Luis Racionero, Fernando Sánchez Dragó and Xabier Añoveros
Xabier Añoveros, vice president of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), promoted and moderated an interesting debate on the impact on Spanish literature of the famous work by Fernando Sánchez Dragó “Gárgoris y Habidis” on the fortieth anniversary of its publication. The event, presented by the renowned writer Luis Racionero, took the form of a dinner-colloquium held at the Equestrian Circle of Barcelona, an institution of which Añoveros is also vice president.
Published in 1978 and reissued on numerous occasions, “Gárgoris y Habidis” was the greatest literary explosion and philosophical transgression of post-Francoism. A few months after its publication, its author received the Spanish National Prize for Literature, and it is now a classic that has been translated into numerous languages and of which more than 300,000 copies have been sold. Gargoris and Habidis are the protagonists of the oldest fable in the West.
Gargoris was king of the Cunetes, a patriarch of the Tartessian forest where the Titans rose up against the gods. He was paired with the most beautiful of his daughters and he had a son, Habidis, who was a wise, prudent, generous and great monarch. Habidis founded the holy city of Astorga, possibly the oldest urban enclave of Iberia that still exists. Habidis brought to the peninsula concord, peace, the Neolithic revolution, and the transition from hunter-gathering and livestock-keeping to sedentary settlement and agriculture.
