Figures of Speech: Poems by Enrique Lihn

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Summary: An excellent introduction to a passionate, ironic poet
Review: Enrique Lihn (1929-1988), is outstanding in a country known for its poets, among them two Nobel Prize winners. His poems manage to be both deeply passionate and ironic, even acerbic at times, and trace a Latin American generation's journey through repressive upbringings, self-doubt and self-deprecation, political allegiances and disasters, tormented and tormenting love-affairs, and ultimately - in "A Diary of Dying", a journey towards Death, the ultimate unknown. Lihn's unfailingly intelligent and intense voice can be appreciated by English-speaking readers thanks to this very good selection of his work, prepared by poet Dave Oliphant. Translations are careful and manage to preserve a great deal of the original, though a few errors are apparent to native Spanish speakers.

Rating:
Summary: A bilinqual anthology of Chile's most important poet.
Review: Figures Of Speech is a 200-page bilingual (Spanish/English) collection of poems by the late Enrique Lihn, one of Chile's most important poets. A number of these poems, ably translated by Dave Oliphant, have never before been published for an English reading public and will showcase Lihn's outstanding gifts as an award winning poet extraordinaire. A World of Persons That I Do Not Know: A world of persons that I do not know/as I recognize myself in their ignorance/of me, they with their abundance/of likenesses equal me: I sing cho-/rus. I repeat what their tongues have told:/an unmatched parrot by the resonance/of the scream he renders, the distance/ripped apart by his beak of gold./Privileged big-shot who counts in the tale/and so many stories, sings not and figures/among those nearly natural monsters;/emblem or not, even so he still/stands for the same inclination so brutal/and human: mad one of all the creatures.