Andres Trapiello

Andrés García Trapiello (Manzaneda de Torío, León, June 10, 1953) is a Spanish writer and editor. He is the author of the monumental Salón de pasos perdidos , described by its author as a novel in progress , of which twenty-three volumes have appeared to date.

Biography

In March 2017 with other members of the Historical Memory Commissioner, at the Madrid City Council, for which he was proposed by Citizens

Andrés García Trapiello was born in Manzaneda de Torío, province of León, in 1953, one of the nine children of a well-to-do Falangist peasant and merchant, Porfirio García, married to Laura Trapiello. Two years later the family moved to León to live at the paternal grandfather's house. Several members of his family have had humanistic inclinations: a priest uncle, César Trapiello, cartoonist and journalist, whose altar boy he was, introduced him to reading; a great-uncle, José Trapiello, was a modernist poet; and his brother Pedro García Trapiello is a journalist.

He studied internal baccalaureate in a Dominican school and the PREU with the Marists of Palencia. After a trip to Marseille, where he worked as a waiter, he entered a Dominican monastery in Caleruega (Burgos) at the end of 1970, but was expelled two months later for not believing and for rejecting self-flagellation. His father kicked him out of the house later when he discovered under his bed some issues of Mundo Obrero . He then spent five months in Madrid with some anarchists and in a pension, subsisting with seedy jobs. He later did incomplete studies in philology at the University of Valladolid, attracted to that city by the false promise of working in the factory of his paternal uncle. By then he joined the Young Red Guard and was already writing and collaborating in the press. He was a member, according to what he declared in an interview, in the Maoist International Communist Party of Spain PCE (i), from which he was purged in 1974 as a "revisionist and drug addict."

In 1975 he went to Madrid, where he currently lives, hired as a writer for an art magazine, Guadalimar. He also worked until 1979 on the TVE cultural program Encuentros con las letras; there he met his wife, Miriam Moreno (1954), with whom he has two children. He directed the magazines Entrega de la Ventura and Número , and in 1981 he participated in the refounding of the Trieste publishing house. He also collaborates with the Comares publishing house from Granada.

He knew and esteemed Ramón Gaya, whom he considers his mentor:

It was in a way the father and the teacher and the friend that we had not had of young people, without pretending to be him for us none of the three things. With Gaya you were next door and you had to understand on your own what it was, what it had been, his silences and what he said, everything. Because he wouldn't explain. At last we understood that there was a Spain that we could be proud of, of which we had the obligation to be a part, a Spain that we should preserve, care and beg. La España de Cervantes y Velázquez, la de Galdós y la de JRJ, y yo hoy addía, la España de Gaya. He called it “the Spanish miracle”. He pointed to us painters, readings, cities, people, attitudes. He taught us to read the past without beatry or resentment, naturally speaking of naturality as a quality of feeling, and the feeling of art as the very nature of this. He taught us above all to consider art as a life and reminded us that there is a certain salvation in art, a matter in which Miriam now works. He also taught me to look at the years of war as no one had done before.

His novel The Ghost Ship (1992) was received with enormous hostility by left-wing literary critics, due to having published the Falangist Sánchez Mazas shortly before. He is best known for his diary (of which, up to now, he has published 22 volumes, which receive the joint name of Salón de Pasos Perdidos) and his novels. He has also dedicated himself to the investigation of literary history, especially focused on some recurring writers: Cervantes, Galdós, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Unamuno, in addition to being the author of titles open to the general public. Rather than a typical academic researcher, he would identify himself as an avid reader.

In one of his essays, undoubtedly the best known and most extensive, Las armas y las letras. Literature and Civil War (1936-1939), studies the behavior of writers and intellectuals in that period, both among those who sided with the rebels (such as Torrente Ballester, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Rafael Sánchez Mazas or Agustín de Foxá) as by the Republicans (Antonio Machado, Rafael Alberti, Bergamín, Miguel Hernández, García Lorca, etc.), as well as the non-aligned (Pío Baroja, Azorín, Unamuno, Manuel Chaves Nogales, Clara Campoamor). Interested in fascism literary, he has rescued the work of some prominent Falangist authors, concluding that they "won the war, but lost the pages of literature manuals". His knowledge and ingenuity as a scathing writer are appreciated. However, the main criticisms that his way of approaching the figure and works of the writers of the period receive are a lack of rigorous research and the poor handling of sources. The critic José Luis García Martín, after confessing his admiration for Andrés Trapiello, affirms that "we already know that his rigor, when it comes to citing and historicizing Spanish literature (one of his hobbies) is not excessive". Trapiello himself He anticipated criticism in 1993, acknowledging that Las armas y las letras is a hybrid between literature, history and politics: «To be a history book, it lacks dates; to be critical an overview and ways that it does not have. Perhaps, as life is a hybrid.

Trapiello, who has defended that "the past must not be politicized", was a candidate for the Madrid Senate on the UPyD lists for the 2015 general elections and one of the members, proposed by Ciudadanos, of the Commissioner de la Memoria Histórica, an entity created by the Madrid City Council in 2016, which was entrusted with the preparation of a report on the change in the name of the streets of the street in Madrid for the sake of compliance with the Law of Historical Memory, of which, however, is a detractor.

On June 13, 2021, he read the manifesto of the Unión 78 civic platform on the stage of Plaza de Colón in Madrid on the occasion of the demonstration against the pardons that the PSOE government was going to grant to the Catalan pro-independence prisoners since the autumn of 2017 for the Catalan sovereignty process of 2012-2021. After him, Yeray Mellado, president of the S'ha Acabat! association, and Rosa Díez, former president of UPyD and founder of Unión 78 intervened.

Works

Poetry

• Next to the water (1980)
• The traditions (1982)
• Easy life (1985)
• The same book (1989)
• The traditions (1991), compilation of his first poetic work 1979-1990
• A truth (1993)
• Naked branch1993-2001 (2001)
• A dream in another (2004)
• Second darkness (2012)
• And (2018)

Novels and stories

• The nice ink (1988)
• The ghost ship(1992)
• The evil (1996)
• Days and nights (2000)
• The night of the four roads. Madrid, 1945 (2001)
• The perfect crime friends (2003)
• When Don Quixote dies (2004)
• The confines (2009)
• Yesterday (2012)
• The end of Sancho Panza and other luck (2014)

Journals

More than twenty volumes of his newspaper Salón de pasos perdidos have been published by Pre-Textos publishing house. In 1999 Capricho Extremadura appeared, a selection of extracts from his diary with a thematic center in the countryside of Extremadura; a revised edition was published in 2011.

1. The cat locked up1987 (1990)
2. Unfounded Madness1988 (1992)
3. The glass roof1989 (1994)
4. The clouds inside1990 (1995)
5. The gentlemen of the fixed point1991 (1996)
6. The strangest things1992 (1997)
7. A rod that thinks1993 (1998)
8. The Hemisphere of Magdeburg1994 (1999)
9. Do I.1995 (2000)
10. inclemences of time1996 (2001)
11. The Hialino fana1997 (2002)
12. Seven modern1998 (2003)
13. The garden of the gunpowder1999 (2005)
14. The thing itself2000 (2006)
15. The mania2001 (2007)
16. Troppo vero2002 (2009)
17. Just sensitive., 2003 (2011)
18. Miseria and company, 2004 (2013)
19. I'll doubt it., 2005 (2015)
20. Only facts, 2006 (2016)
21. World is2007 (2017)
22. Diligence2008 (2019)
23. Quasi a fantasy2009 (2021)

Articles

The Los desvanes collection brings together his journalistic articles and other collaborations:

1. A thousand1985-1995 (1995)
2. Everything is less1985-1997 (1997)
3. Relative blue1997 (1999)
4. The brevity of days1998 (2000)
5. Turru... and other slopes1999 (2001)
6. Yes and no2000 (2002)
7. Sea without shore1997-2001 (2002)
8. Against all evidence2001 (2004)
9. We're two.2002 (2004)
10. Oranges of the sea2003 (2007)
11. More or less2004 (2007)
12. Neither yours nor mine2005 (2009)
13. The bastions2006 (2009)
14. Costanilla de los desamparados2007 (2017)
15. Business pending2008 (2017)
16. If you worship me2009 (2022)
17. Strange country2010 (2022)

Essay

• Gabarrón Plastic Experience (1977), with a prologue by Miguel Fernández-Braso
• The lives of Miguel de Cervantes (1993)
• Arms and letters. Literature and civil war1936-1939 (1994)
• Classic grey suit (1997)
• The grandchildren of the Cid. The new golden age1898-1914 (1997)
• It was just shadows. (1997)
• Travellers and stables (1998)
• The Daily Writer (1998)
• The paths back (2000)
• The ark of the words (2004)
• ... and Cervantes (2005)
• Modern printing (2006)
• The broken silk (2006), with photos of Juan Manuel Castro Prieto
• The vagamunds (2011)
• The Rastro (2018)
• A little company. Impromptu barojiano (2019)
• Madrid (2020)
• The fountain of charm. Poems of a Life, 1980-2021 (2021)
• Madrid 1945. The Night of the Four Ways (2022)

Some anthologies and collective books

• José Luis García Martín, The generation of the 80s (1988)
• José Enrique Martínez, Anthology of Spanish poetry1975-1995 (1991)
• Juan Manuel Bonet, Visions of Madrid (1991)
• Eligio Rabanera, The Crime Union (1994)
• Miguel García-Posada, The new poetry1975-1992 (1996)
• Chronicle of the Spanish Civil War (1996)
• That summer, that love. 33 writers confess a summer love (1997)
• Germán Yanke, The quiet poets (1998)
• Last third of the century. Anthology consulted by Spanish poetry1968-1998 (1998)
• 98 Gentes (1998)
• Juliana Chaverrías Álvarez and Marcelino Jiménez León, 18 Spanish poets of the millennium (2000)
• Jesus Munarriz, A century of sonnets in Spanish (2000)
• Juan Cano Ballesta, Recent Spanish poetry1980-2000 (2001)
• José Pérez Olivares, The axe and the rose. Three decades of Spanish poetry (2001)
• With another look. A Vision of Disease from Literature and Humanism (2001)
• We alone (2001)
• Manuel Hidalgo, Fobias (2002)
• Madrid 11 March (2004)
• Poésie espagnole contemporaine (2006)
• Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Anthology of the Spanish story (2006)
• Antonio Manilla and Román Piña, The house of the poet (2007)
• Marta Sanz Pastor, Metalinguistic and sentimental. Anthology of Spanish poetry, 1966-2000 (2007)
• Luis Alberto de Cuenca, Ten poets of the eighties (2007)
• Francisco Gutiérrez Carbajo and José Luis Martín Nogales, Literary articles in the press1975-2005 (2007)
• Emilio Coco, Poeti spagnoli contemporanei (2008)
• Javier Muguerza and Yolanda Ruano de la Fuente, West, reason and evil (2008)
• Views on Extremadura (2008)
• Francisco Rico, A thousand years of Spanish poetry (2009)
• Manuel Hidalgo and Amparo Serrano de Haro, Another final (2009)
• Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, War Parties (2009)

Edition

He has prepared editions by Miguel de Unamuno, Juan Ramón Jiménez, José Bergamín, Manuel Machado, Ramón Gaya, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Rafael Sánchez Mazas and José Gutiérrez Solana, among others. He has fully and faithfully put Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes into current Spanish.

He directed the Trieste publishing house with Valentín Zapatero, and currently directs the La Veleta collection of the Comares publishing house from Granada.

Awards

• Novela Plaza & Janés International Prize, 1992, by The ghost ship
• Prize for the Criticism of Castilian Poetry, 1993, by A truth
• Award don Juan de Borbón, 1995, by Arms and letters. Literature and civil war 1936-1939
• Madrid Community Letters Award, 2002
• Nadal Prize, 2003, by The perfect crime friends
• Award for the best foreign novel in China, 2005, by The perfect crime friends
• José Manuel Lara Foundation Award, 2005, by When Don Quixote dies
• Prix Européen Madeleine Zepter to the best foreign novel, 2005, by When Don Quixote dies
• Miguel Delibes National Journalism Award, 2005, for the article “The Ark of the Words”, published in The Vanguard on 23 April 2005
• Julio Camba Award, 2007
• Francisco Valdés Award, 2009
• Castilla y León de las Letras Award, 2010
• Best novel for readers El País, 2012, by Yesterday
• 2021 bookshops award, in the rehearsal category, for the work Madrid
• Mariano Award of Cavia, 2022