Aurora de Albornoz
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Aurora de Albornoz was born in Luarca, Asturias, Spain, in 1926. As a youth, she lived in Luarca with her parents, sister, and extended family, throughout the duration of the Spanish Civil War—1936 to 1939; an event that informed her later poetry.
Her family was a noted family of poets and politicians. Her grandfather and father were well known local poets. Her father’s uncle, Alvaro de Albornoz, was the minister of the Department of Justice of the Republican government of Spain until the Civil War. Eventually, he became the president of the Republican government of Spain in exile in Paris and Mexico that was superseded by Franco’s dictatorship. In 1959, her uncle, Severo Ochoa de Albornoz (who had fled Spain on a Republican passport) while living and working in the United States, was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for deciphering RNA.
Her family had been involved in business in Puerto Rico since the 1890’s. In 1944, de Albornoz at 18 years old, moved with the de Albornoz household to San Juan. There she began her formal academic education which led to taking an M.A. from the University of Puerto Rico. At that time, she was studying under the tutelage of the Puerto Rican Nobel Laureate, Juan Ramón Jiménez.
In August, 1950, de Albornoz married Jorge Enjuto Bernal, of Andalusia in Puerto Rico. Like de Albornoz, Bernal was from a Republican affiliated family living outside of Spain. Bernal’s father, Federico Enjuto Ferrán was the Republican magistrate of justice who was involved in the trying of General Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, the Fascist party in Spain. (After living together in Puerto Rico, a short time in Kansas, and Paris, the marriage would dissolve in 1967.)
Also at this time she began teaching. In 1955, she was awarded a scholarship to study comparative literature at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris.
From 1955 to 1957, de Albornoz returned to Europe to continue her studies in Paris with José Bergamín, a celebrated Spanish poet and critic living in exile. She then proceeded to Spain, to complete her doctorate at the University of Salamanca. De Albornoz’s scholarly work was committed almost exclusively to the escritores exiliados of Spain.
Among other publications, in 1961, de Albornoz published, in Puerto Rico, “The Prehistory of Antonio Machado” a compilation of Machado’s war poems which was banished work not allowed to be published in Franco’s Spain (Machado himself having died in exile in 1939 in Collioure, France).
Upon receiving her degree in 1966, she returned to Puerto Rico to become a professor at the University of Puerto Rico.
Around 1968, de Albornoz returned to Madrid where she taught at the University Autónoma (Department of Humanities) and at the University of New York in Spain. Besides professor and poet, Albornoz was by now a celebrated scholar. She had become a critical authority on the works of Miguel de Unamuno, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Rosalía de Castro, Federico García Lorca; and particularly Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and José Hierro. As already stated, her interest naturally extended into the work of exiled Spanish poets such as José Bergamín in Paris, Rafael Alberti in Argentina, and León Felipe and Juan Rejano in Mexico.
She was a permanent member on the board of judges for the International Antonio Machado Prize given every year in Collioure, France.
Throughout Spain—and in America, as well––de Albornoz taught many courses, participated in many congresses, colloquiums, and writer’s meetings; she collaborated toward cultural activities that dealt with scholarship and writing—such as the founding of journals, magazines, newspapers, radio programs, awards, and literary groups.
De Albornoz was called upon to introduce, preside, or read with emerging Spanish voices such as Claudio Rodríguez, José Manuel Caballero Bonald, José Ramón Ripoll, Fanny Rubio, Alvaro Salvador, the Cuban scholar José Olivio Jiménez, Juan Macías, Dionisio Cañas, and Luis García Montero.
June 6, 1990, Aurora de Albornoz, at 64 years old, died in her apartment in Madrid. She was struck down by a cerebral hemorrhage.
Besides a vast amount of critical work in books, anthologies, and newspapers, de Albornoz had published eleven books of poetry. She was an innovative poet who incorporated prose poems, collage, and other modernistic techniques into her work. Her style has connections to the general movement of Spanish writing toward “fantastic realism.” Her work is of particular interest as she spans through the Civil War, the Generation of ‘50, and the following generations giving voice to the experience of the exiliados… the exiles.
