Listening to the murmur of drowning. As regards passages and their limits

Abstract

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.