Peter Salinas

Pedro Salinas Serrano (Madrid, November 27, 1891 – Boston, December 4, 1951) was a Spanish writer best known for his poetry and essays. Within the context of the Generation of '27, he is considered one of his greatest poets. His translations of Proust contributed to the knowledge of the French novelist in the Spanish-speaking world. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile in the United States until his death.

Biography

Early Years

Pedro Salinas was born on Calle de Toledo in Madrid, the son of Soledad Serrano Fernández and Pedro Salinas Elmos, a merchandise merchant, of whom he was orphaned when he was barely six years old. He was a student at the Colegio Hispano-Francés and the Instituto de San Isidro in Madrid. He moved with his mother to Calle de Don Pedro, at the age of 19 he began to study Law at the University of Madrid, which he abandoned at the age of two. years to enroll in Philosophy and Letters (a subject in which he would obtain a doctorate in 1917 with a thesis on the illustrations of Don Quixote). by Ramón Gómez de la Serna in his magazine Prometeo. In 1913 he was appointed secretary of the Literature section of the Ateneo de Madrid, an institution where, with Enrique Díez-Canedo and Fernando Fortún, they set out on the mission of "liberating Spanish verse from the yoke of metrics."

Marriage and professorship

In 1914 he obtained a position as a Spanish reader at the Sorbonne. During the summer of 1915, at the age of 23, Salinas married Margarita Bonmatí Botella in Algiers. The couple settled in Paris where the poet began his readings of Proust, whose first three volumes of the saga À la recherche du temps perdu, later translated in collaboration with José María Quiroga Plá.

In 1917 the Salinas couple returned to Spain and a year later, he obtained a professorship at the University of Seville, where they lived until 1929 in the capital of Seville, (and where he had Luis Cernuda among other students). He requested leave of absence. in 1922 and 1923 to occupy an assistantship at the University of Cambridge, and on his return he published his first collection of poems, Omens. In 1930 he exchanged his Seville chair for Jorge Guillén's chair in Murcia, although he never taught there. In that same year he began to practice at the Central School of Languages, in Madrid, where later, in 1932, he founded the magazine Literary Index . Between 1928 and 1936 he joined the activities and objectives of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, through the Center for Historical Studies, where he was in charge, among other various tasks, of the Modern Literature Section.

Romance

Involved in the creation of the Santander International Summer University (of which he would be general secretary between 1933 and 1936), in the summer of 1932 he met an American student, Katherine R. Whitmore, who would later become a language teacher and Spanish literature at Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts), with which he fell in love. She was the recipient of his poetic trilogy The voice due to you, Reason for love and Long regret. The romance continued, in epistolary form, when Katherine returned to the United States to continue her studies; She returned to the young woman for the 1934–1935 academic year, but Salinas's wife discovered her infidelity and tried to commit suicide, so Katherine decided to end the relationship. The Civil War and the exile of Salinas in North America made that break difficult; Despite this, Katherine married her colleague Brewer Whitmore in 1939 and, although she still had sporadic news about Salinas, the relationship ended up withering. They last saw each other in 1951, shortly before the poet's death. She, who died in 1982, authorized the publication of her Epistolario with Salinas, kept in the library of Harvard University, as long as it was 20 years after her death and the letters that she I send him. Those of Salinas are about three hundred, testimony of a relationship that lasted fifteen years until its conclusion in 1947.

Civil War and exile

Surprised in Santander by the coup that would lead to the Spanish Civil War, he moved to France, from where he went into exile in the United States. He held the position of visiting professor at Wellesley College (whose appointment he had held since 1935); later he worked for Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and in the summer of 1943 he transferred to the University of Puerto Rico. During this time of his, in 1946, Salinas was the person who presented the exhibition of the artist Eugenio Fernández Granell, a Spanish exile in the Dominican Republic. There is an interesting photo of his visit to the Dominican Republic, in which the poet is with, among others, Vicente Llorens, Eugenio Granell and Vela Zanetti.; he returned to Baltimore in 1946. He died in Boston on December 4, 1951, although he would be buried in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Poet of 27

Salinas himself defines poetry as a delving into reality, "an adventure towards the absolute. You get more or less close, you travel more or less a path: that's all", and he reduces the elements of his creation to three: "He valued poetry, above all, authenticity. Then the beauty. Then wit". Following this guideline, Leo Spitzer considered that the main characteristic of Salinas was "inner conceptism", which manifests itself in paradoxes and condensation of concepts. A quick glance through his poetry books reveals that he prefers short verse and almost always forgoes rhyme. The apparent simplicity of his verses made Lorca call them prosías (according to Vivanco).

Poetic stages

• La Initial stage (1923–1932) is marked by the influence of the pure poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez and the echoes of the futuristic and ultraistic avant-garde. The idea of poetic depuration and perfection and the prominence that are taking on it the loving themes profile what will be its stage of fullness. Belong to this stage Preagios (1923), Surely random. (1929) and Fable and sign (1931).
• La stage of fullness (1933–1939) is formed by loving trilogy:

The voice to you due (1933), whose title is taken from a verse of the Third century of Garcilaso de la Vega, presents the story of a loving passion, from birth to rupture.

Reason for love (1936) examines what remains of love when it ends. The passion and pain of separation are therefore the central themes of the book.

Long lament (1939), whose title evokes a verse by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, continues the line marked in the previous works.

The three books are written in heptasyllables and eightsyllables "white" or without rhyme, to which ten-syllables are added until the proportion is reversed in the last book. Enumeration is frequently abused and there is a certain conceptualist tone: "Everything wants to be two", "You will be, love, a long goodbye that does not end", etc.

• La stage of exile (1940–1951) is formed by The contemplated (1946), an extensive poem in which he dialogues with the sea of San Juan de Puerto Rico; All clearer and other poems (1949), where he deals with the theme of creation through the word, and his posthumous work Trust (edited with Complete poetry in 1955), joyful affirmation of the lived reality. From this time, his impressive poem "Cero" is often highlighted, aroused by the destruction of atomic weapons.

Poet of love

"I've always had a desire for love so alive, that's why I've been a poet."

Pedro Salinas has been recognized by many critics as the "poet of love" of 27. Few equaled the subtlety with which he knew how to delve into the feeling of love. He transcends the pure anecdotes to find the most joyful key to sentimental relationships; from a clearly anti-romantic position, love is for him, instead of suffering, a prodigious force that gives fullness to life and meaning to the world, enrichment of one's own being and enrichment of the loved one, a jubilant event: « What a joy to live / feeling lived...!”, he exclaims. Love makes one love life, say yes to the world: «Yes, everything in excess: — light, life, the sea!». Only in some passages of Razón de amor does a more serious tone sometimes appear, in certain poems that speak of the limits of love, of its possible and inevitable end.

Foreword

His first book in prose was Víspersas del gozo (1926), a work inscribed in the avant-garde line of the time. Twenty-five years of narrative silence followed, and it was not until the end of his life that he revisited the genre with a novel about the horrors of the atomic bomb, The Incredible Bomb (1950), and The Nude. impeccable and other narratives (1951).

Greater consistency and influence had his essays on literature, Spanish Literature. Siglo XX (1940), Jorge Manrique or tradition and originality (1947), The poetry of Rubén Darío (1948, and the editions he prepared on Fray Luis of Granada and Saint John of the Cross.

Playwright

Perhaps the least studied aspect of Salinas, author of fourteen dramatic pieces, between 1936 and 1947, for Max Aub "with scenes of an evident poetic breath".

Work

Poetry

(first editions)

• Presagio, Madrid, Index, 1923.
• Surely random., Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1929.
• Fable and sign, Madrid, Plutarco, 1931.
• The voice to you due, Madrid, Signo, 1933.
• Reason for love, Madrid, Editions of the Tree; Cross and Raya1936guel N. Lira, 1938.
• Lost Angel and Other PoemsBaltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1938 (Bilingual anthology with Unpublished Poems. Trad. by Eleanor L. Thurnbull).
• Poetry togetherBuenos Aires, Losada, 1942.
• The contemplated (Mar; poem)Mexico, New Floresta; Stylo, 1946.
• All clearer and other poemsBuenos Aires, South American, 1949.
• Complete poetry, Madrid, Aguilar, 1955 (includes the unpublished book Trust).
• Complete poetry, Madrid, Aguilar, 1956 (Edit by Juan Marichal).
• Return and other poemsMilan, All'insegna del pesce d'oro, 1957.
• Complete poetry, Barcelona, Barral, 1971.

Theater

• The director (1936)
• The resemblance (1942-1943)
• She and her sources (1943)
• The Sleeping Beauty (1943)
• The Treasure Island (1954)
• The head of the jellyfish (1945)
• Insurance (1945)
• Cain or a scientific glory (1945)
• Judit and the tyrant (1945)
• The stratosphere. Wines and beers (1945)
• The source of the archangel (1946)
• The saints (1946)
• The price (1947)
• The blackmailer (1948)

Translations

Cover of the first edition in Spanish By the way of Swan (in two volumes), by Marcel Proust, in Espasa-Calpe, in 1920.

• The caprices of Mariana, (1920), Alfred de Musset.
• By the way of Swann (1920), by Marcel Proust.
• In the shadow of the girls in bloom (1922), by Marcel Proust.
• The World of Guermantes (1931), by Marcel Proust.

Narrative

• Modernized version of Song of Mio Cid (1926).
• Vespera of joy (1926).
• The amazing bomb (1950).
• The impeccable nude and other narrations (1951).
• Complete NarrationsPenínsula, Madrid, 1998.

Essay

• Spanish literature. 20th century (1940).
• Jorge Manrique or tradition and originality (1947).
• The Poetry of Rubén Darío (1948).
• The responsibility of the writer. Barcelona: Seix Barral (1961).
• Complete testing. Edition: Marichal Salinas. Madrid: Taurus, (1983); t. I. and t. II.
• The defender, Editorial Alliance, Madrid, 2002.
• Editions by Fray Luis de Granada and San Juan de la Cruz.

Epistolary

• Letters of Love to Margarita (1912–1915), edition of Soledad Salinas de Marichal, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1986.
• Letters to Katherine Whitmore. Secret Epistle of the Great Poet of Love, Barcelona, Tusquets, 2002.
• Salinas, Pedro. (1988 a). Letters to Jorge Guillén. Christopher Maurer, ed. Bulletin of the García Lorca Foundation, n.3, p. 34- 37.
• Eight unpublished letters to Federico García Lorca. Christopher Maurer (ed.) Newsletter of the García Lorca Foundation, n. 3, (1988); p. 11- 21.
• Letters from Pedro Salinas to Guillermo de Torre. Rebirth, n. 4, (1990) p. 3- 9.
• Eight letters from Pedro Salinas. Enric Bou (ed.) Revista de occidente, n.126, nov.(1991); p. 25- 43.
• Salinas/Jorge Guillén correspondence (1923-1951). Editing, introduction and notes by Andrés Soria Olmedo. Barcelona: Tusquets (1992).