José Viera y Clavijo

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José Viera y Clavijo

José Viera y Clavijo (born December 28, 1731 in Realejo Alto , Tenerife , † February 21, 1813 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria ) was a Spanish Roman Catholic clergyman , polymath (especially in the fields of general history , natural history and botany of the Canary Islands Islands ) and an important poet of the Spanish Enlightenment .

Life

José Viera y Clavijo studied various branches of knowledge in the Dominican convent in La Orotava , with an emphasis on scholastic philosophy, from which he soon turned away. Early on he developed a fondness for literature, especially poetry. The speeches of the Hieronymite Benito Feijoo exerted a great influence on him and promoted a positive attitude towards the rationalism of the Enlightenment in him . In 1750 he received minor orders in La Laguna , and later higher orders in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria .

Six years later, in 1756, he moved with his family to La Laguna on Tenerife and served as parish priest from 1757 to 1770. In Tenerife he was in the most prestigious circles of society, in particular with Tomás de Nava Grimón, Marqués de Villanueva del Prado , in whose house Cristóbal del Hoyo Solórzano , Fernando de la Guerra and Lope de la Guerra , Juan Antonio de Urtusáustegui u. a. met. A confidential gazette, the first "newspaper" in the Canaries, was published by this group. Viera y Clavijo had access to the great library of Tomás de Nava Grimón, where he read the French classics , as well as philosophers and moralists such as Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens , Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle , Voltaire , Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau met.

Monument in the Botanical Garden, Gran Canaria

In 1763 he began to write a Historia de Canarias ("History of the Canary Islands"), the first volume appeared in 1772, the second a year later. In 1770 he left the Canary Islands and went to Madrid as a teacher to the daughter of the President of the Royal Academy of Spain . While traveling with her in the Mancha landscape , he published his travel diary Viaje a la Mancha in 1774 (“Journey to the Mancha in 1774”). A few years later, in 1777, at the suggestion of the director of the Historical Academy, he was accepted as a member. He made the acquaintance of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (politician, lawyer and writer), Juan Meléndez Valdés (1754-1817; politician and poet) and corresponded with the well-known botanist Antonio José Cavanilles , also a clergyman.

In 1780 José Viera y Clavijo accompanied the Marqués de Santa Cruz on a European trip to Paris, Turin, Rome, Naples, Venice and Vienna, in 1781 further to Germany and the Netherlands. He also wrote a diary ( itinerary ) about this trip . In November 1780 he took up his quarters in the Spanish embassy in Vienna, with Domingo de Iriarte , the embassy secretary from Tenerife . In the diary there are remarks about concerts by Mozart , the elephants in the Schönbrunn Zoo and sleigh rides with Pietro Metastasio . In Rome he obtained important documents for his Historia and, last but not least, the ecclesiastical permission to read banned books . He stayed in Paris for almost a year, attended scientific conferences and courses in chemistry and physics, assisted in the Academy of Sciences , and got to know Voltaire , Condorcet and d'Alembert . This stay in Paris was the reason for his renewed interest and future intensive occupation with the natural sciences .

In 1782 José Viera y Clavijo was ordained Archdeacon of Fuerteventura in the Cathedral of Las Palmas . In 1784 he left Madrid for good and moved to the Canary Islands, where he stayed until his death. He shifted the focus of his work now primarily to his function as a member of the Royal Academy of Economics, as a teacher at the San Marcial School, as well as on his own literary work and translations of other scriptures.

A few years later (July 25, 1797) he saw Admiral Nelson defeat in the attack on Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1797) against General Antonio Gutiérrez (Santa Cruz was then declared a free and invincible city, the first step on the way to the capital from Tenerife). In 1799 he wrote his Diccionario de historia natural de las islas Canarias ("Lexicon of the Natural History of the Canary Islands"), a year later El Nuevo Can Mayor o constelación canaria , a thirteen- volume hymn of praise for the Canaries.

José Viera y Clavijo died on February 21, 1813 in Las Palmas. In 1860 his bones were reburied in the cathedral.

Honors

After him the plant genus Vieraea is Sch.Bip. from the sunflower family (Asteraceae) and named the scientific journal "Vieraea". The Botanical Garden of the Canaries Jardín Botánico Canario Viera y Clavijo on Gran Canaria near Las Palmas , founded by the Swede Erik Ragnar Svensson and opened in 1959, is also named after him.

Works

Signature of José Viera y Clavijo

Poetry

In addition to some satirical poems, through which he got into some difficulties, he wrote teaching poems aimed particularly at his young students to illustrate scientific experiments, for example

  • Al globo aerostático (The balloon)
  • Las cuatro partes del día (The four parts of the day)
  • Las bodas de las plantas ("marriage of plants", = fertilization), and other botanical subjects
  • Los aires fijos (Six songs about the "air", = meteorology )

prose

  • Noticias del cielo o Astronomía para niños (Notes from the sky or astronomy for children)
  • Los Vasconautas , an epic (narrative poem), written in 1766, first published in 1983 (!). It consists of four ironic chants, the content of which is composed of mythical-fantastic and historical elements, yet enlightening, with various allusions to the " Divina Comoedia " by Dante Alighieri .
  • Also in 1766 he wrote the Diccionario de Historia Natural
  • His main work in the field of history are the Noticias de la Historia General de las Islas Canarias (published 1772–1773).
  • La vida de Santa Genoveva (The Life of Saint Genoveva ), a neoclassical tragedy
  • La vida del noticioso Jorge Sargo (The life of the famous Jorge Sargo ), his only story, a picaresque novel influenced by German Mateo , was written in his youth.

Translations

He translated, among other things, plays from the Baroque period , various forgotten works by Jean Racine and La Harpe .

literature

  • José Batllori y Lorenzo: D. José Viera y Clavijo. Noticias de su vida y de sus obras . Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 1931
  • Victoria Galván González: La poesía traducida de Viera y Clavijo . In: Dicenda: Cuadernos de filología hispánica , ISSN  0212-2952 , Nº 20, 2002, pp. 73-104
  • Carlos Brito Díaz: Andanzas del último pícaro español: Vida del noticioso Jorge Sargo, de José Viera y Clavijo (1731–1813) . In: Actas del XIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, Madrid 6-11 de julio de 1998 / coord. by Carlos Alvar Ezquerra, Florencio Sevilla Arroyo, Vol. 2, 2000, ISBN 84-7039-847-4 , pp. 10-19

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymic plant names - extended edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Viera y Clavijo, José
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Viera y Clavijo, Joseph de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish Catholic clergyman, polymath, poet of the Enlightenment
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1731
PLACE OF BIRTH Realejo Alto
DATE OF DEATH February 21, 1813
Place of death Las Palmas de Gran Canaria