Editorial: October 2004

January 18, 2006

I was ashamed of my dialect,
I was ashamed of the Italian language –
of having live seed inside me
mute broken thread of darkness –
darker and darker inside the breath.

Thus writes {id="3546" title="Villalta"} in his long, previously unpublished poem in twelve sections ‘Dedication’. Villalta writes in Italian, as well as in a mixture of Venetian and Friulano dialect, and translates his own poetry from one language into the other. He has written a fascinating essay on the process of self-translation, {id="3516" title="Changing Voice"}. Also published here for the first time are his notes on ‘Rhythm’ and ‘The Voice of Poetry’.

The two new Moroccan poets, {id="3818" title="Boujema El Aoufi"} and {id="3822" title="Mohamed Bachkar"}, can both be said to belong to the "New Poetry" movement in their country. Yet both remain somewhat outside the mainstream, writes our editor Norddine Zouitni in his concise analysis of the two, emphasizing their "incessant search for that which is wholly other". To quote El Aoufi, who devoted a poem to his ‘silenced poems’:

I write them with special tenderness
But again end up by loathing them . . .
And distrust the words they contain . . .

In Zimbabwe, on the other hand, words or poetry can sometimes seem more reliable than the actual political reality of the country. {id="5754" title="Chirikure Chirikure"}, one of Zimbabwe’s leading performance poets and a great satirist, is a steadfast critic of the corruption, bad leadership and and malpractise found in his country. Always on the side of the Zimbabwean people, to "acknowledge society’s cracks . . . in order to prevent our dream crumbling" is the self-professed purpose of his work.

New Colombian poet {id="1281" title="Mario Rivero"} is the influential founder of the magazine Golpe de Dados, and a revolutionary force in Colombian poetry. With his first collection in 1963, he invited "the word" to take off its clothes and said: "you will be the lover of a man to whom it doesn’t matter/ if you are ugly or poor", writes Nicolás Suescún in his introduction to Rivero. Rivero’s work is published in the Colombian magazine next to that of the mysterious poet {id="1265" title="Aurelio Arturo"}. In 33 years of publishing, Arturo only gave his approval to 31 poems, to be considered his canonical work.

Perhaps the Portuguese poet {id="4646" title="Daniel Faria"} can be considered as a kindred spirit: Faria, who died young, is a true mystic, exploring the spiritual and hovering between heaven and earth in his verses:

I walk lightly above what I say
And I pour blood into my words
I walk a little above the poem’s transfusion

On the other hand, the verses of his famous fellow-countryman {id="4647" title="Eugénio de Andrade"} are deeply rooted in earth. As Richard Zenith writes in his introduction, the two poets "share a common concern: paradise". But Eugénio de Andrade’s paradise and his faith is very much of the earth and the body:

Body on a horizon of water,
body open
to the slow intoxication of fingers,
body defended
by the splendour of apples,
surrendered hill by hill,
body lovingly made moist
by the tongue’s pliant sun.

And here, at last, we find again a restored faith in language and poetry itself:

A single syllable.
Salvation.