Alberto Bernabé
(Huelva, 1946).
Alberto Bernabé is Emeritus Professor of Greek Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has led several research projects on Greek religion, especially Orphism and the cult of Dionysus. He has given courses and lectures in Spanish, European and American institutions and is the author of more than 400 articles and books on Greek and Indo-European linguistics, Greek literature, religion and philosophy in Spanish and foreign publications.
“Poets talk about music: metaphor as an expression of the musical phenomenon.”
In the archaic lyric poems there are a number of passages in which the poet speaks of the way they understand singing, of its necessity and its power, of the effects it produces, and also others in which they lay bare their intimacy as a composer, their awareness of their greater or lesser mastery of the art or the problem of musical and poetic creation as a choice, which can lead to success or failure. Such allusions are metaphorical, poetic images that lyricists associate with music. But they can certainly be far richer and more informative than mere hard data.