Lorena Rodríguez de la Torre
Ourense, Dec 20 (EFE) .- The Galician pedagogue José Paz treasures the most important library that exists in Spain on the writer Rabindranath Tagore, a giant of the intellectual and cultural life of India in the 20th century. He has collected more than 30,000 volumes in six decades and his retirement dream is to donate the extensive collection.
This longing does not stop there. There is a second desire, which would be to create a Tagore center in Ourense, where he originated, that allows the dissemination of the work of this thinker whom the writer, politician and essayist Vicente Risco had already described, upon discovering it, as “ one of those extraordinary beings ”of life.
Paz, a confessed ‘Tagorean’, a man who has lived for years between Ourense and India, where he dedicates himself body and soul as a volunteer to teaching and studying more and more the work of Rabindranath, talks to EFE about the ” goodness “of this historical figure, of his creative worth, and also of the ‘socio-religion’ centered on equality between men and women.
To the literary Tagore, he adds the musician -and shows more than half a thousand CDs-; the painter, the philosopher, the social reformer, the defender of peace and the pilgrim. A “Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century”, he sums up.
Since he retired, José Paz thinks about donating his extensive library with the sole purpose of not losing the “extraordinary legacy” of a thinker who created schools in India and who established values such as equality, he proudly says.
At this time the 30,000 volumes are at a low commercial in Ourense. The place is full of translations “in all the languages of the world”, including Esperanto; and of works by Tagore, and others about Tagore and its educational institutions.
To donate her library, Paz establishes conditions: “That it be in a decent place, that it can be consulted and that it continue to be published.” For this, it asks that the entities interested in receiving the material “create a Tagore center in the city center (if possible) and that they commit not only to its adequate conservation, its dissemination and edition of the appropriate catalog in various media” As it is essential, apart from all this, the realization of cultural activities around Tagore “throughout the Iberian Peninsula.”
Paz speaks enthusiastically of her experiences in India. He is a defender and connoisseur of numerous languages, “except English”, curiously. He speaks Bengali and such is his command that he is able to defend himself without any help for India and Bangladesh – “I can read and write.” He understands French and Italian perfectly.
As an anecdote, he points out that his children have a specialty in English, a language that he rejects because he “associates it with war” and “colonization”. He does not delve into it, but he can spend hours talking about India, the ‘Tagorean’ work, buildings, festivals and beliefs.
His relationship with India is not accidental. “My surname is curious, the word peace is the most important in India” and it is sacred, he maintains. In fact, all religions use the word “peace”, he says.
Every year he spends several months in India, between October and March, in a house that he has not been able to go to in 2020.
Count the months to be able to return, “hopefully” in October of next year 2021, he calculates.
Meanwhile, he is looking for someone to bequeath his “extraordinary” compilation.
The only politicians who have been interested in his collection are “José Luis Baltar – the former president of the Ourense deputation”, who even asked him not to take the books to India, he says. Also the former Galician politician Manuel Fraga. “He was the first to really take an interest in her,” recalls Paz.
“I have a huge and wonderful collection that I don’t want to end up being sold anyway. There are real treasures. If in the end it is possible, I would like to place it in Ourense in an emblematic building and make a Tagore Center ”that would allow Galicia to enter the network of centers distributed throughout the world, concludes the ‘Tagorean’ pedagogue. It will continue to wait. EFE
1011025
lrt / on / sb
–
