Angel Crespo

Ángel Crespo Pérez (Madrid, Ciudad Real, July 18, 1926-Barcelona, December 12, 1995) was a Spanish poet, essayist, translator, and art critic.

Biography

He was born in Ciudad Real on July 18, 1926, into a family of medium-sized landowners. Until the outbreak of the Civil War, he lived between the capital and Alcolea de Calatrava, where his mother —María de los Ángeles Pérez de Madrid y Céspedes— owned farms. His father, Ángel Crespo Crespo, was a Telegraph official.

The connection with nature will mark his life and it will be noticed in his work. He spends the three years of the war in Ciudad Real, without attending school and receiving lessons at home. A friend of his parents who was a French teacher and was taking refuge in his house, taught him this language.

She read Jean Henri Fabre On the life of animals and communes with nature and reading in the passage owned by her parents known as Cuesta del Jaral; he makes a great impression on a book on Greek mythology, especially the iconography and legends of Hermes. At the end of the war he undertook his baccalaureate studies, between readings by Salgari, Verne and Rice Burroughs. He reads the Spanish and Latin classics, and among his favorite authors are Rubén Darío, Berceo, Espronceda and the Duke of Rivas.

He began to write poetry and published it in the media of the province. He translates fragments of Virgil's Georgics into linked triplets. His uncle Pascual Crespo gave him the anthology Spanish Poetry 1915-1931 and he felt attracted to surrealism and creationism. After finishing high school, in 1943, he moved to Madrid to study Law, following his father's wish, instead of Philosophy and Letters, as he would have liked.

In Madrid, he discovered Postismo as soon as its first Manifesto was published in 1945, and he established a relationship with its founders Eduardo Chicharro, Carlos Edmundo de Ory and Silvano Sernesi. In Postismo he finds a renewal in relation to the poetry that was being written in Spain at the time, polarized by the Garcilasista and Tremendista groups, and adheres to it. He studies the isms of the historical avant-garde, reads Dante and modern French and Italian poets, and is interested in esotericism. He begins to write art criticism. In 1948, in collaboration with Ory, he organized the exhibition 16 Artists of Today at the Bucholz Gallery in Madrid.

After finishing his law degree in 1949, he spent six months in Tetuan to finish his military service. It is his first stay outside of Spain, which he will consider essential for his training. Upon returning to Spain, he took refuge in Alcolea to prepare oppositions to Notaries and dedicated himself to writing poetry. He then writes the book that he will consider the first of his own voice, A language emerges , and publishes it in 1950. It is the first book of what has been called his magical realism.

In 1950, back in Madrid, he began working as a lawyer and became increasingly involved in Madrid's cultural life. In the same year, with Gabino Alejandro Carriedo and Federico Muelas, he founded and co-directed the poetry magazine El pájaro de paja (1950-1954) and he alone, in 1951, founded and directed the magazine Deucalión (1951-1953), sponsored by the Diputación de Ciudad Real. Throughout the 50's he continued with art criticism and published seven books of poetry that constituted the stage of his magical realism.

He is invited to the Salamanca Poetry Congress (July 1953) and becomes a prominent figure in the post-war renewal of Spanish culture. In 1956 he married María Luisa Madrilley, from whom he separated years later. He makes his first trip to Portugal. In 1957 his son Ángel was born. That same year he began to publish his translations of Fernando Pessoa with a selection of Alberto Caeiro's Poems.

During the 1960s, Ángel Crespo, who is involved in the clandestine struggle against the dictatorship, is concerned with realism and writes poetry with a committed intention, although he rejects Marxist aesthetics. To promote his points of view, he founded and directed, with Gabino Alejandro Carriedo, the magazine Poesía de España (1960-1963), where he published the poets with whose conception of realism he is more than agreement.

In 1962, he founded and directed the Revista de Cultura Brasileña, sponsored by the Embassy of Brazil in Madrid, which he would continue to direct until 1970 and in which he would introduce Spanish readers to the flourishing Brazilian culture and It will disseminate the positions of its vanguard, including concrete poetry. In 1961 he met Pilar Gómez Bedate, whom he would marry years later.

In 1963 he traveled to Italy for the first time, with her, and the experience of this trip —which would have a decisive influence on his poetry— encouraged him to leave his profession as a lawyer and start a new life, far from the harassment of Franco's police and disagreements with his fellow party members. In 1964 he published «El caso Eugenio Hermoso» in the magazine Artes , on December 23rd, a highly commented criticism at the time about the Extremaduran painter Eugenio Hermoso. In 1966 he published The Florentine Dozen , a book in which the committed point of view persists but which uses decidedly modern language full of cultural references (culturalism). In 1967 he accepted the invitation from the University of Puerto Rico to teach in its Department of Humanities and moved to this country along with her new classmate, also invited by the University to teach in the Comparative Literature program.

The new stage in the life of Ángel Crespo, who will not return to Spain until a democratic Constitution has been implemented, is cosmopolitan: always having Puerto Rico as his base —where he was deeply involved in his teaching and research tasks— and his fixed address in Mayagüez, he received his doctorate at the University of Upsala (Sweden) —with a thesis on El moro expósito of the Duke of Rivas— and taught as Visiting Professor at the Universities of Leiden, Venice and Washington; He also gave lectures in various places and countries, he was invited as a poet to International Congresses as a modern humanist. He translates into verse the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and the Cancionero by Francesco Petrarca, works for which he received National Translation Awards; He is interested in the Portuguese poetry of Fernando Pessoa, about which he composes some essays, including a biography, The plural life of Fernando Pessoa (1988), and translates some texts. His poetry becomes more and more aphorismatic.

In 1988 he returned to Spain permanently and settled in Barcelona, where he worked as a Visiting Professor at the Central and Autonomous University, and was finally named Professor Emeritus at Pompeu Fabra University. He dies in this city in 1995.

During the years in Barcelona, he will alternate his life in this city with long periods in Calaceite, a town in Teruel where he will revive his contacts with nature from his origins and where he will once again write a poetry that reflects this relationship. He is buried in the Calaceite cemetery.

In 2011 his first biography was published, Humanidad y humanismo de Ángel Crespo (1926-1995), whose author is Amador Palacios, a specialist in the currents of Spanish poetry in which Crespo participated.

Work

A key figure in the Spanish cultural panorama of the 1950s and 1960s, the poet Ángel Crespo was relegated to oblivion as a result of his voluntary retirement to Puerto Rico in 1968 due to critics of the Communist Party in which he was a member, overwhelmed by the political situation of those years and for the aesthetic struggle, since realism of a Marxist nature was defended at all costs and he did not admit pamphleteering realism. In 1971 he published En medio del camino , a work that collected his poetry up to that moment. In 1983 he published El bosque transparente , which brings together his poetry from the 70s; in 1985, The bird in its air. In 1996, the Jorge Guillén Foundation published three volumes containing his poetry published up to then and most of the unpublished up to that time. He wrote an autobiographical text entitled My converging paths and, for several years, diaries of which The works of the spirit (1971-1972 and 1978-1979) have been published, written in Sweden, Puerto Rico, Italy and Spain, and rich in personal reflections on, for example, Dante's poetry, literature in minority languages or the daily experience of the author and his friends.

His poetic work is not easily ascribed to any tendency, so that critics have had difficulties to fit Crespo into some of the currents of postwar poetry. If he began with Postismo, in which his first poems are framed, he went on to other stages called with the labels of "magical realism", of "culturalist humanism"; and of "transcendent humanism" or "esoteric poetry". His verse has a rich sonority typical of someone who had an exceptional musical ear, and it is imaginative and dreamlike. He uses a rich symbolism and feeds, from his very origins, on materials from very different sources: the biographical, the everyday, the cultural tradition and the mythical. Poetry is for him a way of knowing, a search for the sacred, always mysterious, from within language, and contains an implicit philosophy in its artistic formulation. Crespo faces the limitations of language to express an intuited reality beyond itself and through symbolization processes transcends the arbitrary and conventional dimension of the literary sign to accommodate a progressively broader and more unitary conception of reality (world and I). The Crespian symbols have a pagan and initiatory religious virtuality as an inalienable part of the psyche in the search for Meaning as the objective of all human manifestations. Likewise, the Crespian lyric is easily inscribed in the international context of the lyric of its time for assuming very varied cultural traditions. His poetic work has been translated, among other languages, into Italian, Portuguese, French, Greek, Swedish and German. He was also an outstanding translator, especially of Dante Alighieri, of whom he wrote the Divine Comedy in chained triplets, but also of the Songbook by Francesco Petrarca and the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. There are also excellent versions to his credit of the Chanson de Roland, of the Memories of Giacomo Casanova, Eugénio de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Guimarães Rosa, Cesare Pavese and Maragall.

He obtained, among other recognitions, the Italian Readers and Booksellers prize for his translation of Dante's Comedy (which also earned him the Gold Medal della Nascita di Dante from the city of Florence); the Silver Medal of the University of Venice; the National Translation Prize for his version of Petrarca's Songbook, in 1984; the City of Barcelona prize for poetry in Spanish for his poetic book El bosque transparente ; and the National Award for the work of a translator, in 1993.

Author's Bibliography

Lyrical

• Meseta (Real City: Alpha Types, 1943)
• Crazy to tie (1945-1946)
• A language emerges (Real City: Institute of Manchegos Studies, 1950)
• There are signs left (Madrid: Nebli, 1952)
• The painting (Madrid: Ágora, 1955)
• Everything is alive. (Madrid: Ágora, 1956)
• The basket and the river (Madrid: Lazarillo, 1957)
• Happy June (Madrid: Adonais, 1959)
• Oda a Nanda Papiri (Cuenca: El Toro de Barro, 1959)
• Door stuck (Montevideo: Sea Horse, 1961)
• Submit and follow (1958-1960) (Barcelona: Colliure, 1962)
• Letters from a well (1957-1963) (Santander: The Isle of the Rats, 1964)
• I don't know how to say it. (Carbons of Guadazaón: The Bull of Barro, 1965)
• Dozen Florentine (Madrid: Poetry for all, 1966)
• Sure, dark. (Zaragoza: Independent Life, 1978)
• Collection of climates (Seville: Aldebaran, 1978)
• Over time, against time (Carbons of Guadazaón: The Bull of Barro, 1978)
• The invisible light (Carbons of Guadazaón: El Toro de Barro, 1981)
• Where the air doesn't run (Seville: Vasija, 1981)
• The air is of the gods (Zaragoza: Olifante, 1982)
• Confidential parking (Jerez: Arenal, 1984)
• Fire occupation (Madrid: Hiperion, 1990)
• Initiation in the shadow (Madrid: Hiperion, 1996)
• Aphorisms (Madrid: Huerga " Fierro, 1997)
• Amadís and the explorer (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2015)

Anthology

• First anthology of my verses (1942-1948) (Real City: Jabalon Editions, 1949)
• Poetry anthology (Valencia: Verb, 1960)
• In the middle of the road (Poeesy 1949-1970) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971), complete poetry with unpublished poems
• Transparent forest (Poetry 1971-1981) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983)
• Poetry anthology (Venice: Editrice Cafoscarina Library, 1984.
• The bird in its air (1975-1984) (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1985)
• First Poetry (1942-1949) (Real City: Library of Authors and Subjects, 1993)
• Poetry (Valladolid: Fundación Jorge Guillén, 1996), complete poetry in three volumes
• Poems in prose (1965-1994) (Tarragona: Igitur, 1998), edition of Pilar Gómez Bedate with prologue by Carlos Edmundo de Ory
• Occult transparency (Poetic anthology 1950-1959) (Cuenca: El Toro de Barro, 2000 by Carlos Morales), with Toni Montesinos prologue
• The entire reality (Poetic anthology 1949-1995) (Barcelona: Lesson Circle, 2005)
• Poetic anthology (1949-1995) (Barcelona: Chair, 2009)
• The will to endure (Poems 1949-1964) (Badajoz, Fundación Ortega Muñoz, 2016)

Essay

• The case Eugenio Hermoso (Madrid: Revista ARTES No. 62, 23 December 1964)
• Poetry, invention and metaphysics (Mayagüez: University of Puerto Rico, 1970)
• Structural aspects of The moro expósito, of the Duke of Rivas (Upsaliensis Academiae, 1973)
• Juan Ramón Jiménez and the painting (San Juan de Puerto Rico: Editorial Universitaria, 1974)
• Dante and his work (Barcelona: Dopesa, 1979)
• Studies on Pessoa (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1984)
• Dante (Barcelona: Barcanova, 1985)
• El Duque de Rivas (Gijón: Júcar, 1986)
• Lisbon (Barcelona: Destination, 1987)
• The ashes of the flower (Gijón: Júcar, 1987)
• The plural life of Fernando Pessoa (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1988), biography of the Luso poet translated into German, Dutch, Portuguese and Italian.
• With Fernando Pessoa (Madrid: Huerga and Fierro, 1995)
• For centuries (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2001)
• The poet and his invention (Barcelona: Gutenberg Galaxy, 2007)

Translations

• Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Alberto Caeiro (Madrid: Adonais, 1957)
• João Guimarães Rosa, Great Serton: Veredes (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1963)
• Anthology of the new Portuguese poetry (Madrid: Adonais, 1961)
• Eight Brazilian poets (Carbons of Guadazón: El Toro de Barro, 1981)
• Junichiro Tanizaki, Wicked counts (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1968), retranslation from English.
• Dante Alighieri, Hell (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1973)
• Anthology of Brazilian poetry (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1973)
• Dante Alighieri, Purgatory (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976)
• Classic Latin poetry (Barcelona: Editions B, 1988), study and annotated versions of Lucilio, Lucrecio, Catulo, Virgilio, Horacio, Ovidio, etc.
• Dinis Machado, What Molero says (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1981)
• Dante Alighieri, Divine comedy (Barcelona: Reading Circle, 1981)
• Fernando Pessoa, The poet is a faker (Poetic anthology) (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1982)
• Anthology of contemporary Portuguese poetry (Madrid: Júcar, 1982)
• Francesco Petrarca, Songbook (Barcelona: Burguera, 1988)
• Turoldo, Cantar de Roldán (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983)
• Fernando Pessoa, Book of Disappearance (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984)
• Giacomo Casanova, Memories of Spain (Barcelona: Planet, 1986)
• Fernando Pessoa, The return of the gods (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986)
• Antonio Osorio, Poetry anthology (Zaragoza: Olifante, 1986)
• Fernando Pessoa, Love letters to Ofelia (Barcelona: Editions B, 1988)
• Fernando Pessoa, Fausto (Madrid: Tecnos, 1989)
• Didier Coste, XII. (Barcelona: Noésis, 1992)