Medbh McGuckian y la ansiedad ecofeminista: “La contingencia del acontecer”

Autores/as

  • María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia Universidade da Coruña

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2020-9757

Palabras clave:

Medbh McGuckian, “The Contingency of Befalling”, elegía, poesía, Irlanda del Norte, ecofeminismo, crisis climática

Resumen

El presente artículo analiza el poema inédito de Medbh McGuckian “The Contingency of Befalling”, que aborda la actual crisis climática desde una posición ecofeminista. Podría decirse que la poeta forma parte de la tendencia elegíaca de Irlanda del Norte al tratar cuestiones de su país, pero se aparta de una tradición dominada por los hombres y conecta el lamento con cuestiones éticas, políticas, nacionales, ecológicas y relacionadas con las mujeres. Este poema está conectado con los de su reciente libro Marine Cloud Brightening (2019), en el que se incluyen poemas de duelo tanto por su hermano como por otros poetas irlandeses fallecidos recientemente, con especial atención a Seamus Heaney. La perspectiva de McGuckian sobre la situación de la tierra y de los que viven en ella es sombría y la vincula con las penurias, si las políticas de los gobernantes no cambian.

Biografía del autor/a

María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia, Universidade da Coruña

María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia is Full-Professor of English Studies at the Universidade da Coruña and Dean of the Faculty of Philology. Her latest publications include monographs: Mid Eighteenth-century Female Literary Careers in The Monthly Review and The Critical Review, with Mónica Amenedo Costa (ArCiBel 2018); journal articles in Multicultural Shakespeares  (2017); Coolabah (2017); Boletín Galego de literatura (2017), ES Journal. Spanish Journal of English Studies (2017), Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance (2017), Women’s Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal (2018), Oceánide (2020); and book chapters in Bloomsbury The Reception of George Eliot in Europe (2016), Ex-sistere. Women’s Mobility in Contemporary Irish, Welsh and Galician Literatures (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), Femmes auteurs du dix-huitième siécle. Nouvelles approches critiques, Honoré Champion (2018), The Invention of Female Biography (Routledge, 2018), Out on the Fields. Reimagining Irish Literature and Culture (Rennes Univ. 2018), and The Ethics and Aesthetics of Ecocaring: Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s), with Margarita Estévez-Saá (Routledge, 2019).

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Appendix

 

“The Contingency of Befalling”

 

In the galloping melt of the lethal church

there are eighty species of lupin,

a grove of candles, Mary plants.

their perfume becomes a ghost of itself,

unrewindable as a woman’s sense of smell.

 

The formerly esteemed fragrances

of nature’s good intentions photographed

lips in that psychedelic year, scented

the signature, the fallen god of our senses.

 

I obey the freshness of water, perfume’s

ally, in my self-scape dream,

as the global bleaches out the subfeminine,

laundry drying on the outside of the room.

 

It is the thin character of angels,

skimmingly light, to soak graves

with spirit steps, the body wrapped

in stringy bark, fever car just departed.

 

Witches who don’t have a library

stole my symptoms, my monthsick

hands in some pattern of dangerous prayer,

their t-celled wombs wider than leechbook leaves.

 

They wrap this earth in black wool

and sell it, spine like a railway,

tree and branch breakage,

the sympathy of silk, her valley finally

reborn into the world with a tongue now dust.

 

“La contingencia del acontecer”

 

Al derretirse al galope la iglesia letal

Hay ochenta especies de altramuces,

Un huerto de velas, las plantas de María.

Su perfume se convierte en un fantasma de sí mismo,

Irrebobinable como el sentido del olfato de una mujer.

 

Las fragancias antes estimadas

De las buenas intenciones de la naturaleza retrataban

Labios en aquel año sicodélico, perfumada

La firma, el dios caído de nuestros sentidos.

 

Obedezco a la frescura del agua, del perfume

Aliada, en mi sueño de autoescape,

Como lo global blanquea lo subfemenino,

La colada secando en la parte exterior de la habitación.

 

Es el carácter fino de los ángeles,

Superficialmente ligero, para absorber de las tumbas

Con pasos de espíritu, el cuerpo amortajado

Con corteza fibrosa, el coche de la fiebre acaba de partir.

 

Las brujas que no tienen biblioteca

Robaron mis síntomas, mi regla

presenta una cadencia de rezo peligroso,

Sus matrices de células T más grandes que las hojas del libro de las sanguijuelas.

 

Envuelven esta tierra en lana negra

Y la venden, con la espina vertebral como la de un ferrocarril,

Rotura de árboles y ramas,

La sintonía de la seda, su valle finalmente

Renacido al mundo con una lengua ahora de polvo.

Publicado

31-10-2020

Cómo citar

María Jesús Lorenzo-Modia. (2020). Medbh McGuckian y la ansiedad ecofeminista: “La contingencia del acontecer”. Estudios Irlandeses, 15(2), 53–64. https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2020-9757