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Mario Vargas Llosa will not attend the language congress in Cádiz next week

2023-03-23T13:22:52.587Z


The Nobel laureate is in Peru and the speech he had planned will not be read either, announced the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero


The Spanish-Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize for Literature, will not attend the ninth International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE), the great triennial event with this language spoken by almost 600 million people in the world, which is held in Cádiz next week, from Monday, March 27 to Thursday, March 30. The announcement was made by the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, at an informative breakfast in Madrid, in which he participated together with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the European Union and Cooperation, José Manuel Albares, and the director of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), Santiago Muñoz Machado.

The news, which could have been foreseen but had not been confirmed, becomes important given that the author of

Conversation in the Cathedral,

86 years old, he was the one who promoted that this congress be held in Arequipa, in his native country, an appointment that finally had to be suspended on December 22 due to political instability in Peru.

His editor in Alfaguara, Pilar Reyes, has confirmed it by phone: "Mario is in Peru, on a long-planned trip."

There he was decorated two weeks ago by the Government of Dilma Duarte in an act in which he was an accolade to the Peruvian president.

At the meeting, organized by the New Communication Forum, García Montero also informed that the speech that Vargas Llosa had planned to give in Arequipa will not be read in Cádiz either, but will be donated to Cervantes in an act of homage to the writer at the headquarters of this institution in Madrid, on April 11 and 12.

All this despite the fact that the motto of the Peruvian congress,

Spanish language, miscegenation and interculturality

, and some acts that were going to take place in Arequipa, were maintained.

The presence in Cádiz of Vargas Llosa, a contributor to EL PAÍS, will be one of his texts included in a new edition published by Alfaguara of the work

Los ríos profundos

, by the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, Reyes has reported, and the inclusion of a short story known, but not unpublished, in a special issue to be presented in Granta magazine

.

Muñoz Machado, for his part, has criticized in his speech "the monumental nonsense of the Ortega couple to suppress the language academy in Nicaragua", referring to the decision adopted in May 2022 by the country's president, Daniel Ortega, and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is the vice president.

"A situation that deprives Nicaragua of being part of the group of countries that work for the unity of our language."

The director of the RAE has also charged against the Government of Mexico: "We would like [Andrés Manuel] López Obrador to give more support to the Mexican language academy, which barely has resources."

More information

Spain and Peru move the Spanish language congress from Arequipa to Cádiz due to instability in the Andean country

Asked by the person in charge of the RAE if there is in some countries of America a campaign from some groups against Spain due to the colonial past, he has denied it: "What there is is a new constitutionalism in some nations that returns to the way of thinking of the peoples originating”.

It has also been raised in the debate if there have been frictions between Cervantes, dependent on Foreign Affairs, and the RAE over the academic programming of CILE, as some media have reported, pointing out sources from the academy.

Both institutions organize the congress together with the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language and the city of Cádiz.

Muñoz Machado has ruled it out: “There is always some kind of friction, but it even seems healthy to us.

Most of the participants have been chosen by the RAE”.

Of the 23 Spanish academies in the world, there will be "more than a hundred speakers", he added.

While García Montero wanted to remove iron "from normal friction in a congress of this type, which had to be prepared in two and a half months."

Meanwhile, Albares has provided some data to demonstrate the power of Spanish in the world.

“It is an official language in 20 countries, 18 of them American, plus Spain and Equatorial Guinea.

It is the second in native speakers, with almost 522 million, and in the global calculation it reaches almost 600 million.

8% of internet users communicate in Spanish, the third behind English and Chinese.

In the publishing sector it is the fourth language”.

However, demographic trends indicate that it may lose weight in the coming decades, "which is why we must influence its presence in areas such as scientific communication."

Lastly, he pointed out that Spanish-speaking countries "generate more than 6% of world GDP and exports between Spanish-speaking countries double those of English-speaking ones."

This morning's event in Madrid has served as a preamble to an appointment that will begin hours after the end of a new Ibero-American Summit in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic).

CILE will host 277 speakers and some 350 journalists in the Andalusian city, among which Albares has highlighted the presence of "

youtubers

and

podcasters,

in what will be the first Spanish-language congress broadcast in its entirety and live through digital platforms ”.

It is the second time that Spain hosts this meeting.

The first was in Valladolid, in 2001. For this occasion, the Council of Ministers approved spending of 3.7 million euros.

Source: elparis

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