The double exile of José Viñals

Exile, since its more usual definitions, refers to the state of being barred from the country in which a person normally lives, generally due to political reasons. Later developments had widened the term beyond the more or less forced geographical displacement. Thus, the category of the internal exiled or outsider came to existence, applied to a person who is excluded from the privileges and powers of his society because of his critical attitude. Both categories could be applied to the Spanish-Argentinean poet José Viñals (Córdoba, Argentina, 1930-Málaga, 2009), the son of recent Spanish emigrants particularly his father, arrived to Argentina from Spain under Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship few years before his birth. Viñals repeated this journey in the opposite direction in 1979, attempting to avoid the hazards of Videla’s military dictatorship and getting settled in Spain ever since until his death. The situation of Spanish poetry he found at his arrival, with its scene dominated by approaches that proposed a normalized poetical expression in a surprising twist produced after the transition to democracy, meant for him the other side of exile. The poetry then legitimated, conservative in its expression, anchored in referentiality and contentious towards modernity’s artistic accomplishments, relegated his and other remarkable poets’ work alien to that approach, to a peripheral situation of sporadic critical attantion.