Scaling poetic heights.

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When it comes to Chile, it's not a bad idea to compare poets to mountains, especially when it comes to two giants of poetry such as Nicanor Parra and Gonzalo Rojas. The former is 94 years old and the latter 92, and both have more spark than many post-modern teenagers. Both are from Chile's Bio-Bio region and come from popular provincial families. The Parra family has produced some of Chile's most profound and authentic voices, including the renowned folk singer Violeta Parra, the poet's late sister.

Nicanor Parra describes himself as "the oldest son of an elementary school teacher and a piecework seamstress." Gonzalo Rojas is the son of a miner, who died when the poet was only four years old, and a taciturn mother who raised six children by herself. The path for both men has been long and winding. Both studied at the Barros Arana high school and the University of Chile's Pedagogical Institute, century-old public institutions through which many notable Chilean writers and artists have passed.

The two poets have been perceptive witnesses to their time and to their country, that narrow, elongated creature with its head in the northern desert city of Arica and its feet in the Antarctica. Parra and Rojas come from the very center of the country, its solar plexus. In their own way, as poets have done since the beginning of time, both have undertaken a spiritual survey of their people and their own lives--one far more extensive, of course, than anything done by Gallup or its ilk. Instead of just wading in the capricious waters of the present, they sound out the secret undercurrents of the past and fathom the possibilities of the distant future.

Each one chose his own path and made his own way, and each represents a distinct aspect of the Chilean soul. With his irrepressible irreverence and sharp, relentless black humor, Parra is the Chilean who is always on his toes, refusing to be taken in by rosy political spin. Rojas, a friend of silence and a timid suitor--an introverted Don Juan--is the insular Chilean, as conservative as the mountain and as free as the sea.

Chile, the land at the end of the world, has produced not just great poets but many of them. Continuing the Andes analogy, there are five pinnacles that almost touch the clouds (those houses of poets, as someone once said): Gabriela Mistral (Nobel Prize, 1945), Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda (Nobel, 1971), Nicanor Parra, and Gonzalo Rojas. From those sources spring innumerable poetic rivers and tributaries, as there is no poet in Chile who does not have something to do with at least one of them. Mistral received Rojas's first book, La miseria del hombre (The Misery of Man), with open arms, pronouncing herself "dazzled" by his originality. Neruda, in turn, celebrated Parra's Poems and Antipoems.

But like adolescents in search of their own identity, Parra and Rojas had to shake off their poetic parents to find their own voices--and they did. And so the tire now greet each other and join hands at those heights that are only occasionally glimpsed by the most intrepid climbers.

With the publication of his Poems and Antipoems, in 1954, Nicanor Parra planted a time bomb that has been detonating and leaving fragments in the Spanish language for the last 50 years. It anticipates Postmodernism in that it brings poetic discourse down from the exalted thrones of academia and makes it a kind of daily bread: hot and fresh on people's lips, not empty rhetoric embalmed in a dead rhetorical tradition. Parra's language cuts like a blade, questioning the idols and values of a world undermined by war and the absurd--and like all great humorists, he also turns the knife on himself.

   I teach in an obscure school,
   I've lost my voice giving classes.
   (After all or nothing
   I put in 40 hours a week.)
   How do you like my ragged face?
   Truly to see me inspires sadness!
   And what do you say of this rose rotting
   from the dust of the flaking chalk.

Or consider this gem:

   I was what I was: a mixture
   Of vinegar and olive oil,
   A sausage of angel and beast!

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Putting on the airs of an old-time "cowboy from Chillan," Parra has no limits and tells readers they should not take his poems too seriously. He plays with words and wants everyone to laugh--even though, as he warns, "the sky is coming down in pieces." He claims that reading his own poems puts him to sleep, "even though they were written in blood." Much has been said about Parra's "antipoems": that they are devices waiting to explode; that they are filled with black humor and a sense of the absurd; that they are the tip of a pin that touches a balloon just before it pops. Parra aspires to a dialogue, and the reader is the other part of the poem. "To me, the interlocutor is a sacred element that has to do not only with the literary work itself but with the presence of man in this world," he once told an interviewer.

For Gonzalo Rojas, recognition has been longer coming; his work spent many years lurking in the shadows before finding the light in which he is seen today. He wrote his first three books--La miseria del hombre in 1948, Contra la muerte (Against Death) in 1964, and Oscuro (Dark) in 1977--over a period of thirty years, moving down the paths of poetry at a snail's pace. His voice is subdued and tragic:

   Like a blind man weeping against an
      implacable sun
   I persist in seeing the light through my
      empty eyes
   burnt for ever.

   What use the ray
   that writes with my hand, what use fire,
                     the depth
   of depths,
           what use the World?

In "Against Death," he anguishes:

   I don't want to see--I can't!--human beings
      dying every day
   God is no use. No one is any use for
      anything

The poem ends with the hunger that "devours" him: "the hunger to live like the sun / in the grace of the air, for ever."

By way of different paths, these poets have managed to capture a young generation of readers, Parra wielding a machete to hack down the weeds of tradition and solemnity, Rojas whispering like the wind through the poplar trees. Strong-minded and white-haired, these grand old men areas part of Chile's consciousness as the snowy peaks of Marmolejo and Juncal.

Parra stayed after the coup against Salvador Allende, while Rojas--serving as a diplomat in Cuba at the time--was forced into exile. But both were constant beacons in the Chilean night, writing without asking anyone's permission and without changing a comma of their verses.

Both poets have been honored with Chile's National Literature Prize, Parra in 1969 and Rojas in 1992, and both have received the Reina Sofia Award for Ibero-American Poetry, in 2001 and 1992. In addition, Rojas was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2003. Both have been mentioned as candidates for the Nobel Prize.

It was recently announced that the Fifth International Congress of the Spanish Language--to be held in Valparaiso, Chile, in 2010--will offer a special tribute to Parra and Rojas. Even though, according to Rojas, poets are "stubbornly growing children," it would be fitting to move up the date to honor the nonagenarians. Such a tribute would belong not just to Chile or even to Latin America, but to all who believe, with Parra, that poetry is no longer a luxury but "an absolute necessity" and that "We cannot live without poetry."

Hector Pena Diaz is a journalist from Colombia and a frequent contributor to Americas.