El Defensor

by Pedro Salinas

Madrid. 1986. Alianza. 20x12. 327p.

Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

About the author

Pedro Salinas y Serrano (27 November 1891 – 4 December 1951) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27, as well as a university teacher, scholar and literary critic. In 1937, he delivered the Turnbull lectures at Johns Hopkins University. These were later published under the title Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry.
e was born in Madrid in the Calle de Toledo, 1891, in a house very close to the San Isidro church/cathedral. Salinas lived his early years in the heart of the city and went to school first in the Colegio Hispano-Francés and then in the Instituto Nacional de Segunda Enseñanza, both close by the church. His father, a cloth-merchant, died in 1899. He began to study Law at the Universidad central in 1908 and in 1910 started to study History concurrently. He graduated successfully in both courses in 1913. During his undergraduate years, he began to write and publish poems in small circulation journals such as Prometeo.[2] In 1914 he became the Spanish lector at the Collège de Sorbonne in the University of Paris until 1917, when he received his Doctorate. He had married Margarita Bonmarti, a Spanish girl of Algerian descent whom he had met on his summer holidays in Santa Pola, Alicante, in December 1915. She had been born in 1884. They had two children, Soledad (always referred to as Solita) born in 1920 and Jaime born in 1925. His academic life seemed to act as a model for his slightly younger contemporary Jorge Guillén with whom he struck up a friendship in 1920.

In 1918 he was appointed Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Seville and he held the post until 1928, although he spent 1922-23 as lector at the University of Cambridge.[3] One of his students in Seville was Luis Cernuda in the academic year 1919-20, to whom he gave special encouragement. He urged him to read modern French literature, in particular André Gide and the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud.[4] He continued to publish poems in magazines such as España and La Pluma. In vacations, he spent time as a lecturer at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he got to know the leading lights of his generation, such as García Lorca and Rafael Alberti. In April 1926, he was present at the gathering in Madrid where the first plans to celebrate the tercentenary of Góngora's death were laid. Salinas was to edit the volume devoted to the sonnets: a project that never came to fruition. While at Cambridge, his translation of the first two volumes and part of the third of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time into Spanish was published. And in 1925, his modernised version of El Poema de Mío Cid was published by Revista de Occidente.

In 1928 he became a researcher at the Centro de Estudios Históricos in Madrid before becoming director of studies for foreigners at the University of Madrid.[6] In 1930, he became a professor of Spanish literature at Madrid and doubled up as originator, organiser and secretary-general of the International Summer School of Santander between 1933 and 1936. This school was set up to accommodate 200 Spanish students (approximately 4 from each of the established universities in Spain) and an international teaching staff.

On 8 March 1933, he was present at the premiere in Madrid of García Lorca's play Bodas de sangre. In August 1933, he was able to host performances at the Magdalena Palace in Santander by the travelling theatre company La Barraca that Lorca led. On 20 April 1936, he attended the launch party in Madrid for Luis Cernuda's new collection La realidad y el deseo.[9] and on 12 July he was present at a party in Madrid that took place just before García Lorca departed to Granada for the last time before his murder. It was there that Lorca read his new play La casa de Bernarda Alba for the last time.

On 31 August 1936, shortly after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he moved to the USA, to take up the position of the Mary Whiton Calkins professor at Wellesley Coll

Reviews

[Raquel Cacereño · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considero que es muy recomendable para todo filólogo o aspirante a serlo. Es una apología de las letras, de las buenas letras. Se trata de un libro ensayístico con cuatro capítulos principales que son independientes entre sí. Están salpicados por sentencias brillantes de Salinas quien consigue ir hilando sus reflexiones de un modo magistral pues si bien, a veces, reitera sus ideas no resulta repetitivo. Es una defensa de la cultura y del ser humano. Está concebida desde una perspectiva romántica, alejada del materialismo imperante tanto en el siglo XXI como en el XX. Es más parece que muchos de los miedos que pululan por las páginas salinianas y de sus críticas a un futuro potencialmente egoísta se han extendido hasta (casi) cumplirse. No obstante, tiene algunos puntos en los que difiero como, por ejemplo, su crítica a los tebeos, a los cómics y al cine. A veces, su opinión resulta demasiado purista.

[Alejandro Torresano · Rating 3 out of 5]

He leído la edición de Alianza Editorial de 1983. Es un conjunto de 5 ensayos sobre el cuidado de la lengua. La 1ª y más extensa habla de la escritura de cartas, y a mí modo de ver es la mejor. El resto creo que han envejecido regular, aunque el trasfondo sigue estando de actualidad, incluso tiene predicciones que desgraciadamente se han cumplido. Probablemente los interesados en la filología le sacarán más provecho, en mi caso, llegué a él por el interés en el autor y al final se me ha hecho algo denso.