Montehermoso
Poetry is fantastic
6 Nov, 2023
13:00
Poetry is beautiful when we read it, when we make it ours; but it touches a nerve string when somebody reads it in our ear. In Tartalo. I Week of the Fantastic in the Arts we will have the opportunity to enjoy a selection of poems through the voices of a poet (Juan de la Cruz Ramos) and three rhapsodists (Txaro Martínez, Esther Villar and Luis Lagos), who will attempt to take us to magical worlds, full of power and passion. Poems that offer a window to the fantastic and the unknown, since, as the poet Gabriel Celaya wrote, poetry is a weapon loaded with future.
Traveling through the sounds and languages of medieval Europe with poetry, song and prayer
Facultad Letras
10 Nov, 2023
17:30-18:00
In this poetry recitation session, Tomás Vicente Ferreira will take us through the languages and sounds of medieval Europe (and even farther afield) by means of its poetry. Poems, songs, prayers and excerpts to be recited (all in the original languages), include, but are not limited to, selections from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the song-book of the Harley Lyrics, the Galician-Portuguese cancioneiros, the Cantigas de Santa Maria by King Alfonso X the Wise and probably a provocative Provençal troubadour song by William IX of Aquitaine. If possible, Tomás will also try to include bits of an Old Icelandic religious poem, at least one Byzantine Greek liturgical hymn (maybe one by St. John of Damascus) and a portion of a Classical Armenian prayer-poem either by St. Gregory of Narek or St. Nerses IV Shnorhali. Tomas would love to (but as of writing this does not know if it will be possible for him to) include a very small sample of Shota Rustaveli’s medieval Georgian epic The Knight in the Panther Skin and/or of Slavonic or Ethiopian Ge’ez poetry. The session will end with recitation of some verses of St Hildegard of Bigen’s Latin poems in which she uses words from her invented language the lingua ignota and two “neo-medieval” poems/prayers in Quenya written by the great J. R. R. Tolkien. Do come and hear it, and we hope you will like it (if you don’t, you can try to sleep through it, ideally without snoring)
