Anne Carson in Compostela, between an intimate diary and a pilgrimage

talk about Anna CarsonSome time ago, the American critic (a penchant for polemics) Harold Bloom said something similar that it gave him the magic of being twenty years plus hair to think that he would leave this world without taking “a lifetime’s work” with him. a unique Canadian poet. The complexity of the writer’s poetics — Prize of the Princess of Asturias for letters no. 2020 — continues to amaze with its depth, subtlety and ambiguity, the way it expresses itself through an intimate autobiography, a journey into nature, a goal that must erase the boundaries between genres such as narrative, poetry and essay, because of how emotions and thoughts flow organically . Such is the case Anthropology gives birthwhich develops as a kind of elegiac homage to my father (affected by dementia) and which comes to bring the Galician or Chan da Pólvora of Lugués translator Jesús Castro Yáñez. The volume is a collection of heterodox texts that do not find saving power in water, a reliable leader with a flexible character, who knows that he cannot keep homes, loved ones, people, like water, in his hands. Write it down there, enter the anthropology exercise, which hox recommends that you always choose to meet — just like some other cultures — face to face.

Among the materials that make up the work, there is also his pilgrimage to Compostela, a narrative whose structure – Castro Yáñez points out in a short but significant afterword – shows a certain kinship with which Japanese literature preserves this dimension of displacement, in which travel diaries and poetry appear as inseparable genders: «O haibun, a composition that combines haiku and prose, written to recount the journey using autobiography and essay». This connection in many cases exceeds the quotations the poet uses from the verses of authors such as Matsuo Basho, Izumi Shikibu, Socho, Tanizaki, Iio Sogi, Masaoka Shiki and Mizuta Masahide (and also Machado), among others.

I do not know his speech of thanks to the Princess of Asturias, Carson remembered that in 1983 he traveled the pilgrimage route from Saint Jean Pied de Porto to Santiago, and that he expanded his variant of fisterra. But the writer offers several hints in her text — there is no calendar or people’s names; ao home that accompanies the chámalle My Cid— the same deforms reality, even with fabrication, lies and concealment, it seems that the map and certain data are not expensive upwards and it does not matter if you go from León to Arzúa, there is never a day and the next stop on the route is not O Pino… Senón Orbigo! Feitos are not what they seem, they have no importance — or what really matters is the intensity of their poetic resonance. The reader suspects that in certain parts she wanted to be an ordinary American tourist who, somewhat carefree, with a stern look, felt rushed. Perhaps because there are no answers to the questions Romeiro faces. Thus, subliña or editor, Carson «pilgrimages to the Galician and American landscapes, the recunchos of the family and the spirit, the discomfort of sex or the desire for penance. The map of their male relationships is recorded in the black box of the transit, which reveals itself with more ellipses than lines or words that would rather be simply the nervous impulse they summon. Is mystical enlightenment possible without the glare of the seeker blinding you in the end?».