Αnthology – Preface: Manuela Palacios
Translation: Sofia Karatza, Teresa Pardo
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Tamara Andrés, Jesús Castro Yáñez, Gonzalo Hermo, Alba Cid, Francisco Cortegoso, Antón Blanco, Arancha Nogueira, Rosalía Fernández Rial, Lara Dopazo Ruibal, Xabier Xil Xardón
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This anthology starts with a “Warning” – according to the title of the first poem by Tamara Andres – that the journey ahead will be convoluted and turbulent; the same could very well apply to the journey through the next few pages. This selection of poems is neither a record of routes, nor a compilation based on specific themes or styles; it is an invitation to its readers that they are free to roam at will and follow their own directions as they go along, according to currents, winds, fog and the stars on the horizon.
This collection of poetry by Vakxikon.gr brings together young poets from both genders, with the intent to present, both domestically and internationally, the poetic work of authors from different countries of Europe, born during the ‘80’s in the 20th century, whose literary careers culminated in the production of one book at minimum. It is fortunate that the fertile soil of contemporary Galician poetry is capable of presenting many poets who meet these requirements. At this point, I must stress the fact that this volume presents merely a small sample, which I hope will pique the interest of the readership to continue exploring the most daring and demanding recommendations of young Galician poetry.
I selected ten poets, taking into account the fact that the bilingual format of this volume, combined with the somewhat recent opportunity for direct translation from Galician into Modern Greek, result in a quantity that is, for all intents and purposes, manageable. I have also placed emphasis on the equal representation of male and female poets, since this is a particularly crucial aspect of contemporary Galician poetry. I added together with this prolific stylistic and thematic heterogeneity my own personal interest for literary careers that deviate from the prevailing standard literary model. The careers of our featured poets are in different stages of development, if we take into account the fact that by virtue of effective poetic ventures, the end product of their debut books sometimes crosses into other media such as music, visuals, blogs, live recitals, printed or online literary magazines and edited volumes, emerging from movements whose aim is to raise public awareness about contemporary social problems, or even in awards, literary conferences or festivals etc. Other recent anthologies of Galician poetry, such as 13.Antoloxía da poesía galega próxima (publ. by Chan da Pólvora, 2017), compiled under the wise guidance of Maria Xesús Nogeuira, or No seu despregar (publ. by Apiario, 2016), were used as valuable guides. I shared the responsibility of selecting the poems jointly with the featured poets themselves, who provided me with a careful pre-selection of their works that gave me the opportunity for more in-depth examination, in order to give readers a more extensive and rich repertory of voices, poetic styles and genres, rhythms, images, themes and subjectivities.
What is the historical, economic and cultural background of young Galician poets? They have no actual experience of Franco’s dictatorship, which lasted from the period of the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) to the first democratic elections (1977) held after Franco’s death. Nevertheless, these creators are capable of clearly discerning the ideological legacy and its catastrophic consequences on the society and culture of Galicia, the inaction, paralyzing fear, intolerance, conservatism and the potential perils of returning to this totalitarian past. Furthermore, these poets were all born after the ratification of the Galician Statute of Autonomy (1981), the Decree on Plurilingualism, which incorporated the Galician language into the educational system of Galicia (1979), and after the Law of Linguistic Standardization (1983). This explains their solid education in Galician language and literature and their choice to write in the native language. Although Galician is the official language of Galicia, jointly with Castilian Spanish, the vast majority of writers prefer to use their native language, and this use of Galician currently constitutes the main criterion for defining our concept of Galician literature. Be that as it may, and despite our best efforts to avoid a self-victimization that would only intensify the stigma, the truth is that there are multiple and diverse political and socioeconomic factors that result in the demotion of the status of Galician language and the ensuing gradual decrease in the numbers of its systematic users.
Our young poets compose their verses in the context of a terrible economic crisis. Since 2007, youth has been struck with unemployment rates that rose to 50% – even now, they are as high as 36% – a fact that explains the abundance of themes such as flight and exile in their poetry. University degrees are succeeded by postgraduate studies and relocations to other parts of Spain or abroad, to work or study, because young Galicians are all too aware that their employment future in Galicia is not particularly promising. Herein lies one of the paradoxes that readers are bound to come to notice: Galician poetry is a poetry that, like a castaway, attaches itself to a language, a culture and a web of personal and artistic relationships, while economic and political structures look on with indifference and embarrassment as our young people take flight. It is understood, then, that this poetry is redolent of loss, anger, constant exercise in memory, a yearning for a return and a loyalty to a culture and natural environment cherished during childhood and adolescence and now under threat. However, this is not so much elegiac poetry, as a kind of poetry of self-affirmation and resistance, a poetry that strongly believes in itself and this assertion is what captivates and surprises us.
I incorporate this young poetry in this particular historical, economic and sociopolitical context not merely because I believe that literature “reflects” social conditions, but because this poetry is produced by poets who are conscious of the complicated dependency between reality and art, society and discourse. They know that in poetry, the experience of the “I” becomes the experience of the “other”, and language is capable of intensifying and suppressing, incorporating but also excluding. They know that what they want to express changes according to the formulas of linguistic and literary conventions. They insist on the historical and spatial uniqueness of their writing, in order to allow distant and dissimilar readers to enrich their worlds with other perspectives and come to question their certainties. The pluralism of voices in their poems is a sign of fragmented, unstable and constantly shifting subjectivities, whose fractures not only allow, but also encourage the reader’s involvement in the creation of meanings.
The anthology begins with a number of poems by Tamara Andrés, dealing with subjects such as the destruction and rebuilding of identity, the function of poetry as an exercise in memory that fights against silence and encourages convergence with beauty, and a time stretched to the point where it stands with one foot in the present and with the other foot firmly planted back in the roots (Andrés, 2018). After Andrés, the poetry of Jesús Castro Yáñez demonstrates a style permeated by his familiar rural environment and his material and sensory relationship with nature. The poet doesn’t dismiss grand themes – such as love, time, identity and memory – nor hesitates to reclaim symbols from other prevalent discourses, although he knows that words are rebellious and cannot be subdued. He pays particular attention to the critical threshold that separates what doesn’t exist and what ends up existing, a moment during which everything could be possible (Castro Yáñez, 2015, 2018).
Next we have the poems of Gonzalo Hermo. Here we find a celebration of life, fluidity, lust and desire, along with reconciliation with the past, the kind that comes when you begin a return journey free of “leftover baggage”. In contrast with its intricate and unconstrained elaboration that leaves ample room and time for contemplating what is left unsaid, the poem itself acknowledges the close-up struggle with language, its mannerisms and ambiguity of types and the beauty of disorder (Hermo, 2014, 2018). Alba Cid leaves the imaginary of Galician poetry open to interact with other languages and cultures, through intertextual references to specific canons of western literature, interchanged with allusions to distant and marginal practices described with precision akin to that of ethnographers. A collective subject embarks on a journey to the world, trying to understand foreign concepts using it own cultural and depictive tools, all of which result in an inventive syncretism.
Despite his short literary career, which ended abruptly with his passing at the age of 31 years, Francisco Cortegoso managed to refine the elegant expression and rigid vocabulary of a hedonistic poetry that pursued the beauty of a moment in suspension and the violation of syntax as a way to denounce the brutality of western civilization. His poems in this anthology represent both of these approaches: on the one hand, they declare the here and now of certain bodies stretching out in the sun and breeze; on the other hand, they meditate on the gears of history and life in art. Antón Blanco, whose verses are next in line, encourages us to see things from different perspectives, including the anthropological perspective, imbuing words with the intensity found in great epic or religious narratives. His poetry explores power relations, ideologies and the mechanisms of the discourse building the superstructure of a city that ends up devouring itself (Blanco, 2018).
The poetry of Arancha Nogueira, in the succeeding pages of the anthology, demonstrates that it is possible to blend familiarity and resistance, thus giving a revolutionary and transformative power to dreams, desires and personal interests. Her poems condemn ecocide – like the one caused in Galicia by the wreck of the tanker Prestige back in 2002 – the reification and superficiality of personal relationships and the alienation brought by the mutation of the places we used to inhabit. Love and emancipated eroticism are the only things that can protect us from and arm us against everyday conflict. Rosalía Fernández Rial listens closely to identify the rhythms, harmonies, dissonances and silences that give life to nature, musical composition, poetry, and our very own bodies. Each compilation of her poems is regulated by her own personal symbolic universe: music, nomadism, passion etc. Although the craving for freedom fades into the background when it comes face to face with the dangers of obscurity, lack of communication or paralysis, she finds a way to rearm it with new breaths of rebelliousness and eroticism.
Lara Dopazo Ruibal, from her part, partakes in the modern interest for subjectivity that fuses the “I” not only with the “other” human beings, but also with the non-human, the animal and nature. Her poetry delves into the sense of weakness caused by the fall of community structures that support the individual, a feeling of frustration that acquires physical characteristics in bodies already burdened by the identities of gender that shape them (Dopazo Ruibal, 2017). This anthology is concluded by the poems of Xabier Xil Xardón, which open the channel of the “I”: the lyrical I, the I as writer, the I that is constructed and deconstructed by language, the male I, the I of childhood, the bodily I, the ghostly I, the I as other, the I as community. Xardón’s verses are all about identity, representation and writing, overthrowing syntax and meaning with manipulations that are playful and at the same time pessimistic, distorting reality in order the shatter the mirror and the sense of magic.
Manuela Palacios