issue 33: monsoon 2026
ELVIRA HERNÁNDEZ
Bodies Found in Various Places
Translated from the Spanish by Alec Schumacher and Daniel Borzutsky
from The Selected Poems of Elvira Hernandez
1
someone without pain said it was a hollow-eyed pumice stone
sleepless many years
a sponge on fetid earth of Judas kisses
craters one and another craters cranium in short
where there was light and voice for its own lacrimal font there was none
the ants entered with their juices
flies emerged without their eggs
the children cheered on the waste creator of life
and once again without meaning to, something larvated in Juan's head
in the garbage dump of Buin
2
it appeared to the incredulous of the sea without abyssal eyes
brilliant in the green salt its marine sequins
like a brief eel struck down by its own lightning
starfish little octopuses algae hair
long nails like calcareous oars of life
missing genitals yellow rind an alkaline curl
a bubbly sputum of ozone for the world
freed from its lost anchor it joined my tranquil tear
3
they said it had been charred down to the bones
they said nothing had been gathered and silence
they spoke of the air of the soul and of oblivion
the magisterial light descending like a votive candle from Hiroshima
gafft appearing like a dynamited mine of lime
4
they found the fear of the lava Man dressed as an animal
and a mammoth sculpted on a pebble
and delicacy in a silex comb
and a woman hidden in a little pink shell
and horses in the cave of Altamira still on the edge of history
in the caverns of Calata the viscera lie in the dust of another
civilization
5
the crown of thorns was just another laurel wreath
no one drilled into a skull
the nails passed without tetanus through the loving eternal flesh
the bones remained intact for eternity without distress
no one needed to break its knees
Longinus only had to confirm the presence of a passing death
he did not truly need to tear off slices of flesh
they covered the transparent white sex with linen
and the body was carried off by family and the good Arimathea
here no bone was left on bone
Elvira Hernández, pseudonym of María Teresa Adriasola, is a Chilean poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is one of the most important voices of contemporary poetry in the Southern Cone and the Chilean neo-avant-garde. Some of her most important works include: ¡Arre! Halley ¡Arre! (Giddy up, Halley!) (1986), La bandera de Chile (The Chilean Flag) (1991), Santiago Waria (1992), and Pájaros desde mi ventana (Birds From My Window) (2018). She is the recipient of the Jorge Tellier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Award (Chile 2024).
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún.
Alec Schumacher is Associate Professor at Gonzaga University. His research interests are Latin American poetry, translation, and avant-garde poetics. His publications have been focused on Chilean poets Juan Luis Martínez and Elvira Hernández. His translations include works by Jorge Arbeleche, Elvira Hernández, and Luis Correa-Díaz. In 2019, he published The Chilean Flag, a translation of Elvira Hernández’s book which was nominated for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2020 by The American Literary Translators Association.