Madrid: Visor, 2023. 347 pages.
Blanca Varela (Lima, 1926-2009) is a vital figure in the development of contemporary Peruvian and Latin American poetry. The new edition of her Poesía completa, issued by the Spanish publisher Visor, offers readers an excellent opportunity to explore a body of work showcasing a uniquely expressive poetic voice.
Although Varela began writing poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, international recognition for her work—including the Federico García International Poetry Prize in 2006 and the Queen Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry in 2007—came relatively late in her life. Nonetheless, the start of her career couldn’t have been better. Her first book, Ese puerto existe, published in Mexico in 1959, includes a laudatory prologue by Octavio Paz. Some years prior, Varela had met the Mexican poet in Paris, and he had given her the idea for her book’s title. Unfortunately, the new edition of Poesía completa does not include Paz’s prologue, which included an astute synthesis of Varela’s work. As Paz indicates: “Her poetry doesn’t explain or reason with us. Nor does it confide in us. It is a sign, an invocation before, against, and toward the world, a black stone tattooed by the fire of salt, love, time, and solitude. And an exploration, as well, of one’s own consciousness.” One only has to read the verses in “Puerto Supe,” one of Varela’s most celebrated poems, to understand that Paz’s intuitions were on point. In this poem, Varela writes: “There’s my childhood on this coast / under the tallest sky, a sky like no other… / There I destroy my parents’ home with shining stones / There I destroy the little birds’ cage… / Here on the coast I climb up on a black well, / I go from night to deep night… / Here on the coast I have roots, / imperfect hands, / a smoldering bed where I cry alone.”
“Reading Blanca Varela’s poetry means discovering hard, heartbreaking verses that are, at the same time, full of spellbinding beauty.”
Varela was part of the “Generation of 1950” in Peru, a notable group of writers that included such important figures as Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Carlos Germán Belli, and Javier Sologuren. As a young woman, she married the talented Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo, and lived in postwar Paris where she experienced the influences of Existentialism and Surrealism. Despite her first book’s auspicious debut, Varela discreetly published modest editions of her subsequent books of poetry in Peru, as if she were trying to avoid attention. These include Luz de día (1963), Valses y otras falsas confesiones (1972), and Canto villano (1978). These works are part of the same search portrayed in her first book—an exploration characterized by the poetic voice’s introspective and self-affirming process of understanding an oscillating existence, one in which horror and beauty coexist. In other words, the objective world and subjective dimension fuse together in Varela’s poetry, thanks to a continuous, pendulum-like movement alternating between wakefulness and sleep. In this space, an injured and wavering poetic speaker wanders about, full of enduring complaints and scars. It is noteworthy, for example, that although love is a recurrent theme in her work, she doesn’t write “love poems” in the most traditional sense of the phrase. Rather, she writes reflections or confessions about love. At the same time, we are not always sure if the “you” that the poetic “I” addresses is a man, a loved one, herself, or even Lima, the city where the poet was born. What is clear in her work, though, is the ever-present, both painful and heartbreaking tone. A good example of this is in the poem “Vals” from Luz de día. In this work we read verses such as: “I rise and fall to the depths of my soul / awaken agonized in light, magnetized in light. / In this coming and going time beats its wings / confined forever.”
The last books Varela published in the 1990s—Ejercicios materiales (1993), El libro de barro (1993), and Concierto animal (1999)—echo her earlier poetics. Varela’s poetry resists the acceptance of life as it is. It conjures a discreet, quotidian insurrection against every act or force that denies it, or, further still, that snuffs out the fire of imagination and memory. Varela’s poetry is an act of defense, a lucid protest against life’s imperfection. Her verses emerge from the certainty that the world is a fragile, uncertain place, and therefore, the fleetingness of the human condition always reveals itself. As a result, the poetic “I” contemplates existence with a cold, injured gaze, but mostly, without any false illusions.
This new Spanish edition of Poesía completa brings together eight books that Varela published in her lifetime: Ese puerto existe (1959), Luz de día (1963), Valses y otras falsas confesiones (1972), Canto villano (1978), Ejercicios materiales (1993), El libro de barro (1993), Concierto animal (1999), and Falso teclado (2000). New in this volume are six poems which appeared in two literary magazines in the 1960s but were never included in her books. It also includes the poem “Trato golpeo todas las puertas,” published for the first time in 2007 in the anthology Aunque cueste la noche, published by the University of Salamanca when Varela was awarded the Queen Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry.
Apart from the material noted above, Visor’s new edition respects Varela’s grouping of her works. Here I refer to the volumes Donde todo termina abre las alas: Poesía reunida 1949-2000 (Madrid, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2000), which includes a prologue by Adolfo Castañón and an epilogue by Antonio Gamoneda, we well as a Peruvian edition with the same title (Lima, Librería Sur, 2016), which includes texts by Ana María Gazzolo and Giovanna Pollarolo, respectively.
Reading Blanca Varela’s poetry means discovering hard, heartbreaking verses that are, at the same time, full of spellbinding beauty.
Translated by Amy Olen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
