Yale University, Professor Emeritus, New
Haven, CT
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oetry is, as
Octavio Paz notes in The Bow and the Lyre (El Arco y la Lira), “knowledge,
salvation, power, abandonment. An act
capable of changing the world, poetic activity is revolutionary by nature; a
spiritual exercise, it is a system of internal liberation.” And the poem is “a passage of access to pure
time, immersion in the nascent and original waters of existence.” Antonio Machado is more brief, but not less
accurate: “ poetry is the essential word in time.” For Coleridge, poetry is remembrance --memory of an emotion
distilled in words --in a later age more serene and reflexive.
As we know,
poetry is nourished by profound emotions and intense experiences. To ensure that the audience that listens to
poetry can share the emotions of retrospection and introspection of Beauty, the
poet must carry words to the cusp of their power, must create images and
rhythms, establish internal connections, almost always invisible at first
sight, within each part of the poem and other parts within each section and its
entirety. And as each experience is
untranslatable, and each emotion is the reaction to our own intimate being,
with every fiber of our muscles, with every drop of our own blood, something
great and intensely profound is disclosed right before us --a communication of
experience and emotion which is one of the most difficult literary feats and
which requires the maximum expressive effort.
With each well constructed and revealing poem, the poet finds his place
in the cosmos and helps us to find our own place in it.
And that is
exactly what happens in Central America in My Heart. Oscar Gonzáles knows how to create an expansive poetry, that
opens up to horizons that are more vast each time, without forgetting its roots
in the concrete, in the immediate, in detail that is precise and revealing, a
poetry that approaches and offers the reader
verses
that shiver like sapphires of silent music
that lead to the sea
(“Inebriated Breeze of the Sea”)
and in which the
poet achieves to beautifully communicate what is inexpressible, he moves
towards distant horizons in mystical ships like Rimbaud, and arrives at eternal
and unexplored sites, on secret shores where only mystery resides. Poetry like an adventurous danger, poetry
that pursues and reaches the unattainable, a poetry of vertigo that tries to
communicate to us --and achieves-- what the poet pursues and reaches as a man,
as an enamored man, as a man for whom love is not only a victory, but a passage
towards the knowledge of the absolute:
the incomprehensible sensation of eternity
on my lips
(“Dreaming you in the tepid gold of the
dusk”)
Each poet who
deserves this name is, we know it, unique, original, unclassifiable. And, at the same time, it also helps us to
understand a work by placing it within a more encompassing corpus. Our poet belongs to an eminent and numerous
group. More concretely, Oscar Gonzáles
comes to us from a country that is easily classifiable as “exotic” and
“tropical”, until you have visited and shared the sadness and hopes of its
people: Honduras. It is a country with
its very own and valuable poetic tradition, although it is not well-known in
Spanish America and Europe, especially outside of the Hispanic tradition, a
tradition which Oscar Gonzáles knows perfectly and which has helped him to find
his own voice.
In a more
encompassing perspective and light, we can assert that our poet belongs to the
family of Pablo Neruda, because of the amplitude of his poetry’s horizons, the
strength and firmness of its voice, and the “intimist” and cosmic sensuality of
his love poetry. Eroticism and
panoramic vision of nature are characteristics that unite the two poets,
together with an interest in the themes of liberty and the disdain of
oppression, injustice, tyranny that were manifested in a book of poems formerly
written by Oscar Gonzáles titled Where Lead Floats (Donde el Plomo Flota), in
which the principal theme encompasses the daily life --saddened, limited,
oppressed-- of his native motherland.
But now the theme of his poetry is love, shared and victorious sensual
love, and this makes it easier for his readers to share the experiences of the
poet and vibrate with the emotions that each poem evokes in us.
Yes, our poet
belongs to the family of Neruda, the enamored Neruda of Twenty Love Poems and
Desperate Song (Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada), and later,
the one thousand and one poems inspired by Margarita Aguirre.
But at the same
time Neruda belongs to the family of Quevedo --and to that of the surrealists,
even though he denied it-- and all poets belong to the great family of Homer,
Dante, Garcilaso, Donne, Milton, Racine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Rilke,
Eliot. All are related through their
essential style and their passionate desire to communicate something precious
and intense that they have seen, that they have felt, that they have lived. And now the voice of our poet is added to
all these voices. And since every book
of poems is at the same time a revelation of something intimate, a vision that
allows us to share that intimacy, a ceremony and a celebration, now it is our
turn to pay attention: the poet embarks on his trek of prophecy, the curtain is
about to rise.