Ricardo Yáñez returns to his roots with Fingidor

▲ La Jornada contributor Ricardo Yáñez plays two characters in his latest collection of poems: one who asks a question and the other who answers . Photo courtesy of the author.

Reyes Martínez Torrijos

La Jornada Newspaper, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, p. 4

The poet Ricardo Yáñez began writing at 13 or 14 to escape from himself. "I didn't realize it until poetry brings you back to your reality ." " Fingerprint ," his most recent collection of poems, written in décimas (ten words), "is my return to my origins ," the author told La Jornada .

The writer mentioned that in the film Cabeza de Vaca, there's a man who escapes, takes many detours, and returns to the same place. "This is about a witch doctor who has a tied-up lizard, and what the animal does is what the fugitive does. So I did: I escaped into poetry until poetry brings you back."

“It's horrible because poetry tells you: 'Go away, don't worry, I'll take care of your house here, but you'll come back.' I don't like that. You have to come back. It's horrible.”

Yáñez (Guadalajara, 1948) said that his text, published by Taller Editorial La Casa del Mago, is written in measured, rhymed verse. "I really like tradition. I started writing rhymed and measured poems almost as a child. It's my return to my roots. That's how I started, that's how I'm going back."

“It's very laborious because you run out of rhymes. You don't want to repeat yourself, and you have to. That's more technical work than fundamental, substantive work, but it's very meticulous. 'Meticulous' is a word that Jorge Hernández Campos told me came from fear.”

This newspaper's contributor pointed out: "The rhyme work is meticulous, that is, it's done with a certain fear, like 'here I'm going to see myself as an old man, as a cheapskate.' It's like a melody or a sonata; if it's in C, it's in C. So you just keep at it. You're not moving from here."

She added that she wonders what she's really doing in her life, and the best way to answer that question is through writing. I write because I don't know how to speak, and I don't know how to speak because I don't know how to think. What I do know is that if anything becomes clear to me, it's in writing. It's a bit obscure. That's also why it's obsessive. This book wasn't clear to me, and I kept going on and on. I deliberately let it be known in the titles that it's repetitive, because it has a colophon, things like farewells .

Regarding the title of this volume, which includes his illustrations, Ricardo Yáñez explained that he has a penchant for the stage, and that "the pretender is me, but on stage. I began to act as two characters: one who asks questions and the other who answers, even poorly, as if to say, 'Stop asking me things.'"

It's a dialogue and a dispute. That also struck me as endearing, because the book seemed terrifying to me, and in a way, I'm afraid of that. I tend to joke, play, evade, and then the text presented itself to me as something very subterranean, and I tried to make it not subterranean. But I couldn't manage it. In a way, I finished it out of fear, out of exhaustion.

The poet said he couldn't sustain the terrible tone and tried to balance the text. "I see it as a single poem; at most, a suite, that is, a poem and other poems, but they're all related. This collection of poems took me a lot of work. First I said, 'How easy it is to write poetry!' In a week I already have a book. And then: 'No, you're lost.'"

“The first poem is almost exactly as I wrote it. It was the one that prompted me to continue. I didn't write the others with such a clear impulse. They were more elaborate, because I kept trying and it didn't work until I abandoned the book. As Valéry says: 'Poems aren't finished, they're abandoned.'”

The author concluded: “In the neighborhood, they used to say, 'Follow him until he gives up.' That's what I tried to do: follow the poem, the first one, until it gave up. In reality, I was the one who gave up.” It took him five years to complete.