Rosalía and the river

Given the amount of energy invested last year in my studies of metapoetics in Darío, it is no surprise (to me) that I find this to be fatally prescient. No, it isn't that, so much, what then? The "¿Qué me pasa que eu non sei?", that underlying pain that requires of a few lonely beasts to use words to attack the silence, the solitude, the knowing and feeling of other's pain. I was trying to explain to my professor that instead of just a repetitive lament, writing, for some people, is a way in which to order the entropic universe; that feeling imagined and future pain with deep empathy, and writing it as if it were one's own, is a state that would almost have be present in order to truly live in the interstices of the language that one manipulates, in which s/he acheives greatness. I saw that in Darío, despite his weakness as a man, and his mysogynist tendencies (in his nouvelles manquees he intimated the secret desire for a female partner of his mental stature, unlike the simple second wife that he had chosen) there was that long-suffering ache, the hollow inside, the infinitely breaking soul. It wasn't just the alcohol, though he would have wanted to be a Verlaine sipping absinthe, and it showed through despite the stiflingly erudite francified forms that he magistrally managed to couple in the Spanish language. It was the horror vacui, the horror of the empty page, the fright confronted with the blinding white of nothingness, and inability to express itself. And here it is again, in Rosalía del Castro, simpler, less imposing, maybe more lyrical, fifty odd years before. And it reminds me of something, something I cannot place, like a forgotten lyric that dances behind our clouding memory, a misplaced object that calls to us, and needs to find its way home. From Folhas Novas (it is much more beautiful, I think in Gallego, which sadly, I don't speak, but which remarkably resembles my brand of Portuñol)

¡Silencio!
A man nerviosa e palpitante o seo,
as niebras nos meus olhos condensadas,
con un mundo de dudas nos sentidos
i un mundo de tormentos nas entrañas,
sentindo cómo loitan
en sin igual batalla
inmortales deseios que atormentan
e rencores que matan,
mollo na propia sangre e dura pruma
rompendo a vena hinchada,
i escribo..., escribo..., ¿para qué? ¡Volvede
ó mais fondo da ialma
tempestosas imaxes!
¡Ide a morar cas mortas relembranzas!
¡Que a man tembrosa no papel só escriba
palabras, e palabras, e palabras!
Da ideia a forma inmaculada e pura
¿dónde quedóu velada?