Liturgy, eroticism and dissidence: the poetic group Cántico claims its place | Culture | EUROtoday

The Cántico group, some of the distinctive phenomena of twentieth century Spanish poetry, may have disappeared with no hint. In 1976, when the poet Guillermo Carnero devoted an anthological research to this journal that had printed its final problem twenty years earlier, his legacy had fallen into oblivion. “When I heard about them, in the early seventies, there was not a single book by them in bookstores. It was a total absence,” remembers the author Luis Antonio de Villena, who has simply printed a e book, The beautiful and elusive lifetime of Julio Aumente (Editorial Cántico), which brings collectively recollections linked to probably the most wayward and unorthodox member of that ephemeral collective.

Chant It was, on the time, a marginal and precarious phenomenon: a short-lived literary journal – it had two levels, between 1947 and 1949, and between 1954 and 1957 – promoted by a small group of younger authors from Córdoba: Pablo García Baena, Ricardo Molina, Juan Bernier, Mario López and the aforementioned Julio Aumente. The Civil War was very latest and the poetry of the time, which was starting to divulge heart’s contents to the social, solely admitted non secular existentialism and patriotic classicism.

In that short-run publication, fastidiously illustrated by Miguel del Moral, Lorca, Cernuda and Aleixandre have been vindicated, names banned in Franco’s circles. Its promoters translated Rilke or Gide, printed important articles and their very own poems. But they weren’t profitable. After the second try, discouragement set in. They devoted themselves to different issues and forgot about poetry.

Time, nonetheless, appears to have confirmed them proper. Fifty years after the publication of the essay that introduced them again to life —The Cántico de Cordoba grouprepublished and expanded by Carnero in 2009—anybody who needs to get nearer to the work of those authors has at hand editions of full works, essays, biographies and even documentaries. None of this is able to have existed with out the restoration carried out by the Novísimos, the technology to which De Villena and Carnero belonged, and who acknowledged in these Cordoba poets precursors of their approach of understanding poetry: culturalist, baroque, vitalist and stuffed with aestheticism. “The truth is that we liked to look for parents,” De Villena acknowledges. “They lived the end of Chant like a defeat. They felt that their aesthetic proposal had no echo. The rise of social poetry made them seem outdated in the fifties, when those of my generation realized that they were actually something new that revived a tradition.

The editor Raúl Alonso holds a similar opinion. “The Cántico group was an island of freedom and beauty in the Spanish cultural panorama of the 1940s,” explains Alonso, who in 2009 named his publishing home—the identical one the place Julio Aumente’s biography was simply printed—Cántico Editorial, in clear homage. “Those young people published in the magazine Chant the best of the poetry that was published inside and outside our borders. Their extraordinary sensitivity led them to make poetry a celebration of life when everything was gray in a fascist regime. “They created a universe of flamenco, painting and poetry that knew how to fuse our best tradition with the heterodoxy of their vitalist and homoerotic thirst.”

Homoeroticism is just not a secondary ingredient. De Villena remembers that, when he was not but aware of Cántico, one other poet from Córdoba described them as glorious poets, “but they were all fags and sanctimonious.” And, aside from Mario López—heterosexual—maybe homoeroticism was one of many causes that made them uncomfortable in postwar Córdoba. During their youth, Ricardo Molina or Juan Bernier crammed their poems with mysterious presences, desired figures with out identify or face who have been misplaced within the shadows of a backyard or a twilight palace. Others, like García Baena or Julio Aumente, masked want in sophisticated compositions stuffed with archaeological, creative or liturgical references.

However, when within the eighties and nineties a few of them returned to writing—Ricardo Molina, who died in 1968, didn’t see the rehabilitation of his work—their allusions grew to become extra express. That of Aumente is probably the most putting instance, and the biography of De Villena, who frequented him in these years, when the person from Córdoba was a heraldist and antiquarian who lived locked up in an enormous Madrid condo full of antiques, explains how his poetry of outdated age was cast. In his final poems, printed after he was seventy years outdated, Aumente recorded his amorous affairs with younger skaters whom he met on Paseo de Recoletos. His books from the early nineties, comparable to The music of the harpies o Rollersare erotic, ribald and extremely cultured collections of poems, the place he narrates his dalliances with suburban children who wouldn’t have regarded misplaced in a quinqui film, however whom he described as princes of the Renaissance. That was a small scandal within the all the time minority subject of poetry. “I understood that those books were very innovative, because they included the speech of the kids I was treating,” De Villena remembers. “I was still an esthetician, but with a different aestheticism, with a very special refinement.”

Julio Aumente died in 2006 with hardly any official recognition. García Baena, who died in 2018, did obtain quite a few awards and his full work has been printed for the primary time in an intensive version, in a number of volumes, by Rafael Inglada within the Sevillian publishing home Renacimiento. The poetry of Aumente, Molina, García Baena or Vicente Núñez—an creator who, though he barely printed in Chantsure he was very near the group—is offered from the Visor publishing home. Bernier’s, alongside along with his surprising diary, in Pre-Textos. Even the consecration of María Victoria Atencia, who obtained the National Literature Award this yr, may be linked to Cántico; Although she didn’t belong to this group, the Malaga lady is nearer to them than to some other technology.

All of those texts, these from the postwar interval and people from the top of the century, are people who have reached new generations of poets, who’ve present in them a special and transgressive custom, nearer to their sensibilities. Authors comparable to Juan Antonio González Iglesias, Victoria López Mata, Luis Bravo, Antonio Praena and Juan Gallego Benot cite Chant greater than his predecessors. Ángelo Néstore, head of the Letraversal publishing home, specialised in present poetry, is obvious about it. “For me, rereading the Cántico group today means reconciling ourselves with that which for decades has been despised as corny,” he factors out. “In García Baena, in Bernier or in Aumente there’s a deliberate dedication to emotion, the extreme, magnificence, sensuality and the decorative, in a context that demanded sobriety, virility and likewise ethical restraint. This deliberate extra, with insistence on the affective and the feminized, has been a type of political and important dissidence, and is near queer poetics that flee from academicism and declare the fitting to jot down from want, vulnerability and the pleasure of language.” Almost seventy years after publishing its final problem, Chant can boast of getting achieved one thing unprecedented: a heterodox legacy that continues to problem at present’s poets because the oppressive post-war interval.