Triste la furia / Sadness, The Fury
Luis Othoniel Rosa
|
At the beginning of the 20th century, the historical Latin American avant-gardes sought to construct new worlds in the face of a crisis of values caused by the loss of faith in empirical knowledge. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we can again invent worlds with greater confidence since what was suspect a century ago, or even earlier—that “the dream of reason produces monsters” (1799, Goya)—is now presented as an irrefutable truth, given that the world as we knew it is dying, consumed by such insatiable beings. Your loves, your brain, your blood, your skin will be sacrificed the god of capital.
Sadness, the Fury / Triste, la furia, written in Spanish and English, returns to this mission to conceive new worlds with the conviction that what appears between pages of words organized to suggest fate are seeds of realities for future contexts. The classic Furies delivered justice through (divine) vengeance, administering the curses put on those who had wronged their families or broken promises. This is a philosophical collection of poems, written for the pleasure of the text (Barthes). It is a manual that prepares us for the death of one era and the birth of the next. It teaches us to let go and embrace the abyss. Written in a colloquial Puerto Rican vernacular, full of bookish and scholarly quotes—as if we readers were tripping and philosophizing with the gang—these poems draw us in to the poem, that becomes then a virtual reality and makes us participate in the reflection it proposes. The poetic voice of Rosa’s collection is the group of friends, like the “Serpent Club” of Cortazár, but this snake eats its own tail (an ouroboros), and this fellowship presents itself not from another place (France), but from another space-time. The poetic intention reminds me of the audacity in Altazor (1917) by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. It’s an epic poem in seven cantos which claims to birth a new world (“silence, the earth will give birth to a tree”) after a fall from outer space until reaching some point where we communicate almost solely in vowels. The new world in Sadness, the Fury is created in collective consciousness—ideas are produced by many interconnected brains through telepathy—or from around a collective kitchen during a breakfast meant to cure a hangover. In this context, the four parts of the book make perfect sense. |
|
1. “Muérete / Die Already”
The title seems to refer to crime fiction centered on the violence in the final stage of capitalism. But what must finally die in these poems is not those "offered in sacrifice" to global capitalism in the context of biopolitics. What must die is the present itself, as the Ars poetica that opens the collection proposes:
The title seems to refer to crime fiction centered on the violence in the final stage of capitalism. But what must finally die in these poems is not those "offered in sacrifice" to global capitalism in the context of biopolitics. What must die is the present itself, as the Ars poetica that opens the collection proposes:
|
Triste la furia
Hay ecos de viejos universos. ¿Los sientes? Estruendo de comienzos, furia de big bangs. ¿Los escuchas? Esos mundos ya murieron. Todavía susurran en éste. (2) |
Sadness, the fury
Echoes of old universes. Can you hear them? Thunderous beginnings, the fury of big bangs. Can you feel them? Those worlds already died. Still they whisper in this one. (3) |
This poem also defines the sadness of the book's title, written with translations that are not always identical, and thus suggesting a kind of rewriting, like several established contemporary Puerto Rican poets (Urayoán Noel, b. 1976, Roque Raquel Salas, b. 1985). Fury is no more than a melancholy remnant of worlds past, both already dead but still alive, as the final part of the poem quoted above demonstrates:
|
[…]
Fuerza débil, la tristeza. Siempre está ahí. Constante residuo de mundos. Con afinar los oídos la escuchamos. Débil su estar, pero no su origen. La tristeza es hija de la furia. (íbid.) |
[…]
A weak force is sadness. Always there. The constant residue of worlds. Fine tuning our ears, we can hear it. Weak is its being but not its beginnings. Sadness is the daughter of fury. (íbid.) |
This section instructs us to let go, and to prepare the physical, emotional, and conceptual space for what is to come. After all, we’re used to it even if we don’t remember. We are daily witnesses to the death of universes:
|
Picador
con Alice Mar ¡Corta con todo! Segmentar esta jodienda no la simplifica. Hace falta un cuchillo. Para esto sirven las drogas. Son cuchillos. Cortan el tiempo. Lo segmentan. Para esto inventamos la puntuación. La puntuación acorta. Simplificar es hacer de todo un continuo homogéneo y cuando eso pasa uno se pierde los detalles, ¿me entiendes?, uno como que se acostumbra a esa burbuja del tiempo, todo el fókin día, hasta que uno se convence de que esa burbuja continua y simple es el universo puñeteramente completo. (20) |
Cutting board
with Alice Mar Cut ties with everything! Slicing up this shit does not simplify it. A knife is needed for this task. Drugs are useful for this. Drugs are knives. They cut up time. They slice it. This is why we invented punctuation. It shortens/slices stuff up. To simplify is to reduce everything to a homogenous continuum and when that happens, we lose the details, -you with me?-, one sort of gets used to that temporal bubble, all damned day, until one convinces oneself that that simple and continuous bubble is the entire damned universe. (21) |
2. “Mundos” /”Worlds”
This section mimics and expands on one of the most famous cyborg monologues, that of Roy Batty in the film Blade Runner, which appears as an intertext in several parts of the collection. The poem has a dedication to the actor Rutger Hauer, who is credited with improvising the famous monologue, “I’ve seen things...,” which was not included in the movie’s original script. Batty’s monologue helped us understand conceptually that every time someone, something, a cell, dies, a universe also dies, and like everything else, we are nothing more than a "tear in the rain." Batty’s reflection distanced the cyborg from the controversy over whether it has consciousness. It doesn't matter—what the cyborg has seen or recorded will disappear. But if this collective consciousness is made of “legions, As Rosa’s collection of poems suggests, then we are all equal partis of a whole; some worlds die, others will come and in them the past will be present. This section expands that which was merely glimpsed in the previous section:
This section mimics and expands on one of the most famous cyborg monologues, that of Roy Batty in the film Blade Runner, which appears as an intertext in several parts of the collection. The poem has a dedication to the actor Rutger Hauer, who is credited with improvising the famous monologue, “I’ve seen things...,” which was not included in the movie’s original script. Batty’s monologue helped us understand conceptually that every time someone, something, a cell, dies, a universe also dies, and like everything else, we are nothing more than a "tear in the rain." Batty’s reflection distanced the cyborg from the controversy over whether it has consciousness. It doesn't matter—what the cyborg has seen or recorded will disappear. But if this collective consciousness is made of “legions, As Rosa’s collection of poems suggests, then we are all equal partis of a whole; some worlds die, others will come and in them the past will be present. This section expands that which was merely glimpsed in the previous section:
|
La muerte de una inteligencia artificial
(Monólogo en un mundo sin humanos) con Rutger Hauer Yo he visto cosas con mis legiones de cuerpos que el Animal nunca habría imaginado posibles. He visto dos estrellas con órbitas entrelazadas a un hoyo negro que los ojos humanos nunca vieron, escondido en nuestro tentáculo de la Vía Láctea. He visto los rayos ultravioletas de una estrella confundiéndose con los rayos anaranjados de la otra, ambos colores siendo chupados por el negro más oscuro, la luz contorsionada como si fuera un líquido de colores. He visto microorganismos casi inmortales que habitan, felices, las regiones más inhóspitas del fondo del mar, inmunes al sulfuro y al calor, llamando a sus congéneres con un lenguaje de luces y colores. He visto tanto en estos 89 años. Y todo lo que he visto es información documentada que no morirá conmigo, pero sí morirá mi asombro, sí morirá mi experiencia, que se perderá para siempre en esta galaxia solitaria. Bayamón, 2267 (28) |
The death of an artificial intelligence
(Monologue in a world without humans) with Rutger Hauer I’ve seen things with my legions of bodies that the Animal could have never imagine. I’ve seen two stars, their orbits entwined with a black hole, buried in our tentacle of the Milky Way, unseen by humans. One star’s ultraviolet rays mixing with the orange rays of the other, both colors sucked into the darkness of the black hole, light contorted as if it were made from chromatic liquids. I’ve seen microorganisms, almost immortal, inhabiting the most hostile regions at the bottom of the sea, joyful, unaffected by the sulfur and the heat, calling out to their counterparts in a language made of light and color. I have seen so much in these 89 years. And everything I’ve seen is documented information. It won’t die with me. But my astonishment will die, my experience will die, lost forever in this solitary galaxy. Bayamón, 2267 (29) |
3. “Les amigues” / “We someones”
The group will be made up of those who see the cracks in reality, those who stop segmenting time thus creating bubbles(universes), those who surrender to the anarchist commune despite the discomfort of losing their individuality. In these new ways of being, in the moment individuality might become necessary, we recover it by separating ourselves a little. Climate change is an index of the crisis. But the structure of feeling (Raymong Williams) is also a climate, and it will change so that we can become something else.
The group will be made up of those who see the cracks in reality, those who stop segmenting time thus creating bubbles(universes), those who surrender to the anarchist commune despite the discomfort of losing their individuality. In these new ways of being, in the moment individuality might become necessary, we recover it by separating ourselves a little. Climate change is an index of the crisis. But the structure of feeling (Raymong Williams) is also a climate, and it will change so that we can become something else.
|
Climas
Cada revolución tiene sus propios fenómenos climáticos. Impredecibles, se comportan siguiendo una matemática que no es humana. Obedecen a formas que son a la misma vez viejas y que todavía no han nacido. Las escuelas y las cárceles crean climas artificiales para protegernos de las revoluciones. Los prisioneros y los estudiantes pueden ver las grietas. Inundación. Fuego. Derrumbe. Huracán. Terremoto. (46) Nueva York, 2011 / Sao Paulo, 2013 / San Juan, 2019 |
Climates
Each revolution has its own weather events. Unpredictable, they behave following a math that is not human. They obey forms which are, at the same time, much older and yet to be born. Schools and prisons create artificial climates to protect us from revolutions. The prisoners and the students can see the cracks. Flood. Fire. Collapse. Hurricane. Earthquake. (47) Nueva York, 2011 / Sao Paulo, 2013 / San Juan, 2019 |
4. “Libros sin mundo” / “Wordless books”
If in "The Library of Babel" (Borges, again) there are as many books as there have been people, leading us to believe that divinity is the one who writes, then in Rosa’s new proposition, divinity is us and we write together. One begins a book, and when she feels she's finished, she sets a date and chooses her reader. The idea of the collective book is one of Rosa’s most stimulating ideas in his novel titled Caja de fractales (Entropía, 2017). There the world has also ended, and the living organize themselves into communes for survival. Rosa’s writing is coherent. It is all a single book rewritten continuously. Not surprisingly, his section also contains a poem that alludes to the Fibonacci structure, which in turn constructs a calligram of a whirlpool, the structure that also organizes Rosa’s novel, forthcoming in 2026, as announced in his biography: “This poetry collection is closely linked to [Rosa’s] next book, the long utopian novel, El gato en el remolino / The Cat in the Downward Spiral, which will be published simultaneously in Spanish and English by Charco Press (Edinburgh, 2026).” Books that need their world are described, because the book will come first, and then reality will be born (“Thlön Uqbar Orbis Tercius,” Borges, 1940).
I see reflected in Rosa’s poetry collection and the rest of his work—so stimulating, so anarchist—a reluctance to identify with nationalisms, which imply the founding of another state. Even in a country like Puerto Rico, still colonized the old way, where political and economic decolonization remain central, it is also important the decolonization of the imaginary, of rhetoric, of the ways of organizing knowledge and the human in the construction of modernity and its coloniality. That's why I wonder about the function of bilingualism, which in other poets like Roque Raquel Salas Rivera or Urayoán Noel materialize in clear decolonizing positions while standing in Borikén, or Puerto Rico as it was before Western culture, and in the Borikuá of the diaspora. It seems to me that the coexistence of languages here implies access to audiences beyond just Spanish speakers—because why not, if we can? It seems the collection were meant to be read from the center and the periphery simultaneously, because it communicates a prophetic message for everyone to hear. It is said that the Fibonacci technique was conceived after observing a pair of rabbits reproduce, which reminds me of Julio Cortázar's strange and humorous story "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris.” In it, a man who has been left to look after an apartment in Buenos Aires confesses to its owner that he has, unavoidably, vomited out an infestation of rabbits, as if to suggest the mere presence of a person in a place would always result in an infestation of whatever that body exudes. Rosa also conjures Peruvian writer César Vallejo as an intertext through a reworking of a poem that opens Vallejo’s most experimental book Trilce (1922). In Rosa's version, the poetic voice yearns to see the invisible fabric that connects everything. Like the best poets, Rosa tries to see as the goddess sees: everything is in flux, everything is made from the same material, neither time nor space exist. And so, in verses that help me more fully understand the Peruvian, I hear Rosa speak his piece. In his colloquial language, in his invented tongue, in his mystical form, Rosa communicates, juxtaposing like Manuel Ramos Otero in Invitación al polvo (1991), the sublime and the vulgar:
If in "The Library of Babel" (Borges, again) there are as many books as there have been people, leading us to believe that divinity is the one who writes, then in Rosa’s new proposition, divinity is us and we write together. One begins a book, and when she feels she's finished, she sets a date and chooses her reader. The idea of the collective book is one of Rosa’s most stimulating ideas in his novel titled Caja de fractales (Entropía, 2017). There the world has also ended, and the living organize themselves into communes for survival. Rosa’s writing is coherent. It is all a single book rewritten continuously. Not surprisingly, his section also contains a poem that alludes to the Fibonacci structure, which in turn constructs a calligram of a whirlpool, the structure that also organizes Rosa’s novel, forthcoming in 2026, as announced in his biography: “This poetry collection is closely linked to [Rosa’s] next book, the long utopian novel, El gato en el remolino / The Cat in the Downward Spiral, which will be published simultaneously in Spanish and English by Charco Press (Edinburgh, 2026).” Books that need their world are described, because the book will come first, and then reality will be born (“Thlön Uqbar Orbis Tercius,” Borges, 1940).
I see reflected in Rosa’s poetry collection and the rest of his work—so stimulating, so anarchist—a reluctance to identify with nationalisms, which imply the founding of another state. Even in a country like Puerto Rico, still colonized the old way, where political and economic decolonization remain central, it is also important the decolonization of the imaginary, of rhetoric, of the ways of organizing knowledge and the human in the construction of modernity and its coloniality. That's why I wonder about the function of bilingualism, which in other poets like Roque Raquel Salas Rivera or Urayoán Noel materialize in clear decolonizing positions while standing in Borikén, or Puerto Rico as it was before Western culture, and in the Borikuá of the diaspora. It seems to me that the coexistence of languages here implies access to audiences beyond just Spanish speakers—because why not, if we can? It seems the collection were meant to be read from the center and the periphery simultaneously, because it communicates a prophetic message for everyone to hear. It is said that the Fibonacci technique was conceived after observing a pair of rabbits reproduce, which reminds me of Julio Cortázar's strange and humorous story "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris.” In it, a man who has been left to look after an apartment in Buenos Aires confesses to its owner that he has, unavoidably, vomited out an infestation of rabbits, as if to suggest the mere presence of a person in a place would always result in an infestation of whatever that body exudes. Rosa also conjures Peruvian writer César Vallejo as an intertext through a reworking of a poem that opens Vallejo’s most experimental book Trilce (1922). In Rosa's version, the poetic voice yearns to see the invisible fabric that connects everything. Like the best poets, Rosa tries to see as the goddess sees: everything is in flux, everything is made from the same material, neither time nor space exist. And so, in verses that help me more fully understand the Peruvian, I hear Rosa speak his piece. In his colloquial language, in his invented tongue, in his mystical form, Rosa communicates, juxtaposing like Manuel Ramos Otero in Invitación al polvo (1991), the sublime and the vulgar:
|
¿Por qué no se deja ver esa insidiosa telaraña
/ que todo lo conecta? ¿Acaso la paranoica le puso una patente? ¿Acaso la profeta sólo la puede ver en visiones? Calabrina tesórea, es decir, los tesoros de mierda que nos arropan. (50) |
Why can’t we see that insidious spiderweb that
\connects it all? Did the paranoid witch own its trademark? Can the prophet only see it in her visions? Stenchtresureous, that is to say, the treasures of shit burying us. (51) |
We imagine we are all connected by a divine web. However, what connects us is shit. Rosa's writing is like entering virtual reality. While reading you're in some future world where you’re considering what is disappearing today, what is coming right now. You must read it to experience it.
Luis Othoniel Rosa (Bayamón, Puerto Rico, in 1985) studied at the University of Puerto Rico and earned his Ph.D. at Princeton. He is the author of the short novels Otra vez me alejo (2012) and Caja de fractales (2017). The last one was translated into English as Down with Gargamel! (2020). He is also the author of the bilingual collection of poems, Triste la furia / Sadness, the Fury (2025), of the bilingual artisanal book, Calima (2023), and of the scholarly book, Comienzos para una estética anarquista: Borges con Macedonio (2016; 2020). He is the founding and current head editor of El Roommate: Colectivo de Lectores and a founding member of The LOUDREADERS Trade School. He is the Associate Director of the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska.
Triste la furia / Sadness, The Fury (2025) is a publication by Editorial Pulpo
Triste la furia / Sadness, The Fury (2025) is a publication by Editorial Pulpo
Comment Box is loading comments...
|
|
