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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. When did I begin to write? This question, invariably the first, is easily answered. I'm a rather late poet, if we call someone late who wasn't introduced to poetry until he was eighteen years old. Life went along until one summer, in a town in the Sierra de Avila where by chance we'd met and made friends, Dámaso Alonso, a boy like myself, handed me my first book of poems. How pleased I am to to tell everybody now! The poet Dámaso gave me was Rubén Dario, and that truly maiden reading was a revolution to my soul. I discovered poetry: it stood revealed, and the one great passion of my life took hold in me, and never let go. (A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre, edited by Lewis Hyde, Copper Canyon Press, 2007, p. 133) Vicente Aleixandre was born in Seville into a well-to-do
family. He was the only son of Cirilo
Aleixander Ballester, a civil engineer, and Elvira Merlo
Garcia de Pruneda, the daughter of the district military
superintendent; she died in 1934. Aleixandre grew up in Málaga, and
later depicted its
sunny landscape in his poems. After moving in 1909 with his parents and
sister to Madrid,
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, Aleixandrebecame 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; afraid of criticism, he never showed them to
anyone. The first work published under his name was a series of
articles on railway economics. In his late 20s, Aleixandre started to have serious problems with his health. Due to kidney problens, he became semi-invalid in a few years and retired to his father's house in the countryside. There he evoted 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." (from 'Nobel Lecture' by Vicente Aleixandre, December 12, 1977, in Nobel Lectures: Literature 1968-1980, edited by Sture Allen, World Scientific, 1993, p. 148) 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.
Before turning to poetry, most of his reading focused on history
and the nineteenth-century realists. Aleixandre's early works, which appeared in small-circulation magazines flourishing throughout Spain, were written under the influence of Darío, Antonio Machado, and Juan Ramón Jiménez (another Nobel Prize winning Spanish poet). In 1928 he made his debut with Ámbito (Ambit). The poems describe a poetic world where natural forces have anthropomorphized appearance, from the depths of the sea to the heights of the sky: "The sea seems to be lashed to the deep / Abyss and, spread out, is gazing into / The heavens above as / violently groaning, / He struggles to free himself fro the dark bed." (from 'Mar y noche' (Sea and Night), in Vicente Aleixandre's Stream of Lyric Consciousness by Daniel Murphy, Bucknell University Press, 2001, p. 47) Around this time Alexaindre started to read the works of Sigmund Freud, whose influence is seen in the collection Pasión de la tierra (1935). Other authors the Generation of 1927 read and discussed included James Joyce and the French surrealists. In his early collections the central vision was, in the author's words, "the amorous unity of the universe". La
destrucción o el amor (1935, Destruction or Love)
was about love, death, time and the cosmos –
it is considered Aleixandre's poetic masterpiece and one of the most
intense works of all 20th-century Hispanic poetry. In 'Soy el destino'
the poet places himself in the centre of the universe, he is the unity
or mouthpiece of elements: "I am destiny summoning all who love, /
single sea toward which all loving radii will flow / seeking their
center, rippled by a circle / turning like the perfect murmuring rose."
(Destruction or Love = La destruccion o el amor, introduction, translation, and illustrations by Robert G. Mowry, Associated University Press, 2000, p. 182) In 1933 Aleixandre won the Premio Nacional de literatura. Like his fellow writers, Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Pedro Salinas, and Jorge Guillén, Aleixandre went through a surrealistic period in the 1930s and experimented with automatic writing. During the Spanish Civil War
Aleixandre lived in the Republican zone. Tubercular nephritis kept him
bedfast. The family home was destroyed
in bombings. Aleixandre's house was near the University of Madrid, on
Calle Velingtonia. Lorca
had visited the house, nicknamed "Casa de los poetas" (House of the
Poets), on several occasions. Also the future Nobel laureate, Pablo
Neruda, was seen there after he came to Madrid – he called Aleixandre
as a "poet of limitless dimension". (Memoirs by Pablo Neruda, translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, p. 118) Most of
the central
figures of the Generation of 1927 left Spain, but Aleixandre stayed
in Madrid due to the chronic kidney disease from which he had suffered
from since his youth. Of his closest friends, only the poet and
literary critic Dámaso Alonso remained in Spain. Lorca was murdered by
fascist soldiers. A poem about a heroic Republican soldier, printed in 1936 in Rafael Alberti's El mono azul (The Blue Monkey), was later used as a proof of Aleixandre's disloyalty against Franco's National Movement. 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. Sombra del Paraíso (1944, Shadow of Paradise), which he had began already in 1939, anticipated many of the themes of his later works. In this collection harmony and destruction, love and death, are mixed with nostalgia for paradise lost. "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', Shadows of Paradise, translated and with an introduction by Hugh A. Harter, University of California Press, 1987, p. 3) "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. According to the poet Luis Antonio de Villena and the
journalist, novelist and playwright Vicente Molina Foix, the
issue was a delicate matter with him. ('Aleixandre,
Vicente (1898-1984)' by Alberto Mira, in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian
History: From World War II to the Present Day, edited by Robert
Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, 2001, pp. 7-8)
He lived a fairly uneventful life but his house on Calle Velingtonia
(now renamed Calle de Vicente Aleixandre) was the mecca for aspiring
young writers. The house is noted for the ceder tree Alexaindre planted
in the garden in 1927. 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', p. 150) Over the years, Aleixandre emerged from his inner exile every now and then to speak against totalitarianism, repression, and censorship. In 1949 he was elected to the Royal Academy of the Language, which secured his position as a writer of national stature. Nevertheless, he was nearly imprisoned by the regime when General Jorge Vigón, Minister of Agriculture, accused him of being a communist. Aleixandre received the Critics Prize in 1963, 1969, and 1975. Too weak to attend the Nobel ceremonies, Aleixandre, a surprise winner, 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: 'The Unanimous Heartbeat: Co-existence and Self-identity in Vicente Aleixandre's Historia del corazón' by David F. Richter, in Poéticas: Revista de Estudios Literarios, No. 9 (2019); City of Paradise' by Eric Reinholtz, in Encyclopedia of World Poetry: 1900 to the Present by R. Victoria Arana (2013); Vicente Aleixandre's Stream of Lyric Consciousness by Daniel Murphy (2001); 'Vicente Aleixandre (Merlo) 1898-1984' by Michael P. Iarocci, in Encyclopedia of Literary Translation Into English: Volume I: A-L, edited by Olive Classe (2000); 'Aleixandre ,Vicente,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 1, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999); 'Introduction' by Hugh A. Harter, in Shadow of Paradise by Vicente Aleixandre (1987); Vicente Aleixandre: A Critical Appraisal by Santiago Daydi-Tolson (1981); Critical Views on Vicente Aleixandre by Vicente Cabrera and Harriet Boyer (1979); Vida y obra de Vicente Aleixandre by Leopoldo de Luis (1978); La Poesía de Vicente Aleixandre by Carlos Bousoño (1977); La parola poetica di Vicente Aleixandre by Dario Puccini (1976); Cinco Poetas del Tiempo by J.O. Jiménez (1972); Vicente Aleixandre by Kessel Schwartz (1970); The Surrealist Mode in Spanish Literature by Paul Ilie (1968) Selected works:
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