Jorge Pimentel
Ave Soul
At its core, Ave Soul is a sweeping, lyrical meditation on human inter- connection in times of tumult. More specifically, it is a poetic consideration of urban experiences. Although the work is full of insights into Peruvian culture, it poses broad questions on the matter of what it means to inhabit a city: to leave it, to return to it, to experience its evolution and contribute to its culture. As it posits answers to these questions, Pimentel’s voice is deeply embedded in the particularities of place. Critic Carlos Villacorta González suggests that the act of walking in Ave Soul renders the city legible, much in the same way as it does for Walter Benjamin’s flaneur. By wandering the streets, the speaker is lifted out of his isolation: “caminar es la finalidad que une al yo con el otro” [“walking is the objective that joins the self with the other”]…
John Burns, from the prologue.
A COMMENTARY BY ROBERTO BOLAÑO
ON JORGE PIMENTEL
ABOUT THE WRITER JORGE PIMENTEL
It was the poet Diana Bellesi who gave me Kenacort y Valium 10, Jorge Pimentel’s first book, many years ago, in 1971 or 1972 in Mexico City. Diana liked Pimentel’s poetry and knew him personally and I liked Diana, the travels of Diana, the conversations of Diana, the readings of Diana, and of course I also liked Pimentel’s book. In 1974, after a stint in Chile and having returned to Mexico, I met Mario Santiago. He had also read Kenacort (we were probably the only ones in Mexico City who knew of Pimentel’s poetry) and one of the territories in which our friendship was cemented was in the reading and rereading of that convulsive, belligerent poetry and in the multiple paths that opened from it and that Mario and I discussed until the dawn would break over Mexico City, dawns of absolute privilege…
What I mean is this: the poems of Ave Soul have not aged a bit. They are as fresh and readable as when Pimentel wrote them. How many Latin American poets can we say the same about? All those books that won awards, both those on the political right and left, the municipal awards, the Casa de las Américas awards, have aged notably. Pimentel’s book, on the other hand, is still there like baked bread fresh from the oven, and the tragicomedy is that no one has taken notice.
- ROBERTO BOLAÑO
Biography - Jorge Pimentel
Jorge Pimentel was born in Lima in 1944. In 1970, alongside fellow Peruvian poet Juan Ramírez
Ruiz, he wrote the manifesto “Palabras urgentes” and founded Hora Zero, a neo-avant-garde
movement. He has published the following poetry books: Kenacort y Valium 10 (1970), Ave Soul
(1973), Tromba de agosto (1992), Primera muchacha (1997), and En el hocico de la niebla (2007). This is the first English-language translation of Ave Soul, which includes a prologue writ- ten by Roberto
Bolaño, who was a great admirer of Pimentel’s work.
John Burns, Translator
John Burns is a poet, translator and scholar who lives in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. He has
translated numerous poets from Chile, Mexico, the United States and Spain. He and Rubén Medina
collaborated to edit and translate an anthology of Beat poetry into Spanish, Una tribu de salvajes
improvisando a las puertas del infierno (Aldus/ UANL, 2012).
His monograph of Contemporary Hispanic Poets: Cultural Production in the Global, Digital Age was published by Cambria Press in 2015. He is currently associate professor of Spanish at Bard College.