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José de Espronceda
José de Espronceda | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 25 March 1808 Almendralejo (Spain) |
| Died | 23 May 1842 (aged 34) Madrid (Spain) |
| Children | Blanca Espronceda de Escosura (1834–1900) |
| Writing career | |
Movement | Romanticism |
José de Espronceda y Delgado (Almendralejo, 25 March 1808 – Madrid, 23 May 1842) was a Spanish writer recognized as one of the leading exponents of Romanticism in Spain, and he is considered the most representative poet of this movement during its first phase.
His life, marked by emotional intensity and rebelliousness, reflected the characteristics of Romanticism, including his participation in secret societies, his love of liberty, and his defiance of social conventions.
Biography
Espronceda was born in Almendralejo (Province of Badajoz, Extremadura) on 25 March 1808. The full name given to him at his baptism that same day was "José Ignacio Javier Oriol Encarnación de Espronceda y Delgado".
He was the son of Juan José Camilo de Espronceda y Fernández Pimentel, then sergeant major of the Borbón cavalry regiment, a native of Los Barrios aged fifty-nine, who was traveling with his family toward Badajoz when the birth came; his birth in Almendralejo was, therefore, fortuitous.[1]
His paternal great-grandparents were distinguished merchants established in Tafalla (Navarre), with an old ancestral house there, and his grandfather was a competent military man who reached the rank of lieutenant and gave his son Juan José Camilo the same career; the latter served in the Gibraltar campaign of 1782 under the orders of the famous writer José Cadalso, who died there, and he distinguished himself particularly in the Napoleonic Invasion of Spain, even going so far as to obtain the cross and medal of the Order of Saint Hermenegild and the rank of Colonel. He was posted to La Coruña with his family. During the Constitutional Triennium (1820–1823) he was in Guadalajara, and then, until his death in 1833, in Madrid.
José de Espronceda's mother was María del Carmen Delgado y Lara, and she had married Juan José Camilo in 1804 in Zaragoza; both were widowed and had had children who had already died; she brought a considerable dowry. Her family and she herself were settled in a village of Granada, Pinos del Valle; she also had relatives in the military, and in the Church as well, some as distinguished as her uncle the Archbishop, cardinal and vice-president of the Senate Juan José Bonel y Orbe; one branch of her family came from the Basque Country. In short, the poet was born into a well-off middle-class family.[2]
Espronceda's mother was in Madrid with her son at least from 1815, when the military man and liberal conspirator Porlier was executed by firing squad in Galicia; Lacy followed him in 1817; the father, however, remained aloof from all politics and joined them in 1820, when the liberal revolution of Rafael del Riego triumphed; all these events made an impression on the young José, who in 1820 submitted and then withdrew his application to begin a military career as a cadet at the Artillery Academy of Segovia.
In 1821 he began studying at the Colegio San Mateo of Madrid, founded in 1821 by the poet of Pre-Romanticism Alberto Lista because he had been denied, as an afrancesado, a chair at the Royal Studies of San Isidro; it was a private, modern school (it had physics and chemistry laboratories and taught not only ancient but also modern languages: French, English, Italian and German) and quite expensive; the pupils also had to buy two uniforms; the curriculum was a whole declaration of intent:
A nation governed by liberal principles needs above all things that the young acquire knowledge and virtues; without these gifts they will neither love the constitutional regime, which substitutes justice for passions and favor, nor be able to be useful to the fatherland and to themselves; for in free governments the man without instruction is of little service, and the man without virtues is dangerous.[3]
Of his time at the school there remains the testimony of Escosura, in his double capacity as relative and close friend, who was able to consult and summarize Espronceda's school records, which were later reproduced in full by Cáscales, who also found and published a curious petition from his father, who sought to be transferred from his post in Guadalajara to the General Staff of the Court in order to be able to look after a son who gave "hope of being a brilliant young man useful to the fatherland".
According to Escosura:
"At 15 he was not one of those intelligent, diligent and docile boys who rightly are the delight of their teachers, for whom, and not without reason, the modest gifts of submissive and hard-working mediocrity are worth more than the flashes of genius, always incomprehensible to pedagogy.
Thus, while Lista, and perhaps also Hermosilla himself, already divined the future poet in the turbulent young lad, the inspectors of the Colegio de San Mateo, in their official reports, see Espronceda's mischief and lack of application more than his powerful intelligence."
The school was closed in 1825, but Lista's pupils founded the so-called Academy of the Myrtle in order to continue the teaching.[4] Besides Espronceda himself, those who read poems there included Santos López Pelegrín, Cesáreo Blandin, Jaime Dot, Antonio José Cabanilles, Lino Orellana, Gabriel Ferrer y Dávila, Juan Bautista Alonso, Ventura de la Vega, Santiago López Pelegrín, Luis María Pastor, Luis de Usoz, Felipe Pardo y Aliaga and other unidentified figures. From one of its members, Miguel Ortiz, came the idea of creating a liberal secret society made up of himself, Espronceda, Bernardino Núñez de Arenas, Ventura de la Vega, Patricio de la Escosura and up to at least twelve young members, under the name of the "Numantines" (1823–1825).
The society attended the public execution of Rafael del Riego and swore, as Escosura wrote, to avenge his death.[5] Espronceda was then only fifteen years old.
Denounced for his intellectual activities to the absolutist police by a mole introduced into the society, the former printer of El Zurriago Manuel Ruiz del Cerro, in 1825 he was sentenced to exile from Madrid for five years, although his sentence was finally reduced to three months, which he served in a monastery in Guadalajara, where his father was posted.
In the summer of 1827 he went to Portugal (where he fell in love with Teresa Mancha, daughter of the émigré liberal Colonel Epifanio Mancha), and then to England, where he arrived on 15 September of that year; there he came into contact with the circle of Spanish liberal émigrés of Somers Town, more specifically that of General Torrijos, who was conspiring to overthrow the absolutist regime; from there he then went to Brussels as the general's emissary and finally settled in Paris as a liberal exile, from where he traveled again to London to receive orders, where he once again met Teresa Mancha.
Around that time he read Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, Voltaire's La Henriade and the Poética of Francisco Martínez de la Rosa. Around that time he composed the fragments of an epic poem, the Pelayo; but he was more attracted by the compositions that James Macpherson signed with the pseudonym Ossian, and he wrote various compositions inspired by those influences and a grieving sonnet on the execution by firing squad of Torrijos and his companions. He also composed a first dramatic attempt, Blanca de Borbón, a neoclassical tragedy intended to set out a parable about the government of the bad king.[6]
He took part in the revolutionary waves of 1830 in Paris together with some old friends of his. Shortly afterward Teresa would marry, by order of her father, a merchant named Guillermo del Bayo. With her he returned to Spain, together with other liberals, thanks to the amnesty declared after the death of the sovereign Ferdinand VII, in 1833. In 1838 Teresa left Espronceda and died shortly afterward.
From the death of the King onward, Espronceda devoted himself to politics and journalism. He enlisted in the National Militia, becoming First Lieutenant of the Madrid Company of Chasseurs. In 1834 he joined the Royal Guard, but Cea Bermúdez sent him away from Madrid, fearing his inclinations as an exaltado liberal, and posted him to Cuéllar, where he began writing his historical novel Sancho Saldaña o el castellano de Cuéllar. Nevertheless he remained active in the literary life of the capital, since that year he worked as an editor of the newspaper El Siglo, which Martínez de la Rosa (also a Romantic writer, a moderate, who succeeded Cea Bermúdez in the government of Spain) censored, which provoked the estrangement of Larra and Espronceda, the two most prominent writers of the most liberal Romanticism, and the poet's banishment in September, this time to Badajoz.
In 1836 he was appointed secretary of the Spanish Legation in The Hague, and shortly afterward he was elected deputy for Almería at the same time as Larra was elected for Ávila, but these elections were annulled. He was finally elected a member of parliament to the Cortes Generales in 1842 for the Progressive Party. His activity as a deputy occupied the last two months of his life. He died at the age of thirty-four from a chill of the throat that developed into garrotillo (diphtheria) in that same year of 1842, when he was about to marry Bernarda de Beruete.
Works
During his stay in the monastery, and encouraged by his teacher, the Sevillian scholar and poet Alberto Lista, he began writing the historical poem El Pelayo in royal octaves, which he left unfinished. Later he wrote the historical novel Sancho Saldaña o el castellano de Cuéllar. In 1835 he wrote El pastor Clasiquino, a comic mockery of neoclassicism, and in 1840 a volume of Poesías that had great success and impact.
Espronceda is considered the Spanish Romantic poet par excellence because his poetry displays an exalted liberal ideology that is in tune with the initial period of the height of Spanish Romanticism, which is situated in the 1830s after the death of Ferdinand VII and the return of the liberal exiles. Indeed, his poetry shows echoes of that of Lord Byron, above all in his two longest narrative poems: El estudiante de Salamanca, on the theme of the Don Juan–like seducer, which can be considered an accomplished exponent of the Romantic genre of the legend, regarded as the best poem in this subgenre of the 19th century, and the incomplete El diablo mundo (1841), a heterogeneous philosophical poem in which he describes man as a being of natural innocence who suffers social reality and its evils, and which includes the famous "Canto a Teresa", dedicated to his lover Teresa Mancha, one of the greatest among love elegies. He also wrote a large number of short poems that he called "Canciones" (Songs), among which the best known is the "Canción del pirata", which for decades Spanish schoolchildren have learned by heart; also included are "A Jarifa en una orgía", "El verdugo", "El mendigo", "El reo de muerte" and "Canción del cosaco". All these poems are inspired by antiheroes or by characters marginalized or excluded from society, so that for the first time the social theme appears clearly formulated in Spanish lyric poetry. It should be noted, however, that the authorship of the poem "Desesperación", long attributed to Espronceda, is disputed by some researchers, who attribute it to Juan Rico y Amat.[citation needed]
In his "Himno al sol" and in the poem "Óscar y Malvina", Espronceda displays a more cultivated style, with rhetorical effects, though flexible and inspired at his best moments.
For José Moreno Villa, he was seduced "by mystery, by primitive goodness, friend of the downtrodden, enemy of outworn norms. It is not strange that he gathered more admirers than other Romantics".[7]
In 2006 Diego Martínez Torrón produced the first annotated edition of Espronceda's complete works, with an established text and unknown texts, which he expanded with other unpublished texts in El otro Esproceda.[8] [9]
See also
References
- ↑ Cf. Robert Marrast, José de Espronceda y su tiempo. Literatura, sociedad y política en tiempos del Romanticismo. Barcelona: Crítica, 1989, p. 18.
- ↑ R. Marrast, op. cit., p. 27.
- ↑ Quoted by R. Marrast, op. cit., p. 32.
- ↑ "Espronceda. Vida y obra" (in español). Archived from the original on 1 June 2010. Retrieved 16 December 2010.
- ↑ R. Marrast, op. cit., p. 47 ff.
- ↑ R. Marrast, op. cit., p. 123 ff.
- ↑ José Moreno Villa, Los autores como actores, México: FCE, 1976, p. 269
- ↑ José de Espronceda, Obras completas, edited by Diego Martínez Torrón, Madrid, Cátedra, 2006 (Bibliotheca Áurea).
- ↑ El otro Espronceda, Sevilla, Alfar, 2016, (Alfar Universidad, 215).
External links
- Portal of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library devoted to Espronceda (in Spanish)
- Digitized works of José de Espronceda in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain (in Spanish)
