Texas-Chile Student Leaders Exchange Program

The fifteen UT students and their faculty sponsor, on their arrival at the airport in Santiago, Chile, in July 1965. Left to right are: Ricardo Romo; Paul Quinton; Richard Cohen; Merry Nell Van Fleet; Dave; Fran Spivy; Mike Hennen; Kaye Northcott; Tommy Stephens; Sally Green; Robert Denham; Marian Pendleton; Ann Oakes; Professor Donald Larson; Cliff Drummond; and Tony Pate.

In 2001, the year of the photograph of Dave with Nicanor Parra, he was invited to present a paper on the antipoet at the homage paid to him at the University of Chile. Dave's paper, entitled "Un tejano descubre la antipoesía de Parra y la trata de traducir" ("A Texan Discovers Parra's Antipoetry and Tries to Translate It"), would be published in the proceedings from the event and reprinted in Dave's collection of his writings on Chilean poetry, Hallazgo y traducción de poesía chilena (2019).

María was chosen by her classmates to give the farewell address at her high school graduation. She scored high enough on the university entrance exam to qualify for any field. Interested at first in going to law school, she decided instead to attend library school. She was always an avid reader, and wrote beautifully in both Spanish and English.

Dave's work at the Binational Institute, or Instituto Chileno-norteamericano, involved teaching classes in English conversation and American literature, and also his starting and editing a literary magazine. To supplement his minimal salary at the Institute, he taught two classes at the Catholic University, an American literature survey course and a course in essay writing. As would become his practice in producing student literary magazines, he used tide as a teaching tool. His students wrote some of the material included in tide, along with short stories, articles, and poems by Chilean and U.S. authors. Brother Carazo, a student at the Católica, designed the cover. Contributors to the second issue of the magazine included Dave's longtime friend Morton Stine, who sent an essay on Melville's humor; Luis Domínguez, who contributed a short story; and Carlos Cortínez, a friend-to-be, who was represented by a poem in English translation. The first issue of tide included a student's translation of a poem by Enrique Lihn that Dave had discovered in a local poetry magazine entitled Orfeo. Dave himself would subsequently translate a collection of poems by Lihn under the title of Figures of Speech.

Carlos Cortínez, a Chilean poet working in the administration of the Universidad Austral in the southern city of Valdivia, came to the Institute with an offer for Dave from the university: it would pay for him to come to Valdivia and give two talks on U.S. poetry. There Dave would be lodged in the home of Carlos and his family, and would meet the poetry group called Trilce, whose members included Carlos and Omar Lara.  After Carlos had come to the States to study for the Ph.D. at the University of Iowa and stayed on to teach at several U.S. universities, he involved Dave in a number of translation projects. Meeting Carlos and his family in Valdivia would have a long-lasting impact on Dave's career as a writer and translator, and also as a reader. For details, see Dave's Harbingers of Books to Come.