The presence of voice. Perceptions and poetic language in Germán Carrasco and Erri De Luca

This article studies the representation of a multi-sensory voice in some works by two contemporary authors-Germán Carrasco (Chile) and Erri De Luca (Italy)-and the way it interrogates the relation between the poetic word and its referent. Particularly, it will consider the interplay between voice and image: on one hand, voice and image come together, generating a synesthetic continuum that emphasizes the materiality of representation; on the other hand, they eclipse each other, so that the frustrated access to the referent through a specific sensory channel make it paradoxically more present. With the support of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's corporeal phenomenology, it will be possible to show that the signification process in poetry and in poetic prose is deep-rooted in the perceptive dimension of the referent, as well as in the materiality of language. The analysis of the corporeal and multisensory voice in both authors will finally result in a sketch of their poetics: Carrasco creates a spacing or inter-body between words in order to expand the subject's perception to what is invisible, while De Luca tends to endow the word with all the intensity of the material referent.