‘Gracias a la vida’: Violeta Parra and the Creation of a Public Poetics of Introspective Reflection

Abstract

This essay is inspired by and in dialogue with Robert Pring-Mill's 1990 lecture on Latin American protest poetry and song, ‘Gracias a la Vida’: The Power and Poetry of Song (C39), which analyses the work of Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara. In it, I seek to follow Pring-Mill's thought processes, which lead him from a subjective and imaginary engagement with the young woman to whom the lecture is dedicated (Kate Elder), to the prolonged consideration of two songs, particularly Violeta Parra's now iconic ‘Gracias a la vida’. Pring-Mill eloquently follows the move from the introspective to the public, to a sense of shared community that Violeta Parra traces in her song. It is this move that I then develop by close readings of her Décimas: autobiografía en verso (1959), placing them in the context of the cultural turns of popular poetry, and the genealogies to which her writing — and its study — belong. The essay then seeks to place Parra's work within a broader poetics that spans the popular, orality and the written, situating it in the force of wilful marginality from a state that is traditionally seen to disdain those that are beyond a narrowly defined centre.

This essay is inspired by and in dialogue with Robert Pring-Mill's 1990 lecture on Latin American protest poetry and song, ‘Gracias a la Vida’: The Power and Poetry of Song (C39), which analyses the work of Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara. In it, I seek to follow Pring-Mill's thought processes, which lead him from a subjective and imaginary engagement with the young woman to whom the lecture is dedicated (Kate Elder), to the prolonged consideration of two songs, particularly Violeta Parra's now iconic ‘Gracias a la vida’. Pring-Mill eloquently follows the move from the introspective to the public, to a sense of shared community that Violeta Parra traces in her song. It is this move that I then develop by close readings of her Décimas: autobiografía en verso (1959), placing them in the context of the cultural turns of popular poetry, and the genealogies to which her writing — and its study — belong. The essay then seeks to place Parra's work within a broader poetics that spans the popular, orality and the written, situating it in the force of wilful marginality from a state that is traditionally seen to disdain those that are beyond a narrowly defined centre.

Este trabajo se inspira en la primera Kate Elder Lecture sobre la poesía y la canción de protesta latinoamericanas de Robert Pring-Mill, ‘Gracias a la vida’: The Power and Poetry of Song (1990) (C39). Abriendo un diálogo con la conferencia, intento trazar los procesos de pensamiento de Pring-Mill que le llevan desde un compromiso subjetivo e imaginario con la joven a cuya memoria se dedica, hasta el estudio pormenorizado de dos canciones, especialmente la ya icónica ‘Gracias a la vida’ de Violeta Parra. Pring-Mill describe de manera elocuente el proceso poético por el que Parra se mueve desde la introspección hacia una voz pública. A partir de estas percepciones de Pring-Mill y de una lectura atenta de la obra de Parra Décimas: autobiografía en verso (1959), analizo este proceso en el contexto de los giros culturales de la poesía popular y de las genealogías a las cuales pertenecen tanto su obra como el estudio de ella. A continuación intento situar la obra de Parra dentro de una poética más amplia que abarca lo popular, la oralidad y la escritura, una poética apoyada en el poder que le brinda la marginalidad intencionada frente a un Estado que tradicionalmente ve con desprecio a los que se encuentran fuera de los límites de un centro estrechamente definido.