On the love letters he wrote a poem Pessoa - which he quoted in his cousin opera Jonás Trueba - that says that all love letters are ridiculous and that, in addition, « They would not be love letters if they were not / ridiculous. / I also wrote in my time love letters, / like the others, / ridiculous. / Love letters, if there is love, / have to be / ridiculous. / But, after all, / only creatures that did not write love letters / yes they are ridiculous ».

The love letters of I want to write to you tonight a love letter , published by Lumen, which brings together pieces of 15 writers, accompanied by a setting in context of each one, are ridiculous in the sense that Pessoa says, while they are of love . And, at the same time, also following Pessoa, they are a sign of humanity and fragility, of the vulnerability of those who wrote them and, therefore, take their authors away from ridiculousness.

The list of authors goes from Eloísa, which would inspire The new Eloísa , from Rousseau, to Simone de Beauvoir through Hildegarda de Bingen, Ninon de Lenclos, Julie de Lespinasse, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Emilia Pardo Bazán , Katherine Mansfield, María Zambrano, Marina Tsvietáieva, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Ángeles Caso has been in charge of the selection of writers and their letters, as well as most of the translations, since many of the letters gathered here are published for the first time in Spanish. Also, in addition to the short texts that serve to contextualize the writers, there is a prologue written almost exclusively with questions, because, in part, these letters could answer a first question: what is love?

The material compiled here is diverse and covers eight centuries, from 1132 to 1959, and different countries in Europe, with slight incursions into America. Eloísa's are the first love letters of a nun of which there is news, for example. Many of the letters are addressed to other writers, of whom the writers were in love or with whom they had a relationship: Galdós, Rilke, Sartre, Musset or Robert Browning .

There are heartbreaking stories, heartbreaks, punishments, misfortunes, illnesses, premature deaths, children abandoned to their fate and dead babies. But there are also stories with a happy ending, such as those in fairy tales, others that last just but end in sincere friendship, others that never came to fruition. Some reveal the contradictions we live with. There are loves between women, with sex or not, adulteries, clandestine loves that did not resist the confrontation with the day to day, and others that overcame everything and everyone. There are rapt and other serene loves. Some have the impetus of youth, others the calm of maturity. Access to the intimate texts of these writers is a privilege: each one is shown in love as in his work, with his style and his voice. Among the most beautiful are the letters of Elizabeth Barrett; Among the most snatched, those of Mansfield. Woolf and Pardo Bazán surprise in their unexpected tenderness.

This book also hides a history of intimate relationships, of their evolution over time and, also, offers a wide inventory of possibilities of integrating love into lives: living together or not, for example, lovers tolerated or not, fidelity , monogamy ... And more clearly exposes how the seams that belittled women with respect to love have been broken; that is, how the possibility of surrendering to love and desire is a conquest of freedom. Sometimes it makes unnecessary emphasis on the always subordinate position of women, it also squeaks - because it is not understood - that some words in some letters appear underlined.

The letters offer a display of ingenuity to translate into words what is intraducible: the deepest feelings, sometimes incomprehensible even to those who feel them . And they also show that love also has a much more palpable and vulgar correlate: to talk about love you have to talk about many other things that sometimes have to do with domestic affairs, others with books, others with cities and others with walks.

The assembled corpus composes, perhaps involuntarily, a catalog of relationships , and a universal chronology of lovers can also be read in it: that moment of the beginning is deeply touching, when they have already surrendered to intimacy, but not yet It has fallen into repetition and is soon for reproaches. Then, the lovers confess how frightened they were at the beginning, the doubts, the approaches, the flirting. Love makes us all vulnerable , be it Simone de Beauvoir or a teenager who faces that for the first time.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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