Ernestina de Champourcín
[4] Around the age of 10, Champourcín moved, together with the rest of the family, to Madrid, where she was enrolled in the College of the Sacred Heart, received private tuition, and was examined as a free high school student.
Later, she would use this knowledge of languages to work as a translator for the Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica, for about fifteen years (during which she stopped publishing poetry), even though her role as a translator is less well known in literary circles[5] Her love of reading and the cultured family atmosphere brought her into contact with the greats of universal literature from a very young age, and she grew up with the books of Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, Vigny, Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Verlaine and the great Castilian mystics, John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Jesus.
[4] Like the vast majority of writers of her generation, the first witnesses of her poetic work are loose poems published from 1923 in various magazines of the time, such as Manantial, Cartagena Ilustrada o La Libertad.
[4] In 1926, Maria de Maeztu and Concha Méndez founded the Lyceum Club Femenino, with a view to bringing women together and encouraging unity, so that they could help each other in the struggle to find a role in the cultural and social affairs of their time.
[6] Through her acquaintance with him she also got in touch with some of the members of the Generation of '27: Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas and Vicente Aleixandre.
An evolution in her work can be discovered from an initial modernism in the shadow of Juan Ramón Jiménez to a more personal poetry marked by the theme of love wrapped in a rich passion.
[2][6] In 1930, while doing activities at the Lyceum Club Femenino, alongside other intellectuals of the Second Spanish Republic, she met Juan José Domenchina, poet and personal secretary of Manuel Azaña, whom she married on 6 November 1936.
However, this work represents an important milestone in the literature written by women, as the author uses a narrator-protagonist to provide a fine analysis of the upbringing, education and socialization of bourgeois girls in the first decades of the 20th century.
During this time she worked as a translator for the Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica and an interpreter for the "Association of Technical Staff of International Conferences".
[4] However, her stay in Mexico was eventually to be one of her most fruitful stages, and she published Presencia a oscuras (1952), Cárcel de los sentidos (1960) and El nombre que me diste (1960) during this period.
[3] Her mentor, Juan Ramón Jiménez, worked as a cultural attaché at the Spanish embassy in the United States, and other members of the group of 27 also went into exile to America, such as was the case of Emilio Prados and Luis Cernuda.
Ernestina's husband, Juan José Domenchina, did not adapt to her new life as an exile, and died prematurely in 1959;[5] she, for her part, came to have strong feelings of union with this new "homeland".
[14] The stage of the poetry of the memory of love (1974–1991) begins with her return from exile, at which time new concerns arose for the author: namely to be able to adapt to her new situation, and to be reunited with places both known and unrecognizable.
