It has been said on several occasions that the weakness, and even the absence, at times, of thought and criticism —in the face of the presence, almost in every generation, of notable creators— is practically a constant in the modern Spanish cultural tradition (the which, to understand each other, begins in romanticism and continues until today). Hence, it is necessary to pay due attention to any critical interpretation essay deserving of that name, since this class of essays does not abound and, with rare exceptions, hardly receives the consideration and evaluation that indicate its interest and importance. The book we are reviewing, in our opinion, deserves that attention.
Alexander Krawietz (Tenerife, 1970), poet and critic of art, literature and cinema, has carried out extensive work in the fields of creation, criticism and cultural management. After a stay at the University of Western Brittany (1997-2001), he has directed the magazine Piedra y Cielo and has held the position of director of the MiradasDoc International Documentary Film Festival and assumed the direction of the municipal public library of Guide de Isora, as well as the coordination of the municipal editions and the cultural programming of its Municipal Auditorium. His recent appointment as Island Director of Culture for the Cabildo de Tenerife represents a turning point in his fruitful professional career focused on conscious and reflective cultural activism. As for his literary “biography”, Krawietz is the author of the essential anthology The Other Young Spanish Poetry (2004, produced together with Francisco León) and an attractive compendium and study of the poetry of Ángel Crespo, La realidad entera. Poetic Anthology (2005). His poetic production, recognized with the Pedro García Cabrera Prize and the Gutiérrez Albelo Poetry Prize, stands out for the rigorous linguistic demand and the unitary nature of its subject matter, and has been published in three installments under the titles of La mirada y las támaras (La mirada y las támaras ( 1994), Memory of light (2001) and On the shore of the air (2006) and later revised and gathered in a single volume (For a daytime god, 2017).
His most recent publication, La educación de Nausícaa, compiles twenty-five essays written in the last quarter of a century that value the critical and creative position of the «poetry of exceptions», claimed as a true sign of modernity in the face of the self-congratulatory critical context and decaffeinated of contemporary Spain. This “erudite book” is made up of two parts in constant dialogic interaction: it claims the need for careful and intelligent poetics, underlining the shaping power of a word “fit for thought and symbol, fit for dreams and law, fit for for description and attack, suitable for explanation and for war”, and, in turn, draws up an alternative map of avant-garde voices, among which we find those of authors such as José Ángel Valente, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andersen, Juan Goytisolo, Haroldo de Campos or Andrés Sánchez Robayna, among others. In the first block of texts, the figure of Nausícaa is presented to us as part of a metaphor with geographical and ontological roots that identifies her with a place of meeting and departure at the same time —a space, we would say, located and open—, the island that we must recognize in order to finally “awaken” to it, abandoning ourselves to metaphysical contemplation. Both in this text and in the three-part essay entitled «Of islands and shipwrecks (supervening reflections)», Krawietz analyzes the problem of postmodern insular identity and denounces the urgent imperative of a critical observation of tourism from philosophical, aesthetic , anthropological and hermeneutical, delving into the dual nature of the reality of the islands, of natural convulsive beauty. On the other hand, his experience as editor of the cultural magazines Paradiso and Piedra y Cielo will allow him, both in “Gaceta de Arte y la tradición del essay” and in “Ordenar la diversidad. 30 years of Syntaxis”, highlighting the role of avant-garde publications in the cultural space of Canary Islands and in the broader field of contemporaneity, as well as delving into the typological question of the essay as the ideal expression to listen to the «big themes».
In the second block of texts, dedicated to the analysis of the work of some of the most notable poets on the national and island scene, the critical and artistic discourses of each of the authors are integrated, guiding the reader through the themes and writings chosen. This formal decision allows Krawietz to offer a complete critical proposal and underline the creative height of the analyzed voices. In one of the most interesting essays in this block, «The author and the translator before the limit. The dialogue between Valente and Celan”, the debate on translation occupies the thematic core of the text: it focuses on the figure of the poet-translator and proposes a broader and more conscious definition of the act of translation, which must be understood as an interpretation in open regime of a work and face from the awareness of the limits of the poetic word. In the same way, in the third and fourth paragraph of the article «Juan Goytisolo. Three personal lessons and a master class”, the author delves into the idea of translation as a possibility for difference and for the encounter of different poetic languages, as a valid form of critical introspection, and highlights the significance and role of the Workshop of Literary Translation of the University of La Laguna, which he considers “one of the most universal, prestigious and well-known projects of that university”, a space for reflection and practice of translation that had just turned twenty-five at the time of the publication of the rehearsal.
Other articles in the volume, dedicated to creators such as Juan Ramón Jiménez or Severo Sarduy, broaden the creative and epistemological framework that Krawietz examines. The same can be said in the case of authors born in the Canary Islands but with extensive horizons such as Arturo Maccanti, Miguel Martinón, Melchor López or Francisco León, strongly linked to their cultural territory of origin and to that metaphor that gives the volume its title. The need for a creative and conscious vanguard, the question of translation as a critical act, the power of language as a shaper of worlds and the problem of insular identity are at the center of the proposals formulated here, which are presented to us in a a book of dialogue and protest, an open matrix for debate, a manual for understanding the voices of the most committed modernity. The critical spirit, often so absent in the cultural spheres of our country, survives in The Education of Nausícaa, an intelligent book in its content and in its dialectical structure, which functions as a compelling invitation to conscious reflection on issues and problems that constitute our reality and, finally, as a reminder of the need to pay attention to the authors who, far from the focus of interest of the usual critical institutions, take the language of modernity further.
