The Romantic Dogs [Paperback]

Roberto Bolaño (Author), Laura Healy (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 2008

Listed as a "2009 Indie Next List Poetry Top Ten" book by the American Booksellers Association: Roberto Bolaño as he saw himself, in his own first calling as a poet.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper's, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolaño's poetic voice is like no other's: "At that time, I'd reached the age of twenty/and I was crazy. /I'd lost a country/but won a dream./Long as I had that dream/nothing else mattered...."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Savage Detectives, the best-known novel by the Chilean-born Bolaño (1953–2003) recently found spectacular success across the English-speaking world, bringing much attention to his other work. Now comes a very competently rendered bilingual selection of his fiery, if sometimes uncontrolled, verse. Bolaño began as a poet, and some of the work here seems to have come from an extraordinarily young man: a record of stormy, untamed teen emotion—the depths of despair (From these nightmares I'll retain only/ these poor houses) or the heights of sexual adventures. Bolaño moves easily into a blend of surrealism and populism, with in-your-face gestures learned perhaps from Pablo Neruda, as when he watches a trail of nurses and a trail of scorpions wending their ways home. Other poems are closely tied to The Savage Detectives: Bolaño's dreamt motorcycle journey in The Donkey, mirroring the life of the real poet Mario Santiago, will send readers back to the fictionalized portrayals of Bolaño and Santiago (Arturo and Ulises) in the novel. Bolaño the poet's deliberate immaturity/ And splendors glimpsed on another planet can delight: they echo his brilliant but out-of-control authorial persona, with its high-speed, self-conscious verbal play, and those echoes will be more than enough to lead fans of his prose straight to his verse. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

The fiction of Chile-born, Mexico-dwelling Bolaño (1953–2003) has been embraced the world over, igniting talk of a cult following. His acclaimed novel The Savage Detectives (2007) portrays two poets, and Bolaño saw himself as a poet first and foremost. “Poetry is braver than anyone,” writes Bolaño, literary brother to Charles Simic. A survivor of political persecution and exile, Bolaño composed with tender clarity darkly lyrical dispatches from a land of assassins and vigilantes, haunting poems meant to exorcise menace and mayhem. Tormented detectives facing “hideous crimes” serve as envoys between the painfully sensuous world and the transcendent sphere of feeling, memory, and dream as Bolaño writes of persecuted homosexuals, the sorrows of women intimate with beauty and terror, guns, dogs, and “savage trees.” In poems that unscroll like black-and-white movies or occupy the page like a tattoo, art and life entwine, and all is sinister and precious. With more translated novels soon to be published, the Bolaño effect will remain a potent force. --Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; Reprint edition (November 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811218015
• ISBN-13: 978-0811218016
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.4 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #353,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #59 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Caribbean & Latin American

More About the Author

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed "by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times)," and as "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50. Chris Andrews has won the TLS Valle Inclán Prize and the PEN Translation Prize for his Bolaño translations.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Savage Consistency February 6, 2009

By Keith W. Harvey VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

With "2666," Roberto Bolano is now a sensation in the United States. "2666" is a remarkable book, full of engrossing narratives; however, I find "The Romantic Dogs" in some respects more satisfying.

It is common knowledge that Bolano considered himself first and foremost a poet and I believe he is right, although his fame here in America will derive from his fiction.

Many reviewers have spent all their time talking about Bolano and Chile, as if "The Romantic Dogs" is only a political book. However, I wonder if the reviewers made it past the first poem. Yes, there are poems that make reference to political events but how can a Latin American not be political. However, politics are only a part of the soup of existence. Bolano writes about being in the sense that a philosopher writes about being.

"The Romantic Dogs" is an amazingly cohesive work. This is not a collection of poems written as one-offs. Instead, the poems hold together through various rhetorical devices: repetition of images, symbols, and themes.

The overall theme of the work is the shortness of life, the cruelty of illness, the fragility of existence, and the the beauty of poetry.

Unifying images are dreams, blackness, white worms, snow, cars, motorcycles, burros, films, detectives.

Bolano announces in the first poem of the collection that the dream of poetry opened up the void of his spirit and accompanied him through his life.

The first poem of the collection, "The Romantic Dogs," announces this theme. "I'd lost a country/but won a dream." He adumbrates the importance of poetry in the penultimate poem of the collection "Muse:" "she's the guardian angel/ of our prayers./ She's the dream that recurs."

"The Romantic Dogs" presents a brave story--because ultimately Bolano is a dramatic poet--of a dying poet fighting to remain here in being "with the romantic dogs."

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The Romantic Dogs June 7, 2009

By Dallas Fawson

Format:Paperback

While I disagree with Bolano about him being a better poet than a novelist, I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would. I didn't read this because I like poetry, I read it because I like Bolano.
If you're like me, where you're not a huge reader of poetry but a huge fan of Bolano nonetheless, you should definitely pick it up. Most of these poems are excellent, and even the not-so-great ones are still worth reading. Here is one of my favorite poems from the collection:

I dreamt of frozen detectives, Latin American Detectives
who were trying to keep their eyes open
in the middle of the dream.
I dreamt of hideous crimes
and of careful guys
who were wary not to step in pools of blood
while taking in the crime scene
with a single sweeping glance.
I dreamt of lost detectives
in the convex mirror of the Arnolfinis:
our generation, our perspectives,
our models of fear.

These poems show an emotional level you generally don't encounter in his fiction, from creepy paranoia to stripped down poems of love and thankfulness. This deserves to be checked out by fans of Bolano and poetry in general.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars If you think Bolano's fiction is good... January 26, 2009

By J. D. Willis

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Roberto Bolano the novelist/fiction writer is often wordy, ambiguous, lengthy (in the cases of The Savage Detetives and 2666), obscene, and utterly lacking resolution. He also wrote some of the best fiction of the past twenty years and is fantastic in his portrayal of the human condition.

Bolano took to writing to writing fiction as a means to support his family, but his greatest love was always poetry. He died considering himself a poet. In one interview he said, "I blush less when I reread my poetry."

After reading this collection, I understand why he always preferred poetry as an art form. Bolano as novelist is good, but Bolano as poet is everything good about his fiction plus his raw, emotive poet voice.

In short, this is some of the best poetry I've ever read. Get this. Although short, only 77+ pages (the side of the page is in Spanish, for the bilingual people), each poem in this volume stands up to repeated readings.

Highly recommended.