DRAGON: The Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi won the Cervantes Prize

Thursday, November 11, 2021

The Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi won the Cervantes Prize

Cristina Peri Rossi

The Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi won the Cervantes Prize

By David William
November 11, 2021

Narrator, essayist, poet and translator, Peri Rossi, a Uruguayan based in Barcelona after having left her country in 1972 due to the advance of dictatorships in the region, is recognized for books in which she has cultivated different genres, from novels, poetry, short stories to essays, always committed to contemporary social issues and traversed by that singular synergy between love and exile, her two topics.

But Peri Rossi is also so because of her political activism in left and gender movements, which is why she was persecuted not only under the dictatorial government of Uruguay but also, once in Spain, by Francisco Franco, which led her to to settle in Paris for a few months. There he met who would be his great friend, Julio Cortázar.

Among his works, which were translated into more than twenty languages, stand out “The ship of fools”, “State of exile”, “Love is a hard drug”, “The insubordinate”, “Private rooms”, “When smoking was a pleasure”, “Barbarian Babel”, “Playstation”, which earned him the Loewe Award.

In the middle of this year, the Caballo Negro publishing house published in Argentina the volume “Stop, instant, you are so beautiful”, a book that came to repair the omission that existed regarding the author’s local publications in our country, despite that his work circulated thanks to his readers.

More in an anthology format than complete works, as she preferred, this volume published by the Cordovan label brings together poems written from what they call the third wave of feminism, in the 70s, when homosexuality was considered a crime or mental illness, until now, in this fourth wave of feminisms that condenses other approaches and pluralities: LGTB + diversities expanded with equal marriage settled, for example.

With a stripped down and precise language, with a powerful literary gesture, Peri Rossi became the sixth woman to be distinguished with this award, which since 1977 had only awarded five others, including the most recent, also Uruguayan, Ida Vitale, in 2018. If it is about Uruguayan literature, in less than a week two writers of that nationality were recognized with important awards; to the recognition of Peri Rossi is added that of Fernanda Trías who won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for her novel “Mugre Rosa”.

Born in Montevideo in 1941, Peri Rossi is one of those writers who claims to write so that life becomes bearable for her. In an interview in 2017 with the newspaper El País, with a bias of irony and sincerity, he answered the question “Who would you give the next Cervantes award to?” “. Since then he has continued to publish titles such as “Las replicantes” and “Todo lo que te no te pude”.

Due to her delicate state of health for some time she has not given interviews, but in a report granted last September to the EFE news agency, where she herself worked, she said that writing poetry made her “feel alive” and that is why she was almost finishing a book that he would call “A Point de Poem”, about “the experiences and feelings about which very little has been written: the disease, the relationships between doctors and patients.”

Regarding an interview with this agency, María Teresa Andruetto pointed out: “The sarcastic, the impious, the stark are qualifiers that I would associate with the poetry of Peri Rossi, not only the affairs, the poetry as a female, the writer relationship and poetry like the relationship of a female with another female. Desire, especially exile, language as a mother, as matter. All of this is the heart of his writing, but there is something fierce in the form, like a howl that is not exactly a complaint, but something deeper, torn, like an animal they want to lock up, a she-wolf left alone. ”

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