Sky Below

Raúl Zurita, a prolific poet and visual artist, has chronicled the violence against the Chilean people since the 1973 coup that replaced Salvador Allende’s democratic government with Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. His work has been widely translated. Along with other artists, he founded the art action group CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte), dedicated to the creation of political art resisting the military regime. In 1982 he composed a poem in the sky over New York, and in 1993 he bulldozed “ni pena ni miedo” (“no pain no fear”) into the coarse sands of the Atacama Desert. Zurita has been awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literatureand a scholarship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a professor emeritus at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago.Anna Deeny Morales is a literary critic and translator. Her translations of Ra.l Zurita’s works include Purgatory and Dreams for Kurosawa. Her translation of Floating Lanterns by Mercedes Roff. was published in 2015, and her essays and translations of poetry by Alejandra Pizarnik, Nicanor Parra, and Gabriela Mistral, among others, have appeared in such anthologies as Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America and in journals, including the Paris Review, Mandorla, BOMB, and the Harvard Review. She teaches in the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University