“You have eighty syllables to say what you

Shakhar28

Alexis Díaz Pimienta Havana is the poet of repentismo improvisation. As a repentista he has reached the highest levels having participated in the albums and concerts of Zenet Joaquín Sabina Jorge Drexler Javier Ruibal Kanka and Rozalén being a teacher of improvisation in tenths of many of them. As a poet he has just won the Casa de las Américas Prize in Children's and Youth Literature with his work ' Piel de noche ' to mention only the last of his forty published books that make him one of the most awarded Cuban writers of the generation of him. In his role as a repentista he improvises in tenths a type of baroque and complicated stanza that hid in the oral culture of Latin American peoples when it was expelled from the cultured halls.

Last April he taught a course in Madrid in which fifty of the best-known singer-songwriters participated demonstrating the rebirth of rhymed poetry on both sides of the Atlantic in a journey that unites us through verse. We spoke with him on the occasion CXB Directory of the course dedicated to improvisation in tenths that will be held next September in Cuenca Spain an intensive workshop especially aimed at actors and word artists who use verse as a means of expression. Improvisation and verse recitation that become a delicacy in the hands of this giant of repentismo in the Spanish language.

José An. Montero | What is the tenth?

Alexis Díaz Pimienta | The tenth is a wonderful and varied universe. It is a classic complex and baroque verse I think the most difficult of all. However it became the main and favorite verse of popular singers in America. He was born in a cultured cradle and flourished with Calderón and Lope but fell out of favor due to the arrival of the Italianate high art.



I have been collaborating for many years with great musicians and word artists such as Zenet Joaquín Sabina Jorge Drexler Javier Ruibal el Kanka or Rozalén. Right now they are the protagonists of a true revolution within Spanish oral poetry

He arrived in Latin America through the theater and there he took refuge in the peasants in the sailors in the popular people who continue to preserve octosyllabic poetry also in carols quatrains couplets and ballads as a much more transparent form of expression. The tenth will become a very popular verse in countries such as Cuba Argentina Uruguay Chile Venezuela Colombia or Ecuador reaching even Brazil .

José An. Montero | In Cuba you only improvise in tenths?

Alexis Díaz Pimienta | Although in other countries tenths limericks quatrains and other different stanzas are improvised in Cuba improvisation is monostrophic. It is only improvised in tenths in a tradition of centuries. There is an area of ​​mystery as to why the tenth but what is indisputable is that it has become the popular strophic flag of almost the entire American continent.