Paradise in Zurita: An Interview with Raúl Zurita

I can tell you that Raúl Zurita was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1950. That he studied engineering, then became a poet. That his early works were poignant responses to Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. That he was arrested at six in the morning on September 11, 1973, and beaten. That he was a founding member of the radical artistic group cada (Colectivo de acciones de arte). That he has published more than twenty collections of poetry, essays, and criticism; his work has been included in countless magazines and anthologies; his work has been translated into numerous languages; and he has won some of the most prestigious prizes, including the Premio Nacional de Literatura, Premio Pablo Neruda de Poesía, Premio Municipal de Literatura, Premio Pericles de Oro from Italy, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and, most recently, the Premio de la Crítica for Zurita (2012). He is one of the most important poetic voices in Latin America today.

But what’s really important is the way he explores the geography of the earth, the body, the soul. 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 leaves us with twenty-two inscribed phrases in the cliffs of the north coast of Chile that can be read only from the sea. He refines distance as well as the sea. He is the revolution of language. Lyrical and epic. Mythical and mesmerizing. He saw “nothing of what [he] believed” but inspires us to return to what’s sacred—our humanity. And he reminds us that “Poetry was born with the human, it is older than writing, older than the book, older than the Internet, and it will continue taking on millions of new forms until it dies when the last man contemplates the last sunset.” Zurita is his long sentence.

If “Neruda is the great river” that Chile doesn’t have, then Zurita is its current. He is the poem that man will contemplate at the far edge of paradise.

Nathalie Handal:

Let’s start from the beginning. You were a member of cada, along with the novelist Diamela Eltit and the visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo. It was created in 1979 and ended in 1983. cada was a daring initiative—political art against the dictatorship in public places. This included performances and actions in streets, churches, schools, and clandestine locations. It was risky and dangerous. Can you tell me who was the Raúl of that time and what he was thinking?

Raúl Zurita:

All that I came to do in those years, like the art actions with the cada, was because I felt that pain and death should be responded to with a poetry and an art that was as vast and strong as the violence that was exercised over us. To place in opposition the limitless violence of crime and the limitless violence of beauty, the extreme violence of power and the extreme violence of art, the violence of terror and the even stronger violence of all our poems. I never knew how to throw stones, but that was not our intifada. You can’t defeat a dictatorship with poetry, but without poetry, and this is no metaphor, humanity disappears, literally, in the next five minutes.

NH:

How were you able to do all that you did? For example, get ten milk trucks from Soprole (Sociedad de Productores de Leche), completely repaint them, and not get caught? What was cada’s most daring action?

RZ:

Only passion can accomplish those things. We weren’t afraid at all. We didn’t have any way to get those milk trucks out of there, to recount Salvador Allende’s program against infant malnutrition, we didn’t have any way to fly six planes, in the midst of the dictatorship, launching thousands of flyers with a poem about Santiago, but we...