Photography: José Ángel Valente. Cervantes Institute.
Jose Angel Valente was born in Orense in 1929 and passed away on a day like today 2000. He studied Romantic Philology in Santiago de Compostela and Madrid and was professor of literature at the University of Oxford. It was also essayist, translator and lawyer as well as poet, with a work that received several awards such as the Adonais Award, the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters, the National Poetry Award or the Reina Sofía Award. This is one selection of poems to discover or remember it.
José Ángel Valente - Poems
When I see you like this, my body, so fallen ...
When I see you like this, my body, so fallen
Through all the darkest corners
of the soul, in you I look at myself,
just like in a mirror of infinite images,
without guessing which of them
we are more you and me than the rest.
Die.
Maybe dying is no more than this
return gently, body,
the profile of your face in the mirrors
towards the purest side of the shadow.
Love is in what we tend ...
Love is in what we tend
(bridges, words).
Love is in everything we hoist
(laughs, flags).
And in what we fight
(night, empty)
for true love.
Love is as soon as we get up
(towers, promises).
As soon as we gather and sow
(children, future).
And in the ruins of what we fell
(dispossession, lie)
for true love.
The Angel
At dawn,
when the harshness of the day is still strange
I meet you again on the precise line
from which the night recedes.
I recognize your dark transparency
your face not visible,
the wing or edge with which I have fought.
You are either come back or reappear
at the extreme limit, sir
of the indistinct.
Do not separate
the shadow of the light that she has engendered.
Subject
Turn the word into matter
where what we want to say cannot
penetrate further
of what matter would tell us
if to her, like a belly,
delicately apply,
naked, white belly,
delicate the ear to hear
the sea, the indistinct
rumor of the sea, that beyond you,
the unnamed love begets you always.
Desire was a still point ...
The bodies stayed on the lonely side of love
as if they denied each other without denying the desire
and in that denial a knot stronger than themselves
indefinitely unite them.
What did the eyes and hands know,
what did skin taste like, what did a body retain
of the breath of the other, who gave birth
that slow motionless light
as the only form of desire?
The sin
Sin was born
like black snow
and mysterious feathers that extinguished
grim grinding
of the occasion and the place.
Dripped squeezed
with a sad gasp
on the wall of regret,
between murky caresses
of homosexuality or forgiveness.
Sin was the only one
object of life.
Wicked guardian of haggard hands
and wet teens hanging out
in the attic of dead memory.
In many times ...
In many times
your head clear.
In many lights
your warm waist.
In many times
your sudden response.
Your body is prolonged submerged
until this dry night,
up to this shadow.
This image of you
You were by my side
and closer to me than my senses.
You spoke from within love
armed with its light.
Never words
of purer love will breathe.
Was your head softly
leaning towards me.
Your long hair
and your happy waist.
You spoke from the center of love
armed with its light,
on a gray afternoon of any day.
Memory of your voice and your body
my youth and my words be
and this image of you survives me.
When the love
When love is a gesture of love and it remains
empty a single sign.
When the log is in the home,
but not the living flame.
When it is the rite more than the man.
When did we start
to repeat words that cannot
conjure up the lost.
When you and I are face to face
and a deserted expanse separates us.
When the night falls
When we give ourselves
desperately to hope
that only love
open your lips in the light of day.
Sources: A medio voz - Zenda Libros