Nicanor Parra

Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval (born September 5 1914) is a Chilean poet, mathematician, and physicist. He is considered an influential poet in Chile and throughout Latin America. Some rank him among the most important poets of Spanish language literature. Parra describes himself as an "anti-poet," due to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and function; after recitations he exclaims "Me retracto de todo lo dicho" ("I take back everything I said").

Life
Parra, the son of a schoolteacher, was born in 1914 in San Fabián de Alico, Chile, near Chillán in southern Chile. He comes from the artistically prolific Parra family of performers, musicians, artists, and writers. His sister, Violeta Parra, was a folk singer, as was his brother Roberto Parra Sandoval.

In 1933, he entered the Instituto Pedagógico of the University of Chile, and qualified as a teacher of mathematics and physics in 1938, one year after his first book, Cancionero sin Nombre, appeared. After teaching in Chilean secondary schools, in 1943 he enrolled in Brown University in the United States to study physics. In 1948, he attended Oxford University to study cosmology. He returned to Chile as a professor at the Universidad de Chile in 1946. Since 1952, Parra has been professor of theoretical physics in Santiago and has read his poetry in England, France, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. He has published dozens of books.

Parra chooses to leave behind the conventions of poetry; his poetic language renounces the refinement of most Latin American literature and adopts a more colloquial tone. His first collection, Poemas y Antipoemas (1954) is a classic of Latin American literature, one of the most influential Spanish poetry collections of the twentieth century. It is cited as an inspiration by American Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg. Parra turned 100 in September 2014.

Awards
Parra has been proposed on four occasions for the Nobel Prize in Literature. On December 1, 2011, Parra won the Spanish Ministry of Culture's Cervantes Prize, the most important literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world. On June 7, 2012, he won the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda.

List of works

 * Cancionero sin nombre (Songbook without a Name), 1937.
 * Poemas y antipoemas (Poems and Antipoems), 1954; Nascimento, 1956; Cátedra, 2005, ISBN 978-84-376-0777-1
 * La cueca larga (The Long Cueca), 1958
 * Versos de salón (Parlor Verses), 1962
 * Manifiesto (Manifesto), 1963
 * Canciones rusas (Russian Songs), 1967
 * Obra gruesa (Thick Works), 1969
 * Los profesores (The Teachers), 1971
 * Artefactos (Artifacts), 1972
 * Sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui (Sermons and Teachings of the Christ of Elquí), 1977
 * Nuevos sermones y prédicas del Cristo de Elqui (New Sermons and Teachings of the Christ of Elquí), 1979
 * El anti-Lázaro (The Anti-Lazarus), 1981
 * Plaza Sésamo (Sesame Street), 1981
 * Poema y antipoema de Eduardo Frei (Poem and Antipoem of Eduardo Frei), 1982
 * Cachureos, ecopoemas, guatapiques, últimas prédicas, 1983
 * Chistes parRa desorientar a la policía (Jokes to Confuse the Police), 1983
 * Coplas de Navidad (Christmas Couplets), 1983
 * Poesía política (Political Poetry), 1983
 * Hojas de Parra (Grape Leaves / Pages of Parra (Spanish pun)), 1985
 * Nicanor Parra: biografía emotiva (Nicanor Parra: Emotional Biography), Ediciones Rumbos, 1988
 * Poemas para combatir la calvicie (Poems to Combat Baldness), 1993
 * Páginas en blanco (White Pages), 2001
 * Lear, Rey & Mendigo (Lear, King & Beggar), 2004
 * Obras completas I & algo + (Complete Works I and Something More), 2006
 * Discursos de Sobremesa (After Dinner Declarations), 2006
 * Obras Completas II & algo + (Complete Works II and Something More), 2011
 * Así habló Parra en El Mercurio, entrevistas dadas al diario chileno entre 1968 y 2007 (Thus Spoke Parra in El Mercurio, Interviews Given to the Chilean Newspaper Between 1968 and 2007), 2012
 * El último apagón de luz (The last blackout), 2017

English translations
 * Poems and antipoems: Edited by Miller Williams. Translators: Fernando Alegría and others. New Directions Pub. Corp., 1967
 * Nicanor Parra: Poems and Antipoems, ed. David Unger, New Directions, 1985, ISBN 978-0-8112-0959-5