Apparent Breviary by Gastón Fernández

Apparent Breviary

By Gastón Fernández

Translated from the Spanish by KM Cascia

World Poetry Books 2025

Gastón Fernández (1940–1997) was a Peruvian art historian, the author of a handful of monographs and a travel book, all written in French, all published while he was still alive. Both of the books he wrote in his native Spanish—a collection of stories and a volume of poems—were published posthumously. These are also, ironically, the two titles upon which his reputation depends. The poetry book, Apparent Breviary, is now available for the first time—Fernández himself is now available for the first time—in an English-language edition from World Poetry Books.

In their Introduction, translator KM Cascia quotes Enriqueta Belevan, another Peruvian poet, whose mailbox played a key role in the book’s conception:

…there began to arrive, in manila envelopes, 10 office-sized pages with a poem numbered out of order: 4? 8? 10? 15? 18. Like that. They arrived with discipline, every 10 days, 10 pages. Everyone in my house participated in this. From the extremely surprised postman to my own super-amused mother. … Ten envelopes later I gathered together all the pages and had the Apparent Breviary complete before my eyes.

A breviary isn’t just any kind of book: it’s a collection of prayers designed to impose a spiritual structure upon one’s day. Are Fernández’s poems meant to be read in kind? Apparently.

Divide the veins

I see is less accessible than

depth

                        of air

from my place

I’ve seen

that indeed air has no

velocity.

Then air,

Lord.

That’s the first of a hundred such poems, the loose arrangements of which resist all the hallmarks of the stuff that typically gets codified in print—the regimental stuff, the breviary-stuff. In Fernández’s hands, poetry renders the prayer that lives on tongues and never makes it onto the page: prayer of the stutterer, the basketcase, the mourner, the child. Terse, elliptical, by turns naive and apocalyptic, virtually all of the poems in Apparent Breviary weigh in at fewer than fifty words, the words spread airily around the page (none exceeding the length of a page, many making do with less than half of one). While some poems say “Lord” out loud like this one does, many don’t. Most still manage to make reference to some suitably rich symbol or other: death, silence, infinity, light, desire, blood. The result is a swirl of gestures toward profundity.

Not to say:

us.       Not to say silence.

            Not to say wonders.

Close the lines of light on the neck

of man,

promote vanity

in shadow        so to begin.

The beginning.            The word.

Twist neck and belly does not guess the epiphany

of the man

the number

may be.

May man behold himself        fire in his hands

fire

in vanity.

Meter? Rhyme? Fernández’s vaporous verses float freely of such earthbound concerns. Meaning remains elusive throughout the book, true, but repetition offers its own contrapuntal structure.

To pass from turned page

to the exact

                                    deposition

of the gaze,

without appeal,

without wounds

And the turn of one’s face is a

symbol,

to represent one’s self

minute after minute in the other         in two or three parts

without the body knowing, place one’s self

unhurriedly, with no problem

between the gaze and

death

Read what the symbol may be

and the book

and the hunger

derision in fire

Gaze, hunger, fire. Elsewhere, it’s fingernails and flesh, flight and song, all of it shot through with this remarkably forceful, quasi-Poundian Neoplatonic lionization of light:

Multiple of light: nothing dampens                in the night

The result is a swirl of gestures toward profundity, a dust cloud of images, something fluid, whirling, and gritty all at once, the kind of poetry that fails to cohere at a glance but rewards careful, attentive readers. That’s not to say that this is a book for codebreakers. Rather, Fernández’s hermetic, incantatory palm-of-the-hand poems provide their own continuum of roofs, an imperfect refuge from an extremely imperfect world. Give this meditative, visionary book your eyes, your ears, and especially your tongue: Kascia’s virtuosic translation all but begs to be read out loud.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.