7.8 /10 1 Votes7.8
Translator Laura Healy Publication date 2008 ISBN 978-0-8112-1801-6 OCLC 227016624 | 3.9/5 Goodreads Language Spanish Originally published 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Cover artist detail of a photograph by Allen Frame, design by Semadar Megged Similar Roberto Bolaño books, Poetry books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Romantic Dogs (Los perros románticos in Spanish) is a collection of poems by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was published in 2006. The bilingual edition, with English translations by Laura Healy, was published by New Directions in 2008.
Contents
These 43 poems span nearly twenty years, from 1980 to 1998, embracing a wide variety of topics. Bolaño's obsession with detectives is evident in several poems, but the collection suggests other preoccupations, as in the poem "Godzilla in Mexico."
The poems
Reception
According to Charles Bainbridge, writing for The Guardian:
"The collection is dominated by a series of sustained reminiscences, fuelled by rage and a sense of cornered idealism [...] at key moments the writing pitches a kind of visionary anger. Bolaño seems most at home when describing the sparse Mexican towns near the border with the US [...] and much of the best writing evokes characters, such as "The Worm" or "Lupe", who inhabit this violent world. But the book ends on a very different note with two sudden love poems – lyrical, even gentle – that celebrate the possibility of a kind of salvation"
Sarah Kerr, writing for The New York Review of Books found the poems to be "wonderfully unreserved" while Boyd Tonkin of The Independent states that Bolaño "can sound like a Whitman-esque visionary, as in "The Last Savage", or erotically star-struck, as with "La Francesa" and her love "brief as the sigh of a guillotined head", or lyrically touching, recalling teenage hooker "Lupe" and her lost baby."