"Thank you, Imad, you're here!" exclaims in the Palau de la Música Catalana the curator of the 38th Barcelona International Poetry Festival, Maria Callís - with Josep Pedrals - in reference to the poet Imad Abu Saleh, whom they refused the visa to come to recite.
On the stage –the work of Bernat Mas Adrover–, a carpet with scalextric tracks. The show begins with music by Joana Gomila and Laia Vallès, largely synthesized from voice samples of the participating poets. Throughout the hour and a half of recital they will be aligning the verses and playing interludes. Ana Martins Marques exchanges “with the neighbor / words of about 800 years / and I step on a puddle / with 2 hours of history / where an image / that has lived / for a few seconds dissolves”.
Perhaps Abu Saleh would have liked to be “a drop of water / for the workers to drink / when it is hot”, among many other things that he would have said if he had been there. His translator and editor Valèria Macías has given him his voice, also in Arabic.
Later, Olga Novo recites a long poem, Amour fou, in which she confesses that she cried "kissing the bark of a poplar in the middle of a village that no longer exists", and that she only wanted "to be on earth to contemplate your precious bouquet of atoms”, and more, “and all the rest / literature”.
Blanca Llum Vidal, in Catalan, wonders "what if the nightmare became a part (...) and if closing hell would be enough"", but warns that we will be able to "talk so softly that we will do a lot ours".
The Mexican José Eugenio Sánchez invents without reading a cosmic western starting with the incredible world of machines, where you can buy a terminator online and it costs 314 dollars and in two days it arrives at your house. Safe, funny and sarcastic, he ends up seeing how the planet mart “suspended at dawn looks at us incandescent / like a genius with arms crossed / and nobody does anything”.
Danez Smith finishes, with a direct and heartbreaking style, inherited from the slam poetry circuit that he has frequented since he was 14 years old, he remembers to finish that it is "a bad day to be a boy", but "we have all come here to dance". Or more: "I have come to turn heaven into a garden." A garden of applause.
Catalan version, here
