Gramática de un pensamiento solitario. Lenguaje y poesía en Alfredo Gangotena

Abstract

The broadest sphere of bilingualism corresponds to the coexistence of two languages in a writer. This dissertation addresses less evident forms and realms of bilingualism in poetry. It is focused mainly on Alfredo Gangotena (Quito, 1904-1944), an Ecuadorian poet of French and Spanish expression. Through Gangotena's work, the author defines bilingualism as the individual code a bilingual writer forges through the writing process using two linguistic and cultural systems which, together, constitute the second element of his bilingual circumstance. This private language emerges as a universe with its own values and coherence as it creates its own constellation of influences and elective affinities, always within a split existential situation. Mother and second language, origin and destination, are categories subverted by the bilingual poet, whose literary and vital space becomes liminal and undetermined. Alfredo Gangotena's work is also shaped by illness. The body is the space of experience and confluence of physical suffering, anguish, inner exile and rootlessness, all expressed often through images of infirmity. Beyond a mere set of rhetoric strategies, writing is an aesthetic outlet for this circumstance. Although it cannot be confirmed if he suffered of hemophilia or any other blood disorder, Gangotena's poetic universe is built upon the image of a bleeding body. The Andes and France are not conceptually linked -at least, that is what the extant critical material would lead us to believe. The dissertation also focuses on the linkages that exist between Gangotena as an Andean poet, and the turn-of-the-century Parisian cultural environment that shaped his poetry in great measure. The author analyzes his work within a transatlantic experience of language and expatriation. Through the creation of his work, Gangotena questioned the intellectual tasks assigned to writers in Ecuador at the height of indigenism and the consolidation of the national project, being therefore perceived as a dissident, an afrancesado.