Tres

by Roberto Bolaño, Laura Healy (Translator)

Overview

“Poetry is braver than anyone,” Roberto Bolan~o believed, and the proof is here in Tres, his most inventive and bracing poetry collection.
Roberto Bolan~o’s Tres is a showcase of the author’s willingness to freely cross genres, with poems in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. As the title implies, the collection is composed of three sections. “Prose from Autumn in Gerona,” a cinematic series of prose poems, slowly reveals a subtle and emotional tale of unrequited love by presenting each scene, shattering it, and piecing it all back together, over and over again. The second part, “The Neochileans,” is a sort of On the Road in verse, which narrates the travels of a young Chilean band on tour in the far reaches of their country. Finally, the collection ends with a series of short poems that take us on “A Stroll Through Literature” and remind us of Bolan~o’s masterful ability to walk the line between the comically serious and the seriously comical.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811219273
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/30/2011
Edition description:	Bilingual Edition
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	137,075
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.74(h) x 0.74(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.

Editorial Reviews

Its complexities amaze and treat us to an unexpected magical experience that one can sit down reading for hours until our eyes and brain go numb—and you’ll like it.

Gazamos

In this long list poem, or list poem of dreams, or dream list poem, Bolano describes nocturnal encounters with famous, often dead authors and poets, with the sort of proximity one usually saves for family members. Tressounded entirely new to me, and so I decided to re-read it, or I guess, read it, because if you can't remember it have you really read it? But then when I started to, I remembered it, kind of like a conversation you’re not sure you really had, but then you dream about it and it seems real, until you wake up. It felt — for lack of a better word — metaphysical.”

Bookslut

What finally matters isn’t whether Bolano disdained prose or favored poetry — Bolano’s prose is firmly rooted in his poetry. So anyone who fell under the spell of The Savage Detectives or 2666 needn’t feel any trepidation about Tres. You will find very much the same author between its pages.”

Edmonton Journal

Written in both prose poetry and lineated verse, and translated dexterously by Laura Healy, Bolano’s Tres peers at the infinite through three series of compelling, surreal, and cinematic poem.”

The Faster Times

We savor all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius.

Patti Smith

One of my two best books.

Roberto Bolaño

One of my two best books.

Roberto Bolano

This second translated volume of the late Chilean writer's poetry (after 2008's The Romantic Dogs) contains three long pieces—two sequences of prose vignettes and one spare, narrative poem—that move through the harrowing registers of despair and alienation characteristic of his fiction. Written in 1981, "Prose from Autumn in Gerona" documents a young screenwriter's repeated, doomed attempts to frame and clarify his innermost romantic aspirations amid the external world's kaleidoscopic chaos. "The neochileans," from 1993, reconstructs a rock band's road trip through "godforsaken/ provinces" of a Latin America "Positioned within the geometry/ Of impossible crimes," while 1994's "A stroll through literature" is a dream diary in which literary figures make cryptic cameo appearances ("I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only human being to contemplate the end was Franz Kafka"). The original, Spanish-language versions are included. VERDICT For all its surreal moments, Bolaño's bitter vision of life, like Charles Bukowski's, is rendered with a candid, unmagical realism that springs from painful experiences and a militant refusal to seek comfort in the familiar conventions of literary genre. For all readers of contemporary poetry.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal