 Ink-scented Fingerprints: new summer section |
26 Newspaper is dressed for summer and arrives, among its novelties, with a section for the summer season: Huellas con olor a tinta (Ink-scented Fingerprints), which seeks to make visible the work of writers from Las Tunas in a prolific land in literary matters. Here we share with you the first installment, we hope you like it.
Nowadays, in a country where rhymed verse has lost and loses more and more space, it is fresh to find a book like Fabulaciones del Verbo (Fabulations of the Word, Sanlope Publishing House, 2015), by the writer Junior Fernández Guerra. It is the opera prima of this writer, who would later win the Calendar Award in the category of Children's Poetry with another book of similar style. In this volume, he presents three sections with a well-defined theme and structure: "Abstraction of the stone of sanity", "The bearable need of being" and "The flowers of the sea."
Although Junior fables with the self, as a kind of inner monologue or conversation with that other reader about loneliness, sex, desire, abandonment or, simply, love and disaffection in this first part as the thematic axis, this is a question that we will be able to find in the rest of the work. But, beware, it is not at all a romantic book.
The author needs to fabulate, to philosophize, to tell us something. He does it in the best way he knows, with literature, especially poetry. This gives him the possibility to show off exquisite, erudite language, which allows for an intelligent play of words and images that enrich the verses. In addition, he adds depth to the texts with suggestive titles, playing with biblical references, scenes from mythology and Greek culture, poems, and poets...
This is a good part of the main attraction of the booklet, in addition to the experimentation and risk. The titles of the poems give us a synopsis of what we will find: Mata Hari ecstatic before the firing squad while death performs the "dance of the seven veils", "The tenth muse in the pool of nymphs", "Last Delirium" of Donatien in Charenton ("asleep between Constance's legs"), "Elegies of the bard" (or any incestuous bipedal silhouette), "Exodus 19,94", among many more so suggestive.
He did not want to write a comfortable or simple book, it is evident from the first page. He took the risk of choosing complicated themes to develop originally and differently. In addition to using a high, erudite, multi-referential, modern, fresh language, with touches of irony and black humor, even critical at times.
Likewise, in a land where the tenth is the queen of poetry, he wanted to take a risk and play "in the house of the spinning top". And he played with the structure, with the form. He took the spinel, the avant-garde décima, the sonnet, and did what he felt was necessary to convey his message. But octosyllabic verse, hendecasyllabic verse, and the traditional form were not enough for him. Some of his texts demanded another structure; he broke it and adapted the form to the content. He wrote what might seem to be free verse, poetic prose, and -even- epigrams, for the reader less familiar with rhymed poetry. However, they are tenths, octosyllables, hendecasyllables, and even three and five-syllables. In Fabulaciones del Verbo, form does not generate content, quite the contrary.
But he needed to go further, towards the sonnet, and that is why he wrote (in addition to the traditional ones) something that could be called "sonetesima", as the writer Eduardo Rosell says. At the beginning and end of the second part, he wrote two sets of seven décimas, each within the structure of five sonnets. If it is difficult to create a good décima or a good sonnet, imagine mixing both compositions and making them work individually and as a whole.
This book needs to be read by lovers of rhymed poetry and, above all, by those who claim that this structure is "a straitjacket" for both content and language. It is also proof that young Cubans and people from Las Tunas, in particular, are writing contemporary, modern, interesting, experimental, and transgressive poetry. And, at the same time, they remain faithful to classical forms.
In general, it is an immense story and, as such, it brings a teaching, something that does not leave you indifferent. It is proof that, if we step out of our comfort zone and take risks, we can create masterpieces, the kind that contaminate us for the better and leave us wanting to continue fabulizing, forever.
