La publicación en 1954 de "Poemas y antipoemas" revoluciónó la poesía y la manera de poetizar en todo el mundo hispanohablante. Su éxito fue inmediato en todos los sectores. La voz natural del cantor lírico se transformó en la de un antilírico adversario de sí mismo. El discurso está constituido por saltos, exabruptos y reflexiones imprevistas. Surgieron unos poemas nuevos, antipoemas, que se nutrían de lenguaje poético tradicional, ironizándolo. La labor del preparador de esta edición ha sido seguida muy de cera por el autor; sin embargo, éste "no respodne de las molestias que puedan ocasionar sus escritos".

Poems and Antipoems

Nicanor Parra

W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval (1914 - 2018) was a Chilean poet, mathematician, and physicist. He was considered an influential poet in Chile and throughout Latin America. Parra described himself as an "anti-poet," due to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and function; after recitations he would exclaim "Me retracto de todo lo dicho" ("I take back everything I said"). Parra, the son of a schoolteacher, was born in 1914 in San Fabián de Alico, near Chillán, in Chile. He came from the artistically prolific Parra family of performers, musicians, artists, and writers. His sister, Violeta Parra, was a folk singer, as was his brother Roberto Parra Sandoval. In 1933, he entered the Instituto Pedagógico of the University of Chile, where he qualified as a teacher of mathematics and physics in 1938, one year after the publication of his first book, Cancionero sin Nombre. After teaching in Chilean secondary schools, in 1943 he enrolled in Brown University in the United States to study physics. In 1948, he attended Oxford University to study cosmology. He returned to Chile as a professor at the Universidad de Chile in 1946. From 1952, Parra was a professor of theoretical physics in Santiago and read his poetry in England, France, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. He published dozens of books. Parra chose to leave behind the conventions of poetry; his poetic language renounced the refinement of most Latin American literature and adopted a more colloquial tone. His first collection, POEMAS Y ANTIPOEMAS (1954) is a classic of Latin American literature, one of the most influential Spanish poetry collections of the twentieth century. It is cited as an inspiration by American Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg. This is the English translation of this book.

New Directions

The first major collection in almost twenty years of new work by one of Latin America's greatest poets. "Real seriousness," Nicanor Parra, the antipoet of Chile, has said, rests in "the comic." And read in that light, this newest collection of his work is very serious indeed. It is an abundant offering of his signature mocking humor, subverting received conventions and pretensions in both poetry and everyday life, public and private, ingeniously and wittily rendered into English in an antitranslation (the word is Parra's) by Liz Werner. Of the fifty-eight pieces in Antipoems, the first twenty-three are taken from Parra's 1985 collection, Hojas de Parra ("Vine Leaves" or "Leaves of Parra"), two others appeared in his Paginas en Blanco ("Blank Pages," 2001), while the rest come straight out of his notebooks and have never been published before, either in Spanish or English. The book itself is divided into two sections, "Antipoems" (im)proper and a selection of Parra's most recent incarnation of the antipoem, the hand-drawn images of his "Visual Artefactos." As his anti-translator Liz Werner explains in her Introduction, Parra's scientific training infuses his work. "Viewed through the lens of antimatter," she writes, "antipoetry mirrors poetry, not as its adversary but as its perfect complement."

Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great

Literature & Fiction

Liz Werner

Poetry

Poemas and Antipoemas

Editorial Universitaria

Hojas de Parra

Universidad Diego Portales

Poemas para combatir la calvicie (Spanish Edition)

FONDO DE CULTURA ECONOMICA*

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