Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

3 P rince of A sturias A wards 1981-2014. S peeches Laureates. Excerpts The imaginationof people, as it respires ceaselessly, is amoving narrative sequence. It is the navigational chart for great sailing voyages under the open sky. It makes us accessories to all cultures, to every century, to feelings hidden deep inside and others worn on the sleeve. We are prompted by it to restore archaeological ruins in a desperate attempt to stage the lost paradise. As wandering Goliards, we wield language and lust, we experience the flavour of the languages of Babel, a poetic binding agent between the sacred and the profane. We are ever confident that the chimera is within everybody’s reach. And though modernity mocks gullibility, dreaming radiates the pleasures of the flesh and of the spirit. The sun of the Americas, however, is beneficent, a metaphor that precedes the discourse of cross-breeding, and protects it. In this American fief, we are made of human leftovers. In the course of funereal and epiphanic chants, the spark of poetry was bestowed upon the language, the all-transforming vision that describes the palimpsest of our faces and documents the past and days to come. Somewhere in the Ibero-American identity, there is sheltered the memory of native tribes of monotheistic and pantheistic castes. Its Faustian, scattered culture of Greek, Roman, Iberian, Arabic, indigenous and African origin leads to a unique way of relating to the world, of launching into exalted allegories, of submerging in the utopias that once betrayed so many generations, of questioning thoughts and actions, enigmas and the polyhedron of light, the lacerating notions of unbridled passion. Nélida Piñón — Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2005 Excerpt from the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature on 21/10/2005.