Episode #12: Are Atheists Allowed to Pray?: Daniel Borzutzky
In the most poetry-rich episode to date, Julie talks with poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky about Daniel’s Chilean and Jewish family, about his close relationship with the Tree of Life synagogue and how he wrote about the 2018 massacre, about writing violence in a time of ongoing mass violence and war—after, before Israel’s ongoing massacres in Gaza and beyond—and about the tension between our sense of responsibility for and connection to those we share identities with and a more universalist sense of care, grief, and solidarity. Daniel talks about what reading and translating Raúl Zurita has meant to him and asks whether atheists are allowed to pray.
This interview was conducted over zoom.
Texts and authors mentioned and discussed:
Raúl Zurita, Purgatory
Of Glory not a Beam is left
But her Eternal House –
The Asterisk is for the Dead,
The Living, for the Stars
Daniel Borzutzky, photo by Patri Hadad
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún.
He teaches English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Return the Key
Jewish Questions for Everyone
