Il paesaggio andaluso come metafora in Vicente Núñez e Manuel Alvarez Ortega

Although different from one another, Vicente Núñez and Manuel Álvarez Ortega share both their membership in the Andalusian group of the Generation of ’50 and their use of landscape transfigurations as symbol of their discontent. In their works, natural elements lose the positive connotations traditionally associated with the south of Spain in Spanish poetry. In the verses of Núñez’s Himnos a los árboles, the towering trees are a metaphor for the inhabitants of a small village in the province of Córdoba who neither welcome nor understand the writer. Meanwhile, in Álvarez Ortega’s final trilogy, the desolate and inhospitable landscape conveys, through concrete imagery, the state of mind of a weary and solitary lyrical subject. In both authors’ works, fire emerges as a transformative force that destroys and regenerates, providing the final epilogue of their allegorical phantasmagorias.