Photography: Royal Spanish Academy
The Valencian poet Francis Brines has received the Cervantes Prize 2020, awarded yesterday. At 88 years old, and the last representative of the Generation of the 50s, he has won the most prestigious award in Spanish literature. This is one selection of poems chosen from his work to honor him.
Francis Brines
Born in Olive in 1932. He studied Right in Deusto, Valencia and Salamanca and also Philosophy and Letters in Madrid. It belongs to the second postwar generation and with Claudio Rodríguez and José Ángel Valente, among other names, they are known as the Generation of the 50s. He was a reader of Spanish Literature in Cambridge and Spanish teacher at Oxford. And since 2001 it is member of the Royal Spanish Academy.
Among his works are Embers, Words to the dark o The autumn of roses. And other recognitions are the National Literature Prize in 1987, the National Prize for Spanish Letters in 1999 and the Reina Sofía Prize for Poetry in 2010.
poems
About a car trip
Windows reflect
the fire of the west
and a gray light floats
that has come from the sea.
In me wants to stay
the day that dies,
as if I, when looking at him,
could save him.
And who is there to look at me
and that can save me.
The light has turned black
and the sea has been erased.
That summer of my youth
And what was left of that old summer
on the shores of Greece?
What remains in me from the only summer of my life?
If I could choose from everything I've experienced
somewhere, and the time that binds it,
his miraculous company drags me there,
where being happy was the natural reason for being alive.
The experience lasts, like a closed room from childhood;
there is no longer the memory of successive days
in this mediocre succession of years.
Today I live this lack,
and trouble of deception some ransom
that allows me to still look at the world
with necessary love;
and thus know myself worthy of the dream of life.
Of what was luck, of that place of happiness,
greedily looting
always the same image:
her hair moved by the air,
and gaze into the sea.
Just that indifferent moment.
Sealed in it, life.
Who will i make love with
In this glass of gin I drink
the boarded-up minutes of the night,
the aridity of music, and acid
desire of the flesh. Only exists,
where the ice is absent, crystalline
liquor and fear of loneliness.
Tonight there will be no mercenary
company, or gestures of apparent
warmth in a warm desire. Far
is my house today, I will get to it
in the deserted early morning light,
I will undress my body, and in the shadows
I have to lie with the sterile time.
Happy hour is back. And there is nothing
but the light that falls on the city
before leaving the afternoon,
the silence in the house and, without a past
nor future, me.
My flesh, which has lived in time
and it knows it in ashes, it hasn't burned
until the consumption of the ash itself,
and i'm at peace with everything i forget
and I appreciate forgetting.
In peace also with everything that I loved
and that I want forgotten.
Happy hour is back.
That arrives at least
to the illuminated harbor at night.
When I am still life
Life surrounds me, as in those years
already lost, with the same splendor
of an eternal world. The slashed rose
from the sea, the fallen lights
from the orchards, the roar of the pigeons
in the air, the life around me,
when I am still life.
With the same splendor, and aged eyes,
and a tired love.
What will be the hope? Live still;
and love, while the heart is exhausted,
a faithful world, though perishable.
Loving the broken dream of life
and, although it could not be, do not curse
that ancient delusion of the eternal.
And the chest is consoled, because it knows
that the world could be a beautiful truth.