Legacy of Alfonso Reyes, to the Caja de las Letras of the Instituto Cervantes

Madrid. The Mexican intellectual and writer Alfonso Reyes, one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, wrote a manuscript in his own handwriting about his way of understanding and approaching one of the great classic texts of universal history, the Iliad, of Homer.

That original text, with the pages yellowed by the passage of time, was deposited in the Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute, an armored vault that protects objects, books, writings and memories of some of the great authors and writers of Latin America, such as Rubén Darío, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Fernando Fernán Gómez, José Saramago, Federico García Lorca, María Zambrano, Luis Cernuda, Ernesto Cardenal, Ramón López Velarde and José Emilio Pacheco, among others.

The Autonomous University of Nuevo León (UANL) is responsible for safeguarding the valuable collection left by Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) after his death, which it carefully cares for in the Alfonsina Chapel.

Santos Guzmán López, rector of this house of studies, the second most important and largest in the country after the National Autonomous University of Mexico, traveled to Madrid to deliver a legacy that will also serve as a reminder of the close intellectual and biographical link that Reyes had with Spain and with Madrid, where he spent long periods of time and maintained an intense intellectual, philosophical and literary dialogue with some of the great Spanish authors of his time.

At the ceremony of handing over the legacy, in addition to the rector Guzmán López, there was the director of the Cervantes Institute, the Spanish poet Luis García Montero; Both recounted the origin of this new delivery to one of the cult centers of literary memory. On a visit by the rector of the UANL to the Cervantes headquarters, they ended the tour in the Caja de las Letras, with its golden cubicles and all those names of very prominent authors. There they raised the urgency and need for Alfonso Reyes to also have his space; From there, the selection of the material and the preparation of all the documents and legal and bureaucratic matters to make the delivery began.

García Montero, in his capacity as host of the reception, explained that this legacy represents a exciting memory of the figure of the Mexican philosopher, who left a very important mark in the cultural history of both countries and in the best memory of the Spanish-speaking community.

Rector Santos Guzmán pointed out that Words have the power to transform the world and Alfonso Reyes managed to build bridges between Latin America and Europe, as well as between tradition and modernity. Today, the spirit of Reyes travels again as it did in life to enrich new horizons: his work continues to be a shining beacon for universal culture..

The legacy was deposited in box number 1633, and consists of the original manuscript Brief commentary on the Iliad, written in the handwriting of the Mexican thinker and which he gave to his friend and writer Pedro Guillén. This document expresses his opinions on Homer’s work up to the first nine cantos, and includes some drawings.

The event also included a brief discussion in which Raquel Caleya, director of Culture at Cervantes, participated; Alberto Enríquez, winner of the 2024 Alfonso Reyes International Award; Víctor Barrera, director of the Alfonsina Chapel University Library of the UANL, and José Javier Villarreal, secretary of Extension and Culture of the UANL. The director of the Cultural Institute of Mexico, Jorge Arturo Abascal, attended on behalf of the Mexican embassy in Spain.

Barrera, one of the leading experts on the work of Alfonso Reyes, explained that in that manuscript about the Iliad Reyes’s essayistic prose is recovered “in all its splendor, with analysis, reflections and evocations of a text that he admired. Well, he always said that in Homer there is no hesitation or movement that, once started, does not reach the end of its consequences: he had a masterful handling of history.

For Reyes, Homer disdained the filling of psychology and description, that congenital evil of the novel. So this manuscript shows the process of appropriation that the writer makes of Homer and is an x-ray of his studies, in what is a brief snapshot of Alfonsine prose.