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.
