Writers are mendicants, says Mexican poet

Alcala de Henares (Spain), April 25 (IANS/EFE) Writers are “members of a mendicant order” and most writers’ lives are filled with humiliations and failures, an award-winning Mexican author has said.

Mexican poet Jose Emilio Pacheco, who received the Cervantes Prize from Spain’s king Juan Carlos Friday, said writers are not given the recognition they deserve.

“In all of Spanish literature, no life has been filled with more humiliations and failures than that of the author of ‘Don Quixote’,” Pacheco said.

“I wish there had been a Cervantes prize for (Miguel de) Cervantes,” he said, referring to the lucrative honour that is considered the Spanish-speaking world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“How that would have comforted him in his later years! We know that the tremendous success of his book did little or nothing to alleviate his poverty,” he said.

The Cervantes Prize, which carries a cash award of 125,000 euro ($167,000) is presented annually to honour the lifetime achievement of a Spanish-language writer.

“It’s painful to think of him or his rival Lope de Vega humbling himself before dukes, counts and marquises. Only the names have changed. Almost all writers, whether they want to be or not, are members of a mendicant order,” Pacheco said.

“It’s not because of our basic abject essence, but the result of circumstances that date back 2,000 years and are being exacerbated in the electronic era.”

Poverty among writers comes from Rome, when in the time of Augustus “the market for books was established”. Everyone involved in the publishing process, from people who copy text, to papyrus suppliers, editors and book-sellers, was assigned “a payment or a means of earning income”.

“The only one who was excluded was the author, without whom none of the rest would have existed,” Pacheco said, adding that Cervantes “was a prime example of this unjust system”.

That life of humiliation and failures - “one could say that thanks to that he produced his masterpiece” - is reflected in “Don Quixote”, but “it’s not a laughing matter. I think it’s very sad when it happens. Nothing can shake that sorrowful vision out of my head”.

Pacheco first saw a theatrical version of Cervantes’s masterpiece in Mexico City in 1947 when he was eight years old. That play awakened in him “a reality called fiction” and put him on a path that would eventually take him to the pinnacle of literature more than 60 years later.

–IANS/EFE