The Introduction to this selection invokes the names of Vicente
Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra - and to
their ranks adds fellow Chilean Enrique Lihn. We've got two words
to say about that: Shame. Shame. Since there is bilingual text
here, one's first apprehension is shunted toward the amateurish
translations ("We stopped rolling around, overcome by a strange
feeling of/shame, without managing to come up with another
reproach/than the one for finding such an easy victim") but further
persual yields evidence that it's Lihn himself who's that dreadful.
Banal quasi-philosophy ("we have all the time in the time ahead/to
become the emptiness that we are deep down inside"), sense
infelicities ("We all live in darkness, kept apart from each other/
by walls easily crossed but full of false doors"),
bludgeon-politics ("No doubt about it;/of the sixty thousand FBI
and CIA agents, only a few/ have shown their true faces").
Admittedly, Chile, for certain sectors of the literary scene, is
now what Vietnam used to be - a sentimental Eden of bloodied but
unbowed genius - but surely we could have found someone better,
less insufferable, than Lihn. "I wrote, was a poor kind/of beggar
boggled with pride,/and also put a few readers to death. . . ." Too
true. (Kirkus Reviews)
The Dark Room presents in a compact bilingual selection the
extraordinary poetry of Enrique Lihn (1929-1988), winner of the
prestigious Casa de las Americas Prize and one of Chile's most
remarkable writers. Gathered here is Lihn's most representative
work from 1963 to 1977, drawn from his major books.
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