Blanca Varela

Blanca Varela Poems

Blanca Varela Biography

Blanca Leonor Varela Gonzáles (10 August 1926 – 12 March 2009) was a Peruvian poet. Varela was born in Lima. Her mother was a composer who authored many famous creole waltzes. She studied Humanities and Education at the National University of San Marcos where she met other future writers such as Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Javier Sologuren, Jorge Eduardo Eielson, and her future husband, the artist and sculptor Fernando de Szyszlo with whom she has two children. In 1949 they travelled to Paris where she met Octavio Paz, a key figure in her life, who introduced her to the artists and intellectuals there, such as André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Michaux, Alberto Giacometti and Fernand Léger, among others; and also other Latin American authors who lived in France at that time, for example Carlos Martínez Rivas. Paz persuaded her to publish her poetry, and in the preface to the first edition of her debut book Ese puerto existe (1959) he wrote: "At that time we all used to sing. And among those songs you could hear a lonesome song of one Peruvian girl: Blanca Varela. The most secret, timid and natural of them all." Later Varela lived in Florence and Washington, D.C. In 1962 she returned to Lima and since then traveled mainly to US, Spain and France. She was awarded the Medalla de Honor by the Peruvian National Institute of Culture, the Premio Octavio Paz de Poesía y Ensayo (Octavio Paz Prize for poetry and essays), the Premio Internacional de Poesía Ciudad de Granada Federico García Lorca (City of Granada Federico García Lorca International Poetry Prize, 2006; as the first woman ever), and the Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana (Queen Sophia's Prize for Iberoamerican Poetry, 2007). Her poems are surrealist in the way that they try to express the world in an innocent way from the inner space's point of view, yet they cannot prevent cruelty from coming into them from the outside world. This attempt to find perfection with every new poem has, according to Mario Vargas Llosa who used Varela's poem Ternera acosada por tábanos (Calf tortured by horse-flies) as a notable example of her philosophy, "the quality of heroes from ancient myths who die, but fight to the very last moment anyway." Her books have been translated into English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Czech.)

The Best Poem Of Blanca Varela

Family Secret

I dreamed of a dog
a skinned dog
its body sang its red body whistled
I asked the other one
the one who turns out the light the butcher
what has happened
why are we in the dark

this is a dream you are alone
there is no one else
light does not exist
you are the dog you are the flower which barks
sharpen your tongue sweetly
your sweet black four-legged tongue

dreams scorch the skin of man
human skin burns disappears
only the mutt's red pulp is clean
the true light dwells in the crust of its eyes
you are the dog
you are the skinned mongrel every night
dream of yourself and let that be enough

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