Guillermo de Torre
Encyclopedia
Guillermo de Torre was a Spanish
essayist, poet and literary critic, a Dada
ist and member of the Generation of '27
. He is also notable as the brother-in-law of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
.
, in his book Pombo (1918), described him as "an intelligent and crazy young man". In 1918 he met Vicente Huidobro
and Robert
and Sonia Delaunay
. He subsequently became estranged from Huidobro. He studied law and obtained a diploma, but was unable to become a diplomat due to his deafness. He traveled through Europe and was exposed to various avant-garde
artistic movements. In 1919 he wrote the manifesto of Ultraism, and in the same year collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges
and Tristan Tzara
in writing an automatic
poem. He elaborated on Ultraism with a Vertical Manifesto, which appeared in 1920. The same year, with José de Ciria y Escalante, he launched Reflector, which Tzara included in his list of présidents Dada. In 1923 he published a book of Dadaist poems, Helixes, which makes extensive use of calligram
s, negative space, free verse, proparoxytone
s, and the mechanistic frenzy of Futurism
. The book's cover was designed by Rafael Barradas, and it was illustrated with woodcut
s by Norah Borges
. Critics savaged the unorthodox work, which is noteworthy for including some of the first haiku
s written in Spanish
:
In El movimiento V. P., a roman à clef
by Rafael Cansinos Asséns
that appeared in 1921, De Torre was caricatured as "the youngest poet", speaking in neologisms and proparoxytones. He continued to contribute to numerous Ultraist reviews, including Grecia (1919–1920), Cervantes (1919–1920), Ultra (1921–1922), Tableros (1922), Horizontes, Cosmópolis, and various European magazines such as Manomètre, of which he became an editor in 1925. In 1923, in an article in the September issue of Alfar, he launched a polemic against Creacionismo
, the movement founded by his old acquaintance Vicente Huidobro. In it, he accused Huidobro of stealing the aesthetic from Julio Herrera y Reissig
, the Uruguay
an modernist. (However, the antagonism between De Torre and Huidobro arose in 1921. In Cosmópolis 32, August 1921, Guillermo de Torre wrote about Huidobro: "De ahí que frente a la reiterada obcecación egolátrica del autor de "Poemas árticos", nos vemos obligados a ratificar nuestras aserciones negativas de su ilusa originalidad personal, creyéndose único promotor y cultivador del creacionismo (...)" page 591).
In 1924 De Torre published a translation of Max Jacob
's Le cornet à dés. In 1925, he republished some of his writings from Cosmópolis under the title European Vanguard Literature, a work which enjoyed enormous success in Spain and Latin America ("For us," said Alejo Carpentier
, "it was a kind of Bible") for its elucidation of such a vast and complex subject. In 1965 an expanded, revised edition, omitting the apologetic tone of the original, was released in three volumes under the title History of Vanguard Literature.
De Torre had a strong interest in the relationship between poetry and visual imagery, and drew upon the theme of cybernetics
. His work often reviewed the contributions of major literary figures, both in European Vanguard Literature (Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendras, Reverdy, Pound, Lee Masters, etc.) and in History of Vanguard Literature (T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, etc.).
In 1927 he served as secretary in the foundation of La Gaceta Literaria, the review of the Generation of 27 directed by Ernesto Giménez Caballero
and illustrated by Gregorio Prieto. He collaborated in Revista de Occidente as well. He married his former collaborator Norah Borges, sister of Jorge Luis Borges
, and relocated to Buenos Aires
. There he collaborated on the Gaceta Americana. His major theoretical works during these years were Test of conscience: Aesthetic problems of the new Spanish generation (Buenos Aires, 1928) and Itinerary of new Spanish painting (Montevideo, 1931).
Between 1932 and 1936 he and his wife lived in Madrid
. He contributed both to newspapers (notably El Sol), and to cultural reviews, among them Revista de Occidente, La Vie des Lettres, and L'Esprit Nouveau. In 1932, he wrote the manifesto of the Society of Iberian Artists (SAI, Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos). In the same year, along with Pedro Salinas
, he founded Índice Literario and collaborated in its review, Arte. At the group's inaugural exhibition in Berlin
in 1933, he delivered a conference titled "Panorama of new Spanish painting". In 1934, he and Roberto Payro
wrote a monograph on Joaquín Torres Garcia
. With Julio Pérez Ferrero, he compiled the 1935 Literary Almanac. As a member of the Madrid chapter of L'Amics de l'Art Nou (ADLAN), he wrote the prologue of the catalogue of the works of Pablo Picasso
organized by that organization. He was one of the most notable peninsular contributors to Eduardo Westerdahl
's Canarian
review Gaceta de Arte. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
, he fled to Paris
, where he worked for the republican office of tourism. Later, he settled permanently in Buenos Aires.
De Torre headed the department of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and held professorships at numerous universities throughout the Americas, while continuing his work in literary and artistic criticism. He was a co-founder and literary adviser of the publishing house Losada, where he oversaw the compilation of the Complete Works of Lorca
, and devoted space in his anthologies to Alberti
, Bergamín
, Cernuda
, Faulkner
, Kafka
, Camus
, Moravia
, Malraux
, and others. He collaborated on many Spanish and Latin American periodicals concerned with criticism, including Buenos Aires's La Nación and Síntesis, of which he was the secretary. Above all, he devoted himself to the study of comparative literature
. Like his celebrated brother in law Borges, he grew blind with age. He died in Buenos Aires on January 14, 1971.
A 2005 translation into Italian
of his only collection of poems, Eliche, includes some biographical notes, Appunti su mio padre, by his son Miguel de Torre Borges published by Bibliotheca Aretina. As well as appearing in Asséns's El Movimiento V. P., he is satirized by Gerardo Diego
in one of his jinojepas, titled Guillaume de Tour, as "prince of the archipenic
proparoxytone" (príncipe del esdrújulo archipénico).
Though de Torre's skill as a literary critic is comparable to that of Juan Ramón Jiménez
and Luis Cernuda
, two other great poets of the 20th century, his intuitions were far from perfect. In his post at Losada, he is remembered for rejecting Gabriel García Márquez
's first novel, Leaf Storm
, to the author's great discouragement. He also failed to appreciate the poetry of Pablo Neruda
, when presented with Neruda's Residencia en la tierra during a voyage to Spain. As an art critic, he is known for his biography the Life and Art of Picasso, the essay Menéndez Pelayo and the Two Spains, and the series The Adventure and the Order. In his Triptych of Sacrifice, he examines three Spanish authors – Lorca, Unamuno
, and Machado
. Among his theoretical works are the monographs Guillaume Apollinaire: His Life, His Work, the Theories of Cubism, The Problems of Literature, Keys to Hispanoamerican Literature (1959), and The Pointer of the Scale (1961), in which he examines the motivations of socially involved art, which he calls "engaged literature" in the case of poetry, prose, and drama, and "informalism" when describing plastic arts.
His final works were Minorities and Masses in Contemporary Culture and Art (1963), To the Letters (1967), The Metamorphosis of Proteus (1967), New Directions in Literary Criticism (1970), and the compilation Literary Doctrine and Criticism (1970).
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
essayist, poet and literary critic, a Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
ist and member of the Generation of '27
Generation of '27
The Generation of '27 was an influential group of poets that arose in Spanish literary circles between 1923 and 1927, essentially out of a shared desire to experience and work with avant-garde forms of art and poetry. Their first formal meeting took place in Seville in 1927 to mark the 300th...
. He is also notable as the brother-in-law of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
.
Biography
He became a writer at a young age. Ramón Gómez de la SernaRamón Gómez de la Serna
Ramón Gómez de la Serna Puig was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel....
, in his book Pombo (1918), described him as "an intelligent and crazy young man". In 1918 he met Vicente Huidobro
Vicente Huidobro
Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He was an exponent of the artistic movement called Creacionismo , which held that a poet should bring life to the things he or she writes about, rather than just describe them.Huidobro was born into a wealthy...
and Robert
Robert Delaunay
Robert Delaunay was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee...
and Sonia Delaunay
Sonia Delaunay
Sonia Delaunay was a Jewish-French artist who, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. Her work extends to painting, textile design and stage set design...
. He subsequently became estranged from Huidobro. He studied law and obtained a diploma, but was unable to become a diplomat due to his deafness. He traveled through Europe and was exposed to various avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
artistic movements. In 1919 he wrote the manifesto of Ultraism, and in the same year collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
and Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
in writing an automatic
Surrealist automatism
Automatism has taken on many forms: the automatic writing and drawing initially practiced by surrealists can be compared to similar, or perhaps parallel phenomena, such as the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz....
poem. He elaborated on Ultraism with a Vertical Manifesto, which appeared in 1920. The same year, with José de Ciria y Escalante, he launched Reflector, which Tzara included in his list of présidents Dada. In 1923 he published a book of Dadaist poems, Helixes, which makes extensive use of calligram
Calligram
A calligram is a poem, phrase, or word in which the typeface, calligraphy or handwriting is arranged in a way that creates a visual image. The image created by the words expresses visually what the word, or words, say. In a poem, it manifests visually the theme presented by the text of the poem...
s, negative space, free verse, proparoxytone
Proparoxytone
Proparoxytone is a linguistic term for a word with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, e.g the English words cinema and operational. Related terms are paroxytone and oxytone .In English, most nouns of three or more syllables are proparoxtones...
s, and the mechanistic frenzy of Futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
. The book's cover was designed by Rafael Barradas, and it was illustrated with woodcut
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...
s by Norah Borges
Norah Borges
Leonor Fanny Borges Acevedo , better known by the pseudonym Norah Borges was a visual artist and art critic, member of the Florida group, and sister of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges....
. Critics savaged the unorthodox work, which is noteworthy for including some of the first haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
s written in Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
:
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- La tijera del viento
- corta las cabelleras
- de las espigas más esbeltas.
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In El movimiento V. P., a roman à clef
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
by Rafael Cansinos Asséns
Rafael Cansinos Assens
Rafael Cansinos Assens , born in Seville, was a Spanish poet, essayist, literary critic and translator.Cansinos was a polyglot; he translated The Arabian Nights into Spanish, as well as the works of Dostoyevsky, and the complete works of Goethe and Shakespeare for the publisher Aguilar.In the...
that appeared in 1921, De Torre was caricatured as "the youngest poet", speaking in neologisms and proparoxytones. He continued to contribute to numerous Ultraist reviews, including Grecia (1919–1920), Cervantes (1919–1920), Ultra (1921–1922), Tableros (1922), Horizontes, Cosmópolis, and various European magazines such as Manomètre, of which he became an editor in 1925. In 1923, in an article in the September issue of Alfar, he launched a polemic against Creacionismo
Creacionismo
Creationism was a literary movement, initiated by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro around 1912. Creationism is based on the idea of a poem as a truly new thing, created by the author for the sake of itself — that is, not to praise another thing, not to please the reader, not even to be...
, the movement founded by his old acquaintance Vicente Huidobro. In it, he accused Huidobro of stealing the aesthetic from Julio Herrera y Reissig
Julio Herrera y Reissig
Julio Herrera y Reissig, was a Uruguayan poet, playwright and essayist, who began his career during the late Romanticist period and later became an early proponent of Modernism.-Background:...
, the Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
an modernist. (However, the antagonism between De Torre and Huidobro arose in 1921. In Cosmópolis 32, August 1921, Guillermo de Torre wrote about Huidobro: "De ahí que frente a la reiterada obcecación egolátrica del autor de "Poemas árticos", nos vemos obligados a ratificar nuestras aserciones negativas de su ilusa originalidad personal, creyéndose único promotor y cultivador del creacionismo (...)" page 591).
In 1924 De Torre published a translation of Max Jacob
Max Jacob
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
's Le cornet à dés. In 1925, he republished some of his writings from Cosmópolis under the title European Vanguard Literature, a work which enjoyed enormous success in Spain and Latin America ("For us," said Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba; and despite his European birthplace, Carpentier strongly self-identified...
, "it was a kind of Bible") for its elucidation of such a vast and complex subject. In 1965 an expanded, revised edition, omitting the apologetic tone of the original, was released in three volumes under the title History of Vanguard Literature.
De Torre had a strong interest in the relationship between poetry and visual imagery, and drew upon the theme of cybernetics
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...
. His work often reviewed the contributions of major literary figures, both in European Vanguard Literature (Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendras, Reverdy, Pound, Lee Masters, etc.) and in History of Vanguard Literature (T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, etc.).
In 1927 he served as secretary in the foundation of La Gaceta Literaria, the review of the Generation of 27 directed by Ernesto Giménez Caballero
Ernesto Giménez Caballero
Ernesto Giménez Caballero , also known as Gecé, was a Spanish writer, film director, diplomat and pioneer of fascism in the country difficult to classify as an European citizen and philosopher as he can be thought as one of the Spanish surrealists not far from Russian- Polish-Italian- "French"...
and illustrated by Gregorio Prieto. He collaborated in Revista de Occidente as well. He married his former collaborator Norah Borges, sister of Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, and relocated to Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
. There he collaborated on the Gaceta Americana. His major theoretical works during these years were Test of conscience: Aesthetic problems of the new Spanish generation (Buenos Aires, 1928) and Itinerary of new Spanish painting (Montevideo, 1931).
Between 1932 and 1936 he and his wife lived in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
. He contributed both to newspapers (notably El Sol), and to cultural reviews, among them Revista de Occidente, La Vie des Lettres, and L'Esprit Nouveau. In 1932, he wrote the manifesto of the Society of Iberian Artists (SAI, Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos). In the same year, along with Pedro Salinas
Pedro Salinas
Pedro Salinas y Serrano was a Spanish poet and member of the Generation of '27. He was also a scholar and critic of Spanish literature, teaching at universities in Spain, England, and the United States....
, he founded Índice Literario and collaborated in its review, Arte. At the group's inaugural exhibition in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
in 1933, he delivered a conference titled "Panorama of new Spanish painting". In 1934, he and Roberto Payro
Roberto Payró
Roberto Jorge Payró was an Argentine writer and journalist.Payró founded the newspaper La Tribuna in the city of Bahía Blanca, where he published his first newspaper articles. He then moved to the city of Buenos Aires where he worked as an editor at the newspaper La Nación...
wrote a monograph on Joaquín Torres Garcia
Joaquín Torres García
Joaquín Torres García , was a Uruguayan plastic artist and art theorist, also known as the founder of Constructive Universalism...
. With Julio Pérez Ferrero, he compiled the 1935 Literary Almanac. As a member of the Madrid chapter of L'Amics de l'Art Nou (ADLAN), he wrote the prologue of the catalogue of the works of Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
organized by that organization. He was one of the most notable peninsular contributors to Eduardo Westerdahl
Eduardo Westerdahl
Eduardo Westerdahl was a Spanish painter, art critic and writer, and a member of the Surrealist Movement...
's Canarian
Canary Islands
The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...
review Gaceta de Arte. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, he fled to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, where he worked for the republican office of tourism. Later, he settled permanently in Buenos Aires.
De Torre headed the department of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and held professorships at numerous universities throughout the Americas, while continuing his work in literary and artistic criticism. He was a co-founder and literary adviser of the publishing house Losada, where he oversaw the compilation of the Complete Works of Lorca
Federico García Lorca
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads...
, and devoted space in his anthologies to Alberti
Rafael Alberti
Rafael Alberti Merello was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27....
, Bergamín
José Bergamín
José Bergamín Gutiérrez was a Spanish writer, essayist, poet, and playwright. His father served as president of the canton of Málaga; his mother was a devout Catholic...
, Cernuda
Luis Cernuda
Luis Cernuda , was a Spanish poet and literary critic.-Life and career:...
, Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
, Moravia
Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation, and existentialism....
, Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
, and others. He collaborated on many Spanish and Latin American periodicals concerned with criticism, including Buenos Aires's La Nación and Síntesis, of which he was the secretary. Above all, he devoted himself to the study of comparative literature
Comparative literature
Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
. Like his celebrated brother in law Borges, he grew blind with age. He died in Buenos Aires on January 14, 1971.
A 2005 translation into Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
of his only collection of poems, Eliche, includes some biographical notes, Appunti su mio padre, by his son Miguel de Torre Borges published by Bibliotheca Aretina. As well as appearing in Asséns's El Movimiento V. P., he is satirized by Gerardo Diego
Gerardo Diego
Gerardo Diego Cendoya was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27.Gerardo Diego taught language and literature at institutes of learning in Soria, Gijón, Santander and Madrid...
in one of his jinojepas, titled Guillaume de Tour, as "prince of the archipenic
Alexander Archipenko
Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko was a Ukrainian avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist.-Biography:...
proparoxytone" (príncipe del esdrújulo archipénico).
Though de Torre's skill as a literary critic is comparable to that of Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. One of Jiménez's most important contributions to modern poetry was his advocacy of the French concept of "pure poetry."-Biography:Jiménez was born in Moguer, near Huelva, in...
and Luis Cernuda
Luis Cernuda
Luis Cernuda , was a Spanish poet and literary critic.-Life and career:...
, two other great poets of the 20th century, his intuitions were far from perfect. In his post at Losada, he is remembered for rejecting Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
's first novel, Leaf Storm
Leaf Storm
Leaf Storm is the common translation for Gabriel García Márquez's novella La Hojarasca. First published in 1955, it took seven years to find a publisher...
, to the author's great discouragement. He also failed to appreciate the poetry of Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....
, when presented with Neruda's Residencia en la tierra during a voyage to Spain. As an art critic, he is known for his biography the Life and Art of Picasso, the essay Menéndez Pelayo and the Two Spains, and the series The Adventure and the Order. In his Triptych of Sacrifice, he examines three Spanish authors – Lorca, Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher.-Biography:...
, and Machado
Antonio Machado
Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz, known as Antonio Machado was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of '98....
. Among his theoretical works are the monographs Guillaume Apollinaire: His Life, His Work, the Theories of Cubism, The Problems of Literature, Keys to Hispanoamerican Literature (1959), and The Pointer of the Scale (1961), in which he examines the motivations of socially involved art, which he calls "engaged literature" in the case of poetry, prose, and drama, and "informalism" when describing plastic arts.
His final works were Minorities and Masses in Contemporary Culture and Art (1963), To the Letters (1967), The Metamorphosis of Proteus (1967), New Directions in Literary Criticism (1970), and the compilation Literary Doctrine and Criticism (1970).
Criticism
- Manifiesto vertical, 1920.
- Literaturas europeas de vanguardia, Madrid: Caro Raggio, 1925.
- Examen de conciencia. Problemas estéticos de la nueva generación española. Buenos Aires: Humanidades, 1928.
- Itinerario de la nueva pintura española, Montevideo, 1931.
- Vida y arte de Picasso (1936)
- El fiel de la balanza, (1941), ensayo.
- Menéndez Pelayo y las dos Españas (1943)
- Guillaume Apollinaire: su vida, su obra y las teorías del cubismo (1946).
- Problemática de la literatura (1951)
- La metamorfosis de Proteo, (1956), ensayos.
- Claves de literatura hispanoamericana (1959)
- La aventura estética de nuestro tiempo (1961)
- Historia de las literaturas de Vanguardia (Madrid, Guadarrama, 1965).
- Ultraísmo, Existencialismo y Objetivismo en Literatura. Madrid: Guadarrama, 1968.
- El espejo y el camino (1968), ensayos.
- Minorías y masas en la cultura y el arte contemporáneo (1963)
- Al pie de las letras (1967)
- La metamorfosis de Proteo (1967)
- Nueva direcciones de la crítica literaria (1970)
- Doctrina y crítica literaria (1970).
- Correspondencia Juan Ramón Jiménez / Guillermo de Torre 1920-1956. Madrid / Fráncfort: Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2006.
Works cited
- Juan Manuel Bonet, Diccionario de las Vanguardias en España 1907-1936. Madrid: Alianza Editoria, 1995.
- Miguel de Torre Borges, "Appunti su mi padre"', in Eliche, edited by Daniele Corsi, Arezzo, Biblioteca Aretina, 2005.