John valera

Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano (Cabra, October 18, 1824-Madrid, April 18, 1905) was a Spanish writer, diplomat and politician, whose most famous novel is Pepita Jiménez historically recognized novel

Biography

He was born on October 18, 1824 in the current Isaac Albéniz Conservatory in the Cordoba town of Cabra, being baptized in the church of Asunción y Ángeles, as the son of José Valera y Viaña, a Navy officer and retired, and Dolores Alcalá-Galiano y Pareja, Marquise de la Paniega. He had two sisters, Sofía (1828-1890), Duchess of Malakoff and Ramona (1830-1869), Marquise of Caicedo, as well as a brother, José Freuller y Alcalá-Galiano, had in a first marriage of the Marquise de la Paniega with Santiago Freuller, a Swiss general at the service of Spain.

His father had sailed in the Orient as a young man and remained for a long time settled in Calcutta; he was a teacher of Ronda and of liberal inclinations, for which the absolutist reaction purged him and he was forced to "make the Cincinnatus", as his son would say, cultivating the lands of the wife of he; His son Juan lived in Cabra until he was nine years old. But when Ferdinand VII died in 1834, the new liberal government rehabilitated his father and named him Commander of Arms of Cabra and soon after Governor of Córdoba. He moved there with his family and later to Madrid. Finally they went to Malaga, where the father joined the Navy again.

His mother was opposed to his pursuing a career in arms like his father, so Juan studied Language and Philosophy at the Málaga seminary between 1837 and 1840 and at the Sacromonte school in Granada in 1841. He then began his studies in Philosophy and Law at the University of Granada, where he graduated in 1846; by then he had already begun to learn modern languages, published verses in La Alhambra in Granada and El Guadalhorce in Malaga, and read avidly both the literature of the Enlightenment and that of the Romanticism:

At the age of twelve or thirteen I had read Voltaire and presumed sprit fortWhile I was scared when I was dark and I was afraid the devil would take me. Romanticism, the legends of Zorrilla and all the amazements, spectra, witches and appeared of Shakespeare, Hoffmann and Scott rebuked in my soul a tough fight with volttery, classical studies and fondness of the Gentile heroes.

He published his poems in 1844, but only three copies were sold. However, the readings of romantic poetry, and in particular of his admired José de Espronceda, whom he got to know in person, gradually disappeared, replaced by those of the Latin classics: Catullus, Propercio, Horacio... Around 1847 he began to practice poetry. diplomatic career in Naples together with ambassador Ángel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, poet and painter of Romanticism and also a refined galantuomo of whom many beauties said quanto é simpaticone questo duca. He taught her many things that were not stated in the books during the two years and eleven months that he was there. On the other hand, he deepened his knowledge of ancient Greek and also learned the modern one by establishing a deep friendship with Lucia Palladi, Marchioness of Bedmar, & # 34; The Greek Lady & # 34; or & # 34; La Muerta & # 34;, as he liked to call her, whom he loved very much and who marked him greatly. Returning to Madrid, he frequented gatherings and diplomatic circles in order to get what in the language of the time was called "a good nougat"; At the end of 1849 he met the Arabist Serafín Estébanez Calderón, famous for his paintings of Andalusian customs, who had a decisive influence on his writing and was one of the main correspondents of his extensive epistolary. At that time (1850) he almost married the third of the nine children of the Duke of Rivas, Malvina de Saavedra (1848-1868), one of his many girlfriends, and failed in his attempt to be a deputy. At that time he became friends with his uncle, the politician and moderate liberal critic Antonio Alcalá Galiano, from whom he asked for a prologue for a second edition of his poetry that appeared in 1859.

Afterwards, different destinations led him to travel as a diplomat throughout a large part of Europe and America: Lisbon (where he acquired a great love for Portuguese culture and political Iberianism) and Rio de Janeiro (from where he took notes for his novel Genius and Figure). Returning to Spain, he began to write and publish essays in 1853 in the Revista Española de Ambos Mundos ; in 1854 he failed again in his attempt to be a deputy; again he was in the German embassies in Frankfurt and Dresden (already with the position of embassy secretary); and he read not a little German poetry, especially Goethe's Faust; His command of German will also allow him to translate into three volumes the Poetry and Art of the Arabs in Spain and Sicily by Adolf Friedrich von Schack.

He went with the Duke of Osuna to Saint Petersburg, where he stayed for six months in 1857; Manuel Azaña studied this picturesque journey in one of his most famous books. At that time (1857) he polemicized with Emilio Castelar in the pages of La Discusión, later writing his essay Of the doctrine of progress in relation to Christian doctrine. However, After finally being elected deputy for Archidona in 1858, which he found out in Paris while attending the wedding of his beloved sister Sofía with a famous soldier, Aimable Pélissier, newly appointed first Duke of Malakoff, abandoned his diplomatic tasks for a few years to dedicate himself to literary works in the numerous magazines of which he was editor, collaborator or director: El Semanario Pintoresco Español, La Discusión, El Museo Universal, La América... And he founded, together with Caldeira and Sinibaldo de Mas, the Revista Peninsular. He later resumed his diplomatic career at the embassies in Washington, Brussels and Vienna, where on the brink of his seventies he was still hanging around "in a lawful, aesthetic and platonic way"; to the actress Stella von Hohenfels. He recorded all these trips in a juicy and entertaining epistolary, immediately published without his knowledge in Spain, which annoyed him a lot, since he spared no information about his multiple love affairs, among which he highlighted his crush on actress Magdalena Brohan.

Portrait of Juan Valera in The Spanish and American Illustration.

On December 5, 1867, he married Dolores Delavat in Paris, two decades his junior and a native of Rio de Janeiro, with whom he would have three children: Carlos Valera, Luis Valera and Carmen Valera, born respectively in 1869, 1870 and 1872. When the Revolution of 1868 broke out, he became an interesting chronicler of the events and wrote the articles "On the revolution and religious freedom" and "On the concept of Spain that is formed today." He translates from German and publishes Schack's Poetry and Art of the Arabs in Spain and Sicily in three volumes. He is elected senator for Córdoba in 1872 and in that same year he is given and lost the post of Director General of Public Instruction; in 1874 he unveiled his most famous work, Pepita Jiménez and in the following year he met Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, with whom he established a great friendship and began an interesting correspondence. In 1895 he was almost blind, retired and returned to Madrid from the Dresden consulate; but he dictates his writings to a clerk and has them read aloud; He began his second narrative period with Juanita la Larga (1895), culminating in 1899 with Morsamor . He frequents various gatherings and has his own in his house, which is attended by prominent intellectuals. In 1904 he is elected a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. He died in Madrid on April 18, 1905 and was buried in the San Justo sacramental. However, his remains were exhumed in April 1975 and transferred to the cemetery in Cabra, his hometown, on the seventieth anniversary of his death.

Political career

In 1858 he provisionally retired from the diplomatic corps and decided to settle in Madrid, where he began a political career; with the help of his brother José Freuller, a seasoned politician who, after two previous failures, managed to be a deputy for Archidona, and later an official of the State Office Secretariat, undersecretary and ephemeral general director of Public Instruction with Amadeo de Saboya. In 1860 he explained at the Ateneo de Madrid the Critical history of our poetry with immense success. They elected him a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1861 and already in his old age of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences

Literary life

Valera, who as a writer mainly cultivated storytelling, epistolography and essays, has collaborated in various magazines since he did so as a student at La Alhambra, although at first he was always pane profiting , for what he called "chronic syndineritis" of his family. He was director of a series of newspapers and magazines, founded El Cócora and wrote for El Contemporáneo, Revista Española de Ambos Mundos, Revista Peninsular, The State, La América, The Picturesque World, La Malva, La Esperanza, El Pensamiento Español and many other magazines. He was a deputy to Cortes, secretary of Congress and dedicated himself to literature and literary criticism at the same time. Although he started writing at the time of late romanticism, his full development occurred during realism, but he cannot be considered either realistic or romantic because of his idealizing aestheticism. He was never a romantic man or writer, but an Andalusian epicurean, cultured and ironic, inclined to philosophy but always hostile to defining his own system.

The Hispanist and writer Gerald Brenan assures that he was the best literary critic of the XIX century after Menéndez Pelayo; He always acted above and outside the literary fashions of his time, governed by general aesthetic principles of idealistic and poetic bias, for which he never finished assimilating the customs of one of his main friends, the Arabist Serafín. Estebanez Calderon. For example, he wrote to his wife from Cabra:

This is a poor country, ruin, infect, bastard, where the looting and bad faith reigns. I have quite a poet, even if it doesn't seem to you, and I fake another very poetic Andalusia, when I'm away from here.

Undoubtedly we must review the judgment that critics have offered of his poetry, which is often much more inspired than that of his contemporaries. In his translations, at least, he managed to achieve formidable versions of, for example, the Elegy to the loss of Seville and Córdoba by Abul-Becka, in broken foot sextuplets:

How much climbs up to the top, / descends soon down / to the deep; / woe to him who in something esteems / the deciduous and lied good / of this world! / At all times being / only remains and hard / moving; / what today is bliss or pleasure / will be bitter tomorrow / and sorrow. / It is the transitory life / a walk without rest / to oblivion; / brief term to all glory / has the presumptuous time / granted. / Even the strong tie / that the steels are opposed/powerful, / at the end is fired / or with the rust is put / rough.

Picture by Juan Valera, donated by the writer to the Colegio de la Purísima Concepción de Cabra, today IES Aguilar and Eslava, together with his personal library.

He was one of the most educated Spaniards of his time, owner of a prodigious memory and with a great knowledge of the Greco-Latin classics; Furthermore, he spoke, read and wrote French, Italian, English and German. He had a reputation as an epicurean, elegant and tasteful in his life and in his works, and was a writer much admired as a pleasant stylist and for his talent to outline the psychology of his characters, especially the female ones.; he cultivated essays, literary criticism, short stories, novels, history (volume VI of the General History of Spain by Modesto Lafuente and some articles) and poetry; Writers such as José Martínez Ruiz, Eugenio D'Ors and the modernists declared their admiration for him (one of his criticisms presented to the Spaniards the true dimension and merits of Rubén Darío's work).

Ideologically, he was a moderate liberal, tolerant and elegantly skeptical of religion, which would explain the focus of some of his novels, the most famous of which continues to be Pepita Jiménez (1874), initially published in installments in the Revista de España, translated into ten languages at the time and sold more than 100,000 copies; the great composer Isaac Albéniz made an opera of the same title.

In 1856 he stayed for several months in Madrid, waiting for a job or legation, which he took advantage of to intensify his literary collaborations. He founded, in collaboration with Carlos José Caldeira and Sinibaldo de Mas, the Revista Peninsular, an attempt at a bilingual magazine in Portuguese and Spanish. The magazine gave him a certain reputation as a literary critic and benefited his social relations, frequently attending literary circles. In 1868, Valera began to collaborate in the recently founded Revista de España, from Madrid, whose pages featured renowned journalists and writers. He also publishes the second volume of Poetry and art of the Arabs in Spain .

Diplomacy and travel

Juan Valera greatly expanded his culture through travel and constant study. He began his diplomatic career in Naples as an unpaid attaché in 1847. After spending two years and eleven months there, in which he worked under the Duke of Rivas and saw the 1848 revolution break out in Europe, Valera passed to the legation in 1850. from Lisbon. Later (1850), he was ambassador in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro (1851), Dresden (1854), Saint Petersburg (1856), Frankfurt (1865), Lisbon again, this time as minister (1881), Washington (1883)., where he had a loving and epistolary relationship with the young and cultured daughter of the US Secretary of State Katherine Lee Bayard, who ended up committing suicide, Brussels (1886) and Vienna (1893).

In 1895 he had become practically blind, so he requested retirement for health reasons, which was granted by a Royal Decree of March 5, 1896. He left Vienna, already quite ailing, and settled in Madrid, although he still He had time to meet the French Hispanist Ernest Mérimée, nephew of the author of Carmen, in Zarauz in August 1897, and encourage him to write a history of Spanish literature. From then on he had himself read aloud in Spanish, French, German and Greek and dictated his writings to his secretary Pedro de la Gala Montes, whom he familiarly called Perikito; for example, he dictated most of his latest novel Morsamor to him while he felt his way around shaving, as the Count of Las Navas recalled. He also held a famous Saturday night gathering at his house on Calle Santo Domingo de Madrid, which was attended, among others, by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Luis Vidart Schuch, Narciso Campillo, Emilio Pérez Ferrari, the aforementioned Count de las Navas, the Vázquez de Parga family, the Quintero brothers, the publisher Fernando Fe, Blanca de los Ríos and a young Ramón Pérez de Ayala, evenings that sometimes lasted until two in the morning. His nephew, the sculptor Coullaut Valera, was also in charge of creating the monument dedicated to him on Paseo de Recoletos in Madrid. But Valera also frequented other gatherings

Ideas, style and themes

Monument to Valera in Madrid, the work of his nephew, the sculptor Lorenzo Coullaut Valera (1928).

He cultivated different genres. As a novelist, there were two fundamental ideas of her:

• The novel should reflect life, but in an idealized and embellished way. It is realistic because it rejects the excesses of fantasy of romanticism and its sentimentality and because it chooses precise environments, but at the same time it seeks to eliminate the painful and crude aspects of reality. Its difference with Benito Pérez Galdós is evident, since it considers that the novel has to be a faithful reflection of reality.
• The novel is art, its end is the creation of beauty. That's why he takes care of the style so much. This is characterized by its correctness, precision, simplicity and harmony; it is the first stylist of its generation, refined and academic, certainly, but provided with a burlone irony, of volttery eyebrows, fruit of an essential skepticism ("I feel incapable of being dogmatic in my philosophical judgments"); its realism does not exaggerate, but idealizes, and pleasing all aspects The function of the novel is to delight, not to instruct:

My idea in composing stories, narratives or whatever, since they are not novels, is not to prove anything. To prove thesis I would write dissertations... The main object of the author must be painting, the work of art, and not teaching.

The fundamental themes of his works can be reduced to two: love conflicts (especially between mature men and young women) and religious conflicts.

Valera began to write narrative very late, as he began as a poet (of his first book, Ensayos poéticos -Granada, 1844- only three copies were sold) and epistolographer. At the age of fifty, he published his first narrative work, Pepita Jiménez (1874), a novel in two parts of which the first adopts the epistolary form in the first person (letters from the seminarian Luis de Vargas to his uncle dean) and the second a third-person narrative. The first refers to the progressive falling in love of the seminarian Luis de Vargas with the young (twenty years old) Andalusian widow promised to her father who gives the work its name. After great spiritual struggles, he ends up happily marrying her. The psychological process of struggle between divine and human love is subtly described in the epistolary part and the inauthentic ascetic purposes of the protagonist are ruined through the company of the young lady and contact with nature, while in the part The final narrative is dominated by touches of manners and the happy sensuality with which the Andalusian environment is described, idealized, as usual. The smooth and careful style is also admirable; Actually, it is a thesis novel in which the primacy of the natural and the vital over the artificial and the affected is defended.

El Comendador Mendoza (1877) has as a knot a case of conscience similar to that of El escándalo by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, but in this case a falsehood is maintained to avoid greater evils. And, contrary to Alarcón's work, the author's interest is focused more than on the moral conflict on the grace of the narration and on the characterization of the likeable protagonist, a kind of liberal encyclopedist quite similar to Juan Valera himself, and who ends up marrying in his mature age with a niece of his.

Dona Luz (1879) reconsiders, as in Pepita Jiménez, the dichotomy between divine love and human love, but this time the conflict ends tragically, since the old friar P. Enrique died when the protagonist married, with whom he had fallen in love.

Juanita la Larga (1896) insists, in turn, on the theme of the love affairs of an elderly man with a girl. But on this occasion Valera gave an extensive entry to the costumbrista description, although, as usual with him, the landscape, the types and the Andalusian environment, and even the language, are subject to a slight idealistic stylization, so that the locals they express themselves as academically as the author.

Morsamor (1899) is his last novel, written shortly before he died and very different from what he used to express: it is a historical novel that is almost an adventure novel; it also abandons the aesthetics of realism and gives way to the fantastic element: the protagonist, old and frustrated with his life and sheltered in a convent, is rejuvenated by taking a magical elixir and, with a new opportunity, embarks on a redemption journey to the East, more in particular India (which Valera knew well because his father had lived in this place for a long time), where he fell in love again, and returned after various incidents to the convent again frustrated. The hero's name is symbolic (mors is Latin for "death"). In a letter to his friend José María Carpio, he expresses his intention to write "a novel of modern chivalry":

«Taking seriously some ironic precepts of Don Leandro Fernández de Moratín in his Poetic LessonI have put in my book how much has been presented to my mind of what I have heard or read in praise of a time very different from the present, when it was Spain the first nation of Europe» (J. Valera, "Prologist-Dedictory" a Morsamor, 1899)

However, it is a novel of maritime chivalry. Drawing inspiration from the Don Yllán of the infant Don Juan Manuel and from Goethe's Faust, Juan Valera also produced this novel, which the critic Eduardo Gómez de Baquero "Andrenio" called his Persiles, a kind of ironization of the genre of the historical novel and even of the epic, more specifically of Os Lusiadas by Camoens.

Orders and Jobs

Orders

Kingdom of Spain

• Big Knight of the Order of Charles III.
• September 2, 1856: Commander of the Spanish and American Order of Isabella the Catholic.
• Grefier de la Orden del Toisón de Oro.

Foreign

• Knight of the Order of San Jenaro. (King of the Two Sicilies)
• 1849: Knight of the Order of Saint Ferdinand of Merit.
• Big Cross Knight in the Order of Pius IX. (Pontifical States)
• Big Knight of the Order of Our Lady of the Conception of Villaviciosa. (Reino de Portugal)
• Knight of the Supreme Order of Christ.
• Great Knight of the Order of Saints Mauritius and Lazarus. (Kingdom of Italy)
• Grand Cross Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy.
• Great Knight of the Order of St Stephen of Hungary. (Austrian Empire)
• Commander of the Order of Leopoldo.
• Second class Knight of the Order of Santa Ana. (Russian Empire)
• Commander of the Imperial Order of the Rose.
• Order Officer of the Legion of Honor. (France)

Jobs

• Ambassador of His Catholic Majesty to His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty the Emperor of Austria-Hungary.
• Ambassador of His Catholic Majesty to His Majesty the King of Portugal.
• Ambassador of His Catholic Majesty to the King of Belgium
• Ambassador of His Catholic Majesty to the United States
• Bachelor of jurisprudence.
• Academic number of the Spanish Royal Academy.
• Academic Number of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences
• Academy corresponding to the Lisbon Academy of Sciences.

Work

He cultivated all literary genres: epistolary, journalistic, literary criticism, poetry, theater, short stories and novels.

• Complete works, Madrid, Printed German Bookstore [Carmen Valera and Sánchez Ocaña], 1905-1935, 53 vols., 8th small.
  • "Academic speech," vols. I and II
  • "Novelas", vols. III to XIII
  • Counts, XIV and XV
  • "Teatro", XVI
  • Poetry, XVII and XVIII
  • "Literary criticism" XIX to XXIII
  • "Philosophy and Religion", XXXIV to XXXVI
  • "History and Politics", XXXVII to XL
  • XLI to XLIV
  • "Miscellaneous", XLV, XLVI and XLIX
  • "Correspondence", XLVIII and XLVIII
  • "Political Discourses," L
  • "Translations (Poetry and Art of the Arabs)", LI a LIII.
• Selected works, Madrid, New Library, 1925-1929, 15 vols., 8o.
• Complete works, preliminary study by Luis Araujo Costa, Madrid: Aguilar, 1934-1942, 2 vols., 8o; 2.a ed., 1942-1949, 3 vols.; 3.a, 1958.
• Unknown works by Juan Valera. Ed. de Cyrus C. DeCoster, Madrid, Castalia, 1965.
• Articles of "The Contemporary". Ed. de Cyrus C. DeCoster, Madrid, Castalia, 1966.
• Complete works, Madrid: Biblioteca Castro / Turner, ed. de Margarita Almena, (1995-) nine vols, of which three have been published:
  • I: Tales. Tales and Andalusian chascarrillos. Unfinished Narrations. Translations. Theatre. Articles of customs (1995).
  • II: Little lady and Antonio. Pepita Jiménez. Dr. Faustino's illusions. Comendador Mendoza. Get smart. (2001)
  • III: Doña Luz. Juanita la Larga. Genius and figure. Morsamor(2003)

Novel

First stage

• Pepita Jiménez (1874, the most perfect one). In it gets the ideal that his author always pursued, art for art. He wrote this novel at the age of 50 and became an opera with music by Isaac Albéniz.
• Dr. Faustino's illusions, in Revista de España (28 October 1874-13 June 1875) and Madrid, Noguera, 1875. There are modern editions of Cyrus C. DeCoster (Madrid, Castalia, 1970) and José-Carlos Mainer (Madrid, Editorial Alliance, 1991).
• Comendador Mendoza, in The Field (1 December 1876-1 May 1877) and The Cordoba. A little crematistic (Madrid, Imprenta de Aribau y Compañía, Administración de la Ilustración Española y Americana, 1877).
• Spend smart., in The Field (16 August 1877-1 May 1878); there is one in hard cover without year (1878?) and another also exempt, perhaps the first (Madrid, Biblioteca Perojo, 1879).
• Doña Luz in Contemporary Magazine (15 November 1878-30 March 1879), and Madrid, Biblioteca Perojo, 1879. There are modern editions of Benito Varela Jácome (Madrid, Íter, 1970); M. Sanz Agüero (Madrid, Ediciones Busma, 1982) and Enrique Rubio Cremades (Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1990).
• Letters from a suitor (1850), Mariquita and Antonio (1861)

Second stage

• Juanita la Larga in The Impartial (October-December 1895), and Madrid: Fernando Fe, 1896. There are modern editions of Enrique Rubio Cremades (Madrid, Castalia, 1985); Jaime Vidal Alcover (Barcelona, Planeta, 1988) and José Ibáñez Campos (Barcelona, Edicommunication, 1994).
• Genius and figure (Madrid: Fe, 1897). There is modern edition of Cyrus C. DeCoster, Madrid, Chair, 1978.
• Morsamor. Heroic pilgrimages and lances of love and fortune by Miguel de Zuheros and Tiburcio de Simahonda (Madrid: Fernando Fe, 1899). There are modern editions of Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Barcelona: Lábor S. A., 1970 and Leonardo Romero Tobar (Barcelona, Plaza-Janés, 1984).
• Elisa, "La Malagueña" (1895), Don Lorenzo Tostado, Currito the optimist, The jewel, Anastasia (laughing)

Story

• The green bird
• Good fame
• The doll
• Tales and Andalusian chascarrillos, 1896
• Tales and dialogues
• Novels and fragments1907.
• Tales1908.
• The prehistoric bermejino
• Garuda or the white stork
• The mirror of Matsuyama

Theater

• Asclepigenia1878, dialogue.
• Gopa
• The Revenge of Atahualpa
• Best of the treasure
• Traits of love and jealousy

Articles and essays

• From the nature and character of the novel, 1860
• Critical studies on literature, politics and customs of our day1864.
• About the concept that today forms Spain (1868, published in the Revista de España).
• Literary proceedings, Madrid, 1878.
• Critical studies on philosophy and religion1883-1889.
• Notes on the new art of writing novels, 1887, where he polluted with Emilia Pardo Bazán on naturalism.
• New Critical Studies, Madrid, 1888.
• American letters, 1889
• New American cards1890.
• Ventura de la Vega1891.
• Romanticism in Spain and Espronceda
• From the castizo of our culture in the 18th century and in the present
• From the joke and the amenity of the style
• The lyric and epic poetry in the 19th century Spain
• Popular poetry as an example of the point where the vulgar idea and academic idea of the Castilian language should coincide
• Freedom in art
• From the influence of Inquisition and religious fanaticism in the decline of Spanish literature
• From mysticism in Spanish poetry
• The novel in Spain
• About the Quixote and on the different ways to comment and judge him (1861).
• Considerations on the Quixote
• From the doctrine of progress
• Teaching Philosophy at Universities
• Harmonic rationalism (on krausism)
• From Spanish Philosophy
• Psychology of love
• Light metaphysics
• Metaphysics and poetry
• About the various ways of understanding History
• From the revolution in Italy, Spain and Portugal
• Revolution and Religious Freedom in Spain
• Diplomatic notes
• Literary criticism14 vols.
• Letters from Russia

Poems

At first, in 1840, he cultivated a certain Romanticism, but he soon opted for classical inspiration and ancient themes.

• Poetic testing1844.

Translations

He composes a large number of translations of poetry from other languages, thereby highlighting not only his poetic vocation but also his handling of different languages. His work as his translator was a constant that accompanied him throughout his literary career, as Juan de Dios Torralbo Caballero has studied.

• Dafnis and Cloe Longo, 1880.
• Translations of poems by Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Uhland, Emanuel Geibel, Abul-Becka (from the German), James Russell Lowell, William Wetmore Story, John Greenleaf Whittier, Juan Fastenrath, Victor Hugo and Almeida Garret, among others.
• Poetry and art of the Arabs in Spain and SicilyAdolf Friedrich von Schack. Seville: F. Álvarez, 1881, 3 vols.

Epistolary

Assembled in modern times after several partial attempts, it includes the letters he wrote to Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Miguel de los Santos Álvarez and many others, encompassing a total of 3,803 letters edited in eight volumes directed by Leonardo Romero Tobar in the Castalia publishing house between 1992 and 2010, although collections still continue to appear.