La metáfora en la poesía de Antonio Martínez Sarrión

Abstract

Antonio Martínez Sarrión —poet born in Albacete and a prominent member of the neo-avant-garde generation of the Novísimos— has created, over the past five decades, an integral work, where culturalism and life experience are merged. The metaphor (a trope or a semantic resource that establishes a similarity between two elements, one real and the other imaginary) is a fundamental expression tool of this author. Martínez Sarrión uses the two existing modalities in metaphor: the daily one (whose bases are in experience) and the poetic one (which belongs to the creative sphere). While daily metaphors have an instrumental character, operating within the lyrical device, they convey —as poetic metaphors also do— aesthetic values and, therefore, indubitable doses of ambiguity. As revealed by the Russian formalist Jakobson according to literary semantics (Richards, Empson, Wheelwright…) in the poetic function the message is oriented towards itself, which results in multiple meaning. So, many Sarrión’s metaphors visibly point to several denotations, besides expressing some connotation. The ambiguity is also evident when Martínez Sarrión formulates some of the elements of these tropes tacitly or vaguely, or when the corresponding statement lacks punctuation (total or partial). Besides being an ideal vehicle to embellish the text and to convey —all at once— different ideas, the metaphor allows the author of Teatro de operaciones to express sensoriality (something noticeable, for instance, in the connotations, which are the individual and variable meanings) and even to structure each text.