I promised in an earlier post to write about the second book I read in Mexico this year, Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations. But every time I try to write about the book I get stuck: Parra’s book is brilliant but, for me at least, unsummarizable. The collection contains five long poems in the form of speeches, which Parra actually delivered on various occasions. The first was delivered as his acceptance speech upon receiving the Juan Rulfo Prize in 1991, and in the first of its 50 sections Parra attributes the inspiration for his versifying of such a speech to a recently deceased friend. Here is that section, in Dave Oliphant’s agile translation:

MRS. CLARA APARICIO

Widowlife of Rulfo
Distinguished authorities
Ladies and Gentlemen:

A friend who has just died
Suggested to me the notion
That I forget about giving an academic speech
Basing it on the fact
That nowadays no one believes in ideas:

End of history
Art and philosophy toppled

What you should do
Is read your antipoems Carlos Ruiz-Tagle said to me
Preferibly
Those that are closely connected with death
In Mexico death has a lot of pull:
Rulfo will applaud you from his grave

You may remember that my first post in this series concerned Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star, whose villain is one Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an autodidact and fascist poet who gains fame in Bolaño’s tale by skywriting under the pseudonym of Carlos Weider. So I might be forgiven the creepy shiver of recognition that went through me at Parra’s mention of Carlos Ruiz-Tagle. That mention cast a strange light back over the book I had just read, and made me wonder who Ruiz-Tagle was. I’ve found a little information about him—a writer of short stories and novels, editor of anthologies, and pseudonymous author of a comic novel called La Revolución en Chile, which since its publication in 1973 has gone through 21 editions and sold 110,000 copies (this in a country of 16.5 million people). What Bolaño meant by making giving his villain an in-joke for a name I’ll have to leave for a native Chilean reader to explain.

The Ruiz-Tagle connection aside, reading Parra was plain delightful, though puzzling here and there. His declarations are full of wordplay, asides to friends and enemies living and dead, acerbic modesty, diffident bravado; scarcely a line goes by that isn’t laced with irony and crackling with colloquialisms. (Parra plays at being simple, but it’s good to keep in mind his degree in advanced mechanics from Brown University in the United States, his stint at Oxford University studying cosmology, his work as director of the School of Engineering at the University of Chile and his later work as a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chile. The inventor of antipoetry is no rube.) Here’s section 20 of the Rulfo speech, in which Parra finds a parallel between his own work and Rulfo’s famously sparse literary output:

RULFO STOOD FIRM AGAINST ALL ODDS

Three times 100 and stop
not another page
The writer is not a sausage factory

With respect to myself
17 years between the first and second book
Well sure later came what came:
They call me the leap year poet
Patience
Every 4 years I’m pregnant again
Plagiarisms
Adaptations
Garglings for fighting off insomnia
If anyone has something to say

A glance across the page shows just how challenging Parra has made his translator’s task in even this fairly straightforward poem, for the original bristles with slang and shorthand. In Spanish “Not another page,” for example, reads “ni una página +”—the plus sign standing in for the word “más”. Further on, “Every 4 years I’m pregnant again” translates Parra’s original line, “C/4 años un domingosiete” (“C/4” for “cada cuatro” and “domingosiete” referring, if I’m not mistaken, to a women who is pregnant at the time she becomes engaged to marry). There are passages even more dizzyingly fraught, but Oliphant consistently brings over Parra’s essential meanings, if not always their every nuance.

One last quotation and I’ll let this entry go. The last poem-speech in the book was delivered on the occasion of Parra’s being awarded an honorary doctorate. Here’s section 6:

TO THE WORD DOCTOR

Are assigned at least the following meanings
1. Someone who knows his subject well
2. Someone who has something to say
3. A voice that comes from afar
4. One who makes statues speak
5. Someone who talks without moving his lips
6. A phantom who laughs at everything
Including the ontological demonstration of the Existence of Marx
7. Shadow that moves through the Bible
Like President Pedro Aguirre Cerda through his house in Conchalí

I stick to the meaning
Assigned by the Commedia Dell’ Arte
Quote
Grotesque character
Caricature of a university pedant
Recognized by his interminable rhetorical orations
Loaded with Greek and Latin citations
In Chile it signifies kill the healthy
Commonly used as a synonym foir Boss
In a burlesque sense:
Hello Doc
Hello Honcho Hello Chief
To call one Dr. in Chile
Is almost as serious as insulting his mother
Let the truth be told

In a long-ago post I put Parra on my short list for the Nobel Prize. Evidently the august Committee hasn’t gotten the word. The guy’s in his nineties and writes brilliant poetry that sounds like nobody else on the planet. Give him a break! Cough up the prize already!