[World Poetry Books; 2025]
Tr. from the Spanish by KM Cascia
A breviary is a holy book. It contains prayers for recitation, most often prayers for the canonical hours of the day: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, and Compline. Upon opening Apparent Breviary, I felt the force of the title. The poems are prayers; many of the poems address the Lord overtly, and all bear an intimate spiritual plea. The breviary is “apparent” because the spaces on the page—the vacuum between words—is every bit as meaningful as the words themselves. For the poet, Gastón Fernández, words are only apparent. Real prayer happens in emptiness, in silence. Translator KM Cascia respects both sound and silence, word and void, in this sensitive translation.
Gastón Fernández was born in Lima, Peru, to an affluent family in 1940. He trained in law in his home country, then left for Europe to pursue a doctorate in art history, a subject he taught, primarily in Belgium, until his death in 1997. Fernández wrote stories and poetry through the 1980s, then stopped to focus on essays in theory and criticism for the rest of his life. His English translator, KM Cascia, is a study in contrast. Cascia dropped out of school at age seventeen and learned Spanish working in restaurants in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, eventually becoming a poet, editor, and translator. Poet and translator had very different starts in life. The push-pull of this difference lends energy to Apparent Breviary, with Cascia employing very strong, terse English that draws from the cornucopia of English monosyllables and strongly accented disyllables, while reducing the number of words to the bare minimum. The translation of Fernández’s spread-out line “Quedar se” as “Re main” illustrates Cascia’s approach.
Fernández wrote the 100 numbered poems of Apparent Breviary during the years 1980 and 1981, and began sharing it in manuscript form a few years later. In 2006, Renato Goméz published the book as Breviario with a supplement titled “Breviario, pasa la página aparente.” In their introduction to Apparent Breviary, Cascia notes that Goméz found it difficult to coalesce the single extant manuscript into a book, citing “technical problems, legibility issues, uncertain readings,” and other factors. Even though he published the collection, Goméz insisted that the genuine Breviario is the author’s manuscript, not the printed book.
Cascia’s introduction to Apparent Breviary suggests that the sense of the manuscript’s primacy, and the book’s inadequacy, stems from the power of space and silence in the poems. “I understand the phenomenon—,” Cascia writes, “common to everyone who approached these poems over the years—of getting a little too wrapped up in them and kind of losing your head. There’s simply so much white space to fall into.” Several commentators, including Goméz and Maribel de Paz, have noted the occult effect of intra- and inter-line space in Fernández’s poems, the way the spaces seem to search for quietude, for a place to hide. The effect, wrote Gabriel Ruiz Ortega in La República, is a poetry “marked by strangeness [marcado por la extrañeza],” not for the tastes of the majority, but for the “hunter of sensitivity in writing [cazador de la sensibilidad en la escritura].” Given Apparent Breviary is ostensibly a book of prayers, I believe that the poet imagines hush, stillness, secrecy, strangeness, and emptiness as prayerful qualities. This is embodied in the first poem in the book, which sets the tone for the remaining ninety-nine:
| 1 Dividir las venas veo que es menos accesible que la profundidad del aire desde mi sitio he visto que el aire en efecto no tiene velocidad. El aire entonces, Señor. | 1 Divide the veins I see is less accessible than depth of air from my place I’ve seen that indeed air has no velocity. Then air, Lord. |
The poem declares that to “divide the veins,” a physical, tangible action a person can see, is somehow “less accessible” than the effectless air devoid of even velocity. This paradoxical concept—that air or space is more available and real than the apparently real sensible world—is mirrored by a form in which the pauses are pregnant with significance. In this context, “Then air, Lord” places prayer within vacuity, recitation within the silent, motionless, open air. The words only serve to point us to the devotional space.
I believe my interpretation gathers support from historical and literary comparisons. When I first read the initial poem in Apparent Breviary, I reacted almost instantly with two recollections of poetry translations: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, translated by David Young in 1978, and Paul Celan’s Lightduress, translated by Pierre Joris in 2005. In the moment, I did not reflect on my reaction, but held onto it as I read through Fernández’s work. After reading, I began to unpack any connection between Apparent Breviary, Duino Elegies, and Lightduress. Now, my overwhelming sense is that all three books of poetry are devotionals within a century of God gone quiet—the 20th century, with its outrages of gold, guns, and genocide, that sadly have continued into this century. Cascia alludes to this idea in describing the process of translating Fernández:
[As] I worked on this through the fall and into winter, as bombs fell on Gaza like water, an untranslatable poem about the silence of God came to seem proper for the future we do inhabit. And the work grew heavier as my encounter with the reality the poems describe became more and more urgent. One beholds horrors, and one weeps, then returns to work. The silence remains.
Devotion in a Godless age, to a quiescent God, must itself be hidden and silent—the very qualities of Fernández’s poem number one, and I would say all the poems in the book. It is the same quality as Rilke’s desperation in the “First Elegy,” as we “Throw armfuls of emptiness out to the spaces that we breathe [Wirf aus den Armen die Leere zu den Räumen hinzu, die wir atmen].” The same quality as the image in section one of Lightduress: “a star-permeable leaf, instead of a mouth [ein stern-durchlässiges’ Blatt statt des Mundes].” God has become impossible, unspeakable in the modern age. There is no language of prayer. Whatever God might be, this being can only be expressed by an empty silence.
A methodological parallel further connects Apparent Breviary, Duino Elegies, and Lightduress: all three books were completed quickly, in a brief and intense period of creativity. Fernández completed his book between 1980 and 1981—after that, it was a short time until he wrote no more poems. Rilke had developed drafts of Duino Elegies starting in 1912, and fiddled with them a few times in the ‘teens, but finalized the work in a kind of intuitive storm in February 1922 at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland. Celan wrote Lightduress between June and December 1967, a mere three years before his suicide. The books were all created in a moment of “spirituality” in the broadest sense—that mystical moment when an artist is inspired in a way that defies explanation, as driven by a spirit beyond human understanding. But as 20th century poets, Fernández, Rilke, and Celan didn’t use baroque images of prayer to petition the spirit, “the Lord” as named in seventeen of Fernández’s poems. They used emptiness. What makes Fernández unique is that, among the three writers, much more of this emptiness resides in the form of the poems than the verse, which allows the reader to “fall into” wide white spaces.
To evaluate Cascia’s craft in translation, I have asked whether the translator gave life in English to the formal silences of Fernández’s original. My question alludes to the theories of translation as the afterlife of poetry and prose advanced by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Rabindranath Tagore—did Cascia achieve a “rebirth” of these spacious poems in English? I believe the answer is “yes.” The translator has accomplished the kind of translation that doesn’t decode poetry, but creates poetry in a new language for a new time. Cascia combines two techniques: fidelity to Fernández’s line counts and spacing, both inside and outside the line, with a commitment to the most direct and simple English possible. The second of these techniques, in my view, is abetted by the qualities of diction and syntax that Cascia, with their experience as a drop out and worker, brings to translation. The result is that Fernández’s meaningful spaces are noticed and felt when reading:
| 66 Ninguna vez acá el sonido el flujo, la intensidad. Sólo el fluido. El ruido. Grafismo pienso del aire en uno | 66 Never once here sound flow, intensity. Only the fluid. The noise. Graphics I think of air in one |
Another important aspect of Cascia’s craft is a careful attention to preserving repeated words from poem to poem. Fernández created a book that feels all of a piece, and an important part of that is exact repetition of vocabulary: aire, ave, sol, agua, and others. Cascia picks up this repetition, so that the translation is the same kind of unified whole as the original.
Perhaps I am that “hunter of sensitivity” that Ruiz described as the aficionado of Fernández. But I found both the Spanish and the English in Apparent Breviary eminently readable and enjoyable. The book was not a struggle. I read it for pleasure from the moment I set eyes on the first poem. I reached a place of tranquil sadness as I moved along. Silence, vacuum, and air in each poem slowed me down to a welcome pace in my usually hurried day. A spirit—the thing I call God—was there. God unheard, but breathed inside the spaces that Gastón Fernández and KM Cascia have made.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. Delibovi is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist, and consulting poetry editor at the literary e-zine Cable Street. She is the translator and commentator of the book Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila.
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