Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Puig (July 3, 1888 – January 13, 1963), born in

Madrid Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...

, was a Spanish writer, dramatist and

avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...

agitator. He strongly influenced

surrealist Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...

film maker

Luis Buñuel Luis Buñuel Portolés (; 22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish and Mexican filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico and Spain. He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians and directors to be one of the greatest and ...

. Ramón Gómez de la Serna was especially known for " Greguería", a short form of poetry that roughly corresponds to the one-liner in comedy. The Gregueria is especially able to grant a new and often humorous perspective. Serna published over 90 works in all literary genres. In 1933, he was invited to

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, controlled by the government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Argentina. It is located on the southwest of the Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires is classified as an Alpha− glob ...

. He stayed there through the

Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War () was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republicans and the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the Left-wing p ...

and the following Spanish State till the end of his life.

Biography

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Gómez de la Serna refused to follow his father into law or politics and soon adopted the marginal lifestyle of a bohemian bourgeois artist, writing for the journal '' Prometeo'', funded by his father between 1908 and 1912. In April 1909 Gómez de la Serna published the

manifesto of futurism The ''Manifesto of Futurism'' ( Italian: ''Manifesto del Futurismo'') is a manifesto written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, published in 1909. In it, Marinetti expresses an artistic philosophy called Futurism, which rejected the ...

in the magazine which was translated by him into Spanish. During the First World War, Gómez became Spain's chief exponent of avant-garde writing, establishing a base in the literary ''tertulia'' he founded at the centre of Madrid. This was Spain's most famous contribution to what Roger Shattuck has called ''"the banquet years"''. But behind the self-publicizing avant-garde antics, Gómez developed not only an extravagant public persona, but also his own equivalent of what Shattuck defines as a "reversal of consciousness", deliberately divesting himself of conventional ways of thinking and being in order to adopt a peculiarly innovative way of looking at the world, one which influenced the younger 1927 generation of poets (as Luis Cernuda has explained). The six or so remarkable books he published from 1914 to 1918 – ''El Rastro'' (The Flea-Market), ''El Doctor Inverosímil'' (The Improbable Doctor), ''Greguerías'' (Greguerias), ''Senos'' (Breasts), ''Pombo'' (Pombo), and ''El circo'' (The Circus) – illustrate most of his main characteristics: his search for a new fragmentary genre of short prose poems (giving them the arbitrary name of ''greguerías''), his exaltation of trivial everyday objects, his emphasis on eroticism, his exuberant self-projection and exclusive dedication to art, his playful humour, his contemplative secular mysticism, and above all his cult of the image, especially witty surprising images. These abound in all his works, especially his many, utterly idiosyncratic and textually pleasurable novels, such as the first real one ''La viuda blanca y negra'' (The Black and White Widow), written in 1921, inspired by his relationship with the early feminist writer, Carmen de Burgos. It was in fact the ''greguerías'' that first attracted the attention of Valery Larbaud, who in the 1920s soon had him translated into French. Within Spain, though his work often provoked controversy and sometimes hostility, one of his most eminent defenders was José Ortega y Gasset. Subsequently, unorganized consensus in mainstream

Hispanism Hispanism (sometimes referred to as Hispanic studies or Spanish studies) is the study of the literature and culture of the Spanish-speaking world, principally that of Spain and Hispanic America. It may also entail studying Spanish language ...

deemed Gómez's work to have been overrated. Gómez's lack of commitment during the Republic, followed by his declaration of support for Franco after self-exile to his younger, Jewish wife's flat in Buenos Aires at the outbreak of civil war, led to ostracism and neglect. Despite still producing some of the most original works in Spanish of the twentieth century – the existential-surrealist novel ''El hombre perdido'' (The Lost Man) (1947) and his autobiography ''Automoribundia'' (Automoribund) 948– his life in exile was one of pathetic isolation and increasing poverty, neither of which were helped by the knowledge that he had left behind (and in 1947 donated to the Spanish State) the painting of the Pombo Tertulia by Gutiérrez-Solana (now given pride of place in Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum), in addition to the cubist portrait of him painted in 1915 by

Diego Rivera Diego Rivera (; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was a Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the Mexican muralism, mural movement in Mexican art, Mexican and international art. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted mural ...

(which was lost during the civil war, but has apparently resurfaced). On 13 January 1963 Gómez died from natural causes. In a letter to one of his companions, he mentions acknowledging his imminent death and welcomed it. Despite the decline in Gómez's reputation, two notable voices in particular declared their admiration: Octavio Paz, who wrote the following in a letter to ''Papeles de Son Armadans'' in 1967: 'Para mí es el gran escritor español: el Escritor o, mejor, la Escritura. Comparto la admiración, el fanatismo, de Larbaud: yo también habría aprendido el español sólo para leerlo’ (For me he is the great Spanish writer: ''the'' Writer, or rather, Writing. I share Larbaud’s admiration, his fanaticism: I also would have learned Spanish just to read him), and

Pablo Neruda Pablo Neruda ( ; ; born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto; 12 July 190423 September 1973) was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old an ...

, who in his prologue to Ramón's ''Obras selectas'' (Selected Works) (1971) claimed that 'la gran figura del surrealismo, entre todos los países, ha sido Ramón' (the major figure of surrealism, in any country, has been Ramón). His works have been published in 20 volumes by Círculo de Lectores/Galaxia Gutenberg (Barcelona), edited by Ioana Zlotescu.

Works

*''El circo'' ''Translations into English:'' *''Aphorisms'', trans. by Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth (Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1989) *''Dalí'', trans. by Nicholas Fry (New York: Park Lane, 979 *''Eight Novellas'', trans. by Herlinda Charpentier Saitz and Robert L. Saitz (New York: Lang, 2005) *''Greguerías: The Wit and Wisdom of Ramón Gómez de la Serna'', trans. by Philip Ward (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1982) *''Movieland'', trans. by Angel Flores (New York: Macaulay, 1930; new edition: Arlington, MA: Tough Poets Press, 2022) *''Some Greguerías'', trans. by Helen Granville-Barker (New York: . pub.printed by Rudge's Sons, 1944)

References

Citations

* An earlier version of this article by Alan Hoyle first appeared in a special number ('Marginals and Megalomaniacs') of ''Aura: A Journal of the Avant-Garde'', no. 3 (Summer 1995), 51–53, ed. by Jeremy Stubbs and Andrew Hussey, and published in the Department of French, University of Manchester.

External links

The Ramón Gómez de la Serna Papers collection at the University of Pittsburgh

Ramón Gómez de la Serna
hosts the internet journal ''BoletínRAMÓN'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Gomez De La Serna, Ramon 1888 births 1963 deaths Spanish people of the Spanish Civil War (National faction) Writers from Madrid Spanish male dramatists and playwrights 20th-century Spanish dramatists and playwrights 20th-century Spanish male writers Burials at Cementerio de San Justo

Biography

Works

References

Citations

Further reading

External links