In his posthumous collection of poems Fragmentos de un libro futuro (2000) José Ángel Valente explores the nature of language, oblivion and death. One of the book’s poems dialogues with the passage from the Odyssey in which the lotus-eaters appear. On the basis of Valente’s poem, the composer Beat Furrer wrote, in 2006, the piece Lotófagos, later incorporated into his musical theatre work Wüstenbuch (2009). In this paper we analyze this composition from a series of motifs, images and concepts implicit in Valente's poem, such as, above all, the desert.
This article presents and publishes for the first time the play As estrelas están lonxe (1966-1967) by Manuel María, based on the typescript discovered among the theatre censorship archive files for 1970 at the General Administrative Archive in Alcalá de Henares. As estrelas están lonxe was awarded second place in the 4th Castelao Prize, organised by the O Galo cultural association in 1967, but was never staged or published and thus remained unknown. The play explores the phenomenon of Galician emigration in Europe, examining the socioeconomic causes behind it and its psychological consequences. The discovery and publication of As estrelas están lonxe marks the completion of the corpus of dramatic works by Manuel María.
The narrative by Fanny Garrido from A Coruña is a representative sample of how the debate about the emancipation of women experienced a rise in the second half of the 19th century. This paper aims, on the one hand, to rescue Garrido’s work, unknown to the public and critics. On the other, to address how the author’s liberal ideology, regarding female education and work, penetrates her two main novels: Escaramuzas (1885) and La madre de Paco Pardo (1898), through exhaustive analysis and based on studies about women’s situation at this time as well on the thoughts of some of her contemporaries such as Concepción Arenal.
Through four collections of poems constructed by means of literary ekphrasis, this article proposes an approach to the new critical perspectives of the genre. The study includes the books La piel del vigilante [The Skin of the Watchman] (2005), by Raúl Quinto, Sistemas inestables [Unstable Systems] (2015), by Rubén Martín, Descendimiento [Descent] (2018), by Ada Salas, and El bello mundo [The Beautiful World] (2019), by Francisco Javier Navarro Prieto. The selected corpus shares, from different intermediate approaches, the same theme —the body in pain—, and show a clear renewal of ekphrastic codes. Although they have all been published in the 21st century, each collection of poems engages in different dialogues of very different sign with the original artistic work, thus offering a broad panoramic portrait of current ekphrasis. This demonstrates not only the growing vitality of the genre, but also its relevance and scope in recent Spanish poetry.
De algún tiempo a esta parte (1939) is the monologue written by Max Aub that marks the beginning of his literature composed in exile. The work mirrors the contentious reality of Europe at that time, as seen through the character of Emma. This character, a kind of literary alter ego, allows Aub to reveal the repercussions of exile and to condemn the atrocities committed by European totalitarian governments. As a result, this article delves into the construction of collective memory based on the testimony of an individual character, the inner exile experienced by this character and the trauma associated with surviving in a tragic context. It also draws parallels with Aub’s real-life situatio.
In the lyrics of Antonio Martínez Sarrión ― an exponent of the neo-avant-garde generation of the Novísimos ― the metaphor not only transmits ideas in a precise and aesthetic way, but also functions as a means to structure the poem. In this sense, the author from Albacete uses the different modes of metaphorical development characterized by Vicente Cabrera: the metaphorical singularity (the different linguistic games are at the service of an idea expressed in a conceptualization), the metaphorical plurality (metaphors are juxtaposed), the metaphorization of metaphors (the concepts overlap, thus creating double metaphors) and the revitalization of metaphors (an element of surprise is injected into a worn-out metaphor, with which they coexist, in the mind of the reader, the current and the old meaning).
In this paper, from the perspective of cultural studies, the text The Surprizing Adventures of John Roach, Mariner of Whitehaven (1784) by John Roach is studied. Thus, the representation of the indigenous as a subject is analyzed. To do this, the construction of the indigenous settlers of the Nicaraguan Caribbean coast is examined according to the vision of the colonizing narrator. Furthermore, the different manifestations of popular culture by the colonial subject are interpreted.
Nowadays, the forms of literary expression that combine word and photography on the same support are becoming more and more frequent. This overcomes the obsolete conception of the image as a simple illustration of a previous text. Within the Spanish publishing scene, the collaboration between writer Óscar Esquivias and photographer Asís G. Ayerbe, co-authors of a series of miniaturized works, stands out. In order to exemplify the mechanisms underlying this intermediate practice and assess its aesthetic scope, this article analyzes their most outstanding photonarrative artifacts: En el secreto Alcázar (2008), secretos xxs (2008) and Calle Vitoria (2015). In these microdevices, the confluence of two semiotic systems sensorially broadens the reading experience and enriches the possibilities of minifiction.
This article starts from Los Cuadernos de Velintonia as a source of information for different studies related to its content or to authors who are especially relevant to them. Below, information is briefly offered regarding the relationship between José Ángel Valente and the author of the notebooks, José Luis Cano, and their main protagonist, Vicente Aleixandre. This previous context will serve as a basis to delve deeper into certain aspects or anecdotes in which the Galician poet appears mentioned in the book. Thus, the main purpose of this study is to gather all the cases in which José Ángel Valente is mentioned in Los Cuadernos de Velintonia in order to expand its context and the data of both links of the poet with the aforementioned authors, after which the conclusions that have been reached with all this information.
Jose Ángel Valente’s relationship with Hispanic-American literature was prolific and multifaceted. As Valente’s critical work shows, alongside multiple biographical works about him, the reading of Cesar Vallejo’s poetry was one of his earliest contacts with Hispanic-American literature. This contact remained in time during the writer’s career, as many texts of different nature, written throughout his life can testify. Thus, this work aims to start from reading the author’s critical work to offer a clear idea of Valente’s vision of César Vallejo, in order to make an approach to the work of the Peruvian poet that allows to put it into dialogue with Spanish poetry and the new poetic sensibility of the 20th century. Furthermore, reading Vallejo’s poetry from José Ángel Valente’s perspective means to come close to Valente’s multifaceted figure and knowing the integrative nature of his creativity. Another objective of this work is, therefore, to investigate the main factors that distinguish Valente as a critic from the Spanish literary criticism of Hispanic-American literature in the 20th century. Although César Vallejo and José Ángel Valente never got to know each other, Valente constructs in his poetry and in his prose a space for dialogue with Vallejo’s work, making the Peruvian’s poetic legacy fit into a concrete and privileged place within an integrative vision of arts and literature.
The so-called self-writings that were produced as a result of the Spanish Republican exile have been an invaluable source of reference for history, but they have been less studied from a literary perspective, even more so if she was an author and had no other work and, even more so, if her reading could not be done in a hegemonic language. This is the case of Syra Alonso, a Galician exile in Mexico, who fled with her three children after the murder of her husband, the avant-garde painter Francisco Miguel. These circumstances prompted the writing of her diaries: the Diario de Tordoia, written in Galicia before leaving for exile, and the Diario de Actopan, written in Mexico a year after her arrival, both published in full in Galician for the first time in 2000. After a hemerographic research work, the gathering in this article of up to seven unknown narrations of the author, published between 1943 and 1951 in two Mexican literary magazines, reinterpret Syra Alonso's work and offers answers to essential biographical moments of her exile, which were unknown until now. Therefore, we propose, on the one hand, an analysis of the critical reception of her Diaries that can respond to the invisibility of the author within the canon and, on the other hand, a contextual, literary and even ethnographic analysis of these narratives in dialogue with her diaristic work and her own biography. All this, in view of the urgency of a present marked by the discovery of Francisco Miguel's body in a mass grave in Bértoa a few months ago. It´s a present of historical memory, reparation, and homage.