Spanish Poetry of the Grupo Poético de 1927

217 Pages·1977·12.547 MB·English

by  Geoffrey Connell, R. B. Tate, G. W. Ribbans and E. Rivers (Auth.)

PERGAMON OXFORD SPANISH SERIES
General Editors: Professor R. B. TATE, Professore. W. RIBBANS
and Professor E. RIVERS
Other titles of interest:
P. R. BEARDSELL Ricardo Güiraldes: Don Segundo Sombra
J. L. BROOKS Benito Perez Galdós: Torquemada en la Hoguera
J. G. CUMMINS The Spanish Traditional Lyric
G. EDWARDS Calderón de la Barca: Los Cabellos de Absolón
R. E. LOTT JuanValera: Pepita Jiménez
F. PIERCE Two Cervantes Short Novels
J. RODGERS Benito Perez Galdós: Tormento
D.ROGERS Tirso de Molina: El Condenado por Desconfiado
P. VILAR A Brief History of Spain, 2nd Edition
(translated by R. B. Tate)
Spanish Poetry
of the Grupo Poètico de 1927
SELECTION, INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
GEOFFREY CONNELL
University of Glasgow
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This selection Copyright ©1977 Geoffrey Connell
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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First edition 1977
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Spanish poetry of the Grupo Poètico de 1927.
(Pergamon Oxford Spanish Series)
Bibliography: p.
1. Spanish poetry-20th century. I. Connell,
Geoffrey.
PQ6187.S65 1977 861\6'208 77-3297
ISBN 0-08-016950-3
In order to make this volume available as economically and rapidly as possible the
author's typescript has been reproduced in its original form. This method unfortu
nately has its typographical limitations but it is hoped that they in no way distract
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Printed in Great Britain by PAGE BROS. (NORWICH) LTD.
Foreword
This anthology has been prepared specifically for use by sixth-
formers and undergraduates, but I hope it may also interest anyone
who has read a little Garcia Lorca and has been attracted enough
by this poet to want to know something of his companions in perhaps
the greatest period of Spanish verse since the Golden Age.
The choice of poets to be included presented no real problem.
Those represented here were outstanding even in the richness of
their context· Prados and Altolaguirre, bound to the poets chosen
by strong ties of friendship and often included in anthologies
along with them, were inferior to them in talent and originality;
the maestria of these two lay not in verse, but in typography, and
had their poetry been represented, then the work of the much more
interesting and original Villalón and Hinojosa could hardly have
been omitted, Dâmaso Alonso, a great poet and a vital member of
the Grupo, has been omitted because of his own dissociation of his
poetry from that of his contemporaries:
"Si he acompanado a esta generación corno critico,
apenas corno poeta· Mi primer librito es anterior
(1921) a la constitución mas trabada del grupo. Las
doctrinas estéticas de hacia 1927, que para otros
fueron tan estimables, a mi me resultaron heladoras
de todo impulso creativo. Para expresarme en liber-
tad necesité* la terrible sacudida de la guerra
espanola."
The poems were chosen to illustrate the poets' development and
range of expression, and this has had a number of consequences.
First, very long poems have been omitted, and as I find deplorable
the extraction of short passages from works which were meant to be
read as a whole, this has meant that the temptation to include fine
poems such as Guillen's "Salvación de la primavera", Salinas'
"Cero", Garcia Lorca's "Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias" and
Alberti's "Soledad tercera" has had to be resisted. Then, where a
choice was available between a much-anthologised poem and an
equally fine alternative, the latter was selected: for example,
Lorca's "Romance son£mbulo" was omitted in favour of the "Romance
del emplazado". Finally, the selection has been weighted towards
the pre-Civil War period, not only because, in my opinion (though
many critics would disagree), all the poets produced their best
work then, but also because differing approaches to common themes
can best be illustrated by poems written at a time when the poets
were still in direct contact with one another.
The Introduction deals mainly with changing trends in poetry
between I918 and the present, the biographical notes and those on
the different books being intended to show the effect (or lack of
xiii
xiv The Grupo Poetico de 1927
effect) of these movements on the individual poets. The notes on
the poems vary in type and length according to the work concerned.
Where specific reference to an image or item of vocabulary may
help towards the understanding of the poem, this has been made;
in other cases, near-paraphrase has been used to throw light on a
poem whose difficulty lies in the whole rather than the detail;
whilst yet other poems call for hardly any comment at all. It will
be noticed that, generally speaking, the longer poems of the post-
Civil War period require less comment than the shorter, earlier
pieces; amongst poems as well as stars there are red giants and
white dwarves.
The "Suggestions for Further Reading" were made with a clear
recollection of the calls on a student's time and his need not to
waste hours reading works which, in the early stages at least, will
profit him little. The further reading most strongly recommended
is more of the poetry itself. The complete works of these poets
are generally expensive, and should be obtained from a library
wherever possible. Cheap editions and useful selections are listed
where available· Then, other works,- critical and autobiographi­
cal - by the poets themselves should be studied. It will be noted
that the opinions quoted in the Introduction are drawn almost ex­
clusively from these works, and there is little doubt that more can
be learned about, say, Guillen's attitude to poetry by reading
what he has written about other poets than by reading any work on
him by a more recent critic, or that Garcia Lorca's lectures (col­
lected in the Obras complétas) teach one more about the poet than
any of the dozens of books written since his death. When the works
of other critics are read, it should always be with the poet's own
words very much in mind.
Benjamin Jarnés, a novelist of the same generation once wrote:
"El libro, corno un astro, tiene dos orbitasi una
de gran radio, la de la luz, y otra de radio mas
corto, la del calor."
The same is true of these poems. Their "òrbita de luz" is obvious
at a first reading; but it is hoped that the notes given in this
anthology will help the reader to approach the "òrbita de calor".
Glasgow 1970 GEOFFREY CONNELL
Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used in the Introduction
and Notes:
AP La arboleda perdida (Alberti)
LyP Lenguaje y poesia (Guillen)
OC Obras complétas (Aleixandre and Lorca)
PEC Poetas expanoles contemporaneos (Alonso)
PyL Poesia y literatura (Cernuda)
xv
Introduction
1. Ultraismo
Many critics have described the first half of the present
century as a second Golden Age of Spanish literature. Opinions as
to when this Golden Age began and whether it still continues vary;
but it is generally agreed that it reached its peak in the years
between 1921 and 1936 in the work of a group of poets probably
unique in modern literary history not only for the richness and
variety of poetry it produced, but also for its failure to produce
manifestos or pronouncements, its lack of militancy and its resist­
ance to all attempts to classify or pigeonhole it. Critics have
attempted to find a collective name for this group on the model of
the universally accepted Generación de I898, but references to a
Generación de 192*f, de 1923, de 1927, de 1928 are sufficient in
themselves to indicate that no significant year can be agreed on,
The most generally accepted and most adequate term, and that which
no doubt hispanists will continue to use, is Generación de la
Dictadura, because the period of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship
(1923-30) covers the years in which the group of poets gradually
assembled, the first books of most of them were published, and the
most significant change of direction in their poetry took place.
It was originally intended to use this term in the present an­
thology; but when certain of the poets objected so strongly to
the alleged "political overtones" of the term as to refuse to
allow the publication of their poetry under this heading, a change
had perforce to be made. And since one of the poets even objected
to the use of Generación with any additions, the only choice left
was the term apparently now used "officially" in the Spanish uni­
versities: Grupo poètico de 1927 (1)*. The use of the term here in
no way implies that the compiler finds it satisfactory; 1927 was an
important year for the poets, but the group certainly already ex­
isted as such several years earlier.
If no one date can be taken as the starting-point for the Grupo
itself, the poets have been ready enough to admit that they owed a
debt to an earlier movement whose beginnings we can locate in a
specific year: I918. This year saw the end of the First World War
and of the artistic isolation which Spain had suffered for the
duration of that conflict. Revolutionary artistic movements have,
for one reason or another, always been slow to make their mark in
Spain· The Marques de Santillana wrote Italianate sonnets in the
fifteenth century, but it was not until the 1330s that Garcilaso
established the Renaissance forms in Spanish verse; articles on
Romanticism appeared in Spanish magazines in the first few years
* For Notes see pages 23-25
1
The Grupo Poetico de 1927
of the nineteenth century, but it was not until the l830s that the
brief hey-day of Spanish Romanticism began; and nearly half a
century of French Parnassianism and Symbolism made its first real
impact on Spain only in I896, with the publication of Ruben Dario's
Prosas profanas. So it was that the new movements in art and
literature, notably Cubism and Futurism, which were already being
hotly discussed and practised in Paris before the outbreak of the
war, should hardly have been noticed in Spain before the frontiers
were closed and the country was virtually isolated·
There were a few writers who had already commented on the new
movements, notably Ramon Gómez de la Serna, who had published in
his magazine Prometeo a translation of Marinetti's Futurist mani­
festo. But as far as young men who had been born around the turn
of the century, and who felt the first stirrings of a poetic
vocation during the war, were concerned the literary atmosphere of
Spain was one of stagnation, and there seemed to be no new direc­
tion they could follow, no new poet of genius on whom they could
model their early efforts. Guillermo de Torre (born I9OO) has
summed up the scene as it appeared to him and to his contempor­
aries :
Espana, siempre un poco distante o desdenosa,
sentia agravada su aislamiento en lo intelectual, y
quienes estâbamos âvidos de explorar el otro lado de la
frontera, esperâbamos con impaciencia que desapare-
ciesen murallas, visados y censuras. Pues el panorama
de lo proximo era exiguo y no bastaba a satisfacer
nuestras curiosidades y afanes de cambio· Efectiva-
mente, en el sector lirico, no el capital, pero si
aquél en que suelen producirse inicialmente las mudas,
se vivia aun de los residuos finales del modernismo.
Los rezagados de esta tendencia repetian mimèticamente
gestos y decires ya exhaustos (2).
The "panorama de lo proximo" included some great poets: Antonio
Machado, Unamuno, Juan Ramon Jimenez; but these were hardly revol­
utionaries and their work was, presumably, classified as part of
the "residuos finales del modernismo", represented amongst the
younger writers by the appearance, as late as I9I8, of a new maga­
zine, Grecia, published in Seville and bearing on its front page an
art nouveau design and a quotation from Dario:
En la angustia de la ignoraneia
de lo porvenir, saludemos
la barca llena de fragancia
que tiene de marfil los remos.
The sudden change in the literary scene following the end of the
war was reflected in this magazine which, in the winter of I918-I9,
as Gerardo Diego later observed
virò subitamente, intentando rumbos inexplorados,
arrojó por la borda su cargamento helénico, arrió
velas, quebró remos, y por arte de birlibirloque se
convirtió en un santiamén en un buque mecânico, con
T.S.F·, motores flamantes, cu£druple juego de
hélices y un magnifico y abigarrado lastre de ismos
Introduction 3
en la bodega, importados a toda prisa de Francia,
de Italia, de Yanquilandia, de Rusia (3)·
This sudden conversion was due to a young Chilean poet who had
been one of the first to cross the frontier at the end of the war,
Vicente Huidobro who "tornaba de Paris corno el adelantado, corno el
primer viajero que después de largo temporal de nieves, atraviesa
las montanas, trayendo en su équipa je novedades y sorpresas" (*f).
As early as 191^, Huidobro had published his revolutionary mani­
festo Non serviam in his native Santiago· In 1916 he had written
El espe.jo del agua, and in the same year he had gone to Paris,
where he collaborated with Apollinaire, Reverdy, Dermée, Tzara and
Max Jacob in the publication of Nord-Sud (1st number, March 15th,
1917)· Whether Huidobro's theory of creacionismo was fully formed
before or after his acquaintance with the French writers is a
matter of dispute (5); but that was immaterial to the eager young
Spaniards who sat at his feet during his visit to Madrid of July
to November I918. To them he was not only the prophet they had
been awaiting, but the prophet of a new god whose name was
Guillaume Apollinaire.
Apollinaire had been the very incarnation of that esprit nouveau
about which he had written (6), a man who could write perfect verse
in a traditional lyrical style at one moment and a revolutionary
poem in which the Eiffel Tower, typists, posters, cars and Christ as
an aviator all figured at the next; who had helped to shape Cubism,
had written the French Futurist manifesto and was later to be pro­
claimed the father of Surrealism; who had volunteered for the
trenches and whose view of the war as a sort of Futurist firework-
display had not been dimmed by a serious head-wound which was to
weaken him and leave him an easy prey to the influenza epidemic of
19ΐδ; and who was to die while the crowds outside his sickroom,
hailing the defeat of the Kaiser, howled "A bas Guillaume!" It was
little wonder that, for the eager audience listening to Huidobro,
"el nombre por excelencia en que vino a cifrarse la voluntad trans-
formadora, el que surgió corno bandera de novedad, fue el de
Guillaume Apollinaire" (7).
Huidobro had evolved his own style, creacionismo, whose princi­
pal aim was to do for the poem what the Cubist painters were trying
to do for the picture: to make it non-representational, not an
imitation of something else (landscape, portrait, etc.) but an
independent object in its own right, a new "creation". Thus
Huidobro wrote in El Espejo del agua:
Por que cantâis la rosa, loh Poetas!
Hacedla florecer en el poema.
The method by which he sought to achieve this end was never really
explained, but appears mainly to have depended on a clear distinc­
tion between ordinary language and poetic language. In a lecture
given in the Madrid Ateneo in 1921, Huidobro said:
Aparte de la significación gramatical del lenguage,
hay otra, una significación magica, que es la unica
que nos interesa. Uno es el lenguaje objetivo, que
sirve para nombrar las cosas del mundo sin sacarlas
The Grupo Poetico de 1927
fuera de su calidad de inventario; el otro rompe
esa norma convencional y en él las palabras pierden
su representación estrieta para adquirir otra mas
profunda y corno rodeada de un aura luminosa que debe
elevar al lector del plano habitual y envolverlo en
una atmosfera encantada . . .
Las palabras tienen un genio recòndito, un pasado
magico que sólo el poeta sabe descubrir porque él
siempre vuelve a la fuente . . ·
El valor del lenguaje de la poesia esta en razón
directa de su alejamiento del lenguaje que se habla.
Esto es lo que el vulgo no puede comprender, porque
no quiere aceptar que el poeta träte de expresar sólo
lo inexpresable. Lo otro queda para los vecinos de
la ciudad· El lector corriente no se da cuenta de
que el mundo rebasa fuera del valor de las palabras,
que queda siempre un mas alla de la vista humana, un
campo inmenso lejds de las formulas del trâfico
diario.
These ideas recall the theories of Mallarmé, and were to find an
echo a few years later in Ortega y Gasset's La deshumanización del
arte (1925):
Crée el vulgo que es cosa fâcil huir de la realidad
cuando en realidad es lo mâs dificil del mundo. . . .
Lograr construir algo que no sea copia de lo "natural",
y que sin embargo, posée alguna sustantividad, implica
el don mas sublime ... El poeta aumenta el mundo,
anadiendo a lo real, que ya esta ahi por si mismo, un
irreal continente . . . Vida es una cosa, poesia
otra. No las mezclemos. El poeta empieza donde el
hombre acaba.
Both Huidobro and Ortega stressed thus in their turn two factors:
that poetry was detached from ordinary life and that it was for
initiates only, being incomprehensible to the "vulgo". In both
ideas they differed from Apollinaire, who had happily made use of
everyday aspects of modern city life in his poetry and who, al­
though having taken pleasure in the French intellectual's sport of
épater le bourgeois, especially in his Futurist manifesto, really
had neither animosity nor scorn for the "vulgo" (8).
The young Spanish poets who had listened to Huidobro and dis­
cussed the new movements at tertulias presided over by the critic
Cansinos Assens absorbed the Chilean poetfs anti-"vulgo" ideas but
reflected more truly the spirit of Apollinaire in their readiness
to admit and support any manifestation of the esprit nouveau,
whether it be Cubism, Futurism, creacionismo or any other of the
"abigarrado lastre de ismos"(9). Seeking a global term to express
this intent, they coined ultraismo, defining this as: "Ultra,
dentro del cual cabran todas las tendencias avanzadas, genèrica­
mente ultraistas, que mas tarde se definiran y hallarân su diferen-
ciación." These words appeared in 1919 in'the new magazine Ultra,
one of a series of ephemeral publications (the others being