Marginalia Nº 2 - November 2001


Marginalia Nº 2 - November 2001

First Interprovincial Intercollegiate Poetry Contest Ibeoamerican Academy of Poetry, Cuenca Chapter

Interview


Marginalia Nº 2 - November 2001

Rubén Astudillo y Astudillo (El Valle, Azuay, 1938) is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting literary figures in Ecuador today.
In his capacity as a diplomat he has resided in Israel, Cyprus, North Vietnam, Venezuela, and, lately, in China, a nation from which he has just returned to stay, for now, in his country.
Existential poet, his work is resolved between tenderness and rebellion, the permanent search for solidarity as the only way out of the tragic condition of the human being. The main themes of his poetry are God, love and death.

Here is a brief interview that he gave us upon his arrival from Asia:

The changes that have taken place lately, in this pragmatic and globalized world, how have they influenced poetry?
Like any other human activity, poetry has to be affected by the changes that occur in society. This is nothing new. This has been the case throughout history. For this reason, today it is not possible to write as in the Middle Ages. Poets have to open up their creative spaces to the new promptings of history.

Does it make sense to talk about poetry today?
In the contemporary world, full of promises and threats, poetry is an instrument of reflection and even of knowledge about the real meaning of existence. A way, on the other hand, to complement and defend the daily miracle of life.

How should today's poetry be understood?
For me, personally, poetry is the possibility of witnessing time, events and beings, through the word.

Is poetry condemned to its exclusivist and elitist condition?
In all societies - and at all times - poetry has been one of the "auroral forms" of human expression conceived as an artistic fact. It should not be forgotten that first it was the poets who were in charge of exalting or conjuring beauty. Anyway, I think that as an axiological fact, poetry will always be elitist.

A few words about late Chinese poetry ...
Chinese poetry, one of the oldest and most splendid on the planet, has moved within an aesthetic world that is quite closed for our mentality. There are poets like Li Bao, of universal value, who are almost unknown among us. Chinese lyric has become more accessible to the Western world as a result of the emergence of contemporary poets like Ai Qin.

New works of yours about to appear ...?
Two books of poetry: SOLO PARA LOBOS and THE RETURN TO THE VALLEY OF THE GOLDEN HILLS. In addition, a study on literature and society in Latin America, and another on Ecuadorian literature.

ELEGY AND FULGOR OF GOODBYEES
And now
I start to say goodbye to
the thing. Me
heart understands that
when I'm from
back, neither he nor
they must be the same
which
in this long moment of
our passage through
tiempo
that was loaned to us.

What will be by then of
this landscape in whose greens
blue waves my soul has contemplated
like who looks at
a mirror, while my heart
sounded like an echo of
the steps of
air in
amidst the rocks and
trees.

Simultaneous mirror and echo than ever
we can repeat ourselves, my soul
says goodbye and grateful
celebrates them. And sings.
 

Cuenca poetry


THE SHIPS OF THE WIND
In the ships of the wind
I send you green scarves
with eucalyptus scent

------------

In the garden
in mysterious dance
winged shadows get drunk
with cherry perfume

------------

About tanks and rifles
flowers have grown.
In war cemetery
a garden has sprung up

------------

A bird
has hung his nest
from the shadow
of a balcony

------------

Put his hand
in the pocket
and he found
a nest of birds

------------

With sandals
of Dreams
I walk
the ways of the life

Magaly Vanegas Covena

Universal poetry


THE SEA BURNS
Oh be a fifteen year old captain
old sea lion unfolded sails
the sirens of the harbors and the soot and silence in the
            barges
the smoking pipes of the shipowners painted
            oil
the strikes of the crane loaders stopped before the
            zinc sky
the nightly gunfights in the dock flashes a
            body in the waters with a dull boom
the smoke in the cafeterias
Dick tracy foggy glasses gypsy music
The tales of octopuses, snakes, and whales
Of buried gold and filibusters
A figurehead the old god Neptune
A lady in the Antilles laughs and waves her fan of na-
            car under the coconut trees.

Guest poet


At the beginning of 1933, María Ramona Cordero y León, Mary Corylé, from Cuenca published CANTA LA VIDA, a book before which "the pacato poets, the pacato critics closed their eyes: they saw the grape leaves fall" (Antonio Lloret). And this aureole of rebellion and contempt will accompany her throughout her life. She was never part of any literary group, "well," she said, "I judge the gregariousness of small animals."

María Ramona is situated - along with her contemporary, the immense Aurora Estrada, and Dolores Veintimilla, the precursor of Romanticism in Ecuador - among the most controversial writers in the country.

She was National Director of the Historical Archive, and founded the Municipal Library of Cuenca. But his greatest merit lies in having polished Ecuadorian letters, and this, thanks to his poetry of sensuality, whose maximum reference is love, in a kind of paneroticism (following, probably, the splendid work of Delmira Agustini) . Her best poems are precisely the love ones, in which she reaches great intensity and beauty.

The same poetry is for our author "the song of love, the exultation of life."
If Aurora is remembered, first of all, for her beautiful poem It's a sweet and lost language, and for Dolores, for her immortal Complaints, by Mary Corylé she always repeats herself -he, in his time, very scandalous- Bésame, with a fragment of which we close this note:

Reviews


  
At the beginning of 1933, María Ramona Cordero y León, Mary Corylé, from Cuenca published CANTA LA VIDA, a book before which "the pacato poets, the pacato critics closed their eyes: they saw the grape leaves fall" (Antonio Lloret). And this aureole of rebellion and contempt will accompany her throughout her life. She was never part of any literary group, "well," she said, "I judge the gregariousness of small animals."

María Ramona is situated - along with her contemporary, the immense Aurora Estrada, and Dolores Veintimilla, the precursor of Romanticism in Ecuador - among the most controversial writers in the country.

She was National Director of the Historical Archive, and founded the Municipal Library of Cuenca. But his greatest merit lies in having polished Ecuadorian letters, and this, thanks to his poetry of sensuality, whose maximum reference is love, in a kind of paneroticism (following, probably, the splendid work of Delmira Agustini) . Her best poems are precisely the love ones, in which she reaches great intensity and beauty.

The same poetry is for our author "the song of love, the exultation of life."
If Aurora is remembered, first of all, for her beautiful poem It's a sweet and lost language, and for Dolores, for her immortal Complaints, by Mary Corylé she always repeats herself -he, in his time, very scandalous- Bésame, with a fragment of which we close this note:

KISS ME
Kiss Me in the mouth,
bloody temptation
that in ivory
color of my complexion
your crazy look;
kiss her, it is yours.

Take and imprison
my lips hold them
long, long time
inside your mouth
and stay in mine
the imprecise footprint
of your eternal kiss.

Drown my laughter
suffocate my breath
with your crazy happiness:
kiss Me in the mouth.

  
Kiss me on the breasts:
hidden ermine
after charity
slight of dress:
haunting duo
of twin roses;
sleeping pigeons
in the same nest;
of life essence
fill pomas.
My breasts ... my breasts ...
whiteness on
with rose buds.
My breasts ...
undulating, full:
kiss me on the breasts

Rodrigo Pesántez Rodas Guayaquil, University of Guayaquil, Front of Hispanist Affirmation of Mexico 2001
Rodrigo Pesántez Rodas Guayaquil, University of Guayaquil, Front of Hispanist Affirmation of Mexico 2001

Short and beautiful book. Thirty-two short poems that remind us of what poetry really is: a word that moves and enchants.
Pesántez Rodas has always been distinguished by his visceral writing, haughty, uncompromising, harsh in his criticism of hypocritical society and poorly administered powers. But this sardonic poetry has also managed to give way to tenderness and nostalgia, reaching even - in moments of painful evocation - to the elegy, of deep pathos and somber beauty.
In LOS SILENCIOS DEL BOSQUE, the author basically takes up the second way, and develops it fully, on the basis of beautiful, daring and suggestive images.
So, verses like these emerge:

"She enters my eyes / slowly / and alone in the water / she undresses the aroma of her breasts"

"Goodbye bunches of a winged demon, / naked sore that I offered to sin /
and the surrealities of the flesh "

"Your memory at the door of oblivion / and this swarm of meaningless dreams / they still bare my flesh"

Daily, meditative, philosophical writing; brilliant metaphors, successful paronomasias, sustained rhythm, precise and precious finishes. All this, the ripe fruit of love and technique; in short, of the wisdom that the continued exercise of life and poetry gives.

Sara Vanegas Covena

Sara Vanégas Coveña Cuenca, University of Azuay, House of Ecuadorian Culture, Cuenca, 2001
Sara Vanégas Coveña Cuenca, University of Azuay, House of Ecuadorian Culture, Cuenca, 2001

Splendid anthology of the Spanish poets of the 70s
Sara Vanégas, with her fine literary sensitivity and her experienced critical sense, points out the main characteristics of the five selected and anthologized poets, who are among the most representative and who she considers will remain in our memory: Pere Gimferrer, Leopoldo María Panero, José María Álvarez, Luis Alberto de Cuenca and José-Miguel Ullán.
They are concerned with the act of writing and immerse themselves fully in experimentation, which links in some way with the avant-garde movements of the beginning of the century, even reaching the rediscovery of visual poetry, metapoetry and so-called culturalism. In almost all of them, the verses reflect his conception of the autonomy of art and poetry, the symbolic vision of the poem, the influence on the literary creation of cinema and advertising; in short, the incorporation of new myths.
The reader is sharing aesthetic experiences and knowledge. It is, without a doubt, one of the great achievements of this book, the emotion and human intensity, the fine sensitivity of literary criticism, manifested in its perceptions and in its reading of such important poets of XNUMXth century Spanish poetry. .

Carlos Perez Agusti.

SENTRY OF THE ASHES
SENTRY OF THE ASHES

Magaly Vanégas Coveña Cuenca, National Union of Educators, Nucleus of Azuay, 2001

CENTINELA DE LAS ASESAS reflects the feeling of a writer with a refined style and a clean soul, a master at carving beautiful and shocking images, penetrating into areas where angels and stars coexist.
Poetry that reaches the greatness of elementary things, such as the nest, the flight of seagulls, the fall of the leaves in the autumn or the light of the lanterns that prevents the complete hegemony of the night.
Magaly's feeling has a bottom of fatalism, because disappointment beats there. A leaf is felt in the wind. Follow the wave of the swan song.
The synthesis, the innovative metaphor are key elements of this painful, but always vital poetry (which also includes short and highly suggestive prose texts)
Here are some examples of this poetry: "The lanterns: / sleepy eyes / of the night //";

"Who / in a cold night / knocks at my door? / The dry / autumn leaves".

EROTIC POETRY OF WOMEN. ECUADOR ANTHOLOGY
EROTIC POETRY OF WOMEN. ECUADOR ANTHOLOGY

Several authors
Mayor Books, Central University of Ecuador,
Quito, 2001.

Nineteen authors make up this work - a pleasant journey through the love poetry written by women in Ecuador in the second half of the XNUMXth century.
It begins with Ileana Espinel (1931-2001), and, going through well-known names such as Violeta Luna, Sonia Manzano, Catalina Sojos, Maritza Cino, it ends with Marialuz Albuja (1972).
The work, although it leaves out some important author, nevertheless constitutes an interesting compilation of texts selected by the writers themselves, where we find beautiful, subtle, suggestive poetry, along with raw, direct, totally denotative verses, written with daring and little modesty; all this, in a society that is still quite lazy like the Ecuadorian one.
The literary quality is guaranteed, despite certain "dips" in some texts.
Here, two samples from the anthology:

"Your voice is already one with the hoarse voices of the ocean // far far away what was your agony and your pleasure. you / you go. firm and voluptuous and light. and to another. and to yourself / and only desire and water / divine shadow: / I already forget "

"Let the others / also observe me / kiss my salty breasts / feel my copper buttocks / entangle their fingers in the water lilies of the pubis / piously pass their tongues through my navel"

Sara Vanegas Covena

Credits


Year 1, Number 2
November 2001
Brazil 3-101, Cuenca
Fax: 818 840

Email: svanegas@uazuay.edu.ec

Director:
Sara Vanegas Covena

Collaborating in this issue:
Rubén Astudillo and Astudillo, Magaly Vanégas, César Molina, Inés Márquez Moreno, Alberto Ordóñez Ortiz, Carlos Pérez Agusti, Franklin Barriga López.

Layout:
Katherine Ortiz Vidal

The management is not responsible for the opinions contained in the signed articles. Partial or total reproduction is allowed, if the source is cited.

Correspondence and collaborations:

box: 01-01-1178,
Ecuador basin
Email: svanegas@uazuay.edu.ec