In late April 2010 Brines was awarded the prestigious Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana. You can see announcements on the following newspaper websites: in English in the Latin American Herald Tribune; and in Spanish in La Vanguardia. The jury acclaimed Brines as, among other things, a 'great metaphysical poet', and one moreover who through his verse 'teaches us (how to) live'. Not inappropriately then, Brines was featured on Spanish TV on the day of the announcement, reading his poem, 'El teléfono negro', 'The Black Telephone', which aptly illustrates this metaphysical quality embodied in the activities and thoughts of everyday living.
In this poem, taken from La última costa (1995), the speaker describes the experience of ringing up the telephone numbers of dead friends, knowing full well that this is a futile exercise. He will no longer hear the sound of cherished voices. Or will he? Just as the speaker climbs into bed at the end of a long night spent alone in his house, the telephone against all expectations starts to ring:
Me apresuro. Le digo que me diga. (l.15)
- A line that is as simple as it is idiomatic in Spanish. Customarily, in Spain at least, the usual way to answer the telephone is 'diga' or 'dígame'. So the speaker in the second sentence is reporting in indirect speech what is being said into the receiver. To preserve this formula in our English version we found we had no option but to sacrifice the pithy parallelism of the orginal:
I rush to pick up. I ask who's calling.
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