Críticas Magazine

Adriana V. Lopez

The Olympics' Paradise Lost?
August 22, 2008

I’ve become numb sitting on my tucus watching so many people in shape compete in the Olympics. But with a little web surfing in between, I at least exercised my mind a little reading this Q&A with William Ospina in El Tiempo . He’s considered one of Colombia’s greatest literary minds alive today and he’s got two new books out on poetry and literature you should be aware of. I’ve included the link above so you can read the interview and translated Ospina’s (nope, no relation to our beloved former Críticas editor, Carmen) thoughts on the Greek’s cerebral Olympic poetry. Do you disagree with Ospina that it’s changed today? Let me know. Now back to the couch...

 
In other essays you’ve reflected on the significance of the body for the Greeks in the Olympic Games. Has your opinion today changed?

Wiliam Ospina: Exactly, for the Greeks the body was the soul, and it seems that in the gyms of our era the body is all alone. The soul doesn’t form part of the exercise. In my opinion, to say that in Greece the body was the soul is to say that that the body wasn’t outside the cultural arena. The body was also memory, it was also imagination, it was also language, it was also thought, it was also dialogue, and that’s why there was poetry’s proximity to the Olympics’ phenomenon .In our age, sports’ biggest danger is becoming mere merchandising. It seems as if they’re telling us that sports are wonderful to watch but not practice. This is one of the downfalls of a consumer society: it converts the world’s greatest wonders into this that a few specialists can do and that the rest of mankind passively contemplates.

**William Ospina's new books are La escuela de la noche (Norma) and Poesía (Norma).

Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on August 22, 2008 | Comments (0)