Monday, October 28, 2013

Radio program Third World Players, On Cronipoemas a book by Jorge Etcheverry, recorded 10 Dec 2011

Ramón Sepúlveda


Among several critiques written about Cronipoemas, there are two very extensive ones that give ample coverage of this book written by Jorge Etcheverry, one by Professor Fernando Veas Mercado, in Gatineau, Canada, and the other by Professor Julio Piñones en Santiago, Chile. Jorge Etcheverry is one of the most prolific Hispanic Canadian authors. His writing includes, prose, poetry, essay, chronicle. This book in particular plays with two literary genders, Chronicle and Poetry, Cronipoemas in Spanish. As the author says in the book prologue, his intention has been to collect pieces, fragments, allusions, minute details, corners of diverse shapes, extensions, different degrees of endings, and what is known around as “states of mood.” This eclectic collection of qualifiers “attempts to keep the apparently fragmented, mosaic like tone of my previous books. This is because I believe that a language that is too cohesive may, inadvertently or not, distort or simply lie.”

 

In the voice of Fernando Veas, this is a book that takes us through different tensions and trails with a dynamic, suggestive, rich and flexible language, which revolves around itself as comprehensive spirals.

 

Julio Piñones says that the content is assumed by such voices, in no case "with resignation"; but rather, with temples of mood that are manifested strained by voices that corroborate, expose, enunciate, ironically and extolling these provisions with other attitudes and their issuers.

I personally share the above approaches that, given the limitations of time of a radio program, I would summarize, by saying that in my view what Jorge Etcheverry succeeds in creating, is a state of mood, to use his own concept, in myself the reader, that points to the particular mutual experiences we have lived at the same time or at the same place with the author. We both come from the same country; we were both enthusiastic participants of the Allende’s days, shared similar experiences of exile and perhaps the wrongly called “acculturation” experience. In particular, these experiences are part of the book, but never in a form of an extreme nostalgic or melancholic fashion, they are there as necessary implementation of a poetic imagery. They appear as part of the scene, if a certain poem moves you in one way or another, which invariably does, it is not because of the sentimentalism, but rather by the omnipresence of a subjacent text, not always evident, but that invariably reaches the reader. One feels a certain agreeably complicity, a feeling of having being there with the narrative voice. This is what I mean, by creating a state of mood.

The refined sense of humour, always present in Jorge Etcheverrys work, is not absent in Cronipoemas, just as an example I will cite the first poem written in Italian;

 

Amore e gastronomia

come pane e pesto

pasta e provolone

io sono prosciuto

e tu sei melone

Or further into the book, page 66

Perdularia

Perdulario

Unos solitos

Otros gregarios.

 

One of my favourites in Cronipoemas on page 67 illustrates, not without humour, the futile and disappointing feelings on attempting to speak with someone who has become very important recently, and has no time or intention of answering the phone to friends that are too needy. The title of the poem is “A call to Marco Polo”.

Cronipoemas, Jorge Etcheverry 2010, serie El alba volante de Split Quotation / La cita trunca.

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