Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto / Edgardo Dobry

Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto

Poetry. Lorenzo García Vega (Jagüey Grande, Cuba, 1926) was the youngest member of the group led by José Lezama in the Havana of the fifties, an experience to which he gave testimony in Los años de Orígenes (1997, published a second time in Buenos Aires in 2007). A book completely removed from self-serving memories and the trickle of prestigious names: García Vega speaks there of the “baroque boogie,” of “the lie of the French,” of “the opportunistic firmness of the farcical Latin American left.” Since, residing in Miami (which he indefectibly calls “Playa Albina”) for forty years now, he had to endure the unconditional support for the Cuban revolution, that condemned the true exiles of that Latin American chimera to ostracism; and the profuse mythology surrounding Lezama and the Orígenes group, against which he took revenge in that book. At once heir to this last resplendence of great Cuban poetry and marginalized, alone, without a tribune, a press or a professorship, García Vega wrote a series of desolate and funny poems, without pity or vain commiseration. Closer to Samuel Beckett’s convulsions of pain and laughter than to any neo-baroque rhetoric in use, there we have extraordinary, extremely unique books that have been published lately: El oficio de perder, No mueras sin laberinto, Devastación del Hotel San Luis. At eighty-five García Vega publishes this book made up of two blocks –Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto–, in a hybrid genre of prose poem, a sketch of chronicles of the void, fragmentary reflection removed from all systems. To the marginality of the exiled poet, of the man stripped of his destiny without receiving anything in return, sharply disillusioned of any fantasy of redemption (for him, for the world), he now adds the resentment of old age, received like a jovial mask: “Sitting at the living room sofa, at five in the afternoon –I didn’t do anything else (if before five in the afternoon you can say I did anything).” Or this: “A sad reality of this Playa Albina where I live. Drums, knick-knacks. What finally makes no noise, even if one spends the day playing the drum.” Play the drum: write the poem. Nietzsche said: “Nihilism is a type of idleness.” But a form of humanism persists in desolation, in the uncomfortable laugh, in the histrionic astonishment of true pain. If you want to know what forms truly contemporary poetry seeks in our language it is impossible not to read Lorenzo García Vega.


Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto
Lorenzo García Vega
Ediciones La Palma, 2011
284 pages. 13 euros




{ Edgardo Dobry, Babelia, El País, 10 September 2011 }