An introduction to the three poets of the July issue

June 28, 2006 Although Porfirio Barba Jacob died in 1942, he was, in a certain sense, a nineteenth-century poet: he was influenced by the rich ‘modernist’ vocabulary of Nicaraguan-born revolutionary poet Rubén Darío, and did not innovate at all, being content to adopt Darío’s style for his own, less progressive, purposes.

As a consequence of the murder of the liberal leader, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, on 9th April, 1948, Colombia was suffering from its greatest wave of political violence when Horacio Benavides was born. In 1949, some 30 thousand were killed in a country with a population of just under 11 million inhabitants.

By 1970, when María Clemencia Sánchez was born, the population had almost doubled and the violence had changed in nature; now, besides the government itself, the actors were two newly-founded guerrilla groups which are still fighting the government today. Later, a third actor, the paramilitary who opposed them, would appear on the scene.

Sánchez is one of the many young antioqueño poets who has had the good fortune of being able to discover poets from all over the world at the International Poetry Festivals in Medellín. In 1991, when the festival was founded, she was 21 and studying languages at university; three years later she translated the poems of the South African poet, Mazisi Kunene, for the festival.

In Sánchez’s poems, a dreamy, almost surreal atmosphere reigns, and she uses frequent literary or historical references. She talks about the “terrible beauty” of her searches, affirms that she follows in the footsteps of Rilke and Valéry, and quotes Wittgenstein to the effect that “what can be said, cannot be showed” [sic], which means that she understands “poetry as a path long before she understood the impossibility of language”.

Horacio Benavides is one of several Colombian poets of his generation who do not belong to a particular movement and have, in a solitary and sometimes painful search, found their own voice, that peculiar rhythm and imagery that paints them so faithfully. In his case, it is a spare style, perfectly adapted to the expression of subtle feelings and images. The extreme simplicity of his poetry is remarkable in a country given to bombast.

Although so different from one another, both of these poets are at the other end of the spectrum from Porfirio Barba Jacob. They are not only from another time, they seem to be from another country. There is an immense difference between the Colombia of the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, and the Colombia of one century later.

These were almost idyllic times, most of the deaths in the civil war were caused by tropical diseases, and Barba did not fire a single shot. The poète maudit could shock his fellow countrymen and other Latin Americans with his decadent and debauched style of life, his sexual preferences, and his expressions, spoken with diabolic emphasis, like, “to be a full man, two things are necessary: to hate one’s homeland and to abhor one’s mother.” Sánchez and Benavides, who have grown up in a country suffering from terrible violence, can only smile at Barba’s intent to épater les bourgeois, and perhaps neither do they have an ear for the rich – but perhaps to them empty-sounding – music of his poems.