Bleeding from all 5 Senses
Most readers have never heard of José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda (1953-1998). A few might know him by his pseudonym, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. But many readers know (and even love) the quasi-mythical character he inspired, Ulises Lima, from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives: “a ticking time bomb” who wrote incessantly “in the margins of books that he stole and on pieces of scrap paper that he was always losing,” but who “never wrote poems.” The real Santiago did, in fact, fill every page he could find with his words. And he may indeed have been “a ticking time bomb.” But—for the record—he did write poems.
Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (1953-1998) is the pseudonym of José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda, the poet immortalized as Ulises Lima in Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives. Born in Mexico City, Santiago came of age during a period of acute political repression, artistic censorship, and violations of academic autonomy that culminated in the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, in which hundreds of student protesters and bystanders were killed or injured, and over a thousand were arrested. Over the years, Santiago’s poems trickled out in small infrarealist magazines and anthologies. In the mid-nineties, he released the only two books to be published during his lifetime, Beso eterno [Eternal Kiss] (1995) and Aullido de cisne [Swan’s Howl] (1996), both under his own imprint, Al Este del paraíso [East of Eden]. At the time of his death in 1998, he left behind over 1,500 poems.
Cole Heinowitz is a poet, translator, and scholar of British, Latin American, U.S., and transatlantic literature from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Rubicon (The Rest, 2008) and Daily Chimera (Incommunicado Press, 1995), and the chapbook Stunning in Muscle Hospital (Detour Press, 2002). Heinowitz is the translator of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic (Wave Books, 2013) and Beauty is Our Spiritual Guernica (Commune Editions, 2015), as well as A Tradition of Rupture: Selected Critical Writings of Alejandra Pizarnik. She is Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College, where she has taught since 2004.
