- Biography
- Training
- Return and death
- Plays
- Influences of modernism
- Disturbed world
- 5 am
- Weariness
- The shadow of the wings
- References
Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño (1889-1927) was a famous writer born in Ecuador, member of the so-called Beheaded Generation, named to identify a group of Ecuadorian writers who agreed on their poetic theme (depressive-melancholic) and suffered tragic deaths very young.
Noboa belonged to the wealthy class of the time and was widely influenced by the main European modernist poets during the 19th century, such as Rubén Darío, José Martí, José Asunción Silva and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, among others.
He also identified with the so-called French "cursed poets" (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine), whom he read in their original language. All of them had a psychological profile marked by avoidance, neurosis, internal conflict and uprooting.
Through his literary creation, the reality of the young Ecuadorian writers of the time is palpable, who faced a society that lacked criteria in the appreciation of art and exhibited a notable resistance to novelty.
This poet also carried on his shoulders the mission of opening the doors to Ecuador towards what the rest of Latin America had been experiencing in the literary field for some time: modernism. Noboa had to face an insensitive society that sharpened the dire nature of his spirit.
Thus, the world around him contrasted with his cosmopolitanism and provoked the maladjustment and the desire for escape, typical of modernist poets. For this reason, he traveled to Europe, where he definitely connected with the essence of the literary trend that marked his style.
He was a tormented man, whose seizures he calmed with morphine and high doses of drugs and alcohol, which led to a desolate life and an early and tragic death.
Biography
Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño was born in Guayaquil on August 11, 1889. His parents, Pedro José Noboa and Rosa María Caamaño, belonged to an upper-class family and were political activists.
Training
He studied in his hometown the first stage of his academic training and then moved to Quito to continue his studies. In this region she forged a close friendship with another Ecuadorian writer, Arturo Borjas.
His family settlement was in Quito, and it was in this city where Noboa began to discover his passion for writing. Several magazines and newspapers in the city were spaces where this poet captured his first creations and served as platforms to gradually increase his popularity.
The nature of his personality made him want to visit other spaces to avoid what he considered to be an unresponsive and very crude environment.
For this reason he traveled to Spain and France in search of himself, trying to escape his neurosis and strengthen his mind, knowing deep down that he was hopelessly lost and without the courage to overcome the loneliness of his world.
However, despite his internal conflicts, the experiences he accumulated as well as his vision of the world made him one of the most important representatives of modernism as a literary current.
Return and death
Noboa returned to Quito, and writing his second volume of poetry entitled La sombra de las alas, tragic death reached him. Still very young, at 38 years of age, he committed suicide on December 7, 1927.
Plays
His work is imbued with remarkable perfection and subtlety, the product of his marked European modernist influence.
Samain, Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, the great French symbolists, provided the power, strength, and intensity of images to his poetry. Among his most outstanding literary creations we can find the following:
- Evening emotion.
- To my mother.
- Old portrait.
- Of that distant love.
- Divine Comedy.
- Bored.
- Old portrait.
- 5 am.
- Summer romance.
- Nostalgia.
- The shadow of the wings.
He was a true architect of modernist aesthetics in his country, which was many steps behind the new literary proposals in Latin America.
Influences of modernism
During the course of the 19th century, Spanish American writers felt the irremediable desire to become independent and to get away from the influence of the Spanish tradition.
For this they drank from the sources of English, Italian and especially French literature. This provided them with exotic, symbolist and Parnassian elements, among others, that defined this poetic genre in its form and substance.
Disturbed world
When reading Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño, one perceives a hallucinated, disturbed and overwhelmed world. A restless spirit between doubt, hopelessness and discouragement, irrefutable characteristics of the so-called "cursed poets".
His dichotomy between life and death is a back and forth between an emotional, gloomy and pessimistic chiaroscuro where the beauty of life remains intangible and isolated, this defines a gloomy theme that reflects its hidden realities, marked by an outside world that categorically rejected.
In his compositions he expresses what he feels and what he thinks through sensory elements, revealing the subjective of his perceptions through, for example, objects and their colors.
Similarly, symbolism and exoticism are present in the allusion to elements of foreign culture such as the Sabbath and the coven (meetings of witches and witches to perform spells). The presence of the painter Francisco de Goya is also evident.
On the other hand, perfection and beauty are also evidenced, representatives of Parnassianism, and its idea of "art for art's sake" expressed in the inclusion of luxury objects such as gold, a museum and even the dream theme as an element. of evasion.
5 am
The formal characteristics of modernism mentioned above can be identified in his poem 5 am:
"Early risers who go to mass at dawn
and stale people, in a picturesque round, down the street that shines the pink and mauve light
of the moon that shows its rogue face.
Mercy and vice are mixed in parade, polychrome shawls and torn cloaks, faces of madhouse, lupanar and hospice, sinister tastings of sabbat and coven.
A lean old woman runs who already misses mass, and next to a whore with a painted smile,
cross a skull of jarana and tramoya…
And I dream of that painting that I am in a museum, and in gold characters, at the bottom of the frame, I read:
This “whim” was drawn by Don Francisco de Goya ”.
This text reflects in a sensory and vivid way the image and characteristics of Quito's society in its daily activities - such as going to mass at the ringing of the bells - and how the strata mix at times without conscious distinction.
Weariness
The poetry of this Ecuadorian exponent adjusts to the aspects of perfection in the rhythm and meter of his stanzas as a sine qua non condition to achieve the musicality of his verses.
The poem Hastío presents the perfect structure of the sonnet, one of the emblematic stanzas of modernism: 14 verses of major art, Alexandrian, divided into two quartets (ABAB / CDCD), 2 triplets (EXE / FXF) of consonant rhyme and a free verse:
"Living from the past out of contempt for the present,
look to the future with deep terror, feeling poisoned, feeling indifferent, before the evil of Life and before the good of Love.
Go making paths over a wasteland of thistles
Bitten on the asp of disillusionment
with the thirst in the lips, the fatigue in the eyes
and a golden thorn within the heart.
And to calm the weight of this strange existence, seek final consolation in oblivion, to be stunned, intoxicated with unheard-of fury,
with invincible ardor, with fatal blindness, drinking the mercies of the golden champagne
and inhaling the poison of the flowers of evil ”.
The content responds to that unmistakable influence that the French poets had on the writer. For example, the mention of the "flowers of evil" refers to the work of the same name written by Charles Baudelaire.
In this work the seduction of beauty and the power of evil that detonate in the solitude of contemporary man are imbued.
The shadow of the wings
Finally, from the sources of European inspiration, Noboa acquired voices from the English, Italian and French languages to raise his expression to the poetic stature of these nations, summits of all the arts.
In his posthumous poem The Shadow of the Wings, this structural and aesthetic detail can be appreciated. Here is a fragment of it:
«I dream that my wings project in their flights
the faint wandering shadow
today under clear sky,
tomorrow in a distant
hazy gray sky;
For my eternal nostalgia, for my deep longings
of the arcane seas, and the unknown soils
and the distant shores of the dreamed country…!
«Navigare est necesse» says the archaic motto
of my heraldic emblem;
and in a light environment like impalpable tulle, a weightless galley on the waves rows, and a new light cruva on the blue… ».
Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño was a man whose frustrations and disagreements with destiny, whose existential anguish and abstraction from the crude and poor-spirited environment where he lived, forged the irreverent poet, equidistant from all happy themes but coherent in his literary creation with his tragic conception of the world.
References
- Calarota, Antonella. (2015). “Modernism in Ecuador and the« beheaded generation ». University of La Rioja. Retrieved on November 20, 2018 from the University of La Rioja: dialnet.unirioja.es
- Feria Vázquez, M. Á. (2015). "Parnassianism and symbolism at the crossroads of modernity: towards a general revision of its links". Complutense Scientific Journals. Retrieved on November 20, 2018 from Complutense Scientific Journals: magazines.ucm.es
- "Weariness". Poeticous. Retrieved on November 20, 2018 from Poeticous: poeticous.com
- Calarota, Antonela. (2014). "The" beheaded "Generation in Ecuador". Counterflow. Retrieved on November 20, 2018 from A Contracorriente: acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu
- "Parnassian and Modernist Poets". Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library. Retrieved on November 20, 2018 from Miguel de Cervante Virtual Library: cervantesvirtual.com