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• Culture and Traditions
• Personalities
• 04 / 26 / 2010

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Jose Emilio Pacheco is a down-to-earth poet; of course, it does not mean he lacks flair; but that he puts wings to things that do not have them normally or rather to what does not have them at first sight. And in the meantime, he stays on the ground, watching them fly…

Now that he has received the Cervantes Prize for Literature he has many eyes on him, but in some way he’s always had them, because his literature speaks on friendly terms with the ordinary man, and most people like writers tell them about the beauty of the world (or about its ugliness, when the time comes) clearly, without rhetoric or grandiloquences.

Clear does not mean simple, and when you read Pacheco’s poetry, or his prose, you immediately notice an extraordinary rigor and an ease to direct the most dissimilar and witty ideas of life and things through the most unpolluted linguistic paths.

He’s been called daily-life poet over and over, but the true thing is that Pacheco is not an objective chronicler: his is a set of mirrors where the image is drawn deliciously distorted… As when, he asks his cat in one of his poems to come closer, because that will be the only opportunity to caress a tiger.

His point of views, in both life and books, are peculiar. Today, when receiving the Cervantes Prize, he’s made us understand that the Quixote is not a laughing matter. He thinks that it is not his humor what has turned him into a classic, but his extraordinary sadness.

However, his poetry is full of humor (when it’s optimistic) or of irony (when deception domineers). Sadness does not seem to have an effect on it… Although all can be a mirage.

By Yuris Nórido

Source: Cubasi