Myths change with the generations. In the case at hand (since the voice myth has many other meanings), myth is what makes up our personality, which is remembered by illustration or delight. What remains in our intellectual sediment and also in the sentimentality that makes us up. As a teenager, I was a voracious comic book reader - then it was said comics - and, like in the cinema, I liked how much it was about the American far west (topic that I hate today) and, above all, for something that I could not explain , I liked the comics that were about Romans, enjoyed in movies (later read the novel) like Quo Vadis ?, which enchanted me (especially the characters of Nero and Petronio Arbiter).

They told me that I always went with the bad guys, because of the Far West I liked the Indians and I hated Yankee cavalry, just like in the case of ancient Rome, the meek and pious Christians (I studied in a school of priests), I was fatal , while I was fascinated by the red plumes of the centurions, the golden sandals and the purple banquets. That is to say, in fact, my tastes went where theoretically they would not have to go. It goes without saying that the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon found my assent, perhaps aesthetic, while the Christian god seemed monotonous, rather boring, and if there was something more intimate there, it was for my interlinings.

This passion that I tell about comics ended in a rather radical way, when very soon after I started reading books. Some generational companions have remained faithful to comics, not me. My childish side - I sure have it - goes elsewhere. After swelling of Captains Thunder and Jabatos - my favorite - I fell into the reading passion that has never left me. It is true that for a year I devoured some books by Salgari, Jules Verne or a rare German named Karl May. Of Verne I remember, above all, Twenty thousand leagues of underwater voyage, where the very suggestive figure of Captain Nemo appears - in Latin Nobody - who is fed up with the world in his fabulous submarine from which he can see the abyss of the sea, while playing to the organ some score of Bach. I think Captain Nemo and the Petronio of Quo Vadis? They are at the origin of my commented decadentism. But I already say that those books usually called adventures or youth literature soon ceased to interest me to move on, without continuity solution, to adult literature.

I am aware now that many young people of my generation had an immense thirst for culture. I will not pretend to say, then, that I read everything, but that step by step I was reading the things that came and agreed and I was able to understand. My vocation as a writer (and also as a scholar) was born after reading, more or less at age 15, a succinct manual of Greek and Roman Mythology - I 'm really sorry not to remember the author - and a curious biography of Petrarca, the great Italian poet , in which a lot of emphasis was placed on his facet as a humanist, a searcher of ancient texts, and a writer himself in Latin of epistles and even an epic poem that sought to imitate the taste of that language in the time of Augustus.

I wanted to be a humanist likewise, and if I dared to write a sonnet (which should be horrifying), dedicated to a neighbor named Susana - easy rhyme - it was only to find that the great humanist had written in Italian the immense Rime in vita e in morte di Madonna Laura . Not long after - in a summer - I read a biography of Oscar Wilde that at the time (1967) I loved it, but that probably should be judged only as medium. Its author, a forgotten Catalan novelist, Sebastián Juan Arbó. That biography, in which I recognized myself and made friends with Wilde, immediately led me to read the works of the portentous Irishman (Wilde always insisted that he was not English), starting with Dorian Gray's portrait , and immediately for almost all his stories, never childish, although some superficially might seem like The Ghost of Canterville .

Every author takes you to another or others, and Oscar took me to Proust - at the beginning only for a dandish aura - and to the writers of French symbolism, who are legion and good, but I stayed at the beginning with Baudelaire, Verlaine and the novelist Huysmans, author of the priceless A Rebours , which should not be translated as Contra natura but simply the other way around.

Spanish authors or in our language? There were always many and pleasant, say from Quevedo to Valle-Inclan, to finish, for example, in Borges, which I discovered in 1968, but if I speak less of them it is not because I value them less, but because many were part of the readings of that high school that today seems so illustrious. We had to read, for example, something from Antonio Machado, something from Ortega and Gasset, something from Eugenio D'Ors -they are only examples-, in addition to having learned by heart sonnets of Lope, Quevedo or Góngora, and poems by Rubén Darío, José Asunción Silva or Manuel Machado, for me then the good ... Later, and already in the university, came the discovery of Ezra Pound or TS Eliot. Pound took me to the troubadours, to Venice and to Chinese poetry; I was already studying Greek and Chinese, but let's close, because I'm entering another story.

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Luis Antonio de Villena is a poet, novelist and translator. His latest book is 'The King's Exile' (Cabaret Voltaire)

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