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Guest of Honor Pavilion

Spain, Guest of Honor
Guest of Honor Pavilion
Meetings (and misunderstandings). Luis Cernuda y Xavier Villaurrutia

In 1952, Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), weary of life in the United States, with no intellectual or personal incentives, went to Mexico, where he began working part-time at UNAM. Cernuda's years in Mexico were the most fruitful of his life. Here he would find the warmth of the people and the color of a landscape so reminiscent of the Seville he had been forcibly exiled from, first to England, then France, later the United States and finally to Mexico, where he died. In Variaciones sobre tema mexicano, the poet talks about his experience and his reclaimed childhood. The death of the multifaceted Xavier Villaurrutia, also a poet, two years before Cernuda's arrival frustrated the opportunity to hold a personal meeting that would have very likely been mediated by Octavio Paz, a friend of both poets. The work of Cernuda, who was part of the Generation of '27, and the poetry of Villaurrutia, founder, together with Salvador Novo, of the group and magazine Contemporáneos, have interesting overlaps both in the themes they cover in their verses and in their aesthetic and formal concerns. Love and death, homosexuality and the human condition. Their verses are not devoid of social criticism, mainly against the conventions of a rigid and hypocritical bourgeoisie. Both were advocates of the independence of art. The two also embraced surrealism, a rich realm of dreams and a perfect canvas for exploring eroticism. While the exiled Cernuda did not hide Los placeres prohibidos, Villaurrutia suffered the attacks and permanent exclusion by adherents to the nationalist and sexist cultural policy of the Alvaro Obregón government, although the author of Nocturno de los ángeles found in poetry a place that was conducive to "open confession." At this discussion, our guests, also poets, will make it possible for Cernuda and Villaurrutia to meet at last.

Participants: Hernán Bravo Varela, Antonio Rivero Taravillo

Moderator: Àngels Gregori

Hernán Bravo Varela

(Mexico City, 1979) is the author of thirteen books of poetry, essays, and various inventions, including Oficios de ciega pertenencia (1999 and 2004, National Council for Culture and the Arts, Mexico), Sobrenaturaleza (2010, Pre-Textos, Spain), Hasta aquí (2014, Almadía, Mexico), Historia de mi hígado y otros ensayos (2017, Fondo de Cultura Económica), Modelo centinela (2021, La Castalia / Ediciones de la Línea Imaginaria, Venezuela and Ecuador), and Ejercicios de respiración; seguido de El Estado empresario mexicano (2023, Pre-Textos, Spain). The Argentine publishing house Bajo la Luna published Porque no sé empezar, a poetic anthology of his work selected and introduced by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg.

He has translated into Spanish and published various works by Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, and Leonard Michaels, among other English-language authors.

He won the Premio Nacional de Poesía Joven de México in 1999 and the Certamen Internacional de Literatura Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 2010, in the literary essay category.

He has been a member of the National System of Art Creators (Mexico) since 2017.

He is the editor of Periódico de Poesía at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Antonio Rivero Taravillo

Invitado de Honor

Writer from Seville born in 1963 in Melilla (Spain). Author of novels whose protagonists include Octavio Paz, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, he also writes non-fiction, travel books, biographies of Luis Cernuda, Juan Eduardo Cirlot and Álvaro Cunqueiro, and he is a literary critic and translator of many of the most important poets in English, from Shakespeare to Pound, and writers in Irish Gaelic, such as Flann O’Brien, Liam O’Flaherty and Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin. He has published seventeen books of poems, the most recent of which is Luna sin rostro (Pre-Textos). His poems have been translated into English, French, Italian, Serbian, Portuguese, Chinese and Hungarian.

He has been a bookseller and editor, and has directed magazines such as Mercurio, El Libro Andaluz and Estación Poesía. Today, he regularly collaborates with Diario de Sevilla, Jot Down, Letra Global, Letras Libres and Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. In Mexico, his texts have appeared in the Laberinto and El Cultural supplements, and in the magazines Inundación Castálida, Luvina and UNAM's Periódico de Poesía.

The awards he has received include the Seville Book Fair, the Rafael Cansinos Assens Award for his translation of John Keats, and the Comillas Award for his biography of Luis Cernuda, which was published in two volumes by Tusquets in Spain and Mexico. He wrote prologues for La realidad y el deseo and Ocnos y Variaciones sobre tema mexicano for Alianza Editorial, and is considered one of the main scholars of the life and work of Cernuda, on whom he has published numerous works.

In 2025, his new translation of Hamlet will be published.

Other activities involving the participant:
Poetry Room

Àngels Gregori

Invitado de Honor

(Oliva, Valencia, 1985)

She is a poet and cultural manager. Her works include Bambolines; Quan els grans arbres cauen; New York, Nabokov & Bicicletes; Quan érem divendres and Jazz, for which she has received the awards Amadeu Oller, Alfons el Magnànim, Jocs Florals de Barcelona, Ausiàs March and Vicent Andrés Estellés. In 2019, she won the award Premio de la Crítica from Valencian writers and, in 2024, the Cavall Verd-Josep M. Llompart Award for the best book of the year in Catalan.

She directed Barcelona Poetry, the Sant Cugat Poetry Festival, the Lleida Poetry Festival, the meetings of the Casa Antonio Machado de Rocafort and the Mediterranean Writers' Meetings. From its creation in 2019 until 2023, she headed the Francisco Brines Foundation. In 2005, she created Poefesta, the Oliva Poetry Festival, which over the years has received the awards Premio de Fomento de la Lectura de la Fundació Bromera and Premio Difusión de la Literatura de la Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC). In 2024, she was appointed Commissioner of the Year of Estellés, in celebration of the centenary of the Valencian poet, and since 2021 she has been a member of the Valencian Language Academy.

Other activities involving the participant:
Journeys. Silent time. Tribute to Luis Martín-Santos
Journeys. Tribute to Vicent Andrés Estellés
On literature in other formats. Modern Valencian poetry. Recital and musical performance

Wednesday December 04
17:00 to 17:50
Pabellón de España, Expo Guadalajara