THE MEMORY OF THE MIRROR
Volume V
Poems by
CLAUDIO SERRA BRUN (Argentina-Spain)
and Music by Maestros
ERNESTO CAVOUR (Bolivia)
DOMINGO CURA (Argentina)

©CLAUDIO SERRA BRUN, 2002. Legal Deposit:V:62-2002.
(The tracks from the CD will be played during the act).

I thank all of you for attending the presentation of a new volume of my series of poems and music, The Memory of the Mirror. In addition, I would like to thank the Authors’ Society, which provides us - the authors and members of this House - the unique possibility to present our artistic works in Madrid, knowing how little is dedicated to culture today.

This reception - made to authors, to all authors - differentiates in fundament as well as in shape to those made for those riding “the chariot of success and fame,” a chariot surrounded with a halo of money, pushed by checks a priori and favors; a chariot that is approached by mass media, attracted by the light like flies are…

Simple and democratic in its principle, this reception - which has been made for people like us who do some type of cultural work - is what makes me have the hope that in the near future, the fantastic media that the Scientific and Technical Revolution has been able to provide us with will be finally at the service of people and not of interest groups, as it is happening now days.

We always should keep alive the vision of evidence: that the summary of the work of the entire humanity gives us a positive result and that it makes civilizations progress.
Getting back to the book/disk that gathers us all here, I must say that it is the result of two years of reflection and maturation, but that its genesis, its booster, traces back to a decade ago, to the days in which I climbed the hills of the Andean Mountains, in the frontier between Bolivia and Argentina, when I was doing an investigative report about those peasants whose job was to cut the salt leafs, at heights as much as 4500 meters above sea level; dried residue of an old sea enclosed in geologic times, when the earth was growing, indefinitely, towards the sky, and was raising an entire sea between its arms of mountains, in a spectacle that is not within the reach of human time and imagination.
Now, the only thing left are those enormous salt surfaces, brilliant plaques that must look, from the heights of the sky, as silver medallions on dark soil, within the eternal snow-like crowns of the Andes. Up there, sheltered by the blinding light, work those peasants with pickax and shovels, and at the end of a hard working day, arrives, hardly, the old truck which will take down to the town all of the accumulated leafs of salt…

Because of previous journeys, I had in mind the music of the great Bolivian composer, Ernesto Cavour, the sound of the charango, acute and pure like the air of the high plateau. Moreover, from Buenos Aires, I also had in my collective memory the rhythm of the maestro, Domingo Cura, the percussionist who made the sweltering wind from the Pampa and the horses’ gallops enter the great city, conjuring them with the steps on the paving stones with the infinite noise of the urban iron factories. All of this so that we may remember that the only and inevitable destine of the culture from the Pampa and from the great Silver City is to live and grow in a fellowship of men.This brotherhood of the voices and the arts, of apparently diverse cultures, was my intention since many years ago, after my journeys throughout America and Europe, and used to come to my over and over as a recurrent dream, a dream that is trying to make itself be heard and that is trying to get a life of its own. Long since my stances in Madrid and Paris, I had knowledge of the profound friendship that existed between the great Peruvian Poet, Cesar Vallejo, and the Spaniard, Juan Larrea, a visionary poet which foresaw the change in writing that was about to come, years before the Spaniard generation of ’27. Embellished was Larrea with the Chilean, Vicente Huidobro, the precursor of creationism – the great aesthetic change in the Spanish poetry – and one of the main cultural promoters of the Hispanic American poetry in France. The friendship that united Larrea to the great Vallejo, and the combined experience of the edition of the vanguardist magazine Favorables-Paris-Poema, led Larrea to make a journey in 1930 to get to know more about the country from which his friend was. He traveled to the great heights of the Peruvian Andes. It was there where Larrea conceived the luminous idea of the New World, of the union of the culture in Spanish, of its immense American potentialities.

Thus was I going through those mountains, as I was saying, with the sight lost in the horizon’s crystalline line, with the secret intuition of having crossed the threshold of a new vision; of having found the sudden and flashing bond of odd facts, lengthily meditated in previous years. There are times in which chances shows us the vivid face of our thoughts, the driving thread of our dreams. Hazard wanted my adventure at the high plateau to coincide with the festival of Asunción, on august 15, at a town by the name of Tumbaya, at the Salinas Grandes. Suddenly, the empty streets were filled with women, fried food, cheese balls, and turnovers, kids with colorful ponchos, and images of the Virgin carried on a procession up to the hermitage, the peasants playing and dancing to the charango, the erke, the bass drum, and the siku….
After that day, I finally understood the cosmic experience poet Juan Larrea experienced in front of immensity itself, at Peru’s highest point, and his firm conviction of the renovating dawn of the Hispanic world, which announces America to Spain. Years after his first trip for America, Juan Larrea, like many other Spaniards, found refugee there, since they were fleeing the Spanish Civil War. He then would live in Buenos Aires, and in Cordoba, Argentina, for the rest of his life.

And from there, it will be dedicated during all its life to spread its Hispano-American ideas, its fidelity to the work of its friend Caesar Vallejo, with that Spanish old nobility, that is now vanishing, as much here as in America, and that characterizes itself by the austerity and the scorn of the brass foil, of the offensive ostentation of the false monedero, of the new petulance of the rich one, attitudes that today, unfortunately, have rooted themselves in the scope of the culture, and more specifically, in culture that approaches the mass media. The work of its Peruvian friend Cesar Vallejo illuminates since then our letters, not only by the universality of its poetry, also by the work and the attitude of its pairs, by Juan Larrea’s fraternal fidelity. Let us remember, on the contrary, the imposed forgetfulness to Gabriela Mistral and Vicente Huidobro, by an ideologized and fomented cultural current even by some great name of poetry.This spirit of collaboration of the letters American-Spaniards was inaugurated by the great Rubén Darío, the poet-traveller, the ambassador of the culture by all America and Spain, the one who renewed Spanish poetry at the beginning of the XX Century.
Perhaps it must today say more than then, than now, in the dawn of century XXI, it is still more necessary than before, that the prophetic words of Larrea flourish in a new conscience of the culture of Spain, of the Spanishness, the Americanness of that which is Hispanic. It is because of America that the culture of Spain recovers and revives incessantly, and is based on this great continental and peninsular perspective, reason why Hispanic America is constructed as well, in all the points of its geography.

That day, at a town located in the Andes, and enlivened by the color and music of the people, I understood that life was concocted with the threads of chance. In addition, I understood that the bridges between men are built with threads of words, threads that join their hearts in far away parables, encouraged to fly by the music found inside all of us and that feeds us and accompanies us always. With these words, I wanted to bring to you the silence of the heights, to retain, for the future, a chord, the whispering of the wind through the tree-lined avenues, a voice, some written lines, and a thought. With humility, I dedicate these poems and music
To my fellow countrymen from Jujuy,
from La Pampa,
from Bolivia,
to my fellow countrymen from the eternal plateau, Castellana.
Also, to Juan Larrea and César Vallejo, to their fraternal conception of our culture. And to all the dreamwalkers of a better world.

©CLAUDIO SERRA BRUN, 2002. (Read during the presentation of the CD: Friday, November 15, 2002, at the General Association of Authors and Editors of Spain, SGAE (in Spanish), Manuel de Falla Hall, Fernando VI St., 4 Madrid.)