Dylan Thomas, the natural heir to William Blake, a zealous believer in Vision, capitalized, and the most hermetic yet brilliant voice of genius in the splendor of English Romanticism, was a poet too great to be. Known for his stories, the poet deserves to be evaluated on an equal footing with his poetic work. In fact, he fulfills a certain old curse that has haunted many talents throughout literary history, and although some of his poems are excellent in form, not even Borges has succeeded. bypass. That curse says you can’t be the pinnacle of poetry and narrative at the same time. Perhaps only Pessoa has been capable of embodying both exceptional principles, but it is possible to admit that his extreme reputation as a prose writer is not encrypted in his stories, but limited to that indefinable and indefinable text, a genre in itself. We know it under the title Book of Disquiet.
But let’s return to Dylan Thomas as narrator, the fascination of these stories that, while not as outstanding as his poetry, therefore do not deserve to be neglected and are also influenced by his hallmark, Vision. The Welsh writer is one of the most intense meteorites to cross the sky in European literature in the last century. Read the magnificent translation of them by the ever-missed Miguel Martínez-Lage, The Complete Stories of Thomas form a faithful precipitate of the author’s interests. The first notable frame on the set is, in this case, Swansea, the region in the south of Wales to which his story has devoted its finest pages, and which has been revived by the happy meeting of the three guests there. auspicious: the sanctity of the landscape, the poignancy of the peasantry, and the long myth-poetic tradition that weaves a relationship between land and people until it reveals a way of being in the world.
A second moment of privilege is facilitated by language articulated as a sovereign ambassador between what and how, between content and container. From this point of view, it is illuminating to admire how the author’s writings can evolve from the sensory recording of texts in which the disturbing and illogical aspects of the narrative are emphasized, with results as extraordinary as those appearing in Los enemigos and El. From Visitante to its chronic, funny and hilarious tone, which at times reminds us of John Ford’s Irish films, and which we find, in the examples, as irresistible as A Tale’s alcoholic tour, through an inner examination, autobiographical exploration, and deliberation around certain inseparable elements. Elements of personal adventure (journalism, drinking, friendship) that reinforce the foundations of Thomas’ most important work, Portrait of the Puppy Artist.
It is this third area of pure and luminous intimacy that is most decisive in the narrative at hand, as it occurs in the author himself. It consists of the maturation process of a soul, the formation of a psyche, the germination, formation and consolidation of a complex personality. The only collection of short stories Thomas published during his lifetime, Portrait of the Dog Artist, which we mentioned earlier, actually adopts the classical and fruitful structure of the bildungsroman and admits that it is read as a kind of educational novel. everything that embellishes an artist’s singularity: the birth of his profession, the shaping of his character, the calculation of his emotions.
The 10 stories that make up the plot of this stand-alone volume are the most notable stories in the book. As an inward observer, Thomas combines his skills with common sense and at the same time lightness, an irony that never acidifies and a great ear for the popular without being folkloric or sentimental, two risks that the Welsh takes with great grace. They are stories that are absolutely spontaneous and uncontaminated, almost elegant, as if written under the spell of eye-opening diction, in which a remarkable sense of lightness is experienced before them.
In the process one breathes the joy of being young and alive, the joy of laughter, and a certain joyful unconsciousness, but at the same time one shudders to know that soon one is touched by condemnation and ecstasy of the tongue, with certainty. Claims will then be charged, one way or another, by resignations on the spot or unconditional surrender to their authority.
Bright, clear and faithful
These are tales close to palinodia in their tone, evocative of who they leave in the soul of the reader and tolerant of his own multiple weaknesses, showing the end of his childhood and early youth of a surprisingly lively, bright, clear and loyal man. as if no fraud could taint them, as if they could never hurt them, as if the author’s art had sculpted them in the way Faulkner predicted with his famous wisdom in his legendary interview with The Paris Review. In 1956: “The aim of every artist is to stop motion, that is, life, by artificial means, and keep it still, so that after a hundred years, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.
This is the artist’s way of blurring the oblivion that he has to live one day”. A goal, a promise, a commitment, which Dylan Thomas summed up in the sentence that titled this reading, closing his story Old Garbo, and satisfying in his own unique and indisputable way of the believer in the Vision.