Fabio Morábito: from Italy to Mexico without missing a flight

"I write prose while I gather/ courage for the verses,/ I write prose so that the verses/ write themselves almost alone," says Fabio Morábito in A cada cual su cielo , and the truth is that along with his stories, novels and miscellanies, his work as a poet occupies a central place in his work. Un náufrago nunca se seca is an expanded edition of the one published in 2011, and brings together four decades and six volumes, from Los lotes baldíos , from the mid-1980s to Canción segunda , from 2024.

Born in Alexandria to Italian parents, Morábito lived in Milan until he was 15, then moved with his family to Mexico, where he settled permanently. This change of homeland and language at such a crucial age shaped his work. From then on, he adopted Spanish as his literary language.

Colloquial, almost always urbane, the apparent simplicity of his poetry is a marvel of precision and balance, of acute intelligence. Made of verses, often measured and sometimes not, spoken by a discreet subject who prefers to observe rather than participate, the poems are erected like small blocks placed obliquely, like those thin-walled buildings to which he often refers.

To look with fresh eyes at everyday and pedestrian things, matters without prestige that reveal forgotten meanings, not because they are hermetic or strange, but because they are immediate, inconspicuous, or poorly concealed. There is no embellishment or pretense of depth; there is the careful flow of a voice that explores the present, what is hidden in the obvious. The way to account for this is by subtracting attributes, avoiding rhetoric, surrounding the issues until a kind of linguistic truth is found. Wastelands, flies, beer cans, cars that start, a mother driving for the first and last time, cities that are experienced or left behind—the nostalgia that inhabits Morábito 's poetry is not for something lost, but for that which has no mediation, something rather alien to intellectual work with words, to the subject "educated by/ newspapers and books."

To produce something true and concrete, like the bricklayer who constructs buildings, that at the end of the day deserves the rest of the person who created something solid. As in his stories and novels, in his poems there is a vocation to address small anomalies, the inconveniences of daily life, those capable of opening a rift or radically changing a perspective: a creaking table, the hum of an air purifier, a nail in the wall, missing a flight.

Attention to the places where actions take place is essential for this subject who thinks as he observes. Awareness of what lies behind the facade and what is composed, like the bathroom in that old restaurant that draws attention because of the pipe sunk into the cement, allowing us to sense the network of plumbing, the sensation that "in everything there is a below, / a behind, a bottom."

The use of similes to talk about writing is another resource Morábito likes to use: writing is linked to eating and digesting, teeth to words that bite, tectonic faults to style, the narrowness of a mobile home where everything is compressed and transformed into something else refers to the artisanal work with the poem.

Since a happy man wouldn't write, "Why do I waste my time writing?" asks the man who boasts a double foreignness: "that of writing, which is a betrayal of the world, and that of writing in a language other than one's mother tongue, which is a betrayal of speech." Perhaps a few verses from this open and powerful book can summarize the attitude encapsulated in his poetry: "My thing is not the fact, / but its pale reflection; / not the thing, but the eyes that have seen it."

A castaway never dries up , Fabio Morábito. Gog & Magog, 218 pages.