Listening to him speak is like attending an intimate event to which one has been generously invited. Luis García Montero’s voice makes its way like a whisper, a lullaby that, however, is filled with important words, as if from another time, to remind us that poetry still has something to tell us about the world of tomorrow, that It is today’s and also yesterday’s. Does one year and three months, as the title of his latest collection of poems says, that the writer and director of the Cervantes Institute presented this book in Mexico, composed during the illness and after the death of his wife, the writer Almudena Grandes. Time has passed and his mood is different. What was an open wound has become a mourning, a memory “that is present and accompanies without the painful aggression of the first moments,” says the poet, who receives the newspaper at the residence of the Spanish ambassador, where hosts.
García Montero (Granada, 65 years old) is visiting the North American country to receive the Recognition of Excellence in Letters and Humanity awarded by the Chamber of Deputies of Mexico and which last year, in its first edition, went to his friend and Also poet Raúl Zurita. For a few months now, the man from Granada has taken advantage of these trips to resume his old habit of poetry, which he had given up on since he finished the book dedicated to Grandes. He didn’t feel the need. “Suddenly, one day in April I wrote a poem in which I was looking at the light on the balcony, and seeing how the trees were blooming and the branches were filled with green, and I found that I was living in the moment without thinking about the past, without thinking about the future, letting myself be carried away by spring,” he says, and his eyes shine.
The need to “reconcile with life” beats in his new verses, as does the experience of grief, but what has really driven him to approach poetry again is the situation in Gaza, which fulfills his concerns. “Watching a genocide televised minute by minute, without there being resounding opposition from democratic countries, is leaving international institutions without legitimacy,” he denounces. “With what legitimacy are we going to oppose Islamic fundamentalism that is mistreating women, or to demand a democratic transformation in Russia or China? They are leaving us human rights defenders in absolute solitude, and that affects me personally,” she laments. That is why in her new poems the childhood devastated in the Strip also appears, “a girl who comes out of the rubble and contemplates her own corpse.”
The war makes him wonder about his own home, about a emptiness and loneliness that are also those of the world. And he does it from a writing that interweaves, even merges, personal and political experience, a hallmark that has accompanied him since his beginnings and that has led him to highlight the most intimate aspects of the social contract. “For the heat of the body that I learned to respect / while I disarmed it with my body,” he celebrated the recovery of democracy in Spain, which also democratized couple relationships. It’s a round trip. His most personal verses also have an obvious political dimension. “Of the final poems that I wrote for Almudena,” he details, “some are a clear defense of the values of care, and some palliative doctor who is overwhelmed has approached me to thank me for the book because it has reinforced his vocation.” . Times have changed since a young García Montero began to join the Communist Party, later the United Left. “When I started writing, in a time of great militancy, some comrade called me petty bourgeois for being entangled in my own self, and look, things have changed, now even a love poem can be understood as a defense of healthcare.” public,” he jokes.
Behind that humor shines the lucidity of someone who knows that politics is a battle that is fought on all fronts. And although these are not good times for this profession, García Montero defends the nobility of it as an instrument that commits us to the future. “The degradation of politics is at the service of the very great fortunes, who want to discredit it because the political authority is the one that sets the frameworks for coexistence in freedom and equality,” he maintains: “Depoliticization, like disinformation through hoaxes “They are very politically calculated projects.” This problem has always existed, he says, but now there is a tremendous power to “put it into our consciousness.” He mentions Trump, Bolsonaro, Milei, also the campaigns against Boric: the extreme right that is becoming strong on the continent and whose perversion begins in the use of language, which is for the poet an act of hospitality, but which becomes “an attempt to appropriate the other and dominate” when it is violated.
Faced with the “throwaway moment” that these leaders and their “virtual realities” embody, he claims a relationship with words that anchors us in a time that is not that of the perpetual present but that receives the inheritance of human experience: “Culture serves to value time with a dimension that is not that of merchandise, but rather that of a generational dialogue between the past that the elders represent and the commitment to the future that the children represent.” That is why he feels heir to the Spanish exile, whose 85th anniversary is commemorated in Mexico, and that is why in his speech the constellation of voices that contributed to building his own appears from time to time: García Lorca, María Zambrano or Gil de Biedma, among the Spanish. Rosario Castellanos, José Emilio Pacheco or Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, among the Mexicans. Also Alfonso Reyes, whose legacy he will collect this Friday in Monterrey to integrate it into the Institute’s Caja de las Letras.
“My poetry is very linked to Mexican poetry,” he admits. “I am very happy about this week’s recognition of the feeling of debt and brotherhood that I have with the country, which perhaps has to do with gratitude for the reception of the Spanish exile, but also with my daily life as a poet and with my situation now as director of the Cervantes Institute,” he develops. The ties with American institutions are a source of special pride for him, which is recognized in the desire to create an international response of Hispanic tradition that does not submit to any of the hegemonic forces of the world: “When I see the dynamics of globalization, I soon remember the pan-Hispanism of Francisco Ayala, and I say, we must sign agreements with the UNAM in Mexico, with the UBA in Argentina, with the Caro y Cuervo Institute in Colombia…
As part of these agreements, the Institute is preparing, together with the UNAM, for this year’s Guadalajara book fair (which will have Spain as the guest of honor), an edition translated into 30 indigenous languages of a poem that Lorca wrote in Nueva York in 1929, and which was “the great denunciation against fascism and against the dangers of war.” “One of the great wonders of our language now is that it has understood that its creation has to do with dialogue with other languages,” says García Montero, who recalls that the European Union, when it was established – unlike the United States ―, defended linguistic diversity as a right.
Democracy must be filled with content, which is why the poet jumps from the most abstract humanism to total political concreteness without losing perspective of what he wants to say. There is clarity in his thinking and in his serene teacher’s voice. And there is, above all, an awareness of the power of words to direct reality in addition to naming it. “We live in a complicated time in which we need to reflect on the rules of coexistence, and I believe that poetry can contribute some things,” he says. Perhaps he cannot change the world, put an end to war or the lies that overwhelm us, but between naive optimism and cynical pessimism, he says, hope remains: like a trench, like a promise, like a flash of light.
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