A discussion will take place on “Architecture and Literature: the City of the Ozama in the Dominican Literature”

A discussion will take place on “Architecture and Literature: the City of the Ozama in the Dominican Literature”
Santo Domingo, December 4, 2013

The Directorate of Literary Management of the Ministry of Culture and the Erwin Walter Palm Foundation will hold a symposium on “Architecture and Literature: The city of the Ozama in the Dominican literature,” next Tuesday, December 10th, at 7:30 pm, in the Casas Reales Museum.

The following architects and writers will participate in the event: Edwin Cott, José Enrique Delmonte Soñé, Manuel Salvador Gautier and Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, who will present their views on the subject from their own perspectives, as experts and scholars in the area.

Basilio Belliard, Director of Literary Management, announced that the literary event aims to reflect and think about the city of the Ozama from the perspective of its relationship between architecture and literature, from the point of view of poetry, short stories and novel, and how our writers have narrated or put into poetry the imaginary city, from its foundation to the present.

Another objective is to analyze the city from the point of view of the monumental and architectural heritage, from the colonial times to the twentieth century, and how the city of Santo Domingo has been transformed from a village to an urban metropolis, with majestic towers, splendid buildings and colorful shopping malls, which place it among the cities with highest urban growth in the region.

“The city of Santo Domingo, the First City in the Americas, often forgotten in its supremacy and ignored in its memory, has been, however, often sung to and named by our poets and novelists and immortalized by poets of universal stature such as Pablo Neruda in his Versainograma a Santo Domingo when it was invaded by the U.S. Marines in 1965. In 2010, it was declared the American Capital of Culture, and in 1990, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site,” Belliard said.

He argued that “the city has been immortalized in verse and narrative passages by poets and storytellers such as Salomé Ureña, José Joaquín Pérez, Gastón Fernando Deligne, Vigil Díaz, Víctor Garrido, Lupo Hernández Rueda, Abelardo Vicioso, Pedro Mir, Máximo Avilés Blonda, Miguel Alfonseca, Norberto James, Juan Carlos Mieses, Francisco Moscoso Puello, Carlos Federico Pérez, Manuel Salvador Gautier, Roberto Marcalle Abreu, Manuel García Cartagena, René del Risco, Luis Alfredo Torres, Juan Sánchez Lamouth, Rafael Anez Bergés, Enriquillo Sánchez, and Pedro Peix.

Others that did the same were: Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Tulio Manuel Cestero, Joaquín Balaguer, Andrés L. Mateo, Efraim Castillo, Pedro Verges, Manuel Rueda, José Mármol, Víctor Villegas, Enrique Aguiar, Lopez-Penha, Guillermo Piña, Sanz Lajara, Ramón Lacay Polanco, Manuel Amiama, Soledad Álvarez, Alexis Gómez Rosa, Tony Raful, Amable López Meléndez, Edgar Hernández Mejía, and Enrique Eusebio,” among others.

Mr. Belliard, who is also a writer, said that various authors have built and rebuilt a symbolic and imaginary representation from theirs novelistic or poetic worlds about the city of Santo Domingo. They have narrated or turned into poetry the urban architecture as the protagonist and a character of their literary recreations. Many novels, stories and poems of our literature make up the memory of the city, where the architectural and literary language merge, and where there is an imaginary mapping of verbal creation of our writers, forming a literary body of identity symbols of the monumental heritage of the architectural space of our city.