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Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984) |
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Spanish poet, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977. Vicente Aleixandre has been called an existentialist, a mystic pantheist, and a neoromantic. Although Aleixandre did not consider himself an orthodox surrealist, his poems contained surrealistic images and Freudian subconscious associations. Central motifs are erotic love, solitude, time, and death. From his mid-20s, Alexaindre suffered from kidney tuberculosis. "The poet, the truly determinative poet, is always a revealer; he is, essentially, a seer, a prophet. But his "prophecy" is of course not a prophecy about the future; for it may have to do with the past: it is a prophecy without time. Illuminator, aimer of light, chastiser of mankind, the poet is the possessor of a Sesame which in a mysterious way is, so to speak, the word of his destiny." (from Nobel Lecture, 1977) Vicente Aleixandre was born in Seville. His father, Cirilo Aleixander Ballester, was a civil engineer and mother, Elvira Merlo Garcia de Pruneda, the daughter of the district military superintendent. Aleixandre grew up in Málaga, and later depicted its sunny landscape in his poems. When the family moved to Madrid in 1909, Aleixandre attended the Colegio Teresiano, from which he received his high school diploma in 1913. The following year he entered the University of Madrid, where he studied law. Upon graduation in 1920, he became an assistant professor at the School of Mercantile Management in Madrid. He then worked for the Andalusian Railways, and wrote poetry for his own pleasure. After 1922 Aleixandre started to have serious problems with his health. In a few years he became semi-invalid. He retired to his father's house in the countryside and devoted himself entirely to writing. "Solitude and meditation gave me an awareness, a perspective which I have never lost: that of solidarity with the rest of mankind." Withdrawn and in delicate health, Aleixandre wrote secretly until his first poems were published by friends in 1926 in the magazine Revista de Occidente. The next year Aleixandre settled in a small villa on the northern outskirts of Madrid, where he spent the rest of his life. Aleixandre's early works, which appeared in 'little magazines' flourishing throughout Spain, were written under the influence of Darío, Antonio Machado, and Juan Ramón Jiménez. In 1928 he made his debut with Ámbito, a crystalline collection of poems of nature and love. Around this time Alexaindre started to read the works of Sigmund Freud, whose influence is seen in the collection Pasión de la tierra (1935). The poems are arranged in a series of sequences and explore a world in which real things disintegrate. La destrucción o el amor (1935) was about erotic love and death – it is considered Aleixandre's poetic masterpiece and one of the most intense works of all 20th-century Hispanic poetry. In these early collections the central vision was, in the author's words, "the amorous unity of the universe". In 1933 Aleixandre won the Premio Nacional de literatura. Like others of the Generación del 27 (Generation of 1927) in Spain (Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén), Aleixandre went through a surrealistic period in the 1930s. During the Spanish Civil War Aleixandre lived in the Republican zone. His writings were banned and near the end of the war his house was destroyed. Most of the central figures of the Generation of 1927 had left Spain, but Aleixandre stayed in Madrid due to the chronic kidney disease from which he had suffered from since his youth. Never submitting to Franco's regime, and known for his political indepencence, Aleixandre's works were not printed for some time. After the ban was lifted, he published several collections of poems. The first was Sombra del Paraíso (1944, Shadow of Paradise), which he had began already in 1939. In this collection pleasure and pain are mixed with nostalgia. "Yes, poet, love and grief are your kingdom. / Yours is mortal flesh that quickened by the spirit / blazes in the night or rises up at mighty noon, / immense prophetic tongue that licking at the sky / illumines words that bring death to men." (from 'The Poet') "Sí, poeta: el amor y el dolor son tu reino / Carne mortal la tuya, que, arrebatada por el espíritu, / arde en la noche o se eleva en el mediodía poderoso, / immensa lengua profética que lamiendo los cielos / ilumina palabras que dan muerte a los hombres." Mundo a solas, written in the 1930s, was published in 1950. Historia del corazón (1954) focused on human solidarity. In En un vasto dominio (1962) Aleixandre connected the theme of death with a cosmic and historical framework. In the experimental Diálogos del conocimiento (1974) two people confront one another, one speaker always talks of hope and struggle, and the other of desolation and renunciation. Where is truth, Aleixandre asks. Can one reach it? Aleixandre never married and never made public his own sexual orientation. In 1950 he was elected to the Royal Academy of the Language. He received the Critics Prize in 1963, 1969, and 1975. Too weak to attend the Nobel ceremonies, Aleixandre was represented by his friend and younger colleague, the poet and translator Justo Jorge Padron (b. 1943). Aleixandre died of kidney failure in Madrid on December 14, in 1984. For further reading: Vicente Aleixandre's Stream of Lyric Consciousness by Daniel Murphy (2001); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 1, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Vicente Aleixandre: A Critical Appraisal by S. Daydi-Tolson (1981); Critical Views on Vicente Aleixandre by V. Cabrera and H. Boyer (1979); Vida y obra de Vicente Aleixandre by L. de Luis (1978); La Poesía de Vicente Aleixandre by C. Bousoño (1977); La parola poetica di Vicente Aleixandre by D. Puccini (1976); Cinco Poetas del Tiempo by J.O. Jiménez (1972); Vicente Aleixandre by K. Schwartz (1970); The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature by P. Ilie (1968) Selected works:
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