The Unknown University

by Roberto Bolaño, Laura Healy (Translator)

Overview

A deluxe edition of Bolano’s complete poetry
Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolano touted poetry as the superior art form, able to approach an infinity in which “you become infinitely small without disappearing.” When asked, “What makes you believe you’re a better poet than a novelist?” Bolano replied, “The poetry makes me blush less.” The sum of his life’s work in his preferred medium, The Unknown University is a showcase of Bolano’s gift for freely crossing genres, with poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. “Poetry,” he believed, “is braver than anyone.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811219280
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/11/2013
Pages:	766
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.10(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela
Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.

Laura Healy has received a Master’s in Spanish from Harvard. She is the managing editor of Harvard Review and the web editor of Zoland Poetry.

Table of Contents

Nota de los herederos del autor / Note from the authors heirs vii

Primera Parte / Part 1

La novela-nieve / The Snow-Novel 5

Guiraut de Bornelh 69

Calles de Barcelona / Streets of Barcelona 81

En la sala de lecturas del Infierno / In the Reading Room of Hell 127

San Roberto de Troya / Saint Roberto of Troy 157

Nada malo me ocurrirá / Nothing Bad Will Happen to Me 219

Tu lejano corazón / Your Distant Heart 269

Segunda Parte / Part 2

Tres textos / Three Texts 291

Gente que se aleja / People Walking Away 303

Iceberg 437

Prosa del otoño en Gerona / Prose from Autumn in Gerona 449

Manifiestos y posiciones / Manifestos and Positions 521

Tercera Parte / Part 3

Poemas perdidos / Lost Poems 557

Nueve poemas / Nine Poems 575

Mi vida en los tubos de supervivencia / My Life in the Tubes of Survival 599

Un final feliz / A Happy Ending 787

[Notas del autor, sin título] / [Author's notes, untitled] 813

Breve historia del libro / Brief history of the book, by Carolina López 817

Index of English titles 823

Índice de títulos en español 829

Translator's note 835

Editorial Reviews

There are moments of bliss. Bolano had one of 20th-century literature’s great dirty minds, and many of this volume’s best lines are unpublishable here.... A handful of these poems are something akin to sly masterpieces.... The sound The Unknown University mostly makes is that of a promising young writer seeking his way in the world of words.... Bolano was hungry, this book reminds you, for just about everything.”

Dwight Garner - The New York Times

The Unknown University, a new anthology of Bolano's poetry, reads like a series of fragments from a diary of this epic artistic journey. It's a book filled with sorrows and joys and discoveries as Bolano the poet takes up themes that are repeated often in his novels. For him, writers are men and women engaged in a sacred search, with poets the purest seekers of all. It's a pursuit that's all the more noble, given that Bolano knows that the immortality writers seek is unattainable.”

Los Angeles Times

It is his earliest work published in English to date, and fans of The Savage Detectives will hope to find in it some hints of what the real Visceral Realist poetry was like.... It is a testament to Bolano’s fundamental artistic honesty that buried here, in his own long-lost notebook, we find Cesárea Tinajero’s poem/drawing, written twenty years earlier. He was the master of smoke and mirrors, but he couldn’t lie.”

The Millions

Bolaño's fiction (e.g., the National Book Critics Circle Award winner 2666) has met with great critical acclaim and enjoys a devoted, almost cultlike following, but poetry was his first love. Now for the first time, his complete poetic works are offered in a handy and well-crafted bilingual edition. Previously published collections (Tres and The Romantic Dogs) are included here; some individual poems have already appeared in anthologies and literary journals. All these poems are the product of Bolaño's early and prefiction creative life, the first dating from 1978 and later ones from about 1994, nine years before his death. To maintain fidelity to Bolaño's original manuscript, the poems have been arranged in an order that does not coincide with how they were previously published. Even the 56 prose poems of Antwerp, which appear here as a novel, are heavily edited and renamed "People Walking Away." The poems are often fragmentary and somewhat dark, but the subject matter foreshadows themes of Bolaño's later and more fully developed fiction. VERDICT This volume has the advantage of combining all of Bolaño's poems in one volume, but it makes clear that they are products of an earlier time. For fans who can't get enough or readers who want to delve beyond his unique fictional world, this collection will showcase the author's more reflective side.—Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH

Library Journal