Eve Battle | Valencia (EFE).- The writer Carlos Marzal returns, thirteen years after his last publication in verse, to poetry in his new book “Euforia” (Tusquets), “a moral portrait of a person who has turned 61” and a return to memory to rescue moments of intensity from his past.
“I had not left the genre, it had been poetry that had left, because at least for me poetry is written when it wants to,” reflects the Valencian writer, National Poetry and Critics Award winner, in a conversation with EFE and one of the main representatives of the poetry of the experience of the 80s and 90s.
Poetry, he assures, “we must miss it so that when it returns it catches us with all five senses” and meanwhile “accumulating experiences”, which he has embodied in the 120 poems written in more than 200 pages that make up “Euforia” , a title that evokes vitalism, so present in his work.
“A turn back in memory” by Carlos Marzal
Carlos Marzal (València, 1961) describes the book as “a return to memory”, the rescue of moments of intensity from the past and “the moral and autobiographical portrait” of a 61-year-old writer, with a confessional and of intimacy that poetry offers.
On whether there has been an evolution in his poetry in the last decade, he jokes and affirms that the reader will have to be asked “if it has been for the better or for the worse”. “I want to believe that along the way I have learned things and that the book is the crystallization of the trade that I have been learning,” she says.
“Surely I have lost freshness in some things, but I try to replace it with knowledge and reflection. The poet always starts from scratch, despite the experience and despite the years”, says the writer.
The choice of the title “Euphoria” already anticipates that we are dealing with a vitalist book, because the writer considers himself “a good guest of the world” and a “grateful” guest.
“Almost all of us live in a highly favored part of existence, of reality and I think it’s fair that we sing that also despite the sorrows,” he considers.
Euphoria, an art to bear misfortunes
The word “euphoria”, in its classic and etymological sense, not only refers to overflowing joy: it is also an art to endure misfortunes, a form of resistance to adversity, and for this reason, it anticipates the reader, in the book “There is singing, but also crying.”
He talks about his experience with love, family or fatherhood, which have changed his way of being in the world, in the form of gratitude and happiness and joy.
In these thirteen years, Marzal has published two novels, as well as numerous articles, essays and aphorisms, and he combines writing with the literature classes he teaches at the University of Virginia in Valencia.
To his students, Carlos Marzal talks about his literary references, such as Quevedo, since he is a declared “quevediano by vocation”; of Juan Ramón Jiménez, of the brothers Antonio and Manuel Machado and of his friend, tutor and “literary teacher” Francisco Brines, a “gift” that life and literature gave him, and one of his great references along with the rest of the members of the generation of poets of the 50s.
The recognition of Brines with the Cervantes Prize “was well deserved but I regretted that they did not give it to him before” because his work, he defends, was crystallized, made twenty or twenty-five years ago. He considers that in Spain there is an unpleasant tradition that is to give prizes when one has almost no strength, health or time to enjoy them, as also happened with Joan Margarit.
On future projects, juries and their relationship with poetry
“I would like the juries to be a little braver, more daring, that they do not need to wait until the last breath of the writers to award the prize,” says Marzal, who sees in the current panorama, in the field of poetry but also in the case of novels and essays, to magnificent writers of his or earlier generation who are deserving of these awards.
Carlos Marzal has a new novel in his hands that he still doesn’t quite know “where it’s going to go” and he writes many aphorisms, a genre that interests him a lot and “easily transportable”, on a phone, a note or a recording.
Although he has never stopped writing poems, in his relationship with poetry, he confesses, “it is convenient to give ourselves some time”, after the emotional discharge that “Euforia” has brought about. “I hope it’s not thirteen years,” jokes the writer, “but you have to breathe.”