Applause resounded on the walls of the Neptuno Palace this Tuesday afternoon, when Luis García Montero went up to collect the XX Blanquerna Premi from the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa. After eight years without the contest being held, the poet and director of the Cervantes Institute has been recognized for being “a disseminator of Catalan literature, as a poet, critic and teacher, as well as his commitment to all the literature of the State from the direction of the Cervantes Institute,” said journalist Àngels Barceló – a member of the jury – while winking and giving the winner a smile.
García Montero’s words of gratitude were, for the most part, acknowledgments to his Catalan poet friends, who live with him, but he cannot call on the phone, he joked. “Sharing poetic illusions with Catalan friends in Barcelona, Valencia or Mallorca. Barcelona was Àlex Susana, Miquel de Palol or Joan Margarit. It was a form of love of freedom.”
In his words he also spoke of his admiration for names prior to his career, such as Jaime Gil de Biedma, Carlos Barral, Joan Maragall, Salvador Espriu, Mercè Rodoreda, Gabriel Ferrater, Joan Vinyoli or Vicent Andrés Estellés.
Barcelona is his family, he said, because uncles and nephews live there, because friends who emigrated in the sixties and seventies lived there, and because Editorial Tusquets was a fundamental company for him and his wife, the writer Almudena Grandes, who also died in 2021. For him it has been fortunate to “inhabit a diverse Spanish culture, proud of its languages and its literary traditions that dialogue with each other as a sign of identity of democratic illusions.”
The 66-year-old from Granada has starred on the Spanish literary scene in recent decades. His career, which began in the eighties, includes an extensive list of publications, such as poetry collections Separate roomswith which he won the Loewe and National Poetry Prize in 1994; either The intimacy of the snake which earned him the Critics’ Prize in 2003. He is also an essayist – his writings include The sixth day, The owners of the void e Barbaric concerns—, and author of novels such as Tomorrow will not be what God wants, someone says your name o Don’t tell me your life. But his career has not been limited to culture, but also to politics, with his activism first in the Communist Party and then in Izquierda Unida, where in 2015 he headed the list for the Madrid regional elections.
Precisely, the intervention of the president of the Generalitat dealt with politics, with a conciliatory tone on the relationship between Catalonia and the rest of Spain, and on the current social crises in which he listed the war in Ukraine and Palestine, discrimination against migrants and the need for memory 50 years after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. Illa began his words by recognizing García Montero as “one of the most important poets of the Spanish language”, and then asked himself: “What does a poet do with his verses? Search for the deepest truth. Defending the truth is defending democracy”, and quoted the poet’s words: “I need not to be unjust from the truth to continue fighting against lies.”
After the respective hugs and photos showing the award, the celebration continued with a musical number by Paco Ibáñez, who declared himself happy to sing to his friend. The singer sang and the audience followed him with applause in Gallopingwith the text by Rafael Alberti, and Once upon a time, about the poem by José Agustín Goytisolo. Minutes before, the actor Josep María Pou read the poem Epistleby García Montero, translated into Catalan.
Also speaking at the event was the academic and director of the Poetry Classroom of the University of Barcelona, Noemí Montetes-Mairal, who proposed the candidacy: “(García Montero) is a philologist aware that every linguistic conflict is in itself a political conflict and that, to unravel the linguistic issues, the political ones must first be unraveled. This was one of the key hallmarks of his career.” For Montetes-Mairal, the poet symbolizes meeting points, the desire to strive to improve relations between both languages.
Beyond the speeches, the friendships, the awards and the songs, to know the poet’s relationship with Catalonia it was enough simply to listen to his poem walk with you: “He crosses people and speaks in a beautiful language that I find difficult to understand. And yet this city is mine, it belongs to my life like a port to its ships.