Skip to main content

Emilio Adolfo Westphalen Biography

Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

(Lima, 1911-2001) Peruvian poet whose work, balanced between the avant-garde and classicism, is one of the fundamental manifestations of Latin American lyricism of the last century.Trained at the German School (where he befriended another future poet, Martín Adán) and at the University of San Marcos de Lima, from which he graduated in letters, during the thirties he was part, along with César Moro and Xavier Abril, of a surrealist poetic group that exerted an important renovating work in the national lyric.

Emilio Westphalen

Westphalen directed the surrealist publication The use of the word (1939) and the cultural magazines Las moradas (1947-1949), Revista Nacional de Cultura (1964-1966) and Amaru (1967-1971).Between 1949 and 1956 he was a translator at the UN headquarters in New York; the same job he later carried out at FAO headquarters in Rome (1957-1963).Returning to Peru, he taught at the University of San Marcos and held diplomatic positions in Portugal and Mexico.

Although Emilio Adolfo Westphalen's production is chronologically framed in the context of the avant-garde, it should be noted in her a deep vocation for heterodoxy and for stylistic singularity, which led her from a first revolutionary stage, heir to symbolism and companion on the road of the surrealist generation, to a second where those influences are sublimated in an amazing recovery of Petrarchism and the Spanish gold.

In this way, Westphalen managed to depart from the mere psychic automatism trumpeted by some of his contemporaries and establish a path that began with Strange Islands (1933) and Abolition of la muerte (1935), two collections of poems with a solid structure and brilliant images that make up his stage closest to surrealism, but which also show the mark of authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke, TS Eliot or Ezra Pound.

The publication of these two books was followed by a long silence of almost forty years, which was finally broken to allow a return of equal aesthetic dimensions but which showed a subtle and disenchanted creator, who had marked distances in front of to the supposed magic of poetry and language.This was confirmed by the important titles of this second and final stage, such as Beauty of a sword stuck in the tongue (1980), What is laughter (1989) or False rituals and other hoaxes (1992).In The goddess Ambarina is back (1988) he paid homage to his compatriot José María Eguren.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

green Day Biography

Green Day American rock music group reminiscent of punk, formed in 1988 in Berkeley and made up of Billie Joe Armstrong (vocals, guitar), Mike Dirnt (bass) and Tre Cool (drums).Billie Joe Armstrong (born 1972 in California) and Mike Dirnt (whose real name is Mike Pritchard, born 1972), residents of the Californian town of Rodeo, formed the band in the late 1980s. Green Day Billie Joe Armstrong had grown up in a family of six siblings, whose father, a trucker and jazz musician, passed away when Billie Joe was ten years; Her mother, a waitress and country fanatic, gave her a year later a guitar that she still owns and plays.For her part, Mike Pritchard was the son of a heroin addict, which led to her being adopted by a couple who, in turn, divorced when Mike was seven.At the age of fifteen, Mike rented a room in Billie Joe's house. Tre Cool, whose real name was Frank Edwin Wright III, was born in 1972 in Germany, and grew up in Wilitis, a town north of San Francisco.Soon he ...

José Sarmiento and Valladares Biography

José Sarmiento y Valladares (17th-18th centuries) Spanish colonial administrator.He was viceroy of New Spain (1696-1701), a position he left after the death of Carlos II and the change of dynasty.During his tenure, he managed to reactivate mining activity, suspended for lack of quicksilver, and trade in the colony.He held the titles of Count of Moctezuma and Tula.

Guillaume Briçonnet Biography

Guillaume Briçonnet (Paris, 1472-Esmans, 1534) French prelate.He was Bishop of Meaux (1516) and, influenced by the doctrine of Erasmus, was a supporter of the Reformation (1518).Around him, a group of humanists and theologians was formed, the Cenacle of Meaux , whose tendencies were closer to Luther, whom Briçonnet condemned.

Harry Lloyd Hopkins Biography

Harry Lloyd Hopkins (Sioux City, 1890-New York, 1946) American politician.He was a Roosevelt collaborator from his time as governor of New York.During his presidency he was one of the promoters of economic recovery and its representative in Europe during World War II.

Francisco Gutierrez Biography

Francisco Gutiérrez (San Vicente de Arévalo, 1727-Madrid, 1782) Spanish sculptor.He was a disciple of L.S.Carmona and was a pensioner in Rome.He is the author of the goddess and the chariot of the Madrid fountain of Cibeles; He also carved the tomb of Fernando VI and María Bárbara de Braganza, designed by Sabatini.

Edouard Manet Biography

Édouard Manet (Paris, 1832-id., 1883) French painter and printmaker.Son of an important civil servant of the Ministry of Justice, Édouard Manet was a mediocre student interested only in drawing.Faced with paternal resistance to starting an artistic career, he tried unsuccessfully to enter the Naval Academy until, after a second failed attempt, his family reluctantly agreed to finance his artistic studies, which began in 1850 in the workshop of the classical painter Thomas Couture. Édouard Manet After six years of apprenticeship, Édouard Manet established himself in his own studio.In those early days he established a relationship with artists and writers such as Henri Fantin-Latour, Edgar Degas and Charles Baudelaire.At the beginning of 1860 some of his works began to be recognized, which deserved, among others, the warm reception of the critic and writer Théophile Gautier. In his production at the end of the 1870s he accentuated the naturalism of his subject matter, to give th...

Francisco de Zurbarán Biography

Francisco de Zurbarán (Fuente de Cantos, 1598-Madrid, 1664) Spanish painter.At the age of fifteen Francisco de Zurbarán moved to Seville, where he was a disciple of the painter Pedro Díaz de Villanueva and met Velázquez.He married María Páez in 1617, and from that year until 1628 he remained in Llerena (Extremadura).Although there are documentary news of different works made by Zurbarán during this time, there is no known one that can be safely located at this time. In 1625 Zurbarán married Beatriz Morales a second time.In 1627 he painted his first major signed and dated work: the Crucifixion of the oratory of the sacristy of the Sevillian Dominican convent of San Pablo el Real, for which in 1626 he had contracted the realization of twenty-one paintings in eight months.Between 1628 and 1629 he carried out a cycle of paintings for the Franciscan school of San Buenaventura. The defense of Cádiz against the English (c.1634), by Zurbarán Zurbarán's art appears already perf...

Jose Luis Abellán Biography

José Luis Abellán (Madrid, 1933) Spanish thinker and essayist.He studied high school at the Ramiro de Maeztu Institute and a degree in Philosophy and Letters at the University of Madrid, from which he graduated in 1957; three years later he received his doctorate in philosophy from the same university.He taught in Puerto Rico, Northern Ireland and, later, as a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. José Luis Abellán His most important work is the Critical History of Spanish Thought (in seven volumes, 1979-1992), in which he synthesizes the evolution of ideas and philosophy in Spain since Roman times, taking into account the Latin, Arab and Hebrew substratum that shapes peninsular thought and the birth and development of national identity.In 1981 he received the National Essay Award for the first three volumes of this work, the edition of which ended in 1992. He dealt with the subject of Spain in works such as Culture in Spain.Essay for a diagnosis (1971) and V...

Hebraeus Bar Biography

Bar Hebraeus (Abú-l-Faray ibn al-Ibri, called Bar Hebraeus; Melitene, 1226-Maraga, 1286) Syrian theologian.The author of a Syrian chronicle, which he later translated into Arabic, he was a monk in Antioch, bishop of Aleppo, and head of the eastern Jacobite community.