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Dámaso Alonso was born in Madrid in 1898, raised in Asturias and then returned to his native city where he completed his studies in Law and Literature.
He was a student of Menendez Pidal at the Centro de Estudios Históricos and an enthusiastic participant in the cultural and literary life at the famous Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid.
There, such influential artists of the 1920s as painter Salvador Dali, poets Rafael Alberti and Federico Garcia Lorca, and film director Luis Buñuel were meeting to explore Surrealism.
As a poet Alonso was a member of the ‘Generation of 1927’. He subsequently was made professor of Spanish language and literature and taught at universities in Spain (Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid) and abroad (Berlin, Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford, Columbia and Leipzig).
He was also director of the Revista de Filología Hispánica (a Spanish philology magazine) and the Biblioteca Románica Hispánica of the authoritative Gredos publishing house. He directed the Instituto Antonio de Nebrija (Higher Council of Scientific Investigation in Philology) and wrote for influential literary magazines such as Revista de Occidente and Los Cuatro Vientos.
Alonso had wide-ranging interests and simultaneously produced works of literature, criticism and historical studies, writings on style, research on classical Spanish poets, popular poetry, the jarchas, and well-known authors like Luis de Góngora, San Juan de la Cruz and Gil Vicente.
He is credited with revolutionising the study of Spanish Baroque poetry, particularly the work of Luis de Góngora. Alonso’s critical writings are acclaimed for their intellectual rigour and precision and include La lengua poética de Góngora (The Poetic Language of Góngora; Madrid, C.S.I.C. 1961) and Ensayos sobre poesía española (Essays on Spanish Poetry; 1944).
Though he was a member of the ‘Generation of 1927’, his best-known works date from the 1940s onwards. Alonso used to refer to himself as a ‘poeta de rachas’, or ‘part-time poet’.
His volumes of poetry include Poemas puros: Poemillas de la ciudad, (Pure Poems; Madrid, Galatea, 1921); El viento y el verso (Wind and Verse; Madrid, 1925); Oscura noticia (Dark News; Madrid, Col. Adonais, Hispánica, 1944); Hombre y Dios (Man and God; Málaga, 1995); Hijos de la ira (Children of Wrath; Madrid, 1944); Antología de nuestro monstruoso mundo, duda y amor sobre el Ser Supremo (The Anthology of Our Monstruous World, Love and Doubt about the Supreme Being; Madrid, Cátedra, 1985); and Álbum, Versos de juventud (Youth Verse; Barcelona, Tusquets, 1993).
Apart from creating his own work he helped to develop among his generation an interest in influential contemporary European writers. He was the first to translate into Spanish James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Retrato del artista adolescente) published by Nueva Biblioteca in Madrid in 1926.
A member of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua since 1945, he was its director from 1968-1982. He was a member of numerous other associations and academies including the Real Academia de la Historia and the Modern Language Association, and he was President of the Asociación de Hispanistas. His main work as director of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua was to organize meetings with American academies with whom he collaborated to prevent fragmentation of the Spanish language.
The Library at the Real Academia Española de la Lengua has a special section dedicated to its former director, with more than 40,000 volumes of his work and personal documents and memorabilia. There are copies of some of these items in this Library, including a letter from James Joyce concerning Alonso´s translation of his book into Spanish.
Because of his major contribution to Spanish philology and literature, Alonso was honoured with prestigious awards including the premio Nacional de Literatura in 1927, the Fastenrath in 1943, el Premio Nacional de Ensayo in 1969, and the Premio Cervantes in 1978 which is considered the highest award of the Spanish literary world.
He also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Bordeaux, Freiburg, Granada, Hamburg, Lisbon, Oxford, Oviedo, Rome and Mayor de San Marcos de Lima in Peru. He died in Madrid on the 25th of January 1990.
N.º 633. Noticias destacadas
