The Life of the Fields
Las cosas del campo
Published on 5. July 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
132 pages
978-1-84861-950-0 (ISBN)
Description
Las cosas del campo is one of three books of Spanish prose poems that are often cited as the most accomplished in this form in the last century. Las cosas del campo is about the people and the landscape of Andalusia at a specific time, in the middle of the last century, still recognisable, still to be found, despite the fact that Andalusia has seen so many changes in these past seventy years. More specifically, it is about the landscape around the family home of the poet near the country town of Antequera in the province of Malaga; about the house, the Caseria del Conde, and the people who lived and worked there. It has come to represent a whole epoch of rural Andalusia and is full of magical descriptions of the land and its people, their character and ways of life. The interest and regard the English have always shown for Andalusia is justification enough for bringing this most attractive book into our language.
More details
Language
English
Spanish
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
177 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-950-0 (9781848619500)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Jose Antonio Munoz Rojas (1909-2009) lived to be almost a hundred. His first book was published in 1929 and his last in 1997, Objetos perdidos, about the trials of old age, for which he was awarded Spain's national poetry prize. The reasons for this late recognition are related to the history of Spain in the last century. Munoz Rojas came from Antequera in the south. His family were landowners. At the outset of the Civil War, his brother was killed, and he found himself in hiding and in fear of his life in Malaga. The story of his rescue by two Cambridge dons (he had been in Cambridge for the academic year 1935-36, researching connections between English metaphysical poets and Spanish poets of the Golden Age) is told in his autobiography. In the post-war years, he worked for Banco Urquijo in Madrid and helped fellow writers of whatever persuasion. Munoz Rojas was an anglophile. He translated T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and other English poets. Amongst his most highly regarded works are two books published in the 1950s, Cantos a Rosa (1954), intricately woven love poems; and the prose poems of Las cosas del campo (1951).