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ABSTRACT:
EXTRACT
The Frankfurt Book Fair coincides each October, at least approximately, with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and this time round, 2010 saw a full house for Latin America, with the Fair from 6 to 10 October dedicated to Argentina and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa lifting a much-accoladed Nobel on the second day. Both events, indeed, have, as I see it, in their different ways helped boost the already strong credibility of Latin American literature and culture on the world stage. Vargas Llosa’s Literature Nobel was the 11th for the Spanish language, the 6th for Latin America, the first for Peru and the first for any Hispanophone author since the 1990 award to Mexico’s Octavio Paz. Peru became the sixth Spanish-speaking country to be honoured with the prize, joining Spain (5), Chile (2), Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico: the whole country celebrated on the streets, « as if we’d won the World Cup »!. In Spain, El País featured ‘Nobel Vargas Llosa’ as the day’s banner headline, devoting its lead editorial and a sixteen-page special to the award. It was front-page news too in the German and Italian press, and even in the International Herald Tribune (..)
The Spanish-speaking presence in Frankfurt was impressive, with Argentina obviously at centre stage, but with strong representation too from Spain, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Venezuela and elsewhere. The main Spanish publishers and numerous Spanish university presses were out in force, Catalonia and Galicia included. Mexico was represented by the Fondo de Cultura Económica and the Centro de Promoción del Libro Mexicano (..)
(..) Overall the Argentinian presence was powerful and convincing, with maximum use of graphic design to attract and impress. The logos – « Argentina, Cultura en Movimiento » (« Argentina, Culture in Movement ») and « 200 Años – Bicentenario Argentino » (« 200 Years – Argentinian Bicentennial ») ably exploited the national colours, blue, white and yellow; the fair’s main restaurant served up puchero (stew) and other Argentinian dishes; the Argentinian pavilion made maximum use of visual impact in foregrounding the country’s writers and culture; the unfolding sequence of lectures and round tables on Argentinian themes was backed up by a graphic slideshow with cartoons, cityscapes, dinosaurs (a national treasure) and more. Among the lectures may specially be mentioned that by Maria Kodama, Jorge Luis Borges’ widow, who held the audience spellbound with both her official subject of « Borges and Iceland » and her reminiscences of the great writer (..)
NOTE: the dates of the journal issue are in fact July 2010 -Jan 2011. A Spanish-language version of this article is available on-line (see separate getcited entry).
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