After-Dinner Declarations by Nicanor Parra (review)

Book Reviews established circuit schools to expand the federal government’s reach across the countryside, and Central Agricultural Schools to make campesinos into industrious farmers. In addition, he set up frontier primary schools to stem the flow of Mexican children to U.S. schools, combat the spread of American culture in northern Mexico, and inculcate Mexican nationalism among border residents. Marak clearly shows the federal government was unable to fully impose its education program on the northern states due to its regional weakness. State governors, including fellow Callistas, often pushed back against federal policymakers in order to extract concessions from Mexico City. Peasants and indigenous groups did the same and negotiated with federal authorities to shape education policy to meet local needs. For example, parents in the border region regularly threatened to pull their children out of the frontier schools and send them to U.S. schools unless the SEP dismissed radical teachers and offered courses, such as English instruction, that better suited their needs. Similarly, the Tohono O’odham Indians leveraged the superior options of settlement and education in southern Arizona offered by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs in order to gain better schooling from SEP in northern Sonora. The author concludes that Calles’s “developmentalist education model” was an advancement over the religious-dominated elite-based system that preceded it. He rightly adds, however, that while many of Calles’s reforms failed in the short term, in the long run they enabled Lázaro Cardenas’s administration to advance the official party’s corporatist agenda and bring “previously unassimilated indigenous groups into the nation” (x). Andrae Marak has written a very rich, balanced, and informative book that any scholar of modern Mexico, the border region, education policy, and indigenous history should read and consider for course adoption. John J. Dwyer Department of History Duquesne University AFTER-DINNER DECLARATIONS. By Nicanor Parra. Trans. Dave Oliphant. Austin, TX: Host Publications, 2009, p. 513, $60.00. Dave Oliphant’s translation of Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations skillfully conveys the Chilean poet’s ironic voice in a series of five discursos, or verse speeches/declarations/statements. In keeping with Parra’s ethic that “poetry should be written in the language of the street” (i), Oliphant’s choice of “declarations” captures the underlying character of the five long poetic texts included in this volume, which commemorate events such as Parra’s receipt of the Juan Rulfo Prize (awarded by the Mexican 81 The Latin Americanist, December 2009 government), William Shakespeare’s birthday (at the Congress of the Theater of Nations), fellow Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s centenary (at his precursor’s home in Cartagena, Chile), the conferral of an honorary degree upon Parra by the Universidad de Concepción, and a celebration of renowned writer and educator (and childhood friend of the poet) Luis Oyarzún at the Universidad Austral in Valdivia. This bilingual edition of Parra’s Discursos de sobremesa (2006) represents the most recent addition to the sizable body of work of the internationally-acclaimed 95-year-old poet. As Oliphant suggests in his brief, yet extremely well-crafted introduction , the new genre of the “antispeech”—evoking Parra’s 1954 publication of Poems and Antipoems and subsequent self-proclaimed role as Chile’s patron saint of antipoetry—finds its origins in these five occasional pieces, which deeply engage varied intellectual and personal currents running through Parra’s multifarious intra- and intertextualities. Ever the ostensibly reluctant, (falsely) modest, self-effacing puppet-master, the Chilean writer parades a national and international pantheon of philosophers, historical and political figures through carefully measured movements, fits, and starts, all in the service of playfully and humbly accepting or rendering (anti-)homage while at the same time ironizing the very possibility of such discourse. Oliphant’s translation succeeds on a number of different but inextricably related levels: first, in its treatment of Parra’s idiosyncratic inventiveness and localisms (textually and as explained by occasional footnotes); second, in capturing the unique voice of this irreverent poet that claims to “love to make people sneeze” (93); and third, in convincing the reader of Parra’s constant relevance as the poet nears his own centenary. Oliphant’s...