A panel of poets and friends share experience of Havana International Poetry Festival, as well as the dreams and aspirations
Havana, Correspondent
A luxury panel made up of poets and friends Nancy Morejón, Basilia Papastamatiu, Virgilio López Lemus, Victor Fowler Calzada and Francisco López Sacha shared testimonies of their many experiences with the Coleccion Sur team, as part of a much larger project, the Centro Cultural CubaPoesia, which also includes the Havana International Poetry Festival, but they also talked about the dreams and aspirations they share with CubaPoesia. Each of them thanked the poet Alex Pausides for his perseverance and ability to dream so that Coleccion Sur becomes elk victorious and display these results today.
The poet Karel Alexei Leyva Ferrer read the text that the poet, editor, essayist and professor Juan Nicolás Padrón sent for the occasion. Minutes before, the poet, translator and curator of the exhibition Ricardo Alberto Pérez, in charge of the theoretical field of the CubaPoesía Cultural Center, in the presence of the poet and editor Alpidio Alonso Grau, Minister of Culture of the Republic of Cuba, inaugurated the exhibition “Collection Sur 30 years with the Cuban reader”, which includes the most representative works of the friend’s catalog of 400 titles, published in three decades by the small Cuban publishing house of the Havana international poetry festival.
The minister was also accompanied by the theatrologist and editor Omar Valiño, director of the José Martí National Library. Also present are Juan Rodríguez Cabrera, president of the Cuban Book Institute, and Marta Bonet, first vice president of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.
Also present were the poet, translator and academic Nancy Morejón, National Literature Prize winner, and Senel Paz, narrator and screenwriter, National Film Prize winner, among other important Cuban writers, editors and literary promoters.
The evening culminated with a brief recital by the young artist Annalie López, which followed the presentation of the Coleccion Sur catalog in the Ruth Tiendas virtual store, so that readers can access her books on the Internet anywhere in the world.
Thus, this first season of the celebration closed, which will culminate next May, with the holding of the 30th Havana International Poetry Festival. A moment of beauty, solidarity and intense emotion was constituted by the video projection and reading of a dozen messages sent to this festival of literature from multiple points of the planet: Kathmandu, Moscow, Jerusalem, Cairo, Lagos, Rome, Budapest, Paris, Granada, Montreal, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Medellín.
The metaphor of the library as a place of worship of the spirit, evoked by the Egyptian poet, translator and editor Ashraf Aboul-Yazid, still resonates luminously in the halls of the imposing and familiar National Library of Cuba.
A Message from Cairo
Ashraf Aboul-Yazid, poet, novelist and journalist from Egypt addressed iconic poets and writers gathering in the José Martí National Library:
“In our youth, the library was the second place of worship for most of us, after the mosque or church. In the first house of worship, there is only one text sent by the God, which gives us faith, while in the library, the second house of worship, there are a thousand and one gods; gods whose multiple texts give us wisdom, happiness, hope, and may push us to sadness, contemplation, or revolution!
These authors; these gods with their different and multiple tongues, stand behind them an equally important god, the publisher, who eventually gives us the first meaning of freedom. The freedom to choose the topic, the freedom to choose the title, the freedom to choose the cover, and the freedom to choose the font of letters, a river of freedoms flowing from the brains through the printing press, to reside between two covers.
Today we celebrate the Colección Sur, on its thirtieth anniversary, which created a special freedom for it. Today, after a generation of publishing, it represents a renewed energy that was not limited to the printed books only, but also believed in the freedom of the space in which these words float, by joining the world of digital publishing.
Four hundred titles in thirty years means that we have a group that believed in change through the soft revolution, the revolution of ideas, and let us take these gods from the shelves, speak to us with love and in silence, and accompany us on our freedom path. Let us read in the library, at home, and in the garden, with many books sleeping next to our pillows like a god giving us security with their texts.
Let us dream together of another thirty years of qualitative creativity, and that the younger generations after us will celebrate the Diamond and Golden anniversaries, and the Colección Sur publishing house will not stop drawing the future of literature and freedom.”
Editorial Sur Editores
Editorial Colección Sur was founded on March 24, 1993, and 400 titles are included in the catalog of the Sur collection, in which the most important authors are Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti and Nicolás Guillén, alongside Anna Ajmatova, Wislawa Symborska, María Teresa León and relevant poets such as Nazim Hikmet, Mahmud Darwish and Leopold Cedar Senghor.
_________________
