Ruben Dario

Rubén Darío is considered the most influential Spanish language modernist poet, and his book of poems, Azul, the opening salvo of Spanish language modernist poetry. I stress the term ‘Spanish language’ because Darío was born in Nicaragua but traveled throughout the world fulfilling his post as a foreign diplomat. He is most associated with el cisne, which led to one Mexican poet to write an anti-modernist poem in which he manifests his protest with the line: “torcerse el cuello del cinse.” Darío experimented with foreign and little used forms in Spanish lyricism, such as the alejandrino, in his search for musical harmony. For Darío, music was the ideal language, and his poetry reflected this conceptualization. In addition, his poetry is characterized by synesthesia, especially sensations sound (music) and sight (a plethora of colors), and an abundance of analogies, metaphors, alliteration, symbols, signs, different tones and registers, and an elaborate display of language. While Bécquer was characterized by 4 verbs for every adjective in his poetry, Darío employed many adjectives to evoke the same sentiment.

Modernists were identified by among other characteristics for their distancing from the social world that they inhabited, alejarse del mundo ruin, looking for beauty outside of their materialistic and dehumanized environment and denouncing their contemporary world with subtlety. Darío’s poetry exemplifies this attitude; “Era un aire suave” navigates the princely courts of the French king, Louis the XIV, whose self-given nickname was the Sun King. “Venus” is a poem of anguished love directed at the planet and goddess aptly named Venus. “Responso”, a poem dedicated to Paul Verlaine, compares the aforementioned, deceased poet to the god Pan and the mythological creature the centaur. Classical mythology, foreign spaces, imagined spaces, frivolous luxury of the ancients, pastoral figures and a ghostly absence of anything modern is prevalent in his poetry. His poems are outside of history, time and reality. “Yo el tiempo y el día y el país ignoro,/ pero sé que Eulalia ríe todavía,/ ¡y es cruel y eterna su risa de oro!” (“Era un aire suave”). This poetic trope is also in response to the secularization of society and the loss of the sacred…his poetry searches for the answers to transcendent questions that religion had once taken on.

Symbolism was a great influence on Darío’s works, and his admiration for French symbolist poets is evident in both his poetics and in such explicit examples as his elegy to Paul Verlaine. One important symbolist aspect of Darío’s works, and one that Bécquer also utilized, is synesthesia. “Era un aire suave” names a plethora of musical instruments, sounds and dances (movement): ritmar, violoncelos, trémolo, liras, Eulalia’s laughter, orchestra, magical notes, a chorus of winged sounds, dances to Hungarian violins, staccati, trino, arpegio, etc…etc…The poem reflects this obsession with musicality. It is written as an alejandrino (“Sonatina” being another example), has a consonant rhyme scheme, alliterations (“que desdenes rudos lanza bajo el ala,/ bajo el ala aleve del leve abanico”) and reflects the lyrical rhyme mentioned in the poem. Trémolo is a rapid succession of many equal notes of the same duration; 3 times repeated “la divina Eulalia ríe ríe ríe”. This repetition of ríe achieves trémolo, as does the tactic that Darío uses of ending a verse and beginning the next verse with the same word (“boscaje,/ boscaje”).

This leads into the discussion of language, music and analogies. For the Modernists, as well as the Symbolists and Romantics, the world is a harmonized place and all things are interconnected, no matter how distant they may seem. Things cease to only be things and are transformed into signs or symbols, representations of spaces; also, the poetic tropes utilized by Darío not only make his poetry beautiful but reinforce his vision of the world, beautiful and musical; they are expressive forms in their own right (as mentioned in the previous paragraph). Language for Darío as for Bécquer is not sufficient in capturing beauty; for Darío, the perfect language is music, signs that refer to nothing outside of themselves. Music is essential to life and existence for Darío and his poetry.

The Wire and Lorca

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200708/?read=interview_simon

A cool interview with David Simon, creator and one of the writers of The Wire.

The resting place of Federico Garcia Lorca, which will be dug up due to the Ley de Memoria Historica.

Musings on Romance de lobos

I don't know if this makes sense, but I tend to project my interests and beliefs on the works that I'm reading. Whenever I read something, I focus first on the humor and enjoyment aspect before anything else, which might not be the best thing for a graduate student in Spanish literature who should be suffering, questioning everything, having a critical and engaged experience with the words on the page...I'd rather laugh and have fun. But once I get past that and realize you can't just say I liked that book, it's good, it's funny, uh uh., I decide to focus more. However, I find it hard to not either project my social beliefs on a work nor is it easy to take what I've read and see the bigger picture, how it fits into the larger picture of the author's production, time period, history, genre, metaphors, symbols, and to see the differences and similarities with past writers/works. One issue I have is paying attention to the plot and argument more than the formal aspects; I like good stories. So one thing I need to improve upon is taking a work, drawing a larger conceptual map and then supporting that theoretical scaffolding with concise, specific examples from the works that I'm reading.
Romance de lobos can be one of those works; I cannot read VI's works without first thinking about the consistent employment of grotesque elements...the dead Indian child eaten by pigs in Tirano Banderas, Max Estrella dying on the street, cold, alone, his friend robbing his winning lottery ticket, the need to test and see if he's really dead by burning his toe, and I'd say that there are a lot of grotesque images and actions in Romance de lobos. The sons fight over their inheritance while their just dead mother Maria's body is upstairs. Tended by two women, one woman has sewed her a mortaje without fixing the hems (because it's not like she's going to a dance) and then cutting it in half to put it on her. Maria's face is bloated and blue. One son is a priest, who neglects to say the prayers and take care of his Christian duties regarding his mother. On the contrary, he is obsessed with who took the valuable silverware; later we see him climbing into the chapel where her body has been laid and proceeds to steal the sacred cups. There is a constant bombardment of discomforting and grotesque images.
It is important to note the critic Kaiser's definition of the grotesque: 'estrangement from the real'. If we agree with Kaiser, entering into an unknown world is the grotesque. From the very moment the play begins, the atmosphere is uncomfortable and unknown. Our horseman is drunk, returning from the feria which is a wink at the Carnaval/grotesque; there is a terrible storm; he falls off his horse, is lifted through the air and then is immediately confronted by the Santa Campana, a funeral procession. Its surreal qualities jolt Montenegro; there is a river the size of a lake that symbolizes the River Styx, they are building a bridge between life and death, and on the other bank is a burial, which he assumes to be of his wife, Maria. The witches of the procession turn into bats and fly away, and Montenegro is returned to 'reality' to flee back to his house in the storm.
Given the extent of the grosteque, it is hard to take seriously the reading of this work as only the Catholic Redemption of a devil sinner, the patriarch of the Montenegro family. Undoubtedly this is a valid reading, but not alone. It does not take into consideration the historically symbolic role of this novel/play, nor does it allow for the generic experimentation (is it a dialogued novel, a hybrid novel/play) nor the abundance of grotesque elements.
What is the historical occurrence equivalent to the plot of this novel? Decay of traditional values, great men, to avarious greedy animals. It mirrors the downfall of Spain, especially in the 19th century, and the attempt to unearth the reasons behind its decadence. Montenegro refers many times to the greatness of his family lineage, full of great capitans and saints. However, it is evident that this greatness did not trickle down to his sons; rather, they are animalistic, barbaric, brutal wolves, Cains, ravens. Where did this deformation of lineage come from? It does not come from the outside (of Spain or Montenegro). Nowhere does Valle-Inclan blame French ideas or foreign intereference.
Lost my train of thought...

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Bécquer has been labeled as a Romantic poet and as an initiating force, the father, of the modern Spanish lyric, a sort of bridge between the two poetic worlds. His poetry retains certain characteristics of Romanticism, such as an exploration of the role of inspiration and genius in the creation of poetry, a formal lyrical freedom and the ‘I’ subject. However, his posthumously published poetry can be seen as representative of his symbolic role as bridge, since he uses this metaphor in his Rimas to describe the need to mediate the gap between “el mundo de las ideas” and the poem itself. Bécquer was extremely influential for Juan Ramón Jiménez and many poets of the Generación ’27 (links which I want to further investigate once I delve further into their works); Dámaso Alonso called him a contemporary poet.

What are Bécquer’s poetics and how does this lead to us to consider him the father of modern Spanish poetry and not a latecomer to the Romantic movement? Poetry for Bécquer exists outside of the personal, subjective poet and is a ‘sentimiento’ that exists independent of poems and the poet. “Podrá no haber poetas, pero siempre/ ¡habrá poesía!” Rima IV. He does believe in poetic inspiration, but he allows this feeling (‘sentimiento’) to sit and does not write inspired. Bécquer explains, “…cuando siento no escribo”. This allows for de-individualization of the poetic self: rather than an expression of interior, subjective feelings and emotions per Romantics, avoiding an excessive sentimentality and relegating to a lower sphere the need for biographical resources. Once the poet has experienced this poetic inspiration and creates distance between himself and the feeling, then he utilizes reason and intelligence takes over. The poet employs language (incapable of truly expressing feeling) to attempt to capture and transmit the more objective, universal poetic feeling. This constant battle between the poet and his inspiration/reason can be seen in a few of his Rimas, especially in Rima III. That is another important characteristic of his poetry, the metapoetic concerns. In addition to his introduction to “La Soledad” and his various cartas, one can look to his poems to understand his poetics. This is one aspect that is taken up by the modern Spanish poets.

This process reminds me of how Baudelaire describes modern aesthetic production in “The Painter of Modern Life”. The painter sees figures in the streets during the day and feels inspiration, but he allows these forms to dissipate and disassociate from the actual object he saw. Then at night he paints the memories of the forms once viewed, turning a subjective view into a more objective one. The difference here would be that Bécquer is not necessarily taking objects from the outside world and transforming them into poems; on the contrary, this poetic feeling exists outside of his world.

One of the most important legacies that Bécquer passed down to future poets was the solution to the insufficiency of language: synesthesia. Rather than expressively name the object or idea that is impossible to express anyway due to language’s insufficiency in capturing the poetic feeling, suggestion of this thing allows for a closer approximation. This is apparent in Rima I: “con palabras que fuesen a un tiempo/ suspiros y risas, colores y notas.” Bécquer’s poetry appeals to the human senses of smell, touch, sight and sound, evoking instead of pronouncing. Another important point that should be mentioned is his interest in popular poetry (from Sevilla, Bécquer explored the popular form cantares), evident in shorter, concise poems, simpler language and the musicality and ease in remembering his poems. This aspect is important for many future poets such as García Lorca.