Ramón Pérez de Ayala

Ramón Pérez de Ayala y Fernández del Portal (born August 9, 1880 in Oviedo , † August 5, 1962 in Madrid ) was a Spanish writer , journalist and diplomat .

Life

Ramón Pérez de Ayala was born in Oviedo as the son of a textile merchant who had lived in Cuba when he was young . At the early death of his mother Luisa, Ramón suffered a lot emotionally. He spent most of his childhood in boarding schools run by the Jesuits , San Zoilo in Carrión de los Condes and Colegio de la Inmaculada in Gijón . Various experiences in these schools were also decisive for the anti-clericalism that was noticeable in later work, especially in the autobiographical novel AMDG ( Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam ) .

He studied law in Oviedo, where he was professor of the well-known writer and legal scholar Leopoldo Alas , better known as "Clarín". There he got to know the thoughts of Krausismo and Regeneracionismo. In his youth he presented himself as a dandy and free spirit, with long hair and a monocle . At this time he also came into contact with representatives of modernism .

In 1902 his first novel was, Trece Dioses. Fragmentos de las memorias de Florencio Flórez , very still in the decadent siècle fin de master tuning of the Sonatas of Ramón del Valle-Inclán held in El Progreso de Asturias printed as a serial novel. In 1903, together with other intellectuals, he founded the magazine Helios, Revista del Modernismo ; from 1904 he began to work as a journalist in El Imparcial and ABC . In 1907 he fled the scandal caused by his novel Tinieblas en las cumbres to London , where a year later he learned of his father's financial ruin and suicide.

He traveled through France, Italy, England, Germany and the USA and also worked as a ghostwriter for his colleague and friend Azorín when he was going through a depressive crisis. During the First World War , Pérez de Ayala worked as a war correspondent for La Prensa in Buenos Aires . His work Hermann encadenado (1917) grew out of his experiences on the battlefields .

In 1927 he received the Premio Nacional de Literatura (State Prize for Literature) in Spain, in 1928 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Española . During the Second Spanish Republic, he was appointed head of the Museo del Prado and became a member of the Cortes . In 1932 he was appointed Spanish ambassador to London, but resigned from this post in 1936 due to political differences and returned to Spain.

When the civil war broke out , he sided with the nationalists and sent his two sons to join Francisco Franco's army as volunteers . In 1938 he left Spain, then lived in Paris and Biarritz , and later in Buenos Aires, until he settled back in Spain in 1954. Ramón Pérez de Ayala died in Madrid on August 5, 1962.

plant

On the one hand, the novels of Pérez de Ayala exude an intellectual note, since his characters often embody abstract ideas and he generally has a tendency towards the symbolic; there are also many reflections and dialogues in it. His texts are also characterized by tolerance , humor , a sense of equality and great psychological interest, sometimes a didactic impetus comes into play in them. Pérez de Ayala likes to play an intellectual game with ideas and has a tragicomic worldview; Irony alternates with lyrical passages.

Novels

• Tinieblas en las cumbres (1907)
• La pata de la raposa (1911).
• AMDG ( Ad maiorem Dei gloriam ) (1910)
• Troteras y danzaderas (1913)
• El ombligo del mundo (1924)
• Los trabajos de Urbano y Simona (1923)
• Belarmino y Apolonio (1921)
• Tigre Juan (1926)
• El curandero de su honra (1928)

Novellas and short stories

• Prometeo, Luz de domingo, y La caída de los limones (Novelas poemáticas de la vida española) (1916).
• Bajo el signo de Artemisa (1924), short stories: Prometeo , Luz de domingo , La caída de los limones .

Poetry

• La paz del sendero (1904).
• El sendero innumerable (1916).
• El sendero andante (1921).

Essays

• Hermann encadenado. Libro del espíritu y el arte italiano (1917).
• Las máscaras (1917-1919).
• Política y toros (1918).
• Amistades y recuerdos (1961)
• Fábulas y ciudades (1961).

Translations into German

• AMDG. Novel. (AMDG La vida en los colegios de jesuitas, 1910) Berlin 1912
• Artemis. Two novels . (Bajo el signo de Artemis. Novelas, 1924) Translated from Wilhelm Muster. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1959 (= BS 50)
• Tiger Juan. Novel . (Tigre Juan, 1926) Translated by Wilhelm Muster . Fischer, Frankfurt 1966 (Fischer-Bücherei, 773)
• Belarmino and Apolonio. Novel . (Belarmino y Apolonio, 1920) Translated by Wilhelm Muster. Fischer, Frankfurt 1964 (ibid., 633)
• Peppercorn and a thousandfold forgiveness. (El padre eterno, from: El ombligo del mundo, 1922) Translated by Hermann Stiehl. In: Spain told. Fischer, Frankfurt 1953 (ibid., 503); again in: The great masters. European narratives of the 20th century. Ed. Rolf Hochhuth . Bertelsmann Lesering , Gütersloh 1964, 221-242

Film adaptations

2007 Luz de Domingo directed by José Luis Garci .

See also

• Spanish literature

literature

• Roswitha Derndarsky: Ramón Pérez de Ayala: On the subject matter and artistic form of his novels . Klostermann, Frankfurt 1970 (= studies on philosophy and literature of the 19th century, 8)
• Martin Franzbach: History of Spanish Literature at a Glance . Reclams Universal Library , 8861. Stuttgart 2002 ISBN 3-15-008861-5
• Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht : A History of Spanish Literature . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1998 ISBN 3-518-58062-0
• Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer : Spanish literary history . Metzler, Stuttgart 2nd edition 2006 ISBN 3-476-01857-1
• Christoph Strosetzki: History of Spanish Literature . Niemeyer, Tübingen 2nd edition 1996 ISBN 3-484-50307-6

Web links

• Literature by and about Ramón Pérez de Ayala in the catalog of the German National Library
• Digitized works in the Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes
• Ayala, Spanish . Por Miguel Viñuela, Gettysburg College , 1999. With a link to a text from 1903