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149 u 9 The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Literary Institutions of Late Modernity Jonathan Mayhew The rise of Antonio Gamoneda to his current position of pre-eminence in contemporary Spanish letters requires some explanation. Although he was born in 1931, and hence ought to belong—chronologically—to the cohort of poets who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, the famed “Generation of the 1950s,” Gamoneda was still a relative unknown when he published his collected poetry, Edad, in 1987. Poets like Claudio Rodríguez, Jaime Gil de Biedma, and José Ángel Valente, in contrast, had attained their place in the canon by the end of the 1960s. Edad, an edition of Gamoneda’s collected poetry published by Cátedra in the prestigious Letras Hisp ánicas series, won the Premio Nacional de Poesía in 1988, establishing Gamoneda, hitherto a regional poet closely identified with the province of León, as a strong presence on the national scene.1 In 2006—nearly twenty years after he emerged from his provincial or regional stage—Gamoneda was awarded both the Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoameri­ cana and the Premio Cervantes in recognition of his life’s work. Throughout the 1990s and the first half of the subsequent decade, he had published major new books (Libro del frío, Libro de los venenos, Arden las pérdidas) along with numerous other editions of his poetry—a process that has continued unabated. The 2004 appearance of a second volume of his collected poetry, Esta luz, which, like Edad, featured a long critical essay by Miguel Casado, represents the culmination of this phase of his career. The publication of so many books by Gamoneda, many of them largely redundant in their contents, could be seen alternatively as a cause or an effect of his newfound canonical status.2 The awarding of the Reina Sofía and the Cervantes also made Gamoneda into a public figure—a role that he occupies with a certain ungainly gravitas. One senses that he is essentially a modest and private person who is somewhat ill at ease with his own newfound fame. The secondary bibliography in Casado’s edition of Edad consisted of only three texts—including one by Casado himself—all of which treated him explicitly in a regional context.3 Gamoneda’s emergence onto the national scene in the period be- 150 JONATHAN MAYHEW tween 1987 and 2006, then, is quite dramatic, given the circumscribed nature of this earlier reception. As I write this essay, in 2008, Gamoneda is considered, by some at least, to be the most significant living Spanish poet, and consequently as one of the most important writers in the Spanish language of the last thirty years. As Casado has pointed out in his 2004 epilogue to Esta luz, this canonization is not yet complete: “Incluso hoy perviven ciertos desajustes: el prestigio y la influencia indudables de la voz de Gamoneda no encuentran a veces su justo eco en medios académicos, en manuales de estudio, en las enumeraciones pretendidamente canónicas” (Gamoneda, Esta luz 576) (Even today there persist certain imbalances: the undeniable prestige and influence of Gamoneda’s voice do not always find their deserved echo in academic environments, in study guides, in purportedly canonical lists). Gamoneda is absent, for example, in Luis García Jambrina’s 2000 an­ thology La promoción poética de los 50, which limits itself to eight male poets who were already well known in the 1960s. One obvious factor in the uneven acceptance of Gamoneda into the canon is that his career does not fit neatly into the still widely accepted generational scheme—the basis of García Jambrina’s selection. In its classic formulation, the theory of the literary generation predicts that writers will reach their peak between the ages of thirty and forty-five. This model could not have anticipated , then, that the major poets of the last two decades of the twentieth century would be poets in their fifties and sixties, like María Victoria Atencia, José Ángel Valente, and Antonio Gamoneda. Another factor in the resistance to Gamoneda is the barely contained hostility of a movement that was—supposedly—the “dominant tendency” in Spanish poetry of the current period, the so-called poetry of experience. After Gamoneda’s Cervantes prize, even poets and critics affiliated with this movement have had to acknowledge his prestige, even as they continue express their resentment in various ways.4...

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