César Fernández Arias, Ramón Goméz de la Serna / 100 illustrated gregueriás

A greguería is the wildest and most random part of an idea that we have to follow along a path past snakes, ants and woodworms, all the way to happy chance. This is what we have to do - and more - if we want to meet a greguería.

This is one of the thousands of ways Ramón Goméz de la Serna (1888 – 1963), a Spanish avant-garde writer and journalist, defined his invention: a legendary sentence on the edge of a joke, wordplay, an original association and nonsense poetry – a greguería.

In his lifetime he wrote more than ten thousand greguerías and he didn’t consider himself the only writer who thought them up. He found forerunners of greguerías in haiku poets, in sayings and in ancient Arabic-Andalusian poetry. He defined the greguería as humor plus metaphor.

Greguerías are well known in Czech thanks to the interpreter Josef Forelský. However, this is the first time greguerías have been published with the amiable illustrations of César Fernández Arias, the Spanish contemporary sculptor, painter and draftsman (1952). He made them for the Spanish Publishing Company Media Vaca.