In the courtyard of the house two trees give shade in the morning already cold: a royal laurel and a horse chestnut. In the background, one of the spiers of the cathedral of León. On the high floor, the poet Antonio Gamoneda (Oviedo, 1931) smokes rolling tobacco and reviews the latest pages of the new installment of his memoirs. A few months ago, along with Jordi Doce, he left his complete poetry ready. Two volumes that add up to almost 1,000 pages with the title of This light , epilogue by Miguel Casado and that next week publishes Galaxia Gutenberg. The second volume houses unpublished books such as Las venas comunales y Mudanzas II , as well as a selection of latest poems.

Gamoneda speaks slowly, his eyes narrowed mostly. The barricades of books that made the office a maze disappeared. Defend his status as "provincial poet", gently away from noise and the canon. He is a demanding poet . Serious. With a writing of depth that has a lot of memory pole and some battle in the limits of words.

He suffered the sinister ash of the postwar period and Franco. That conditioned him with a resistance character. He stopped publishing and writing for more than 15 years as an intimate rejection of censorship. But almost 20 years ago, Gamoneda's work began to take place. First it was the Europe Prize, then Reina Sofía de Poesía and the Cervantes auction. Everything in 2006.

With the same condition of alert man on his side, he speaks here of poetry, memories, disappointments and a few certainties.

Does the meeting of complete poetry suggest a fulfilled life? Can be. Completed because there is no other choice at my age, of course. More than complete poetry I would say testamentary poetry. To that feeling, which I don't know if it is good or bad, it is added that the size of these books offers a warning.What? Even if they are 70 years of writing I think it is too much poetry. We know that the poets of extensive work in the end are poets of a few pages. How much emptiness there will be. But well, now it is irremediable.What is activated in memory when one sees all his poetry displayed? There are 70 years here, then you go with the memory at the beginning of those years. What was he doing? Why I got up with poetic will. You even look once more at your first written and preserved poem, which is from the year 47. That is what happens when you see the whole work, that you return to the beginning of things. There was in you, for many years, a propensity to Withdrawal and loneliness. But it was not a voluntary vocation of loneliness, but something else. He was (and still is) a vocational provincial who came to poetry by a series of automatisms that began when he could hardly read or write. Like everything, I did it my way. And that led me to never be too aware of where the shots of poetry were going, so I had no chance of adopting favorable or contrary attitudes. What has poetry saved him from? It is a strong matter to think that poetry has made me saved from something. But I could say that poetry constantly saves us from ourselves. Turning a suffering, for example, into the aesthetic fact that is a poem is a liberation. And, for that very reason, an act of salvation. He was more than 15 years without publishing anything. And writing very little at that time. What happened? There was a series of biographical, cultural and political coincidences that prompted me to leave writing for a while. I was, in a humble way, in the resistance. And that implies some requirements. He had written the poems of Castilian Blues , which was published by the publisher Ciencia Nueva, by poor Batlló, but censorship prevented him from accusing the content of that book of Marxist and atheist. I got angry with that circumstance and, without deliberation, started a strike process that lasted more than 15 years. At that time I wrote little and did not publish anything. Didn't I feel need? Poetry, as you know, is prior to writing. That I did not write did not mean that I dispensed with poetry in my life. On the contrary, he lived in expectation or in the need for poetry, which is an intense way of living it. But, as I say, it was the difficult years in which my poverty and the friends of the resistance helped me endure the unsatisfied tension of poetry. Somehow, I think, I was also charging the batteries. How far is the second volume of memories? I'm about to finish those pages. I thought to make three or four volumes, but life is always complicated, so I leave it in this second installment, which comes so far, although it is a chronologically dilapidated book. It is written when memories come. Are there account adjustments? Rather, a sort of accumulation of judgments that begins with myself. There is no adjustment of punctual or deliberate accounts, but there is an attitude of qualification and maybe even a small revenge with some people. There is also in them the enormous verification of the emptying of Spain that was the Civil War and the dictatorship. And in that sense I don't close my beak. Nor in what happens, for example, now. Does the political reality of the moment influence your writing? Yes. But not only of its immediate and specific aspects, but they confirm me in the historical, political and ideological sequence of Spain. What I have been thinking for so many years is confirmed. For example, that what we call democracy is a fiction. How. It is the last apparent subtlety: an imaginary democracy within which a predatory attitude is still practiced. We have a political democracy that houses an economic dictatorship. And everyone says amen to the system. That causes the suffering to remain. Has age made him more skeptical? Without a doubt, in relation to those concrete wills of struggle and social improvement. If at any time I thought that resistance would end with a profound mutation in Spain and the disappearance of the suffering generated by the dictatorship, I am more skeptical. Although not respect with my neighbors. Even the most suffocated and muddy has a spark of generous and supportive will towards others. The extreme right returns, because it seems like a small phenomenon. It can bother and be a historical impertinence, but I don't magnify it. The ups and downs follow each other in the march of history: the coming and going, the white and the black. That phenomenon, which is going forward by taking steps backwards, is another way History has to move. That does not mean that I am not indignant. Is poetry a way of saying no? Juan Carlos Mestre says it is a form of resistance to evil. Okay, well. In that sense, poetry also has value. More than Sartre denied when he spoke of the "uselessness" of poetry as a revolutionary tool. That does not mean that poetry should be a rally, but there is even a poetic (better or worse) in social movements and other historical moments. Also in the most aberrant. I think of that bug that was Isabel the Catholic when she says: "I have to fight for faith against the infidels." Poetry is in everything and unfortunate examples are left over.

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