<h6><strong>The Diplomat</strong></h6> <h4><strong>This past Tuesday, the Instituto Cervantes' Caja de las Letras (Box of Letters) received the legacy in memoriam of Guatemalan writer and Nobel Prize winner in Literature Miguel Ángel Asturias. This legacy includes first editions of his works (one of them dedicated to Federico García Lorca) and a 100-year-old sheet of paper containing the author's writing from his time as a lawyer.</strong></h4> During the ceremony, held in Guatemala City, the writer's son, Miguel Ángel Asturias Amado, presented his father's documents, which also included a draft for "El Señor Presidente," the novel that made the Guatemalan writer, Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1967, one of the greatest exponents of the so-called "dictator novel." Asturias Amado expressed his "gratitude to the Instituto Cervantes for the invitation to receive this legacy." The Institute's Director of Culture, Raquel Caleya, spoke at the event, and the President of the Republic of Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo, and Spanish-Nicaraguan writers Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli acted as witnesses. The event was the key moment in the inauguration of the Centroamérica Cuenta 2025 literary festival, dedicated this year to Miguel Ángel Asturias—considered the father of the "Latin American boom"—which began on May 19 and closed this Saturday, May 24, with the collaboration of the Spanish institution. The delivery of this deposit will be safeguarded by the Instituto Cervantes until it enters the Caja de las Letras at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, in box number 1273. The legacy includes several books by Asturias, such as the first edition of "Leyendas de Guatemala," printed in Spain in 1930, and one of his famous "fantomimas," dedicated to Federico García Lorca, of which only 200 copies were published in 1940. There is also an edition of the "Anales de los Xahil," written by the Cachiquel Indians, translated from French into Spanish by Miguel Ángel Asturias, a work that introduced him to the indigenous world. A manuscript with his handwriting on a double sheet of paper, like a folded letter, has also been deposited. What is significant about this document is that the sheet of paper he used was one of the drafts of "El Señor Presidente," written on a typewriter. 'El Señor Presidente,' a work written between 1920 and 1933 and published in 1946, ranks alongside other novels such as Valle-Inclán's 'Tirano Banderas,' Roa Bastos's 'Yo el Supremo,' García Márquez's 'El Otoño del Patriarca,' and Mario Vargas Llosa's 'La Fiesta del Chivo,' among the so-called "dictator novels." In this work, the writer's most celebrated, Asturias draws inspiration from the last government of Manuel Estrada Cabrera in Guatemala to explore the mechanisms that make a political dictatorship work, as well as its effects on society. Born in 1899 in Guatemala and died in 1974 in Madrid, Miguel Ángel Asturias was a proponent of the pre-Hispanic cultural cycle. He began his literary career interested in surrealism and following figures such as Georges Raynaud and J. A. González de Mendoza. His poetic work includes titles such as ‘Lark’s Sien’ (1948), ‘Poetic Exercises in Sonnet Form on Themes by Horace’ (1952), and ‘Spring Clairvigil’ (1956), as well as narrative works such as ‘Legends of Guatemala’ (1930) and ‘Men of Corn’ (1949). In addition to ‘Mr. President’ (1946), he published prose texts such as ‘The Little Jewel’ (1961), ‘Mulatto of Such a One’ (1963), and ‘The Mirror of Lida Sal’ (1967).
