Pitfalls of the verses

It is constantly repeated that we live superconnected.

Some say it critically or annoyed by the interference.

The majority, with an astonishment that tries to go unnoticed so that the eventual interlocutor does not assume that the person who says it has just discovered it, because he is a first-timer on the web and checks that his birthday was already mentioned in the tweet of a friend .

Okay, we're super connected.

I wonder how something long and difficult can be read in a super connected state.

When complete literary texts began to appear on the web, I thought that my readings for the next vacation were already stocked, because I would not have to carry a bag with half a dozen books to the saws.

I took the tablet.

I chose

a novel by Flaubert that, when I tried to read it at the age of 15, had expelled me, because it referred me to unknown places and times and, therefore, impassable.

Would they be real or made up?

Looking them up in the encyclopedia interrupted my reading as much as my ignorance.

Convinced that this time Flaubert was not going to leave me behind, I decided to cheer myself up the day after arriving at a mountain inn, surrounded by thorny scrub.

I sat down on the verandah, in front of the talas that shaded my elegant ranchito, and opened

By then I had read well

and the

therefore I believed that Flaubert could not play another trick on me.

He had read a lot of French literature, from Chateaubriand to André Gide.

The years had strengthened my illusions.

But

left me outside again.

She seemed as convoluted and distant to me as the first time I opened the yellow covers of the Garnier edition.

Carthage was still too far away.

Since then, I began to think that each of us is not cut out for some books, even if he has read a lot and feels unbeatable.

We are also not cut out for certain sports.

You can play tennis well and lack any qualifications for cricket, a game that seems to us Latinos to require a British or Indian passport.

I always admired the photograph of Virginia Woolf with the bat and the position of cricket on British grass.

She realized that that same stick would have made me look ridiculous.

She did not have the gestural tradition, although she wielded the hockey stick with no difficulty, because she had learned it as one learns a foreign language.

Something like this can happen to us with the classics.

In the theater, talented directors know the strategies for large audiences to access Greek tragedy or Baroque drama.

I give an example: Aeschylus's

translated by Heiner Müller, whose performance I attended at the Berlin Volksbühne, addressed the question of how to approach without betraying.

And he answered it in a beyond the text.

Even when the texts have been written in our language (although I hesitate to simply call the Spanish of the Golden Age my own), if time separates us, something must be done, not to destroy its beauty, but to make it perceptible.

Of course, a danger always threatens any change.

At the San Martín theater in Buenos Aires, a staging of

seemed, at first, perfect, but it soon became clear that the local actors were not used to reciting the versification.

The memory exercise that learning a baroque drama implies does not compensate for the anachronism of a recitation that does not always hit the accents of the verses.

The staging may be original, but the accents don't fall where they should.

Calderón multiplies the difficulties for the different Spanish and Latin American versions of Castilian.

The same thing happens with poetry outside the theater.

To recite a hendecasyllable well, one must have learned to perceive, almost naturally, where the accents fall and how the enjambment from one line to another is respected.

Should the precepts of the verse prevail over the meaning?

The discussion about whether to respect the final cut of the verse or the semantic continuity can be long.

In that

that I saw in Berlin, the actors had this figured out and you could tell that they always knew where the pause or continuity was going.

Versification, through which we enter a work, is only the founding beginning of the aesthetic experience.

In the Calderón drama that I heard in Buenos Aires, the actors respected the semantics in the first place, convinced that

is difficult enough without introducing cuts caused by the versification.

They were right in thinking that the text always contains the staging and acting style instructions.

And they contributed their ideas of how to represent a work written centuries ago.

Sometimes they went towards parody, sometimes towards philosophical and subjective drama.

Sometimes they whispered and sometimes they screeched like angry birds.

They added modern baroque to classical baroque.

It wasn't bad, because in the theater philology doesn't rule, but rather that mysterious union of bodies and voices.

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