Untimely Uses of Western Historical and Cultural Heritage in the Poetry of Aldo Oliva

Abstract

Among the papers Aldo Oliva left when he died, there is a kind of ironic autobiography that ended up in the back cover of his book Poesía Completa. There he says: «At the age of fifteen I ran into culture; I don’t remember it». Such a statement sounds peculiar coming from a poet like Oliva, whose erudition and patient work over the western tradition is immediately evident. However, this paradoxical intersection between tradition and novelty, between culture and oblivion is to be found across the author’s whole oeuvre; he produces a poetics that is at the same time classical and rupturist. Starting from the analysis of some poems from his last book, Ese General Belgrano y otros poemas (2000), and some Nietzs- chean reflections on the weight of history for life, we will approach this double positioning that conforms the singularity of Oliva, and we will try to trace the filiations that create this stressed realm. The «oblivion» of Oliva, we will conclude, can be read in this sense: as irreverence to the past, as a biased reading that pierces its apparent completeness to allow creation. Poetry (art) once again sets in motion a tradition that seemed frozen, petrified: as proposed by one of the poems analysed, which could
be considered an ars poetica, poetry transforms emblems into problems, into «the seminal adventure of the fruit».