{"id":280246,"date":"2010-10-18T19:30:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-18T19:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/10\/18\/latest-review-song-for-his-disappeared-love-by-raul-zurita\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:10:01","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:10:01","slug":"latest-review-song-for-his-disappeared-love-by-raul-zurita","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/10\/18\/latest-review-song-for-his-disappeared-love-by-raul-zurita\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "Song for His Disappeared Love" by Raul Zurita"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews Section<\/a> is a piece by Vincent Francone on Raul Zurita’s collection Song for His Disappeared Love<\/em>, which was translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky and published by Action Books. <\/p>\n

I don’t read much poetry, so I wasn’t familiar with Zurita until Vincent Francone pitched us this review. (Although I love his Wikipedia entry:<\/a> “Ra\u00fal Zurita Canessa (born 1950) is a Chilean poet and anthologist. He won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2000.” This is a street. There is a house.) Strangely—or maybe not so—one of the best overviews is available through the Blue Flower Arts agency<\/a> and makes him sound pretty interesting:<\/p>\n

\n

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\u2019s 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<\/span>, 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, \u201cThe New Life,\u201d over New York and later\u2014still during the reign of Pinochet\u2014he bulldozed the phrase \u201cNi Pena Ni Miedo\u201d (\u201cWithout Pain Or Fear\u201d) into the Atacama Desert which, for its length, can only be seen from the sky. An article in Jacket Magazine elucidates, \u201cHe 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.\u201d Zurita\u2019s renowned poetic trilogy, composed over a span of 15 years, is considered one of the singular poetic achievements in Latin American poetry: Purgatory<\/em> appeared in 1979, Anteparadise<\/em> in 1982, and The New Life<\/em> in 1993.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Anyway, here’s the opening of Vincent’s review of the new book:<\/p>\n

\n

To the betterment of our cultural landscape, a number of works by Ra\u00fal Zurita have been recently translated into English. Much of this work centers on the nightmare of Chile\u2019s Pinochet era. While other writers have tackled this subject, mostly while in exile, Zurita remained in Chile, a direct witness to the terror that began on September 11, 1973 and remained beyond the seventeen years of Pinochet\u2019s rule. Zurita, like so many, was captured and tortured. Unlike so many, he lived to tell the tale. His work exists in opposition to the dictatorship and, by extension, the long, terrible history of man\u2019s inhumanity to man. The latest of his translated books, Song of His Disappeared Love<\/em> (Action Books) is more than a reflection on the disappeared, tortured, and murdered; it is a direct confrontation. The reader is beset by the poem, forced to parse through the language and face the horror head on. His writing\u2014often surreal and incantatory\u2014rides the crest of the avant-garde without succumbing to empty abstractions, urging the reader to look directly into the abyss and yet, oddly, conveying a sense of hope. Within the elusive moments are punctuations of astonishing imagery. To this reader, the image that refuses to die is that of the disappeared thrown from helicopters into the sea and the mouths of volcanoes, unseen but impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Click here<\/a> to read the full piece. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Raul Zurita’s collection Song for His Disappeared Love, which was translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky and published by Action Books. I don’t read much poetry, so I wasn’t familiar with Zurita until Vincent Francone pitched us this review. (Although […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[35776,27236,35766,10576,19236,1646,35786,22356],"class_list":["post-280246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-action-books","tag-chilean-literature","tag-daniel-borzutzky","tag-poetry","tag-raul-zurita","tag-review","tag-song-for-his-disappeared-love","tag-vincent-francone"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312586,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280246\/revisions\/312586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}