Ramón Gómez de la Serna


Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Puig was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna was especially known for "Greguerías" – a short form of poetry that roughly corresponds to the one-liner in comedy. The Gregueria is especially able to grant a new and often humorous perspective. Serna published over 90 works in all literary genres. In 1933, he was invited to Buenos Aires. He stayed there during the Spanish Civil War and the following Spanish State and died there.
Some sample Greguerias:

El par de huevos que nos tomamos parece que son gemelos, y no son ni primos terceros.



El pavo real es un mito jubilado.



Las puertas se enfadan con el viento.

Biography

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Gómez de la Serna refused to follow his father into law or politics and soon adopted the marginal lifestyle of a bohemian bourgeois artist, finding his literary feet in the journal Prometeo, which, funded by his indulgent father between 1908 and 1912, introduced into Spain a whiff of scandal from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Remy de Gourmont and Marinetti.
During the First World War Ramón, as he liked to be known, became neutral Spain's chief exponent of avant-garde writing, establishing a base in the literary tertulia he founded at the centre of Madrid in the old Café Pombo.
This was Spain's most famous contribution to what Roger Shattuck has called 'the banquet years'. But behind the self-publicizing avant-garde antics, Ramón developed not only an extravagant public persona, but also his own equivalent of what Shattuck defines as a 'reversal of consciousness', deliberately divesting himself of conventional ways of thinking and being in order to adopt a peculiarly innovative, almost phenomenological, way of looking at the world, one which influenced the younger 1927 Generation of poets and in Ramón's case produced some of the most original and brilliantly creative prose writing of the period.
The six or so remarkable books he published from 1914 to 1918 – El Rastro , El Doctor Inverosímil , Greguerías , Senos , Pombo , El circo – illustrate most of his main characteristics: his search for a new fragmentary genre of short prose poems, his exaltation of trivial everyday objects, his emphasis on eroticism, his exuberant self-projection and exclusive dedication to art, his playful humour, his contemplative secular mysticism, and above all his cult of the image, especially witty surprising images.
These abound in all his works, especially his many, utterly idiosyncratic and textually pleasurable novels, such as the first real one La viuda blanca y negra , which was inspired by his relationship with the older, early feminist writer, :es:Carmen de Burgos|Carmen de Burgos.
It was in fact the greguerías that first attracted the attention of Valery Larbaud, who in the 1920s soon had him translated and lionized in France.
Within Spain, though his work often provoked controversy and sometimes hostility, one of his most eminent defenders was José Ortega y Gasset, who perceptively described Pombo as the last liberal barricade before the imminent rebellion of the masses from both left and right; and in his famous study on the dehumanization of art mentioned Ramón in the same breath as Proust and Joyce.
A subsequent, lazy consensus in mainstream Hispanism has deemed Ramón's reputation to have been overrated, but the comparison with Proust and Joyce seems justified, whilst recognizing that what differentiates him from their modernist cult of large-scale structures and formal perfection is precisely his avant-garde experimentation with a fragmentary, anarchic formlessness on the one hand, and on the other, his dedication to a kind of untranscendental meditation in a present usually severed from Joyce's classical archetypes and Proust's memories of the past.
Such was Ramón's insistence on constant novelty that when he published his own survey of the period's Ismos in 1931, its prologue was one of the most notable defences of artistic autonomy and verbal freedom at a time when the avant-garde and surrealism were giving way to socio-political commitment.
Ramón's lack of commitment during the Republic, followed by his embarrassing declaration of support for Franco after self-exile to his younger, Jewish wife's flat in Buenos Aires at the outbreak of civil war, led to ostracism and neglect.
Despite still producing some of the most original works in Spanish of the twentieth century – the existential-surrealist novel El hombre perdido and his extraordinary neo-baroque autobiography Automoribundia – his life in exile was one of pathetic isolation and increasing poverty, neither of which were helped by the knowledge that he had left behind the celebrated painting of the Pombo Tertulia by Gutiérrez-Solana and the equally famous cubist portrait of him painted in 1915 by Diego Rivera.
On 13 January 1963 Ramón died from natural causes. In a letter to one of his companions, he mentions acknowledging his imminent death and welcomed it.
Despite the decline in Ramón's reputation, two notable voices in particular declared their admiration. Firstly Octavio Paz, who wrote the following in a letter to Papeles de Son Armadans in 1967: 'Para mí es el gran escritor español: el Escritor o, mejor, la Escritura. Comparto la admiración, el fanatismo, de Larbaud: yo también habría aprendido el español sólo para leerlo’ .
And secondly Pablo Neruda, who in his prologue to Ramón's Obras selectas claimed that 'la gran figura del surrealismo, entre todos los países, ha sido Ramón' .
Though still often regarded as a marginal figure, there has of late been a marked revival of interest, stimulated perhaps by the recent vogue for postmodernism, which Ramón's avant-garde art can be seen both to anticipate and, in many cases, surpass.
Fittingly, his complete works are now nearing completion, published in 20 volumes by Círculo de Lectores/Galaxia Gutenberg in a splendid edition admirably edited by Ioana Zlotescu.

Works

Translations into English: