Parra has influenced and been translated into English by poets such as Merton, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti. His reputation as an antipoet was established in the 1950s and in the 1980s it has grown with Sandra Reyes's prize-winning translation of the first two volumes of the Sermons and Homilies of the Christ of Elqui (University of Missouri Press, 1984). These two volumes, published in Santiago in 1977 and 1979 (a third one appeared in 1983), are one of the most significant responses by a contemporary Chilean poet to the country's institutional crisis. Parra's Elqui poems are complex semiotic artifacts whose formal language produces an added level of (contextual) meaning that reflects the Chilean political crisis, even when the poems are not overtly political.

The most obvious formal device that enables the poet to speak in the controlled environment of Chile's military rulers is the adoption of a poetic mask, that of Domingo Zárate Vega—also known in popular folklore as the Christ of the Valley of Elqui—an itinerant preacher of the late 1920s who was a construction foreman in the northern desert before the revelation of his mission and who wrote several booklets of popular and moral instruction in the course of his wanderings. Parra's construction of his poetic character is almost novelesque: the prophet receives his divine mandate in a dream following his mother's death, dresses all in black and lets his hair and nails grow for the next twenty years; he's scorned by the rabble and must depend on the Chilean police for food and shelter (an ironic allusion in the updated context of the preacher's “biography”); he preaches his “wholesome and wise cogitations” in “… jails and hospitals / in rest homes / at meetings of Mutual Aid societies” not to glorify himself but for the good of Mankind, “especially those souls in distress / showing no distinction of social class / even in cases of terminal illness / or people who had almost nowhere to turn” (IV); and he lets the simple-minded refer to him as a Christ-figure though he makes it clear to his audience that his mother is a mortal woman called Clarisa (the name of Parra's own mother).

Parra's choice of poetic character, moreover, is overdetermined by several factors in addition to the poet's/prophet's identification with the marginal elements of society (in other words, those left out by the current government's economic program) and the colloquial nature of his sermons. In poem II the author dates precisely the moment of Zárate's conversion from laborer to prophet: 1927, the very year in which General Ibáñez (Pinochet's predecessor and role model) staged a coup and became President for four years. This “coincidence” allows Parra to speak covertly of Pinochet, as with the reference to Pisagua, a Pinochet-era detention camp for internal exiles, in poem XXIV:

When the Spaniards arrived in Chile …
food was scarce
still is some of you might say
which is what I have tried to emphasize
the Chilean people are hungry
I know that for saying that
I could be sent to Pisagua
but the incorruptible Christ of Elqui has no reason to exist
except to tell the truth
may General Ibáñez forgive me
in Chile they don't respect human rights
freedom of the press does not exist here
the fox is in charge of the henhouse
but I wish somebody would tell me
in what country they do respect human rights.

(tr. Sandra Reyes)

The last two lines of the poem avoid the kind of sectarianism that many have expected of Parra, an ideologically anarchic poet who has been excoriated by both the Left and the Right:

Spineless
                    ingenuous
                                        Marxistoid
three scornful epithets I don't deserve
but the reactionary press hangs on me
even though they know perfectly well
how
                    when
                                        and where the shoe pinches
all they have to do is look at my clothes
to realize I'm neither red nor white
but more on the ultraviolet side
which is the color of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ

(tr. Sandra Reyes)

The Christ of Elqui does not intend to accuse or denounce but merely to tell his truth and break the molds. On the other hand, truth-telling is a dangerous business in a military state, which is why the poet must resort to subterfuge and to the kind of ambiguity declared in sermon XXVI:

To sum it all up
to mistake a leaf for a leaf
to mistake a branch for a branch
to confuse a forest with a forest
is to be a fool
this is the quintessence of my doctrine …
now you can see that clouds are not clouds
rivers are not rivers
rocks are not rocks
they're altars!
                    columns!
                                        domes!
it's time to say mass.

(tr. Sandra Reyes)

Another factor operating in Parra's choice of poetic character is the religious nature of the prophet's discourse, not only because religious morality and values are self-legitimating for large segments of the population but also in view of the great prestige amassed by the Catholic Church in Chile under the military regime. At the time of the coup, no other institution was in a position to conduct a human rights struggle against the regime and to shelter the poor and the victims of repression. The Church hierarchy could have complied with the regime, as its Argentine counterpart did at the same time and under similar conditions, but instead the Church chose to become the bulwark against repression and to organize its resources on behalf of the dispossessed and the persecuted. The institutionalization of this struggle was the creation of the Vicariate of Solidarity in 1976, a human rights organization that recently received the Carter-Menil award for humanitarian action.

A more militant reason for focussing on the Christ of Elqui is that as a construction foreman in the nitrate fields of northern Chile, Domingo Zárate is linked to Luis Emilio Recabarren, a labor organizer who operated in the same region and who founded the Chilean Communist Party in 1922. Recabarren is the subject of sermon LXI:

As I was saying
nobody knew him better than I
since I was his poor guide dog
when he was still a nobody
I close my eyes and see him as he was
tall—stocky—with a fierce look
a plain man—hair combed back
a nitrate worker like the rest of us
he wasn't afraid of the bourgeoisie
he thumbed his nose at the police
I worked with him in a print shop
against those capitalist bloodsuckers …
at that time being a proletariat
was worse than being a leper
they wouldn't listen to him even with his hat in his hand
with Don Emilio things changed though …
he was a fighter for the human race
I am a gladiator for the divine
each one to his own specialty …
without that lighthouse of Chuquicamata
where would Chile be right now

(tr. Sandra Reyes)

This poem should not be hastily read as one more recuperation of a working-class hero under a regime in cahoots with the financial bourgeoisie. The speaker's perspective is mobile (referring, for example, to his subject both as “Recabarren” and “Don Emilio” and thus establishing different degrees of internal distance), and the last two lines are mordantly ironic.

There are other politically overt sermons in which the speaker's perspective is mediated by irony. Poem LIII is a retrospective prophecy of the events of 1970-1973, and LV is a commentary on the regime's privatization of cultural production that adopts an ambiguous stance regarding the value of poetry. More often, though, Parra's texts generate subtle political readings of non-political themes. For instance, the theme of salvation can be related to Salvador Allende's messianic aspirations just as the theme of resurrection in sermon VIII connotes the leader's lifeless body. Even the maternal “fixation” that characterizes the sermon allows for a political interpretation. What is at stake is not just the preacher's mother but the mother country as well, specifically in those poems (such as XXIV and XXXIV) that “trace” the genealogy of the Chilean nation to its Spanish ancestry. In this context, the speaker's mourning for the mother acquires a communal meaning.

The sermons dramatize a discursive situation consisting of a speaker, an audience, and a message about the contemporary world. Their form is colloquial and their addressee is meant to be the general public and not the traditional readers of poetry. Furthermore, we've seen that these particular sermons are deceptive and ironic, and that this allows them to function politically in the cultural context of present-day Chile. Another discursive form that fulfils these conditions and that Parra has incorporated into the sphere of poetry is the joke. One doesn't have to go into the sociology of jokes to realize that jokes are typical of a wide variety of political cultures, and that their communal authorship (or deletion of their author and therefore of their authority) gives them the capability to evade censorship in the same measure that their synthetic form makes them amenable to oral transmission and replication. We're not concerned here with scatological or bathroom humor but with the wittier and more epigrammatic forms of jocular discourse (typical of comedy, irony, and satire) that pose an interpretive challenge to the joke's addressee and that establish a complicity between speaker and interlocutor.

In 1983 Parra published Chistes parra desorientar a la policía, which without the pun translates as “Jokes to Mislead the Police” (some of these appear in David Unger's New Directions edition of Parra's poems, Antipoems: New and Selected, 1985). In order to put the police on the wrong track Parra explicitly appeals to his reader's complicity: “I trust the reader 100٪ / I'm convinced that even … / civilians / are able to read between the lines.” Having established this pact with the reader Parra delves deep into the “unconscious” of public discourse to liberate its repressed energies. His themes include authoritarianism, censorship, social injustice, economic privilege, the intervention of universities, torture, the disappeared, patriotism, exile, and freedom of expression. Here are some examples:

Chile was first and foremost a country of grammarians
of historians
a nation of poets
now it's a nation of … dot dot dot;

(tr. David Unger)

Torture doesn't have to be
bloody
Take an intellectual
for example—
just hide his glasses;

(tr. Paul Pines)

Parra's made a fool of us
I thought he was on our side.
What did you expect Your Excellency?
In a coup
you find out
who's who;

(tr. Edith Grossman)

As to his appearance, yes he appeared
but in a list of the disappeared;
“Motu proprio”
not “de motu propio”
Mr. Delegate Rektor”
—Take it easy, poet, easy …
—A censored poem is worth two.

It's also worth remarking that these poems (more daring and less subtle than the majority of the sermons) appeared at the moment when the regime's legitimacy was seriously undermined by a major economic crisis, a time in which the opposition took to the streets and Pinochet's downfall seemed imminent. Parra's more recent production has sought to integrate politics into the larger question of ecology and thus to transcend its divisiveness in the face of an apocalyptic threat.