Nicanor Parra

Nicanor Parra was one of the most important Latin American poets of the 20th century, heralded for his biting, ironic, lucid style—what he called “anti-poetry.” Parra claimed poetry as a colloquial, irreverent art. “I always associated poetry with the voice of a priest in the pulpit. … Let the birds do the singing,” he once said.

Parra was born into a large, artistic family. One of his sisters was Violetta Parra, a famous Chilean folk singer. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Chile, Brown University, and the University of Oxford. For more than 40 years, he taught theoretical physics at the University of Chile. Beginning in the 1950s, his books of poetry were a shot across the bow of Latin American poetry. As opposed to his friend Pablo Neruda’s high political lyricism, Parra advocated for a poetry of irony, absurdity, and common speech. His collections of poetry include Poemas y antipoemas (1954), Obra gruesa (1969), Artefactos (1972), Hojas de Parra (1985), Obras completas & algo (2006), and Obras Completas, II & algo más (2011), among many others. He translated King Lear into Spanish as Lear Rey & Mendigo (2004). A collection of his interviews with the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio was published in 2012. Parra’s final collection in Spanish, El último apaga la luz, was published the year before his death. Its title in English is The Last One to Leave Turns Off the Light.

Parra’s work has been translated into English in the collections Poems and Antipoems (1967), Antipoems: New and Selected (1985), Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great (trans. Liz Werner, 2004), and After-Dinner Declarations (trans. Dave Oliphant, 2009). He died in 2018 at the age of 103.