Destruction or Love is the first complete English translation of one of the major works by Spanish Nobel Laureate Vicente Aleixandre. It conveys to English readers some of the syntactic inventiveness and suggestive imagery of the original, which became a landmark of twentieth-century European literature. Illustrated.
These include surrealism and the seminal role of Freud, narrative structure, genre, and lyric ancestors such as Fray Luis de Leon, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, and Ruben Dario."--BOOK JACKET.
Begun in 1939, barely four months after the close of the Spanish Civil War, these poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Vicente Aleixandre were written during a period of hardship and despair. In spite of his surroundings Aleixandre created the splendor of the shadow of a lost paradise that consisted of memory, nostalgia, yearning and illusion. This is the first full English version. The original Spanish text is included.
García Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism: The Aesthetics of Anguish examines the variations of surrealism and surrealist theories in the Spanish context, studied through the poetry, drama, and drawings of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936). In contrast to the idealist and subconscious tenets espoused by surrealist leader André Breton, which focus on the marvelous, automatic creative processes, and sublimated depictions of reality, Lorca’s surrealist impulse follows a trajectory more in line with the theories of French intellectuals such as Georges Bataille (1897–1962), who was expelled from Breton’s authoritative group. Bataille critiques the lofty goals and ideals of Bretonian surrealism in the pages of the cultural and anthropological review Documents (1929–1930) in terms of a dissident surrealist ethno-poetics. This brand of the surreal underscores the prevalence of the bleak or darker aspects of reality: crisis, primitive sacrifice, the death drive, and the violent representation of existence portrayed through formless base matter such as blood, excrement, and fragmented bodies. The present study demonstrates that Bataille’s theoretical and poetic expositions, including those dealing with l’informe (the formless) and the somber emptiness of the void, engage the trauma and anxiety of surrealist expression in Spain, particularly with reference to the anguish, desire, and death that figure so prominently in Spanish texts of the 1920s and 1930s often qualified as “surrealist.” Drawing extensively on the theoretical, cultural, and poetic texts of the period, García Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism offers the first book-length consideration of Bataille’s thinking within the Spanish context, examined through the work of Lorca, a singular proponent of what is here referred to as a dissident Spanish surrealism. By reading Lorca’s “surrealist” texts (including Poetaen Nueva York,Viaje a la luna, and El público) through the Bataillean lens, this volume both amplifies our understanding of the poetry and drama of one of the most important Spanish writers of the twentieth century and expands our perspective of what surrealism in Spain means.
Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents the first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists. Avoiding the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary Spanish verse is rooted in the modem tradition and poetics that see the text as a unique embodiment of complex experiences. He then traces the evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of text as process rather than as product. By centering his study on major periods and examining within each the work of poets of different ages, Debicki develops novel perspectives. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were not merely the setting for a new aestheticist generation but an era of exceptional creativity in which both established and new writers engendered a profound, intertextual, and often self-referential lyricism. This book will be essential reading for specialists in modern Spanish letters, for advanced students, and for readers inter-ested in comparative literature.
This critical study of the group of remarkably talented poets who flourished in Spain between the First World War and the Spanish Civil War includes copious quotations accompanied by English prose translations. Mr Morris treats his poets as a group, showing how they shared certain themes and attitudes. He begins with a general study of the generation as a whole and then examines the use of tradition; the zest and levity of the Jazz Age; the exaltation of life as a shared attitude; then its converse; the escape from life; and finally the expression in complex imagery of personal tensions and disturbances. These are often 'difficult' poets, but become less so when they are sympathetically examined in this way and in relation to earlier literary traditions. Mr Morris enables the reader to take bearings and establish relationships which are enhanced by reproductions of photographs of the poets.
Equally important to our understanding of history and humanity are the great works of literature. The Nobel Prize for literature recognises modern classics and the efforts of authors to bridge gaps between different cultures, time-periods and styles; the prizewinners between 1968 and 1980 are from four continents.These volumes are collections of the Nobel lectures delivered by the prizewinners, together with their biographies, portraits and presentation speeches for the period 1968 – 1980. Each Nobel lecture is based on the work that won the laureate his prize. New biographical data of the laureates, since they were awarded the Nobel prize, are also included. These volumes of inspiring lectures by outstanding individuals should be on everyone's bookshelf.Below is a list of the prizewinners during the period 1968 – 1980: (1968) Y KAWABATA — for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind; (1969) S BECKETT — for his writing, which — in new forms for the novel and drama — in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation; (1970) A SOLZHENITSYN — for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature; (1971) P NERUDA — for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams; (1972) H BÖLL — for his writing which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal of German literature; (1973) P WHITE — for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent to literature; (1974) E JOHNSON — for a narrative art, far-seeing in lands and ages, in the service of freedom; H MARTINSON — for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos; (1975) E MONTALE — for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions; (1976) S BELLOW — for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work; (1977) V ALEIXANDRE — for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars; (1978) I B SINGER — for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life; (1979) O ELYTIS — for his poetry which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness; (1980) C MI≡OSZ — who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.
Contains alphabetically arranged entries that provide career biographies of twenty-nine twentieth-century Spanish poets; each with a list of principal works and a bibliography.
Women in exile disrupt assumptions about exile, belonging, home and identity. For many women exiles, home represents less a place of belonging and more a point of departure, and exile becomes a creative site of becoming, rather than an unsettling state of errancy. Exile may be a propitious circumstance for women to renegotiate identities far from the strictures of home, appropriating a new freedom in mobility. Through a feminist politics of place, displacement and subjectivity, this comparative study analyses the novels of key contemporary Francophone and Latin American writers Nancy Huston, Linda Le, Malika Mokeddem, Cristina Peri Rossi, Laura Restrepo, and Cristina Siscar to identify a new nomadic subjectivity in the lives and works of transnational women today.