Bewildering Stories introduces and welcomes...

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Gustavo A. Bécquer was a journalist in Madrid in the mid-19th century, but he had aspirations to writing poetry. He was influenced by Romantic contemporaries in Spanish literature as well as by the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe. In Toledo, he began writing his History of Spanish Temples, which was published in 1859.

“The Kiss” has some important things to say, but readers will have to accustom themselves to the syntax of Michael Wooff’s English translation. The Spanish original has the ornate style of a stately religious or royal procession, which is made possible by the Romance languages’ use of grammatical gender, pronouns and participles. English normally uses other grammatical resources to describe such things as simultaneity as well as cause and effect.

The style deliberately conflicts with the content in order to emphasize the egregious behaviour of French troops occupying and wantonly damaging the church in Toledo during the Napoleonic wars. The ending invokes fantasy to express the resentment that the Spanish people must have felt toward the foreign invaders.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s bio sketch can be found here.

Bewildering Stories welcomes Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. We’re glad to have him with us!