Ricardo H. Herrera
Mastronardi and we
[Text read at the presentation of the complete works of Carlos Mastronardi. Book Fair, May 6, 2011]
I worked my first essay on the poetry of Mastronardi during the summer of '84. In the following decade, I went to measure myself with his work a couple of times, finding always the same wonder at the strength of the aesthetic values \u200b\u200bthat sustain it. By revealing the treasure of tradition, for demanding the most attention and responsibility in our relationship with words, no poetry lessons are truly priceless. Arnaldo Calveyra, where preliminary site work to complete Mastronardi (recently published by the Universidad Nacional del Litoral) calibrated exactly what it means to rediscover the grace intact with a voice that accompanies us brightly through the years; means, says Calveyra admitted to a level of "felt time", "intensity of days and evenings focused on that light made words on a page. "
Mastronardi, as poet, is one whose mental processes are subject to riffs, rhythmic figures that are made in the modulation of voice, inflections of voice. Prose (his critical prose, for example) looks, he speculates, proposes ideas held by the wit and irony, diction, Mastronardi has something falsetto register in his essays and annotations periodicals; not on his memoirs , where reality gives an emotional attachment to their expression. His poetry, however, creates an extended resonance space to accommodate the inflections and modulations of her voice more intimate, enduring voice. What is irreducible in poetic expression that is: what is aesthetic itself is both the strength of secrecy as the key communicability of art of the poet. By an eye in total harmony with the ear, Mastronardi Alexandrine verse leads to an incredible peak of expression, his language generating visual transparency and sonic purity in which it regains full thickness real sensitive. Mastronardiana Cadence has no rival in the poetry of Argentina, is truly unique. I choose a verse of light province to verify my assertion. It reads:
Streets of intimacy without anyone forgetting and sun
Tristan western bands,
and the waltz in retreat, poor charm in the evening:
Despite his flowery looking for us, his voice we want.
Nothing is left to chance in the fragment (a totality in itself) is a precision instrument. The sound pattern traces a long and complex melodic figure quietly unfolds from the first to the last word of the stanza, an arabesque of a clean sound simply wonderful phrasing. The game between vowels and consonants is so nuanced that almost go unnoticed alliteration and assonance that contribute to this aesthetic achievement. A little to read, understand: the music seeks to walking alone, he seeks and finds. The four lines articulate the passage of light to shadow, from day to night, motionless as the dynamic, simultaneously realize how close and how distant from the street as long as the ultimate horizon. Time and space, time and landscape concentrated in four sentences of exquisite modulation. Feat. The amalgams dilapidated "poor charm" and "flowery regret" illustrate the nature mastronardiana elegiac voice. At the same time, notions of musicality and lyrical intonation melt in his poems: the "waltz in retreat" is the image of the tone of their own song, that song that says goodbye limpidly slow, while the emotions are expressed twilight state, a retreat, in absentia. The time when literature was formed Mastronardi is dead (who would dare to use today, without a trace of irony, the key words of the verses cited: "privacy", "Waltz in retreat", "poor charm" " flowery regret "?), but his voice is still alive, his art continues moved, both for musical excellence and for its emotional depth. His method, therefore, it is still liable to be profitably profited.
This method, which abounded on both Mastronardi, could be reduced to three words: composition, condensation, sedimentation. However, there is a fourth element that must necessarily be included in the set of technical instruments: grace. "Beauty without grace attracts but does not hold," reads a note of mastronardiana 1930-1931 Notebook, date key, because in those years most likely begin to take shape Light province. What the poet alludes to the word "grace"? I believe that refers to a constant in his art: the graceful, pleasing, pleasing him, ie the "cordial frankness" in dealing with language and with the reader. It is this quality that makes it reach areas of intimacy with very special characteristics, truly provincial (in the best sense of the word). Confession is not talking, but to achieve the affective register of trust, which is linked to the native warmth in personal dealings with others. I take a couple of examples from Knowledge the night: "Mate, sorry what is missing / spectacle and faith ...";" I'd like to see, be one in your chest ... "Solidarity, companionship, emotional complicity. These tonal virtues can not be obtained through the alchemy launched by condensation and decantation; respond, rather, the same sensitivity of the poet, at his untransferable. In 1948-1950 Notebook , Mastronardi copies a Baudelaire's observation that goes to the point I am trying to explain, says: "The sensitivity of each is his genius." Mastronardi was perfectly aware that, if any, that sensitivity provincial roots era, no other poet of the last century knew province to embrace this virtue as consciously as he. And it is no coincidence, of course, that his most representative works, including the word "province" in their titles: Light province, Memoirs of a provincial . No literary revolt skyline distracted him from his fidelity to the native intonation. The loneliness and suspicion of the century in which he lived sapped his strength, but never lost his poetic word for the warmth, the friendliness of the native region.
However various skepticism that often give death and new life to the poetry of history skepticism, skepticism, criticism, skepticism, the author's own case mastronardiano continues to claim our attention. Not only for the absurd paradox posed by the fact that a poem like light province, owned by a clear willingness to community integration, has been able to grow within a consciousness that he had a little less than an absolute exclusion, almost intolerable, but because of the rarity itself that embodies his poetry: so rare, so precious, so meticulous and yet so possessed by grace. Beyond explanations Mastronardi himself was making his notes on his great poem, beyond the explanations we give ourselves to write our own, the enigma remains mastronardiano, neither he nor we just defined the magical seduction that follows the meeting of line with reality illumined by memory, with the flow of a peaceful time.
not mean to suggest by this that in front of his poetry only profitable a catechumen worship, but simply to assert the primacy of poetry about the criticism, about the endless ideological and methodological debates. The persistence of a poem in time not only escapes the calculations of any judgmental forecasting, but even exceed the aspirations of the rhetoric that made it possible. To the extent that eludes the common wear any speech which is set in print, the persistence of a poem in a kind of time is beyond expression: an act of transcendent truth in our literature. This rarity, survival of those affected by the grace of the musical cadence of the human voice, this rarity-clear flowing water in our mouths when we taste, is the crux of the maturity of the term. In the words of their own Mastronardi: "The strongest are the aesthetic values a work of art, the more vaporous or its subject matter seems invisible. These values \u200b\u200bare common to say a big drag and purifies everything. "
