Jorge Guillen

Jorge Guillén Álvarez (Valladolid, January 18, 1893 - Málaga, February 6, 1984) was a Spanish poet and literary critic of the Generation of '27.

Biography

He was born in Valladolid, where he lived during his childhood and youth. He always said that he "was from Valladolid". Grenade. From 1909 to 1911 he lived in Switzerland. His life ran parallel to that of his friend Pedro Salinas, whom he succeeded as Spanish lecturer at the Sorbonne from 1917 to 1923. In those years he made several trips through Europe; in one of them, in 1919, he met Germaine Cahen, whom he married two years later. They had two children: the critic and prominent specialist in comparative literature Claudio Guillén (1924-2007) and Teresa, who married the critic Stephen Gilman, a Hispanic professor at Harvard, a disciple of Américo Castro.

Guillén earned his doctorate in 1924 at the University of Madrid with his notoriously difficult dissertation on Góngora, and at the same time exhibited one of his great poems, the Polifemo. He held the Chair of Literature at the University of Murcia from 1925 to 1929, where, together with Juan Guerrero Ruiz and José Ballester Nicolás, he founded the literary magazine Verso y Prosa to replace the Literary Supplement of The Truth and level it up.

Despite his academic occupations, he continued to visit the Student Residence, limiting them on his vacations. This allowed him to meet young members of the Generation of '27 such as Rafael Alberti and Federico García Lorca. He kept in touch with them. He once met Lorca at an Art Club in Valladolid; There Guillén gave an introduction to his collection of poems, in which he reflected himself as a compassionate man and a great poet, despite having edited only one collection of poems.

He began to write Cántico and published literary criticism in the press, and his first single poems in magazines. In December 1928 he appeared in the Revista de Occidente the first edition of Cántico ; He did an assistantship at the University of Oxford (1929–1931) and in this last year he joined the University of Seville.

The Spanish Civil War surprised him in Valladolid and he was briefly imprisoned in Pamplona; He returned to his Chair in Seville and briefly approached the Spanish Falange, translating Paul Claudel's Song to the Martyrs of Spain, which was published with the yoke and arrows on the cover, an edition of which he later regretted it. He was subjected to a purge file for being a "sympathizer of the left", "a militant of Acción Republicana", giving "lectures at the Instituto Hispano-Cubano together with other militant left-wing professors" and being "of advanced ideology in the political and religious order. In one of the reports on which these accusations were based it was said: «in Madrid he was from the avant-garde group of intellectuals, mostly from the left. Married to... the daughter of a Jewish landowner, who claims that he is a Freemason. He would not have anything particular that the referred one was ». In October 1937, he received a sanction that was not as serious as might be expected, since he was reduced to suspension of employment and salary for two years and disqualification from managerial and trust positions.

He went into exile in July 1938. He taught at the Universities of Middlebury, McGill (Montreal) and at Wellesley College; Germaine died in 1947 and she retired from Wellesley College in 1957; she then went to Italy. She later moved to Malaga; she, however, had already been in Spain after the war in 1949, when she went to visit her sick father.

In 1961, he married Irene Mochi-Sismondi in Bogotá, whom he had met in Florence in 1958. He resumed his teaching work at Harvard and Puerto Rico, but a fall with a broken hip removed him from teaching in 1970; in 1976 he received the first Cervantes Prize and in 1977 the Alfonso Reyes International Prize. He was named Favorite Son of Andalusia in 1983, a year before he died in Malaga on February 6, 1984. His mortal remains rest in the San Jorge Anglican Cemetery, Malaga.

Analysis

Because of his penchant for pure poetry, some critics consider him the most direct disciple of Juan Ramón Jiménez. Guillén entered the literary field late: at the age of thirty-five he published his first book, Cántico, which will be expanded in various editions, since from the beginning he thought of his work as an organic whole, at which gave the general title of Our Air. If Aleixandre is the poet of cosmic pessimism, Guillén is of optimism. «The world is well done», he proclaims, which in the Spanish post-war period caused him a certain enmity between the existential and social poets who suffered the harsh consequences of the war, for which the poet will correct himself later, in Cry: «The world of men is poorly made».

Her poems start from specific situations to extract from them the most quintessential ideas or feelings; the style that he adopts is at the service of such a procedure: he uses extraordinarily elaborate language, after a rigorous process of elimination and selection; it strips language of the flattery of easy musicality and other resources that directly touch our sensibility; Hence, his poetry is difficult, not because of its accumulation of ornament, but because of its condensation and density: each phrase, each word tries to undress the essence of what the poet presents to us. Some features of his style respond to this attention to essentials:

• Abundance of nouns, often without article, and of nominal phrases, without verb, because the names collect the essence of things, not their existence, as the verb.
• Frequency of exclamative prayers.
• Preferential use of short verse or minor art.

Cántico was published for the first time in 1928 in the Revista de Occidente and consisted of only 75 poems. The final version, published in 1950 in Buenos Aires, has 334 poems divided into five parts: "Al aire de tu vuelo", "Las horas situadas", "El pájaro en la mano", "Aquí mismo" and "Full being".. In this work he exalts the joy of existing, the harmony of the cosmos, the luminosity, the fullness of being and the integration of the poet in a perfect universe where often the beloved and the landscape merge. Optimism and serenity preside over the different poems that make up the book.

Because of the experience of the Spanish War, in his next poetic book, Clamor, Guillén becomes aware of temporality and introduces the negative elements of history: misery, war, pain, death... If Cántico is the poet's gratitude for the perfection of creation, in Clamor the belief in the perfection of the cosmos is quartered. However, it is not a distressing or pessimistic book because the desire to live dominates in it. This work is made up of three volumes Maremágnum (1957), whose central nucleus —“Luzbel bewildered” and “La bella y los eccentricos”— presents a lack of harmony; That they are going to hit the sea (1960), where he develops the idea of continuity provided by death, and A la height of the circumstances (1963), where he appears the struggle to restore balance.

Homage was published in 1967. As its title indicates, Guillén exalts outstanding people from the world of arts and sciences using the techniques of dramatic monologue and portraiture.

He titled the compilation of his three great poetry books up to 1968 with Our Air. He would still publish Y otros poemas (1973) and Final (1982).

The complexity of Guillen's work lies in its ideal of pure poetry, which can be summarized as: suppression of the anecdotal, substantivization of adjectives, scarcity of verbs, linguistic precision and thematic concentration.

Works

Lyrical

• Quantum (75 poems), Revista de Occidente, Madrid, 1928
• Quantum (125 poems), Cross and Raya, Madrid, 1936
• Quantum (270 poems), Litoral, Mexico, 1945
• Quantum (334 poems), Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1950
• Melibea Garden, M., Insula, 1954
• From dawn and awakening, Valladolid, 1956
• Clamor. MaremagnunBs. As, South American, 1957
• Place of LazarusMalaga, Col. Who with me goes, 1957
• Clamor... That they will give in the seaBs. As, South American, 1960
• Natural history, Palma de Mallorca, Papers of Sons Armadans, 1960
• The Temptations of AntonioFlorence/Santander, Graf. Brothers Bedia, 1962
• Depending on the hours, Puerto Rico, Editorial Universitaria, 1962
• Clamor. At the height of circumstancesBs. As, South American, 1963
• Homage. Meeting of lives, Milan, All'Insegna del Pesce d'oro, 1967
• Our air: song, clamor, homage, Milan, All'Insegna del Pesce d'oro, 1968
• Civil garlandCambridge, Halty Eferguson, 1970
• Outside, M., Visor, 1972
• And other poemsBs. As, Muchnik, 1973
• Convival, M., Turner, 1975
• Very natural history. M. Hiperion, 1980.
• The poet before his work. Ed from Reginald Gibbons and Anthony L. Geist. M. Hiperion, 1980.
• Final, B., Barral, 1981
• The expressionFerrol, Valle-Inclán Culture Society, 1981.
• Mechanics Celeste, Madrid, Huerga and Fierro editors, 2001. Editing and prologue by Jorge Urrutia.

Criticism

• Language and poetry (1962)
• The argument of the work (1969)
• Around Gabriel Miró: brief epistolary (1973)
• «Prologue» to Works by Federico García Lorca (1898–1936).

Translation

• Le Cimetière marin by Paul Valéry (1930).
• To the Spanish martyrs by Paul Claudel (1937).