Academic Francisco Rico, clever man, good friend and promoter of Spanish literature, dies | EUROtoday

Francisco Rico, professor, critic, RAE tutorial, editor and essayist, should have seen himself as a fictional character, half ethical and half rogue, half legend and half Public Administration official degree 27. For years, Rico has been attributed powers, friendships, manias and phobias that he at all times handled as a jokey misunderstanding. Today, the educational has died at some point earlier than his 82nd birthday.

Rico was, above all, a part of an instructional custom that point has ennobled: his lecturers on the University of Barcelona, ​​José Manuel Blecua and Martín de Riquer, modernized Hispanic Philology and the information of Spanish literature at a time. during which the Spanish college appeared paralyzed. Rico, who arrived on the college within the Nineteen Sixties, was a step ahead in that work: he studied the connection of Spanish literature in its first centuries with that of different European languages. Above all, with Italy, which was probably the most aesthetically and intellectually artistic nation in Europe and which led Rico to Petrarch, his major object of examine.

Another Italian, Indro Montanelli, mentioned of Javier Maras that write “in European”. Rico was an in depth good friend of Marías and will have been defined with those self same phrases. Rico's view of Spanish literature in its first centuries consisted above all of exhibiting it in its cosmopolitanism, eradicating its self-absorption and, on the similar time, delving into its essence. The picaresque novel and the perspective (1984), for instance, famous that what was really new concerning the Spanish novel of the Golden Age was that grant the privilege of narration to the dispossessed character. Rico argued in these pages that this gesture, most likely spontaneous, was the important thing to all subsequent European narrative.

Rogues and humanists have been at all times blended in Rico's tutorial work. The counterpoint of The picaresque novel and the perspective could also be The dream of humanism. From Petrarch to Erasmus, an essay that dialogued with the Italian philosophy of the Renaissance to stipulate an virtually mental biography. Rico defined the authors whom he had most idealized and thru them he defined himself. From the entire, one concept stands out or, somewhat, a longing and a nostalgia: that of information as a completewithin the type of the traditional humanists, against the fashionable world of hyperspecialization.

At the midpoint between the rogues and the humanists have been Don Quixote and Cervantes, the author who traveled to Italy and ended up making a poor residing virtually like a rogue, and the common character he invented. Rico was for Cervantes one thing much like what Harold Bloom was for Shakespeare: a formidable popularizer, able to find important gestures in seemingly secondary particulars. His studying of Quixote I used to be melancholic. His favourite passage was the one about returning to the village of Quijano, who in a banal dialog agreed that Dulcinea was a dream that might by no means come true. But it was additionally an ethical studying, since she found in Cervantes a type of love for all times within the easy and painful.

Rico not solely regulation Quixote; He additionally labored it as a scientist. In the 2000s, he delved into all of his texts, among the many multitude of editions that Cervantes' work has had, he collated them and was capable of synthesize them, eliminating what was added and what was superfluous. Rico maintained as a speculation that Cervantes himself would have synthesized the textual content of his novel much more if he had been in a position, that he would have made a Quixote that it was extra Quijano and fewer an journey e-book, as occurred within the second a part of the work. But that was only a idea. In observe, the philologist was in control of the RAE version of Don Quixote on its centenary, a model that was additionally an mental map of the masterpiece of Spanish literature.

The metaphor of the map can be utilized in relation to the opposite nice work of Francisco Rico, History and criticism of Spanish literaturea collective set (however coordinated by the UB professor) of 9 volumes that It started in Santo Domingo de la Calzada and San Millan de la Cogolla and ended within the creator's era.. Today, such an endeavor appears as anachronistic as constructing a pyramid within the desert, however the focus of the work is recognizable: Spanish literature seems handled within the assortment as a information with which to elucidate the mental historical past of the boys who’ve spoken a language, Spanish, they usually have lived in a territory, Spain. Freedom, poverty and equality have been the themes of History and criticism of Spanish literature as a lot or greater than the Italianate sonnet or the realist novel.

Each quantity of History and criticism of Spanish literature He had a enjoying card in his deck. The new names 1975-2000, her first complement, signed with Jordi Gracia, carried a 9 of swords, as if it have been an invite to combat. That learn extra like a journalistic e-book, somewhat scathing, than like an instructional work. Much of Rico's fame as a feared and considerably quarrelsome critic comes from that point. Was it a good fame? The world is stuffed with former college students of the professor on the University of Barcelona who go away that very same query within the air. They bear in mind it as a instructor who may intimidate and, on the similar time, as an extravagant and charming artist of the transmission of information. He himself appeared to really feel snug in that ambiguity.

Rico was additionally a contemporary character in his method of connecting the educational world with the skin world. Flirty, hedonistic, ironic, unpredictable, charming regardless of his guise as an indignant, theatrical professor and critic… Rico was on the coronary heart of Spanish cultural lifetime of his era, He was a good friend to all and an enemy to some and have become the nice cultural prescriber of his time.. Two of his books, A thousand years of European poetry y A thousand years of Spanish poetry, They present Rico's expertise for understanding artwork as a significant entire. In addition, they’re two excellent objects for lovers to offer to one another, an concept that Rico, half mischievous and half humanist, may contemplate with good humor.

The final books printed by Francisco Rico now appear, in his loss of life, to be two farewell monologues within the type of medieval theater. In A protracted loyalty (2022), Rico wrote about his lecturers and concerning the custom during which he was inserted: Ramón Menndez Pidal, Eduard Valent, Dmaso AlonsoMartn de Riquer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jos Manuel and Alberto Blecua, Roberto Calasso, Fernando Lzaro Carreter, Claudio Guilln, Jos Mara Valverde, Yakov Malkiel, Mara Rosa Lida…

Lastly, Petrarch. Poet, thinker, character, Published in 2024, it included 4 articles by Rico concerning the determine to whom he had devoted probably the most efforts in his tutorial profession, the one who had accompanied him since highschool. One of those texts defined that the Italian thinker divided his self between a kind of inaccessible intimacy and a picture earlier than the theatrical world, in the present day we might say that performative. It is tough to keep away from the temptation to assume that Francisco Rico should have been in the identical recreation, that he made his self one thing much like a murals.