POET VICENTE ALEIXANDRE, 86;
SPANIARD WON 1977 NOBEL PRIZE
Author: Associated Press
Date: Saturday, December 15, 1984
Page: 14
Section: OBITUARY
Vicente Aleixandre, whose haunting poetry was banned by Francisco Franco and
went on to win him the 1977 Nobel Prize for Literature, died at his home
Tuesday, his physician said. He was 86.
The dean of Spanish poets, Mr. Aleixandre was a recluse who was little
known to younger generations before he won the Nobel Prize. He was too frail -
suffering with heart problems - to go to Stockholm to receive his award.
Dr. Jose Cerdan said Tuesday that Mr. Aleixandre, who was in a coma, was
taken from the hospital where he was being treated to his home, only 100 yards
away, and died there.
Cerdan said Mr. Aleixandre died of "renal failure and hemorrhage shock."
Mr. Aleixandre was born in Seville in 1898 and was the fourth Spaniard to
win the literature prize.
The Nobel Academy said it gave him the award for work, in the tradition of
Spanish lyric poetry, that "illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and
present-day society."
Mr. Aleixandre, interviewed in his modest home in Madrid on the eve of the
1977 awards ceremony in Stockholm, said the prize would not make him change
either his destiny or his old gray sweater.
"The Nobel Prize is an honor," he said. "But it is also an accident, one
which cannot touch the substance of the poet. . . ."
"I have my own world. I have completed and am completing my destiny. . . .
The Nobel Prize has not changed my life in essence. I have been working for
more than 50 years. I continue working," he said.
But the award brought new critical study of his writing, while translators
struggled with his ambiguous words.
His principal theme is that life replenishes itself. "Man is a passenger
in life, automatically incorporated into the universe on death," he said.
In the interview on the eve of the Nobel ceremony, Mr. Aleixandre said he
had strong feelings against Franco, the right-wing dictator, during the
1936-1939 Spanish Civil War.
Franco, who ruled for four decades, banned his poetry from 1936 to 1944.
"I was a Republican in the war," the poet said in the interview. ''Franco
prohibited my name or my poetry from being published. I wrote only about four
or five war poems at the start of the war and then went into forced silence."
"We were not in the war to write poems but to defend our position," he
said.
Mr. Aleixandre was a bachelor.
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