Description
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky. "I sang the song of the old concrete sheds. It was filled with hundreds of niches, one over the other. There is a country in each one; they're like boys, they're dead." In this landmark poem, written at the height of the Pinochet dictatorship, major Chilean poet Raúl Zurita protests with ferocious invention the extinguishment of a generation and the brutalization of a nation. Of the role of poetry and of his own treatment by the military under this regime, Zurita has said, "You see, the only thing that told me that I wasn't crazy, that I wasn't living in a nightmare, was this file of poems, and then when they threw them into the sea, then I understood exactly what was happening." This elegy refuses to be an elegy, refuses to let the Disappeared disappear.
Author Bio
Raúl Zurita's books of poems include, among others: Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), El paraíso está vacío (1984), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), La vida nueva (1994), Poemas militantes (2000), INRI (2003), Los países muertos (2006), Las ciudades de agua (2007), In Memoriam (2007), Cuadernos de guerra (2009), Sueños para Kurosawa (2010), Zurita (2011), and EL PAÍS DE TABLAS (2015). Translations to English include Purgatory, Anteparadaise, INRI, SONG FOR HIS DISAPPEARED LOVE (Action Books, 2010), Dreams for Kurosawa, Militant Poems, and THE COUNTRY OF PLANKS (Action Books, 2015). His numerous awards include the National Literature Prize of Chile and the Pablo Neruda Prize. He lives in Santiago, Chile, where he is a professor of literature at Universidad Diego Portales.
Author City: Santiago CHL