Hardcover. Lewisburg ME, Bucknell University Press , 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 321 pages, black cloth covers with gilt lettering on the spine. Bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY THE TRANSLATOR, DANIEL SHAPIRO on the title page. Bilingual edition. Chilean poet Tomas Harris's Cipango - written in the 1980s, first published in 1992, and considered by many to be the author's best work to date - employs the metaphor of a journey. The poems collectively allude to the voyage of Columbus, who believed that he'd reached the Far East ("Cipango," or Japan), not the Americas. Building on that mistaken historical premise, Cipango comments on the oppressive legacy of colonialism in Latin America - manifested in twentieth-century Chile through the 1973 military coup by Augusto Pinochet and the brutal dictatorship there - and on the violence and degradation of contemporary urban society. The author's vision is of a decadent, apocalyptic world that nonetheless contains the possibility for regeneration. Clean copy.
