hispanic research journal, Vol. 10 No.

1, February, 2009, 70–85

‘Gracias a la vida’: Violeta Parra and

the Creation of a Public Poetics of
Introspective Reflection
Catherine Boyle
King’s College London

Pero los secretarios no te quieren

Y te cierran la puerta de tu casa
Y te declaran la guerra a muerte
Viola doliente.

Porque tú no te vistes de payaso

Porque tú no te compras ni te vendes
Porque hablas la lengua de la tierra
Viola chilensis.
(Nicanor Parra, ‘Defensa de Violeta Parra’)

De cantar a lo humano y lo divino,

voluntariosa, hiciste tu silencio
sin otra enfermedad que la tristeza.
(Pablo Neruda, ‘Elegía para cantar’)

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.

© Queen Mary, University of London 2009 DOI 10.1179/174582009X380166

 VIOLETA PARRA 71

On genealogies and dialogues

I was never a student of Robert Pring-Mill, and I only met him on a few occasions.
Yet I feel a strong connection with him and with his work, which was a first point
of reference for my own study of Latin American song and popular poetry; a source
of profoundly moving interpretation and meaning. As I have thought through my
connections with him, a number of realizations come to me, a number of memories
of life experiences that connect with my intellectual endeavour and what that has
meant to me in my years of reading, studying, teaching and translating Chilean and
Spanish American culture; a network of genealogies and dialogues, and it is this that
I want to use as the framework for this reflection on reading both Robert Pring-Mill
and Violeta Parra.
First in this network of genealogies and dialogues is writing my first essay on the
work of Violeta Parra, despite having studied and taught her work for many years,
believing, with a number of others, that her Décimas: autobiografía en verso (1959)
is ‘una de las piezas clásicas’ of Latin American literature (Martínez Reverte 1983:
18). The Pring-Mill essay with which I am in dialogue is, of course, ‘Gracias a la
vida’: The Power and Poetry of Song (1990), the first Kate Elder lecture to be deliv-
ered at what was then Queen Mary and Westfield College, in memory of a student
who had died in an accident (C39). When I first used the essay in my lectures on
Violeta Parra in my early years at King’s College London, one student looked par-
ticularly involved, in what Violeta might have called a mixture of ‘dicha y quebranto’,
happiness and affliction (or ‘good fortune and heartbreak’ in Pring-Mill’s translation
[C39: 25]). She was Kate’s younger sister, Nancy Elder, who later talked to me at
length about the power of Robert Pring-Mill’s lecture for the family, and who lent
me materials that he had given them. My study of ‘la nueva canción chilena’ brought
me into dialogue with Jan Fairley, whose ‘pioneering thesis’ on the subject Robert
Pring-Mill directed, and whose ethno-musicological work has been an important
source for the scholarly study of the importance of song to the cultural and political
processes of the 1960s and 1970s in Chile. Related to my study of Chilean theatre is
a week spent in Glasgow in 1989 looking after Violeta’s brother, Roberto, during the
tour of the wonderful production La Negra Ester by Andrés Pérez and El Gran Circo
Teatro based on his eponymous décimas: he had met a retired Glaswegian sailor who,
inevitably, had frequented the brothels of Valparaíso where Roberto used to sing,
and with whom he embarked on a whisky binge the like and results of which I have
rarely seen. My own — more demure — teaching of Violeta Parra and ‘la nueva
canción chilena’ has meant that students have gone on to study these and other
cultural expressions — popular poetry and song, theatre, radio serials, arpilleras
and plastic arts, cultural publications, and the movement of the oral poetry from
Spain to Latin America, teaching me about the reality, extent, and legacy of a large
variety of cultural expressions. Endless dialogues, endless connections, and endless
inter-relations, some of which I study here.
I do not say all of this for the sake of idle autobiography or anecdote. Rather,
because re-reading ‘Gracias a la vida’: The Power and Poetry of Song brought home
to me forcefully the power of the subjective in academic writing, and our own place
in a genealogy of scholars, to whom we declare intellectual, but rarely personal or
emotional, debt; scholars who have engaged with learning from so many refracted
72 CATHERINE BOYLE

positions, points of view and life experiences. Returning to Robert Pring-Mill’s work
has given me renewed insights into the role of the subjective, and I want to use these
to engage with both his ideas and with Violeta Parra: both, I believe, used the subjec-
tive consciously in the pursuit of the highest quality and rigour in their professional
and ‘objective’ pursuits.
It is with delight — and no small envy — that I re-read Robert Pring-Mill’s account
(C3) of his land-rover journey through Latin America, collecting poetry, talking to
poets and their audiences, entering into the context of their production, bringing
his knowledge to bear on the acts of hearing and gathering songs and poetry whose
references range from the biblical and liturgical, to the medieval, the socialist or
communist, the specific everyday existence of communities, as well as their rituals,
memories and heritage. (In terms of genealogies, this does, of course, echo Violeta
Parra’s journeys through Chile, ‘recopilando’ the poetry and song of her people.)
There is such joy in reading essays that bear their learning like what Gabriela Mistral
might call ‘a blanket of light’ (Mistral 1992: 47), that engage the subjective and that
offer the reader the means of embarking upon their own journey of discovery of
the cultural expression to which they have been introduced. Pring-Mill’s Kate Elder
Lecture and his essay on ‘Spanish American Protest Poetry’ (C3) pose important
questions about the study of these forms in the academy and in the context of our
understanding of this cultural field of production.
Let us first return to the dialogues that are inherent to the lecture on the power and
poetry of song and some thoughts on education and the Arts:
In the first instance, university-level teaching in the Arts is, surely, chiefly concerned with
helping human beings learn not facts but general skills: namely ‘to think effectively,
to communicate thought, to make relevant judgements, to discriminate among values’
(in the words of a celebrated Harvard Committee’s report). (C39: 4)

In a footnote, alongside the reference to that 1945 Harvard report on ‘General

Education in a Free Society’, Pring-Mill reveals more:
One may also be learning a useful specialism, thus it is that hispanists also happen to be
learning Spanish, which is an effective means of communication at many levels; but I am
sufficiently heretical to regard the acquisition of this ‘marketable’ qualification as inciden-
tal to the ‘proper’ business of reading for an Arts degree, namely the process of learning
how to know oneself and how to be oneself. The ‘general skills’ which that process of
learning involves can be taught as an ‘academic subject’, although it is only through the
handling of such a subject that they are ‘brought out’: any Arts subject for which one has
a genuine talent would serve this ‘higher’ instrumental purpose equally well. (C39: 4)

The words are an echo of a transitional period in recent British academic life, and
they bear witness to a haughty ideal, which Pring-Mill suggests is being lost: the
process of learning how to know oneself and how to be oneself. I would say, of
course, that the acquisition of language in studying other cultures is fundamental, for
it is the profound structures of language that signal meaning and guide us to it; learn-
ing a language is about more than marketability. But then Pring-Mill would agree,
and it is the driving of Arts education into the marketplace that he is signalling here.
This is not a diversion into a political philosophy of education and the Arts (necessary
 VIOLETA PARRA 73

as that may be); it is another means of entry into the subject of the study of Violeta
Parra.
In the first part of the essay, Pring-Mill pays sensitive and insightful homage to
Kate Elder, a young woman he, in fact, never knew. He had studied her, learnt about
her, communicated with her family and friends about her, and made the judgement
that Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara were appropriate subjects because:
Both of them could certainly think and communicate ‘effectively’; they, too, made judge-
ments which they deemed ‘relevant’ to their situation (but which were often unacceptable
to those ‘set in authority’) and they were both deeply concerned with discriminating
‘among values’. (C39: 5; the emphasis is in the original)

The connection is simply and effectively established as a possible communication

between subjectivities, including approaches to intellectual authority. The power of
the lecture lies in the fact that the subjective engagement with the topic is achieved
through sustained intellectual engagement with the writing. It does what very little
criticism on either Violeta Parra or Víctor Jara has done since then: it reads their
words, hears their music and, while rooting itself in specificity, studies these in the
context of a literary and cultural field that stretches far beyond the popular culture
of Chile — as any study of popular culture should, for it is the distillation of ideas,
belief systems, images and languages that are ‘modulated’ (C39: 76) through their
creators. Pring-Mill eschews the biographical as the key indicator of value and worth,
but neither is the biographical positioning of the artists lost. In this first approach to
the décimas of Violeta Parra, I want to express my understanding of her poetics, first
inspired and now rekindled by Pring-Mill’s essay, building on his assertion that in
‘Violeta Parra’s rhetoric in “Gracias a la vida” [. . .] every image had its place in a
logical structure whose orderly concatenation mirrored the underlying order of the
inherited world picture’ (C39: 57–58).

Dicha y quebranto: Good fortune and heartbreak

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.
me dio dos luceros que, cuando los abro,
perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco,
en el alto cielo su fondo estrellado
y en las multitudes el hombre que yo amo.
[. . .]
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.
Me ha dado la risa y me ha dado el llanto.
así yo distingo dicha de quebranto,
los dos materiales que forman mi canto.
y el canto de ustedes que es el mismo canto
y el canto de todos, que es mi propio canto.

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto. (C39: 24)

The key insight (very much abbreviated) that is at the heart of Pring-Mill’s analysis
of ‘Gracias a la vida’ is this:
74 CATHERINE BOYLE

On looking back over this song-text, it can be seen to start out as a series of meditative
— almost introspective — reflections. [. . .] In the fourth and fifth stanzas, however, she
refers to her absent lover in the second person: ‘la casa tuya, tu calle y tu patio’ [l. 20]
and ‘el fondo de tus ojos claros’ [l. 25]. This move from introspection to direct address,
although it is purely a poetic fiction since the addressee is a distant lover, adumbrates
the way the final stanza will move from the impersonal ‘Gracias a la vida’, through the
statement of life’s last pair of gifts, to a series of reflections which are directed to an
immediate audience — whether actual or potential — in the reference to ‘el canto de
ustedes’ of l. 30. [. . .] The final clause ‘que es mi propio canto’ serves to underline the
fact that the universalization of her initial reveries springs from her own act of singing
and also that the bonding between singer-spokesman, the immediate audience (the ‘todos’
whose feelings she is equally singing) lies in canto itself. With five appearances of this
word in less than two-and-a-half lines, the insistent repetition punches home the message
that Violeta sees canto as a socially unifying force: a force whose risa and llanto are not
merely the expression of her own sentiments but also the expression of what others feel,
which is similarly grounded in the two materiales — dicha and quebranto — which lie
at the heart of the human condition. The difference is that she is capable of articulating,
through the joint medium of the words and music, what we all feel more fully than most
of us are able to express for ourselves. (C39: 47)

In the context of his full and illuminating study of ‘Gracias a la vida’, this statement
clearly moves the poem into a cultural scene that positions it far beyond the
popularly conceived and erroneous notion of the song being the final composition of
a love-sick woman who shortly afterward committed violent suicide. What interests
me in his approach are the ways in which the language is illuminated in order to
allow Violeta Parra’s writing to breath as the conscious creation and deployment of
a poetics that will constantly express and evoke movement in the journey along
a continuum of life experiences, expressed through stark oppositions, recognized
symbols and everyday realities and languages that are, in many ways, as available
to everyone as they are to the privileged sensibility of the poet. As is so effectively
portrayed in her décima on one of the many falls from grace suffered in her family:
Mas van pasando los años,
las cosas son muy distintas;
lo que fue vino, hoy es tinta;
lo que fue piel hoy es paño;
lo que fue cierto, hoy engaño,
todo es penuria y quebranto,
de las leyes de hoy me espanto;
lo paso muy confundida
y es grande torpeza mida
buscar alivio en mi canto.
[. . .]
Yo no protesto por migo,
porque soy muy poca cosa,
reclamo porque a la fosa
van las penas del mendigo.
 VIOLETA PARRA 75

A Dios pongo por testigo

que no me deje mentir,
no me hace falta salir
un metro fuera ’e la casa
pa’ ver lo que aquí nos pasa
y el dolor que es el vivir. (Parra 1988: 35–36)

Inherent in this declaration are three elements that Pring-Mill sees as fundamental
to Spanish American committed poetry: a response to the environment in which the
poet lives; the intention of affecting that environment; communication ‘in ways that
will be meaningful to its members’ (C39: 12). So, the oppositions above are based
on everyday materials, the poet inserting herself in her community, the ‘shock’ of
the modern experience and its topsy-turvy laws, and the declaration of the, perhaps
clumsy, power of poetry to raise her voice in protest.
Pring-Mill’s approach asks the academic to move into the ‘horizon of expectations’
(C39: 12) of the poet. He states that the poetry is intended to be ‘unequivocally univo-
cal in its purpose — with even its intentional ambiguities and ironies contributing
to an “intended meaning” aimed at an “intended audience”’ (C39: 12). The study of
this poetry means entering into the structures of univocality that are integral to the
poetic form, making the distinction between this and the multiplicity of meanings that
may arise from its insertion into different cultural environments and contexts, and
understanding that ‘such texts still have a primary “privileged meaning” which [. . .]
it is the critic’s duty to seek out’ (C39: 13).
It is this space between the distanced readings through which multiplicity emerges
and the univocality of the original that poses the main methodological problem.
The answer, unsurprisingly, is partly suggested by Pring-Mill’s exhortation to accept
the specific use of the tools of rhetoric, convention and a ‘familiar grammar of
dissent’ as ‘potent carriers of meaning’ (C39: 14), which reveal complex fields of
cultural tradition and into which new meanings can be inserted. Univocality does
not dismiss the multivocality that is needed to create this shared language; it asserts
a commonality of intention, and the listener — the immediate audience — is best
placed to enter spontaneously into that language, the dialogue that the poet sets up.
The challenge, then, is to find the means to enter it from the perspective of the
outsider; to imitate the listening community. This is facilitated to some degree, in
terms of Violeta Parra, by the fact of the décimas being in print; but it is oral culture
to which they essentially belong.
Violeta embarked on the writing of her Décimas: autobiografía en verso (1959)
— which, I agree with her son Ángel, is ‘el libro fundamental para quien quiera
conocer a mi madre’ (2006: 70) — on the encouragement of her brother, the poet
Nicanor Parra:
Muda, triste y pensativa
ayer me dejó mi hermano
cuando me habló de un fulano
muy famoso en poesía.
Fue grande la sorpresa mía
cuando me dijo: Violeta,
76 CATHERINE BOYLE

ya que conocís la treta

de la vers’á popular,
princípiame a relatar
tus penurias ‘a lo pueta’. (Parra 1988: 25)

The ‘fulano muy famoso en poesía’ is, Ángel Parra tells us (2006: 70), none other
than José Hernández the author of El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872), the great gauche-
sque poem, written from popular form and experience. This legacy is recognized
by Martínez Reverte: ‘El libro es un pequeño “Martín Fierro”, desprovisto de la gran-
deza épica del poema de José Hernández, pero profundamente tierno y simple,
lleno de humanidad, de verso sencillo y de categoría poética indiscutible’ (1983: 18).
Her first reaction is to name life experience as an impediment:
Válgame Dios, Nicanor,
si tengo tanto trabajo,
que ando de arriba p’abajo
desentierrando foklor.
No sabís cúanto dolor,
miseria y padecimiento
me dan los versos qu’encuentro;
muy pobre está mi bolsillo
y tengo cuatro chiquillos
a quienes darl’ el sustento. (Parra 1988: 25)

This is an echo of Gabriela Mistral’s poetic image of ‘La contadora’ in the ‘Locas
mujeres’ section of Lagar II (1954), where the travail of the collector of stories is
relentless:
Historias corren mi cuerpo
o en mi regazo ronronrean.
Zumban, hierven y abejean.
Sin llamada se me vienen
y contadas tampoco me dejan. (Mistral 1999: 236)

Like Gabriela Mistral, Violeta Parra will accept the challenge, so that she can
publicly denounce social ills, and express both personal and collective pain through
inscription in a meeting place for the private and the public:
Pero, pensándolo bien,
y haciendo juicio a mi hermano,
tomé la pluma en la mano
y fui llenando el papel.
Luego vine a comprender
que la escritura da calma
a los tormentos del alma,
y en la mía que hay sobrantes;
hoy cantaré lo bastante
pa’ dar el grito de alarma. (Parra 1988: 27)
 VIOLETA PARRA 77

In the first décimas, we see a consciousness of the demands of entry into a

cultural and linguistic community governed by a tight-knit system — control of the
form, an awareness of the demands of the ‘oficio’ and an integration of individual
experience into a collective language that is exploited in this way by all such poets.
To begin her book she seeks to share and communicate her experience, but,
moreover, to ‘train’ her reader — urban, literate, not accustomed to memory-driven
orality — in confronting a ‘new’ form:
Pa’ cantar de un improviso
se requiere buen talento,
memoria y entendimiento,
fuerza de gallo castizo.
Cual vendaval de granizos
han de florear los vocablos,
se ha de asombrar hast’el Diablo
con muchas bellas razones,
como en las conversaciones
entre San Peiro y San Paulo.

Tamién, señores oyentes,

se necesita estrumento,
muchísimos elementos
y compañero ‘locuente;
ha de ser güen contendiente,
conoce’or de l’historia;
quesiera tener memoria
pa’ entablar un desafío,
pero no me da el senti’o
pa’ finalizar con gloria. (Parra 1988: 23)

This is, of course, based on the skills of the popular poet or ‘payador’, who would
engage in forms of ‘contrapunteo’, poetic battles that demanded skill in handling
and improvizing on the closed structure of the poetic forms, including rhyme schemes
and metre, as well as showing knowledge and learning in matters to do with the
experience of their audiences, both human and divine. It draws on a set of ‘themes’,
which are deeply rooted in this poetry in terms of its genealogy — paradise, fall, the
journey, plenty, change of fortune, the world upside-down, the rituals of the everyday
and, of course, lo humano and lo divino. All of these relate to language systems that
allow for discrete expression and create interlocking systems that will provoke
surprise — even ‘asombrar hast’el diablo’ (Parra 1988: 23) — by knowing the place
of each ‘vocablo’ and then through the skill of improvization, of understanding,
knowledge, and wit, place it carefully and with agility; move it, transport it, in order
to ‘finalizar con gloria’, to end in triumph — that is defeat the rival in improvized
and oral expression.
The dynamic of Violeta Parra’s engagement immediately propels the reader/
listener into the role ‘intended’ (to use Pring-Mill’s term) for the verses, both as lived
experience and as the understanding of a subject matter that will force itself upon the
poet as the pool for expression. In her words:
78 CATHERINE BOYLE

Igual que jardín de flores

se ven los campos sembra’os,
de versos tan delica’os
que son perfeutos primores;
ellos cantan los dolores,
llenos de fe y esperanzas;
algotros piden mudanzas
de nuestros amargos males;
fatal entre los fatales
voy siguiendo estas andanzas. (Parra 1988: 26)

Her decision to accept Nicanor’s challenge means that she will harvest the language
that she has gathered in the ‘rutas de Chile’, and will develop the skills to which she
has introduced us: the skills of the poet that will allow her to ‘aprender la del
canario’, make her worthy of the role, and not be condemned publicly as a fraud
(Parra 1988: 24); the writing to ‘calm’ her experience and others; and her declared
intention of giving ‘el grito de alarma’ — through truth, clarity, and vision. Embed-
ded in these first décimas is a poetics of movement, restlessness, travel, wandering,
a meditation on what the verses convey, and the direct address to the audience that
will lead from introspection to public address through a shared poetics.
There is a dynamism in Violeta Parra’s writing that derives from the voice that will
‘dar el grito de alarma’ and through which she takes her listener/interlocutor/reader
on an endless series of journeys in her poetry, following at times violent moves from
‘dicha’ to ‘quebranto’ and back, as she expresses in ‘Gracias a la vida’. This has led
me to think of her writing spatially, visualizing the ways in which a network of
images that she creates defines itself and derives energy from the certainty of its
ability to communicate through common languages and experiences, to move from
the introspective to the public, to the moment when she can sing ‘el canto de todos,
que es mi propio canto’. This is what is fascinating for me in her work — it allows
us to track cultural moves and turns, to follow the traces of cultural expression
within a specific environment at a specific historical moment, with the twists and
turns of national history serving as the background for the vicissitudes (‘penurias’) of
the poor and dispossessed. It allows a real sense of how an individual sensibility
emerges from something that is profoundly collective. From what is ‘in the air’ we
can almost touch the cultural turns in the moves from self to collective, from rural
to urban, from happiness to heartache, from ‘popular’ to ‘elite’, touching the divine
(even when singing of the human), as she so eloquently declared in her famous
refalosa, ‘Cantores que reflexionan’:
Y su conciencia dijo al fin
cántale al hombre en su dolor,
en su miseria y su sudor
y en su motivo de existir.
Cuando en el fondo de su ser
entendimiento así le habló
un vino nuevo le endulzó
las armaguras de su hiel.
 VIOLETA PARRA 79

Hoy es su canto un asadón

que le abre surcos al vivir,
a la justicia en su raíz
y a los raudales de su voz.
En si divina comprensión
luces brotaban del cantor. (Parra 1986: 40)

The power of the décima, with its ‘estructura cerrada’ (Epple 1994: n.p.), its
regular and rigorous rhyme and metre, is that it creates a form that facilitates orality,
memory, communication. It is heard and understood; it does not create barriers to
transmission within its linguistic community, and it invites interaction. It rests on a
store of ready-made rhymes, Biblical allusions, symbolic set pieces, which create the
foundation from which the great artist will improvize and beguile. Nicanor’s chal-
lenge to ‘relatar a lo pueta’ is one to enter publicly into a community of committed
and fiercely proud (usually male) poets, to articulate and communicate her own great
journey of re-encounter with her linguistic, aural, cultural community, with a world
that has been lost to the hegemony of the urban (Epple 1994: n.p.). It is a poetic world
that allows, even demands, a fierce univocality, where oppositions and dichotomies
based on the central oppressor/oppressed fault line set the parameters of belonging
and exclusion. It is revealing, in this respect, to set the impulse towards writing her
décimas not only in the context of both Nicanor’s encouragement and his own
poetry, which by and large inhabited the space of the ‘elite’ poet known through
print, but also in the context of the printing of the work of popular poets in the
communist newspaper El Siglo, from 1952 to 1958.
In her thesis, ‘Cris et écrits de l’opprimé: Le Bandit et le soldat dans la poésie
populaire Chilienne (1880–1973)’, Delphine Grouès studies the wonderful and fasci-
nating forgotten archive of Diego Muñoz and Inés Valenzuela of correspondence with
popular ‘puetas’, including the hundreds of poems they were sent for their weekly
page, ‘La Lira Popular’ in ‘El Siglo’ (Grouès 2007: 52). In this context of the conscious
rescuing of oral poetry from both rural decadence and urban invisibility, the work
of Violeta Parra — and indeed of both Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra — takes on
a different shape, and becomes inserted into a scenario of re-valorization of oral
culture through which its loss would be countered by print, which, in turn, could
become the prop on which the oral would again be supported and strengthened
(Grouès 2007: 58). In this archive is the ‘proof’ of the linguistic and cultural sources
on which the poets built, the ways in which these constituted the shared community
of language in which the décimas are rooted and through which they would find their
most skilled and knowledgeable interlocutors.
And like the best popular poets, Violeta Parra inserted a new element into the
known vocabulary of verse. The décimas have been called ‘la escenificación de la
cotidianidad’ (Epple 1994: n.p.), which they are, if we are willing to accept the quotid-
ian as dense with meaning. For the quotidian is, of course, domestic; and the décimas
reveal how the poetic can, as Pring-Mill has it, ‘ritualize our experience of reality’
(C39: 48). They will create tangible inter-connections between the role of women
in this ritualized quotidian and the primarily male voice of the poet, tracing parallel
lines of experience, and creating a dynamic intervention in the univocality of the
tradition.
80 CATHERINE BOYLE

The creative ritual of the everyday

Por suerte la inteligencia
a mi mama la acompaña,
haciendo mil musarañas
con la costura, su ciencia,
son finas sus reverencias;
si llega la Pascualita,
recibe la costurita
y luego, cuando la entrega,
un matecito le ceba
mientras guarde una varita.
[. . .]
Y no era cosa tan fácil
seguir con estos milagros.
pa’ proteger nueve cabros
exige de ser muy ágil,
velando hasta en lo más frágil.
Mi mama, qué gran orgullo,
si aprovechaba hast’ el yuyo
con muy claro entendimiento,
y en los actuales momentos
sabroso hace el cochayuyo. (Parra 1988: 53–54)

Violeta Parra forcefully brings women into her work. Not as an abstract or as
an aside, but as the central force in day-to-day survival. The mother is central —
as she is to Gabriela Mistral — and Violeta shares with Gabriela the will to bring
the mother figure concretely into the public realm as the ‘furiosa’ (Parra 1988: 43)
defender of her children and the constant source of consolation and strength. It is
women who harbour and share the skills, values, resourcefulness, and forcefulness
to bring families through extreme hardship and it is they who form the core of an
unwritten history. Women like her mother and, for example, Doña Rosa Lorca,
described here by Violeta’s son Ángel, complete in her command of her domain:
Aristócrata del pueblo. Doña Rosa, a su manera era la Violeta Parra que mi madre
buscaba. La Violeta chilena humilde, y orgullosa, trabajadora, digna y dueña de su
destino. Sola y entera. Partera-matrona; cantora, reina de la cocina y en la alcoba, decía
ella; arregladora de angelitos. (Parra 2006: 70)

The complete Chilean ‘popular’ woman — for this representation is vehemently

rooted in the poor — who is the motor for the quotidian forms that ‘ritualize our
experience of reality’ (C39: 48), Doña Rosita is the embodiment of all that is valued
in the ‘horizon of experience’ of women in this environment, in control of the rituals
of the everyday, of life and death. Violeta Parra will express this through languages
that parallel the celebration of the skills of the popular poet: understanding (‘enten-
dimiento’), intelligence and wiliness (‘agilidad’), ingenuity and improvization; strength
(‘fuerza’) and final glory (‘finalizar con gloria’) in the survival of the family. A mirror
of the skills needed to be a ‘poeta’, to be a mediator for lived experience. As she
so beautifully declares when, describing her mother’s trials, she talks of the role of
 VIOLETA PARRA 81

creativity, and of the craft of fierce and intelligent domesticity in the life experience
of day-to-day survival. She will repeatedly insist on the creative power needed
in domestic survival as a model for her artistic endeavour, which will later find
full artistic expression in, among other things, her arpilleras, rooted surely in a con-
sciousness of the capacity of sewing as to be read as authentic narrator of domestic
tales:
En casa hallaba consuelo,
con mis trapitos jugaba
uno tras otro juntaba
para formar un pañuelo,
lo hilvano con mucho esmero;
del ver sus lindos colores
igual que jardín de flores
me brilla el pensamiento
para contar este cuento
pañuelo de amores. (Parra 1988: 60)

The insertion of female experience into the known languages of the form is
poignantly felt in a décima in which she can barely contain her rage at the rape and
murder of a young woman:
También viene a mi cabeza,
como una vista brutal,
un martes al aclarar
se llevan a la Teresa,
entre nueve y a la fuerza
l’arrastran Mapocho abajo
sacándole los refajos,
mientras se hacen que no ven
unos que dicen amén
por no entregarse a los tajos.

Yo debo seguir cantando

pues paga la clientela,
mas la voz se me congela;
la Tere ya está gritando,
se le oyen de cuando en cuando,
cada vez menos los gritos;
más tarde se oyen los pitos
del vigilante atrasa’o
corriendo desafora’o
pero después del delito. (Parra 1988: 153)

The conventions of descriptions of character in their stock social roles are present:
the cowardly ‘upright’ believers; the figures of the law who arrive too late to help
someone from the lower classes; later in the décima, the impotence of ‘el que no sabe’,
the abuse of power by those who have ‘títulos varios’, that is ‘conserva’or o vicario,
/ alcalde o taita de grupo, / terrateniente macuco, / industrial o comisario’. To this
she adds the painfully impotent place of the singer, who must continue to perform
82 CATHERINE BOYLE

for the paying public as humanity reeks around her. (It is worth noting that it is
the experience of singing urbanized and sanitized folklore in these ‘cantinas’ and
‘boliches’ that will propel her into her search for the authentic expression of the
poor.) She ends the poem with a protest and a call for the control of the ‘cementerio
legal’ of bars, to be replaced by education: ‘que se abra una chichería / cuando abran
miles d’escuelas’ (Parra 1988: 154). Yet the calls for justice are also gendered: the
standard call for dignity for the poor and dispossessed that informs popular poetry
is here effected through a specific case of violence against women through which she
calls her interlocutor to bear witness to the fact that the type of violence is endemic,
accepted and colluded in by men from all classes. Set alongside the conventional call
for dignity for the poor who are left to putrefy in the most miserable conditions,
it is clear that her message is that women will suffer the worst type of humiliation
and annihilation at the hands of those who are ‘drowning’ in a sea of ‘misery and
vice’ (1988: 152 & 148). This gendering of the form is central to her writing and, in
its univocality, has an unequivocal meaning.
If we are to read her writing in the context of the socially committed poetry
that provides the form and languages for her expression, then we should read
her ‘intended meanings’ in the broader context of the writing and debates around
women and family of the period. The proper study of the gendering of her writing
relates to feminist debates of the earlier part of the twentieth century around the
centrality of family and home to the female insertion in the public and political sphere
that, in their complexity, prefigure modern Latin American feminist thought (see,
for example, Castillo 2005). As with the work of Gabriela Mistral, there is a need to
reconsider the writing as a counterpoint to dominant male discourses, to appraise the
ways in which these writers seek to inscribe women in both oral and written histories
and memories, by first making visible the personal histories that rarely, and with
difficulty, exceed the parameters of the domestic. Theirs is a poetic and affective
link, as Violeta so eloquently says in her ‘verso por despedida’ on the death of
Gabriela:
Presidenta y bienhechora
de la lengua castellana,
la mujer Americana
inclina la vista y llora
por la celestial señora
que ha partido de este suelo,
yo le ofrezco sin recelo
en mi canto a lo divino,
que un ave de dulce trino,
la acompañe al alto cielo. (Parra 1988: 207)

The turns of orality

My aim in sketching out these different networks of experience in Violeta Parra’s
writing is to map out and articulate an intuition about its place in a broader poetics
that is shared by her brothers Nicanor and Roberto Parra, and which inserts itself
into a type of wilful marginality. Based on this approach, it is with real interest
that I read Ángel Parra’s words about how his mother proceeded by ‘unearthing’
 VIOLETA PARRA 83

(‘desentierrando’, as she said) folklore, as she persuaded people — very often women
going about their daily tasks — to share their store of songs and poetry:
Para convencerlas sólo algunas palabras de mi madre hacían falta. Que yo recuerde
eran siempre las mismas: Chile, cultura, pueblo, dignidad, orgullo, tierra, amor y justicia.
Palabras mágicas que poseían un gran poder de convicción. Las mismas que las
autoridades se negaban a escuchar. (Parra 2006: 109)

Here are the core elements against which we can organize an understanding of
her preoccupations: ‘palabras mágicas’ because, as she knew, they have the power of
being at the core of the pool of a shared set of references; they connect beyond oral
communication with the lived experiences of her interlocutors and will immediately
conjure up response from them. These were the voices that would be turned from the
popular and oral into the urban, into literature. In her radio show on Radio Chilena,
‘Canta Violeta Parra’ (1953–1954), she would begin the labour of bringing the culture
that she had been unearthing into urban Chile, presenting voices, forms and narra-
tives that were far removed from the sanitized folklore of commercial groups (and
that she herself had sung). This is well commented on, but what interests me here is
how this forms part of a broader statement about marginality, poverty and oppres-
sion, presided over by the ‘la bandera que no dice ni chuz ni muz’ (1988: 26), just
as the ‘palabras mágicas’ will be ignored by those in power. The image of the flag,
represented as being appropriated by disdainful and neglectful authority, will return
once and again with its belonging and ownership questioned, its excluding force, its
veiling of cowardly and oppressive authority, its legacy of violence and silencing
of voices, all detested with ferocity. The flag will symbolize not nationhood but the
violent force of marginality.
This is particularly evocative here because what begins to emerge in Violeta Parra’s
décimas and songs is a sense of wilful marginality; the goal of allegiance to a set of
words and symbols defined by the way they belong to and are used by the popular
classes. Their experience fills these words with meanings that are defined by their
distance from the centre and from power. This, for Violeta Parra, will be the unques-
tionable definition of the authentic, the true, the real, the valuable, and she would
immerse herself in this type of willed marginality: this is what would define an alter-
native vision of Chilean reality and its future. These are values she will write and sing
of as beyond the ken of the ruling classes and the military, who will thus betray the
country and the flag. Marginality is a political statement far beyond its social reality,
and it is in this way that she is at one with the ‘horizon of expectations’ and the
univocality of the committed poet. Her position will brook no opposition.
Yet, there are also ways to approach her work that lead us to relocate her in a
broader context, through which we can start to pose a further set of questions about
Chilean cultural expressions. It is the ways in which she articulates her positioning
as a Chilean artist, the ways in which the network of key words and symbols can be
traced through her work that suggest the situating of other artists in a broader con-
text: that problematic move from univocality to multivocality. Many artists choose
the site of the marginal from which to write, often as a means of political affiliation.
However, it is the popular voice that can educate about ideas, positions and ways of
speaking that derive from a culturally specific set of conventions. In previous studies
of Roberto Parra’s La Negra Ester (1989) and Nicanor Parra’s translation of King
84 CATHERINE BOYLE

Lear into anti-poetry and décimas (2005), I have talked of the echoes of popular
poetry against which the Parra brothers’ writing demands to be heard, as a re-
encounter with a language that is recognisable but not of an urban public space. The
quality of the Décimas de la Negra Ester, at the time of the plebiscite through which
Pinochet was voted out and the return to democracy began (1988–1989), was the
quality of a language that, especially for an urban audience, was strangely vague, like
a suggestive echo (through, for example, the songs of Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara and
Violeta’s children, Ángel and Isabel Parra).
Historicizing the work, by studying the cultural, social, historical contexts in which
it is written and performed, allows entry into the ways in which the language of
Roberto Parra’s stage décimas laid open a type of aural memory, where what the
audience receives are tones and tonalities, rhythmic shapes and cadences, anachronis-
tic to a certain degree, but calling to a place that had been invisible during the
dictatorship yet recalls an important fact: these places exist beyond the political
periodization of history, and, when heard, create a serious disruption of the tenor of
that history. This is what Violeta would have seen as the appropriation of the Chilean
flag, more silent than ever in the face of the impact on the lower sectors of what was
called ‘el costo social’ of the regime’s policies. In this broader poetics of a wilful
marginality, the language is antithetical to that of the clinical language of the regime
and of dominant discourses. It is consistently ‘vulgar’, on the margins, with no regard
for the centre. It will not be incorporated into a sanitized version of the country.
It is aural evidence that the possibility for the choice —– for here it is also choice
— to live beyond the parameters of national history was available, and was taken
(Boyle 2005).
Through the popular poetics of the décimas runs the thread of an oral and
aural consciousness and memory. If Nicanor Parra will call his famed ‘antipoemas’
‘parlamentos dramáticos’ that will seek out a shared community of language and will
do ironic battle with the consecrated poet, then we can recognize an aesthetic that
is shared in Violeta Parra’s poetry, and that, because of this, can lead us into a
re-reading of, among others, Nicanor’s poetry. Violeta’s ‘parlamentos dramáticos’
seek out an interlocutor that shares her knowledge, wisdom, judgement, and desire
for self-expression. If the writing is ‘on the margins’ she will decentre the centre, she
will seek to establish a centre around her art. This was the function of her last home,
La Carpa de la Reina, which she intended as a complete space for artistic expression,
both her own and that of other artists, where she finally committed suicide, and
where her ideal was that, in this ‘margin’ militantly opposed to the centre, she would
not be an isolated voice, for her voice would be at one with others. Ideally, with
‘todos’.
It is in this way that Violeta’s art is born from dialogue, engagement, suffering
and happiness, and is a poetic celebration of the move from private introspection to
public expression in a community with whom she will share her language. Echoing
Robert Pring-Mill’s engagement with her poetics — reprising my dialogue with him
and indulging the subjectivity of a personal genealogy — I finish with one further
interconnection. At the end of the Kate Elder lecture, Pring-Mill describes (C39: 80)
how ‘an old Irish prayer supplied the model for my version of “Gracias a la vida”’.
It was his version of an unstable text ‘wrought by oral transmission’, and on my ear
it transmits a distant aural memory, as all popular poetry should:
 VIOLETA PARRA 85

Thanks be to God for the light and the darkness . . .

Thanks be to God for the weal and the woe . . .
Thanks be to God for the shower and the sunshine . . .
Thanks be to God that what is, is so.

Works Cited
Boyle, Catherine, 1989. ‘La Negra Ester cuerpo y alma en Glasgow’, Apuntes: Revista de Teatro de la Pontificia
Universidad Católica de Chile, 98: 15–22.
——, 2005. ‘Nicanor Parra’s Transcription of King Lear: The Transfiguration of the Literary Composition’, in
Latin American Shakespeares, ed. Bernice Kliman & Ricardo Santos (Cranberry NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP),
pp. 112–29.
Castillo, Alejandra, 2005. La república masculina y la promesa igualitaria (Santiago: Palinodia).
Epple, Juan Armando, 1994. ‘Violeta Parra: una memoria poética-musical’, Lingüística y Literatura, 26: n.p.
Grouès, Delphine, 2007. ‘Cris et écrits de l’opprimé: Le Bandit et le soldat dans la poésie populaire Chilienne
(1880–1973)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Toulouse Le Mirail).
Martínez Reverte, Javier, ed., 1983. Violeta Parra: Violeta del Pueblo (Madrid: Visor).
Mistral, Gabriela, 1992. Desolación. Ternura. Lagar (México: Editorial Porrúa, S.A.).
——, 1999.Gabriela Mistral: antología poética (Madrid: Biblioteca Edaf).
Parra, Ángel, 2006. Violeta se fue a los cielos (Santiago de Chile: Catalonia).
Parra, Violeta, 1986. 21 son los dolores, ed. Juan Andrés Piña (Santiago de Chile: Aconcagua).
——, 1988. Décimas: autobiografía en verso (Santiago de Chile: Sudamericana).

Este trabajo se inspira en la primera Kate Elder Lecture sobre la poesía y la can-
ción 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 mar-
ginalidad intencionada frente a un Estado que tradicionalmente ve con desprecio
a los que se encuentran fuera de los límites de un centro estrechamente
definido.

Notes on Contributor
Address correspondence to: Professor Catherine Boyle, Department of Spanish and
Latin American Studies, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK;
catherine.boyle@kcl.ac.uk