Fernando Aramburu (San Sebastián, 1959), with the honesty of someone who believes in the value and meaning of words, admits that language is the longest-lasting toy in this life. He lost almost all of his belongings from his childhood, except for a globe ball and a ludo board, which can still be seen today. He started practicing this fun language-related activity at school at a very early age, where he could already see the positive impact of mastering words. Later, in adolescence, this mastery of voice and writing gave him a certain advantage over girls and turned him into a “different, attractive” boy. It was the happy beginning of her relationship with the person she said was her “sincere, close, loyal” friend throughout her life. Language seduced him and allowed him to be seduced, and also offered him a way to escape the modest social reality from which he came. All this valuable knowledge, culture, which he began to discover at the age of fourteen or fifteen, without ever giving up the discord that still defined him, was his best and most effective means of liberation. Even though he doesn’t write poetry anymore, he still does, but he reads other people’s poems because the patient and kind man who fell in love with the music of Chet Baker, who is behind the author, managed to endear himself with poetry again. , until you accept that it will always be a part of your life. Proof of this is the publication of the corporal Sinfonía, which collected his poetic works.
In the epilogue of the Sinfonía corporal, Irazoki says that dissonance was his first literary guide.
Impropriety is a part of me and is bound to intrude when I write. I’ve calmed down over the years. The same activity that triggered my rebellion has filled me with a serenity that I find very pleasant, and this is my philosophy of life; it is like a long apprenticeship in accepting our mortal destiny and dying with a certain grace.
Do you recognize yourself in the young man who wrote these verses in the 70s and 80s?
I don’t deny that I am a young man. In fact, I feel a certain pride in this young man who chose literary creation in his youth. In the Corporal Symphony I see the young man whose poetic value I sincerely tried to raise, and also that there has been not a rupture, but progress in that fiery boy, a little obsessed with singing about physical pleasures, who thinks too much about death, and the calm, mature, routine-bound man who enjoys monotony and boring. That’s why I keep thinking about these poems.
When did you realize that culture would be your best tool for liberation?
Very soon, around 13 or 14 years old.
Soon?
Yes, and I owe this to the counterexample of my wonderful father, an ordinary factory worker. I didn’t want the same thing for myself, my whole life waking up at five in the morning, earning little money, and knowing the course of your life from beginning to end. I realized that knowledge of languages could provide me with a gateway to a more interesting, richer life. I have great gratitude to the young man who realized that knowledge, study, and dedication to positive activities are great not only for himself, but perhaps for others as well.
I always sense in you an enthusiasm for language. How do you prevent it from ending?
First of all, this enthusiasm has nothing to do with a thankless job. Language, which is the activity related to words, is a toy for me, the longest lasting toy in this life. Soon I could see the positive impact of mastering words. The language has been my sincere, close, faithful companion throughout my life, and I will never stop learning it. I do not accept that language gives me an identity.
So what does language provide you?
Language gives me, above all, the opportunity to communicate with others, to enjoy their sounds and rhythms, to invent and imagine. I don’t like waving my tongue like a flag that contradicts other flags.
From what I know of him, I don’t think he cares about flags.
Nothing, nothing, I’m not interested. I have been living as a foreigner for thirty years and the idea of a nation has no validity in my private life. I understand that from an administrative perspective it makes sense whether someone is local or foreign. But in my life, if I am a country, that country belongs to everyone. It does not comply with my ethical principles to parcel out the planet and see people as alien and strange.
Going back to literature, is it possible to depoetize oneself?
I tried and thought I succeeded, but it’s not true. What I managed to do was to free myself from the poet’s madness by writing a book that was ugly, cacophonous and deliberately profane.
Are you writing poetry now?
Not now.
Currently saying…
Most of the time, when I just read other people’s poems, I feel a warmth in my fingers, it passes immediately, and I get a little excited again… I don’t like to get caught up in the automation of poetry or to be interested in it. truth through poems. On the other hand, one of my biggest obsessions or hobbies is, I don’t know, human behavior, and the human behavior of many people I observe, not mine, leads me directly to the narrative.
There are many references in his poems to the sea, where he lived far away for decades.
For me, the sea is not just a decorative or landscape element. I was born five hundred meters from the sea, and for many years this was a pleasant company that somehow allowed me to position myself in the world even in my childhood. Those of us who probably don’t believe in heaven find an alternative in the sea, a vast, unchanging expanse. So when I go to my city and look at the sea, I have the feeling that I see the same thing as other people five, ten thousand, twenty thousand years ago. And this feeling is something that moves me, moves me to speak, I will not say pray, but I will try to communicate with this extension that I know has come before me and will happen to me. For many years I lived in a city where there was no sea, and I tried to deceive myself by imagining that the forest could replace the sea. So the forest grew to this huge size before which I stood naked and humble, meditating, observing.
So is life still a “confusing mess”?
[Ríe] I’m sure of that. Even though I live a very secluded life and I am a very simple person, the moment I step on the street I hear chaos, noise, argument, conflict, argument and scandal. This has to do with a person’s genes.
“The gentle words of the one who prays alone were not spoken to me”… Which words were not spoken to you?
A lot has been done. But I received a religious education, and there came a time when I stopped believing and praying and accepted Stoicism.
There is a long poem dedicated to this in the book: Perla candente.
Yes, it is a poem in which I express my understanding of human life. I believe that we are born by chance, which does not mean that we do not need to make sense of this quota of years that falls on us. I’m so grateful for life.
Song sung by Violeta Parra.
Yes, this was a lullaby-like song that I sang to my daughters when they were little. I share and continue to share the philosophy gained by that song.
Do “obscure hermits whose job it is to endure the wounds of their owners” still live here?
Here they go. I also think it’s very human, it’s dishonest, it gives a social image that then doesn’t match the private one. I can accept this as a novelist who makes up fake stories and wants to provoke people and make them laugh. But not in poetry, my poetry collects my little personal truth.
So what is your truth?
A positive truth of assuming embracement, anger at injustice and bloodshed, beauty, harmony, everything that makes life better.
“The eyes that think I’m afraid are not mine,” he writes in another poem. What are your fears now?
I am not an autonomous being. I have a familiar connection with other people and other groups socially. Therefore, this disharmony and conflicts, including the lands I come from, create great fear in me. This is a constant fear that keeps me thinking. It’s not just me, I have other fears about my health. I don’t see myself as a guy sitting peacefully on the couch, but fear is an element that fortunately doesn’t take over my entire psyche but is there and gives me warnings. For example, I am not afraid of death.
NO?
No no. I’d like to live a little longer because I still want to lay a few eggs in the nest, but I’ve totally accepted that. Yes, I am afraid of pain. The pain mainly makes me angry but then effectively discourages me.
Another very impressive poem is My Daughter. I don’t think I’ve ever asked a writer this, yes, a writer, but I’ve never asked a writer: does fatherhood change a writer?
But completely, completely. Fatherhood gave me other eyes, other ears, and above all, filled my body with empathy. Suddenly my self took the backseat. One of the best things that happened to me in my life, it is not without problems because there are diseases, falls, anxiety, but I do not know loneliness. And what I am most grateful for about fatherhood is not only that it allows me to practice a love that does not seek reward, but also that it allows me to free myself a little from the anchor of the self, from being preoccupied with myself all the time. with what’s mine But in addition, all my literary work suddenly seems justified, the ultimate horizon of my literary efforts is no longer success, applause or good reviews, but contributing to the well-being of the family. So, I work to help the family, perhaps financially, and this saves me from laziness and writing whenever an idea comes to my mind, and in a way, I turn my work into a professional one. If it weren’t for fatherhood right now, I wouldn’t be understood. Fatherhood also corresponds to motherhood, and this union takes living with the other person to a wonderful level.
A dead poem is proof that the author cannot live by turning his back on history. Isn’t this proof that writing is a commitment?
I’m not a big fan of the word commitment because I think it’s inherent in expressing oneself on behalf of others. Moreover, because it already smells of an ideological tendency that seems to have been imposed on you. However, a writer, poet or novelist who turns his back on the social reality in which he lives will be in a bad situation. The world extends beyond one’s room, there are other people, there are conflicts, there are wars. In the poem you quote, there is an awareness that humans are, in a sense, the result of history. Whether or not a person is born here or there depends on the fate of his past. I lost my grandfather in the Civil War, fighting the people on the other side who destroyed Irún. While doing this, it seemed to me that I needed to express myself through poetry, but then I do not go out because I am committed to it. I don’t like looking for those cultural safe passages. I had to write this poem, I had to write about terrorism or against terrorism, and I did it for many reasons, among others I have a moral conscience that asks me: «Son, don’t you have anything to say here? You are faced with injustice, you are faced with horror, there are missile launchers here, you have nothing to say, do you continue with your butterflies and autumn oak leaves? However, this is a commitment I have made, I accept that it is not limited to just joining a trend.
What they say is sad because it’s true. Ultimately, the word commitment has been perverted.
Yes, and it is very simple, only a meaning related to the subject of what was written emerged. And we forget that words also have connotations, that they have musicality, and that even devotion must be effective, that it should not be exempt from careful and harmonious writing, that any nonsense is worthless just because it amounts to a protest.