Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

SOBRE LOS ÁNGELES : A POET'S APOSTASY

1960; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382602000337222

1469-3550

C. B Morris,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Abstract Rafael Alberti's enigmatic Sobre los ángeles has attracted surprisingly little close critical attention: while not stinting their praises, critics have tended to stay at a safe distance from it, retiring either behind the by now elastic adjective “surrealist” or behind vague generalizations such as that “Sobre los ángeles is concerned with a terrible crisis in which Alberti finds that for no explicable reason he has lost his trust in himself and his hold on existence…”. An exception is L. F. Vivanco, whose opinions carry more weight than most because of his friendship with Alberti in the 1920's, when Sobre los ángeles was in gestation. BSS Subject Index: ALBERTI, RAFAEL (1902–1999)SOBRE LOS ÁNGELES [R. ALBERTI] Notes 1C. M. Bowra, TheCreative Experiment (London 1949), 222. See also E. Proll, “The Surrealist Element in Rafael Alberti”, BSS XVIII (1941), 70–82; F. Olivero, “Su Sobre los ángeles di Rafael Alberti”, Quaderni Ibero-Americani II (1953), No. 13, 256–58; Azorín, “Los ángeles. Poesía”, ABC, 6, VI. 1929. 2“Rafael Alberti en su palabra acelerada y vestida de luces”, in Introducción a la poesia española contemporánea (Madrid 1957), 240, 241–42. Also in Papeles de Son Armadans VI (1957), 11–30. References are to the former. 3“¿ Poesía amorosa en Sobre los ángeles?”, ínsula (Madrid), no. 80, agosto de 1952. It could be added, in support of Muela, that the same woman's presence is felt throughout the work also in the recurrence of feminine adjectives without antecedent, as in El ángel mentiroso (141) and Engaño (149). References to Alberti's poetry are to Poesía 1924–1944 (Buenos Aires 1946). 4Proll is too engrossed in surrealist elements to expand his reference to Alberti's “education in the Colegio de Jesuítas… having as a…result … a violent reaction to religion” (71). 1Note, for example, his attitude to Don Alvaro and his beata sister Elvira in El obispo leproso, and his descriptions of life in a Jesuit colegio in Niño y grande (especially pp. 437–46, Obras completas, Madrid 1949) and El libro de Sigüenza (El señor Cuenca y su sucesor, pp. 571–74). 2“Niñez intacta, que una tarde se marchitó oyendo predicar a un jesuíta” (Madrid 1927, 181). 3 El artista adolescente (Madrid 1926); quoted hereafter as A A. 1 Meditaciones de los mysterios de nuestra santa fe, con la prática de la Oracion mental sobre ellos (Valladolid 1613), Tomo I, 142. 5 Quinta meditación, preámbulo 2, punto 3; Obras completas (Madrid 1952), 174. 9 De la diferencia entre lo temporal y eterno: crisol de desengaños (Madrid 1762), 372; a work well known to Ayala's Bertuco: “Reapareció Mur con un libro abierto en las manos; dióselo a Bertuco. El niño conocía bien aquel volumen, aforrado de tela negra mate, como los ataúdes: era la Diferencia entre lo temporal y lo eterno, por el Padre Juan Eusebio Nieremberg” (Madrid 1931, 159). 1 La arboleda perdida, 137. Ayala and Azaña coin equally vivid phrases to describe this type of oratory: Ayala writes of the “machaqueo terrorífico del Inspector” (92), and Azaña of the Jesuit preacher who “descargaba tajos de retórica tremebunda” (109). 1 Obras completas (Madrid 1957), 123. Azaña too complains of “el mismo fárrago de lecturas desordenadas que perturbó los albores de mi adolescencia” (16). 2Azaña is lost in the same maze of unanswered—and unanswerable—questions: “Los maestros preguntan de historia, de física, de agronomía …; pero de ese laberinto en que el mozo se aventura a tientas, con pavor y codicia del misterio, nunca” (25). 1 Libro de poemas, Obras completas, 120. 2“Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be shaken”. Matt. xxiv. 29 “And great earthquakes shall there be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven”. Luke xxi.11 1Cf. Lorca, Libro de poemas, Obras completas, 155–56: El cielo estaba marchito, ¡ Oh tarde cautiva por las nubes, esfinge sin ojos! 2“And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, ”And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out of the earth, and his angels were cast out with him”. Revelations xii. 7–9 1 The Creative Experiment (London 1949), 231. 1 I wish to thank Professor Stephen Reckert and Mr. H.M. Quinn for their comments on the typescript of this article; I am also indebted to Professor E. M. Wilson for valuable suggestions.