It was on April 23, 1616, that chance, immortality, or the inscrutable designs of fate forever united the lives, and above all the deaths, of the two great geniuses of world literature. One of them was William Shakespeare, of English origin and, the other, the brilliant Miguel de Cervantes and Saavedra, author of the most widely read book in history, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. For this reason, UNESCO in 1995 approved the proclamation of April 23 of each year as “World Book and Copyright Day”.
Next Monday, the students of the school will celebrate their own Book Fair where Antonio Machado He will be the main honoree. This writer, one of the most representative Spanish poets of our literature, was influenced by Modernism and Symbolism. His work is a lyrical expression of the ideals of the Generation of '98. Machado's early texts, commentaries on current events and chronicles of local customs written in collaboration with his brother and signed with the pseudonym Tablante de Ricamonte, appeared in The caricature in 1893. His first poems were published in Electra, Helios and other modernist magazines, a movement with which Machado identified when he began his literary career. Like Unamuno, Machado considered his mission to be “to eternalize the momentary,” to capture the “fleeting wave” and transform the poem into “word in time.” In later years, his meditation on the transient and the eternal intensified in Castile fields (1912), but not through self-contemplation; rather, he turned his gaze outward and observed with keen eyes the Castilian landscape and the people who inhabited it. An austere and somber emotion runs through the poems of this book, which evokes the tragic, dark Spain so criticized by the Generation of '98 from a regenerationist perspective, while at the same time describing with profound patriotism the decline and ruin of the old Castilian cities.
Furthermore, Charles Dickens He will be another of the writers chosen by the English department to celebrate World Book Day. This author of Oliver Twist evolved from a lighthearted style to the socially engaged stance of one of his greatest successes. These early novels brought him enormous popular success and a certain renown among the upper and educated classes, leading to his reception in the United States in 1842. However, he soon became disillusioned with American society, perceiving in it all the vices of the Old World. His criticisms, reflected in a series of articles and in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, caused outrage in the United States, and the novel was the most resounding failure of his career in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, he regained his public favor in 1843 with the publication of A Christmas Carol.
