The Guatemalan Nobel Miguel Ángel Asturias will join other Central American authors such as Rubén Darío, Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Horacio Castellanos Moya and Claribel Alegría, whose legacies remain in The Caja Caja Cervantes Lyrics in Madrid.
On May Guatemala will be the center of literary themes through Central America festival, (CAC), which will have about 60 national and international guests.
During the inauguration of the festival – on May 20 – the legacy of Miguel Ángel Asturias will be delivered to the Caja de las Lyrics of the Cervantes Institute that will be received by Luis García Montero, director of the sameand with the presence of President Bernardo Arévalo as a witness.
How was the box of letters born?
The headquarters of the Cervantes Institute occupies an old bank. The building in which we are was the Bank of the Río de la Plata, founded in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century.
Then, the building was occupied by different banks and ended up owned by the Spanish State, which decided to establish the headquarters of the Cervantes Institute.
Some historical corners of the beginning of the last century are preserved that are characteristic of bank architecture. One of those sites is the great flow of flows. They were rental boxes where customers had their section. There they kept family documents, jewels, money and secrets they wanted to protect.
“The decision was made to transform that large money rental box into a box of culture and letters. And that is what we call our box of letters, which has a double purpose. The first is to affirm that the great wealth of a community is its culture; the second, betting on the future and receiving the inheritance of the past,” says the poet and writer Luis García Montero.
In those old rental boxes we receive legacies from great authors, Cervantes Awards, film directors, actresses and outstanding actors, musicians, sculptors. “We have received the legacy of Gabriel García Márquez, Alicia Alonso – the great Cuban classic ballet dancer – Luis García Berlanga and many writers, such as Rodrigo Rey Rosa or Sergio Ramírez,” explains the director of this institution that Nation in the 1990s.
“We consider ourselves heirs of all of them and guard their legacy to project it towards the future. That is what will be held in Central America has Miguel Ángel Asturias, taking advantage of the sessions in Guatemala. It will be an act of tribute to the great writer, to incorporate it into our box of letters,” he explains.
The pieces that will be delivered by the son of the Nobel Guatemalan Prize, Miguel Ángel Asturias Amado.
What kind of objects is stored in the box of letters?
Renowned writers – among them all Cervantes Awards since that year – and prominent names of cinema, art, music, dance, theater or science have left in this old battleship camera of the Cervantes Institute in Madrid Retazos of their vital and professional career.
The Box of Lyrics Eats Locking those symbolic legacies as a living memory of the culture of Spain and the Spanish -speaking countries. Miguel Ángel Asturias will be the second Guatemalan in this project. Rodrigo Rey Rosa was selected in September 2023.
- Rodrigo Rey Rosa
The Guatemalan chose one of his first stories, the delivery, as well as one of the notebooks that form the human material, in which his first visits to the General Archive of Central America are consisting, in February 2007, in search of some memoirs of work of the National Police, which he found, but mutilated.
It has assigned box 683, until 2032. There appears its first original poetry book that published in 1973, as well as manuscripts and a butterfly -shaped pendant.
He placed the first fountain pen that was bought four decades ago. Montero, before capturing his stories on the computer, writes by hand. It included notebooks with diversity of notes.
The academic records of Federico García Lorca – among other documents that were donated by the University of Granada – are preserved in the Caja de las de Las Instituto Cervantes.
