Legends, myths and history come together to recover dreams and illusions from ancient cultures around the world to create new chimeras and pursue them until they become a reality. This is possible thanks to a publication that is, in itself, an ideal of a group of students from the University of Costa Rica (UCR) that has been achieved: the virtual magazine Quimera.
According to Ivannia Victoria Marín Fallas, director of the magazine, Quimera is an independent cultural and educational project, generated from the initiative of a group of students from the UCR, which aims to spread art and knowledge; not only virtually or in print, but also through activities that involve community members.
The axes of the publication are literature, history, folklore and, in general, the heritage of ancient cultures and their survival . The magazine is published every six months and is virtual, although some copies are also printed. According to Marín, who is a classical philologist and current student of the Academic Master's Degree in Classical Literature, the profits obtained from the sale of each issue are directed to a different non-governmental social or animal welfare organization on each occasion.
“Since the foundation of this project, we have been working constantly, non-profit, to encourage and disseminate literary creation and knowledge of various cultures through our digital publications. We have also organized activities such as the III AFL Literary Contest of Greco-Roman Mythology, in collaboration with the Association of Philology Students of the UCR, among other activities”, explained Marín.
The director assures that the magazine has already reached 88 countries and exceeds 45,000 views. The articles have been read in nations such as Russia, Italy, China, Brazil, New Zealand and Spain, the country with the highest number of views followed by Costa Rica and Mexico.
The fourth volume of the magazine will be presented next June 15 at the Cultural Center of Spain in Costa Rica, starting at 6:00 pm, and will feature the participation of the editorial team made up of Félix Alejandro Cristiá, Victoria Marín Fallas and Masiel Corona Santos. Likewise, there will be the presence of Penélope Gamboa, Xochipilli Hernández, Ulises Paniagua and Xóchitl Cuauhtémoc Xicoténcatl, who have generated content for the magazine.
For more information you can visit the site of the virtual magazine Chimera by clicking HERE.
The fourth volume of Chimera, in the words of the editor Félix Cristiá:
By virtue of the lyrics that accompany this volume, we enter the mysterious plant world, thanks to that attempt to understand the Arborescent Language that Josué Rodríguez Calderón invokes in his poem, perhaps with the desire to go through the laws that have created the human beings and reach the simplicity at the same time so complex to which Xochipilli Hernández alludes. Along this path, we could perceive natural changes as a heartbeat – Xóchitl Cuauhtémoc insinuates – that becomes memory, an Offering. There are many ways to get close. Isn't that the secret kept by the wise grandfather mentioned by Hubert Malina? These secrets, visible only to those who use their senses above reason, rest among the trees recited to us by Alberto Arecchi and Carlos Belziti, in the Lilies by Pablo Guisado, in the rain by Masiel Corona Santos, on the corn. We speak of a being that metamorphoses itself.
Our ancestors had the courage to try to decipher the synthesis between the visible and the unexperienced, but they could do no more than watch carefully. Through the myth, and perhaps what most encourages us at this time, the story, they interpreted and taught the changes of nature, as Angélica Santa Olaya reminds us in her Fruits of love, or Aldo Vicente Favero with his legendary seed. Just like those masters of universal letters, who found in the story the way to approach the fantastic world, Ulises Paniagua tells us about the mandrakes, and Ricardo Evangelista about a boy from the forest who looks with horror at the ax of civilized man. Similarly, Eduardo Honey Escandón recalls the magic of the mangroves, veins of the Earth that have shaped a structure that renews itself, sometimes as strong and stubborn as the determined trunk that Penélope Gamboa tells us about, and in others as fragile as the margarita of María Pérez Yglesias.
Recalling the passion of writing to learn, learning to investigate, and research to spread, Patricia Zanatta shares a little about the medicinal secrets of Andean plants, which is in turn the story of an entire population. Through a return to the forest to which the essay by Carlos Guzmán (Gani) invites us, where human rules do not rule, but rather the incessant wonder of children, we finally get rid of the daring thought that we can only learn from the specialists and scientists; we begin to pay more attention to the leaves, the petals, or the ponds, as Mirna Wabi-Sabi presents us, because despite the incredible advances of science, the human being is not yet capable of replicating and predicting all the facets of the nature kingdom.
These texts (written in Spanish, Portuguese, Mè'phàà, Nahuatl and Bribri) together account for the different manifestations of knowledge and imagination, transmitted through various styles and languages, inspired in turn by a whole world that, If we adopt the beliefs of the authors with whom we have dealt, it could be a single, enormous, exalted entity that nevertheless manifests itself in innumerable forms so that the human being can understand it in various ways, and thus, perhaps, can also perceive itself as part of the same splendid whole.
"Quimera seeks to reconcile the values of universality and diversity through myth, history and art in general." (Ivannia Victoria Marín Fallas, director of the magazine Chimera)
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