Sky Below

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ISBN 978-0-8101-3387-7
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Contributors
Raul Zurita (Author)
Anna Deeny Morales (Translated and with an Introduction by)
Publication Date
October 2016
Categories
Poetry
Page Count
288 pages
Trim Size
6 x 9
ISBN
0-8101-3384-9

Sky Below

Selected Works
Raul Zurita; Translated from the Spanish and with an introduction by Anna Deeny Morales

Chilean poet Raúl Zurita has long been recognized as one of the most celebrated and important voices from Latin America. His compelling rhythms combine epic and lyric tones, public and most intimate themes, grief and joy. This bilingual volume of selected works is the first of its kind in any language, representing the remarkable range of an extraordinary poet. Zurita’s work confronts the cataclysm of the Pinochet coup with a powerful urgency matched by remarkable craftsmanship and imaginative vision. In Zurita’s attempt to address the atrocities that indelibly mark Chile, he makes manifest the common history of the Americas.

About the Author

RAÚL ZURITA, a prolific poet and visual artist, has chronicled the violence against the Chilean people since the 1973 coup that replaced Salvador Allende’s democratic government with Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. His work has been widely translated. Along with other artists, he founded the art action group CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte), dedicated to the creation of political art resisting the military regime. In 1982 he composed a poem in the sky over New York, and in 1993 he bulldozed "ni pena ni miedo" ("no pain no fear") into the coarse sands of the Atacama Desert. Zurita has been awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature and a scholarship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a professor emeritus at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago.

ANNA DEENY MORALES is a literary critic and translator. Her translations of Raúl Zurita’s works include Purgatory and Dreams for Kurosawa. Her translation of Floating Lanterns by Mercedes Roffé was published in 2015, and her essays and translations of poetry by Alejandra Pizarnik, Nicanor Parra, and Gabriela Mistral, among others, have appeared in such anthologies as Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America and in journals, including the Paris Review, Mandorla, BOMB, and the Harvard Review. She teaches in the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University.

Reviews

"His poems are bone, river, spirit. They are weaved in the sky and in the desert. His words give us eyes to see the blue, the white, the endless hues of beige and ocher—the colors of the desert he returns to. . . He refines distance as well as the sea. He is the revolution of language. Lyrical and epic. Mythical and mesmerizing." —Prairie Schooner

“There isn’t a more important contemporary writer than Raúl Zurita. And through her insistent attention to diction and syntax, Anna Deeny creates an English poetry as abrupt, heuristic, sweeping, and finally redemptive as the Spanish; to wit, she delivers Zurita’s genius.”  —Forrest Gander, author of Eye Against Eye and Torn Awake

"Raúl Zurita is one of the essential poets of the twenty-first century, and we are fortunate to have these fiercely beautiful translations." —Robert Hass, author of The Apple Treesat Olema and What Light Can Do

"In her powerful and useful introduction to these poems, Anna Morales reminds us of the specific historical events that generated Zurita's poetry. These need to be known. ‘To be disappeared’ is to be taken away to another piece of the earth, a particular place, and hidden there. In Chile Pinochet and a population gone blood-mad did this. 'To disappear' is to die into God.  Zurita studies this difference.  His marvelous poetry, as such, is a work of mystery.” —Fanny Howe, author of Come and See and Second Childhood