“We need a new way of looking, a new analytical and critical capacity, and poetry can give it to us,” said the poet Coral Bracho (Mexico City, 1951) yesterday, upon receiving the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages, the most important awarded by the International Book Fair (FIL) of Guadalajara (Mexico), that ‘giant’ (the largest in the world in Spanish) in which, until December 3, more than 630 books will be presented and which raises difficult expectations to match, with more than 3,000 accredited journalists.
The poet, thin, with a fragile appearance but happy and vital, like the bright colors of her blouse, studied psychology when she was young, and yesterday she asked, in a meeting with the press, very seriously, “that those who aspire to be presidents of a country are previously subjected to a psychological and psychiatric test to prevent disturbed people from reaching power. It is something elementary for a position of that responsibility, it would help us prevent governments from attacking the life and dignity of those governed.”
It is to be expected that the career of Bracho, an elusive poet, who spent many years without giving interviews “although I am delighted to do so now”, will rise significantly in countries, such as Spain, where she is still little known. The FIL prize, endowed with 137,000 euros, is a kind of ‘Mexican Nobel’, limited to Romance languages ??(Spanish, Catalan, Galician, French, Occitan, Italian, Romanian or Portuguese) and, in its 33 years of history, counts with winners such as Mircea Cartarescu, Ida Vitale, Enrique Vila-Matas, Emmanuel Carrère, Claudio Magris or António Lobo Antunes. In the case of the Spanish language, it can be considered a clear prelude to Cervantes, since several of its winners have subsequently obtained the highest prize in Spanish literature, such as Nicanor Parra (1991 and 2011), Juan Marsé (1997 and 2008), Sergio Pitol (1999 and 2005), Juan Gelman (2000 and 2007), Juan Goytisolo (2004 and 2014), Fernando del Paso (2007 and 2015), Rafael Cadenas (2009 and 2022) or Ida Vitale (2018 and 2018, with a few months Of diference).
“Poetry is a way of linking closely to the world around us,” Bracho explained, “it brings us closer to what we easily stop seeing. With science it shares questions: what are we? why do we exist? what is the air like, water, plants, animals, us? With the social sciences it shares the need to ask: how is it possible for the human race to continue fighting with all the violence imaginable against itself? How is this abyssal inequality and this violence possible? enormous against women and different identities? I see solutions to the world’s problems, we all know what they are, the disturbing thing is that governments do not adopt them. After the Second World War everyone knew how horrible war was, fathers and mothers had lost thousands of children, and they avoided her. Time passes and it seems that we have forgotten that.”
“I didn’t give interviews for a long time,” he continued, “because my poetry was complex and I didn’t want to explain or describe it. When you write, poetry gives you things that you didn’t expect, that were in your mind but hadn’t reached you.”
Bracho’s themes are very diverse, from love and eroticism to landscape and the natural world, through illness and loss or political criticism. Among his most notable works are ‘The Being Who’s Going to Die’ (1982), ‘The Will of Amber’ (1998), ‘Hotel Room’ (2008), ‘The Emperor Laughs’ (2010) and ‘Marfa , Texas’ (2015). The ERA publishing house published his ‘PoesÃa reunida’ in 2019.
On the first day of the FIL Рwhich has the European Union as the guest of honor Рthere were, beyond the award ceremony to Bracho, even tears. Those that could not contain some speakers Рsuch as Marisol Schulz, director of the fair Рwhen evoking the figure of Ra̼l Padilla (1954-2023), the man who founded from nothing in 1987 what is today this great event for the industry. book, only surpassed in the global ranking by that of Frankfurt. Padilla committed suicide last April and the FIL will vacate its position as president until 2025, as a tribute.
