Valencian students know that the poetic work of Vicent Andrés Estellés (1924-1993) is being examined. Poems like “Un entre tans com esperen i callen”, “I don’t write eclogues”, “Tomorrow will be a song”, “The lovers”, “The stampede”, “Vicent’s song”, “Time”, “Here”, “For example” or the well-known “Assumiràs la veu d’un poble” were in the syllabus of Language and Literature in Valencian for the exams of the past EBAU, so the group that forms when the students come to Carmina Andrés, the poet’s daughter, it’s almost exciting. “More than reading the poems, what they wanted was to come and meet her,” says Ester Casabán, teacher of Valencian at Escola La Comarcal.
Last Wednesday, her students gathered around Andrés to greet her, and even take photos at the end of the presentation ceremony of the poet’s centenary held in Burjassot, Estellés’ hometown. It was a small, modest, open-air event presided over by the logo created specifically for an event that seems to tiptoe around the Valencian Government.
The attitude shown by the vice president and Minister of Culture, Vicente Barrera, towards cultural references such as Joan Fuster, Carles Salvador and the poet from Burjassot already showed signs a few months ago of where things would go. It was then that the Cent d’Estellés platform was established and began to shape a celebration that will be “of the people and for the people,” as the singer-songwriter Pau Alabajos, promoter and presenter of the event, remarked in a protesting tone.
“Conseller Barrera’s statements already say a lot about the intentions of the Valencian Government, which is why organized civil society has decided to roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves positively, constructively and to celebrate. He is a poet who clung to joy and this is a good way to do it,” explains Alabajos.
Catalonia has made explicit its support for the celebration and it will be next February 15 when the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes declares the Estellés Year, for which the programming is still unknown. However, in the Valencian Community the Ministry of Culture, which has not answered this newspaper’s question about whether it will also declare 2024 as Estellés Year, assures that it does plan to carry out actions to mark the centenary.
They explain that there will be a meeting of writers from the Valencian Library where they assure that “for the first time” a poetry recital of their work will be held for educational centers. “We do not turn our backs on culture, we are against contributing to the subsidy of a Chair that the previous government included by previously modifying the strategic subsidy plan,” they emphasize from the department directed by Vox, alluding to the decision to leave without aid the foundation that promotes the author’s work.
Still moved by the event and by the enthusiasm of the students, Carmina Andrés avoids any political assessment and recognizes that the celebration of the Centennial “is a source of pride because it is a celebration of the people.” She says she came to support the celebration and remembers her father, “who always said that ‘he was nothing’. Well, that’s the same for us,” she adds.
With the same humble attitude, he had participated that same morning in the route that the group of students had taken through Burjassot, visiting some spaces where the figure of someone who was also a journalist is remembered. A walk that was explained, very didactically, by the poet’s grandchildren, Isabel and Vicent Anyó. The Plaza de la Constitución is one of the stops, where a panel allows you to read the verses of “Assumiràs la veu d’un poble”, and where in 1979 the town of Burjassot paid tribute to the author. There, a bust was exhibited that was first painted and attacked by fascist groups, and then forgotten by the City Council. Today he is in Benimodo – “where they also loved him very much”, explains his granddaughter – and is currently on display in the Town Hall.
On the way, the route had passed in front of the house on Josep Carsí Street, where Estellés wrote the Llibre de meravelles and where he lived the last years of his life, ending in the Plaza de Sant Roc, right at the back of the Pati de les Sitges where the collaborators of Cent d’Estellés gathered to celebrate this year of activities in memory of the poet.
When spring starts, there will be many educational centers that will ask to do the Estellés Route, says Isabel Anyó, who, in addition to being her granddaughter, is a tourist guide. They will ask to do it guided or they will do it freely, following the QR codes that are displayed in different parts of Burjassot, but also in València, where the poet also resided.
The City Council of the then mayor Joan Ribó created a few years ago a literary route in honor of the poet that pursues the author’s poems on En Llop street, Plaza Redonda, Cabillers street or Portal de Valldigna, and that can be done, now without a guide, but autonomously, listening to the writer’s verses in passing.
Also in Tarragona there is a route that tells the biography of the poet, an itinerary open to following it autonomously in which the spaces of this city poetized by Estellés are visited, such as the cloister of the cathedral, Cal Degà, the Pla de la Seu , the Pretori, the Archaeological Museum and the amphitheater-church of Santa Maria del Miracle.
All in all, it seems that the celebration of the memory of Vicent Andrés Estellés, considered the best poet in Valencian since Ausiàs March, will be a matter of a few, or many, but all of them full of faith.
