Ernestina de Champourcín Morán de Loredo (10 July 1905 in Vitoria-Gasteiz – 27 March 1999 in Madrid) was a Spanish poet. She is most associated with the Generation of '27.
Early life
Ernestina Michels de Champourcín Morán de Loredo, was born into a Catholic and traditionalist family, which offered her a thorough education (she was taught a range of different languages) as part of an aristocratic and cultured family atmosphere.
Her father was a lawyer of monarchical ideas, and despite his liberal-conservative inclination, Antonio Michels de Champourcín possessed the title of baron of Champourcín, a title which pointed to his paternal family's origin in Provence. Ernestina's mother, Ernestina Morán de Loredo Castellanos, was born in Montevideo, being the only daughter of a military man, of Asturian descent, with whom she often traveled to Europe.
Around the age of 10, Champourcín moved, together with the rest of the family, to Madrid, where she was enrolled in the College of the Sacred Heart, received private tuition, and was examined as a free high school student. at the Instituto Cardenal Cisneros. Her desire to study at University was truncated due in part to her father's opposition, despite her mother's support. Her mother was willing to accompany her to classes, to comply with the existing standard for underage women.
Champourcín's knowledge of French and English, and her creativity, led her to start writing poetry in French from a very young age. Later, she would use this knowledge of languages to work as a translator for the Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica, for about fifteen years (during which she stopped publishing poetry), even though her role as a translator is less well known in literary circles
Her love of reading and the cultured family atmosphere brought her into contact with the greats of universal literature from a very young age, and she grew up with the books of Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Vigny, Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Verlaine and the great Castilian mystics, John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Jesus. Later, she read Valle-Inclán, Rubén Darío, Concha Espina, Amado Nervo and, above all, Juan Ramón Jiménez. The figure of Juan Ramón Jiménez is of vital importance in the development of Ernestina as a poet, and in fact, she always considered him as her teacher.
Like the vast majority of writers of her generation, the first witnesses of her poetic work are loose poems published from 1923 in various magazines of the time, such as Manantial, Cartagena Ilustrada o La Libertad. In 1926, Maria de Maeztu and Concha Méndez founded the Lyceum Club Femenino, with a view to bringing women together and encouraging unity, so that they could help each other in the struggle to find a role in the cultural and social affairs of their time. This project interested Ernestina, who became involved in it, taking care of everything related to literature.
In the same year, Champourcín published her work En silencio in Madrid and sent a copy to Juan Ramón, awaiting the poet's judgment and critique of her first work. Even though she did not receive an answer, she came across Jiménez and his wife – Zenobia Camprubí – in the Farm of San Ildefonso. From this chance encounter a friendship arose between the two that led her to consider him her mentor, just as was the case, a little later on, with their other peers. Through her acquaintance with him she also got in touch with some of the members of the Generation of '27: Rafael Alberti , Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas and Vicente Aleixandre. In addition, thanks to her mentor, she came into contact with classical and modern English poetry (Keats, Shelley, Blake, Yeats).
In 1927, Champourcín began a stage in which she published literary criticism works in newspapers (especially in the Heraldo de Madrid and La Época (Madrid) . In these articles published before the Spanish Civil War she deals with issues such as the nature of pure poetry and the aesthetics of the "new poetry" that the young people of the generation of '27 were working on. She herself felt integrated into this group, as she shared the same conception of poetry. She published her first books in Madrid – En silencio (1926), Ahora (1928), La voz en el viento (1931), Cántico inútil (1936) -, which made her well known in the literary world of the capital. An evolution in her work can be discovered from an initial modernism in the shadow of Juan Ramón Jiménez to a more personal poetry marked by the theme of love wrapped in a rich passion. Perhaps that is why Gerardo Diego selected her for his Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Poetry, from 1934.