Spanish literary life There was a rare Aragonese who always wanted to be from Buenos Aires.. He was one of the most influential figures this country had in life, and he used it to glorify literature, improve the language, straighten an outdated dictionary, and give glory. .
Now, as its centennial year has come to an end, the full centennial year, that is, the year of his birth which was last Thursday, many of us realize that very few remember it, many have forgotten it, or at least the clock is odd. Clocks like to be careful, as Allah commands, who gave the order to shut up until the Spanish language can be heard better.
Not to be forgotten is full of words that he himself polished so that they would not be lost. Words about life, theater, literature, journalism and words of oblivion. Forgetting is full of words and also words that come together in its name. Fernando Lazaro Carreter.
He had an imposing authority that dominated his voice, gait, clinging to life and things, the way he listened to the radio and talked about it, even citing football and other sports. In order for the language to live differently in people’s words, it is necessary to listen to everything.
Forgetting Fernando Lázaro Carreter should be seen as a mortal sin
Day and night was his own activity, and although he was an intellectual, a man forced to spy on this prosody with his own knowledge, but also creative and sincere.. It was his job to listen, and as a linguist telling us faulty journalists what else we’ve done wrong in his useless use of Cervantes, it was one of his strengths to pass judgment on what caused his curiosity or scandal.
Forgetting Fernando Lázaro Carreter should be seen as a mortal sin for those who remember what he did at the Language Academy (Felipe González’s) where the government (Felipe González’s) helped to exist even in difficult times here (Felipe González’s) because here language has not always been taken seriously. Not now.
And this extremely serious man had the courage and the life-risk of being a statesman (hence he was a state legislator) forcing him to focus on the common good, which is good talk.
He was twice director of the House of Words, and that was because power took him, or not just because it took years for the scope of his cause to solidify, until today’s Academy began to be his and others’. Until now, when a figure’s centennial came around, I honestly never thought anyone would forget.
Forgetting Fernando Lázaro Carreter and doing it at the same time as academia and journalism is a feat that can only be understood as memory fades in Spain or the starry hound withered in hasty hands. Journey into the nothingness of oblivion by the great men of whom we know nothing, because we are not for other things or we are for nothing.
Fernando Lazaro Carreter. He was as heavy as a large man, had shoulders to carry hundreds of books or ideas, and walked slowly.
At the end of his time, he was attacked by a pain that doomed him one day to physiotherapy, a man in need of affection and joy, and would sometimes tell you to go and see him on the phone, then take him away. To be invited to one of the restaurants in the north of Madrid and, if he comes, to talk about anything, not academic words, that he cares about as part of a garden built by the history of Spanish good literature. It was when he spoke of Buenos Aires as if he had been dreaming.
After all, his own name is as long as a king’s birthday. It was necessary to have him sing praises or lectures while he was alive, and perhaps shortly after he died, because it was such a rich vocabulary, language, and prose, and so impressive prestige that newspapers or institutions that boasted of it were also used. Their passion for knowledge to show themselves as educated or cultured by being an active part of the Spanish language.
Then oblivion, this oblivion, was celebrated on the Thursday designated that day by Villanueva de la Cañada, a town in Madrid, where the Fernando Lázaro Carreter library is located, and is exactly what it was to inaugurate on December 13, 2022. .
They remember him there, there among the forests that will always seem new, proud to have books to house that timeless place that was the library.
They looked for him from that library, he said, and he went there and, like one attacked by the nature of the future, like someone who now takes refuge in his own name, he’s stuck inside between the last volumes. He died in 2004. Born in Zaragoza with his roots, he was a university and high school professor.
His compatriot Charo López said that when I reminded him that his friend and teacher were turning a hundred years old and few people remember, he always told him in Salamanca lessons that he was “expelled” from the classroom. ..
It was when he spoke of Buenos Aires as if he had dreamed of it.
In 2003, for Lázaro Carreter his friend, theater and cinema so important to him, presented with others a new version of “Pseudo-Darts”, his “dictionary” of mistakes and mutual reproaches to others. Dedicated to journalists in a series of gentle yet powerful, memorable accusations of what we, those in the papers, have done or done wrong…
In that 2003 photograph, Charo is present with her teacher and others who accompany them right now, on the centennial of his death, to the only place they remember the man who loved Buenos Aires and had never been to Buenos Aires. . publications…
At the edge of the abyss where the years reflect, I asked Lázaro at home, in my last interview with him, if anything was wrong, even though I knew that the wise man was also a big boy in pain. I wanted to do…
He looked at me with eyes like the melancholy brutality of a child who dreams of fixing the past. Then he told me that what he wanted to do in his life was to be from Buenos Aires. That flash was a letter to the future and there was no future.
He died a short time later before he could make the journey. Now this farewell commemorates that city of Borges and Lázaro, as if from Villanueva de la Cañada or Aragón, Don Fernando had received a telegram giving him the address he wanted to go to one day. The dream is already a hundred years old, and even Borges is not there to invite it into the space where the nature of hope wants to live.