INICIACION

This is the beginning of this journey. 

It all began with my father announcing that my grandparent’s home was finally sold. My heart sank in sadness, so many moments in time, so many memories stored in that house. The effort, the love, attention that my grandparents placed there not only to its material existence but every single person that used to walk through their doors; my grandparents were up to their last breath, always welcoming and giving. I always had dreams of bringing the home back to its splendour, even converting it into a care home, in which older people could live a happy enjoyable life. I left Mexico 16 years ago to live in England, and the house was not part of my father's inheritance, so my dreams couldn't come true. But after my father's news on the house, I began to have a series of dreams of the home calling me, dreams of me visiting the home and witnessing its life , seeing its spirits. It occurred to me that if I could view my grandparent´s houses spaces and expression from a different perspective, I could dig somehow into my grandfather´s beautiful Self and mind. All of a sudden, from that angle, my grandparent’s home has become a place full of life and eternal manifestations inside of me as well as an opportunity of exploration in my own Self too. For that, and the wonderful childhood moments, for the love, care, presence, I will always be so grateful to them. And I witness now that even after their death, they keep filling my life with colour, rhythm and love!

It feels just right for me to write this blog in English. English language forms part of my reality and life after so many years living in this country. After sharing my dreams with my therapist, she suggested that I could take the venture of translating a book of poems from Spanish that my grandfather wrote and published in 1944. Interestingly enough, my grandfather was a lover on mastering language, he did so in Spanish as well as in English, and he was self taught. He was always challenging himself in any venture he decided to take, he will challenge his mind, every single time, his brain never aged, and he kept it bright up to the last moment. Playing, we used to bring a dictionary in English and just choose a word by random and he was must of the times 99% right. Beautiful Mind! Some of us have taken just "some" of that passion, for me out of need, living in this country, but another one is my brother Jesus Ortiz who will be with me, cooperating in the finding of the best expression of what my grandfather could have meant in his poems (he doesn’t know yet, I have kept him texting each other suggestions, and naturally he responds). My brother had the most years living near my grandparents in our childhood, and in his adulthood lived besides him and supported him in the last breath of his life and to whom my grandfather's life is too an inspiration.

There was so much happening in the life of my grandfather in the early 40’s. His graduation from Medicine School in 1942, so I could just suppose that he was ever so busy placing himself as a Doctor in the "Regiomontana" (from Monterrey, N.L. Mexico) Society as well as paving the way to marrying my grandmother Berta Martinez. What I feel coming from my grandfather is that at his early 20's he was a vibrant, energetic and passionate young man with a whole world to discover. But there is also another side to him, a profound and intimate soul experience manifesting and desiring more expression. But it has been the sincere and profound introduction that Don Eusebio de la Cueva into my grandfather's book of poems on March 1943 (Nuevo Leones novelist, poet and university cathedratic and who surprisingly passes away on July of the same year), the one that has clearly shown the guidance into the journey that I am about to embark. The expression of what he saw on my grandfather and the different elements and dynamics working inside and outside of himself is beautifully placed.  He expresses that although his strength in academic knowledge, he doesn’t sacrifices his own inner poetic truth and instead expresses it with audacity; remembering my grandfather, I know he did the same in many areas of his life, he was a creative nonconformist truthful to himself spirit, ahead of his time! I could just say that there could have been very few people that were able to touch the reality of the immensity of his Self. Eusebio de la Cueva does warn us, the readers, that it will not be “an easy task to precise the mind flows far from human perceptions that determine in the poet the way he translates himself. A tiring hurdle could be to pretend certainty into what strange external influences concern in the hidden meadows of the intimate” which is precisely the quest I have been willing to take. But my quest is a very intimate one, it talks to my Self and I believe in the power of our blood connection and knowledge and wisdom placed in my ancestral line. I hope these series of “sharings” will be for whoever reads them a journey, a pilgrimage to their hearts too.

 
Introduction to “Iniciación"

My friend reader,

As soon as your eyes sneak into the pages of this book: “Iniciación", it will be true for you that you find yourself facing the works of a poet.

Each brief sprout of the youthful numen that these poems begin with is a joyful achievement that accuses the intimate excellencies of a spirit that traduces itself in beautiful expressions of poetic forms.

It will not be an easy task to precise the mind flows far from human perceptions that determine in the poet the way he translates himself.

A tiring hurdle could be to pretend certainty into what strange external influences concern in the hidden meadows of the intimate.

But it doesn’t offer difficulties to see if the poet is facing forwards or sideward in front of the surrounding urgencies of life in what she has of being pushy and persistent; of being disturbing  and suggestive; of being cruel and tyrant.

And the poet whose first work you find yourself dear reader, is one of those that go in a joyful way, facing Life, and who is, for your own luck, still young, and he is one of those who has strengthened his own youth with methodical study and a strong gathering of the excellences of knowledge.

In my hands, this young poet placed, a rightful winter day, with no preliminary strange influences that could credited him, a kind of pile of papers "with long and short lines", with the hope that I read them, -looking forward to create a book-, and then while my eyes looked at the series of pages I found myself  believing I saw emerging in front of my sight, like vague apparition in the foggy canvas of the distance, now the unfortunate Holderlin, -on those days in which Fatality was not being on a hurry to immobilize his genus-, now the Mussett before the days of fever with Jorge Sand of Venice, now that Becquer sick of excruciating nostalgia and eagerness drilled by de dagger of despair.

I found that the ways of translating himself this young soul facing life, on top of the hostile crag of its torturous realities, of temptation, could pain perhaps in indecision, in abruptness, in disobedience to canons of academic order, but -and find here the saviour "but" this time-, give freedom, uncovered, without muffled techniques, the intimate sense of its poetic truth.

The form is obedient to an inner sense of his own poetical truth.

He translates himself in free ways with undisguised audacity that is not uncomfortable and that in the other hand is moving.

I hope that like me you will achieve, my dear reader, having certainty that all of these brief poems confess the work of a poet whose initial achievements are reserved in fixed -for the indecipherable tomorrow- realisations that carry perennial potentialities by the opulence of all virtue.

Eusebio de la Cueva
March, 1943