After-dinner declarations by Nicanor Parra and translated by Dave Oliphant

This is poetry from Chile.

After-dinner declarations by Nicanor Parra translated by Dave Oliphant is published by Host Publications. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2009.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780924047633E12.

Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations, translated by Dave Oliphant, brings the Chilean master of antipoetry into a social and performative frame. Parra’s work has always delighted in puncturing solemnity, dragging poetry away from its marble pedestal and back toward speech, joke, contradiction, irritation, and public life. The after-dinner declaration is a perfect Parra situation: ceremonial enough to invite rhetoric, casual enough to expose its absurdity. Oliphant’s translation keeps the talky edge and comic bite that Parra requires. This is not poetry that wants reverent hush. It wants interruption, laughter, argument, and the embarrassment of hearing language behave too much like a human being. For readers interested in twentieth-century Latin American poetry, Parra is essential because he changed the temperature of the room. After-Dinner Declarations shows a poet still suspicious of prestige and still wonderfully alive to the ridiculous.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.