Phrases By Nicanor Parra, The Antipoet
Nicanor Parra’s phrases do not speak of poetry, but of antipoetry, as he himself declared. He was a man of letters who lived more than a century without ever ceasing to surprise readers with his particular way of seeing and expressing the world.
Antipoet Nicanor Parra was born on September 5, 1914 in San Fabián de Alico, Chile. The son of a musician and elementary teacher and a seamstress of peasant origins, from an early age he was stimulated to appreciate folk art. His parents instilled in him a strong social awareness that is strongly reflected in his works.
He won the 1969 Nacional de Literatura Prize, the Reina Sofía Prize for Poetry in 2001 and the Cervantes Prize in 2011. An eternal candidate for the Nobel Prize, he never won it. He died at 103, surrounded by the love of his readers. Here are some of his most beautiful and unforgettable phrases.
Phrases by Nicanor Parra
Statistics
Antipoetry is characterized by a marked detachment from traditional poetry. It uses bizarre themes, structures and languages. It is a current that wants to demonstrate that poetry is not always done with complicated puns.
Nicanor Parra’s sentences are antipoetic and do not follow any metrics. “There are two loaves. She eats two. I none. Average consumption: one loaf per person “. With irony and humor, Parra refers to the contradictions of statistics applied to the social sphere.
The oracle’s response
One of the aspects to which Nicanor Parra’s antipoetry is devoted is the absurd. The exploration of this dimension emerges in many of his antipoems and phrases: “Oracle’s response. Whatever you do you will regret it ”.
It’s a beautiful way of saying that it doesn’t matter what happens or what we do. There will always be something imperfect or wrong to some extent. Doing something involves leaving something else aside, and somehow this also involves a certain degree of repentance.
Guilt and forgiveness
One of Nicanor Parra’s most famous phrases is “Stealing flowers in the moonlight, I ask for forgiveness left and right, but I plead not guilty”. The flowers stolen from the dark are made of light, for this we apologize.
Anyone who apologizes, however, does not plead guilty. What a beautiful way to declare that, despite having made a mistake, there is no form of repentance for what has been done! It is a declaration of intent: we act with conviction and aware of being able to harm others.
Do countries exist or is it an illusion?
The political theme recurs in Nicanor Parra’s antipoetry. He was not exactly a supporter of any cause, more than anything else he denounced the contradictions of power. His was an anarchist point of view: neither on the right nor on the left, but on the side of reason and of the human being.
Another important quote from Nicanor Parra reads “We believe we are a country, but the truth is that we are hardly a landscape”. This statement is a clear rejection of man-made political-administrative concepts. The earth does not distinguish countries and states. It is men who set boundaries. In reality, there is only one landscape.
The names of things
The antipoet Parra also reflects on poetry and the role of the poet. One of his sentences reads “The poet does not keep his word if he does not change the names of things”.
Poetry is first of all giving new names to the world and to reality. Re-baptize physical and mental objects. In other words, saying things differently from how they have been said up to now and looking at what exists with a new perspective.
We have brought you only some of the most beautiful phrases of Nicanor Parra, the antipoet. His homeland and the whole world mourn his passing. However, the testimony of a man who made the word an authentic creation remains for posterity.
