The Clearings of Time

Literature and poetry embrace many experiences from places that are far from the official time of watches, mythical spaces where time is immobilised, closed spaces like caskets guarding the hours. Physics and mysticism also share many metaphors on how to free oneself from temporality. Time halted or suspended within time, time out of time, time taken away, or time made to grow like an appendix to a calendar. Fernando Pessoa, Octavio Paz, Juan de la Cruz, Clarice Lispector, Thomas Tranströmer, and also Menchu Gutiérrez herself have written on numerous occasions about such experiences.

Menchu Gutiérrez is a novelist, poet, essayist and translator. She has recently published the collection of poems Lo extraño, la raíz (The Strange, the Root, Siruela, 2015) as well as the fictional works Araña, cisne, caballo (Spider, Swan, Horse, Siruela, 2014) and El faro por dentro (The Beacon Within, Siruela, 2011), which are about memory, contemplation and the passing of time.

Presented by: Anna Guitart, literary journalist at Tria 33.