Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry

Pablo de Rokha

ISBN 10: 1848613776 / ISBN 13: 9781848613775

Published by Shearsman Books, GB, 2018

About this Item

Pablo de Rokha was one of the great trio of Chilean modernist poets, along with Vicente Huidobro (2 years his senior) and Pablo Neruda (10 years his junior). All three were communists, all three were great poets, and all three cordially detested each other. De Rokha is the least known of them outside Chile, and this volume redresses that by offering an introduction to this astonishing body of work in the first book-length selection of his work to be published in English."More tragic and irremediable than his enemy Pablo Neruda's, more vast than Ezra Pound's, more profound than Rilke's, the great poetry of Pablo de Rokha reveals to us the desperate landscapes of hope. De Rokha committed suicide on December 10, 1968. He was perhaps the major poet of the 20th century." -Raul Zurita"This book is an event, a monumental work of translation and poetry that will force us to rethink our understanding of global modernism and the hemispheric avant-garde. Pablo de Rokha, finally accessible to the English-speaking world, is a major Chilean poet of the early 20th century, who ought to sit front and center alongside Neruda, Mistral, Huidobro, Vallejo and Girondo; and Urayoan Noel's work here as translator and editor is a historical and archival restoration on a massive scale. Noel's evocative introduction--which refuses "to disentangle de Rokha the vanguardist from de Rokha the indigenous poet"-brilliantly situates de Rokha as a poet who is as focused on the local as he is on the international. De Rokha strikes the modern reader as entirely contemporary, in his form, language and, most interestingly, in how he foretells the political and economic violence of a global, neoliberal continuum. This translation will dazzle, and de Rokha's voice, with its hyperbole, its contradictions, its obsessive critique of Yankeeland, will, inevitably, say as much about 2018 as it does about 1922." -Daniel Borzutzky.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781848613775

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry
• Publisher: Shearsman Books, GB
• Publication Date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1848613776
• ISBN 13: 9781848613775
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 433 grams

About this title

Synopsis

“More tragic and irremediable than his enemy Pablo Neruda’s, more vast than Ezra Pound’s, more profound than Rilke’s, the great poetry of Pablo de Rokha reveals to us the desperate landscapes of hope. De Rokha committed suicide on December 10, 1968. He was perhaps the major poet of the 20th century.” —Raúl Zurita

“This book is an event, a monumental work of translation and poetry that will force us to rethink our understanding of global modernism and the hemispheric avant-garde. Pablo de Rokha, finally accessible to the English-speaking world, is a major Chilean poet of the early 20th century, who ought to sit front and center alongside Neruda, Mistral, Huidobro, Vallejo and Girondo; and Urayoán Noel’s work here as translator and editor is a historical and archival restoration on a massive scale. Noel’s evocative introduction­—which refuses “to disentangle de Rokha the vanguardist from de Rokha the indigenous poet”—brilliantly situates de Rokha as a poet who is as focused on the local as he is on the international. De Rokha strikes the modern reader as entirely contemporary, in his form, language and, most interestingly, in how he foretells the political and economic violence of a global, neoliberal continuum. This translation will dazzle, and de Rokha’s voice, with its hyperbole, its contradictions, its obsessive critique of Yankeeland, will, inevitably, say as much about 2018 as it does about 1922.”  —Daniel Borzutzky

About the Author

Pablo de Rokha was born Carlos Diaz Loyola in 1894 in Licanten, Chile. The eldest of 19 children, he attended school in the nearby city of Talca. As a young man, he studied at a seminary, sold agricultural products, wrote for local newspapers, and attended the University of Chile in Santiago, though he did not graduate. In 1916, he married Luisa Anabalon Sanderson, who later took the name Winett de Rokha and would go on to be an esteemed poet in her own right as well as his life companion and collaborator. In 1922, he published Los gemidos (The Moans), one of the first books of Latin American avant-garde poetry. He would go on to publish such groundbreaking works as Suramerica (Southamerica, 1927) and Escritura de Raimundo Contreras (Raimundo Contreras's Writing, 1929), two experiments in folk surrealism and automatic writing. He founded a number of magazines and periodicals, including the Revista de Arte Libre with Vicente Huidobro in 1913, and the avant-garde Agonal with Winett de Rokha in 1924. Also with Winett de Rokha, he founded the more politically engaged Multitud in 1939; this morphed into a press that would publish much of his later work. Initially active in anarchist internationalism, he would later join and be expelled from Chile's Communist Party, where he served as president of its cultural organ, the Casa America. In the 1940s, upon being named cultural ambassador, de Rokha began a long period of travel across the Americas that inspired his 1949 epic Carta Magna de America. His later works include Fuego negro (Black Fire, 1953), a book-length elegy for Winett de Rokha, who had died of cancer in 1951, and Acero de invierno (Winter Steel, 1961), which contains his well-known `Canto del macho anciano' (Old Man's Song). He received Chile's National Literature Prize in 1965, and died from a self-inflicted gunshot in 1968.