Description
Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky. "First introduced to a U.S. audience by Cecilia Vicuna in 4 Mapuche Poets, Jaime Luis Huenun has become best-known through Daniel Borzutzky's vivid, memorable translations. In these recent poems--published in 2001 in Chile--Huenun invents a setting influenced by Melville's vivid scenarios, Coleridge's languid morbidity, andGeorge Trakl's silences and darkening seas. Borzutzky's English version is as haunted, brooding, and terrific as the original"--Forrest Gander. "PORT TRAKL is a world whose characters do not know which world they belong to, and which world they want to belong to; and as they attempt to depart one state of exile and enter into another, we get the sense that they will always be caught between worlds: between the real and the imaginary, between speech and silence, between poetry and the impossibility of hope"--Daniel Borzutzky.
Author Bio
Jaime Luis Huenún was born in 1967 in Valdivia, southern Chile. He is an award-winning Mapuche-Huilliche poet writing in Spanish. His books include Ceremonias (1999), Puerto Trakl (2001), Reducciones (2012), FANON CITY MEU (2014), and La calle Maldestam y otros territorios apócrifos (2016). He has received numerous awards, including the Pablo Neruda Prize (2003), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), and the Chilean National Council on Arts and Culture's Best Work of Literature 2013 for Reducciones. He has also edited several anthologies of Mapuche and Latin American indigenous poetry, including Epu mari ülkatufe ta fachantü: 20 poetas mapuche contemporáneos (Lom, 2003), Los Cantos Ocultos: Antología de poesía indígena latinoamericana (2008), and Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology (2013). His poetry was first introduced to English-language readers in Cecilia Vicuña's ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets (1998) and later in the full-length book, PORT TRAKL (2008), translated by Daniel Borzutzky. FANON CITY MEU was translated into Italian in 2015.
Jaime Huenún currently lives in Santiago, Chile, where he works in the Chilean Ministry of Culture's Department of Intercultural Studies, prior to which he taught literature at several Chilean universities, including the Universidad Diego Portales and the Universidad Alberto Hurtado. He has been invited to many international literary events in the United States, England, Spain, Australia, Colombia, and Argentina. Aside from English, his poetry has been translated into Mapudungun, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Catalan.
Author City: USA