Rodrigo Lira

Listen to the poem read in the original Spanish by Rodrigo Olavarría:

In his short story, “Meeting with Enrique Lihn,” Roberto Bolaño writes: “He read my poems and included some of them in a kind of reading he organized to present the work of the younger generation at a Chilean-North American institute. In his letter he identified a group of hopefuls destined, so he thought, to be the six tigers of Chilean poetry in the year 2000. The six tigers were Bertoni, Maquieira, Gonzalo Muñoz, Martínez, Rodrigo Lira, and myself. I think. Maybe there were seven tigers. But I think there were only six. It would have been hard for the six of us to be anything much in 2000, because by then Rodrigo Lira, the best of the lot, had killed himself, and what was left of him had either been rotting for years in some cemetery or was ash, blowing around the streets and mingling with the filth of Santiago.”1 But despite Bolaño’s evaluation of the young tiger Rodrigo Lira as “the best of the lot,” recognition of his work has yet to spread beyond Chile’s borders, due mainly to the difficulty of translating his poetry into other languages. His exploitation of local slang and complex wordplay, along with allusions to Chilean popular and folk culture, seems to purposefully resist interpretation. Lira’s poetry poses an especially difficult challenge that often requires creative rewriting.

From a historical and political perspective, Lira offers a glimpse into the suffocating environment of Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing dictatorship (1973-90). Shifting between explicit and more concealed political criticism, his poetry reflects the psychology of living under a dictatorship and offers stories, sensations, and atmospheres that history books are unable to capture. From a strictly literary perspective, Lira’s parodies of internationally recognized Chilean poets (Neruda, Mistral, De Rokha, Huidobro, Parra, and Zurita) complement perceptions of their work and its impact among Chilean writers. Furthermore, his iconoclastic style and political critiques offer many parallels to several US literary movements, such as the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats, proving that no matter how much Lira’s poetry interacts with local references, it also reaches much farther. 
 

1The Return (New Directions, 2010). Translation by Chris Andrews.

Rodrigo Lira was born in Santiago in 1949. He gained notoriety during the seventies for his dramatic public readings and eccentric parodies of many established Chilean poets. Tormented by a diagnosis of schizophrenia as well as social marginalization, he committed suicide in 1981, on his thirty-second birthday. After his death and the posthumous publication of his first collection of poems, Proyecto de obras completas, interest in Lira’s poetry and life grew exponentially into a cult following that has influenced many younger generations of Chilean poets and writers. Combining erudite literary knowledge, intense language, and dark burlesque humor, Lira’s work is often compared to contemporaries Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. Roberto Bolaño described him as “one of the last poets of Latin America.”

Rodrigo Olavarría (Puerto Montt, Chile, 1979) is a writer and translator. He has published the poetry collection La noche migratoria (2006) and the novel Alameda tras las rejas (2010), while his short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He has translated books by Edgar Lee Masters, Herman Melville, Eileen Myles, and Sylvia Plath, among others. His Spanish translations of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems and Kaddish and Other Poems were published by Anagrama in 2006 and 2014, respectively. His upcoming novel, Cuaderno esclavo, will be published in 2017.

Thomas Rothe (Berkeley, California, 1985) has translated several contemporary South American poets into English, including Rodrigo Lira and Jaime Huenún. His translations have been published in Amerarcana, Jacket2, InTranslation, OOMPH!, and Lunch Ticket. He has published critical essays on Latin American and Caribbean literature in journals such as Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (Washington University in St. Louis) and Revista Meridional (Universidad de Chile), among others. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in Latin American literature at the Universidad de Chile.