Hannibal Nunez

Aníbal Núñez San Francisco (Salamanca, November 1, 1944-ibid., March 13, 1987) was a Spanish poet, painter and engraver.

Biography

Son of photographer José Núñez Larraz and Ángela San Francisco, he was born and trained in Salamanca, his hometown. He studied Modern Philology at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Salamanca; later he was a student at the School of Nobles and Fine Arts of San Eloy and the School of Arts and Crafts. He wrote numerous books of poetry and left an equally abundant pictorial work.

A highly educated man, he knew how to express himself in two artistic languages —one plastic, the other poetic— with great fluency and knowledge and knew how to recognize in translation the best exercise to develop the poet's technical capacity. He translated, among others, Propertius, Catullus and Rimbaud.

Despite the unity and undeniable originality of his work, recognition during his lifetime was very partial and intermittent: even having published his second book (Fábulas domesticas) at the express wish of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán at Ocnos (then one of the most prestigious national collections), critics ignored his work. Aníbal Núñez had problems publishing the rest of his books, and those who crossed the threshold of the unpublished frequently suffered numerous obstacles and restrictions. This situation meant that most of the books that he came to publish would have been written by the poet many years before. Today, critics have great difficulty classifying his work —increasingly recognized— in any of the tendencies of contemporary Spanish poetry.

Work

It can be said, in a general but limited way, that the poetic work of Aníbal Núñez is articulated on some substantial principles; we are referring to those points on which criticism affects and seems to agree: the dissociation between reality and meaning, the conception of its creation as an open work, and the dissolution of history in poetic language.

• with Angel Bolivar: 29 poems, 1967
• Domestic fables, 1972
• Unrecoverable nature1972-1974
• Ultramarine tubes1974
• Definition of sap1974
• House without ending1974
• Figure in a landscape1974
• Workshop of the sorcerer1979
• Quartz1981
• Trino in pond1982
• soluble spring1978-1985
• Anger of ruin1983
• Key of the three kingdoms1986
• Lorraine Crystal, 1987

Posthumously:

• Poetry work complete in two volumes (Edición de Fernando R. de la Flor y Esteban Pujals Gesalí. Madrid, Hiperión, 1995).
• Letters [1961-1973], 2007. (Original manuscripts; ed. by R. de la Flor and Germán Labrador)