Spanish Poet Research Articles

Poetry, Parody and the Construction of Contrarian Discourse in Franco’s Spain

This article examines how poetry subverted Francoist control over the written word in National-Catholic Spain. Despite the policing of culture by the regime’s censors, poets were able to use their works to express their nonconformity with the social and political situation. Spanish poets working under the regime resorted to subtle techniques in order to articulate their dissent. This article explores the political possibilities of one such technique: parody. It evaluates the limitations of parodic discourse as a form of political critique and offers an appraisal of the value of this literary form in the specific context of Francoist Spain. Offering a close reading of a work of parodic poetry by Ángel González, the article analyses how parody is used to appropriate and subvert Francoist National-Catholic discourse.

Oblicza Andaluzji w twórczości Federica Garcíi Lorki

FACES OF ANDALUSIA IN THE WORKS OF FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA This article is dedicated to discussing the role of Andalusia in the works of Federico García Lorca in the context of intercultural dialogue. The research questions posed will focus on the image of Andalusia in Lorca’s works and the elements of folklore used to address universal themes. For this reason, a brief biography of the poet will be presented in the introduction, combined with an explanation of why he is the most important Spanish poet of the 20th century. The theoretical basis of the study will include the issue of the literature that has been published to date in relation to Lorca’s work, which will be followed by a brief discussion of the most important elements that make up Andalusian culture. The analysis carried out will allow the research to be developed in a practical way. In turn, the Arab and Roma influences and aspects related to the art of flamenco present in the artist’s work will be discussed. A further part of the research will be an analysis of how Lorca uses the aforementioned elements to address universal themes such as death, oppression, infertility or social realities. The study will conclude that Andalusia in Lorca’s work is a region with many ‘faces’ and a place of intercultural dialogue.

The Symbolism of the Moon Between Darwish and Lorca: A Comparative Study Between Darwish's "Afraid of the Moon" and Lorca's "Ballad of the Moon"

The moon does not always shine bright; at times, it appears dark. Despite its associations with femininity, beauty, innocence and new beginnings, the moon also embodies masculinity, fear, sin and connections to endings. This comparative study focuses on the contrasting use of moon symbolism and its implications in relation to two distinct cultural backgrounds; the Arabic culture represented by Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet who presents the moon as a source of fear in his poem "Afraid of the Moon", and the western culture represented by Frederico Garcia Lorca, a Spanish poet who portrays the moon in "Ballad of the Moon" as a symbol of femininity and sensuality. This study attempts to highlight the influences of their choices in symbolizing the moon and the variations in meaning that come with it through the lens of French comparative literature theory. Keywords: Comparative literature, Poetry, Moon, Mahmoud Darwish, Lorca.

CATÁSTROFE E RESISTÊNCIA NA AMAZÔNIA CONTEMPORÂNEA: uma análise discursiva do conto Mamí tinha razão, de João Meirelles Filho

This communication proposes to analyse, from the perspective of comparative studies and landscape theory, the poem Canción de jinete, by Federico García Lorca, and the Brazilian resistance poetry produced after the military coup of 1964 (Ferreira Gullar, Thiago de Mello, mimeograph generation, etc.). To this end, theoretical and philosophical contributions on landscape and complexity (Claudio Guillén, Michel Collot, Anne Cauquelin, Agustín Berque, Alain Roger, Gilles Deleuze, Manuel Ángel Vázquez-Medel, Èdouard Glissant) will be taken as support to seek parallels and similarities, in the construction of the forbidden landscape, between the Spanish poet and Brazilian poetry. Military dictatorships have disastrous consequences on any community and one of the most persecuted segments, due to its power of persuasion, is the artistic/intellectual. Murders, torture and exile are the main resources used by usurpers to silence the voices of those who resist living under the shadow of totalitarianism. As a cultural construct, the literary landscape is influenced by the space-time circumstances in which the poet finds himself. The landscape apprehended in experiences of oppression and exile records the violence that human beings can exercise in situations of power, remaining as a historical testimony of a tragedy that should not be repeated, nor forgotten.

CANCIÓN DE JINETE: o olhar equidistante da paisagem proibida

This communication proposes to analyse, from the perspective of comparative studies and landscape theory, the poem Canción de Jinete, by Federico García Lorca, and the Brazilian resistance poetry produced after the military coup of 1964 (Ferreira Gullar, Thiago de Mello, mimeograph generation…). To this end, the concepts of landscape and complexity (Claudio Guillén, Michel Collot, Anne Cauquelin, Agustín Berque, Alain Roger, Gilles Deleuze, Manuel Ángel Vázquez-Medel, Èdouard Glissant) will be taken as a theoretical and philosophical support to seek parallels and similarities, in the construction of the forbidden landscape, between the Spanish poet and Brazilian poetry. Military dictatorships have disastrous consequences on any community and one of the most persecuted segments, due to its power of persuasion, is the artistic/intellectual. Murders, torture and exile are the main resources used by usurpers to silence the voices of those who resist living under the shadow of totalitarianism. As a cultural construct, the literary landscape is influenced by the space-time circumstances in which the poet finds himself. The landscape apprehended in experiences of oppression and exile records the violence that human beings can exercise in situations of power, remaining as a historical testimony of a tragedy that should not be repeated, nor forgotten.

El poeta español Pedro Herreros (1890-1937) en el espacio editorial y literario de Buenos Aires

The autobiographical marks that traverse the poetic work of Pedro Herreros show the gaze of an emigrant who, in difficult economic conditions, adapted himself to living at the beginning of the 20th century during the expansion of modern capitalism in Buenos Aires. The correspondence he had with his close friend, the Argentine cartoonist Antonio Bermúdez Franco, still unpublished, shows some of the strategies that the Spanish poet used to publish his work and be part of literary and publishing circles that would give him the desired recognition. Through both documentary sources, which have served as a methodological guide, we show the difficult economic conditions that Herreros endured and some of the resources he used to make his way into the literary world.

Towards a phonetic history of the voices of Spanish poets

How does the voice of a poet sound? Poetry reading, an essential component of this art, represents interesting material for phonetic studies. However, it remains an under-researched topic. This work attempts to go beyond the state of the art, providing an experimental analysis of some voices of the Generation of ’27, aiming to mark the first step towards a phonetic history of the voices of Spanish poets. This research, which employs a qualitative phonetic approach and a statistical approach, has brought to light some principal elements. These include variation as a consistent element among authors and within a single author, enabling the detection of main features and sub-groups; common features marking a global grouping; and the possible variety and criticism of clusters, revealing the complexity of this speech and the effectiveness of our model to describe it.

The Creativity Literary of Gongora

يعد (غونغورا Gongora) واحدا من رموز الفن الادبي الاسباني ونموذجاً (لجيل شعراء 1927 في اسبانيا), خلال مسيرته الادبية كتب عدة اشعار ومسرحيات ذات مواضيع تقليدية شعبية مكوناً في ذلك لوحة عن شخصيته الطيبة والغامضة يمتاز بأسلوب التصنع والبديع في الاعمال الادبية وهذا واضح في عمله الموسوم (اسطورة بوليفيمو وكالاتيا la Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea)، وكذلك في عمله الموسوم (الخلوات las soledades)، الذي يصل فيها إلى قمة غموضه الشديد في (أسلوب الباروكو) .ان ذلك الغموض كان أسلوبا فنياً خاصاً بقصائد تلك المرحلة. كان ذا أسلوب فني وأحاسيس وذكاء حاد في الكتابة، الامر الذي جعل البعض من أصدقائه ان يطلبوا منه أن يبدل أو يلغي بعض التراكيب اللغوية في أعماله وذلك لأسلوبه الادبي الغامض لقد كان غونغور واحدا من الشعراء الاسبان الذين اسهموا بشكل كبير في "الكولتيرانيسمو: وهو تيار أدبي ظهر في عصر البارّوك الإسبانيّ ويستخدم الألفاظ النقيلة والاستعارات الخالصة والتلميح عبر الأساطير القديمة. ويعرف هذا التيار الجمالي أيضاً باسم "غونغوريسمو" نسبة إلى غونغور الذي يعد واحدا من مؤسسي هذا التيار الادبي. ينقسم البحث على فصلين الاول يتناول السيرة الذاتية للشاعر واسلوبه الادبي واعماله البارزة ,اما الفصل الثاني يعرض ال "غونغوريسمو" والبناء الادبي لقصائده الشعرية الغنائية

دراسة أسلوبية بين شعر ماتشادو والسياب "تحليل تقابلي

دراستنا الأسلوبية المقارنة بين شعر أنتونيو ماتشادو وبدر شاكر السياب تهدف إلى استكشاف وتحليل التشابهات في الاسلوب لهذين الشاعرين المميزين. تركز الأسلوبية على دراسة السمات الأدبية والتقنيات والخصائص الشكلية التي تشكل التعبير الفني في اللغة. في هذه الدراسة، سنقوم بدراسة العناصر الأسلوبية المختلفة التي يستخدمها ماتشادو والسياب لتحليل كيف يتجلى أسلوبهما في شعرهما.
 يُعرف أنتونيو ماشادو بأسلوبه اللغوي والعميق، الذي يتميز في كثير من الأحيان ببساطته وقدرته على نقل المشاعر والتأملات الفلسفية. قصائد ماتشادو يغلب عليها حزن عميق ورؤية شاعرية للوجود. الامر الذي ينعكس كثير في شعر بدر شاكر السياب، الشاعر العراقي المميز، الذي عاش حياة مثقلة بالمصاعب الصحية والكثير من الفقدان لمحيطه الاجتماعي وكان اقساها فقدان امه. تتميز قصائده بلغته الكثيفة والرمزية، حيث يتناول مواضيع مثل العذاب والحنين لفترة الشباب وعشقه لأرض ولادته. كما يتناول مواضيع الرثاء والوطن والوحدة، وهي مواضيع يشترك فيها مع ماشادو. على الرغم من اختلاف الخلفيات الثقافية بينهما، فإن المواضيع الشعرية للشاعرين تتشابه بشكل ملحوظ.
 كلمات مفتاحية: أنتونيو ماشادو، السياب، أسلوبية، شعر، أسلوب شعري.

“Neither Erudite Nor Didactic”: José Bento’s Translation of Spanish Literature into Portuguese

When considering the long list of translations by the Portuguese poet and translator José Bento (1933–2019), the most striking feature is probably the diversity of Spanish poets, novelists and playwrights that he translated (and often commented on) during his lifelong career. Diversity, however, does not mean randomness, and despite any particular circumstances, it may be argued that this list of translated works suggests that Bento had a clear idea of what should be made available in Portuguese translation as key texts of Spanish literature, including both classical and modern authors, titles and genres. The translator’s comments to his published translations show that they were intended for a large Portuguese audience of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most emblematic statement being that the anthologies he organized were “neither erudite nor didactic” (Bento 2001: 728). This article will focus on José Bento’s selection, translation and paratextual comment of several Spanish literary works, eventually taking into account he was also a published poet, with clear ideas about literary reading and creative writing. This will allow us to discuss some specificities of the translation of Spanish literature into Portuguese, as well as Bento’s conceptualization of the translator’s task as a reader and re-writer of the Iberian literary tradition.

Translating Linguistic Poetry: Mario Martín Gijón’s Rendicción in Polish, English and French

The lyrical work of Spanish poet Mario Martín Gijón is linguistic in the extreme. Not only does he juxtapose similar-sounding words, but he fuses them graphically into one, with parentheses containing a word fragment [me(re)ce, entreg(u)arme] or two fragments separated by a slash [conju(r/nt)os, in(v/f)ierno]; he also uses enjambment within words (cor / reo, tarde / seosa). These techniques result in a multiplication of readings, which constitutes a major challenge for translators. Terence Dooley, Miguel Ángel Real and the author of this essay (here in the dual role of translator and researcher) translated Martín Gijón’s poetry into English, French and Polish, respectively. Each translator had at their disposal language matter with very distinctive characteristics. The translator into French was able to take advantage of the largely convergent Romance roots, which made it possible to recreate many word games on a one-to-one scale or with only minimal changes. The English language afforded such a possibility much less frequently, and Polish, just once. As a result, the English and Polish translations are re-creations to a much larger extent than the French one. However, the significant differences between each of the versions stem not only from the properties of the target languages, but also from the different approaches of the translators.

Of Eggplant, Ham, and Identity

In his much-anthologized “Tres cosas me tienen preso,” the Spanish poet Baltasar del Alcázar (1530–1606) compares a dish of ham, eggplant, and cheese to the beautiful Inés, and finds her wanting. While the poem can be read as a comic conflation of sex and food as dueling human appetites, here I suggest that the cultural connotations of ham (a quintessential Christian marker in Renaissance Spain), eggplant (a food strongly associated with the Muslim and Jewish “other”), and to a lesser extent cheese reveal the poet’s own cultural anxieties and represent an attempt to resolve them.

Sor Juana and Elvira Sastre – Ecological Advocacy and the Female Voice as Witness in Patronage Economies

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is frequently hailed as Latin America’s first feminist, in whose writing activism and art converge to advocate for education for all. Throughout her literary corpus, knowledge is connected with light and divinity, and one’s connection with the natural world further strengthens a philosophical relationship with God. In Sor Juana’s writing, the destruction of the land in post-Conquest Latin America becomes an assault on the self, where the poetic voice both observes and critiques ecological and patriarchal violence. In the modern day, the social media platform Instagram is employed by a new generation of Spanish poets for the publication and promotion of their work. Elvira Sastre engages with rhetoric surrounding the climate crisis whilst negotiating her personal expression through representation of the body as Earth. Again, by observing the literal destruction of the Earth, Sastre’s poetic voice rises above this violence, self-fashioning as an advocate for change. This paper therefore explores ecological advocacy in both female authors’ work and positions, underscoring how they both use their positions as writers within their respective creative patronage economies to reconcile (male) violence with the female voice.

Queer Futurity and Conflicted Feeling(s) in the Poetry of Ariadna G. García

The work of Spanish poet Ariadna G. García (Madrid, 1977) occupies an unusual place within the archive of modern queer Spanish poetry. Collections like Construyéndome en ti (1997), Napalm. Cortometraje poético (2001), La Guerra de Invierno (2013), Helio (2014), and Ciudad sumergida (2018) are the product of a changing society in which poets can engage with questions surrounding queer participation in social institutions like couples and families as a concrete reality instead of imagined and anticipated future possibilities. The past(s), present(s), and future(s) that García’s poems explore highlight the potential that both negative and positive emotions have as sources of meaning for queer subjects and vehicles through which to imagine and think through potential alternative roles, identities, and opportunities. This poetry traces how poetic subjects who seek out social benefits and strive to make the most of fleeting moments of happiness and record past and present struggles for future generations stake out a complex position between hetero- and homonormativity and look beyond what José Esteban Muñoz has termed “the quagmire of the present.” Futurity in García’s work thus builds on positive affect in the present to imagine, project and cope with future moments, in the process demonstrating that queer utopianism need not rely on a negative view of the present to imagine a more inclusive future.

The sexual upheaval of the Spanish sixties: gender and sexual-affective diversities under Franco’s authoritarian regime

ABSTRACT Variation and diversity played a dynamic role in creating social heterogeneity in the Spanish 1960s and resisting the homogenizing purposes of an authoritarian moral project. Inspired by Eve K. Sedgwick, my study goes beyond presentist genealogies of identity and vindication of variation in sexual orientation. I assemble an archive of diversities to explore this sexual heterogeneity of the Spanish sixties. I show the “Kinsey effect”, or the influence of Alfred Kinsey’s (1894–1956) matter-of-fact studies on sexual variation in Spain, through Spanish medical literature written by doctors, and a number of Spanish surveys on sexuality. I also show how incipient consumerism destabilized the sex/gender system and diversified masculinity. I contend that audiences may interpret certain representations of ambivalent masculinities, shaped by modern femininities, as transgressing gender codes. Finally, I rely on the Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma (1929–1990) to argue that Sedgwick’s criticism of a simplistic understanding of sexuality highlights the poet’s difference in transgressing normative masculinity and living out the traditional sex/love binary. My archive of diversities helps to connect biological ideas of sexual variation to political notions of diversity and difference in the Spanish sixties.

Characterizing the visualization design space of distant and close reading of poetic rhythm.

Metrical and rhythmical poetry analysis is founded on the systematic statistical analysis and comparison of sonic devices (e.g., rhythmic patterns) that emerge from a combination of pre-established aesthetic and structural rules and the poet's abilities and creative genius to convey a given message adhering to the said constraints. These rhythmical patterns, which have been traditionally obtained by means of a careful close reading of the poems, in a process known as "scansion," can now be obtained and made visible by automatic means. However, the visualization literature is still scarce on approaches that allow an insightful close and distant reading of the rhythmical patterns in a poetry corpus. In this work, we report our initial efforts in characterizing of the visualization design space of distant and close reading of poetic rhythm. By employing a digital version of a corpus of 11,268 verses originally written by the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García-Lorca (1898-1936), we could craft several prototypical visualizations representative of the inherent complexity of the problem which we expect to employ in future user studies and that we share here with the rest of the community to foster further discussion around this interesting topic.

Felipe Valencia. The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora

Felipe Valencia. <i>The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora</i>

Emily Dickinson, Poets' Poet: First Versions in Spanish (Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gilberto Owen, Ernestina de Champourcin)

Abstract: This paper focuses on the first three Spanish versions of Dickinson's poetry. They were linked from the start, as the cult of the poet was passed on by word of mouth in the Spanish-speaking world, like a secret sap that brought together those who fed on it. Dickinson's first translator was the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who included versions of three of her poems in his Diario de un poeta recién casado ( Diary of a Newlywed Poet , 1917). It was through Jiménez that Dickinson became known to the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, who would publish his own translations in 1934 in the cultural supplement of the newspaper El Tiempo in Bogotá, and to the Spanish poet Ernestina de Champourcin, the author of the first selection of Dickinson's poems published as an independent volume ( Obra escogida [ Selected Work s], 1945), in collaboration with Juan José Domenchina. These translations are marked by the fact that their three authors are poets; rather than being a professional exercise, they are the result of an intimate dialogue, an homage, or even a strategy by means of which Jiménez, Owen, and Champourcin attempted to revive in their own voices the singular emotion aroused by such a different poet.

William Godolphin and Francisco de la Torre’s Agudezas de Juan Oven (1674): Patronage, diplomacy, and confessionalism

Aragonese poet Francisco de la Torre y Sevil (1625–1681) dedicated his Agudezas de Juan Oven (1674) to William Godolphin (1635–1696), English ambassador to Madrid (1671–1678). Examination of the rich paratextual matter suggests that the bond of patronage between Spanish poet and English diplomat was forged at the convergence of two factors: the problematic nature of Owen’s text, a collection of epigrams expurgated by the Holy Office whose publication in Spanish, although permitted, required avoiding inquisitorial censorship; and Godolphin’s profile as a foreign ambassador converted to Catholicism and owner of an extensive library.

Ignacio Prat y la transducción dantesca

In Spain during the second half of the twentieth century a certain type of poetry was born that did not find the place and the space for the debate that it undoubtedly deserved given its high linguistic and literary value. In this sense, the poetry of the Spanish poet Ignacio Prat deals with those types of writings that flank with experimentalism and with the true avant-garde itself. In this piece of work and through the study of a text entitled “Lineamenta” we will endeavor to show how the presence of a universal poet such as Dante can be perceived in the making and editing of the very text of such a poet. The proximity between literary creation and translation is proven here with the analysis of the poem, which, as we shall see, is influenced by the presence of Dante by a game of intertextual cross-references that achieve to offer us a poem of high communicative content adorned with diachronic literary materials that the Spanish poet can reuse for a text of contemporary poetry.