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Rodríguez Almodóvar, on Friday in Seville.alejandro ruesga / EL PAÍS
August 7, 1983 in Galaroza, in the heart of the Sierra de Aracena and Picos de Aroche (Huelva). Catalina Tejera Cobo, then 70 years old, had gone to school "very little", but she was an excellent storyteller. "She was a woman highly regarded in the town for her affable character and her communication skills," recalls Antonio Rodríguez Almodóvar, a corresponding academic from the RAE and retired professor of the Language Institute. That day, the Sevillian scholar, tape recorder in hand, discovered in Catalina one of his best “informants”, as he calls in academic terms the storytellers who have kept the oral tradition of the story alive, a tradition to which he has dedicated more than 40 years of work.
The old woman narrated a version of the story
The girl who watered the basils
.
His story is included among the more than 67 hours of recording - "audible and usable" - in the archive of Almodóvar, who has decided to donate it to the Museum of Popular Arts and Customs in Seville.
More information
Antonio Rodríguez Almodóvar, National Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature
Rodríguez Almodóvar takes a story to the Alhambra
More than a hundred cassettes form that sonic legacy through which stories from informants from Andalusia and Extremadura parade, although Rodríguez Almodóvar's works, since he began to tour Spain in 1977, cover the entire national territory and all the languages of the State. “I have spent my life looking for authentic storytellers, mostly illiterate people, not illiterate. They were almost always wise old men, with a lot of culture, although of a different kind ”, he emphasizes. The archive, which will now be available to researchers, includes stories collected between 1983 and 2009. The previous material, from 1977 to 1982, disappeared in a robbery suffered by Rodríguez Almodóvar.
All the stories that are heard in the tapes are inserted in the Indo-European tradition of the marvelous tale —a name that the specialist defends over the best-known fairy tale—, which dates back to the Neolithic and the birth of the first agrarian societies. "The lower Neolithic era was the most revolutionary time of humanity, when agriculture expanded and with it, migrations, which allowed the transfer of stories that have reached today," the academic emphasizes. “The stories have their variants, rich and nuanced, but they are the same in all cultures. It does not matter in the language in which they are collected ”, abounds.
And she recalls the case of another old woman who lived in a town near Gernika (Bizkaia), whom she recorded for the documentary
La memoria de los cuentos
(2009), by José Luis López Linares: “He had something in his speech, translated for us for his daughter. Suddenly, I realized that, without knowing it and despite never having left his town, he was telling one of the oldest stories, How Meats Wants Salt, in which Shakespeare was inspired to write
King Lear
" .
Among the narratives most present in the archive are up to four versions of The grateful animals and the aforementioned The Girl Who Watered the Basils, "the most original and Andalusian of all, which served as inspiration for a lyrical toy by Lorca", says Rodríguez Almodóvar, who received the 2005 National Prize for Children's and Young People's Literature.
"They are stories, but not stories for children or adults," he reflects on most of the issues - some rugged - that parade through the narratives: incest, abuse, stalking kings ... "Now they would not resist the filters of educators, but in These issues are where the peasant gathering was most entertained and what most captures the children's conscience that, contrary to what we may think, does not demand kind stories. Children want conflicts, which are the engine of intelligence ”, he highlights. “We are overprotecting the child in his education. The encounter with reality is going to be a collision ”, he says.
