Latin America Archives

Purgatory Poetry Collection, Raúl Zurita Canessa (1979)

November 10, 2021 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

“Raúl Zurita Canessa (b.1950) is a prominent Chilean poet whose work Purgatory is the first of three works based on the poetry of Dante (the other two being Anteparadise [1982], and The New Life [1994]). The late poet C.D. Wright provided the foreword to this English translation from Spanish published by the University of California Press. Wright wrote, ‘Purgatorio is arguably the seminal literary text of Chile’s 9/11/1973, the date of the U.S.-backed military coup led by Augusto Pinochet which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. With his first published collection, the young Chilean poet began his Dantean trilogy, his long, arduous pilgrimage toward earthly redemption.'” –Contributor Devin Shepherd

Contributed by Devin Shepherd (University of Arkansas, ’22)

Carlos Martínez Moreno, El Infierno (1981)

February 17, 2021 By Jasmine George, FSU '24

“This last novel by Uruguayan writer and defense attorney Martínez Moreno, who died in exile in 1986, depicts the revolt of Uruguay’s Tupamaro urban guerillas and their suppression by the military in the early 1970s. Using true accounts of kidnapping, torture and murder from political detainees whom he defended while living in Uruguay, Martínez Moreno fashions a dreamlike yet brutally realistic story of a police state. His book borrows chiefly from The Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy. In this modern-day hell, wealthy Uruguayan bankers and prosecutors are kidnapped by the Tupamaros; army colonels and police officers learn more effective ways to torture political prisoners from the ‘cold, calculating’ North American ‘adviser.'” —Publishers Weekly, 1988

For more on the novel and its relationship to Dante’s poem, see Efraín Kristal’s “What Is, Is Not: Dante in Tomas Eloy Martínez’s Purgatorio,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 31.4 (2012): 473-484 (accessible here).

Tomás Eloy Martínez, Purgatorio (2008)

February 16, 2021 By Jasmine George, FSU '24

“It should be noted from the outset that unlike Dante’s Purgatorio, which explores the painful processes of self‐examination of those who sinned, repented before they died, and are preparing themselves to enter Paradise’s realm of bliss, Martínez’s Purgatorio is a meditation on a state of suffering by the innocent victims of Argentina’s dictatorial regimes of the 1970s. The notion of a ‘purgatory’ for repentant sinners in Dante, therefore, is creatively transformed in Martinez’s Purgatorio to suggest a shameful period of Argentina’s history plagued by repression and violence, but most importantly, by the pain it generated for decades to come in those who were affected by it.” –Efrain Kristal, “What Is, Is Not: Dante in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatorio,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2012 (abstract publicly available; full text behind paywall)

The novel, originally published in Spanish in 2008, was translated into English by Frank Wynne (Bloomsbury, 2011).

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