Launch: Raul Zurita's "INRI"

In the Council Room
___________________

Reading by Raul Zurita, with translation by William Rowe: Followed by refreshments.

All Welcome

Note: the Birkbeck Main Building is sandwiched between Malet Street and Torrington Square, and the main entrance is on the Torrington Square side, at the Senate House end of the square/plaza.

Raul Zurita, winner of the Chilean National Poetry Prize, is one of the best known poets of Latin America. His work is part of a revolution in poetic language, that began in the 1970s and sought to find new forms of expression, radically different from those of Pablo Neruda. The challenge was to confront the contemporary epoch, with its particular forms of violence, including violence done to language. 

INRI is distinctive in that it does not speak out of individual sorrow, though this is not missing from the text, but seeks, rather, a new space, out of which love might be asserted as prime human reality, a space which might give birth to a different type of society.

William Rowe is Anniversary Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and his translations of Latin American poetry include 5 poets in the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry in Translation and Cesar Vallejo Poemas (yt communication).

Entry: Free

Time: 8:00pm