The Spanish writer Irene Vallejo (Zaragoza, 45 years old) took office this Monday as a foreign corresponding member of the Colombian Academy of Language, the oldest in Latin America. In her presentation, presented at the Academy headquarters in the historic center of Bogotá, the author of the best-seller Infinity in a reed He has recognized the importance that Colombian literature has had in his creative process and has defended that the essay be seen as a genre for all languages and that it stop being dominated by Anglo-Saxon authors.
The presentation, titled Words, anatomy of a mystery It touches on several axes in Vallejo’s writing, such as her passion for philology (“My heart as a philologist beats galloping right now, in this mythical language academy”), and the relevance of literature to “build communities.” The thread of the text presented for the first time this Monday is driven by his admiration for Colombian literature and its great creators: “Before visiting it for the first time, I already had Colombia in the bloodstream of my language.”
“I discovered Colombia for the first time in my parents’ library, in a prominent place I discovered the books of Mutis and Márquez (…). I always felt that their literature is generous and I appreciate that they consider language a conjugation of hospitality,” he noted. Among the several names that he has ingratiated, in addition to Álvaro Mutis and Gabriel García Márquez, those of Fernando Vallejo, Pilar Quintana and Juan Gabriel Vásquez stand out. “It is a country of so many great humanists,” he stressed.
Vallejo, a philologist by profession and also a columnist for EL PAÍS, has also intertwined the historical relationship between Colombia and Spain as a bridge for creation. “I cannot travel to Colombia without forgetting the Spanish exiles who were received here. Not only did they open their arms and borders to them, but they encouraged their intellectual careers” in several universities, among which the Universidad Libre, La Sabana, the Pedagogical and Los Andes, in Bogotá, stood out, where dozens of republican academics were able to continue with his research in the 1930s.
The author also went on to defend the essay that, she said, “remains east of Eden” and today is “dominated by the English language,” according to Vallejo. For her, the genre should be more diverse and explored in more languages, with a special emphasis on Spanish, so that the issues that Hispanic American authors write about do not remain “on the sidelines of the conversation.” In defense of the field for which he receives the most praise, he has insisted that the essay is a “therapeutic literary genre.”
The writer, who has published diverse works, from novels to poetry, gained international recognition with the book Infinity in a reed (Siruela, 2019), a text that covers the history of books for 30 centuries. Translated into thirty languages and with hundreds of thousands of copies sold, the essay won her the National Essay Prize of Spain in 2020.
In his presentation, the director of the Academy, Eduardo Durán Gómez, hailed Vallejo for having known how to position himself “in the world of language and communication.” About him best seller of literature in Spanish – a success that even Vallejo herself has welcomed with disbelief – the Colombian writer Juan Esteban Constaín, who joined the Academy in 2023, has referred to in his welcome speech. “If someone had said on the eve of publication that the most important book of our time, not only of our language, was going to be a personal history of the adventures of ink and paper to the present day, no one would have believed it. nor conceive. However, it happened,” highlighted Constaín, who applauded the Spanish woman’s rigor, erudition and style.
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