The Generation of 1927

It may happen that from time to time, a special group of poets, writers and artists would come together for a common cause and as a result their collective influence become far more important than those of other generations . The reason for this may be complex. It may be just a historical accident when for one reason or another, the circumstances are such that a special chemistry arises between and amongst the different members of the group who otherwise may be very different individuals. This happened in Spanish poetry. We have now what has been called  the Generation of 1927 or in Spanish Generación del 27. They are an influential group of Spanish  poets in the literary circles between 1923 to 1927 who came together because of a shared desire to experience and work on the Spanish poetic tradition by incorporating avant garde form and elements, looking both on the one hand backward and on the other forward. This group has also been called the "Generation of the Dictatorship" because many of their members had suffered physical and cultural attacks under the dictationship of General Franco who rose to power in the period of the Spanish Civil War which started in 1936. Their general sympathies were for the abolition of the monarchy in Spain and for the establishment of a republic . Hence they have also been called "Generation of the Republic". Because their leaders were Jorge Guillén (1893-1984) and Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) they are sometimes also called the  "Generation Guillén-Lorca" , Guillén being its oldest author, and Lorca its youngest. Sometimes they are called the "Generation of 1925"  because the average publishing date of the first book of each author is 1925. Because they advocated some pretty advanced ideas about art in general and poetry in particular, they are sometimes also called the  "Generation of Avant-Gardes".

This group had their first formal meeting in  Seville in 1927. The occasion was the 300th anniversary of the death of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora (1561-1627). Góngora wrote in a style which has been called "culteranismo" or "gongorismo". It is characterized by the use of a great many words to suggest what was meant, but never directly what actually was meant. It plays on the ambiguity of the contexts of the words to create interest. He uses a very flowery language and invented many new words ( neologism) which previously never existed in Spanish, generally constructed or created from words with Latin or Greek roots. He also relies heavily on what has been called "hyperbaton" or an unusual or non-conventional word order as a rhetorical device to highlight the effect of certain other words e.g. by reversing the word order like placing the object before the verb or placing the adverb before the verb, the adjective before the noun etc. for emphasis. In this respect, Góngora borrowed heavily from Latin, which allows a rather loose syntactical structure, so that sometimes, the subject may be separated from the object, direct or indirect and sometimes, its verb, by very many other intervening phrases, subordinate clauses in parenthesis, but without the parenthesis marks to indicate that they are put in parenthesis. He sometimes also imitates the way the blacks or Moors in Spain speak or use words. His style was much criticized by his opponent, chiefly another baroque poet writing in the same period, Franciso de Quevedo (1580-1645), a very learned man who studied theology, Hebrew, Arab, Latin, Greek and Italian and was very much into courtly elegance, who advocated the contrary idea: what has been called "conceptismo" , aiming at clarity of expression, simplicity and elegance through using simple words, puns or word plays, so that one word may have multiple meanings in different contexts. 

It is difficult to generalize on the style of the group of poets whose main members may be argued to include about a dozen or so poets and writers namely Rafael Alberti (1902-1999), Felipe Alfau (1902-1999), Vincente Aleixandre (1898-1984), a Nobel prize winner, Manuel Altolaguirre who edited the Malaga review Litoral with Emilio Prados (1899-1962), Amado Alonso (1897-1952), Dámaso Alonso (1898-1990), Pedro Salinas y Serrano (1897-1951) Mauricio Bacarisse (1895-1931),  José Bello (1904-2008), Rogelio Buendia (1891-1969), Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), Ernestina de Champourcin (1905-1999), Juan José Domenchina (1898-1959), Gerardo Diego (1896-1987),Antonio Espina (1894-1972), Agustin Espinosa (1897-1939), Federico Garcia Lorca (1898- 1936),  Juan Gil-Albert (1904-1994), Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899-1988), Jorge Guillén (1893-1984), Miguel Hernández (1910-1942), José Maria Hinojosa (1904-1936) who wrote the famous La Flor de California.etc.  Alberti wrote in a mainly romantic style in his early years but as he grew older wrote more and more political and social poetry.Guillén celebrated life in the present. Lorca wrote on love, the Spanish countryside, cities in Granada and later New York, gitanos in odes, sonnets and towards the end of his life in gacelas and casidas etc. Gerardo Diego was actively involved in the ultraist movement of Guillermo de Torre and Luis Borges, which sought to fight against the excesses of modernismo and eliminate useless middle sentences, (gongorism) articles, adjectives, excessive lyricism, sentimentalism, combining two or more images into one, to use evocative imagery about the machines and the modern world taking their cue from the French symbolists, to abandon all rhyme scheme, put emphasis on the layout of the words of the poem on the printed page like that advocated by Ezra Pound. Pedro Salinas wrote mainly on love. They also share certain common values with creationism of Huidobro who advocated that the poem must be something self-sufficient, always something completely new, rather like a tree being created by Nature.   

Whatever may have been their individual subject matter and styles, the generation of 1927 did their best to revive the Spanish folk tradition, folk lores and attempted to write in a popular style, but trying also to fuse the classical literary tradition with elements of the European avant garde, emphasizing the music in poetry. Some of them also adopted the baroque imagery from the Spanish folk tradition and also created some new Gothic images of the city and juxtaposed what is inside the human psyche with what is outside in the physical, natural or urban world. In different ways and to different extents they were influenced by the Surrealism of Dali, especially Luis Cernuda and some of them were influenced by Cubist, Futurist, Ultraist and Creationist ideas. They sometimes also wrote in free verse, breaking the rigid rules related to rhyming, the number of syllables and also length of poems according to the needs of the expression of emotions in the particular context of the individual poems.

In fact, the Generation of 1927 includes more than mere poets and writers. In a wider context, they also include such surrealist painters as Dali and Oscar Dominguez, the painter and sculptor Maruja Mallo, the film maker Luis Buñuel, the caricaturist K-Hito, the toreros Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (for whose death on the plaza Lorca wrote a famous Llanto as a homage ), Rodolfo Halffter and his musicologist brother Ernesto Haffter of the so-called Group of 8 and also a group of Catalan artists who called themselves the Grupo de Artistas Catalanes Independientes including such names as Roberto Gerhard, Ricardo Lamote de Grignon and the composer Federico Mompou. 

The Generation of 1927 was centred not only in Madrid but in spirit also in Sevilla around the review Mediodia, in the Tenerife around the Gaceta de Arte and in Malaga around the reveiw Litoral.

The Generation of 1927 suffered heavy casualties as a result of the Spanish Civil War: Lorca was murdered, Hernandez died in jail, and others like Alberti, Jose Bergamin, Leon Felipe, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Juan Ramon Jiménez, (1881-1958) another Nobel prize winner  and Mauricio Bacarisse were forced into exile, although virtually all kept writing and publishing late into the 20th century. The war split the group. Only Dámaso Alonso remained reluctantly in Spain but Gerardo Diego surrendered and actively supported the traditionalism of Franco, mixing many elements of Spanish culture like its toreros, its church, its music and even existentialist concerns. Still others like Juan Gil-Albert withdrew within himself and explored the world of his emotions and thought as a kind of interior exile and gave support to new poets like Vincente Aleixandre. But few of them really came to terms with the regime of Franco. This was to be done by what has been called the Generation of the 50's. 

 

 

 

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. 

Background to Spanish Poetry.2

Luis de Góngora is at the head of one of the strongest Spanish poetic traditions. To his detractors, his style is pejoratively described as "culterano" by analogy to "luterano"( Lutheran) much attacked during the Counter-Reformation in Spain. This style is very Latin. Often, the subject and the first verb is separated from the direct and indirect object or the demonstrative pronoun is separated from its noun by a multi-line parenthesis e.g in his Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea (Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea), this is very evident:

Un montre era de miembros eminente   An eminent mountain of limbs

este (que, de Neptuno hijo fiero,            this (which, the fearsome son of Neptune,

de un ojo ilutra el orbe de su frente,     with an eye, lights up the orb of his forehead

emulo casi del major lucero)                 emulate almost the greatest light)

ciclope.                                                  cyclop.

There is much rivalry between the traditions of Góngora and Quevado, cultismo and conceptismo ( a particularly concentrated form of conceptual wit which produced what has been called "conceits" as applied to the 17th century English Metaphysical poets like John Donne). In fact, Quevado might write with as much elevated baroque pomp as Góngora could write with dense word play and ingenious metaphors. To Walters, their difference are more differences of degree, not of kind. This was the Siglos de Oro of Spanish poetry and Spanish culture with such famous painters, writers, poets, clerics like El Greco, Veláquez, San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa, Lope de Vega, Cervantes. San Juan de la Cruz and his teacher and fellow mystical poet Fray Luis de Leon (  poet of the unknown light, unheard music, the evening spheres) were both imbued with biblical and kabbalistic literature and Neoplatonism and had little interest in the court manners and concerns of Castiglione's Cortegiano but wrote their major poems in the lira, an Italian poetic form borrowed from Bernardo Tasso.

Between the 17th and the early 19th centuries, there is very little poetry of genuine merit except those of Sor Juan Ines de la Cruz (1651-95) who wrote Cántico espiritual.   The 18th century is the century of French classicism, the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment, with emphasis on clarity and balance as if all shadow, literal or metaphorical, had been decimated but towards the end of the 18th century, there arose what could be termed  the Pre-Romantic style typified by the art of painting of Goya, the certainty and rationality gradually giving rise to doubt, skepticism, darkness, as in the poem of Alberto Lista y Aragon:

Qué horror! La fiera noche                         What horror! The fierce night

ha triplicado el denegrido manto                has tripled the besmirched cloak

de tinieblas sin fin. Huyo del cielo               of darkness without end. The nocturnal splendor

el nocturno esplendor: no hay una estrella fled from the sky: there is not a star

que con su yerta amortiguada lumbre         whose rigid subtle light

hiera la oscuridad del firmanento.              hurts the darkness of the firmament.

However even in this period of relative infertility of Spanish poetry, the balladic tradition quietly continued eg. in the romances históricos of Duque de Rivas (1791-1865) whose narrative poem set the model for later poets.

In the Romantic period, we find poems like El estudinate de Salamanca of José de Esprondceda (1808-42), which re-worked the theme of the legendary Don Juan, emphasizing the eerie atmosphere of Gothic horror and breaking the formal and metrical rhythm of the past in much shorter lines ;

Era más de medianoche,             It was past midnight.

antiguas historias cuentan,         ancient tales are telling,

cuando en sueño y en silencio    when in dreams and in silence.

lóbrego enveulta la tierra,         gloom covers the land,

los vivos muertos parecen,        the living appear dead,

los muertos la tumba dejan.      the dead leave the grave.

Era la hora en que acaso          It was the hour when each of the  

temerosas voces suenan            fearful voices sound,

informes, en que se escuchan    unformed, when hollow

tácitas pisadas huecas,             steps are heard,

y pavorosas fantasmas             and terrifying ghosts 

entre las densas tinieblas         in the dense darkness

vagan y aúllan los perros        come and the dogs howl

amedrentados al verlas.         in horror upon seeing them.

In describing the final flicker of the death of its hero, the lines are short, almost breathless, ending in a single word line:

la frente inclina          his face bent

sobre su pecho          over his chest

y a su despcho,         and despite himself,

siente sus brazos       his arms sit

lánguidos, débiles     lanquid, weak,

desfallecer.               faint.

But even in the Romantic period, the narrative ballad tradition continued by such poets as José Zorilla (1817-93) and even in the 1850s and 1860s Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870), a Sevillian who settled in Madrid wrote a series of leyendas (legends) like the prose equivalent of the Romantic narrative poem. His verse, greatly influenced by the folk songs and the lyrics of the German poet Heine, was much fresher than those of his contemporaries like Ramòn de Campoamor (1817-1901) and Gaspar Núñez de Arce (1834-1903) whose poems are often formal and verbose e.g. La visión de Fray Martín of Núñez de Arce:

Era una noche destemplada y triste      It was a night intemperate and sad

Del invierno aterido. Lentamente        from frozen winter. Sluggishly

la nieve silencios, descendiendo           the silent snow, falling

Del alto cielo en abundantes copos,     from high heaven in abundant drops,

Como sudario fúnebre cubria               like a funenary shroud covered

La amortedida tierra. Cierzo helado     the dead earth. Icy breeze

Azotaba los árboles desnudos              whipped the trees stripped

De verde pompa, pero no de escarcha.  of green pump, but not of frost.

This type of poetry is entirely conventional, where nouns are followed by the usual predictable  adjectives, very different from the concise and understated poems of Bécquer. But after Bécquer died, his place was taken by Rosalía de Castro (1837-85) who wrote in her native Galician and in Castilian and by the poet-priest Jacint Verdaguer (1845-1902) who wrote entirely in Catalan. 

(To be cont'd)      

Background to Spanish Poetry.1

I have translated a number of poems from Spanish into English and Chinese some of which I have already posted in either this blog or in a previous blog but the majority of which, those related to the Spanish dramatist and poet Garcia Lorca have not yet been published. I have also given brief comments on those translated poems when I published them on the net. But never have I given any kind of historical and cultural background to any of those translated poems. Since it is now weekend and I have a little time before attending first a funeral and then a wedding, I might as well give a brief introduction. I claim no originality for what I say here. Any credit should go to  Willis Barnstone's Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet (1993) and D. Gareth Walters' The Cambridge Introduction to Spanish Poetry-- Spain and Spanish America  (2002) which I have read and from which I have learned what little that I do about Spanish poetry.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning. But as in any historical survey, there will always be disputes as to which poem should be considered the very first "Spanish" poem. Should the criteria be the land which we now call Spain ? Should we consider Catalan or Castilian as "the" Spanish language? Catalan gradually became the chief language in Spain with the publication in 1492 of the first Spanish grammar or indeed the first book of grammar in any language, Arte de la lengua castellana by Antonio de Nebrija. But beforee then, from around the 10th century, poets of Al-Andalus (the lands occupied by  Arabs or Moors in presentday southern Spain, the moors having occupied Spain for about 800 years from the 7th century on ) had written what has been called muwashashas in Classical Arabic  and later in Hebrew that contained a final section in Vulgar Arabic or Mozarabic called kharja (literally going away) which show some resemblance to the subject matter and themes in the poetry in north-western Iberia in the 13th and 14th centuries and certain popular songs prevalent in the 15th and 16th centuries. But in 1492, the moors were driven out of Spain and the last Islamic kingdom of Granada fell before the armies of the Catholic kings in 1610, when the last moriscos (forced Islamic converts into Christianity ) rebellion in Granada was crushed and with it the loss of a valuable poetic tradition, until it was revived some 400 years later by Garcia Lorca in early 20th century by the publication of his El diván del Tamarit modelled after the Arabic or Persian casida and gacela.  In addition, there is another tradition of Galician-Portuguese in north-western Spain with the common origin of a female narrator. As in all cultures, there is an oral epic tradition. The earliest example of this is the Poema/Cantar de mío Cid, a blend of oral and written traditions, written by either a cleric, lawyer or a semi-literate minstrel, probably written at the start of the 13th century. Another is the Siete infantes de Lara which dates from around the start of the 11th century and was revised three centuries later. The third tradition is that of the villancicos which is the only one truly written in what we now regard as Spanish.

The most famous name in Spanish poetry of the 13th century is that of Gonzalo de Berceo (c 1196-1260?), a Rioja ( those who drink Spanish red will know which region) monk who wrote poetry with a different metrical scheme from that of the oral epic, for recitation, the mester de juglaria: this metrical scheme depends on rhythmic patterns, the number of rhythmic accents and length of time for recitation:

de los sos ohos    tan fuerte mientre llorando  from his eyes  so strong whilst crying  

tornava la cabeça  y estava los cantando             he turned his head  and was singing them

In Berceo’s most famous poem the Milagros de Nuestra Señora ( The miracles of our Lady) , the rhythm is obviously different:

Divan olor sovejo         las fores bien olientes       

Refrehscavan en omne las carnes e las mientes;

Manavan cada cano     fuentes claras corrientes,

En verano bien frias     en ivienro calientes     

 

The sweet smelling flowers  gave off their perfume

They refreshed all                the bodies and the minds

Issued from each song         bright flowing fountains

In summer so cold               in winter so warm

Here we find that the two halves of the lines ( or hemistichs) are of equal length, so unlike the oral epic lines. This is an example of what has been called mester de clericía. What is decisive is the number of syllables: each line has 7 syllables with an unchanging rhyme scheme of aaaa bbbb cccc, in contrast to the epic rhyme-scheme which relies on assonance, achieved by repetition of similar vowel sounds (vocalic rhyme). They use what is called the cuaderna vía (four-fold way). This cuaderna via metre is still being used by Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita (1282-1350?) about a century later in his Libro de buen amor, supplying connective threads between a variety of other verse forms and a constant narrative rhyme.

According to Walters, we usually think of poetry as related to nationality but in the Middle Ages, the concept of nationality was not fully developed and people in those days placed more emphasis on the poetic genre. In lyric poetry, they used the Galican-Portuguese  not Castilian language. Therefore though Berceo wrote Milagros in Castilian, the songs he wrote at the court of King Alfonso X in Galician-Portuguese. In this regard the most published songs are the Cancienero general, compiled by Hernando de Castillo, from 1511 onwards.

Another important influence on Spanish poet was Italian, due largely to political reasons arising from various dynastic alliances by kings and emperors because of the changing policies of the united crowns of Castile and Aragon and later the territorial legacy of Charles V. Italian poetry was first introduced into Spain from mid-14th^th century to early 15^th century by Franciso Imperial and Marqués de Santillana (1398-1458). But it was really only in the 1520s that the Italian sonnet with its hendecasyllabic line and with a rhyme scheme of abba abba cdecde became the norm. The pioneer of this form was Juan Boscán (1501/3-36), as part and parcel of the general importation of Italian Renaissance ideas into Spain,  when he met Andrea Navagero the Italian ambassasor to Spain, at the banks of the Darro in Granada, whilst accommpnying Carlos V on a state visit to Alhambra and urged Boscan, who translated Castiglione's Cortegiano prescribing courtly etiquette, to write sonnets and other forms used by good Italian authors,  on the emphasis being placed on the Aristotelian poetic of mimesis. Boscán then started to compose canzoni, ottava rima and sonetos. In this period, Spanish poets started to imitate the classical forms of ancient Greece e.g the pastoral poem of Eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil. Thus Garcilaso, an intimate friend of Boscán with a marvellous talent for words, used the Italian form to create poetry of perfect harmony e.g his Egloga tercera closely imitated Virgil’s Seventh Eclogue.

Flérida, para mi dulce y sobrosa              Flérida, for me sweet and tasty

Más que la fruta del cercada ajeno,          more than the fruit of the adjacent near

Más blanca que la leche y más hermosa   whiter than milk and more beautiful

Que'l prado por abril de flores lleno         than the April meadow full of flowers.

In 1543, the widow of Boscan published the Obras de Boscan y algunas de Garcilaso de la Vega and went through 16 editions by 1610. Gacilaso's poetry became the model of Italian poetry in Spain. He wrote 38 sonnets, 5 canciones and three églogas and an epistle in verse. His sonnets and eclogues gave Spain its ideals of Petrarchan love and Virgilian pastoral imagery. He has a painfully pure sensitivity to beauty and love and he portrays real passion beneath an exterior of pastoral and mythological allusions and disguised his Italian origin so well, following in the tradition of Provençal courtly love poetry. Garcilaso's sonnets express an elegant despair, his young man is endowed with all good qualities, handsome, high born, amorous, poetic but he constantly meets with frustration, the cruelty of time and the slow poision which is life itself. The beauty of grief is turned into an art. But his poetry was not immediately accepted. His followers were criticized as self-pitying, lacking in humor, foreign, distant from the common people and the popular anonymous songs and verse. By the end of the 16th century, the dispute between the Italianist and the Castilian forms had disappeared and we find splendid use of both formal and popular modes by the same authors like Lope de Vega, Luis de Gongora, Francisco Quevedo, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and all the way to Antonio Machado and Federico Garcia Lorca and Jorge Luis Borges in the 20th century.

But in the meantime, it became usual to include classical allusions as illustration or as metaphors e.g Midas for greed and Icarus for rashness, a kind of literary shorthand with rich built in associations. Their model was the love sonnets of the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) whose Canzioniere was rediscovered in early 16^th century and widely imitated by the poets of the Siglo de Oro  (Spanish Golden Age)  e.g by Franciso de Quevedo (1580-1945):

Rizas en ondas ricas del rey Midas          You laugh in rich waves of King Midas

Lisi, el tacto precioso, cuando avaro;       Lisi, the precious touch, when greedy;

Arden claveles en su cerco claro,             Carnations burn in her bright ring,

Fragrante sangre, esplendididas heridas.  Fragant blood, wonderful wounds.

The waves of Midas refers to the golden tresses of her hair. However, minas” is linked to Midas only phonetically. This kind of use is sometimes referred to as "baroque”style . But even more, the Spanish poets attempted to imitate the classical style of the Latin poets in both syntax and rules  e.g the poetry of Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) in the style called cultismo. The Spanish sonnet remains in essentially the same form until some 300 years later, it was changed by the Argentian Jorge Luis Borges, one quarter English through his paternal grandmother, when he adopted the Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg.

(to be con’d)  

A Funeral and a Wedding

Saturday was a topsy turvy world for me. In the morning, I went to work in Central. In the evening, I went to a funeral in Hunghom and then a wedding in Wanchai. The work was tedious as usual. I had to provide answers to some 31 questions and had to go through more than 10 4-inch box files of documents to find the relevant answers. With patience and method and the assistance of a summer student, I managed to find answers for nearly all of them. It's not something I could not handle.

What I could not handle is the way a certain preacher tried to make use of the occasion of the funeral to "preach" the word of God. She was a lady in early 30s with a clean sharp face, clear skin, high round forehead, small eyes beneath a pair of weak half-moon eyebrows, small straight nose and thin lips surrounded by strong jaws and had a soft wheedling voice. The Christian ceremony started out with a minute of silence. Then she started with Luke 8: 52. Jesus said, "Weep not, she is not dead but sleepeth." Then followed a psalm which all had to sing together about how merciful the Lord is, how much peace we lose, how much we suffer in vain, how we despair upon meeting difficulties, how weak we are, how heavy the burden upon our shoulders, how we feel deserted by our friends and family, before falling into the bosom of Jesus who would give us protection, consolation, free us from our worries, how he would give us refuge etc. And then followed the favourite Psalm 23: "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restored my soul. He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for his name's sake. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou prepareth a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. Surely good and mercy will follow me all the days of my life: I will dwell in the house of the Lord." These are usual in a Christian funeral service.

At that funeral service in Hunghom, I saw how the preacher made use of the moments when any ordinary person who is not emotionally stone dead is most vulnerable because of the kind of grief and sorrow they experience upon the sight of the dead, to preach time and again one and the same message and one-size-fit-all solution and one panacea: "Believe in Jesus". I am amazed at how she was able to support every point she made including the need to observe the rules made by God and how if we don't we will burn in hell,with a quotation from the Bible, exactly like the old rabbi who said, "It is said in the Torah etc....".  I am even more amazed at how firmly she takes every word of the Bible as "literally" the "word of God.". What she said might have been more acceptable had she qualified what she said with the remark that nobody knew what Jesus really said but that no matter what the truth might have been, in her personal opinion, some of the things said in the Bible made a lot of sense and it might be useful if we were to take them into account when we make our own decisions in different kinds of social situations in our daily lives. But she does not appear to be aware that the old Testament had been written by hundreds of different authors, how even the orthodox and expurgated New Testament have got 4 different versions ( many of the expurgated versions before the 5th century CE have since been discovered by archaeologists) and how the earliest of which was written only some 40 years and the latest more than a century AFTER the death of Jesus  and that Jesus did NOT write down anything by himself at all and how what he was credited to have said often conflict with one another even on matters of "facts", and how there are different versions of the famous 8 (in some version 10) Beatitudes, and on how many and what miracles Jesus performed, how there are conflicting versions of where exactly Jesus was born, how Jesus actually died and whether he actually rose from the dead and the circumstances he was said to have resurrected, how there are different versions of what Jesus did after he rose from the dead and where and when he "ascended into heaven" etc. Does she know the original meaning of the word "hell" which in the original Aramaic version of the Bible merely meant a particular low area outside of Jerasalem where the Jews used to burn rubbish and for that reason particularly hot and not the kind of "hell" subsequently elaborated in paintings by Medieval artists? And she attacked the Buddhist idea of hell as portrayed in the Tiger Balm Garden as "false"! Is there any need for that? Do we really know if there is "truly" a  physical place(s) corresponding to that? Is it not more likely that the concept of "hell" might just be a "metaphor" which simple minded people have taken "literally"? She merely went on and on for nearly half an hour believing that she is rendering a great service to God and misleading her flock by her well intentioned ignorance by talking about a literal place called "hell" with live fire and all! When I saw the self-satisfied expression on her face with the apparent "correctness" of her views which she delivered with such complete confidence that they represented eternal "truths", I had a most difficult time restraining myself from walking out right in the middle of the service. For the sake of not embarrassing the family of the deceased, the mother-in- law of my wife's younger sister, I stayed in my seat insteading of storming out in disgust. I felt so sorry for Jesus.

Does she realize that she to has to be sensitive to the feelings of the relatives of the deceased and ought perhaps merely to comfort them with just a few words that she believed that the deceased will probably be welcome by the Lord for having suffered 9 months and that her passing away would finally give her a respite from further sufferings. What angers me is her "exploitation" of this moment of emotional vulnerability of her flock to "indulge" in spreading the "good news" of the coming of the Lord! If God truly exists, I wonder whether he would have been happy to have such a "servant"! Surely, Jesus came to this Earth to show us "how" exactly to love and not just the "need" to love others and how to worship God by loving what God loves, ie. our neighbors. Had she practised what she preached, she might have been more sensitive to the feelings of the friends and relatives of the deceased and cut short her inordinately long "preaching" because surely one of the requirments of love is to be sensitive to the needs of the others, not just the need of oneself as a "preacher" to preach.

To me, there is one fatal flaw in the Christian idea of God as a jealous, exclusive and all powerful God which might have encouraged the kind of behavior I observed. The concept of "God" has been fashioned in the image of a tribal god. His "supreme" authority seems to remove him from common humanity. Because of this idea of the supremacy of God, every thing which is "merely" human is considered of little or no worth, when compared to the excellence and perfection of God. For this, we have that Roman Jewish ex tent seller and Jesus-persecutor stricken by a bad cosncience turned super-salesman and top-notch Jesus promoter called the apostle Paul to thank. It is precisely on account of this idea of the exclusive supremacy of God, that God is everything and man absolutely nothing, which had led so easily to the blood-shed of religious wars, the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of witches, the extermination of the Incas civilization, the expropriation of the land of the North American Red Indians, the Austalian aborigines, the imperialistic idea of the "Whiteman's Burden", and all other kinds of man's inhumanity to man, all in the holy name of spreading the "good news" (which is what the gospels are all about.): absolute ideas! If Christian theologians do not restore the "human" face of God, we will certainly see a God who is more and more remote from man. I don't think that would have been what Jesus came to this earth for. If I am right, Jesus came to give back a 'human" face to the Jewish God and to demolish the image of God as an inexorable and harsh Law Giver, as advocated by the Pharisees of his age. If Jesus were still alive today, I have the gravest doubt if he would be very happy with what some of his "preachers" are doing in his name.

What happened at the funeral is repeated by the pastor at the weddding. He too made use of the occasion to do some preaching and repeated how Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding of Cana and reminded us of the Biblical injunction that "What God put together, let no man put asunder." Mercifully, the pastor, a man in his 50s, judging from his almost bald head, was rather more restrained and did not take more than two or three minutes to do so. As a result, we had rather more time to enjoy the delicious food of the wedding feast. Nonetheless, the wedding banquet at the Grand Hyatt did not finish until 11.30 p.m because of all the "entertainment" packed into the banquet by the "wedding planners"!