Vicente Quirarte and the responsibility of “purifying everyday words”

▲ Poet and essayist Vicente Quirarte during a talk with La Jornada . Photo by María Luisa Severiano

Reyes Martínez Torrijos

La Jornada Newspaper, Sunday, July 20, 2025, p. 2

Poet and essayist Vicente Quirarte, winner of the 2024 National Prize for Arts and Literature in the field of Linguistics and Literature, stated that those who work with language have a great responsibility to make the words we use every day purer .

In an interview with La Jornada, the writer spoke about his passion and love for poetry, the importance of the city in his work, his work as an editor over the decades, his fascination with themes, and the authors he considers his mentors.

Regarding the national recognition, which was announced on June 5, Quirarte (Mexico City, 1954) mentioned that above all he feels enormous gratitude to the Mexican government that honored him with it, as well as to the jury that chose him, to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which he considers his home, and to institutions such as the Mexican Academy of Language (AML) and El Colegio Nacional.

He says he's amazed by the recognition, which will be presented to him on July 22 at the Palace of Fine Arts, given that there are so many excellent poets of my generation, such as Jorge Esquinca, Alberto Blanco, and Fabio Morábito. They are all excellent poets .

The conversation took place at his home in southern Mexico City, surrounded by images of poets Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, art and fiction books, in a room flanked by overflowing bookcases and a large window facing east. On his desk is a volume by the American poet H.P. Lovecraft.

Quirarte, who has practiced genres such as narrative, drama and essay, but above all recognizes himself as a poet, agrees with what Xavier Villaurrutia once said: it does not matter that a poet plays several instruments: they are all like a mask, they all head towards a common ground which is poetry .

The award-winning author's work includes more than 20 poetry titles and around 30 essay collections. A collection of his poetry was published in 2000 under the title Razones del samurai (Razones del samurai). He has received the José Revueltas Literary Essay Award in 1990, the Xavier Villaurrutia Award in 1991, the Ramón López Velarde Ibero-American Poetry Award in 2011, and the National University Award for Artistic Creation and Cultural Outreach in 2012.

Regarding one of his most notable figures, Ramón López Velarde, Quirarte said: "He's a poet who teaches us to distrust words. He was the first to distrust putting one syllable after another, which is why his metaphors are brilliant. For example, 'music, waist,' 'narcotic eyelids,' 'music lover, pin, without the faith of rats.' He's extraordinary."

“The creation of images in him is marvelous, especially his prose, which has been collected posthumously in the volume El minutero. López Velarde is a great prose writer, and the poet is always present; in other words, one sees his prose and the poet continually emerges. I would like the genre of poetry to permeate the prose poems I have written.”

Darkness is another light

The fascination with poetry, he said, lies in the fact that it says something everyone knows, but that one suddenly discovers. It's like a joke. We already knew it, but when someone tells it, they say something new. Poetry is also like that: we know what we want to say and feel, but when we read an authentic poet, our being vibrates differently .

Vicente Quirarte has always been drawn to the dark, because, like Olga Orozco, he believes that darkness is another light ; in that sense, he wrote, for example, Syntax of the Vampire, a serious text about this mythical figure and its transformations over time.

Along the same lines is his fascination with authors like Rimbaud, who wrote a lasting work between the ages of 17 and 21. Lovecraft and Poe, the former's master, are his favorite books. I'm glad Lovecraft has been rediscovered by young people. I read him when my paternal grandmother died. I was a teenager then, in the early 1970s. It was an incredible discovery .

Quirarte's love of books was instilled in him by his father, the idea that they are living, speaking, breathing beings, and also that one should only have the books that one can give a home, shelter, and sustenance to; not too many books, but enough that one can sustain .

Regarding his work as Director of Publications at UNAM, he said that he created the collection El Ala del Tigre as a tribute to Rubén Bonifaz Nuño. "I fulfilled one of the university's obligations, that of publishing new poets, who don't have many resources or recognition. Even now, it's difficult to find a poetry publisher. They are very few ."

He recounted that he wrote the text "Deserve a Book ," dedicated to readers because without them, books and the complement of writing would not exist. The reader is the one who finishes the book, who says what is right or wrong. One always thinks of the anonymous reader, but that reader is there, waiting for us .

Regarding the great responsibility that comes with great power, he mentioned that the phrase he used in his AML acceptance speech made him happy that no one in the faculty noticed he was quoting a line from one of his childhood heroes, Spider-Man, who received this advice from his Uncle Ben.

Vicente Quirarte, who is recovering from a recent physical illness, said he continues to work. He is working on a text in which the authors are children and talk about their childhoods, from the huehuetlatolli (The Advice of a Father to His Daughter ) to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and 19th-century authors such as Guillermo Prieto and Concha Lombardo de Miramón. An annotated edition of Santa is also about to appear in the AML, which he described as the most definitive edition of the novel, because it has about 500 footnotes.

Alondra Flores Soto

La Jornada Newspaper, Sunday, July 20, 2025, p. 3

Since the writer Paul Auster died on April 30, 2024, the sense of time has been out of whack, says essayist and novelist Siri Hustvedt, his life partner of 43 years, who initiated the release of Ghost Stories, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love. The more than 300 pages are the way she found to mourn and resurrect him.

Ghost stories are also love stories, he described in a short video published a few days ago on his social networks to present the publication of his most personal book to date, published by the British publisher Hodder & Stoughton, which will begin circulating in May 2026, although it is already possible to purchase autographed copies in advance, even in stock in the catalog of bookstores in Mexico.

Siri Husvedt (Minnesota, 1955), considered an avant-garde author and feminist advocate, explored how grief frees up time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to shape daily life. In her public reflections on Instagram , she believes grief threatens everyday time because what was once routine is distorted by the absence of the loved one, and this emptiness in the world disrupts the rhythm of life .

Our work, an intimate element of our relationship

Paul Auster and Siri Husvedt are among the most established and recognized literary couples. They met in 1981 in New York and married shortly after. Auster's first marriage was to Lydia Davis. As she herself noted, when they met, he was working on the second part of The Invention of Solitude, and after moving in together in Brooklyn, he embarked on the New York Trilogy, one of the most successful works by the man considered an essential author of contemporary literature.

Hustvedt, who is also a leading figure in literature, emphasized: "Our work has been an intimate component of our love affair and our 23 years of marriage ," as she detailed in 2004 in the text Excerpts from a Story of the Wounded Self.

On April 30, the first anniversary of the death of the author of The Book of Illusions, his widow revealed that since Auster's death from cancer at age 77, she had begun Ghost Stories. I know the book was my way of actively mourning him, my way of resurrecting something of him in its pages. What I know with absolute certainty is that what I wrote was a lifeline for me .

▲ Writers Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster lived together for 43 years, until the Baumgartner author's death on April 30, 2024, from cancer, at the age of 77. For the American writer, her new book was "my way of actively mourning him, my way of resurrecting something of him in its pages ." Here, the couple in images taken from the Facebook page of the author of "The Woman Who Looks at Men Who Look at Women ."

In a lengthy Instagram post a few days ago, the author of Todo cuanto amé outlined that the literary result is an emotional, full-bodied account of a life story together. She used the metaphor of a quilt made up of sewn-together patches containing memories from 40 years of love and life together.

The material in these fragments consists of entries Siri made in her diary from the early stages of her illness in November 2023 until May 3, 2024, the day of the funeral, along with emails she sent to friends during her treatment (or journey through cancerland, as she called it at the time), notes Paul sent her during the course of their relationship, and three love letters she wrote to him in 1981.

It also included the 35 pages of the book Paul was writing for his grandson Miles, born in January 2024, months before his death. Too weak, he couldn't finish it as he'd planned, so it now appears interwoven with Siri Husvedt's grief memoir in Ghost Stories.

His words revive him

Books are a technology of ghosts: the dead speaking to the living , Hustvedt said in Madrid during the tribute to Paul Auster at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. Then, still clearing the fog and the deafening silence of loss, she noted: "It's strange when you stop to think about it. The writer may have died, but their words revive them in the reader ." After her partner's death, a large number of people approached her with the best intentions of telling her that he lived on in her work.

And it's true, and it comforts me, but it doesn't change the grief one bit for those of us who loved Paul, because his books are no substitute for the living person.

Husvedt, who is often a storyteller on social media, shared a little about the celebrations at the family home where she lived with her daughter, son-in-law, grandson, and sisters last Christmas.

Maintaining routine, the small daily activities that mark the rhythm of time, she discovered, are very important: cooking, writing, running errands, and walking. I cling to these repetitions for sustenance .