Southern Seas (originally "Los mares del Sur"), available for loan at the Internet Archive, is the fourth installment of the Pepe Carvalho detective series. Carvalho is employed to find a missing man, Stuart Pedrell, who all his life had yearned to emulate Paul Gauguin and move to the South Pacific, but who instead simply disappeared with no warning, and turned up a year later having been murdered.
In his investigation Carvalho goes through Pedrell's papers, and finds several excerpts from poems. With the help of a literature professor he identifies three of them: "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter" from The Waste Land, an extract from The South Seas by Pavese, and the line "Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud" from Lamento per il sud by Salvatore Quasimodo. One poem remains unrecognised though:
Exiled to the Marquesas
he saw the inside of prison
under suspicion of not arousing suspicion
in Paris
he was taken for an arrant snob
only a few natives knew of his passing impotence
and that the or de corps
was a pretext
for forgetting the black choir stalls
the cuckoo of a Copenhagen dining room
a trip to Lima with a sorrowful mother
the pedantic chatter of the Café Voltaire
and above all
the incomprehensible verse of Stéphane Mallarmé
(translation by Patrick Camiller, 1986)
Within the story it is described as "a poem from the poetry magazine Gauguin" by "a writer unknown to Carvalho". Does this poem actually exist? If so, who is the author and what is its title?
