Zurita: "As long as there is even one person who suffers, poetry will continue to be the art of the future."

Convinced that "poetry is the hope of the hopeless," Chilean poet Raúl Zurita , one of the greatest living authors in Spanish , reflects in an interview on the value and future of verse in the face of the challenges emerging in today's "fierce" world.

"As long as there is a single being who suffers, poetry will continue to be the art of the future ," says Zurita (1950), who has been able to confirm during the more than fifty years he has dedicated to writing that "poetry means the dream of something better" and that, without that dream, "no one can last even a minute."

"Poetry can't stop a dictatorship, a war, slave labor, or drug trafficking, but without poetry, no change would be possible ," he adds, thinking about the meaning of verses in a world that, he laments, "is terrifying because it makes you write about things that would have been better never to write about."

"We write poems because we have not been happy," he admits, recalling the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), a period he refers to as "night" and which marked the life of the then civil engineering student, for whom poetry became a kind of "self-affirmation" and "the only way to face what was happening."

Following a "form of struggle" that sought to "inject horror with all the violence that beauty can have," Zurita composed Purgatorio , a collection of poems that inaugurated a rich literary career recognized by awards such as the Chilean National Literature Prize in 2000, the Pablo Neruda Prize in 2016, and the Reina Sofía Prize in 2020.

" You have to start from terror, from your own shortcomings and failings , from everything you need and don't have, or everything you see others need and don't have. (You have to) undermine yourself, break yourself, and then, from there, begin to see again," he explains.

With that intention, he wrote books such as Anteparaíso, Canto a su amor perdido (Anteparadise), Canto a su amor perdido (Song to his disappeared love) and La vida nueva (The new life), works that he reviews from his home, his "small oasis of peace" in Santiago , at the age of 75, having reached the end of his poetic journey with the calm of thinking that as an artist he did "everything he had to do."

Zurita no longer writes, but he is aware that he waged a "permanent struggle" with his pen that he must continue "every second, every day."

"A very horrible world is emerging," he warns, pointing to the "rebirth of fascism," a "tremendously dangerous" phenomenon he has also witnessed in Chile, where discourses like those promoted by the dictatorship more than fifty years ago have been "revived."

" We've never been very supportive, but now we're tremendously unsupportive . We've never been individualists, but now there's an extreme level of individualism. We've always liked trivial things, but never more trivial than now," he adds.

Zurita, however, acknowledges that he still retains hope because "otherwise he would have died by now" and hopes that the insistent accumulation of "small and pale victories" will make "this humanity worthy of the universe it inhabits."

To achieve this , he even opens himself up to the contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) : "As long as it has a part that fixes this world, it's fine."

"I worry if it's terrible, but what could be more terrible than us?" muses the author, who believes that "AI may be the greatest artistic creation of our time" and asserts that if it could "build the best poems in the world," it would "love" to read them.

Zurita's poetry has transcended the pages of his books more than once. In 1982, he wrote The New Life in the Sky of New York , in 1993 he excavated Ni pena ni miedo (Neither Pain nor Fear) in the Atacama Desert, and in 2024 he projected Verás (You Will See) on the cliffs of northern Chile.

Now, the poet lets his imagination run wild again and reveals his ultimate dream: "I would like to write a poem about the ice walls of Antarctica."

"I don't know if I'll have the strength to do it," he admits , but he is clear that, if he succeeds, the verses will end with what he calls his "final poem": "Then, crushing my burned cheek / against the rough grains of this stony soil / –like a good South American– / I will raise my face to the sky for one more minute / like a crying mother / because I who believed in happiness / will have seen the radiant stars again."