I'm thinking I should do at least one chapter on Latin American poets who belong to the same general movement of late modernism in Spain--the transatlantic dimension. From Lezama Lima (Cuba) and Octavio Paz (Mexico) to Eduardo Milán (Uruguay) and Blanca Varela (Peru).
Gamoneda wrote an epilogue to Varela's complete poetry in Galaxia Gutenberg. Milán wrote the introduction to García Valdés's poetry in the same collection. Valente, Sánchez Robayna, Milán, and Varela did an anthology together of both peninsular and lat am poetry--also published in Galaxia Gutenberg in Barcelona. So evidently something is going on here on the level of publishing.
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I'm working at least one hour a day on this project throughout the summer. Now I have twelve potential chapters so something might have to give way. I count time blogging about this project in the one hour. Once I do the one hour then I am free to work longer on it in the bonus zone, or to do other things.
I'd be interested to hear your reaction to this passage in Borges's preface to the Gold of the Tigers (The Book of Sand, Penguin, p. 97):
ResponderEliminar"...if I were obliged to name the influence behind my poems, I would say they stemmed from modernismo - that enormous liberation that gave new life to the many literatures that use the Castilian language, and that certainly carried as far as Spain."
He goes on to mention Leopoldo Lugones and (through him) Rubén Darío, finally, that he favours "affinities" over "regional differences" in the language. What I can't make out (because of my ignorance of Spanish-language poetry) is whether all of that is about "modernismo", or whether he is listing modernismo among his influences, which also include Lugones, Darío, and this linguistic emphasis.
Darío and Lugones are modernistas--not to be confused with modernists, so he's using them as examples of his own modernista influences. Lugones was the main Argentine modernista, so he is important for Borges.
ResponderEliminar"not to be confused with modernists". Thanks. That will no doubt save me some embarrassment. I've got some more reading to do. Perhaps your other book clears this up?
ResponderEliminarOr your next one?
Modernismo in Spanish America (but not Brazil) is equivalent to decadentism / late symbolism / Parnassianism, and peaks in the 1890s. What we call in English modernism--the movement that peaks in the 1920s--is called "vanguardia" in Spanish, more or less, though this remains problematical. The Brazilians, though, called their avant-garde in the 1920s "modernismo."
ResponderEliminar