The official audience didn’t take it very seriously, because there are things that end up here like pain, but the author of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ put in the creator’s head that this bastion of the alphabet was worthless to him, at least that bastion should have been destroyed.
did not fall, there is hache that serves its purposebut later in the first of such meetings where the language is consolidated zacatecas, Mexico, Gabo’s pulse looked like it could knock him down. Not possible. He resisted, there he was, mute or full, plump, like a chair with letters on it.
Before the writing of the most important prose writer in the Spanish language in 1997, it was in the splendor of the steppe. Gabo no longer lavished himself on conferences or public statements. He was convinced that he knew more about grammar than his ancestors and future ones. From this authority, he dictated, for example, that hache and other services, which he considered outdated, should pass through or through the valley.
García Márquez’s jokes
Then, says the Spanish journalist school arsenioDeputy director of ‘El País’ and now managing ‘ArchiLetras’ magazine, He was a language expert who had to call him from his place at the newspaper to warn the Colombian that Gabo was not summarizing well, in part of his memoir ‘Vivir para contarla’, which Escolar edited at the newspaper on Sundays. ‘Duty’, leaving only for ‘duty’. Like? Gabo was not a good flea in this regard.
So he kept quiet on the other end of the line and then said: “Why aren’t you a journalist and not an academic?” Arsenio listened on the frozen phone. “Everything will be fine, Gabo,” he dared to say. “But what are we going to do with yours?” Silence again. “Well then fix the first one and leave the others”. “So why not all the rest you’ve been exposed to in this case?”
Silence.
“Because it’s not coming out of my balls.”
He came out of that part of it to finish Ah, and this sparked a great debate after Zacatecas about whether orthography was sacred or should be desecrated according to the best, greatest commandments of the 20th century. the author of our language.
This is now part of the anecdotes, but it was an enormous mess at the time because Gabo had a media authority and measure superior to any academic.. But he won the ax in that fight between armies. The spelling was kept in place and the author of ‘Living to Tell’, Also, he already knew what to do with ‘duty’ and ‘duty’ on the other hand.
“And how would the ax fall?!” The Mexican (and Asturian) asked himself yesterday in Cádiz. gonzalo celloDirector since 2019 Mexican Language AcademySomeone who is a friend of Gabo’s and knows what it’s like to be Colombian in wars like Don Quixote.
At the time, Celorio was not invited to Zacatecas because he was not an academic, but he remembers all too well those gossip that left the H and other cursive spellings in the hands of the most heartless of his cynics. Both Grammar and Dictionary, already famous academician yesterday, are “descriptive, not authoritative, they are presented with a correction criterion. Spelling is what imposes, and H or not, tilde or not, and the user very willingly accepts this authorization”.
What Gabo suggested was “an optional subject. It’s not true what he said, that the h doesn’t sound, it’s silent. And when you say egg or say huarache, it’s vowel, because it’s semi-consonant. Then it’s mute in the habada or son, but not in the egg, it’s mute in the hyena or he is not mute while following a diphthong”.
What the son of the Aracatana telegrapher (there is no accent in the telegram) suggested was “an aberration, because the truth is that there is a traditional communication mechanism that allows the unity of communication and language to be preserved.” he mocked Juan Ramon Jimenez g’s changed to jack but was left alone. “And when Gabo defies accentuation, it impoverishes language…”
Was he a spirit and where was he going? “I wanted to pull out the expression on the academic corset. and even though the example he used was a spelling example, I don’t think he was the lucky one. It was neither happy nor effective: what is certain is that behind this statement was the importance of Latin American literature in the context of creative freedom and Spanish language literature.
Was it an argument? “On the contrary,” says Celorio now, “he had a voice.”
mind game
Was listening to Gabo in Zacatecas. Juan Villoro. Now he is one of the greats of the literary language in Spanish, a very agile Mexican for prose and dialectic, and it abounds in the requirements of Congress these days. He remembered his tirade yesterday. “It was a game of creativity, it was a little playful, Language Congress is important to understand. [el primero que se celebraba] it would not be a serious event, it would be an open opportunity to have fun with language. It then set an important precedent for the next Congress held in 2013. rosary beadsArgentina, listen Roberto Fontanarrosa Talk about the opportunity to curse. He liked Gabo: he tries to show that the language is clear, just as the H is seemingly useless, there are words that, in the Argentine’s opinion, should be banned because they are profanity or defamation, but, frankly, people use them profitably. ”
These, Villoro says, are controversial, overt contributions, but there’s everything in this literary bond that can also take away the smug, arrogant, and selfish seriousness typical of a language used for fun. “Also obvious, non-serious, shocking… Literature is made of these extremes. The pomp also showed some good results. I especially prefer intelligence and disrespect.“.
where we talked yesterday Dario Villanueva, Spanish academic, former director of the RAE and now the author of a book about it, ‘The power of words’ (Galaxia Gutenberg). We ask him for his opinion: Was Gabo right?
“I don’t think so, because orthography is necessary, and for a language as large as ours right now, the stability afforded by orthography is very appropriate and apt. What he said was very ingenious. He also responded to the spirit of freedom that my writing sometimes constrains, but we must not forget that ours is one of the simplest, clearest of all spellings. “Let’s compare Portuguese with French,” he said. Juan Benet French spelling is like a hurdle race. It’s not ours and it cannot be removed by Gabo. He thought that pulling on one of the strings would rip the entire tapestry off”.
It was not so successful that it is now called “Somewhere in La Mancha” or “Years later in front of the firing squad”… No Quixote, no aftermath, no firing squad.