Paula Bozalongo

- Spain -

Paula Bozalongo was born 1991 in Granada, Spain. She is a student of architecture at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. Her debutant book December and we kiss (Diciembre y nos besamos) is the winner of the “Bridges of Struga” award of the “Struga Poetry Evenings” and UNESCO of 2015. The book of poems December and we kiss was awarded the prestigious “Hyperion” Poetry Prize in its XXIX call.

Her poems have been published in significant literary magazines, not only in her motherland, but other countries of the world as well.

Her debut book “December and We Kissed” through 26 poems, divided in two parts, brings forth a poetic language which radiates with a characteristic sensibility, not burdened by some adventurous rhetoric, experimental and metaphorical expression. This is poetry carrying reflections of certain insecurities and fears, indecisiveness in search for closeness. This is by no means some old-fashioned sentimentality, but a spirit-filled expression of intimacy which brings sincerity expressed in a special way, filled with evocative images influenced even by architecture.

The lyric subject reflects an intimate lyric temperament through the elegant and bold changes in the poetic images, through elegiac tonality in which their constant transformations take place. The tranquil tone of this self-reflective lyric is suddenly interrupted by contrapuntal images which sometimes bring contradiction and amazement, and act as an emotional cadence in the poem. Such poetic form allows the young poetess to harness in the poem all of her reminiscences, allusions, emotional outpourings, memories, doubts and fears through the skillful interchange of the story and the confession and create an exceptionally suggestive lyric which challenges the reader with constant interruptions of this confidential tone through constant juxtapositions of images.

This poetry arises from that belief in the transforming power of emotions which fill the poetic images with a tendency to rediscover and change the internal logic of time and space. Hence this quest for love, for intimacy is emphasized through the reflected representations of places and objects that contain the coldness and alienation, and it is entwined in the poem as a muffled cry in the storm (“The Prestige of Crying”). These introspections of disappointments, longings and dreams become contemplative images which contain geometric shapes and structures, architectonic metaphors, such as in the poem “Geometry” where in cubic manner she draws out the silhouette of her loved one in triangles, trapezoids, circles and ellipses. “I lack dimensions/ to explain the world”, as she herself says in her poem, she announces another name whose poetic quest for a new poetic expression will certainly bring poetic creations which will attract the attention of the European and world literary public.

More about the poet

Poetry

So you won't forget me / Para que no me olvides

At the height of the season
when the rain cries out
and a lightning flash watches over
our empty room,
the light has gone out.

The roof has grown weary
of holding back the water
that April flowers will require.

We are in December
and there are storms that etch
their sorrow on the window pane
so that you won't forget
to love me in winter.

Translated by Gordon E. McNeer
En el cenit del tiempo
cuando la lluvia grita
y un relámpago vela
la habitación vacía,
se ha apagado la luz.

El techo se ha cansado
de sostener el agua
que pedirán las flores en abril.

Estamos en diciembre
y hay tormentas que rasgan
su duelo en el cristal
para que no te olvides
de quererme en invierno.
The inevitable shadow / La sombra inevitable

All the decisions that we make one day
live on piled up like wreckage
or ethereal fragments
that climb and rise up
just like vines
that never let go of us.

Love is black,
the journey is black,
the house is in darkness.

Without nuances or scales or brilliance or contrasts
there no longer exists in the shadows
even the outline of your face shouting out at your enemy
for the right to the last word,
sadness descending in an elevator,
or the trachs that are the vestiges of the moment
in which I left and you left my childhood,
a place we will never return to.

The lights of the future avoid details
and permit living
beyond the shifting shadows
that now cross the sand,
the sheer darkness
behind the abyss,
but they never reach
the dwelling place of the inevitable shadow
anchored in memory.
Translated by Gordon E. McNeer.
Todas las decisiones que tomamos un día
siguen acumuladas como escombros
o porciones etéreas
que escalan y se alzan
igual que enredaderas
que nunca se separan de nosotros.

El amor es negro,
el viaje es negro,
la casa está a oscuras.

Sin matices ni escalas ni brillo ni contrastes
ya no existe en la sombra
ni el perfil de tu rostro gritando al enemigo,
el derecho a la última palabra,
la tristeza bajando en ascensor
o las huellas que son el rastro del instante
en que me fui y te fuiste de mi infancia,
un lugar al que nunca volveremos.

Las luces del mañana evitan los detalles
y permiten vivir
más lejos de las sombras movedizas
que ahora cruzan la arena,
la oscuridad escarpada
detrás del precipicio,
pero no llegan nunca
al rincón de la sombra inevitable
anclada en la memoria.

Paula Bozalongo

- Spain -

Poetry

So you won't forget me / Para que no me olvides

The inevitable shadow / La sombra inevitable