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.