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Pound’s almost ‘infinite’ approach, but find
Eliot’s more firmly materialized. Pound is a
babel of culture, with an overwhelming tab-
leau of layers, textures, and backlights, but
Eliot has a freer hand. Pound’s ambition is
all very well, but as far as I’m concerned, the
true poet is Eliot. His world view, his capacity
to concretize a perspective of humanity in a
poem, as he does in The Waste Land or Four
Quartets, is of a magnitude beyond the reach
of all the rest.
LFG: For us, too, he was a legend, in part
because he was a great literary critic, a bit
like our own Juan Ramón Jiménez, who was
not only a great poet but also a great eru-
dite of poetry. I remember being young and
learning the first stanzas of The Waste Land
by heart. But I was partly schooled in Great
Britain, so inevitably read in English. In any
case, when I read poets whose languages I
do not speak, I like to read them in bilin-
gual editions. Even without understanding
the original language, there is something in
the sound that you suddenly pick up. For
example, I did not previously have much of
an opinion of Pessoa as a poet. I considered
him a prose writer, a master of thought. I
never thought of him as a great poet until I
read him in a bilingual edition.
AL: I agree, and do the same: contrast,
study, compare. It happened with Adam Za-
gajewski, the Polish poet, one time we had a
reading together. His poems took on a full-
ness and flight that I only grasped when he
read them aloud, even though I didn’t really
get the message. On the other hand, Pessoa
was a chest full of people, an extraordinary
neurotic, a figure endowed with a rare psy-
chopathy for words. And a poet shared by so
many as to give rise to statements as dumb
and gimmicky as: “There’s a Pessoa for every
occasion.” More seriously, how extraordinary
and passionate his poetry is! One can’t have
enough of Pessoa.
LFG: I will admit that for me, too, there
were two mythical figures, the Pessoa of The
Book of Disquiet and the Borges of short
stories, and that only as an adult did I begin
to appreciate them as poets. I find Borges the
poet absolutely dazzling, though not many feel
the same way.
AL: Borges is a poet of tremendous depth.
It probably has to do with what you state so
well: that reading the poet Borges requires
more time and more knowledge, more expe-
rience, more sediments of life. You need to
have all the tempos well in place. Your view
of the world has to have already often touched
upon him. I have the same experience with
artists like Morandi; the more time passes,
the more entity he acquires. Something light
which may even seem monotonous later takes
on very delicate nuances, to the point that
the brushstroke and repetition become a cat-
egorical thought. It’s after much exposure to
Pollock that one gets to Morandi better.
LFG: With what editions was your genera-
tion educated? Mine first had the brown books
of Austral, and later the gray ones of Losada.
AL: We mainly had Visor, Hiperión, and
Pre-Textos. These three publishers have been
part of the sentimental education of several
generations. In my case there was a special
relationship with Visor, so much that I have
been going there every fortnight since I started
at the university at 17, to this day. We have
gotten a lot of nourishment from that book-
store and publishing house.
LFG: There’s another thing I’ve realized
has changed over time, and it’s that our
generation hated Lorca. Lorca was pictur-
esque, or, in Borges’s words, an Andalusian
professional. And Poet in New York was
for us like a surrealist delirium. For our
generation, the great poet was Machado.
Juan Ramón was too complicated. He was
a figure we yearned to love, but did not
manage to connect with.
AL: You hated Lorca? That’s new to me,
and quite snobbish. The early Juan Ramón,
the modernist one, is definitely cloying. Even
he disowned it in his later years. I think Juan
Ramón was rediscovered with the publication
of his American work in full, in that excellent
volume titled Lyric of the Atlantis, published
by Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores.
There we have a Juan Ramón in exile and
often in agony. Essential. A Juan Ramón who
doubts, is hurt, estranged from enjoyment and
verbiage. A poet full of conflict. Every good
poem has conflict within. Poetry is not an
“Every poem has an inner
conflict. Poetry is not an
escape, but a way to pin
yourself to the present.”
