Alicante (Spain), Feb. 21. The Mario Benedetti Center for Ibero-American Literary Studies of the University of Alicante (Spain) has digitized for free consultation the handwritten annotations of the Uruguayan writer in which he reflects on his own work and also on that of others writers.
As the center reported on Tuesday, these annotations were found among the pages of books that made up the author’s personal library during his stay in Madrid.
Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), who spent part of his exile in the Spanish capital, donated this library to this university in 2006, with which he had a close relationship, which was installed in the scepter that bears his name.
The collection houses, among its abundant documentation, titles by contemporary writers such as Juan Gelman, Gonzalo Rojas, Roberto Fernández, José Luis Sampedro, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar or Mario Vargas Llosa, among others.
From reading these and other authors, he extracted sentences and ideas that had caught his attention or expressed his opinion on the content and wrote them on small pieces of paper which he then inserted between the pages books.
Now these annotations, which correspond to the period of Benedetti’s stay in Spain (1980-2006), have been digitized for consultation and research, after nearly eight months of compilation work.
The digitized notes, which reveal both the reader and literary critic and essayist side of the Uruguayan author, can be consulted online and complement the abundant material of the Mario Benedetti Foundation of Montevideo.
Among these manuscripts, Benedetti’s annotations were found on titles by the Chilean Gonzalo Rojas -one of its highly appreciated authors-, the Spaniard Gabriel Celaya or the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez, among others, according to the director of the center, Beatriz Aracil ,
The common denomination of these notes is committed literature and allusions to the experiences of the dictatorship, since one of the characteristics of Benedetti is the mention of the figure of the executioner, centered on the literary field through stories, novels and drama show.
Benedetti embodied some of the reflections that arose after reading the books in his own literary creation and his annotations speak of the literary and cultural interests of the moment and of himself, a perfectionist poet with his work to the fullest and an intellectual defender of freedom of speech .
The digitization is the continuation of an earlier work in which this library was cataloged and the most significant dedications to Mario Benedetti were compiled, some of them from eminent writers of the 20th century, such as Rafael Alberti, José Luis Sampedro, Luis Goytisolo, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán or Juan Cruz, as well as the Argentine footballer Jorge Valdano, among others.
The library is made up of more than 6,000 copies and also houses the writer’s private correspondence and newspaper clippings that he himself kept on literary works by other authors. ECE
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