Gerardo Diego's Creation Myth of Music

Since its publication nearly eight decades ago, the consensus among scholars about Fábula de Equis y Zeda, by the Spanish poet Gerardo Diego (1896-1987) remains unchanged: Fábula is an enigmatic avant-garde curiosity. It seems to rob the reader of the reason necessary to interpret it, even as it lures him or her ineluctably to the task; nevertheless, the present study makes the case that this work is, in fact, not inaccessible, and that what the anhelante arquitecto, intended with his masterpiece was a creation myth that explains the evolution of music in his day. This monograph unlocks the fullness of the poem-s meaning sourced in music's mythical consciousness and expressed in a poetic idiom that replicates aesthetic concepts and cubist strategies of form embraced by the neoclassical composers Bartok, Falla, Ravel, and Stravinsky.

Judith Stallings-Ward is Associate Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at Norwich University, where she currently serves as Spanish Program director. She received her PhD from Yale University. She specializes in twentieth-century Spanish poetry as well as Cervantes. She has published extensively on the Vermont poems of Federico García Lorca, the inter-art relations in the poetry of Gerardo Diego, Cervantes's Don Quixote, and the anarchism of Gandhi and Durruti.

Introduction PART I Foundations of Diego's Creation Myth Chapter 1 Three Guiding Questions Chapter 2 Theory and Criticism Chapter 3 Manual de espumas as Incubator of Fábula PART II Fábula de Equis y Zeda Chapter 4 The Framework Chapter 5 "Brindis" Chapter 6 "Exposición" Chapter 7 "Amor" Chapter 8 "Desenlace" Conclusion