
Guillermo de Torre Ballesteros (
Madrid
Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...
, 1900 –
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, controlled by the government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Argentina. It is located on the southwest of the Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires is classified as an Alpha− glob ...
, 14 January 1971) was a Spanish essayist, poet and literary critic, a
Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...
ist and member of the
Generation of '27
The Generation of '27 () was an influential group of poets that arose in Spain, Spanish literary circles between 1923 and 1927, essentially out of a shared desire to experience and work with avant-garde forms of art and poetry. Their first form ...
. He is also notable as the brother-in-law of the Argentine writer
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo ( ; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish literature, Spanish-language and international literatur ...
.
Biography
He became a writer at a young age.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna
Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Puig (July 3, 1888 – January 13, 1963), born in Madrid, was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna was especially ...
, in his book ''Pombo'' (1918), described him as "an intelligent and crazy young man". In 1918 he met
Vicente Huidobro
Vicente García-Huidobro Fernández (; January 10, 1893 – January 2, 1948) was a Chilean poet born to an aristocracy, aristocratic family. He promoted the avant-garde literary movement in Chile and was the creator and greatest exponent of t ...
and
Robert
The name Robert is an ancient Germanic given name, from Proto-Germanic "fame" and "bright" (''Hrōþiberhtaz''). Compare Old Dutch ''Robrecht'' and Old High German ''Hrodebert'' (a compound of ''Hrōþ, Hruod'' () "fame, glory, honour, prais ...
and
Sonia Delaunay
Sonia Delaunay (; 14 November 1885 – 5 December 1979) was a French artist born to Jewish parents, who spent most of her working life in Paris. She was born in the Russian Empire, now Ukraine, and was formally trained in Russia and Germany, be ...
. He subsequently became estranged from Huidobro. He studied law and obtained a diploma, but was unable to become a diplomat due to his deafness. He traveled through Europe and was exposed to various
avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
artistic movements. In 1919 he wrote the manifesto of
Ultraism, and in the same year collaborated with
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo ( ; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish literature, Spanish-language and international literatur ...
and
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara (; ; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, c ...
in writing an
automatic
Automatic may refer to:
Music Bands
* Automatic (Australian band), Australian rock band
* Automatic (American band), American rock band
* The Automatic, a Welsh alternative rock band
Albums
* ''Automatic'' (Jack Bruce album), a 1983 el ...
poem. He elaborated on Ultraism with a ''Vertical Manifesto'', which appeared in 1920. The same year, with
José de Ciria y Escalante, he launched ''Reflector'', which Tzara included in his list of ''présidents Dada''. In 1923 he published a book of Dadaist poems, ''Helixes'', which makes extensive use of
calligram
A calligram is a set of words arranged in such a way that it forms a thematically related image. It can be a poem, a phrase, a portion of scripture, or a single word; the visual arrangement can rely on certain use of the typeface, calligraphy o ...
s, negative space, free verse,
proparoxytone
In linguistics, a proparoxytone (, ) is a word with stress on the antepenultimate (third to last) syllable, such as the English language, English words "cinema" and "operational". Related concepts are paroxytone (stress on the penultimate syllable) ...
s, and the mechanistic frenzy of
Futurism
Futurism ( ) was an Art movement, artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the ...
. The book's cover was designed by
Rafael Barradas, and it was illustrated with
woodcut
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that ...
s by
Norah Borges
Leonor Fanny "Norah" Borges Acevedo (March 4, 1901 – July 20, 1998), was an Argentine visual artist and art critic, member of the Florida group, and sister of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
Early life and source of nickname
She w ...
. Critics savaged the unorthodox work, which is noteworthy for including some of the first
haiku
is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 Mora (linguistics), morae (called ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a ''kire ...
s written in
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas
**Spanish cuisine
**Spanish history
**Spanish culture
...
:
:::::::::::''La tijera del viento''
:::::::::::''corta las cabelleras''
:::::::::::''de las espigas más esbeltas''.
In ''El movimiento V. P.'', a
roman à clef
A ''roman à clef'' ( ; ; ) is a novel about real-life events that is overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people and the "key" is the relationship between the non-fiction and the fiction. This m ...
by
Rafael Cansinos Asséns that appeared in 1921, De Torre was caricatured as "the youngest poet", speaking in neologisms and proparoxytones. He continued to contribute to numerous Ultraist reviews, including ''Grecia'' (1919–1920), ''Cervantes'' (1919–1920), ''Ultra'' (1921–1922), ''Tableros'' (1922), ''Horizontes'', ''Cosmópolis'', and various European magazines such as ''Manomètre'', of which he became an editor in 1925. In 1923, in an article in the September issue of ''Alfar'', he launched a polemic against
Creacionismo, the movement founded by his old acquaintance Vicente Huidobro. In it, he accused Huidobro of stealing the aesthetic from
Julio Herrera y Reissig, the
Uruguay
Uruguay, officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast, while bordering the Río de la Plata to the south and the A ...
an modernist. (However, the antagonism between De Torre and Huidobro arose in 1921. In Cosmópolis 32, August 1921, Guillermo de Torre wrote about Huidobro: "De ahí que frente a la reiterada obcecación egolátrica del autor de "Poemas árticos", nos vemos obligados a ratificar nuestras aserciones negativas de su ilusa originalidad personal, creyéndose único promotor y cultivador del creacionismo (...)" page 591).
In 1924 De Torre published a translation of
Max Jacob
Max Jacob (; 12 July 1876 – 5 March 1944) was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.
Life and career
After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic c ...
's ''Le cornet à dés''. In 1925, he republished some of his writings from ''Cosmópolis'' under the title ''European Vanguard Literature'', a work which enjoyed enormous success in Spain and Latin America ("For us," said
Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (, ; December 26, 1904 – April 24, 1980) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of French ...
, "it was a kind of Bible") for its elucidation of such a vast and complex subject. In 1965 an expanded, revised edition, omitting the apologetic tone of the original, was released in three volumes under the title ''History of Vanguard Literature''.
De Torre had a strong interest in the relationship between poetry and visual imagery, and drew upon the theme of
cybernetics
Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system's actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action. It is concerned with ...
. His work often reviewed the contributions of major literary figures, both in ''European Vanguard Literature'' (Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendras, Reverdy, Pound, Lee Masters, etc.) and in ''History of Vanguard Literature'' (T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, etc.).
In 1927 he served as secretary in the foundation of ''La Gaceta Literaria'', the review of the
Generation of 27 directed by
Ernesto Giménez Caballero and illustrated by
Gregorio Prieto. He collaborated in ''Revista de Occidente'' as well. He married his former collaborator Norah Borges, sister of
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo ( ; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish literature, Spanish-language and international literatur ...
, and relocated to
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, controlled by the government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Argentina. It is located on the southwest of the Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires is classified as an Alpha− glob ...
. There he collaborated on the ''Gaceta Americana''. His major theoretical works during these years were ''Test of conscience: Aesthetic problems of the new Spanish generation'' (Buenos Aires, 1928) and ''Itinerary of new Spanish painting'' (Montevideo, 1931).
Between 1932 and 1936 he and his wife lived in
Madrid
Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...
. He contributed both to newspapers (notably ''El Sol''), and to cultural reviews, among them ''Revista de Occidente'', ''La Vie des Lettres'', and ''L'Esprit Nouveau''. In 1932, he wrote the manifesto of the Society of Iberian Artists (SAI, ''Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos''). In the same year, along with
Pedro Salinas, he founded ''Índice Literario'' and collaborated in its review, ''Arte''. At the group's inaugural exhibition in
Berlin
Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...
in 1933, he delivered a conference titled "Panorama of new Spanish painting". In 1934, he and
Roberto Payro wrote a monograph on
Joaquín Torres-García
Joaquín Torres-García (28 July 1874 – 8 August 1949) was a prominent Uruguayan-Spanish artist, theorist, and author, renowned for his international impact on modern art. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, he moved with his family to Catalonia, Spa ...
. With
Julio Pérez Ferrero Julio is the Spanish equivalent of the month July and may refer to:
*Julio (given name)
*Julio (surname)
*Júlio de Castilhos, a municipality of the western part of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
* ''Julio'' (album), a 1983 compilation albu ...
, he compiled the ''1935 Literary Almanac''. As a member of the Madrid chapter of
L'Amics de l'Art Nou (ADLAN), he wrote the prologue of the catalogue of the works of
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...
organized by that organization. He was one of the most notable peninsular contributors to
Eduardo Westerdahl
Eduardo Westerdahl (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, 1902-''ibidem'' 1983) was a Spanish painter, art critic and writer, and a member of the Surrealist Movement.
Biographical notes
Westerdahl was born of a Catalan mother and Swedish ...
's
Canarian review ''Gaceta de Arte''. After the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War () was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republican faction (Spanish Civil War), Republicans and the Nationalist faction (Spanish Civil War), Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the Left-wing p ...
, he fled to
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
, where he worked for the republican office of tourism. Later, he settled permanently in Buenos Aires.
De Torre headed the department of literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and held professorships at numerous universities throughout the Americas, while continuing his work in literary and artistic criticism. He was a co-founder and literary adviser of the publishing house Losada, where he oversaw the compilation of the ''Complete Works'' of
Lorca, and devoted space in his anthologies to
Alberti,
Bergamín,
Cernuda,
Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he s ...
,
Kafka
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a novelist and writer from Prague who was Jewish, Austrian, and Czech and wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of real ...
,
Camus,
Moravia
Moravia ( ; ) is a historical region in the eastern Czech Republic, roughly encompassing its territory within the Danube River's drainage basin. It is one of three historical Czech lands, with Bohemia and Czech Silesia.
The medieval and early ...
,
Malraux, and others. He collaborated on many Spanish and Latin American periodicals concerned with criticism, including Buenos Aires's ''La Nación'' and ''Síntesis'', of which he was the secretary. Above all, he devoted himself to the study of
comparative literature
Comparative literature studies is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across language, linguistic, national, geographic, and discipline, disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role ...
. Like his celebrated brother in law Borges, he grew blind with age. He died in Buenos Aires on 14 January 1971.
A 2005 translation into
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
of his only collection of poems, ''Eliche'', includes some biographical notes, ''Appunti su mio padre'', by his son
Miguel de Torre Borges published by Bibliotheca Aretina. As well as appearing in Asséns's ''El Movimiento V. P.'', he is satirized by
Gerardo Diego
Gerardo Diego Cendoya (October 3, 1896 – July 8, 1987) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27.
Diego taught language and literature at institutes of learning in Soria, Gijón, Santander and Madrid. He also acted as lite ...
in one of his ''jinojepas'', titled ''Guillaume de Tour'', as "prince of the
archipenic proparoxytone" (''príncipe del esdrújulo archipénico'').
Though de Torre's skill as a literary critic is comparable to that of
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón (; 23 December 1881 – 29 May 1958) was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high ...
and
Luis Cernuda, two other great poets of the 20th century, his intuitions were far from perfect. In his post at Losada, he is remembered for rejecting
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José García Márquez (; 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian writer and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo () or Gabito () throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th centur ...
's first novel, ''
Leaf Storm'', to the author's great discouragement. He also failed to appreciate the poetry of
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda ( ; ; born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto; 12 July 190423 September 1973) was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old an ...
, when presented with Neruda's ''Residencia en la tierra'' during a voyage to Spain. As an art critic, he is known for his biography the ''Life and Art of Picasso'', the essay ''Menéndez Pelayo and the Two Spains'', and the series ''The Adventure and the Order''. In his ''Triptych of Sacrifice'', he examines three Spanish authors – Lorca,
Unamuno, and
Machado. Among his theoretical works are the monographs ''Guillaume Apollinaire: His Life, His Work, the Theories of Cubism'', ''The Problems of Literature'', ''Keys to Hispanoamerican Literature'' (1959), and ''The Pointer of the Scale'' (1961), in which he examines the motivations of socially involved art, which he calls "engaged literature" in the case of poetry, prose, and drama, and "informalism" when describing
plastic arts
Plastic arts are art forms which involve physical manipulation of a ''plastic medium'', such as clay, wax, paint or even plastic in the modern sense of the word (a ductile polymer) to create works of art. The term is used more generally to ...
.
His final works were ''Minorities and Masses in Contemporary Culture and Art'' (1963), ''To the Letters'' (1967), ''The Metamorphosis of Proteus'' (1967), ''New Directions in Literary Criticism'' (1970), and the compilation ''Literary Doctrine and Criticism'' (1970).
Works
Poetry
*''Hélices'', Madrid: Mundo Latino, 1923.
Criticism
*''Manifiesto vertical'', 1920.
*''Literaturas europeas de vanguardia'', Madrid: Caro Raggio, 1925.
*''Examen de conciencia. Problemas estéticos de la nueva generación española''. Buenos Aires: Humanidades, 1928.
*''Itinerario de la nueva pintura española'', Montevideo, 1931.
*''Vida y arte de Picasso'' (1936)
*''El fiel de la balanza'', (1941), ensayo.
*''Menéndez Pelayo y las dos Españas'' (1943)
*''Guillaume Apollinaire: su vida, su obra y las teorías del cubismo'' (1946).
*''Problemática de la literatura'' (1951)
*''La metamorfosis de Proteo'', (1956), ensayos.
*''Claves de literatura hispanoamericana'' (1959)
*''La aventura estética de nuestro tiempo'' (1961)
*''Historia de las literaturas de Vanguardia'' (Madrid, Guadarrama, 1965).
*''Ultraísmo, Existencialismo y Objetivismo en Literatura''. Madrid: Guadarrama, 1968.
*''El espejo y el camino'' (1968), ensayos.
*''Minorías y masas en la cultura y el arte contemporáneo'' (1963)
*''Al pie de las letras'' (1967)
*''La metamorfosis de Proteo'' (1967)
*''Nueva direcciones de la crítica literaria'' (1970)
*''Doctrina y crítica literaria'' (1970).
*''Correspondencia Juan Ramón Jiménez / Guillermo de Torre 1920-1956''. Madrid / Fráncfort: Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2006.
Works cited
*
Juan Manuel Bonet, ''Diccionario de las Vanguardias en España 1907-1936''. Madrid: Alianza Editoria, 1995.
*Miguel de Torre Borges, "Appunti su mi padre"', in ''Eliche'', edited by Daniele Corsi, Arezzo, Biblioteca Aretina, 2005.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Torre, Guillermo De
1900 births
1971 deaths
Writers from Madrid
Spanish art critics
Dada
Spanish literary critics
French–Spanish translators
Generation of '27
20th-century Spanish poets
Spanish male poets
Burials at La Recoleta Cemetery
20th-century Spanish translators
20th-century Spanish male writers