With her I've learned to speak Spanish properly, that until then I only was able to read and chew some phrases, because since El Lazarillo, La Celestina and Don Quixote, through Góngora, Quevedo and other sacred monsters of this strange race of genius, until “el rayo que no cesa” by Miguel Hernández and the impact of lightnings and thunder, daggers and blood, bullfighting, horses, señoritos and gypsies, cante and duende and more and more by the greatest sorcerer, unsurpassed and unique, Federico García, I had read, again and again, devoured and absorbed (something, of course, not all) of the supreme genius of the Peninsula - where after all I came to live in, may the gods and the wind know for how long!
Perhaps the adventurer flame of an old Cantabrian ancestor compels me to seek constantly for new places and landscapes, new languages and accents, new faces and friendly smiles, then without it - what is the sense of all, right? And immediately came again into my veins the spark of poetry, becoming more and more a second nature or vice or blessed obsession which I'm not able to---
My very first intent seems to have attracted a certain attention, especially through the most positive Comments, ending to my surprise with an "accésit" of the
I PREMIO INTERNACIONAL DE POESÍA ADDISON DE WITT for the poem giving title to the collection (unpublished, though): “Modulaciones en sol menor”
Between timid formal experiments and poetic games with the new language, images brimming over with magic and riddles, half hidden, pending in the air of the peninsula and its islands, the daily search for possible musical solutions, rhythm and fine-sounding colors in a language up to now only read and admired, tasted, declaimed (to myself), most especially the poets —so many—, I'm mentioning here just those of the twentieth century, Alberti, Aleixandre, Cernuda, A. González, J. Guillén, Juan Ramón, León Felipe, A. Machado, Salinas, Gil de Biedma, A. Valente, Pimentel, Gamoneda, besides many others, present and past, which I'm discovering day by day.
To the aforementioned pairs [Quevedo and Góngora, M. Hernández and García Lorca, permanent devotions] I should add for special affection Rosalía de Castro, leaving for another day the vast list of Hispanic Americans, otherwise I would never end.
The award-winning poem: Modulaciones