> Memory on the fly
The ‘Palabras al Vuelo’ festival brought yesterday afternoon the documentary ‘La memoria de los cuentos’, directed
by José Luis López and written by the member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Language, Antonio Rodríguez
Almodóvar, to the Lanzarote Island Library.
This work fiercely defends the thesis that popular stories that have crossed oceans of time to our dates making use
of oral tradition are a fundamental part of the history of literature. The project aimed to value one of the jewels of the popular culture of this country that is none other than those stories that have been transmitted from time immemorial within the family, between peasants while working the field.
This heritage of tradition, which has survived weakly to us, has formed many generations, often illiterate, in a very rich collective symbolic universe but not always well valued. The documentary explains that many of the stories that have survived used to be accompanied by another that put the counterpoint or explain the story from the opposite point of view. Almost always survived the version of those who could control the narrative.
In the realization of this project Antonio Rodríguez Almodóvar and José Luis López Linares toured the spanish
geography to locate and interview some of the last bearers of oral heritage. Thanks to the cooperation between
researchers and oral narrators, we can verify that the same stories are located at very distant geographical points. The geographical amplitude of the stories is a reflection of their permanence in time.
‘La memoria de los cuentos’ treats the oral tradition as one of the ways that rural societies had to make their
wisdom survive. They achieved it thanks to people who learned to listen and who couldn’t go to school due to the
harsh conditions in which they spent their childhood. A beautiful exercise of remembrance given to us by ‘Palabras
al Vuelo’.