Adriano del Valle

Adriano del Valle

Adriano del Valle Rossi (Seville, January 19, 1895 – Madrid, October 1, 1957) was a Spanish poet, columnist, short-story writer and painter. Associated with the Generation of '27, a modernista close to Ultraism and creationism, most of his works, lyric poetry and prose poetry, were published in scattered form in newspapers, magazines and bullfighting weeklies.

Adriano del Valle won numerous Floral Games, and he received the National Poetry Prize in 1933 for Mundo sin tranvías.

Biography

Adriano del Valle Rossi was born in Seville to an Asturian father and a Sevillian mother. His maternal ancestors, the Rossi family, had emigrated from Corsica to Paris. He left school at the age of sixteen to help his father in his toy-manufacturing business. The death of his mother in 1907 and of three of his four siblings marked his adolescence.

In 1912 he took up poetry after reading Cantos de vida y esperanza by Rubén Darío, an author who exerted an important influence on his poetic career. In 1916 he met Federico García Lorca, through whom he came into contact with the neo-populist currents, in the style of Romancero Gitano or Marinero en tierra, a work by Alberti. Two years later, in 1918, he founded the magazine Grecia, the official organ of Ultraism in Seville, together with his great friend Isaac del Vando-Villar and Luis Mosquera; he signed the poems he published in the magazine with the pseudonym Amalio Rossi and used the pseudonym Adrianus for his prose publications. At that time he met Eugenio d'Ors, whom he would always call his master. D'Ors, in turn, felt great admiration for the young poet, whom he described as the peddler of spring.

In 1923 he married Pepita Hernández in Huelva and settled in that city. On his honeymoon trip to Lisbon, he met José Pacheko (director of the magazine Contemporânea), Judith Teixeira, Raúl Leal and Fernando Pessoa. With the latter he began, that same year, to translate Mário de Sá-Carneiro, who had committed suicide.

In 1927, in Huelva, together with his close friend Fernando Villalón, a poet and bull breeder, and Rogelio Buendía, he founded the magazine Papel de Aleluyas (to which Alberti, Cernuda, Ayala, Altolaguirre, Gerardo Diego, Gómez de la Serna and Eugenio d'Ors, among others, contributed), and in Madrid Santo y Seña. His passion for art led him to cultivate friendships with painters such as Daniel Vázquez Díaz, whom he accompanied in 1929 when the latter began his work on the murals of the Monastery of La Rábida, and who painted several portraits of him, such as "Adriano del Valle en Itálica" (cited by Ana María Preckler in Historia Del Arte Universal de Los Siglos XIX Y XX, Volumen 2) or the Cubist portrait "Adriano del Valle vestido de monje mercedario", which is part of the portrait collection of the Provincial Museum of Huelva; José Caballero, with whom he created three murals at the Ateneo de Sevilla; Francisco Mateos, with whom he collaborated on the magazines La Esfera and Nuevo Mundo; and he also maintained frequent contact with Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Cristino de Vera and Rafael Canogar. In 1929 he introduced collage, in the style of Max Ernst, into Spain. He was also a great lover of music and cultivated friendships with Joaquín Turina, Miguel Fleta, Manuel de Falla, Jacinto Guerrero, Joaquín Rodrigo and Ernesto Halffter, among others. An enthusiast of bullfighting, he was a friend of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Luis Miguel Dominguín, Manolete... On October 20, 1931, he received a letter from Gerardo Diego telling him that he deeply regretted not having included him in his Antología and apologizing for it. His absence was widely criticized, among others by Camilo José Cela, who considered it "notoriously unjust".

Primavera Portátil, a book requested of him by García Lorca, was written in Écija between 1920 and 1923. Not having been able to publish it for lack of financial means caused Adriano many problems. In 1927, Papel de Aleluyas announced its publication, which could not be carried out because the magazine unexpectedly ceased to exist. The book did not see the light until 1934.

In 1933, the Sevillian poet was awarded the prestigious National Literature Prize in the category of National Poetry Prize for his work titled Mundo sin tranvías (later included as the fourth section of the aforementioned first edition of Primavera portátil). After the outbreak of the Civil War, Adriano del Valle sided with the Nationalist cause and contributed abundantly to the magazine Vértice, the organ of expression of Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS.

Once the war was over, he brought to press Lyra sacra, a compilation of earlier poems written after receiving the National Prize. It was followed by two other collections of verse: Los gozos del río and Arpa fiel. Years after his death, Guillermo Díaz-Plaja brought out a posthumous edition of the poetry Adriano del Valle had written between 1941 and 1957, and finally, in 1977, Editora Nacional issued a volume containing virtually all of Adriano del Valle's lyric output, titled Obra poética.

In 1942 he was appointed director of the magazine Primer Plano. From that position he launched the Punta Umbría Film Festival, and he was one of the promoters of the San Sebastián International Film Festival. In 1943 he was awarded the Mariano de Cavia Prize for Stella matutina, a prose text inspired by Sevillian Holy Week. In 1946 he represented Spain at the Book Exhibition in Lisbon. In 1952 he took part in the First International Poetry Congress, held in Segovia, together with numerous Spanish and foreign poets, including Camilo José Cela, Vicente Aleixandre, José Hierro, Dionisio Ridruejo, Manuel Díez-Crespo, Maestro Rodrigo, Father Federico Sopeña and the South African Roy Campbell. He died in Madrid on October 1, 1957.

In 2006 his son, Adriano del Valle Hernández, published Adriano del Valle, mi padre, an extensive illustrated biography of the poet and translator, with the publisher Renacimiento.

Work

His extensive work is fundamentally poetic. Most of his articles were published in magazines and newspapers, in addition to articles in newspapers and literary magazines such as Cervantes, Ultra, Reflector, Proa, Helios, Centauro, La Esfera, Nuevo Mundo, Mediodía and Prisma. Of his highly scattered work, only a small part was published in books of poems. With a certain preference for Andalusian motifs, they range between popular forms and classical meters, often adorned with imagery of Baroque taste. Unpublished during the author's lifetime, apart from the collection Mundo sin tranvías, were El jardín del centauro, poems from 1916–1920; the auto sacramental La divina pastora (1923); and Musa-Omnibus, a collection of poems from 1934–1937.

Books of poetry

• 1934 – Primavera portátil.
• 1939 – Lyra sacra.
• 1940 – Los gozos del río.
• 1941 – Arpa fiel.
• 1942 – Sonetos a Italia.
• 1954 – La innombrable.
• 1955 – Misa de Alba en Fátima y Gozos de San Isidro.
• 1956 – Oda náutica a Cádiz.
• 1957 – Égloga de Gabriel Miró y Fábula del Peñón de Ifach.

Bullfighting poetry

Main article: Bullfighting poetry

Adriano del Valle wrote bullfighting poetry; part of his work revolved around the world of the bull, a frequent resource used among the poets of the Generation of '27. He took part in the bullfighting tertulias with the intellectuals of the time, such as Lorca or the bullfighting historian José María de Cossío, which were also regularly attended by bullfighters such as Manolete or Ignacio Sánchez Mejías and bull breeders such as Fernando Villalón, with whom he remained friends until the death of the breeder and garrochista in 1930.

José María de Cossío mentioned him in the poetic anthology on bullfighting that he published in two volumes in 1931 under the title Los toros en la poesía castellana. Adriano del Valle published part of his bullfighting poetry in the bullfighting weekly El Ruedo; notable among these are the works dedicated to Manolete and Domingo Ortega:

• A Álvaro Domecq, dedicated to the bull breeder and rejoneador on the occasion of a tribute when he received the Cross of Beneficence on February 6, 1944,
• the romance Torería, published on the occasion of the Seville bullfighting fair,
• A Domingo Ortega, a bullfighter and friend of the poet,
• A Manolete, a romance that was selected and included by the City Council of Madrid in 1998 in a commemorative book for the 50th anniversary of the death of the bullfighter from Linares; some of the poems chosen for that publication were read at the tribute paid to the bullfighter on December 11, 1944, accompanied by several intellectuals, at the Lhardy restaurant. The poem was reissued in 1947 after the death of the Fourth Caliph of Bullfighting, with the addition of Brindis Póstumo.

Bibliography

• Barrera López, José María. El Ultraísmo de Sevilla (Historia y textos). (Sevilla: Alfar, 1987). 2 vols.
• Cuenca Benet, Francisco. Biblioteca de autores andaluces: Modernos y contemporáneos (La Habana, 1922). 2 vols.
• Méndez Bejarano, Mario. Diccionario de escritores, maestros y oradores naturales de Sevilla y su actual provinciaa (Sevilla, 1922–25).
• Raida, Pedro. El poeta Adriano del Valle (Madrid, 1957).

External links

• Biography of Adriano del Valle (in Spanish)