What book ruined your ability to enjoy “light” literature forever?
Leaves of Grass, by a long-haired guy from Long Island named Walter Whitman. A bilingual edition from Galaxia Gutenberg that my partner gave me at the end of 2019, the year we met and also the bicentennial of the author’s birth.
I had never read anything so cohesive and barbaric in terms of architecture or verbal revolution. Leaves of Grass was the watershed between the sublime and what—out of stylistic hypocrisy—I must call lightness, but it is something more prosaic than lightness. All my previous readings of poetry collections considered “benchmarks” came crashing down, even though modern literary theory keeps them on a bed of saffron.
Which author would you like to invite to dinner, just to contradict them for three hours?
T.S. Eliot. It would be a difficult dinner, complex for both of us. As a reader of translations, I would attack those approaches, the tendency to inject indomitable liturgies and litanies into plain verse, the drift toward inoperative length, hermeticism, ambiguity, the darkness between two beautiful but excessive entities, with much of what, in my view, damaged later poetry, secular poetry, false imitators, and reading.
What book did you pretend to have read with the most conviction?
Residencia en la Tierra, by Pablo Neruda. It was fashionable to claim to have read it in the circles I moved in at the time. A woman’s intuition is usually keener than that of her male counterparts, and when that feminine instinct gets stuck on a work and shows honest resistance, it must be respected.
Which literary character would you kill yourself?
Juan con Todo, from the poem “Tengo”, by the Cuban Nicolás Guillén, heir and example of a host of similar poets (with hymns to Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Fidel Castro…), of various authors with pieces given over to subcultural obedience. Juan con Todo is an exaggerated and ridiculous character who moves from capitalist Nothingness to socialist Nothingness, pretending to have everything, throwing himself into the extravagance of each ill-conceived and poorly written verse.
The work of a poet I admired for his rhythmic transcendence, Juan con Todo is the epitome of the wrong use of poetry, through flattery. More often than prose, poetry takes on the role of a condescending seal with scoundrels and their processes. In these cases, quick poetic euthanasia is the fairest and most merciful alternative.
What “classic” book do you consider a punishment to read, yet still defend in public?
The Song of Songs, by Solomon. I defend it in public and in private. As a crime and as punishment. In a rescue that also saves it from myself.
What is your guilty literary pleasure, the one you hide behind a fake copy of Proust?
The complete works of Miguel Hernández, recycled, always revived.
Which book do you treat as a sacred object, but whose first page remains more pristine than your new Kindle?
The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa.
Which author would you trade places with, even if it were just to have a scholarship at the Sorbonne?
Fernando Pessoa, specifically Álvaro de Campos.
Which bookstore has stolen the most money from you with your consent?
The street vendors on Wallapop (a platform for buying and selling second-hand goods between individuals, very popular in Spain) and, of course, Amazon.
Which books have you started more than three times without getting past page 40?
The Beauty of the Husband, by Anne Carson.
What Latin phrase do you use to sound profound, even though you don’t really know what it means?
Verba volant, scripta manent; carmina volant et manent.
Which literary character would you like to have as a therapist, knowing that they would ruin you emotionally?
Christ on the Cross, by Borges. Although the poem—in general—is pretty bad. But the character is magnificent.
What is the most absurd edition you have ever bought just for its aesthetics?
I have never bought anything for its aesthetics. Not even face creams. Everything I buy has a use, because I was poor as a child and was taught to appreciate money. In relation to the minimum wage, books in Spain are expensive. I tend to love them for their guts, their digestion, and not for how they look, in order to buy them.
What literary genre do you pretend to despise because your intellectual friends do?
The songs of Manuel Alejandro, the Spanish ballad composer. I love them. Behind my façade, I listen to them often.
Which contemporary author do you pretend to be uninterested in but secretly wish you had written their books?
I really envy two poems by the same contemporary author. El enamorado y MacDonald’s, by Manuel Vilas. I don’t know if they’re in the same book, because I don’t read Manuel Vilas. But both fulfill the axiom of the perfect magic circle: each one is an express book.
How many books do you have left to read, and how many do you continue to buy each month?
Thousands. I read an average of half a book a month.
What literary scene made you close the book and stare at the ceiling as if you had experienced something?
A thousand scenes, stark, naked, found in the poems of Dylan Thomas, Gonzalo Rojas, Mary Oliver, Derek Walcott, Wisława Szymborska, Louise Glück, Adonis, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Leopoldo María Panero, Hermann Hesse, and all the other authors mentioned throughout my answers. Scenes that you don’t immediately think of as literature, but that you have to think about when you talk about the public and emotional education of nations, homes, and kitchens.
I also think of the brilliant scenes of many emerging authors who pause for a moment, write—as if to get out of the way—a verse with fabulous inner music, a sense of meaning, and linguistic precision, and then never write anything else or anything better in their lives.
What book would you give as a gift just to test whether someone is worthy of you?
Aristotle’s Poetics, just finished reading about poetry, without restrictions.
What is the most heinous literary crime? Dogging pages, underlining books, or not reading?
Not underlining verses (with a nice yellow, orange, or light green marker…) is almost like not reading.
Do you read the author’s blurb before starting a book, or do you prefer to ruin the experience later?
I always read it, of course. Although it’s the least important thing. It’s so insignificant that often the verse and the author don’t even share a sarcophagus. And they are saved or burned separately.
What fictional library do you deserve according to your level of literary neurosis?
My greatest personal achievement is having remained free of literary neuroses. I need nothing but real libraries. Given the choice, I’d take any (interconnected) library at any university.
Have you ever stolen a book? Which one(s)?
No. Never.
What is your greatest achievement as a reader: surviving Ulysses or finishing Don Quixote?
I’m more into other songs, like the Odyssey… or even El Mío Cid.
What book would you have liked to write just so you could sign it and show it off?
Distintos modos de cavar un túnel, by Juan Carlos Flores.
At what age did you realize that reading didn’t make you a better person, just more unbearable?
Reading makes me a better person. I haven’t been able to verify the opposite.
Which secondary character deserved more prominence than the main character?
Clytemnestra, who makes her own way. It is not for nothing that female authors and poetic prose (from Marina Tsvetaeva to Margaret Atwood, via Margarite Yourcernar) have focused on her controversial and unfading figure.
How many bookmarks do you own, and how many do you actually use (apart from the lottery ticket that you didn’t win, of course)?
I buy as many bookmarks as I buy books. In Spain, they make beautiful ones. Bookstores are factories of customized bookmarks. They’re so beautiful that I end up losing them all and using the book’s own cover as a reference.
Which author do you think is brilliant, but would rather not have around at a dinner party?
Homer.
What phrase do you use to justify not finishing the books you start?
There’s music outside.
If your life were a book, on which shelf in the bookstore would we find it: “unnecessary drama,” “pretentious fiction,” or “essay on disappointment”?
I would start a new section, not included in the previous ones: Tasty Lyrics.
