Television for many years, insolent, bald, wise, acidic, sarcastic, irrepressible actor, clandestine sentimental, anti-protocol protocol and the first Spanish humanist of the last half century. These are some of the things that a man of ungovernable talent and personality has been, both in the academic, family and social spheres, Francisco Rico, who died today at the age of 81 in Barcelona after being admitted to the hospital 10 days ago. . His inability to remain silent or correct himself and his desire for public intervention have been part of the dimension of a professional of humanism who never understood that he should live only suffocated in the dust of libraries but also in the open field of screens, of life. public and the relationships with the literature of his time, or that which he loved most, whether it was first Jaime Gil de Biedma, Gabriel Ferrater or Juan Benet or later Pere Gimferrer, Eduardo Mendoza, Javier Marías, Javier Cercas or Andrés Trapiello.
He enlisted almost all of them in his countless projects and improbable ideas as prologue writers or commentators on the best literature because they were friends and because he wanted the living breath of today’s literature pushing the old one. He dealt with almost everyone in one way or another almost for the pleasure of arguing and refuting, arguing and counterarguing between frequent drinks and incessant cigarettes (lately Nobel Prize) chained in a compulsive manner. Among what he suffered the worst in the last few days in the hospital was that inhumane prohibition to end up dying one day before his birthday, as happened with his own Petrarch. Just a few months ago he had gathered some of his best interpretive studies on the poet and father of humanism, but the adventures of his intimacy with Petrarch to change the international vision of the person and the character stemmed from his insulting intellectual precocity, back in an unfindable edition. , Vida u obra de Petrarch: lectura del Secretumpublished in Padua in 1974, when he had already written an unprecedented masterful piece that would have killed anyone but him in the attempt: The small world of man, in 1970, the same year in which he gave a monumental shake to the picaresque, and to the Lazarillo in particular, in another very personal essay published in Seix Barral and with the swaying prose of someone who likes to write: The picaresque novel and the point of view. Of course, he did more things in his ultra-fertile thirties, and among them directed a ground-breaking collection of rescue of exiles and forgotten people for Labor, Modern Hypanic Texts, in addition to giving a complete turn to a couple of rather central characters, Alfonso the Wise and the General story and that Nebrija so much of his that lasted a lifetime: Rico was an inhuman anomaly, to put it mildly.
In reality, Rico changed many things not only in the history of literature but in everyday reality, some visible and others less visible (among the visible was also the antipathy generated by his arrogance and his rudeness towards self-conscious colleagues). The university teaching method of Spanish literature was one of those changes, through the invention of a History and critic of Spanish literature with the help of his close and great friend Gonzalo Pontón, founder of the Crítica publishing house, and a very old friend like José-Carlos Mainer (the only one who should have dared in life to throw him out of a Department Council, and then accept the contrite apologies from the expelled).
But he also made the borders between hypertrophied erudition and the street that reads, which also exists, more flexible and permeable, and that is why it occurred to him to first preface a handful of classics and then gather the prologues into a miraculous book of insight, wisdom, and good prose. and intention, Brief library of Spanish authors. It is that type of book that the many hooligans We highlight Professor Rico whenever we can because in them the literary animal and the wise humanist appear. reassembledcast, as in First quarantine and general literature treatise (200 pages that fueled the desire to see the second among many of us) or as in The discourses of tasteanother exceptional essay on literature to read, or placing art at the center of the square of letters and humanities, as in another gifted book, Figures with landscape. It is true that popularly its name is closely associated with that of the successive and multiple editions of the Quixote which he took care of with the methodical obstinacy of someone who is not going to give in to an error, a bad reading, a poorly told minutiae to the team that worked with him on that extraordinary project, and part of a gigantic collection of classics today published under the protection of the RAE .
Does reading it today make sense? He has it, and so that there is no doubt: whoever wants to know what the civil revolution that opened humanism (and that still lasts) is about can do so with The dream of humanism in your hands and, if you are not a philologist or an academic expert, there will be no better way to express your knowledge than to approach the edition that he personally took care of for street readers, desire and taste, without the academic pretensions but with all the guarantees of being getting intimate with Cervantes while reading the Quixote.
He had time to see, browse, semi-read and above all recognize himself in the tribute issue that the magazine Insula dedicated to him in one of his last issues. The joy came from his eyes and his gestures, and that, the elegant and often malicious and sentimental joy, was part of the instinct that made him open his knowledge and his intemperance to a large group of students, teachers, writers and readers who They wanted it even against him and in spite of him, but he already knew it, and sometimes his eyes even watered, like ours now.