AL OTRO LADO DEL ESPEJO - José María Álvarez

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AL OTRO LADO DEL ESPEJO. JOSÉ MARÍA ÁLVAREZ
No creo que sea más difícil. Además eso no tiene sentido.
Yo uno de los cuentos más inteligentes, un cuento perfecto, que
yo haya leído nunca es JACOB Y EL OTRO.
Pero Onetti no acaba de ser un autor de éxito. Y ya son
muchos años.
No creo que eso a Onetti le importe mucho. Está más allá,
con su aire de tangista arrasado. El ha escrito como tenía que
hacerlo.
JOSE MARIA ALVAREZ AND
THE AMERICAN AUDIENCE
The American reader finds much to admire in the work of José
María Alvarez, whose poems inevitably call up associations
with two of the greatest forces behind all modern poetry-
Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot. Mr. Alvarez is an obvious admirer
of these earlier writers, is well as of many others, too numerous
to discuss here. The epigraphs and dedications which are integral
to many poems attest to the wide-ranging knowledge and
allencompassing cultural interests of this poet who, by his own
account, «has devoted his life to literature». Yet his is a poetry
which succeeds by its individualism as well. Alvarez brings his
own vision of the world to his writing-a vision that is made
up, in part, of a child-like innocence which has been perverted,
a disillusionment which, as is usually true of the disappointed
idealist, becomes all the more devastating.
What good is my life?
Each time I put up my house
I destroyed it. Any country
I arrive at I love
only at first sight.
I could never say welcome
to the same woman twice.
It is a poetry of despair, of disenchantment, of little hope. And
yet because, like much twentieth century American poetry, it
is rooted absolutely in the senses, and because whatever