Photography by Cristina Peri Rossi: ASALE website.
Christina Peri Rossi Uruguayan writer born on November 12, 1941 in Montevideo, is the winner of Cervantes Prize granted each year by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport and is endowed with 125.000 euros. Absent for health reasons at the event that took place today in Alcalá de Henares, has been the actress Cecilia Roth the one in charge of reading his speech. For this reason, here is a selection of chosen poems To celebrate.
Christina Rossi
exiled in our country during the military dictatorship in Uruguay, settled here and has worked as articulist in various media such as El País y El Mundo. write as much prose as verse with works like Crazy people's nave, Play Station, Description of a shipwreck, Europe after the rain, Invitation o The Word.
Chosen poems
The foreigner
Against his natal baptism
the secret name with which I call her: Babel.
Against the belly that shot her confusedly
the basin of my hand that encloses it.
Against the helplessness of their primal eyes
the double vision of my gaze where it is reflected.
Against his haughty nakedness
the sacred tributes
the bread offering
of wine and kiss.
Against the obstinacy of his silence
a long slow speech
saline psalmody
hospitable cave
signs on the page,
identity.
Plenilunio
for every woman
that dies in you
majestic
worthy
mallow
a woman
born in full moon
for lonely pleasures
of the translating imagination.
Dedication
Literature separated us: everything I knew about you
I learned it in the books
and what was missing,
I put words to it.
The passion
We came out of love
like a plane crash
we had lost our clothes
the papers
I was missing a tooth
and you the notion of time
Was a year as long as a century
or a century short as a day?
for the furniture
by the House
broken offal:
glasses photos leafless books
We were the survivors
of a landslide
of a volcano
of the snatched waters
And we parted with the vague feeling
to have survived
Although we didn't know why.
sailor's handbook
Taken several days of navigation
and for not having anything to do
when the sea is calm
the vigilant memories
for not being able to sleep,
to carry you in memory
for not being able to forget the shape of your feet
the soft movement of haunches to starboard
your iodized dreams
Flying fish
for not getting lost in the house of the sea
I started to do
a sailor's handbook,
so that everyone would know how to love you, in case of shipwreck,
so everyone knew how to navigate
in case of maneuvers
And just in case
signaling
call with the o that is red and yellow
call you with the i
which has a black circle like a well
call you from the blue rectangle of the that
beg you with the rhombus of the efe
or the triangles of the z,
as hot as the foliage of your pubis.
Call you with the i
signaling
raise your left hand with the ele flag,
raise both arms to draw
-in the night glare-
the lugubrious sweetness of the u.
The Word
reading the dictionary
I have found a new word:
With pleasure, with sarcasm I pronounce it;
I feel it, I speak it, I cloak it, I trace it, I pulse it,
I say it, I lock it up, I love it, I touch it with my fingertips,
I take the weight, wet it, warm it in my hands,
I caress her, I tell her things, I surround her, I corner her,
I stick a pin in it, fill it with foam,
then, like a whore,
I miss her.
Reminiscence
I couldn't stop loving her because oblivion doesn't exist
and memory is modification, so that inadvertently
loved the various forms in which she appeared
in successive transformations and was nostalgic for all the places
in which we had never been, and I wanted her in the parks
where I never wanted her and was dying of reminiscences for the things
that we would no longer know and were so violent and unforgettable
like the few things we had known.
Sources: In a low voice, Poems of the soul