The conquest of collectivity through a memory with transformative potential: Al fondo de la escena (2011), by María Teresa Cervantes

Abstract

The recent publication of the complete works of María Teresa Cervantes, edited by Fran Garcerá with a prologue by Francisco Díaz de Castro, by Torremozas publishing house, represents a valuable rescue of her extensive poetic career. This volume of almost a thousand pages covers a large part of the first decades of the 21st century, showing that Cervantes' poetic work intensified beyond the 1950s and 1960s, when she was linked to the mid-century generation. Her poetry is characterised by a personal commitment in the face of an unfavourable present for women poets, similar to that of contemporaries such as Carmen Conde, Concha Lagos and María Beneyto. Her voluntary exile to Paris and Germany, escaping from an oppressive family environment, influenced her style and led her to adopt an outsider's perspective. His training in languages and his experience of the 1968 revolution enriched his later work with reflections of universal scope. From first years of the XXIst century, her poetry was oriented towards the memory of youth and homeland, undertaking a recovery of the past in order to understand the present in an elegiac key and through notions of experientiality from a phenomenological perspective. This paper analyses Al fondo de la escena (2011) from the perspective of remembrance as collective memory, underlining the need to re-evaluate Cervantes within literary historiography in order to avoid new exclusions.