Raúl Zurita
Chilean Poet
"Zurita's sequence of poems—and they must be read as a sequence—creates as it explores a geography of earth, body, and soul, a syntax of pain and topology, an imagery of flesh and land painfully entwined, ultimately freed…. This is ground-breaking, mind-breaking, bone-breaking style; the miracle is that Zurita heals all by the end, wringing triumph out of anguish." —Ronald Christ, president of PEN Mexico
"Chile's tragic recent history provides the fire in which this…poet's Dantean visions have been forged. The poetry that emerges is by turns cold, molten, scathing, and ultimately liberating—a remarkable thing."
—John Ashbery
"More than anything, Zurita emits warmth. As if there were honeysuckle under his skin." —Jacket Magazine
Raúl Zurita, winner of the Chilean National Poetry Prize, is arguably the most powerful poetic voice in Latin America today. His compelling rhythms combine epic and lyric tones, public and most intimate themes, grief and joy. Despite having been arrested and tortured under the Pinochet dictatorship, Zurita’s prevailing attitude in his Dantesque trilogy Purgatoi (Purgatory), Anteparaíso (Anteparadise), and La Vida Nueva (The New Life) is a deep love for everything and everybody in the world. 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, Zurita’s latest book in English, is distinctive in that it does not speak out of individual sorrow—though this is not missing—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.
Raul Zurita was born in Santiago, Chile in 1950. He started out studying engineering before turning to poetry. His early work is a ferocious response to Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Like many other Chileans, Zurita was arrested and tortured. When he was released, he helped to form a radical artistic group CADA, and he became renowned for his provocative and intensely physical public performances. He has written what are perhaps the most massively scaled poems ever created. He has done this with earth-moving equipment and with smoke-trailing aircraft. In the early 1980s, Zurita famously sky-wrote passages from his poem, “The New Life,” over New York and later—still during the reign of Pinochet—he bulldozed the phrase “Ni Pena Ni Miedo” (“Without Pain Or Fear”) into the Atacama Desert which, for its length, can only be seen from the sky.* An article in Jacket Magazine elucidates, “He says that in those days of brutality and distrust and terror…he began to imagine writing poems in the sky, on the faces of cliffs, in the desert…. He started to imagine that he might fight sadistic force with poems as insubstantial as contrails in the air over a city.” Zurita’s renowned poetic trilogy, composed over a span of 15 years, is considered one of the singular poetic achievements in Latin American poetry: Purgatory appeared in 1979, Anteparadise in 1982, and The New Life in 1993.
Zurita is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Casa de las Americas Prize from Cuba and the National Poetry Prize of Chile. His work has been translated into a dozen languages. In English, INRI is translated by William Rowe and published by Marick Press. Two new books, Song for the Disappeared Love, translated by Daniel Borzutzky, and Purgatory, translated by Anna Deeny, are forthcoming from, respectively, Action Books and The University of California Press. Zurita’s other poetry collections include: El Paraíso Esta Vacío, Canto a Su Amor, Desaparecido, El Amor de Chile, Los Países muertos, In Memoriam, Las Ciudades de Agua. He has just completed a book that includes “Inscriptions Facing the Sea,” a project to inscribe 22 phrases in the cliffs of the north coast of Chile that would only be read from the sea.
*See "Ni Pena Ni Miedo" in Google Earth.
About INRI (2009, translated by William Rowe)
“The poem itself is a surreal translation into both possible and also impossible imagery of unspeakable and nearly unsayable experiences of imprisonment, torture and murder, of powerlessness and sorrow and spiritual destruction, yet also of enduring and holding onto one’s humanity, during the brazen dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.” —Reginald Gibbons
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, that 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.
About PURGATORY (2009)
Raúl 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 Valparaíso when, on the morning of the coup, he was arrested, detained, and tortured. Conceived as the first text of a Dantean trilogy that includes Anteparaíso (Anteparadise) and La Vida Nueva (The New Life), Purgatory is his anguished response to Chile's violent recent history. The Bloomsbury Review says of Purgatory, "It remains one of the most important and dynamic works of contemporary Latin American poetry....This sequence of startling and painful poems combines visual and concrete poetry with short, lyrical texts that release the forces of suffering until they become the poetic body of triumph. Every young poet who wishes to find out what a poem does needs to read and study this book. The lessons found here will redefine poetic commitment."
