José Bergamín

José Bergamín

José Bergamín Gutiérrez (born December 30, 1895 in Madrid , † August 28, 1983 in Fuenterrabía near Donostia-San Sebastián , Guipúzcoa province ) was a Spanish writer, poet and dramaturge.

Life

José Bergamín was born the youngest of 13 children of the lawyer and conservative politician Francisco Bergamín García and a fanatical Catholic. Throughout his life he tried to reconcile Catholicism and communism. The statement: "With the communists until death ... but not one step further" is ascribed to him.

After completing his law degree, José Bergamín, who was interested in politics, began to write newspaper articles in the Índice magazine, headed by Juan Ramón Jiménez . His friendship with Jímenez lasted as long as that with Miguel de Unamuno . The group of the Generación del 27 (later Generación de la República ), which gathered around this magazine, he was probably only loosely connected. Critics put him in the group Generación de 1914 . During the Second Republic, Bergamín held various government offices.

During the civil war, Bergamín was the chairman of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals . He gave Pablo Picasso the commission for the painting Guernica for the world exhibition in Paris. In 1937 he was chairman of the Congreso Internacional de Escritores en Defensa de la Cultura in Valencia . He justified numerous murders committed by communists and Trotskyists during the civil war. After Franco's victory, Bergamín fled via New York to Mexico, where he lived from 1939 to 1946 and worked as editor of the exile magazine España peregrina and the works of Antonio Machado , Rafael Alberti , César Vallejo , García Lorca and Luis Cernuda in the publishing house he founded Séneca pressed.

García Lorca had given him manuscripts and materials for his poetry collection Poeta en Nueva York in 1936 and asked him to publish them, but this did not materialize because of the outbreak of civil war. From Mexico Bergamín had the English edition of The Poet published in New York by Norton; the Séneca edition followed a short time later; Whether the arrangement of the poems corresponded to García Lorca's will has long been debated.

Bergamín lived in Venezuela in 1946/47, then went to Uruguay and in 1955 to France. He returned to Spain in 1958, but left the country again in 1963 on the advice of Manuel Fraga Iribarnes , after he had signed his manifesto against the oppression of the Asturian miners and his apartment had been set on fire. André Malraux made him Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1966 .

In 1970 Bergamín finally returned to Spain from France. Unhappy with the restoration of royalty and political developments, he joined the Basque autonomy movement and moved to the Basque Country, where he died in 1983.

Works (selection)

Bergamín's mystical style, still linked to the traditions of the 19th century, is heavily influenced by Unamuno. In his work on the Spanish theater of the 17th century, he traced the confusing cultural bloom of this time. His essays have appeared in 110 magazines, mostly in the Spanish-speaking world. In 2013, 32 previously unpublished poems, which were written in exile in Paris, were published.

• Mangas y capirotes: España en su laberinto teatral del XVII. Madrid 1933 (facsimile 2007), new edition Buenos Aires 1950.
• El alma en un hilo. Mexico City 1940 (Séneca).
• La voz apagada: Dante dantesco y otros ensayos . Mexico City 1945.
• A volver. Barcelona 1962.
• Hora última. Madrid 1984.
• Antología poética. Madrid 1997.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ernst Rudin: The poet and his executioner? Lorca's poetry and theater in German translation 1938-1998. Kassel 2000, p. 121 ff.

Web links

• José Bergamín, una poesía del exilio. El País, June 22, 2013.