There is always a book. A book that opens you, in a wonderful way, “to the expectations of great literature.” There are other titles before. And many more later, surely. But that was the first one that caught us. That’s what happened to
Basilio Baltasar, when he was fourteen years old, with ‘The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quiijote de la Mancha’. Not in any edition, but in that of the Juventud publishing house of 1966. The one with green covers, in imitation leather, with texts and notes by Martín de Riquer. Nor in any episode, but in the one in which Sancho, vexed and hungry, resigns from the government of the Barataria Island, meets his gray once more and gives him
a kiss of peace on the forehead.
“Don Quixote is an amazing book,” says the director of the Foundation and president of the Formentor Prize jury. Awesome and brotherly, because knows how to accompany you throughout life: it tells you something different with each reading and allows you to admire, amaze, celebrate each advance in the discovery “of the true artistic scope of the author’s intelligence”. That has earned Cervantes Basilio Baltasar when it comes to becoming the editor, journalist, writer and cultural weaver that he has been over the years. Without forgetting that from his parents he also inherited a fortune: that of considering each book as a wonderful object.
The eagerness of each day
But beyond dreams, each day comes with its eagerness. And knowing it, or without knowing it, Baltasar ended up on his way founding literary magazines like ‘Bizoc’; directing editorials such as Seix Barral, newspapers such as ‘El Día del Mundo’, foundations such as Bartolomé March or Santillana… Even publishing novels such as ‘Pastoral Iraqi’, which appeared in Alfaguara in 2013 and which, at the moment, does not claim to have relief.
A distance race with specific weight in the reference of the Formentor awards. Because, if we think regarding it, something or a lot has to do with those mythical encounters in Formentor, that open character, complicit, almost of platonic dialogue of Don Quixote. The image of the Mallorcan paradise facing the sea of words, in a hotel that will soon be a hundred years old, and in which characters like
Grace Kelly, Winston Churchill o el Dalai Lama. Or also, between the 50s and 60s, Carlos Barral and Jaime Salinas, who founded the colloquiums, the group and the awards of this name here. A part of the small history of our literature.
Can the islands be suitable places for high conversation? Antonio Colinas, who lived in Ibiza for a long time, says yes. And Camilo José Cela, who made Mallorca his home in 1954, always said the same thing. Like Robert Graves, Anthony Kerrigan or many others. Dialogues of writers, editors, musicians, architects, plastic artists, by the sea… The island, says Baltasar, continues to be a magical place, which “awakens interest of those who feel curiosity and admiration for the art of eloquence». The art of conversing: an artistic improvisation that gives us “that immediacy of expression that writing never reaches”, however close it may be. And that it is not capable of reproducing, in its true dimension, any recording. Because its value lies in the feeling that “important things can happen only once in our lives.” And they are not recordable except in memory. Cervantine charms.
Of all the privileges he has had throughout his career, he says, he would keep the one of having found interlocutors who taught him to converse. It is not easy to quote just one, but if it had to be done, The same remained with Cabrera Infante: ingenuity, humor, brilliance… and an immense talent as a listener. About this bunch of great writers and conversationalists, Baltasar is precisely now preparing the book ‘El canon Formentor’: a collection of essays on the winners both in the first stage, between 1961 and 1967, and in the second, from 2011. , by the way, for the ex aequo glorioso de la edición inaugural: none other than Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges, at the International Prize, and Juan García Hortelano, at the Formentor.
History recalls that neither the tone nor the argument of the first conversations in Formentor were then to the liking of the regime, with whichthe awards left Mallorca to seek other places such as Corfu, Salzburg or Tunisia. In his second stage, back in Spain following 44 years of silence, another great conversationalist, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, was in charge of opening a new list of winners, which has its last reference in the Argentine César Aira.
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