Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

P rince of A sturias A wards 1981-2014. S peeches 5 As Eduardo Torres might well have put it, Central America has always been defeated, both by the elements and by the enemy’s ships. I refer here to the natural catastrophes of recent years, and to the economic and political disasters that have been forced upon us by the interests of powerful foreign companies who produce the fruit that has given rise to our countries being called “banana republics”. It is my duty to point out once again that it is not only bananas that we have produced over the centuries. I would remind you that our Mayan forefathers, consummate astronomers and mathematicians, who invented the zero before other great civilizations, had their own cosmogony, in what is now known by the name of Popol Vuh , the national book of the K’iche’ people, mythological and poetic and mysterious. I would remind you of Rafael Landívar, the author of Rusticatio mexicana , the best neolatin poem of the 18th century; of José Batres Montúfar, a satirical story-writer in verse whose octavas reales (eight-line, eleven syllable verse) descend directly from Ariosto and Casti and brilliantly round off world narrative in this verse; and, to conclude, so as not to get dangerously close to our era, I would remind you of Rubén Darío, who renewed the language of poetry in Spanish like no other had done before since the times of Góngora and Garcilaso de la Vega. Three legacies —indigenous, Latin and Spanish— that most Central American writers, I am sure, strive to be worthy of, and, why not, to preserve and contribute to with dignity and respect. In a moment of optimism I declared a few years ago on an occasion like this that my greatest ideal as an author lay in taking up, one day in the medium-term future, half a page of my country’s primary schools’ reading text. This may well be the greatest immortality that a writer can aspire to. Augusto Monterroso — Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2000 Excerpt from the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature on 27/10/2000.