Time symbolism in Garba, by José Moreno Villa

Abstract

In 1913, feeling the European uneasy spirits due to the threatening closeness of the Great War’s outbreak, the first collection/poem book of José Moreno Villa (poet and painter who stands in between Modernism and Avant-gardes at the beginning of the XX century of the Spanish literature) appears published with the title of Garba. This work has been considered to be a modernist book of youth, inside a Modernism «a la andaluza,» conceiving Modernism as a syncretic «movement», hybrid from different trends, from Parnasianism to Symbolism, suffering from the decadentism of the fin de siècle’s fits. In a general sense, however, Garba can be seen as a work of its times in its European context, a work proper to a historical and social moment of crisis in the traditional values and changes in time perceptions. Without forgetting about its Spanish context, this short analysis has the aim of highlighting the unity of the work as a whole, a unity which is based on a cyclical structure close to the time perception of Nature —against mechanized time—, trying to break free from that alienated feeling which the industrialization of the beginning of the century conveys. Therefore, Garba may be seen as a work which reflects all the concerns about time perception which other contemporary authors were suffering far beyond the Spanish frontiers.