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María Cristina Ramos's Poetry: How to Build a House in the Air (and Dare to Live in It)

2020; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bkb.2020.0047

1918-6983

María José Troglia, Márgara Averbach,

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America

María Cristina Ramos's Poetry:How to Build a House in the Air (and Dare to Live in It) María José Troglia (bio) Translated by Márgara Averbach Reading has a house quality, the quality of a place where one can be, somehow, sheltered. Graciela Montes María Cristina Ramos was born in Mendoza, Argentina, and lives now in Neuquén city. She is a literature teacher, a writer, a workshop facilitator, and an editor. She has many courses, workshops, and lectures in her CV and has received several honors and prizes for her books. She has published, among other books, Un sol para tu sombrero, Azul la cordillera, Un bosque en cada esquina, Del amor nacen los ríos, Cuentos de la buena suerte, Maíces de silencio, Corazón de grillo, Las lagartijas no vuelan, Mientras duermen las piedras, Belisario y los fantasmas (que continúa la serie de Belisario), La escalera, El baile, Pétalo de nube, Cordelia y los arañijos, Desierto de mar, Las sombras del gato, El trasluz, Para llegar hasta el sol, and Francisco Solar Madriga. She is a 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award finalist. Click for larger view View full resolution A House in the Air If literature is an opportunity to create worlds and start to discern what up to that moment could barely be sensed or could not be put into words, María Cristina Ramos's poetry is literature at its finest. Ramos's poetry is also an architecture that designs and builds what is light and subtle and at the same time deep and lasting, like a house built in the air, made of silences and scents, rhythms and transparencies. Literature is, for Ramos, a "dome made of air" (Ramos, La casa 8), a space where imagination is the homeowner, a space that is open to anyone who wants and dares to inhabit it. This "imaginary house," as defined by Graciela Montes (48) in the epigraph, [End Page 32] allows us to inhabit it and constantly surprises us because what happens there is at the same time similar to and different from what is happening in the world. The language of air is that of possible universes that need quiet, slow walks, with no fear of getting lost in the nooks and turns. This house made of air has the capacity to transform reality or invent new dreams; even when there are no more dreams, it can create places of belonging and new forms of being in the world. While the world outside overwhelms us with its noise and its feverish rhythms, Ramos invites us to engage in an internal search, to recover a resonance that comes from childhood, to evoke the affection that accompanies scents and songs. Her texts, especially her poems, restore the silent time of reading so we can start looking at the small things of the world against the light and listen to the tiny rustle of life when it decides to go ahead and rise to the surface. The secret of poetry lies both in the words and in what they summon: Pájaro de agua,suspiro de vuelo,si cierro los ojosestoy en su cielo. (Ramos, Corazón) Bird of water,sigh of flight,if I close my eyes,I am in his sky. (Ramos, Heart) And this seems to be an aspect of poetry that Ramos is very much aware of: We believe that it is necessary to get to the poem through the words but we do not know that, unconsciously, we enter it through the door of affection, of rhythm, of that which links it to our inner breathing and to the heartbeat of the universe. Because a poem is made of all that. Of words and silences, of presences, but more than anything else of mysteries and absences, of things which appear in the flow of time and then disappear and then are born again. (Calvo 35) Ramos's poetry is a poetry of childhood, not because it speaks about children (very few of her poems feature children as characters) but because it is built in the cadence of children's voices, which we grown...