Azorín: Supreme Confession

Supreme Confession

Azorín 

(1873-1967)


If I had to summarize my mental life from four years old (1877) to this moment (1959), I would do it in two words: “the concrete.”  And I would clarify: “necessity of the concrete, of the definite fact, of tangible things.”  I detest vague dissertation.  For me, in the novel, in poetry, there are neither classics nor romantics.  There are men who feel the concrete and know how to express it.  Prose can run clear and pure; it will leave no wake if it is not concrete.  We will not even bee able to read it without fatigue.  Novelistic precepts do not exist.  No one can say how a novel has to be.  It is almost always applauded by mental contagion.  And if the novel comes from afar, so much the better.  In poetry, could there be anything more vague and insipid than the “Song to Teresa”?  What an interminable and arid road!  What tautology!  And I will say it brutally: What vileness towards a poor woman!  In “The Lake” of Lamartine—also an evoker of a past—what transparency and what spirituality!  In the novel, I incline to Pedro Antonio de Alarcón.  Observe Alarcón badly; at each moment, we bump into the absurd, like the key in the famous story, like the multitude of circumstances in another famous story—“The Three-Cornered Hat"—.  But there, fixed is our attention; there our sensibility is grasped.  The relief of things is prodigious.  I don’t want to talk about Alarcón’s prejudicies.  The anti-Frenchness in Alarcón—who does not know France—is unbearable.  

To have or not to have imagination?  That is the other part of the problem.  I have just read that Baudelaire had no imagination.  The prologuist of The Flowers of Evil—an impartial prologuist—says this in the Lemerre edition (1917).  I smiled.  He has an erroneous concept of the imagination.  He believes that to have imagination is to invent prodigious adventures.  He does not understand—he does not want to understand—that one needs imagination, much and fine imagination, in order to write a novel in which nothing happens.  In which nothing complicated or inextricable happens, and in which what happens is all fine, delicate, and ethereal.  The ecstatic, sirs, can be as novelistic as the dynamic.  The sensation can be given with more intensity.


Notes: The "Song of Teresa" is José de Espronceda's "Canto a Teresa."  Alarcón's "key" story" is "El clavo," originally published in 1853, then definitively edited and republished in his 1881 collection Cuentos amatorios.  "The Three-Cornered Hat" is Alarcón's novel El sombrero de tres picos (1874), later adapted into a famous ballet (1919) with music by Manuel de Falla (1876-1946).

Source: Azorín, “Suprema confesión,” in Azorín, Obras selectas (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1962), 1343-1344.

Translation ©2024 B. P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the translator.

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