The Poetry of the Imponderable—Pedro Salinas’s Vocation: Unreliable Perception, Certainty of Chance, and the Reality of Fabling

Abstract

In Reality and the Poet, Pedro Salinas recounts an anecdote about Garcilaso de la Vega who, attending a social gathering during a visit to Italy, joined his distinguished hostess in lamenting that her servants had destroyed the beauty of the sunset by entering into the room with bright lamps (72–73).¹ Like Garcilaso, Salinas would have lamented the destruction of the beauty at sunset, a time in the day when reality seems suspended in a liminal state between light and shadows. The ambiguity of light at the sunset hour invites ways of perception that are less than rational or “normal.” Salinas’s fascination with subtle, unconventional ways of perception runs parallel with his interest in the imponderable side of reality, as made evident in the titles of his first three books, Presagios (Premonitions; 1924), Seguro azar (Certain Chance; 1924–1928), and Fabula y signo (Fable and Sign; 1931). The title Presagios, as Jorge Guillén explains, comes from prae-sagire (to perceive beforehand, to test, to try), suggesting a kind of knowledge predating confirmation or proof; a presaßio is a signal of what is to come, an omen or foreboding.² Seguro azar, his next collection, relates “certainty” to chance, thus, making unpredictability what is sure to happen. Fábula y signo fuses the poet’s fabling or creative perspective with the sign, as the supposedly faithful means to convey it.