Last Minutes
- Last Minutes
These are the last minutes of the evening of Monday,September 10, 1973, and the parades started less thanan hour ago. For a moment the columns seem to havestopped before the burnt sky; a second later, the burstof instructions and chants inundates the streets. Aheadof us, interminable, a carpet of dried stones of thePacific spreads out until disappearing in the horizon.I know that someone has probably been controllingmy features, that is, controlling my insomnia, acertain nervousness, a way of talking recognized inthe crushed stones on the edges of a port, Valparaíso,followed by a university façade (and, stuck to it, thebroken images defining a life: an engineering career,a bunch of students rotating their menacing sticks, themaddening whiteness of waves breaking against thestones); suddenly, I heard the wind sound sweepingaway the infinite drought of the soil. Did all thishappen just a few seconds ago? Millions of years?A day? I raise my eyes. Motionless, the immense redsky floats over the multitude who also stop and nowlook cold, fearful, as if in a dream, at the hopeless dusk. [End Page 43]
raúl zurita won Chile’s National Literature Prize. The poem in this issue, “Last Minutes,” is part of the book Zurita (Editorial Diego Portales, 2011). He co-edited, with Forrest Gander, the anthology Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America.
ilan stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Among his recent translations are The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela (with Anna More) and The Plain in Flames, by Juan Rulfo (with Harold Augenbraum). He is the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry and All the Odes of Pablo Neruda.
