Few
of the poets featured on Poetry Portal led comfortable lives,
and Gustavo
Adolfo Bécquer (1836-70) was no exception. He was
one of eight
children born in Seville to the genre painter José Domínguez
Bécquer, but was progressively orphaned
at 5 and 11, being then brought up by his uncle,
Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer, another painter. Becquer
wrote his first (and accomplished) poem in 1848 and was
having work published in local newspapers by 1853. A year
later Bécquer left for Madrid,
there supporting himself by writing for the theatre and
light opera. In 1859 appeared the first of what would become
Rima XIII, and in 1860 Rima XV in the Album
of fashionable young ladies and couriers. Later in the
same year he wrote Rimas LXI, XXIII and LXII,
and married Casta Esteban from Soria, whom he met during
his travels
around Spain. Theirs was a turbulent affair: several children
resulted but Casta left him for good in 1868 and Bécquer's
health deteriorated. Bécquer continued to write his
Rimas and considerable prose. The minister González
Bravo offered to finance the publication of the Rimas,
but the manuscript was lost when his house was ransacked
in the 1868 Revolution. Bécquer partially recovered the
text from memory, the poems appearing as the Book of
the Sparrows, but the manuscript itself was then all
but lost in the National Library in Madrid from its acquisition
in 1896 until 1914. In September 1870, his equally impoverished
and much loved brother Valeriano died, and Bécquer
stopped caring. His wife returned for a brief reconciliation,
but Bécquer died
on 22nd December in Madrid of pneumonia and hepatitis.
Bécquer's
poetry
Only
Rima IV was formally published in Bécquer's
lifetime. In 1871, to help the surviving family, Bécquer's
writings
were collected into two volumes, where the Rimas
made a small showing. Three other Rimas
appeared in the Book of the Sparrows, which was seen
through the press by his friend Ramón
Rodríguez Correa. But whatever his personal misfortunes,
and the uncertain history of the manuscripts, Bécquer's
poems were recited from memory by his contemporaries, and
greatly influenced
the generations thereafter. Hauntingly brief, rigorously
modelled in strict stanza forms, deeply musical,
with ethereal images and ineffable longings,
often plangently
erotic, Bécquer's 98 Rimas
amount only to a few thousand lines, but became the foundation
of modern Spanish poetry. Darío
was the great invigorator, but his gifts were all his own.
Bécquer taught poets two things: to look deeply into their
own inchoate feelings, and to realise that popular
folksongs expressed something universal in human existence.
Bécquer
and Spanish poetry
Reputations
shift as poets find new things to dislike or appreciate
in their predecessors. Bécquer
appeals today because his troubled inwardness foreshadows
Modernism in a way that Darío's exuberant Parnassian
preciosity
does not. Almost as well known, and admired for similar
reasons are RosalíadeCastro
(1837-85, writing in Galician) and JacintoVerdaguer
(1845-1902, writing in Catalan). Bécquer's
simple
compositions are popular with adolescents, but they also
revived the expression of feeling without sentimentality.
Their saving grace was a German
influence, a mournful introspection learnt from Heine,
whose work Bécquer
knew very well. As a result, the '98 generation and the
poets
that followed
— JuanRamónJiménez
(1881-1958), FredericoLorca
(1899-1936), AntonioMachado
(1875-1939), JorgeGuillén,
PedroSalinas,
etc. — were better equipped to take up the varied elements
of Spanish culture and to give them an individual colouring.
Outside Modernism, the nineteenth century Spanish poets
who were once popular include Francisco
Casas y Amigó, JoanMaragall
(1860-1912), Rubió
y Ors (1818-99), M.
Costa y Llobera (1854-1922) and Núñez
de Arce
(1834-1903). Academic importance and individual taste are
different matters, and readers will gradually make their
own choices.
Reading the Spanish
Spanish,
an easy language to learn, andthe lingua
franca of Latin American, is fast becoming the most
spoken tongue in the USA. A good dictionary
should enable you readRimas
in the original,
and Bécquer's
proseworks.
But if you want to master Spanish properly, then theInternetoffersmanylearningsites,
books,
cassettesandCDs.
They open the door to one of the world's great literatures
— plays and poems of the golden
age, the pre-Revolution
poetry, the novels and short stories of Spain
and Latin
America. A good introduction is provided by the Spanish
Poetry section of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics (1993); Critical
Studies and bibliophilegroup
will take matters further. You
can find translations of Rimas at Howard
Landman, (with a good listing of previous renderings)and
galeon
— and help with Spanish prosody at Jehle,
Gleaves,
and Williamson
and Abraham. Translations in book form include Young
Alison's The infinite passion, being the celebrated
Rimas and the Letters to an unknown woman of Gustavo Adolfo
Becquer (1924) Rupert
Croft-Cooke's Twenty Poems from the Spanish of Bécquer,
With an Introductory Note on his Life and Work (1927),
Arthur Wallace Woolsey's The witch of Trazmoz & other
stories and poems. Translated from the Spanish of Gustavo
Adolfo Bécquer
(1965), David and Joan Altabé's Symphony of love: las
Rimas; a translation. (1974), Susanne Dubroff's Flower
on a Volcano (1980), Bruce Phenix's The Rimas of
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1985) and Henry
W. Sullivan's The Poems of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer:
A Metrical Linear Translation (2002). Good sites for
Spanish literature generally are Spanish
Literature Links, Spanish
Arts, IPFW,
Spanish
Links, Cultura,
Poesia
Castellana and Los
Poetas.
