Abstract

RODRIGUEZ, Susana A. C.. Listening to the murmur of drowning. As regards passages and their limits. Tóp. Sem [online]. 2007, n.17, pp.45-61. ISSN 2594-0619.

Relato, by Eduardo Atilio Romano, constitutes itself as threshold and passage in the book of poems Estrecho mar (2006). The author, born in San Ramón de la Nueva Orán (Salta, Argentina), wrote it as a consequence of his exile in Nerja (Malaga, Spain). The experience of the journey -made because of economic difficulties (now, not political ones) that force young people to a kind of exile whose characteristics could be the subject of another essay- becomes condensed and evident in the images of the Africans that try -putting their life at risk- to cross the Strait of Gibraltar (passage to the threshold of a desired world, the European one) -what a paradox- in order to survive.

The reflection on the function that the poem has in relation to the other poems of the book and to the experience of the poet’s life makes us think in the figure of the passage as a double semiotic instance: place of manifestation of actions, and threshold, border zone that is movement towards a new state. The theoretical foundations lie on the idea of text (Iuri Lotman) as a device of intelligent memory that permits, in our opinion, to grasp its “space” (Michel de Certeau) as the scene in which the passage to another world and the the others is inscribed. Thus understood, Relato is a palimpsest text (Silvia Barei) written over previous texts, re-writing of the ritual passage of the birth and the journey.