FORMENTOR

 

Formentor! The word would be said

the long echo of a golden thunder

of light

Endless verdure of yellow flax.

Variant pines,

an accumulation of boiling mass,

but new boil of pure freshness,

covers the man as he reposes under

the original green.

I tried one day to sing it and put

my eyes in his shadow,

only by divination did I find glooms

of primal brilliance and awkward induced

the first law, and tried it, presumed.

Poemario de Formentor / “Formentor”, in Papeles de Son Armadans, 1959

Translated by Carlota Oliva.

(Sevilla, 1898 – Madrid 1984)​. Vicente Aleixandre was a poet of the Spanish Generation of 1927 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977. He spent his childhood years in Malaga and studied Law in Madrid, where he also enrolled at the School of Commerce. His zest for literature would lead him to read the great works of world literature and forge friendship with Dámaso Alonso, Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda, among others. In Madrid, literary gatherings were frequent in his home, a meeting place for poets of the day. He collaborated with the magazine Papeles de Son Armadans and he attended the Poetic Conversations in Formentor in the late 1950s. Among his works are La destrucción o el amor (1932, Espadas como labios (1932), En un vasto dominio (1962) or Diálogos de conocimiento (1974).