Rafael Cadenas: “Wars are caused by the selfishness of nations”

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“I’m tired of taking advice from people who are more lethargic than me,” she wrote. Raphael Chains (Baquisimeto, Venezuela, 1930) In Defeat, the most comprehensive and civilian some of his poems Antique without excluding others (“… I was ostracized for the sake of people more miserable than me”), he recalls, “he was plunged into a deep depression.” And even though it was written in his thirties and not entirely representative of his diverse and unique work, they bring him up again and again. Maybe they’ll ask for it at their encores next Friday, which is his birthday. 92nd birthdayIn a broadcast synchronized with the headquarters of the Cervantes Institute in Bogota and Madrid, he read his lines from Caracas.

The obsession with the paradox, perhaps equally concise and exuberant, realistic and Orphic, verbal and linguistic, shimmering matte, in many of his lines, is inseparable from the suffering of those who oppose oppression. Originally a communist militant, he spent five months in prison under his dictatorship. Perez Jimenezended with four years of exile in the British colony of the island of Trinidad. And then, as in a Kafkaesque spin, since Chavismo’s raid, he’s been looked down upon and brought to the point of exclusion as an anti-patriotic-counter-revolutionary of the Bolivarian spirit… “The national ego is disastrous everywhere. I don’t know how clean up the word homeland is. “The current Venezuelan regime has done nothing but propagate an illusory national ego with false rhetoric full of euphemisms that disguise the truth.”

Cadenas speaks slowly with a calm, sincere voice and the watery gaze of a noble, shy and gentle dog. Professor of Literature at the Central University of Caracas, for decades, has generally believed that “the crisis in today’s society is largely due to the deterioration of language use. As he points out. Ezra Poundwhen language is corrupted, society sinks to the bottom.” And when asked about the definition of mysterious syncretism in his poetry, he takes the time to point out: “Well, the truth is: I know a lot more about what my poetry is. Always open to a mystery of nuance and full of aphorisms (“Truth can only be touched by error” Or: “I / I use you / who then leaves you alone?”…) .

When this is pointed out Nietzsche He describes poetry as the art of “dancing with chains,” that is, “dancing while you dance,” drawing a half-smile with his obsidian watery and slightly sunken eyes shining, and nodding: “Yes, I have always been struck by such premonitions. Notice, for example, , Person It means “person” in Portuguese, and the poet has created a number of heteronyms, each with its own name and personality. I love this metaphor of Nietzsche. It concludes with Alfonso Reyes’ saying that “poetry is the dance of speech”.

Even poetry in general deserves an insoluble paradox: “Both powerful and insignificant.” And he excuses himself for not being able to talk about himself, because “every book has something to do with a situation: there is no common version. I limit myself to observing the truth and approaching confession, because we are less and less confessing. One thing that is clear to me is a that poetry nourishes itself”.

He personally describes himself as an “incredible mystic”, including disbelief. And he clarifies: “I agree jasper when you say you have no real understanding of the world and everything is a great mystery. When thinking recognizes its limits, it makes sense to have an opening towards the mystical. But I refuse to abandon the truth. My opposition is also ontological and existential. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I limit myself to observation, and my only certainty is that truth can only come from an adaptation of language to truth.

Paradox for paradox, curiously, in wrong maneuvers a book right afterBeat“, Cadenas seems to want to reclaim his previous palynody. For example, in the poem “Fracaso” he admits: “What I took as victory is just smoke.” And he congratulates his lover of failure, which made him more human: “Thanks. You gave me the joy of not being afraid of you.”

In his sequential poetry collections, Cadenas seems to use a good dose of poetry. homeopathic medicine Regarding this, “The Real Defeat. Therefore, if the poem was not born, but if your life is real, you are its incarnation.”

Another of his famous love / heartbreak, for example, assuming his current abandoned girlfriend is in his bedroom: “The dog that woke us up / runs his nose in my bed.” And what happened to you now “It’s not magic, I didn’t forget anything as long as I existed without you”… In the poetry collection beloved (1988), saves him from the sharp aphorism: “The lover’s mission / mission: to burn / to get out of the way”. And another of his emblems collected in various anthologies is his poem “Marriage”, which is an x-ray of married life, and he says briefly and deeply:

“Everything is ordinary, / without magic, / without the embellishments used by rhetoric, / without embellishments to replenish the mystery, / without embellishments that are ordinary. / The pure lines of a classical painting, nothing more. / A passage full of antiquity, / everyday essence, / instead fetch. Like people who open at the usual hour”.

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