Texto íntegro de la propuesta de candidatura al Premio Nobel de Literatura de D. Francico Ayala.

Presentada por D. Manuel Angel Vázquez Medel a la Academia Sueca

As all great creators, Francisco Ayala (Granada, Spain, 1906) began by emulating the masters. Having thus been imbued with the finest universal literary tradition, he would soon join their ranks with writings characterized by an unquestionably distinctive world view and style. Rarely in contemporary literature can one find such a well-balanced tension between the search for what is permanent on the one hand and, on the other, faithfulness to the specific historical moment in the context of which such investigation acquires meaning. Because of this inherent unity in his work, the basic characteristics of the mature Ayala can already been discerned in his first two literary endeavors, a pair of fairly traditional novels entitled Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espiritu (Tragicomedy of a Man Without Spirit), 1925, and Historia de un amanecer (Tale of a Dawn), 1926. Shortly thereafter, in the seven short pieces contained in El Boxeador y un Angel (The Boxer and an Angel), 1919 and Cazador en el alba (Hunter at Dawn), 1930, his voice is truly recognizable. These two volumes, among the finest examples of avant-garde prose fiction of the period, combine the playful sensibility of the 1920s with an element of gravity that foretells the momentous events soon to transform the course of European history. Indeed, the tragic dimension of human existence that characterizes stories such as Erika ante el invierno (Erika Facing Winter), 1930, anticipates narrations such as El Hechizado (The Bewitched), 1944, described by Jorge Luis Borges as "one of the most memorable short stories in Hispanic letters." This work was subsequently included in Los usurpadores (Usurpers), 1949, Ayala' s first collection of short fiction written in exile in Argentina.

The tales making up this volume, all of which illustrate the principle that "power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation," are examples drawn from Spanish history and constitute a mirror of the present. Ayala's storytelling succeeds in drawing us close to situations that, by virtue of their elaboration, are entirely credible, but whose imaginary dimension points to a far deeper reality. Such is also the case in La cabeza del cordero (The Lamb's Head), 1949, a collection of six novelle revolving in some way around the Spanish Civil War while, in the end, once again referring to the condition of Man who, because of intransigent confrontation and violence, is subject to degradation or to external circumstances. Hence, one's reading of La cabeza del cordero is enriched when carried out in conjunction with that of Los usurpadores.

In the period between 1950 and 1976, during which he taught in universities in Puerto Rico and the continental United States, Ayala never distanced himself from the construction of his fictional universe, which was becoming increasingly unified, complex, and complete. In contrast to his fiction of the previous decade, his works of these years are characterized by a humor frequently bordering on sarcasm. An initial collection of short fiction, Historia de macacos (Monkey Tale), 1955, contains texts of a truly international flavor: Africa, Buenos Aires, New York...This was followed by another pair of complementary novels, Muertes de perro (Dog's Death), translated into English as Death As a Way of Life, 1958, and El fondo del vaso (The Bottom of the Glass), 1962, which reveal the light and dark sides of both dictatorship and democracy. Two more collections, El as the bastos (The Ace of Clubs), 1963, and De raptos, violaciones y otras inconveniencias (Of Abductions, Rapes, and Other Inconveniences), 1966, also contain a literary homage to an episode in Cervantes' Don Quijote (the novella El rapto [The abduction]).

While Ayala only returned to live in Spain in 1976, he began making regular visits to his country from 1960 on. Our country was increasingly opening its doors to the outside world, and a new generation of readers soon became familiar with his writings. Then suddenly, at a moment when everybody had concluded that his future literary trajectory would be subject to few modifications, Ayala surprised us with an entirely new way of relating the fragment to the whole in El jardin de las delicias (The Garden of Delights), 1971, 1978, 1990, a continually evolving work in which, owing to the realistic magnitude of its narrative invention, the boundaries between reality and fiction almost vanish. Similarly, constraints of genre (the perimeters of the essay, narration, autobiographical materials, or free and spontaneous digression) give way in this book to a new kind of writing.

Thanks to the high literary caliber of his prose and his extraordinary ability to transcend the anecdotal and make way for dazzling reflections, Ayala would once more question the limits between fiction and reality in his most important contribution to the genre of twentieth-century memoirs, Recuerdos y olvidos (Things Remembered and Things Forgotten), 1982, 1983, 1988.

In the course of his long life, Don Francisco Ayala has made his way through territories both terrible and joyful. A citizen of one sole Humanity, he experienced the light and dark sides of life in his native Granada; in Republican Madrid; in the ferment of the Berlin of the early 1930s; in his exile in Argentina or Puerto Rico; in the United States; or back home again in Spain...

Such is the dialectic of El jard,n de la delicias, whose two parts, "Diablo Mundo" ("Devilish World") and "Dias felices" ("Happy Days"), are opposed. Ayala, truly a writer in his century, has been able to express this dialectic with the precision of the finest intellectuals and the sensitivity of our finest creators. Neither in his most difficult days was he in need of accolades that never reached him, nor has he altered the rectitude of his course in light of the well-deserved recognition that has recently been bestowed upon him. Such as: his election to the Royal Spanish Academy (1983); the National Prize for Literature (1983); the Gold Medal of the City of Granada (1987); Doctor Honoris Causa of Northwestern University (1977), The Complutense University of Madrid (1988), the University of Sevilla (1994), and the University of Granada (1994); The National Prize for Spanish Literature (1988); and the Prize for Andalusian Letters (1989). When, in 1991, Ayala was awarded the Cervantes Prize for Literature, the highest honor that can be conferred upon a writer of the Spanish language, his creative work was praised as being in the Cervantine tradition and, like that of Cervantes, of universal significance. The numerous translations of his work into major languages bear proof to this.

In addition to these exceptional merits, Francisco Ayala is one of the greatest contemporary literary theorists and critics (for example, Las plumas del fnix ,[The Feathers of the Phoenix]) as well as an eminent translator from the English, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese, and a theorist of translation...He is also a renowed essayist who combines both an impressive sociological formation, as attested to by his Tratado de sociologia (Treatise of Sociology) or his Introduccion a las Ciencias Sociales (Introduction to Social Science), with a permanent interest in technological innovation and the evolution of societies (Hoy ya es ayer. [Today is Already Yesterday],Contra el Poder y otros ensayos [Against Power and Other Essays], El escritor en su siglo [The Writer in His Century], etc.), and combines precise and balanced words of brilliant quality with a prophetic vision of the crisis of modernity and the keys to a humane and realistic future based on freedom and on the spiritual enlightenment of nations and of Man.