Spanish Literature: Key Authors, Works, and Literary Concepts

Posted on Jan 9, 2025 in Latin

Spanish Literature: Key Authors and Concepts

Jorge Guillén (1893-1984)

Jorge Guillén was a prominent representative of pure poetry. His work includes the book Air Ours, which brings together three collections of poems:

  • Song: Poems in this collection emphasize the happiness of being alive, using images that suggest lightness and perfection.
  • Clamor: This collection addresses issues such as poverty, death, and suffering, which contradict or question the perfection held in Song.
  • Tribute: These poems praise various personalities in art and science. After this stage, Guillén began to incorporate social criticism into his work.

Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958)

Juan Ramón Jiménez was born in Huelva, Spain. He married Zenobia Camprubí in 1916 in the U.S. He left Spain and returned to the U.S. after the outbreak of the Civil War. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. His work is characterized by the pursuit of perfection. His creative cycles are defined as follows:

  • Sensitive Stage: Influenced by Modernism, this stage emphasizes the sonority of verse and symbols and motifs present in Modernism, such as sunsets, the moon, and gardens. Musicality and adjectives are of great importance. Notable works include Sad Arias, Elegies, The Sound Isolation, and Platero and I.
  • Intellectual Stage: This stage began in 1916 with Diary of a Newly Married Poet. Nakedness characterizes the formal and more complex issues. Topics include loneliness, death, eternity, and creation. Notable works include Eternity, Stone and Sky, and Total Station.
  • Stage of True Enough: These books were written during his exile in America and include On the Other Side and God Desired and Desiring. This stage focuses on transcendence through perfection and beauty, identifying poetic perfection with purification and the search for God.

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)

Federico García Lorca was born in Granada, Spain. He moved to the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid in 1919. In 1929, he sailed to New York, where he wrote the poems in Poet in New York. He died in Granada. His poetry can be distinguished into two phases:

  • First Stage: Gypsy Ballads: In this stage, Lorca composed folk poetry with traditional forms. Topics include desire, rebellion, and death. Notable works include Poem of the Deep Song (which recreates Andalusian folklore motifs and forms) and Gypsy Ballads (in which the poet makes the Roma a mythical people, symbolizing values such as beauty, courage, and freedom).
  • Second Stage: Poet in New York: This stage was influenced by avant-garde and Surrealist movements. Topics include poverty, hunger, and social injustice. Lorca used free verse and surrealist images (based on irrational associations of ideas). The poems convey strong emotions.

Lorca’s Theater

Lorca was one of the most innovative figures in Spanish theater during the first third of the 20th century, along with Valle-Inclán. His works include:

  • The Curse of the Butterfly: A symbolist drama.
  • Mariana Pineda (1927): A successful historical drama in verse.
  • Blood Wedding: Explores the impossible love between a man and a woman from two rival families.
  • Yerma: Depicts the anguish of a woman unable to have children.
  • The House of Bernarda Alba: Focuses on the moral tyranny of an overbearing mother.

In all of Lorca’s plays, the central conflict is between individual freedom and authority.

Antonymy

Antonymy refers to words that have opposite meanings (antonyms). There are different classes of antonyms:

  • Binary or Complementary Opposites: These are mutually exclusive words. The affirmation of one implies the negation of the other (e.g., sick/healthy, possible/impossible).
  • Reverse Antonyms: These words designate the same action or relationship from opposite viewpoints (e.g., buy/sell, give/receive, father/son).
  • Graded Antonyms: These words relate to the extremes of a scale that allows for varying degrees (e.g., hot/cold, which are the ends of the temperature scale).

Homonyms

Homonyms are words that are written or pronounced the same but have different meanings. They are words of different origins whose forms coincide. Do not confuse homonyms with polysemy (when a word has various meanings). Homonyms have two separate dictionary entries.