Textos por fuera / Eleonora Requena

Texts on the Outside



[Eleonora Requena / Esteban Fonseca]


•


deciding
not to wait
increases the speed of the droplets
another farce


•


brief
each day
facing the screen
one word
another


•


without the keys to the door down the hall
from the one walled in by frets and brushwood


•


I shut up
from you
in the redoubt
as hygienic as
an ache (like a love)
exempt of any drama


•


“I love tautologies”
“you love what?”
“tautolgies”


•


there’s no poetry here, according to them
ideas and desires
run through the house


•


je sublime
tu sublimes
il sublime


•


you will never inhabit the place of certainties
you’re outside


•


as much as they’re aerial and elusive
they are the guide
of a minimal theater


•


go to the plaza to contemplate the guillotine
they’ve set up on a stage
for the pleasure of the condemned
this afternoon they’ll pass by us
followed by an abominable arrogant
court


•


wherever you thought you were safe
it hurts there too


•


neither clearings nor bellows
determined words
without consent


•


you should bring your ear closer
to the ear
to the ear


•


Warning:
sharpshooters will cut down all messengers


•


you’ll be safe from the dark swallows here


•


Conjectural tango:
it’s neither sky nor blue
it’s only writing




Ten Notes on the Margins of a Blank Page

1. Old schemes, new devices
2. It’s about a plot amid two absent people
3. I prefer the periphery to the edges
4. All space abounds here
5. Nothing escapes these four corners
6. Drought is an atmospheric phenomenon
7. ( )
8. Whiskey sips are the alliteration
of what’s unsaid, unwritten, silenced,
previous to a scream?
9. There is no text, nor pretext
10. Yes, none of this makes sense, I know




Eleonora Requena (1968) is a poet. She was recognized with the Premio de la V Bienal Latinoamericana de Poesía José Rafael Pocaterrra (2000). She resides in Argentina. The poems offered here belong to her recently-published book, Textos por fuera (El Taller Blanco Ediciones, Colombia, 2020).



__




•


decidir

no esperar

es aumentar la velocidad del goteo

otra farsa


•


breves

cada día

frente a la pantalla

una palabra

otra


•


sin las llaves de la puerta de al fondo

de aquella tapiada por trastes y brozas


•


callo

de ti

en el reducto

tan higiénico como

un dolor (como un amor)

exento de drama


•


– amo las tautologías

– ¿las qué?

– las tautologías


•


aquí no hay poesía, según han dicho

las ideas y los anhelos

corren por la casa


•


je sublime

tu sublimes

il sublime


•


nunca habitarás el lugar de los aciertos

estás fuera


•


en tanto aéreas y esquivas

son el corifeo

de un teatro mínimo


•


ve a la plaza a contemplar la guillotina

que a gusto de los condenados

han montado sobre una tarima


•


esta tarde pasarán a nuestro lado

seguidos de una corte infame

altivos


•


donde te creíste a salvo

también duele


•


ni escampos ni fuelles

palabras denodadas

sin consentimiento


•


debes acercar la oreja

a la oreja

a la oreja


•


Apercibimiento:

francotiradores darán muerte a todos los mensajeros


•


aquí estarás a salvo de las oscuras golondrinas


•


Tango conjetural:

ni es cielo ni es azul

sólo es escritura




Diez notas al margen de una página en blanco

1. Viejos ardides, nuevos artilugios
2. Se trata de una trama entre dos ausentes
3. Prefiero la periferia a los bordes
4. Aquí sobra todo el espacio
5. Nada se escapa de estas cuatro esquinas
6. La sequía es un fenómeno atmosférico
7. ( )
8. Los sorbos de whisky son la aliteración
de lo no dicho, no escrito, callado
¿previo a un grito?
9. No hay texto, ni pretexto
10. Sí, no se entiende nada, ya sé




Eleonora Requena (1968) es poeta. Fue reconocida con el Premio de la V Bienal Latinoamericana de Poesía José Rafael Pocaterrra (200). Reside en Argentina. Los poemas aquí ofrecidos pertenecen a su libro recién publicado Textos por fuera (El Taller Blanco Ediciones, Colombia, 2020).




{ Eleonora Requena, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 May 2020 }

Versos de moral etérea / Douglas Gómez Barrueta

Verses of Ethereal Morality

The poems of the Venezuelan Eleonora Requena serve to build an Ethics of Air, the book that was baptized last Saturday with the presence of Rafael Cadenas.


Eleonora Requena’s verse couldn’t be contained in the pages of Ética del aire and it took up all the spaces of the Lectura bookstore in Chacaíto last Saturday at noon. “Don’t spy, don’t get worked up, / don’t lie to yourself, don’t demand, / don’t list, / don’t reiterate, don’t blame yourself / if you’re happy, / if you’re extremely sad,” read aloud the poet Rafael Cadenas during the presentation of the book, edited by Bid & Co., which includes two collections by Requena: Ética del aire, which gives the volume its title, and Mandados, which in 2000 won the Poetry Mention at the V José Rafael Pocaterra Latin American Biennial.

The words floated, as minutes later would the soap bubbles with which the ceremony culminated, assisted by the voice of the poet Cadenas: “Protect the heart / from ravines, / from falling into the precarious / pleasure of falling / into ravines, / protect the heart / falling deep / stones below, / protect it / from stumbles, / let it / fall / hopelessly.” Minutes before, Harry Almela, the former editor of La Liebre Libre publishers and a poet as well, recalled that during his time as a judge for the José Rafael Pocaterra Biennial he was surprised by Requena’s verse. “I thought it was by a writer from abroad, because it broke with everything written by women in this country.”

Almela reminisced that after a few of Requena’s verses were published in El Nacional’s Papel Literario, the now disappeared Salvador Garmendia wrote a note full of praise to the poet. This text, along with another one by Almela himself, forms part of the epilogue to Ética del aire. He also mentioned that during the presentation of Mandados, “during one of the book fairs from before,” the recipients of the National Prize for Literature Elizabeth Schön, Eugenio Montejo and Rafael Cadenas were all present. An unusual occurrence, considering it was “barely” the young poet’s second book.

Requena was born in Caracas in 1968, and from the time her first book Sed was published ten years ago by Eclepsidra she became one of the protagonists of the poetry by women that burst into Venezuelan literature at the end of the previous century. Her poems are anthologized in Las voces de la hidra: la poesía venezolana de los años 90 and El hilo de la voz: antología crítica de las escritoras venezolanas del siglo XX.

She has also published Es de día (2004) and La noche y sus agüeros (2007), both under the imprint El Pez Soluble. She won the Premio Italia 2007 for poetry in the category “Mediterranean and Caribbean,” sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Poetry at the University of Bologna.

THE OTHER IN LOVE POETRY
Almela explained that a love poem can only presume to be one if it moves between two spaces: that of the event and that of consciousness. The first one “occurs in the poem as a lived thing, and it belongs to the experience of the speaking subject in that movement towards the other.” The second one happens “in the minor or major capacity it might have to become consciousness for the reader. Something that can only happen thanks to the nickname, or the synecdoche, a rhetorical figure where a part of something is used to represent the whole or, vice versa, where the whole is used to represent one part.”

According to Almela, the center of the love poem is not the subject who sings but rather the absent one, as well as the reader: “who recreates the imaginary now expressed in words, already detached from the experience that motivates it.” As he sees it, within Ética del aire moves “the fissure that remains between the space of the experience and the space of consciousness.”

Requena had words of gratitude for the editor Bernardo Infante Daboín, for taking a risk and publishing books of poetry; for Cadenas, for his generosity in reading her poems and accompanying her; for Almela, for always encouraging her to write and for being a “tutor;” for “Salvador Garmendia, the great absent one,” for the words that stimulated her to keep exploring the path of poetry; and for the poet and scientist Jesús Alberto León, who wrote the blurb for the book, where he affirms: “In this poetry we notice there is no place. The remote pedagogy of air, the titillating orbits of the birds, offering only elusive enigmas: no shelter from deterioration. Neglect, the tremulous risk, the storm, these are the promised certitudes, the inevitable burns of a wounded eroticism that is a suffering pleasure, a panting that groans under the breath, at the jagged edge of breathing…”

The air of the Lectura bookstore, a space managed by Walter Rodríguez located in the basement of the Chacaíto shopping center, was already full of poems from Ética del aire, but that didn’t stop Requena from closing the event by reading the poem “Word Kit I Conjure to Get You Out of My Head”: “corkscrew, ringlet, crossed out word / solar eclipse, rat poison, liquor, dissolvent, / exterminating angel, waste basket, catapult, / armor, freezer, white out, soap / surgical tape, delete, delete, it’s over.”




Translator’s note: Harry Almela’s epilogue for Ética del aire can be read here at his blog (in Spanish).




{ Douglas Gómez Barrueta, Tal Cual, 8 December 2008 }

Diez notas al margen de una hoja en blanco / Eleonora Requena

Ten Notes on the Margins of a Blank Page

1. Old schemes, new devices
2. It’s about a plot amidst two absent people
3. I prefer the periphery to the edges
4. All space abounds here
5. Nothing escapes these four corners
6. Drought is an atmospheric phenomenon
7. ( )
8. Whiskey sips are the alliteration
of what is unsaid, unwritten, silenced,
previous to a scream?
9. There is no text, nor pretext.
10. Yes, none of this makes sense, I know




{ Eleonora Requena, Nocturna, mas no funesta, 1 September 2008 }