Oh summer love! Yes, well, summer or any season, all right, but it's now, in the middle of August, when we reread this Song by Enric Casasses (Barcelona, 1951) and those early and late infatuations may come to mind, those who don't are and those who endure. There are plenty of love poems, whether they are dedicated to the object of this love or -perhaps more often- to heartbreak, in as many ways as one wants.
Finding love is the entrance to touch that moment of eternity that summer also gives us, when everything is both behind and in front, as if in perpetual parenthesis. That space where time stands still, where “you don't get old” and of course you are cured of everything, the antidote “against pimples / syphilis of the brain, / the sadness of the hands”.
And then we find that it is a game of chance, of course, and we find ourselves looking at the moon, looking for a guide, like that October 2001 in Valencia where everything changed (think of your own date and place here). Casasses offers us a love as strong as stone, mysterious as the sphinx, wise as the star that has lived it all and redeems us from this madness of ours, an egalitarian love but adrift from lunatic passions, the tides that come and go .
If we find love, which will give us life, we will know how to move "heaven and earth", which is also going back to the past to go forward, because after all love is everything, "it is god", but in case perhaps the poem wonders if perhaps the only deity will be the moon... Casasses plays with images that surprise us, without sugar, with the hint of popular lyrics and the one that doesn't seem like it.
It is certainly not the only Canción de Casasses (he has a few more), nor is it the only poem in which he compares love with God. In No plou, by Desfà els grumolls (3i4, also published in 1994), he says that “l'amor és déu en barca” (“love is god in a boat”, although it is also “bread and cheese”, and “falling in the puddle and find love”), a fragment that Miquel set to music in 2001 at Orgànic. In fact, this song also became the theme of an album, in this case Gerard Quintana's second solo album, Les claus de sal, in 2004, with another of his poems, Jo.
Many have already finished the holidays, others are finishing them and there are those who have not even started them. How many have been touched by Aphrodite or Eros, Venus or Cupid? How many will have rediscovered "the yangs that yins pretend"? How many have faced the "hidden face of death"?
And if not, we always have this poem that is a song. Join us.
Catalan version, here
