The Spanish Luis García Montero will have a relevant role in Central America Account (CAC 2025), in which more than 60 guests from the world of lyrics will participate to talk about literature, cinema, music and various current themes.
The appointment will be held in Guatemala, from May 19 to 24. The lover of letters and poetry has transcended with his name not only for his books, because he is currently the director of the Cervantes Institute.
The last years have been strong experiences for the writer. One year and three months (2022) is a book that brings together the poems written by the Spanish Luis García Montero following the loss of his wife, Almudena Grandes, who died of cancer in 2021.
The poems lead to recognizing the emotions of the writer, the disease and convalescence of her, the experience and emotion of the lived. “In its verses the argument of the last walk in summer, the unexpected diagnosis, the care, the end of the year at the hospital, the tear of the pain, the empty house, the memories called by the absence, the moments of a long love story that here charges all its meaning,” described in the prologue of the book.
We share a fragment of the one of the poems of Luis García Montero:
I don’t get the accounts
And you never learn completely
To add and subtract.
I take away this time,
A simple subtraction in the verb living,
And I see you arrive, appear
In the middle of a writer congress,
beautifully free,
dressed in yourself,
Morena in speaking and looking at me.
We were thirty to fold life,
proud of love and nude,
of sheets taken and memories,
willing to look for maps.
Nor did I understand what can be added,
to an expected pain,
A simple sum in the verb losing …
The memories of his wife Almudena Grandes
One year and three months It is symbolic because it was the time between the diagnosis of the disease and the farewell. The couple lived almost three decades. The BBC He describes it as a wink of that relationship, a work that has been described as “a moving duel lesson”, “a lucrative and sad book, but at the same time full of luminosity”, “one of the best love books of recent literature”, “a table of salvation before the wreck”.
But, it was not the only writer book dedicated to his wife. Almudena (2024) also arrived to show the love poems that the author dedicated to his wife between 1994 and 2021.
Tusquets editors published a video of why these books, as well as the way the writer lives his duel. “Any vocation poet has poetry as the best reason to find reality a meaning,” said García Montero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE55L9Hrzme
The author who will be in Guatemala, during CAC 2025, will present two books: an anthology of your work, as well as a special edition of the Cervantes Institute, in 27 American native languages, of the poem I shout towards Romeby Federico García Lorca.
The work collects Lorca’s poem from the book Poet in New York, with versions in a selection of native languages of communities of Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Chile and Guatemala. It appears in Kaqchikel.
In addition, one of the most prominent moments will be during the inauguration of the CAC. On May 20, at the Miguel Ángel Asturias Cultural Center, the legacy of the Guatemalan Nobel Nobel Asturias will be delivered to the Caja Cervantes Institute, which will be received by García Montero. The president of Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo, as well as Miguel Ángel Asturias Amado will participateson of the Nobel Prize. In this way, the creator of Mr. President will become part of the group of Central American authors whose legacy remains in the box of letters, such as Rubén Darío, Ernesto Cardenal, Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli, Horacio Castellanos Moya and Rodrigo Rey Rosa.
In a brief interview with Libr PressE speaks more of his career and future visit to the country:
When do you discover your passion for poetry and literature?
I was lucky to discover soon, in my parents’ house library, the poetry of a Granada author who had died 22 years before I was born: Federico García Lorca. His death occurred during the Spanish Civil War and I was very impressed to read it. Later, I was impacted to get to know details of Lorca’s life.
When I entered the university, it was the years in which the dictatorship was ending and fought more openly for democracy. For me, dedicating myself to poetry was like dedicating myself to freedom, to recover the lost memory, to speak again of authors who had been silenced during the dictatorship, such as Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Antonio Machado and Lorca. Little by little, my life mixed with literature, and that was what made me poet.
In his role as defender of the Spanish language, how difficult is it to reach children and adolescents today?
We live at a time when visual culture and social networks are very important, and entertainment has been confused with culture. For me, the word culture has to do with education, with personal training, while entertainment is related to leisure, with spending time in a fun way.
It is true that, in a society like Spanish, in Europe – I suppose that also in Guatemala – there is now a hurry of life marked by social networks and images rather than reading. However, in poetry I realize that there is something that unites poetry with the culture of social networks: the narrow dialogue between intimacy and the public. Social networks allow us to move from privacy to the public very quickly and that is what poetry has always tried: presenting very intimate feelings in public. I think that is an incentive for people to also be interested in poetry and, in fact, there are many young authors who have approached poetry and publish on social networks. Poets write, not to quickly have “like”, but to do an exercise in knowledge.
What have you represented for you to direct the Cervantes Institute?
The Cervantes Institute was founded in 1991. It is a young institution, compared to others, such as the French Alliance, which was born at the end of the 19th century, and the British Council, in the third decade of 1900. The tasks of the Cervantes Institute consist of defending Spanish and cultures in Spain. These cultures respect diversity, because in addition to Spanish there are Catalan, Galician and Basque. We defend that diversity.
Spanish is a language with 500 million native speakers, and the Spaniards represent only 9%. The majority of Spanish speakers are found in Latin America. That is why we collaborate with the embassies of Latin American governments, in cultural centers or projects such as Central America. The language is more than a vocabulary. In words, memory, culture and the possibility of understanding are preserved. I think Spanish has much to contribute in a world that respects cultural diversity and distrusts any type of hegemony that pretends to impose a language as unique on the planet.
During Cac there will be a tribute to Miguel Ángel Asturias and you will take a legacy to the box of letters to Spain. What symbolizes this project?
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 Institute there. 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, bet on the future and receive the inheritance of the past. 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. 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.
Awards
He is considered one of the most important poets in Spain. He has studied the work of authors such as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro, Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Luis Rosales, Francisco Ayala or José Emilio Pacheco. He is currently director of the Cervantes Institute. As a poet, narrator and essayist he has received several awards.
- The Adonáis Award (1982)
- National Literature Award (1994)
- National Critics Award (2003)
- Madrid Library Guild Award (2009)
- Poets of the Latin World Poets (Mexico, 2010)
- Ramón López Velarde Award (Mexico, 2017)
- Parallel Prize 0 (Ecuador, 2018)
- Carlo Betocchi International Award (Italy, 2020)
- Golden Antílope Poetry International Award (2021, China)
He has studied the work of authors such as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro, Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Luis Rosales, Francisco Ayala or José Emilio Pacheco.