Almost a century on, “revitalized and full of energy”: poet Ida Vitale

The Uruguayan poetess Ida Vitale, who this year will celebrate a century of life, attended this Monday an act of homage to his work at the Roman University of Sapienza, where She acknowledged feeling “revitalized and with a lot of energy” thanks to the meeting held with a hundred students.

Before the young people present, Vitale took stock of his historic literary career, which has earned him awards such as the Cervantes Prize for his poetry framed in the Latin American avant-garde tradition, and acknowledged that he still feels strange when other people read and study it.

“Writing does not give any sense of security. We authors have a great responsibility when it comes to daring to make public something that we have created and We feel the pressure not to make a language worse that others have used before you, which is a difficult task”he claimed.

In a classroom packed with Hispanic literature students from La Sapienza, one of the most prestigious universities in the country, the renowned author read texts such as “Translate”, “Resources” or “Running the risk” and explained to the new generations that only “thanks to the passage of time, it is possible to see a poem with objectivity and distance.”

Among the attendees the expectations were varied: while some went to the conference out of academic obligation, others were grateful to be able to chat with such a veteran writer.

“I discovered Vitale in a Spanish-American literature class and have been interested in her ever since. That a poet of this level comes to speak at my university is lucky and I couldn’t miss it”, the young student Dana di Leone celebrated before EFE.

The conference, organized by the Embassy of Uruguay in Italy and the Cervantes Institute of Spain, has also had the participation of experts in the work of Vitale and some of his translators into the language of Dante Alighieri.

The director of Cervantes, Ignacio Peyró, told EFE that Vitale’s link with Italy goes back to his youth, when the only poetry in his house was Italian, due to the writer’s origins.

“There was a bookcase of poetry that she was in charge of cleaning and only when she had an Italian teacher who had fled the war was she able to start reading it with great pleasure,” she explained.

Member of the Uruguayan generation of ’45 and representative of essentialist poetry and the Spanish-American avant-garde tradition, Vitale is one of the most important voices in 20th century poetry.