Poetry
Vainas y otros poemas
Not translated into English
María Mercedes Carranza · 1972
Synopsis
A first book with a familiar title: in Colombia, vainas is said of everything one does not want to name, things, troubles. The poems turn their back on the solemnity that the previous generation expected of poetry, that of the author's father. They take on the city, failed love, speech itself: one of them addresses the Word as a liar and a whore. The tone is that of conversation, cut short, without image or ornament.
Context
The book appeared in Bogotá in 1972 from Ponce de León, when the author was twenty-seven and already had five years of journalism behind her; it gathers poems written between 1968 and 1972 and carries an epigraph from Borges. Its cover is a collage in which a president, a general, a comic-strip character, Mexican calaveras, a pope and Hồ Chí Minh stand side by side: the age summed up in a single image. What it rejects is the manner of her father, the national poet of the previous generation.
Who it is for
A short collection in Spanish, with no French translation. The language is that of conversation; the allusions to the Colombia of the seventies sometimes call for a note.
Prizes and reception
The first of the five books of a poet whom Colombia reads and who is little known elsewhere. It opens the familiar vein in which all her work has remained.