A journey to joy through the magical path of Cunqueiro

“I encourage you to read Cunqueiro because it makes life happy.” This is published by Jesús Blázquez, director of Ediciones 98 and responsible for the publication of three major works in Galician by the brilliant Spanish-language writer —Other feirantes, Chronicles of sochanters and School of menciñeiros and fairy tales of various people—, translated into Spanish, the language in which 80% of the prolific production of the author from Mendoza is concentrated.

In times of uncertainty, Cunqueiro’s magical prose is sought after at the Casa de Galicia in Madrid this week as a potion, a vital balm. It is not surprising that his very particular creative universe, in which the dead and the living, reality and metaphor coexist in an imaginative ecosystem, led Gabriel García Márquez to believe—during a visit to Santiago after receiving the Nobel Prize, as Blázquez recalled—that Cunqueiro (not him) who should have received the Swedish Academy Award.

Edition of School of healers and fairy tales of various peoples, Other fairground and sochantre chroniclesand others will soon follow, such as Xente from here and there, which closes the Terras de Miranda cycle and with which — said the editor — he “justifies Cunqueiro, his work and his universal transcendence, since he talks about the human condition, worries, dreams … and he does it with humor.” He will also translate his famous novel merlin and family.

The headquarters of Xunte, which in the last nine months the tandem of Juan Serrano and Javier Vázquez turned into a focal point of cultural, gastronomic, social and economic promotional life with a Galician surname in Madrid, restored the reputation of the writer born in Mondoñedo in 1911. The meeting had the expressive title “Cunqueiro por Cunqueiro. Redemption of his works”. Because it was César Cunqueiro — poet and son of a writer — who was the guide for the audience, following them through the origins of his father’s magical universe. “He was a small-town citizen from the province, a life full of routine. Therefore, his authentic biography must be literary”, his son later began to define him as the “Mozart of literature”, for a vast production that has its roots in five worlds: Greek culture and mythology, open to the miraculous; medieval society, wrapped in the miraculous and to which “miracles happen all the time”; a world full of witches, alchemists and with the presence of Satan; an abundance of metaphors from the Scandinavian sagas; and, finally, Chinese poetry, also a fertile area of ​​the metaphorical.

— I’ll be back, comrades. These words of Cunqueiro made sense because, as the icing on the cake of the meeting, his granddaughter Leticia was in charge of unveiling a plaque with her grandfather’s name in one of the three exhibition rooms of the Casa de Galicia. Until the arrival of Juan Serrano as director, they were called A, B and C. Now they have been renamed Rosalía de Castro, Camilo José Cela and Álvaro Cunqueiro.