Cipango

Chilean poet Tomás Harris's Cipango—written in the 1980s, first published in 1992, and considered by many to be the author's best work to date—employs the metaphor of a journey. The poems collectively allude to the voyage of Columbus, who believed that he'd reached the Far East ('Cipango,' or Japan), not the Americas. Building on that mistaken historical premise, Cipango comments on the oppressive legacy of colonialism in Latin America—manifested in twentieth-century Chile through the 1973 mi…