This is no Chilean-style boast.

In this century the scope of Chilean poetry is vast, but in no way is it superior to poetry in other Spanish-speaking countries or to poetry in other languages.

There is no championship in poetry, culture, or beauty. But Rosenmann-Taub's poetry, for its taste, for its knowledge, and in all justice, is peerless and reveals a temperate yet unbridled beauty. And, for the depiction of a tormented contemporary life, it is the poetry of a superlative author.

What a fortuitous gift that this poet Rosenmann-Taub should be among us in our time.
His body of work is very extensive, even the number of volumes that have so far been published. His work has been known to the public for fifty years, and he is turning seventy. Known to the public? He is virtually unknown. Unrecognized in Chile. And why? It says nothing against Rosenmann-Taub, but is very telling about the Chilean infirmity. How can it be thought that he does not exist and even - for some of the few who have heard his name - that he is a kind of literary invention?

The fact that his character may be difficult to deal with for those who have met him does not explain the appalling ignorance of the fullest poetic ideal in Chile still alive. Where is he? Well, in his works; and physically in North America, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. He continues to write on his own.

Gabriela Mistral generated antipathy in Chile: this is why she left, and saw her homeland again precious few times; and died abroad. Yet she obtained, albeit grudgingly, some acknowledgment in her country during her life. Rosenmann-Taub has not.

This man born in Echaurren Street, in the wretched, dilapidated, and incoherent capital of the country Chile, may as well never have been born at all as far as the others, his contemporaries, are concerned - in spite of the fact that his first book, the ineffable Cortejo y Epinicio, was favored with a certain admiration by a number of good Chilean voices, those of Hernán Díaz Arrieta, Roque Esteban Scarpa, Hernán del Solar.

After the publication - also by the outstanding Soria brothers of Cruz del Sur - of his subsequent two short books of poetry in the first years of the fifties, almost nobody said anything about them. And yet, poems of his continued to appear, previously unpublished or not, whether in anthologies or in a hand-printed edition by Taller 99, with engravings. And in the seventies, five phenomenal books by the publisher Esteoeste in Buenos Aires came out. Only one of these books is known to have received a review - by Hernán del Solar; it went unnoticed. That was the only echo these books raised.

Rosenmann-Taub's entire oeuvre has, over time, remained largely neglected. A scarce few of us, in Chile or abroad, have asserted his supreme value. But almost no one has been listening.

What is going on in Chile?

What country are we in, that a poet, unique in letters as well as in the spirit of those who speak, think, and feel in Spanish, should be left aside, forsaken, dispossessed? Is it for us to dispossess ourselves of him, as if we were rich in genius?

Everything, of the worst kind, comes to pass in Chile. Thus Chile will pass. With pain, and without glory.

But the poet endures; his poetry is perdurable. We would say imperishable if we did not know that eventually, in the end, everything will die in this world.

Rosenmann-Taub's voice, choked by pain and love, is heard in poems of more than forty years ago. And read, if you find it, the extraordinary metaphysical, divine poem in the last book of his that we know of, brimming with the fatal wine of one single poem spilt into multiple stanzas: El Cielo en la Fuente (The Sky in the Fountain).

[In another book, Los Surcos Inundados (The Flooded Furrows), the poet speaks of the child "dandún," who is dying:]