Keywords: Poetry, poverty, Mandelshtam, Venezuela, Caracas, ghetto, life, death.
MANDELSHTAM’S WALL
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Igor Barreto
English
Translated from the Spanish by Rowena Hill
Foreword by Sergio Chejfec
Photographs by Ricardo Jiménez
2023
Paperback | 232 pages | 8.25 x 8.25 inches
II
“The winter brings white horses
that slip on the frost.”
There’s a line that’s impossible for us.
It belongs to Jorge Teillier, a poet from Temuco,
in the south of Chile.
So that line of his seems to me the key to everything:
“The winter brings white horses
that slip on the frost.”
This is impossible at forty degrees in the shade. And the trap
consisted of just that: falling lyrically in love with the “other”
and becoming, suddenly, how to say it: a yearner.
- Igor Barreto
Mandelshtam’s Wall emerges as an ongoing work, under construction, similar to works in a popular neighborhood, urban enclaves that never slow down and that need, like any scarcely legible territory, a poet to describe them. But the poet – call him Barreto or Mandelshtam – does not want only to highlight the social vicissitudes of the place, he is also trying to construct the enclave based on his own gaze adhering to the context. As the poem ‘The Canary’ says, the daily accounting “that keeps us alive in an eternal present”.
– Sergio Chejfec
IGOR BARRETO (San Fernando de Apure, 1952) is a Venezuelan poet, essayist, and university professor. His publications include: Crónicas llanas [Flat chronicles] (1989), Carama (2001), Soul of Apure (2006), El Llano ciego [The blind plain] (2006), El campo / El ascensor. Poesía reunida [The field / the elevator: collected poetry] (1983-2013) (2014), and El muro de Mandelshtam [Mandelshtam’s wall] (2017), among others. His work has been translated into English, French, and German.