{{short description|Book by Roberto Bolaño}} {{Infobox book| | name = The Unknown University | title_orig = La Universidad Desconocida | translator = Laura Healy | image = The Unknown University, by Roberto Bolaño.jpg | caption = 2013 New Directions cover | author = Roberto Bolaño | cover_artist = | country = Spain | language = Spanish | genre = Poetry | publisher = Editorial Anagrama (Spanish, 2007)<br>New Directions (English/Spanish bilingual, 2013) | release_date = | pages = 835 | isbn = 978-0-8112-1928-0 | dewey= 861/.64 | congress= PQ8098.12.O38 A2 2013 | oclc= 812781269 }} '''''The Unknown University''''' is a posthumous anthology of poems by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. It was first published in Spain as ''La Universidad Desconocida'' by Editorial Anagrama in 2007. A bilingual edition with English translation by Laura Healy was published by New Directions in 2013.
Several poems in the collection were originally published in English in ''The Believer'', ''Boston Review'', ''Conduit'', ''McSweeney's'', ''The New Yorker'', ''The Paris Review'', ''Pleiades'', ''Poetry'', ''A Public Space'', and ''The Threepenny Review''.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Bolaño |first1=Roberto |title=The Unknown University |date=2013 |publisher=New Directions Publishing Corporation |location=New York |isbn=978-0-8112-1928-0 |page=7 |url=https://archive.org/details/unknownuniversit0000bola/page/7/mode/1up |access-date=18 August 2024}}</ref>
==History== Most of the roughly 300 poems in the collection were written between 1978 and 1984, with a few dating as late as 1993.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Bolaño |first1=Roberto |title=The Unknown University |date=2013 |publisher=New Directions Publishing Corporation |location=New York |isbn=978-0-8112-1928-0 |page=813 |url=https://archive.org/details/unknownuniversit0000bola/page/813/mode/1up |access-date=18 August 2024}}</ref>
According to Bolaño's widow, Carolina López, the earliest version of the book was a 57-page manuscript found among Bolaño's papers titled ''The Unknown University, poems 1978-1981'', seemingly assembled in 1984 or earlier. Another manuscript with the same title had 138 pages and was prepared sometime after 1985. A third and final manuscript was titled ''The Unknown University, definitive version (almost) 1993''. This was the basis for the version published by Anagrama.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Bolaño |first1=Roberto |title=The Unknown University |date=2013 |publisher=New Directions Publishing Corporation |location=New York |isbn=978-0-8112-1928-0 |page=817 |url=https://archive.org/details/unknownuniversit0000bola/page/817/mode/1up |access-date=18 August 2024}}</ref>
A version of ''The Unknown University'''s "People Walking Away" was published in 2002 (in Spanish) and 2010 (in English) as ''Antwerp'', translated by Natasha Wimmer; Healy adapted Wimmer's translation for the book. An earlier version of the text titled "Fragments of the Unknown University" won the 1992 Rafael Morales Prize from the government of Talavera de la Reina, Spain, Morales' hometown.
The book takes its title from one of its poems, "Between Friedrich von Hausen":
{{poemquote|(Dear Alfred Bester, at least I've found one of the wings of the Unknown University!)}}
"The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," a 1958 story by American science fiction writer Alfred Bester, told the story of a mad scientist named Henry Hassel, a "professor of Applied Compulsion at Unknown University...Nobody knows where the Unknown University is or what they teach there. It has a faculty of some two hundred eccentrics and a student body of two thousand misfits—the kind that remain anonymous until they win Nobel Prizes or become the first man on Mars."<ref>{{cite web |last1=Harris |first1=James Wallace |title="The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester |url=https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2023/06/08/the-men-who-murdered-mohammed-by-alfred-bester/ |website=Classics of Science Fiction |access-date=18 August 2024 |language=en |date=8 June 2023}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Miles |first1=Valerie |title=The Telepathy of Bolaño's Archive {{!}} At the Surface of the Visible |url=https://southwestreview.com/volume-108-number-2/the-telepathy-of-bolanos-archive-at-the-surface-of-the-visible/ |website=Southwest Review |access-date=18 August 2024}}</ref>
==Reception== In ''The New York Times'', Dwight Garner noted that most of the poems were written in Bolaño's 20s — "and very often they read like juvenilia — the unrhymed free verse of a man who was equal parts poet and poet manqué, a word-drunk literary drifter still finding his voice...Many are vignettes, full of play, written almost like journal entries...The sound ''The Unknown University'' mostly makes is that of a promising young writer seeking his way in the world of words."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Garner |first1=Dwight |title=At Play in the Field of Verse |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/books/roberto-bolanos-unknown-university-collects-his-poems.html |access-date=18 August 2024 |work=The New York Times |date=9 July 2013}}</ref>
In the ''Los Angeles Times'', Hector Tobar wrote that ''The Unknown University'' 'reads like a series of fragments from a diary of [Bolaño's] epic artistic journey...it's a book that illuminates the personal struggle behind one of the great literary careers of our times, a career that has come to define a global literary aesthetic."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Tobar |first1=Hector |title=Was Roberto Bolano a poet at heart? 'The Unknown University' says yes. |url=https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-roberto-bolano-unknown-university-20130714-story.html |access-date=18 August 2024 |work=Los Angeles Times |date=12 July 2013}}</ref>
''Salon'' reviewer J.P. Smith found the collection thematically similar to Bolaño's novels and "not unexpectedly of uneven quality, especially when it comes to the more youthful efforts."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Smith |first1=J. P. |title="The Unknown University": Bolaño finds poetry under the volcano |url=https://www.salon.com/2013/07/11/ghosts_and_demons_and_killers_and_whores_the_underworld_in_roberto_bolanos_unknown_university_partner/ |access-date=18 August 2024 |work=Salon |date=12 July 2013 |language=en}}</ref>
In ''World Literature Today'', Andrew Martino called it "some of Bolaño’s earliest and grittiest writing. The book is classified as poems, but this may be misleading, as I’m not sure we should really read these as poems at all. Of course, there are poems here, and more than a fair share of prose poems. Most of the work here is unpolished and raw, and thrilling.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Martino |first1=Andrew |title=The Unknown University by Roberto Bolaño |url=https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2013/november/unknown-university-roberto-bolano |website=World Literature Today |access-date=18 August 2024 |language=en}}</ref>
Jonathan Beck Monroe, in his book ''Framing Roberto Bolaño: Poetry, Fiction, Literary History, Politics'', wrote that ''The Unknown University'' "represents at least the belated possibility, previously unrealized during his lifetime, that Bolaño, an author best known as a novelist, may at last garner some greater measure of recognition as a poet, not only as a writer fully invested in poetry who wrote autobiographically inflected novels in which so many of the protagonists, as well other characters, are poets and/or poet-critics, and in which poetry is central, but also as an author who himself wrote poetry."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Monroe |first1=Jonathan Beck |title=Framing Roberto Bolaño: Poetry, Fiction, Literary History, Politics |date=3 October 2019 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-1-108-49825-8 |page=66 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nG-rDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66 |access-date=18 August 2024 |language=en}}</ref>
''The Unknown University'' was shortlisted for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=10712 |title=2014 Best Translated Book Awards: Poetry Finalists |publisher=Three Percent |author=Chad W. Post |date=14 April 2014 |access-date=16 April 2014}}</ref>
==References== {{reflist|2}}
==External links== * [https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-unknown-university/ New Directions' page for the book] * [https://archive.org/details/unknownuniversit0000bola ''The Unknown University''] at the Internet Archive * {{Worldcat|oclc=812781269|name=''The Unknown University''}}
{{Works by Roberto Bolaño}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Unknown University}} Category:Works by Roberto Bolaño Category:Editorial Anagrama books Category:New Directions Publishing books Category:2007 poetry books Category:Chilean poetry collections Category:Spanish-language books