Poetry
My Voice Because of You
La voz a ti debida
Pedro Salinas · 1933
Synopsis
Seventy poems without title or number, conceived as a single poem, which the author addresses to a woman he never names. A story takes shape: the sudden joy of a nascent love, then tensions, and reality gradually surfacing. The beloved, distant and luminous, appears as a force that gives birth to the world and to the poet himself; he seeks, behind appearances, what she truly is. Love becomes a way of knowing oneself through the other, and pain its final form.
Context
Published in 1933, the book opens a trilogy of love poems completed by Razón de amor, in 1936, and Largo lamento. Its title takes up a line from Garcilaso's third eclogue. Critics long regarded the beloved as an imaginary figure; the publication in 2002 of the poet's letters to Katherine R. Whitmore, an American he met in Santander in 1932, showed that the book originated in this love. Bernard Sesé translated it into French, and Willis Barnstone into English.
Who it is for
Short poems, in short verses almost without rhyme, simple in appearance, to be read from beginning to end.
Prizes and reception
First part of the trilogy that forms its author's period of fullness, opened under the sign of Garcilaso.