Ramón Gómez de la Serna - a central figure in the European and Latin American avant-garde, and a key contributor of Anglo-American imagism to Spanish literature. Father of the prose and poetry of the "Generation of ‘27"

 

Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Eight Novellas. trans. by Herlinda Charpentier Saitz and  Robert L. Saitz. Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2005

read it at Google Books

www.ramongomezdelaserna.net/

The eight novellas collected in this book display the humor, exuberant spirit, love of language, and insight of the Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a central figure in the European and Latin American avant-garde, and a key contributor of Anglo-American imagism to Spanish literature. Father of the prose and poetry of the «Generation of ‘27», Gómez de la Serna was admired by T.S. Eliot, Macedonio Fernández, Oliverio Girondo, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Alfonso Reyes, and was a source of inspiration for Borges, García Márquez, Cortázar, and Pizarnik. These novellas, with their humorous and witty exaggerations of everyday human foibles, their simple story lines and often-surprising endings, are presented here in the original Spanish with a clear English translation on facing pages. This book will be useful in intermediate and advanced Spanish classes and in translation courses.

«Besides (Ramón’s) ‘greguerías’ little else has been translated. An occasional short story has appeared in an anthology where it remains buried, or in an inaccessible literary review. For this reason the publication of Robert and Herlinda Saitz’s translation of a generous selection of novelle can be hailed as an important literary event. The cooperation between Professor Herlinda Saitz (who, as a critic-scholar, has produced two important contributions to Gómez de la Serna’s scholarship) with her husband Robert, a Profesor of English, has proven quite successful. Their translations can be read as if the texts had been originally written in the English language. There are no seams or hanging threads. To continue with Cervante’s famous simile, we feel that we are looking at the tapestry from the right side, not from the wrong one.» - Rodolfo Cardona

«The stories I read - ‘Kill the Morse!’ and ‘The Master of the Atom’ - are extraordinary. I had never previously heard of de la Serna, but I am delighted to know that you are going to make him known to us Anglophones. He seems to have achieved a very special blend of the naïve and the surreal, utilizing the technological allusion available in his time to express a touching modernist mood of bewilderment and yearning. I hope you are planning to publish these soon.» - Millicent Bell

Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Aphorisms. Trans. by Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth. Latin American Literary Review Press, 1990.

An important collection of around 500 aphorisms (greguerías), which are a landmark of innovative literary technique akin to that of Futurism. Ramón Gómez de la Serna introduced Spain to European avant-garde literature with this new genre, presented here in a stunningly thorough representation of an influential form and including an in-depth analysis by the translator. The book also includes a list of other works by Gómez de la Serna in English translation, two brief bibliographies, and a keyword index.

A Non-Poet King of Poetry: Ramón Gómez de la Serna 

Either Spanish literature consists of nothing but anomalistic masterpieces or I’ve had exceptional good fortune in my selections for Spanish Literature Month.[i] I decided to stick to Spain itself (easier said than done), and have been surprised, humbled, and not a little awestruck by what I’ve found. My choices came largely by chance; I read each knowing next to nothing about its author, content, or place in the Spanish canon. Each not only turned out to have had significant impact on Spanish literature, but also moved into the ranks of my personal favorites from any literature. Following Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina (1499) and Angel Ganivet’s The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya (1897), my final selection for the month hails from the 20th century, two books by an author who came to my attention only this week. Thanks to terrific posts by Miguel of St. Orberose concerning lists compiled by Jorge Luis Borges for two book series Borges had started to edit, I took a look at some of the names on the lists I didn’t recognize.

How is it possible that I’ve made it this far through life without ever hearing of Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963)? Any of you who might also be late to this party may well ask: why should I have heard of him? Let’s see what the introduction to one of these books, a collection of eight novellas by Gómez de la Serna entitled (with remarkable restraint) Eight Novellas[ii], has to say about him:

…the literary mentor of Buñuel and Dalí.

…the Spanish writer most sought after and the one who had the strongest impact on the Latin American avant-garde writers from the nineteen twenties on…

…often considered one of the two true artistic geniuses of his time in Spain, the other being Picasso.

Okay, so that’s the opinion of the editors/translators. Do they provide assessments other than their own? They do:

As Ortega [y Gasset] describes how the new [modernist] art looks at reality…he refers to Proust and Joyce but cites only Ramón.

Gabriel Garcia Márquez declared that Ramón was the most influential writer of his formative years.

Cortázar regarded him highly, and used to follow him along the Calle Florida as an idol.

Okay then. But how about some primary sources?

“…for me he is the great Spanish writer” – Octavio Paz 

“…a visionary of the universe, mental monarch and king of poetry” – Pablo Neruda.

Coming full circle, the introduction notes: “Borges wrote a book about him.” 

One excuse for my not having heard of Gómez de la Serna is that little of his work has been translated into English, aside from scattered anthologized stories; an old issue of the literary journal Zero containing a handful of stories translated by Paul Bowles; and the Eight Novellas I’d found in the library. There’s a selection, published in English as Aphorisms and which I also found in the library, of the literary form Gómez de la Serna invented and called greguerías – short, humorous, imagistic, aphoristic one-liners. Finally, there’s one of de la Serna’s twenty novels translated as Movieland! (it’s supposedly about Hollywood). This, alas, was not in the library, and the price of the sole copy I could find for sale - $1,000 U.S. - put me off a bit. 

The biographical details of Ramón’s life - I’ll switch to using his first name, as that’s apparently how he’s known in Spain - are perhaps even more incredible than the praise heaped upon him. It’s worth picking up these books just for the biosketches they contain; the Wikipedia entry for Ramón does not quite convey the outlandishness and electrical presence he apparently commanded. Suffice here to say that he was a catalyst – really the catalyst – for avant-garde Spanish literature and art, living a wildly inventive lifestyle and inhabiting a Madrid apartment more like a cabinet of curiosities than a residence. He bridges Spanish and Latin American literature, as he left Spain at the beginning of the civil war and lived out his life in Argentina. His prolific literary output comprises some 90 books of short stories, plays, novels, essays, literary criticism, biographies and, the contribution for which he may be best known, his beloved greguerías.

The greguerías make a good a place to start, especially since they make their way into his longer pieces with a style so singular that it bears his name: ramónismo. Aphorisms is a curious title for this collection of some 400 greguerías, since translator Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth goes to great lengths to distinguish them from aphorisms (his introduction is as succinct and invaluable an analysis of the aphoristic genre as one is likely to find anywhere). Ramón’s greguerías are exceptionally playful, experimental, lyrical condensations that illustrate how Neruda could call him a “king of poetry” even when poetry was one genre Ramón did not attempt. Poetic they are nonetheless:

Clouds should bear tags disclosing their destination so we don’t worry about them.

In the background of all mirrors there crouches a photographer.

The fragrance of flowers is an echo.

It was such nice weather that all keys took the day off.

Cloves of garlic: witches’ teeth.

Distant sails like napkins in the goblets at the banquet of the sea.

We should take more time to forget; that way we would have a longer life.

Gonzalez-Gerth notes that the form originated during a visit to Florence when, gazing upon the Arno, Ramón “suddenly perceived that each of the two banks of the river wanted to be where the other one was…an extraordinary perception [by which] all pairs and even peers among things became involved in a sort of natural and fatal competition of desire which altered the whole humdrum surface of reality.” Thus the genre was born, and Ramón came to define it mathematically: “metaphor + humor = greguería.” 

This condensed metaphorical form gets woven into the absurdist stories constituting the enormously enjoyable Eight Novellas: a man’s liver appearing at his doorstop one day to move in as a constant companion; a misanthrope who spends a part of every day aspiring to become a physical feature of Naples’ Principe di Napoli galleria; a battle against influenza waged largely by amateur medical opinion; a revolution of hat haters; a mathematical approach to understanding social interactions in an apartment building; a lady who vanishes mysteriously from a hotel (the inspiration for the Alexander Woollcott novel that in turn inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes); a man attempting to recuperate from a failed marriage by building a short-wave radio and immersing himself in its aural world; and a mad scientist intent on splitting the atom. These cursory descriptions barely hint at the humorous, often moving and glittering poeticism mingled with glimpses of the profound that one finds in these tales, which call to mind the work of Nikolai Gogol, Daniil Kharms, Dino Buzzati, and Frigyes Karinthy (Gonzalez-Gerth also mentions the poet Christian Morgenstern), but with a lighter yet more wildly energetic touch by which ideas shoot off like showers of sparks from a Roman (Ramón?) candle. 

In “The Flumaster” (“Le Gran Griposo”), Ramón presents a plethora of dazzling greguerían descriptions of what it feels like to have the flu and addresses the myriad ways people deny illness by proposing all kinds of rationalizations and quack therapies. The afflicted protagonist even wonders if “he could ever find the word that would banish the flu! Success might come by using one word against another.” This remarkably pure modernist concept suggests something of the quality of ramónismo. Ramón writes as though slowly turning a complex kaleidoscope filled with words that tumble into different metaphorical combinations. But – and here he differs from surrealists out for pure effect – he also seems to point his kaleidoscope/microscope/telescope towards every emerging aspect of the modern world, sometimes with a penetrating view into the future. The introduction notes Ramón’s uncanny anticipation of such things as the Internet, various medical and psychological discoveries, the impact of car culture, and even a frighteningly prescient prediction of the atomic bomb, which, via his far-seeing 1926 story “The Master of the Atom” (“El dueño del átomo”), he claimed to have invented. The sophistication of Ramón’s surrealism shows in his story “Kill the Morse!” (“¡Hay que matar el Morse!”), where he refers not to the difference between the real and the unreal, as would be the expected approach, but to that “between the real and the real that seems unreal because it is so far away.”  

Ramón’s imagistic sentences often display a kind of fever of composition and experimentation, frequently resulting in startling originality, energy, lyricism, depth, and varieties of beauty that could make the snowflake community jealous. Far from appearing labored or crafted, his prose has a wildly free, extemporaneous quality, a vital and living language. Like his revolutionary hat-hater, “free from the torture of holding onto his hat” and at liberty to stroll through the world “enjoying the challenge of a cane, twirling, riposting, parrying,” Ramón Gómez de la Serna demands the new, and delivers it with flair, joy, and a freedom of spirit rare in literature. I can’t wait to read more.

seraillon.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-non-poet-king-of-poetry-ramon-gomez.html

Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Movieland. Tough Poets Press, 2022

About Ramón Gómez de la Serna: One of the most original and prolific modern Spanish writers, de la Serna (1888 –1963), who liked to be referred to as simply Ramón, was an early exponent of avant-garde and surreal writing. During his lifetime, he published more than 90 works in a variety of literary genres, only a handful of which have been translated into English. He is considered the father of the greguería, a Spanish and Latin American literary genre consisting of short prose poems that roughly correspond to comedy one-liners. Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel credited Ramón as being one of his strongest artistic influences. The two collaborated on the script of what would have been Buñuel’s first film, Los caprichos, but it was never produced. Octavio Paz, recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote of Ramón, “For me he is the great Spanish writer.” And Pablo Neruda, also a Nobel laureate (1971), claimed that “the major figure of surrealism, in any country, has been Ramón.”

There is something in the landscape that keeps them quiet: it is a house which bricklayers and painters are finishing up—the city that will burn tomorrow in the film The Big Fire.

“It’s too bad that a city so carefully built is going to be destroyed,” remarked Jacques.

“But we’ll make a film…. This city will live longer than those other cities now standing up that will never be filmed!”

A rare image of the rare first edition. Photo generously provided by friend and collector Nick Kyprianou.

Hollywood, already long notorious for its unreality, becomes a fantasia of a fantasia in Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Movieland, first published in 1930. The author holds a funhouse mirror up to a funhouse mirror and describes the fractal film freaks, the panoramic prima donnas, the smizing villains, and plenty of others in this menagerie. In fact, the novel partly reads like a cine-bestiary this side of Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings, giving us fake bullfighters, Elsa the Movieland Queen, a woman’s stolen beauty spot, a spoiled child actor, absurd cocktails, a chameleon thespian whose “whole psychology changed with every rôle,” Emerson the Movie Emperor, and then there’s quite literally a beast: “Movieland’s most fantastic animal, one who differs from all imaginable animals, is a crocodile that once upon a time had to be a dinosaur; that is to say, during the making of Movieland’s most impressive prehistoric film he had to wear a bony crest and imitate a dinosaur by walking majestically and adapting his gestures to the orders of the stage director.”

The research-consumed William T. Vollmann would likely balk at the following postscript in translator Angel Flores’ insightful introduction: “Ramón has never been in Hollywood. Not even the U.S.A.” I’d claim that this lack of firsthand experience breeds a more imaginatively fertile surrealscape. Of course, it’d be going too far to say the author has no notion of Hollywood whatsoever. Despite having written this novel in his homeland of Spain, he doubtlessly experienced that type of American propaganda we almost all succumb to, that of watching the Hollywood films themselves in all their silver screen glory, their lullabies of tempting lies, their melodies of melodrama.

Rather than a traditional plot, the book is comprised of vignettes describing aspects of Movieland, with some characters crossing over and developing their relationships and ambitions but coming and going with shooting-star speed. Thus, the eponymous Movieland itself becomes a kind of omnipresent character. Think Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities for a sense of the structure and the mostly bird’s-eye narration, not to mention the generous dose of magical realism, a wholly appropriate sensibility for the subject at hand. It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine Movieland as an entry in Calvino’s catalog, except this is a city that’s all too visible. The translated prose is often as rich as Calvino’s, and rife with cinematic analogies, the lens seen through a lens, so to speak. Here are two early examples of the latter: “The tourists moved jerkily, like flickering films” and “The guide, like the subtitles in a film, passed on quickly through the streets….”

Some chapters contain several vignettes in one. As a result, more than a handful feel underdeveloped, lacking yet deserving the same attention as the single-vignette sections. In that sense, they’re like actors vying for the starring role, but I doubt that was de la Serna’s intention. The last quarter or so of the novel loses some of its original power, but it also picks up a more stable narrative thread in Carlotta, a Lolita-like star who comes out of nowhere and dethrones Elsa the Movieland Queen, who is later reduced to opening a Kissing Academy in which she coaches aspiring actresses in the art of the silver-screen smooch (the Kissing Academy is one of several delightfully inspired institutions, the bleaker ones being the thespian nut house known as the Museum of Expressions and the Asylum for the Blind, for those who have slowly lost their sight from the powerful lights of Movieland). In addition to Nabokov’s nymphet, Carlotta is also like Márquez’s Remedios the Beauty in 100 Years of Solitude: “No one knew how it was accomplished, but the whole universe became new and exciting at the girl’s least gesture. All men who saw her resented or forgot the women they had known before. […] She was like silken paper spread to hide all the defects and the failures of the world.” Of course, she is soon doomed to the darkness of Movieland, a place that does everything to conceal real-life tragedy lest it stain the perfect promises sold by celluloid.

(Beware: there are sections on “The Japanese,” “The Negroes,” and “The Jewish Quarter,” which turn racist stereotypes into outright hyperboles. Modern readers could easily find these sections offensive, but whether or not de la Serna believed in these stereotypes is anachronistically irrelevant. The sections show how these minorities were viewed and treated back then (and to this day) while also fitting the novel’s general cartoonish tone. No one comes out of these stories looking like a paragon.)

Despite the blistering critique (“‘The soul is cremated while the film is being shot…’”), there’s an undeniable degree of marvelous awe, even at the outset: “Movieland looks like a Constantinople combined with a little Tokyo, a touch of Florence and a hint of New York. […] It is like a Noah’s ark of architectures. A Florentine palace, seized with that salaciousness which exotic buildings produce, looks longingly at a Grand Pagoda,” but then a more critical comparison at the page’s bottom: “To stroll through the streets of the city is like a nightmare, and the stroller becomes a circumnavigator who tours the world in an hour.” And it only gets more excoriating from there.

Hollywood has been a freakshow of out-of-touch caricatures for longer than one might realize. Despite being written less than two decades after the birth of Hollywood, the sweeping satire remains relevant almost a century later. Regardless of talent, Jared Leto and his Echelon cult would fit right in with the rest of the circus, likewise the Scientologist stunt devil Tom Cruise, the coffee-douching Gwyneth Paltrow, the exiled rapist Roman Polanski, the pillow-shitter Amber Heard, the post-car crash computer-generated Paul Walker, and the list goes on like a never-ending credit sequence.

In a kind of onanistic act, Hollywood has produced plenty of films about itself, not all of them as self-serving as one may suspect. A Star Is Born (1954), for instance, more than hints at a deep darkness in those who yearn for a persistent spotlight, and the same is true of The Artist (2011), even if it ends on a much happier note. And then you have a different beast altogether in Damien Chazelle’s epic masterpiece Babylon (2022). Like Movieland, Babylon disregards historical facts to present (mostly ungrateful) viewers with a maximalist film that blends genres and styles in a sensorial bacchanalia, culminating in the Big Bang that gave birth to cinema until the colors that make up the stuff of film finally bleed into each other and all that’s left is an abstract concoction of feelings. And like Movieland again, there’s a mixture of critique and awe in the motion picture, going further into the realm of outright nostalgia (a commodity of Hollywood more in demand than ever, it seems).

Damien Chazelle is a known jazz fanatic, and Babylon isn’t his only film to feature a jazzy score. If he were to read Movieland, I’m sure he’d appreciate the several mentions of his favorite genre, including, right off the bat, “the noise of jazzbands, the lunacies of xylophones,” which often provided silent films with their soundtracks. As it happens, a phenomenally visceral scene in Babylon highlights the difficult transition to talkies. Curiously, de la Serna doesn’t highlight this momentous transition. Still, true to his fantastic imagination, he describes a futuristic “seeing sleep” method of experiencing films that will only come out once the cinematic powers that be sense the imminent downfall of Hollywood, a top-secret backup plan prescient in its similarity to virtual reality, that digital opium den. Later in the novel, this from someone who may not even be aware of the “seeing sleep” invention, but simply cinema proper: “‘The thing we are loosing on the world,” said the most disillusioned of the group, ‘is a gigantic tapeworm.’”

Admirably enough, Spielberg’s autobiographical Hollywood bildungsroman The Fabelmans (2022) takes a sober look at his urge to make films beyond the need to control the uncontrollable, embodied in a scene where young Spielberg observes his clashing parents with an almost clinical desire to frame them, not fiddling while Rome burns but filming, fetishistically so. The tapeworm, or more accurately, the filmworm, runs deep, yet it can breed such amazing art, within Hollywood and without, from Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) to Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid (2023).

Flores mentions in his introduction “at least half a dozen significant novels” by de la Serna, including Black and White Widow, “considered by the Paris-Journal—hurrah!—among the five greatest works of fiction of our generation….” It’s truly a literary crime that only a handful of de la Serna’s works have been translated into English, most of them mere hors d’oeuvres, and Movieland, the most substantial example of his translated oeuvre, was out of print for decades and decades until Tough Poets Press came to the rescue with a new edition (alas, the translator isn’t listed on the cover, an unfortunate oversight). Simply put, Ramón Gómez de la Serna deserves more attention from the English-speaking world. - George Salis

https://thecollidescope.com/2023/09/24/movieland-by-ramon-gomez-de-la-serna/