Carlos Germán Belli

Poet and translator Carlos Germán Belli was born in Lima, Peru, to Italian parents. He earned his doctorate from the National University of San Marcos. Often described as one of the most original poets of South America, Belli is known for poems that braid technological vocabulary, colloquial Peruvian, and Spanish Golden Age diction and meter; his work relies on what Belli has called plagio, or strategies of appropriation from medieval and classical European traditions. Calling himself an “amanuensis,” Belli incorporates forms such as the canzone and sestina into a complex vision of history, futurity, and authorship. According to Rose Shapiro, Belli takes “thematic inspiration from sources as diverse as the pastoral tradition, the street language of Lima, and a sort of utopian science fiction mostly of his own creation. Despair is often the guiding emotion of these wanderings; but we also find anger, pettiness, envy, annoyance, thwarted desire. In recent work his poetic voice is more expansive and even celebratory, but the spirit of the amanuensis is always with us.” Belli’s many books of poetry include Poemas (1958), ¡Oh Hada Cibernetica! (1962), Sextinas y otros poemas (1970), El buen mudar (1987), Trechos del Itinerario: 1958–1997 (1998), and the bilingual Poemas escogidos, Selected Poems: 1958–2006 (2008).

Belli’s honors and awards include a National Poetry Prize and two Guggenheim Foundation Awards for Poetry. In 2006, he was awarded the Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda from the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes de Chile, and in 2007, he was nominated for a Nobel Prize.