Rubén Derlis - Coghlan - Colectivo 219
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
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| Rubén Derlis in Coghlan |
One of the charms of getting old is that if one loses some of one’s inhibitions one can make new friends. That has been my case. One of these newish friends is an avowed Stalinist who cultivates his moustache so he can look like his Soviet inspiration.
Since he is a porteño, a Buenos Aires-born man his poems are all about costumbrismo. This is a word that Argentines use to describe that most peculiar talent of Argentines to compose music, write novels, short stories and poems that are about Buenos Aires.
For anybody who no longer lives in his place of birth
(Buenos Aires and that’s me) Borges,Cortázar any tango but especially Piazzolla
tangos is to live in remembering those memories of my past that I have not
forgotten (a Borgesian way of explaining it).
What makes Rubén Derlis especially notable to me is that he
is passionately in love with his Buenos Aires barrio of Coghlan, the very
barrio of my youth. In April of this year I met up with Derlis at a café (near
Coghlan on Cabildo) where he handed me the lovely book on poetry inspired by
his more than 40 year life in our barrio.
Mexico City has its colonias.
There is Colonia Polanco, Colonia Las Lomas de Chapultepec and so on. In other
Latin American cities these parcels or sections of a city are called barrios. I believe that since our
Vancouver is a smaller city in comparison to Buenos Aires and Mexico City, our
neighbourhoods, Kitsilano, the Westside, Marpole, etc may be also smaller in
size and may be really about that area in close proximity to where you live.
Buenos Aires which when it began was so small that the only
direction was South is my poor translation of Derlis’s:
Cuando Buenos Aires se fundó
Buenos Aires which when it began was so small that the only
direction was South is my poor translation of Derlis’s:Cuando Buenos Aires se fundó
era tan pequeña que solo tenía sur.
Para un
Friso Porteño – 2012
What is unique about the barrios of Buenos Aires is that
many of them are named after the train stations that traians went to on their way to the outskirts of the city. The
British built the Buenos Aires train system.
Of Coghlan Coghlan historian Alfredo Noceti wrote:
De apellido irlandés y alma porteña
vive apartado del “mundanal ruido”,
Quizás alguno diga: adormecido,
Pero Coghlan no duerme, sino ensueña
Of an Irish surname
and a porteño soul
it lives separate
from the mundane noise,
Perhaps someone
would say: slumbering,
but Coghlan does
not sleep, it dreams.
I will not attempt to translate Derlis’s nostalgic poems
about Coghlan in which he describes with extreme sadness its very disappearance
(the memories of his past, that is) but here is one of my faves, Colectivo 219 which is all about a now
extinct bus and its bus route.
Colectivo 219
No tomarás el 219 en Pinto y Pedraza
-ya ni ese número es-,
sólo tu entonces puede hacerlo.
Es un colectivo invisible y lunático:
dobla por Freire,
se aleja hacia Monroe,
cruza el angosto puente,
baja por Superí hacia Los Incas,
y más no sé,
en un recorrido imposible,
a contramano por las mismas calles,
cuarenta años ayer.
De tarde en tarde,
un fantasma sesentista, nostálgico, asciende a
el
en un viaje a sí mismo,
hasta un antes perdido en el tiempo,
llamado juventud.
2005
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| Melián 2770, my old Coghlan home - Rubén Derlis, Rosemary, Rebecca & Laura |
An English Boy in Coghlan
Un inglesito en Coghlan
Rubén Derlis - Versito - Augusto Pinochet
Coghlan, Mercedes, Home & A Kosher Style Restaurant
Miss Tink & English Trains
