The rabbit arrived at the Vitale house in Montevideo with the worst fate: it ended up in the family pot. But chance intervened and the happy man ended up in the arms of Ida, the smallest of the offspring. “Who kills a rabbit?” asks the poet Ida Vitale (Montevideo, 1923), sitting in front of the river – almost the sea – in the resort of Las Flores in southern Uruguay. She says that her friend the rabbit, nameless and somewhat smelly, accompanied her for a while in her childhood, until one day chance took him away from her, the same one who had given him to her. “In the end he escaped, went somewhere and they ate him.” The above mentioned left the house, but not the memory of his previous owner. It later resurfaced in his verse: “They gave you a rabbit / They made you love it / without having explained / that it is useless to love / which ignores you.”
Vitale, who turned 100 in November, remembers the unfortunate hare as the interview – a conversation, to be fair – that he gave to EL PAÍS in Las Flores came to an end. The premature appearance of a black cat caught his attention and he quickly left the room to catch it. “I would have liked a cat or a dog, but it was a rabbit,” he later said. On his easy walk he paused in wonder as he saw a single flower, the irregular shapes of the clouds and the low tide. “There’s a whole world over there,” he comments. He has been here since December, almost untraceable, in a house overlooking the beach, resting with his daughter Amparo Rama. These years were busy: he received, among others, the Cervantes Prize and the Guadalajara International Book Fair Award in 2018, the Federico García Lorca Award in 2016 and the Reina Sofía Award in 2015. He took part in literary fairs in Europe and America, took part in honors and conferences and recently presented the documentary Ida Vitale.
What follows is a fragment of the interview with this poet, translator, essayist and teacher, which began with the mad song of the cicadas and ended at dusk with the misfortune of the ungrateful rabbit. The reader will be able to see that her sophisticated words and tireless humor are impeccably sound, despite her “excessive age,” as she often says.
Questions. Did it bother you much to live to 100?
Answer. I wasn't very approachable [ríe]. I feel perfect, just a little hot.
Q “What happens by chance is no coincidence,” says his poem “The Back of the World.” How much coincidence has there been in your life?
R. Being born is an opportunity. I could have fallen into boredom, but no one forced me to read anything. Well, it just so happens that you have to help him.
Q You helped him, you were a curious girl.
R. All children are curious. Imagine a world full of children who are already bored. If you're not curious about a world that's completely new and different… Sometimes you get bored with people, yes. Because everything exists in families. There are those that entertain you and others that bore you.
Q Boredom is a source of wisdom and invention, says another of his poems. During this time, there seems to be little room for boredom with so much noise and stimulation. He doesn't believe?
R. Well, what may be stimulation for some may be boredom for others. Even incentives don't work.
A ring adorns Vitale's hand. Natalia Rovira
Q What does boredom mean to you?
R. It takes work to get out there. There is no one else.
Q You were the only child in a large family and grew up surrounded by elders. Was he bored?
R. I had many uncles of all kinds. I had an aunt, Débora, who was the director of a school, which can be very negative, but no. She was a restless woman. I grew up next to her and it wasn't bad.
As a child, Vitale tended to the plants in the family home, which her grandmother called Galinda in Latin, as did her aunt Ida, a botanist who died when she was young. From her he inherited his name, his room and his library. She went to school with her other aunt, Débora, a pioneer teacher. He protected his uncle Pericles, the good one, and loathed Rosalino, the superfluous doctor uncle. “That’s why I tried to stay healthy,” he says with a laugh. He later studied literature at the Faculty of Humanities in Montevideo under the Spaniard José Bergamín, his revered professor. She knew and read passionately Juan Carlos Onetti, admired Jorge Luis Borges and was a friend of the short story writer Felisberto Hernández. He named his dog Macedonio, after Macedonio Fernández, the famous Argentine writer.
In 1949 Vitale published his first collection of poems: The Light of This Memory. The second, Palabra dada, was published in 1953 and praised by Juan Ramón Jiménez, an inevitable reference. She married the critic Ángel Rama and had two children with him: Claudio and Amparo. During the Uruguayan dictatorship (1973-1985), he went into exile in Mexico with the poet Enrique Fierro, his great traveling companion. They returned to Uruguay and left again, this time to the United States, where they lived until 2016. “They are here and there: passing through / nowhere,” says her poem Exilios.
Books on the window in Ida Vitale's house. Natalia Rovira
Q Do you remember when you discovered your love of reading?
R. There were books in my house and they read to me. There was a children's library with novels and stories. It was wonderful. There wasn't much poetry. After that I went to [León] Tolstoy, because there was also a library of Russian authors there. I was a great prose reader. I think the novel is admirable when it's good.
Q Prose reader who decided to write poetry.
R. By choice or because I thought poetry was easier [ríe]. When you get used to admiring the good, you realize how difficult prose is.
Q In the Lexicon of Affinities he says: “Words are nomadic; “Bad poetry makes them sedentary.” If a child asked you what poetry was, what would you say?
R. First I would ask him: Don't you know something about this that could help me? What is poetry? It's hard to define.
Q Some reviews describe her as an “essentialist” poet. Does this definition suit you?
R. I don't know what you mean by that! They repeat it everywhere. I have to be the representative. You can write that I detest him.
His great friend Álvaro Mutis, a Colombian poet, said that he was jealous of the reader who would discover Vitale's works, because a pleasure awaited him of which he had no idea. In addition to those already mentioned, in 1960 the poet published “Everyone in His Night,” which reads: “I accept only this enlightened, true, impermanent world of mine. / I only praise its eternal labyrinth and its sure light, even when it hides.” Also Hearer andante (1972), Silica Garden (1980), Parvo Reino (1984), Pursuit of the Impossible (1998), Plants and Animals ( 2003) and El ABC de Byobu (2004).
The Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale in her home in Las Flores, (Uruguay) Natalia Rovira
Q When awarding him the Cervantes Prize in 2018, the jury emphasized that his language was both intellectual and popular. How did you take it?
R. I must have thought: Popular? [ríe]. But I didn't say anything. I've always thought that Chileans, for example, get along very well with anything that's popular. So that it doesn't become cumbersome or unpopular, you have to know how to program it. I love what's popular in music.
Q Music was a source of happiness for you, it is very present in your life and in your lyrics.
R. The music of course. Music could be heard at home. There were also people who listened to tango all the time. I don't rule out the possibility that they guided me at school. I always really liked it and tried to become a singer. There was a teacher who lived very close to his home, [la soprano] Olga Linne, from a German family who was wonderful. He gave lessons and gave a concert from time to time. And it was flawless. One day I said, “I have to learn from this woman.”
Q I can do it?
R. When I was young I studied for four or five years. I didn't go to the cinema, I didn't buy chocolate to pay for it. It fascinated me. He charged very little and I suspect he charged me less.
Q But he took the writing route and did it very well.
R. [Ríe] I wanted to be a singer like her.
Q Well, there are a lot of them. In the documentary about your 100th anniversary at TV Ciudad (public broadcaster in Montevidia), editor Valerie Miles claims that you are a literary rock star.
R. Rock star? How crazy! I don't strive for it. Well, it should be translated as “stone star.” [ríe y ríe]. Stone, I accept it.
The Las Flores Spa from the window of Ida Vitale's house. Natalia Rovira