Spanish Poetry Background. 3

In the second half of the 19th century, the force of change came from South America, from a Nicarguan Rubén Dario (1867-1916), who was much influenced by Parnassianism, a French literary movement which envisaged the poet as a sculptor, seeking to turn the poem into something almost tangible, using a new and richer vocabulary, fantasy and exoticism e.g Dario's Sinfonia en gris mayor (Symphony in dark grey):

La siesta del trópico. El lobo se duerme.    The tropical siesta. The wolf  falls asleep.

Ya todo lo envuelve la gama del gris.            The gamut of grays already surrounds everything.

Parece que un suave y enorme esfumino        Seems as if a soft and huge blur

del curvo horizonte borrara el confin.             of horizontal curve will erase the boundary..

 

La siesta del trópico. La vieja cigarra             The tropical sieta. The old cicada

ensaya su ronca guitarra senil,                        tries its old and hoarse guitar

y el grillo preludia un solo monótono               and the cricket sings a monotonous solo prelude    

en la única cuerda que está en su violin.          with its only string which is in its violin.

Whilst the South American modernismo continued to influence younger poets like Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), back in Spain, the people were shocked by the loss of its colonies like Cuba and Philippines from its totally unexpected defeat in the Spanish-American War which triggered  a wave of reflections about what it meant to be Spanish and what was the basis of Spanish culture and where it was going. A generation of new poets and writers like Unamuno, Baroja, Azorín, Ganivet, the so-called Generation of 1898,  began a movement of revival of Spanish culture .But the most popular and enduring poetry came from Antonio Machado (1875-1939). He wrote:

Castilla miserable, ayer dominadora                     Miserable Castille, yesterday dominant

envuelta en sus andrajos, desprecia cuanto ignora. enveloped in its rags, scorns that which

                                                                             it knows not.

WWI was a time of great cultural disturbance and renovation of the styles of art, much like the Romantic eara of the previous century following the French revolution, the revolutionary wars and the Restoration of old Europe. Everywhere, European arts were agitated by the new movements of Dadaism, Futurism and later Surrealism. In Spain and South America, a species of Futurism appeared called ultraismo, led by Guillermo de Torre (1900-7). Their aim was to reflect the spirit of the machine and technological advances, different from the poetry of either the Generation of 1898 and those of the modernista poets. There was another strain of the avant-garde called creationismo, led by a Chilean poet in Europe called Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). He previously contributed to the Nord-Sud magazine founded by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who, together with such other poets as Paul Valéry tried to import the ideas of Cubism into poetry, treating the poem as a self-sufficient object with its own aims, concerned only with expressing itself, and not expressing any external meaning, complementing rather than representing life. The spirit of this latter movement was well captured by the following quotation from Huidobro's "Arte poetica":

Por qué cantais la rosa, oh Poetas!    Why sing of the rose, oh poets! 

Hacedla florecer en el poema.            Make it bloom in the poem.

A varied group of poets actuated by these new ideas were loosely grouped under the title the Generation of 1927 or the Generation of 1925, the Generation of the Dictatorship. They include such poets as Gerardo Diego (1896-1987), a creationista, Pedro Salinas (1891-1951), Jorge Guillén (1893-1986), Rafael Alberti (1902-99), Vincente Aleixandre ( 1898-1984), Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Luis Cernuda (1902-63) and Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), the last four of whom were linked with surrealistas in one way or another. But unlike the creationistas and the ultraístas, they wanted to go back to the roots of Spanish past, to the traditional poetry of the Middle Ages, the poetry of the Golden Age and of the Renaissance.Thus in Marinero en tierra, Alberti's first collection, blended the old and the new e.g. in the poem "El aviador", the machine age met the Middle Ages:

--Madre, ha muerto el caballero             Mother, the knight of the air

del aire, que fue mi amor.                        has died, he who was my love.

Y en el mar dicen que ha muerto           And at sea, they say that he has died

de teniente aviador.                                 as a lieutenant pilot.

 

En el mar!                                                At sea!                                               

Qué joven, madre, sin ser                        How young, mother, without being

todavía capitán!                                       captain yet!

Alberti's contemporary, Luis Cernuda, however, followed another line, not the line of Renaissance popular poetry but of the learned idyllic, stylized pastoral poetry of Quevedo in the latter 's Egloga, elegia, oda e.g

Entre las rosas yace                                  Amidst the roses lies

El agua tan serena,                                    the water so serene,

Gozando de si misma en su hermosura;   Enjoying itself its beauty

Ningún reflejo nace                                   no reflection rises

Tras de la onda plena,                               beyond the full wave.

Fria, cruel, inmóvil de tersura.  .             Cold, cruel, immobile from smoothness.

The Spanish poets were joined in this second Golden Age of Spanish poetry by the prolific Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-73) resident in Spain in the 1930s and also another self-taught poet from Orihuela, Miguel Hernández (1910-42). But the Spanish Civil War starting 1936 put an abrupt halt to this vigorous poetic renaissance. Garcia Lorca  was executed by the supporters of Franco in Granada just a month after the war began; Antonio Machado died during his escape across the French border in 1939 and Hernández died as a political prisoner in 1942. Like the Restoration in early 19th century, there was a restoration of the poetry of 16th century Spain by a literary journal Garcilaso as a reaction against the radicalism of the pre-Civil War poetry. However, the Civil War also brought about a renewed interest in the Spanish ballad

In the second half of the 20th century, the social poetry of the 1940s and 1950s led by Gabriel Celaya (1911-91) and Blas de Otero (1916-79) were refined by a group of writers called novísimos like Pere Gimferrer (1945-) and Guillermo Carnero (1947-). But there is another line of poetry concerned with reflecting the consumerism of the late 20th century like that of Gloria Fuertes (1918-98) e.g in her poem Galerìas preciadas whose title resemble that of a famous department store Galerìas Preciados:

Todo te viene pequeño                   Everything for you is small

--o demasiado grande--,                --or too big--

ni siquiera lo que escoges te va,      what you choose won't be given, 

todo te viene pequeño.                   everything for you is small.

Con el alma desnuda por una cosa  o otra  We beg the shopkeeper

        imploramos al Tendero.           for one thing or another with a naked soul.

Another poet Ana Rosetti (1950-) explores the exploitation of sex and the body in commercial advertising in her poem "Chico Wrangler":

Dulce corazón mío de súbito asalto.                    My sweet heart of sudden assault.

Todo por adorar más de lo permisible.                All for adoring more what is permissible.

Todo porque un cigarro se asienta en una boca All for a cigarette settling upon a mouth 

y en sus jugosas sedas se humedece.                   and for the juicy silks to be moistened.

Porque un camiseta incitante señala,                  Because a provocative T-shirt signals

de su pecho, el escudo durismo,                          from her chest, the hard shield

y un vigoroso brazo de la minima manga sobresale. and a vigorous arm protruding from

                                                                             the short sleeve.

But to Walters, this is no more surprising than in Carcilaso's Egloga primera,  depicting the Duke of Alba in a hunting expedition using military metaphors in his Renaissance poem reminding one of the equestrian portraits of Veláquez:

  replendiente, armado,                             replendent, armed,

representando en tierra el fiero Marte;   representing the fearsome Mars on earth;

agora, de cuidados enojosos                    now, free from worries

y de negocios libre, por ventura                and of free business, for venture

andes a caza, el monte fatigando              to go hunting, the tiring mountain 

en ardiente ginete que apresura                in fiery steed which presses ahead

el curso tras los ciervos temerosos.          in its path through frightened deer.

Such similarities show how often the residual effects of the past age will never fade completely in a later age, no matter how far away. No matter how hard some will like to efface the past, a tradition will take a much longer time to die. More often, traces of the past will somehow always manage to find a way to co-exist in some form or other with the present. The fingers of the past has a very long reach indeed, and often much longer than we would like to give it credit for.