Antonio Cisneros


Antonio Alfonso Cisneros Campoy was a Peruvian poet, journalist and academic. He was born in Lima on 27 December 1942 and died there of lung cancer on 6 October 2012, aged 69.

Career

Cisneros studied literature from 1960 to 1964 at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima and later he took a PhD at the National University of San Marcos in 1974. While still a student he began to publish his poems, including the collections Destierro, David and the prize-winning Comentarios reales de Antonio Cisneros, the novelty of which assured his reputation. It was further widened by Canto ceremonial contra un oso hormiguero, for which he gained the Cuban Casa de las Américas Prize.
That collection was the fruit of his critical involvement with the social problems of his time, but academic appointments abroad during the period of the political setbacks of socialism in Latin America kept him out of harm’s way for a while. Between 1967-1969 he was at the University of Southampton and then until 1971 at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. There he wrote his Como higuera en un campo de golf in which he sets personal pain as the starting point for a critical examination of his own time. Again, after his return to Peru and appointment at San Marcos University, he accepted an exchange professorship at the University of Budapest for the year 1974–75 and references to his stay there appeared in his next collection El libro de Dios y de los húngaros. As well as drawing on his travel experiences from a uniquely Hispano-American point of view, it announced his surprising conversion to Christianity.
Since then Cisneros taught during 1996 at the University of Virginia and, in addition, grants made possible stays in Paris, London and Berlin. His travels furthered his international reputation. There have been four translations of his work into English in the UK and the USA and more into other languages. These include the Brazilian anthology of his work, as well as collections in Hungarian, Dutch, German and French.

Poetry

According to Alonso Rabí do Carmo, “the characteristics at the heart of Cisneros’ poetry are intertextuality and constant word-play; the simultaneous presence of the personal and the public or collective that achieves a new kind of epic discourse and dramatic harmony; the abolition of the false dichotomy between ‘pure poetry’ and ‘social poetry’ and the abandonment of any hint of provincialism or local reference, so as to situate the speaker within the poem in his own time, which provides the poetic individuality that is Cisneros’ trademark; the diverse use of the poem as a path to reflection and representation of the individual, the social and the cultural. This triad is given its own equal particularity and importance, whether addressing day-to-day experience, social relationships or historical context.”
The style emerged particularly in his first poetic success, Comentarios reales de Antonio Cisneros, in which the public account of the imperial enterprise is undermined by reinterpreting it from the point of view of the subject peoples. This is signalled by the play of meaning in the word real in his title, which can signify both ‘royal’ and ‘real’; the boastful official commentary on events is counterpointed in the collection against the bare statement of the human cost. The terse and understated accounts there make their point wittily without the need of further elaboration.
The style was further elaborated in his next, equally successful collection, Canto ceremonial contra un oso hormiguero ; there too a growing familiarity with the new style of writing in the United States led Cisneros to experiment from then onwards with a more flowing, longer-lined poetry.

Works

Prose:
Translations in English:
His voice and his poetry are recorded in the Word Archive of the Library of Congress in Washington DC, in the Archive of the Word of the Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba and in the Word Archive of the Silva Poetry House in Bogotá, Colombia.