Language: In the cradle of the Spanish language.

Jacobo Zlabudowsky, 30/4/07

Good bye San Millán SAN MILLÁN OF the COGOLLA, the Rioja. -

Touches it with its hand! , Juan said to me to the father Angel Grandson, prior of the monastery of San Millán of the Cogolla. We ahead had a parchment of 1085 with writings of a Spanish of almost thousand years ago. Touches it! , my resistance insisted the priest when seeing to put the hand on that object of museum, one of books, not oldest, of the Library of San Millán. I passed the yolk of the fingers over the margin, soon over the signs, the red that seemed fresh. I understood so that the prior had repeated its order. It touches it was to feel something that the Vista does not give. The tact on the book produced an emotion different from the one from the other senses. The father Grandson had taken until sancta sanctorum to us of the convent, the library. In the library there is no electrical light. It is conserved as they constructed it and they furnished century XVIII by the end of. It does not have more than 10 thousand books, but its interest is not in the amount but in the peculiarity of some units that hoards. There it is the Evangelario de Jerónimo Nadal, prisoner in Amberes in 1595, whose laminae are policromadas by hand, one to one. An edition prince who also forced to touch the prior to us. And it showed the Summa to us Casuum de Bartholomeus de Sancto Concordia, a incunable in perfect state, published before 1475 and del that only conserves five units anywhere in the world. I had in my hands one of those five. For any lover of that object that some create in called danger of extinction book, this pleasure can be compared with which you imagine. It had opened “hell to us”, where the priests of other times kept prohibited books, she had removed from the black habit one more a key greater than its hand. It was the end of a route by the church, the vestibule, claustro, the greater altarpiece, sacristía and the museum of San Millán of the Cogolla. The arqueta that contained the rest of san Millán has its original ivory sculptures, where the miracles of ermitaño are detailed who does thousand 500 years inhabited the cave, and soon the hermitage in which it lived until the 100. The route was the end of the work day. Not only the monastery, that in fact is two, the one of Suso and the one of Yuso, but the surroundings, the atmosphere of this place of the northwest of Spain contribute to evoke to those who created the language. The anonymous monk who caught of the popular speech what it was a new language and already he left testimony of her as glosses of a parchment, was followed by poets and writers who put first stones of our Literature. In this valley, Gonzalo de Berceo wrote the miracles of Our Lady, considered his work summit, that some describe as the most delicate sample as medieval descriptive Literature, with a total ingenuous realism of popular flavor and candor. We have closed the international seminary on the Spanish in the noticiarios of television to both sides of the Atlantic. The three days of round tables culminated Saturday with the creation of a group of pursuit with members of Spain and Latin America, for doubts and agreements on innovations that arise in the daily work of the noticiarios of television. One has settled here the greatest research center and diverse studies on the Spanish language. Although many universities not only in countries of Spanish speech but where other languages are spoken have courses or faculties to study the Spanish, will be here, where the language left the first testimony of its existence, the laboratory with the richest document collection that allows to know with exactitude the evolution of the languages that became which today it is our language. The monastery, occupied partly still by recoletos agustinos monks, has destined most of its space to the seat of the Center the International of Investigation of the Spanish Language, Cilengua. It is on the ruins of the original house of san Millán, between eternally green mounts that maintain the old constructions separated of the worldly noise. The trip from any place to San Millan.