The Present and the Proximity of the Present

Arcadio Pardo has published approximately twenty books, collected almost in their entirety in Ardimientos, ajenidades y lejanías, published by the San Martín University of Buenos Aires in 2018. He has served as a secondary school educator at the Spanish Lycée in Paris and at the Lycée International in Saint Germain-en-Laye; in higher education, he has taught at the Universities of Aix-en-Provence, Paris-Sorbonne, and Paris-Nanterre. He was awarded the Castile and León Prize for Letters in 2015 and received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the San Martín University of Buenos Aires in 2017. "My poetry has been conceived in distance, liberated from circumstances and national literary pressure. It represents a deepening into the contingent to enter into amplitude: not my time, but Time itself; not diversity, but the one: genres parcel out and fragment. Instinct has led me to think in the neuter, to bestow the name of 'sú' upon the supreme essence of beings, to attain a conformity with the multiple environment that I have had the fortune to experience and which is never foreign to me. I come to believe that the highest knowledge resides in the final stage—not in senescence, but in that which is senescent. Consequently, that vital experience of enjoying all that has been acquired and inherited is akin to a youth reincarnated at the confines of life."