Author Interview

Roberto Sosa

Conversation by the Sea: An Interview with Roberto Sosa
by Jo Anne Engelbert
In Yoro, Honduras, birthplace of poet Roberto Sosa (1930), it occasionally rains fish -- symbol, for Garcia Marquez, of Latin America's magical realism. Showers of fish are not the town's only miracle, as we learned in an interview with Sosa during a conference in Belize.

J. What was it like growing up in a remote rural area like Yoro? How did you learn about poetry there? There could not have been many books in Yoro.
R. There were almost none. There were very few books in the entire town and hardly any in my school. It was almost impossible for me to find books. But nevertheless I discovered poetry there at the age of thirteen.

J. How did that happen? What did you discover?
R. I learned that poetry has the power to console. And because it does, we have to have it. Poetry fills a human need.

J. How did you learn this?
R. I'm blessed with an odd gift. I've always been able to memorize verses just by hearing or reading them a couple of times. I started repeating verses to myself in my mind, over and over. I would recite, mentally, La prière pour tous by Victor Hugo, actually the Spanish translation by Andrés Bello, La oración por todos

J. That's an amazing translation; I love it too. Where did you hear or read La oración por todos if there weren't any books where you lived?
R. I have to thank my teacher, Joaquín Reyes Tejera. He was my Spanish teacher in public school. He loved poetry, and he put together a handwritten anthology for us.

J. How did he make copies?
R. He dictated the poems to us in class and we wrote them down. Then he corrected the copies and gave them back to us. And then they were ours to keep. I still have my copy.

J. What a labor of love.
R. He loved poetry, as I said, and he wanted us to love it too.

J. What poets were in the anthology besides Victor Hugo?
R. Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, our Honduran poets, Juan Ramón Molina, Luis Andrés Zúñiga, Froylan Turcios, and many others. I memorized every poem.

J. Is that when you began to write poems?
R. Yes. I was fascinated images, metaphors, and with the phenomenon of the truth expressed in verse. I guess you could say that I began to feel a desire to write because of what my teacher gave us to read, what I was exposed to. He showed me a path I could follow.

J. Did he help you?
R. When he saw I was interested in literature, he showed me the one or two books of poetry he possessed. Some elements of my poetry probably came from that reading. My fascination with the adjective, for example. I remember being astonished by the adjective "espléndidas," for example, applied to a woman's temples in a poem in my teacher's book. I had scarcely even heard the word -- or most of the other words for that matter. I think this teacher "put the arrows in my hand," as we say in Spanish.

J. Were there other influences besides Joaquín Reyes Tejera?
R. A few years later, still in the forties, I came across a book by Giovanni Papini that made a tremendous impression on me. It was an autobiographical work called Un uomo finito, which I read in the Spanish translation, of course. What was so interesting to me was that Papini described the readings that led to his knowledge of literature. I had nothing else to go by, so I decided to follow this outline. Thanks to Papini, I read Homer, Dante, Petrarch, and all the other authors he mentions. By then I could get books in Tegucigalpa. But it was always hard for me to find them and then of course to afford to buy them.

J. Did you read them on your own?
R. Yes, I had no other choice. I remember one of the authors I read was Knut Hamsun.

J. Did he mean a lot to you?
R. Yes, I was impressed by his simplicity, his absolute lack of rhetoric. Nothing but the bare word. I consciously tried to imitate him. These readings began to open a new way for me, a kind of personal creation that was very simple, without pretension, and I hope without rhetoric.

J. When you started to write, no one in Honduras was doing what you were doing. You gave a model of a new kind of poetry.
R. I was attracted by testimonial writing. I suspected that this type of writing came closest to the truth. And for me, truth, a specific truth, had to be the basis of poetry. Honduras was not a folkloric reality, it was a transcendent reality, and this transcendence had to find its aesthetic formula: we had to find an exact base and the form to express it -- this had to be balanced, integrated, like two halves of the same thing. I started from the social reality, the life I lived, the city, reflected in mirrors and tried to find the form.

J. Was it dangerous to publish Los pobres [The Poor]?
R. Los pobres was not extremely dangerous. At that time in Honduras there was not so much persecution as an eye watching you, constant surveillance. Intimidating, yes.

J. How about your next book, Un mundo para todos dividido [A World for All, Divided]?
R. Well, it's an extension of the world of Los pobres. But the tone is more accusatory. My friend Andrés Morris said it conveys an atmosphere of fear. I guess he's right. I wanted to portray the nervous system of a society in the process of collapse

J. I know that Secreto Militar was dangerous for you. I personally heard death threats...
R. Secreto militar was written to raise consciousness, to denounce a real gallery of criminals invested with absolute power. Somoza, Stroessner, Duvalier, Pinochet, Carías. It was a necessary book I think I would have been incapable of not writing this book. I paid a price for it at the time. But strangely enough, these three books, Los pobres, Un mundo para todos dividido and Secreto militar, although they were problematic for me when I wrote them, had positive consequences for my life. They have been my way of earning a living.

J. It's always seemed ironic to me that these books that branded you as someone to be watched are now required reading for Honduran students. Secreto militar was an exorcism, no? Your next two books, El llanto de las cosas [The Weeping of Things] and Máscara suelta [The Lifted Mask], have none of that vitriol.
R. In El llanto de las cosas I wanted to return to the things closest to my heart. It is practically a book of elegies. But the elegies are not for the dead, but for the living, for what I love and honor, persons, things, animals.

J. And Máscara suelta?
R. The theme is woman. Eroticism, but a "musical eroticism" -- not desire, but a restrained, attenuated emotion that would show the complexity of a hand reaching toward another hand.

J. This woman is not an object...
R. Oh, no. She is companion, friend, lover, defender of the hearth; the balance between spirit and matter...

J. I have never seen woman less objectified, more complete.
R. I mean for her to be the symbol of the genius of the species.

J. You identify woman with the sea.
R. My link to the sea started in the womb. My mother was in Trujillo before I was born, a beautiful port where the waves crash against the shore. The sea is a center of beauty because it is a terrifying mass. It attracts us strongly because we can't save ourselves from it and because we know that we emerged from its waters. The shore attracts us because we want to come closer to the sea, we want to submerge ourselves in it, even though this ice can become death; we can't resist. The sea makes us feel humble, helpless, completely defenseless, because it most resembles the unknown. Love may be the only salvation from the destructive image of the danger of the sea. The music of the sea is the music of the spheres the philosophers talked about. When everything has turned to stone, the music of the sea may persist.

J. I was just thinking about Joaquín Reyes Tejeda. Teachers can never be sure what they may set in motion.
R. That's a good thing!

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