Chus Pato's expanded poetry wins the 2024 National Poetry Prize | Culture | EUROtoday

The poet Chus Pato (Ourense, 69 years previous) has been awarded this Thursday with the 2024 National Poetry Prize for her work Sonora (Xerais), a textual content whose experimental nature and dialogue with demise, particularly with the lack of a mom, have been highlighted by the jury. “A true fulcrum of Galician poetry, Chus Pato explores new ways of deconstructing and reconstructing the frameworks of traditional poetic thought,” says the jury’s textual content. The prize, awarded by the Ministry of Culture, is value 30,000 euros.

Pato, a member of the Real Academia Galega, answered the telephone at dwelling whereas getting ready the meal, as a result of poets additionally cook dinner. “It seems like a miracle to me,” she says. She didn’t consider that her e-book or herself have been attainable candidates for this award. “Above all because it has poems that are quite outside of what is generally understood as poetry,” she provides.

It is what she calls “expanded poetry,” and she or he has practiced it not less than since her poetry assortment I-Talá (Xerais, 2000). “I start from the basis that poetry is meaningless, that it can touch on any literary or artistic genre, or on anything in life.” In her poetic work there could seem dialogues, dramatic or essayistic elements, with out being performs or essays, there could seem questions of geography or historical past (Pato was a instructor of those topics), or a small textual content on a portray by Murillo, nonetheless being poetry, however poetry that goes past essentially the most inflexible limits of poetry.

This expansiveness has additionally been valued by the jury, which writes: “Chus Pato creates textual spaces full of escapes: rhetorical, semantic, capable of hybridizing different codes in which all his inextinguishable sound power is displayed. Sonorapersonal, social and political memory whisper the multiple voices of one of the most daring contemporary poets.”

A genetic chain of ladies

The mom's orphanhood (which occurred in 2018) is the central theme of the gathering. “I found it ridiculous to think about being an orphan when I was already of a certain age, but the truth is that orphanhood occurs: my mother's body protected me from a face-to-face with death,” she explains. She immediately felt just like the “breaking point” of her lineage, a non-aristocratic lineage: a lineage of Galician peasants and shepherdesses. “I speak of the body because what I conceive is a genetic chain of women, that in the Neolithic there is a person who resembles me. The maternal body is also the culture, the technique, the invisible, the spirit,” provides the poet, a satisfied feminist, who gained the Clara Campoamor Prize in 2018, which celebrates equality in Ourense.

Writing in Galician and being in a peripheral geographical place has not been a severe impediment for her. “The fact that few people read Galician does not mean that Galician literature is small,” she stresses, “and I have travelled to international poetry festivals all over the world… even in India! My position has not been marginal at all.” She has, nonetheless, missed the curiosity in translating her work into Spanish, which was beforehand generously translated into English and revealed in seven books in English-speaking international locations.

In Spanish, though it has had earlier translations in publishers equivalent to La Palma or Amargord, the reference work is its Collected Poetry in a number of volumes, by the Ultramarinos publishing home, translated by Gonzalo Hermo. Curiously, final yr's award winner was additionally Galician, Yolanda Castaño. Both be part of an inventory made up of names equivalent to Aurora Luque, Miren Agur Meabe, Olga Novo and Pilar Pallarés, amongst others.

“I am very grateful for the award,” she concludes. Now she will have lunch. She has fried hake, boiled potatoes and tomato sauce. Enjoy!