Poetry
Children of Wrath
Hijos de la ira
Dámaso Alonso · 1944
Synopsis
A book of protest, written, according to its author, at a time when no one was protesting in Spain. The human being is thrown into an indecipherable and hostile world, facing injustice, death and solitude. The first poem, Insomnia, sees Madrid as a city peopled by the dead, and the poet questions God there, who remains silent. The language, readily grotesque and wounding, unfolds in long verses with a repetitive syntax, inherited from the Penitential Psalms.
Context
Published in 1944, then corrected and expanded in 1946, the book was born, said the author, of disgust at the injustice of the world, in the wake of two collective follies, one Spanish, the other universal. It broke with the neoclassical poetry, in the manner of Garcilaso, that the post-war period favoured, and its proponents judged it excessive and anticlassical. Critics see in it the beginning of so-called uprooted poetry, marked by existentialism. Elias L. Rivers translated it into English in 1970, in a bilingual edition.
Who it is for
Long poems, in verses, of a deliberate verbal violence; no French translation has appeared.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the author's masterpiece and as a founding book of postwar Spanish poetry.
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