Background
Jorge Guillén was born on January 18, 1893 in Valladolid where he spent his childhood and adolescence.
Horses in the Air and Other Poems
Jorge Guillén was born on January 18, 1893 in Valladolid where he spent his childhood and adolescence.
He studied at the University of Madrid in the College of Philosophy and Letters and at the University of Granada, where he received a master's degree in 1913.
Gullen traveled to Germany and from 1917 to 1923 lived in Paris, where he was a lecturer in Spanish at the Sorbonne. In 1924 he returned to Spain and obtained his doctor's degree at the University of Madrid; later he taught at the University of Murcia, was lecturer in Spanish at Oxford from 1929 to 1931, and for the next five years held a professor's chair at the University of Sevilla.
Not being in agreement with the Franco dictatorship, Guillen then went to Canada and in 1941 to the United States as professor of Spanish literature at Wellesley College. He received the poetry award of the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955 and was appointed lecturer at Harvard for 1957-1958. In 1976 he received the Cervantes Prize, the highest literary award of the Spanish-speaking countries. His writings have been collected in Affirmation: A Bilingual Anthology, 1919-1966 (tr. Julian Palley, 1968).
Guillen does not share the impressionistic vision of the world that was common among his literary predecessors, the writers of the "generation of '98. " They were more concerned with the aspects of things than with the things themselves; Guillen, on the other hand, speaks of "these sacred things" rather than of their attributes. Similarly, while they tended to see everything as being in a state of flux, Guillen indirectly responds with the assertion: "To be, nothing else - that is the supreme happiness. "Guillen's manner of rebelling is not by negation, nor is it by attack; it is rather by affirmation and construction, and for this reason he wrote slowly.
He published one major book, Cantico, often enlarged (first edition, 1927; final edition, Buenos Aires, 1950). Cantico, or canticle, is a term originally applied to a composition of thanksgiving to God; in adopting it Guillen may have had no conventional religious idea in mind, but in any case his book actually constitutes an offering of thanksgiving for life. The subtitle of the 1945 edition, Fe de vida, is highly significant, for in Spanish fe not only means "faith, " but also "certificate, " and fe de vida may thus be taken as meaning a certificate proving the existence of a person. In this sense Guillen sets forth an unwavering faith in life and expresses in striking verses a felicitous and exact vision of human concerns. The awareness of what exists and vibrates with life around man is thus of paramount importance for Guillen, and this recognition of things is in itself a kind of poetic creation. To experience a self or a being is to love it, for the full recognition of experience involves trusting, believing, and living; and the fact of recognition also implies an immediate naming, for he who does not accurately identify his perception does not really see. Expression is thus the consequence of sight: by means of words one recognizes the world, and through them one possesses it.
For Guillen the word is like glass, of which he says: "This window pane, by its very exactitude, renders transparent for me its transmitted life, as it were--its own ideal. "From this view of poetic creation follows Guillen's exigent and heroic fidelity to the word, and he thus places himself consciously and inevitably not only within the Spanish tradition of love for the word, but above all, within the tradition of those who are enraptured with the beauty of nature and with the profoundity of life. Life is admirable and full, and there is no fear or misgiving for what may come afterward, for man will then have ceased to see. "I know myself to be so dark a thing that the idea that one day I shall not be is not sad, " says the poet, striking a traditional Hispanic attitude. As one of his verses expresses it, Guillen embodies within himself "enrooted centuries" of Hispanic life.
( Winner of the 2000 Harold Morton Landon Translation Awa...)
Generation of '27
In 1921, married in 1921, married Germaine Cahen. They had two children.