{"id":28198,"date":"2012-03-26T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-26T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=28198"},"modified":"2012-03-26T16:17:15","modified_gmt":"2012-03-26T20:17:15","slug":"our-twilight-lands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/26\/our-twilight-lands\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Twilight Lands"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero wrote this article, translated by Sarah Foster, based on her interview with Chilean poet Nicanor Parra at his home on the coast of Chile. It was published in the Spanish newspaper <\/em>El Pa\u00eds after Parra was awarded the Cervantes Prize last December. The prize, given by Spain\u2019s Ministry of Culture, is the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world. Parra\u2019s poem \u201cDefense of Violeta Parra\u201d <\/em>appeared in our two-hundredth issue, on newsstands now<\/a>.
<\/em><\/p>\n

Reaching the house where Nicanor Parra lives, on Lincoln Street in Las Cruces, a coastal town two hundred kilometers from Santiago de Chile, is easy. The hard part is reaching him<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Nicanor Parra Oiundo de San Fabian de Alico is the first-born son out of a total of eight children brought into the world by Nicanor Parra, a high school teacher, and Clara Sandoval. He was born in 1914, was twenty-five during World War II, sixty-six when John Lennon was shot, and eighty-seven when the planes hit the towers.\u00a0Last September, he turned ninety-seven. Some people don\u2019t even know he\u2019s still alive.<\/p>\n

Las Cruces is a town with two thousand inhabitants, shielded from the Pacific Ocean by a bay that embraces several towns: Cartagena, El Tabo. Parra\u2019s house is on a cliff, overlooking the sea. In the garden, a staircase comes down to the front door, where local punks have painted graffiti so that no one will dare touch the house; it says, \u201cAntipoetry.\u201d In the foyer, he has written the names and telephone numbers of his children.<\/p>\n

Nicanor Parra\u2019s hair is white. He has a long beard and no wrinkles, only furrows in a face that seems to be made of earth. His hands are tanned, no spots or creases, like two roots rinsed in water. Lying on a table is the second volume of his complete works, Obras completas y algo <\/em>(1975\u20132006). In its preface, Harold Bloom writes, \u201cI firmly believe that, if the most powerful poet produced by the New World until now is still Walt Whitman, Parra joins him as an essential poet in our Twilight Lands.\u201d At the end of the eighties, when Parra was still living in Santiago, he stopped giving interviews, and, although there have always been exceptions, he often objects to direct questions in unexpected ways, so that a conversation with him is subject to uncertain diversions, into topics that he repeats and brings up for whatever reason: his grandchildren, the Laws of Manu, the Tao Te Ching, Neruda. <\/p>\n

Sitting on a low stool covered by a wool blanket, he\u2019s wearing a jean shirt, a beige sweater with several holes, corduroy pants. Behind him, a glass door separates the living room from a balcony with two chairs and, beyond, a backyard full of shrubs and then the Pacific Ocean. He tells me, of his grandson Tololo, \u201cOnce the director of his school called an urgent meeting with his mother because they had called his name for attendance and little Tololo didn\u2019t answer. So I tell him, \u2018Listen, buddy, why didn\u2019t you answer when the teacher called your name?\u2019 \u2018I can\u2019t because my name isn\u2019t Cristobal anymore. Now my name is Hamlet.\u2019 Since then, I gave up literature and now I spend all my time writing down what children say.\u201d<\/p>\n

It may sound like a joke, but it\u2019s not: Parra writes down things he hears from his grandchildren or from Rosita Avendano, the woman who cleans his house, or from random people he sees walking around, and then he transforms them: \u201cLater they wanted to send me to the school \/ Where the sick children were \/ But I didn\u2019t put up with them \/ Because I\u2019m no kind of sick girl \/ I hate to say it \/ But I\u2019m just not a sick girl,\u201d he writes in \u201cRosita Avendano.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parra writes with a plain ballpoint pen in plain notebooks, he takes massive doses of ascorbic acid, he always eats the same things: soups, cazuelas<\/em>, arrollados. <\/em>He has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize and every year for the Cervantes, before winning on December 1, 2011. A while ago they asked him to film a commercial for milk. Shakira was also part of the project, so he told them they should pay him however much they paid her. They say he was paid thirty thousand dollars for a half-minute appearance, so now he tells everyone that he charges one thousand per second. He has two houses in Santiago, one in Las Cruces, and one on Isla Negra. Nobody knows what he does with the houses he doesn\u2019t live in.<\/p>\n

Parra\u2019s childhood was full of hardships and relocations, until, at age sixteen or seventeen, he left alone for Santiago. With the help of a scholarship from the League of Poor Students, he was able to finish his studies at a prestigious institution. He had good grades in the humanities subjects but not in the hard sciences, so he studied math and physics at the Universidad de Chile \u201cto show those bastards that they didn\u2019t know anything about mathematics.\u201d In 1938, while making a living as a teacher, he published Songbook Without a Name<\/em>. In 1943, he traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, to study advanced mechanics at Brown University; in 1949, he went to England to study cosmology at Oxford; and in 1951, he went back to teach math and physics at the Universidad de Chile.<\/p>\n

Then, in 1949, he published Poems and Antipoems<\/em>, revolutionizing Latin American poetry with deceptively simple language: \u201cNeither very bright nor a total fool \/ I was what I was: a mix \/ of oil and vinegar for eating \/ A sausage of angel and beast!\u201d It had a prologue from Neruda, with whom Parra would come to have a rocky relationship, in part because his poems began to be read as a negative reaction to Neruda\u2019s. This was followed by a very productive period; he published four volumes between 1958 and 1967 and won the Chilean National Literature Prize in 1969.<\/p>\n

In 1970, Parra was fifty-five, pro-Castro, and on the jury for the Cuban Casa de las Americas Prize when he attended a writers\u2019 meeting in Washington and, along with all the other guests, visited the White House. They were invited, unexpectedly, to have tea with President Nixon\u2019s wife. But drinking from Mrs. Nixon\u2019s teacup in the thick of the Vietnam War was enough to finish Parra: Casa de las Americas disqualified him from being part of the jury and showered him with insults.<\/p>\n

Parra\u2019s political position had come under suspicion, and it wasn\u2019t long before his literary works caught up. In 1972, he published Artifacts<\/em>, a series of sayings, accompanied by drawings, that were alternately irreverent, blasphemous, and politically incorrect: \u201cThe right and the left united will never be defeated.\u201d The kindest reviewers said that it was not poetry, the harshest critics said it was the best propaganda the fascists could have gotten their hands on. In 1977, during the Pinochet dictatorship, he published Sermons and Teachings of Christ of Elqu<\/em> (\u201cI\u2019ll bet my head \/ that nobody laughs like I do when the Philistines torture him\u201d) and Jokes to Confuse the Police <\/em>(\u201cIf it appeared that he appeared, but only in the list of the disappeared\u201d), but, like other poets who stayed in Chile during these years, he was judged with a certain suspicion for not opposing the military regime strongly enough. In 1985, he published another book, Hojas de Parra<\/em>, and then entered twenty years of silence, broken only in 2004, when he published a translation of Shakespeare\u2019s King Lear<\/em>, now considered the best in the Spanish language. \u201cAfter we published King Lear<\/em>,\u201d said Matia Rivas, the publisher who approached Parra about the translation, \u201che went into a university and there were millions of young people following him. He had turned into a rock star.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1940, Parra married Anita Troncoso, with whom he had three children, and in 1951 he married Inga Palmen. He had a son with Rosita Munoz\u2014a previous housekeeper\u2014and two more with Nury Tuca, who was thirty-three years his junior. In 1978, he met Ana Maria Molinare, a woman in her early thirties. When she left him, he wrote in order to get over her, ultimately producing a radioactive mantra, a poem called \u201cThe Imaginary Man\u201d: \u201cThe imaginary man \/ lives in an imaginary mansion, surrounded by imaginary trees \/ on the bank of an imaginary river.\u201d Three years later, Ana Maria Molinare committed suicide.<\/p>\n

Since 1998 he has been\u2014more or less\u2014single. \u201cWhat I really need \/ is a Maria Kodama \/ who can take care of my library [\u2026] with a young widow in the picture \/ [\u2026] the coffin looks rosecolored \/ even stomach pains \/ brought on by the Stockholm academics \/ disappear like magic,\u201d he wrote. In his old age, he has started to get a reputation for being eccentric. He buys clothes from a second-hand store in the Port of San Antonio, a rough neighborhood, but he gets along pretty well there, like everywhere else. A while ago, when some of his writing notebooks were stolen from his house, he found out that some local dealers had received them as a payment, so he went to look for them and they were returned with apologies.<\/p>\n

His reluctance to publish is legendary. Even when Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales was publishing two more books\u2014After Dinner Declaration <\/em>(2006) and The Return of the Christ of Elqui <\/em>(2007)\u2014he took years to sign the contracts, months to work out satisfactory versions for publication. The process of putting together his complete works took almost a decade.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Are you satisfied with your complete works? <\/em>
\u2014 Surprised. I read those poems, and I don\u2019t feel like I was the person who wrote them. I think I never wrote anything because I have always just pulled things out of the air.<\/p>\n

\u2014 It\u2019s pretty here, no?
\u2014Yes, it would be nice to live here.<\/em>
\u2014 More like, to die. Think about everything that\u2019s been done, and still they haven\u2019t figured out this one thing.
\u2014 Which thing?<\/em>
\u2014 Death. They\u2019ve figured out other things. But why don\u2019t they concentrate on that?<\/p>\n

Article \u00a9Leila Guerriero\/EL PA\u00cdS S.L. 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero wrote this article, translated by Sarah Foster, based on her interview with Chilean poet Nicanor Parra at his home on the coast of Chile. It was published in the Spanish newspaper El Pa\u00eds after Parra was awarded the Cervantes Prize last December. The prize, given by Spain\u2019s Ministry of Culture, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":320,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[6842,6846,6844,6848,6840,6847,6838,6435,1720,6851,3914,2161,6845,6850,116,6841,6839,6843,5873,6849],"class_list":["post-28198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-antipoetry","tag-artifacts","tag-borwn-university","tag-casa-de-las-americas","tag-cervantes-prize","tag-chile","tag-defense-of-violeta-parra","tag-issue-200","tag-king-lear","tag-matia-rivas","tag-nicanor-parra","tag-pablo-neruda","tag-poems-and-antipoems","tag-richard-nixon","tag-rules","tag-santiago","tag-sarah-foster","tag-shakira","tag-vietnam-war","tag-white-house"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOur Twilight Lands by Leila Guerriero<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 26, 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