'Corporal Symphony', all the verses of Fernando Aramburu

Fernando Aramburu has occupied an almost hidden place in the wide space of Spanish poetry in recent decades despite timidly appearing in the literary world in 2010 with the anthology I would like to rain. There are two reasons that have conditioned it: the great reception of his narrative work, with the Homeland phenomenon as a central moment, and the delimitation of his poetic work in a time period located in the eighties of the last century. Added to this is the circumstance that in the period between 1977 and 1986, a time period that includes almost all of the texts of body symphonyhis collected lyrical work, his young poetry was dominated by the figurative and neo-romantic reaction to the culturalism of the seventies.

The commitment of the very young Aramburu, committed, at the end of that decade, to a poetics of provocation, riding on Dadaism, in the wake of André Breton, and promoter of the group CLOC together with Álvaro Bermejo and José Félix del Hoyo, had little to do with the return to the realism of the fifties that the young poetry that would dominate the new decade invited. The rigor and coherence with which the poet incorporated this aesthetic into the six books or platelets in which it divides the collected poetry. The richness of the language, the happy turns with which it settles into irrationalism (a non-hermetic irrationalism), and the combination of the surrealist impulse with the use of expressive modes that come from the Golden Age, from the Castilian baroque – more from Góngora than from Lope—and that overflow in poems full of meanings, of allusions to reality, with some more than memorable such as 'Canto incarnado', alluding to a terrorist attack around 1980: “A squeak of ominous wheels, / and now the machine gun with its gargles / of irreparable ruin.”

It is a poetry that breathes a unitary will, a commitment to delve into the chosen aesthetic, avant-garde in times of crisis of the avant-garde and full of illuminations, with a reflective background and a strong existential gravitation not alien to the thought of Albert Camus. We know that he had a relationship with Gabriel Celaya, whose influence could only be traced in his first and surreal book, Tide of silence (1934). And we also know that he lived for several years, as a student, in Zaragoza. Curiously, in the formative years of his poetic tools, a time in which the memory of Miguel Labordeta and his surrealist heterodoxy were more than present in Aragon. Quite a few poems from one of his books, debris materials, They are dated in its capital, in 1980. A certain impregnation of that pulse cannot be ruled out, which had clear antecedents in Postism and in the minority rupturist currents of the sixties.

body symphony It is much more than an example of the literary work of a youthful narrator who has been successful with critics and readers. The six books that comprise it show mature poetry that addresses the great themes of all time: death, love, life, childhood memory, poetry itself and its mysteries, the years of lead and its emotional marks. Almost all the poems are dated between 1977 and 1985. There are less than half a dozen of them dated in the nineties and only one in the new century (January 2005), the one that closes the volume, 'Yesterday': “Yesterday I realized in the shadow, forgive me.”

We are talking about five years of intensive creation and the survival of some embers in later years. In the last texts of the book there is a tendency towards stripping, a certain search for essentiality, as if Aramburu had consciously addressed the farewell to the genre: “I sang, sang, they sang / and behind them was left without them / their voice “, my voice, the fruit / fallen on the ground.” Let's hope it's not definitive.

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