Sombra del Paraíso / Shadow of Paradise
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Autor:
Vicente Aleixandre
Country:
Spain (ES)
Book Theme:
The books of the Nobel prizes
Publisher:
Editorial Castalia
Publishing Year:
1976
V. Aleixandre was born in Seville, spent his childhood in Malaga and lived most of his life in Madrid, where he studied Law and Commerce. A member of the Generation of ’27, friend of Lorca, Neruda, Manuel Altolaguirre, Dámaso Alonso and Jorge Guillén, after the Civil War he decided to stay in Spain, where he became, from his house in Velintonia Street, the mentor of all contemporary Spanish poetry, from the post-war period to the poetic group of ’50 and the novísimos. He won the National Literature Prize in 1933 for “La destrucción o el amor” the Critics Prize in 1963 for “En un vasto dominio” and in 1969 for “Poemas de la consumación”. He was an academician of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1950 occupying the chair of the letter O. In 1977 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
National Award for Children’s and Young People’s
Abstract
With this book of 52 poems, Aleixandre’s language reaches the highest poetic heights. The author has commented that Sombra del paraíso “tries to be a canticle to the dawn of the world, from the present man”; that it is “a canticle to the light, from the conscience of the darkness”; that it is “the vision of the dawn, as a yearning for truth and plenitude, from the painful shuddering of today’s man”.
The poet shows us a virginal and paradisiacal world, which contrasts with the current human reality, in a book of great beauty, tending to reflect a dream world that yearns for the pure and elemental, evoking through childhood memories a kind of dawn of the universe. Magical Eden where the poet lived and now “remembers without knowing it”, as the author himself said in a well-known letter to his friend and critic Dámaso Alonso.
Disturbing such a radiant dream, man, who should be a harmonious element, becomes an impure stain. And love passes idealizing sensual beauty, among naked beings who enjoyed the unreal adventure, leaving sad foam as a trail of lost glory.
