In this issue we introduce our readers to the poetry of a
talented contemporary poet from Chile, Victor Lobos. (His
poetry was translated by our partner translation agency NRWTO-GO). In order to experience and to understand this peace of
art, to plunge into the world of Chilean poetry, we asked the
author to tell us shortly about himself and his poetry (read it
further).
VICTOR LOBOS SAAVEDRA
Víctor Lobos Saavedra was born in Santiago de Chile in June 1960 and belonged to the first
generation of José Donoso Writers’ Workshop, when the Chilean novelist returned to his country
after years of self-imposed exile, after the terror of Pinochet’s dictatorship was beginning to
soften and intellectual life wasn’t persecuted as viciously as before. Donoso is considered the
greatest novelist his country ever produced and his best novel, “The Obscene Bird of
Night” (1970), the darkest, weirdest and most demanding bloom of the celebrated Latin American
Boom of the 60’s and 70’s. Lobos wanted to be a prose writer and after two years at the
workshop he had mixed results. One the one hand, he learned the seriousness and subtleties of
the writer’s trade; on the other, he became extremely self-critical and disappointed with his novel
in progress, a sort of apocryphal biography of the Romanian surrealist painter Victor Brauner. As
a result, he gave up writing and forgot his calling, studied Psychology at the Catholic University of
Santiago de Chile, got married, had a daughter and became a proper bourgeois, until utter
despair coupled with the reading of Robert Graves’ “The White Goddess” sent him back to the less
traveled path. As a result, after fifteen years practicing Clinical Psychology, he returned to writing,
this time to poems. Following a particularly productive period from 2000 to 2006, when he
managed to write two or three good enough poems daily, he finally decided to publish his first
book, “El ojo y otros puntos de vista” (“The Eye and Other Points of View”), in 2007, which resumes
the story of Brauner, and “Norte in Elocoyán” (“North Wind in Elocoyán”), in 2013, a nostalgic
journey through memory, loss and death, laced with legends and traditions of the Mapuche and
Huilliche Indians of the South of Chile. He has been partially translated into English, Russian and
Romanian, and his poetry has been praised by some of the best Chilean poets, among others, by
Andrés Morales, Manuel Silva Acevedo and Raúl Zurita (this author won Chilean National Prize for
Literature in 2000), who considered his work one of the most remarkable of his generation. An
important portion of his poetry is rather allusive, full of literary, artistic and historical references,
but also very fluent, vivid, intense and moving to read, sometimes animated with surrealistic
touches and always characterized by a very personal combination of sense of humor, sense of
horror and sense of the Erotic.
Víctor Lobos Saavedra, exclusively for the "NEW ::: POETRY" magazine.
According to the author, the cycle «Crows» forms a part of unpublished poetry with the name
«Crows and other poems found in dreams».
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NEW ::: POETRY. Issue . | :_.::