The poet Eduardo Milan (Rivera, Uruguay, 73 years old) hits his ear with his hand, as if he wanted to hear better, but no, he says bluntly, he does it to make it clear that his own are the sounds. “I am a totally auditory guy,” he says in the cafeteria of a beautiful bookstore in southern Mexico City, on a spring morning, surrounded by jacarandas in flower. “Brazilian music has totally helped me to be a poet. Caetano Veloso entered the ear, Buarque Chico, Gilberto Gil,” says Brazilian mother writer, whose culture was seduced by that sensual and melancholic sound of the Portuguese. Because for Milan the sound of words is key to creating poetry. He explores that tense relationship between words, rhythm and even silences. This spring has published a new poems entitled Reversura (Editorial Elefanta), in which he delves into the beauty of language, poetic freedom, his status as a foreigner and his relationship with old age and death. And also the importance that the figure of his father has had in his life, arrested for supporting the Tupamaro movement. Reversura It is the word chosen by Milan because it reminds him of the moment when the oxen ends the work of furrowing the earth, an agricultural metaphor that in it, Uruguayan and poet, it is perfect: Milan ara in the language to make beauty sprout.
Ask. You affirm in one of your poems that you like words less. Because?
Answer. They are not the words itself, but the use of words, what we have done with language. There is a contempt for words, it is a purely instrumental use. When one writes he falls in love with language. I have Brazilian mother tongue and that is very important, because if there is a language that makes you love it is the Portuguese. As Borges said, this gunner’s language that touched us, Spanish, is hard. You listen to a Spanish professional Talk and expect Franco to arrive. When you see that there is a language that has an affectionate way to treat the word is wonderful. You listen to an Amalia Rodrigues Fado and you crumble, that woman kills you chatting.
P. Is the poet’s function to preserve the word of that misuse to which he refers?
R. Is! But I will tell you that this conscience has been lost for greater function Extrapoeticswhich is communicative and social bond. Poetry asks you for special care, that you dedicate yourself to it, not that you use it to link and be more or less nice, brilliant, conqueror, what do I know.
P. How is her link with her?
R. Age weighs, spends. Fear is the natural expense and getting used to the fact that there are necessary impairments, both in your life and in language. You end up accepting everything, but above all the duration of your own existence.
P. A friend of his friend, who said there is no spent language, but spent poets. What should a poet do to avoid that wear?
R. I think it’s a lost war. You spend yes or yes. But you can try to keep the language as vital and lozano as possible. The passage of time and wear is a lost struggle. Fighting that is impossible. There are vitamins, hormones, which meanwhile they keep us alive, but we must not be confused with the meanwhilebecause it is nothing more than a way to go through the way.
P. He writes in the book that he forgets that young man who was. Does poetry help you remember, to keep your memory alive?
R. Definitely. It is infallible. Poetry sounds and accompanies memory, which benefits from rhythm and rhyme without a doubt. And I have a lot of personal events that concentrate on my poetry.
P. “I dreamed with Uruguay,” he writes in a poem. And in another says: “A foreigner should never forget that he is a foreigner.” How has this strange condition marked his work?
R. Mexico has treated me extraordinarily well, it is a cozy country. And I think it was a little more when I arrived, in 1979. There was the antecedent of Spanish exile, the Chileans, the Argentines. But, perhaps because it is from such a particular country, because the small, instead of diluting, tends to differentiate, the Uruguayans feel different and that is why the condition of foreigner. Juan Carlos Onetti told me that the problem of us is that we take care of ourselves as if we were more important than we are, but deep down we are nothing.
P. He also writes about his father, sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for opposing the Uruguayan dictatorship. How did that mark it?
R. I am a mother orphan since I had a year and two months. My mother was a construction I did, because the dominant figure was my father. I am that type of engendro created by the grandmother, which is an unbearable thing, because we are more protected, because the grandmother jumps over the absence. My father sat a totally vertical perspective and everything came good until he falls prisoner for linking to the Tupamaro movement. He was a bank manager, delivers an assault and gives him 24 years in prison, one of the longest sentences in Uruguay. At six years old, I went to talk to him and told him that I had to go, because there was no perspective in the country. That was horrible. He was imprisoned for 12 years. My father fell 50 years old, but he left whole. It was an absolutely guy striking.
P. He is still present in his poetry.
R. Always. It was a kind of ethical emblem. The guy was careful to be a kind of model. I was not interested in following that righteousness, but I would tell you that at the level of importance it was the most important person in my life. But let’s not forget the symbolic plane: my father’s presence and my mother’s absence.
P. You, in a very nice poem, write: “The organism is done or almost orgasm is done at your last moment.” And in another poem he says: “Old age gains ground until it becomes grim, it doesn’t speak anymore.” Does death worry?
R. I have a Peruvian poet friend, Mario Montalbetti, who we are of age, as they say here. Once I talked so much in a speech that Mario told me: “I stop a little, that we still lack the encounter with the inexorable.” Death is the inexorable, because we don’t know any of that, but there it is, it is the human condition. It is what, as far as possible, I try to get used to it.