• The travels of THE WORLD. Prints and stories

When one, looking at his bookshelves, notices the travel books he has not yet been able to read, he feels a double nostalgia: on the one hand, the small anxiety of the pending readings, and on the other, more diffuse, the melancholy of the journeys already impossible . And now that in our time traveling is something that just consists of sitting in a seat and being moved in exchange for more or less money, reading first-hand testimonials about explorations in Africa or the first navigations through unknown seas is something more similar to what one properly understands by "travel" than actually taking a safari through Kenya or a cruise through the South Seas (where the most curious thing, worthy of being investigated, would not be places but travel companions , not landscapes but psychologies).

For a long time, in that sense, it is a bit ridiculous to presume to have traveled , however remote or exotic the places visited may seem. And, coming to what matters to us, any contemporary travel book that, veiledly or not, contains any kind of personal presumption already has a point against it.

Zaragoza writer Patricia Almarcegui is, in that sense, a different traveler. She, a professor of Comparative Literature, knows perfectly well that any book today has to contain and almost exhibit a subjectivity, that any book, even if it deals with whales, has to display a personal and singular look, that each one has to tell what only he or she could write ( "say what only you can say and say nothing more," Thoreau wrote ), but that, as should also happen in poetry, the authors must take great care to "disturb", they must prevent interposing between the reader or the text ... They must reveal themselves, yes, but not in a vain or narcissistic way , but in a generous, inclusive way: the self as a lever, not as an obstacle. Introduce yourself in your own text, but without making faces, or posturitas, with real naturalness.

The author herself, says the flip of her books, has resided in Egypt, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, India and Iran, so it also saves that advice that Danilo Ki gave to young writers: «Never write a book about a place where you have only been passing through »... But it is convenient to clarify from now that The Myths of the Journey (Fórcola) the text we are commenting on today is not exactly a travel book, but a book on travel theory , About traveling .

Almarcegui wrote in his Meet Iran that «travel literature is characterized by rewriting. The itinerary is prepared with the books of other travelers », and in this essay he draws a tour of the genre itself, first focused on the more or less abstract theory and then looking at specific trips, but no longer their own but some others not only other people's but very old, but that left illustrious testimonies. And Almarcegui, as he did in other previous books, demonstrates in passing that you can always find important authors when you search with true good will (and without lowering the bar of the requirement) , because you have to insist that many foundational trips They were made, say, with women's shoes.

Like almost all books that are born from the compilation of earlier texts more or less scattered, this volume has some counterfeit, but on the other hand it is skillfully cohesive, and the chosen title is effective, both attractive and revealing: yes to trips so real that here the word "myth" flies over them is because the author explains well the enormous precautions with which you have to read the chronicles, the diaries, the logs and even the documents of those times. What is desired to find obviously conditions what is in fact, and the encounter with the other, as discussed here, is a phenomenal salad of confusion, misunderstanding, mutual caution and conflict, especially because of the expectations with which He started, or prejudices, because a prejudice, as Juan Vicente Piqueras has so brilliantly explained in one of the recent aphorisms of Ascuas , is "to be sure of something that is not known." Too many times we do not allow perceptible reality to belittle what suits us.

In my opinion, the section where the trips of Marco Polo, Ruy González de Clavijo or the quirky Alí Bey are narrated, with good details and timely appointments, are more interesting, and certainly more informative and entertaining, than the first one, where it rises a general theory of travel essay, very stimulating, that is, debatable, and with general, almost moral , humanistic implications , formulated with boldness and courage: «Those of us in the world must know who the others are. Cultures do not talk to each other, but people do.

This book, then, also cares more about people than spaces, and to understand them we travel and read, the two superior ways of growing, learning and knowing each other.

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