Archibald MacLeish, The Silent Slain. A propòsit d’Archibald MacLeish i Marià Manent

Abstract

Based on the analysis of the poem The Silent Slain by the American Archibald MacLeish, the aim of the paper is to make a concrete approach to the expression of war in 20th century Western poetry and to the use of the heroic medieval literary past, its presentification. Two critical perspectives are combined: the discourses on the epic and its realist component (György Lukács, Emil Staiger and Erich Auerbach), and the analysis of sensations and phenomenology that has sought veracity in the expression of the real. The paper considers Marià Manent, MacLeish’s most prominent translator into Catalan, as well as the different readings that the Catalan poet made of the American, their coincidences and their divergences in relation to the concreteness of the image. Finally, a figural reading is proposed, as suggested by Auerbach, of The Silent Slain, contextualized in a time oriented and marked by war.