Guillermo Rothschuh Tablada, one of the great poets and teachers in the history of Nicaragua, died at the age of 96 this Sunday, November 6, in his native Juigalpa, in the department of Chontales, his family reported in a statement.
The poet Rothschuh Tablada is remembered as a generous intellectual who left his mark on generations of students, both at the Josefa Toledo de Aguerri National Institute of Chontales and at the Miguel Ramírez Goyena National Central Institute in Managua. In the first he served as director between 1949-1953; and in the second he was director between 1953 and 1958.
He founded the Chontales Intellectual Clan, developed children’s library projects and also a teaching enriched by his people skills, his encyclopedic knowledge, his memory and good humor. In 2010 she received the national Luisa Mercado award for teaching and that same year she was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa award from the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua-Managua (UNAN).
Sergio Ramírez Mercado, Cervantes Award from Nicaragua and who recognized the poet’s work from the Luisa Mercado Foundation, highlighted the importance of the deceased’s intellectual work. “Guillermo Rothschuh transcended Nicaraguan poetry, education and culture of the twentieth century, and was a man of free initiatives who challenged the molds of his time.”
In 2016, Rothschuh Tablada was honored by the Granada International Poetry Festival for the quality of his work. For the poet Anastasio Lovo, his departure leaves a void that “no one can fill.”
Lovo considers that the teacher was the founder of the “village called Juigalpa”, because with him, for the first time, a Chontaleño of those dimensions emerged nationally and internationally.
“He took Catarrán (character from Chontal) to immortality with his text. He also highlighted his pedagogical work, he was the one who brought the agricultural high schools to Nicaragua. Guillermo taught us the word freedom,” said Lovo.
The writer León Núñez also reacted, for whom the poet was the “greatest intellectual personality that Chontales gave.”
My friend and countryman, the Poet Guillermo Rotschuh Tablada, has died, the greatest intellectual personality that gave Chontals throughout their history and one of the most outstanding in Nicaragua. I am in mourning.
– Leon Nuñez (@leondeacoyapa) November 6, 2022
There will be no ceremony
According to the family pronouncement after the death of the intellectual, no type of ceremony will be held in respect of the will of the poet. In the statement they also thanked the local medical staff, who they said were ready “to assist him at all times.”
His funeral honors will be held at the Rothschuh Villanueva house, located on Calle Palo Solo, which will be open from 10 am on November 7 for all those who want to come and express their condolences in a personal way.
His son Jorge Eliécer Rothschuh Villanueva portrayed the poet last July on his social networks, who rarely left his house at his advanced age, but highlighted the magic that reading made for his memorable father. “When he reads he returns to the universe of suns and cultural adventures that he accompanies without haste. With fidelity he survives,” he said then.
“Your daughter and sons live trusting to the healthy advance of time, to the return of the starry night and the new dawn. That’s him. Juigalpa and the entrails of it. Chontales and the landscape of it. That’s him. House by house, for a long time each sidewalk went from one side of the street to the other, gathering, building, designing with the people new formative stages, looking for the right and exact color that would rise like an immense flame in the province. That’s him, ”read Jorge Eliécer, according to a post from his Facebook account.
He is the author of five books of poetry: Poemas Chontaleños (1960), Appointment with a tree (1965), Twenty elegies to the Cedar (1974), Quintento a Don José Lezama Lima (1978), Litanías a Catarrán (1985) and Tela de Cóndores. (2005).
Juigalpa was always present in the master’s work, as Lovo himself recalled in a text in the newspaper La Prensa, published during 2020 on the occasion of the 60 years of “Chontalean poems”in which Rothschuh Tablada declared his love for the city, after comparing it to a “lying cow”. “Not me, I love its extension, its grassland, its slime, its overa shadow that covers whites and Jueranos”, is read in the poem.
