Josefina Plà, naufraga aggrappata a un paesaggio

Abstract

In Josefina Plá’s poetry very few verses refer to the subtropical landscape of Paraguay, where she arrived after her marriage to the Paraguayan ceramist Andrés Campos Cervera in 1927. The European rose dominates her early poems as a symbol of passion at first and then of frustrated maternity, in contrast to the fertile and dehiscent nature of this South American country. After her husband’s untimely death, allusions to her native Canarian seascape – on which she might have modelled her impressions and perceptions – become more and more frequent, and her own anatomy is often replaced by the topography of the tiny, rocky and desert islands where she spent her childhood, absorbing from the sea not only her thirst for new horizons but also a salty, painful destiny. Landscape, considered as a fragment of nature or as a picture, becomes a metaphor of life itself, which the poetess regards as a definite, framed manifestation of absolute Time and Space.