www.plagio.cl
January 2005
Beyond Poetry
José Ignacio Silva A.
David Rosenmann-Taub
País Más Allá (Country
Beyond)
LOM,
Santiago, 2004, 177 pp.
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 Perhaps
one of the most legendary Chilean writers of the moment is the
poet David Rosenmann-Taub (b. 1927), who has attained what thousands
of other personalities of our national literature cannot even envision,
nor would it interest them: to create a stir solely by means of
his work. The “bullhorn” of this poetic renown has
been the publisher LOM, which published País Más
Allá (2004), their fourth installment of Rosenmann-Taub's
poetry, after Cortejo y Epinicio (2002), El
Mensajero (2003), and
El Cielo en la Fuente/La Mañana Eterna (2004).
And to make the legend more surprising still, Rosenmann-Taub really
does write a poetry totally different from anything that we see
in our bookstores. If very poorly read, his poetry would give the
impression of being hermetic, deliberately complicated, with obsolete,
anachronistic words, and poems that are almost epigrammatic. But
that is a narrow, deplorable point of view. It goes without saying
that reality has, fortunately, given us a poet who fully masters
the raw material of poetry – language – and
does it in such a way that he is able to build minimal, almost perfect structures,
characteristic of an oeuvre that has been in the process of distillation for
almost half a century. If poetry has somewhere been defined as the art of pushing
language to its limits, then Rosenmann-Taub is the poet par exellence. Possessed
of a style and a mastery that is both efficient and powerful, Rosenmann-Taub
does justice to the fable confected by others, with a language that vivifies
the word, and a unique poetry charged with meaning, music, and rhythm. In short,
Rosenmann-Taub lets nothing escape him, and neither should the reader let the
possibility escape of reading and re-reading this poetry, unparalleled in our
literature. |
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