3. What is the image of a poet in Chile? Why are we asking? I mean what is his appearance
among population. e.g. In Great Britain he is associated with drugs, homosexuality, marginal
style of life, in Korea the poet is vagabond, beggar, in Russia he is a celebrity, sometimes
from psychiatric hospitals, or school girls who fell in love or in maze of "likes", "reposts",
"publics" etc.
In Chile there are marginal poets, but probably not real marginal ones like Paul Potts. Their
marginality comes from 2 or 3 things, first of all there are the mapuche poets, some write in
mapudungun, the mapuche language, most of them write in Spanish though but they stick to a theirs
subject which concerns the oppression they have suffered and their traditions. There are the feminist
poets, of course. If you ask me I would say normal people sees a poets as somewhat out of place in
the new Chile. People don't have much time to read poems, that is why there are not so many poets.
4. We hope this situation will change to the best soon. And now we' like to ask a question
about your poem. "Crows" is very strong and deep piece of art, which can scary and confuse
an unprepared reader. Please, tell us, how to prepare yourself to read, to interpret, to
understand it correctly. Does one need a special state of mind or the preliminary knowledge
of books or moves related to "Crows"?
It is kind of a dream, but I will tell you more – that is a real dream. I remember when I had the first
dream, because they were three dreams, while dreaming I said to myself... hey, these crows perching
on that tree look like that Hitchcock movie. The cycle “Crows and other poems found in dreams” was
finally based on the whole series of these dreams. And I remember these dreams in detail and this
helps me to write them down.
5. And finally we'd like to know what poets can you recommend for our readers and for
us to translate into English or Russian? And thank you so much for this interview! And we
hope to read much of your poetry in the future.
Yes, sure. Here we go: Octavio Paz, from Mexico and Jorge Luis Borges, from Argentina are my
favourite Latin American poets. The last one rather old fashioned in his style but modern in his
imagination. From Chile, Oscar Hahn, Raúl Zurita (he strives to write the great poem about Chile, the
one that defines it as Neruda’s defined it for previous generations), Manuel Silva Acevedo, Oscar Lihn,
Gonzalo Millán, Miguel Arteche, Veronica Zondek, Andrés Morales, Rafael Rubio (his father and
grandfather were brilliant poets too), Diego Maquieira, Tomás Harris, Gonzalo Rojas and Jorge Teillier,
the great poet of the South region.
Interviewer: Т. Istomina