© Pepe Torres
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Raúl Zurita is Chile’s, and Latin America’s, foremost living poet and one of our most lucid political voices. Born in 1950 in Santiago, Zurita was detained on the morning of the Pinochet coup while on his way to university in Valparaíso, where he was an engineering student, and held and tortured alongside hundreds of other prisoners in the belly of the ship Maipo. His work since—his life’s work—gives us an enormous, panoramic vision of how language breaks open, and opens up, to contain and recalibrate the disasters of torture, disappearance, and dictatorship and what it means to be human. In Zurita—again and again, resounding—the human speaks where it cannot, in new language, new forms, and with new urgency.
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Foreword |
Funeral Rites
We’re in a world and in a society that doesn’t bet on the human anymore. It’s a really arid age and we’re probably witness to the end of things that are important. Literature is suffering a wholesale, radical change. Texts have practically replaced letters. I belong to a world that’s disappearing with big things and with big tragedies.
Poetry, as we can see today, is, with very few exceptions, really insignificant. It’s been reduced to the craft of little lines that don’t have anything to do with the world. This poetry is autistic, it has no impact.
This total distancing between a society and poetry corresponds to an authorial crisis that’s been going on for a long time now. I think that poetry understood as verse-poem is now a dead form and seems to me pretty limiting.
The poetry of our age is not in poetry. At least it’s not in the insufferable truckloads and truckloads of poetry about the self, and technology, or whatever else, can hardly influence something that’s not there, that doesn’t exist anymore.
The I, that great cultural construction, is built after Homer, after the Exodus. Moses sees the burning bush and God tells him, “Take your shoes off, you’re on holy ground” and the guy asks him, “Who are you?” so I can tell them—the Israelites—who’s ordering me to free the Egyptians.” And he says, “I am that I am.” So Moses should answer, “I am” sent me to free you. The I, until the great Rimbaudian deconstruction, is an Other. But this I doesn’t have anything to do with the I of poetry today.
Poetry renounced the most important themes to surrender them to narrative, to the essay or the chronicle, and limited itself to only being witness to a few private emotions. The poverty this has meant is critical. All this talk today about how the poem is a reflection on poetry itself is a fatal bore. Five minutes of hardcore porn would be a thousand times better. At least it says more about the world than all of Spanish poetry put together. Every great poem sparks a dazzling and unrelenting debate about what lies beyond the poem; if it doesn’t tell us this, it doesn’t tell us anything. This is first and foremost A Throw of the Dice by Mallarmé; his inquiry goes from society’s view of the newspaper and the new forms of reading it birthed to the textures of the universe.
Poetry, as we can see today, is, with very few exceptions, really insignificant. It’s been reduced to the craft of little lines that don’t have anything to do with the world. This poetry is autistic, it has no impact.
This total distancing between a society and poetry corresponds to an authorial crisis that’s been going on for a long time now. I think that poetry understood as verse-poem is now a dead form and seems to me pretty limiting.
The poetry of our age is not in poetry. At least it’s not in the insufferable truckloads and truckloads of poetry about the self, and technology, or whatever else, can hardly influence something that’s not there, that doesn’t exist anymore.
The I, that great cultural construction, is built after Homer, after the Exodus. Moses sees the burning bush and God tells him, “Take your shoes off, you’re on holy ground” and the guy asks him, “Who are you?” so I can tell them—the Israelites—who’s ordering me to free the Egyptians.” And he says, “I am that I am.” So Moses should answer, “I am” sent me to free you. The I, until the great Rimbaudian deconstruction, is an Other. But this I doesn’t have anything to do with the I of poetry today.
Poetry renounced the most important themes to surrender them to narrative, to the essay or the chronicle, and limited itself to only being witness to a few private emotions. The poverty this has meant is critical. All this talk today about how the poem is a reflection on poetry itself is a fatal bore. Five minutes of hardcore porn would be a thousand times better. At least it says more about the world than all of Spanish poetry put together. Every great poem sparks a dazzling and unrelenting debate about what lies beyond the poem; if it doesn’t tell us this, it doesn’t tell us anything. This is first and foremost A Throw of the Dice by Mallarmé; his inquiry goes from society’s view of the newspaper and the new forms of reading it birthed to the textures of the universe.
I think the problem with poetry is that it’s fenced in by the vigorous, unexpected novel—because after the nouveau roman, we thought that was the end of it—that shows signs of a pretty incredible vitality, and by visual art, which is also pretty strong. And poetry is stuck in between, as if constrained, as if the poets had withdrawn.
There’s a frivolous purism that doesn’t understand the urgency of human passion. The purists claim that they deal in the most profound reality, but in reality, they’re talking about the easiest forms of irreality. There’s a whole poetry that you ask to stop, because you don’t know what it’s talking about, what it’s saying to me. This is purism. Language in its pure state is mathematics and the pure poets are mediocre mathematicians.
That poetry is dying; that poetry that at a certain point broke away from orality, that founded the concept of the person we speak in, it’s fading, and maybe it’s not a bad sign that it fades out.
Nicanor Parra launched his famous “the poets came down from Olympus” and it was read as a celebration, when in reality it was a great loss.
It was understood backwards, it was a recrimination: they came down, leaving poetry to its fate. It’s the betrayal of the poets.
Parra’s intuition is brilliant, like he is. It’s the great intuition of a genius, but what he foresaw was something really cruel. The last thing you can ask of poets is that, okay, they came down from Olympus, they partied all over town, and now they go back up to sing the last songs of a great art that’s dying.
Back up to Olympus, then, to sing the final verses of horror and of the wonder of being alive in a world that is time and history, and that second by second builds its apocalypse and its new dawn.
I have the feeling that I belong to an age that is indeed dying, but I don’t see it as necessarily something bad, because I’m not either an admirer of the times it fell to me to live. Maybe this kind of wave, of directionless sea, makes continuing with art today more difficult and maybe more heroic than during the dictatorship.
Men and women will keep on falling in love, but there’s a time, a kind of waiting, that generates the possibility of the dream. When everything is instantaneous, there’s no time anymore for dreaming. But I’m not an alarmist, because if you look at this ancient time, it was pretty terrible. It was an unbelievably violent time.
I think that experience tells you if you’ve had an encounter, if you’ve really experienced it strongly. And you don’t mean the encounter, you can’t say anything, and the other person can’t say anything because saying “I love you, I really love you, I adore you” is too much and the only thing it would do would be to shut down the circuit and return you to a state of communication where the history of language and words reveal themselves as misunderstood history, that language is not everything, that there are things they don’t ever understand like your pain that could have been called hell in any work of literature or poem, and there are things that are too big to grasp and that could have been called paradise. I think everything we try is like a transition, a purgatory; in purgatory there are no words.
There’s a frivolous purism that doesn’t understand the urgency of human passion. The purists claim that they deal in the most profound reality, but in reality, they’re talking about the easiest forms of irreality. There’s a whole poetry that you ask to stop, because you don’t know what it’s talking about, what it’s saying to me. This is purism. Language in its pure state is mathematics and the pure poets are mediocre mathematicians.
That poetry is dying; that poetry that at a certain point broke away from orality, that founded the concept of the person we speak in, it’s fading, and maybe it’s not a bad sign that it fades out.
Nicanor Parra launched his famous “the poets came down from Olympus” and it was read as a celebration, when in reality it was a great loss.
It was understood backwards, it was a recrimination: they came down, leaving poetry to its fate. It’s the betrayal of the poets.
Parra’s intuition is brilliant, like he is. It’s the great intuition of a genius, but what he foresaw was something really cruel. The last thing you can ask of poets is that, okay, they came down from Olympus, they partied all over town, and now they go back up to sing the last songs of a great art that’s dying.
Back up to Olympus, then, to sing the final verses of horror and of the wonder of being alive in a world that is time and history, and that second by second builds its apocalypse and its new dawn.
I have the feeling that I belong to an age that is indeed dying, but I don’t see it as necessarily something bad, because I’m not either an admirer of the times it fell to me to live. Maybe this kind of wave, of directionless sea, makes continuing with art today more difficult and maybe more heroic than during the dictatorship.
Men and women will keep on falling in love, but there’s a time, a kind of waiting, that generates the possibility of the dream. When everything is instantaneous, there’s no time anymore for dreaming. But I’m not an alarmist, because if you look at this ancient time, it was pretty terrible. It was an unbelievably violent time.
I think that experience tells you if you’ve had an encounter, if you’ve really experienced it strongly. And you don’t mean the encounter, you can’t say anything, and the other person can’t say anything because saying “I love you, I really love you, I adore you” is too much and the only thing it would do would be to shut down the circuit and return you to a state of communication where the history of language and words reveal themselves as misunderstood history, that language is not everything, that there are things they don’t ever understand like your pain that could have been called hell in any work of literature or poem, and there are things that are too big to grasp and that could have been called paradise. I think everything we try is like a transition, a purgatory; in purgatory there are no words.
"We speak because we’re apart. Language is what masks the separation of human beings. Poetry is the vastest, and maybe most desperate, effort to say with words that belong to this world things that are beyond words."
It’s like you witness something that’s about to happen, but that doesn’t happen. Something’s about to be said, but in the end, nothing’s said; but it’s about to touch that unsaid thing, that thing that sound doesn’t reach. Poetic emotion happens because the word pain doesn’t reach the word pain, the word love doesn’t fit in the word love. Deep down, the question is the why of this experience.
When you see someone who’s lost a child, the only thing you can do is try to comfort them, nothing else, they’re not going to hear anything you say and their cry and their scream is also for no one. There language bottoms out, anyone who suffers is exiled from the world, it’s the closest thing to death and it’s something that anyone who has had experience with love knows; but the kind of love where the words love, sex, orgasm aren’t enough.
There isn’t a human being that walks through this life that hasn’t felt, or that won’t feel, that they’re exiled in the desert. For poetry, those words give way to Christ. They’re so universal that they needed not a man to speak them, but a God.
I think it fell to poetry in specific historic moments—Greek, Ancient Judea—to ground history and found communities. And that today, the role of the poet is to withstand however they can the pain and death of the words they use. To know that we deal in the pain of language and the word. The earth doesn’t need us for anything, neither does the cosmos. We can all disappear in one fell stroke and nothing will happen to this universe. We that call ourselves humans introduced a violence that the universe didn’t know. So this thing called poetry is perhaps the last form of expression that belongs to all the hopeless people of the world, and there’s a lot of us.
Great poems give rise to histories, nations: with the Iliad began the history of what we understand to be the West. What we call “the human” is born of the ashes of Trojan Hektor, master of horses.
The human is the history of language. Poetry and languages are the spells we unleash in the face of death. The history of poetry is the history of those spells.
We’re not prepared to absorb in life this excess of passion that we put into our dreams and our art. Poetry is the most fragile genre because it depends on language in a world where language lays dying and it’s the most powerful because it’s the only one that can give this pain its new meanings.
When you see someone who’s lost a child, the only thing you can do is try to comfort them, nothing else, they’re not going to hear anything you say and their cry and their scream is also for no one. There language bottoms out, anyone who suffers is exiled from the world, it’s the closest thing to death and it’s something that anyone who has had experience with love knows; but the kind of love where the words love, sex, orgasm aren’t enough.
There isn’t a human being that walks through this life that hasn’t felt, or that won’t feel, that they’re exiled in the desert. For poetry, those words give way to Christ. They’re so universal that they needed not a man to speak them, but a God.
I think it fell to poetry in specific historic moments—Greek, Ancient Judea—to ground history and found communities. And that today, the role of the poet is to withstand however they can the pain and death of the words they use. To know that we deal in the pain of language and the word. The earth doesn’t need us for anything, neither does the cosmos. We can all disappear in one fell stroke and nothing will happen to this universe. We that call ourselves humans introduced a violence that the universe didn’t know. So this thing called poetry is perhaps the last form of expression that belongs to all the hopeless people of the world, and there’s a lot of us.
Great poems give rise to histories, nations: with the Iliad began the history of what we understand to be the West. What we call “the human” is born of the ashes of Trojan Hektor, master of horses.
The human is the history of language. Poetry and languages are the spells we unleash in the face of death. The history of poetry is the history of those spells.
We’re not prepared to absorb in life this excess of passion that we put into our dreams and our art. Poetry is the most fragile genre because it depends on language in a world where language lays dying and it’s the most powerful because it’s the only one that can give this pain its new meanings.
I remembered a phrase from Artaud: “I can cure myself of everyone else’s judgment with the total distance that separates me from myself.” But it’s not that. They say, and it’s true, that if a single human being dies of hunger it’s the failure of all humanity, of its history, future, of everything. If a poem fails, it’s not the failure of a specific author, it’s the failure of the whole of writing. This is poetic angst, a human can lose their life over it. Not because of what a few people might say or not say to you. I hate arrogance in myself and in others, but what more can we ask for than that rare possibility of dying over and over again that literature gives us.
Poetry is a great art that encompasses, that shaped history. What we call West is born, strictly speaking, from Hektor’s funerals at the end of the Iliad. From there emerges the great image of pity, when Achilles returns Hektor’s body to his father, Priam. Today, the state of poetry is an agonizing state. Poetry has survived and has crossed epochs and eras, taking on different forms, from great stories that became great poems, like Genesis or the Hindu Mahabharata, where we can still feel the beat of orality, of a great collective poetry, the voice of nations, of tribes. In those great books, in the Old Testament, in Homer, a world just recently broken away from orality still reverberates.
Just reading them I feel leveled by both fullness and smallness. Aeschylus overwhelms me even more than Shakespeare, to the point where the only thing I might be sure of in the existence of another life is that there I’d find these works recorded.
It has to do with Greek tragedy and the survival of love even after the death of love. When everything comes apart. When a country sees that its own children disappear and learns the spectacle of death, it becomes convinced that even from negation should come something new.
We speak because we’re apart. Language is what masks the separation of human beings. Poetry is the vastest, and maybe most desperate, effort to say with words that belong to this world things that are beyond words.
The unsayable is just that: unsayable. What the poor poet does is establish an uneven fight, unmercilessly uneven, with silence, to wrest from silence still a couple more meanings. Poetry is the ultimate example of this. The words of a poem are and are cut through with a breath of feeling, and at the same time they are this breath and this feeling.
Written civilization, the one still ours, has had too often to name horror, death, tragedy, genocide, massacre. Words are sick from naming these things so often. We live in a civilization, in a culture, where words are radically sick. The signified no longer matches the signifier. Words are stripped of love. We live in a time when language is on the verge of dying out and I think it produces an enormous longing. I have never seen, like now, so many humans in so many places, with such a deep need to express their feelings. That’s why I think that poetry is the only thing that can respond to this longing.
The language that defines this era is the language of publicity where everything we say is not what we say, every affirmation is not what we believe, where words are totally divorced from their meaning. But it’s a widespread misery these days; we’ve gone from Homer’s “concave ships,” from Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” or from the heavens of Isaiah to “City gas: human warmth, natural warmth.” This is the sickness of language, this is what Rimbaud, Nietzsche, all those so-called prophets of the dark saw, that this time was coming. I’m not trying to act all intellectual citing Nietzsche, but it’s above all the death throes of the word. Now from this end can emerge, maybe it already is emerging, the new language.
A poem can’t compete with a slogan from Nike, but it’s light that generates meaning. You say “tree” and they say, cellulose, whatever. They say young people are speaking with fewer and fewer words. It’s a stupid thing, “I love you” only takes three words to say. The danger is the insistence of the language of capital. Uniformity based on profit is a defeat.
Much of literature is part of this phenomenon, but it doesn’t have to do with any individual way of being; it can be really “light” and still poetry can be extraordinary. Poetry doesn’t really care much about poets, yet one knows that today, now, there’s great poetry. At least this, if it came to an end–as I said, the world is ending–and I don’t care about individual behavior, I care about individual behavior only to the extent that it defines people. What’s important are poems and poems choose through whom they want to be written. We don’t choose the poems: the poems choose us.
The language of this age—communication, publicity, the information empire, the entertainment industry—produces a lot of buzz, makes a lot of noise, a kind of oily secretion that sucks up everything else. What really gets shipwrecked and lost on this stage are words, speech.
The fact of speech, to be able to have someone before you or even to be able to talk to yourself, is an experience of integration or reintegration with the world that means, in the end, a process of healing or curing.
The poet is the antithesis of this noise, the one who can resist it and re-establish communication. We live in societies that long for eras when the word played a fundamental role.
Great art—Greek tragedy, say, or the Renaissance—is always a response to its age. What Michelangelo himself painted, so closely associated at first glance with religious motives, is not the presence of God in the world, but on the contrary, the moment in which God abandons human history. That’s where those bodies, so bent and convulsive, come from. Poetry can be the most fragile of artistic expressions, but it’s also the only one with the strength to recover the energy of communication and the original sense of language in its most archaic sense. Poetry is language in a wild state. Language not dominated by human will, that expresses truths that understanding could never cover or contain.
I think that if the cosmos spoke, it would speak in the voice of poems. You find out that you’re part of a much wider, communal dialogue, that everyone speaks with everything: plants with the sea, the sea with the stars. Everything. And probably, poetry isn’t more than the record of a small part of this great big conversation.
Poetry is always new, even if it repeats the same whispers and themes. Poetry is a tremendous force, unknown, that tends toward connection, to the appeal to what we’ve taken to calling “the sacred.” You can’t talk about poetry as “something we’ve surpassed.” Have we outdone Archelaus? Have we bested Sophocles? Does a contemporary playwright know more about human conflict and the human spirit than they do? Of course not.
Everything we’ve called the sacred, that used to be the religious, the horror and vertigo and the wonder of the universe, the unbelievable fact of death, that which even so keeps you alive, poetry is all of this. You can call it other things, but it’s this. Poetry exists before writing, it will survive the end of writing, and take other forms, incredible forms. The internet, for example, seems amazing to me, and the change it’s provoking is of cosmic magnitudes. Just think about the single fact that on the internet, you can play with your identity, that you can be, if you want, Francis Ponge. You call yourself Francis Ponge and just let someone come along and prove that you’re not Francis Ponge. But the incredible thing about the internet is that you don’t rule these things, you don’t control this crowd of personas. All the classical concepts about the individual, the person, intimacy, are disappearing. But we haven’t exactly built the best of worlds with these concepts, so maybe it’s a good thing that they’re coming to an end.
I think all this deep-seated passion for space exploration, for the study of the heavens and galaxies, isn’t more than an effort to re-establish that sacred and magical relation that communities used to have with the universe they lived in. In that sense I think we’re moving toward a reunion with the most ancient and original relationships that we had with the universe, and so for me these technological advances have, in spite of everything, a positive side.
Poetry is a great art that encompasses, that shaped history. What we call West is born, strictly speaking, from Hektor’s funerals at the end of the Iliad. From there emerges the great image of pity, when Achilles returns Hektor’s body to his father, Priam. Today, the state of poetry is an agonizing state. Poetry has survived and has crossed epochs and eras, taking on different forms, from great stories that became great poems, like Genesis or the Hindu Mahabharata, where we can still feel the beat of orality, of a great collective poetry, the voice of nations, of tribes. In those great books, in the Old Testament, in Homer, a world just recently broken away from orality still reverberates.
Just reading them I feel leveled by both fullness and smallness. Aeschylus overwhelms me even more than Shakespeare, to the point where the only thing I might be sure of in the existence of another life is that there I’d find these works recorded.
It has to do with Greek tragedy and the survival of love even after the death of love. When everything comes apart. When a country sees that its own children disappear and learns the spectacle of death, it becomes convinced that even from negation should come something new.
We speak because we’re apart. Language is what masks the separation of human beings. Poetry is the vastest, and maybe most desperate, effort to say with words that belong to this world things that are beyond words.
The unsayable is just that: unsayable. What the poor poet does is establish an uneven fight, unmercilessly uneven, with silence, to wrest from silence still a couple more meanings. Poetry is the ultimate example of this. The words of a poem are and are cut through with a breath of feeling, and at the same time they are this breath and this feeling.
Written civilization, the one still ours, has had too often to name horror, death, tragedy, genocide, massacre. Words are sick from naming these things so often. We live in a civilization, in a culture, where words are radically sick. The signified no longer matches the signifier. Words are stripped of love. We live in a time when language is on the verge of dying out and I think it produces an enormous longing. I have never seen, like now, so many humans in so many places, with such a deep need to express their feelings. That’s why I think that poetry is the only thing that can respond to this longing.
The language that defines this era is the language of publicity where everything we say is not what we say, every affirmation is not what we believe, where words are totally divorced from their meaning. But it’s a widespread misery these days; we’ve gone from Homer’s “concave ships,” from Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” or from the heavens of Isaiah to “City gas: human warmth, natural warmth.” This is the sickness of language, this is what Rimbaud, Nietzsche, all those so-called prophets of the dark saw, that this time was coming. I’m not trying to act all intellectual citing Nietzsche, but it’s above all the death throes of the word. Now from this end can emerge, maybe it already is emerging, the new language.
A poem can’t compete with a slogan from Nike, but it’s light that generates meaning. You say “tree” and they say, cellulose, whatever. They say young people are speaking with fewer and fewer words. It’s a stupid thing, “I love you” only takes three words to say. The danger is the insistence of the language of capital. Uniformity based on profit is a defeat.
Much of literature is part of this phenomenon, but it doesn’t have to do with any individual way of being; it can be really “light” and still poetry can be extraordinary. Poetry doesn’t really care much about poets, yet one knows that today, now, there’s great poetry. At least this, if it came to an end–as I said, the world is ending–and I don’t care about individual behavior, I care about individual behavior only to the extent that it defines people. What’s important are poems and poems choose through whom they want to be written. We don’t choose the poems: the poems choose us.
The language of this age—communication, publicity, the information empire, the entertainment industry—produces a lot of buzz, makes a lot of noise, a kind of oily secretion that sucks up everything else. What really gets shipwrecked and lost on this stage are words, speech.
The fact of speech, to be able to have someone before you or even to be able to talk to yourself, is an experience of integration or reintegration with the world that means, in the end, a process of healing or curing.
The poet is the antithesis of this noise, the one who can resist it and re-establish communication. We live in societies that long for eras when the word played a fundamental role.
Great art—Greek tragedy, say, or the Renaissance—is always a response to its age. What Michelangelo himself painted, so closely associated at first glance with religious motives, is not the presence of God in the world, but on the contrary, the moment in which God abandons human history. That’s where those bodies, so bent and convulsive, come from. Poetry can be the most fragile of artistic expressions, but it’s also the only one with the strength to recover the energy of communication and the original sense of language in its most archaic sense. Poetry is language in a wild state. Language not dominated by human will, that expresses truths that understanding could never cover or contain.
I think that if the cosmos spoke, it would speak in the voice of poems. You find out that you’re part of a much wider, communal dialogue, that everyone speaks with everything: plants with the sea, the sea with the stars. Everything. And probably, poetry isn’t more than the record of a small part of this great big conversation.
Poetry is always new, even if it repeats the same whispers and themes. Poetry is a tremendous force, unknown, that tends toward connection, to the appeal to what we’ve taken to calling “the sacred.” You can’t talk about poetry as “something we’ve surpassed.” Have we outdone Archelaus? Have we bested Sophocles? Does a contemporary playwright know more about human conflict and the human spirit than they do? Of course not.
Everything we’ve called the sacred, that used to be the religious, the horror and vertigo and the wonder of the universe, the unbelievable fact of death, that which even so keeps you alive, poetry is all of this. You can call it other things, but it’s this. Poetry exists before writing, it will survive the end of writing, and take other forms, incredible forms. The internet, for example, seems amazing to me, and the change it’s provoking is of cosmic magnitudes. Just think about the single fact that on the internet, you can play with your identity, that you can be, if you want, Francis Ponge. You call yourself Francis Ponge and just let someone come along and prove that you’re not Francis Ponge. But the incredible thing about the internet is that you don’t rule these things, you don’t control this crowd of personas. All the classical concepts about the individual, the person, intimacy, are disappearing. But we haven’t exactly built the best of worlds with these concepts, so maybe it’s a good thing that they’re coming to an end.
I think all this deep-seated passion for space exploration, for the study of the heavens and galaxies, isn’t more than an effort to re-establish that sacred and magical relation that communities used to have with the universe they lived in. In that sense I think we’re moving toward a reunion with the most ancient and original relationships that we had with the universe, and so for me these technological advances have, in spite of everything, a positive side.
"I think that if the cosmos spoke, it would speak in the voice of poems. You find out that you’re part of a much wider, communal dialogue, that everyone speaks with everything: plants with the sea, the sea with the stars. Everything. And probably, poetry isn’t more than the record of a small part of this great big conversation."
At the same time, I have a feeling this system is going to collapse. But we haven’t gotten to that point yet, we still can’t discern what it is and that a new history is about to emerge, so to speak. I believe it, almost like in a dream, and I sometimes have the feeling that all the poets, after Rimbaud, are a kind of aiodos [epic poet], everyone, everyone, every one of us is accumulating phrases, poems, little songs, so that a new Homer can come and collect them all up. And tell of a new beginning.
I also think that what we’ve called literature, poetry, is taking its leave of the world, at least in the form we’ve known it. But it’s been a tremendous art, from the Iliad on. On the other hand, the written civilizations have shown a terrible violence. Really, I think this is disappearing, although I’d like these final death throes to have a certain dignity. We’re not going to belittle ourselves just because poetry is in its final phase. Let it go out with a bang. Rescue that millenial dream that meant something to humanity. Something else is coming; I think what’s coming will be better.
If you look at history, even if just the last three years, you get the feeling that we never came out the other side of a cursed era. We never left the rage behind. There’s not a single instant, a single minute in which some city in the world isn’t being bombed, where they’re not torturing people in some secret prison.
In the Iliad, we see the gods, destiny intervene in the characters’ lives. Man performs his life, but other forces also act through him. And in the Olympics of Ancient Greece there were contests of tragedies, between poets. The function of tragedy was catharsis: to synthesize feelings of the collective, take on its guilt and pain, portray them and therein liberate the community of that burden. This role of the poet hasn’t changed.
It’s this long journey that goes from the fullness of the great ancient texts where the word and what it names seemed to be a single thing up until “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.”
Every fact, every event, every image is part of this deep piety that we’ve carried with us from time immemorial and that we call the poem. The poem, poetry, is our piety for every detail of the world and so then also for the preservation of the dream of the world and the dream of the earth.
There’s a Mapuche myth, a Mapuche creation story, that says that Ngenechen was alone and he felt alone. He asked himself why, and so then sent a part of himself to go out and make the world, a son. He threw him with great strength so that when he hit the waters of the dark, he fainted. He didn’t make anything because he was stunned. Ngenechen sent his wife, at her core another part of himself, to wake up his son so they could make the world. The woman first woke his brow and made the heavens and the stars. Then she woke his arms and from these arms formed the mountain ranges. She woke him up part by part, and with each part of his body that she woke up they set about creating fish, water, everything. But she forgot to wake his heart. So the heart woke up alone, half dazed, and from this was born man, who was the last to be born. That’s why he doesn’t understand, because he came late, and that’s why he’s condemned to thought and he fears death. He’s the lowest link in creation.
My youngest son once came home crying from nursery school, where they had introduced him to Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, and he got that in order to see them, he had to die. It was a tremendous anguish. At first I laughed but later told him: “But you’re a kid, I mean, these things to do with death have to do with old people. Look, when you’re good and old, you can say I want to die and you die, but if you don’t want to die you don’t just up and die.”
All works of art, whatever they are and whatever they’re about, whatever the genre, are saying that we were not happy, because if we had been happy none of this would have been possible. The history of art is the history of human misfortune. If it had been a happy adventure, art wouldn’t exist. So the history of art is the history of pain. That’s not to say that a happy art can’t exist, but an angelic happiness doesn’t need to be depicted anywhere but in happiness.
Every artist and every writer creates with the dream that the things they’re writing about won’t any longer be inevitable. I think that art is the compensation for the history of unhappiness. Human history is the history of misery. Or if we prefer, in Christian terms, it’s the history of the fall. Of beings that left paradise and who painfully try to look for ways back.
Without pain there’s no art. It’s the fissure through which the expressable emerges; if there’s no wound there’s no expression. That’s how it is, but our human duty is to happiness, not art.
Everything that’s been created in the cultural sphere from time immemorial—from the caves of Altamira to Picasso, from Homer to One Hundred Years of Solitude—is nothing more than a metaphor for the struggle of thousands and thousands of human beings to keep on being human.
In other words, the duty of the human is to persist in the collective construction of paradise, even where all the evidence before us tells us this proposition is madness.
Because the end of poetry is in itself a political fact of astronomical proportion and the only thing we can wish for those who come after us—if we care about those who come after us—is that what follows be a peaceful civilization, less violent than the three thousand years of written culture, and where poetry, from Homer to Canto general by Neruda, had the task of recording the rage of Achilles and its lasting consequences.
The last line that Borges published is amazing. It’s the last line of the last poem of the book in The Conspirators. The poem refers to Christ on the cross and its last line reads: “What does it matter if he suffers if I suffer now.” In reality, all of Borges comes together in this phrase and my appreciation for his work is, how to put it, an unsentimental appreciation. The infinite catastrophes, infinite pains, losses, abandonments give us an overwhelming picture, a picture of existence, but the end of art is the end of pain. Those who predict that poetry’s end is near are wrong, but the reason why is a hard one: as long as there’s a single unhappy human, poetry will continue to be the art of the future.
I also think that what we’ve called literature, poetry, is taking its leave of the world, at least in the form we’ve known it. But it’s been a tremendous art, from the Iliad on. On the other hand, the written civilizations have shown a terrible violence. Really, I think this is disappearing, although I’d like these final death throes to have a certain dignity. We’re not going to belittle ourselves just because poetry is in its final phase. Let it go out with a bang. Rescue that millenial dream that meant something to humanity. Something else is coming; I think what’s coming will be better.
If you look at history, even if just the last three years, you get the feeling that we never came out the other side of a cursed era. We never left the rage behind. There’s not a single instant, a single minute in which some city in the world isn’t being bombed, where they’re not torturing people in some secret prison.
In the Iliad, we see the gods, destiny intervene in the characters’ lives. Man performs his life, but other forces also act through him. And in the Olympics of Ancient Greece there were contests of tragedies, between poets. The function of tragedy was catharsis: to synthesize feelings of the collective, take on its guilt and pain, portray them and therein liberate the community of that burden. This role of the poet hasn’t changed.
It’s this long journey that goes from the fullness of the great ancient texts where the word and what it names seemed to be a single thing up until “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.”
Every fact, every event, every image is part of this deep piety that we’ve carried with us from time immemorial and that we call the poem. The poem, poetry, is our piety for every detail of the world and so then also for the preservation of the dream of the world and the dream of the earth.
There’s a Mapuche myth, a Mapuche creation story, that says that Ngenechen was alone and he felt alone. He asked himself why, and so then sent a part of himself to go out and make the world, a son. He threw him with great strength so that when he hit the waters of the dark, he fainted. He didn’t make anything because he was stunned. Ngenechen sent his wife, at her core another part of himself, to wake up his son so they could make the world. The woman first woke his brow and made the heavens and the stars. Then she woke his arms and from these arms formed the mountain ranges. She woke him up part by part, and with each part of his body that she woke up they set about creating fish, water, everything. But she forgot to wake his heart. So the heart woke up alone, half dazed, and from this was born man, who was the last to be born. That’s why he doesn’t understand, because he came late, and that’s why he’s condemned to thought and he fears death. He’s the lowest link in creation.
My youngest son once came home crying from nursery school, where they had introduced him to Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, and he got that in order to see them, he had to die. It was a tremendous anguish. At first I laughed but later told him: “But you’re a kid, I mean, these things to do with death have to do with old people. Look, when you’re good and old, you can say I want to die and you die, but if you don’t want to die you don’t just up and die.”
All works of art, whatever they are and whatever they’re about, whatever the genre, are saying that we were not happy, because if we had been happy none of this would have been possible. The history of art is the history of human misfortune. If it had been a happy adventure, art wouldn’t exist. So the history of art is the history of pain. That’s not to say that a happy art can’t exist, but an angelic happiness doesn’t need to be depicted anywhere but in happiness.
Every artist and every writer creates with the dream that the things they’re writing about won’t any longer be inevitable. I think that art is the compensation for the history of unhappiness. Human history is the history of misery. Or if we prefer, in Christian terms, it’s the history of the fall. Of beings that left paradise and who painfully try to look for ways back.
Without pain there’s no art. It’s the fissure through which the expressable emerges; if there’s no wound there’s no expression. That’s how it is, but our human duty is to happiness, not art.
Everything that’s been created in the cultural sphere from time immemorial—from the caves of Altamira to Picasso, from Homer to One Hundred Years of Solitude—is nothing more than a metaphor for the struggle of thousands and thousands of human beings to keep on being human.
In other words, the duty of the human is to persist in the collective construction of paradise, even where all the evidence before us tells us this proposition is madness.
Because the end of poetry is in itself a political fact of astronomical proportion and the only thing we can wish for those who come after us—if we care about those who come after us—is that what follows be a peaceful civilization, less violent than the three thousand years of written culture, and where poetry, from Homer to Canto general by Neruda, had the task of recording the rage of Achilles and its lasting consequences.
The last line that Borges published is amazing. It’s the last line of the last poem of the book in The Conspirators. The poem refers to Christ on the cross and its last line reads: “What does it matter if he suffers if I suffer now.” In reality, all of Borges comes together in this phrase and my appreciation for his work is, how to put it, an unsentimental appreciation. The infinite catastrophes, infinite pains, losses, abandonments give us an overwhelming picture, a picture of existence, but the end of art is the end of pain. Those who predict that poetry’s end is near are wrong, but the reason why is a hard one: as long as there’s a single unhappy human, poetry will continue to be the art of the future.
Notes (Foreword)
+ I’d like to thank Raúl Zurita, Héctor Hernández Montecinos, and Anna Deeny Morales for their enthusiasm for this translation and their generous collaboration.
1. Anna Flagg and Shannon Heffernan, “‘Why Is This Happening to Us?’ Daily Number of Kids in ICE Detention Jumps 6x Under Trump,” The Marshall Project, 1.29.2026. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/01/29/ice-kids-in-detention-numbers
2. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1980), 39.
3. Jean Améry, the name adopted by Hans Chaim Maier in the aftermath of World War II, would go on to end his own life 33 years after he survived internments at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen.
4. Karen Elizabeth Bishop, “Estrellas precisas: On Translating the Fragments of Marcelo Uribe.” Translation Review, no. 88 (2014): 13-25.
5. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 43.
6. Raúl Zurita, INRI, trans. William Rowe (Grosse Pointe Farms, MI: Marick Press, 2009), 31.
+ I’d like to thank Raúl Zurita, Héctor Hernández Montecinos, and Anna Deeny Morales for their enthusiasm for this translation and their generous collaboration.
1. Anna Flagg and Shannon Heffernan, “‘Why Is This Happening to Us?’ Daily Number of Kids in ICE Detention Jumps 6x Under Trump,” The Marshall Project, 1.29.2026. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/01/29/ice-kids-in-detention-numbers
2. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1980), 39.
3. Jean Améry, the name adopted by Hans Chaim Maier in the aftermath of World War II, would go on to end his own life 33 years after he survived internments at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen.
4. Karen Elizabeth Bishop, “Estrellas precisas: On Translating the Fragments of Marcelo Uribe.” Translation Review, no. 88 (2014): 13-25.
5. Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 43.
6. Raúl Zurita, INRI, trans. William Rowe (Grosse Pointe Farms, MI: Marick Press, 2009), 31.
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© Pepe Torres
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Raúl Zurita is the author of numerous works of poetry, including Purgatorio (1979; trans. Anna Deeny Morales), Song for His Disappeared Love (1985; trans. Daniel Borzutsky), INRI (2003; trans. William Rowe), and Zurita (2011); numerous collections of essays, including Sobre el amor, el sufrimiento y el nuevo milenio (On Love, Suffering, and the New Millenium, 2000) and Son importantes las estrellas (The Stars Are Important, 2017); a founding member of Chile’s political Colectivo de Acción de Arte (Arts Action Collective, or CADA); and author of verse in skywriting over Queens, NY (1982) and bulldozed into Chile’s Atacama Desert (1993).
He has received, among many other recognitions, the Chilean National Prize for Literature (2000), the Pablo Neruda Iberoamerican Prize in Poetry (2016), the Queen Sofía Prize for Iberoamerican Poetry (2020), the García Lorca Poetry Prize (2023), and has been a Guggenheim fellow (1984). He has been Chile’s cultural attaché to Rome, visiting speaker at leading international universities, was in 2024 the guest of honor at Madrid’s literary Festival Eñe, and recites his work around the world. The significance of Zurita’s contributions to the world of poetry and to how we understand the lived experience and history of dictatorship cannot be overstated. |
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Karen Elizabeth Bishop is a UK/US poet, translator, essayist, and scholar. Her poetry collections include the deering hour (Ornithopter, 2021) and Si|If, written in Spanish and offered in a self-translated bilingual edition. She has translated work by Susana Thénon, Lucía Boscà, Blanca Varela, and is translating Raúl Zurita’s selected work in prose. Recent creative work can be found in the Tahoma Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, The Lincoln Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and New Writing Scotland. She is a 2025 New Jersey State Council of the Arts Fellow in Poetry and 2023 recipient of the inaugural Community Megaphone Fellowship from the Woodberry Poetry Library at Harvard in support of her work with The Elegy Project, which she founded with David Sherman.
Bishop is a scholar of Latin American literature and human rights, with expertise in the history and representation of enforced disappearance and torture in the Southern Cone. She is the author of The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror (SUNY, 2020) and the editor of Cartographies of Exile: A New Spatial Literacy (Routledge, 2016). She is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and Founding Director of the Rutgers Translation Studies Initiative. She divides her time between the wilds of New Jersey and Sevilla, Spain. |
