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.
