Port Trakl
by Jaime Luis Huenún
Translated by Daniel Borzutzky.
Poetry.
ISBN: 9780979975509
1 January 2008
$14
“First introduced to a U.S. audience by Cecilia Vicuna in 4 Mapuche Poets, Jaime Luis Huenún has become best-known through Daniel Borzutzky’s vivid, memorable translations. In these recent poems–published in 2001 in Chile–Huenún invents a setting influenced by Melville’s vivid scenarios, Coleridge’s languid morbidity, and George Trakl’s silences and darkening seas. Borzutzky’s English version is as haunted, brooding, and terrific as the original”
–Forrest Gander
“Port Trakl is a world whose characters do not know which world they belong to, and which world they want to belong to; and as they attempt to depart one state of exile and enter into another, we get the sense that they will always be caught between worlds: between the real and the imaginary, between speech and silence, between poetry and the impossibility of hope”
–Daniel Borzutzky
REVIEWS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Reducciones, by indigenous poet Jaime Luis Huenún, was recently recognized by the National Council on Books and Literature as Chile’s best poetic work in 2013. The book is a compilation of poetry, stories and archived documents which aims to shed light on the history, culture and the heart of the indigenous Mapuche people. Huenún has received numerous awards over the years including the Pablo Neruda Prize in 2003 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2005. He comes from a Williche community in Osorno, Chile.
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.