“I could give up writing before reading,” says the Spanish poet Ada Salas

The writer Ada Salas, one of the most original voices in current Spanish poetry -with publications such as “Arqueologías”- affirmed that “I could give up writing before reading”, although she later reflected that if she had not read, perhaps she would not have written , during his stay in Buenos Aires to participate in a new Frost Reading Series, which in this edition touched on “The magic of the sign”, in a review of his work and his link with literature.

“I don’t know if I would write if I hadn’t read, I don’t know that, once I got to know writing I couldn’t live without it either, but of course I could give up writing before reading,” the poet, essayist, and translator assured Télam. born in Extremadura in 1965, after participating in the cycle that for the last 15 years has been bringing together renowned writers to speak about their work of literary creation and to share the reading of some of their works with the audience.

Salas has among his poems “Art and memory of the innocent”, from 1988; “Variations in white”, from 1994; “The thirst”, from 1997; “Place of defeat”, from 2003; and “Descent”, from 2018.

“Archaeologies”, his most recent book, is an unusual handful of verses that could be thought for a world in ruins, in which the emotion before objects of the past is tense with history and personal affections.

In collaboration with the painter Jesús Placencia, he published the books “Ashes to ashes”, in 2011, and “Ten Commandments”, in 2016; while among his essays there are titles such as “The margin, the error, the erasure”, also from 2011.

-Télam: What is your ideal reading predisposition?

-Ada Salas: The ideal reading disposition is an open and generous disposition, especially in poetry, which requires a greater disposition to see herself in the mirror, something that is not always pleasant; without taking into account that poetry puts the reader very in front of himself, more than fiction, and that is an adventure that not all of us are willing to run. But once that opening is achieved, poetry gives much more than one can invest or the effort one can put into that reading.

-T: What form of enjoyment do you find in reading and what in writing?

-AS: Reading has always nourished me, a verse by Quevedo says “I live in conversation with the deceased and I listen to the dead with my eyes”, that listening with the eyes is reading, it is thinking that one has fathers and mothers in the extreme exploration of language, feeling at home when you read a poem. I don’t know if I would write if I hadn’t read, I don’t know that, once I got to know writing I couldn’t live without it either, but of course I could give up writing before reading.

-T: What is, if you could summarize it to a core fact, the engine of your writing?

-AS: What drives me to write is the desire to have an intense, true, deep and dizzying experience that I can only have, alone, alone, writing; it is a desire to multiply life in some way.

-T: In the text “In a foreign language” you wrote that the poet “tends to write and exposes himself to it because he feels precarious with respect to his language, insecure, impotent even” before “the matter” with “which works”. Can he be considered a worker?

-AS: I don’t know if the person who writes poetry is a worker, but of course he is not the boss, and in that sense he is a worker, he is more under orders than dominating. The poet must be someone absolutely humble in his work, start from uncertainty and lend himself to the language to send him, as far as possible it is up to him to obey.

-T: Do you think that literature is a collective construction?

-AS: Literary creation is a collective creation that comes from a very ancient memory, in what one writes is what they have lived, what their predecessors have lived and what all those who have come before one have written, that it is there and dialogues with it and feeds on all of it. Unamuno said that you don’t have to be original but original.

-T: You said in a fragment of the poem “Chanson du désir”, from the book “Limbo”: “Desire is the mute” /, “in the mute ferments what dismembers a brain”. What is the power of the unsaid in writing?

-AS: It is, at least, the same as the power of silence in language, many times we say while remaining silent, we affirm by denying and not speaking, not wanting to say something, is also a way of saying and that is already a message in itself. A silence is also sometimes worth a thousand words. In poetry it acts as a motor, words are an echo of silence, they bring it with them, and in poetry what is silent must be as significant as what is said.