Editor’s Note: The friendship between Carlos Germán Belli and Pedro Lastra has lasted many decades. It is a friendship between poets, who also communicate through their poems themselves.
Enrique Lihn also formed part of this friendship. He was an early supporter of Belli’s literary talent, and his friendship with Lastra lasted until his death in 1988.
The two poems below serve as a testament to this friendship and mutual admiration.
Two poems of friendship
friendship between poets
spanish poems about friendship
Letter to Carlos Germán Belli
(A note on his poem “Oh Cybernetic Fairy,” written c. 1960)
Today we need, and more than ever,
the aid of your cybernetic fairy
because he has returned again:
the invisible, “crude
henchman of the stakes.”
He travels through the world’s air
and through silence,
beloved silence,
which has brought him and which bears him
unknowing.
He fell upon us like night falls
and seems, like night, born of nothing.
May the cybernetic fairy
then invoked
free us at last from this fate,
which for the ancients
could well have been the name
of doom.
Pedro Lastra
May 23, 2020
In Praise of Lastra and Lihn
Here Pedro Lastra’s concision,
here the hearty glibness of Enrique Lihn,
at one point and another
on the blank page, both present
as a sign of the differing natures
with which they use the pen,
while both are alike in showing
all the best of their respective souls,
in rich Castilian words
and throughout our twentieth century.
Because they know how, in the end,
to vanquish the oblivion that lurks ahead:
your concision, dear Pedro,
is so wise and refined
in that it is the very living boil
of your glibness, Enrique, friend
recalled forever among us.
Eloquent and laconic to a man,
here in printed letters will remain
two giants, each in his own way.
Carlos Germán Belli
