The Cold

Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Kit Schluter. Jaime Saenz was born in 1921 in La Paz, Bolivia, the city where he was to spend his days until his passing in 1986. Poète maudit in letters and life, Saenz was rumored to have stolen a limb from a corpse at the university morgue, and to have brought a panther home to his wife on their wedding day. He lived nocturnally, excoriating the false divisions of body and language, debauchery and exaltation, and life and death in his many novels, plays, and poems. It was around his now notorious, magical Krupp Workshops that a whole generation of young La Pazian poets burgeoned, and his body of work was the first Bolivian, and among the first Latin American, to openly explore the bisexual experience. Kit Schluter's translation of THE COLD, presented here bilingually and introduced by Forrest Gander, brings this long- awaited poem from 1967 into English for the first time, and is followed by the translator's reflections on translation, cheating death with language, and Jaime Saenz himself.