Épica y acción lírica en la ciencia ficción: «Ala Anima» (1991), de Luís Filipe Silva

Abstract

Epic poetry and science fiction have combined a number of times in the (post)modern period, demonstrating that the former has not disappeared and that the second can be adopted by high literary genres. The epics poems by Harry Martinsson, José Saramago, Frederick Turner, and Abel Montagut are good examples of this. Science fiction epic poetry has several modes. One could be what Rafael Morales called lyrical action, this is to say, poems having a plot and a rhetorical form of a rather lyrical nature. Poets such as Leopoldo Marechal, José Hierro, and Edwin Morgan have illustrated this genre. More recently, one of the leading Portuguese science fiction writers, Luís Filipe Silva, has produced the poem «Ala anima» , which is a remarkable example of lyrical action with a metamodern approach. Silva outlines there the whole future history of the universe until its entropic destruction and recreation. This is a relatively short lyrical and narrative poem that uses a number of different rhetorical discourses in order to successfully convey a sense of the sublime before the overwhelming grandness of the universe and the position of the intellect in it.