• Fundación Banco Santander publishes Prosas dispersas, a book with unpublished texts by the Nicaraguan poet, sculptor and priest Ernesto Cardenal on the centenary of his birth.
• Through short essays, chronicles and autobiographical texts covering mysticism, literature, ecology and his pioneering experience of social action on the island of Solentiname, we traverse the different stages of Cardenal's varied and wide-ranging life
• Luce López-Baralt, writer, professor of Spanish and Arabic literature at the University of Puerto Rico and friend of the poet, writes the foreword to this edition, and Juan Carlos Moreno Arrones, researcher at the Cervantes Institute in Beijing, introduces the volume.
• The book will be released on 15 January, accompanied by nine sound pieces in which the multidisciplinary artist Niño de Elche gives voice, music and sound to Cardenal's texts in a surprising and provocative journey. These can be listened to free of charge on the Banco Santander Foundation website.

Madrid, 13 January 2024– PRESS RELEASE

The 20th of January marks the centenary of the birth of the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal (1925-2020). Fundación Banco Santander, as part of its Obra Fundamental collection, is publishing Prosas dispersas, a volume with a title given by Ernesto himself, which he did not live to see published, and which brings together fifty prose texts - most of them unpublished - and a short story, El sueco, with nine sound pieces by multidisciplinary artist Niño de Elche, who creates a surprising and provocative version of some of Cardenal's texts from a vision that leaves no room for indifference. Undoubtedly a first-rate literary testament to a figure of the stature of the Nicaraguan priest and poet.

Cardenal does not fit into a conventional biography. He does not have one. These texts are a good example. The personality of the winner of the Queen Sofia Prize for Poetry was extremely rich, acting with a radical and profound energy in each of the experiences he chose to participate in during his very long life. From the young poet who admired Rubén Darío or the Nicaraguan writer and literary master José Coronel Urtecho, to the liberation theology priest who defended the poor, later appointed Minister of Culture of the Sandinista Revolution - from which he eventually renounced - admonished and deprived of his ministry by Pope John Paul II and pardoned in 2019 by the current Pope Francis, to the sculptor, The sculptor, the scientist and the mystic, to the pioneer of solidarity who founded a community of dispossessed and indigenous people on the island of Solentiname, which became a true social experiment, organising primitive painting, photography and poetry workshops for children with cancer, which was even picked up by the New York Times, which praised the poetic initiative set in motion.

This volume offers us short essays, chronicles and unpublished autobiographical texts with which we are invited to delve into the relationship between science and the spirit, the mystical and the cosmic, literature and culture, ecology or different dissertations that bring us closer to the concerns and responses of Ernesto Cardenal to life and the problems of the evolution of the human being and our civilisation. We will have access to the biographies of spiritual masters such as Lao Tse, Heraclitus and Cardenal's mentor, Thomas Merton, and those of poets such as Rubén Darío, Neruda, Rivas and Urtecho with their profound vision of Latin American and North American poetry, and lyrical passages that evoke the origin and dissolution of the utopia of Solentiname, the place where Cardenal created a Christian, revolutionary and artistic community that would go down in the history of contemporary social action.

In the poet's long life there was room for numerous vocations and missions that helped him to temper an ideology of how the action of the spirit can change the world, making him a ‘revolutionary poet’, who set foot in ‘social solidarity with the founding of the contemplative community of Solentiname’. Luce López-Baralt, a personal friend and proofreader of Ernesto Cardenal, who wrote the prologue to this volume, points out that, ‘the only thing that I believe to be an absolute constant in Ernesto's life is his spirituality. That never changed’, and that we can undoubtedly consider him to be “not only one of the greatest contemporary poets, but the founder of contemporary Latin American mysticism”.

Cardenal's work is full of love for the human being, as indicated in his first book in 1970, Vida en el amor, ‘all living beings are in communion with one another’, the poet tells us. These Prosas dispersas, which the author himself grouped together under this title before his death, are proof that he never lost sight of those on the margins, but they also show us a contemplative literature of the first order. In the words of Javier Expósito, head of literature at the Banco Santander Foundation, ‘Ernesto Cardenal was not only a great poet and thinker, but also a pioneering contemporary mystic who united science and spirit, as well as a revolutionary who created a pioneering community whose desire was to improve the lives of those forgotten by society and punished minorities’. In the opinion of Óscar de Baltodano, director of the Ernesto Cardenal Foundation, ‘the publication of the Prosas dispersas de Ernesto Cardenal in the Obra Fundamental collection not only celebrates the centenary of a giant of world literature, but also fulfils his last great dream: to bring together all his prose in a single book, as an eternal legacy for generations to come’.

The book is accompanied by nine sound pieces in which the multidisciplinary artist Niño de Elche, using texts from Prosas dispersas as a starting point, has taken voice, music and sound on a surprising and provocative journey that challenges the listener, from the head to the non-verbal expression, leaving no room for indifference in an exercise in sound masks. From Gregorian chant to rap, from percussion to flamenco or recitation, Niño de Elche unravels in each passage, styles and sound personalities that offer a daring and challenging version of these texts, in which the universe and poetry, the scientific and the lyrical, Cardenal's teacher, Thomas Merton, conversations with Benedetti are allied; Rules for Writing Poetry, from the commitment of his experience in workshops for children with cancer; the defence of the Indians, echoing numerous legends of indigenous tribes throughout America, or his pioneering ecological sense of Gaia, without forgetting the utopia he tried to implement in the community of Solentiname, and the micro-story 'Ya nadie sabe hablar sumerio', in which Cardenal combines humour and science.

These pieces are an approach to different themes that have crossed Ernesto's work," says Niño de Elche. "I wanted his poems to be understood not only from a narrative point of view, but also in a more sensory way, with the resources that a recording studio allows. The audio pieces are available free of charge on the Banco Santander Foundation website, along with the interviews with Luce López-Baralt and Niño de Elche.