Nicanor Parra

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Nicanor Parra (2005)

Nicanor Parra Sandoval (born September 5, 1914 in San Fabián de Alico near Chillán , † January 23, 2018 in Las Cruces , San Antonio Province ) was a Chilean poet . He described himself as an "antipoetic" and is considered to be the founder of " antipoetry ".

Parra, 1935

life and work

Childhood, adolescence and studies

Nicanor Parra Sandoval was the eldest son in the large marriage of Nicanor Parra Parra and Clara Sandoval Navarrete. Although he grew up in modest circumstances, due to his parents' affinity for music, he was given an upbringing with pronounced artistic development. His father was a music teacher at a primary school, his mother a seamstress with an inclination to singing Chilean folklore. In particular, the father's punchy anecdotes and his jokes are said to be an early source of inspiration for Parra's later antipoetry. Nicanor Parra was the older brother of the musician Violeta Parra .

The family's limited means led to a vagabond existence of the family, which was characterized by frequent moves. Thanks to a scholarship, Parra came to Santiago de Chile , the capital of the country, in 1932 . He met Luís Oyarzún , Jorge Millas and Carlos Pedraza , who, like himself, attended the Nacional Barros Arana boarding school. A year later he enrolled at the Pedagogical Institute of the Universidad de Chile for the courses in mathematics and physics. In 1935 he published the story Gato en el camino in the Revista Nueva, which was edited together with Millas and Pedraza . Because of the bizarre narrative structure of this "anti-cuento" there was a scandal between the editors.

Literary career

In 1937 Parra published his first collection Cancionero sin nombre , containing 29 poems , whose diction, humor, characterization and narrative structure are still strongly based on Federico García Lorca . Nevertheless, it won the Premio Municipal de Santiago with its first publication and was referred to by the later Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral as "el futuro poeta de Chile", the future poet of Chile. That year he returned to Chillán to teach mathematics and physics at the school he had once attended as a student.

Another scholarship enabled him to stay at the renowned Brown University in Providence , which belongs to the Ivy League, from 1943 to 1946 . In addition to his postgraduate studies in physics, he deepened his reception of American and British poets such as Walt Whitman , TS Eliot and Ezra Pound . In addition, his contact with American culture and language made it easier for him to come into contact with poets of the Beat generation, as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti arranged for Parra's translations from Spanish into English when the latter had reached a larger audience. After this stay abroad, Parra repeatedly went to the capital of his country to work at the Universidad de Chile, first as a professor of mechanics and then as the deputy director of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. From 1949 to 1951 he received a British Council scholarship to study cosmology at Oxford University in England . He also took up reading the writings of William Blake and Franz Kafka here . The latter was to shape him for a long time. Parallels between Kafka and Parra in terms of the passivity and devotion to fate of the protagonists are often noted.

His poems showed more and more an oppositional stance to canonized poetry of Chilean origin, especially in relation to Pablo Neruda . After his return he published the Quebrantahuesos , collages consisting of newspaper texts , together with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Enrique Lihn . His big breakthrough came with his Poemas y antipoemas , published in 1954 , which only appeared 17 years after his first book publication. Not only did he succeed in the literary scene, this collection of poems also marks a turning point in Chilean and Latin American literary history as a whole. Apart from the Cueca larga (1958), which takes up folkloric elements of the Cueca and was partly set to music by the sister Violeta or other famous Cueca singers, Parra tried to radicalize the style of antipoetry in later publications. The Artefactos (1973) are seen as an explosion of antipoetry . These are postcards on which, under a simple illustration by Juán Guillermo Tejeda, there is a short, pointed, partly rhymed motto by Parra. Shortly after the military coup by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973, the Artefactos Parras were crushed and not reissued until 2006.

While some of the already Artefactos castigated political and social disparities in bitter cynicism, the poet spent with his Ecopoemas to (1982) a dedicated trend literature, without, however, permit a definite allocation to the left-wing camp. Parra's translation of William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear (2004) received great acclaim from literary criticism . In 2006, at the Chilean Book Fair in Santiago, the collected works were presented in the presence of the author by Ricardo Lagos , the country's former president. They were the best-selling book at the fair. Most recently, Nicanor Parra lived in seclusion in Las Cruces , the neighboring village of the former home of Pablo Neruda La Isla Negra , and devoted himself to a Hamlet translation.

In 2011 Parra received the Cervantes Prize , the most important literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world.

Parra and the Pinochet dictatorship

Resolute criticism of the Pinochet dictatorship is absent in Parra's work. During the military regime, the poet did not go into exile like many other intellectuals, but kept his lectureship in mathematics and physics at a state institution, the Universidad de Chile. He was also able to continue writing. Nevertheless, there are some passages in his writings of a subtly concealed criticism of the power apparatus, for example when one of the figures in his work, the Cristo de Elqui (1977), formulates:

[E] n Chile no se respetan los derechos humanos
aquí no existe libertad de prensa
aquí mandan los multimillonarios
el gallinero está a cargo del zorro
claro que yo les voy a pedir que me digan
en qué país se respetan los derechos humanos.

[I] n Chile human rights are trampled underfoot
here there is no freedom of the press
here the multimillionaires are at the helm
here the fox rules in the chicken coop
but please tell me a country
in which human rights apply.

Interpretative approaches

Nicanor Parra and Pablo Neruda

Some readers have the premature, but essentially not entirely false, cliché that Neruda is unable to appreciate those who stick with Parra - and vice versa. However, it is shortened to see Parra solely as Neruda's antipode. Certainly some of the antipoetic's poems are a direct parody of the Neruda style, such as the profane Oda a unas palomas , the ode to a few pigeons, which can be linked to Neruda's Odas elementales . There is also an anecdote according to which Neruda saved the Poemas y antipoemas by taking along suitcases containing the unpublished manuscripts that Parra had forgotten in a café.

There was no question that there was a positive relationship between the two of them during their lifetime. The hymn of praise for the blurb of the first edition of the Poemas y antipoemas was written by Neruda himself. In the second edition, Parra had the text deleted in order to defend himself against the influence of the poetry over-father whose name, according to Parra, had long been traded as a unit of measurement to gauge how many “Nerudas” there were in a poet.

Antipoetic mechanisms of action of the work

In order to clarify the mechanisms of action of anti-poetry, one must first consider what constitutes poetry. In this respect, numerous representatives of the Second Modern Age are suitable for a reflection on - ultimately unexplained in literary studies - concepts of poeticity. According to Roman Jakobson , the poetic function is in the foreground of a message as soon as it is used for its own sake, i.e. when rhetorical figures in the broadest sense (alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, parallelism or tropes such as metaphor or metonymy) are taken into account.

A use of language is antipoetic when it deviates from precisely this poetic function. With this, a different approach to explaining poeticity comes into play, namely that of the aesthetics of deviation or deviation, which was first described by Viktor Šklovskij . With its structure of antipoesy, Parra deviates from previous patterns of modernity and creates something new. However, no literary form can continually produce innovation and is prone to novelty fading. In order to prevent this, Parra radicalized antipoetry again and again, which literary criticism accused him of being mannerism . However, the author proves that he did not only use idioms and phraseologisms systematically and that he also tends to use informal language.

In his diverse abilities to change, Parra also shows a skillful handling of the formal linguistic register. Both an academic, clerical and overall rhetorical highly sophisticated style as well as a language that is characterized by figurations of the beggar, peasant or barker is used. Violations of the poetic principle of beauty or aestheticism, subjectivity and originality can be identified as antipoetic deviation criteria. Aestheticism is violated, as one usually expects linguistic complexity and an elaborate style from poetry. Subjectivity is not fulfilled by antipoetry, since the lyrical ego does not express its feelings in inner vision like a seer, like a father . After all, the principle of originality is also not complied with, in that not the extraordinary, but the everyday is depicted in a rhetorically less sophisticated way or with the help of trite, clichéd and supposedly lyrical comparisons.

In his Metalyrical poems Parra castigates the entire course of literary history in the tone of a barker who addresses an audience who hardly turns to him:

For half a century,
poetry was
a haven for solemn fools.
Then I came
with my roller coaster.
Get on board
when you feel like it.
However: I am not liable if you end up
bleeding from your mouth and nose.

Parra also tries to contribute something to a definition of the controversial term of the lyrical, but in his own ironic way. The answer to the question “What is poetry?” In the poem of the same name is rather cryptic and productively allows a wide scope for interpretation. What makes a poem a poem is ultimately left open:

todo lo que se dice es poesía
todo lo que se escribe es prosa
todo lo que se mueve es poesía
lo que no cambia de lugar es prosa

Everything you say is poetry
Everything you write is prose
Everything that moves is poetry
that which does not change place is prose.

Intertextual approaches

Forerunners and role models Parras

When looking for influences on Parra's work, the name Franz Kafka is often mentioned without giving precise references. The figure constellation of a passive lyrical ego in Parra and the passive protagonists in Kafka, who are subordinate to a bureaucratic apparatus of power, is not sufficient for an interpretive parallel that can promote knowledge. Exact parallel passages in the work of the two authors can hardly be made out, although Parra himself often refers to Kafka as a radical reading experience.

For the naming of the Poemas y antipoemas different forerunners may have been the godfathers. In Canto IV of the work Altazor o el viaje en paracaídas (1931) from the pen of the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, which is considered untranslatable, it says “Aquí yace Vicente antipoeta y mago”. The surrealist Apoémes (1947) by Henri Pichette or the Antipoemas (1926) by the Peruvian avant-garde poet Enrique Bustamante Ballivián should not have escaped Parra. For Parra, as a physicist, the thought of positive and negative charges that meet in poemas and antipoemas was also appealing . In any case, initial title concepts such as Oxford 1950 or A pan ya agua faded into the background. For the use of everyday expressions in poetry, predecessors can also be found that had an effect on Parra, such as the Veinte poemas para leer en el tranvía (1922) by the Argentine Oliverio Girondo .

Reception Parras by other poets

Parra's influences on other authors are even more numerous. In addition to epigones who have copied his style and not achieved it, there are also well-known authors who have implemented antipoetic mechanisms of action in Parra's sense very productively. First of all, reference should be made to Neruda's Estravagario Collection (1958). In particular, the description of less romantic love relationships can be parallelized.

Furthermore, references can be made to important Chilean poets of more recent date, such as Enrique Lihn or Raúl Zurita . Zurita, for example, tends to decontextualize poetry by writing poems on electro-encephalograms or having the poem La vida nueva (1982) written in the sky above New York using a smoke cartridge attached to an airplane .

The writer Roberto Bolaño created a monument to Nicanor Parra in the novel The Wild Detectives (1998), in which the protagonists, who otherwise railed against Latin American poets, praised Nicanor Parra's poetry.

Parra was also received in the United States beyond national borders. In the case of Lawrence Ferlinghetti , Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso , important representatives of the Beat Generation , there was an overlap in the use of montage and the everyday style of conversation. Nicanor Parra's poetry has been translated into German by powerful poets such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Nicolas Born . However, no direct intertextual relationships with these poets can be proven.

Political readings

Although Parra cannot be clearly assigned to a political camp, there are numerous political allusions to be found in his poems. His ridicule is directed in all conceivable directions.

The so-called “tazita de té” with the President's wife Pat Nixon gave rise to an involuntary and externally undertaken political positioning . At that time Parra was a member of the jury at the renowned cultural institute of the Cuban Casa de las Américas. A Latin American delegation of writers, including Parra, was invited to the US government's White House in the early 1970s, at a time when the Nixon-era US was bombing eastern Cambodia . Suddenly the first lady appeared and invited the company to a cup of tea documented in the media. The photos sparked a scandal and Parra was immediately dismissed from the jury of the Casa de las Américas. His attempts at justification failed. Parra's initial calls for political tolerance (“Cuba sí, yankees también”) culminated in bitter cynicism (“La izquierda y la derecha unidas / jamás serán vencidas”).

A clear appeal for nature conservation measures can be found not only in his so-called "Ecopoemas", but also in his interviews. To preserve nature, Parra calls for a return to the Mapuche , the indigenous indigenous people of Chile: A balance of the environment only works on the basis of an economy and ecology that gives back what it takes from the earth.

Further interpretive approaches

The most examined subject of literary studies on Parra's poems is, in addition to intertextual references and literary historical locations, his deviating linguistic usage. In addition, there are numerous studies that focus on the Metalyrian or political poems. Analyzes with an autobiographical or psychoanalytic reading are also relevant.

Awards, prizes and nominations

Parra has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times by academic bodies . The first nomination came in 1995 from Columbia University in New York under the leadership of the literary scholar Marlene Gottlieb . A second took place in 1997 from the Universidad de Concepción and another in 2000 from the Universidad de Chile.

Works (selection)

  • Cancionero sin nombre . Nascimento, Santiago 1937
  • Poemas y antipoemas . Nascimento, Santiago 1954
  • La Cueca Larga . Universitaria, Santiago 1958
  • Versos de Salón . Nascimento, Santiago 1962
  • Canciones Rusas . Universitaria, Santiago 1967
  • Obra Gruesa . Universitaria, Santiago 1969
  • Artifacts . Nueva Universidad, Santiago 1973 (on postcards)
  • Sermones and Prédicas del Cristo de Elqui . Ganymedes, Valparaíso 1977
  • New Sermones y Prédicas del Cristo de Elqui . Ganymedes, Valparaíso 1979
  • Ecopoemas de Nicanor Parra. Gráfica Marginal, Valparaíso 1982
  • Hojas de Parra . Ganymedes, Santiago 1985
  • Poemas para combatir la calvicie . Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico City 1993
  • Trabajos prácticos . Cesoc, Santiago 1996
  • Discursos de Sobremesa . Cuadernos Atenea, Concepción 1997
  • Lear. Rey & Mendigo . Diego Portales, Santiago 2004

Work edition:

  • Obras completas & algo † . 2 volumes. Ed. Niall Binns, with a foreword by Federico Schopf. Círculo de Lectores and Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona 2006–2011, ISBN 84-672-1450-3 and ISBN 84-8109-530-3
    • Vol. 1: De “Gato en el camino” a “Artefactos” (1935–1972) , Barcelona 2006, ISBN 84-672-1451-1 and ISBN 84-8109-531-1
    • Vol. 2: De "News from Nowhere" and "Discursos de sobremesa" (1975-2006) , Barcelona 2011

German selection edition:

  • And Chile is a desert. Poetry and anti-poetry . Edited by Peter Schulze-Kraft. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-596-25034-X

Films about Parra

  • Guillermo Cahn made the film Nicanor Parra in 1981 . Cachureo .
  • In the documentary film Retrato de un antipoeta , which Victor Jiménez Atkin presented in 2008 with rare, private recordings of the poet, Parra makes an urgent plea for respect for human rights. This is man's first duty: "Primer deber humano: Respetar los derechos humanos."

literature

German

  • Nils Bernstein: Phraseologisms with Ernst Jandl and Nicanor Parra , in: Jarmo Korhonen, Wolfgang Mieder, Elisabeth Piiraine, Rosa Piñel (eds.): EUROPHRAS 2008 . Contributions to the international phraseology conference from 13. – 16. August 2008 in Helsinki. University of Helsinki, pp. 198-206 ( PDF ).
  • Nils Bernstein: The innovation potential of antipoetry. For Nicanor Parra's 95th birthday. In: Fixpoetry (features: column, essay, interview), 2009 ( online ).
  • Nils Bernstein: "do you know me, gentlemen / my ladies and gentlemen". Phraseologisms in modern poetry using the example of Ernst Jandl and Nicanor Parra . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4699-5 .
  • Thomas Brons: The Antipoesía Parras. Attempt to interpret from an ideological point of view . Alfred Kümmerle, Göppingen 1972, ISBN 3-87452-117-6 (plus dissertation, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich 1971).
  • Federico Schopf: Epilogue to Nicanor Parra: And Chile is a desert. Poetry and anti-poetry. Edited by Peter Schulze-Kraft. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-596-25034-X , pp. 127-138.
  • Jürgen von Stackelberg: Age poetry as everyday poetry. Notes on Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra . In: Latin America Studies , Vol. 13., Wilhelm Fink. Munich 1983, ISBN 3-7705-2154-4 , pp. 869-882.

Spanish

  • Niall Binns: Nicanor Parra . Eneida, Madrid 2000.
  • Iván Carrasco: Para empty a Nicanor Parra . Cuarto Propio, Santiago 1999, ISBN 956-260-160-9 .
  • Coloquio Internacional de Escritores y Academicos (ed.): Antiparra productions. Ciclo homenaje en torno a la figura y obra de Nicanor Parra . Santiago 2002.
  • Maximino Fernández Fraile: Fichas bibliográficas sobre Nicanor Parra ( online ).
  • Marlene Gottlieb: No se termina nunca de nacer. La posía de Nicanor Parra . Colección Nova Scholar, Madrid 1972.
  • Raquel Olea: "Aferrémonos a esta piltrafa divina". La construcción del sujeto femenino en la antipoesía de Nicanor Parra . In: Claudius Armbruster, Karin Hopfe (eds.): Horizon Shifts. Intercultural understanding and heterogeneity in Romania . Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 1998, ISBN 3-8233-5188-5 , pp. 473-482.
  • Federico Schopf: La antipoesía y el vanguardismo. In: Acta Literaria 10-11 (1985-1986), pp. 33-76.
  • Pamela G. Zúñiga: El mundo de Nicanor Parra. Antibiografía . Extended new edition. Zig-Zag, Santiago 2001, ISBN 956-12-1417-2 .

Web links

Commons : Nicanor Parra  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rocío Montes: Muere el poeta chileno Nicanor Parra a los 103 años . El País , January 23, 2018, accessed January 24, 2018 (Spanish).
  2. ^ Leonidas Morales: Conversaciones con Nicanor Parra . 3. Edition. Tajamar, Santiago 2006, p. 25 f.
  3. ^ Nicanor Parra: Obras completas & algo † . Edited by Ignacio Echevarría. Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona 2006, pp. 563-567.
  4. ^ Iván Carrasco: Para empty a Nicanor Parra . Cuarto Propio, Santiago 1999, p. 63.
  5. ^ Leonidas Morales: Nicanor Parra
  6. ^ Jaime Quezada: Nicanor Parra de cuerpo entero . Andrés Bello, Santiago de Chile 2007, p. 59.
  7. ^ Niall Binns: Nicanor Parra . Eneida, Madrid 2000, p. 23, and Andrés Juan Piña: Nicanor Parra: La poesía no es un juego de salón , in: the same: Conversaciones con la Poesía Chilena . Pehuén, Santiago 1990, pp. 13–51, here p. 39.
  8. ↑ Nicanor Parra, collage con artefacto de on the website of Universidad Chile.
  9. ^ Nicanor Parra: Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui . Ganymedes, Valparaíso 1979, XXIV.
  10. ↑ Nicanor Parra: And Chile is a desert. Poetry and anti-poetry . Edited by Peter Schultze-Kraft. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 100, translated by Peter Schultze-Kraft.
  11. ↑ Eric Goles: Eric Goles y la maleta de Nicanor , in: Juan Diego Santa Cruz u. a. (Ed.): The Clinic. Número especial: Parra . Santiago, October 21, 2004. p. 11.
  12. ↑ Nils Bernstein: The innovation potential of antipoetry. For Nicanor Parra's 95th birthday
  13. ^ Roman Jakobson: Linguistics and Poetics .
  14. ↑ Viktor Šklovskij: Theory of Prose . Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 14.
  15. ↑ Federico Schopf: Estructura del antipoema , in: Atenea 399 (1963). Pp. 140-153.
  16. ↑ Nils Bernstein: Phraseologisms in Nicanor Parra , pp. 198–206.
  17. ^ Iván Carrasco: Para empty a Parra . Cuarto Propio, Santiago 1999, pp. 102-106.
  18. ↑ meta-poetry of Nicanor Parra on poeticas.es
  19. ↑ Nicanor Parra: And Chile is a desert. Poetry and anti-poetry . Edited and translated by Peter Schultze-Kraft. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 26.
  20. ↑ Nicanor Parra: Chistes par (r) a desorientar a la policia poesía . Edited by María Nieves Alonso and Gilberto Triviños. 4th edition. Visor, Madrid, p. 216.
  21. ^ Nicanor Parra in: Juan Andrés Piña: Nicanor Parra: La poesía no es un juego de salón , in: The same: Conversaciones con la Poesía Chilena . Los Andes, Santiago 1990, p. 22.
  22. ↑ Vicente Huidobro: Altazor or El viaje en paracaídas. Poema en VII cantos . Editorial Universitaria, Santiago 1991, Canto IV, V. 287, p. 72.
  23. ↑ Roberto Bolaño: The wild detectives . Translated by Heinrich von Berenberg. Carl Hanser, Munich and Vienna 2002, pp. 93 and 180.
  24. ↑ Federico Schopf: La antipoesía y el vanguardismo , in: Acta Literaria 10-11 (1985-1986). Pp. 33–76, here p. 72.
  25. ↑ Nicanor Parra: And Chile is a desert. Poetry and anti-poetry . Edited by Peter Schultze-Kraft. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1986.
  26. ^ Andrés Juan Piña: Nicanor Parra: La poesía no es un juego de salón , in: The same: Conversaciones con la Poesía Chilena . Pehuén., Santiago 1990, p. 47 f.
  27. ^ Nicanor Parra: Obras completas & algo † . Edited by Ignacio Echevarría. Galaxia Gutenberg 2006, p. 538.
  28. ^ Nicanor Parra: Obras completas & algo † . Edited by Ignacio Echevarría. Galaxia Gutenberg 2006, p. 461.
  29. ^ Jaime Quezada: Nicanor Parra de cuerpo entero . Andrés Bello, Santiago 2007, p. 34.
  30. ^ Honorary Members: Nicanor Parra. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 18, 2019 .
  31. ↑ Pamela G. Zúñiga: El mundo de Nicanor Parra. Antibiografía . Zig-Zag, Santiago 2001, 183f.
  32. ^ Nicanor Parra in Retrato de un Antipoeta .
personal data
SURNAME Parra, Nicanor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Parra Sandoval, Nicanor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean poet
DATE OF BIRTH September 5, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH San Fabián de Alico near Chillán , Chile
DATE OF DEATH 23rd January 2018
Place of death Las Cruces (Chile) , San Antonio Province