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.