seen in perspective, 1989 was a Christmas rare, a parenthesis between two deaths. On December 12, Carlos Barral; weeks later, his friend Jaime Gil de Biedma. It was the 8 of January of 1990, today, 30 years ago. He was 60 and had published his last book of verses —Poems posthumous— in 1968, something that did not prevent to continue to be an author and influential read. What remains. To make matters worse, had the courtesy to write a little bit. His complete poetry, which fits in a volume of 200 pages, is full of memorable moments that have the tone of confidence more gaunt and, at the same time, the conversation more intelligent.
No one has reflected as he on love and sex, the poor class-consciousness and the memory of a child of the war —“the happiest years of my life / and it is not strange, since in the end / didn’t have the ten”—, the Barcelona of the bourgeoisie and of the murcian of the emigration. “The city belongs to them one day,” he said thinking of them the same thing that he had said that “of all the stories of the History / the saddest without a doubt is Spain because it ends badly”. The phrase has become a cliché demonstrates the strength of its findings, which placed it in the stanza most difficult of all —the sistine— certifies their mastery of a craft in that he never won the bread (or caviar): his work as a director in the General Company of Tobacco of the Philippines, occupies a good part of his Portrait of the artist in 1956, diaries that were completed posthumously with a commercial report written as high literature, and with fragments they portrayed his controversial backdrop to pedophiles on a trip to Manila.
Gil de Biedma always acknowledged his debt to Luis Cernuda and, in a certain sense, completed the task started by this: to introduce into Spanish poetry, —largely credited to the French influence— the ways narrative and meditative poetry in anglo-saxon. Let’s say, those of Auden and the Eliot of the Four quartets (more than that of The wasteland). As the two of them, was also a huge writer: sharp, bright, hurtful. When he wrote to please was good; not to mention when I was writing against.
If Gabriel Ferrater asserted that with the same defects but with less qualities it would have worked better, to Juan Ramón Jiménez called it —by his attacks on other writers, interestingly— of “petty and malicious playboy casino town of Huelva”. A little earlier he pointed out that the voice that speaks in the books of JRJ “is always in favor of the own emotions”. Yours —a different way of flirtation— she was always against it. That’s why he wrote 55 memorable verses graduates Against Jaime Gil de Biedma: “If you weren’t such a bitch!”. Those were the times that I still wanted to be a poet, then withdrew: he preferred to be a poem. I got it from. He died 30 years ago and no one has forgotten him.
