Pedro Casariego Córdoba, unpublished | Babelia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 ”.

The sweat of the birds (1992), acrylic on canvas by Pedro Casariego Córdoba.

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The book, of more than 500 pages, is completed with a special introduction for each book and five unpublished poems, three of which we publish today in Babelia.