Much more than a journalist and, at the same time, what a great journalist. Álex Grijelmo has been, for decades—at least since Gabriel García Márquez distinguished him as one of the greats of this language—the writer who has made a literature of the obligation to take care of journalism. There is no defect in his history, and if there were, he would be the first to remedy it, to convert it into a faith of errors. The typo haunts the newspaper; explaining the error dignifies it.
There is no word that, under Álex’s rule, has been broken for spurious reasons, just because, and has appeared like that, like a deletion, in the newspaper for which he has worked for so many years. It is the one that warns you, and also the one that warns itself so that nothing that is inappropriate is part of what the newspaper is obliged to cross out. Álex Grijelmo is the demanding caretaker of his craft, and he is such in such a way that he has made an art of the craft of journalism.
In the history of what he knows, and his demand to make it known, there is Julio Alonso, co-founder of EL PAÍS, master of those who, like Grijelmo, have felt that for the newspaper to be what it is – and it has been down to the smallest error – it must be treated as a work of art, or at least as an obligation that does not cause shame. Teachers like him, and like Julio Alonso, have had over the years in EL PAÍS the guarantee of Stylebook and, also, the vigilance of the successive guardians of this, at the head of which is now Soledad Alcaide, daughter of Julio Alonso and defender of the Lector.
This last Tuesday, Álex Grijelmo had lunch in a restaurant in Madrid with his friend and partner, Juan José Millás. Nearby was the director of Clarion from Buenos Aires, Ricardo Kirschbaum. He asked Grijelmo for a word nueva that he had seen in EL PAÍS, Álex’s newspaper. Until Grijelmo explained to himself what the possible typo consisted of (which it was not), he did not finish the final greeting of that lunch.
His colleagues at EL PAÍS have experienced Álex Grijelmo’s wisdom as a lifeline that has made the newspaper, from the Stylebookbut also from the daily warning, the impossible obligation of the perfect. Now he will also be watching the language from the language itself that is obliged to the splendor of Spanish…
Álex was already part of the Language Academy in Colombia as a corresponding academic, along with Sergio Ramírez. Ramírez, who has just been appointed to take the place that his friend Mario Vargas Llosa had in Hispaniola, greeted his immediate colleague like this: “I learned about Álex Grijelmo when García Márquez gave his famous speech at the opening of the International Language Congress in Zacatecas, in 1997, where he proposed some extravagant changes in the rules of Spanish grammar that Álex responded to in EL PAÍS with a few paragraphs of One hundred years of loneliness under these new and strange rules, so the classic original text was no longer understood; demonstration that that provocative proposal was nothing but, as they say in good Colombian, a cock’s bottle.”
Sergio Ramírez concluded his way of seeing what his colleague means: “Álex is not a language prosecutor, but rather a creative watchdog who inspires confidence that what he certifies as good, is. in the city and the world. I am fortunate to know that we will occupy our seats almost at the same time at the Royal Spanish Academy, but I hope they are sufficiently close. We are already members of the Board of Trustees of the Urgent Spanish Foundation, where we will have a lot of fun with the twists and turns of the words. Better company, impossible.”
Daniel Samper, a Colombian journalist, also a member of the Academy of that country, thus receives the news that his colleague is now also an academic in Spain: “The language academies try to have on their payroll creators and cultivators of literature, teachers of literature, protectors and disseminators of literature. Álex Grijelmo, my colleague at the Colombian Academy, is, simultaneously, a great scholar of the language and its most persistent and popular popularizer in the press. He will occupy only one position in the Royal Academy chair, but it will fulfill multiple missions.”
Juan José Millás, who last Tuesday was trying to find out with Álex about a typo that did not exist, has been close to the new academic for years, “always talking about grammar, since he directed the EL PAÍS newspaper. booklet then. He has a thousand virtues: music, football, dealing with those who were his schoolmates in Burgos. Know about the uncomplicated grammar, of artificial intelligence… He is a very special person, with a great nose for language, at the same time he knows that grammar can be a corset but it can also be a lifeline.”