Francisco Rico is one of those teachers who follows the tradition of the great humanists, a scrutinizer of that small world of man that is universal and constant since before that other globalization, the economic one,” journalist Josep Massot wrote in 2004 in a profile about the professor and academic who died yesterday on the eve of his 82nd birthday in Sant Cugat del Vallès, the town where he had lived since the sixties. Born in Barcelona in 1942, the illustrious philologist had retired from academic life for a couple of years, due to a significant deterioration in his health.
Rico dedicated his literary passion to studying in depth the work of Miguel de Cervantes. As a result of this specialty, in which he became a reference, he was responsible for the critical edition of Don Quixote published by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) on the occasion of the fourth centenary of its publication. In it he led a team of almost a hundred specialists. He was also responsible for the edition of the apocryphal Don Quixote, that of Avellaneda. “Don Quixote is the only book in the West that has been a best seller every day of his life. Neither Calderón nor Shakespeare nor Dante achieved something like that,” he claimed.
In his studies, Rico insisted on demystifying Cervantes’ masterpiece, emphasizing that it was a work full of humor, without second readings or esoteric interpretations as some scholars had wanted to see.
It was in 1987 when he joined the RAE as a full academic, where he worked on multiple research projects and debated passionately with his colleagues, since his marked polemic character with his friends and opponents, inside and outside the corporation, was known.
In parallel, and as a complement to his Cervantes passion, Rico treasured multiple editions of the book that narrates the adventures of the knight-errant, a collection that he gave to the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Some of these copies were first editions from the years 1605 and 1608. In 2015 the UAB organized an exhibition of its quixotic volumes, which was sponsored by Jordi Savall with his music, and by Eduardo Mendoza. The author of The City of Prodigies had a great first reader of his works in the figure of Rico, since, before publishing them, the philologist was in charge of reading the first manuscript.
Rico was a professor of Medieval Hispanic Literatures at the UAB, but his academic projection was always marked by the work of Miguel de Cervantes and, also, by that of Petrarch. The professor was a great lover of Italian literature, and this was demonstrated this year with his latest work, a profile of the author of the Songbook, titled Petrarch. Poet, thinker, character (Arca).
When Javier Marías visited Catalonia, he became his neighbor in Sant Cugat. There the novelist asked his permission to make him a character in his works and Rico gave him his permission, but set one condition: that he not appear with an invented name, but with his own. And this is how he appears in the work of the Madrid author.
In addition to Cervantes and Petrarca, Rico admired the poetic height of Ausiàs March and had another weakness, Lazarillo de Tormes, about whom he wrote his entrance speech at the RAE. In the learned house, he directed the Classical Library collection, of 111 titles, which includes, in addition to the aforementioned Don Quixotes, the complete works of Miguel de Cervantes, presented in November 2019.
The Council of Ministers on December 29, 2015 awarded him the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, and in April 2016 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bologna, in Italy, his second literary homeland.
