DE ATRASALANTE EN SU PORFIA

by Juan Gelman

Adelante en la aventura de ser, de averiguarse al paso de los dias, Juan Gelman desciende a los antros mas hondos de la lengua. Como Quevedo y Vallejo, padre y abuelo mineros, formula de nuevo la misma que soy, quien soy? Duda esencial y fundadora que indaga por aquello que nadie ha de frasear sin acudir al balbuceo. Hamlet porteno, Gelman asume una perplejidad tanguera al enfrentar las cachetadas de la muerte y la vida. A la primera, de plano la releva de su oficio discreto de putilla para endilgarle un titulo mas hijaeputa. A la otra le pinta una gambeta y la deja plantada con sus viejas ofrendas en la mano. Como sea, una y otra conviven aqui en tension, se completan a fuerza de La vida y la no vida tan/ juntas en un pedazo de muerte/ no tienen peso ni medida ni precio. En estos poemas el desencanto y la desdicha son apenas escalas en el largo camino hacia el hallazgo de lo que nunca fue. Asi restaura el poeta su extenso inventario de utopias; asi tambien les restituye su dimension de cosas por cumplirse. Nada es perdida en el diario afanarse por la dicha, en el juego infinito de el amor, cada dia, vuelve a echar mano del gesto y la palabra para lamer las heridas de lo posible. Lo que esta voz informa desde hace mas de cincuenta anos se afina y se depura en estas lineas, abiertas como nunca a ciertos suenos que no se pueden comer, ciertos fantasmas que vuelven a la lengua con un sollozo mudo"".

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Juan Gelman is one of the most read and influential poets in the Spanish language. He has published more than twenty books of poetry since 1956 and has been translated into fourteen languages. A political activist and critical journalist since his youth, Gelman has not only been a literary paradigm but also a moral one, within and outside of Argentina. Among his most recent awards are the National Poetry Prize (Argentina, 1997), the Juan Rulfo Prize in Latin American and Caribbean Literature (Mexico, 2000), the Pablo Neruda Prize (Chile, 2005), the Queen Sofia Prize in Ibero-American Poetry (Spain, 2005), and the Cervantes Prize (the most important award given to a Hispanic writer, Spain, 2007).

Long biographical note

Juan Gelman is the most significant, contemporary Argentine intellectual figure and one of the most read and influential poets in the Spanish language. Son of a family of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, he grew up like any other porteño, among soccer and tango, in the populous neighborhood of Villa Crespo. At 11, he published his first poem in the magazine Rojo y negro, and in the 1950s formed part of the group of rebel writers, El Pan Duro. He was discovered by Raúl González Túñón, among the most relevant voices of the southern country’s poetic avant-garde, who saw in the young man’s verses “a rich and vivacious lyricism and a principally social content […] that does not elude the richness of fantasy.”

Gelman has published, from his initial Violín y otras cuestiones (1956) to his most recent Mundar (2008), more than twenty books of poetry. These works, as Mario Benedetti asserted early on, constitute “the most coherent, and also the most daring, participatory repertoire (in spite of its inevitable wells of solitude), and ultimately the one most suited to its environment, that Argentine poetry has today”, and Hispanic poetry in general, as the profusion of re-editions of his books and numerous anthologies proves. Gelman’s poetry has achieved international recognition, with translations into fourteen languages, including English. Among his awards are the National Poetry Prize (Argentina, 1997), the Juan Rulfo Prize in Latin American and Caribbean Literature (Mexico, 2000), the Pablo Neruda Prize (Chile, 2005), the Queen Sofia Prize in Ibero-American Poetry (Spain, 2005), and the Cervantes Prize (Spain, 2007), the most important award in Hispanic Letters. No one should be surprised to see him the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature one day.

It would be relevant to note that Juan Gelman has not only been a literary paradigm but also a moral one, within and outside of Argentina. A political activist and critical journalist since his youth, he was forced into an exile of thirteen years because of the military dictatorship that ravaged his country from 1976 to 1983, and the weak governments that followed. In 1976 the ultra-right kidnapped his children, Nora Eva, 19, and Marcelo Ariel, 20, along with his son’s wife, María Claudia Iruretagoyena, 19, who was 7 months pregnant. Nora Eva would later return, unlike his son and daughter-in-law, who were killed; their child born in a concentration camp. The vehement search for the truth about the fate of these family members, which culminated in finding his granddaughter in Uruguay in 2000, has made the poet a symbol of the struggle for respect for human rights.

Like other poets from his time and space, Juan Gelman creates his work starting from a critique of the so-called post-avante-garde poetry, which surges in the Hispanic world in the 1940s and breaks with the powerful avante-garde. He is a poet who denies the labors of the Mexican Octavio Paz, the Cuban José Lezama Lima, the Argentine Alberto Girri, among others, to reaffirm it in his own way. It is a poetry that goes against the current, transgresses the established social and cultural order, challenges the individualism intrinsic to modernity and the neo-colonial condition. A poetry that renounc