Pedro Casariego Córdoba, unpublished | Babelia

“Our own words / prevent us from speaking. / It seemed impossible. / Our own words ”. Quoted, copied and retouched, these four verses have become an emblem of Spanish poetry in recent years. The same as its author, Pedro Casariego Cordoba, who was born in 1955 and committed suicide 37 years later by throwing himself onto the train track. Two days before – on January 6, 1993 – he wrote his last text, a story illustrated by himself as a gift for his daughter Julieta. Casariego, what many times he signed PeCasCorBetween 1977 and 1987, he wrote – afterwards he devoted himself to painting – six arguably “chained” poems and fifty poems in which his unconventional vision of love and of a world to which it does not adapt particularly shines.

In 2003, the Seix Barral publishing house gathered all that poetry in a volume prologue by Angel Gonzalez with notes like this: “Pedro Casariego Córdoba’s literature, oscillating between humor and gravity, immodest and demure, will always preserve an elusive secret background that resists any attempt at rationalization. Nor is it necessary; it is enough for readers to abandon ourselves to the strange charm that this largely ineffable speech gives off to intuitively apprehend what in its secret depth is suggested and not said ”.

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Almost 20 years later, the same label publishes this Tuesday a revised and expanded edition of that collected poetry. Reviewed by the Casariego -all one family of writers- and expanded with texts the figure of PeCasCor signed by authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas, Ray Loriga, Marta Sanz, Belén Bermejo or Antonio Gamoneda.

The book, of more than 500 pages, is completed with a special introduction for each book and five unpublished poems, three of which we publish today in Babelia.

Your red eyes

1983. Manuscript

I

they love

your

eyes

blue

flushed

by

the

excesses

of

the

nights

what

raisins

far

of

me.

Those

nights

dwarf

your

eyes

until

drops

of

sea.

I FORGIVE YOU

1983. Manuscript

I forgive you.

Maybe I put in you

too much hope

and too many hands

(in your terrible shadow

so withered

in your future mouth

so quiet

in the irremediable smile

what are your repeated lips

by Mendel and his family).

If a sick tree

if a tree

is the photocopy

from another tree …

if a fallen tree

is another tree that stands tall

how to look up

then the one who speaks alone

(the mute)

(Carson McCullers)

it’s the drawer pull

from the flowers

the shooting rain

the drought

for the good of the snails

star shell

very fast

destined for stillness

of the

astronomers.

Needed

I just need to pay the

price of a coffee that gets cold

poke around

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In my blue pockets

THE ROSCÓN DE REYES

for Berta. (December 1992- January 1993). Manuscript

Everything is full of cops

and that’s why the eyelids get tired.

There are also tigers

blues that weave without stopping.

I don’t know what else there is.

Maybe there are too many breakfasts

and too many cupcakes.

They tell me that

roscón de Reyes

is more dangerous than

a howitzer.

‘Chained poems’

Author: Pedro Casariego Cordoba

Editorial: Seix Barral. 2020

Format: Soft top or pocket. 544 pages

I believe it.