José María Álvarez
José María Álvarez, born in Cartagena, Spain on the 31st of May, 1942, is a Spanish poet y novelist.
The principal work of Álvarez is Museo de cera (Wax Museum)[1] which was a work in progress for many years due the author's endeavouring the completion of a unique and all-encompassing book (un libro único y totalizador). In the most recent edition, Álvarez has finally brought the cycle to a conclusion.
He has also translated into Spanish the work of, among others, Constantine P. Cavafy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, François Villon and the poems from the years of madness of Friedrich Hölderlin.
José María Álvarez has followed a number of the trends in contemporary Spanish poetry passing from socially aware poetry to a culturalism deriving from his life experience. His protagonist is no revolutionary wishing to change lives, but a bon vivant, disdainer of vulgarity, lover of lost causes.
His poems are often bipartite:
- An introductory quote (allusions to cinema mythography, theatrical dialogues, fragments of novels, poems, essays, song lyrics, etc.) and
- The poem as such, which attempts to organise chaos, to explain an incomprehensible world.
In 2003, he published his reminiscences Los decorados del olvido (The stage sets of oblivion) [2], a poetic work reflecting, generally in a sarcastic tone, on sex and society.
References
External Links (in Spanish)
- CTpedia
- His personal Web Page
- Poems of José María Álvarez
- José María Álvarez in Cisne Negro (The Black Swan)
- José María Álvarez, Sobre Shakespeare (On Shakespeare) (El Gaviero Ediciones, Almería, 2005).
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