Elsa Cross, poet: “I am not afraid of death, I am very curious. “Let him come whenever he wants”

The Gita turtle walks with all the parsimony of its species among colorful fish, at the bottom of a pond full of water lilies.

It is a warm morning of a premature spring and the garden of the poet Elsa Cross (Mexico City, 1946) is already dressed for the season.

The silky, green grass that I love you green.

The trees, in flower;

the bougainvilleas, in ecstasy.

And the crazy palm trees, dancing to the sound of the breeze that relieves the heat, as well as the bristly ferns.

At the center of it all, an Indian deity.

This Eden of Cuernavaca, a refuge city for Mexican intellectuals, is like a personal sanctuary for the writer, one of the most prominent voices in Mexican poetry.

It is here where Cross disconnects, attentive to the call of the muses, and it is here where she researches, writes and speaks to the world through her work.

Cross has been showered with awards in recent months, recognition of a long career in which poetry, she says, has been her life companion.

“It has been a search and a response to many things.

An extraordinary delight,” says the poet.

The turtle's name is a nod to the

Bhagavad-gītā

, a sacred Hindu text, a religious classic, one of the worlds that have fascinated Cross, which also include religion and mythology.

The poet made a trip to India in 1978 that marked her, mainly because of the practice of meditation.

“India was a very beautiful setting.

It was important because it completely changed my view of the world,” says Cross.

—How was that change?

—I was very pessimistic.

But I started to see things differently, in a more positive way.

That influenced my poetry a lot.

I see it in my first book, written when I was 23 or 24 years old,

The Lady in the Tower

, which is a tremendous vision, very negative and desolate.

And all that disappeared.

(In that collection of poems Cross wrote:

Maltrovando, loss of everyone and myself / I leave gloomy places towards nowhere. / I recognize my ashes in the ruins. / Lovers who burned there.

)

This morning the poet received the journalists heatedly.

She has just arrived from her errands and asks for some time to freshen up and change.

A lemonade with mint will help her recover.

Cross turned 78 the day before and celebrated with a meal.

She has reached a stage in life where she, she says, doesn't read newspapers, she prefers music and writing.

She has a lot of work and is a little worried about not having enough time to finish her translations and academic essays and research.

“How long can I live lucid?

Not much.

And there are a lot of jobs,” she says.

Dressed in a fresh white linen blouse, the poet assures, of course, that she is not afraid of death.

“Not at all,” she says.

“Whatever ends, fine;

What not, I will try not to leave it in disarray, or things in half.

But if I can't finish it all, I don't care either, I don't think it's a big loss for humanity, so there's no need to worry,” she jokes.

Cross has had an almost mystical experience with death.

It happened when her daughter, Cecilia, died, which marked her, she says, in a very profound way.

She mentions meditation as a plank that saves a drowning person, in complete desperation to stay afloat.

“Without the meditation that I have had through the grace of heaven, of God, of whatever, I don't know how I would have been able to deal with it.

It would have been very difficult.

That often allows us to place things in another way,” says the writer.

—How did your daughter's death mark your poetry?

—I can say that death has returned to something much more natural.

When you confront things, you often have a very different response than what you thought you would see.

I do not have feelings of fear towards death;

In any case, it is very curious.

Let him come whenever he wants, because he doesn't scare me.

(Cross writes about that experience in

Poems for Ceci:

You have taken root in death. / You pass like a bird of light, but you move away. / You go to those confines that only you know. / A strange nest, impossible cliffs where you come from radiant, / with laughter on your lips, just to leave again

.)

Elsa Cross in her garden, in Cuernavaca (State of Morelos), on March 7. Iñaki Malvido

In addition to the celebrations for her 78th birthday, the poet has much more to celebrate.

In October, the Ministry of Culture awarded her the 2023 Alfonso Reyes

International Prize

for the relevance of her poetic, essayistic and translation work, and in early February she received the 2024 Mazatlán Literature Prize, for her collection of poems

De ella Isla negra

.

Braulio Peralta, cultural journalist and member of the jury, has said that Cross's poetry “has passed silently for decades without the screams of egoism or the culture of spectacle, with the humility of bare, serene feet, stomping in art. ”.

An eloquent way of highlighting that in many cases they are recognized less than their male peers, who dominate awards and honors.

—How do you receive these awards now?

—I appreciate it very much, especially if it helps my poems spread.

But on a personal level it represents nothing.

What is clear is that women, poets and storytellers, have been relegated to the background, although when listening to her their positions may seem contradictory.

“Before there was this strong feminist movement, I wrote an article looking at the systematic exclusion that there has been of women from the beginning.

Everyone has heard of Sappho, but Corina?

And so with many other Greek poets contemporary with Sappho.

What is known about them?

Apart from specialists, no one knows them.

And so, era after era, so many writers, painters, and sculptors have been excluded and their work has even been plagiarized,” she says.

—Are you a feminist?

—No, not the opposite.

I think I would not accept any definition of any kind, because it implies a militancy that personally does not interest me nor do I have time to exercise.

—Women's struggle is a centuries-old struggle to have their work recognized as well.

—I have no doubt about that, how good that it is recognized, how good that it is brought to light, but that they leave the language alone.

—Inclusive language?

-Yeah.

Seriously, they are going to ruin themselves reading.

What the girls, the boys, are saying;

the deputies, the deputies is annoying, it is absurd, it is redundant.

A language as beautiful as Spanish is going to be ruined by that corniness.

—Do you think that in the publishing world women now have the same space as their male peers?

-I have no idea.

I never had any problem publishing anywhere because I was a woman.

I think it's not a question of gender, it's a question of quality.

I would not accept anything because of a gender quota, it would seem unworthy to me, it would make me ashamed.

Of course, I also wonder how many of the gentlemen who are in those positions also deserve that job.

So I think there should be a very high standard, whether men or women.

The conversation takes place in the bright garden, flanked by the torture Gita and a sculpture of the god Shiva Nataraja, who dances to destroy this cycle of existence, as marked by Hindu tradition.

Mythology has an important weight in the author's poetic work, always full of references to ancient Greece or India.

She says that this comes from her since she was a child, when she asked for the first book on the subject, at the age of 12, a copy that she still keeps.

“It was great,” she says excitedly after a small sip of the mint lemonade.

“I was able to come into contact with creativity, with those myths and those figures and those stories.

All of this is extraordinary and I was very fascinated by this whole world, which is a hymn to beauty, but seen in many ways, because it can also enter into the grotesque, for example, a gargoyle in the case of the Middle Ages,” he explains.

Cross unites the search for that beauty in poetry with rhythm, cadence, essential elements for her, without which, she says, she cannot understand poetic creation.

“What doesn't fit that are like lame verses for me, which I either end up modifying or they leave the poem.

I'm not talking about rhyme or regular meters or anything like that.

If I feel that there is no song in someone's poetry, it falls off and I end up getting very bored,” she explains.

There is the work of the artist, the woman who says that her inspiration comes to her “suddenly”, that it can attack her anywhere and at any time.

And she writes by hand, and then corrects it.

“I can start a poem with a rhythm, with a word, with an image, with a memory, with whatever, but inspiration comes when it feels like it.”

He began writing poetry at the age of 14, a time when he says he read a lot, everything he could find, fiction or poetry.

“I have never been able to read so much again, nor do I want to,” he jokes.

These readings, from Homer, through Goethe, Dante Alighieri, Shakespeare and even comics like Superman, shaped the poet, as well as music, one of her great pleasures, to which she continues to dedicate herself every day.

She also says that her trips to countries that dazzled her, like Greece, with its ancient past of greatness and beauty, influenced her.

Greece and its mythology are very present in her poetry.

In

Athená Poliás

writes:

Mantle embroidered with snakes / and the smile with which he defeats the giant that he melts in the sea.

/ His step inclines his entire body / strong and flexible like a spear stuck in the earth / still vibrating.

The Ministry of Culture has classified her as “the poet of clarity, dreams and mysticism.”

His works are published in Mexico by Ediciones Era and among its titles is his long poem

Insomnio

, which “was born circumstantially,” he says, during a trip to present a book that had been translated into Bengali, published in Calcutta.

“I arrived in New Delhi first with things to do, and the time I had to do them was when I should have been asleep.

On the third day of not being able to sleep, that book began to come out and the first two or three songs were given,” says the poet.

The book continued to emerge in other sleepless nights, during other trips, like dreams.

(Cross writes in that poem:

Insomnia and sleep embrace like furious lovers / they bite each other, they slide beast claws down each other's back / They kiss darkly / they fight to the death / they want to devour each other, separate themselves from themselves / become the other / They sniff each other, they squeeze each other, they curse / they cling to each other, disconsolately blind

.

Cross's days pass quietly.

From time to time she meets friends for lunch or talks to her son or immerses herself in her work, always in her house, surrounded by books and music (she is accompanied by Beethoven's sonatas, among others). ).

She is now preparing translations of a book of essays and also of Indian mystical poets, which includes eight women.

“It is a miracle that these women survived.

There are some who were illiterate and could not write their poems, they dictated them,” she says.

The poet has wandered through bookstores in India and Paris to find the most faithful translations of these works, a job that has taken her decades.

She hasn't let up, she says, because these works “reflect a lot of what my own experience has been.”

Between sips of lemonade she says that she hopes to soon finish this effort.

Today, however, she has something more urgent to do at the end of the interview: feed the turtle Gita, who with all the parsimony of her species hopes that the poet has not missed her mealtime. .

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