The Manizales Book Fair ends today, which again was virtual, and forced to be glued to the screen, but with the great advantage that all the talks were recorded for anyone to review them at any time they want. The expectation I had with the talk between the writer Orlando Mejía Rivera, author of the book Dante y la Medicina, and Danilo Manera, literary critic, about Dante Alighieri was phenomenal. To review and annotate recommended translations.
Here are some sections of three different talks, but remember that you can enter the YouTube channel of the Manizales Book Fair and you can find all the talks about books, literature and other things.
A meeting point
“Colombia needs to recover a meeting point, because that is not what the educational system is doing today, which I repeat, it is even distancing and separating more and more. In 2018 I proposed to create social brigades, a mandatory social service for replace that who we had at that time and that now has disappeared in this society that is debated in huge differences, fanaticism, almost ferocity, but what it has done is undermine that national identity. What is being Colombian, why do we feel Colombian , why should we all embrace each other, which is precisely what we try to do later in the conversations to end the conflict with one of the oldest wars. That is the mark that I want to recognize from the University of Caldas and that is expressed in the book Scattered Memories “.
Humberto de la Calle Lombana, author of Scattered memories
Maternity and literature
“It is difficult to imagine yourself as a mother, and also your children have the power to challenge everything you believe in and start doing the opposite. All the ideas that I had about how I was going to raise my child I have challenged everything, because every little boy It comes as it is and you have to adapt to them, as well as they to you. Look, when I was writing my first novel in the late 90’s, it was very common to hear people say that motherhood and writing were incompatible trades, and this was not The gentlemen told me, I heard it from academic women where I worked. And if I hear that phrase today, it seems terrible to me. Because I don’t think any man has been told that because he was going to be a writer he had to give up parenthood. When I wanted to have children, after 40 and I did, for me not only has motherhood not been incompatible with writing, but it has also been a very important creative source. I stop as a writer is the place where I do not know should say. Where the mother, the aunts, the school teachers told me that is not talked about, that is not said by a decent young lady, that is where I stop as a writer. And I think motherhood is full of that. “
Pilar Quintana, author of The abysses
About Dante
“Dante does not want to read and he does not want to read for a simple reason because he is a poet. None of the enormous effort of knowledge and wisdom because Dante is an encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. None of that great effort would suffice if Dante were not the great poet That is. Today it is difficult to read poetry, but whoever falls into that temptation, the wounded lyrics, can rejoice. As Borges said: “Direct contact with the Divine Comedy is the most inexhaustible happiness that literature can administer”, simply. …) Dante was a man who wanted and knew how to draw the universe and the hereafter, but he did it with songs. So ethics, aesthetics, cosmogony, medicine are made in the rhythm of a versatile language, they are made like clay in his hands, poetry is made. So let’s think of that Dante who is an exile, a condemned man to death, that image of Dante as an unfortunate politician, so significant for countries like Italy and Colombia, is linked to that Dante in love with Beatriz, who is more a dream than reality . It was boyish love, I was in love with a girl who died, she lived for a very short time. “
Danilo Manera, literary critic
“From the literary point of view, most of Dante’s readers agree that Hell is the point of the great characters. I have been very interested in that point of purgatory, because it had been created in the spheres of Christianity, but they had not developed it, but I am sure that the great creation of the Divine Comedy is purgatory, because the purgatory that Catholicism will later defend is the one invented by Dante, there is none before. Looking for this topic, there is a book very beautiful of the birth of purgatory, where he speaks of that creative role of Dante’s purgatory. It gave him the ability to forgive, between that hell, where they are condemned without the possibility of leaving there, that purgatory was filled with sweetness “.
Orlando Mejía Rivera, author of Dante and medicine
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