Raúl Zurita

Raúl Armando Zurita Canessa (born January 10, 1950) is a Chilean poet. He has received the Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry in 2020, the National Literature Prize in 2000, and the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award in 2016.
Born to Raúl Armando Zurita Inostroza and Italian immigrant Ana Canessa Pessolo, Raúl Zurita grew up in a bilingual environment where Italian was predominantly spoken. His father died when Zurita was only two years old, leaving his mother to support the family through secretarial work. As a result, Zurita and his sister, Ana María, were primarily cared for by their grandmother, Josefina.
Josefina played a significant role in Zurita's upbringing. She held a strong attachment to Italy and viewed Chile as a miserable country. Her nostalgia for Italy led her to frequently discuss Italian culture and figures with Zurita and his sister during their childhood. Josefina often recounted passages from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy to the young Zurita and his sister, particularly the section about hell, which she knew by heart. This early exposure to Dante's work left a lasting impact on Zurita, shaping the themes and imagery that would later permeate his poetry.
Zurita recalls a childhood marked by economic hardship. His family had inherited houses in Iquique, Chile, but the value of these properties had diminished, leading to financial struggles. While Zurita characterizes his childhood as one of poverty, he emphasizes that it was not proletarian poverty. His father, who had studied engineering, fell ill with pleurisy and died at the age of 31. Josefina had opposed her daughter's marriage because she considered him a uomo malato, or a sick man. After his death, Josefina became a widow just two days later.
Zurita attended school at Liceo Lastarria and later pursued Civil Engineering in Structures at the Federico Santa María Technical University in Valparaíso. During his university years, he became a member of the Communist Party, a political affiliation he continues to maintain.
Around 1970, Zurita was part of the literary scene in Valparaíso, where he associated with other writers and artists, including Juan Luis Martínez, Eduardo Embry, and Juan Cameron.
Zurita married Miriam Martínez Holger, a visual artist and the sister of his poet friend Juan Luis Martínez, at the age of 20. The couple had three children: Iván, Sileba, and Gaspar. However, shortly after the birth of their youngest child, Gaspar, the marriage came to an end.
On September 11, 1973, at 6 o'clock in the morning, the day of the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet, Zurita was detained by a military patrol as he was on his way to have breakfast at the university.
Zurita's initial destination was Playa Ancha Stadium. Four days later, and for the subsequent 21 days, he was held captive in the cargo hold of the ship named Maipo, alongside 800 individuals, in a space designed for approximately 50 people, where he endured torture.
After his release, Zurita attempted to find employment that would allow him to fulfill his responsibilities:
During this period, Zurita undertook various artistic actions aimed at critically and creatively integrating and expanding different concepts of art and life. He carried out various actions using his body as a medium of expression, intending to convey a sense of powerlessness in the face of reality and the need to communicate without words. In collaboration with sociologist Fernando Balcells and artists Lotty Rosenfeld, Juan Castillo, and Diamela Eltit, he formed the CADA group (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte). Their artistic stance was based on using the city as a space for creation. With Eltit, whom he met in 1974, Zurita formed a lasting partnership that lasted for a decade, and they had a son, Felipe, who is a musician.
Zurita's first book, Purgatorio (1979, referencing Dante), "bewildered both readers and critics of the time" due to its originality and received critical acclaim. The cover featured a black and white photo of a scar on the poet's cheek resulting from a self-inflicted burn. According to Memoria Chilena, this poetry collection marked "the first step in a project to restore the author's life—his mind, his body, his suffering—in poetry." Before this, he had published in university magazines such as Quijada from his alma mater and Manuscritos (Department of Humanistic Studies at the University of Chile), edited by Cristián Huneeus.
In March of the following year, the poet attempted to blind himself by pouring ammonia into his eyes. Inspired by photographs taken by his then-partner Diamela Eltit, which showed her injuries and burns, Zurita decided to carry out this act in what he described as "a competition in harm, in which of the two would go further in this mutual fury that included self-destruction." The act was unsuccessful, and he retained his vision after receiving medical attention.
Zurita's second book, Anteparaíso, was published three years later. According to Rodrigo Cánovas, author of Lihn, Zurita, Ictus, Radrigán: Chilean Literature and Authoritarian Experience, this book, like its predecessor, "represents a liberation from repressive codes that have attempted to subdue language throughout history."
On June 2, 1982, Zurita's creative work took a new turn with the poem La vida nueva, written in the skies of New York using five planes that traced the letters with white smoke against the blue sky. This creation consisted of fifteen phrases, each 7-9 kilometers long, in Spanish. The work was captured on video by artist Juan Downey. In October 2012, composer Javier Farías presented the choral piece Cantos de vida nueva in New York, based on Zurita's poem.
Another artistic action involved inscribing the phrase Ni pena ni miedo in the Chilean desert in 1993. The photograph of this inscription concludes the book La vida nueva, and due to its length of 3,140 meters, it can only be read from a high vantage point. With these initiatives, Zurita aimed to transcend the traditional concept of literature and approach that of total art.
Between 1979 and 2016, Zurita wrote the trilogy comprising Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), and La vida nueva, whose final version was published in 2018. These works traverse a variety of landscapes, from deserts and beaches to mountains, grasslands, and rivers. These works, along with Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), INRI (2003), and Zurita (2011), are considered among his most significant contributions to literature.
During the presidency of Patricio Aylwin in 1990, Zurita was appointed as a cultural attaché in Rome. It was during these years that his Parkinson's disease began to manifest itself. In 2019, he underwent a successful Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) surgery in Milan, Italy, which greatly alleviated the symptoms of the disease.
In 2001, Zurita was awarded the National Literature Prize of Chile.
In 2002, while in Berlin on a DAAD scholarship, Zurita experienced a profound sense of emptiness that led him to contemplate suicide. This feeling emerged after he inadvertently joined a protest against George W. Bush. It was during this period that he began work on his monumental book, Zurita, which spans over 750 pages. He started releasing excerpts from it in 2006, culminating in its final publication in 2011. In 2001, Zurita separated from his third partner, Amparo Mardones Viviani, following a 15-year relationship. Upon his return from Berlin in 2002, he met Paulina Wendt, a fellow literature scholar at the university where he taught. They became a couple that same year and married in 2009. All of Zurita's books published after 2000 are dedicated to Paulina Wendt, with the dedication in Zurita reading: "To Paulina Wendt, with whom I will die."
In mid-2007, Los países muertos was published, a book that sparked controversy due to its mention of various figures in the Chilean cultural scene. Later that same year, he published Las ciudades de agua in Mexico, followed by Cinco fragmentos the next year. Zurita was a heavy smoker but quit in 2008 as his Parkinson's condition progressed.
In 2009 and 2010, Zurita continued to release fragments of Zurita, in which the author aimed to conclude the cycle of Purgatorio while creating an intertext with his seminal work, the Divine Comedy, which he was translating at the time.
Zurita has served as a visiting professor at Tufts University, the University of California, Harvard University, and currently teaches at the Diego Portales University.
Numerous researchers have dedicated theses to his poetic writing, including French scholar Benoît Santini (Le discours poétique de Raúl Zurita: entre silence et engagement manifeste dans le Chili des années 1975-2000, 2008). Several publications have been dedicated to his work, such as zuritax60 (Mago, 2010), Raúl Zurita: Alegoría de la Desolación y la Esperanza (Visor, 2016), Fronteras, límites, intercambios en la obra de Raúl Zurita (Presses Universitaires de Midi, 2019), and international colloquia on his work held in France, Spain, and Chile. In 2017, the Archives Collection of the University of Poitiers in France dedicated two volumes to the critical study of his work.
On May 4, 2013, Zurita was one of the founders of the Marca AC movement, which aimed to draft a new Political Constitution for Chile through the establishment of a constituent assembly.
On March 5, 2015, Zurita was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Alicante, and on November 6 of the same year, by the Federico Santa María Technical University. He also holds an honorary doctorate from University of La Frontera in Temuco and is a professor emeritus at the Diego Portales University. In 2015, the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library inaugurated its author's library in his honor.
Zurita received the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award in 2016, as well as the Ibero-American Literary Creation Prize José Donoso from the University of Talca and the Asan World Prize in India, among others.
Books and selections of Zurita's poems have been translated into various languages, including English, German, French, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Norwegian, Dutch, Hindi, Slovenian, and Greek. In 2019, the documentary film about his life and work, Zurita, Verás No Ver, directed by Alejandra Carmona, was released. That same year, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by scholars from different countries around the world.
Since 2008, Zurita began collaborating with the band González y Los Asistentes, led by poet and musician Gonzalo Henríquez, to create music based on recited poems. This collaborative effort resulted in the album Desiertos de amor (2011), which they have performed live at various events in Chile and Argentina.
In July 2014, Zurita also participated in the 30th-anniversary concert of the Chilean band Electrodomésticos, where he recited the lyrics of the song "Yo la quería" from the 1986 album ¡Viva Chile! on stage.