LLEI D'ART 11

in culture. And we should do it quickly because it would be a mere second to destroy it. It is easy to forget and there are people who like to forget.’ Is her attitude in line with the lavishness of the Ministry for Education, Culture and Sport? I can’t understand it – neither the jury nor the decision –to award two prizes, in less than a year, to the same autor. In November 2012 the National Art Prize was given to Jaume Plensa, and now, just a few months later, the Velázquez Arts Prize. The Culture Ministry has given €130,000 in a year to an artist who needs greater museum exhibition rather than anything else. Not to do Plensa’s work down, but it is strange that he has been given two very similar awards. Which way is the Velázquez Art Prize heading in? If we look over the list of the winners, we can see that it has been an exercise in pity. Last year it didn’t run, with no explanation given, and now, Plensa has been awarded the prize in a hurry. Is it personal? Is it for sculpture, or opportunism? All this has nothing to do with the dimension of the work of the author, who has been offered the prize and is pleased to accept. To keep the racket going, the composer Josep Soler is returning his Gold Medal in Fine Art, awarded in 2012, in protest at José Ignacio Wert’s embarrassing culture policies. The news has been confused with another and some thought that he was returning his National Prize, which he accepted in 2009. The National Poetry Prize has been given to Manuel Álvarez Torneiro, to whom I wish to dedicate the following section for the importance of his work and the silence that he has generated. V Mat. When the name of Manuel Álvarez Torneiro popped up for the National Poetry Prize, for many people thought it was a joke, since these awards and the Ministry have got us used to this kind of thing regardless of who is in charge. Even people who thought themselves informed hadn’t heard a word. Silence in the press, if it weren’t for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport’s official notice. Ignorance? From my point of view it is the only Prize that justifies these prizes, at least on this occasion. Why? Because of the scale of his poetry, the value of his solitude, the lack of attention that has been paid to him; for the inclusion of his poetry in Galician and Spanish in the best of Western poetry. Spanish poetry has been confined to its tradition over recent decadres –there has never been a Rimbaud, a Hölderlin, a Kavafis, a Rilke, a Pound, neither has there been a Saint-John Perse nor a Wallace Stevens. Poetry in Spanish has been renewed in Argentina, Chile and Peru, but this has not reached Spain, even if some of the poets have been to Madrid, like Vallejo, Huidobro, Borges, Neruda, Hidalgo or Paz. And Álvarez Torneiro, who doesn’t look down on Arcipreste de Hita, Fray Luis, Góngora or Quevedo, converses as an equal with the great Western poetry, leaving trails of his brilliance. To say that he has been given an award for only one book, Os ángulos da brasa (The recesses of the fire), published last year by Kalandraka is like not knowing that rivers run to the sea or that salt dissolves in rain. It is a good book, but not MAT’s best work – there is a kind of farewell melancholia, a nostalgia and touch similar to the saying ‘an accordion, well played, cries’. MAT writes with a new light, but dipping his pen into his past. His first book of verse, Memorias dun silencio (Memories of a Silence), printed by Edicións do Castro in 1982, opens a singular and lonely cosmos, was nominated for the National Literature Prize in 1984. Some Galician critics, claiming him as their own, gets him involved in the Xeración das Festas Minervais (a Galician literature festival), but MAT has little in common with his Galician compatriots apart from coinciding in time. I read the reviews in the La Voz de Galicia newspapers, and was impressed by Restauración dos días (Restoration of the Days, printed by Sotelo Blanco, Barcelona, 1986) and a MAT in plenitude, musical, enlightened, luminous, open and as clear as crystal, ‘As túas mans esparexendo luces’ (Your hands spreading lights). From then on, I looked for his looks and entered his dark flow, filling oceans, but inaudible. We have to revisit many ideas and behaviours, not just the content of democracy. We confuse a well-read, important man with a cultured man, but culture is an attitude, a stage that shapes our action, not something stochastic and circumstantial. In Galician press, there was news and interviews; in the national press, apart from the announcement, nary a word; from academics, deliver us O Lord, even from those that write about poetry. MAT is a poet, unable to defend himself against the wild tsumani of the passing days; he writes from his solitude in the altars where time creates its liturgy. He runs, with neither walls nor ties ‘detras dunha libélula imposible’ (after an impossible dragonfly). He dreams when he wakes and speaks with the woods, recognizing the voice of each tree. He loves blue and the comments and writes messages on the cloud in rain, which the sun illuminates in the downpour for the moon to read and keep them. A Nephelibate, MAT is primary, secluded, naïve, he creates his own universe, like a well that you lean into and you see light reflected in the watery mirrors. Poetry is his identity, a testimony of life. As García Márquez said at his Nobel acceptance in 1982: ‘poetry is the only concrete proof of the existence of man’. Then, Rigorosamente humano, Epicentro (Rigorously human, Epicentre) –a wonderful book, again a finalist for the National Prize. Manuel Álvarez Torneiro (A Coruña, 1932), an accomplice of poetry and of life, has created a universe that places him in the heart of modernity, sensitive and pure, like Juan Ramón Jiménez. Sometimes he paints, exergonic, Vivaldian, fertile –it smells of clean, like washed clothes drying in the sun, blindingly white. His greatness needs not prizes but readers!!! VI Press releases. Where has this plague come from? You go to a museum, or any kind of artistic event, to pop-up 37