Guatemala, the inspiration of Saint-Exupéry to write "The Little Prince"

Antonie Saint-Exupéry meets Guatemala by chance. Whoever destroyed his plane and left him injured. He had gone across the skies of America in search of this numen to direct his pen and was in the land of eternal spring where he found inspiration for his famous work: "The Little Prince."

It was in 1938 when the aviator and writer He began a trip from New York to Punta Arenas, South America. On the way, Saint-Exupéry, the third of five brothers of a family of the French aristocracy, decides to stop in Guatemala to refuel.

But at the time of takeoff, a complication in the left wing causes the plane, with the novelist and his mechanic on board, crashed. The aviator suffered several fractures and spent five days in a coma. Such was the gravity of the time when the colonial city of Antigua was recovering from its wounds.

To celebrate this writer's pbadage through Guatemala, the Ludwig von Mises Library of the Francisco Marroquín University organized a series of activities. Among them, talk about the traces of this trip in his unique work, explained to Professor Efe Luna Mishaan of Jaschkowitz.

This teacher, a creative and modest verb, read the book for the first time as a child by the influence of his grandmother, a woman of French descent who devoted her entire life to the reading. This is his "life example". Then he read it with his children and in recent days he has returned to the pages of a book marked on each page more than three times.

He is convinced that the most "fascinating" of this work is that everything is a "personal perception" that varies according to the stages of life of every human being who decides to interfere in the story. It is there that he now sees parallels with his Guatemala.

The three volcanoes, one of them inactive, the roses or the "Cerro del oro", a kind of hat that reflects the boa when he swallowed the elephant, are clear of the references to the Guatemalan landscape and more particularly to the colonial city La Antigua, where Saint – Exupery was re – established after the accident.

"I was saying again, I have a flower that I sprinkle every day, I have three volcanoes to which I sweep every week, because I'm also busy with the one that is extinct, "reads in a fragment of this book.

It is known that the writer had an accident in Guatemala and that one of his doctors treated him at the military hospital. Luz Méndez de la Vega's father, national prize for literature and one of the people who opened the gap to women in the country. The rest are appreciations that seek echo.

And that is Antigua, continues this graduate professor of literature and who is walking in the halls of the university, it is a "magical" place that could have been the only one. to inspire to create "the curtain" of "The Little Prince", a book that continues to be valid and whose values ​​are still topical

"If I believe that (Antigua) could have had an impact on the work, "says this woman who professes a deep and sincere love for Literature Without Limits.

Saint-Exupéry, a man who loved a woman from El Salvador and who walked the streets of the colonial city of La Antigua while waiting for his recovery, had to see the volcanoes of Guatemala, smell his roses and live with his people before shaping his masterpiece.

As he himself said, he made his life a dream and his dream a reality. All so that people can see the world with the eyes of a child and let the imagination fly. Do not lose the ability to surprise.