Ramon Gomez de la Serna

Ramón Gómez de la Serna Puig (July 3, 1888 in Madrid – January 13, 1963 in Buenos Aires) was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel.

Ramón Gómez de la Serna was especially known for "Greguerías" – 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. He stayed there during the Spanish Civil War and the following Franco regime and died there.

Some sample Greguerias:

El par de huevos que nos tomamos parece que son gemelos, y no son ni primos terceros.
[The couple of eggs we eat look like identical twins, and they're not even third cousins.]

El pavo real es un mito jubilado.
[The peacock is a retired myth.]

Las puertas se enfadan con el viento.
[Doors get angry with the wind.]

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, finding his literary feet in the journal Prometeo, which, funded by his indulgent father between 1908 and 1912, introduced into Spain a whiff of scandal from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Remy de Gourmont and Marinetti.

During the First World War Ramón, as he liked to be known, became neutral Spain's chief exponent of avant-garde writing, establishing a base in the literary tertulia he founded at the centre of Madrid in the old Café Pombo.

This was Spain's most famous contribution to what Roger Shattuck has called 'the banquet years'. But behind the self-publicizing avant-garde antics, Ramón developed not only an extravagant public persona (megalomaniac some would say), 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, almost phenomenological, way of looking at the world, one which influenced the younger 1927 Generation of poets (as Luis Cernuda has explained) and in Ramón's case produced some of the most original and brilliantly creative prose writing of the period.

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