Raul Zurita (1950) is a Chilean writer and poet, considered one of the most outstanding today due to the deep content of his work. The intellectual was academically trained as a civil engineer, which influenced his work from the point of view of logic.
Zurita's literary work has been characterized by the use of simple language, but at the same time conjugated with a certain syntactic disorganization. On the other hand, the poet has captured his own personal experiences, as the expression of the entire Chilean society, specifically in the times of the dictatorship. In his poetry there is pain and discontent.
The literary work of this Chilean poet is extensive and has crossed borders. Some of his most important works have been: Purgatorio, Anteparaíso; Literature, language and society, La vida nueva, INRI Y War notebooks. Raúl Zurita has been awarded several prizes, among them the National Literature.
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Raúl Armando Zurita Canessa was born on January 10, 1950 in Santiago de Chile. The writer descends from a cultured, lower-middle-class Italian family. His parents were Raúl Armando Zurita Inostroza and Ana Canessa Pessolo.
The poet had a younger sister named Ana María. Zurita grew up without his father's presence, since he passed away when he was two years old. The childhood of this Chilean intellectual was marked by poverty and misery.
Despite the panorama, the hostility of his childhood found rest in the constant readings that his maternal grandmother Josefina made him of the Divine Comedy. This is how Dante Alighieri became his first inspiration to make poetry..
Raúl began his first years of studies in 1955 at an English teaching institution. Later, Zurita completed his studies at the Liceo José Victorino Lastarria. At that time he began to write his first verses and participated in several student marches. Later he entered the Technical University Federico Santa María.
Zurita joined the ranks of the Communist Party during his training as a civil engineer. In addition, the then university student joined the hunger strike carried out in 1967 by a group of students in favor of equal participation of all members of the universities..
Love came into Zurita's life when he was 21 years old and still in college. The young Raúl married the visual artist Miriam Martínez Holger in 1971. As a result of the relationship, three children were born: Iván, Sileba and Gaspar. The couple were married for approximately three and a half years..
Zurita's student actions landed him in prison on September 11, 1973, after the military coup against Salvador Allende. Raúl suffered severe beatings and torture. His time in prison extended until the beginning of October of that same year. After being released, he decided not to rejoin the Santa María University.
Raúl traveled to Santiago in 1974 after ending his relationship with Miriam Martínez. There he joined the section of humanistic studies at the University of Chile. In addition, he participated in an art organization called Tentativa Artaud. At that time he made friends with Diamela Eltit.
At that time Zurita published "Green Areas" in the magazine Manuscripts, text that earned him a good reception from the public. That stage in Santiago was marked by economic deprivation, so Raúl stole books to survive, which he sold to teachers and his student friends..
Life smiled again at Zurita when his son Felipe was born in 1978, the result of the love affair he had with Diamela Eltit. A year later, the writer had the opportunity to publish his first work, Purgatory. This collection of poems was based on his experience in prison and the social consequences of the nascent Pinochet dictatorship.
Zurita's position against the Augusto Pinochet government was evident. For this reason, the poet participated in various events organized by the Collective of Art Actions (CADA) in favor of social and artistic freedom. As, for example, the activities "Ay Sudamérica" and "NO +".
Raúl Zurita was able to develop his literary career despite the censorship and limitations imposed by the dictatorial regime. This is how in the eighties he managed to publish five of his most outstanding works. These were: Anteparaíso, Literature, language and society, Paradise is empty, Song of his disappeared love Y The love of Chile.
At that time the writer made a trip to the United States to offer a series of talks and conferences at various universities. Among the institutes he visited were Harvard, Columbia and Stanford. On the other hand, the poet had the satisfaction of seeing the English translation of his poems Purgatory Y Anteparaiso.
Zurita added several achievements to his professional career as a poet in the late eighties. The intellectual made a literary tour of Europe in 1986. At that time, the writer served as visiting professor at the University of California. On the other hand, he started a love relationship with Amparo Mardones.
At that time, Raúl unveiled the work The love of Chile (1987). A year later the writer was awarded one of the most important awards of his career, the "Pablo Neruda". At the same time, he celebrated the fall of the government of Augusto Pinochet (1988).
Zurita's literary performance and constant cultural activities led him to diplomacy. The writer was appointed cultural attaché of his country in Italy in 1990 by the government of Patricio Aylwin. During the five years that he lived in the European nation, he attended different literature festivals and expanded his poetic work.
At that time, his work Anteparaiso it was translated into German. In addition, Zurita made frequent visits to universities in Europe, and traveled to Africa invited by the University of Tunis. The poet got his work published The new life in 1994 (which he began writing in 1986).
Raúl Zurita returned to his country in 1995 and was promptly recognized with the Municipal Prize for Literature for the development of The new life. Two years later, the poet undertook a literary visit to Japan. Back home, he became involved in Ricardo Lagos' campaign for the presidency of the Republic..
Later the writer published several works between 1999 and 2001, some of them were The whitest day Y Militant poems. As for his personal life, the writer ended the relationship he had with Amparo Mardones since 1986 at the beginning of the 21st century.
The last years of Raúl Zurita's life have been spent dedicated to his literary career and in the company of Paulina Wendt (his sentimental partner since 2002). Among his most recent activities are the publication of New fictions, your life breaking, you will see Y The new life, final version.
On the other hand, Zurita's literary performance has been recognized from 2015 to 2018 with the following awards: Andrés Sabella International Literary Merit Award, Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award, José Donoso Award, Asan Viswa Kavitha Puraskaram Award and the Internazionale Alberto Award. Dubito.
In the following video Zurita recites his poem I sing to his missing love:
Raúl Zurita's literary style was characterized by being neo-avant-garde, that is, it broke with the aesthetic structure that prevailed in Chile during the 20th century. In addition, the writer has used a simple and expressive language with which he expressed his own experiences, which converged in the experiences of the entire society.
According to the previous paragraph, the feelings of pain, hopelessness and discontent that Raúl expressed in his poems were the feelings of an entire nation that suffered the horrors and attacks of the Pinochet dictatorship. On the other hand, Zurita applied logic and the change of the syntactic structure in all his poems
- Purgatory (1979).
- Anteparaiso (1982).
- Literature, language and society 1973-1983 (1983).
- Paradise is empty (1984).
- I sing to his missing love (1985).
- The love of Chile (1987).
- Selection of poems (1990).
- The new life (1994).
- I sing to the rivers that love each other (1997).
- The whitest day (1999). Autobiographical account.
- On love, suffering and the new millennium (2000). Test.
- Militant poems (2000).
- INRI (2000).
- My cheek is the starry sky (2004).
- Poems (2004). Anthology.
- Your life falling apart (2005).
- My friends believe (2005).
- The dead poems (2006). essays.
- The dead countries (2006).
- LVN. The country of tables (2006).
- Love Poems (2007).
- The cities of water (2007).
- Im memoriam (2008).
- Five fragments (2008).
- War notebooks (2009).
- Poems 1979-2008 (2009). Anthology.
- Dreams for Kurosawa (2010).
- Zurita (2011).
- New fictions (2013). Stories.
- Your life breaking (2015). Personal anthology.
- You'll see (2017). Anthology.
- The new life, final version (2018).
- Deserts of love (2011). Accompanied by the band Gonzalo and Los Asidores.
“In mourning the pastures of Chile
Your mother would never forgive herself
through those cursed grasslands
In mourning even the wind crackled over the burned pastures of these
ghostly unfolded plains drying up like leaves that
the air will take away
i. Like brambles even the mother burned on the pastures of Chile
ii On the burned pastures Chile itself was drying dismembered
burning up to mother
iii. Yellow the same sky burned over the dying valleys
like bramble sticks until the mother drying up ".
"Peru, Uruguay and the homelands
of my love and gone.
Then the Pacific was seen opening while the Andes
spun rising between those walls of water and were
like sheds full of crosses its mountains there
where countries lie and their pieces pile up in
the middle of the sea crust going up.
… Where human skies break touching
the torn flesh still trembling
screaming that even the cries beg and it is
of cement the South American sky.
When the ocean abyss showed the vertical of the
Andes crossed with the horizontal of the beaches and the
cross of dead love lit up our dead faces
in the depths of the waters. Dead love lit up the
bottom of the cracked waters and they were scab and blood
our remains looking at the homelands of these misfortunes ".
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"If you only knew how I cry and not
I can wake up, how funny would you see me if
you would be like me in front of the rivers of my
country crying for you. They told me and it is not
true, only I have seen you, I saw your face
color of jet and sky but not.
The boys pulled out white flags
in the camp, but they beat us anyway.
Are you among the beaten, the tearful,
the dead? Are you also there my god
sleeping head down?
There is no forgiveness for this new land, I
they say and nothing we do will change
how lucky we will be, but I cry and not
I wake up and my God goes away like a ship ".
“Those were not the Chilean destinations that
they cried moving away the whole beach was
he was making a pure sore in his eyes
It was not those beaches that they found but rather the clearing of the cycle
in front of their eyes white as if it were not theirs in all Chile mirroring
the open sores that washed ... ".
- "Poetry needs a certain radicalism and passion that while it lasts will make you not settle. I don't know if what I'm doing is good, bad, or mediocre, but I can't bring myself to do what you would expect of a guy at 65: put on his slippers? ".
- “A country that emerges from a dictatorship is quite detestable. You can understand that you want to forget, but an arrogant, unsupportive and vulgar country emerged ".
- “Art has a vocation for the extreme. You have to be able to touch the darkest areas ".
- "A poem cannot compete with a Nike slogan, but it is the light that returns meanings".
- "We live the agony of language".
- "My poems are shattering with me like foam against rocks".
- "Poetry is made by the sea of human speech".
- "All poem, all poetry, are small islands in the infinite ocean of the universe".
- "If poetry disappears, humanity succumbs as before a neutron bomb".
- "The cliffs are like an image of what a human being will see on his way over the earth".
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