Biography of Antonio Trueba: – His works in prose always reflect the rural environment of the Basque Country or Castile, aspect that announces the generation of 98. Son of a family of farmers worked in Madrid like dependent of a hardware store.
Later he would be archivist and chronicler of the Senorio de Vizcaya and staunch defender of the fueros of this region. Kind and simple man and self-taught writer, was called in Vizcaya “Anton the Song.”
Biography of Antonio Trueba
- Born:- 24 December 1819, Galdames, Spain
- Died:- 10 March 1889, Bilbao, Spain
- Books:- The Cid Campeador, El Libro de Los Cantares – Scholar’s Choice Edition
Antonio Trueba was linked from the beginning to the group of poets (among them Gustavo Adolfo Becquer) influenced by the German romanticism and that collaborated in the magazine “The Mail of the Fashion”.
See Also: Biography of Frederick Augustus Abel
However, coinciding with Ramón de Campoamor, he sought to overcome romanticism by opposing to national exaltation a social and ethical concern expressed in a popular tone.
This position resulted in the imitation of the oral tradition, made in 1852 in The Book of Songs, which brings poems of simple form and language of praise to the customs of his native province and which influenced Rosalía de Castro, and El Cid Campeador, historical novel that followed the Dove and the hawks (1865), the coat and the jacket (1872) and others.
His moralizing customs, which can be seen in his poems The Book of the Mountains (1868), had its maximum expression in the set of his short stories, among which are Popular Tales (1853), Cuentos de color de rosa (1854) ,Peasant tales (1860), Tales of various colors (1866 ) and Tales of the home (1875).
In The Book of Songs (1852), Antonio Trueba shows with satisfaction his modest position of dependent and self-taught, which justifies the absence of rhetorical complication and literary knowledge, and at the same time praises the garments of natural inspiration that the success of the book would reveal They form the poetry of popular character, in which Trueba takes as chorus a song or copla of those that walk in the mouth of the common.
The song itself gives the theme, which the author broadens, sometimes following the lyrical sense of singing, and more often inventing an action congruent with the feelings of the couplet.
This drama is the one that gives personality to these compositions, many of which could enter into the rhetorical classification of ballads, sometimes of contemporary atmosphere and not few of historical character, although almost always of very recent history.
The romance and the seguidilla are the meters that more frequently it uses. After its publication, the success was immediate and noisy; at that time, attention had not yet been sufficiently fixed in the unexplored quarry of popular singing, and the amplification of Trueba, perhaps by the very origin of the poet, revealed that charm which was soon to be praised by poets and folklorists.
