The Unexpected (poetry)

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary street map · Year: 1936 · Authors: Domingo López Torres

The poet, essayist and intellectual Domingo López Torres (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1910-1937) was one of the most outstanding figures of the Spanish surrealist movement. Intensely, as everything in his life, linked to the ideological left during the period of the Second Spanish Republic, in the summer of 1936 he was arrested by the rebel forces and imprisoned in the Fyffes prison. There he wrote a collection of poems entitled The Unexpected, a book handwritten and illustrated by his friend, also a prisoner, Luis Ortiz Rosales. In February 1937, López Torres was transferred to a prison ship anchored in the bay of Santa Cruz and thrown into the sea wrapped in a sack. 

The Unexpected , a collection of poems written just before his death, is one of the key books of surrealism in the Canary Islands and one of the most outstanding of this movement nationally. In the six poems it includes, we find enormous emotional and expressive depth.

We could have chosen any of them, but in the one entitled “The Flies”, López Torres transforms the oppressive atmosphere of the prison into poetry. A small insect is the reason to describe the overcrowding, food scarcity, lack of hygiene and hope in that inhuman concentration camp. 

 

The Flies

Neither the relentless persecution

of the most forceful adjectives,

nor the continuous turning of 2000 arms, 

nor that thick cloud of extermination

that invading everything

made your lucky star pale

could divert that fate

of a vile itinerary.

 

You were in the soup, the pockets,

in Ortiz Rosales’s blue waistcoat.

In everything.

 

The graceful turning of short flight,

the restless movement of six legs,

the perfect brotherhood of wings and smell,

your agility, your audacity,

nailed your presence so firmly,

that you are like the showers, the toilets,

the yard, the news:

the constant obsession that invades everything.

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