By Antonio Florido Lozano
Conference at the Bolivian Catholic University "San Pablo"
Tarija (Bolivia)
October 2016
Flaubert spoke of poetry as something useless and out of fashion. However, for the society in which we have had to live, the poetic fact is necessary, almost obligatory, as a form, as an envelope of an expressive capacity to be, adapted to the breath of sadness and meekness that almost everyone has. it drowns us. It is a non-knowledge far from simple ignorance, which longingly seeks the perception of the distant element in order to compensate in this way the confusion between concept and concept, saving, filling the gaps, ensuring that the word becomes itself, itself. alone, in the communicative immediacy. The poetic becomes, thus, an expected step from the individual to the universal, the tenuous thread that sews together the feelings and way of understanding the world of millions of people.
In Spain it is not read. The annual statistics cling to the successive and unstoppable decline. Books, in general, and poetry books in particular, are displayed in large stores as simple consumer goods, fruits of the most soulless and colorful marketing. The careful editions that the large companies in the sector are in charge of designing are elegant. But the content of these products lately suffers from a lack of rigour, effort, emotion, a pulsation of life in their pages...
However, as in any time of crisis - in this cultural case -, you can always find jobs that are worth it. Let's talk about them and something about their very young authors.
Ana Muela Sopeña, born in Bilbao in 1961, although she began writing poetry in 1979, began in 2006 when she embraced poetry as something totally necessary. She says: “I am all those faces of history / united in my glass box / in my ancient memory, since genesis.”
The fact of living in a democracy is decisive for the constructive future of work. Authors who know, without censorship or bias, everything that is published in the world. They constitute personal voices, beyond the so-called new ones. That SELF, gigantic, herculean, sounds thunderous, like a cosmic element, almost Lovecraftian, trying to anchor itself to the being, to one's own self, managing to subjectify what is felt, the daily nausea, the existential pain, the anguish due to unexpected absences. In another passage drawn in the air, perhaps following Cocteau, he declares: “Time passed without me knowing it. / Minutes, hours, days passed, / months and years, / decades, centuries, millennia, / eras, the year of the Pleiades... / and I was still there looking at Tara, / I had turned into a star / and the heart of the world whispered / love in every sea and in every ocean, / love in the mountains and in the rivers, / love in the storms and in the rain.
Ana María Espinosa, from Jerez, was born in 1962. Although she works in the real estate sector, she states that she likes more to “build with bricks of words.” She is convinced that you can make poetry out of anything and that it sometimes takes you down unknown paths. as an anticipation of what was perceived, of what will later reach us, penetrating our lives, turning strange experiences into flesh and blood, into thoughts, into memories. In 2007 she published her first book “Pintando Verses”. She usually edits her work in the magazines Litoral, Animalia and El vino. She has been awarded numerous times.
As an example, let's read his short poem titled Poetics: “The word is rest / waste / detached from the skin/orphanhood of the voice. / Mouth crumbling / before the light that is extinguished / in your eyes.”
Luna Miguel was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1990. A poet who normally uses computer media to express the revolution within, drawing unpredictable, necessary and fair images and contours. We are faced with a concise and precise author, expressing her concerns between the elliptical and the brief. She describes it as inspiring and fresh, with a subtlety that flows freely between words. In Diary of a Medical Leave, we can read: “I speak the language of cats. Not the one that is meowed but the one that is caressed. I speak the language of fetuses, my fingers against the button protruding from this navel that once healed 25 years ago leaving a star-shaped mark. I speak the language of fetuses, yes, of those that are not there because the skin covers them. I press and stroke like a kitten and my son's leg responds to the impulse. I speak the language of cats, the language of fetuses, the language of the dead: I address Mom with my hands, I remind her that two years ago we were dying and we were caring. Did you like porridge, mom? Did you like morphine? I talk alone and I talk to them: the cats, the fetus, the mother who doesn't. I tell Mom that I'm a mother now, you know? That word now means something else, you know? I speak, so that they may speak among themselves. In bed the flower pyjamas, the expectant cat, the kick and the caress, mom's favourite song. I speak the language of crazy people, the feline language, the amniotic language, the language of the mommy who doesn't. It is a language that is learned slowly, that is practised in dreams, that in reality only serves to say "yes", "how sweet", "hello" and "goodbye".
Among the latest poets, I find two voices that I do not want to forget: Luis Miguel Madrid and José Javier Souto.
Luis Miguel Madrid was born so long ago in the capital of Spain, and he dedicates his time to smiling maliciously, to engendering irony, and sarcasm, to laughing at life when it becomes unhealthy and absurd. Well known in the literary world of Spain and this part of here, he is the director of the Culture of “Babab” Magazine.
Specialist, as he himself states, in Latin American Literature and Centripetal Relativism. He is a poet, short story writer, literary critic, lyricist and joker.
In his work, The Sacrifice of Winning, Luis Miguel paints verses full of humour and philosophy. In the words of Jonás Trueba, “…we witness in its pages beautiful greguerías, deforming mirrors and also, of course, many moments of beauty.”
Losing is growing, it is laughing at oneself, at the circumstance, at the excess with which we sometimes drink the drinks of life; To lose or fail is to license laughter in front of the other, marking the pregnancy of what is, of the fine lines that cross our faces; It is, in short, learning to mock our face, deepening and replicating the cosmic indifference of the universe, recognizing, without falling apart, the futility and unnecessary presence of that strange thing to which we give the name LIFE.
In some poem, he says:
“There are those who sacrifice food / to obtain food / who have to be silent so that they can be heard…”
I will read one of his inspirations in full below, as a paradigmatic example of his way of writing and as an epitome to these brief references. It is titled MR. NOBODY.
“He tried to be convincing by showing his simplicity / his blandness or the absence of value. / She reliably demonstrated her clumsiness, her qualities as an insignificant / perfectly expendable character. / She finally achieved it, after ten years of effort and dedication. / Now he can boast of being nothing / or even, nobody.”
At the age of 24 he was buried inside a mine. Later came the absences, the forgetfulness, those voids without return that not everyone knows about. He learned to distance himself from words perhaps to become aware of the need he had for them. He began to write, to feel on the white pages, to recognize defeat disguised as beauty, seed, hopes...
José Javier Souto Fernández, vintage of '61, was born in the Turón valley, in Mieres del Camino. A person of versified treatment, go among the vates of this new batch of eloquent voices. He speaks with his verses about life, death, love, the same land that one day buried him without asking permission.
He writes in Spanish and in Bable, thus contributing more beauty and musicality to his compositions.
From the collection of poems Eternal Shadows Amain in Your Lap we choose these verses: “When the dream is infinite; / when the doors close / and life escapes through the cracks; / when the dust on the furniture becomes old / hiding the shine of beauty; / when the moisture in the eyes / is hidden behind false smiles; / when the scared mirror / no longer reflects your image; / then, I will appear like the fog, / your heart will be mine / and we will depart with the gentle song / of the sea towards another sky.”
From Nothing Remains, a poem from his recently published book Of Life, of Death, of Love, we extract only a few verses with which José Javier composes a beautiful song: “...The words are a blue river without birth, / a deceased story that didn't start. / Behind the gloom there is a clock, looking at me, / all the hours that spent with me / will die like a bohemian without a bottle, / without bottom, without liquor, without soul..."
The current narrative experiences the harassment of the immediate, of the superfluous, of a strange and dark sense of success. Today's narrator travels quickly through this vertiginous decline of what is called digital, where the publishers, critics and agencies themselves seek and search for authentic values, disdaining and forgetting, perhaps, that this authenticity writes in the lee of fashions, dealing with the problems and eternal concerns, those of the human being immersed in a society that flies like crazy towards nowhere, embarrassed, dazed, without looking back at that other person who passed him by, fleeting, absorbed, blind.
The attempt to publish under decent conditions, to find a wide and sincere distribution, marketing regardless of potential profits, always specifying balances, anticipating, capitalizing returns. The only way that these beginning writers find is to win some so-called big literary competition (politicized, monetarist, extremely commercial), to gain the trust and risk of some prestigious publisher... Winning always consists of that, of winning, in demonstrating its worth to the reader who does not read, to the simple buyer of shelf decorations, with green spines, encyclopedic, eye-catching.
Although they increasingly make reading easier with the current electronic readers of digital books, which are cheap and available to almost everyone, reading requires an effort, a will, a knowledge that one possesses the work, that one can touch, smell, place and displace at will. A book, a good novel, a work that is parked in the memory of what has been read, remains beyond time, transcending, forming fabric and being, expanding that limit that is spoken of, the term that no one has seen, the suspected and sensed deterioration of the thinking soul.
Notwithstanding the above, new voices emerge that deserve the necessary opportunity to be discovered. I will briefly talk about some of them.
Matías Candeira, a storyteller with many stories, a teacher of creative writing workshops and a screenwriter, was born in Madrid in 1984. He is interested, he says, in literature that produces errors, which is an error in itself. That is to say, a possible error of form, since, according to his own testimony, he detests round and neat texts where nothing is left over or missing; an ideological error, since it violates their sense of the world; an error about the real, since it places it in the fantastic, in the necessarily strange.
After the publication of his first set of stories, The Solitude of the Ventriloquists (2009), its inclusion in several of the best anthologies of the genre and his stories having received many awards, his second work, Before the Giraffes ( 2011), confirmed expectations. They say that he is a very technically gifted realist who has also understood that not all things can be explained from a balanced perspective.
Pablo Martín Sánchez, el egosurfing como telón de fondo, nació en Reus en 1977. Tras tocar todos los palos del sector editorial y trabajar de corrector, lector, traductor y librero, en el 2011 se lanzó a reunir sus relatos en Fricciones.
Su novela El anarquista que se llamaba como yo, publicada por Acantilado en el 2012, fue elegida como mejor ópera prima del año, lo que supuso todo un estímulo para el autor. Pablo Martín afirma: “Si la distancia más corta entre dos puntos, cuando se interpone un obstáculo, es la línea curva, escribir es trazar esa parábola, esa perífrasis que nos lleve hasta el lector pasando por el texto. O dicho de otra forma, escribir es ponerse obstáculos que hagan fascinante la tarea del leer”.-
Hablar de Sara Mesa es hacerlo de los personajes poco heroicos. Nacida en Madrid en 1976, ha publicado dos libros de relatos, La sobriedad de los galápagos en el 2008 y No es fácil ser verde en el 2009, además de las novelas El trepanador de cerebros (2010), Un incendio invisible (2011) y Cuatro por cuatro (2013). Sara afirma de su manera de escribir: “Me atraen los narradores testigos, los enfoques parciales, las estructuras anómalas y esos personajes con vidas poco heroicas pero que, puestos bajo la lupa, resultan extremadamente sugestivos”.
Hablamos ahora de otro madrileño nacido en 1979, esta vez de Sergio del Molino. En su novela La hora violeta, editada en el 2013, narra la enfermedad y muerte de su hijo Pablo. Dicen de esta novela que afronta un tema que durante el siglo XX y lo que llevamos del XXI se ha ido convirtiendo en tabú, el de la muerte. Su primer trabajo novelado fue No habrá más enemigo, del año 2012. Habla Sergio del Molino: “Uno escribe primero y luego teoriza sobre lo escrito, encajando su credo estético en su obra, y viceversa, asumiendo que ambos discursos casi siempre van a contradecirse”. Y añade: “Creo que empiezo a perseguir un ideal muy claro que llamaría literatura de dormitorio. Reivindico la inutilidad de la literatura. Su inutilidad social. El único ámbito de influencia de la novela es la mesilla de noche del lector. Por tanto, aspiro a una literatura cada vez más íntima e inútil”.
We end this journey with another promising name, Gonzalo Torné, Barcelona, 1976. After flirting with translation and scripts, Torné has definitively turned to the novel. He published Lo inhospito in 2007 and Hilos de sangre three years later. They perhaps criticize his way of writing for excessive ambition accompanied by sometimes dazzling prose, full of sharp insights and unexpected angles of vision. Gonzalo recognizes that “…the arts were born to be eternal, ahistorical, timeless, not to be the memory of a photographic time, but the memory of what never happened, of the enduring and of the original…”.
I end this talk (as Rulfo would say) by highlighting the importance of creativity, both of poetry, in its synthesizing and stabbing desire, and of the novel, expressed and understood in all its variants and manifestations. Both tools to perceive and explain the inexplicable, the ununderstandable, that part of reality that we are not even able to glimpse. This was achieved by the broad and loose belonging of what was expressed to the common men and women who decided to dedicate some time of their lives to hearing the voices of those who died or of those who, although alive, gave up from misery and ruin . that surrounds them, aspiring to stir, to transform, to improve this horizon that never allows itself to be apprehended. The curve of ignorance straightened by the volitional nature of the words, by those graphed sounds, in the style, as previously noted, of Cocteau.
(As a representative of a small part of Spanish literature, along with my fellow artists, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to talk about what all of us here are passionate about: literature.
Finally, thanks to the audience, to all my literary colleagues who have come here from different and distant countries and to the Engineer Rene Aguilera Fierro, without whose mediation and support this one who speaks to you would not have been able to enjoy your company) .
