Pedro Salinas
| Pedro Salinas | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
November 27, 1891 Madrid, Spain |
| Died | December 4, 1951 (aged 60) Boston, Mass., USA |
| Cause of death | Cancer |
| Resting place | Santa Maria Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery in San Juan |
| Spouse(s) | Margarita Bonmarti |
| Children | Solita Salinas de Marichal, Jaime Salinas |
Pedro Salinas y Serrano (27 November 1891 in Madrid – 4 December 1951 in Boston) 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.
He 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. 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. 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. 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.
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