Degree Year

2013

Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Comparative Literature

Advisor(s)

Sebastiaan Faber
Bernard Matambo

Keywords

Spanish poetry, Translation, Luis Garcia Montero, Poesia de la experiencia

Abstract

The work of Luis García Montero, one of Spain's most lauded poets of the past three decades, is marked most strongly by a desire to dissolve hierarchies between generations, between artists and ordinary citizens, and, above all, between the self and the other. He frequently realizes this goal through his metaphoric technique, employing personification almost ubiquitously to equalize the emotional power of animals, landscape, and inanimate pieces of technology. Though his poetry is romantic, he takes a significant departure from traditional forms of the genre by assigning little more importance to the lover than he does to the many facets of his environment. García Montero constantly challenges the preeminence of the self and seeks to recuse himself of the poetic voice that is master of all that surrounds him. I translate two of his books, Diario complice (1987) and Quedarse sin ciudad (1994), and in doing so I examine my own role as an accomplice in García Montero's efforts to combat isolation. I introduce García Montero to the English-speaking reader and consider his writing within the trajectory of twentieth-century Spanish poetry as well as placing his work in an international theoretical context. I analyze the function of urban settings, surrealist imagery and the romantic address in his poetry and explore these two works as a narrative of the political, social and artistic evolution of Spain in the 1980s and 1990s.

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