Frankfurt Book Fair opens with Spain as guest of honour

The inauguration ceremony was held on Tuesday 18 October and was attended by Their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain. During his speech, Felipe VI expressed his gratitude for the opportunity provided by this great European and world cultural and literary showcase.

"Over 30 years have passed since Spain was Guest of Honour at this exhibition for the first time, in 1991. The Spain of today bears little resemblance to the Spain of that time. The unprecedented transformation and modernisation of our country, particularly since its accession to the European Community in 1986, has resulted in profound changes in society, culture and economy.

He ended his speech with words of thanks to the protagonists of this Book Fair. "To the authors, publishers and everyone behind the strength, bibliodiversity and creativity of the publishing sector in Spain. A sector that is not only the main cultural industry in our country, but one which transcends our borders thanks to its successful internationalisation, building a bridge of letters between Europe and Latin America".

For his part, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was accompanied by his wife Elke Büdenbender, expressed the hopes and expectations invested in the meeting: "Who knows what new discoveries or surprises about Spain this fair will bring? The German public is very curious. It wants to discover the experiences that Spanish authors convey to us in their books. To discover the vision of the world that can be communicated from their country".

Irene Vallejo and Antonio Muñoz Molina

The ceremony was also attended by authors Irene Vallejo and Antonio Muñoz Molina. One of the main themes of the Book Fair this year is translation in its many facets, on the precept that translators are essential, and not only in the world of literature. Thanks to them, words find their way into the world as the basis for trading literary rights and building understanding between cultures amidst diversity. Spain brings to the fair more than 150 German-language titles to be released this year and a total of 450 translated into German from 2019.

In her speech, Irene Vallejo paid tribute to the work of translators. "Whose hands gave us the passport to limitless geographies? These bold journeys are made possible by the craft of translation, which expands the universes of others. In the words of José Saramago, writers make national literatures, while translators build world literature. To those who have given me the homeland of their language, to those who accept being me so that I may be another, my Babel family, I want to publicly express my infinite gratitude.

Emphasising the importance of the schools of translators in Spain, she said: "In Toledo, a border territory, a fabulous school of translators was born, whose ripple effect would reach Salamanca, Seville and Tarazona, where schools, translation centres, libraries, spaces of knowledge and shared knowledge sprouted up. We rarely remember today that the Hindu Pachatantra and the works of Aristotle lost in the West reached Europe by these routes. They were translated from Arabic into Spanish as early as 1080, and from there, centuries later, from Latin into German and English. European thinkers of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries took sustenance from these sources".

In her speech, she also pointed out that Cervantes, already aware of their importance, paid a subtle tribute to translators in his most universal work. "Don Quixote is presented as a translation of a chronicle written by an imaginary Muslim scholar named Cide Hamete Benengeli. At some point in the knight's adventures, the manuscript is suddenly interrupted and Cervantes, the narrator, desperately searches for another copy so that he can find out the outcome. The place where we will recover the thread of history is, of course, Toledo".

Antonio Muñoz Molina reminded us that more than 30 years ago, in 1991, Spain was the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair. "One of the great differences between the Spanish literature that came to Frankfurt then and the literature that is arriving now is the irruption of women, who have always been the majority of the reading public, and who are now beginning to take their rightful place in publishing catalogues and in the general ecosystem of literature. There is no greater diversity than that arising from free imagination, from the sovereign exercise of observation, invention, memory, diatribe. The more people, male or female, of whatever origin of birth or class or sexual status, who have access to quality education, the greater the number and the more varied will be those who choose to express their creativity through the arts.

As the writer from Jaén and member of the Real Academia Española pointed out, in the intervening thirty-one years, Spanish literature has multiplied its voices, and therefore its worlds. "And much of what was previously kept secret or said in hushed tones is now declared with an affirmative forcefulness that has much to do with defiance, with a proclamation of one's own irreducible life, because the expressive forms of literature can be as varied as those of desire and personal identity. In literature, which is the irreducible space of the singular, of the ambiguous, of the nuanced, there is no room for general judgements. I don't know whether Spanish literature is now overall better or worse than it was thirty years ago, or even whether it is freer. What I do know, and welcome wholeheartedly, is that it is much more varied and pluralistic in every sense".

The Theory of Cherries

After the ceremony, the King and Queen, accompanied by the President of the German Republic, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Minister for Culture and Sport, Miquel Iceta, the German Minister for Culture, Claudia Roth, the Director General for Books and the Promotion of Reading, María José Gálvez, the President of Acción Cultural Española, José Andrés Torres Mora, and the curator of the project, Elvira Marco, toured the 2,000 square metres of the Spanish Pavilion as Guest of Honour. Under the conceptual approach 'The Theory of Cherries', which originates from the Spanish author Carmen Martín Gaite, who said that stories are like cherries, when you pick one the next one follows on automatically, the space is a living dictionary which, like a hypertext, strings together words, languages and stories and transforms the space into a magical environment.

Nearly 200 writers, illustrators, publishers and translators, among others, will take part in the more than 50 roundtables and meetings that will take place in the Pavilion. The Professional and Literary Programme of Spain Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2022 stands out for the diversity of genres represented, from narrative, to non-fiction, to poetry, to graphic novels, and includes both contemporary and classic authors of the Spanish language.

The Spanish proposal, presented under the slogan 'Creatividad Desbordante', focuses on a broad and varied literary programme based on the pillars of bibliodiversity, linguistic and social diversity, gender equality, strength of the sector, innovation, digitalisation, sustainability and the value of Spanish as a bridge to Latin America.

Spanish exhibitors

Their Majesties the King and Queen visited some of the 320 stands of Spanish exhibitors at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Among others, there is the space of the Federación de Gremios de Editores de España, the corridor where independent publishers are accommodated, and the space dedicated to Children's and Young People's Literature. They also visited the exhibitions 'Illustration: a visual literature', which provides an overview of the main contemporary illustrators in our country; 'A house for Walter Benjamin', a rehabilitation project of the old Portbou Town Hall, a building of heritage value dedicated to the memory of the German intellectual of Jewish origin; 'Encounters with the Prado Museum', with its reproductions of the Madrid art gallery in the Agora of the Frankfurt fairgrounds; and 'El llibret de Falla: una oportunitat cultural', organised by World Design Capital Valencia 2022 in The Arts+ pavilion.

The literary agenda

As part of the programme's full and diverse literary agenda, the first roundtable was 'Landscapes on the Margins of the City', in which the writers Kiko Amat, Najat El Hachmi, Lara Moreno and José Ovejero took part. They discussed urban peripheries, which by definition are the transitional landscape between the countryside and the city, discovering how these changing spaces are narrated in recent literature.

Marta Sanz, Irene Vallejo and María José Gálvez engaged in lively discourse about 'The Invention of Books'. Since Gutenberg, the journey of our gestures for reading still finds its best area of expression in this object, the guardian of our knowledge, of our memory and of our ideas of possible worlds.

Is there such a thing as a Europe of writers? This is the question that Nina George (President of the European Writers' Council), Pepa Roma (Spanish Writers' Association) and Nicole Pfister Fetz (Swiss Authors' Association), moderated by Lena Falkenhagen (German Writers' Association), attempted to answer. They discussed the differences in the work and social influence of writers in different European countries, focusing on the comparison between Spain and Germany, probably the two European countries with the strongest publishing industries.

Other inspiring roundtables so far have been 'Long live the fairy tale', 'The past as fiction', 'Portraits of the present', 'The voice of the family' and 'Beyond the borders of imagination', and with such powerful protagonists as Javier Cercas, Sara Mesa, Daniel Gascón, Lana Corujo, Isaac Rosa, Marta Orriols, Patricio Pron, Clara Obligado, Luis García Montero and Cristina Fernández Cubas.

Non official translation