Submergir-se en el naufragi

Adrienne Rich
2022
16.00
144
ISBN: 978-84-18693-08-3

16.00


Diving into the wreck, a National Book Award-winning book, was written at a moment of impasse between the life Rich had known until then and the life that awaited her. Her husband of seventeen years committed suicide in the fall of 1970. From that point on, all of Rich’s romantic experiences would be with other women. In Diving into the wreck we find, for the first time bluntly, the change of consciousness that had been building for years, and the author deals with topics such as language and its relationship with power, the historical relationship between men and women, and sexuality. It reveals the intellectual and creative journey made up to that moment, and it is also where you can see the world that opened up in front of her. We readers accompany the poetic self in this search for a new way of trying to grasp and explain the world. It is a me that inquires, doubts and illuminates.

Throughout the work, the importance of language is shown to portray these new realities, fleeing from male literary canons and, therefore, looking for an alternative way of expressing oneself. There is a commitment, latent in most poems, to the idea of ​​community and interdependence. Consciousness, which may seem personal, is actually a social and shared consciousness. There is also a commitment to unearthing the silenced, and the fact is that Diving into the wreck is a book that, in essence, wants to give space to possibility. Pol Guasch’s translation into Catalan, beyond respecting the formal awkwardness of the original, keeps the emphasis where Rich places it, and makes the potential meanings reach us intact.

Rich is talked about as a political poet, but her poetry never fell into the slogan. It reaches us with the same validity as half a century ago because what transcends it are not only the ideas that arise, but the mind – curious, intelligent, open to mistakes – that is behind it.

Translation by Pol Guasch
Foreword by Ada Bruguera

Biography of the author
Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929, Maryland – 2012, California) was an American lesbian poet, essayist, intellectual, critic and activist. She died at the age of 82. As a student, her poems won the prestigious Yale Prize for Young Poetry, from which came A Change of  World (1951), which showcased his formal technique.

Her next work, Diving into the wreck, shows the transformation from well-crafted but imitative poetry to an energetic personal style. Her growing commitment to the feminist movement influenced much of her work. Her poetic work, along with that of Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, have inspired the struggle not only of North American feminists but also of Latin America.