Manhattan, or the Steps of an Improbable Identity
Résumé
Along the past two centuries, while a certain identity of Latin-American poetry was in construction, then claimed its place, exported, and inscribed its tradition in contemporary lyrics, New York has undeniably occupied a prominent position. Contemporary Latin American poetry sometimes makes its way towards its northern counterpart. The present essay is a first attempt at examining what happens at the contact point between the two poetic traditions, especially when Manhattan is at the center of the poem . While this article will refer to many poets in whose creation New York was an important step, the analysis will focus on three Andean poets whose voices have marked the Latin-American lyrics over the past half-century: Peruvian poetess Blanca Varela (Lima, 1926-2009), Chilean poet Enrique Lihn (Santiago de Chili, 1929-1988), and Bolivian poet Eduardo Mitre (Oruro, 1943). All three are acknowledged well beyond the borders of their motherlands and all three are among the leaders of contemporary poetry in Spanish. Significantly, passing through Manhattan was a decisive step in their work, whether they defined a new poetic line or gave theirs a new dimension there. This essay will not examine whole collections but will analyze poems that represent, in the biographies of the three poets, significant steps in a cosmopolitan journey. The poems are respectively Varela's "Valzes," the long opening poem of Valses y otras falsas confesiones (1971), several poems extracted from Lihn's A partir de Manhattan (1979) and Pena de extrañamiento (1986), and Mitre's complete collection El paraguas de Manhattan (2004). These texts, spread over four decades, constitute, in successive touches, poetic and plastic perceptions of New York, and they represent part of the contemporaneous imaginary of the Latin-American "voyage." The present essay will follow the poets' walk in the city, which sometimes takes the form of a loss in the labyrinth and sometimes that of the new consciousness of a foreignness or strangeness, when the urban landscape by antonomasia, Manhattan, affected both by gravity and grace, metamorphoses into a space questioning the poetic making.
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