Poetry is a way of knowledge and communication, of a world that is discovered and constructed at the same time. It implies, therefore, not only the creation of new relationships between the elements of the universe, or of new nuances in them, but a genuine transfiguration of existence. Therein lies the exceptional power and brilliance of poetic language.
Knowledge and communication do not constitute in poetry two separate or independent elements. On the contrary, they can only be distinguished analytically. In reality, they form a single complex, which results from the interdependence between them, and which, in turn, conditions them. Therefore, the richness and serenity of poetic communication, of poetic language, are themselves the serenity and richness of the world that is discovered, that is transfigured, that is constructed, that is known. The poet is part of that world, with all the risks and all the commitments that are involved in that situation.
Vehicle and substance at the same time, poetic language reveals the excellences and limitations of the poet's creative task, not only because it shows in what concrete way and up to what horizons the poet illuminates or can illuminate an area of existence, uncover its most hidden and secret nuances or its strongest features, but, above all, because it shows the quality, the nature, of the elements he inserts into existence, in his existence, therefore. The poet reveals himself, gives his own naked presence, his own way of participating in reality, his way of yielding to it or transforming it, the conditions and circumstances of his own struggle.
Because poetry is a mode of relationship between man and his reality, the most direct, the most intense, the most profound. The most beautiful.
From this perspective, the poetic elaboration of the world includes the need to develop, maximally and incessantly, the instruments of communication-knowledge, on the one hand, and to enrich and purify, in quantity and quality, the elements of the existence in which the poet participates and risks. The concrete work of art always expresses the hazardous dialectic of both dimensions of the creative task. Poets often seek such enrichment, trying to establish, not only to discover, new relationships, or new nuances, between the elements of existence. But, in truth, the most genuine and enduring work of poetry is the establishment of new elements in "reality," the modification of the relationships that exist between them, the incessant recreation of one's own relationship with reality. For this reason alone, poetry can become the highest and most risky enterprise of transfiguration of existence. Thus, poetry is a praxis: knowledge-communication, transfiguration of existence, and, in and through it, transfiguration of the poet's and man's own existence. In the Peruvian poetry of the last ten years, Washington Delgado is, perhaps, the most illustrious example of such an intense and powerful creative trajectory. With admirable lucidity and discipline, he is the clearest example of how poetry is not reduced only to a way of speaking or writing—as is happening to so many other poets with talent, but without a vocation for risk—but is also and fundamentally a way of conceiving and committing to existence.
From the delicate and precise images of sadness and absence ("Formas de la Ausencia" ("Forms of Absence"), in which the greatest commitment was still to take possession of the spells of the word and the possible structures of the poem, through the joyful discovery of the most vital possibilities of daily existence ("Días del Corazón" ("Days of the Heart"), and therefore the adherence to the joy and anguish of the revolutionary creation of human existence ("Para vivir mañana"), the world, and therefore the poetic language of Washington Delgado has been enriching, purifying and maturing, almost without parallel in recent Peruvian poetry. Salinas, Elouard or Hikmet, among others, have served him, at times, as references or milestones, up to here. Now, the need for a more intimate communion with the most serene and simplest, yet deepest, areas of existence, the passionate search for them, the creation of them, results in his latest book, in a poetic language more his own, but also more common, which emerges from the oldest and most constant sources of the Spanish language…
This book (a sample of which appears in this issue of Haraui) is also a new presence of landscape in Peruvian poetry, a new image. The singular way in which the poet incorporates the landscape into his world is expressed in a transparent and harmonious relationship, which has the value of constructing the landscape from within, as a human phenomenon and not merely physical. This is the direct basis of the diaphanousness, the robust delicacy of his language.
This is sublime! Is there a way I can cite this? Presuming that it is a translation on Quijano's text? I am happy to cite this as source, but may not be suitable for academic text it may be not enough? I would be grateful for any information