Colección Voces que dejan Huellas

This is a collection of the best 20th century Spanish speaking and universal literature authors recorded live in analogic and digital formats and saved thru the valuable contributions of too many culture apostles mainly from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the Fondo de Cultura Económica publishers, El Colegio Nacional in Mexico, CAEDMON, Academy of American Poets and several other cultural evangelists and many other friends in several European and Latin American countries.             Three have been the inspirational columns upon which this collection is created and maintained. These foundations have marked my life with a very profound joyful and enthusiastic drive to better perceive the deep feelings and emotions of mankind thru the personal performances of Hispanic and world literature authors not only from their written literature, cultural, scientific and social testimonies but from their free will expressed by their own voices captured since more than one hundred years ago thru the creative use of technological devices.             The first of these pillars, which indeed moved my spirit, arose while hearing Victoria de Los Angeles brilliant characterization of Bizet´s Carmen, perfectly conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, in a memorable recording from 1960.  That sense of timeless detachment from everyday life thru voice and music transmitted more than words, a full world of feelings, pain, anguish and happiness as never a written story could do.             Words shape our world, and resemble more than any other media the triumphs and disasters of mankind. The BBC in their London “Speaking for the century” series offered me a dramatic stream of the most impacting moments in the 20th century history thru the words of its most important leaders. As I approached this Internet document it made me feel like discovering a diamonds mine that fed my spirit instantly. It is this selection that molded the world without any doubt and by hearing these huge individuals in their own voices puts me in a high state of commitment and thrust focused toward new goals and challenges in my own life.             The third event that hit me arose from hearing Carlos Fuentes´ “La región más transparente”, recorded in an archaic 33rpm disk from the “Voz Viva” collection, edited by the national University of Mexico in 1964. This beautiful, wonderful piece of Mexican literature awakens new feelings, reflections, and insights amplified thru the frontiers of the spirit and love for literature in its most precious expression: the spoken word.             Victoria de los Angeles, Carlos Fuentes, Neil Amstrong, fountains of permanent inspiration, reflected in us the blend of culture and science arising from a better human centered universe expressed thru the best of mankind. This is how I started discovering the human voice as a completely richer way of transmitting ideas, feelings, and sense of belonging. We have to consider that spoken literature came thousand of years before written language. And it may well be that times are changing, and if “the book” has ruled over language since years before Cervantes Saavedra´s "Don Quijote" up to these days being the unquestionable means of its message, maybe it will come to be that the “spoken word” regains its antique power and spreads again as a most widespread mean of cultural transmission and communication.             The collection is based on several of the original “Voz Viva” recordings made thru the 60´s in Mexico City. The collection brought together several of our irreplaceable thinkers, creators, poets, writers and humanists fundamental for the Castilian culture in those turmoil years. Authors as important as Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Carlos Pellicer, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and several other masters of Hispanic literature contributed to set ground to a new and modern brand of literary expression which consisted in recording thru audio media their own readings, feelings and self expressions, setting a new frontier well advanced to their own time.             El Colegio Nacional and the Fondo de Cultura Económica publishers, at the same time, started a visionary recording project, the “Entre Voces” collection, recalling   the most authoritative members of the College, proactively proposing a whole set of new ideas in anthropology, sociology, literature, political science and several other disciplines. These recordings compile selected conferences, speeches, dissertations and recitations during most of the second half of the 20th century.             By the end of the century, the Spanish speaking countries, according with the dramatic changes imposed by digital and computerized technologies, instead of feeling its literary evolution threatened, had leveraged on these same technologies to flourish a reborn and enriched literary expression, attracting a permanently increasing number of   authors and compilers in their own voice recordings, from their original sources, and distributing these marvels instantly across the whole world thru the Internet superhighway.             Thru digital recordings and the Internet media we are now able to maintain a permanent dialogue with our culture giants keeping them flowing deep in our souls, constantly devoted and loyal.             Fragments of the best Castilian novel, short story, poetry and scientific speech from the most prominent artists and scientists are now at our hands, or shall we say at our ears, in such a way that we can enjoy the delight of hearing the universal Jorge Luis Borges, our beloved Pablo Neruda, or even the patriarchs of the 20th century Hispanic literature as Jacinto Benavente, Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz or Juan Ramón Jiménez.             Definitely, our continually richer Spanish American culture has to follow the permanent acceleration embedded in the modern society technology drivers, leveraging on the new means for the creation, knowledge accumulation and distribution of culture and at the same time gaining its own space and pace expanding its influence thru the whole world.             In such surprising and dazzling routes we will be able to keep on living with our beloved Sabines, Neruda, Arreola, Benedetti and all our necessary brothers and sisters that engage in the tremendous responsibility to feed us with more than bread and water but with the flesh and blood of our own culture.          Voice is still alive. Eduardo Ortiz Moreno octubre 2020