Una poetica del descenso: entre mezcla y conversacion en Blanca Varela

This essay proposes to read the poetry of Peruvian author Blanca Varela (1926) as the embodiment of a poetics of descendant, which implies an existential sense of fall and disenchantment. Varela's literary production is situated in the context of what has been called the Generation of the 1950s in Peruvian literature and posvanguardismo in twentieth-century Spanish-American poetry. Her poetic writing poses critical questions to the symbolic power of language, in order to bring to the fore its finitude and historical immersion. Focused on the analysis of Varela's poem "Conversación con Simone Weil," from her book Valses y otras falsas confesiones (1972), this essay builds intersections between Varela's poetic approach to the issue of hunger and existential disenchantment, and Simone Weil's elaborations on the notion of "mouvement descendant" and the experience of starving. In this way, the Peruvian poet develops a writing strategy based on a mixture of metaphysical and bodily, biological, existential, and social dimensions, through the formulation of the poem as a site of conversation.