Nicanor Parra, the Alpha-Male Poet

Nicanor Parra died last week at the age of a hundred three. Here, David Unger remembers a collaboration with Parra that seemed doomed from the start. 

Nicanor Parra. Photo: Fundación Iberoamericana

I first began translating the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in 1973, on the recommendation of Frank MacShane, the professor of my graduate translation course at Columbia University. I bought Obra gruesa, an anthology of Parra’s poetry published by Chile’s Editorial Universitaria at the Las Americas bookstore in Union Square. Back then, there were four Spanish-language bookstores on or around Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. Later, I picked up Poems and Anti-Poems and Emergency Poems, two New Directions collections of Parra’s work. At the time, I was a serious silk-scarf/whiskey-breath poet, best buddies with classmate Frank Lima, a Rimbaud-like, jail-schooled poet.

I devoured these three Parra books, then went about looking for poems that had not been translated into English. I found “Último brindis,” a cynical mathematical poem that exemplified Parra’s antipoetry philosophy, and translated it as “The Final Toast.” 

Like it or not
We’re given only three choices:
The past, the present and the future.

And not even three For the philosopher tells us The past has passed It’s ours only in memory: From the rose stripped of her petals Another petal can’t be drawn.