Poetry
The Dark Room and Other Poems
La pieza oscura
Enrique Lihn · 1963
Synopsis
The poem that gives the book its title brings together in a dark room four children, the narrator, his sister Paulina and their cousins Ángel and Isabel, who roll on the floor in a mock fight in which they imitate the gestures of adults. For Claudio Guerrero Valenzuela, childhood haunts the whole collection: the sequence “Invernadero”, “Navidad”, “El bosque en el jardín” sets the order of adults against the freedom of children, while monologues make a father speak to his son of a few months or an old man face death, and “Jonás” expresses present anguish.
Context
Published in Santiago by Universitaria in 1963, the collection brings together poems written between 1956 and 1962; its author regarded it as his first real book, reports Claudio Guerrero Valenzuela, who sees in it the passage from a “poetic” poetry to a situated one. Memoria Chilena makes it a fundamental piece of the generation of 1950. A bilingual edition, La Chambre noire, appeared in France in 1972 with drawings by Roberto Matta, and New Directions published in 1978 a selection entitled The Dark Room and Other Poems.
Who it is for
Expansive, reflective poems, demanding to read; translated into French and, for a selection, into English.
Prizes and reception
Atenea Prize in 1963, and one of the landmarks of Chilean poetry for Memoria Chilena.
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