Song for His Disappeared Love / Canto a Su Amor Desaparecido
by Raúl Zurita
Translated by Daniel Borzutzky.
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition.
ISBN: 9780979975578
15 August 2010
$16
“Raúl Zurita is, with Nicanor Parra, Chile’s preeminent living poet,and his ‘Canto a su amor desaparecido,’ here in Daniel Borzutzky’s superb translation,is a shattering cyclotron of compact epic. Written in wake of the poet’s experiences of imprisonment, torture, and underground resistance, Zurita offers, in the poem’s opening half,stuttering, heart-wrenching testimonies of political and personal loss, followed by a tour de force sequence continental in scope– a kind of Canto General ‘in negative,’ drained of any of the consoling teleologies. It is a brave work that conjoins the major and the minor, the vatic and the humblest–and most courageous–orders of the quotidian. Giving no quarter to abstract aesthetic, it’s a poem whose traumas jolt us awake and demand we remember.”
– Kent Johnson
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raúl Zurita’s books of poems include, among others: Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), El paraíso está vacío (1984), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), La vida nueva (1994), Poemas militantes (2000); INRI (2003), Los paises muertos (2006) Las cicudades de agua (2007), In Memoriam (2007), Cuadernos de Guerra (2009), Sueños para Kurosawa (2010), and Zurita (2011). Translations to English include Purgatory, Anteparadise, INRI, Song For His Disappeared Love, Dreams for Kurosawa, and Militant Poems. His numerous awards include the National Literature Prize of Chile and the Pablo Neruda Prize. He lives in Santiago, Chile, where he is a professor of literature at Universidad Diego Portales.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Daniel Borzutzky’s recent books and chapbooks include The Performance of Becoming Human (2016); In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Bedtime Stories for the End of the World!(2014); Data Bodies (2013) and The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011). Poetry translations include Raúl Zurita’s Song for His Disappeared Love (2010), and Jaime Luis Huenun’s Port Trakl (2008). His work has been supported by the PEN American Center, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council.