A dreamlike music, between sweetness and disruption. "On top of you all the flowers", sings Marina Herlop with the Tarta Relena as choristers, with a shocking costume by Rosa Tharrats. The XXXVII Barcelona International Poetry Festival begins, at the Palau de la Música, the end of the most lyrical week in the city. Seven poets of different ages, languages and aesthetics.
A historical poet like Jordi Pàmias (Guissona, 1938) enters the stage and appeals to the “man split between a future of technological advances / and the quiet magic of a memory”, until he returned to Minotaur at the end of the century, the red night of the monster ”, in the form of implicit war.
Between poem and poem, piano music. Later, between poet and poet, with synthesizers and voices, in invented language.
It is the turn of Hirondina Joshua (Maputo, Mozambique, 1987), considered a lyrical promise in the Portuguese language. She draws with words a metaphysical house, with walls and furniture where there is a person who speaks, and “her loneliness puts the world into action”.
Golan Haji (Amuda, Syria, 1977), a Syro-Kurdish poet settled in Paris, recites in Arabic between the resonance of war and hope, and, dressed in green, quotes Yeats saying that it is the color of fairies.
Romanian poet Marta Petreu (Jucu, Romania, 1955), recent winner of the prestigious Eminescu prize, remembers a long time ago. When there were feelings, "immersed in each cell within a sheet of genetic code."
Ángelo Néstore (Lecce, Italy, 1986), non-binary poet of queer expression, of Malagan and Italian origin, questions identities in Spanish based on mainstream porn, questions about God or his absence, and social divergence.
Then, Andríi Antonovskyi, Ukrainian-Catalan artist and poet, with an ironic and anti-war message, with a powerful diction that triggers a “black bile” that melts into “bls ngr”, sound poetry, or in another poem “towards the magic womb disrupted”, to the “unknown / Unknown”.
And he also took the opportunity to remember, in the midst of a war like the one in Ukraine, that on May 18, 1944, the Stalinist regime deported the Crimean Tatars.
Alice Oswald (Reading, Great Britain, 1966), one of the living classics of English poetry, began by recalling the death of Hector, the hero of Troy, to move on to the great questions of nature that sheds its leaves, of the leaves that they are souls, that we are all and no, that in parentheses thin the verses, until the end. Death floats everywhere, in a distant war, which is both there and not, and the words say it without it coming out. They shoot like no bullet.
Catalan version, here
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