Midnight

Although highly respected within Spain as an author, public intellectual, and cultural provocateur, Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) is little known outside his native country. This edition will help remedy this by presenting the first English translation of Valle-Inclán’s innovative First World War chronicle, accompanied by a critical introduction that situates the author within the central concerns of European modernism. A remarkable innovator, who wrote poetry, novels, drama, essays, and art criticism, Valle-Inclán was a strong influence on a generation of literary and visual artists, and his work is in conversation with the literary experimentation of modernists such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.

Midnight is a powerful account of Valle-Inclán’s experiences on the Western Front in 1916. From a distant, all-encompassing perspective, what Valle-Inclán refers to as ‘astral vision’, the Poet who ‘deserves to be called Seer’ creates out of the devastating fragments that characterize individual experience of war a view of the whole, outside of time and space. Midnight’s distillation of experience brings into sharp relief the horrors of war and the suffering of those caught up in it.

Valle-Inclán’s desire to disengage experience from its fragmentary expression in language, and to observe from a position of cosmic omniscience, along with the theosophical underpinnings of his aesthetics, inspired literary innovations that ensure his place among the foremost modernists of Europe and the Americas.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Drumm is John B. and Elizabeth M. Yeon Professor of Spanish and Humanities at Reed College, Portland.