Marcos-Ricardo Barnatán: "Those of the Beat Generation would not be thrown into jail or asylum today for being homosexuals"

Marcos-Ricardo Barnatán, at his home in Madrid, on December 21, Santi Burgos

Marcos-Ricardo Barnatán (Buenos Aires, 75 years old) arrived in Spain when he was 18 years old and the journeys he has made since then (to London, to Buenos Aires, where he was born) have always attracted him to this country where, in addition, he has been a prominent host of two of his great favorite poets: Jorge Luis Borges, whose voice he is capable of imitating as if it were his Argentine countryman, and Allen Ginsberg, head of the Beat Generation. Barnatán wrote

from that episode of breakdown of American (and world) poetry ,

which is now turning half a century and has been republished by the Alhulia publishing house. We talked about this and many other things by phone at the end of December with the Argentine poet and novelist, author as well as

,

and

.

More information

Marcos-Ricardo Barnátan: “I couldn't finish 'One Hundred Years of Solitude”

Ask.

Many

poems you quote seem to have been written about today's problems.

The dead-end labyrinth of the time, the abyss of impenetrable mist with which the future was faced.

Answer.

And 70 years have passed!

Situations from then remain despite all the changes that have occurred in these decades.

Anyway, we have improved a bit.

In Ginsberg's poetry there is a certain paranoia, those poets feel persecuted and oppressed, but their attitudes are recognized today: now they would not be thrown into jail or asylum for being homosexual.

Something change.

Q.

What would poets have to be outraged now, as the Ferlinghetti and Ginsbergs were in the 1950s?

A.

The concerns have changed. More than human rights, today the concern of young people is more about ecology, about whether there is a future for the Earth, whether or not we maintain the type of industrial exploitation of the sources of wealth, and so on. This has not yet been transferred to literature, unless there are poetic or novelistic works that I am not aware of and that deal with those themes that, on the other hand, are in the thinking of the new generations.

Larry Rivers, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, David Amram and Allen Ginsberg, in New York in the 1950s John Cohen (Getty Images)

Q.

You said in that edition of the anthology: "A new mentality arose from the youth divorced from their elders, rebellious and vagrant, who, persecuted many times, took refuge in the suburbs of the North American paradise." And there he explained the origin of the Beat Generation, perhaps the last poetic movement that had its own name.

A.

Yes, and also immediately after European surrealism, of which it became contemporary.

In this anthology I include a poet little known in Spain, Philip Lamantia, who André Breton considered one of his own.

In Spain, Jack Kerouac is best known, especially for his novel

, and Allen Ginsberg.

Ferlinghetti was also a publisher and bookseller, and was the nucleus of the movement in San Francisco.

In 1993, when he came to Madrid, Ginsberg advised me to translate here more to Gregory Corso, the last one who passed away.

Even then the Beat Generation was a long way off.

I made the book when I was 21 years old, during my stay in London.

The

were like my sin of youth.

Q.

And now what are these poets to you?

R.

I maintain my sympathy for that movement and my admiration for some of them, especially Allen Ginsberg, the most important figure of that moment, who kept American poetry in tension for several decades, practically until his death in 1997. Those are those. youthful loves that one maintains in the background of their influences.

Standing Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky.

Crouching, Gregory Corso and Lafcadio Orlovsky.

All on vacation in Mexico City in 1956. Rue des Archives / RDA

P.

Here, you say, there was a poet, Carlos Oroza, whose public action, between scandalous and great, could be assimilated to the

Meanwhile, what was happening here at that time?

R.

My generation was discovering literature.

The newest movement was being born.

The first poet I met, when I returned to Spain in 1965, was Pere Gimferrer, with whom I became friends.

Around him is mounted that movement that Josep Maria Castellet baptizes.

There were also poets who called us

because some of us wrote poems dedicated to Venice, a culturalist icon with which they identified us compared to the prevailing poetry in the elderly.

We saw this poetry prosaic, in some simple way.

The beginnings are always very radical, so the sophistication we sought was also radical and very hermetic poems were made as a reaction to what prevailed.

P.

Who ruled in that poetry that you called prosaic?

R.

The generation of 50. José Hierro, Ángel González ... It was not uniform. Some of my generation felt close to Jaime Gil de Biedma or Francisco Brines. Frontally, they looked like a unit, but then they weren't. There were poets with very different voices. We see

, I can tell you from my old age. I was very interested in Brines, as did Carlos Barral, whom everyone remembers as an editor and few as a poet, although his was a very important piece of poetry. A forgotten contemporary of that generation was Manuel Álvarez Ortega, closely linked to 20th century French poetry. A Spanish teacher would be Vicente Aleixandre. Living teachers in our time were also Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges. This was particularly important to me.

P.

The

wave was still playing .

What did they mean? What happened to them?

R.

They were renovators of poetry in Castilian in Spain.

Guillermo Carnero is for me, with Gimferrer, head of that movement, associated with Leopoldo Panero or José María Álvarez, who is the senior of the

one of the most interesting of the time.

What happens with generations is that they do not last long in the collective imagination;

next comes another that faces the next for almost biological needs.

What was called the poetry of the experience was headed by Luis García Montero;

it was a

in my opinion, of the poetry of Gil de Biedma, who was also a poet of experience.

Today we live in a moment of great confusion: poetry is confused with rap, with music ...

Q.

Where does this confusion come from?

R.

From a certain idea that there was intimacy between serious poetry and song. There was a time when many people said that the future of poetry was in the song, in the singer-songwriters, who were so fashionable at one time. The confusion is general in youth, for which values ​​that affect literature and all human activities have been diluted. It is true that social networks have spread some poets who have many followers and who are

of poetry who have not yet gone to Andorra. But that enrichment is a thing of the future, because until now poetry has not enriched anyone. But it is true that social networks and new technologies have helped dilute the idea of ​​the book and the proliferation of other types of poetry distribution.

Jorge Luis Borges, in Madrid in 1985.BERNARDO PÉREZ

Q.

In the years when you were the youngest of the poets who sat in the Café Gijón, you made Borges more popular here.

What was it for you?

R.

I am a convert to Borges. At 17, in Buenos Aires, my heart was in Havana, with Cabrera Infante, and my favorite writer was not Borges, it was Cortázar. My colleagues considered Borges a right-wing writer, foreign to him because of his Anglophilia. In Spain I got rid of these pressures. When I returned to Argentina in 1968 to do my military service, I dedicated myself to persecuting Borges. He inspired a lot of respect in me, I did not dare to approach him, but I went where I knew the teacher would be. Until one day I plucked up the courage and called him on the phone. I went to see him at his house, to have breakfast. Then I would take him out for a walk on Florida Street, I would accompany him to bookstores… And when I returned to Spain I set myself the task of popularizing his work here, which was very little known. Poets did not read it and it was hardly considered as such,but more as a narrator. A major publisher published a novel of yours with an author photo of Eduardo Mallea! And Borges is the bread and butter everywhere today.

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