Rodrigo Guzmán Barros, lawyer, current ambassador to Ethiopia, author among others of the book of poetry, “Asimov, A Journey to Oblivion” (Santiago, 2021) with other writers, author of “Díptico Poético” (Bucharest 2019) and Prontuario Poetico (Bucharest, 2016), tells us that diplomacy is linked to poetry in Chile, since Gabriela Mistral and Neruda, and just like it, it helps to discover new worlds.
Ethiopia is a very interesting place, he points out, the land of the Queen of Sheba, and of Lucy, the first Hominid, cradle of civilization, of Man. “Writing poetry is part of my DNA,” he points out, “I have a vocation as a diplomat, but I feel that I was born a poet, who look at it differently, like the vates (of predicting) who also exorcised demons. In this world today, more poets are needed than ever,” he adds.
“The experience of “Asimov, a journey towards oblivion”, arose in the pandemic, I lived in Bucharest and at the initiative of the poet Marco López, based in Washington, we met on Zoom on Saturdays, with other writers such as Eugenio Dávalos, Patricio Hidalgo, Samuel Leal, etc., we talked and wrote and invited poets of different nationalities, thus this ship begins its cosmic flight, impregnating that difficult time with poetry. Gonzalo Contreras, writer and editor, said “it must be immortalized in a book” and that is how it was born. Unfortunately, Gonzalo died shortly after a year and a half ago,” he clarifies that this is not Gonzalo Contreras Fuentes, the novelist.
In addition, he indicates that he is close to releasing another book of poetry and short stories, mixing both genres.
“I conceive poetry as a picture, a painting, it is born from the heart and generates emotion, in narrative there is a more intellectual relationship between the reader and the author, poetry is more on an emotional level,” he points out. At 12 or 13 years old I started writing, about love. Later it was a more political poetry, at the time of the dictatorship, in the ’80s and then it turned to the cosmic energy that moves the world and whose most powerful aspects are love and sex. My poetic brief from 2016 summarizes my poetry, and for that edition I relied on a Romanian painter, it was published in Bucharest, and then I published Poetic diptych with Cosmic Love, the energy that moves the world and The Groped, two books in one. La Manoseada is a prostitute who transforms and helps the world, an anti-heroine. This was one of the best-selling poetry books in Romania,” she explains in this interview.
Furthermore, the poet maintains that “although I have no talent with music, I have released a poetry and music video in tribute to Alexis Sánchez, based on my poem “Cosmic Player”, with a Romanian singer who sings in Spanish, which is on YouTube ”.
“Alexis is a great person, apart from his talent. I would like to launch it in Chile later. I dedicated and gave my first book to Alexis Sánchez, in Romania, whom I met in 2017 where he was playing in a friendly match prior to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, which, as we know, we unfortunately did not go to. Now I am trying to unite poetry and art between Chile and Ethiopia, different cultures and civilizations. He notes that he did a book presentation with a prominent local painter in Ethiopia. “I’m trying to translate poetry in Spanish into Amharic, which is difficult because translating poetry is difficult and a non-Latin language is even more difficult, I have it as a project,” he concludes.
Check out the full interview below: