Ángela García

Colombian poetry written by women has suffered from an excess of whimpering and sentimentality, or from an empty and repetitive bedroom eroticism. Ángela García’s poetry is happily free from both of these regrettable features. To begin with, her verbal economy is outstanding; in many cases she even does without defining adjectives and articles. But her search of precision does not affect the musical quality of her verses. This will to condense and leave out the debris is a method which sometimes may imply certain problems of comprehension for the reader:

I am harassed
by the name without equivalent
the advancement
ignored language
initiation chamber
name without phoneme
sign
like sun or blackness
without resemblance

Another one of the virtues of García’s work is that, even though hers is a discreet voice, measured and without rich adjectives, to the point of being muffled sometimes, she is assisted in her most intimate substratum by a solitary and almost painful reflection, a contemplation of one’s place in the world and what the world means to someone who is constantly questioning the meaning of everything:

It has been pursuing what I want to be
it lights up when one can see nothing
it lends me an ear
it sprouts my future voice

And this contemplation in many of her poems has as a result a sort of celebration and gratitude for the miracle of living. Nor absent from her work is a look at the outside world, as in these beautiful and hard verses in one her poems:

A country lies
at the bottom of a sea of blood. Bibliography

Poetry
Entre leño y llama (Between log and flame), Serie Hipnos, Medellin, 1993.
Rostro de Agua (Face of water), serie Hipnos, Medellin, 1997.
Farallón Constelado/ Sternige Klippe (bilingual Spanish-German), translated and edited by Jona y Tobías Burghardt, Delta, Stuttgart 2003.
De la fugacidad/Om flygtigheten, (bilingual Spanish-Swedish), translations by Lasse Söderberg, Aura Latina, Malmö, 2005.
Veinte grados de latitud en tres horas, (bilingual Spanish-Serbian), translation by Zlatko Krazni, Smederevo, Serbia, 2006.


Translations
El horizonte solo tiene un lado, Claude Darbellay, serie Hipnos, Medellin, 1998. 


Links:
In Spanish 
International Poetry Festival of Medellín web page http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/pub.php/en/Corporacion/hipnos/hipnosa2.html
Selected poems from Rostro de Agua