Edmundo Benaján (1935-2000)

Benaján was born in Trani, Puglia, on February 12th 1935. On 1940 his family moved into Barcelona, Spain, where he was until 1962. In Barcelona he assisted to a Spanish school, graduated from the Conservatorio Municipal de Música and made several occasional works. From 1962 to 1964 he was in Torino and 1965 he moved to Milano. From 1970 until his death in 2000 he lived in Bologna.

He grew up in a cosmopolitan and laic Jewish family. His father was linotypist and his mother was a hat maker.

Benaján tried all his life, without success, to become a professional composer of classic music. In particular, he was a devote specialist on the Italian barroque period. Corelli (1653-1713) and Monteverdi (1567-1643) were his preferred composers and models, althought he also had preference for less known caractheres of today, like Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643). His compositions, most of them lost, were in many occasions a replica and/or variations of these composers.

It is probably the failure of not becoming a professional composer what pushed Benaján towards the writing, in particular towards poetry. He wrote six books of poetry, all of them unpublished. He also wrote a very long essay on Monteverdi, which again was never published.

From the 1960s onwards he also became a painter. He produced many oil-based works but also other with mixed techniques, specially working on wood, metal and acrylic tinctures.

Work in Progress

Benaján Poetry Works

This is the list of the known poetic works of Benaján which he produced between 1959 and 1984. There are indications that many more were written but I was not able to locate them. There are 5 in total and each one has more or less the same extension, that is, they contain around 30/40 poems each.

Per quanto, puedo? (1959)
Manual para videntes (1967)
Casi, sin que, y música (1970)
Silencio líquido (1975)
Manubrios y barrocos (1984)

We are working at the moment in the compilation and revision of a 'Complete Poetry Works', which will evetually be published in 2011. We are also working in the slow process of collecting all the plastic work (paintings, cartoons, drawings, etc.) which Benaján also produced, specially in his late period in Bologna.

El Falansterio del Tulipán

Benajan was an active member of the ‘Falansterio de Tulipán’, a group of artists, intellectuals and writers who, during the 1970s, were getting together and met regularly in Amsterdam. And it is in this group that Benajan, Ingaramo and Fogaretta, the three diasporic Castilian speakers artists that we are studying, established their first contact.