“If you are not leap, / one year it breaks down / in three hundred sixty -five mosquoadillas. / On the contrary, a life / leaves – it was – in a sigh. They are verses by Antonio Rivero Taravillo (Melilla, 1963 – Sevilla, 2025). In his case, Cobra has been a lung cancer detected two years ago that he has had the world of letters in Seville all this time and that, perhaps as therapy perhaps to conjure the destination, turned into literary matter. He wrote many poems because they were detected by the disease, “a complete book,” he said a few months ago in an interview. What else can a man of letters do to grab life.
But Antonio Rivero, who has died in Seville this Friday at 62, was much more, the total writer: novelist, translator (of the most important poets in the English language, such as Shakespeare and Yeats), essayist and biographer (by Luis Cernuda, by Juan Eduardo Cirot and more recently, by Álvaro Cunqueiro, whose biography is still without a publication date). And fundamentally, he was a person appreciated as a trunk figure of culture in Seville, immensely loved and respected by his colleagues and committed to the most quixotic causes that would not have to be, but that the laziness of the administration elevates them to that category: such as opening to the public the native house of Cernuda or to maintain the assisted breathing to the book of the book of the city until dignity.
Despite being a Sevillian of the prototype’s underside – inmensely Sevillian, therefore: as Antonio Machado, as Luis Cernuda – his best known passion was Ireland, the gaelic languages and the translation of his Celtic poets into Spanish. He was able to inoculate in the city where he always lived that feeling of attraction for the Gaelic, with Joyce by flag and his Bloom’s Day every June 16. He even published, about eight years ago, a Sentimental dictionary of the Irish culture (Editorial Fórcola), where, more than definitions, the selected entries formed a skein of stories that distilled an encyclopedic knowledge of the island, but also its emotional dependence towards this culture, which has marked all its literary career.
Ireland has marked it and Luis Cernuda, the Sevillian poet of 27 who also put a spicy on the British islands and was an important translator of authors such as William Wordsworth and William Blake. There was still no complete and exhaustive biography of the author of Reality and desirewhen Antonio Rivero Taravillo published Luis Cernuda: Spanish years (1902-1938) (Tusquets) – to the one that would follow Luis Cernuda: years of exile (1938-1963)– And that constituted a milestone in the approach of this poet who inhabited oblivion.
Rivero travels key environments and circumstances: the sullen family atmosphere, Seville as a loved and hated city, and, above all, the emergence and development of a poetic vocation already felt forever as the duty to express the mystery of the world and its conflicts. “He has died almost with the same age as his sernuda …”, the Sevillian writer Eva Díaz Pérez lamented yesterday, remembering the death of the poet of 27 in Mexico, of a fulminating infarction when he was 61 years old.
For this biography (edited by Tusquets in two volumes) he received the Comillas de Historia, Biography and Memoirs in 2008. RTVE counselor.
Leaves a great project started – the restoration and endowment of content of the native house of Cernuda will not be completed; A posthumous work – the biography of Álvaro Cunqueiro – and a pending event: his participation in the Fair of the Old Book of Seville was announced, where he had to act as a preacher next Friday, September 26. To say that he was a tireless worker is not a common place in the case of Antonio Rivero Taravillo, the Sevillian of the underside, of half smile and extreme discretion. Always between two waters: the most Andalusian of the Irish poets, the most Irish of the Sevillian poets.