Purgatory by Raul Zurita - Paper - University of California Press

About the Book

Raúl Zurita’s Purgatory, a landmark in contemporary Latin American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990) in the fiercely inventive voice of a postmodern master. This beautiful en face edition, superbly translated by Anna Deeny, brings to English-language readers an indispensable volume written by one of the most important living poets writing in Spanish today. Zurita was a 24-year-old student in Valparaíso when, on the morning of the coup, he was arrested, detained, and tortured. Conceived as the first text of a Dantean trilogy that includes Anteparaíso (Anteparadise) and La Vida Nueva (The New Life), Purgatory is his anguished response to Chile’s violent recent history.

Reviews

“Lucidly translated by Deeny (whose afterword insightfully contextualizes Zurita within the broader Latin American poetics), this bilingual edition of a politically and formally revolutionary text is an exciting literary event.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Chilean poet Raul Zurita’s first book is back in print. It remains one of the most important and dynamic works of contemporary Latin American poetry. . . This sequence of startling and painful poems combines visual and concrete poetry with short, lyrical texts that release the forces of suffering until they become the poetic body of triumph. Every young poet who wishes to find out what a poem does needs to read and study this book. The lessons found here will redefine poetic commitment.”
— Bloomsbury Review

“A bilingual edition of the Chilean poet's landmark sequence, originally published in 1979, during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. . . . Includes a generous set of explanatory notes.”
— Foreword Reviews

“A visually stunning book of unforgettable poems.”
— Harvard Gazette

“Purgatory is beautifully produced, well translated, and as lyrically chilling as when it was first written in the shadow of Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship of Chile. His collection is organically political . . . and his experimentation with incorporated imagery is especially noteworthy.”
— Molossus

“As citizens of the United States of 'America,' we have most recently in our national election responded to an horrific chapter in our nation's history. But there remain other wicked events for which we have yet to answer. Certainly U.S. complicity in the evil that befell Chile on September 11 (1973) is one of them. In Purgatory, Zurita's bleak but searching poem, the poet shares with us his struggles to reconnect to his humanity. We should be grateful for Anna Deeny's translation and afterword, and for bringing Zurita to us.”—David Bonior, Chair, American Rights at Work

[praise for Anteparadise, translated by Jack Schmitt]

“Chile's tragic recent history provides the fire in which this young poet's Dantean visions have been forged. The poetry that emerges is by turns cold, molten, scathing, and ultimately liberating—a remarkable thing.”—John Ashbery

“Zurita's sequence of poems—and they must be read as a sequence—creates as it explores a geography of earth, body, and soul, a syntax of pain and topology, an imagery of flesh and land painfully entwined, ultimately freed in joyful pastoral. . . . This is ground-breaking, mind-breaking, bone-breaking style; the miracle is that Zurita heals all by the end, wringing triumph out of anguish.”—Ronald Christ

Purgatory

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews