Poesía y juramento: los monólogos dramáticos de Álvaro Cunqueiro

The aim of this article is to recognise the relations of linguistic, semantic and pragmatic contiguity in a series of poems of the book Herba aquí ou acolá, by the Galician writer Álvaro Cunqueiro. The performance dimension of the poems is based on their link to the judicial declaration—generally built from the self-nomination of the characters. As a result of literary styling, the place of justice in these texts becomes a threshold largely determined by declarative peculiarities pertaining to dramatic monologue. Even though theoretic sources on dramatic monologue have highlighted its character based on a specific place, the places referred to in these texts revolve around a net of transcultural references, deeply affected by the update of the historical-literary and/or mythical past. The series dislocates and transmutes the spatial references, undoing the identity illusion of being rooted to an exclusive space, as well as the linguistic principle of decorum. The linguistic register is, in fact, one of the elements through which Cunqueiro creates a dislocated semantic reference. It is also an eloquent hint at the somewhat liminal position acquired by some bilingual texts/authors.