Blanca Llum Vidal: "There are loves that hook you like a drug and are completely destructive."

BarcelonaThere are loves capable of shaking the foundations of those who experience them thanks to their "bloodthirsty, revolutionary, and erotic" dimension. So pretty and tyrannical (Bow), with what Blanca Luz Vidal (Barcelona, ​​​​1986) has won the latest Carles Riba Prize, delves into a turbulent and difficult period, in which the liberating desire ends up poisoning the voice, as powerful as it is anguished, that conveys the poems. The book coincides on the new release counters with the recovery of Maripasoula, a trip to French Guiana that the author made more than a decade ago: published by Tushita for the first time in 2015, she is now putting it back into circulation –and rightly so– Editor Club. This light-filled adventure contrasts with the dense, twisted texts of the author's latest book.

The only verses we find embedded in the prose poems of So pretty and tyrannical They cover, in Catalan, a song by Raffaella Carrà. They say: "Everyone will say that my love / is the enemy of calm, / but for me, who am already crazy, / it is the only act that saves me." I think this fragment of Journey It is a good summary of what we will find in the book.

— Perhaps they do end up summarizing the book, but that was not my intention. Journey It was the first thing I wrote about So pretty and tyrannicalI never have any book projects in mind. I need writing, and in this sense, So pretty and tyrannical It was a life-saving book, although not in a therapeutic sense, but simply to break the block.

Do you remember when you got it?

— Two summers ago. It speaks of a very tight journey to personal experience.

It tells of a time in which you experience love with intensity and also with suffering.

— It's a book that's not only about love and the pain it can cause, but also about the possibility of crossing a threshold and having it all end up affecting you pathologically.

"Desire sometimes doesn't overwhelm and can ignite quietly," you write. Yet, the desire for the book is experienced as a powerful passion, beautiful yet authoritative.

— All the facets of love appear with hyperbolic intensity. There are loves that hook you like a drug and are completely destructive.

The ones that appear here end up being quite a lot.

— There is more than one, yes.

You yourself refer to Meat, which begins by exploring one of the darkest love stories of the Private life of Josep Maria de Sagarra"He who loves only one thing loves nothing."

— The book is very polyamorous. The "you" isn't a single addressee. "He who loves only one thing loves nothing" are words of Marina Tsvetàeva, an author who has greatly influenced me.

This isn't the first time you've explored desire in a book. You've done so for This love that is not one (Ultramarinos, 2018) and in prose in The princess is you (Club Editor, 2022) already You shall not commit adultery (Fragmenta, 2024).

— In This love that is not one, the force of desire tended towards dependence and possession. In So pretty and tyrannical There's an attempt to break out of an exclusive place. There's a sexual and intellectual openness that's very liberating.

No matter how much you want freedom, the other wants you "heeding and obeying the difficult and beautiful pact that is only for you."

— In this specific case, a relationship that is initially very free ends up becoming one of dependence. It's very difficult for love to be reciprocated with the same intensity. It's almost a miracle, I would say. In the poem Freedom I'm talking about someone who wants to be pursued, which causes dynamics of connecting with the invisible.

Does desire become more extreme in your books?

— I'm talking and writing about love, passion and desire. So pretty and tyrannical There comes a time when desire goes to the limits, to the margins. Desire can be very intense and dangerous; it can lead you to interesting places of thought, which are powerful but can also hurt you. The princess is you There was a desire expressed through the letters a voice wrote. Here, the writing is very attached to the event.

Were you working on the book while you were living it? In other words, were you writing from a place of passion and suffering, or after you'd left them behind?

— From within. Writing after emerging from all this would have involved thematizing suffering and analyzing it poetically. There is an experience of pain that can literally leave you speechless. Writing it was a way of returning to language, but doing so from a place of turbulence.

You convey that turbulence in many of the poems.

— I have a hard time reading them aloud. I often run out of breath. Some readers have told me they have to stop mid-book because they're so suffering.

This happened to me when I arrived at Endurance. It speaks of the visit of someone "authoritarian and haughty." "That's what you've done," you write later, "intrude into a body you claimed and rejected all at once, mount a mission to belittle and undo it, bombard its desire and plunder its language." It's a very harsh text. You don't emerge unscathed, as a reader.

— The primary recipient of this book—and the one that appears in Endurance—it's a very narcissistic you. He's not just domineering, but he also really enjoys getting to know himself. There's a huge mirage in this way of being. Falling in love with someone like that says a lot about the person falling in love. I mean, what attracts you to him? What's the force that draws you to a place like this?

If you asked me that question, I would tell you that someone who accumulates insecurities might be attracted to someone full of certainties.

— Of apparent certainties and that he knows how to transmit as such.

We often project onto our loved ones what we don't have and what we long for. Or maybe that's not the case?

— Here I'm talking about something that can be called love and that, deep down, empties you completely. In fact, it leaves you bereft. I don't know why, but if I had to paint an image of this you, for me it's the Jellyfish From Caravaggio's painting. It's that perfection, that grandeur, that thing that is so beautiful and lovely at its core, but that is also completely tyrannical because, if you look at it, it immobilizes you. Jellyfish It leaves you completely without will, without the ability to move, stripped of yourself.

At a certain point, when you're already suffering greatly, you wonder if what you've experienced is love or "falling to the ground, sleeping in a random corner, wandering around in ruins until you find yourself in a cave."

— I don't want to apologize for pain as a necessary step toward knowledge, but it's true that you emerge from pain differently and with a different kind of strength. You end up thinking, nevertheless, that it was all worth it.

Does love always end?

— Although my experience so far has been that yes, love always ends, I live with the feeling that love should be able to never end. There's something in me that believes in it, and it has nothing to do with romanticism, but with something very deep that perhaps, instead of disappearing, is transforming.

In addition to publishing So pretty and tyrannical you have recovered Maripasoula, a travel book you wrote over a decade ago. Have you reread it?

— Yes. I remember that was a very happy time. I had suffered very little yet. I remember carrying a personal backpack that was barely or not at all loaded. As you go through life, things get more and more twisted. MaripasoulaThe voice is outward-looking, completely open to the outside world, to the people it encounters and who guide it through the world. It is a subject open to the world.

Are there any other trips you've taken that you could write about?

— There is one, yes, but it would take a huge leap forward in time. When I was 4 years old, I went to India with my parents and became very ill. In fact, I nearly died from pneumonia. I spent a month in a hospital in New Delhi. One of my memories is that I became very good friends with a boy. We played a lot and communicated without speaking any language in common. One day, that boy, whose name I don't remember, left... and never came back. He was dead.

FOUR BOOKS ABOUT LOVE TODAY

Is a radical redesign of love possible? In this essay, peppered with biographical anecdotes, Seyda Kurt sets out to dismantle the norms of love framed within the context of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and explores models of relationships other than the traditional ones.

Leaving a relationship has become an increasingly common act, whether through divorce, separation, or lack of commitment. Eva Illouz shows the cultural, social and economic effects of eliminating personal emotional ties.

We grow up with the promise of love, but many adults believe they have no idea how to love, starting with themselves. Essayist Bell Hooks defines love as an action, not a feeling, and questions the centrality of sex and desire in relationships.

After reviewing the history of love, Lluís Calvo addresses the impossibility of getting rid of them, the full recognition of otherness, the need to unlearn everything in a new relationship and, finally, calls for the need for a new affirmation of love.