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‘Thy Fading Mansion’: The Image of the Empty House in Rafael Alberti's Sobre los ángeles

1987; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382872000364225

1469-3550

Derek Gagen,

Spanish Philosophy and Literature

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: ALBERTI, RAFAEL (1902–1999)IMAGERY/METAPHORSOBRE LOS ÁNGELES [R. ALBERTI] Notes 1. Rafael Alberti, Sobre los ángeles (Madrid: Compañía Ibero-Americana de Publicaciones, 1929), 21–22. 2. Sobre los ángeles, 129. 3. Alberti's autobiography, La arboleda perdida (Buenos Aires: Fabril, 1959), 274–75, offers a vivid account of this event, suggesting it occurred in the summer of 1928. Alberti's chronology is suspect. The poem, which has never been collected, was printed in the local newspaper Revista Portuense, 25 January 1928 (Año XLII, No. 12126), 1–2. 4. Cf. my ‘Traditional Imagery and Avant-garde Staging. Rafael Alberti's El hombre deshabitado’, in Staging in the Spanish Theatre, ed. Margaret A. Rees (Leeds: Trinity and All Saints’ College, 1984), 51–86. The present article is an expansion of some comments made in that study, 63–64. 5. Luis Cernuda, La realidad y el deseo (Madrid: Castalia, 1982), 115. 6. T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 77. 7. Sobre los ángeles, 160. 8. The image is especially important in the play De un momento a otro: cf. my ‘ “Necessary murder”? The Inevitability of Violence in Alberti's De un momento a otro’, Romance Studies, III (1983–84), 14–30. 9. C. B. Morris, ‘Parallel Imagery in Quevedo and Alberti’, BHS, XXXVI (1959), 135–45. 10. Edward M. Wilson, ‘Spanish and English Religious Poetry of the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, IX (1958), 38–53. 11. R. A. Cardwell, ‘Rafael Alberti's El hombre deshabitado’, Iberoromania, II (1970), 129. 12. La arboleda perdida, 166—67. 13. La arboleda perdida, 239–42. 14. La arboleda perdida, 155. 15. La arboleda perdida, 171. 16. Gerardo Diego, Poesía española contemporánea. Antología (Madrid: Taurus, 1974), 425. C. B. Morris, ‘Sobre los ángeles, medio siglo después’, Archivo Hispalense, CLXXXVI (1978), 74, copes with the omission of Quevedo and others from Alberti's list by adding ‘y más nombres aún se podrian añadir a esa lista’ and includes Quevedo among these. This is not entirely convincing. 17. Ricardo Senabre, La poesía de Rafael Alberti (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1977), 47. Senabre notes that ‘Desahucio’ also recalls the expressionist horror films of the twenties. 18. Gregorio Torres Nebrera, El teatro de Rafael Alberti (Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1982), 94–96. 19. G. W. Connell, ‘The Autobiographical Element in Sobre los ángeles, BHS, XL (1963), 160–73; ‘The End of a Quest. Alberti's Sermones y moradas and Three Uncollected Poems’, HR, XXXIII (1965), 290–309. The latter article particularly concentrates on the importance of the ruined house. 20. ‘The Autobiographical Element. . .’, 170. 21. ‘The End of a Quest. ..’, 298. 22. ‘The Autobiographical Element. . .’, 163. 23. Several critics have investigated the love theme in Sobre los ángeles, in particular Joaquin Gonzalez Muela, ‘¿Poesía amorosa en Sobre los ángeles?’, Insula, LXXX (1952), August, 5, and C. B. Morris, Rafael Alberti's ‘Sobre los dngeles’: Four Major Themes (Hull: University of Hull, 1966), 16–28. 24. Geoffrey Connell, ‘Sobre los ángeles: Form and Theme’, Spanish Studies, IV (1982), 1–14, p. 10. This study, unfortunately published in an obscure periodical, provides a wealth of background detail as well as a coherent assessment of a number of critical questions. 25. Thus in his note to lines ‘ese pórtico verde/busco en las negras simas’ from the poem ‘Paraíso perdido’, Morris refers to Christ's words ‘I am the door’ (John 10:9) and to the Catholic tradition that represents Mary as the gate to Heaven. Like many of the parallels adduced by Morris, such observations raise important methodological questions beyond the scope of the present discussion. Suffice it to say that the word portico does not hold such resonances for most readers. However, the imagery of habitation does hold specific resonances for modern readers. Equally, many of Morris’ biblical references are well judged, e.g. on poems such as ‘Los angeles de la prisa’. 26. The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1963), 65. 27. R. M. Price, ‘A Note on the Sources and Structure of “Miré los Muros de la Patria Mia”’, MLN, LXXVII (1963), 194–99. 28. Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited with an analytic commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1977), 505–06. Michael West, ‘The Internal Dialogue of Shakespeare's Sonnet 146’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XXV (1974), 109–22, gives plentiful further cases of this usage. A characteristic example is ‘we are but tenants at will in this clay form’ from Christopher Sutton's Disce mori of 1600. 29. Romeo and Juliet III. 2: 1. 10. The allegory of the body as a habitation was exceedingly common in medieval love lyric. For the Chateau d'Amour see C. L. Powell, ‘The Castle of the Body’, Studies in Philology, XVI (1919), 197–205. 30. For Alberti's lack of faith see C. B. Morris, ‘Sobre los ángeles: A Poet's Apostasy’, BHS, XXXVII (1960), 222–31. Alberti has clarified the nature of this lack of faith—rather than loss of faith—in an interview with Manuel Bayo, reproduced in Amando C. Isasi Angulo, Diálogos del teatro español de la postguerra (Madrid: Ayuso, 1974), 23–44. 31. In a review of E. F. Stanton's The Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante jondo, HR, XLIX (1981), 130–31. 32. Francisco Villaespesa, Andalucia (Madrid: Vidal, 1911), 35–36. 33. Francisco Villaespesa, Poesías completas, I (Madrid: Aguilar, 1954), 66. Subsequent references follow quotations and are to this edition. 34. Gustav Siebenmann, Los estilos poéticos en España desde 1900 (Madrid: Gredos, 1973) supplies a succinct account of the rediscovery of tradicion popular and the mimetic verse of the ‘popular poets’. For Alberti's indebtedness to the popular tradition Jose Luis Tejada, Rafael Alberti, entre la tradición y la vanguardia (Madrid: Gredos, 1977) is indispensable. 35. Manuel Balmaseda, Primer cancionero flamenco (Bilbao: Zero, 1973). 36. Antonio Machado y Álvarez, Cantes flamencos (Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe, 1947), 39. 37. Francisco Rodriguez Marin, El alma de Andalucia en sus mejores coplas amorosas (Madrid: Revista de Archivos, 1929), No. 897. Nos. 894–99 use the images of cueba and chosa similarly. 38. Narciso Díaz de Escovar, Mas coplas . . . (Malaga: Zambrana Hnos, 1901), 17. 39. Machado y Alvarez, Cantes flamencos, 125. This is one of the most frequently collected poems and had also appeared in Francisco Rodriguez Marin, Cantos populares españoles (Primera edition argentina) (Buenos Aires: Bajel, 1948), No. 3741, and Cancionero popular. Colección escogida de seguidillas y coplas recogidas y ordenadas por D. Emilio Lafuente y Alcantara (Madrid: Bailly-Bailliere, 1865), 182. 40. Machado y Álvarez, Cantes flamencos, 155. 41. Lafuente y Alcántara, Cancionero popular, 47. 42. Ventura Ruiz Aguilera, Obras completas, 5th ed. (Madrid: Imprenta de la Biblioteca de Instrucción y Recreo, 1873), 247. 43. Narciso Diaz de Escovar, Guitarra andaluz (Barcelona: F. Granada, 1911), No. XCIV. 44. Juan Ramón Jimenez, Segunda antolojía poetica (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1956), 203. 45. Jiménez, Segunda antolojía poetica, 251. 46. There is scope for a wider investigation of the sememe ‘habitation’ in modern verse. Consider, by way of example, Antonio Machado's lines ‘Es una tarde cenicienta y mustia/destartalada, como el alma mía;/y es esta vieja angustia/que habita mi usual hipocondría’ (Soledades. Galerias. Otros poemas, LXXVII). An even more suggestive parallel lies in Bécquer's Rima LXX. This poem supplied the epigraph ‘Huesped de las nieblas’ for each section of Sobre los ángeles. C. B. Morris, ‘Sobre los ángeles, medio siglo después’, 74–75, has written persuasively of the affinity between Bécquer and Alberti. 47. Raymond de Becker, The Understanding of Dreams (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), 336. 48. Rafael Alberti, Poesia (1924–1967) (Madrid: Aguilar, 1972), 308. 49. Sobre los ángeles, 104. 50. I am indebted to the Staff Travel Fund of the University of Manchester for grants that made possible research incorporated into this article.