Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile by Raphael Alberti

At the age of 10, he entered the Jesuit-run Colegio San Luis Gonzaga as a charity day-boy. This sense of belonging to a “bourgeois family now in decline” was to become an enduring theme in his mature poetry. As a result, Alberti’s father was no more than a commercial traveller for the company, always away on business, as the general agent for Spain for brands of sherry and brandy that had, before, only been exported to the UK. However, at some point, while they were handing down the business to the next generation, bad management resulted in the bodegas being sold to the Osbornes. Both of his grandfathers were Italian one of his grandmothers was from Huelva, the other from Ireland. Alberti was born there in 1902, to a family of vintners who had once been the most powerful in town, suppliers of sherry to the crowned heads of Europe. The Puerto de Santa María at the mouth of the Guadalete River on the Bay of Cádiz was, as now, one of the major distribution outlets for the sherry trade from Jerez de la Frontera.

He published his memoirs under the title of La Arboleda perdida (‘The Lost Grove’) in 1959 and this remains the best source of information on his early life.

On his return to Spain after the death of Franco, he was named Hijo Predilecto de Andalucía in 1983 and Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad de Cádiz in 1985.

After the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile because of his Marxist beliefs. He is considered one of the greatest literary figures of the so-called Silver Age of Spanish Literature, and he won numerous prizes and awards. Rafael Alberti Merello (16 December 1902 – 28 October 1999) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27.

Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile by Raphael Alberti