[04/22/25] Fernández, Gastón / Cascia, KM (tr.): Apparent Breviary

World Poetry Books, paperback

Translated by: KM Cascia

Publication Date: April 22, 2025

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Gastón Fernández’s hermetic collection of 100 psalm-like poems marks the English-language debut of this legendary Peruvian writer of the late twentieth century. Fernández lived most of his adult life in Belgium, working as an art historian. While publishing his scholarship mostly in French, he produced literary works semi-secretly in his native Spanish. Shared only with close friends, very few of these works were published in his lifetime. Apparent Breviary is his lone collection of poems, notable as much for their silences as what they say, their use of negative space as a counterweight to speech, and the hallucinatory effect of their sequence.

KM Cascia’s careful, attentive translations expand my own pantheon of short—poem gods available in English-Emily Dickinson, Paul Celan, Russell Atkins—to now include Gastón Fernández. Like those masters of jagged lines and enfolding energy, Fernández enlivens the idea of the hermetic back through its etymology to its shape-shifting mercurial aspect. These poems compress the greatest mystery—call it God or the signified—such that, to enter, it’s the reader who must become as agile as mercury, as light as a feather. But prepare yourself, because poems compressed to such density make their own gravity. You’ll float like a feather, but you’ll come down like a hammer.—FARID MATUK

Fernández’s poetry evokes the image of Octavio Paz’s “lake of silence,” that depth from which words would rise, one by one, to become the poem. In both, the same richly populated emptiness, the same musical void. —MERCEDES ROFFÉ

Poet, art historian, and cult figure Gastón Fernández Carrera left few ephemeral traces on the no-one’s-land of the page—equal parts reticence, rage, derision, and despair. KM Cascia has made audible now a poet’s passwords for exile in language and for a “deposition of the gaze” transfigured into stark patterns of temperament. To a cruel god of desire, Fernández offered the sparest invocations of a life “without edges” and “past finality” in the barren place for a person at pains not to disappear completely.—ROBERTO TEJADA

Gastón Fernández’s poems are deft and booming like trails through a mountain. In KM Cascia’s always excellent translation this book “pours: / one word through / another.” —NOAH MAZER