Lucía Estrada (Colombia)
Por:
Lucía Estrada
Traductor:
Nicolás Suescún
The mask of bone
refuses to reveal
if the features it hides
are those of a god or of a beast
or of both, which, after death,
continue fighting
for the same crown.
Lucía Estrada was born in Medellín on July 11, 1980. She has published the poetry books Fuegos Nocturnos (1997), Noche Líquida (1999), Maiastra (2004) and Las Hijas del Espino (2006). She obtained the Poetry prize in the V Summoning of Creation Poetry Prizes "Medellín 330 years". Her poems have been included in different anthologies, reviews and newspapers nationally and internationally. She collaborates with the Spanish magazine Alhucema. Presently she is a member of the work team of The Corporation of Art and Poetry Prometeo. She says about her work: " I attend writing as a ritual night, full of reminiscences and forgotten landscapes and it is their language and its silence the Ariadna's thread that allow my permanence and guide me through the laberynth of a city that could be called in some other way since poetry transforms it for me into other of the vast regions of memory and desire. I write to open a little more, just a bit more, the crevice that I have with me since my birth. That everything that I have from the night, silence, the word as it is in all of its folds, that exiguous that however offers us an instant of absolute comprehension. That everything what I am occupies just one place, that fragile and stormy line, that ray drawing, of extreme shout in the profoundness of the tower. In my poems I aspire not to have a "before" or an "after", that it is all the verticality of a mirror that breaks up, the sole stroke of destiny, the mystery of the surfaces, the ineffability of a body that jumps and breaks up forming laberynths, little maps that it already beared in its enameled face. To be or not to be the crevice word, wound or abyss. To be or not to be what they contain, the fragility of meaning, the signal, the movement, the tremor that prodeced it, its dim compressed shadow, its thunder without light unfolding, its syllable, without doubt the true one much befote being pronnounced. I write to feel" A convulse feeling that established me in pain, in madness, celebration and death. I write to feel it all until I lose my breath, until I get into the root of the own meaning, to submerge myself in it until I do not feel it any more. To read voices, the recovered gold under the fine surface of ice. My hand shivers when it borders the cutting edge of its Marcel, what remains of the night over me.
