The Daily Glance: Zurita
Raúl Zurita’s Song
for His Disappeared Love is horrific and beautiful. Having read Purgatory, I was prepared for the horrific, for after all, the book is
set in Pinochet’s Chile, and Zurita was a major poetic voice against the
dictator, but I was not prepared for the beautiful. Really, it’s a long love poem, and that is
the central element. The lovers have
been separated by death not because of illness or war, but because one has
disappeared, a political practice we unfortunately know from many
countries.
The translator, Daniel
Borzutzky, does a good job and manages to keep Zurita’s forms intact, and,
thankfully, Action Books printed this one as a dual-language translation, but
not a facing page book. One half has
Spanish, one English, and the book must be flipped for the different
languages.
It was the torture, the
blows, that broke us
into pieces. I was
able to hear you but the
light was fading.
I looked for you amid the
ruins,
I spoke to you. Your remains
looked at me and I embraced
you.
Zurita is one of Chile’s,
really Latin American’s, great recent poetic voices, so it is good to see his
work finding a home in translation.
Zurita, Raúl. Song for His Disappeared Love. Trans.
Daniel Borzutzky. Notre Dame:
Action Books, 2010.
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