In the sterile fields of History. Spanish poetry in front of disaster

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i5.8784
Keywords: Poetas en la España leal, Civil War, war places, cultural disaster, engagement

Abstract

The study investigates the formal constants of representation of the war’s spaces in the militant anthology Poetas en la España leal (1937). Composed in Spain, during the civil war, on the occasion of the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, the book brings together the lyrics of some of the major representatives of the early twentieth-century Spanish poetic scene, founding a authorial canon, called upon to engage with the dramatic historical turning point marked by the conflict. In the coherent semantic system of Poetas en la España leal, where the direct description of the war becomes an instrument of reflection that the lyric operates on itself in the present, the places crossed by the war disaster receive an absolutized treatment, functional to the symbolic configuration of the event. The civil conflict, which saw the Spanish people fight on two opposing sides, is for the poets leales a cultural catastrophe against which the lyric is called to verify its engagement.

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Author Biography

Ida Grasso, University of Naples Federico II

Ida Grasso is research fellow in Spanish Literature at the University of Naples Federico II. Her studies focus on the Iberian lyric and romance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its reception on the Italian side. She edited the Italian translation of El árbol de la ciencia by Pío Baroja (Marchese, 2018). Her book Un topos moderno. Il pellegrinaggio sentimentale nella poesia europea tra Otto e Novecento (Pacini, 2013) won the 2013 edition of the "Opera Critica" Prize, promoted by the Association Sigismondo Malatesta, and the “Runner up” International Criticism Gadda Prize (Harvard 2015). She also published the monograph Lirica e destino. Il libro di poesia nella Spagna del Novecento (ETS, 2020).

Published
2021-12-20
How to Cite
GrassoI. (2021). In the sterile fields of History. Spanish poetry in front of disaster. SigMa - Rivista Di Letterature Comparate, Teatro E Arti Dello Spettacolo, (5), 47-72. https://doi.org/10.6093/sigma.v0i5.8784
Issue
No 5 (2021): Historical event, collective trauma and spatiality in contemporary literature and arts
Section
Sezione monografica

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