Rafael Cansinos Assens

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Rafael Cansinos Assens

Rafael Cansinos Assens (born November 24, 1882 in Seville , † July 6, 1964 in Madrid ) was a Spanish poet , translator , essayist and literary critic . He was one of the founders of ultraism , a literary movement in Spain in the early 20th century.

Cansinos spoke several languages. He translated the Arabian Nights , parts of the Talmud , the Koran , works by Dostoyevsky, Goethe and Shakespeare into Spanish. He left behind an extensive literary work, almost all of his published works are now out of print and only a few have been reprinted.

Life

Rafael Cansinos Assens was the son of Manuel Cansino de la Vega and Dolores Assens y Rodríguez. Born in Seville, where he spent the first five years of his life. On November 27, 1882 he was baptized in the Church of San Martin in the name of Rafael María Juan de la Cruz, Manuel, José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad. He still had two sisters, Maria Josefa (* 1876) and Maria del Pilar (* 1877).

When he was 4 years old, his mother taught him to read from beautifully printed old books. Cansinos Assens received a Catholic education through his mother and at school. He attended the Colegio de los Escolapios , run by monks , where he also learned Latin. After the father's death in 1894, the family lived in difficult economic circumstances. At the age of thirteen he left school and entered a business school in Seville, financed by a scholarship. In 1899 the mother died and the economic problems of the rest of the family worsened.

In the following year he dealt with the origins of his family, studied heraldry books and dealt with the oral histories of his family. Beginning in 1901, he signed with Cansinos , believing that in Asturias common Sephardic name Cansino , in Andalusia , the "s" lost. After a few years in the mist of the bohemian Madrid , he started writing for newspapers. From 1905 he worked as a journalist for La Correspondencia de España , during this time he wrote poetry and visited cafes in Madrid, where he met writers and journalists and joined literary circles. Here he met llamado Farache, a Spanish Jew who was actively involved in a Philosephardic movement that sought to remember Spain's history with the Jews, and he began to write psalms.

In 1914 his volume of psalms El candelabro de los siete brazos (salmos) was published. In 1919 he gave up his activity as a journalist in order to devote himself completely to literature. He continued to visit the literary cafés and circles, published the magazine Rivista di Cervantes and during this time met writers like Vicente Huidobro , Guillermo del Toro, Borges , and Adriano del Valle.

Since 1938, South American friends urged him several times to go to South America with them, but he refused. In 1939, during the Spanish Civil War , his house was bombed; As a precaution, he had already put his private library in a safe place. As a Jew, he found himself increasingly exposed to pressures from the fascists; he stopped publishing and went into " inner emigration ". But he continued to write stories and treatises "for the drawer" and devoted himself primarily to his translations from world literature.

In 1962, at the age of 80, he married his long-time companion Braulia Galán Lancha, the mother of his son Rafael (* 1958).

The literary work

Cansinos Assens, who did not have a completed school education or any academic training, has been translating works of world literature into Spanish since his school days, when he had already translated François Fénelon's “Télémaque” from French. In addition to Hebrew and Latin, he mastered a. a. Italian, German, French, Swedish, Russian. In 1944 he began translating the Arabian Nights , which he completed in the spring of 1945. From 1949 he wrote a “literary” translation of the Koran and published an anthology of Persian poetry.

In addition to his translations, he wrote numerous poems, short stories and short stories, some of which have now been reprinted in Spain. His works have not yet been translated into German.

archive

The estate of Cansinos Assens, around 40,000 documents and objects, including unpublished manuscripts, numerous maps and books, is kept and looked after by the Fudacion Cansino Assens in Madrid. The head of the foundation is Rafael Cansinos, a son of the author.

Honors

The Spanish translation prize Premio Rafael Cansinos Assens de Traducción is named after Cansinos Assens .

Works

Autobiography
  • La novela di un literato . 3 volumes. Madrid 2005.
Translations
  • El Quran . Traducion directa, literal e íntegra. [1949]. Madrid 2006. ISBN 978-84-934976-5-1
  • Las Mil y Una Noches . [1945]. 1960.

Cansinos worked on the translation of Balzac's complete works until shortly before his death, which he was no longer able to finish.

Essays
  • Espagna y los judios espagnoles . Tortosa; Monclus 1919.
  • Los valores eróticos en las religiones (De Eros a Cristo) - Madrid, 1925.
  • Los judíos en la literatura española . Columna, Buenos Aires 1937
  • Los judíos en la literatura española . [Buenos Aires 1937] Con una introducción de Jacobo Israel Garzón y un epílogo de Luis Emilio Soto. Valencia 2001.
  • Mahoma y el Korán (Biografía crítica del profeta y estudio y versión de su mensaje) - Buenos Aires, 1954. Prologa César Tiempo. Arca Editorial 2006. ISBN 84-934976-4-9
  • Goethe. Una biografia. 1999. ISBN 84-7702-287-9

Correspondence

  • Correspondencia Rafael Cansinos Assens, Guillermo de Torre: 1916-1955 Ed. By Carlos Garcia. 2004. ISBN 84-8489-168-2

literature

  • Norbert Rehrmann: The Difficult Legacy of Sefarad: Jews and Moors in Spanish Literature from Romanticism to the Middle of the 20th Century . Frankfurt 2002. Therein: The inner perspective: The work of Rafael Cansinos Assens. Pp. 707-734.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ El Korán (El Corán) ( Memento of the original of May 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cansinos.com
  2. ↑ [1]
  3. ^ Premio Rafael Cansinos Assens de Traducción
  4. ↑ book review, span.
personal data
SURNAME Cansinos Assens, Rafael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish poet, translator, essayist and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Seville
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1964
Place of death Madrid