The 2022 Cervantes Prize has gone to the ninety-year-old Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimiteo, 1930). The Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, has been in charge of revealing the name of the winner and the justification of the jury, which has awarded him the award "for his vast and extensive literary work and the transcendence of a creator who has made poetry reason for its very existence and has taken it to heights of excellence in our language". Cadenas had already won the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry in 2018 and is the first writer from his country to receive the Cervantes.
The award jury also added that Cadenas' work "is one of the most important and demonstrates the transforming power of the word when language is pushed to the limit of its creative possibilities. Cadenas distills its dazzling essence from words, placing them in the dual territory of sleep and wakefulness and making his poems a deep expression of existence itself, and of the universe, also putting them in a dimension that is both mystical and earthly".
Born in Barquisimeto in 1930 and living in Caracas, Cadenas is also a translator, university professor and essayist. He taught at the School of Letters of the Central University of Venezuela, where he taught mainly Spanish and North American poetry, and has been translated into French, Italian and English. He combined literature with political militancy in the Communist Party of Venezuela and that led him to prison and exile during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, being a refugee on the island of Trinidad until 1957. Among his works, the poem Defeat stands out, of wide influence in the poetry of his country.
The Minister of Culture wanted to read in the announcement of this year's award, which he still does not know if Cadenas will be able to collect due to his advanced age, his poem Ars poetica: "Let each word carry what it says./ May it be like the tremor that sustains it./ Let it stay like a heartbeat./ I must not utter embellished falsehood or put dubious ink or add glitter to what is./ This forces me to listen. But we are here to tell the truth./ Let's be real. /I want terrifying accuracy./ I tremble when I think I'm falsifying myself. I must carry my words in weight. They possess me as much as I do them./If I don't see well, tell me, you who know me, my lie, point out the imposture, rub me the scam. I'll really appreciate it./I go crazy to reciprocate./Be my eye, wait for me at night and spot me, scrutinize me, shake me".
Endowed with 125,000 euros and considered the Nobel Prize for Literature in Spanish, last year it was awarded to the Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi (Montevideo, 1941), author of novels such as The Ship of Fools or Solitaire of Love.
This award, created in 1975 by the Ministry of Culture, recognizes the career of a writer who, with his work as a whole, has contributed to enriching the Hispanic literary legacy and is considered the most important of those awarded in Spanish-speaking countries.
In the more than 40 years of existence of the award, only six times has it gone to a woman: the Spanish María Zambrano (1988) and Ana María Matute (2010), the Cuban Dulce María Loynaz (1992), the Mexican Elena Poniatowska (2013), Ida Vitale (2019) and the aforementioned Cristina Peri Rossi (2021).
