The Desert of Atacama VI

By Raúl Zurita b. 1951 Raul Zurita

Translated By Anna Deeny

Arid plains do not dream

No one has ever managed to see

Those chimerical pampas

i. The landscapes are convergent and divergent in the

Desert of Atacama

ii. Over the convergent and divergent landscape Chile

is convergent and divergent in the Desert of Atacama

iii. That's why what's there never was there and if it

were to stay where it is it would see its own life turn

around until being the chimerical plains deserted

enlightened fading away like them

iv. And when the convergent and divergent landscapes

of the Desert of Atacama unfold themselves

all of Chile will have been the life beyond because

unlike Atacama they are already extending themselves

like a dream the deserts of our own chimera

over there in these plains of hell

Source: Purgatory (University of California Press, 2009)

Biography

Raúl Zurita is one of Latin America’s most celebrated and controversial poets. After Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 US-supported military coup that ousted Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government, Zurita’s poetry sought to register the violence and atrocities committed against the Chilean people and the corruption of the Spanish language. During the dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1990, Zurita published a trilogy of . . .

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