Anne Carson: "Mom forbade us from walking backward."

BarcelonaFor forty years, every May, verses have taken over the Palau de la Música Catalana for a night "as a gesture of delicate insurrection." Maria Callís and Manuel Forcano, directors of the Barcelona Poetry Festival, recall this in the prologue to the book that those attending the recital, punctuated by the sound and light landscapes curated by Clara Aguilar, took home after an intense hour and a half in which they were able to delve into the subtle voice of the Romanian. Ana Blandiana, in the irony of the Georgian Shota Iatashvili and also in the enigmatic Anne Carson, one of the great attractions of the evening, who has read a dozen prose poems from the distant Short talks (1992).

The Canadian author, who has appeared on several occasions in the running for the Nobel Prize in Literature, has dedicated brief reflections imbued with lyricism to theHomo sapiens, in the river trout, in the exile of the poet Ovid ("every night around that time he dresses in sadness as if it were a garment and continues writing") and the sculptor Camille Claudel, who lived the last thirty years of her life in a mental asylum. It was when she was talking about a memory linked to her mother that Carson managed to connect more with the audience: "Mom forbade us to walk backwards. That's how the dead walk, she said. Where did she get this idea from? Perhaps from a bad translation. We would turn around. Many of them are victims of love."

We can read several books by Carson in Catalan, such as The beauty of the husband and Wrong standard, all of them published by Vaso Roto and translated by Núria Busquet Molist, who has also been in charge of the anthology of Short talks read at the Palau de la Música. During the International Poetry Festival, only half of the audience's flashlights were lit to illuminate the book and make it possible to understand what Carson was saying. Shota Yatashvili's majority was there, and he managed to raise a few smiles with his Letter of anti-motivation, poem sHe commits a "very strange suicide": "When I put my head in the oven, Gazprom will cut off my gas," he recited. The torches were also lit to decipher what the Hungarian Márton Simon, who dedicated one of his "long and boring poems" to Tetris - that's how he defined it in Catalan -, and the Romanian Ana Blandiana, author of books such as My homeland A4, published by Café Central and translated by Corina Oproae. It sounds this good: "I play with children who will become adults / and I try to postpone the moment / in which they will tear me apart with relish, / already adults, / more and more adults, / more and more, / too much more, / while I remain alone in childhood."

As for peninsular languages, this year we were able to hear Berta García Faet ("nihilism or petal?", towards what ends Premarital Questionnaire), the aphoristic Lupe Gómez (who has dared to define freedom with these words: "Running, / downhill, / bumping bodies like / cows") and Adrià Targa, who last year published two impressive books, the verse novel Arnau (Proa) and the compilation Acropolis (Godall), with which he won the Floral Games. In one of the poems he recited, he asked the audience to imitate the waves of the sea by shaking a page of the book that everyone had in their lap. And in Sonnet at Thirty-Seven Years Old He stated, before the audience cheered him: "I am worried / that they have only given me this mouth / to kiss and sing, that there is / so much death, that no poem occupies it."