He is about to say goodbye to the Madrid press, meeting in the great room of the Board of Trustees of the National Library, and with a slow but slightly amused voice he makes a humble request: "I ask you to improve what I have said because it is not the same to speak to write. When one speaks, one feels that something is missing. On the other hand, writing has no limit". The one who asks that they improve what he has said and has so much confidence in the writing is none other than this year's Cervantes Prize winner, the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas, who has just arrived from his country. And that, at 93 years old, he jokes about the size of the Barajas airport and the long trips in a wheelchair that he has needed to get out of there.
And to finally say goodbye, he takes out an old blue folder and reads a poem by one of the great names in European poetry, Rilke, about which he has gone back and forth for years. A character, he says, "so enigmatic and that today is read less than before." The first verses make one doubt whether he is talking about a poet or God. Perhaps there is no difference, because in fact, just at the beginning of his talk with the Cadenas press, when asked if there is poetry in the work of Cervantes, Cadenas spoke of the importance of dictionaries, of learning the language well and knowing the etymology of words, and has recalled that Rilke once wrote to his friend André Gide "that he had been reading the Grimm brothers' dictionary for several months, which was the great classical dictionary in the era of romanticism".
Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930) recalls that "poetry is in language." "I really like the title of a book by María Teresa León: Cervantes, the soldier who taught us to speak. I wish that soldiers would also take care of that today," she smiles. "I think that poetry is in the language of everything that Cervantes wrote. And also in etymology, which fascinates me. That is another piece of advice that I give you: sometimes knowing the etymology of a word is enlightening as to why sometimes there is poetry and other times not. I give the example of the word astonished, which is used a lot. One looks in the etymological dictionary and it means 'struck by lightning'. It is already a phrase that is poetic".
And he adds that "the language of Don Quixote intoxicated me since I was 14 years old. But a few years later was when I was able to read it with another perspective and see that many of the expressions in that book are involuntary poetry. In fact, the essence of poetry is in all the other arts. In the theater, painting, music. Sometimes it is not in the poem", he smiles.
"I have a book of Don Quixote phrases and there is one that I always pass on to the students. In the Maese Pedro episode, Maese's companion, a young man, begins to speak very finely. And then Maese Pedro tells him: ' Llaneza, boy, don't hide that all affectation is bad." A call to simplicity that when I taught I always read to the students. I also tell them not to seek fame. In the writer and the poet I think their center It has to be the creation, forget about everything else."
However, as a young man, before being a professor at the Central University of Venezuela for four decades and translating Walt Whitman at Harvard, he was involved in political struggle in his youth and ended up in exile for several years. And he would write works such as Los cuadernos del destierro or Falsas manoeuvres, his poems being the most famous of his Defeat, a milestone in Latin American literature. "It is my most published and translated poem, and it surprises me because it is not a very encouraging poem, rather it discourages a little and I have always wondered why readers and sometimes people who are not like the poem so much," he says . However, when asked about the situation in his country, Venezuela, he is clear: "I prefer not to answer that question because like many Venezuelans I am quite deprived of information and I don't want to be inaccurate."
On whether the Cervantes that he will collect on Monday from the Kings has arrived late, like so many other writers, he reflects that "he arrived in my old age and, of course, it is preferable to receive an award when one is in good physical condition, for example It's hard for me to travel." And he jokes that "when I received the news I thought that it could be an invention of Don Quixote in one of his astrays, but soon I found out from the representative -Minister Miquel Iceta- and then I had no doubt". "My intention, of course, is to continue writing," he concludes, although, he acknowledges, "with old age the lyrics are lost and sometimes I write a word and I don't understand what it says."
