The aphorism is experiencing a good moment, with more authors than ever. In the era of Twitter and short phrases, the titles that cultivate this form, which is actually very old, have multiplied, since it dates back to several centuries before Christ. According to the RAE dictionary, it is a "maxim or statement that is proposed as a guideline in some science or art".
"That definition should be updated, today it is much more flexible and encompasses many more intentions," replies Andrew Hui, Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, who has just published Aphorism Theory. From Confucius to Twitter, an essay that covers the history of the genre, with special attention to authors such as Confucius, Heraclitus, the apostle Thomas, Erasmus, Bacon, Pascal and Nietzsche.
From his office in the Asian city-state, he tells by phone that “academic institutions, all over the world, continue to consider it a minor issue. However, social networks (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok) have greatly enhanced their use, also that of the micro-story or the micro-essay, although on the internet they only last 24 hours.
Despite being little studied, political systems or religions have been founded on aphorisms, since Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius or Buddha expressed themselves through them, although it was his disciples who collected them. They are not always easy to understand, they often give rise to interpretation. They are born linked to medicine (Hippocrates), which, like poetry or philosophy, tries to understand the world and does so through formulas, prescription and diagnosis. There are all kinds but they usually offer an alternative vision to established knowledge”.
Guillermo Busutil (Granada, 1961) has just published Origami 751 aphorisms related to reading and the world of books, what he calls “language bow ties”. “The aphorism –he says, by phone, from Malaga– is how to draw thoughts in the air, a whole goldsmith's shop, with the charm of poetry, leaves questions and echoes.
"Like César Aira, I believe that short books are a courtesy to the reader." His work pays homage to various authors, from classics such as Verne, Woolf or Cortázar to contemporaries such as the late Almudena Grandes, Irene Vallejo or Jorge Carrión and vindicates a reading activity “based on discipline, like going to the gym, which is the way to obtain the greatest pleasure, a pleasure that also broadens your life and your senses”.
The poet Dionisia García (Fuente-Álamo, 1929) is, at 93, the doyen of the genre in Spain. She has just published two aphoristic books, I fly inside – a title that she sees as "a good definition of what it is" – and the compilation of all her previous work, The hidden thought, both in Renaissance. “I cultivate all genres –she explains, by phone, from her house in Murcia–, it is the theme that tells you how it wants to be expressed, Borges already said. We have inherited the aphorism from our former Greeks and Romans, who expressed themselves so well with their short sentences. Unlike the narrative, they arrive suddenly, without forcing them, like poems, but there is no one to take away the depth. The golden snail (2011), for example, was born in Barcelona, I was in the farmhouse of some relatives, I saw a snail and I got into the life of that being”. She has detected "a growing taste for the aphorism in young people but you have to be careful because it is a reflection and, therefore, it must arise from the residue of years, experience, or culture."
Gemma Pellicer (Barcelona, 1972), author of Extreme Measures , explains by email that she came to the aphorism “not from poetry, as is usual, but from the short story, after observing a progressive thinning in the narrative texts she wrote. Little by little, I was observing that my texts were being refined, until sometimes they remained almost in the same bones”. She believes that, nowadays, “social networks have given the aphorism what they call visibility, in a massive way; and, of course, in those waters bathe especially young people. But, if they do not end up collected in a book, with all that this implies, of selection, purification, organization, etc., they would end up lost in the clouds”.
The poet Erika Martínez (Jaén, 1979), author of Lenguaraz, tells, by phone from Granada, that “I started writing with this genre, which has a lot in common with poetry, because it thinks with images. For me, it is a text with the ability to synthesize an idea in the fewest number of words possible. It also presents a very tense relationship with thought, productive from the conflict, since it reflects in an unsystematic way, which differentiates it from conventional philosophy”.
In the 20th century, he believes, his connection “with poetry was strengthened, since he opted for the arbitrariness of the image, the humorous occurrence or whim, he became freer.” “From ignorance – he continues – there are prejudices against him, as if he were categorical and authoritarian, imposing his truth, but today's aphorists are almost the opposite, they work the conflicts of truth, in a permanent going against, it is a genre of aesthetic, spiritual and philosophical dissent”.
Independent publishers have a fundamental role in this boom. Some of the most outstanding are Cuadernos del Vigía, La Isla de Siltolá, Renacimiento, Pre-Textos, Trea... and also Tusquets, from the Planeta group, with sales hits such as Emil Cioran and Jorge Wagensberg. Spain and Mexico are the two Spanish-speaking countries where the genre has been growing the most since the 1980s, accompanied by a rigorous critical apparatus and various anthologies and annual awards such as the José Bergamín.
Martínez emphasizes that it was Nietzsche who “rescued the term at the end of the 19th century. He thought like that, directly in short sentences”, and points out that there are authors who write aphorisms directly but others “like María Zambrano, who has them because Antoni Marí extracted them from his work as a whole, they are very good, aphorisms by amputation”.
“It is a strange, tiny and clandestine genre, which until now no one has clearly categorized,” says the editor (and author) Miguel Ángel Arcas (Granada, 1956), from Cuadernos del Vigía, in a telephone conversation from his hometown. "It began as a formula to coin knowledge in medicine and other scientific fields, it evolved in the Renaissance and in Romanticism with a more literary character, until it reached the 20th century, when it acquired the poetic body it has today." For him, the important thing is that “it generates its own truth, a reality that was there and could not be seen. In the aphorism, the truth is never enough, there is something more”.
Manuel Neila (Hervás, 1950), author of works such as Broken silence and editor of the collection of Renaissance aphorisms, tells by phone from Madrid that "the great classical aphorists made me see that sentimentality must be united to thought and not separated of the". He believes that "more than because of social networks, the rise of the genre (or, rather, the expressive modality) among young people has more to do with the fact that we have entered a new way of thinking, after the economic and technocentric paradigm that imposed after the Second World War. The philosopher Joan-Carles Mèlich makes it clear that we are in a new mentality, a new reason, precarious and fragile, which has the aphorism as its incision instrument, since thought today is no longer as deductive as before”.
"In Spain -he details- there are today more than 120 active aphorists, with between one and five published books". Hence, “as happened with the explosion of the haiku, there is a danger that it will deteriorate or fail, so it happened with the romance in the 20s or the sonnet in the 40s, which became dozens. There is such an abundance of publications that the quantity begins to impose itself on the quality”.
There are several fundamental anthologies, such as the canonical Think for the Brief coordinated by José Ramon González and which covers from 1908 to 2012; Under the sign of Athena (Renaissance, 2017), coordinated by Manuel Neila and dedicated to ten current authors; o Fires of words (José Manuel Lara Foundation, 2018), on poetic aphorism in the 20th and 21st centuries, coordinated by Carmen Camacho.
We have asked those interviewed in these pages what their favorite aphorists are. Beyond classics, such as Marcial, Joubert, Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer, Wilde, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Kafka, Chesterton, Porchia, Joan Fuster, Carlos Edmundo de Ory or Foucault, among contemporaries, in addition to those already mentioned, names are repeated by José Luis García Martín (Aldeanueva del Camino, 1950), Enric Casasses (Barcelona, 1951), Ramón Eder (Lumbier, 1952), Carmen Canet (Almería, 1955), Ramón Andrés (Pamplona, 1955), León Molina (San José de las Lajas, 1959), Manuel Moya (Fuenteheridos, 1960), Pere Saborit (Manlleu, 1961), Jesús Aguado (Madrid, 1961), José Luis Trullo –or his heteronym Félix Trull– (Barcelona, 1967), Jordi Doce ( Gijón, 1967), Itziar Mínguez Arnáiz (Baracaldo, 1972), Andrés Neuman (Buenos Aires, 1977), Victoria León (Seville, 1981), Eliana Dukelsky (Buenos Aires, 1982) or Héctor Puertas Castro (Salamanca, 1985).
Listen to his words, and then think about them again because, as Professor Hui recalls from his office in Singapore, “the aphorism is the genre that takes the least time to read and the longest to understand”. They are warned.
