Enrique Lihn is a Chilean poet who appears together with Nicanor Parra, Gonzalo Rojas, and Oscar Hahn--not to mention the universally acknowledged Chilean masters: Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and Pablo Neruda--in all major and comprehensive anthologies of Spanish (and Spanish American) verse. Lihn's poetic work--like his other literary and artistic production in fiction, drama, essay, video, and comics--is highly independent, experimental, dynamic, and protean. These characteristics do not cancel other qualities of his work, such as pragmatism, extreme intertextuality, and ever-present criticism, as stated by Mauricio Ostria in his seminal article "Enrique Lihn o la desdicha sin respuesta" (Enrique Lihn or the unresponded unhappiness, 1992).

Lihn was born on 3 September 1929 in Santiago de Chile to Enrique Lihn Doll and Maria Carrasco and died almost sixty years later in the same city and country. Between these two dates he created a distinctive body of literary work and became one of...