The poet has always sung to the saeta. Sing to the cante…almost nothing. Like that one The Saetas, Luis Montoto in the Andalusian Betica Magazine. As Jose Maria Izquierdo, that “the arrow vibrates in the air and in the soul.” As the Madrid native Peter Salinas, that the sung arrow becomes an arrow that pierces the wounds. As Gerardo diego, which “was heard like a crazy swallow / the arrow that trembles / and finally sticks”. As Hadrian del Valle, that in his Stella Matutina It ends with the people as the protagonist, with the saying "the people", which is the arrow in the end: "And below, on the outskirts of the sky that the costalero carries on his sweaty shoulders, the people, almost ineffably illiterate, translate this way that great ornamental compliment that the thurible ones fumigate with the incense coils: My Mother and Hope!".
From Coria –on the immense bank of the great river, which is stained with the blood of the Ortegas–, we asked Juan Rodríguez Mateo What is the arrow? And he can barely tell us in all the verses of his book. arrows.
And we asked him Antonio Murciano, that from the feeling and from the knowledge of art flamenco It tells us the story of so many balconies and so many sunrises.Pastora The one from the Combs / sang thus to her Bitterness… I have engraved in my mind / a sung promise. / As a child I heard it once. / San Jacinto and dawn / “Alfalfa Girl was…”.
And we asked him Jose Maria Peman, who answers us with silver dodecasyllables: “…Popular saetas of Holy Week / sobs of a people with a simple heart, / of a people who feel, of a people who sing / the longings that their Christian chest suffers.”
Y a Rafael Alberti We asked him: “Arrows from the balconies, / long wounds, descending / endlessly to the processions”
Y a Federico Garcia Lorca We coaxed him out, as if it were a ditty:
But like love
the saeteros
They are blind.
On the green night,
the arrows,
they leave traces of lily
hot.
The keel of the moon
purple cloud breaker
and the quivers
are filled with dew.
Oh, but like love
the seateros
they are blind!
Y a Luis Cernuda which, before stating categorically that “Et in Arcadia ego”, compares the voice of the arrow to the musical instruments of the Passion…
Dense, soft the air
air so many alleys,
small squares, whose soul
It is the orange blossom.
They resonate near, far,
male bugles
here, there the flute
and female oboe.
And the saeta, in the verses of poets, takes on other dimensions. A sidereal dimension that reaches from the voice of the saeta singer to the last person who hears it, transcending centuries and centuries.
