Luis García Jambrina (1960 - ) soon appreciated the singularity of the poetic world of Claudio Rodríguez. His closeness to the poet, with whom he maintained an almost filial relationship, allows us to acknowledge his privileged status, both from the personal and from the scholarly side. In 1994 he read his Doctoral Dissertation at the University of Salamanca, based on the poet’s trajectory. Before that, he had already made varied contributions about the rhythm, orality, the “poetic pre-history” of the poet and the connections between his writing and the thought of María Zambrano. He had also published a reading guide (Guía de lectura de Claudio Rodríguez) and a poetry selection for children (Antología para niños), in cooperation with Luis Ramos de la Torre.
In his essay From Inebriation to Legend, based on his doctoral thesis, García Jambrina discusses major issues on Claudio Rodríguez’s idea of poetry. He focuses on that “participation” that the poet used to claim as the path towards the meaning of his poetry. It is a participation of Platonic origin, García Jambrina holds, “but inverted and polarized, as it were, towards the participative relationship between the poet –or men– and the things”. This awareness of participation confirms the undeniable tendency to a Unity as a “pre-form and holds all the forms, although it is not a form in itself”. Such participation is ultimately conducive to the joining of knowledge and wisdom, of world vision and contemplation.
Throughout this process, the poet’s attitude –hence his language– evolves from the exultant to the meditative tone. In the critic’s words, the Dionysiac poet gives way to the Promethean one. Such move can be noticed in the poet’s evolution from Gift of Inebriation to Almost a Legend. In the latter there is a key poem –“The Theft”– based on a local myth, through which the poet’s task among men becomes self-evident: he must lead them towards the truth, even if he remains caught in his attempt.
Based on these reflections, García Jambrina analyzes the poetry of Claudio Rodríguez in each book. He observes a process of inner networks and adhesions that concludes with the “tableau composition” of Almost a Legend, where García Jambrina hypothesizes about new perspectives pursued by the poet at the end of his life: “the memory of the un-lived gives sense to the objectively lived, what also involves (…) a way of envisioning the poetic phenomenon”. It is this loss of certainty, this fusion of legend and life, what confers the book “an extraordinary complex, unfixed structure” in which knowledge, love, death, and resurrection become key concepts in the culmination of the poet’s thought and poetic universe.