Estadio Chile (poem)
Estadio Chile | |
---|---|
by Víctor Jara | |
Translator | Joan Jara |
Written | 1973 |
Language | Spanish |
There are five thousand of us here
in this small part of the city.
We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all
in the cities and in the whole country?
...
How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
Víctor Jara, "Estadio Chile"
(translated from Spanish)[1]
"Estadio Chile", or "Somos Cinco Mil", is the common name of an untitled poem and song credited to Víctor Jara and penned in the days prior to his death. Jara was tortured and killed by the Chilean Army over several days in Santiago's Estadio Chile (renamed Estadio Víctor Jara in 2004) during the 1973 Chilean coup d'état.
History
Víctor Jara was detained in
He was found dead a week later with signs of brutal treatment and gunshot wounds.[1] The "manifesto" survived through both the detainees who memorized the song and the scraps of paper containing Jara's handwritten lyrics.[1] Jara's wife, Joan, presented her research into her husband's final days in her essays[3] and 1984 memoir An Unfinished Song.[1] The poem stretches the entrance to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago.[4]
Interpretation
In The Meaning of Human Suffering, Dr. Joel Gajardo-Velasquez compares the final line of the poem to the message of the cross: that Jara was able to see "the new that will be born in spite of, and probably especially because of, his personal tragedy", as "suffering without hope is death without resurrection".[5]
Response
Naín Nómez placed the poem as the first in a series of semi-anonymous works distributed by hand and designed to challenge the new Chilean state of affairs after the 1973 coup.
See also
- Human rights violations in Pinochet's Chile
- Human rights in Chile
References
- ^ ISBN 9780292781405.
- ISBN 9789562824910.
- JSTOR 4414433.
- ^ Watts, Jonathan; Franklin, Jonathan (10 September 2013). "Agony of Chile's dark days continues as murdered poet's wife fights for justice". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 8 October 2013. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
- ISBN 978-0-89885-011-6. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
- JSTOR 23288687.
- ^ JSTOR 25676969.
- ISBN 9780838756751.
- ISBN 9780415971997.