• Spain’s forgotten literary star from a turbulent age is rescued from oblivion

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/06/spains-forgotten-literary-star-maria-teresa-leon-from-a-turbulent-age-i

    Towards the end of a long life that was more eventful, more peripatetic and more exquisitely chronicled than most, #María_Teresa_León came to a painful conclusion.

    “Living,” wrote the Spanish author and anti-fascist activist, “isn’t as important as remembering. What a horror to have nothing to remember; to leave nothing behind you but blank tape.”

    The lines are from León’s 1970 autobiography, Memoria de la Melancolía (Memory of Melancholy), which has been republished to mark its 50th anniversary and to rekindle interest in a writer whose literary achievements have all too often been overshadowed by those of her second husband, the poet Rafael Alberti.

    Along with Federico García Lorca, Ernestina de Champourcín, Pedro Salinas, Rosa Chacel and Vicente Aleixandre, León and Alberti belonged to the so-called Generation of ’27, named after the year the avant garde literary group met.