A journey through the maze: interpreting Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas «Els jeroglífics i la pedra de Rosetta»

Abstract

Abstract: This paper studies a unique and amazing work on the Valencian poetry scene of the 1970s: Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas’s Els jeroglífics i la pedra de Rosetta (1976). This unusual example of poetic prose represents a radical change from the realism that characterized her early poems towards the most extreme and cryptic formalism, which defies the ancestral and hieroglyphic silence imposed by the hostility of the environment. In the poem, a space where the author’s own words are combined with those borrowed from other texts, Bakhtin’s dialogism, heteroglossia and polyphony, and Kristeva’s intertextuality can be found. Thus, an extraordinary background of mythological, religious, scientific and historical references, which remind us of Salvador Espriu’s influence, construct the gloomy labyrinth of the poem, an alchemy that transforms the foundations of traditional culture into an expression of rebellion, of anger that underlies the written text, as in a palimpsest.

Key words: Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas, Valencian poetry, dialogism, heteroglossia, polyphony, intertextuality.