Nicolás Fernández de Moratín

Nicolás Fernández de Moratín (Madrid, July 20, 1737 – Ibid., May 11, 1780) was a Spanish poet, prose writer and playwright, father of the playwright Leandro.

Biography

He was born in Madrid, into a noble family, of Asturian origin. He studied in La Granja (Segovia) and at the Jesuit college in Calatayud, and later Law at the University of Valladolid. He practiced law in Madrid and entered the service of Queen Isabel de Farnese as an assistant jeweler.

He was a member of the gathering at the Fonda de San Sebastián, which was also attended by José Cadalso, Tomás de Iriarte and Ignacio López de Ayala and where only talk of "theater, bulls, loves and verses" was allowed. He was also a member of the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country of Madrid, and of the Roman Academy of Los Árcades with the nickname "Flumisbo Thermodonciaco". Since 1773 he held the chair of Poetics at the Imperial College of Madrid.

In 1764, to make his verses known, he published the newspaper El Poeta. The following year he published an extensive didactic poem, with a hunting theme, titled The Diana or art of hunting . It was probably at the beginning of the following decade when he composed another didactic poem, with a burlesque tone, the Arte de las putas or Arte de putear, which circulated in manuscript, and was published by for the first time in 1898, more than a hundred years after his death.

His theatrical work includes a comedy, La petimetra (1762), and three tragedies: Lucrecia (1763), Hormesinda (1770) and Guzmán the Good (1777). He conceived the theater, within the ideals of neoclassicism, as a school of ethical training, and participated in the controversies that took place at the time about classical Spanish theater in his three pamphlets Disappointments to the Spanish Theater (1762 -3).

Moratín is the initiator of bullfighting poetry recognized as a precise genre or subgenre within the poetry of the XVIII century, a genre that would reach its peak in the XX century known as the «golden century of bullfighting poetry» in which Almost all the poets of the generation of '27 wrote about bullfighting, for or against it. One of his best-known poems is the one titled "Bullfight in Madrid", written in limericks. He dedicated a Pindaric ode to the bullfighter Pedro Romero titled Canción a Pedro Romero, where he shows a popular, fluid and simple style. On the bullfighting theme he also wrote, in prose, the pamphlet Historical letter on the origin and progress of the bullfighting festivals in Spain (1777). Posthumously, his heroic poem appeared, edited by his son. i>The ships of Cortés destroyed (1785), composed in 1777 for a Royal Academy competition, but which did not win any prize. Leandro himself returned to edit in Barcelona in 1821 some Posthumous Works of his father, highly retouched by him.

An epigram

Among his epigrams, the one titled "Knowing without studying" would become popular:

Appreciated a Portuguese
to see in his tender childhood
all children in France
know how to speak French.
"Arte diabolico es",
said, twisting the must,
«that to speak in gabacho
a fidalgo in Portugal
He comes to old and speaks bad;
and here a boy stands it”.