Valladolid, (EFE).- Fifteen key speeches by the humanist and citizen, husband and father, journalist and writer who was Miguel Delibes, chosen by Professor Ana María Martínez, make up a new book about the author.
The publication, presented this Wednesday at the Valladolid Book Fair, addresses the work of the novelist and occasional speaker: from the written word to the spoken word.
Beyond academic exegesis, theses and studies on his legacy, the value of “The Discourses of Miguel Delibes” (Destiny) lies in the fact that it is the protagonist himself who explains himself.
They are speeches with keys to understand his work
“His speeches give us extraordinary keys to understand all his work,” says the author.
What had already been glimpsed in their stories? Yes, but in this genre it corroborates it and in a more direct way, ”explains Ana María Martínez, professor of literature at the IES Diego Porcelos, in Burgos, to EFE.
In all of them, “the humanist Delibes and defender of nature and freedom of expression” beats, and he does so “with the same highly praised language of his novels, with his great linguistic precision,” he adds.
And to meet the writer and the man
In any case, he summarized, the choice of topics for his speeches “also allows us to get to know the writer and the man he was a little more”.
Skeptical and modest Delibes (1920-2010) appears in those public appearances that the curator of this edition has delimited between 1975, with the admission speech in the RAE “The sense of progress from my work”.
And in 2008, two years before his death, with his gratitude to the University of Salamanca for the Honoris Causa doctorate (“An avant-garde ecologist”).
Biographical notes, emotional evocations, personal traits and, above all, abundant pillars of his work and his way of writing, condense these pages.
They are pages read in auditoriums, plenary halls and other pompadours where he frequently relied on his characters and his books to explain himself.
“It has been enough for me to have my eyes open to see and my ears alert to listen”
Far from the ‘literary ventriloquism’ that Francisco Threshold assigned him, Delibes qualified that the creatures and voices that populate his novels are the result of observation.
“It has been enough for me to have my eyes open to see and my ears alert to listen,” he said at the University of Valladolid (1983) when he was awarded an honorary doctorate.
“I have always been a novelist of characters”, he certified eight years later in El Escorial (1991) during one of the summer courses at the Complutense University, dedicated to his narrative.
There he acknowledged being the author of a work in general “of losers, of humiliated and offended beings, poor marginalized beings (…)”
A journey through three decades
They are more than three decades in the stage of greatest recognition of the novelist in the form of honorary doctorates, tributes and studies on his work.
These are the three parts that make up this compilation by Martínez, a doctor in Hispanic Philology, and specialized in contemporary Spanish narrative.
On very few occasions, except for the lucid and prophetic environmental plea of his entry into the RAE, the public interventions of the author of “Las ratas” had not been gathered as they are now.
Hence the value of contemplating a Miguel Delibes ‘with his pants off’, devoid of the shelter of his stories and characters.
“Here we have the opportunity to verify how, also through his speeches, he demonstrated coherence with the background of his narrative and the rest of his work,” according to the director of the Miguel Delibes Foundation, Fernando Zamácola.
When reviewing the content of all of them, the same thing can be said about Delibes that he said about Miguel de Cervantes when he received the main prize for Hispanic letters in 1994.
“He has not been silent (…) his word continues to live through time, in accordance with the desire for immortality that moves the artist’s hand and heart.” EFE