Moltedo, Ennio: Night

World Poetry Books, paperback

Publication Date: November 15, 2022

Publisher Marketing: Written during the Pinochet dictatorship but not published until democracy's return, Ennio Moltedo's NIGHT is a masterpiece of controlled rage, mourning, resistance, and astonishing humor, and the first of his books to appear in English translation.

Ennio Moltedo (1931-2012), whom Raúl Zurita called "one of the finest, greatest, most curious and honorable poets of Chile," is at once lyrical and political, a dramatist, a historian, and a critic. NIGHT is a Kafkaesque chronicle of the Pinochet era in prose poems that encompass the lyric, mini-drama, mini-epic, and micro-fiction, and which Esther Allen has called "surreal, agonized documents."

"'How much longer?' asks Night, will we endure the 'well-dressed deplorables ... The living dead brilliantly girded for power--on the escalator going up--lights, camera, fanfare--how much longer?' Written in response to the 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz for our present moment in the United States, Moltedo's prose poems are surreal, agonized documents that merge historical fact with, in Feitlowitz's words, 'exquisitely controlled rage.'"--Esther Allen

"Ennio Moltedo, translated now for the first time by the daring mind of Marguerite Feitlowitz, conveys the Chilean night in all its linguistic, political, and cultural meanings: darkness, affliction, and absence of ethics or reason: the enduring wounds of Chile's dictatorship. In Night we see how land and military are irrevocably intertwined: 'If you put your ear to the naked earth, you will precisely hear the murderers' names.' And indeed, these same murderers, or, 'authorities, ' ask the people to 'renew their relationship with the sea, ' the sea which the narrator has been dumped into. 'Let's search for a bit of truth amid towers of corpses, ' writes Moltedo. In this quest for clarity amid darkness, Moltedo's poems reverberate with the force of a language writing its way out of the psychological shackles of the state." Daniel Borzutzky

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translation.