AntiPoems

Antipoems: New and Selected, a fresh bilingual gathering as well as retrospective of the work of Chile’s foremost poet, reintroduces him to North American readers after thirteen years. Though he has been hardly unproductive, the politics of his homeland have channeled his inventiveness into new modes of expression, which remind us of the sometimes sly hermeticism of Italian writers, Eugenio Montale and Elio Vittorini among them, during the Fascist regime. As Frank MacShane makes clear in his introduction, Parra has not tried to escape repression, but by “using his wit and his humor, he has shown how the artist can still speak the truth in troubled times.” Since much of Parra’s early work is now out of print, editor David Unger has included many of the poems which influenced North American poets such as Ferlinghetti and Merton in the ‘50s and ‘60s, some in new or revised translations. Of Parra’s more recent work, there are generous selections from Artifacts (1972), Sermons and Preachings of the Christ of Elqui (1977), New Sermons and Preachings of the Christ of Elqui(1979), Jokes to Mislead the Police (1983), Ecopoems (1983), Recent Sermons(1983), and a section of “Uncollected Poems” (1984). Antipoems: New and Selected is edited by David Unger, who contributed many of the translations to Enrique Lihn’s The Dark Room and Other Poems (New Directions, 1978). Professor Frank MacShane of Columbia University, in his critical introduction, gives a full evaluation of a poet who is “unquestionably one of the most influential and accomplished in Latin America today, heir to the position long held by his countryman, Pablo Neruda.”

Nicanor Parra (1914–1918)—“a poet of total command and total grandeur” (The New York Times)—is the author of over twenty collections of poetry and widely regarded as one of Latin America’s greatest poets. For forty years he taught theoretical physics at the Universidad de Chile, as well as other universities in the US. His work was championed by such luminaries as Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Allen Ginsberg, and Roberto Bolaño, who once wrote, “Nicanor Parra over everyone else.” Nominated on many occasions for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Parra received many awards and honors, including the inaugural Juan Rulfo Prize, Chile’s National Literature Prize, and Spain’s prestigious Miguel de Cervantes Prize. New Directions has also published his books Poems and Antipoems (1967), Emergency Poems (1972), Antipoems: New and Selected (1985), and Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great (2004). David Unger, the recipient of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Literature Prize, has translated eighteen titles, including Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Mr. President, The Popol Vuh, and books by Enrique Lihn, Nicanor Parra, Rigoberta Menchú, and Silvia Molina.