INRI
By Raul Zurita
2003
First Published
4.51
Average Rating
156
Number of Pages
Poetry. Latin American Studies. Translated from the Spanish by William Rowe. INRI responds to the need to find a language for an event that was kept hidden and excluded from official records in Chile: the fact that the bodies of the disappeared were thrown out of helicopters into the mouths of volcanoes and into the sea. In order to bring this event, that was neither seen nor heard, into language, Zurita invents a form and language capable of bringing it into the present. The one place where these unspeakable acts might be registered is in the landscape of Chile: the mountains, desert, and sea. There the event might begin to be touched, heard, and finally seen. When there are no places from which to speak, "the stones cry out."
Avg Rating
4.51
Number of Ratings
232
5 STARS
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4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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1 STARS
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goodreads
Author
Raul Zurita
Author · 15 books
Raúl Zurita was born in Santiago de Chile. In 1973 he was arrested by the Pinochet regime and imprisoned in the hold of a ship. He was a founder of the group Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), which undertook extremely risky public-art actions against the regime. In 1982 five airplanes wrote his poem “La Vida Nueva” in the sky above New York City, and in 1993 he had the phrase “NEITHER PAIN NOR FEAR” bulldozed into the Atacama Desert in a permanent, two-mile-long installation, visible only from above. Zurita received the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2000 and the Asan Memorial World Poetry Prize in 2018.
