If there was a wise one who chose the “Escondida Senda”, an exciting university professor, a novelist of Fuste, a brilliant articulist and a curious man and awake attentive to a present and committed to his century, with his centuries: the Florence of Renaissance Humanism,
The Rome of Horacio, the Trojan of Homer, the Spain of Hurtado de Mendoza, Boscán and Garcilaso, that was, and will be, Antonio Prieto.
Yesterday he left us, after a long life delivered to literature in his triple facet of disclosure, as a newspaper writer and editor (he was a member of the planet’s jury during lustrians), of teaching and research, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, where
He left many students and disciples that we will remind him, smoking without stopping when he still could and encourage our enthusiasm for the work of Petrarch, Cervantes or Quevedo.
The pedagogical secret of him: to talk about all those authors that he loved (and from whom he taught us proudly, first editions, in his recreational slope of biblióil) as strict contemporaries.
As friends.
Live, very alive, interpelators from its present to ours.
And his third facet: the novelist.
With the first novel of him, three steps of man, he rose with the planet award in 1955 at 26 newly complied with.
He followed a series of works among which we emphasize, for his surgery, his beauty, returned, Lázaro or Secretum, in which the author melts methically with Petrarch and loves beautifully the monsters of reason that can create a Distópical Society.
Letter without time (1975), my favorite novel of this first stage, supposes, in its mythical fusion with Homer and Cervantes, a final of this first act as a novelist who resumed, 13 years later, after taking care of skewing academic essays and two
Memorable manuals on the prose and Spanish poetry of the sixteenth century.
They remain the best thing that has been written in such respect.
In 1988 he returned to his novelist task at the ambassador, about the life and work of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the disease of love, the Plaza de la Memoria received the Andalusian novel Award, which was presented with the pseudonym of Homer
.
In 1998, with Isla Blanca, he receives the Andalusian prize of criticism and I know how much he liked to be recognized, although late, as the great novelist he was.
In this last stage there is a newest masterpiece translated into Italian: the blind of Chios, a delicious tribute to Homeric literature, to its Mediterranean Sea and the Vocation of the poet that through the movement of love (Helena, Nausicaa, Penelope) sculpt
In terms of time a sublimated longing to transcend it.
We were gone (I imagine that they have come to receive Dolabella, Marsilio Ficino, Garcilaso and Elisa) the last secret wise we had.
We have, forever, his work.
Ángel García Galiano is a professor of literary theory in the UCM and was a student of Antonio Prieto
