MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

El reciente ganador del premio Poeta Laureado, el serbio Charles Simic, en reciente entrevista se muestra sin pelos en la lengua. No teme decir que muchos intelectuales en EEUU se han vendido a las ambiciones imperialistas de su país. Y también considera que los poetas sólo son tomados en cuenta (entiéndase "son censurados y considerados peligrosos") en los países totalitarios, pero en las democracias no tienen mayor influencia. La entrevista está en B92. Por cierto, me comentó Eduardo Chirinos que Charles Simic junto a Mark Strand (también Poeta Laureado), son los poetas estadounidenses que hoy "gozan de mayor predicamento" (como diría un profesor de Filología en España).

Dice Simic: "Many of our intellectuals in United States are servants of our imperial ambitions. They dream up excuses for wars and justify policies of domestic oppression. I think that has nearly always been the case everywhere despite the myth of the intellectual as a fighter for truth and justice. In my life, I’ve meet only a few independent-minded intellectuals and they tended to be marginal figures in whose opinion no one was interested".

Más adelante agrega: "Writers and poets are only noticed in totalitarian regimes. They are either imprisoned and shot, or they become highly-privileged flunkies of the regime. In Democracies, they are marginal figures without any influence. That suits me just fine since I like and need my solitude.

Etiquetas: charles simic, eeuu, mark strand, NOTICIA

El joven que huyó de la ex Yugoslavia a los 16 años (de eso hace más de 50 años), Charles Simic, se ha covertido en el décimo quinto poeta en lengua inglesa en adquirir el título Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry , sucediendo a Donald Hall, una distinción que otorga la Biblioteca del Congreso de los EEUU desde 1937. Se une así a una lista de autores como Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Mark Strand, Joseph Brodsky. El poeta había ganado antes el Pullitzer por una colección de poemas.

Para quienes quieran leer algunos de sus poemas en castellano, les dejo este enlace.

Dice The Guardian sobre el autor: "Simic received the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1990, for The World Doesn't End, a series of 67 prose poems in which he plumbs the absurdity of a world which, like the river of one of his poems, "in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards." Such imagistic playfulness, coupled with brevity and simple diction, has become his stylistic hallmark; however, the issues he confronts within his poetry are darkly serious. History is his central theme. "My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go," he explains, "so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity (...) Speaking by telephone from his home, Simic described himself as a "city poet", joking that he has "lived in cities all of my life, except for the last 35 years." He originally wanted to be a painter, he said, until "I realised that I had no talent.""

Etiquetas: charles simic, eeuu, NOTICIA, PREMIO