Applause rang out on the walls of the Neptuno Palace this Tuesday afternoon, when Luis García Montero went up to collect the XX Blanquerna Awards from the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa. After eight years without a competition, the poet and director of the Cervantes Institute was rewarded for being “a popularizer of Catalan literature, as a poet, critic and teacher, as well as for his commitment to all the literature of the State by the management of the Cervantes Institute”, said the journalist Àngels Barceló – member of the jury – winking and smiling at the winner.
García Montero’s words of gratitude were, for the most part, thanks to his Catalan poet friends, who live with him but can’t call on the phone, he joked. “Sharing poetic illusions with Catalan friends in Barcelona, Valencia or Mallorca. Barcelona was Àlex Susana, Miquel de Palol or Joan Margarit. It was a form of love of freedom.”
In his words he also spoke of his admiration for names prior to his career, such as Jaime Gil de Biedma, Carlos Barral, Joan Maragall, Salvador Espriu, Mercè Rodoreda, Gabriel Ferrater, Joan Vinyoli or Vicent Andrés Estellés.
Barcelona is his family, he said, because his uncles and nephews live there, because friends who emigrated in the 1960s and 1970s lived there, and because Editorial Tusquets was a fundamental company for him and his wife, the writer Almudena Grandes, who also died in 2021. For him it was fortunate “to inhabit a different Spanish culture, proud of its languages and its literary traditions that dialogue with each other as a sign of identity of democratic illusions”.
The 66-year-old from Granada has been one of the protagonists of the Spanish literary scene in recent decades. His career, which began in the 1980s, includes an extensive list of publications, including poetry collections Separate roomswith which he won the Loewe and the National Poetry Prize in 1994; OR The intimacy of the serpent which earned him the Critics’ Award in 2003. He is also an essayist, among his writings The sixth day, The owners of the void AND Barbaric concerns—, and author of novels such as Tomorrow will not be what God wants, someone says your name OR Don’t tell me your life. But his career was not limited to culture, but also to politics, with his activism first in the Communist Party and then in Izquierda Unida, where in 2015 he was the leader of the Madrid regional elections.
The speech of the president of the Generalitat dealt precisely with politics, with a conciliatory tone on the relations between Catalonia and the rest of Spain, and on the current social crises in which he listed the war in Ukraine and Palestine, discrimination against migrants and the need for memory 50 years after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. Illa began his words by recognizing García Montero as “one of the most important poets of the Spanish language”, and then asked: “What does a poet do with his verses? Seek the deepest truth. To defend the truth is to defend democracy”, and quoted the poet’s words: “I do not need to be unjust with respect to the truth to continue fighting against the lie”.
After their respective hugs and photos of receiving the award, the celebration continued with a musical number by Paco Ibáñez, who declared himself happy to sing for his friend. The singer sang and the audience followed him by applauding gallopwith text by Rafael Alberti, e Once upon a time, on the poetry of José Agustín Goytisolo. A few minutes earlier, the actor Josep María Pou had read the poem Epistleby García Montero, translated into Catalan.
Also speaking at the event was the professor and director of the Poetry Room at the University of Barcelona, Noemí Montetes-Mairal, who proposed the candidacy: “(García Montero) is a philologist aware that every linguistic conflict is in itself a political conflict and that, to resolve linguistic issues, one must first resolve the political ones. This has been one of the distinctive features of his career.” For Montetes-Mairal, the poet symbolizes the meeting points, the desire to strive to improve relations between the two languages.
Beyond the speeches, friendships, prizes and songs, to understand the poet’s relationship with Catalonia it was enough simply to listen to his poetry walk with you: “He cuts through people and speaks a beautiful language that I find difficult to understand. Yet this city is mine, it belongs to my life like the port to its ships.
