LAS ÚLTIMAS NOTICIAS
Santiago de Chile
June 22, 1952
The Voice of a Poet:
The Flooded Furrows by David Rosenmann-Taub
Editorial Cruz del Sur
by Vincente Mengod
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Where
music dies,/once again words, says the poet David Rosenmann-Taub,
in the epigraph of his recent work, Los Surcos Inundados
(The Flooded Furrows). Here are, perhaps, the two lines
of
an unfinished poem, fired off at horizons filled with esthetic
premonition,
doctrine, and content. Because when music languishes, the word
lends
it vibrations, becomes the support and vehicle of another music
that ideas cause to arise in its alchemy.
It may be
an
aesthetic stance to animate words so that they arouse deep human
vibrations. And, in such a case, the poem takes its worth as much
from what it says as from what it suggests.
David Rosenmann-Taub
is a great poet, a skillful creator of allusions, who never goes
so far as to dispense with formal logic. Stimulating associations
bubble up in his verses, like daydreams of harmony. At times, a
thought is the experience that triggers for the poet the emotion
of the poem, and so when he speaks to us about the roots of poetic
creation, he synthesizes the reasons that illuminate the work of
art, as in "a fruit roaming in the fog," "living
lightning," "holy sprout," "sweet-smelling
slime." The son is the "farewell to my ripe brio," stirring
in the poet like "the strong love that dies in
the thorn."
In the verses
of this poet there is a diluted romanticism, a constant oscillation
in his technique of showing the inside and the outside of emotions,
the temporal flow of the anecdote elevated to the exemplary case.
In
the section
called "Frieze of Isabel," we see a sort of romantic
arabesque, very close to a mysticism between lover and intellectual.
The lines, in their rhythm, are like a "breeze, shadow."
Compositions
like the ones titled "Abyss"
and "Requiem" are feats of meditation on the
shadow of death, with a child as the subject; they are full of
paternal
yearnings, of painful tragedy in the face of inexorable dying.
It is not easy
to find echoes of other poets in this work. If such echoes exist,
we need to accept that Rosenmann-Taub has completely reworked what
for the other poets were basic stimuli, the very origin of the poem;
he has reduced these to mere ancillary elements.
In Chile, a
country of great craftsmen of verse, the voice of David Rosenmann-Taub
sings his songs of love, his raptures of mysticism (apparently with
esoteric roots), his exercises in rhythm, like the exponent of an
aesthetic orientation which rests on an intelligent confrontation
with classic poetical resources.
In "The Flooded
Furrows" one glimpses a spirit masterful at plumbing depths;
instead of stooping to trivial chatter, he creates images that
are
winnowed into song.
Here is a poetry
that, without being hermetic, raises allusions to a whole new level.
As with the great poets, a lived or imagined experience becomes
the trigger for subtle lucubrations. And the spirit runs the whole
gamut of the azure, the grays of a lyre that vibrates to the beat
of reality, beyond the concrete and the temporal. |
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