Gonzalo Celorio, Cervantes Prize winner: “The Spanish language was not the language of the conquest, but rather the language of independence” | Culture | EUROtoday

“It is since Cervantes and thanks to him that genres have mixed to the point of promiscuity. They have stopped being watertight compartments and I love that,” mentioned Gonzalo Celorio, the final Cervantes winner, author of a number of genres, but in addition editor, professor, critic, bibliophile, e-book factotum: his favourite phrase is “word.”

Celorio (Mexico City, 78 years previous) entered with a cane and the face of a superb individual, white mustache and light-weight eyes, together with his voice “somewhat diminished,” he mentioned. He was accompanied by the director of the Reina Sofía Museum, Manuel Segade (“This is an invitation to dialogue between word and image,” he defined when presenting), and María José Gálvez, common director of Books, Comics and Reading, who remembered the just lately deceased Beatriz de Moura, editor of Tusquets. This was the publishing home of the winner since his first novel, Self-loveprinted in 1992. “De Moura opened Spanish letters to the world and opened the world to Spanish letters,” defined the Mexican.

Gonzalo Celorio has obtained the best award for literature within the Spanish language, created in 1976 and endowed with 125,000 euros (tax exempt), which rewards a complete literary profession. The supply ceremony, with the presence of the Kings, will happen, as yearly, on April 23, Book Day, the anniversary of the demise of Cervantes (and Shakespeare), within the Auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares. His speech will deal, as he confirmed on the look, about “the late arrival of the novel to the American continent.” In his opinion, “the novel is a very dangerous genre… the novel is not a literary genre, it is a libertarian genre.”

The writer had a deep reflection on genres and the literature of the self, which he has practiced probably the most. “It is thought that the literature of the self is a literature of lyrical expression, but I believe that it has expanded its borders,” he mentioned. He recalled the determine of Michel de Montaigne, thought of the creator of the essay style, who essayed on himself, who was on the identical time the topic and object of writing. And Celorio recalled the definition of the essay by the Mexican polygrapher Alfonso Reyes, as a “centaur” between genders: “It has a part of intellectual domain, but it also has an imaginative and passionate part, where the self expresses itself.” There can also be self, after all, within the style of reminiscence; in addition to within the chronicle: “Without me, the chronicle is history,” mentioned the winner.

Celorio’s literature is targeted exactly on reminiscence, particularly melancholic. He has described his books as “memory novels”, the place, recognizing the deceitfulness of reminiscence (That pile of damaged mirrors, titled, like a verse by Borges, his memoirs printed by Tusquets), delves into the blurry territory of the household and literary previous to generate new tales. “My self slips through all the interstices of writing to talk about my family,” the writer argues, and it’s Celorio himself—his reminiscence—that acts as a standard thread between all his novels, whereas on the identical time drawing a picture of contemporary Mexico.

“What is exceptional is the presence of the self in the novelistic exercise: the novel has always been considered, since the preceding epic genre, as the conquest of the third person,” he harassed. And he remembered these fragments of Homer’s work wherein the Greek poet sneaks into the narrative to exhort Achilles or Hector to do that or that factor or embark on this or that battle. However, the blending of genres and the proliferation of the self occurs particularly when Cervantes arrives and hybridization and the aforementioned “promiscuity” start.

Asturian roots

The author, who directs the Mexican Academy of Language and was director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica publishing home, is a Mexican with Asturian roots: Celorio is the identify of a city close to the city of Llanes, the place the mountain vary meets the Cantabrian Sea; It was his grandfather Emeterio who emigrated to go to the Americas, because the writer relates within the novel steel and slag. He began out as a grocery waiter and ended up amassing a fortune as a liquor service provider, a fortune that his descendants squandered. In Three fairly Cuban girls The adventures of three mates who met their father in Havana are narrated; just one, Rosita, turned his mom. In The apostates The main function passes to the writer’s brothers (Celorio was the eleventh of 12 brothers): one, made conscious of Liberation Theology, is absorbed by the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. The attraction for the opposite is the Mexican baroque structure. A complete lineage in novels: in “memory novels”.

“No one knows who he is if he doesn’t know where he comes from,” mirrored the winner. He intends for his acquainted characters to realize independence from the author and be taken by readers. “We readers are a kind of masochists who are always buying conflicts that do not belong to us, the conflicts of others: it is the only way we have to know that we belong to the human race.”

The award additionally appears to indicate a sure political-cultural reconciliation between Spain and Mexico after a cooling of relations when the then Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador demanded an official apology in 2019 for the excesses of the Spanish conquest. The newest Princess of Asturias awards additionally reported two awards for Mexico: the Concord award, for the National Museum of Anthropology, and the Arts award, for the photographer Graciela Iturbide. The exhibition Half the world. Women in indigenous Mexicowhich was distributed to a number of Madrid venues, was properly obtained by the establishments.

Celorio believes that Spain’s request for a pardon was “nonsense.” It was “anachronistic,” judging {that a} pardon can’t be requested for what occurred so many centuries in the past, when the states as they exist now didn’t even exist, and when there was already violence within the indigenous societies themselves; and in addition “retrotopic”, for judging these indigenous societies as a type of utopian paradise misplaced, with out being attentive to their actuality. As he identified, the Spanish language was not used to beat, as a result of the evangelizers discovered the indigenous languages ​​for this objective: “In reality, the Spanish language was not the language of conquest, but rather that of independence.”