Damaso Alonso

Dámaso Alonso y Fernández de las Redondas (Madrid, October 22, 1898-Madrid, January 25, 1990) was a Spanish writer and philologist, director of the Royal Spanish Academy, the Revista de Filología Española and member of the Royal Academy of History. The Spanish National Poetry Prize in 1927 and the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1978.

Biography

Dámaso Alonso was born in Madrid into a Galician-Asturian family with roots in Ribadeo on his father's side (Dámaso Alonso y Alonso) and in Los Oscos on his mother's (Petra Fernández de las Redondas Díaz, a native and resident of Madrid). He lived in his early childhood in La Felguera (Asturias), where his father, a mining engineer, practiced his profession; but he died of tuberculosis when the future critic and poet was two years old. He studied high school in Madrid, six years with the Jesuits of Chamartín and then at the University of the Augustinians of El Escorial (1917-1918), whose magazine Nueva Etapa he directed, spending his summer vacations in Ribadeo with frequent visits to Los Oscos.

Well gifted for mathematics, which he studied with Augusto Krahe, his family hoped that he would qualify as a civil engineer; but the future poet already showed a fondness for literature that coincided with the friendship he began to have when spending the summer in 1917 among the pine forests of Las Navas del Marqués. It was Vicente Aleixandre, whom he discovered the poetry of Rubén Darío, from whose hobby they later became that of Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose pure poetry influenced Alonso's first poetic books. But since she became seriously ill with her eyesight, she decided that it was best for her to graduate in Law, a career that she nevertheless hated (she had her mother read the syllabus aloud and thus memorize it) and as an official student in Philosophy and Letters, from the Central University of Madrid, where he obtained his doctorate in 1928 with a study on the evolution of syntax by Luis de Góngora.

He studied at the Centro de Estudios Históricos directed by Ramón Menéndez Pidal (something that Federico García Lorca rejected, who advised him to dedicate himself solely to poetry) and took an active part in the activities of the Student Residence directed by the Institutionalist Alberto Jiménez Fraud. There he connected with what would be his generation mates Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel, Pepín Bello, Salvador Dalí, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda and Manuel Altolaguirre. But at the University he was marked by the classes of Andrés Ovejero and Américo Castro, who initiated him in the study of the history of the language and got him the position of lecturer at the University of Berlin (1921-1923), during the terrible time of inflation, in which he received a meager monthly salary of one billion marks. From there he went as a professor of Spanish to the University of Cambridge, in two periods: 1924-1926, at the end of which he published his translation of Portrait of the adolescent artist by James Joyce, with whom he corresponded, and from 1928 to 1929.

In that last year, after attending the founding act of the Generation of 1927 at the Ateneo de Sevilla in vindication of Góngora, he married the philologist and writer Eulalia Galvarriato and they went as teachers to the United States, where they lived the summer in San Francisco, at Stanford University, and the winter in New York, at Hunter College of Columbia University where Federico García Lorca was also housed; there they lived through the crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression; he also gave several lectures.

Literally, he considered himself a member of the Generation of '27 only as a critic, and as a poet within the First postwar poetic generation. He collaborated in the Revista de Occidente and in Los Cuatro Vientos, and vindicated the second stage, the culterana, of the poetry of Luis de Góngora, elaborating to explain it a great theory of the poetic expression within what is generally called Stylistics, his most notable contribution to the history of Philology.

He made a critical edition of Soledades (1927) by this poet, accompanied by an explanatory paraphrase of it. Later he would publish other editions and studies on this author, as detailed as was normal in the philological school of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, in which he was helped by his wife, who also collaborated in his studies on the poetry of San Juan. from the cross.

In 1931 he returned to England, this time to the University of Oxford, where he stayed for two years. In 1932 he wrote his essay El crepúsculo de Erasmo and in 1933 he obtained, in an opposition chaired by Miguel de Unamuno, the chair of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Valencia, although he spent the year 1934 with his wife. at the University of Barcelona.

He disseminates the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the Circle of Prague in the summer courses of the International University of Santander. At that time he edited the lyrical poetry of Gil Vicente and in 1935 he published the first edition of Spanish Poetry , a set of works where he analyzed in depth the stylistics of the Spanish classics; His prestige is already such that he is named a corresponding member of the Hispanic Society, and he spent the course from 1935 to 1936 at the University of Leipzig working with the Swiss philologist Walther von Wartburg to broaden his knowledge of Romance Philology, since he intended to assume the chair that he had left at the Ramón Menéndez Pidal Central University.

With Ortega y Gasset and other intellectuals, he took refuge during the first weeks of the civil war in the Student Residence, for fear of reprisals, since his brothers-in-law were well-known sympathizers of the rebellious side. He spent the rest of the war in Valencia, where he collaborated in the magazine Hora de España ; in 1937 he published Social injustice in Spanish literature and in 1939 his edition of the comedy Don Duardos by Gil Vicente y Tres poetas en desamparo .

After the Spanish Civil War, he managed to be purged without penalty and in 1941 obtained the chair of Romance Philology from Menéndez Pidal (retired at 70) at the University of Madrid; in the latter he formed, among other important disciples, Fernando Lázaro Carreter and Bartolomé Llorens. He was also a visiting professor at several major North American universities. In 1942 he obtained the Fastenrath Prize from the Royal Academy of Language for research in collaboration with his wife Eulalia Galvarriato on San Juan de la Cruz. Among other works, in 1944 he also published poetry: Dark News and Children of Wrath , this book which, according to him, expressed:

I wrote full of disgust before the sterile injustice of the world and the total disappointment of being a man.

For this reason, it is considered within what he himself defined as uprooted Postwar Poetry, an existential consequence of the terrible European wars that forced many then to reconsider whether the alleged benignity of human nature was true. In that same year, his friend Vicente Aleixandre printed his Shadow of Paradise , which obeys the same inspiration. Shortly after, at the request of his friend José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, he read the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who influenced some of the poems added in the second edition, from 1946.

In 1945 he was elected a full member of the Hispanic Society, in 1948 of the Royal Spanish Academy and in 1959 of the Royal Academy of History. He travels to the United States again in 1951 and 1954; in this country he gave courses as visiting professor at Yale, New Haven, John Hopkins and Harvard universities; in 1954 he rested for a month in Mexico. He retired in 1968, the year in which he was elected director of the Royal Academy of Language, succeeding Menéndez Pidal, but resigned from this position in 1982. He was named an honorary member of the Mexican Academy of Language on June 29, 1973. He also received the Cervantes Prize in 1978.

"We must all work for the basic unity of our language in the world.

We have to work for the tongue. Not moved by a nationalist feeling. It's a feeling of brotherhood in twenty countries. No isolated nationalisms.

We will work for our language with a feeling of veneration and respect like the one that usually exists around a child who awaits a great destiny. The destiny of our language is to be a bond of brotherhood, peace and culture among the hundreds and hundreds of millions of beings who, in ever-growing proportion, have to speak in the twenty-first century and in the centuries and centuries of a very long future."

His health deteriorated rapidly, and in his last two years he lost his speech. He died of a heart attack in January 1990 at her house in Madrid. At his funeral, his wife recited two verses from Children of Wrath:

Virgin Mary, Mother, / I want to sleep in your arms until I wake up in God.

Dámaso Alonso, poet

The importance of Dámaso Alonso, within Spanish culture, easily exceeds the limits traditionally established around the figure of a poet, of a creator, since in the Madrid author the creative, aesthetic and existential qualities of his poetic work, the dimension of his philological, critical and stylistic work together with a constant militancy, of universal measures in defense of our common language. However, it is not possible to judge the work of the writer without reflecting on his work as a scholar.

Not only because of Hijos de la ira we must consider the writer an extraordinary poet. Despite being called by Rafael Ferreres a poet in fits and starts, a permanent constancy stands out from his work. Alonso's poetry has been in the making for almost seventy years if we take into account that his first work Poemas puros, poemillas de ciudad began to be written in 1918 and that his last published work, Dudas y love over the Supreme Being, appears at the end of 1985.

His book Poemas puros, poemillas de la ciudad (1924) is classified as pure poetry inspired by Juan Ramón. Starting in 1939, the great knock of the Civil War and the no less desperate post-war period moved him deeply and he published Dark news, the title of which comes from San Juan de la Cruz -"The news that God instills in you, is dark»- and his most important work, Sons of Wrath (1944; second edition corrected and enlarged in 1946) where, inspired by the stylistic procedure of progressive parallelism present in the Biblical poetry from penitential psalms and postwar existentialist philosophy, expresses a torn and gloomy vision of the human condition, using long verses and violent language that makes room for vulgar and rude vocabulary. He accuses, curses and protests the grotesque spectacle of the world, then immersed in a terrible global war.

Followed by this landmark work, which inaugurated and inspired the so-called Poetry uprooted (together with Shadow of Paradise by his friend Vicente Aleixandre), Man and God (1955), a lyrical book of rootless poetry with a very personal religiosity. An existentialist imprint is noticeable and the influence of James Joyce is visible, whose novel Portrait of the adolescent artist had been translated by Alonso under the anagrammatic pseudonym Alfonso Donado in 1926. In this His latest foray into religious themes is Doubt and love about the Supreme Being (1985).

Plate with verses of Dámaso Alonso in Loja, Granada.

His work as a philologist and editor

His important philological work also corresponds to this stage, fundamentally within the field of stylistics, represented by the following studies: The poetry of San Juan de la Cruz (1942), Poetry Spanish: Essay on stylistic methods and limits (1950) and Estudios y ensayos gongorinos (1955). His complete works have been published in ten volumes by Editorial Gredos.

In 1957 he published Notas gallego-asturianas de los tres Oscos, a linguistic study of the Asturian Galician spoken in his mother's native region. In 1969 he returned to the subject of the fala of the Oscos in Galician-Asturian Oral Narratives (San Martín de Oscos): I. Memories of childhood and youth, published in Cuadernos of Galician Studies, which was followed by a second part in 1977, Oral Narratives in the Galician-Asturian of the Oscos. Stories, healing formulas and incantations by Carmen de Freixe (San Martín de Oscos) , a work included in the tribute volume dedicated by the University of Oviedo to her disciple Emilio Alarcos Llorach.

He founded the Hispanic Romance Library collection within Editorial Gredos and was director of the Revista de Filología Española. As director of the Royal Spanish Academy, he tried to unite the remaining American language academies in a common effort, in order to avoid or delay the feared linguistic fragmentation of the language. This position will be taken up later with the pan-Hispanic vision of the academies, which is the current position. His vast specialized library was donated to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) on his death.

Works

• Complete works. Ed. de Valentín García Yebra. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1972-1993, 10 vols.
  • I. Peninsular linguistic studies.
  • II-IV. Studies and essays on literature.
  • V-VII. Góngora and gongorism.
  • VIII. Text comments.
  • IX. Spanish poetry and other studies.
  • X. Verse and literary prose.

Poetry and literary prose

• Pure Poems. Poemillas de la ciudadM., Galatea, 1921.
• The wind and the verseM., yeah. Bello Spanish Bulletin of the Andaluz Universal, 1925.
• "Tormenta", in Litoral1927
• Sons of wrath. Intimate journal, M., Revista de Occidente, 1944 (2.a edic. enlarged, Bs. As., Espasa-Calpe, 1946).
• Dark newsM. Col. Adonais, 1944.
• Man and GodMalaga, El Arroyo de los Angeles, 1955.
• Three sonnets on the Castilian languageM., Gredos, 1958.
• Occasional poetry1958.
• Selected Poems, M., Gredos, 1969 (Contains poems not collected in book).
• Poetic anthology. Llobregat Swords: Plaza & Janés1980.
• Eyes. Pure Poems. Poemillas of the city. Other poemsM., Espasa-Calpe, 1981.
• Voice of the tree1982.
• Anthology of our monstrous world. Doubt and love about the Supreme BeingM., Chair, 1985.
• That day in Jerusalem: Passion's auto, for radio broadcasting: (in a prologue and three paintings). Madrid: Condor1986.
• Poetic anthology. Madrid: Alianza Editorial1989.
• Album. Verses of youth, B., Tusquets, 1993 (Edition of Alexander Duque Amusco and Mary-Jesus Velo. With Vicente Aleixandre and others).
• Verse and literary prose, Madrid, Gredos, 1993 (Complete Works, Volume X).
• Personal anthology. Madrid: Visor Books, 2001.
• A river was called Damasus: poetic anthology. Madrid: Vitruvio, 2002.

Philology and literary criticism

• Critical edition of Luis de Góngora Soledades(1927).
• Evolution of the Syntax of Góngora1928. Doctoral thesis.
• That harp of Bécquer1935.
• The poetic language of Góngora, 1935
• The Dramatic Poetry in Gil Vicente's Don Duardos1939.
• Ed. of Gil Vicente, Poetry, 1940
• The Poetry of Saint John of the Cross: from this hillside1942.
• Ed. of Gil Vicente, Tragicmedia de don Duardos1942.
• Essays on Spanish poetry1944.
• Poetry and novel in Spain: conferences1949.
• An aspect of the Petrquism: the poetic correlation1950.
• Spanish poetry: essay of methods and stylistic limits: Garcilaso, Fray Luis de León, San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora, Lope de Vega, Quevedo1950; 2.a ed. 1952.
• With Carlos Bousoño, Six coves in Spanish literary expression: prose, poetry, theatre1951.
• Contemporary Spanish Poets, 1952.
• Address at the solemn opening of academic year 1955-1956: life and poetry in Fray Luis de León1955.
• Gongorian studies and essays1955.
• Anthology: Critical1956.
• Anthology of Spanish poetry; lyric of traditional type1956.
• In the Andalusia of E: Artistic Dialectology1956.
• Menéndez Pelayo, literary critic: the palinodias of Don Marcelino1956.
• From the dark centuries to the Golden: notes and articles through 700 years of Spanish letters1958.
• Two Spaniards from the Golden Age. A Madrid poet, Latinist and Franciscan in the middle of the 16th century. The Fabio of the "moral Epistle": his face and cross in Mexico and Spain1959.
• Góngora and Polifemo (I think about it) Polifemo and GalateaGóngora, 1960.
• The Italian book1961.
• Early spring of European literature: lyric, epic, novel1961.
• From the Golden century to this century of acronyms: notes and articles through 350 years of lyrics, Spanish1962.
• Four Spanish poets: Garcilaso, Góngora, Maragall, Antonio Machado1962.
• With Eulalia Galvarriato, For Góngora biography: unknown documents1962.
• With Luis Rosales and Eulalia Galvarriato, Spring and Flower of Hispanic Literature1967.
• Menéndez Pidal and the Spanish culture1969.
• The Cervantine novel1969.
• Spanish songbook and romance1969.
• Gallag-asturian oral Narrations. San Martín de Oscos I: Memories of childhood and youth1969.
• About Lope: Marino, Cervantes, Benavente, Góngora, Los Cardenios1972.
• Folk tradition and artistic creation in El Lazarillo de Tormes1972.
• Oral Narrations in Galician-asturian Oscos. Relatos formulas curativas y ensalmos de Carmen de Freixe. San Martín de Oscos1977.
• The moral epistle to Fabio de Andrés Fernández de Andrada. Editing and study. Madrid: Gredos, 1978.
• Reflections on my poetry1984.
• Life of Don Francisco de Medrano1984.

Translations

• With Alfonso Donado's pseud, James Joyce, Portrait of the teenage artist1926.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins Poems, 1948.
• Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1948.

Music and sound recordings

• Archive of the word. No. 6. Madrid: Publications Service of the Ministry of Education and Science1981.
• Songbook of the Passion of Our Lord. Alonso, D. and Galvarriato, E. (ed. lit.). Madrid: PAX1991.
• Christmas songbook. Alonso, D. and Galvarriato, E. (ed. lit.). Madrid: PAX1991.
• JULIÀ, Bernat. Eight poetic songs: for voice and piano [Partitura]. Madrid: Real Musical1996.
• The poets sing to the Virgin. Alonso, D. and Galvarriato, E. (ed. lit.). Madrid: PAX1991.
• Eucharistic poetry. Alonso, D. and Galvarriato, E. (ed. lit.). Madrid: PAX1991.
• Presence of Dionisio Ridruejo: 2nd anniversary of his death: cultural events in the National Library22 June 1977.

Translations of the work of Dámaso Alonso

• Essays zur spanischen Literatur. München: Max Hueber1974
• Figli dell'ira [Sons of wrath]. Chiarini, G. (dir.) Firenze: Vallechi, 1967
• GÓNGORA, L. Samoty s [Soledades]. Alonso, D. (ed. lit.). Praha: Odeon1970
• Children of wrath = Children of wrath. Rivers, E. L. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press1970
• Pluralità e correlazione di poesia.Rostaing, M. and Minervini, V. Bari: Adriatica, 1971
• Poezie spaniola: metode incercare if limit stililstice Garcilaso, Fray Luis de León San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora, Lope de Vega, Quevedo [Spanish poetry]. Marculescu, S. Bucaresti: Univers, 1977
• Söhne des Zorns: gedichte [Sons of wrath]. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1950
• Spanische Dichtung: Versuch über Methoden und Grenzen der Stilistik. Eich, C. and Reiss, I. (ed. lit.). Bern: Francke Verlag1962
• Uomo e Dio [Man and God]. Macri, O. (ed. lit.). Milano: Vanni Scheiwiller1962

Awards

• Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X el Sabio (1977)
• 1981.- Doctor honoris causa (University of Oviedo)
• 1974.- Doctor honoris causa (University of Lisbon)
• 1969. Essay Award (Spain)
• 1962. Doctor honoris causa (University of Oxford)
• 1961.- Doctor honoris causa (University of Rome)
• 1957.- Doctor honoris causa (University of Fribourg)
• 1950.- Doctor honoris causa (University of Bordeaux)
• 1950.- Doctor honoris causa (University of Hamburg)
• 1948. Doctor honoris causa (University of Peru)
• 1943.- Fastenrath Award (Spain)
• 1927.- National Literature Award (Spain)

Predecessor: Alejo Carpentier	Miguel de Cervantes Award 1978	Successor: "ex aequo" Jorge Luis Borges and Gerardo Diego
Predecessor: Miguel Asin Palacios	Academician of the Royal Spanish Academy Armchair d 1948 - 1990	Successor: Francisco Rodríguez Adrados
Predecessor: Ramón Menéndez Pidal	Director of the Royal Spanish Academy 1968 - 1982	Successor: Pedro Laín Entralgo
Predecessor: Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart and Falcó	Royal Academy of History. Medal 1 1959 - 1990	Successor: Felipe Ruiz Martín