154 Shakespearean Sonnets

A Portrait of The Dark Lady

When I read Shakespeare Sonnets, I feel as if he actually talks to me in front of me. Unlike his theather plays (pure drama) and other works, I experience an intimate relationship with the poet and quite understand his feelings to the fullest expression of his verses. Perhaps, the passion and love expressed in some of his verses are consolidated into a trigger for inspiration as if, in fact, it conveyed my feelings for someone especial.
Shakespeare has certainly touched my sensibility to read poetry. He is quite visual and even kinesthetic in his writing. The rythm in his sonnets is the rythm of British life, yesterday and today. I have selected a series of sonnets excerpts to look at from his collection and how they inspired me.
The average Shakespeare reader has probably done a much better job than I have. Except for my reading of his Sonnets, his extended and dramatic work remains a complicated or rather neglected reading task for me, with many incomplete attempts to understanding it from different, various perspectives. Yet his categories are clear: romance, honor, ethics, and various others of social living and values where friendship and love are to be exalted from his dramatic context. But his poetry is more personal and kinesthetic, powerfully driving a reading-like-a-writer drill into a comprehensive reverie of love and passion. This means that the reader lives the poetry, the story within the poem, and the feelings associated with each verse's rhyme and rhythm sometimes arguably being closer to a free verse (verso libre) than to perfect metrics.

Reading the first verse in one of Shakespeare's sonnets is like starting a new clean conversation with your loved one, whether in person, via email, or by text, it hinders a sense of clarity that opens up a new reverie in the daydreaming paradise, although few critics do believe in that the sonnets have some autobiographical value. In particular, I personally believe that some on ethics and business, such as, on usury and loans, could well be related to Shakespeare's real life. Indeed, some Shakespearean verses were dedicated to Southhampton, the patron of about twenty of them.

As I look for a real life or existentialist driver or trigger in Shakespeare Sonnets' hidden messages, I encountered the perceived paradox that many characters in need of love reject that of others who have an enormous need to love them, and you can refer to the frequent love and hate contrast in many of them. A similar but far more complex analogy could be made with entities like music itself. The first 126 poems related the romantic relationship between the young and the poet, while the rest through poem 154 focus on the Dark Lady. Certain poems numbered in the 80's and 90's involve the so called Rival Poet , who according to some experts, was Barnabe Barnes or one among Daniel, Drayton, Marlowe, Nash amd Spenser. The sonnets were dedicated to W.H., most likely William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Surprisingly, the Sonnets were published without Shakespeare's consent by Thomas Thorpe in 1609.

Thus, while the Shakespearean sonnets are not necessarily like his Romeo and Julieth, the paradox is expressed through some pre-determined or even pre-established intrigue among them through so many scenarios presented. The sonnets have a sense of metric imperfection, as it the poet had purposedly neglected it, and there is significant pessimism, contrasting feelings of love and hate, in content and style. Besides, indeed, the criteria through which love is presented in his Sonnets is not perfect either, but rather deeply passional and methodically organized like a small piece of condensed drama.

SELECTED SONNETS

P.S. To me Shakespeare is not only the greatest British literary figure, but also a blessed man and a holy soul.

On Eugene Ionesco and the New French Theatre

Ionesco and the New French Theater (Nouveau Théâtre)

In 1984, le Théatre du Triangle de Paris gave a magnificent presentation of Ionesco's Le Roi se Meurt at Teatro Amira de la Rosa in Barranquilla, Colombia, then under the direction of Alfredo Gomez-Zureck and with the attendance of the city's large French and Francophone community. Le Roi se Meurt had first been played in Paris at the Théâtre de l'Alliance Française on December 15, 1962, by Jacques Mauclair, in which the king expresses his fear of death, some sort of existentialist anguish (angoisse métaphysique).  A couple of weeks ago, after attending a double comedy presentation by Georges Feydeau through the French and Italian Department at Princeton University on the Whitman College campus, I learned that they had recently presented Le Roi se Meurt there as well.


Interestingly enough, born in Romania, lived his early age in France while his father studied law in Paris. After returning to Romania for most of his adosescence, Ionesco was then subject to an unlearning, learning, and relearning process upon his return to France. This compehensive linguistic process allows him to express his concern that he does not only writes literature but true theater, meaning that his text has a specific expression and representation in each scene context. Therefore, his characters are vivid and remarkably well delineated. Ionesco was always criticized one way or the other but never ignored by the literary critic of his time until his final success.

Unlike Racine, Moliere or Corneille, Ionesco owns a prohibited way to impress his audience and touch the sensitivity not only by words but also by the expression vividly deter,ined through his scenes, context, and content. This was especially part of the Nouveau Théâtre started around 1953-1954.

Ionesco reflects his inspiring own fear of death in the Roi se Meurt

Ionesco had looked at Camus and Sartre for inspiration, yet he imposes his creativity beyond La Peste and La Nausée, conceptually an existentialist view of a rotten apple society, perhaps, with a surreal taste. Other explicit images of Ionesco's theater involve politics and violence. An analytic study of his works suggests that intrigue among characters is both a key trigger and driver among those well-defined characters.

Other important works by Ionesco include La cantatrice Chauve, L'Impromptu de l'Alma, Jack ou la Soumission, La Soif et La Faim, La Leçon, La Nièce Épouse, and Victimes du Devoir.

The "Chronicle" Character Case

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García Márquez Wins Case on Copyright of
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

The 1982 Nobel Prize in literature, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, has recently won a case for his copyright on his Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada). The complaint had been filed by the real-life character, an insurance man, matching that of Bayardo San Román in that novel. García Márquez had suggested that there was a Leit Motif that inspired him and that was simply that the central mechanism is the story of the man who returned his wife to her parents on the same wedding night after finding that she was not a virgen. He added that except for the dramatic context, the rest of the story is fiction (false), created by him, and that all characters are fictitious and have no match in real life.

The Superior Court of Barranquilla (Tribunal Supremo de Barranquilla) did not find any reasons to honor any of the several plaintiff's claims on copyright, invasion or privacy, and other honor related issues such as damage to his reputation, as filed.

Beyond his Chronicle, García Márquez is most notably recognized for his One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Autumn of the Patriarch (El Otoño del Patriarca), a rather poetic and complex narration of a Latin American dictator's fall.

As per my literature teachers of various European origins, most notably Spaniards and French, around 1982 García Márquez had been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature solely for his materpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. This theory was probably supported by biographer Jacques Gillard whom I met around that time at the Alliance Française de Barranquilla. An opinion that contradicted the native Latin American literature critics who considered him a Nobel Prize winner based on his comprehensive works, including novels, short stories, essays, and movie scripts. The former vision suggested that until 1982 every other work was simply an extension to his materpiece while the latter considered it to be a comprehensive work in process, which has continued to grow to today's date.

The Creation of the Meta-Psychological Gender

Announcing the Publication of my Second Book:
El Retrato del Fantasma

After several years of reorganization, I have put together my short story book in Spanish, The Portrait of the Ghost (El Retrato del Fantasma). The book includes a collection of my best twelve short stories, written in Barranquilla, Colombia, and a selection of four of my short stories written in the United States, most of them in Montclair and East Brunswick, New Jersey. So, there are about 16 short stories in the book, and over 250 pages. The book had been copyrighted in the US Library of Congress as Con Los Dedos en la Cabeza (El Retrato del Fantasma), where the former main title that refers to a lost family short story and a meditation drill, and recalls an unrelated French movie.

The book combines fiction and non-fiction events and real and surreal characters. The book is dedicated to the memory of my granfather Hermenegildo, in the picture atop, whose portrait inspired my best short story during my late teen years, the winner of the 1982 national literary short story prize at Universidad de Cartagena. The short story was published in the literary page of Diario del Caribe by La Esquina, a literary group that served me as a motivation to pursue my literary career. When the short story was published then, it contained a special header referring to what I called the meta-psychological short story genre (el cuento meta-psychológico), meaning a combination of the psychological short story gender with paranormal (metaphysical) events.

The book will be published in the first half of 2012.

My only novel attempt in Spanish was entitled La Casa Sola, a literary work that I abandoned several years ago. For the future, I could probably attempt to write my first novel in French, as I get used to writing in that language and dreaming of living in Paris.

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