Summers on the beach, in the mountains... or in the city. It can be our own or we can go sightseeing, but what will we look for? What will we find? Even more: who will we be? Because we can be that archetypal male in search of risks, emotions or pleasures of great caliber, who asks for "answers as God intended". Are we perhaps the woman who "was looking for love"? There are only two main lines, in the poem, a man present in the expanse; a woman who in contrast may seem reduced to a single objective, love, but at the same time between love and circumstantial banality there is no possible battle. They will actively seek or simply wish, we don't know, and perhaps there is a time for everything, to ask or to answer, to speak or to listen.
We ask the author. He answers and we listen to him.
The poet and journalist Ernest Farrés –and a colleague in the Editorial section of this newspaper– approached the subject through a painting by Edward Hopper, Summer in the city. Well, we have said a painting and we are talking about a poem, but in fact Farrés devoted an entire book to glossing fifty works by the painter, with a title that could not be more explicit: Edward Hopper, which the Vienna publishing house published in 2006, and which has been translated into Italian, German and also English, a task for which the translator, Lawrence Venuti, won the Robert Fagles Award in 2008. The Spanish version of the poem is by Laura Ferrero.
With the book Farrés (Igualada, 1967) “I wanted to explain not only Hopper's artistic world but also life, that is, biographical, and at the same time explain myself”. In other words, using Hopper, he offered a poetic itinerary of his own concerns, reflections or experiences.
"The poem Summer in the city -he continues- is quite idiosyncratic of Hopper, because many of its main themes can be guessed: alienation, loneliness, lack of communication between men and women... Hopper, in some way, and although he has often been accused of being an easy painter, I think he stands out like few others when it comes to portraying the contradictions of our modern, industrialized and urban society. Well, at least that of his time, in the 20th century, because now we are already in a post-industrial, technological society, etc. ”. And he insists that “to understand the alienation suffered by a majority of people in the developed world during the 20th century, Hopperian paintings are excellent”.
All of this is synthesized in the poems, and this one, he says, "also has the peculiarity of revealing in a very crude way this silent confrontation between the masculine and feminine universe: in the painting it is evident, and in my poem I articulate it with a structure binary, in which a long list of masculine needs are opposed to a simple but complex need of women. Here, in the poem, the 'man' and the 'woman' are obviously not anyone in particular, but archetypes, models. In Hopper's paintings, human figures are also always models of that alienating urban North American society, almost automatons, anonymous, universal...”.
And if art and literature go from the anecdote to the category, here they have gone further because they feed off each other with the suggestion of verbalized empathy and at the same time reflect the most absolute incomprehension.
Search and find are not the same.
Catalan version, here
