Poetry and Tapas

Carlos Edmundo de Ory was in town last week and I was quite fortunate to be able to meet him.  This image here to the left (not very good quality--it's a photo taken from the print version of El Mundo, whose Andalusia version isn't online) was taken at the start of a wonderful lunch hosted by Julio Neira.  I had translated two of Edmundo de Ory's poems for an anthology that Jesús Aguado put together on poems about India and which has just been published.  (Jesús is in Málaga this week organizing a series of talks on bridges between East and West.  We got together for coffee this morning.)  In any case, Carlos is very friendly and fun to talk to, as is his wife, Laura.  De Ory was exiled from Spain in the 1950s and has lived in France ever since.  He has published dozens of volumes of poetry and is best known as the founder of the postista movement.  Carlos Edmundo gave a lively reading at the Centro Cultural de la Generación del 27 while he was here.  Cristóbal Montilla, the tall guy in the photo standing to my right, moderated the event at the Centro Cultural.  (The others in the photo, from left to right, are Rafael Ballesteros, Julio Neira, José Ignacio Díaz Pardo, and Paco Ruiz Noguera.)  After the reading I took two of my students to El Orellana for some tapas.  El Orellana certainly deserves its own entry, as it is one of the classic traditional tapas bars in Malaga, perhaps outdone only by Lo Güeno.   There are lots of great places to tapear in Malaga, but rather few old school places like El Orellana are left.  And  I'll write more about Carlos another day. Here's my translation of the poem "Titiksha", which has absolutely nothing to do with tapas, but which could serve me well if I'm ever feeling an urge for, say, some little squid in their ink, and I'm nowhere near a good bar where they might serve them:

In India there are yogis who practice

Titiksha.  Do you know what titiksha is?

It is the virtue of holy patience,

suffering all ills without complaining.

And there in the Himalayan snow

those unclothed men sit,

or they sleep at the edge of the Ganges

exposed to the midday sun.