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CATZ RESEARCH
Ben Bollig Fellow & Tutor in Spanish
on his collaboration with Argentinian poet, Cristian Aliaga
Cristian Aliaga is a poet, journalist and
academic based in Lago Puelo, Patagonia.
He has published more than a dozen books
of poetry and edited many more, and he
is widely recognised as one of Argentina’s
outstanding contemporary writers. He founded
the newspaper El extremo sur, and edits
its cultural supplement, Confines, two quite
implausible projects in the very far south of
the world. He also directs Espacio Hudson, an
independent publisher and cultural centre.
I first encountered his poetry when organising
a research symposium on culture and political
activism in Latin America. I was struck by its
almost documentary realism: semi-abandoned
towns, huge spaces fenced off or destroyed
by mining, and the everyday struggles of
people trying to get by. Yet his poems also
had a lyrical though unsentimental voice as
they detailed his own travels and reactions to
what he saw. Aliaga records the voices and
stories he encounters, writing as one who
doesn’t quite belong and who is constantly on
the move.
In 2011, Aliaga was awarded a Leverhulme
Visiting Professorship to spend eight months
in the UK, partly to work with me on shared
projects. He was interested in combining
the verbal and the visual, and finding
unconventional ways of publishing poetry.
He envisaged an exhibition of what we came
to call poetry-art: images by the designer
Alejandro Mezzano incorporating phrases and
lines from Aliaga’s poetry.
Each image was presented bilingually, a
version in Spanish alongside another including
my translation. These works explore the
relationship between different languages
and between different media. Mixing design,
literature, and translation, these poem-artposters
sought to take poetry off the page of
the book and into new spaces.
The works were displayed in St John’s College
to the general public, including passersby
and tourists, as well as the academic
community. Students of Spanish from Catz
and St John’s helped set up and invigilate. The
show closed with a bilingual poetry reading,
in English and Spanish, in the atmospheric
setting of The Barn. A recording is now
available to download as a podcast from the
University’s website.
Alongside the exhibition, Aliaga and I were
able to complete two volumes of translations
of his poetry: The Clinical Cause, an
anthology of earlier work published by the
Manchester Spanish and Portuguese Series;
and a chapbook, The Fall Up, of new poems,
exploring illness, mortality, and exile, in part
based on experiences from his European
travels. Our work together has continued
with my introduction to Aliaga’s poetry for an
edition by another groundbreaking Argentine
cultural project, the cardboard collectors’
publishing collective, Eloísa Cartonera. n
54/BEN BOLLIG