El poema en lengua babélica de Bernardo Schiavetta

Abstract

From 2001 onwards Schiavetta has published different printed and online versions of his work in progress, a multilingual text on Babel, Almiraphel. It is a patchwork or cento of quotations in more than sixty languages, a piece of procedural poetry which rewrites a previous poem of the author, namely “Prosopopeïa”, a poetical commentary (the Spanish poetic form named “glosa”) on a verse of the Divine Comedy (Inferno, XXXI, 67) written by Dante in the imaginary language of the giant Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel. Nimrod’s punishment is an eternal lack of comprehension: he can neither understand nor be understood. Schiavetta’s imaginary babelian language is a collage of over a hundred quotations pieced together by a great polyglot, an imaginary author (heteronym). This essay addresses the process involved in the writing of the poem Almiraphel.

Keywords

• autotelism
• metatextual representation
• literary constrain
• procedural poetics
• experimental poetry