‘La Caída de Ícaro’ collects the best verses of the latest winner of the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry / «Few things call me to be written. Poetic processes are not always conscious »
Poetry is only useful to the internal economy of the one who wrote it and the one who reads it. It seems little, but it is the greatest possible. And it is that the poems speak to us as no one else can speak to us ». Olvido García Valdés (Santianes de Pravia, Asturias, 1950) is an essayist, translator and above all a poet.
Hours before García Valdés received the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry, the most important of its kind, García Valdés presented the anthology ‘La Caída de Ícaro’, prepared by Amelia Gamoneda and published by National Heritage and the University of Salamanca.
“There are very few things I need to be written for. The problem is with you, not me. Poetic processes are not always conscious,” García Valdés, author of just seven collections of poetry, said Wednesday. “I think the poet when he writes doesn’t do it; He does it later, as a reader of his own texts,” he said. “Poetry is what needs to be written, which can be anything, but there are very few things that do it,” he stressed when presenting his anthology in the Chamber of the Infanta Isabel of the Royal Palace of Madrid.
«I don’t have a very extensive work: seven books. Each reacts to a few years and a time and at the same time they add up. There are connections between the poems of the different collections of poetry, it is as if he wrote one book”, says the author of ‘Lo solo del animal’ (2012), ‘From the eye to the bone’ (2001) , ‘Caza nocturna ‘ (1997), ‘She, the birds’ (1994) or ‘The third garden’ (1986).
His poetry has been awarded prizes such as the National Poetry (2007), the Asturias Letters (2016) or Ibero-American Poetry Pablo Neruda (2021). Also the Ícaro for Literature’ in 1990 for ‘Exposition’, and the Leonor for Poetry in 1994 for ‘Ella, los pájaros’. His poems have been collected in anthologies such as ‘The test of nine’, ‘They have the word’ or ‘The last third of the century, 1968-1998. Consulted Anthology of Spanish Poetry’.
Olvido García Valdés, graduated in Romance Philology from the University of Oviedo and in Philosophy from the University of Valladolid, has been a professor of Spanish language and literature. She was director of the Cervantes Institute in Toulouse and general director of Book and Reading Promotion. Literary critic in various media has translated poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini into Spanish. His work has been translated into more than 10 languages.
The president of Patrimonio Nacional, Ana de la Cueva, emphasized the importance of the award, so common for the Cervantes, for the institution in its task of disseminating the common cultural heritage. He praised the work of García Valdés, remembered Ana Luísa Amaral, the previous winner, whose brilliant work and human warmth he emphasized.
Ricardo Rivero, Rector of the University of Salamanca, highlighted the alliance between the two sponsoring institutions of the Reina Sofía Award that managed to place it among the great prizes of Spanish letters. For Rivero, this prize reflects “the University of Salamanca’s love of poetry”, now personalized in the figure of Olvido García Valdés and in the book ‘La caída de Ícaro’, which is a brilliant review of his entire career.
The Reina Sofía Prize for Poetry, which is endowed with 42,000 euros, recognizes the whole of the work of a living author who, by virtue of his literary value, makes a relevant contribution to the common cultural heritage of Spain and Latin America.
Source: La Verdad
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