Light, word and action, which can be many things and are poetry, as could be seen yesterday at the 39th Barcelona Poetry Festival, which closed at the Palau de la Música, once again, the long week of Barcelona Poesia . The first poem, before the words, and which continued during the hour of the recital, was the lighting space prepared by Jou Serra, with the music of Aurora Bauzà and Pere Jou, the stage directors.
Leríto, Francisco Ferrer Lerín opened the turn of spoken poems with natural and very particular verses, which at first glance refer to his research as an ornithologist, but which, like the vocation, comes from his childhood. “It was the mice / gnawing at the ears,” he says after talking about the bearded vulture and before the cemeteries. The lights have been modulating colors and intensity as the poems pass.
Sitting in the middle of the stage, the Slovenian Anja Zaj Golob begins among shining oaks, a flock of ducks passing by, the mown grass and the dog running across the field, and “suddenly this effort, / a hard, blunt, dark thing, palpable”… and “suddenly, the sadness is here again.” “I surround you, I take your space, I look for you,” she continues, and “I appropriate you more and more insistently,” and sadness takes her hand and comes. And then “the light radiates from below.” The light moves with the voice.
The French-speaking Moroccan Abdellatif Laâbi has not been able to come due to health problems, but his poetic voice is read by the French-Moroccan actor living in Barcelona Karim Belaane. Read poems that start with a glass full of “a spark of despair”, “a third of blood”, “a third of tears”, “two fingers of scorn”… to recognize, later, that “I could have / to live another life (…) to be silent / to be truly silent (…) not to be there that morning (…) to take refuge in a cave (…) not to exist (…) È finita la commedia! . With a fine black humor, he reminds the tortured, “the right to insurrection” to compose a “symphony of resistance.”
The music returns, with green, blue and white lights, who sing that “my cry has no cure” and precede Raquel Santanera, who dedicated her recital to Lis Costa and Ester Xargay. She was the most applauded even before the start, and she rewarded the audience with her jingle and the punchy rhythm of playful and controversial poems, between Self-betrayal or Mechanics, she who declares herself “a gypsy for all the days you need it”, but also “the polsinada” and even “bell maker”.
The Basque Joseba Sarrionandia assured that “poetry is dead, but it was not me.” He, who has “been a witness / in your theater”, assures that “I will do whatever it takes / so that you don’t catch me again.” Stones, walls and countries, to end with the almost white music of moving light, and a children’s choir singing. Poetry illuminates us, poetry sings to us.
Catalan version, here