2023-10-08 06:29:42
Years ago in Montevideo I bought a book called Anthology of Minor Modernist Poets, in the collection of Uruguayan Classics, published in 1971, compiled by Arturo Sergio Visca, who was director of the Uruguayan National Library during the last dictatorship (in the entry dated December 30). December 1977 of his Diaries, Ángel Rama dedicates a brief comment to him: “News from writers: Visca, progressing in the regime”).
What does minor poetry mean? It is curious, but the Uruguayan book was published just four years before the now classic Kafka, for a minor literature, by Deleuze and Guattari, from 1975, where it is read: “minor no longer qualifies certain literatures, but rather the conditions revolutionary of any literature within the so-called major or established literature. Even one who has had the misfortune to be born in a country of major literature must write in its language as a Czech Jew writes in German or as an Uzbekistani writes in Russian. Write like a dog digging a hole, a rat digging its hole. For that: to find his own point of underdevelopment, his own jargon, his own third world.”
All this comes from one of the poems in the Uruguayan anthology, a minor poem, that is, a great poem: “My inheritance”, published in 1894 by Roberto de las Carreras. De las Carrreras was an anarchist, ironist and great debater, as is clear in his controversy with Lafinur and, above all, with Herrera Reissing. One time, Herrera y Reissing criticized him for having gone through the civil registry (A true anarchist never marries!) and our minor poet responded with an open letter in which he made a fool of the greatest Uruguayan modernist poet (he is regarding Hobbes, He explains that he was marrying “a minor lady” and that therefore “she cannot use her inherited fortune, which if she did not marry me, she would wander aimlessly,” and he ends up dating the letter to the “toldería de Montevideo”).
This is how the poem “My Inheritance” begins: “I have had an enemy for a long time/Great, strong, respected by all;/Unrelenting and fierce towards me,/With all his power he has struck me down/And I find myself truly dismayed/Well I lose, reader… As I say./Who is it? You will ask: perhaps a vile/detractor? Some insolent critic?/A woman? Your eight hundred thousand/countrymen? The public? The people no. My enemy is something more powerful/ It is, unfortunately, the Civil Code!”
The story the poem tells is simple, although described in a hilarious way: the narrator is the natural son of a millionaire father who has just died, and the Civil Code prevents him from collecting the inheritance. From that, and for more than eight hundred verses, de las Carreras narrates the regret of the heir that he was not; situation doubly serious in the case of a poet who does not know how to do anything other than write and have a dilettante life: “My father, severe, reserved/Firm and upright, would have dedicated me/For his pleasure, to commerce or the sciences/More, I, full of dreams and lyricism/I am a great lazy person…I always was/And if I understand, with great cynicism,/That others work for me,/I assure you that I never conceived/That they might also think the same./I know very well that I should be ashamed/If so. It’s not a very lucid thing/But what to do? I cannot reform/And as I am, I will be all my life.”
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