"Otro punto de arranque": Gerardo Diego's Hybrid Romances

In his 1932 lecture at Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin, Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) explores the tendency toward the popular forms prevalent in the Spanish poetry of the 1920s and early 1930s, particularly in the so-named Generation of 1927.¹ Certainly this trend can be found in ample evidence in Alberti's volumes Marinero en tierra (1924), La amante (1925), and El alba del alhelí (1925-1926), as well as in the poetry of his cohort – Federico García Lorca's (1898-1936) Romancero gitano (1928), to take a prime example. Alberti conceptualizes what he refers to as popular art, in his remarks, as the antique and culto preserved in the memory of the pueblo. He affirms Juan Ramón Jiménez's dictum from the Segunda antolojía poética, "no hay arte popular, sino … tradición popular del arte," because just as Jiménez, he views this art not as having originated with the popular classes, but rather as having been kept by them as its guardians (262; "Poesía popular" 3). At the same time, for Alberti if not exactly for Jiménez, the 'popular' properly understood constitutes an "intercambio," the "flujo y reflujo de la tradición conservada, oral, con la recreada por el poeta" ("La poesía popular" 16). Alberti understands the term 'poesía popular' to encompass not only vernacular lyrics, and the literary and courtly transformations of these lyrics, but also the exchange that happens among the creators and disseminators of popular and culto poetry. Contrastingly, in his The Spanish Traditional Lyric (1977), John G. Cummins prefers 'poesía de tipo tradicional' to 'poesía popular' so as to distinguish vernacular lyrics – what he calls poesía popular – from the wider category of poesía de tipo tradicional, which includes culto forms (1). With each of these perspectives in mind, for our purposes, the combined term 'popular and traditional poetry' best delineates vernacular and culto poetry's intertwined relationship, while at the same time recognizing the differences between them.

As an integral part of his lecture's consideration of popular poetry's renaissance, from modernismo through the Generation of 27, Alberti centers on the romance, Spain's popular and traditional poetic form par excellence. He hits on a crucial reason for the resurgence of popular poetic forms in the Generation of 27 – the way in which these forms lend themselves to the renewal of cultural memory and collective identity. Alberti highlights the way in which the romance's rhythm and versification make it easy to recall and recite, thus facilitating the material's passing down from generation to generation: "En general, estos cantaores, por las razones que antes dije y las exigencias de una música ya impuesta, apoyan casi todas sus canciones en el verso castellano más sencillo: el octosílabo de los romances. Tienen la memoria, los oídos, tan llenos de este ritmo, fácil de retener …" ("Poesía popular" 6). Certainly, Diego shares with Alberti and Lorca an attunement to the sounds of popular and traditional lyrics, which is related, in the cases of Diego and Lorca, to their prodigious musical talent and command of the piano. Practitioners of the "romance moderno," of which Alberti regards Jiménez as the definitive progenitor, include, from his standpoint, "Moreno Villa, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Federico García Lorca, Fernando Villalón, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre, Emilio Prados y Manuel Altolaguirre" ("Poesía popular" 13, 14). Strikingly, Alberti excludes his friend and fellow poet Diego (1896-1987), as well as Larrea (1895-1980), another poet and an intimate of Diego: "No incluyo a Gerardo Diego y Juan Larrea por corresponder a otro punto de arranque" ("Poesía popular" 14). Since Diego was one of the greatest and most prolific twentieth-century Spanish writers of romances, Alberti's omission of him from the list seems odd at first – until Alberti's linkage of the romance to the popular is properly contextualized.

Although Alberti recounts meeting Diego when collecting the prize money awarded to both poets for the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1925...