Book launch of “Chronicles of New Hope”
- Cultural Center of Spain, Providencia 927, Providencia.
- Wednesday, July 31 – 7:00 p.m.
This is one of Jaime Huenún Villa’s most personal books, a volume that bears witness to his journey through a “terrible and seductive” childhood – as he himself points out – and through villages and landscapes whose shifting and blurred images still survive in the poet’s memory, according to the editorial review.
“Chronicles of New Hope” (LOM Publishing) attempts to partially recover voices, characters, moments, visions, dreams and nightmares once located in a specific region (the Nueva Esperanza town of Osorno, where Huenún grew up), and of particular symbols that the sombre and contradictory southern modernity has relegated to marginal spaces.
Old mansions and towns, the polluted Rahue River, railroads, fields and rural roads, cemeteries, demolished movie theaters, bridges and boats, bars and street markets, birds and stray dogs are portals to an interior territory where history passes by, but it does not manage to completely destroy the power of the myth that is installed in everyday life and that radiates, in turn, towards poetry.
Cynthia Steele’s translation is presented as a dialogue of similar sensibilities, a mutual learning process to account for both the intimate and the historical and collective that could, ultimately, be common to two distant and different cultures. On the other hand, Álvaro de la Fuente Farré’s photographs manage to capture the diffuse past in the present, testifying to a lyrical journey that is sometimes rooted in surreal images of daily life, creating an atmosphere of singular strangeness and close unreality.
About the Author:
Jaime Luis Huenún Villa (Valdivia, 1967) is a Chilean Huilliche poet born in Valdivia in 1967. His literary work has been recognized with the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize awarded by the foundation of the same name (2003), the Guggenheim scholarship (2005), the award for the best literary work awarded by the National Council of Books and Reading (2013), the Manuel Montt Prize from the University of Chile (2019), and the Jorge Teillier Prize awarded by the UFRO (2020).
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