Alfonso Reyes Biography and List of Works

Prolific literary critic, scholar, poet, and diplomat, one of the leading essayist from Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. Reyes deeply influenced an entire generation of writers in his native land and elsewhere in Latin America. The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges considered him the greatest prose writer in Spanish in any era. Reyes lived many years outside of Mexico. His impressionistic sketches and serious studies reveal his extensive knowledge of the classic Greco-Roman world and the multiple cultural heritage of his own country.

"Mexico is at once a world of mystery and clarity: in her landscape, mystery in the souls of he people."

Alfonso Reyes was born in Monterrey. His father, General Bernardo Reyes, was governor of the state of Nuevo León. Reyes was educated in Monterrey and in Mexico City where he attended National Preparatory School. In 1912 he co founded the School of Higher Studies, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and was its secretary. With the Dominican Republic critic Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), Antonio Caso, and José Vasconcelos he founded the Ateneo de la Juventud (Atheneum of Youth) literary society, which had a strong influence in Mexican intellectual life. Reyes was also part of the Centennial Generation lecture society.

Reyes started to publish verse in 1906. At the age of 21 Reyes published his first book, Cuestiones estéticas, a collection of essays. It gained an immediate success. Visión de Anáhuac (1917) was a colourful, poetic description of the ancient city of Mexico, Tenochtitlan, which amazed the Spanish invaders. Reyes's vision of the capital offers for the reader insights on the relationship between the ancient and the modern.

In 1913 Reyes received a law degree. After the death of his father he went to France as Undersecretary of the Mexican legation and began his career in the diplomatic service. Following the German invasion of Paris in 1914 he moved to Spain and studied in Madrid under Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968). Reyes earned his living as a translator and editor of the cultural section of the newspaper El Sol. As a classical scholar, Reyes remained somewhat apart from all literary movements. He upheld aesthetic value as an intangible absolute towards which it is a duty to strive. He also could combine classics with topical issues as in 'Discurso por Virgilio' (1933), touched government's wine-growing policies.

Ifigenia cruel (1924) is among Reyes's most famous poetic masterpieces. It was based on the myth of Iphigenia at Tauris. According to the story, Iphigenia was carried by Artemis (Diana) to Tauris just before she was meant to be sacrificed. There she became the priestess of the goddess. A new twist in the story is that the heroine has lost her memory. She tries to find her true identity and break the cycle of violence that afflicts her family.

From 1920 to 1924 Reyes was the first secretary of the Mexican legation in Spain. In the mid-1920s he was a diplomat in Paris and from 1927 Mexican ambassador to Argentina and Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro Reyes published Monterrey literary bulletin. When Reyes returned in 1939 to Mexico City he was named president of the House of Spain - the forerunner of the College of Mexico, a cultural research centre. Reyes was awarded the National Prize for Arts and Letters in 1945. Although he was a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, the prize eluded him despite lobbying by Borges, Bioy, and Ocampo.

During the early years of World War II Reyes worked as a professor at the College of St. Nicholas, Morelia, Michoacán, and the National Autonomous University. Reyes's four lessons at College of St. Nicholas were collected in El deslinde (1944), his most developed contribution to the science of literary theory with La experiencia literaria (1942). Reyes made in it a distinction between pure literature and service literature, which has extrinsic purposes. In 1945 Reyes co founded El Colegio Nacional, which offered series of lectures in the arts and the sciences open to the general public. He was the honorary president of Fédération des Alliances Francaises and in 1957 he was elected director of Mexican Academy of the Language. Reyes died of a heart attack in Mexico City on December 27, 1959. His epitaph was:

"Aquí yace un hijo menor de la Palabra." - A small child of the Word lies here

Reyes was appreciated for his stylistic versatility and ranked among the finest in 20th-century Spanish America. Octavio Paz has said that Reyes transformed the anecdote in a literary genre. In his essays Reyes sought to reconcile and blend the cultures of pre-Columbian and modern-day Mexico. He saw that the discovery and cultivation of the uniquely Mexican cultural and artistic values are essential to the expressions of a universal national culture. In 'Notas sobre la inteligencia Americana' (1937) and 'Posición de América' (1942) he presented a cultural synthesis that would fuse Old World and Native American values. Central theme in Reyes work from his youth was the search for Mexican identity and the influence of the Spanish conquistadors and culture on the history of his country.

Reyes translated Robert Louis Stevenson, G.K. Chesterton, Anton Chekhov, and Jules Romains. His translation of the Iliad (La Ilíada) appeared in 1951. Reyes also edited a number of scholarly editions of such writers as Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracián, Lope de Vega, and Amado Nervo. Reyes's publications of classical criticism ranges from Socrates to the Hellenistic philosophers and from Homer and Virgil to the essence of Greek tragedy.

For further reading: Alfonso Reyes ensayista by M. Olguín (1956); Patterns of Image and Structure in the Essays of Alfonso Reyes by James Willis Robb (1958); España en la obra de Alfonso Reyes by Héctor Perea (1965); El estilo de Alfonso Reyes by James Willis Robb (1965); In Quest of Identity by M.S. Stabb (1967); Estudios sobre Alfonso Reyes by James Willis Robb (1976); Genio y figura de Alfonso Reyes by Alicia Reyes (1976); Alfonso Reyes et la France by Paulette Patout (1978); Alfonso Reyes, ed. by Margarita Vera Cuspinera (1981); Comiendo con Reyes by Luis Cepeda Adán, and others (1986); Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, edited by Stephen Tapscott (1996)

Los poemas rústicos de Manuel José Othón, (1910)