Artful giraffe3/19/2023 Metaphor becomes secondary metonymy and oxymoron prevail. In Alban’s poetry, the relationship between word and object, signifier and signified, language and reality, is not inevitable or in any way fixed. In “Saga of Mist,” he writes:Īnd a bird forced to stay aloft forever.* His poetry manifests a structure whose radical interiority is present in all its effects, so that it signifies absence as well as presence. The originality and freshness of Alban’s poetry is a function of the authenticity of his poetic vision. He writes: “So-called direct language is limited by its own precision the semantic exactness for which it strives precludes it from expressing the evolutionary facets of reality” (p. In it he elaborates his concept of poetry as the vehicle by which the poet carries the listener beyond the limited, circumstantial condition of human experience toward a state of transcendental intuition that can only be confirmed through a highly evolved poetic language. The clearest formulation of his poetics appears in Manifiesto trascendentalista (San Jose: Editorial Costa Rica, 1978), of which he is principal co-author. And, although there is nothing it can’t say, if it’s easy to say then it probably isn’t worth saying as poetry. Whatever the poem says, it says in the service of language and poetry. Above all, for Alban, poetry cannot be “used” for other purposes. Alban views his poetry as a bridge between the formal refinement of that European Spanish tradition and the vitalism of Latin American poetry. Since then, he’s published a number of important books and has won numerous prizes (almost a prize per book). In 1978 he left Costa Rica for Spain in order to deepen his knowledge of the Spanish poetic tradition. He has hardly been living in a world of his own, however. Laureano Alban has been writing against the current for over thirty years, an unabashed transcendentalist in an age where poetry has been working to grow lean, to strip itself of image, and to approach the numinous in ordinary language, or not at all. (The three volumes will be illustrated by leading contemporary artists from Latin America.) In these definitions, the objects, concepts and creatures marked by the titles yield up their magic to the scrutiny of the poet-encyclopedist’s gaze. THE SEVEN POEMS printed here represent a sampling of the “definitions” from Enciclopedia de maravillas ( Encyclopedia of Wonders), a thousand-poem collection which Laureano Alban has been working on for the past twelve years and which will be published this fall in a three-volume, bilingual edition (my translation) by the Circle of Costa Rican Writers in San José in collaboration with the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh.
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