Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry

by Pablo De Rokha, Urayoan Noel (Translator)

Overview

"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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781848613775
Publisher:	Shearsman Books
Publication date:	09/30/2018
Edition description:	Bilingual
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Pablo de Rokha was born Carlos Díaz Loyola in 1894 in Licantén, 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 Anabalón Sanderson, who later took the name Winétt 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 Suramérica (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 Winétt de Rokha in 1924. Also with Winétt 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 América. 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 América. His later works include Fuego negro (Black Fire, 1953), a book-length elegy for Winétt 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.

Urayoán Noel is a Bronx-based writer, performer, translator, researcher, and intermedia artist originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is an associate professor of English and Spanish at New York University, and also teaches at Stetson University's MFA of the Americas. Noel is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press, 2015), as well as the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the LASA Latina/o Studies Book Award.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Bibliography

Genius and Character (1916)

from The Moans (1922)

Ballad of Pablo de Rokha

Yankeeland

“Pablo de Rokha” by Pablo de Rokha

from Cosmogony (1925-1927)

Adventurer

Cycle of Stone

U (1926–1927)

from Satan (1927)

Southamerica (1927)

Equation [Song of the Aesthetic Formula] (1929)

from Raimundo Contreras’s Writing (1929)

flag of mourning

alcohol the fear and the fire the imaginary madness

geometry of reason kant the transatlantic logic

cross of onliness

like the senses scattered

Architecture of Dispersed Life (1934)

from High Temperature (1937)

Farewell Song

from Harangue about Art (1949)

Adventures and Misadventures of Harangue about Art

Southland, Pulse of the World, or American Lament of the Colonies

[from American Magna Carta]

from Black Fire (1952)

from Apotheosis

from World to World (1966)

The Oceanic Page