Poets in the literature
grecolatina Maite López las Heras
Ballena blanca, 2022

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Forgetfulness is the most important death and memory seems to remedy. The poetic anthology in the Greco-Latina Literature (White Whale, 2022), produced by Maite López Las Heras (Azkoitia, 1985), is a poetic anthology that aims to turn the brasa of the past into a current flame and, if possible, illuminate the future.

In the book Azkoitia-Azkoitia collects texts from 24 Poles of Classical Antiquity, of Greek and Latin origin. But the collection goes further, as it covers not only poems, but also poets women, who are useful to understand their work and to investigate and face the exclusion that they have historically suffered. Specifically, we can find a prologue and an entry, along with a chronological series that goes from the work of Safo to Akonia Fabia Pauline. With all this, we could say that reading offers two simultaneous possibilities: on the one hand, an approximation to literature and classical culture and, on the other, a reflection on the possible connections between the old and the current situation.

Among them is one of the issues that focus on the very purpose of the book, that of the femininity of poets. This is an issue that involves something in the current literary landscape: in short you can find its reverse to everyone, and we know what it can mean to link authorship and writing to gender. However, the inneutrality of the playing field of literature makes it inevitable to proclaim that these poets were women. In this sense, López proposes, in analogy with the placental word that was approved in 2018, the concept of poetandre, because the word poet, not only is etymologically but also masculine in the imaginary that still dominates, could be recognized by the mere designation.

The collection requires minimum knowledge of classical culture or, failing that, a desire to know it. However, the book itself is a stimulus: it contains elements to awaken that passion for knowledge, since the current concerns it generates can be an enthusiasm to know the past. Anthology is, in short, a memory of what we have to remember without forgetting that we have forgotten poets.