“Silence might have its own significance”: An Interview with Daniel Borzutzky

Authors

  • Ethan Madarieta University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Keywords:

interview, Chile, diaspora, poetry, dictatorship, Chilean American

Abstract

On March 2, 2019, I interviewed Chilean-American poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky at a small café on the North Side of Chicago. Borzutzky has published five books of poetry, including Memories of My Overdevelopment (2015) (which is discussed at length below), the National Book Award winning collection The Performance of Becoming Human (2016), and most recently, Lake Michigan (2018). He has also published translations of poetry collections by Huilliche-Mapuche poet Jaime Luis Huenún, and Chilean poet Galo Ghigliotto. In addition to a published interview with Raúl Zurita, Borzutzky has published translations of two of Zurita’s poetry collections: Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985) (Songs for his Disappeared Love (2010)) and El país de tablas (2006) (The Country of Planks (2015)). Borzutzky teaches creative writing and Latin American and Latino literature as an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the departments of English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Biography

Ethan Madarieta is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working at the intersections of Performance, Indigenous, and Memory studies. His dissertation, "Creative Resistance and Performances of Memory: Latin America in the Era of Neoliberalism", rethinks decolonial resistance through Chilean Indigenous and diasporic memory and performance within a continental American context.

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Published

2019-10-25

How to Cite

Madarieta, E. (2019). “Silence might have its own significance”: An Interview with Daniel Borzutzky. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 17(1), 278–288. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/1952

Issue

Section

Interview / Entrevista