Guide to studying María Victoria Atencia, the National Literature Prize-winning poet | Culture | EUROtoday

María Victoria Atencia belongs to the lineage of poets who impose themselves with out elevating their voices. Serene and luminous, her poetry has been shedding the shell of what’s expendable till it has change into writing—within the phrases of María Zambrano—“without history, without anguish, without a shadow of a doubt.” Trained and made recognized within the surroundings of the Malaga journal Snailnear the Córdoba group of Canticle, He shared together with his older brothers—Pablo García Baena, Vicente Núñez—aesthetic refinement and distance from the dominant currents. His first guide already displays his character, moist floor (1953), which revealed a transparent, contained voice, alien to the noise. Maturity got here quickly, with artwork and half y English Gleneach books from 1961, during which the options that outline his plenitude of labor are acknowledged: musical concord, symbolic invocation, transcended on a regular basis life.

Then got here an extended silence, which he shared with so many different poets in his circle, uncommon birds in a cultural context dominated by realism, communicative vocation and express dedication. From that purgative retreat, “María Victoria Serenísima”, because the adopted Malaga native Jorge Guillén known as her, returned in 1976 with two splendid books: Martha & Mariawhich mixed the 2 evangelical faces of motion and contemplation, personified within the sisters of the resurrected Lazarus, and The goals.

Already within the post-Franco interval, his writing entered a stage of astonishing fertility and coherence, with titles resembling The world of MV (1978), The collector (1979), binary compass (1984) y Paulina or the guide of waters (1984). His poetic universe, already consolidated, confirmed a secure steadiness between type and emotion, self-discipline and dream. His is a serene oneirism, neither irrational nor chaotic, topic to the patterns of the rhythmic pendulum, in verses—Alexandrian ideally—hieratic with out stiffness, dense however with out lumps. The poetry of his maturity is organized into two complementary areas, which correspond to the 2 sisters of Lazarus talked about above—or with the 2 souls of The gypsy nun of Lorca—: the cloister in entrance of the open area, the backyard in entrance of the jungle, the hermitage in entrance of the world. In this stress a pure and purifying gaze is resolved, the place silence turns into revelation and usable objects, as in a Zurbarán refectory, purchase a sacred plenitude.

The poetic self of María Victoria Atencia is a receptive presence that awaits the arrival of that means, like a Annunciation by Fra Angelico. The language, though precise and clear, at all times maintains an aura of thriller: a Parnassian define with a symbolist nimbus. Clarity in Atencia doesn’t preach or demand emotion: it limits itself to containing it. In this order of issues, music acts as an expiration of the soul: a breath that expresses life and establishes a rhythm.

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From the later titles they’re mandatory – the time period “essential” is as pretentious as it’s international to María Victoria’s sensitivity. Of the flame during which it burns (1988) y The adjoining wall (1989). Many of his deliveries appeared in artisanal and restricted circulation editions, and fairly a number of have been anticipated in phases in notebooks and non-venal publications: therefore the significance of The sign (1961-1989) (1990), which introduced collectively his work in a closed corpus. Later books solely consolidated this poetics of ignorance: a spinoff of mystical poetry, which tended in the direction of totally different paths from these of the “poetry of knowledge”, which had—has—poets as gifted as José Ángel Valente. Among these books, stand out To the intruder (1992), The bridge (1992), On the banks of the Ems (1997; quantity 213-214 of Coast), The contemplations (1997) y Trances of Our Lady (1997).

From The hole (2003) his diction adjustments barely. Regular Alexandrians give approach to a looser and extra versatile meter. The biographical parts, at all times obscured, are thinned and attenuated much more. Of losses and goodbyes (2005) might be understood as a type of elegiac farewell. There is not any such factor: though the guide is dominated by dispossession, like a catalog of the stays of the poverelliin it he notes a revelation announcement.

There are award winners who reward the awards they obtain. This is what occurs, I’ve little doubt, with María Victoria Atencia and the National Prize for Spanish Literature. She, MV, is—with Casona’s permission—the true girl of the daybreak who, though she immerses herself in romantic sensitivity, has averted truculence and affectation, and has proven the flowers of nature within the bucaro of domesticity, among the many moist earth and the area crossed by birds of vanity.