Ana Blandiana: «Robots will never understand the suffering and obstinacy to express the inexpressible»

«Every time I collect a prize, my first thought has been for Plato and the laurel wreaths that he proposed for the poets who were later banished from the city.

My second thought is for my country. Just as, as poor children become adults, they always keep looking home to help their families by sending packages and money and keeping the little ones in school, each new achievement brings me back to the place from which I started, a place that in history it was called Dacia Felix when it was conquered by the emperor Trajanbut which in Romanian fairy tales is called “the place where the tops of the mountains collide”, a place nestled between several enemy and enmity empires, to which of all its neighbors only the Black Sea has never desired the evil Our Latinidad, exiled at the other end of the continent, has singled us out and has given us, along with the awareness that we are different from those around us, the feeling of loneliness in history. It is a feeling from which I have never been able to distance myself, to alienate myself, but from which poetry has germinated, as a survival solution. Although thinking about Plato and thinking about my country forces me to ask myself, in these amazing moments when poetry is in the spotlight, what is still, what can continue to be, the link between the poet and others, between poetry and society, what is the role of poetry in our secularized, technical, computerized and globalized world. Can the enormous honor received from the Princess of Asturias Foundation by granting me a poetry prize be considered proof of the importance of the capital of hope that poetry continues to represent in this world? Furthermore, can “that something light, winged and sacred,” as Plato defined poetry and the poet, stop our fall toward nothingness? In fact, the question, which I am not asking for the first time, is: “Can poetry save the world?”, and my modest but firm answer is supported by astonishing facts. Incredible as it may seem, during the 1950s and 1960s, authentic resistance through poetry occurred in the communist prisons of Romania. The world’s first Memorial to the Victims of Communism includes a room with the walls and ceiling entirely covered with poems born during the arrests. In the absence of pencil and paper, which were prohibited, every poem needed three people for its existence: the one who composed it, the one who memorized it and the one who transmitted it through the Morse alphabet, and despite these precarious circumstances thousands were composed. of poems that managed to pass from cell to cell and from prison to prison. In their books of memories, political prisoners describe, as a sacred ritual, the moment of transmission of the new poems, when a prisoner was transferred from one prison to another. And then, after the prisons opened, the first thought of those released was to transcribe what they had memorized, without the names of the poets or with names that they often wrongly assumed, into a true symphony of spiritual resistance, an attempt to convert the mystery of poetry in a weapon of defense against madness. This is proof that, in extreme circumstances, when they felt their own essence was in danger, men turned to poetry as a means of salvation. When the last molecules of freedom were hidden in poetry, people, suffocated by repression, looked for them, found them and breathed them to survive. Poetry does not speak about reality, but is capable of constructing another reality in which we can save ourselves. From an etymological point of view, in ancient Greek the term poetry comes from the verb ‘poiein’, which means to build.

But what yesterday saved us from fear, hatred and madness, cannot save us today from loneliness, indifference, emptiness of faith, excess of materialism and consumerism and lack of spirituality? André Malrauxauthor of ‘The Human Condition’, said that “the 21st century will be religious or it will not be at all.” If, however, we are too tired and lacking in religious fervor, could we not perhaps save ourselves by putting poetry in the place of emptiness?

Now that robots are on their way to soon being superior to humans, we will have to try to place ourselves above everything that they do not understand. Because robots will be able to create verses, rhymes, iambic rhythms, trochees, dactyls, sonnets, roundels, epics, but they will never understand the suffering and obstinacy to express the inexpressible that is hidden under all those clothes, since the mystery cannot be defined. nor win. Obviously Theodor W. Adorno He was wrong when he wrote that “after Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric,” because he did not understand that suffering does not prohibit poetry, but rather enhances it, gives it shine and gives it meaning. A meaning of which freedom is only a small part.

At the end of the Roman Empire, which seemed to be the end of the world, Christianity brought the good news, the gospel of love for one’s neighbor that, despite the ups and downs of history, has managed to keep us in balance for more than two thousand years until that, since the 20th century, hatred (of class or race, between women and men, between children and parents) has prevailed. Modern poetry is the heartbreaking expression of this existential imbalance.

I am happy to be able to affirm, before a room full of Spaniards, the importance that the exclamation of Miguel de Unamuno «Spain hurts me!» has had on my intellectual and spiritual formation. I have used the anguish of the Spanish philosopher in the face of the destruction of his country as a point of support in the current universe, in which nations blur in the face of ideologies, as an anchor in the depth of time, on whose surface the waves crash. ever-changing postmodernism, which I resist because Spain hurts me, Romania hurts me, the world hurts me.

Through the cry of Unamuno, which I discovered in my adolescence and have never forgotten, through my ten volumes translated into Spanish, scattered throughout the immense Hispanic space, and through the honor of this night, thanks to the University of Salamanca, I am forever linked to Spain. And on this privileged night I feel happy to be able to express my gratitude not only for the award, which moves and excites me, but also for the opportunity it gives me to speak these words and have them heard.

The Princess of Asturias Award is different from any other award given to poetry because in its definition it combines the mystery of poetry and the mystery of royalty, so strangely related to each other to the extent that people, without understanding them and without knowing What are they for, he feels that without them everything would be less beautiful and less good.