Ida Vitale receives the FIL Award with declaration of love and gratitude to Mexico

Ida Vitale receives the FIL Award with declaration of love and gratitude to Mexico



The International Book Fair (FIL) of Guadalajara today gave its highest recognition to the Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale, who issued a declaration of love and gratitude towards Mexico, the land she arrived after her exile, four decades ago.

Vitale picked up the FIL Prize of Literature in Romance Languages ​​2018 at the opening ceremony of the fair, after the spokesman of the jury of the award, Efraín Kristal, praised the "poetic voice" of the author.

In his reading of the minutes of the jury, which unanimously agreed to grant recognition to the Uruguayan, Kristal stressed that his poetry "has enriched the Spanish language", with a look "sometimes direct and sometimes tangential" that changes the way people see them. things for the reader.

After being received with a long ovation, Vitale, recently named winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2018, delivered a speech that she said she wrote with the intention of being brief, and in which she recalled her arrival in Mexico in 1974, when she fled the dictatorship. that had been implanted in his country.

With a story in which the humor that keeps unbreakable at the age of 95 emerged, he referred to Mexico hosting the Republican exiles who arrived after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and who have kept their arms open to the people from other countries to this day.

In Mexico, where he remained until 1989, he had "the greatest happiness that an exile can have, which is to be integrated as someone else and to be part of a culture, a way of life, a shared happiness".

Mexican generosity materializes in offers that "are always endless, different and unforgettable, from the most necessary, which is to have a way of living for years, and others a little different," he said.

"I wanted to write and that opportunity Mexico gave me generously", sentenced the author of works such as "Procura de lo imposible" (1988) and "Léxico de afinidades" (1994).

After reiterating his gratitude for Mexico for having awarded him the FIL Award, he pointed out that, however, and "great" the acknowledgments are, "there is one thing that accompanies them and surpasses them, and is the contact with old friends and with the new friends, who are already many ".

Once finished his speech, he wanted to remember those figures who, sometimes like these, accompany her "involuntarily from above".

And he mentioned Huberto Batis (1934-2018), "a great master of journalism", and Octavio Paz (1914-1998), a writer "not only Mexican, but universal".

From November 24 to December 2, about 800 authors and 20,000 professionals from the publishing industry will go through the FIL, which is held at Expo Guadalajara, a space of 34,000 square meters of exhibition.

During the inauguration, the president of the FIL, Raúl Padilla, said that throughout the nine days there will be about 1,800 activities in 23 rooms, in which authors, scientists and academics will participate.

Among them are the Nobel Prize for Literature Orhan Pamuk, who will open the Literary Room tomorrow and receive the Carlos Fuentes Medal, a decoration awarded to distinguished visitors who go through the editorial event.

The program also includes names such as the Romanian Mircea Cartarescu, the Spanish Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the Swiss Joël Dicker and the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez.

There will be various tributes, such as the one that will remember the recently deceased Fernando del Paso (1935-2018) or the one that will abound in the political thought of Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), of which 90 years have passed since his birth.

Portugal is on this occasion the guest country, and will bring a delegation of more than 40 writers, including the prominent António Lobo Antunes and Gonçalo M. Tavares.

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