Texto En Ingles

THE POETRY AND ANTIPOETRY OF CHILE |
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For a nation of only 13 million inhabitants, Chile has the distinction of being the birthplace of at least five world-renowned poets, two of those, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, winners of the Nobel Prize for literature. A third poet who has been touted as deserving of the Noble Prize is the 84-year-old self-proclaimed antipoet, NicanorParra. The concept of antipoetry as prescribed by Parra -"You can do anything in poetry"; "in sincerity lies the danger" and "truth is a collective error" -owes something of its iconoclastic outrageousness to an earlier Chilean poet, Vicente Huidobro, who declared that "the poet is a little God" and "an adjective, when it doesn't give life, takes it away.". Following both Huidobro and Parra, a fifthChilean poet, Enrique Lihn, carried on the antipoetry tradition by attacking both his medium and himself as the messenger, asserting that poetry is "a big pile of muck stirred by chance" and the poet is "a rotten little rhetorician." Despite what may seem an overly negative and therefore limited approach to the making of a poem, Chilean poets have produced in the antipoetic mode some of the mostprovocative and original writing of the last half of the twentieth century.The present selection of work by a handful of Chilean poets is hardly representative of the wide range of styles and techniques employed by writers up and down their long, thin, and highly-varied land. Only one of the poets, Francisco Véjar, exemplifies a more romantic tradition that has always existed in Chilean poetry andperhaps has drawn its inspiration most fully in recent times from the work of Jorge Teiller, who, like Neruda and Parra, was a product of the country's rainy southern region. But the emphasis here, necessarily, is on the more antipoetic style, which has, through the influence of both Parra and Lihn, had such a profound impact on the younger generation of Chilean poets. The first poem offered hereis an early work by Enrique Lihn, which was only discovered in 1998, ten years after the poet's death and some 45 years after its original composition. Lihn's "Portrait" is clearly a self-portrait, and even though its writing antedates the publication of Nicanor Parra's defining collection of Poems and Antipoems in 1954, this early poem indicates that Lihn was well aware of the work of Parra, whichhad begun its influence from the time of his first published collection in 1937. Already apparent in Lihn's self-portrait is his characteristic belittling of himself as a person and poet, which may remind one of Parra's declaration in his "Warning to the Reader," from Poems and Antipoems: "I`m proud of my shortcomings." Lihn may not exhibit the same type of humorous pride as Parra, but hecertainly shares with him and Huidobro a sense of the poetic power of an anti view, of being a "little God" of an "exiled domain," of being "joyful in his grief." (For more of Lihn's poetry, see issues number 1 and 2 of The Dirty Goat.)The antipoet of Chile is, by definition, a poet who both takes his writing seriously and yet can poke fun at his own foibles. This is demonstrated repeatedly in NicanorParra's longest and in some ways most ambitious poem, his over 400-line elegy in memory of his classmate and fellow poet, Luis Oyarzún. Like all of Parra's seriocomic antipoems, his homage to Oyarzún - first published in December 1997 in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio- contains words and phrases difficult to render in another language, beginning in this case with the title, which plays on aspeaker's traditional disclaimer that he has not come prepared to give a speech but then proceeds to talk on and on, in love with the sound of his own voice. Here, as elsewhere, Parra inserts additional letters into certain words -in this case "prepared"- in order to form something of a pun on his own name. Similarly, he adds the letter "i" to the word "particular" for punning on the verb "culiar,"...