Matemática tiniebla reúne—por iniciativa de Antoni Marí— una serie de textos esenciales para entender la tradición poética europea del siglo XX, de Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry y Eliot. Es posible que muchos lectores hayan leído algunos de estos textos; pero lo relevante de Matemática tiniebla es que se recogen, por primera vez, en un volumen, siguiendo una de las ideas de Eliot: "en la segunda mitad del siglo XX fue Francia la que contribuyó de manera más decisiva a la poesía europea. Me refiero a la tradición que comienza con Baudelaire y culmina con Paul Valéry. Me aventuro a decir que sin esta tradición francesa la obra de tres poetas de otras lenguas, [···] muy distintos entre sí —W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke y, si se me permite, a quien les habla—, sería difícilmente concebible. No olvidemos, además que el movimiento francés debió buena parte de su impulso a un americano de origen irlandés: Edgar Allan Poe." Los tres poetas franceses vieron "algo en Poe—dice Eliot—que los lectores de habla inglesa no han percibido". Los cinco poetas de este libro se rigen por la magia del lenguaje y la imaginación y, sobre todo, están hechizados, cada uno a su manera, por la "música del verso". Así pues, se incluyen aquí cuatro ensayos de Poe, en donde plantea su concepción poética; seguidos de los veinticinco textos de los otros cuatro poetas que reflexionan sobre la poesía, siguiendo el hilo conductor de sus ideas. Desde Poe a Eliot asistimos a las transformaciones que defienden la autonomía de la poesía y favorecen las posibilidades expresivas del lenguaje que surgen de su práctica.
Authors
Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a 19th century French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du Mal; (1857; The Flowers of Evil) which was perhaps the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his Petits poèmes en prose (1868; "Little Prose Poems") was the most successful and innovative early experiment in prose poetry of the time. Known for his highly controversial, and often dark poetry, as well as his translation of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire's life was filled with drama and strife, from financial disaster to being prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy. Long after his death many look upon his name as representing depravity and vice. Others see him as being the poet of modern civilization, seeming to speak directly to the 20th century.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S.\_Eliot
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his fiction (poetry, drama and dialogues), he also wrote many essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry is best known as a poet, and is sometimes considered to be the last of the French Symbolists. But he published fewer than a hundred poems, and none that drew much attention. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Paul Valéry entered an existential crisis, which made a big impact on his writing career. Around 1898, his writing activity even came to a near-standstill, due partly to the death of his mentor Stéphane Mallarmé and for nearly twenty years from that time on, Valery did not publish a single word until 1917, when he finally broke this 'Great Silence' with the publication of La Jeune Parque at forty-six years of age. This obscure but superbly musical masterpiece, of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming pairs, had taken him four years to complete, and immediately secured his fame. It is esteemed by many in France as the greatest French poem of the 20th century.
