The poet and novelist Álvaro Mutis is turning 90.

More poet than novelist, since his prose is full of poetic figures and images, and his narrative characters carry that same essence common to the poem, which Mutis himself defines: "Every poem is nothing but the testimony of an incessant failure.". But it is the novel that has placed him in that privileged place of world literature. The citizen of the world, Álvaro Mutis, was born on August 25, 1923, and has been silent since 2007. Perhaps the reasons for his silence can be found in this fragment…

I sometimes think…
Sometimes I think it's time to be quiet.
To put words aside,
the poor words used
down to its last strings,
abused time and time again
until having lost
the slightest sign
of its original intention
of naming things, beings,
the landscapes, the rivers
and the fleeting passions of men
mounted on their steeds
that adorned vanity
before receiving the brief,
the irrefutable lesson of the grave.