For Ramón Andrés, Spain’s most gifted contemporary writer on music, poetry is the hidden measure of his prose. In a recent article for VAN, he told me that whenever he wishes to express something with particular clarity and resonance, he writes in meter, in decasyllables. The result is prose of exact proportion, tempered and lucid, drawing on the full resources and vitality of a cultivated but unpretentious Castilian. His sentences move with restraint, allowing clauses and modifiers to accumulate meaning without strain.
Andrés’ most recent book, Despacio el mundo (2024), seeks quiescence amid the flux of ordinary life. The work is organized around more than 50 paintings, each depicting a musician tuning an instrument. “We now seek, here in gestures, the pause of a reality that dissipates toward its own emptiness,” writes Andrés. “It is possible that painters of the past, and poets as well, saw in the act of tuning the notes of an instrument a moment of suspension, a scene of truth and naturalness, a way to isolate a figure.”
The challenge consists in opening this momentary hiatus to poetic description and observation. Andrés enacts a vision of deceleration: a prose of slowness that stills the world and explores its folds, keyed to that “decisive moment that comes before music.” Readers familiar with Andrés will recognize this sensibility, though never before has it been expressed with such clarity. Here it has become a credo, raising the patient pursuit of equipoise to a moral imperative: “a revolt against the haste that plunders us.”
“The decision to live slowly,” Andrés writes, “the courage to resist a world carried along by force, the conviction of calm, far from the accelerationism of which Nick Land has written, is a gain. To look at a tree with pause, to walk slowly through a park or along a street, is to pay them tribute.” The book was written partly by hand. “Some pages were composed with pencil and paper, others with the help of a keyboard. This alternation, at least in my case, depends on the difficulty of the idea I wish to express. What is more complex, what requires greater attention, I approach through typing.”
The paintings Andrés examines span epochs and styles, from the 15th to the 18th century. The figures in these works are consumed by a striving “to hear everything,” an attentiveness that shapes their posture: “the bodily position influenced by the attention that presents itself to precision, the unconscious stance of the musician who leans toward the resonator to achieve better listening, as in ‘The Musician’ by Bartholomeus van der Helst or ‘The Guitar Player’ by Jean-Baptiste Greuze.”
The same quality of concentrated listening guided my own engagement with the text. This is the first time Andrés’ work has been translated into English, and the process demanded a form of isolated hearing akin to that of the performers he describes. “The performer,” writes Andrés, “when tuning the strings and surrendering entirely to the ear, separates from all that surrounds him.” I followed a similar deceleration in my translation, working first by hand in a notebook, then refining through successive versions on the computer. What remains, I hope, is something of that original stillness, that conviction of calm the book seeks to preserve.
Unlimited access to our
