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The poet Raúl Zurita (Santiago, 70 years old) has won the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, the most important of the genre in the Spanish language, endowed with 42,100 euros. He is the third Chilean to obtain the award. The first was the same year the award was born, in 1992, Gonzalo Rojas. The second was Nicanor Parra, in 2001. This Tuesday, the announcement of the ruling was communicated by YouTube from the Royal Palace of Madrid.
“Poetry needs a certain radicalism and passion, which while it lasts will make you not settle,” said the author of works such as Purgatory, I sing to his missing love, The new life and Zurita, among others. In the latter, he addresses the tear that was caused by the Pinochet coup on September 11, 1973. Without that event that marked the recent history of his country and his own biography —he, a communist militant, was arrested and tortured in the warehouses of a ship used as a detention center – “I would not have written a line.”
Zurita is one of the great Chilean poets of the 20th century, along with Vicente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Rojas and Parra. Always dressed in black, bald and with a long and frayed beard, he has managed to express in his own life his radicalism and passion for poetry.
Winner in 2000 of the National Prize for Literature in Chile, Zurita boasts a telluric poetry, between the grandiose and the intimate, as often happens with Chilean poets. Move from biblical references and magnificence to intimate dreams. “Lo there, lo there, suspended in the air, the Atacama desert. Suspended over the Chilean sky, dissolving between auras. Turning this life and the other into the same Atacama desert, auric, getting lost in the air. Until finally there is no sky but the Atacama desert and then we all see our own phosphorescent pampas, damn it, towering over the horizon, “he writes in Purgatory 1979, a groundbreaking work with which he jumped to the altars of Chilean and Latin American poetry.
On one occasion, he tried to blind himself with acid, burned his face with hot iron and masturbated in front of a painting at an exhibition. “Art has an extreme vocation,” he told EL PAIS in 2015. “You have to be able to touch the darkest areas. One guy said that whoever was not capable of writing a sonnet was not a poet. The problem is not writing a sonnet, the problem is whether you are capable of killing a man. If you cannot kill a man you are not an artist, but if you do you are a disgusting murderer. Exactly on that edge you are ”.
The Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry recognizes the entire poetic work of a living author that, due to its literary value, constitutes a relevant contribution to the common cultural heritage of Ibero-America and Spain.
Despite his prestige and expertise, the new winner is lazy with poetry: “It bothers me. A deep can. It is like making a little package. I find her so far removed from the experience. If a Martian arrived, and the only information they had about the 20th century were the poetry books, it is likely that that Martian would come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing has happened here ”. At 70 years old, and living in Santiago de Chile, however, Zurita has recognized that as a poet he has “a certain peace”: “If you can be at peace with the things that are happening.”
