1979
First Published
3.96
Average Rating
112
Number of Pages
Raúl Zurita’s Purgatory, a landmark in contemporary Latin American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990) in the fiercely inventive voice of a postmodern master. This beautiful en face edition, superbly translated by Anna Deeny, brings to English-language readers an indispensable volume written by one of the most important living poets writing in Spanish today. Zurita was a 24-year-old student in Valparaíso when, on the morning of the coup, he was arrested, detained, and tortured. Conceived as the first text of a Dantean trilogy that includes Anteparaíso (Anteparadise) and La Vida Nueva (The New Life), Purgatory is his anguished response to Chile’s violent recent history.
Avg Rating
3.96
Number of Ratings
603
5 STARS
36%
4 STARS
34%
3 STARS
21%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
2%
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.
