2023-04-25 11:47:36
The Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas received this Monday the Cervantes Prize for Letters from the hands of Felipe VI of Spain in a ceremony in Alcalá de Henares, the town where the author of Don Quixote was born.
Visibly excited, 93-year-old Cadenas, the first Venezuelan distinguished with the Cervantes, received the medal from the king and the prize sculpture, helped by his daughter Paula at all times.
«This is an honor that surpasses me, to be in front of you majesties, and together with poets and writers that I have always admired. It’s a lot for those who read these words,” said the Barquisimeto poet at the beginning of his speech in the auditorium of the University of Alcalá.
Cadenas paid tribute to Cervantes, born in 1547 in Alcalá, “whose life was also an adventure novel”, and to his immortal character Don Quixote, whose history “can be seen as a process from normality to madness, and back once more to a kind of tame normality.”
This former communist, imprisoned and exiled by the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, critical of Venezuelan presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, also had a memory for his university, the Central de Venezuela. «Fortunately, despite not being well for years, it is still plural. One that serves indoctrination ceases to be a university»he claimed.
“Freedom, Sancho…”
The author of “Defeat”, his most famous poem, generational manifesto, especially greeted the Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez, stripped of his nationality and exiled by the government of Daniel Ortegarecalling a quote from Don Quixote.
«Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven gave men. The treasures that the earth and the sea contain cannot be matched with her”, and for her “life can and should be ventured”, recited Cadenas, who had previously described nationalism as “measles”.
It was the first normal Cervantes award ceremony in four yearsfollowing those of 2020 and 2021 were suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic, and that of 2022 did not count, due to health problems, with the presence of the award-winning Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi, who was represented by the Argentine actress Cecilia Roth.
Cadenas, who at the age of 16 published his first collection of poems, “Cantos iniciales”, is deserving of the Cervantes for producing an outstanding work that “demonstrates the transformative power of the word when the language (…) is taken to the limit of its creative possibilities”pointed out the Spanish Ministry of Culture last November.
Cadenas joins his name to a list of awardees that includes Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Álvaro Mutis or Sergio Ramírez.
“The jury has once more found accurately distinguishing to a man who tries to breathe through the pores of language”, Felipe VI said in his speech.
Being the first Venezuelan to win the Cervantes, unites “thus your country to the history of our beloved Cervantes Prize, expanding with it the geographical scope of the winners”the monarch recalled.
«Rafael Cadenas has already joined this Cervantine list that brings together the best writers of the Spanish language»sentenced the king.
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