Rafael Alberti

32

Rafael Alberti : biography

16 December 1902 – 28 October 1999

La amante (1925) and El alba del alhelí (1926) followed in quick succession. Alberti had settled on a style and was writing fluently within it. He was working on the poems which would form El alba when he was invited by his brother, who had succeeded their father as a wine-salesman, to take a trip with him to the Cantabrian coast. Alberti had never before visited northern Spain and the car-trip through the villages and mountains made a strong impression on him. In La amante, his brother is replaced by the figure of an imaginary girl-friend and he assumes the persona of a troubadour, writing short and generally light-hearted verses about the sights they saw. El alba, on the other hand, was written mainly during holidays he spent with two of his married sisters in Málaga and Rute, a claustrophobic Andalusian mountain village. He had by now met García Lorca and seems to be trying to emulate him. However, what in Lorca is tragic, violent and death-laden tends to seem false and melodramatic in Alberti.Connell p 195

Maturity

His next collection, Cal y canto (1926-8), is a big departure. He rejects some of the folkloric influences of the previous two works and picks up again the baroque forms, such as the sonnets and tercets, and also the Ultraist thematic material of Marinero.Connell p 195 He had been placed in charge of collecting the poems dedicated to Góngora as part of the Tercentenary celebrationsAlberti p 234 and there are many signs of Góngora’s influence on this work. Alberti’s technical versatility comes to the fore as he writes sonnets, ballads, tercets and even a pastiche of the intricate style of the Soledades. More significantly, there is a sense of unease hanging over the whole collection.Morris "Generation" Traditional values – myths, religion, convention – are found wanting, but more modern values such as speed, freedom and iconoclasm are also found to be hollow. The nymphs, shepherdesses and mythological figures of renaissance and Baroque poetry are brought into contact with department stores and other aspects of modern life only to appear banal.

There is a sense in this collection that Alberti is writing in this collection as himself, not as the sailor, the troubadour or the tourist of his earlier books.Connell p 197 He even writes a poem about a heroic performance by the goalkeeper of FC Barcelona – "Oda a Platko" in a match against Real Sociedad in May 1928. The violence displayed by the Basques was unbelievable, he writes in his memoirs. At one desperate moment Platko was attacked so furiously by the players of the Real that he was covered with blood and lost consciousness a few feet from his position, but with his arms still wrapped around the ball.Alberti p 262

The most significant poem in the collection is probably the final one, "Carta abierta" (‘Open Letter’).Connell p 197 He makes it clear that he is writing as Rafael Alberti, child of the Bay of Cádiz and the twentieth century. He contrasts the confinement of the classroom with the freedom of the seashore, the excitement and novelty of the cinema with the boredom of lessons, the conventions of traditional literature and ideas with the revolution of radio, the aeroplane, the telephone. In the confusion caused by the clash of old and new values, the poet has a premonition of the feelings of emptiness and desolation that were soon to assail him but he decides to align with the new.

Sobre los ángeles and the works of breakdown

Picking up on the sense of unease that hangs over Cal y canto, Alberti now begins to mine a vein of deep and anguished introspection. He has lost his youthful high spirits and finds himself deshabitado (‘empty’). An unhappy love affair seems to have been the immediate catalyst but the pit of despair into which Alberti plunged was peopled also by deeper-rooted shadows of his life, notably recollections of his rebellious childhood and the hell-fire sermons of the Jesuits at the Colegio, a friend’s suicide, and a full awareness of his own position at the age of 25, misunderstood by his family, penniless, still living at home (it was only after he met María Teresa that he finally moved out) and with no other way of earning a living other than through his poetry. In this black mood,