CARLOS ‘OROZA 100’​

Prensa Ibérica

November 23rd, 2023

Free, we have returned to where we were happy, to Carlos Oroza. We have returned to the verses, to the evocation, to the memories, to reap the wheat between the false physical, ideological, stylistic borders. We have united around the paper that is grouped in pages, that is constructed and deconstructed, putting together the puzzle, undoing it, composing it, looking for words, quotations, our own inspiration or resorting to others. We go up to the beach and down to the mountain, we transgress the imposed order, we disrupt the adjectivations in search of celebratory originality, repeated in a hundred different ways.

The experiences of diversity are accumulated in a single volume of the Évame Oroza Cultural Association, produced by Editorial Elvira, which, as the Galician-Spanish-American scholar Alberto Avendaño rightly says in a non-preface that does not want to be an introduction, we do not even know if it is a book written at the whim of languages, which speaks in languages. It is indeed a publication that gathers the voices, the writings and the gestures of those of us who love the beloved and beloved viveirense; painters, poets, designers, actors, writers, musicians, photographers, journalists… Oroza 100 is that, the other, and continues to requebrando with the honoree the urban and rural routes of a wounded culture of itself, capable of renouncing to its own to be absorbed in its own and most genuine expression, but not the only one.

We celebrate the poet -pRoFeta- who was a man – “itinerant corner”, I say-, stumble and encounter with life, walk until the elevation of the word to the altars of the lyric, until the consecration of the findings provoked by the muses in high poetry. Deep down, we all commune in the sin of the ego, in the form, we participate in a lay ceremony, which is more than recognizing the permanent resurrection of the inspired music of someone else’s phrases, of expressions that acquire meaning when they are enunciated. “… And the words dream that I name them…”. So said the viveirense from Madrid or Vigo, the orphan father now vindicated.

We fly, yes Carlos, with you. With your verses: “I do not paint birds. I paint flights”. And it is hard for us to perch in this hypocritical world, where politicians recite poets to establish distances, impassable borders, inequalities and misunderstandings. Where constipated intellectuals take refuge in palatial institutions. They are the ones who make the wheat grow, who limit horizons, who separate, who choose and condemn. And that was not, is not, and will not be, the message, the proposal of the humble but ethical bard; of the poor but morally rich intellectual; of those far away or admitted to the court but inserted in the landscape of broad horizons, capable of embracing, understanding and welcoming those who, like you, Carlos, were free to be Cela, Torrente or Valle Inclán. The Galician universe knows no limits other than those of a country that is only poor and poisoned by those who deny its breadth and write false obituaries, in cowardly, not mystical absences.

Thanks to Javier Romero, to Arantxa Amatriaín, to Antón Patiño, to the recited Alberto Avendaño, and to the crew that has helped to reap the wheat this time. We did not return black, as the beloved Rosalía denounced. In the background there is hope, and in any case, together and mixed up, against the advice of the honoree, we have returned to where we have been happy, to Carlos Oroza. He is one of our horizons, “to the North there is a higher sea…”. The Chilean Morales Monterríos, Lupe Gómez and Amancio Prada, were the awarded protagonists of the I Gala of the International Prize, to whom Uxía sang and Antonio García Teijeiro praised. May we not have to wait another 100 years to celebrate so much and so good.

Alberto Barciela, Spanish journalist, is the vice-president of EditoRed.