José Cadalso, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

José Cadalso

Colonel of the Royal Spanish Army, author, poet, playwright and essayist

Date of Birth: 08-Oct-1741

Place of Birth: Cádiz, Andalusia, Spain

Date of Death: 26-Feb-1782

Profession: writer, poet, military officer

Nationality: Spain

Zodiac Sign: Libra


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About José Cadalso

  • José de Cadalso y Vázquez (Cádiz, 1741 – Gibraltar, 1782), Spanish, Colonel of the Royal Spanish Army, author, poet, playwright and essayist, one of the canonical producers of Spanish Enlightenment literature.
  • Before completing his twentieth year, Cadalso had traveled through Italy, Germany, England, France and Portugal, and he had studied the history and literature of these countries.
  • On his return to Spain he entered the army and rose to the rank of colonel. Cadalso was the embodiment of the Enlightenment ideal of the "hombre de bien", a learned and well-rounded citizen whose multitude of interests could be utilized to improve society.
  • He was a central figure in the literary landscape of eighteenth-century Spain, especially in the tertulia held at the Fonda de San Sebastián.
  • He influenced a number of Spanish authors, not least among them a young and talented Juan Meléndez Valdés. His first published work was a verse tragedy, Don Sancho García, Conde de Castilla (1771).
  • In 1772, he published his Los Eruditos a la Violeta, a commercially successful prose satire on the obsession with superficial knowledge and the appearance of erudition.
  • In 1773 appeared a volume of miscellaneous poems, Ocios de mi juventud. Cadalso is best known for his Cartas marruecas, an epistolary novel published posthumously by the "Correo de Madrid" in 1789 and as a book in 1793.
  • The Cartas marruecas have often been compared to Montesquieu's, (1689–1755), own Lettres Persanes, (Persian Letters, 1721), although in reality both works represented the period's fascination with epistolary narrative.
  • Cartas Marruecas and Noches lúgubres are often considered his best works, although they are stylistically and thematically different. Whereas Cartas marruecas is a rational, multi-perspectivistic examination of Spanish society through the eyes of a young Moroccan, Noches lúgubres (“Lugubrious Nights”), is a short prose work centered on a mourning protagonist's desire to disinter his dead lover, and was published from 1789 to 1790 in the journal El correo de Madrid.
  • The later work was inspired by the death of his close friend, holding amorously her dying body, actress María Ignacia Ibáñez, (1745 – April 1771, aged 26). This work, along with a number of Cadalso's anguished lyrical compositions, are considered an antecedent of Romanticism in Spain, if not fully Romantic in their own right.
  • A good edition of his works appeared at Madrid, in 3 vols., 1823.
  • This is supplemented by the Obras inéditas (Paris, 1894) published by R.
  • Foulch-Delbosc. Cadalso was killed at the Great Siege of Gibraltar, on 27 February 1782, just 15 days after being promoted to Colonel.
  • He has a tomb in Saint Mary the Crowned Church in San Roque.

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