The Anti-Lazarus by Nicanor Parra
"The Anti-Lazarus" by Nicanor Parra is a notable example of the antipoem genre, consisting of forty-seven free-verse lines organized into eleven stanzas. The title references both the biblical Lazarus, who was resurrected by Jesus, and Parra’s innovative artistic approach that seeks to challenge conventional poetry. The poem's speaker addresses a deceased poet through a metaphorical telephone call, trying to persuade him against returning to life, highlighting the burdens of earthly existence including daily routines and human anxieties. The work contrasts these negative life aspects with the peaceful state of being dead, portraying death as a form of freedom and eternal rest.
Parra employs a colloquial style, deliberately eschewing traditional poetic devices, which emphasizes everyday language and informal communication. This innovative approach aims to reinvigorate language, stripping away the conventional flourishes of poetry. The poem also utilizes elements of satire to critique established literary norms while exploring deeper philosophical themes surrounding life and death. Through "The Anti-Lazarus," Parra not only redefines the concept of resurrection but also questions the value of traditional poetic forms, marking a significant contribution to contemporary poetics.
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The Anti-Lazarus by Nicanor Parra
First published: 1982, as “El anti-Lázaro”; collected in Poemas Inéditos, 1984; English translation collected in Antipoems: New and Selected, 1985
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“The Anti-Lazarus” is an “antipoem” composed of forty-seven free-verse lines divided nonsystematically into eleven stanzas. Its title is a compound word that encloses references both to the Western cultural heritage and to Nicanor Parra’s own innovative artistic ideals. It points, on the one hand, to the biblical figure of Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha who was raised from the dead at Jesus’ command (John 11:1-44). In this sense, it refers to the miracle of resurrection, one of the most important miracles within the Christian tradition. On the other hand, the use of the prefix “anti” refers to the concept of the antipoem, implying a conscious attempt at breaking with traditional lyric forms and constituting Parra’s most significant contribution to contemporary poetics.
The speaker of the poem is addressing an absent interlocutor. Under the guise of an impossible and thwarting telephone call, the poetic voice speaks to an anonymous deceased poet, trying to dissuade him from rising from the dead. The poet reminds his addressee of the many negative aspects of earthly life—the daily routine, human needs and anxieties, the increasing loss of tolerance when facing setbacks, and the vacuity of literature. As a counterweight to all of these, he notes the many positive aspects that the dead man’s present condition has to offer: the happiness of being a corpse, which assures absolute independence and peace, and the perfect communion of the body and the land in which it was buried.
The topic of resurrection occupies the center of the first stanza. In it, anecdotal information is reduced to a minimum, so the reader seems to witness a lyrical monologue in which one human being addresses another in order to impart his wisdom: To resuscitate oneself would be a real deed, but instead of leading to a glorious future, it would evolve into unvarying routine. The next two stanzas enumerate and unfold different aspects of that routine, both at the level of direct vital experience and at the level of philosophical concerns. Three other stanzas retrieve personal recollections from the dead poet’s past, and it is in the last stanza of this group that he is characterized as a poet. In this sense, the seventh stanza becomes a central point in the poem, since it defines poetry, emblematized by Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, as a mirage—more than an ostentatious amusement but inadequate to the task of making sense out of the effort of living.
A change of perspective is shown in the last four stanzas of the poem. Rather than continuing and advancing the skeptical depiction of life, the poetic voice discusses the beneficial elements of being dead, particularly the fact that, unlike life, death is eternal. With all of these, the name “Lazarus” acquires a new significance, and the concept of resurrection, losing its liberating potential as a tool for providing hope beyond the natural limits of human life, is reduced to a senseless effort.
Forms and Devices
The first example of Parra’s innovative approach to poetry may be found in his book Poemas y antipoemas (1954; Poems and Antipoems, 1967), which gained international recognition for the author. Although “The Anti-Lazarus” does not belong to this early collection, it marks a continuation of all the formal and thematic characteristics of the antipoem. Essentially, an antipoem aims to surpass the traditional language of poetry through the recovery of the language and topics of everyday life. The search for this voice implies a new treatment of linguistic resources and the inclusion of colloquialism.
“The Anti-Lazarus” challenges and subverts literary conventions in various ways. Reviving some of the innovations introduced in modern poetry by avant-garde and post-avant-garde writers, Parra puts aside the norms of punctuation and uses only occasional quotation and exclamation marks. He also abandons the principles of regular capitalization and mixes numerals and letters. In addition, the use of formulas typical of a telephone conversation (“hello-hello”), of colloquial and affectionate expressions commonly used to attract someone’s attention, and of the grammatical second person as well as several clichés taken from oral language (“my foot”) contributes to the creation of an atmosphere of informality.
Another characteristic that helps to strengthen the sensation of colloquial communication is the absence of stylized imagery, of conventionally poetic vocabulary and tropes. This does not mean that the poem lacks metaphorical elements—in fact, Parra uses some metaphors from everyday speech (“you used to explode/ in insults right and left”)—or other dominantly poetic devices such as chaotic enumeration (“pride blood greed”). The poet is looking for a way of generating a communication in which rhetorical and literary resources do not interfere in the fluency of the act of reading. The goal of all these expressive searches is to revive language, restoring to it a lost effectiveness.
As Naín Nómez remarks in Poesía chilena contemporánea (1992; contemporary Chilean poetry), “the antipoem is an inverted image of a poem, but it is not governed by the total principle of symmetry. Instead, it is governed by a particularly intense asymmetric force.” This distorting force, essential to the antipoem, is satire, conceived as the center of many literary resources such as duplication, inversion, and deformation. In “The Anti-Lazarus,” the satirical impulse intends to destroy the distinctive aureole that tradition has assigned to the poetic word through the ages.