I. So far, so close
I grew up in a world where the poetic word was respected by our elders. Ballads were recited and memorized, and they remain in popular memory, along with many words that are no longer used in the rest of Chile. Our island condition dictated a way of being-in-community, believing in education and trusting in humanistic education to make children into better people; therefore, school was a space of hope, supported by all. Chilean literature was put on the table, before our eyes, and in family homes the names of the elder poets were repeated, whose voices went beyond their books, turning them into figures linked to the great mysteries of existence. But that was not where I found Violeta Parra: far from school books and academic legitimacy, she was still unknown to me when I left the Chiloé Archipelago to continue my studies.
I first heard her in song, and I first read her as a poet when the priest Enrique White gave me her Décimas Autobiográficas, the same day he told me how he had been detained and tortured for harboring members of the MIR in his parish. That night, I discovered a poetry I recognized right away for its rhythm and its campesino tone, speaking to me now of subjects so different from those of the long poems I used to learn on island winters, which spoke of religious matters or characters from far away. Violeta Parra was writing her own personal history in painful verses that intertwined with Father White’s chilling account. Thus I met her: in the raw intensity of one of life’s defining moments. 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. My encounter with her torrential poetry, with the radical vocation of her words, helped me to find a place from which I could unfurl my own imagination: “No puede ni el más flamante / pasar en indiferencia / si brilla en nuestra conciencia / amor por los semejantes” [Not even the flashiest / can pass by apathetic / if in our consciousness there shines / love for our fellow beings]. The principles that underlay my own development could be found in her verses, laid bare with such rigor and simplicity that it seemed possible for me, also a woman outside the circles of power, to speak—to express myself, and to express those I cared about. She represented the poet in her time with such clarity that her verses foresee, her voice becomes prophetic: “Ya no florece el mañío / ya no da fruto el piñón / se va a acabar la araucaria / ya no perfuma el cedrón / porque al mapuche le clavan / el centro del corazón” [The plum pine no longer blooms / the pine nut no longer bears fruit / the araucaria will be no more / the beebrush no longer perfumes / because they stabbed the Mapuche / through the center of his heart].
In the “time of disgust” (as Stella Díaz Varín called it) we needed the elder voices, and Violeta’s verses rained down, heavy with integrity. Just as she had a clear idea of the place of the creative (far from the privileged, close to her own), she also fervently declared the direction her lyrical flames would take in the struggle to denounce and document wrongdoing: “Entre más injusticia, señor fiscal / más fuerzas tiene mi alma para cantar” [The more injustice, Mr. Prosecutor, / the more strength my soul has to sing]. I was branded by her, recognizing signs I vaguely sensed within myself but that, in her poetry, are pure strength: her eagerness to go beyond in her expression, further than the poem’s own materiality, the poem’s true purpose being to build an unfaltering bridge connecting her people with their own identity. Following her poems’ tributaries, we can feel the game of mirrors that vehemently drove her on: the conviction that, in recognizing its own worth, the people—she herself, amplified and multiplied—could find a meaning for its existence and, what’s more, a different fate: a better fate.
Violeta Parra lent her voice to the daily struggle of a people against adversity, and, in her own personal epic, she helps establish an identity, gathering lifeblood from the speech of the living, from their gestures and their hardships, in order to give them a new place, a visible and ennobling stature. She speaks to those who find themselves on the opposite side from the well-off who occupy the public, institutional stage, and tells them who they are. She speaks with strength and clarity to her peer who “no sabe que hay otro mundo / de raso y de terciopelo” [does not know there is another world / of satin and velvet]. With her words, she establishes a space of encounter and revelation, and she improves this space through her intense reflection, her effort to show her loyalty to its complexities, abysses, tendernesses, mistakes. This clarity—that of a humble, blunt-edged cornerstone—allows us to gain a deep understanding of the tremendous beauty of our brownness and the needfulness of our words in the composition of all things.
II. A Word with People In It
Under the apple tree, lying on the grass, the little girl I once was smells the fragrance of the fruits that fall, pulled down by the weight of their own ripeness, by her side. The book is open on her chest while she looks up at the clouds and spots (so cliché) shapes against the blue background. A little later, she walks with her parents toward a wake. They trudge on through the dark of the night down narrow paths lit by the lamp in her father’s hand. They arrive, and in a big room with wide open doors, the central table is taken up by the dead body, covered in a sheet, head resting on a pillow. From the patio she hears the sound of hammering nails as the neighbors build a coffin. The mourners and visitors are served food at the tabletops placed around the deceased; each plate bears an enormous cut of meat, all of which must be eaten so as not to snub the family. They make their way back with a big loaf of bread under her father’s arm, down the same black path on a moonless night.
Such are life and death, in all their natural rawness, in rural childhood, and this is the material one gradually recalls and reveals. Because there, in the depths of memory, in that dense and mysterious place whose entryway has been erased, but whose pulse we feel still—there, words and things are one. The world and language have a deep belonging. A single word is sometimes, literally, the key that opens a mystery.
If Gabriela Mistral, in Violeta’s own words, is “la madre” or “la mairina,” Violeta Parra is the Big Sister, the first to leave town, who marked a path to follow, a way of life that sets us apart to seek those dense words, nourished by the pulsating reality of an opaque Chile, neither shining nor longed for. Instead of forgetting and leaving behind the harshness of childhood, she plunged ever deeper into a country whose heart beat under the violence or oblivion of evil; she lifted her wounded voice to reproach the powerful for their indifference to injustice even while she was gathering the precious stones of popular wisdom. I have followed her, like a little sister, in her ranger’s journey through the broken, foreign world she was fated to live in; the world where, ever since she was a little girl, she unfurled her passion along with that fateful feeling of falling outside the circle of the fortunate. She was always on the other side of the line, for one cannot help but feel, and feeling the misfortune of others hurts. So it goes in her poetry, which feels the pain of the whole world: the harvest is lost, good people die, those who struggle are persecuted; lovesickness, poverty, hunger. The pain of all things in the world. “El amor es una mancha / que no sale sin dolor” [Love is a stain / you can’t get out without pain].
As a poet, Violeta Parra uses language to relate to the mysteries of life, seeking to open spaces of understanding and estrangement at once in the face of the complex reality we all share. The greatest challenge for any poet is to embody their expression. She takes on this challenge as part of the very truth she senses, following the steps that lead her to discover a language that is all her own just as it is nourished by the voices of many others. “Busca la luz de la verdad / mas la mentira está a tus pies” [Seek out the light of the truth / while lies are at your feet]. I see the construction of this unique voice as a process of continual emptying-out of the self, in order to then be filled up by a permanent pouring-in of words and experiences, both her own and others’. This matter soaks in until it is amassed together into a vigorous language that gathers and melds her own speech with the speech of the nation’s margins. Like her, I have sought to find this communal voice, to swell my own voice, to lend it weight and body, to fill it with humanity. Violeta did this by gathering up the speech of the streets, using popular rhythms, repetitions, encoded formulas, irony, and humor until achieving compositions in which she reached summits of understanding: “Volver a ser de repente / tan frágil como un segundo” [To once again become, all of a sudden / as fragile as a second].
She strode ahead down the path of recognizing and marvelling at the richness of our own people, returning to us the lush tapestry of a language raised like a flag in a certain country more ours than any other. “Si escribo esta poesía / no es solo por darme gusto / más bien por meterle susto / al mal con alevosía, / quiero marcar la partía / por eso prendo centella / que me ayuden las estrellas / con su inmensa claridad / pa publicar la verdad / que anda a la sombra en la tierra” [I don’t write this poetry / for my own good, / I do it to scare off / treacherous evil, / I want to show where to start, / that’s why I light a spark; / may the stars help me / with their mighty brightness / to show others the truth / that walks in the world’s shadow].
III. Liquid Fire for Thirst
In Violeta there burns a necessary word; she was so sure of this that it can be read as an ars poetica throughout her work: “Y su conciencia dijo al fin: / cántale al hombre en su dolor / en su miseria y su sudor / y en su motivo de existir” [And his conscience said in the end: / sing to man in his pain, / in his hardship and sweat, / in his reason for being].
This is a troubling image: Ezequiel eats the scroll the Lord has given him, is left full of rebuking power, and comes to stand as a sentinel over his people’s legacy. After failed attempts to be heard, he is ordered to shut himself up in his house and keep quiet; silence is a punishment, not for him, but for the indifference of “the stubborn family.”
To write poetry is to follow a mandate that comes from some far-off dimension, and Violeta gives herself over to this mission—even while smashed up against the narrow reality that cannot contain her, outside her own time, guided by purposes not even she herself understands (“no sabes cuánto dolor / miseria y padecimiento / me dan los versos que encuentro” [you don’t know how much pain / misery and suffering / the verses I find cause me]). Impelled to go on despite having so much stacked against her, with a blind strength that stands up to misfortune, to power, to her own exhaustion, she soaked up her time on this earth, never surrendering to mediocrity.
Something burned within her being—that fire, proper to the gods (“Se llenan mis huesos de llamas altivas” [My bones are filled with climbing flames]), that helped her encapsulate the people’s legacy in all its richness. “Me aflige la maravilla” [I suffer from wonder], she says in her Décimas. Hers is not an encoded word, nor one that inquiries into itself: it wants to communicate, justifies itself, and exists in order to act as a golden link with which to bind oneself to another, to others.
She realized, as she put in writing, that in order to continue building this space of greater union with others one must swallow the whole parchment, savor the scroll of wisdom. “La divina providencia / se hizo dueña de mi alma / y una corriente de calma / m’aclara la inteligencia” [Divine providence / took control of my soul / and a current of calm / clears up my thought].
Wounded as we are, living in a badly made world that casts us out every day, we long to fill poetry with meaning, to console others and ourselves. We have, at least, the foundational voices, including that of our clear-eyed Big Sister, who warns us, “Mujer que tiene sentido / tranquea con pies de plomo” [Woman who has sense, / stride with feet of lead], for she knows how much it costs to uphold one’s voice.
“Then I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey,” Ezequiel says.
Now, when words are drained, manhandled, reduced to dry splinters, we look longingly toward the vessels of essential water; now is when its poetry is most necessary.
Perhaps the honey of her poetic discoveries did not taste sweet to Violeta, but it was good enough to burn to ashes such that we might try it for ourselves.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
This essay was published as a prologue to the book Poesía by Violeta Parra,
published in 2016 by Editorial UV in Chile, now in its fourth edition.
