Literature at the Center. Language teaching and literary creation

After all, what is literature for? In technological, sanitary and hey! also military times, how can a poem, a piece of theater, a novel, a story, an essay, an aphorism, a piece like those proposed and practiced by Don Alfonso Reyes be useful to us?

Perhaps poetry —also the existing in numerous song lyrics— is necessary to say precisely: hey! With this scream starts the protagonist of Ifigenia cruel, the vast lyrical and tragic text of Reyes himself: poetry can be the interjection that we need in difficult times, and sometimes a single sentence, a couple of simple words, sheds as much light as entire studies: the Gallic bard Charles Baudelaire defined drugs as “artificial paradises”. Exactly! It is up to our readers to extract the implications of two such accurate words.

Likewise, a text from many decades ago can be a point of reference for “the current hour with its coconut belly” (verse of Soft Land of Ramón López Velarde): War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. A town deceived with promises of negotiation and finally invaded, the Russian, defends itself from the Napoleonic troops, far superior in forces and organization, and finally defeats them and expels them from their territory. What would Tolstoy and Fedor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov and Anna Akhmatova say today before so many innocent deaths? (Literature is made from one person for each person from each unrepeatable and unmistakable character; that is why each death must be more than statistical, and it is when profound art intervenes.) Anna Akhmatova was born in Odessa, now Ukraine, and studied in Kiev and St. Petersburg. She wrote about the native land.

The homeland

We don’t wear it in dark amulets
nor do we write snatched sighs about it,
does it not disturb our bitter sleep
nor does it seem to us the promised paradise.
In our soul we do not convert it
in object to be bought or sold.
For it, sick, needy, wandering
we don’t even remember it.

Yes, for us it is dirt in the shoes.
Yes, for us it is stone in the teeth.
And we grind, we rip out, we crush
that land that mixes with nothing.
But in her we lie and we are her
and that’s why, joyfully, we call it ours.

She suffered persecution from the dictatorship and saw her first husband shot and her only son threatened during the initial years of the URSS. His friend Osip Mandelshtam composed a poem that ran from word of mouth and angered Joseph Stalin. Spies and police scrambled entire houses to discover the manuscript; they did not find it because the poem was never written: it was created and memorized and transmitted as a password to drive the tyrant crazy without unprotecting the poet.

Literature allows us to go beyond borders: a German and French languages poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, admired Tolstoy and found in Russia a unique magnitude that allowed him to understand nuances of life, to him who spent his life looking for essential nuances. Rilke’s poetry is filled with fine discoveries, impossible to find elsewhere. An example is the poem about a young woman who is going blind: how she grabs the cup, how she seems to apologize for her clumsiness, how she stands up and how it seems that she is going to fly in the middle of the room and not just walk: it individualizes, personalizes, focuses a human being in a situation that is both vulnerable and tenacious.

Like the works of Ana Akhmatova and Rilke and so many others, Mexican letters prevail in findings and perfect texts. The Foreign Students Learning Center (CEPE, Spanish initials) has a solid Department of Literature that has been able to develop a series of teaching, research and dissemination activities.

For example, on December 21, 2021, it was commemorated the centenary of Augusto Monterroso, a writer born in Honduras, nationalized Guatemalan and neighbor of Mexico, where he developed an intense and valuable literary work not only as an author, but as a master of letters. This significant date motivated, in the first place, a reunion with his work and a series of reflections on the influence that it imprinted on contemporary Mexican literature and that is manifested above all in the parody and explicit allusion. Secondly, we had a series of conversations between fellow professors of literature at the center, who expressed the validity of Monterroso’s work and expressed their own reading experience. Spontaneously, some anecdotes were shared about which stories had been read in the classrooms with foreign students, what had been the reaction and interpretation, which text had been preferred by the students and what intercultural reading had been given.

In the conversation other Mexican authors were mentioned, whose works had also been read in class, either with foreign students or with Mexicans, beginners or versed, who were amazed at the literary richness of the works and manifested the joy of reading. It was agreed on the fact that poetry, narrative and even some dramatic works that had been discussed in the classrooms, are characterized because they allow interpretations on several levels and, with each reading, the text is updated, wich is very useful when working with students who are acquiring Spanish as a foreign language, because obviously their approach to the Mexican literary phenomenon is different. Foreign students naturally incorporate the reading experience into their vision of the world and establish a dialogue with the work to recognize what it tells them about Mexico and its culture and find in its pages allusions or representations of other countries and contexts. They can see their own origin from the eyes of a Mexican creator and that revelation, once assimilated, arouses critical positions that transcend the Mexican context with which they are relating: the literary text induces the reader in an intrinsic way and in that communication its universal value is recognized.

With these ideas on the table, during the talk names such as Sergio Galindo, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge López Páez and Rosario Castellanos were pronounced; all of them born in the 1920s and all belonging to what is known as the Generation of Half a Century. Given this observation, it was proposed to elaborate a long-term project whose purpose is to commemorate, during the present decade, the centennials of those who were part of that generation. Then came to mind names of plastic artists, historians and linguists, fundamental figures of the Mexican culture of the 21st century and those works continue to influence in an evident way the artistic and cultural production of our time.

The project was entitled “The Centennials of the Generation of Half a Century: Reflections about Great Figures of Mexican Literature.” As the first activity, a cycle of round tables was programed whose purpose was to offer an overview of the literary production of some of the members of this generation, talk about the relevance and variety of their works (their relationship with other artistic and cultural manifestations) and establish links between the literary proposals of those who are part of this group, as well as thinking about the Mexican literature during this period of the 20th century and the collaboration networks that were constituted. In this, stands out the accompaniment and conduction that writers such as Juan Rulfo, Juan José Arreola, Agustín Yáñez and Alfonso Reyes offered to others to molding such as Jaime Sabines, Amparo Dávila and Inés Arredondo.

With this structure and following the themes, the seven sessions of this cycle of round tables were developed, which took place from February 22 to March 15, 2022 and to which people who reside in various parts of the world had access, thanks to the fact that it was transmitted through social networks. Ricardo Garibay, Augusto Monterroso, Eduardo Lizalde, in addition to the authors mentioned above, was addressed.

Poetry offers land to the exiled. Luis Cernuda was born in Spain and died in Mexico. While Francisco Franco’s forces bombed Madrid in 1939, the Spanish poet translated a German poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. The windows were swaying and seemed to break with every bomb. José Revueltas, Elena Garro, Octavio Paz, Juan de la Cabada and others had gone to Spain with the purpose of defending the Republic. “Spain, Take This Chalice from Me”, by César Vallejo is one of the best poems to Spain in danger.

Spain, Take This Chalice from Me

Children of the world,
if Spain falls —I mean, it’s just a thought—
if she falls
from the sky downward, let her forearm be seized,
in halter, by two terrestrial plates;
children! what an age of concave temples!
how early in the sun what I was telling you!
how soon in your chest the ancient noise!
how old your 2 in your notebook!

[...]

if I’m late,
if you don’t see anyone, if unsharpened pencils
frighten you, if mother
Spain falls —I mean, it’s just a thought—
Out, children of the world, go amp; look for her!…

(English version by Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia, Spain, Take This Cup from Me, Lima: Fundación BBVA, 1974).

Love poetry is a bastion in literature; there are lyrics that people sing with pleasure, the verses of Jaime Sabines are a touch of the future when it seems that there will be no future:

The lovers

The lovers fall silent.
Love is the finest, the most shuddering,
the most unendurable, silence.
The lovers seek,
they are the ones who relinquish,
those who change, who forget.
Their hearts tell them that what they look for,
what they seek, they will not find.

(English version by Colin Carberry, poesi.as)

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