My first work: song, a wild bird trying to sing.
Violeta Parra
Almost seventy years after Violeta transfigured into a bird, her creations are still with us, showing us the only possible path toward the soul’s restoration: absolute love, multifaceted in its creative expression and singular at its heart; the union of the natural, the human, and the divine in a single song, a single consciousness of belonging and owing ourselves to each other.
The idea behind this dossier, which puts the life and work of this absolute creative in perspective, came about from the welcome appearance, in 2025, of the first biography of Violeta Parra written and published in the English-speaking world: Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra, written by Ericka Verba and published by the University of North Carolina Press. This book brings together and presents a body of research to which Verba—director and professor of Latin American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles—has dedicated decades, and that meticulously spans all the threads that form the fabric of a life: the creative, political, and personal dimensions, with all their areas of light and shadow. This new perspective on the work of Violeta Parra underlines the capacity for action that Violeta set in motion while she “invented and reinvented herself in her struggle to be recognized as an artist on her own terms.” We are grateful to UNC Press for allowing us to include some excerpts from this valuable work in LALT.
In “Ericka Verba’s Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra,” thanks to Nicolás Bernales’ exacting and sensitive reading of Thanks to Life, we get a glimpse at the milestones that fill this biography and put in perspective the complex portrait that Verba paints—in her own language and from her own cultural codes—of Violeta Parra and the story of her life.
From the continent’s south, and in creative alignment with Violeta’s poetic legacy, poet Rosabetty Muñoz of Chiloé, winner of the 2024 Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda, shares her alimental relationship with the cantora’s oeuvre in an essay that revisits the popular, political, and spiritual dimensions of a body of work that laid out a path for others to follow: “Her poetry opened up to me with the fierceness proper to a time that demanded of us a bond between word and history, a commitment to the present that was clear to her, but that we young writers, growing up under dictatorship, had not yet figured out.”
Lastly, we offer one possible reading of the pinnacle of the work that Violeta left us: Las últimas composiciones, which, in their expressive richness and diversity, constitute an existential journey, prodigiously incorporating all the sources that nourished her creativity.
“All the adjectives are not enough, / all the nouns are not enough” to name Violeta, as her brother Nicanor was well aware and set to writing in his “Defense of Violeta Parra” (translated by Anna Deeny and published in The Paris Review):
Poetry
painting
farming
You do it all
Effortlessly
Like someone drinking a glass of wine.
But the bureaucrats don’t love you
And they close the doors to your home
And they hate you to death
Sorrowful Viola.
Because you don’t dress up like a clown
Because you don’t buy or sell yourself
Because you speak the earth’s language
Viola Chilensis.
Because you tell it like it is!
Welcome to the universe of Violeta Parra.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
