The writer and editor Elena Medel arrives this Saturday at La Montaña Mágica in Cartagena to talk about her feature article, La Bella Varsovia
A few verses by Elena Medel (Córdoba, 1985) lead us to a mother and some shoes, to the moment when you start to build your own world: Own property. / She convinced me that I could turn the babble / into chamber music, with my shoes. / “Your shoes are magical,” he told me. Lose one and you get a husband. / Sell two and the seeds of your kingdom will stir before you’…». They are verses that originated in 2006, two years after he wrote the poem “Scuba Diving Course,” which begins like this: “As anticipation of loss, / A heart that floats and survives / The stream of dreams enclosed in bubbles” .
But Elena Medel will not be in Cartagena this Saturday to talk about her poetry nor her facet as a storyteller, including her success with ‘Las maravillas’ (Anagrama), her first novel, “a journey through the last decades of history of Spain and a lyrical and honest portrait of two working women».
She will talk about her publishing house La Bella Varsovia and her experiences as an editor. From other people’s books, from other worlds that can enrich ours. Sometimes wrapped in luminous sadness, or in storms, dances or let’s call it love. He always keeps his eyes awake, leans lucidly on intelligence and is guided by the mystery, if there is any, and never by the absolute.
The appointment with the editor and writer is at 1 pm and his presentation is in the hands of Alberto Soler. She arrives at the invitation of the poet and bookseller Vicente Velasco, for whom “Elena Medel represents an entire generation – and certainly the current one – the paradigm of sensible and patient love of poetry”. “With the management of La Bella Varsovia publishing house since 2004,” he points out, “there was a gap in the cultural space-time of our country.” So “the fact that the label maintains such prestige to this day is to be commended.” Moreover, adds Velasco, «as a poet, as a writer, she is the best example that patience and devotion to the word bear fruit…; many of them have yet to surprise us. La Bella Varsovia is about to publish ‘Un amor español’, Luna Miguel’s new poetry, which « mimics styles and sensibilities learned from the floral poetry of Hilda Doolittle, Renée Vivien or Carmen Conde, indulging herself in ‘Un amor español ‘to the sick narration of a heteronormative romance’, although ‘other themes that hover over this work are: sex after motherhood, long-distance relationships, the closet of bisexuality, the culture of recovery…’.
“I always try to separate the writer’s facet from that of the editor because otherwise I feel like one is swallowing up the other and besides, I’m not very comfortable with the fact that I’m taking advantage of the spaces I go to go as an editor to put a little commercial break of my own books,” indicates the author of the collection of poems “A black day in a false house (1998-2014)”, which we can find in Visor.
What books are you interested in publishing?
-At La Bella Varsovia we are interested in being challenged and seduced by the work with language, the view of reality, the dialogue that is established with the reader and also the possible conversation with other books in our catalog.
“I started editing at the age of 19,” he explains, “after previous childhood experiences with fanzines, small poetry magazines…; I was not born into a reading family, neither my parents nor my close relatives had any contact with the culture either professionally or personally. So it is that the discovery of books happened in childhood in a random way. Nothing special either.
– Which one don’t you forget?
-For me there is a very important book that I discover in puberty: ‘Poeta en Nueva York’, by Federico García Lorca; It’s the book I started reading poetry for. I also regularly return to others such as ‘Ariel’, by Sylvia Plath, in the translation of Ramón Buenaventura; or ‘Cruel Beauty’ by Ángela Figuera…; there are books that become a constant reference for me.
-More books you recommend.
-It excited me so much that I wanted to publish it and do it [sonríe], ‘Aguas madres’, from Leire Bilbao for example; or ‘A Spanish Love’, Luna Miguel’s new collection of poems, which will be published at the end of February.
-And a book not published in La Bella Varsovia?
-I really liked ‘The ideal beast’ by Erika Martínez, who published Pre-Texts. It is a book of poems that I would have liked to publish. It seems to me that she is one of the great contemporary poets in Spain and that this is her best book.
Source: La Verdad
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