¡Bemsha SWING!: Ramón

14/02/2011

Ramón

Ramón Gómez de la Serna has always been one of my favorite Spanish novelists. Today I am beginning to teach El novelista, a metanovel from 1925 featuring Andrés Castilla, a novelist, and numerous novels-within-the-novel. I think I may have taught this book in the early 90s at Ohio State. It fits my plan nicely of teaching Niebla, El cuarto de atrás, and Obabakoak.

I freely admit that Ramón is not a great novelist in the conventional sense. He is mostly known for his metaphorical inventiveness, not his mostly forgettable characters and non-existent or digressive plotting. Yet I still like him better than almost any twentieth century Spanish novelist.

2 comentarios:

Clarissa dijo...: How about Juan Goytisolo? And Luis Martin Santos?; 12:22 p.m.
Jonathan dijo...: I cannot say i love Goytisolo or Martín Santos. They are obviously key novelists in the development of the postwar novel, but I don't really have a deep affinity for either of them. I know I'm supposed to like them.

My favorite Goytisolo is En los reinos de Taifa, which is not even a novel.

I wouldn't have learned Spanish to read the modern Spanish novel, as I did to read poetry written in Spanish. Nothing in 20th century peninsular novel thrills me as much as Galdós and Cervantes do. Ramón comes the closest.; 12:33 p.m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

14/02/2011

Ramón

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