Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, un surrealista a medias

Abstract

Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, a Semi-Surrealist. This work aims to establish similarities between surrealist poetry and the poetry of the Peruvian poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen. The first part of the text is aiming to outline main characteristics of avant-garde literature in Peru between the years 1920 and 1930 and the process of implantation of a surrealist movement born in Europe. The mentioned process of implantation was hard and complex, especially, because it clashed with the local political system and partial renunciation of the previous movements such as Modernism, Symbolism, and Romanticism. Also, French surrealism had to face literary Peruvian critics who were not ready for the arrival of something new. Consequently, Emilio Adolfo Westphalen expressed his discontent over the fossilized literary critic and his poet friends in his correspondence and essays. Westphalen was not only interested in the surrealism of others, but he was also interested in surrealism for his poetry. Our study is based particularly on the following sources: the essays of Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, the surrealist theory included in the Manifestoes of Surrealism, and the critical works by Mirko Lauer, Américo Ferrari, etc.