In “Lección de historia natural”, on the other hand, we read these verses: “Among the plants and the birds, / the stealthy creatures / and the indecisive squirrels, / the life from outside / plots its circular movements.”įor Lastra, indecision, doubt, the undefinable, and indeterminacy do not have a negative status, as we might think at first sight. Many years later / I read in another world / his sharp speech / of desolation”. The beginning of the poem reads, in heptasyllables of free verse: “Omar Cáceres says / that he wrote his poem / with indecisive letters. He repeats this concept in at least two other poems: one is “Con letras indecisas”, a text on Omar Cáceres, the seminal author of a secret vanguard who Pedro Lastra put back in the spotlight in the nineties when he republished, in Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela, Defensa del ídolo (1934), the only book ever published by Cáceres. This is, therefore, the oldest verse by this poet, and, as such, the self-definition of this poetry (from his first book, La sangre en alto (1954), our author retained not a single line, considering the book a youthful exercise whose value was more testimonial than poetic). The word that resumes this attitude for this author is one that he repeats in many of his poems: “indecisive,” Lastra’s seminal adjective.Īlready in Traslado a la mañana (1959), Pedro Lastra’s second book, we find this word in a line that reads “El tiempo con sus ramas indecisas” : the only line, by the way, that the author retained from this book, incorporating it into a later poem called “Noticias breves”, composed of fragments that are like “poetic precepts,” muted reflections that function as epigraphs or poetic mottoes that define Lastra’s own creative activity. The dominant form in which this fiction manifests itself in Lastra is somewhat paradoxical, and we could resume it thusly: the greater the command of language, the less accurate the image of the world. Like any true creator, Lastra is spoken by the language of his poems, not the other way around. Every poet constructs, as Wallace Stevens would say, his “supreme fiction,” his fiction of fictions, and Lastra has not been foreign to this labor that poets undertake over their own figure. The Pedro Lastra of whom I speak, the poet and essayist, is, as ever, a mask created by his poetry. When I say “Pedro Lastra,” I’m not referring to the Chilean citizen born in 1932 who has served as a professor and lecturer at various universities in his own country, Latin America, the United States, and Europe nor am I speaking of the man who was married, widowed, and married again, the father of three daughters who practice medicine, the grandfather and great-grandfather on two hemispheres, the dear friend and voracious reader. These are a few of the images that Pedro Lastra has constructed of himself in his poems. ![]() A painter, an exile, a traveler, someone who converses with his friends and teachers (some of them dead), and, above all, a wayward reader in the aisles of a vast, solitary library, inhabited only by ghosts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |