Nicanor Parra

Nicanor Parra was a Chilean poet, mathematics teacher and physicist, born in San Fabián de Alico in 1914 and who died in La Reina, Santiago, in 2018. He wrote in Spanish, and his work is among the most influential in twentieth-century Spanish-language poetry. He is considered the creator of the antipoetry movement, a way of writing that distrusted pomp and the grand gestures of the lyric tradition of his time.

The son of a primary schoolteacher and of a woman from a rural background, he grew up in a poor family that moved often across Chile before settling in Chillán in 1927. There he began writing verses shaped by popular ballads and by the modernist poets. He studied at the Instituto Pedagógico of the University of Chile and qualified as a mathematics teacher in 1937, the year his first book, Cancionero sin nombre, appeared. After a scholarship took him to the United States to study physics and then to Oxford to study cosmology, he returned to Chile in 1952 to teach at the university, eventually leading its School of Engineering.

In 1954 came Poemas y antipoemas, the book that gave the movement its name. Against the grandiloquent verse of Neruda, Huidobro and De Rokha, Parra chose a colloquial, ironic and deliberately plain language, drawing on humor, street life and popular culture, with a sharp and often anticlerical critical stance. His work changed over the decades, moving through clarity-driven poems, ecological pieces and texts with an oral quality, such as the well-known sermons of the Christ of Elqui. Precise and attentive to form, he aimed to bring poetry to readers from every social background.

His legacy is broad. He received Chile's National Prize for Literature in 1969 and the Cervantes Prize in 2011, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times. His influence reaches several generations of Spanish-speaking poets, and his work has been translated into many languages.