CARTAGENA THINKS: Vicente Cervera in conversation with Alberto Chessa about poetry and knowledge: 'Lethe's dream'. Roman Theatre Museum

POETRY IN THOUGHT

Vicente Cervera in conversation with Alberto Chessa about poetry and knowledge: the dream of Lethe
(Editorial Renacimiento, 2023)

Presented by: Alberto Chessa, poet and translator

Vicente Cervera Salinas will talk with Alberto Chessa about the collection of poems El sueño de Leteo and its links with philosophy and classical tradition.

Poetry and the Idea have traced, from the classical world to contemporary philosophical thought, a particular history of knowledge, which María Zambrano conceptualized under the notion of “poetic reason” and which refers to many complementary modulations without ever having lost its intimate harmony, its concord.

In El sueño de Leteo Vicente Cervera picks up the torch of this tradition and recognises its roots in the mythical archetype of Leteo, from Virgil to Baudelaire, passing through Dante. Through the poetic-philosophical pattern of German idealism, the collection of poems establishes contemporary lines of flight, as a catharsis of the damaged soul in the verbal mirror of its recognition and transfiguration. Poetry as a weapon of knowledge for the subject in the process of becoming in the formal space of beauty

Vicente Cervera Salinas (Albacete, 1961) is a professor of Hispanic American Literature at the University of Murcia, essayist and poet. His works on the poetry of Borges and the contemporary essay are notable: The Word in the Mirror: Studies of Comparative Hispanic American Literature; The Beatriz Syndrome in Hispanic American Literature or Borges in the City of the Immortals. His monograph Poetry and the Idea (2005) received the Anthropos Essay Prize and was published in Costa Rica and Venezuela. He has edited five collections of poetry to date, from De aurigas inmortales (1993, reissued in 2018) to El sueño de Leteo (2023). Anthologized in various collections of contemporary Hispanic poetry, his work has been translated into Italian, Portuguese and French.