Sitting in her wheelchair, but with surprising energy and eloquence at 100 years of age, the poet Uruguayan Ida Vitale (Montevideo, November 2, 1923), considered one of the female writers most important living in Latin America, was presented during the inaugural discussion of the VI International University Book Fair and the University Students of the UNAM (Filuni 2024), where she recalled the importance of Mexico in her life as an exile.
“Mexico was everything: History and the other history, the one that is not organized in the booksbut it is basic, the one we assimilate, suddenly, on our own, alone, through some wonderful poet, a luxurious prose or a surprising cultural history. In short, everything that, in Uruguay, which had arrived later, we had to try to grow under our responsibility,” said the Cervantes Prize-winning poet 2018, who arrived in our country in 1974 as a result of the civil-military dictatorship in Uruguay.
“All of this implied a change that, for me, was a definitive and wonderful shock. When one says ‘shock’ one tends to think of a catastrophe, but no: it was an astral shock,” said the poet who during the years she was in Mexico found a place within the intellectual milieu, alongside personalities such as poet Octavio Paz (1914-1998), with whom he collaborated on the magazine “Vuelta”, or the editor and essayist Huberto Batis, with whom he worked at the newspaper “Unomásuno”.
WE ARE ALL DESTINED TO BE PROSE
Alternating reading some poems and confessions about the perception of his own literatureThe writer acknowledged that what interests her most in the world “is prose,” in the sense that it, far from “strange languages,” allows us to understand life, causing even greater difficulties than just “rhythm” or good or bad taste.
“We all go through the world destined to be a little cube of prose that remains there forever, completing the great cultural panoramas that sometimes overwhelm us,” said the writerwho assured that his education in Uruguay did not lack quality, but that, in his opinion, it was very formal, so he had to read authors that now do not seem good to him, while his knowledge about European literature he did them on his own.
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“I suggest to mothers with children of spoiled age that they let them read, even if it is things that are not for them. I believe that there is nothing more necessary than reading things that one does not understand, although sometimes they sense that one should not ask. Children are not that stupid, they know when there is a border, more or less irregular. I do not believe that anything should be prohibited to them,” said the mother. poet whose bibliography exceeds twenty poetry collections, several of them internationally recognized.
POET OF CHANGE AND OF THE SELF
During his presentation Ida Vitale was accompanied by the coordinator of UNAM CultureRosa Beltrán, and the Spanish poet Luis García Montero, who was recently awarded the Carlos Fuentes Award 2024.
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In his speech Garcia Montero He said that in the poetry of Vitale It contains the experience of almost 1001 years of existence, where the use of its language is not an ornament, but a recognition of the world, in which the same writer has decided to lose herself, in search of identity in movement, recognizing the passage of time.
“The poetry Ida tells us that there are no essential truths, because the poet exposes and exposes himself as a human being when he has to search for his own truth. So in poetry there is no room for dogmas, nor is there a self-assured poetry that wants to present itself as the fixed bridge to point out the only path to reality,” he said.