The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) publishes a new title within its Péñola Blanca poetry collection: Between 2001 and 2006. In the course of And we were all alive, by Olvido García Valdés. This is the fifteenth publication within this collection of unpublished books, bibliophile type, whose careful edition was originally designed by Alberto Corazón. This publication brings together 43 poems and 21 diary entries in an edition of 400 copies, numbered, the first hundred signed by the author.
In this work, García Valdés returns to poems, essays and numerous annotations dated from the early 2000s, texts written between 2001 and 2006, with the purpose of bringing to light these new pages in which, according to her words, “verses and notes reverberate”. A good part of the materials written in that period of time was included in the book And we were all alive (Tusquets, Barcelona, 2006). Others, such as some of the prose texts, collected under the heading 'Notes after And we were all alive', were published in the 'De la escritura' section of That moth that flutters in front of me (Collected Poetry 1982-2008) (Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona, 2008). Some were left out for various reasons and that poetic moment in the career of Olvido García Valdés is now enriched with the new title published by the César Manrique Foundation, thus completing that unitary flow of writing developed over six years.
The poetry of Olvido García Valdés, which arises from a conscious look at the fragility, beauty and misfortune of life, is embodied in a language articulated around the difficulty of being a spoken word of life. In this way, her writing responds to a sense of perception of the world and poetic materiality, a fragmentary, trembling and delicate vision, stripped of adipose verbal tissues, anti-rhetorical and rich in eloquent tensions, physical and transcended by the disturbance of temporality that runs through us. Perhaps in her verses everything is carnality, the beat of an earthly and philological body, at the same time, that does not conform to the stability of conventional culture founded on certainty and assertion, subject to the change of joy and celebration, insecurity, fear and awareness of vulnerability. Just as it happens with the saying of poetry.
So far, within Péñola Blanca, fifteen titles have been published: Deviation towards the other silence, by Manuel Padorno (1995); The snow watcher, by Antonio Gamoneda (1995); Nobody, by José Ángel Valente (1996); Poemes-Poemas, by Joan Brossa (1997); Tiles: Place of God. Overture, by Francisco Pino (2000); Scattered Organs, by José-Miguel Ullán (2000); Feeling the night, by Juan Gelman (2000); In the hospitable stanzas, by Carlos Germán Belli (2001); Knots, by Jorge E. Eielson (2002); Cecilia, by Antonio Gamoneda (2004); Notebooks of notes and poetic sketches of the intemperate Atlantic Palinuro, by Eugenio Padorno (2005); Lateral poems, by Claudio Rodríguez (2006); In the center of a circle of islands, by Andrés Sánchez Robayna (2007); Brand new aerolites, by Carlos Edmundo de Ory (2009); and Between 2001 and 2006. In the course of And we were all alive, by Olvido García Valdés (2023).
Olvido García Valdés (Santianes de Pravia, Asturias, 1950) has a degree in Romance Philology and Philosophy. She has been a professor of Spanish Language and Literature, director of the Instituto Cervantes in Toulouse and general director of the Book, Comics and Reading of the Ministry of Culture and Sports. Among others, she has received the Reina Sofía Award for Ibero-American Poetry 2022, the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award 2021, the Asturias Letters Award 2016, and the National Poetry Award 2007 for her book And we were all alive (Tusquets, Barcelona, 2006). In That moth that flutters in front of me. Collected poetry (1982-2008) (Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona, 2008) her poetic work between those dates is collected. Later she has published The loneliness of the animal (Tusquets, Barcelona, 2012) and, more recently, trust in grace (Tusquets, Barcelona, 2020), inside the animal the voice. Anthology 1982-2012 (Editorial Cátedra, Colección Letras Hispánicas, Madrid, 2020), and The Fall of Icarus, commemorative anthology of the XXXI Reina Sofía Award for Ibero-American Poetry (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2022). Her books have been translated into French, English, Italian, German, Polish and Swedish; Likewise, her poems have appeared in Portuguese, Romanian, Greek, Serbian, Arabic and Chinese.
She is also the author of the biographical essay Teresa de Jesús, texts for catalogs of plastic arts (Zush, Kiefer, Vicente Rojo, Tàpies, Juan Soriano, Venice Biennale 2001, Broto...) and numerous essays of literary reflection. She has translated The religion of my time and Long sand road by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and (in collaboration) the anthology by Anna Ajmátova and Marina Tsvetáieva The song and the ash, as well as The rest of the trip and other poems, by Bernard Noël. She has co-directed the magazine Los Infolios, and was a founding member of El signo del gorrión (1992–2002). Likewise, she has directed or coordinated various courses, seminars and cycles of contemporary poetry.
