Guerra de almohadas

by Soledad Salim

Послушай, дедушка, мне каждый раз, Когда взгляну на этот замок Рётлер, Приходит в мысль: что, если это проза, Да и дурная?..... А. С. Пушкин

Now listen, granpa, to me, every time I take a glance upon this Röttler Schloss, A thought occurs: what if this is just prose, and, moreover, bad one?.. Alexander Pushkin

In his famous epigram, Pushkin parodied the blank verse of «Тленность» by Vasily Zhukovsky. Which, in turn, is a translation of the Alemannic poem Die Vergänglichkeit, also written in blank verse, by Johann Peter Hebel. (Pushkin actually copied the first two lines verbatim from Zhukovsky’s poem.) Yet Alexander Sergeyevich himself was not exactly a stranger to blank verse: Boris Godunov and The Little Tragedies show his mastery of the form. I don’t know what was Pushkin’s opinion on either vers libre or prose poetry but suspect he shoudn’t have cared of them at all.

Now why do I even bring in Pushkin, when he’s got nothing to do with free verse? Forget about him. The point is that, now and then, I come across some free-form poetry that I happen to like.

¿Y si la felicidad siempre ha estado
a la vuelta de la esquina?

Guerra de almohadas is a debut collection by Sole Salim, a social worker by day and an amateur poet, it looks like, always. Sole says in an interview that she writes prose poetry or, rather, short stories which are almost 100% autobiographical. My favourites are several of her “micropoems” (the erotic ones), and others such as Rara, Momentos, La mujer que habla y sonríe con los ojos, ¿Seguimos sumando? and, of course, Me gusta — basically, the lists of things Sole loves. Poems to share with friends and ask them how many items they identify with.

Read some of Sole’s works here.