India welcomes Spanish literature

the

(streets) by Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Miguel de Cervantes or Antonio Machado surround or lead to the Spanish Pavilion, the guest country at the 46th edition of the Calcutta Book Fair, which is held until this Sunday in the Karunamoyee neighborhood from the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal.

Twenty-five Spanish writers from different literary genres have traveled there: David Trueba;

Jordi Gracia, deputy director of Opinion at EL PAÍS, who in his speech glossed over the figure of Miguel de Cervantes;

Anna Caballé and Ana María Briongos;

the also editor Agustín Pániker, and the poets Alba Cid, Ismael Ramos, Violeta Medina, Jesús Aguado and Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute.

Bengali authors related to literature in Spanish have also participated in the program organized by the Spanish Pavilion,

"In the more than 40 years of this literary event, it is the edition to which more writers from the invited country have attended," says Dibyajyoti Mukhopadhyay, member of the fair's organizing committee and coordinator for the Latin American countries.

And the large representation of poets in the Spanish group seems very well brought "in a city, Calcutta, which concentrates the largest number of vates per square meter on the planet," says Subhro Bandopadhyay, a Bengali poet and professor at the Cervantes Institute in New Delhi. .

The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and the director of the Cervantes Institute of New Delhi, Óscar Pujol, at the Calcutta Book Fair.INSTITUTO CERVANTES

The Calcutta Book Fair is no longer the largest in India —the one in New Delhi and some other cities convene more foreign representations and from other states of the subcontinent itself—, but it is still one of the most important in this area of ​​the world.

It is an event focused mainly on Bengali-language literature and the vast majority of foreign performances are exhibited in very small booths and with very few books.

If the 2022 edition attracted some three million visitors, it is estimated that this year, in the first call free of restrictions due to covid, the number will increase considerably.

Bengal has always boasted of its refined culture, its passion for poetry, a glorious history and prosperity, as in times not as far back as the 18th century it had the highest Gross Domestic Product in the world.

Two hundred years of British plunder, however, turned this beautiful region, producer of some of the highest quality cotton in the world and lavish crops of rice, jute and other agricultural products, into a state where famine killed thousands of Bengalis until even the middle of the last century.

This did not prevent, however, that culture continued to flourish and Bengal was the homeland of universal geniuses such as the Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore or the filmmaker and writer Satyajit Ray.

Entrance to the Spanish pavilion at the Calcutta Book Fair. Luis Mazarrasa

A crowd of women elegantly dressed in flowing saris or colorful

—the smocks that sometimes fall below the knee—, men dressed in the traditional

of long shirts and baggy pants, many families with children and even

—the priests. Hindus—covered in saffron-hued robes wander under a not-too-inclement sun with bags loaded with more or less books among the 600 booths at the fair.

Or they quench their hunger and thirst at food stalls serving portions of biryani rice, a type of dumpling called

tandoori

baked chicken

and other Bengali specialties that, as happens to Captain Wyndham in

—by the writer Abir Mukherjee—, glimpsed in the menus displayed on posters, look more like a series of spells from a holy book written in a strange language.

And in the stalls for those with a sweet tooth, the typical

,

,

or

, made with almonds, pistachios, rose water,

—a type of butter— and saffron, among other ingredients.

Almost adjacent to the Spanish pavilion, the largest at the fair after that of Bangladesh, the neighboring country that treasures as much literary tradition as Bengal, the Los Hispanófilos booth

belonging to

a cultural association run by teachers, translators and editors in love with the Spanish language.

Between invitations to cups of tea and spicy fish croquettes, the teacher and editor Shukti Roy, wrapped in a black sari with white veins, says: "Spanish is my passion and it has also become my profession."

With a smile that is enough to illuminate the tiny booth, she conveys the emotion she feels when publishing in Bengali the works of García Lorca —

Blood Wedding,

House

of

,

,

or “the magical realism tales of García Márquez, Borges or Carlos Fuentes”.

Next to him, Malabika Bhattacharya travels between the letters in reverse direction and has translated into Spanish works unpublished in Spain by Tagore, while preparing for 2024 the translations of various classic and contemporary writers from Bengal.

Both have taken part in the acts of the Spanish pavilion with the reading of fragments of their translations.

Several visitors to the Calcutta Book Fair browse brochures in the Spanish pavilion. INSTITUTO CERVANTES

Martí Bassets, cultural manager of the Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi, assures that today in India there is "a growing interest in the Spanish language and literature and, especially in Bengal, the work of García Lorca has been widely translated."

For Assit Swarnakar, a graduate, translator and Spanish teacher in Bhubaneswar, the capital of the neighboring state of Orissa, this boom in schools and universities in almost the entire country "is due to the fact that today knowing the language of Cervantes offers many opportunities for I work mainly in South America, where many computer companies have established themselves or that export goods from India”.

Thus, firms such as Bajaj and Mahindra have broken into the public mobile park of Guatemala, Costa Rica and some locations in Colombia with the export of thousands of

, the typical black and yellow-roofed motor tricycle taxi so ubiquitous on the streets of India.

However, for Tanusi, a young student who in just one year has learned excellent Spanish thanks to

courses , her interest in the language arose from her fascination with the series

, which has taken India by storm and has encouraged many young people to learn Spanish, as corroborated by a source from the Cervantes Institute.