A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre

A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre
by Vincente Aleixandre

A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre
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Book Summary Information

Author: Vincente Aleixandre
Edition: Paperback
Audio: Spanish (Unknown); Spanish (Original Language); Spanish (Published)
Published: 2007-05-01
ISBN: 155659254X
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: American Poetry Review

Book Reviews of A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre

Book Review: In the darker places of loneliness...
Summary: 5 Stars

Vicente Aleixander was part of that great Generation of '27 - famous for such members as Lorca, Cernuda, Alberti and Salinas. He was the least political and this perhaps explains how he survived during the years of the Civil War. Lorca was executed by Franco's troops and the peasant-turned poet, Miguel Hernandez, who fought for the Communists, died in prison in 1942. Many of the Generation of '27 fled the country. Alberti didn't return until well after Franco's death, having lived abroad in Italy and the United States, often a visiting professor. Salinas, too, taught abroad. Aleixandre opted to stay in his native land.

Aleixandre's poetry is darker than his peers. Where Alberti and Salinas celebrate music, beauty, love, and painting (especially Alberti), Aleixandre's is a celebration of loneliness, of isolation. His early poems are quite deep and almost unreadable at times, so fraught with esoteric meaning (like Hernandez's early poems) that it might turn the reader off when first presented with this book. But the further one travels into this great collection, the greater the beauty and more universal the themes of love, loss and sadness. One feels the ocean, the waves, the sand but also a woman's body, the world destroyed but renewed. There is an organic quality to his poetry, it is human but also detached and poignant.

I prefer Aleixandre's work to many of his contemporaries. He reminds me to some degree of Georg Trakl in Germany - the darkness, the silence of the world, the pulse of life in nature surrounding humanity.

This selection features translations by Lewis Hyde (also editor of the book), Roberty Bly, W.S. Merwin, Willis Barnstone and many others...

Summary of A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre

"For the Nobel Prize to come to Aleixandre now is fitting, not only because of the energy and intensity of his own poetry, but because it comes at this moment in Spanish history."-The New York Times

A Longing for the Light is the only available bilingual Spanish-English translation of the poetry of Nobel Laureate Vicente Aleixandre. The collection spans the entirety of Aleixandre's career-from early surrealist work to his complex and fascinating "dialogues." It also contains prose interludes, an introduction by editor Lewis Hyde, and a descriptive bibliography.

Aleixandre was a member of Spain's "Generation of 27" and was one of the few writers to remain in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. His passive but staunch political independence kept his writings banned for a decade, but his vivid poems of harmony and commonality would eventually symbolize much of what post-Civil War Spain aspired toward. As Aleixandre wrote in his Nobel lecture: "The poet, the truly determinative poet, is always a revealer; he is, essentially, a seer, a prophet."

From "With All Due Respect":

I don't notice our clothes. Do you?
Dressed up in three-hundred burlap suits,
wrapped in my roughest heaviest get-up,
I maintain a dawn-like dignity and brag of how much I know about nakedness.

Vicente Aleixandre won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977. He died in Madrid in 1984.

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