Last February marked the hundredth anniversary of the publication, in Paris, of a book that was called to mark a milestone in the contemporary novel: Ulysses , by James Joyce. After multiple obstacles and prohibitions, the French bookstore Shakespeare and Company, run by the American Sylvia Beach, made the brave decision to print the banned book. “Thanks to censorship”, writes Francisco García Tortosa, “the novel acquired the attraction of forbidden fruit”. Its popularity quickly spread throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. Not everyone had read it, but the entire literary flock spoke of it.
Pages of the controversial work were immediately translated and published in our country: into Galician (Otero Pedrayo), Catalan (Manuel Trens) and Spanish (Antonio Marichalar and Ernesto Giménez Caballero). In his unfinished speech on admission to the Royal Academy, in 1931, Antonio Machado also echoed Ulysses with a judgement, by the way, quite categorical and not very receptive. “Dead road”, he calls it, “dead end”.
Among the poets of the next generation, that of '27, a greater interest in Joyce is appreciated. Dámaso Alonso, under a transparent pseudonym, translates A portrait of the artist, giving it a title that did not please the Irish author: Portrait of the adolescent artist (1926), and Vicente Aleixandre, as an avant-garde poet related to surrealism, recognized that his book Pasión de la Tierra , begun to be written in 1928 and published in 1935, responded largely to the influence received from Ulysses . When Carlos Bousoño was preparing his fundamental thesis on Aleixandre, he wrote him a letter in which he confirmed that between 1928 and 1929 he frequented the work of Rimbaud and Joyce: "Joyce, Rimbaud, converged almost simultaneously in my readings", he tells him .
He always maintained this affirmation and even reiterated it, with greater detail, in 1978, a year after the Nobel Prize was awarded, in an interview granted to Cuadernos para el dialogo. There, when talking about the influences received in her training period, she does not hesitate to recognize James Joyce as one of his teachers: “I started reading – Aleixandre declares – prose writers and irrationalist poets (in the twenties). I read, for example, Joyce and I recognize in him the great influence he had on me for the change of writing that moving from Ámbito to Pasión de la tierra meant. Yes –he concludes–, Joyce is also one of my teachers”.
Aleixandre demonstrates with this permeability that his poetic capacity is, as John Keats asked poets, decidedly chameleonic. A writer, a poet, is influenced by what surrounds him from his social and family environment; everything in his environment ends up being selected, filtered and turned into his own flesh and blood. Known by critics were other "assimilations" of his from poems by Dylan Thomas or Rilke. As Bousoño argues: "Many times, the irremediable need to write comes from a poetic moment read that has deeply impressed us." Aleixandre does not submit to a passive imitation, but rather takes the idea and makes it his own, putting into play all the elements of his creative personality, a mechanism that is absolutely legal and justified by the progressive continuity of literature.
The novelty is that today we know with certainty that Vicente Aleixandre did not read Ulysses at that time. There is a letter of his, unpublished until now, to his bookseller León Sánchez Cuesta, in which he tells him not to send him the aforementioned novel, if he does not have it in the French translation (a language in which Aleixandre was well acquainted ). It was February 1926 when he canceled his request in the following terms: “Being English, the edition (that you have) of Joyce's Ulysses does not interest me, given the devilish Irish dialect in which almost the entire work is written. Thank you for your warning."
He would undoubtedly hear about the great novel, he would read those passages that circulated in the Spanish magazines of the time and perhaps some of his friends (Dámaso Alonso, Eva Seifert) would read some of its pages to him in improvised translation. Hence, in Pasión de la Tierra some onomatopoeic sequences emerge sporadically in the style of Joyce's that represent dynamic states of the subconscious: "The throat gargles gargles gargles", "walking on the path of the misguided", "all my blood comes singing the same song, accompanied, laughs, laughs, of a tambourine. So so. So, so, so, so." Resources characteristic of the Joycian style.
Aleixandre also endorsed the ironic ease and provocative tone so skilfully exploited in the dialogues and descriptions by the Irish writer: “Forget! Forget is an easy word, look closely: forget. Like someone who says: 'What a beautiful day'...", or "even the skirt of your dress retains I don't know what centrifugal shape, impatient, and your thighs seem silver. Flip and: clin! How do you sound, inhuman? This burlesque note, not very different from the "objective humor" of surrealism, will be extended later with a non-conformist nuance of social criticism in Swords like lips.
All of this that we have pointed out gives an idea of the poet's awakened sensibility, who, just by tracing a new air, knows how to adapt to it and reshape his style. And although he did not read Ulysses until the appearance, in 1945, of the Spanish translation by J. Sala Subirats, he continued to maintain that Joyce influenced the prose of Passion of the Earth, and possibly, in saying so, he did not depart too far from the true, since that partial and tangential knowledge that he had was enough to radically transform his work, and go from pure poetry to prose given over to the turbulence of the irrational.
What Harold Bloom called “the anguish of influence” shows here its other face, what we could call “the prestige of influence”. To have reminiscences of Ulysses in his poems was, for the young Aleixandre, a consecration of his style.
