BROWSE Columns
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As co-editor of Paraphrasis, LPB’s translation column, I discover with LPB’s community the hidden sounds and melodies of poets, writers and languages. As I see it, this task is a small portion of what I believe is the most fun part of the magazine: to constantly find equivalences between arts, artists, countries and, in our case, languages.
There are many hidden gems still to share with the international community of LPB. One that comes to mind is San Juan de la Cruz’s mystic poetry, which is still considerably unknown to non-Spanish readers despite the international success of Rosalia’s version of ‘Noche Oscura’. San Juan’s Cántico Espiritual, the songs of the Soul who longs for the bridegroom Jesus Christ, is a poem where LPB’s readers will hear the melodic song that the bird, the river, the flower, the deer and the soul sing in unison. It is, perhaps, this capacity of representing and expressing abstract philosophical reflection through the sight of a bird or the cry of a mother that I find so valuable in art and in those artists that I am particularly fond of. Some of these artists are Titian and his unfinished Pietà, which with uncertain lines and tragic light anticipates Baroque painting; Leopoldo Lugones and his theological parables; Peter Paul Ruben’s adoration of the Magi or Gustavo Adolfo Becquer and his definition of Poetry.
When I am not trying (with little success) to achieve this convergence of abstract thinking and beauty in my own poetry, I devote myself solely to the meditation of problems in ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of religion and limit the expression of my ideas to the clarity and economy of analytic philosophical prose.
