Blanca Andreu is a contemporary Spanish poet and writer who was born in La Coruna in 1959. She started writing very early. After childhood and growing-up years spent in Orijuela, Alicante and Murcia, Blanca Andreu moved to Madrid where she lived in company of Juan Benet, another Spanish contemporary writer, until 1993. The Adonis Award which Blanca Andreu won in 1980 was the first literary recognition of her work. A number of prizes and literary awards have followed since. Blanca Andreu’s poems are considered as a starting-point of the Postnonivisima Generation of Spanish poetry. Some of her poems have been rendered in Albanian by Mira Meksi.
Blanca Andreu is a participant in the fifth edition of the Poeteca, an international cultural event dedicated to poetry (Poetry International Festival) that is being held in some of the major cities of Albania from the 21st to the 27th of September, with the participation of Albanian and foreign renowned poets (see former Tirana Times issue).
Tirana Times met her and had her talk to our readers.
Šla eternidad de tiza ō
In a very old poem of the beginning of her literary experience Blanca Andreu has inscribed the words Šla eternidad de tiza Š(the eternity of chalk). “These words and the image they create speak of childhood” – says the poet. The long-resting image of chalk on the black-board, the image of something that remains even after all have gone out of the class and have left their small world empty, inscribes forcefully on the mind of the reader. “I have never thought whether eternity is present in my work” says the poet. “This image is a way to speak of and to remember the permanence of childhood. The eternal world of the childhood” – confesses thoughtfully Blanca Andreu. And childhood stays engraved as our primary world.
While she speaks, her sentences travel in between the fall of the spoken words and the rise of the images of her poetry. Absence of time is the tempo of poetry. This is what suggests the eternity of chalk, an image which has been “eternally” written on the mind of the reader.
“When I was young and begun to write poetry, I wanted to get immortalized in my poems, because then I did not believe in God. Now I think we all have eternity insured. In the human being there is a part which is divine. That Being, Šthe Spirit Što which we also give form, but which is eternal. The nucleus of the being is eternal” – says the poet.
Is Blanca Andreu a poet because she is a visionary or is she a poet because she dialogues with the world in philosophy ? – Does her poetry come from images or from the words and the way they entangle the thought ? She started writing very young, at 14 years of age. She begun writing by images. Nowadays there is some appearance of philosophy in her poetry.
Solitude, I am loyal to you
In one of her poems we read the words “Soledad yo te soy fiel” – She explains this is a verse from Juan Ramon Jimenez, Nobel prize, a celebrated Spanish writer of the first half of the XXth century, a poet that is so familiar in Spanish culture, that every one calls him by his first names. “This is a Juan Ramon literary element, which I included in my poem speaking of a teen-ager giving farewell to childhood” says Blanca Andreu as she speaks of Juan Ramon’s shadow. The words mean “Solitude, I am loyal to you”. She says she still remains loyal. Poetry has furnished solitude for her, it has given her a country.
The language I speak has no alphabet
She seems to know a little bit of the Balkans. Greece is in her poetry (she has a poem on the dogs of Athens). Did she know Albania before ? – Albania she knew a little ŠShe knows classic Greek poetry Šfew contemporary poets Šsuch as Odysseas Elytis, of whom she has a letter by Elitis himself. This is extraordinary since the famous Greek poet did not normally write to anyone. Blanca Andreu had send her second book to him, a book in which was a quotation from the poet, with the words “I know that all this is nothing and the language I speak has no alphabet”. She had chosen these words to begin her book. In his letter Elytis spoke about Lorca, the celebrated Spanish national poet.
Has she know Albanian writers ? – She has just seen through an anthology of contemporary Albanian poetry and says she has had an “honestly good impression (buonissimo !)”.
Albania, a poetical country ?
Life in Albania produces many images and seems as woven with the chaotic threads that are also the thread poetry. – Does she find life in Albania poetical ? – “I don’t yet know whether life in Albania is poetical or not. But it is a country where I could live. Because of the people. The people are like me” – replies with enthusiasm the poet.
Blanca Andreu has published 5 books – and “another one will come out next January”, she says. Besides poetry she has written short stories and has a novel almost finished.
Recurrent elements come into her poetry: the sea, horses, animals, birds, but also love and death.
How has death come to her verses ? How did she appear ? – On her first book death was very present. It occurred as a main motive and appeared as a painting or image with black colors. But latter, while she was preparing the third book she knew death in her life. She then talked to death and said she was not going to write poetry about her any more. The image of death in her second book appears very often and comes through the figure of the angel – but is an a angel without God.
“Poetry brings from non-existence to existence”
Now she writes completely different. She believes that “Poetry brings from non-existence to existence”. And she decided she did not want to bring anything obscure from non-existence to existence.
The image of love has changed very much through her poetry. In her first books The Obscure Dream and Transparent Earth, she remembers some of her love poems. She spoke of love by taking the boys of an Arab slave, based on Spanish Arab poems. She calls that an Elizabethan Arab poem, of dialectical poetry, an argumentative poem. As she says “Now she tries to reason love”.
In her personal life she has travelled from images to philosophy. But she does not believe this to be true for her poetry. She writes by inspiration. She has also made few aquarelles, and also some visual poems. They can be seen at www.blancaandreu.net.
She tries not to read old poetry. As she says it is “generally very painful” to read. But one of those early works, an elegy, which has been a very successful poem, she reads again.
LOS LABIOS IMPACIENTES…
Los labios impacientes de la noche te sanan mientras abren
el olor de la piedra
te conducen si acosan el alma de la piedra
si el tierno coraz
