Welcome to Colombian poetry - January 2006

7 juni 2006 A bad Colombian joke goes that if someone says the word ‘poet’ aloud in a street full of people, each one will turn their head. Not long ago a Colombian poet said that if a country had more than a hundred poets who could be read pleasurably, that country would be ‘saved’.

But of course Columbia is not ‘saved’, as anyone who reads the press or knows about our dreary statistics realises. We will repeat some of those statistics here to try to counter our national amnesia and to pique the consciences of those who prefer to turn their backs when reality is not agreeable. Between 1990 and 1999 there were more than 45,000 violent deaths in Colombia. The country presents the greatest number of labor union members and journalists assassinated in the West, freedom of speech and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association are seriously menaced and violated. Colombia has the highest number of war widows in the world, and the number of displaced persons by the armed conflict surpasses three million, most of them children and female heads of family. Colombia labours under the oldest armed conflict on the planet, and has the highest number of kidnapped persons. Finally, Colombia is the only country in the world in which a political party has been systematically exterminated. But, we repeat that it also has more than 300 hundred poets, and three international poetry festivals, among them the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, considered by many as one of the most important in the world.

This is because, tenaciously and self-confidently, even though it is more often reactive than proactive, poetry continues to breaks new ground. It never stands still and advances, desperate to communicate its findings. Yet it remains removed, apart from the noise and the confusion, even though it is from these experiences that it draws its message and themes; one of the virtues of poetry is the paradox of drawing light from its immersion in darkness.

In the field of art, it has never been easy to determine methodically what is and what is not beautiful: the poetry of two poets, antithetical in their aesthetic conception and their creation, can be equally beautiful and necessary. It has not even been possible to universally define poetry, and in spite of the necessary and even enlightening efforts of poets as well as philosophers and critics, poetry repels definition.

We do not presume that the hundreds of poets in Echevarría’s book are all good poets; however, our intuition and our knowledge of the form allow us to risk this assertion: Colombian poetry is, in defiance of the multiple ills suffered by the nation, in good health. We’re certain that the poets we have so far presented and translated on this site are proof of it, as are the ones that we now include.

Three distinct generations come together in this new issue of Colombian poetry: firstly, the famous José Asunción Silva, one of the greatest Colombian poets of all time. Like Rubén Darío, he was an innovator and rejected the musty form of poetry in Spanish in the second half of the nineteenth century. Hounded by creditors and by the provincial and prudish atmosphere of Bogotá in his day, Silva committed suicide when he was not yet thirty-one years old. Nevertheless he still managed to open the door of modernity for Colombian poetry.

Carlos Vásquez, born at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, is a dense and complex poet, whose poetry is somewhat influenced by philosophical discourse; a philosophy Professor, his doctoral thesis was on Nietszche, and he also published a lengthy analysis of Bataille. Finally, Felipe García Quintero, born a little less than twenty years after Vásquez, and about whom it can already be said that he possesses, in spite of his youth, a personal poetic history and a voice which is increasingly defined. Translated by Nicolás Suescún