Fatherhood, its absence and the ways in which it is manifested are the bridge that connects the collection of poems. Chiron (Broken Glass) with the essay Orphaned parents (Elefanta Editorial), explained the author of both books, Christian Peña: one never quite finishes being a son or a father
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The writer said to The Day what The father figure, that father language and the debt you have with the language you speak is what I have been interested in exploring from different avenues, it could be Kafka’s father, my father or poetry as that language that is adopted
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Peña (CDMX, 1985) obtained with Chiron the Jaime Sabines International Poetry Prize and, in mid-May, the Xavier Villaurrutia Writers’ Prize for Writers 2023.
The Villaurrutia jury ruled that the poet It combines various elements that interact with each other to create a poetic constellation that calls for redefining the relationship between the poet’s past and present, as a son and as a father. It also explores themes such as love, death, identity, morality and the nature of the human being.
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The poet stated that Orphaned parents investigates “my father’s orphanhood, through an investigation and a reading about Juan Rulfo’s orphanhood, present in both his life and his work; on the other hand, Chiron, Although it touches on the topic of the relationship with my father from my vision as a son, its central theme lies in my perspective as the father of my son.”
The collection of poems “delves into Chiron, the centaur par excellence, curiously the mentor of many orphaned heroes. I was interested in the figure of a man carrying his son on his shoulders and how in that kind of metaphor a different animal was created with both of them.
It also goes through the pain of Chiron as a mythological element, when he is wounded in the knee with an arrow poisoned with the blood of the hydra. It is a mortal wound, but since he is an immortal being he is destined to live with that pain and heal the pain of others. For me that is the poetic exercise: there are things that poetry cannot resolve about one’s own injuries and someone can feel close and find a kind of relief.
Christian Peña said that Orphaned parents It started as essays on Rulfo’s work, but then he noticed the closeness of the stories of Rulfo’s father and his own. Chiron he wrote it about a year later.
The essayist also recalled that his first title, Father tongue,It has to do with the imprecision of the father figure. We have a mother tongue, but there is another that can be learned and is imprecise. It has to do with the poetic craft. The figure of the father, even if he is present or absent, is blurred. You have to put it together little by little, as if you were trying to see the precise shapes of a statue at night.”
The writer considered that Juan Rulfo, although he is known above all for his narrative, has in mind Pedro Paramo prose poem spaces and with that he is one of the best poets of the 20th century.
Rulfo, Peña continued, is the author of an almost mythological work and his attempt to bring the speech of his land is very important, as he maintained in interviews, “like the one who if he asked someone how long it would take to get to the next town instead of To say that it was 20 minutes or three hours, they responded: ‘You have to walk a lot in the sun to get there.’ There is an interesting language there, poetic without a doubt.
“Rulfo is a figure shrouded in his own myth: he writes books, works as a tire salesman, was a photographer, mountaineer, publicist; his is a kind of imprecise portrait. Who knows who could have captured Rulfo’s real image or if Rulfo really could have made a self-portrait of himself.
“On the other hand, as I mentioned in Orphaned parents, it seems to me that he is the orphaned father of Mexican literature. He has those two books, he decides to educate, create, give us a lesson in fatherhood with those two books and then he leaves.
Peña maintained that the poet is not a chronicler of emotions, he does not write in a kind of reflection of what happens to him in life, “the poet sings and invents and narrates and rehearses and reflects throughout the poem he is writing.
“Exercise and reflection are important and perhaps that is why Orphaned parents It is the first prose book I have written, although I have essays on Mexican authors that are important to me: Antonio Deltoro, Francisco Hernández and the generation of the 40s, but about Rulfo I needed to express that he is a fundamental figure for my writing and approach him as an orphan and as a poet.”