Loiu, Spain: It's been over a year since I last posted a piece in this space. But today I'm back to share the news about my latest poetry collection, Madre España and Illustrated Love Poems, which was released last week in the United States by CentiRamo Publishing. Reproduced below is the preface I wrote for the poetry collection, which contains illustrations by Spanish artist Machús Aguirre.
Most of the poems in the first part of this book honor the Spanish people and the great Kingdom of Spain, the Mother Country of many nations throughout the world, including the Philippines, my Southeast Asian homeland. The second part is devoted unabashedly to love, the most uniquely human of all emotions. When directed toward God, it is expressed as a prayer of thanksgiving and as a way to celebrate when shared with a loved one.
As the birthplace of Hispanidad, Spain has left an indelible mark on almost half a billion people estimated to speak the Spanish language across the globe. Besides a common language, there are more bonds that glue Spain and its former colonies together: blood, religion, history, culture and tradition, food, music, dance, and literature, to name just a few.
Like an epic, 1898 was in medias res of Spanish arts and letters. That year, the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War was a terrible disaster for the Spaniards. The United States of America, eager to spread its wings in the name of “Manifest Destiny,” had declared war on Spain and, in a few months, the government of Spanish Prime Minister Práxedes Mariano Mateo Sagasta y Escolar lost Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. This event gave birth to the “Generation of ’98,” that period in Spanish arts and letters represented by José Martínez Ruiz (who wrote under the pseudonym Azorín), Miguel de Unamuno, Ramiro de Maeztu, and many other glorious writers. Some precursors who had already read the handwriting on the wall were Joaquín Costa Martinez, Ricardo Macías Picavea, Ángel Gavinet García, and Juan Bautista Amores.
Author Rafael Lazcano, an expert on the history of the Augustinian Order, offers warm praise for the book, which appears as a blurb on the back cover of the poetry collection.
The Philippines was named after King Philip II, who had said of his colony that the sun would never set on it, but soon the Spanish empire became an anachronism, out of step, out of place, breathing its last gasps. It all came to an end when Spain lost its overseas possessions.
But the loss of material possessions produced greatness. It was in this time in Spain that great minds were born and dominated the civilized world, illuminating the four corners of the earth with their thought, poetry, and philosophy, using pen and palette. Modernism would replace the Age of Conquest.
This was conquest just the same; but a finer, higher kind, the triumph of spirit over flesh; the apotheosis of idea over matter. It was Granada regaining its lost grandeur, but this time with an influence more pervasive and lasting because intangible.
When the bells of the Cathedral of León and the Cathedral of Burgos pealed, the echoes reached the farthest corners of the world. Artists and thinkers navigated the horizons of the human mind, on a search for truth. José Ortega y Gasset was followed by Eugenio d’Ors, Gregorio Marañón, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
At the turn of the last century, the world would be astounded by the writings of Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jimenez, José María Gabriel y Galán, and Vicente Medina. Between wars blazed the stars of Juan Larrea, Gerardo Diego, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, and Dámaso Alonso.
Then Rafael Alberti, José Ma. Pemán, Federico García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, and Miguel Hernández made a detour for the popular recreating myths and legends, addressing both the most lettered and the most pastoral. These writers were all an offshoot of Generation of ’98.
Pablo Picasso, father of Cubism and considered, along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, one of the three greatest painters of humankind, should properly belong to Generation of ’98. Salvador Dali, the surrealist “super genius” whose works are “works of genius,” should also properly belong to this generation.
For the past six years, I have lived and worked in Spain as an Augustinian friar and have seen up close and personal the great warmth and extreme kindness of the Spanish people, who think of others first before themselves. I am writing this a year to the day I underwent a life-saving surgery, full of gratitude in my heart for the hospitality and the generosity of the Spanish people, which have sustained me in my long and continuing journey to recovery. Their selflessness exemplifies the nobility of their Iberian roots.
Spain’s greatness did not come crashing down with the collapse of the Spanish empire. The setback simply put Spain to the test in the hot coals of adversity from which it has emerged ever more triumphant as an inextinguishable idea far beyond plus ultra.