Gonzalo Torrente Ballester
(El Ferrol, 1910-Salamanca, 1999) Spanish narrator, playwright and critic, whose work evolved from social realism to fantastic realism.After his first experiences as a professor at the universities of Santiago de Compostela and Albany, United States, he began his career as a theater critic for the Madrid newspaper Arriba and on radio stations.As a playwright, he became known with the pieces The Journey of Young Tobías (1938) and The Return of Ulysses (1946).
Gonzalo Torrente Ballester
In 1943 he published his first novel, Javier Mariño , in which despite the intervention of the censorship, which found in her an overabundance of "lubricious images" and forced him to cut them down, showed a vigorous prose and a fine irony that, as he himself recognized, owed much to Miguel de Cervantes.The humorous and imaginative side (so essential in the future production of Torrente Ballester) is already revealed in his second novel, El coup d'état de Guadalupe Limón (1946), which pretends to be a historical chronicle, with its sources and documents, about an extravagant coup d'état that was carried out by two women in a Latin American country, a story that is not without affinities with Tirano Banderas by Ramón del Valle-Inclán.
Torrente Ballester's narrative work progressed discontinuously.After the publication of Ifigenia (1949), his work was interrupted for a few years, during which the critic imposed himself and wrote books of unequal value, especially useful as an exposition of the ideas of his generation: Panorama of contemporary Spanish literature (1956) and Contemporary Spanish Theater (1957).
The author brilliantly returned to the novel with the realistic trilogy The joys and shadows , a documented historical-social reconstruction of Galician life during the Republic, which consists of from The Lord arrives (1957), Where he turns the air (1960) and The sad Easter (1962).In the following novel, Don Juan , from 1963, he tackles the old literary myth, which he interprets suggestively as a challenge to divinity.With Offside (1969) he offers an ironic vision of artistic-cultural and financial life, but (like the previous one) he was not successful.
Torrente Ballester's public recognition came late with La saga/fugue de J.B .(1972), without doubt his most important novel.It is a fable of great imaginative vigor that tells a thousand years of the history of a Galician people through a protean protagonist (J.B.are the initials of a humble grammarian who in the past embodied other J.B.).
The main theme that developed his work was that of the struggle for power between social classes, which appeared in a strong and realistic way, even with tragic objectivism, in his first works, or the miseries and limitations of those who hold power, which he recreated with irony, humor and powerful imagination in his mature works.
The later influence of Hispanic American literature accentuated its tendency towards the fantastic, as observed in Fragments of the Apocalypse (1977), The island of cut hyacinths (1980), Chronicle of the stunned king (1989) and his posthumous Doménica (1999), in which the marvelous comes naturally to discover the emotion and carnality of the characters as a force for change in an oppressive world.The link between the symbol and the imagination acts harmoniously in his narrative, the former as the mythical sustenance of the story and the latter as the key to deciphering it.The action is thus the consequence of a fiction based on humor and tragedy.
His essay work included Don Quixote as a game (1975), About the novelist and his art (1979) and, among other books, Myth and character of Don Juan (1992).His literary prestige meant that he entered the Royal Spanish Academy in 1975 and received numerous awards, including the Prince of Asturias de las Letras (1982), ex-aequo with Miguel Delibes, and the Miguel de Cervantes (1985).
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