This dossier seeks to continue delving into the poetics—heartrending and luminous, vibrant and unmistakable—of Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, winner of the thirty-second Reina Sofía Ibero-American Poetry Prize (Universidad de Salamanca/Patrimonio Nacional).
Renowned specialists Carmen Alemany Bay of the Universidad de Alicante and Marisa Martínez Pérsico of the Universidad de Udine have contributed enlightening pieces of writing, exploring fundamental themes and vectors of Belli’s work, such as her utopian, hopeful, and prospective vision and her theoretical reflection, in an indispensable look back at the ars poeticas of her literary career. These lines, present in Belli’s writing, open the door to new questions through the sensitive inquiries undertaken by both critics, and are complemented by a selection of poems and an interview that enters into the ethical—but also joyous—dimension proper to the humanist, ever-lively creations of our author.
All of these materials represent valuable contributions to our knowledge of central or prior-known aspects of Belli’s oeuvre, but also to other minor, only apparently more tangential concerns, such as the bewilderment and pleasure generated by her language, the meaning and projection of the impact of orality and music on Central America and on Belli herself, her pained consciousness of injustice, the natural and vital cycles associated with those of a woman, the communicative and also political, feminist, ecocritical potential of her creative imagination, and the great transformations that art can bring about in reality. Only with such trust and optimistic faith in a better future, in the active and everyday reinvention of poetic activism, is it possible to inhabit the earth, even when it charts a course—or precisely because it charts a course—toward unease, failure, and loss.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
