Noticias

---

He is the sixth Mexican author to deserve this recognition

Fernando del Paso received with delight the Miguel de Cervantes Spanish Language Literary Award

April 23, 2016

Alcala de Henares, Spain.- The great afternoon of Fernando del Paso on the exact day on which Don Quixote de la Mancha’s writer died 400 years ago, happened on Saturday 23rd at the University of Alcala de Henares, when the king of Spain gave him personally the Cervantes Prize, with which the Spanish language honors him as at the same time he honored himself a language that he transfigured from his early childhood, calling things with untranslatable neologisms that foreshadowed wrongly that he would never speak the language of his parents.

Praised for his three novels, so essential and a few like Rulfo's work, Fernando del Paso received from the King of Spain, Felipe de Borbon, an award that he raised in both hands like an Olympic medal.

Fernando del Paso looked smiling, full and delighted at the ceremony, having achieved that his wife Socorro, children, grandchildren and one great-granddaughter could accompany him.

He was also accompanied by his childhood memories. Before writing, he recalled, he elaborated new names for things, a custom that enriched his literature full of different layers of languages, popular, archaic, neological, from the neighborhood or scientific.

Fernando del Paso, a critic of his social environment, listed his two reference sources of Spanish authors who were his companions along the way. From Lope de Vega and Gongora he built a bridge to Miguel Hernandez, who in his immense tragedy was the poet who took him to literature and to write sonnets, as stated by the author of Noticias del imperio (News from the Empire).

Yesterday, Fernando del Paso deposited in his cervantina  urn some relics among which highlights a shirt of the deceased Mexican poet José Carlos Becerra who died driving to Brindisi, Italy.

Today, del Paso recalled in his speech that when laziness took hold of him he wore the Tabasco native poet’s shirt, author of El otoño recorre las islas. He remembered his death so young and told himself he had no right to waver. In his tragedy, this Mexican poet motivated his work, as the killed in tragic circumstances, Miguel Hernández and Federico Garcia Lorca from whom he wrote a play that he expects to see on stage.

The Cervantes Prize ceremony was attended by authorities as the president of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, the kings Felipe and Letizia, the Secretary of Culture of Mexico, Rafael Tovar y de Teresa and the general director of the Fund of Economic Culture, José Carreño Carlon.

 Fernando del Paso thus joined the five Mexicans who have been awarded the Cervantes Prize: Octavio Paz, Elena Poniatowska, Sergio Pitol, José Emilio Pacheco and Carlos Fuentes.

 

Mexico,Distrito Federal