From Chile, poet Raúl Zurita

Chile’s Raúl Zurita is one of Latin America’s most celebrated poets. After Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup in Chile that ousted Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government, Zurita sought through his poetry to register the violence and atrocities committed against the Chilean people and his dismay over the corruption of the Spanish language.

In 1973, Zurita was arrested by the Pinochet regime and imprisoned in the hold of a ship. 

American composer Matthew Aucoin has set Zurita’s poems in his Song of the Reappeared, a CSO commission that receives its world premiere performances Dec. 4-7, under Petr Popelka and with soprano Julia Bullock.

During the Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted from 1973 to 1990, Zurita published a trilogy of books (Purgatory, Anteparadise and The New Life). In 1982, five planes wrote Zurita’s poem “La Vida Nueva“ in the sky above New York City. In 1993, Zurita had bulldozers inscribe the phrase, from one of his poems, ”Neither Pain Nor Fear," in Chile’s Atacama Desert. He helped to form the art collective Colectivo de Accion de Arte that used performance as an act of political resistance.

Of Zurita’s early poetry, C.D. Wright has written: “Under the eyes of church and dictatorship, he began to write and publish his poetry, juxtaposing secular and sacred, ruled and unruled. With a mysterious admixture of logic and logos, Christian symbols, brain scans, graphics and a medical report, Zurita expanded the formal repertoire of his language, of poetic materials, pushing back against the ugly vapidity of rule by force.”

Zurita was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature, a scholarship from the Guggenheim Foundation and Asan Memorial World Poetry Prize in 2018. He has held poetry readings at many American universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Berkeley. His books in English translation include Anteparadise (translated by Jack Schmitt), Purgatory (translated by Anna Deeny), INRI (translated by William Rowe) and Song for His Disappeared Love (translated by Daniel Borzutzky).