Luis Rosales Camacho (31 May 1910 – 24 October 1992) was a Spanish poet and essay writer member of the Generation of '36.
He was born in Granada (Spain). He became a member of the Hispanic Society of America and the Royal Spanish Academy in 1962. Rosales obtained the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1982 for his literary work. He died in Madrid in 1992, aged 82.
Biography
He was born in Granada in 1910, into a very conservative family. His beginnings in literary training are related to the environment of artists from the Gallo magazine (although he never published in it), whose members —Enrique Gómez Arboleya, Manuel López Banús, Joaquín Amigo and Federico García Lorca, among others—, will become his great friends. In 1930, after a couple of publications in the avant-garde magazine Granada Gráfica, he made his first poetic reading at the Granada Artistic, Literary and Scientific Center, which was considered a success - the Granada press echoed, and since then his interventions in this institution were numerous—; months later, he began his studies in Philosophy and Law at the University of Granada.
In 1932, he moved to Madrid to continue his studies in Philology, obtaining a doctorate. There he began his friendship with Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillén, who introduced him to Los Cuatro Vientos, considered the last collective magazine of the group of poets of the Generation of '27. In the second number of said magazine, in April 1933, they collaborate the great intellectuals of the time such as Miguel de Unamuno, Benjamín Jarnés, Manuel Altolaguirre, María Zambrano, Luis Felipe Vivanco, Leopoldo Vivanco, Claudio de la Torre, Vicente Aleixandre, Antonio Marichalar, Jaime Torres Bodet and Rainer María Rilke; and Rosales himself publishes his first poems: Eclogue of sleep and Ode of anxiety.
He continued his literary activity in Cruz y Raya, a magazine directed by José Bergamín. He also publishes his verses in Vértice and Caballo Verde para la Poesía, a magazine directed by Pablo Neruda in which poems by other writers such as Vicente Aleixandre or Miguel Hernández also appeared. In the capital of Spain he met the Panero (Juan and Leopoldo) and Luis Felipe Vivanco, companions of what will later be called Generation of 36 (or of the War), of which Dionisio Ridruejo is also a part, and whose common axes, In addition to his affinity and camaraderie, were his intimate Catholicism and his social conservatism.
In August 1936, at the start of the Spanish civil war, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who was a member of the CEDA, arrested Federico García Lorca. The poet had taken refuge in the Rosales house, thus believing that he was safe from reprisals, since there were prominent Falangist members in that family. Luis Rosales could not avoid his arrest and subsequent execution despite the friendship he had with Lorca and his position within the Granada right wing. In that same fateful year, Joaquín Amigo, professor of philosophy and member of the intellectuals who created Gallo magazine and very close to both, was also assassinated. In this case, Joaquín Amigo was assassinated by the Republicans, throwing him down the Tajo de Ronda, while he was stationed in that Malaga town as a high school professor. These two deaths mark the life, both personal and literary, of Rosales, in whose work —both in A face in each wave and in his unfinished New York after death, and in many other writings, both poetic and essays— are reflected the influences of both friends.
In 1937 he published in the newspaper Patria de Granada, the poem «The voice of the dead», probably one of the most important written during the civil war, it chose all the victims of both sides, in which any expression of triumphalism is excluded or exaltation. From that same year Rosales collaborated in the Falangist magazine Jerarquía.
He also collaborated in the newspaper Arriba España and in the Escorial magazine. He was editorial secretary and director of Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos. Starting in 1978, he directed Nueva Estafeta, the only magazine of its time because it included among its collaborations works written in the different languages of Spain (Spanish, Catalan, Basque or Galician). Ideologically, he evolved from the authoritarian ideas of his youth to democratic positions in his maturity.
Pablo Neruda said of him:
At the end of 1949 and the beginning of 1950, he participated in the "poetic mission" with the poets Antonio Zubiaurre, Leopoldo Panero and the ambassador Agustín de Foxá, who toured different Hispanic American countries (among others Honduras) prior to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between these countries and the Franco regime.