Waiting for Perec, first published in a bilingual Spanish/Italian edition in 2015, is Mario Meléndez's fourth full-length collection of poems. As poet, translator, and associate professor of creative writing at Princeton Katie Farris has noted, "It is a tightly woven book of visions in which truly only three characters appear: God, Death, and a passive Christ. Then there are the cameos a brilliant and bewildering crowd of artists, poets, actors, characters, and creatures who step in and out of the dance of these three characters, doing imitations of God or tracking him, holding Christ's bone in his mouth, running ahead of Death on a wooden tricycle, and generally making shenanigans with corpses, being corpses, or digging graves."
As the Colombian writer Piedad Bonnett, winner of the 2024 Reina Sofia Prize for Iberoamerican Literature, has observed, Meléndez's poetry is "nourished by obsessions." Indeed, Waiting for Perec is a poetry obsessed with the notion of writing as an art of reassemblage. Meléndez developed this mode of writing where the poet is a bricoleur who obsessively combines and recombines images and words and churns out new visions of the world based on fragments and references culled from the dusty attic-trunk that keeps the bits and bobs high and low culture in his previous collection Death's Days Are Numbered. The cameos that comprise the collection include painters (Pablo Picasso, Fernando Botero), musicians (John Lennon, Charlie Parker), novelists (Jules Verne, Julio Cortázar), film actors (Buster Keaton, Marilyn Monroe), poets (César Vallejo, Alejandra Pizarnik), fictional characters (Phileas Fogg, Madame Bovary), and religious figures (Judas, Mary Magdalene). This incomplete list, which omits Kafka, Heraclitus, Salome, Diego Maradona, The Sex Pistols, and others, shows the range of references used by this book to build an absurd world where fiction and poetry melt into the philosophical and the theological.
Like the work of Fernando Pessoa, who makes an appearance in these poems, Waiting for Perec is written under a heteronym, that of an anonymous urn maker who scribbles down these ecstatic visions. Yet, as Anthony Geist, Professor of Spanish at Washington University and celebrated translator of Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Luis Hernández, has noted "every poem begins with 'I saw…' What is less clear is who saw: the poet or poetic persona, Heraclitus, God, Christ'." This ambiguity is a sort of no space, a utopia, the ashes of a funerary urn.
While the book plays with the absurd and with nonsense, it does so in the utterly serious tradition of Lewis Carroll and Italo Calvino. The title alludes to the Irish author Samuel Beckett, a practitioner of literary nonsense, and the French novelist George Perec, member of the Oulipo group and a lover of word play. Meléndez, like Beckett and Perec, plays with the absurd and like them his world is tinged with melancholy. To quote Farris, again, in this collection, "Death has never seemed so lively; like Blake's hell, the realm of Waiting for Perec is thriving. Like Christ reading Cortázar, I find myself wanting to read Mario Meléndez, in his own words 'so as not to cry/ he makes my loneliness disappear/ as if by magic'."
Jeremy Paden (Milan, Italy, 1974). He is a poet, translator, and academic. His articles have appeared in Colonial Latin American Review, Romance Quarterly, Romance Notes, Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry. He has translated contemporary Argentine, Chilean, Colombian, Mexican, Spanish, and Peruvian poets. He is the author of several chapbooks of poems, two full-length collections, and a bilingual, illustrated children's book. Among these, world as sacred burning heart (3: A Taos Press) and Autorretrato como una iguana/Self-Portrait as an Iguana (Valparaíso USA), which co-won the first Premio Poeta en Nueva York for poetry written in Spanish by poets residing in the US. Under the Ocelot Sun/Bajo el sol del ocelote (Shadelandhouse Modern Press) won a Campoy-Ada prize awarded by the North American Academy of the Spanish Language for bilingual children's books. His Spanish language translation of Ada Limón's The Hurting Kind, De las que duelen, has just appeared in Valparaíso Ediciones.
Mario Meléndez (Linares, Chile, 1971). He is the author of: Apuntes para una leyenda, Vuelo subterráneo, El circo de papel, La muerte tiene los días contados, Esperando a Perec and El mago de la soledad. Some of his work has been translated to various languages. For several years he lived in Mexico City, where he was the headed up the Poetas Latinoamericanos series in Laberinto ediciones and edited anthologies of Chilean and Latin American poetry. At the start of 2012 he moved to Italy. In 2013 he received the medal of the President of the Italian Republic, awarded by the International Foundation don Luigi di Liegro. During 2014-2016 he edited two collections of Latin American poets for Raffaelli editore, based in Rimini. His poems have appeared in prestigious anthologies in Italy, Spain, and Latin America, and translations of his poems have appeared Gulf Coast, Poetry Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly and other journals. Since 2018 he has been the general editor for the Vicente Huidobro Foundation and spearheaded their on-line journal of world poetry Revista Altazor.
