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Raul Zurita's "Purgatory", a landmark in contemporary Latin
American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual
violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet's
military dictatorship (1973-1990) in the fiercely inventive voice
of a postmodern master. This beautiful en face edition, superbly
translated by Anna Deeny, brings to English-language readers an
indispensable volume written by one of the most important living
poets writing in Spanish today. Zurita was a 24-year-old student in
Valparaiso when, on the morning of the coup, he was arrested,
detained, and tortured. Conceived as the first text of a "Dantean"
trilogy that includes "Anteparaiso" ("Anteparadise") and "La Vida
Nueva" ("The New Life"), "Purgatory" is his anguished response to
Chile's violent recent history.
Chilean poet Raul Zurita has long been recognized as one of themost
celebrated and important voices from Latin America. Hiscompelling
rhythms combine epic and lyric tones, public andmost intimate
themes, grief and joy. This bilingual volume ofselected works is
the first of its kind in any language, representingthe remarkable
range of an extraordinary poet. Zurita's workconfronts the
cataclysm of the Pinochet coup with a powerfulurgency matched by
remarkable craftsmanship and imaginativevision. In Zurita's attempt
to address the atrocities that indeliblymark Chile, he makes
manifest the common history of theAmericas.
The two threads of this book are militancy (civic, political,
social) and love (the beloved, the people). There are threads that
alternate with each other, but the more intriguing moments are
intertwined and this fabric of love and activism is the greatest
merit of the book. One of their highest poetic achievements are in
describing the ruins present and the future of all humankind - from
the Parthenon to the Eiffel Tower, by contrast postulates: "Yet we
have erected monuments / Evergreen: / two gazes that cross, for
example, / my love for you, for example, that precedes me /
thousands of thousands of years / and I will survive until the last
of the / men contemplating / the last of the sunset." It is not
purely a militant poem, but a love poem, or the ultimate poem.
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INRI (Paperback)
Raul Zurita; Translated by Will Rowe
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R532
Discovery Miles 5 320
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A shocking poetic account of an event that was kept secret: the
throwing of the bodies of the disappeared in Chile into the mouths
of volcanoes and into the sea. "INRI" responds to the need to find
a language for an event that was kept hidden and excluded from
official records in Chile: the fact that the bodies of the
disappeared were thrown out of helicopters into the mouths of
volcanoes and into the sea. In order to bring this event, which was
neither seen nor heard, into language, Zurita invents a form and
language capable of bringing it into the present. The one place
where these unspeakable acts might be registered is in the
landscape of Chile: the mountains, desert, and sea. There the event
might begin to be touched, heard, and finally seen. When there are
no places from which to speak, 'the stones cry out'. "INRI" is
written as poetry without regular lines or metre. In the tradition
of Whitman or Ginsberg's Howl, it works with long breaths and large
blocks of meaning: intensities that overrun the usual measures of
speech and syntax. To read it is to experience a strange force
pulsing through the language, breaking apart its usual channels,
and opening unseen and unheard zones. Zurita, winner of the Chilean
National Poetry Prize, is one of the best known poets of Latin
America. His work is part of a revolution in poetic language that
began in the 1970s and sought to find new forms of expression,
radically different from those of Pablo Neruda. The challenge was
to confront the contemporary epoch, with its particular forms of
violence, including violence done to language. "INRI" is
distinctive in that it does not speak out of individual sorrow,
though this is not missing from the text, but seeks, rather, a new
space, out of which love might be asserted as prime human reality,
a space which might give birth to a different type of society.
Here is a major work by a Chilean poet thought by many to be the
most brilliant and important new voice in the Spanish language. In
its first American edition, this poetry is presented in Spanish and
Enlgish, so that readers of both languages may listed to Zurita's
voice.
"Anteparadise" can be read as a creative response, an act of
resistance by a young artist to the violence and suffering during
and after the 1973 coup that toppled the democratically elected
Allende government. Zurita thus follows the example of several
Latin American pets such as the Peruvian Cesar Vallejo and Chilean
Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, sharing their passion and urgency, but
his voice is unique.
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