With my apologies to New Directions,
Miller Williams and Nicanor Parra,
the poems below are
excerpted from Emergency Poems...
Young Poets
Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.
In poetry everything is permitted.
With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.
-- Nicanor Parra
chronos
In Santiago, Chile
The days are interminably long:
Several eternities in a day.
Like the vendors of seaweed
Travelling on the backs of mules:
You yawn - you yawn again.
Yet the weeks are short
The months go racing by
And the years have wings.
- Nicanor Parra
The translator is Miller Williams,
Emergency Poems, New Directions 1972
selects from various Chilean editions
of Parra's work.
biography
Nicanor Parra was born in 1914 in Chillan, a small town in southern Chile,
the son of a schoolteacher. In 1933 he entered the Instituto Pedagogico
of the University of Chile, and qualified as a teacher of mathematics and
physics in 1938, one year after his first book appeared: Cancionero
sin Nombre. After teaching in Chilean secondary schools, he went in 1943
to Brown University in the U.S. to continue his studies in physics. He
returned to Chile as Professor at the University in 1946. Since 1952
Parra has been Professor of Theoretical Physics in Santiago, and has
read his poetry in England, France, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, and the
United States. He has published several books, including one in
collaboration with his great compatriot, Pablo Neruda.
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