The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño must be our most acclaimed translated author since W.G. Sebald. I think he deserves it. But unlike the late German, whose quietly devastating books have a restrained, finished quality, Bolaño reads like literary gunpowder, and his reputation has felt combustible, especially since the translation of “The Savage Detectives,” and its massive reception, last year.

The action in Bolaño’s novels revolves around obscure poets and their cliques — action that would be tedious if it did not smell faintly of sulfur. Violence is at the door of the poetry workshop: Characters die and are kidnapped; feuds break out between the “visceral realists” and other groups; the army invades the university, and some poets just disappear.

Bolaño (1953–2003) himself spent eight days in Pinochet’s prisons, before returning to his adopted home of Mexico City, where he lived as a dropout poet who had to steal books in order to read them. He once remarked that, after his time in prison, he dedicated his life to writing “with my aura of a war veteran.” His novels have the same almost mock-heroic sense of the poetry’s importance that is yet real — the Mexican army really did invade the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in 1968, and hundreds of students were massacred. Yet Bolaño’s poets, like excitable young gangsters, always make too much of their dangers. But the proximity of evil ennobles their most trivial business, and turns the best of them into heroes.

What makes this exciting to American readers — beyond the idea that you might make dangerous friends in a poetry workshop — has been hard to state. Bolaño’s magic can be ticklishly black, as in “By Night in Chile,” in which a dying priest recalls his life’s slow, sickly-sweet corruption; or in “Distant Star,” a tale of sexual murder and fascist sky-writing. Of course, dark literature is nothing new — but what makes Bolaño exciting is his deft touch with grandiloquence, his ability to write at his best when other writers might feel creeped out or gauche. He seems comfortable with categories of good and evil — as few great writers have been, for a long, long time.

“Nazi Literature in the Americas” (New Directions, 224 pages, $23.95) takes this to an extreme. Originally published in 1996, it is actually Bolaño’s earliest novel translated into English so far, and it lays bare the mechanics of his creativity, showing how the idea of Nazism could credibly inspire someone like Bolaño.

Put briefly, “Nazi Literature” is a fictional encyclopedia of far right-wing authors who, to varying degrees, did or would have supported Hitler’s party. It’s his most Borgesian work, but unlike his literary ancestor, Bolaño cares more for the real world than for the library. His is not the account of a concerted movement or school, but the taxonomy of a wide-ranging sensibility. All of the writers are fictitious, but they do not inhabit an alternate universe; instead, they and their work are, case by case, just plausible.

Bolaño has imagined Boca Junior soccer thugs whose fanzines and mock-allegorical victory poems sell out hundreds of mimeographed copies; he has imagined bad painters who make alliances with bored widows, and end up shopping for antiques mentioned in Edgar Allen Poe’s “Philosophy of Furniture”; he has even imagined an American youth who as a child overheard Black Mountain poet Charles Olson and his father discussing “Projective Verse,” took it too seriously, and started a cult.

The voluminousness of this creativity would be one thing, but Bolaño is also — simultaneously — overachieving tonally. He constantly has to come up with titles for fictional books, and each title has to sound like it distinctly belongs to its one author. Sometimes this is fun — and Bolaño is clearly enjoying himself — as when “a Mexican poet inclined to mysticism and tormented phraseology” publishes her first collection, “A Voice You Withered.” But “Nazi Literature” would grow tiring if its stories did not resonate with wider human problems: futility, obscurity, and fatal disorientation. Even had they existed, most of these writers would be forgotten, and for very good reason. But Bolaño makes us care about a few of them, and introduces a larger compass: that of the Americas, “ever fecund in enterprises verging on insanity, illegality and idiocy.”

This kind of self-confident despair always makes Bolaño loquacious, and in his later work he uses the likes of Nazism to set the pitch for his own, brave voice. Having read “Nazi Literature,” it is also possible to see how the dense networks of young poets in, say, “The Savage Detectives” repeat Mr. Bolaño’s initial grand act of creative overdrive. And how would he have initially achieved it, isolating and embellishing a literature that really does not exist, except by founding it on a taboo? After “Nazi Literature,” the idea of verboten doom worked as a kind of generative antimatter, setting off explosions in Bolaño’s world and delineating it, just enough, from reality.

blytal@nysun.com