Mario Benedetti: The Holy Life of a Poet
What to do with Mario Benedetti?
The Uruguayan poet was born 100 years ago and died 10 years ago as a kind of saint of popular Latin American literature.
Vitalist, youthful, lover of wine, football and women, friend of all, champion of every just cause and writer of infinite verses about the paradoxes of life that, in the end, we must not decipher but accept as a joke that makes existence more bearable.
It is so
easy to do loa as a caricature
of one of the poets still "most cited on Instagram" today, according to the editorial director of the Alfaguara label, Pilar Reyes, said yesterday.
Probably the best thing to do with Benedetti is to re-consider his work, which is what Alfaguara has done (with the collaboration of the Visor publishing house) in a
Poetic Anthology
selected by Joan Manuel Serrat.
«I
had
already
worked with the poetry of Antonio Machado and that of León Felipe.
I made my first trip to America and found people giving me books of poetry.
The author who gave me the most was Benedetti, "Serrat explained yesterday at the presentation of his anthology.
That happened in the 70s. The Barcelona singer-songwriter only met Benedetti in the 80s, when
the Uruguayan lived in exile in the Prosperidad neighborhood of Madrid
.
Together they recorded an album, El sur also existe, of which Serrat recalls the generosity with which Benedetti renounced "tinsel, poetic brilliance" for the benefit of songs.
The interesting thing is that Serrat's work in Poetic Anthology has not been routine.
Serrat has chosen to arrange the poems in chronological order so that, together, they make an account of Benedetti's life.
“The editor Carolina Rebollo and I could not see a better solution.
If we had arranged the poems by theme
, we would have lost the dimension of what was happening.
In Benedetti, this sense of a biographical story is especially interesting because he is a poet of the everyday who is always in search of his time, ”Serrat explained yesterday.
His way of reading poetry as a hidden biography allows us to rediscover verses that apparently speak of militancies, such as
Let's Make a Deal
, of the Chicago School economists, such as
The South Also Exists
or of friends and houses, such as
This is my house
: "No doubt.
This is my home.
/ All the dogs and bell towers / pass in front of her.
/ But my house is hit by lightning / and one day it will split in two.
/
And I will not know where to take shelter / because all doors open out of the world
».
Serrat, moreover, has dared to take his selection until the last years of Benedetti's life, the times of the
desexile,
the least considered and known in his work.
To celebrate the
Anthology,
Alfaguara had a handful of admirers of Mario Benedetti who yesterday gathered at the Madrid headquarters of the Instituto Cervantes:
Joaquín Sabina,
Benjamín Prado, Elvira Sastre, Marwan, Vanesa Martín, Juan Cruz, the editor Chus Visor, Rozalén and Luis García Montero read the verses included in the centennial book.
The climax was put by Ismael Serrano with a vindictive piece called Poeta menor.
"It is comforting to be a minor poet."
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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