Why Google is dedicating a doodle to Nicanor Parra

The famous Chilean poet Nicanor Parra appears this Sunday in the “doodle” of the Google search engine, the most used on the Internet, as a tribute for the 107th anniversary of his birth.

The image, in which the writer is observed in front of the blackboard, in his role as a university professor, was illustrated by designer Olivia Quand, who said the inspiration for the design came from Parra’s “work and antipoetry as a reflection of modern life”.

The author, who died in 2018 at the age of 103, is recognized as one of the great Latin American poets, wrote until the end of his days and taught until he was 100 years old.

Physically trained and born into a family of popular musicians (he is the older brother of the legendary folklorist Violeta Parra), the author embraced the words of create antipoetry, a disruptive, more direct and familiar style of verse, which was also used by other Chilean writers such as Pablo Neruda or Vicente Huidobro.

His long artistic career led him to be one of the protagonists of the national cultural scene of the second half of the twentieth century and later a literary figure recognized around the world.

The influence of his work and his aesthetic proposal made him worthy of important recognition locally and internationally, as such as the Cervantes Prize (2011) -the highest distinction in Hispanic literature-, the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Prize (2012) or the Reina Sofía Prize (2001).

Among his repertoire of countless works, translated into different languages, are “La cueca Larga”, “Versos de Salón”, “Artefactos”, “Parra Leaves” and “Public Works”.

Known for his irreverent and fearless character, Parra, who ran five times without success for the Nobel Prize, questioned the Chilean right and left with its prose and verses, in addition to putting the Catholic Church in check.

Admired by Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Roberto Bolaño, the poet was a big fan of classics such as Cervantes, Shakespeare and Dante and, as he once confessed, Gonzalo de Berceo.

As part of this tribute, Carlos Peña, Rector of Diego Portales University and member of the Board of Trustees of the Nicanor Parra Foundation, said that “Parra knew that poetry is the effort to show that what matters more, what struggles to get out into everyday language, we can never say ”.

STYLE

Parra’s poetry has varied a lot over time. During his youth, in the late 1930s, he took a brief step forward as a representative of the so-called poetry of clarity, strongly inspired by the recently deceased Federico García Lorca, and created as a critical response to the hermeticism and subjectivism of the historical avant-garde led by Huidobro. , Neruda or the new surrealist poets of Grupo La Mandragora.

After having abandoned this first step, instead of adhering to socialist realism, whose lack of credibility and high doctrinal abstraction he criticized, he decided to pursue a more avant-garde and even post-avant-garde line, eager for research. and privileged, by its scientific facet, of formal structures and mechanisms of creation. His poetry is distinctly critical, interrogative, anticlerical, political and contingent, and alongside his postmodern and analytical antipoems are also ecological and other poems of oral, popular and local tradition. Using the resources of the absurd, humor, street art and popular culture, Parra was characterized by the democratization of poetry, bringing it closer to readers of different socio-cultural levels.

Parra was very demanding with his poems before publishing them, so once published, in their future versions they usually have very few variations.

DEATH

Nicanor Parra passed away at dawn on January 23, 2018, at the age of 103, in the house of the Parra family in La Reina, baptized by Violeta and Roberto Parra as “the open university of La Reina”, where he resided since August 2017. That same day, the government of Chile decreed two days of national mourning in homage to the poet. The Violeta Parra Museum has opened a book of condolences to citizens, which will then be handed over to the poet’s family.

On January 24, Parra’s remains were transferred to the Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago, where her vigil was held, which was attended by President Michelle Bachelet and President-elect Sebastián Piñera. Parra’s funeral took place in the parish of La Asunción de Las Cruces, and then his remains were transferred to what was his home in this town, where they were buried in an intimate ceremony, which was also attended President Bachelet.

On his coffin was written the phrase “Voy & Vuelvo”, part of his “artefacts” and “practical work”.

(with information from the EFE)

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