“Atlantic night falls,” said one of the verses of tombs and urns – Borges, Haroldo de Campos, San Juan de la Cruz – of his book Shadow and appearance (2010). And, yes, the night has suddenly fallen, nobody expected it with this fury, as well as a heavy curtain that is abandon. We recently knew the tumor, the hospitalized days, but, finally, everything had already taken the route of a treatment – mainly, but usual. It seems that, in the end, it has been a heart attack, they have said. The unforeseen darkness.
The intellectual passion of Andrés Sánchez Robayna (Las Palmas, 1952-tanife, 2025) was uncontrollable, his hope in meanings, in the illuminations from naturally from poetry, but also of painting or music. The ruins and the rose (2024), a great set of meditations that he did not want to consider a book, was the last of his shipments – posted, punctual, incessant – that witnessed a dark but indeclinable faith in the power of language. There were many elucidations about sensitivity and thought, two friends not always well avenue, but always together in poetry and in the essays of Sánchez Robayna. I remember those books of the eighties –The rock, climate, ink– With his thick editorial role, which gained fame of philosophical, minimalist poet, “of silence”, he said then. Then the verses were becoming more porous, permeable to very diverse traditions and nothing rigid or predetermined music. Rhymes appeared, counted syllables; It did not seem good to their co -religional alleged and since then, approximately since Palmas on the cold slab (1989), his way would be only his, until he ended up composing a burning work as few, unavoidable for Spanish poetry of the last fifty years.
He had taken care of Mallarmé, had translated Valery, Wallace Stevens … We already know what we are talking about. But that width (in addition to that height) of sights, led him to write light and very diverse essays, including the many dedicated to the plastic arts, one precious, for example – for example –Draft flame and candle (2022), which I reviewed in this newspaper – dedicated to an image that the culture of the West turned into a central theme of art and everything sacred. Or the one in which he explored the world of his beloved Jorge Oramas, the unique Canarian painter of the 30. There are many painters to whom Robayna paid his attention as intellectual, poet and accomplice: Tàpies, Sicily, Cristino de Vera, Blinky Palermo, Morandi, Luis Fernández … in 2017 commissioner an excellent exhibition, Painting and poetry: The Canarian tradition of the twentieth centurywhich was not well understood by everyone. But that crossroads – painting and poetry, the word and the image – was a place where he felt especially at ease, among the poets who were critics, grandchildren or great -great grandchildren of Baudelaire.
In fact, I met Robayna – a lot – in the Tenerife Gallery Leyendecker, along with his friend Salvatore Mangione, Salvowho had already published the Spanish edition of his acquaintance Of painting (Pre-texts, 1987). He was already a poet celebrated, a friend of peace, of Valente, Yves Bonnefoy … also from Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, to whom he had dedicated patients essays. He directed for 10 years, until 1993, the magazine Syntax, One of those that matter. The critics awards or the National Translation, its involvement in the first journey of the Caam de Las Palmas, the Directorate of the Literary Translation Workshop, of the University of La Laguna, where he exercised as a professor until not so much.
It was serious, the images and words were taken with a seriousness of the twentieth century. It belonged to that race. He worshiped André Breton, Blanchot, Seferis, Lezama Lima. We already know what we are talking about. Actually, his intellectual universe was immense, almost infinite, for more than all that seems in these times a distant sky. He thought of insularity as no one as a mental and bodily condition of consciousness. That stone and light shore surrounded by the metaphors of the absolute on which the darkness now looms.