Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) was born in Cadiz. His grandfathers were Italian. He had a Spanish grandmother and an Irish grandmother. They were vintners. Handing the business down, the family sold some businesses they shouldn't have, and his father was a traveling salesman for the company.
Interesting moment in his childhood, he was kicked out of school, but his family moves to Madrid in 2017 when he is 15 and he was spared the shame of being kicked out of a school. In Madrid he neglected his studies to go to museums and paint, and he seemed to be becoming a painter, but when his father died, a matador died, and the novelist Benito Pérez Galdós died, he felt compelled to write poems.
In 1921 he begins to write poetry, he's published first in 1922. His first book of poems in 1925 wins the poetry award. Many big poets came alive and published in 1927, called generation 1927, and he was one of them (See list below).
He gets a job working for the communist party that allows him to stop depending on his family. In 1932 he marries María Teresa León. They were in Ibeza when the Civil War (1936-1939) broke out, and he was imprisoned. In 1939 he he was running a large country house as a hotel. He eventually fled to Paris via Oran. And with Germany invading France, they move to Buenos Aires Argentina, where they would live until 1963. 1941 he has a daughter Aitana, who would become a poet too. Painting and poetry, plus working on the film La dama duende ('The Ghost Lady') in 1945. In 1964 he moves to Rome Italy in part because of the rise of fascism in Argentina. In 1977 they returned to Spain. His wife died on 13 December 1988 from Alzheimer's disease. He died at the age of 96 from a lung ailment. His ashes were scattered over the Bay of Cádiz, the part of the world that mattered most to him.
This life summary was a combo of Wikipedia (his and his wife's page) and the introduction by Monguio in Belitt translation 1966.
I wondered if there were any poets that spoke to the experience politically of living with fascism looming or present, seeing the rise of fascism.
I’m reading Selected Poems translated by Ben Belitt, introduction by Luis Monguio. This book was published before I was born in 1966.
There a good list of contemporary poets: "Gerardo Diego (1896), Federico García Lorca (1898), Vicente Aleixandre (1898), Emilio Prados (1899), Rafael Alberti (1902), Luis Cernuda (1904). Closely related, if somewhat older, are three earlier poets: José Moreno Villa (1887), Pedro Salinas (1892), and Jorge Guillén (1893); and presiding over the whole pantheon, as di penates of the modern, are three older masters: Miguel de Unamuno (1864), Antonio Machado (1875), and Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881)."
Links:
There's a new translation of a book, Concerning The Angels translated by John Murillo.
Carolyn L. Tipton translated Returnings. She also translated To Painting: Poems.
"Carolyn was able to work personally with the poet Rafael Alberti during numerous visits to Madrid"
She won the Pushcart Prize
Translation by A. S. Kline of The Dove:
The Dove (English)
The dove was wrong.
She was mistaken.
To travel north she flew south,
Believing the wheat was water.
She was mistaken.
Believing the sea was sky,
That the night was dawn.
She was mistaken.
That the stars were dew,
That the heat was snowfall.
She was mistaken.
Your skirt your blouse,
Your heart your home.
She was mistaken.
(She fell asleep on the shore,
You at the tip of a branch.)
Klein actually translated 20 poems currently available online. Here is one:
Naming The Dawn
(A embestidas suaves y rosas)
With gentle red assaults, Dawn, I was granting you names:
Mistaken dream, Angel without exit, Falsehood of rain in the trees.
At the edges of my soul, that recalls the rivers,
Indecisive, hesitant, still.
Spilt star, Confused light weeping, Glass without voice?
No.
Error of snow in water, is your name.
The Good Angel I translation by Lorna Shaughnessy
On The Slopes of El Pardo by Rafael Alberti
Suddenly, sun over slaughter: Such a stunning return
of that brilliance to squander on valleys and mountains!
Such maniacal stillness and such savage tranquility
moving down from the clouds, like a crime, over acorn and oak!
This ruse to annihilate dying, to compete
with the whole of a landscape and burn in a sunburst of light
so that even the snow seems remote in the unction of distance
and the hours in their passing know nothing of all the fight--
How they sting my compunction, undermine what I am,
rob the grace from my vision, while the darkness increases
to batter my conscience with the dynamite charge of my grieving:
till stillness is strident again and the sun goes to pieces.
Personal Footnote: When I took the book from the library, it seems I didn't check it out. Sometimes the buzzer rings when I'm walking out and they wave me through. Maybe it didn't even buzz. When I went to return it, the machine spit it back out at me. So I took it to the librarian. It wasn't checked out. I could have stolen it, easily. But I'm not into stealing. She returned the book. The library has so many books it's pretty easy with books, doesn't seem to mind if some go missing, maybe it would have been a gift to just take a book, any book. Not sure the 1966 book get checked out that much. I've been in the main branch, and underneath, in the basement is just rows and rows of bookshelves of old books. When I take bags of books to donate, they say, even if they don't use them, or sell them, they will recycle them. I'm referring of course to the Queens Library, one of the 5 boroughs in New York City. A wonderful wonderful library.
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