Raúl Dorra considered that the word is music transformed into voice: Gatti

Puebla, Pue. In the main forum of the Carolino building, headquarters of the National Book Fair of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), a meeting also known as Fenali, was presented on Tuesday night Tales gatheredsecond volume of the complete works of the Argentine thinker exiled in Mexico Raúl Dorra (1937-2019), a project promoted by the BUAP and the University of Villa María, in Córdoba, Argentina.

The edition was coordinated by the writer Juan Sebastián Gatti, who during the presentation noted that the stories now collected resonate with the novels, academic texts and essays of his mentor, Raúl Dorra, Well, there are themes and aesthetics that he worked on meticulously. I say things like noise, harmony, echoes, resonances, and I don’t do it gratuitously, because one of the guiding threads of Raúl’s work is precisely the music of the word, the first word, he said, thinking, among other things, in poetry.

For a conversationalist, a poet, a student of the modes of speech, the word was music that is constituted as a voice, Gatti stressed. A work is that, he once said in an interview, a universe of forms. I believe that what you want to communicate is desire, which can be expressed in a story, a dramatic form, a poem. What is important here is the construction of a voice or voices that call and respond, that communicate and get lost. Literature is a call and a wait. Literature is a voice and an ear, so.

In an interview prior to the presentation of the book, Gatti explained: The more one reads Raúl’s work, the more one realizes that it is a harmonious, integral set of texts that go beyond the mere separation of genres, in which this creative integration is noted..

all the stories

Something interesting, he highlighted, was that the editor responsible for this volume, Carlos Gazzera, from the Villa María University Press, had as one of his concerns bringing together all the stories published in various books, making a work that went beyond becoming ornament or intended only for the study of specialized readers.

It was not so. On the contrary, not only could all of Raúl’s stories be brought together, but they work well together in a single volume. We try to be respectful in chronology and writing. Thus, when you read them together, you realize that this integration is notable not only in the complete set, but in its subparts.

Raúl Dorra, values ​​Gatti, He was a splendid recreator because he had, as a literary scholar, a fine ear for popular traditions, specializing in oral literature. Raúl had an attentive ear and enormous capacity to reproduce and recreate those verbal registers that recognize him as the owner of a literary virtuosity in which popular verbal registers appear in the midst of cultured registers..

Gatti goes further: “Raúl Dorra’s work was in many ways ahead of its time; Today, this work can find more and better readers than he had at the time, for many reasons, among them because he wrote his entire life outside of the mainstream, far from the main channels of literary production, which were not of interest to them.” What Raúl Dorra did was ahead of the most recent, most current literature, for the type of writing, the themes and the ways in which it approached the characters and their emotions.

María Isabel Filinich, co-founder of the Semiotics and Significance Studies program that Dorra founded in 1998, participated in the presentation of the new volume of the series dedicated to the Argentine author.

She recalled the work of the exiled writer, who arrived in Puebla in 1976 to be part of the BUAP and dedicate himself to teaching, research, promoting culture and to bequeath a literary work such as Tales gathered, what deserves a place among the great writers.

He explained that another of the aspects that Dorra worked on has to do with the transformations that writing and reading have undergone. He recalled that he reflected on the dialogue that is established today between different languages, in which reading would have to be seen as a kind of significant practice that is deposited on diverse supports and forms of expression.

Today, Raúl could say, any space must become a page and can be used to collect signs of any nature, which shows that writing is not limited to alphabetic writing, but to any type of writing supported by the most diverse supports.

Tales gatheredas well as the first volume of his complete works, The writer’s craftare available through the BUAP distribution channels.