www.plagio.cl, January 2005
David Rosenmann-Taub
País Más Allá (Country Beyond)
LOM, Santiago, 2004, 177 pp.
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.