Roy Campbell. He was a South African poet, satirist, translator, and Hispanicist. During the Spanish Civil War, he saved from destruction the manuscripts of San Juan de la Cruz , which had been entrusted to him by the Carmelite friars of Toledo before being martyred.
Biographical synthesis
He was born on 2 October as as 1901 in Durban, South Africa .
He studied at Durban High School and became fond of literature in his early years. He was a horse trainer, a fisherman and was fluent in Zulu. In 1918 he tried to enroll at the University of Oxford although he did not study there.
Passionate about Spain and admirer of all things Spanish, he fought with the armies of General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War .
In 1921 he married Mary Margaret Garman, with whom he had two daughters, Tess and Anna Campbell.
Roy Campbell died in Setúbal, Portugal , on April 22 , 1957 in a traffic accident.
Work
He achieved success with the epic-satirical poem La tortuga en llamas, 1924 . During the Spanish Civil War he worked as a correspondent for the London newspaper The Tablet in the national zone, for whose cause he assiduously apologized. He was the author of multiple collections of poems such as Adamastor ( 1930 ) and El fusil flowered ( 1933 ), a consequence of his war experience in Spain , and translated works by San Juan de la Cruz and Federico García Lorca into English . An anthological edition of his poetry was published in 1949 .
