Interlitteraria (Dec 2024)
La reescritura prismática del orfismo y sus dimensiones en la poesía de Carles Riba, Agustí Bartra y Josep Sebastià Pons
Abstract
According to historian of religions Marcel Detienne in his book The Writing of Orpheus, this figure is the origin of writing. From this point, I will propose the origin of this article, which will develop how Orphism – in its mythical and religious dimensions – is articulated within the poetic thought of the Catalan poets Carles Riba (1893–1959) and Agustí Bartra (1908–1982), and of the Rosellonian poet Josep Sebastià Pons (1886–1962). On the other hand, the article will show how Orphic rewriting is configured in a prismatic way in each of them: death as the beginning of knowledge and transcendence, the symbol as the embodiment of civil and spiritual conscience and, finally, the Orphic myth as the expression of mourning and absence. In the case of Riba and Bartra, with the ferocious trigger of exile, Orphism is shown as a path of knowledge of mystery and enigma in the act of writing, as well as an unveiling of human consciousness. Carles Riba recreates and makes use of the mechanisms of religion and the Orphic mysteries to give form to his particular initiation after a metaphysical death that appears, for example, in elegy 10 of Elegies de Bierville (second edition, Santiago de Chile, 1949). Agustí Bartra, in his Ecce Homo (1968), rewrites Orphic motifs (elegy II, for example) to create a civic and metaphysical awareness in man and, in this way, dignifies him. In his poem “Òrfica”, from Els himnes (1974), the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is rewritten as a new meaning of love as a transcendence removed from the body and converted into a translucent song of waiting. Josep Sebastià Pons, on the other hand, expounds Orphism as a myth of mourning, memory and love as metaphysical knowledge in his posthumous Faula d’Orfeu (1966). Writing is a means of reinterpreting the functions of remembering and forgetting, and of creating an unfolding of the poetic voice in the figures of Orpheus and Eurydice, framed in a mythical imagery that rewrites the loss of the loved one.
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