Bórges said of him, “Darío renovated everything: subject, vocabulary, meter, the peculiar magic of certain words, the sensitivity of the poet and his readers. Rubén brought liberating novelties to the language he inherited from Cervantes, jolting it from stagnation. The only time Rubén wore a military uniform, a dress coat embroidered with golden laurels and a bicorn hat with a crest of feathers, was when he presented his credentials to His Majesty Alfonso XIII in 1908 as Nicaragua’s ephemeral ambassador a uniform, moreover, loaned to him by his Colombian counterpart because he didn’t have one of his own. It’s strange for an American nation to be founded by a poet with words and not by a general on horseback with his sword in the air. Not everyone in Nicaragua writes verses, but Rubén opened the doors to generation after generation of modern poets, right up to today, with names such as Carlos Martínez Rivas Ernesto Cardenal and Claribel Alegría, both of the latter honored with the Queen Sofía Prize for Hispano-American poetry and Gioconda Belli. And for a writer, it’s essential to find that music of lost things, not the things themselves.” What’s more, I think anyone who hasn’t spent his life reading poetry has difficulty finding the keys to prose, which requires rhythms and invisible music: “silent music/resonant solitude.” It’s what Pietro Citati calls “the music of lost things” when talking about Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s prose in The death of a butterfly: “for most people, things are irremediably lost, but for him they left behind music. Rubén, who knew this, revolutionized not only poetry but also journalistic reporting and was an innovative storyteller.
Poetry is inevitably part of the substance of prose. In my case, I voluntarily declare myself a poet, in the sense that Caballero Bonald recalled from this same chair when receiving the 2012 Cervantes Prize: “that verbal emotion, those words that go beyond their own expressive limits and open or leave ajar the passageways leading to enlightenment, to those ‘deep caverns of meaning’ mentioned by St. Evoking his native land, he wrote: “Mother, whose small belly was able to bear/so many blonde beauties and tropical treasures/so many clear blue lakes, so many golden roses/so many sweet doves, so many wild tigers…”
Cervantes gentle reader trial#
“Poet” is how people greet each other in the street, on the opposite sidewalk, whether they are pharmacists, trial lawyers, obstetricians, office workers or street traders and if not all my countrymen write poetry, they feel it as their own, unquestionably thanks to the formidable tutelary shadow of Rubén Darío, who created our identity not only in the literary sense but also as a country. We are all poets from birth, unless proven otherwise. In an essay of my youth that I titled Balkans and volcanos I tried to explain the cultural nature of that region whose history is branded in blistering iron by cataclysms, repeated tyrannies, rebellions and strife but, in Nicaragua’s case also by poetry. Your Majesties: I come from a small country with its volcanic mountain range rising up in the center of the searing Central American landscape that Neruda, in one of his stanzas in Canto General (General Song), called “the sweet waistline of America.” A volatile waistline. Of the Alcalá de Henares University, Madrid, Sergio Ramírez began his acceptance speechįor the Cervantes Prize on April 23 in the auditorium With these words and a black ribbon on his lapel Nicaragua once again becomes a Republic.” With no other weapons than their ideals so that On the streets while demanding justice and democracy,Īnd to the thousands of young people still fighting To the memory of the Nicaraguans recently killed
“With your permission, I would like to dedicate this prize
Nicaragua CERVANTES PRIZE 2017 A journey outward and back Revista Envío - CERVANTES PRIZE 2017 A journey outward and back
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