Posts by Tim Benjamin

Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part II

[M]aybe Parra is himself Hamlet, paralyzed with doubt about the truth of things and his own role in doing something about it.

Tim Benjamin continues his exposition of the collaboration between revolution and poetics in the  work of Chile’s notorious antipoet, Nicanor Parra. In Liz Werner’s witty translation of his verse in the brazenly titled Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, cynicism, humor, silences, and brutal critique manifest in turns; the deep truths are gathered and reckoned with in the spaces where they collide. Read the first part of this essay here.

Revolts have their actual front lines, of course, and in the case of Chile, these were the columns of students, artists, and veterans of the “Penguin” movements of the early 2000s advancing toward increasingly hostile, increasingly anxious walls of police and military forces employing tear gas and rubber bullets. Recently back in Santiago, after the plebiscite had already been decided, a Colombian friend of mine gave me a tour of the uprising’s hot spots, where he went each evening in solidarity with his adopted country’s awakening. He described scenes of shifting pockets of absolute chaos which had popped up here and there, before dispersing with the wafting, seemingly intentional clouds of tear gas and booms of deterrent rounds. Walking down Alameda Ave, he pointed out to me all the landmarks that were forced to close during the uprising. That afternoon, he and I attended one of the Friday protests, which have continued to this day; as we walked down an Alameda Ave closed off to traffic, I noticed the small crush of people lining the street, not doing much except being there—in conversation with friends, smoking, or staring south to where, before a small plaza, a scuffle began. It wasn’t long before the gas came in one expansive burst, and the people in front of the plaza began to disperse. We thought we were far enough away, but a breeze brought us the invisibly searing burn—and a series of Good Samaritans hopping to with spray bottles of sodium bicarbonate and lemon juice, offering temporary relief. “You get used to it,” my friend said, as we turned back toward Lastarria and its street vendors and mid-scale restaurants. “You build up a tolerance.” And for some reason, through the sandpaper-burn in our cheeks and eyelids, we laughed at this. I don’t know why. I couldn’t imagine getting “used to it.”

Somehow, though, the pain felt justified—the concrete consequence giving body to a concept which I was only partly cognizant of. But it wasn’t the kind of pain that gives legitimacy to criticisms of the government, whose force (normally) seeks justification even after the fact. In other words, it wasn’t a political pain, which is reserved, fair or not, for the majority who hang back from the clashes, repeating the language of revolt that the front line incarnates. After the country’s President, Sebastian Piñera, declared the country “at war” with itself, other friends I spoke with said they would work during the day and go directly to Santiago’s main square after getting off every night, and it was these rear-guard protests that increasingly took on an air of intense jubilation—veritable revolutionary parties in streets fogged in tear gas and the volleying booms of urban warfare, as if the certainty of the success of the cause was enough to start the celebrations a priori. The reaction of those in charge were typically evasive, or offensive. One government minister casually suggested that instead of revolting in the streets, people should wake up early to avoid the increase in public transportation fares; others suggested “alien agents” descending on the country to induce chaos, which social media and protest signage quickly meme-ified.

While lack of shame and self-awareness is the realized utopia of the modern politician, it seems the uprising’s jubilance shared in Parra’s strangely unpretentious counter-narrative to it. More than a few of his poems might work as semi-mystical memes; take the poem “No president’s statue escapes,” whose three verses follow from the title to form a simple, declarative meditation on history’s losing struggle with time: From those infallible pigeons / Clara Sandoval tells us. / Those pigeons know exactly what they’re doing. Both the pigeons and the topless protesters straddling these same statues are definitive symbols of the “certainty” mentioned above, both moving into that rare space where parody becomes something more eternal than mockery.

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Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part I

On a fundamental level, Parra’s antipoetry culminates at that point where parody and devotion coincide.

Chile and its writers are no strangers to the conjugation between revolution and poetry, having long applied the ardent and inciting potentials of well-elected words to fortify and give lyric to its people’s desires for social change. Amongst the most powerful letters of the country’s struggles, the language of Nicanor Parra possessed especially an indomitable power, with its colloquial, irreverent nature lending an imitable voice to the static nature of words. Though Parra passed in 2018, his verse continues to establish itself in the public expressions of dissent, most recently revealing their prescience in regard to the severe 2019–2020 protests. In the first part of this essay, Tim Benjamin puts the poet’s legacy in relation with the social fabric of both his time and ours. Stay with us for the second part, to be published tomorrow. 

I had already left Chile before the country’s 2019 uprising, but I was still living there when Nicanor Parra became a centenarian. The grand misanthrope of Chilean letters had conquered his personal century, and in a country known for wine, political troubles, and writers, there was considerable respect payed to the antipoet’s gesture toward immortality. TV and newspapers dedicated front-page space to a sort of celebratory pre-obituary, and on the night of, I went out for drinks with friends, who talked a little about Parra’s work but mostly about the idea that the old, disheveled fuck seemed to have made it to such a ripe old age just so he could take the piss out of death, like he’d done to poetry sixty years before. Death returned the favor a little under two years before the uprising, but as the introduction of Liz Werner’s overlooked 2004 “antitranslation” of his later work, Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great makes clear, Parra took his joke further than anyone before him.

He didn’t coin the term. At least two poets—Vicente Huidobro and the Peruvian Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián, who published a book titled Antipoemas in 1926—had used it before him. But the concept will forever be etched alongside his name in whatever circle of the literary pantheon he comes to occupy. Parra would pass away in 2018 at the very anti-climactic age of 103, just under two years before the country’s most significant political movement since the “NO” campaign rejected Pinochetismo in 1989. And despite—or maybe because—of his reputation as the antipoet, it seems safe to say that dying before the Revolution was the kind of providential malfeasance he would have at least tried to have some fun with. Indeed, Werner’s “How to Look Better & Feel Great,” chosen in apparently intimate collaboration with Parra, is one of those disembodied parodies that exist somewhere between a wink and a groan. But it also points the way toward the mentality of a country, which, despite the crackdowns and a global pandemic, has hung a definitive asterisk onto South America’s “economic miracle.”

Parra was born in 1914 in southern Chile to a bohemian father and a mother who shows up often in his poetry as the folksy sage “Clara Sandoval.” He was the brother of the legendary folk singer Violeta Parra, whose song, “La carta” was covered by Mon LaFerte during the uprising (The letter arrives to tell me / that in my country there’s no justice / the hungry ask for bread / the military gives them lead). He studied engineering at the University of Chile, physics at Brown, and cosmology at Oxford, which may or may not have contributed to the often sideways transgressions from formalism which defines much of his output—though Werner does emphasize Parra’s occasional use of an algebraic x and shorthand descriptions of relativity. He began publishing poetry marginally in 1938, but made his name in 1954 with the publication of Poems and Antipoems. As Werner’s introduction notes, one Chilean critic wrote that Parra’s book “Returned us . . . once again! [To the fact that] everything could be said in poetry.” Camus would make a similar point a couple of years later in The Rebel, claiming that an artist’s “rebellion against reality” affirms the same motivation as that of the revolt of the oppressed. Poems and Antipoems would go through multiple editions, and the 1967 English-language version would count among its translators Allen Ginsburg, who had joined Parra in an increasingly paranoid Havana two years earlier to give out the Casa de las Americas Prize. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: A selection from Poems for Michael Jordan by Francisco Ide Wolletter

fate is the phenomenon of the ball passing through empty space to arrive at your empty hands

Awarded first place in the CNCAs Roberto Bolaño Prize for Young Literary Creation in the Poetry category, twenty-seven-year-old Francisco Ide Wolleter stands out from the latest generation of Chilean litterateurs. His “Poems for Michael Jordan” are miracles of observation, imbuing quotidian life with existential drama. You won’t ever watch basketball the same way again after this.

I

 the ball’s porous plane

makes me think of human skin

 

a tactile nostalgia

though contact is always illusory

 

the facts are thus: we’re structured on emptiness

built of atoms,

atoms whose nature is to repel

and be repelled.

 

that’s why we don’t mix with things

that’s why when we touch

we haven’t really touched anything at all

 

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