Martin Cid novelist and pipe smoker. Editor of Yareah Magazine. Martin Cid is author of the novels Ariza (2008), A Century of Ashes (2009), Eminescu’s 7 Sins (2010), Fake Game (2011), Ten Masks of Evil (2012) and The Old Siren, still unfinished. Since 2008, he is the director, founder and editor of Yareah Magazine.
Martín Cid
I was born in a Little country called Spain. It’s a beautiful place, with sun and some pretty girls (like everywhere). We loved to drink a little, to speak anywhere, to smoke a little… to live. In art, we had very important names in History like Picasso, Velazquez, Dali… Also, we had a man called Cervantes, one of the best novelists in the History (it’s not me the only one who asserts this). We know we are not very good scientists or playing chess against the Russians… we are not as efficient as German people and, making movies, we cannot compare with America (of course, who could?)… But we were good in something, maybe something not very important in these modern times but our artists were famous in the whole world (excuse me for the confusion but I consider ‘artists’ to the writers too)… Yes, I repeat, we were good in something because, more or less, every country has its good things. Centuries ago, we had also an empire (nobody remembers this now, but I promise we had it)… but we were not conquerors.
At this point, I would like to ask something. What do you think if Russians, for some reason, begin to stop playing chess? Then, maybe you would answer with the famous sentence ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ and, probably, you would be true. And now, I can say you: ‘something is rotten in the state of Spain.’ And I have my reasons to say that (and I am not going to speak about economics or crisis or doves flying): we’ve lost our identity as characters. I must explain this: our literature has characters like don Quixote, who defines the personality and manners of old Spanish people. In some point, maybe when we had to be part of the new Europe, we’ve lost the feeling of our past times and we had to convert it in something different, in something weird. What happened? Influences from Europe came strong, yes, but we thought the old Mediterranean countries had a consolidated History to keep their manners. Of course we were never bankers, of course we’ve never had the best economy but we had and artist in every citizen, a good speaker in every corner, a good wine in every country.
Read the complete article: http://yareah.com/old-mediterranean-artistic-flavor/
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Ariza 