Carlos
Soto Román

“What three things can never be done? Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.” According to the Chilean poet and translator Carlos Soto Román, born 1977 in Valparaíso, these words from American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser’s (1913–1980) documentary poem The Book of the Dead provide a possible answer to the question of what literature can achieve in times of war. They serve as a reminder, therefore, not to look the other way, not to stay silent, and not to shut oneself off from the suffering of others. This quote can also be understood as a kind of signature that points us towards the key aspects of Soto Román’s oeuvre: an exploration of cultural memory through the poetic rearrangement of archive materials; a decidedly political understanding of poetry as an artistic intervention in social processes; a poetic practice that sees itself as collaborative, dialogical, and interdisciplinary, and for this reason seeks many different forms of publicity besides books—poster campaigns, for example, or sound poetry projects such as the bands Radio Magallanes and Sonora Guantánamo.

Since publishing his first volume of poems, La Marcha de los Quiltros (1999), Soto Román—who originally trained as a pharmaceutical biochemist—has been writing at the intersection of concrete poetry, conceptual poetry, and documentary literature. In numerous Spanish- and English-language publications, he has examined the mechanisms of state violence, also drawing on experiences from his years in the United States, which were spent in Philadelphia; at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado; and at the renowned MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, among others. Soto Román approaches this topic not only as a poet, but also as a translator: in 2019, for example, he published the first Spanish translation of Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust, a book of poetry based on witness testimonies from the Nuremberg trials.

A central theme in Soto Román’s work is the history of the Chilean dictatorship in its geopolitical dimensions. For Chile Project: [Re-Classified] (2013), he reproduced and reworked declassified US intelligence files on the role of the US government in the 1973 coup d’état in Chile. By manipulating the heavily redacted pages with further erasures, Soto Román transposes the documentary material as visual poems or lyrical hatchings into a literary system—a translation that simultaneously exposes and comments upon the censorship structure of archival gestures.

Another work that is based on documentary methods is Soto Román’s impressive volume of experimental poetry 11 (2017, translated collectively by Thomas Rothe, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Whitney DeVos, Jèssica Pujol Duran, Patrick Greaney, Robin Myers, and Alexis Almeida in 2023), the title of which refers to the military coup of September 11, 1973. Here, Soto Román drew inspiration from the works of the Austrian writer and photographer Heimrad Bäcker, who employed montage techniques in nachschrift (1986, translated as transcript by Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling in 2010) to unmask the Nazi regime’s language of destructive rage as a “bureaucratic act of violence” and a “language of radical substitution.” Soto Román’s texts collage documents with the voices of perpetrators and victims; above all, his works raise the question of the representability of past injustice, as manifested in filed records through censorship, concealment, and omission. At the same time, 11—and indeed all of his works, including Antuco (2019, co-authored with Carlos Cardani Parra), which has recently been published in German translation—reflects upon the material and immaterial afterlife of documents and asks how poetry can contribute to the critical activation of cultural memory.

In other words, Carlos Soto Román’s creative practice develops a documentary poetics of the future, not of the past. In line with Rukeyser’s famous statement that “poetry extends the document,” he expands our notion of both poetry and memory by reactivating archives. This is what makes his work so fascinating and topical.  

Uljana Wolf,
a Berlin-born poet, translator and essayist who was born in Berlin, explores the ever-changing space between languages.

Translation from the German by Jacqueline Todd