On the porch of the house of the poet Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984), under a poster that said Finally in Velintoniathat is the name of the house, and next to a lectern with a photograph of the writer, the singer Miguel Poveda offered on Wednesday an hour of love concert for poetry. The National Music Award in 2007 was chosen to open a series of actions in the garden of the Hogar of the last Spanish poet that won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1977. The recital was organized by the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sports of the Community of Madrid, the administration that Velintonia bought the heirs of Aleixandre for 3.2 million euros last April to convert it after its restoration into the house of poetry, which prevails in the house of poetry. 2027. The Minister of Culture, Mariano de Paco, was among those who presided over the concert.
That year a century of the birth of the generation of great Spanish poets that was destroyed by the Civil War and the dictatorship of Franco will be fulfilled. Last night, Poveda offered a musicalized poems recital of these authors. With some he had already tried luck, such as Federico García Lorca, but with others, such as Dámaso Alonso, it was his first time.
The Barcelona singer began to Capela with the poem The last loveby Aleixandre, of his book Shadow of paradise (1944), one of its most important titles. Already accompanied to the guitar by Jesús Guerrero, he sang the extraordinary poem Unity in itof the book Destruction or love (1935), with which Aleixandre won the National Poetry Award. “Happy body that flows between my hands, / beloved face where the world contemplates.” A few burning verses, which later say: “I want love or death, / I want to die at all.”
The show was joined by the visual poet Eduartgranada (Eduardo Gorlat), who had decorated the concert space with pink and always vivive paniculatas, and interspersed verses and fragments of Aleixandre’s life between Poveda’s songs.
The concert was extended with the verses of other authors of 27, the first of the various generations of poets who made friends with Aleixandre and shared poems and confidences at his home, which he called Velintonia because he was on Wellingtonia street (today Vicente Aleixandre), the name of a kind of seduoya of the United States that the poet Castilianized from his chair of the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE).
Poveda changed the photo of the lectern to put one by Miguel Hernández, an intimate friend of Aleixandre, who took him oranges that could help him in his delicate health. Of Hernández, killed by tuberculosis in a Francoist prison in 1942, interpreted Poveda the Ultimate song. Luis Cernuda followed, exiled to Mexico, where he died in 1963. The verses of him sounded I have come to see, That ends like this: “Goodbye, invisible lovers, / I’m sorry I had not slept in your arms. / I came for those kisses only; / save the lips in case I come back.”
Next, Dámaso Alonso, the friend who opened the appetite of poetry to Aleixandre when he announced the verses of Rubén Darío. Or Manuel Altolaguirre: “How young and handsome was there,” said Poveda when he placed his portrait in the lectern. Altolaguirre was one of the youngest in the group and performed an important work as an editor and printer.
After referring to the gigantic cedar of Lebanon that Aleixandre planted after the civil war and that follows a few meters from the porch of the house, the show had a memory for the women who also dropped into the generation of 27, such as the artist Maruja Mallo, the philosopher María Zambrano or the writer Concha Méndez, who was married to Altolaguirre, and from whom Poveda So: “Do not ask me passport / because I am not a foreigner, / that the doors of my house / are those of each border.”
The moment that reaped more applause and brave from the nearly 200 people who attended the recital – among which were former Baltasar Garzón, his wife, the former minister of Justice Dolores Delgado, or actress Victoria Vera – it was when Poveda sang to Federico García Lorca: “Fill out of words my madness / or let me live in my serene / night of the soul.” García Lorca was also a great friend of Aleixandre. They had been presented by another poet of 27, Rafael Alberti, and it was Lorca who wrote the phrase “Finally in Velintonia” (title of this series of shows) in the dedication to Aleixandre of a songbook of his after returning from Cuba, as Poveda explained. In Velintonia Federico read his friend for the first time the verses of Poet in New York and those of Sonnets of dark love.
“It fills this emotional trip with pride and happiness,” concluded Poveda, who wanted to remember “the genocide in Palestine, with those terrible images we are seeing.” He also had words of gratitude for the work of the Association of Friends of Vicente Aleixandre, chaired by Alejandro Sanz, who has spent almost three decades fighting so that Velintonia did not miss, closed since Conchita, the poet’s sister, in 1986. Aleixandre’s house was since until now until now in the disagreement between his heirs and the disinterest of the administrations. And the bis went for the shocking poem Unity in itfrom Aleixandre. “Happy body that flows between my hands, / beloved face where the world contemplates.”