MEXICO CITY (proceso.com.mx) .- The following is the speech that the Mexican writer Fernando del Paso read this morning in the auditorium of the University of Alcala de Henares, a town where Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born. The event commemorated the 400 years of tragic author of Don Quixote.
Del Paso full speech at the Cervantes Prize.
I dedicate the award to my parents Cervantes Fernando step Carrara and Irene Alicia Morante Benevendo.
I dedicate these words to my friend Carmen Balcells of Catalonia, the Mexican poet Hugo Gutiérrez Vega and Jose Emilio Pacheco.
Your Majesties, Mr. President of government, Minister of Education, Culture and Sports, Rector of the University of Alcalá, Madam President of the Community of Madrid, Lord Mayor of this city, state authorities, regional, local and academic, dear wife Socorro and children, dear relatives and friends who accompany me, dear all, Ladies and Gentlemen:
the dawn would be, when the phone rang my house and I thought if it was not a tragedy that I would announce, would be the malobra of a ruffian who wanted to disturb my good relations with Morpheus, or perhaps the magician Freston. But it was not, by chance: it was my daughter Pauline who from Los Cabos, Baja California, I announced to have heard that I had been awarded this prize, which colmome said although from that moment the many phone calls I received from friends, relatives and journalists, including those of Spain, to ratify the great new, they did not let me reattached the eye. I, neither slow nor lazy I rushed immediately company awakening as friend and relative I have to tell them what they had communicated to me.
In March last year, when I had the honor of receiving in the city Mexican Merida Jose Emilio Pacheco Literary Excellence Award made a speech that caused a stir. I know that these words aroused great expectations in what refers to the words uttered today in Spain. Things have not changed for the worse in Mexico but continue robberies, extortions, kidnappings, disappearances, feminicide, discrimination, the abuse of power, corruption, impunity and cynicism. Criticizing my country in a foreign country I am ashamed. Well, I swallow the shame and take this international forum to denounce the four winds approval in the State of Mexico of the series named Atenco Law, an oppressive law that enables the police to seize and even shoot at demonstrations and meetings public who violate their discretion, the security, public order, integrity, life and property, both public and people. He stressed: it is at the discretion of the authority, not necessarily present, such an extreme measure is allowed. This seems just the beginning of a totalitarian state that we can not afford. Not report it, now that would give me even more ashamed.
Maybe I should have started this speech differently and say that I was born in the area of the Spanish language on 1 April 1935 in the city of Mexico. “Congratulations lady, is a child,” said the doctor said he was exhausted to maneuver again and again with the forceps, before I not patitas but orejitas in the world and who to see for the first time my then tiny organs players, he especially concluded with great insight that I was a man, beefy not, but neither squalid: I did not want to be born and sometimes still think not want to be born
they tell me I cried a little and Oh, great. ! I cried in Castilian: is that since 81 years and 22 days ago, when I cry, I cry in Castilian; when I laugh, even laughing, I laugh in Castilian and when I yawn, cough and sneeze, yawn, cough and sneeze in Castilian. That’s not all. I also speak, read and write in Castilian
Pancho and Ramona, Prince Valiant, Lorenzo and Pepita, Tarzan and Mandrake, were my first favorite characters, and I could not wait for my father woke to read my Sunday to color cartoons, so that gave me haste in learning to read in pre-primary in which I enrolled my parents, run by two ladies who were not nuns but very Catholic and so miscreants who gave me with great vigor and boldness paddling on the left hand-I am zurdo- when trying to write to her, without obtaining your goal: I am not ambidextrous, I’m ambisiniestro. Later my left hand was devoted to drawing and that was how he avenged the right. But I learned to read with both eyes, and with both eyes and between the roars of lions saw me with Don Quixote. Indeed, a brother of my father who had a great library virgin no one read it: bought books by metro-, invited me to spend a fortnight at home, very close to the zoo, where were heard at different times of day the raucous roars of lions and I told myself: leoncitos to me? and I dove into the literature of the Spanish classics: since I am familiar with all of them: Tirso de Molina, Lope de Vega, Garcilaso, Góngora, the Archpriest of Hita, Quevedo, Baltasar Gracian and several others. It was there also, in my uncle’s house where I faced Don Quixote in uneven and huge battle: he, most of the time was Rocinante rider or astride Clavileño and I pedestre miserable situation. However my Lord and Sancho Panza were illustrated by Gustave Doré and that helped me crosier. I left his highly enriched reading and very happy to have learned that literature and humor could make good friends. From this I gathered that also speeches and humor could be.
From there I continued reading, passionate, and very good many Spanish writers. Mountain Antonio Nariño, a Colombian writer late, entered the advertising agency where I worked and introduced me to his friend, the Spanish-Mexican Jose de la Colina. Soon they became my first literary mentor and I got to meet Benito Perez Galdos, Ramon Menendez Pidal, Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Ramon Maria del Valle Inclan, Antonio and Manuel Machado, Rafael Alberti and others who made me fall in love deeply of the tongue. Back then I rejoiced much reading stylists as Gabriel Miró.
Antonio and Jose also got to meet Joyce, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, Julien Green, Marcel Schwob and many other great authors of the Anglo-Saxon and French literature.
also of course a great Spanish writers as Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, Juan José Armas Marcelo, Juan Marse, the Goytisolo brothers, Fernando Savater, Camilo Jose Cela, Javier Marias, Arturo Pérez -Reverte and who detonated all my literary vocation: the poet Miguel Hernandez, author of the lightning that never stops.
I remember some years ago in a French university, when I started to give a list of writers who as I had influenced me, an audience member pointed out that I had not mentioned any Spanish writer and told me how it was possible. I said, the Spaniards have not influenced me, to the Spaniards in my blood, and added to those Latin American list that are part of my most important readings and therefore my life as Borges, Onetti, Carpentier, Lezama by Lima, Cortazar, Asturias, Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez, Neruda, Huidobro, Gallegos, Guimarães Rosa and Cesar Vallejo and among Mexican Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Mariano Azuela, Martin Luis Guzman, not forgetting Fernandez de Lizardi and our beloved nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.
the wonderful sonnets Miguel Hernandez motivated me to write sonnets of the journal, published by Juan Jose Arreola in “journal of the Unicorn” in 1958. But in reality my first foray into the Castilian world took place when I was very small, “Nano Papo quiee cuca bread Quiquia” my mother played faithfully: “Nano Papo” was “Fernando del Paso”, “quiee cuca bread Quiquia” meant ” wants sugar bread and butter. ” Some grumpy aunts, predicted that I would not give foot with ball with language. They were wrong in every inch. Shortly afterwards, apparently dissatisfied with the familiar euphemism that was assigned to the buttocks, I called “the guinguingas” and soon this neologism was adopted by the whole family. The publication of the Sonnets helped me to meet Arreola and Juan Rulfo, who knew everything there was to know about Mexican, Spanish, Russian, Italian, German novel, and finally on global novel. then I started writing José Trigo, a reflection book of my obsession with language, Nahuatl my fascination with mythology and many other purposes obeyed, who transformed almost nonsense. But there it is, so smugly, his 50 year old: was published in 1966. I followed later with Palinuro of Mexico, a kind of invented autobiography, a literary recreation of my life as a child and teenager, combined in various tenses: the I went, I thought it was, what was not, what would have been, what would be, etc. And then came news of the Empire, the novel about the emperors Maximilian and Carlota in which I decided to give documentation the role of the tortoise and the imagination Achilles. From very small melodrama of these two characters, knowing that we had in Mexico Austrian Emperor long blond beard who shoot him in the city of Queretaro and a Belgian empress who lived, crazy, until 1927, when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in plane, I was fascinated. Of course, as he won Achilles the novel was finished. I have also written books of poetry, children’s books and two plays. One that I dreamed that someday represent or brought to the stage in this country. Death is going to Granada, on the murder of Federico Garcia Lorca
My whole life has continued the fight between my left hand and my right hand. Neither has succeeded and this has meant to me a very deep conflict. However my right hand has been imposed, I do not know if I am a writer, but I know I’m not a painter, I have never stopped writing to draw and have always stopped drawing to write.
However the fight more I have long held in life has been against my own health. Since I was very small and I had surgery for something called “adenoid” to the present moment, when I get over the consequences, long and painful, two series of heart attacks the brain from ischemic character, I have been at least fifteen times in the operating room for appendicitis, two hernias two benign tumors, a torn heart, a stent in the superficial artery of the right leg, another in the left coronary artery, two intestinal occlusions and among other things two operations of which called “open heart”. In addition to recurrent attacks of gout and a fracture of the right ankle. So bad I have been in recent times that when someone saw me said, “but man, so you will go to Spain?” And I said, “I to Spain I will so be stretchered jet propulsion or airplane wheels “.
i said earlier that” i still think i do not want to be born “? Moonshine! It was bravado. Life has been quite a Friend me. I wanted to write and wrote. I never wrote to win prizes, but as you see, I’m here. Socorro wanted to marry and married her. We wanted to have children and had children. We had wanted to have grandchildren and grandchildren. And for about two years we have a great-granddaughter Cora Kate McDougal Pass. I hope that someday their parents to remember that his grandfather wanted him she thank have come into the world to share life with all of us, I do not know what language he will, because he was born in the land of James Joyce and looks set to live in that country. Also from here I send a thousand kisses to our other almost great-granddaughter, Ximena, who would I say almost because it is the great-granddaughter granddaughter almost our son, Arthur. There again, I’ll tell you a story. I will be brief, it’s the same story I told in the Box of Letters: Long ago the young Tabasco Mexican poet Jose Carlos Becerra, won a Guggenheim Fellowship and she went to London for the purpose of buying a car with which travel throughout Europe. One morning, way from Rome to Brindisi in Italy, do not know what happened: maybe he fell asleep at the wheel, the case is to be melted down and killed. I also got my scholarship Guggenheim to London a few months later and stayed at the house of the same mutual friend, Alberto Diaz Lastra, where he had stayed. There, José Carlos forgot a shirt that I inherited. Since then, whenever I feel too lazy to write, discouragement or skepticism, I put the shirt and started to work. I felt that I had a duty towards those artists, men and women, whose untimely death prevented them from saying what they had to say. So that shirt is so important in my life. Deposit it in the Box of Letters does not mean I again not write: the magnificence and importance Award Spanish Literature Cervantes, makes me morally to do and I will do: I put the shirt, so metaphorically, again and again until it is gone (but not the shirt my life).
But I did not come here to tell my life and my work, not to discuss my sorrows. Nor to speak of the guinguingas of anyone, even those of Don Quixote, dazed and rueful as they should be, after so many so tremendous that propinaron beatings during her eventful caballeril profession. I came and here I am today 23 April 2016 on the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, speech in hand marks and the colors of Spain in the chest, near the heart, to thank: their Majesties the Kings of Spain Felipe VI and Queen Leticia, for their very generous hospitality; for their hospitality also to the city of Alcala de Henares and the Rector of the University; the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport and the Cervantes Institute; the jury of the Cervantes Prize for his risky decision, I would say, to the extent that he judged as such to my literature. I also thank my friends and family present, oíslo Relief and my children: Fernando rest in peace, Alejandro, Adriana and Paulina the great support they gave me life. Relief: Forgive me if ever I hurt: I apologize in public. Also deeply and Providence, to chance or causality for having made under the Spanish language, my country Mexico and my parents for giving me this language and above all, thanks to you, Spain, thank you.
by the way, I also dream in Spanish.
Vale.
Fernando del Paso
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