Failure to agree paralyzes governments, the opposing factions refuse to recognize the consequences of their demands. To solve problems implies rejecting the toxic spirit of irresponsibility. The emotion that permeates politics is not passion but disconsolateness. The press examines the loss implied in the collective uproar: incomplete sentences, not articulated, talismans that tarnish or illumine everyday reality.
Violence underlies the decision to cling to lucidity in the dramatic work of the Nobel Prize winner in Literature for 1992, Derek Walcott (St. Lucia, 1930-2017), in whose work individual destiny gives way to the mythical dimension before disappearing.
“Oh wound I envy, spring again/ like this fountain, drench me in blood!/ Lead me through a fine mist of rain/ toward love. Love is the good pain.”
In El Burlador de Sevilla (Vaso Roto, Theatre, 2014), Walcott unfolds all his art in order to adapt, to his situation and that of his contemporaries, the Hispanic language and culture of the seventeenth century, while maintaining a radical originality and independence (…) A deep melancholy pervades Another Life (1973; Trans. Luis Ingelmo, Bilingual edition by Jordi Doce, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2017), a melancholy deepened by the fact that poets too know how to be ferocious, combative:
«Three loves, art, love, and death,/ fade from a mirror clouding with this breath,/ not one is real, they cannot live or die,/ they all exist, they never have existed».
Un placer presentaros la versión al inglés de mi ensayo «Derek Walcott: talismanes», a cargo de Keith Ellis (1935), poeta, narrador, traductor, profesor e investigador de la literatura cubana, latinoamericana y caribeña de origen jamaiquino.
Gracias a María Fuentes y Jeannette L. Clariond, a la poeta y editora Rose Mary Salum, directora de la publicación de Houston, Texas, Literal, Latin American Voices, revista internacional de pensamiento, arte y cultura que se hace eco del artículo, así como al propio Ellis.
Para leer el ensayo al completo, seguir el enlace:
The Heroic Ubiquity of Derek Walcott