A Comparative History of Literatures in The Iberian Peninsula - Fernando Aseguinolaza

A CompArAtive History of LiterAtures
in tHe iberiAn peninsuLA

voLume i
A CompArAtive History of LiterAtures in europeAn LAnGuAGes
sponsoreD by tHe internAtionAL CompArAtive LiterAture AssoCiAtion
Histoire CompArÉe Des LittÉrAtures De LAnGues europÉennes
sous Les AuspiCes De L’AssoCiAtion internAtionAL De LittÉrAture CompArÉe
Coordinating Committee for

A Comparative History of Literatures in european Languages
Comité de Coordination de
l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues européennes
2007
President/Président
randolph pope (university of virginia)
Vice-President/Vice-Président
Daniel f. Chamberlain (Queen’s university, Kingston)
Secretary/Secrétaire
margaret Higonnet (university of Connecticut)
Treasurer/Trésorier
vivian Liska (university of Antwerp)
Members/Membres assesseurs
Jean bessière, inôcencia mata,
fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, marcel Cornis-pope,
elrud ibsch, eva Kushner,
fridrun rinner, Laura Calvacante padilha,
franca sinopoli, steven sondrup,
svend eric Larsen, Cynthia skenazi
Volume XXIV
A Comparative History of Literatures in the iberian peninsula. volume i
edited by fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Anxo Abuín Gonzalez and César Domínguez
A CompArAtive History
of LiterAtures
in tHe iberiAn peninsuLA
voLume i
edited by
fernAnDo CAbo AseGuinoLAZA

AnXo Abuín GonZALeZ
CÉsAr DomínGueZ
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
JoHn benJAmins pubLisHinG CompAny

AmsterDAm/pHiLADeLpHiA
TM he paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American national
8
standard for information sciences — permanence of paper for printed Library materials,
Ansi Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A comparative history of literatures in the iberian peninsula / edited by fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza,
Anxo Abuín Gonzalez and César Domínguez.
v. cm. -- (Comparative history of literatures in european languages ; v. 24)
includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Discourses on iberian literary history -- he iberian peninsula as a literary space -- he mul-
tilingual literary space of the iberian peninsula -- Dimensions of orality -- temporal frames and literary
(inter-)systems.
1. iberian peninsula--Literatures--History and criticism. i. Cabo Aseguinolaza, fernando. ii. Abuín Gon-
zalez, Anxo. iii. Domínguez, César.
pn849.i24C66 2010
860.09--dc22 2009051900
ISBN 978 90 272 3457 5 (hB ; alk. paper)
ISBN 978 90 272 8839 4 (eB) Cip
© 2010 - John benjamins b.v./Association internationale de Littérature Comparée
no part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microilm, or any other means, without written
permission from the publisher.
John benjamins publishing Co. • p.o.box 36224 • 1020 me Amsterdam • he netherlands
John benjamins north America • p.o.box 27519 • philadelphia pA 19118-0519 • usA
Table of contents
Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages ix

Introduction xi
Section I. Discourses on Iberian literary history

Coordinators: Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and César Domínguez
he European horizon of Peninsular literary historiographical discourses 1
Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza
Historiography and the geo-literary imaginary. he Iberian Peninsula: Between
Lebensraum and espace vécu 53
César Domínguez
Section II. he Iberian peninsula as a literary space

Coordinator: Sharon Feldman
Introduction: he Iberian Peninsula as a literary space 133
Sharon Feldman
Identitarian projections: Between isolationism and reintegrationism

he hidden history of tripartite Iberianism 138
homas Harrington
On Lusism and Lusofonia: From identitarian reinforcement to the mapping of
diference 163
Laura Cavalcante Padilha
Travel writing 183
Luis Fernández Cifuentes
Cities, cultural centers and enclaves

Empires waxing and waning: Castile, Spain and American exceptionalism 211
Michael Ugarte
vi Table of contents
Bilbao and the literary system in the Basque Country 222

Jon Kortazar
Contemporary Catalan literature: Fact or friction? 237
Dominic Keown and Jordi Larios
Literary and cultural productions centers in Galicia (1848–1936) 253
Anxo Tarrío Varela
Cities, cultural centers, and peripheries. From Iberia to Africa: he construction of
a literary city 268
Inocência Mata
Southern Spain 278
Lee Fontanella
he Canaries: Between mythical space and global drit 290
Bertrand Westphal
Insulated voices looking for the world: Narratives from Atlantic Islands (Cabral de
Nascimento, João Varela, and João de Melo) 309
Ana Salgueiro Rodrigues
Section III. Multilingualism and literature in the Iberian Peninsula

Coordinator: Ángel López García
Introduction: Multilingualism and literature in the Iberian Peninsula 325
Ángel López García
Bilingualism and diglossia in Medieval Iberia (350–1350) 333
Roger Wright
he impact of Arabic diglossia among the Muslims, Jews and Christians of
Al-Andalus 351
María Ángeles Gallego
he Jewish literature in Medieval Iberia 366
Mariano Gómez-Aranda
he Latin language, a European linguistic continuum. he Hispanic-Portuguese
contribution 386
José María Estellés González y F. Jorge Pérez y Durà
Galician-Portuguese as a literary language in the Middle Ages 396
Graça Videira Lopes
Castilian and Portuguese in the sixteenth century 413
Ángel Marcos de Dios
Table of contents vii
Literary language and diatopic variation: Catalan literary cultures 429

Vicent Salvador
Basque as a literary language 445
Karmele Rotaetxe
Ideology and image of Peninsular languages in Spanish literature 456
Fernando Romo Feito
Section IV. Dimensions of orality

Coordinator: Paloma Díaz-Mas
Introduction to Dimensions of orality 475
Paloma Díaz-Mas
Comparativism and orality: Critical approaches to the ballads of La boda estorbada
(he thwarted marriage) 478
Paloma Díaz-Mas
Epic and ballad in the Hispanic tradition 502
Samuel G. Armistead
he traditional Iberian lyric of the Middle Ages and the Golden Age. A comparative
view 510
Margit Frenk
Linguistic borders and oral transmission 536
José Luis Forneiro
Iberian traditions of international folktale 553
José Manuel Pedrosa
Literature and new forms of orality: Invisible realities 562
Luis Díaz G. de Viana
Section V. Temporal frames and literary (inter-)systems

Coordinator: Fernando Gómez Redondo
Introduction: Temporal frames and literary (inter-)systems 575
Fernando Gómez Redondo
Building a literary model: Prose in the court of Alfonso X (1252–84) 582
Literature at the crossroads of politics: Spain and Portugal, 1580 595
Tobias Brandenberger
viii Table of contents
he court of the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1504), or the break in the equilibrium

among Peninsular languages 601
Víctor de Lama de la Cruz
heatrical repertoire models in Portugal: conlict and circulation (1737–93) 614
Raquel Bello Vázquez
he Spanish literary system in the nineteenth century 630
Leonardo Romero Tobar
he dialogue of Iberian literary nationalisms 641
José-Carlos Mainer
he shiting systems for literary creation in the novel during the transition and
democracy (1975–82) 653
Randolph D. Pope
References 665
Index 727
Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages
In 1967 the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) launched this series of
volumes on the “Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages” (CHLEL), under
supervision of an international coordinating committee of sixteen scholars. Its purpose is to
publish comparative historical studies, each directed by an international team of editors. As its
title indicates, the charge of this committee concerns literatures in European languages, includ-
ing the difusion of literary movements in those languages through regions outside Europe
— for example, in colonial and post-colonial literatures. he CHLEL coordinating committee
serves as a review board that aims to foster the coherence as well as the innovativeness of each
of the volumes produced. As in the ICLA, the primary working languages of the series have
been English and French, although one volume on the Enlightenment appeared in German.
Ater seven volumes were published with Akadémiai Kiadó in Budapest, John Benjamins Pub-
lishing Company has continued publication of the series.
his ongoing project started from two premises laid out by Henry H. H. Remak in his pref-
ace to the early volumes. First of all, traditional literary histories conined to speciic nations,
peoples, or languages, should be complemented by comparative history that studies literary
phenomena from a broadly international point of view. Literary movements present a process
of international give and take, while also expressing the speciicities of local cultural entities.
he work of CHLEL is therefore multilinguistic and intercultural. Second, since it is almost im-
possible for individual scholars to write such comprehensive histories, the editorial committee
calls on structured teams drawing collaborators from diferent nations, to address transnational
and interdisciplinary topics. Some projects have required several volumes, in order to provide
as wide an overview as feasible of interrelated currents.
he initial long-term undertaking of this comparative literary history was to examine pe-
riods or movements that display related stylistic experiences and engage in lively intercultural
exchange and transformations of forms and ideas. As comparatists, literary historians observe
phenomena such as genres, themes, styles, narrative structures and reception that low across
national boundaries. Aiming not only at truly comparative analyses but also at innovation in
their historical methodology, project directors have sought to move beyond the focus of tradi-
tional histories on canonical authors or dominant genres. In part through reception study, they
have interrogated stock conceptualizations of periods by recognizing time lags in movements,
shits in sensibility, or the variegated rise of nationalistic programs. Attention has been given
to “minor” literatures and marginalized phenomena that take on greater resonance when ex-
amined across cultures, such as folklore or the intersections between colonial literatures and
indigenous cultures in non-European countries. Even with forty to one hundred collaborators
working on a project, the goal has never been complete coverage. Instead, it has been to ofer
syntheses built on exemplary analyses, and to explore sites of exchange and dialogue. Examples
of our sub-series devoted to periods are two volumes on twentieth-century avant-gardes, two
volumes on Modernism, ive volumes on Romanticism, two volumes on the Enlightenment,
and four volumes devoted to the Renaissance.
x Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages
Starting in 1986, the second structural orientation of the series has been to explore the sig-
niicance of regional determinants, leading to subseries on Africa, the Caribbean, East Central
Europe, Iberia, and Scandinavia, each in several volumes. he multiplicity of languages in these
regions, which may relect competing imperialisms, colonizations or diasporic movements of
peoples, ofers opportunities to study the lowering of diglossia and the signiicance of transna-
tional literatures such as Latin, Arabic, or Hebrew. Editors of regional studies have used fresh
metaphoric models to conceptualize geo-temporal dimensions, to devise pluralistic methods,
and to renovate our delimitation of the object of study. hey have sought to unsettle hierarchies
of value anchored in socio-political biases, in order trace correspondences, censorships, cre-
olizations, and intercultural conlicts.
Each volume takes into account changing scholarly conceptions of the literary and of the
methods of history. Current projects therefore also focus on the problematic concepts in our
toolkit. With the coordinating committee’s help, each CHLEL project designs the methodol-
ogy pertinent to its subject. heir comparative approaches have highlighted formal as well as
thematic analogies and contrasts, historical contexts as well as cross-disciplinary links, and
diachronic as well as synchronic connections. heir research methods have drawn on the entire
range in practice today, adapting trends such as New Criticism, structuralism, hermeneutics,
deconstruction, reception theory, New Historicism, gender studies, post-colonial theories, in-
terart studies, and studies of orality. Further information about this series can be found at our
internet sites:
http://www.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CHLEL
http://icla.byu.edu/www/association/publications.html
http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=CHLEL
Margaret R. Higonnet
University of Connecticut
Introduction
In June of 2004 the Coordinating Committee for a Comparative History of Literatures in Euro-
pean Languages (International Comparative Literature Association) deinitively approved the
design for a Comparative History of the Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, the irst volume
of which now comes to light. his proposal, irst put forward through the eforts of Darío Vil-
lanueva, was later backed by the concession, and development, of various research projects led
by Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza at the Area of Literary heory and Comparative Literature at
the University of Santiago de Compostela. We are deeply grateful for the early contributions
made by its members.
Since the very outset, the editors clearly understood the necessity of setting in motion a
comparative history that would break with the old nineteenth-century historiographic models
as much in methodology as in the selection and delimitation of an object of study. hus, the
project was conceived with the collaboration of a wide range of comparatists and literary schol-
ars who were aware of the fundamental principles underlying such an efort. he point of depar-
ture was an explicit renunciation of those chronologically organic and narratively omniscient
histories which attempt to cover all ields and periods. In the degree in which it was possible,
the distinctive sections would have to possess a character particular to Peninsular comparat-
ism. Additionally, the authors of each chapter endeavored to consider the diferent Peninsular
literary traditions when it came time to approach each of the questions to be treated. Ideally,
this starting point would produce a novel and attractive approximation, one that paid special
attention to the geo-literary dimension of the phenomena making up the object of study. It was
of course advisable to shy away from an approach that considered each chapter to be an all-en-
compassing panorama. he objective was not so much to trace an exhaustive itinerary through
the diferent literatures, from their origins up to the present, but rather to present a particular
situation in order to reveal a fundamental factor in the understanding of the Iberian Peninsula
as a complex and dynamic framework of interliterary relations. At times, the most operative
strategy was to focus on one or more particularly enlightening cases, always procuring that the
reader possessed, in two volumes, enough information to navigate comfortably through the
network of interconnections which make up a literary history – that of the Iberian Peninsula –
which, if not exactly shared, are nonetheless beholden to the convergence/divergence dialectic.
he result is in the reader’s hands today. A comprehension of its scope will be more pro-
found if, as it has been said, it is placed within the great historiographical shit towards a spatial
or geographic paradigm, which takes shape in a process of regionalization of the object of study
– a tendency already present, in a way, in the series of volumes published by the AILC/ICLA.
his tendency is evident in the two volumes that Albert Gérard dedicated to sub-Saharan litera-
tures in European languages (1986), in those dedicated to the literatures of the Caribbean area
by James Arnold (1997–2001) and above all in the project that Marcel Cornis-Pope and John
Neubauer (2006–2009), respectively, coordinated on East-Central Europe. hough not pertain-
ing strictly to the publications of the ICLA, the volumes directed by Mario Valdés and Djelal
Kadir (2004) must also be cited. It must be mentioned that this shit towards spatialization has
xii Introduction
been orientating itself towards peripheral areas with respect to the Eurocentric and canonical
nucleus of the most traditional comparatism. his has been accompanied by a postnational
impulse linked to questioning the idea of “nation” as an adequate framework for explaining
and justifying literature insofar as a cultural phenomenon, needing to distance itself from “mo-
nological” concepts of culture, emphasizing those of interference or transmission/convergence.
he canonical idea of literature has also been under inquiry, since, practically from its incep-
tion, it has almost always tacitly reairmed the epistemology of literary historiography. If we
approach it from this regional perspective, the boldness of carrying out a Comparative history of
literatures in the Iberian Peninsula makes even more sense as a vision of the renovating aspira-
tions which seek to grant center stage to the phenomena and questions condemned to obscurity
or marginality by nationally-based historiographies. It cannot be overlooked that these histo-
riographies, as it will be seen in the irst two sections, therefore become more visible (both in
their strength and weakness) and go on to form part of the proposed object of study. Likewise,
the eloquent spatial (cartographic) and temporal tensions in the interrelation of the diferent
Peninsular literatures will not be absent, as they necessitate an understanding of comparatism
as a critical theory: a vision that sets about establishing its own constitutive elements at the
same time, beyond the simple gathering of observations and facts about the literary past in an
inter- or supernational framework.
It is itting to note some other characteristics of this endeavor. It was irst necessary to
painstakingly review the institutionalization process of literary historiographic discourse with-
in the framework of comparatism. Furthermore, assessing the balance between hetero- and
auto-characterization with regards to the literatures in the Iberian area was understood as nec-
essary, and lent itself to an implicit interlacing of perspectives in the selection of a group of col-
laborators coming from distinctive backgrounds, both intra- and extra-Peninsular. he project
seeks to question the foundations of national literatures by consciously challenging them with
complex case studies: the literatures connected to nation states (Spanish and Portuguese) are
taken as given, but a comparative study has been insisted upon, stressing national literatures
without state boundaries, such as regional literatures, as well as what might be called a-national
literatures, such as those written in Hebrew or Arabic, or those that point towards an extra-
Peninsular dimension: Hispano-American or African Lusophone literatures. he reader must
permit one inal clariication of particular relevance: though conscious of the controversial
character of the chosen geographic framework, this project stems from a historical recognition
of the Iberian Peninsula as a supranational whole perceived as a possible community, not only
from its interior but rather from an external and distanced position which deines it in relation
to the concepts of European or World Literature.
As shall be seen, this irst volume is divided into ive sections of a very diverse nature.
hese sections produce a decentralized and “multipolar” approximation to the question being
elaborated, resulting in the coniguration of a literary map with deined contours by the end of
the six chapters. Each of the subcoordinators responsible for the diferent sections took it upon
themselves to enter into contact with those he or she considered specialists in each subject and
to provide unity and form to the whole. Only the irst section does not correspond to these char-
acteristics, as it was undertaken by two of the general editors, Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and
César Domínguez. he section coordinated by Sharon G. Feldman, “he Iberian Peninsula as
Introduction xiii
a literary space”, explores some fundamental theoretical and comparative aspects for the objec-
tives of this project: from which spatial parameters (Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic…)
can we understand the literary reality in the interior of our geopolitical scheme? How can the
tension between similarity and diference within the distinctive literary settings be articulated?
In what way can concepts such as global, national, regional, and local be understood, and how
are these dimensions of the literary to be managed? he answers are complex, as are some of
the phenomena studied in this section (concepts such as insularity or extra-Peninsularity), and
place the problem of literary identity at the center of the discussion, while introducing the idea
of literary nation as the object of a necessary and clarifying problematization.
In the introduction to “Multilingualism and literature in the Iberian Peninsula”, Ángel
López García focuses on the interlinguistic and intercultural dimension of the Peninsula, which
takes shape through successive studies in the analysis of certain examples in which the image
of each language in the diferent Peninsular literatures is perceived, and around others in which
bilingual and diglossic situations lower, from the Middle Ages up until our present, with spe-
cial attention to texts in Arabic, Hebrew, and Basque.
he section dedicated to orality, “Dimensions of orality”, coordinated by Paloma Díaz-Mas,
closes in on the problematic status of oral literature, considered traditionally as non-canonical
or, simply non-literary, and thereby excluded by Peninsular philologists. On the contrary, in
her introduction, Díaz-Mas insists on the value of this oral facet for comparatism in general,
and the following chapters conirm the borderline character of such phenomena by examining
them from a genological and Peninsular viewpoint.
Fernando Gómez Redondo oversees the creation of the section titled “Temporal frames
and literary (inter)systems”, which is composed of eight chapters dedicated to eight diferent lit-
erary systems as seen from a geo-temporal viewpoint and considered representative of a relative
interliterary efervescence, which in each chapter is explained contextually and pragmatically.
he second volume, currently in preparation, will elaborate upon other, complementary,
aspects dealing with the images, forms and genres, intermediation, and lastly, the interrela-
tion between popular and mass culture and the literary repertoire. In efect, the irst section of
this second and inal volume will center on the analysis of a series of images and stereotypes
associated with the literary culture they have deined and continue to deine, as much from
the auto- as from hetero-characterization: the diferent Peninsular literatures in their mutual
relations, of course, but also regarding their presence beyond the Peninsular realm. Following
it will be a section on genres and literary repertoires, coordinated by María Fernanda Abreu.
Twelve chapters are included dealing with twelve literary forms and traditions that have shown
themselves to be historically active from a transliterary point of view in the Iberian Peninsula,
as well as from outside its limits. Questions dealing with troubadour poetry, pastoral stories,
adultery novels, and writings of the “I”, to name a few, act in this sense like touchstones to judge
the diferences and ainities of the distinctive literary repertoires. hirdly, a section has been
reserved for a fully institutional perspective. Under the supervision of María José Vega, it cor-
responds to what we describe as “forms of mediation”. It includes analyses of four fundamental
questions: the role of school curriculum, the function and scope of translations, the charac-
teristics and consequences of censorship, and the institutional dimension of diferent forms
of textual compilation and selection – especially the way these have acted as factors in canon
xiv Introduction
consolidation and in interliterary mediation. Finally, the section coordinated by Anxo Abuín,
“Popular culture and literary repertoires”, approaches, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the
discourse coming out of the most peripheral areas of the Peninsular cultural system, examining
ilm and television, popular music, the comic, or literature of the masses.
Note on Documentation and Translation
We follow he Chicago Manual of Style and do not use footnotes, except to provide the origi-
nal version of the literary quotes that have been included in English translation in the body
of the essays. Nevertheless, this general norm has not been applied in the case of Section 4,
“Dimensions of orality”, due to the fact that the line of argumentation itself and the discussion
of the texts dealing with oral tradition and its variants require following the original language.
herefore, only in this section will the footnotes contain translations to English of the literary
examples.
he original versions of critical or essayistic citations are not supplied; they appear only in
the English translations. However, concepts relevant to the line of argumentation are provided
in the original language, followed by the English translation in parenthesis. In later incidences
in the same chapter, the concept is expressed in the original language.
he titles of works and journals, as well as other designations (institutional, juridical, etc.)
are provided in their original language, followed by an English translation in parenthesis. When
a published translation of the work in question exists, this title is used. If this is not possible,
then the translation provided by the Encyclopaedia Britannica is used or, as a last resort, we ofer
our own translation. At times, we prefer clear paraphrasing over an abstruse literality in English.
he names of places (towns, cities, public and private organisms) and people (kings, rulers, etc.)
have been regulated in accordance with the uses of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to several organizations that have contributed to the
elaboration of this volume. In the irst place, to the Xunta de Galicia, the Spanish Ministry of
Education and Science, and the European Union (with European Funds for Regional Develop-
ment) for the inancial support conceded to the research projects undertaken between 2001
and 2008 which sustained this work. he last of these, still in efect, has as its title “Towards a
theory of comparative literary history in the Iberian area” (HUM2007–62467/FILO). We would
also like to thank each one of the coordinators of the sections of this volume for the work they
have carried out, and especially the members of the Coordinating Committee for a Compara-
tive History of Literatures in European Languages of the International Comparative Literature
Association for the constant support provided for this project, and their always careful and
valuable intellectual monitoring. he translators and linguistic copy-editors deserve special
mention, particularly Cristina Rodríguez, Mark Wiersma, Marla Arbach, Manus O’Duibhir,
and Lucinda Wilson.
Section I. Discourses on Iberian literary history
Coordinators: Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and César Domínguez
he European horizon of Peninsular literary historiographical discourses

Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza
National history, foreign literature
here is a signiicant circumstance that afects the historiography of the two main literary tradi-
tions of the Iberian Peninsula when they are considered from a national perspective. his could
be referred to as the “family romance” of Iberian literary historiography, which is responsible
for causing some confusion as to the origin of these traditions. Quite oten, the understanding
of this origin has ignored some important aspects in the constituting process of historiographi-
cal discourses of Iberian literature. For example, it has been held that the historiography of
Spanish literature originated with Resumen histórico de la literatura española (Historical review
of Spanish literature) by Antonio Gil de Zárate in 1844 (Senabre 1998; Ramos Corrada 2000). In
a similar fashion, Francisco Freire de Carvalho (1845), author of Primeiro ensaio sobre historia
literaria de Portugal (First essay of the literary history of Portugal), and to a larger degree, Teó-
ilo Braga have been credited with initiating literary historiography in Portugal.
here is no doubt as to the importance of Gil de Zárate’s Historical review, especially given
its proximity to the Public Instruction Law of 1845. Two of the principal sponsors of this law
were Gil de Zárate himself, who headed the ministerial sub-department responsible for public
education, and Pedro Pidal, a minister of the Spanish government, on whom Gil de Zárate
depended, and also a major medievalist. Pidal’s law – as it came to be known – introduced
Spanish literature as a subject in all oicial curricula throughout the country, which meant
the implicit exclusion of literature in languages other than Castilian (Núñez Ruiz 1994). In
the same years, Abel-François Villemain, historian of French literature, medievalist, and an
outstanding representative of comparative literature, was the minister of Public Education in
France. In Portugal, the historiographical standpoint of Teóilo Braga, who would later become
President of the Republic of Portugal, was also widely inluential. His theories were presented
in Teoría da história da literatura portuguesa (heory of the history of Portuguese literature,
1872), which was used in open competitions to become a professor of Portuguese Literature in
the Advanced Course in Humanities in Lisbon. Even though they are distant, both these refer-
ences share the power of their institutional authority as part of a national public program. hey
are also linked by the prevailing liberalism, endowed with governmental authority and com-
mitted to establishing the identities of the new national states, which was highly characteristic
of the nineteenth century.
he question is, do these circumstances justify relegating all previous literary historiogra-
phies to the level of just mere precedents? here is no doubt that the historiographical discourse
2 Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza
of Portuguese and Spanish literature already had an extensive history, which has oten been
overlooked. his is due to a value judgment, more or less explicit, that regards works prior to
Gil de Zárate and Braga as imperfect or excessively amateur. We could even go so far as to at-
tribute to this perspective the concealed desire to instill an endogenous point of view in each of
these literatures, making a national landmark of each historiography. As a result, these litera-
tures would only be as national as the historiographies that study them. As Xosé Luís Méndez
Ferrín (2002, 23) said in his acceptance speech to the Real Academia Galega regarding Galician
literature: “all literature implies a Literary History.” Under this assumption, all literature that in-
tends to be national must have a national literary history. his is an expression of the belief that
there should be a systemic consistency between discourse and meta-discourse in order to as-
sure the national relevance of a given literature. In metaphorical terms, discourse on literature
needs to be nationalized as a condition for literature to be conceived as national. On the other
hand, based on the above, one can deduce another position which is inseparable from the vari-
ous historiographical traditions, that which leads to deine an institutional and epistemological
authoritative focal point, whether an academy, university, or ministry, which can introduce a
modal approach into the valuation and authenticity of the literary past as a source of knowledge
and education.
Logically, what falls outside of this perspective are the exogenous antecedents of national
literary history as well as those paradigms considered failed or imperfect, that is, those models
and practices that are not regarded as entirely national. his was the case of the literary histo-
ries of the eighteenth century and of the literary histories written by foreign authors and oten
intended for a foreign public. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that in many cases the origin
of the national histories of peninsular literatures is foreign, although with time its discourse has
become internalized and, paradoxically, more local and irrelevant.
here is, in fact, a notorious resistance to cope with the fact that the irst milestones of the
historiography of the Peninsular literatures in the nineteenth century were written by foreign
authors who had an exogenous point of view and quite oten placed Iberian literature within
a much broader framework. Two of these landmark histories were Friedrich Bouterwek’s Ge-
schichte der europaische Poesie und Beredsamkeit seit der Ende des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts
(History of European poetry and eloquence from the end of the 13th century), written in twelve
volumes published between 1801 and 1819, and Jean-Charles Leonard Simonde de Sismondi’s
De la Littérature du Midi de l’Europe (Literature of the South of Europe), four volumes, pub-
lished in 1813. Both of these works touch speciically upon Spanish and Portuguese literature,
with some mention of Catalan, and barely deal with Galician and Basque literature.
In the year 1826, Almeida Garrett published a brief outline, Bosquejo da história da poesia
e língua portuguesa (Outline of the history of Portuguese poetry and language), written as an
introduction to the anthology Parnaso lusitano (Lusitanian Parnassus). In the very same year,
Ferdinand Denis, a Frenchman, published Résumé de l’Histoire littéraire de Portugal suivi du
Résumé de l’Histoire littéraire du Brésil (Review of the literary history of Portugal followed by
the review of the literary history of Brazil). his book was more systematic and extensive than
Garrett’s, and it introduced Brazilian as a national literature independent of the Portuguese for
the irst time. Denis served as a cultural mediator eager to introduce new horizons of unknown
but interesting literatures to the French and other European readers in accordance with the
logic of the World Republic of Letters described by Pascale Casanova (2005). Even before Denis,
the English poet Robert Southey, a key igure in Hispanic and Portuguese studies, had written
a brief historical panorama of Portuguese literature in the Quarterly Review (1809) to introduce
it to the English readers, insisting on the political and commercial opportunities that were be-
coming available to Great Britain in the Iberian Peninsula.
In other matters, another Frenchman, Francisque Michel, is considered the author of “the
irst general relection on Basque literature” (Lasagabaster 2002, 238) with his work Le Pays
basque. Sa population, sa langue, ses moeurs, sa littérature et sa musique (he Basque Country.
Its population, language, customs, literature, and music, 1857), which he wrote while teaching
foreign literatures at the University of Bordeaux. As for Catalan literature, just a few years ater
Magi Pers i Ramona’s Bosquejo de la historia de la lengua y la literatura catalana (Outline of
the history of the Catalan language and literature, 1850), F. R. Cambouliu, again a Frenchman,
wrote Essai sur l’Histoire de la Littérature Catalane (Essay on the history of Catalan literature,
1858), the irst “true history” in this ield (Romero Muñoz 1982, 8).
he role of Michel in French dialectology and ethnography during the nineteenth century;
the proximity of Cambouliu to the Félibrige movement, so determined to revive Provençal lan-
guage and literature; the protagonism of Southey in the cultural and political environment of
England ater the French revolution and in British geopolitical discourse during the Napoleonic
wars; and the case of Denis, with his inherent cultural colonialism and the apparent exoticism
of his analysis of Brazilian as well as Portuguese literatures (Rouanet 1991, 209 f.), all constitute
elements that cannot be disregarded upon investigating the characteristics of the discourse of
the literary historiography of the Iberian Peninsula.
here are other signiicant factors that are not always given their full value. In 1843, a year
before Gil de Zárate’s Historical review, Friedrich Schlegel’s Geschichte der alten und neuen Li-
teratur (History of ancient and modern literature, 1815) had been translated into Spanish and
Adolphe Puibusque’s Histoire comparée des littératures espagnole et française (Comparative his-
tory of Spanish and French literatures) had appeared in France. Well before that date, Schlegel’s
major work had circulated widely in the Iberian Peninsula in its French translation of 1829
(Palma-Ferreira 1985, 35). his work – perhaps along with Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur
(Lectures in dramatic art and literature, 1809–11) by his older brother, August W. Schlegel – can
be considered the principal authority and inspiration in the validation of Spanish and Portu-
guese literature as national literatures, in the romantic sense of the word.
One needs to consider, from a comparative perspective, the European context under
which the discourse of literary historiography developed since its inception in the eighteenth
century. his is the only way to appreciate its true institutional and geo-cultural dimension. It
explains the paradox by which the national images, so oten enforced by the historiographical
discourses of diferent European literatures, including those of the Iberian Peninsula, are actu-
ally the product of a much broader context. Carlos Manuel Ferreira da Cunha wrote that “the
national was born out of an international conlict” (C. M. F. da Cunha 2002, 52; Cabo 2004b).
He was referring to the thesis developed by Michel Espagne (1993; Espagne and Werner 1994)
regarding the inluence of the “foreign paradigm,” basically German, which helped establish
French literature as a national literature throughout the nineteenth century, simultaneously
with the formation of foreign literature departments at diferent French universities starting
in 1830. According to Espagne, the process of the reinvention of French literature as a national
literature parted from the prior discovery of the nationalism of foreign literatures, among them
the Spanish and the Portuguese (Villemain, Baret, Bougeault, Demogeot). Hippolyte Taine was
a crucial igure in this process, as before him, Friedrich Schlegel had been in Germany. In this
way, comparatism in the nineteenth century, in particular that of Germany and France, has a
profound national dimension that was aimed at securing the recognition of their respective
literatures on a European and international level.
he European literary ield and national literatures
It is assumed that the European romantic literary ield deeply depended on a resentment of
French hegemony, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars. We can go even further and talk
of a post-imperial dynamics tied to the defeat of Napoleon as well as to the later collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian empire and the Iberian empires. It is neither to be disregarded that the emer-
gence of the British empire brought about a transformation in that Europe’s attention was now
overtly directed overseas, making way for the current ambiguous connection between postco-
lonialism and nationalism. he most important efect, in any case, was the relationship of the
emergence of national literatures with a profound geopolitical recomposition, in which there is
an obvious connection, on the one hand, with the constitution of the new nation states, and, on
the other, with the development of a doctrinal structure that contributed to the positioning of
new literatures in a wider geo-cultural space, that at this point was basically European. Two sets
of positions can be seen in this situation, one national, the other international.
he development of literary historiography has been closely tied to the organization and
reorganization of the literary ield in its European dimension as well as in a strictly Iberian
setting. he idea of nation, with regard to both these dimensions, has been crucial from a pro-
grammatic point of view. Yet, this development implicates a continuous interlacing of histo-
riographical traditions of diverse scope: some of cosmopolitan pretence; others more strictly
European; some national, that at some points may appear regional – possibly an ambiguous
and sensitive subject – ; and yet others deined with a supranational character, such as the Eu-
ropean midi or the Romanic sphere of inluence. Even so, the nation has acted as the main basis
for historiographical discourses. Its presence depends, however, on the heterogeneity of facets
and levels it displays, as well as on the multifarious perspectives and interests being presented.
Evidently, the assertion of the nationality of Spanish and Portuguese literatures advanced in
Germany with a European outlook which tried to foster the hegemony of German literature
is not the same as, for instance, that of Portuguese national literature as far as it is deployed in
the context of the speciic historical conlicts between Portuguese and Castilian in an Iberian
setting. his can also apply to the conlict of the emerging literary nationalities in a Spanish
framework, which were originally concealed as regional. his conlictive standpoint is obvious
in the modern development of the Catalan, Basque, and Galician literatures and their respec-
tive historiographies.
On a national level there are superimposed literary ields always moving in an unstable
equilibrium of perceptions and diferent audiences. Literary histories are an example of this
situation. Roberto Dainotto (2007, 4) – taking up a thesis by Dipesh Chakrabarty – wrote that
historical thinking invented Europe as its own main subject. Undoubtedly, one could carry this
idea to literary historiography and its relationship with European literature as an object. In
truth, the literary historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had as its funda-
mental basis the idea of Europe. Likewise, national discourses cannot be understood without
recourse to a language that has a European or better yet a Eurocentric scope; which, as we have
learned, depends greatly on silence and omission, especially in some areas that have an obvi-
ous metropolitan dimension, such as the Iberian Peninsula. However, it must be admitted that
the idea of Europe emerging from the traditions of literary historiography is far from deinite.
Although this notion tends to rely on extraordinarily stable axis of reference, it provokes con-
tinued dissidence that becomes an efort to reposition each place or identity in the most conve-
nient way for each particular agenda.
Revisio and literary history
Miguel Tamen (1999) referred to the rather inevitably revisionist character of literary history. In
efect, literary histories tend to locate their origin in the need to revise preceding history, and
focus on the misapprehensions and deiciencies of their antecedents. Nevertheless, as Tamen
keenly stated, it is only those supposed errors that legitimize the revision, which ends up incor-
porating and naturalizing them. In this way a disciplinary language is formed, creating a web of
tacit assumptions that gives coherence, leaning on the principle of revisio perpetua, to the tradi-
tion of literary history. An example within the peninsular ield is the apologetic vocation of the
larger part of eighteenth-century historiography, determined to rise against the partiality with
which Spanish literature and culture had been treated in other European countries by means of
the detailed exposition of its heritage. Another case in point is the insistence with which Portu-
guese historians of the nineteenth century such as Almeida Garrett, Freire de Carbalho, Costa e
Silva, or Andrade Ferreira justiied their work by claiming to correct the errors and distortions
of foreign authors (Bouterwek, Sismondi, Denis). During the irst decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, a similar complaint about the absence of a valid history resonated in the ield of Spanish
literature, which in many cases was a way of objecting to the dependence upon foreign ideas
and demanding a revision of the histories inherited from the nineteenth century (Cabo 2001,
32–34). Likewise, Teóilo Braga continuously redeined the ethnic and geo-cultural support of
his vision of the history of Portuguese literature to better adjust its national dimension. In the
same manner, this revisionist approach is notorious with those who try to incorporate other
literary realities, almost always with a national or proto-national reach, onto the prestigious
stage of European literature.
In 1911, José Cervaens y Rodríguez also resorted to this type of revision when he used
the epigraph dead literatures to describe the Galician, Basque, Catalan, and, curiously, Italian
literatures, and to insist on the importance of their contribution to European literature. With
reference to Catalan literature, Manuel Milá i Fontanals referred to the process that, in ac-
cordance with the development of Romanic studies, resulted in the recognition of “a literary
region whose works have been forgotten” (Cambouliu 1910, iii), contributing to the completion
of European literary geography. hat same approach to revision that calls for a literary past and
strives to assign it a speciic position is actually found in Augusto G. Besada or Florencio Vaa-
monde Lores, the irst historians of Galician literature.
he revisio becomes one of the trademarks in the discourse of literary historiography. It
should be interpreted as the result of a diicult and elusive connection with the past, a connec-
tion that carries an argumentative character oriented towards the establishment of identities
and positions within a complex geo-cultural framework. his framework includes factors such
as the emergence of the modern European national states, the transition from the old regimes
to liberal forms of government, the displacement towards the North of geopolitical and cultural
hegemony in Europe, the crisis of a speciic colonial model, especially of the Peninsular em-
pires, and the post-imperial redeinition of the relation of powers within Europe. Either way, it
deals with speciic circumstances of supranational character. Diferent positions could be taken
according to diferent points of view, and they were to be formulated with the help of tools
provided by the discourse of literary history.
Geo-literary codes
here is a noteworthy circumstance in this respect. While Iberian literatures were subjected
to a geo-cultural typological process from a global European perspective, the same general
categories were used internally as a way to attribute identities and reciprocal diferences within
a speciic Iberian context. Orientalism – used so persistently to characterize Iberian culture
– radically afected in turn the appreciation of Castilian literature by those who tried to legiti-
mize ad contrarium other Peninsular literatures, such as Galician (Manuel Murguía, Vicente
Risco), Asturian (Fuertes Acevedo), and Portuguese, through the claim of a diferential Celtic
substrate and, at times, of a Northern character. Quite signiicantly, Teóilo Braga’s concept of
Portuguese literature evolved into a “transference of Portuguese literature from a ‘Northern’ to
a ‘Southern’ point of view, transforming it from its initial Germanic to a Romanic perspective”
(C.M.F. Cunha 2002, 337). his was a consequence of the coming to light the great songbooks of
Galician-Portuguese medieval poetry beginning in the 1870s, among other factors.
It is a process of symbolic introjection that leads to the replication on an internal level of
the traits governing the image of the Other from a European standpoint. Sometimes the re-
sort to a geo-cultural language led, on the contrary, to sustain an Iberian agenda of Peninsular
integration on the basis of a common position before Europe, that was oten considered as a
external reality. his attitude was also proliic, having taken recourse, for instance, to the notion
of a common Latin background (J. P. de Oliveira Martins). Be that as it may, the conidence in
the unique peculiarity of Iberian literatures, when placed within the context of a universal liter-
ary history, has been noted repeatedly by many authors up to the present, for example, Santiago
Prampolini (1956, vol. 9) and Raymond Queneau (1958). In addition to this assertion of a global
Iberian position on a European or universal literary stage, there was also a distinct determina-
tion to use geo-literary codes with European roots to articulate the identitarian connection
among diferent areas of the Iberian Peninsula, as shown for example in the linkage of Galicia
with Portugal via their presumed Celtic and Atlantic ties (Manuel Murguía, Vicente Risco) and
the identiication of the distinct Catalan linguistic areas by way of their Mediterranean condi-
tion (Eugeni d’Ors).
Literary memoir and heritage
According to its basic lines, the historiography of the diferent Peninsular traditions cannot be
considered exceptional or highly idiosyncratic. We should mention in the irst place diferent
kinds of literary panoramas, subjected to discursive models alien to those of modern literary
historiography, but which may be considered nonetheless as precedents. Many of them partake
of a global Peninsular perspective. A good example of this view was Prohemio e carta (Proem
and letter, c. 1446), addressed by Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana, to Don Pedro,
Constable of Portugal and later Count of Barcelona and suitor to the Kingdom of Aragon. Oth-
ers were the apologetic panorama of Spanish culture De asserenda hispanorum eruditione (Vin-
dication of Spanish erudition, 1553) by Alfonso García Matamoros, the relections on Castilian
poetry of Fernando de Herrera in his Anotaciones (Annotations) to the poetry of Garcilaso de
la Vega, and República literaria (Literary republic) by Diego Saavedra Fajardo, in which works
by Ausías March and Camões are also included. An even earlier example is the extraordinary
historical survey of Spanish-Hebraic poetry written in the twelveth century by Moses Ibn Ezra,
conceived as a demonstration of “the superiority of the Diaspora of al-Andalusia with reference
to the creation of poetry, prose, and Hebraic epistles.”
A fundamental landmark, noted as a major precedent by the historiographical discourse
itself, was found in the pioneer work done by bibliothecae and dictionaries, assigned to cata-
loguing the bibliographic groundwork in each speciic cultural area. Nicolás Antonio’s Biblio-
theca hispana vetus (Old Spanish Bibliotheca, 1672) and Bibliotheca hispana nova (New Spanish
Bibliotheca, 1696) were signiicant for Spanish literary history. Likewise, the four volumes of
Bibliotheca lusitana (Lusitanian Bibliotheca, 1741–1759) by Diogo Barbosa de Machado were
also important for Portuguese historiography. hese were preceded by João Franco Barreto’s
(1662–1665) work with the same title. here were actually many other catalogues and revisions
that resulted in a consistent tradition (Cebrián 1997; F. de Figueiredo 1930, 2, chap. 14; ASJ 1982,
394–5). Tellingly enough, most of these bio-bibliographic catalogues did not rely on linguistic
criteria and included works in diferent languages, clearly expressing the primary need to es-
tablish a general repertoire of the literary heritage of the Iberian kingdoms (M. V. Mendes 1999,
69 f.; Quadrio 2001).
Other works of this kind – Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los es-
critores catalanes (Annotations to help form a critical dictionary of Catalan authors, 1836) by Fé-
lix Torres Amat and Biblioteca valenciana (Valencian Bibliotheca) by Justo Pastor Fuster – were
important references for future Catalan historians. he last chapter of the aforementioned Le
Pays Basque (1857) by Francisque Michel provided information regarding all works written in
Basque up to irst half of the nineteenth century. he primary reference for Galician literature
was, in turn, the three volumes of Diccionario bio-bibliográico de escritores (Bio-bibliographic
dictionary of authors, 1951–1953) by Antonio Couceiro Freijomil, which was in fact preceded by
a tradition of historiographical surveys that had been initiated in the 1880s. his type of index
was also used in other literary domains. Such was the case of Bibliotheca asturiana (Asturian
Bibliotheca) by Carlos González de Posada (1745–1831), unpublished during his lifetime, and
subsequently, Bosquejo acerca del estado que alcanzó en todas las épocas la literatura en Asturias
(Outline of the status reached by literature over time in Asturias) by Máximo Fuertes Acevedo
(1885), which included a bibliography with notes of the area’s writers, independent of their lan-
guage, and appeared as the irst step towards a history of Asturian literature (Ramos Corrada
2002, 11–17).
hose are not the only mentionable cases, as shown by Bibliotheca arabico-hispana Escuri-
alensis (Arab-Spanish Bibliotheca, 1760–1770) by Miguel Casiri (Michel Gharcieh Al-Ghaziri),
a highly inluential compendium of Arabic manuscripts preserved in the library of El Escorial
Monastery. It was a point of reference for subsequent literary histories and the beginning of
Spanish-Arabic studies. he number of dictionaries and bibliothecae is practically inexhaust-
ible, not only by its quantity, but by the diversity of its ields of reference, showing the vast
variety of literary spaces that overlap without coinciding.
To these eforts to establish the heritage and expose the literary capital of the Iberian tradi-
tion we should add the steady work of erudition dependent on royal institutions such as the
Academia Real das Ciências de Lisboa (Royal Academy of Sciences of Lisbon) in Portugal and
the Real Academia de la Historia (Royal Academy of History) in Spain. In summary, the dy-
namics were not diferent from other ambits in Europe, although the cultural institutions of the
Spanish and Portuguese monarchies let a mark on them and submitted to their own agendas
the initiative towards the creation of other literary memoirs. Signiicantly, this was the time in
which the term literature was being deined as “the knowledge of the collection of works which
are considered worthy of being preserved by a nation.” (Espagne 1993, 139).
he literature of the eighteenth century was considered a national legacy that needed to
be exhibited before Europe. he ideal setting and addressee of many of these endeavors was, in
fact, the European literary republic. For instance, in 1745 Father Martín Sarmiento addressed
Memorias para la historia de la poesía española (Memoir for the history of Spanish poetry)
to Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, Secretary of State to Pope Benedict XIV, explaining that
“much of what is popular in Spain tends to be unknown in other countries” (M. Sarmiento 1775,
2). And the fact is that the esteem of Iberian literatures would evolve from apparent neglect and
even contempt to the consideration of interesting manifestations of vigorous literary nationali-
ties. To understand this circumstance we must comprehend the interrelation between the fact
that Spanish and Portuguese literatures became an object of study and the process that led the
Peninsula to a situation of geopolitical marginalization within Europe. he Mexican intellectual
Leopoldo Zea (1957) pointed out that extreme identiication with Catholicism and contact with
Semitism had alienated the Iberian Peninsula from modern rationalistic discourse, marginal-
izing it from the West in the same way as Russia. his sort of theses, together with that of the
intransitivity and anachronism of Iberian culture, brought about one of the constitutive topics
of the modern geo-cultural discourse on the idea of Europe. Angeles Huerta (2004) recently
examined some of the discursive keys of this process. Undoubtedly, this idea was persistent and
had hegemonic character. Its symbolic charge provided signiicance to Spanish as well as Por-
tuguese literature in a European context, inluenced by the Franco-German struggle to become
the core of the new Europe.
Antiaustracismo and Chronopolitics
hese are not the only elements to be considered. Taking into account the internal development
of the historiographical discourse in the Peninsula. here were speciic situations that explain
the way in which certain theses about its literature and culture were consolidated. For example,
it has been noted that during the eighteenth century there was a fragile development of the
‘public sphere,’ conditioned by the close alliance of important groups of intellectuals, many of
them concerned with literary historiography, and the new Bourbon regime arising ater the
defeat of Charles of Austria in the War of Succession (1702–1713). Accordingly, these groups
had a tendency to deine Spanish culture and literature programmatically from a classicist and
centralist perspective, perceived as contrary to the state of things during the Austrian monar-
chy. Even if a number of exceptions could be noted, such as Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, the role
played by important cultural institutions such as the Academia del Buen Gusto (Academy of
good taste) or the Diario de los literatos (Men of letters’ journal) along with the protagonism of
intellectuals such as Agustín de Montiano y Luyando – irst director of the Real Academia de
la Historia –, Blas Nasarre – Royal Librarian –, or Luis José Velázquez – author of Orígenes de
la poesía castellana (he origins of Castilian poetry, 1754) – give credit to the thesis defended by
José A. Valero (1999, 198). Valero understands the cultural program of this intellectual elite as
“an exercise of historical interpretation, of deinition of the present by opposition to an immedi-
ate past that had to be overcome.”
Recently, other researchers have stressed the profound national and central nature of this
cultural agenda (Alvarez Barrientos 2004), thus revealing the ideological framework in which
the aesthetic rejection of the seventeenth century was articulated institutionally and canonically.
his attitude can be identiied with the term antiaustracismo. In other words, antiaustracismo
may be conceived as the negative appraisal of the Hapsburg period, held to be a time of deca-
dence, as well as the need to overcome it in alliance with the state. In summary, we are facing a
basic component of that which José Carlos Mainer (2000, 161) has named literary regalism, i.e.
the association of literary progress to the progress of the state, held directly responsible for the
cultural achievements of the kingdom. hus, literature was considered as decor and credential
of the state on the international stage.
Accordingly, the foundation of the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy) in
1713 came to be held as a historiographical milestone by important eighteenth-century literary
historians such as Luis José Velázquez or the Franciscan Fathers Rafael and Pedro Rodríguez
Mohedano (Historia literaria de España [Literary history of Spain], 1766–91), who considered
this event the turning point in recovering from a period of decay in Spanish poetry and litera-
ture. hese authors stated in their historiographical projects that the academic institution sig-
naled the beginning of a restoration of the grandeur lost during the period of national decline
identiied with the inal years of the Hapsburg monarchy. Ultimately, Spanish literature was
dependent on a broken canon that failed to follow a continuum over time, needing always to
recuperate from these interruptions (Mainer 2000, 156 and 159, 176–82).
Similarly, Francisco Freire de Carvalho described in Primeiro ensaio sobre história literaria
de Portugal (First essay of Portuguese literary history, 1845), clearly dependent still on the his-
toriographical models of the eighteenth century, the decadence of Portuguese literature due to
Spanish “intrusive and tyrannical dominance” and its restoration starting with the foundation
of the Academia Real da História Portuguesa (Portuguese Royal Academy of History) in 1720.
hus, the intermission identiied with the integration of Portugal in the Spanish-Hapsburg
monarchy (1580–1640) became one of the discursive trademarks of Portuguese literary histori-
ography, in spite of some occasional discrepancies (Camilo Castelo-Branco).
Starting with Philip II, the Austrian period was to be considered behind European stan-
dards, and consequently, as a period in which the Iberian Peninsula’s culture started to be out-
dated. Clearly, there was a bond between the antiaustracista attitude and the interpretation of
Iberian culture as an irregular chronological development. his is deined in technical terms as
chrono-literary determination, which is a way of explaining the relationship between Iberian
literatures and the rest of Europe. he historiography of the nineteenth century implied quite a
diferent aesthetic and ideological context, but antiaustracismo as an ideological trademark was
retained by many historians of that period like Bouterwek, Sismondi, and Ticknor. As a matter
of fact, during this century the thesis of chronological anomaly was strengthened in diferent
ways. he German version of Velázquez’s Orígenes de la poesía castellana, by the Göttingen Pro-
fessor Johann Andreas Dieze (1769), was one of the main references for Bouterwek, who was
later used as a basic reference by Sismondi (Hart 1952, 80–83; Meregalli 1990, 26). Velázquez was
also highly inluential in other histories written in the early 1800s by authors such as Malmontet
(1810) in France or the liberal Spanish exile A. Anaya (1818) in England. Although divergent in
their aesthetic and canonic values, the shared facts and converging logic of these authors led
to the development of a Spanish and in general Iberian literature with a well-deined temporal
trademark, that of backwardness and belatedness.
Another crucial element in this respect is the concurrence of the formation of the idea of
Spanish and Portuguese national literatures with the reduction of modern metropolitan Spain
to its Peninsular limits and the marginalization of the Portuguese colonial empire in the colo-
nialist logic of the nineteenth century and the early 1900s. he War of the Spanish Succession
ended with the Utrecht treaties (1713) which rearranged and reconigured the international
order of Europe. In this rearrangement Spain lost a large part of its Mediterranean inluence.
he treaties which put an end to the war led, according to the historian José María Jover (1999,
25), to “the total disarticulation of the Spanish monarchy in Europe.” Under British supremacy,
geopolitics in Europe was to be remodeled ater Utrecht. But the treaties that put an end to
the War of Spanish Succession have to be inscribed in a larger sequence of treaties, such as the
treaty that ended the hirty Years War in Westphalia (1648), which exposed the failure by the
Spanish to reorganize the continent, and that of the Congress of Vienna (1815), which brought
to an end the Napoleonic period and resulted in serious consequences for the Spanish posses-
sions overseas and a growing Germanic inluence in Europe. here were other episodes that
were crucial for the further development of international relations, for example the Conference
of Berlin (1884), which delineated the colonization of Africa, excluding Portugal, the irst non-
Arab colonist in Africa, and assigning a secondary role to Spain. Without taking for granted a
strict parallelism, it has to be asserted that there are close ties between the changing geopoliti-
cal situation and the manner in which European literatures were relating to each other during
this crucial period that gave rise to Romanticism and the development of the national literary
historiographies, as well as literary comparatism.
As for the geopolitical background of these historiographical processes, it is pertinent to

consider texts such as Portugal na balança de Europa (Portugal in the European balance, 1830),
a political relection in which Almeida Garrett from his exile in London wrote about the pre-
carious position of Portugal on the international stage and recommended its integration with
Spain as a lesser evil.
History as apology: Literary nationalism
It is not diicult to discern some of the main reasons behind the apologetic as well as defensive
nature of most approaches to Spanish culture, especially those relating to its self-perception,
since the last quarter of the eighteenth century. he change in the European geopolitical and
geo-cultural equilibrium had a well-known propagandistic dimension. he so-called black
legend quite appropriately relects this European geopolitical transformation: it irst appeared
in Italy in the sixteenth century, continued its development in the Netherlands, and was ac-
cepted by the French and English in the eighteenth century. he black legend started as the re-
active propaganda of those who viewed themselves as objects of occupation, but evolved into
an instrument in the hands of the emerging powers – claiming for themselves the prestige of
rationality and modernity – against the declining Iberia. his form of hetero-characterization
was very efective from a symbolic point of view and ended up afecting Spain’s role in Eu-
rope. he famous article ‘Espagne’ by Masson de Morvilliers in the Encyclopédie méthodique
(he methodic encyclopedia, 1782) endorsed the thesis of marginality persisting in the topics
dealing with decline and decadence of Spain. Among the diverse reactions to this article, the
Oración apologética por la España y su mérito literario (Apologetic discourse in favor of Spain
and its literary merit, 1786) by Juan Pablo Forner, which was sponsored institutionally by the
Royal Spanish Academy, is particularly signiicant. he controversial situation generated by
Masson’s polemic contribution exposed a “changeable, contrasting, polyphonic perception
of the position of the Spanish nation” (Lopez 1999, 403), in which the idea of decadence ap-
peared everywhere.
his mere apologetic attitude gave way in some instances to the irst indication of a change
in values that lead to the acceptance of the decadence of the time and, simultaneously, to a
vindication of the literature of the Golden Age and the wealth of its language; for example, by
Antonio de Capmany in his “Preliminary discourse” to the Teatro histórico-crítico de la elocuen-
cia española (Critical historical theater of Spanish eloquence, 1786–1794). hese views involved
a preterist component that searched for the identity of the literature in a time that had already
passed and strived to establish a canon according to those assumptions (Etienvre 2001, chap. 9
and 10; Baker 2003). hese, along with the emerging interest on medieval literature, are some
of the irst steps towards the consolidation of the nineteenth-century historiographical concep-
tion of literature. In the historiography of the eighteenth century, decadence became the fun-
damental ideological pattern due to the reorientation of the cultural project as a consequence
of the change in dynasty. his reorientation was strongly associated, as it has been mentioned,
with a centralized and canonizing perspective of the literary past. Literary productions were
viewed as goods – according to the use of this notion by Itamar Even-Zohar (2000, 389) – that
needed to be adduced and vindicated in the face of other European nations, in a horizon of
open intersystemic competition, to resort again to Even-Zohar’s terminology.
Masson de Morvilliers famously asked Que doit-on á l’Espagne ? (What do we owe to
Spain?), a symbolic question about the cultural goods of the Spanish nation and the extent of
its contribution to the European heritage, which made many Spanish scholars uncomfortable.
his question can be understood in terms of cultural capital and the forms of its circulation
as well as the quality and quantity of the contributions of a speciic group at a moment of a
restructured European identity.
he sense of Spain’s crisis as a metropolitan entity and European power is clearly deined
by its cultural strategy within a context in which “the black legend, image created by foreigners,
was at the center of every relection of Spain during the Enlightenment and acted as a powerful
stimulant, justifying all projects and intellectual ventures” (Lopez 1999, 322). In addition, Pierre
Chaunu (1964) argued in his classical study on this matter that the singularity of the image of
Spain formed and conveyed by the black legend, a heterogeneous ensemble of negative char-
acterizations of the Spanish past, was its ability to afect the Spanish self-proclaimed image of
culture and character. However, a distinction must be established between the type of percep-
tions that still viewed Spain as a threat and the ones, beginning in the eighteenth century, that
represented Spain through a progressive process of exoticism, emphasizing, especially in France,
its picturesque, decorative, ornamental, and legendary character (Pageaux 1996, 55–73). Hetero-
characterization predominated over auto-characterization, which is a common trait of every
cultural process of marginalization, but with diferent nuances. It is to be noted, in this respect,
that the symbolic minorization, which had reached its peak with the French Illustration, led to
a change in values that paradoxically turned out to make Spanish literature, specially through
the action of German Romanticism, a crucial element of the alternative conceptualization of
the literature and the image of Europe.
he exiled Catalan Jesuit priest Juan Francisco de Masdeu illustrated this case in Histo-
ria crítica de España y de la cultura española (Critical history of Spain and Spanish culture),
originally published in Italy between 1781 and 1787. his work came about as a result of the
controversy created by the negative comments regarding Spanish culture made by some Italian
intellectuals like Francesco Saverio Quadrio and Girolamo Tiraboschi (Baasner 1995, 137–187).
he fact is that Masdeu’s work was one of the irst general histories of culture, coetaneous with
the spread of the term Kultur in Germany, which Peter Burke (1997) placed as the origin of the
contemporary cultural history.
Masdeu hints at the signiicance of the chrono-cultural and chrono-literary stereotyping
of Spanish culture with his resorting to a language that reminds us of the Aristotelian account
of natural slavery. his theory had been used to categorize the New World by authors of the
School of Salamanca during the sixteenth century and systematically introduced the chrono-
political dialectic to characterize the West. In fact, in his preliminary discourse, Masdeu (1783,
1: 1–2) lamented the proliferation of publications illed with “insults towards Spain” and found
in them “the belief by many that the Spanish nation is not only barbaric like the Greek, Ro-
man, and other ancient cultures were but is barbaric by nature, which is not, nor was this
true for any other nation.” he diminution of Spain to a status of natural barbarism without
any real possibility of advancement, denounced by Masdeu, is highly ironic considering that
Spanish intellectuals had resorted insistently to this intellectual tool to build categories for
discourse about the New World two and a half centuries before. Although Masdeu’s approach
might appear strident, the employment of this type of discourse is another example of the
radical change in the symbolic judgment of Spain and the Peninsula at this point of the eigh-
teenth century.
In this disputatious context, the Spanish literary repertory functioned as an extrinsic argu-
ment and testimony of the prestige of the nation competitively situated in a European frame-
work: “sincerely I believe that if Spain were to write a complete history of its poetry, there would
be no other nation in Europe that would be able to publish a better one, whether considering its
antiquity, the number and continued series of poets, the inluence on other nations’ poetry, and
inally the sublimity and delicacy of the creativity of Spanish poets” (Masdeu, 1783, 1: 196). he
recourse to criteria of antiquity, continuity, capacity to inluence, and aesthetic value is appar-
ent, as well as its outright subordination to the objectives of a geo-cultural dispute.
Adrian Marino (1998, 13) placed Masdeu’s theory as an example of the eighteenth-century
notion of a literary Europe and accredited him with being the irst to develop it as “a complete
set of national literatures.” Evidently, the author of Historia crítica illustrates the consolidation
of a European context of valuation and reference as well as the controversial hierarchical ratio-
nale that regulated it. Masdeu referred to “the national genius” of the diverse European nations
in the same manner that the Rodríguez Mohedano brothers (1766) talked about “national char-
acter.” In any case, only in a broad sense is it possible to recognize this as the foundation of na-
tional literatures, although a paradigmatic change was imminent in which the chrono-literary
foundation was going to be determinant. Masdeu’s genius was still a typifying feature (Gestalt)
– in line with the geographic and climatic determination characteristic of the Illustration – and
not an eicient organic cause with a clear historic dialectic dimension as the national character
would be for Romanticism.
Let us recall that Giovanni Getto (1969, 79 f.) had already drawn attention to the leading
role of the Jesuit priests (F.S. Quadrio, Zaccharia, Tiraboschi) in the deinition of a national
character in Italian literature, which actually had a parallel with the Spanish Jesuits living in
Italy ater their expulsion by Charles III. Although Getto pointed out the profound diferences
with the national spirit of the nineteenth century, he found in the eighteenth-century approach-
es “the necessary germinating moment” of subsequent literary nationalism.
In the eighteenth century a nationalist cultural discourse was established in the Peninsula
which had its own peculiarities. It had a programmatic character connected to monarchies such
as that of Fernando VI (Luis Jose Velázquez, Father Martín Sarmiento), and Charles III (Fathers
Rodríguez Mohedano), and to groups close to key institutions in the Bourbon political culture,
like the Royal Academy of History, which was founded in 1735 and remained a fundamental
institution during the nineteenth century (Pellistrandi, 2004). he modern discourse of literary
history appeared in this context (Alvarez Barrientos, 2004) and was later supported by the pub-
licity of Spanish Jesuits in Italy, most of them Catalan and from the ancient kingdom of Aragon,
asserting apologetic strategies in favor of Spanish culture.
he nationalism of the literary historiography of the eighteenth century had two sides
bound by some programmatic elements that help to explain it as cultural discourse. On the
one side it was a nationalism of emulation. his was in response to the “necessities to airm
its own image set by the national intellectual elites vis a vis the literary European republic, in
the framework of a classicist and universal notion of culture and within a concept of national
heritage by which the glory of the nation was identiied with the display of the wellbeing and
prosperity of the monarchy” (Valero 2002). Similarly, the literary regalism, brought up by José-
Carlos Mainer, was linked not only to the geo-cultural dimension of the literary history of the
eighteenth century but also to the character of programmatic discourse, reactive to images and
stereotypes provided by the dominant cultural centers of the time attempting to discredit the
geo-cultural position of the Peninsula.
On the other side, the nationalism of the literary history showed traits of what Valero called
centralist nationalism. his has to do with the integrator that attempted to support a unitary state
through the postulation of a homogeneous cultural model aware of the conluence of diferent
and mixed components. he historiographical discourse was to become one of its main champi-
ons. It was not merely coincidental, for example, that when Fathers Rodríguez Mohedano (1766,
LXXIII) explained that one of the main purposes of their work was “to place Spanish literature
under the same point of view,” they added a signiicant relection about the literary spatial ambit
which included the Peninsula, explicitly excluding Portugal, leaving out the former European
dominions, but emphatically incorporating the American territories. In general terms, Spanish
literary space coincided with the basic territorial setting of the state at the concrete moment in
which this Literary history of Spain was planned. he speciic conception of Spanish literature
depended on a precise ideological and programmatic framework that caused the retrospective
building of that concept.
hese two sides of the literary nationalism of the eighteenth century were greatly inter-
twined. To claim a speciic European position required the presentation of a combined and
homogenous cultural patrimony; and also the opposite, the formation of a unitary discourse
about Spanish literature demanded a more or less precise territorial delimitation and an image
that deined the position and identity of that literature in the European context. here are two
illuminating examples of this polarity.
he language of the nation
he irst example points to the role played by languages in establishing an identity for Span-
ish literature in the historiographical discourse of the eighteenth century. As has usually been
stated, the eighteenth-century model was not formed via linguistic identity, but instead in-
cluded all works within a speciic territorial literary framework no matter what language they
were written in, in accordance with the extent of the notion of literature of the time. Coming
close to wishful thinking, the emphasis on the diferent languages of the Peninsula in some
of these historiographical works has been correlated with “the idea that what deines a nation
is the law and not its ethnic features” (Onaindía 2002, 112). However, the book referred to by
Onaindía, Orígenes de la poesía castellana by Luis José Velázquez (1754), was not so much a
proclamation of the Spanish character of Arabic, Basque, Lemousin, Portuguese, and Galician,
as a consideration of their inluence on Castilian poetry. Poems written in other languages were
valued mainly in as much as they were sources of Castilian poetry, and in fact a genetic plot
was devised based on the thesis that Castilian was later than other Peninsular languages and
ended up subsuming and incorporating them. here was an evident teleological basis behind
this idea. his has been conirmed by Joaquín Alvarez Barrientos (2004, 108) with the following
observation: in the literary histories of the eighteenth century, a multi-cultural and multi-lin-
guistic vision of Spanish literature was prevalent but only until the turning point of the reign of
the Catholic Monarchs, a development converted into a historical landmark. he signiicance
of this development was comparable to the formation of the Royal Spanish Academy for the
recuperation of Spanish literature ater the decadence of the Austrian monarchy. his became
a point of inlection in which Spanish and Castilian literature were identiied in so far as, sup-
posedly, the other Peninsular literary traditions would have already converged into a common
national language. In this way a narrative rationalization of Castilian language as the national
language was created that with few exceptions was converted into a mark of identity of Spanish
literary historiography until the present.
he literary historiography of the eighteenth century somehow substantiated a theory that
can be dated to the sixteenth century, when authors like the Jesuit Father Mariana introduced
Castilian as the crucible where concurred other Peninsular languages. According to Leonardo
Romero Tobar (2006, 43 and 49), this idea was adopted up to the twentieth century by inluent
historiographers like Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Ángel Valbuena Prat. It was essential in the
composition of the historiographical discourse of Spanish literature and was consolidated by
historiographers during the 1700s, although existing both prior to and ater this period. he
argument for the latter preeminence of Castilian in deining the Spanish nation, with the capac-
ity of assimilating and integrating changes, was a concept very similar to the one that served to
assure the cosmopolitan superiority of German, French, and English with respect to European
and other worldwide literatures at diferent moments in time.
Geo-literary positions
he second observation pointed to the European horizon of historiographical nationalism of

emulation that afected even works that did not openly state this intention. Juan Andrés should
be mentioned because of his historiographical work Dell’origine progressi e stato attuale d’ogni
letteratura (Of the origin, progress, and current state of each literature). Published in Parma
between 1782 and 1799, it has been understood in recent times as a distinguished example of
the universal history of literature (Mazzeo 1965), as a paradigm of a universal variant of erudite
literary history (Sinopoli 1996), and also as a model of comparative literary history (Arato 2000;
Pedro Aullón de Haro 2002). Despite the cosmopolitan intention Juan Andrés (1997–2000, 1: 8)
clearly emphasized in the introduction, the fact is that the efort to establish a priveleged posi-
tion for Spanish literature was crucial on the whole and there is reason to believe that it helped
condition the proposed global representation of worldwide literature. According to Mazzeo
(1965, 125) the divulgement and vindication of Spanish literature was the main stimulus of An-
drés’s entire literary history. his may be why Andrés has been reproached, from a Peninsular
perspective, for the tenuous reference to Portuguese literature and furthermore, for using its
erudite works “as a cover for Spanish propaganda” (Palma-Ferreira 1985, 17).
he apologetic direction of eighteenth-century Spanish literary history led to a proto-

comparative dimension since it fostered the interest in the reception and inluence of Spanish
literature and culture in Europe, for example in Lampillas’ and Masdeu’s work, and also con-
nected Spanish authors with classic authors (Urzainqui 2004, 230–232). Andrés’s strategy was
less dependent on parallelism and was much more synthetically ambitious. It tried to demon-
strate the privileged position of Spanish literature by focusing on its connection to Arab culture
and by emphasizing the liminality and transitivity of Spanish culture, which had already been
stressed by other eighteenth-century historians such as the Mohedano Fathers and Father Mar-
tín Sarmiento. he penetration of Arab culture in the Peninsula was undoubtedly a factor in
this process. Juan Andrés was one of the great defenders of a thesis that was to be discarded by
the mainstream authors of Peninsular literary history, mainly that Arab culture had a determi-
native presence in the Peninsula and through it in the whole of Europe (Mazzeo 1965, 155–189).
Once the thesis that Arab literature is the basis of Provençal poetry and aspects such as
rhyme is accepted, the conclusion that Andrés advocates is made apparent: “the beginnings
of modern literature originated in Spain.” Moreover, according to Andrés, the nurturing of
literature in the vulgar languages as opposed to Latin was propagated to all of Europe from the
Peninsula as a result of the exemplary inluence of Arab literature. As this Jesuit wrote: “the
fondness for vulgar poetry and the desire to nurture the native language was communicated to
France via Spain and onwards to the rest of Europe” (Andrés 1997–2000, 1: 270).
he narrative of the origins of modern European literature was not alien to the emphasis
placed by Andrés on Provençal poetry, which he considered prominently Catalan, an opinion
also shared by Lampillas and previously Martín Sarmiento (1775, 346). Neither was this narra-
tive dissociated from the proclamation of Petrarch as the irst modern European poet, nor the
repeated relection that Spanish and Italian literature had a speciic resemblance. From a geo-
literary point of view, Spanish literature and poetry, and in general that of the Peninsula, it in
a Southern ambit. Clearly, this concerned a Romanic and meridional conception in which the
Arab component was fundamental.
Andrés’s theory can be compared fruitfully with the one found in another of the great
literary Peninsular histories of this period. his work, Memorias para la historia de la poesía y
poetas españoles by Martín Sarmiento, was published posthumously in 1775 but had been com-
pleted by 1745. It also defended the decisive inluence of Arab poetry in the birth of modern
European poetry and anticipated the idea of the liminal and transitive character of Peninsular
culture (1775, 46–84). However, the geo-literary orientation proposed in this book had very
signiicant peculiarities. For example, although Martín Sarmiento supported the notion of
Arab inluence in the difusion of poetry, he also considered that there was a northern origin to
rhyme and assumed that it penetrated into Galicia through the Celtics and Suebi (1775, 88–93).
his assumption agrees with Martín Sarmiento’s repeated vindication of the precedence of
Galician poetry among vulgar poetic traditions in the Peninsula as well as in Europe, and its
speciicity with respect to Portuguese (1775, 197). In this way, Martín Sarmiento showed signs
of the re-dimension of the geo-literary situation of the Peninsula, in which the hypotheses of
a northern component in the surge of popular poetry and the leading role of Galician poetry
in the general development of European poetry began to gain ground.
In Andrés’s case, the type of argument he defends is obvious considering that the chapter
dedicated to Arabs follows a chapter centered on the Carolingian Renaissance that the author
considered a frustrated cultural enterprise. Roberto Dainotto (2006) understands that Andrés’s
work expressed discontent with respect to the French-centered model of Europe proposed by
Montesquieu, whose arguments were based on the break with the classic tradition and the priv-
ilege of Charlemagne, and the idea of a Germanic Middle Age as the implicit origin of the idea
of Europe. Montesquieu’s account was highly chrono-political, as deined by Johannes Fabian,
and implied the estrangement of Southern Europe from modernity. Montesquieu transferred
to the geography of Europe the alienating dissimilarity between Europe and Asia by consider-
ing the South an “inner East,” thus indicating its backwardness and marginality with respect
to the epistemological, ethical, and political centrality of the “true” Europe. In this context, the
thesis that Arab literature and culture were the basic impulse for the creation of modern Europe,
springing from the cultural otherness of the South and particularly of the Iberian Peninsula, is
quite an audacious proposition.
he crisis of a model
In summary, eighteenth-century historiography introduced essential aspects that explained the

formation of historiographical discourse concerning the literatures of the Iberian Peninsula.
Besides the recollection of data and the establishment of the extent of a determined literary
patrimony, the literary historiography of the eighteenth century implied a global characteriza-
tion of Spanish literature. his was the basis for a process of “invention” with a programmatic
design associated to a form of nationalism that developed in two directions that complemented
each other: external or emulating and internal or co-optative. In the external kind, geo-cultural
tensions and conlicts about the idea of Europe were evident, as well as a geographical collec-
tive imagination which profoundly afected the development of literary history, particularly in
the Peninsula. In the internal kind, there was a progressive identiication between Spanish and
Castilian literature, although taking into account as a starting point the linguistic and cultural
plurality of the Peninsula. his produced an ambiguous situation for Portuguese literature since
Portuguese was considered by many Spanish historians as one of the languages that formed part
of the pluralistic substrate of Spanish literature.
However, the eighteenth-century paradigm of literary historiography was soon discarded.
he erudite literary history that had its inspiration in the model defended by Francis Bacon
in he Advancement of Learning (1604) was well received in Southern Europe with the help of
Benedictine monks of the Parisian abbacy of Saint Maure, of Franciscans such as Fathers Ro-
driguez Mohedano, and of Jesuits such as Tiraboschi, Lampillas, Masdeu, and Juan Andrés. José
Antonio Valero (1996, 177–78) recognized this model, which was strongly linked to the Church,
as “a discipline in which the cultivators of literature were provided with a discursive space suit-
able to balance the anxiety produced by the modernization of the system of knowledge.” No
doubt that this “system of knowledge” would very soon replace the kind of alternative encyclo-
pedism meant by the literary historiography of the eighteenth century. here was yet another
important consequence of this situation. In spite of the eforts to assign Iberian literature a
central position in the history of European culture, the account of the origins of Peninsular
literature bestowed on it a Southern and Eastern character that would foster its marginality in
the framework of the new European geo-cultural system, already under way. he kind of liter-
ary history that emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century set out with a very difer-
ent cultural position, mainly because the notion of literature had been detached from Bacon’s
model and because the center of inluence had been displaced towards the North.
Subjectivity of literature
he chrono-literary dimension mentioned above was connected to a process without which the
new notion of literature that emerged and gained acceptance starting at the beginning of the
nineteenth century cannot be understood. his process also explains how the marginalization
described previously would turn out to be determinant in establishing Spanish and secondarily
Portuguese literature as a reference for the idea of European literature linked to the consolida-
tion of literary history as a discipline. his refers to the subjectivity of literature and its con-
nection to a precise, characteristic, and distinctive subject. Literature was no longer a good
or a legacy that needed to be exhibited or vindicated but rather the expression of a particular
subject, which was why it acquired a representative and metonymic character, so recognizable
in Bouterwek or Sismondi. he concept of literature as a symbolic asset, which did not com-
pletely lose its validity, was complemented by the representative principle, which presupposed
a relationship with a certain subject and social-historical condition.
Jacques Beyrie (1994, 180) adds an important remark in this sense:
Literature, customarily conceived as being founded upon subjectivity, either individual or col-
lective, reveals itself to be marked in good measure with the stamp of the Other, especially dis-
cernible through intertextuality. Furthermore, this same literature had a tendency to appear in
some ways like a consequence or product. In fact, far from being the pure emanation of a prior
entity, literature oten demonstrates its constituitive and structuring power. For this reason, it
tends to become cause, rather than simple efect.
he irst indication of a change of course may be noticed in the context of the controversies
about the relevance of the cultural and literary heritage of Spain that took place in the 1780s.
An example is the previously mentioned article by Masson de Morvilliers and Forner’s reply in
Oración apologética. Several rebuttals were also made outside of Spain, the most notable written
by the Italian Carlo Denina. his rebuttal served as the basis for Forner, and was even printed
with its Castilian translation alongside Forner’s text. Denina, an erudite from Piedmont whose
role in the evolution of European comparativism has been pointed up by Baldensperger, Getto,
and more recently by Franca Sinopoli (1996), gave a speech in the Academy of Berlin trying to
refute Masson de Morvilliers’s ideas and reacting to classic aesthetic universalism, so tied to
France cultural hegemony. In his 1786 text there was actually a space for geo-political relection
as well, such as in his questioning the motives for the attacks on Spain, since there was nothing
to fear from its dilapidated power. his dimension was obvious in passages such as the dedica-
tory to the Baron von Hertzberg, minister of Frederick II of Prussia, in which Jesús Gutiérrez
(1992, 8) detected an “idealization of Prussian expansionism”, which was clearly associated with
the recovery of artistic independence:
I live and write under the protection of the best King the universe has known; a King who en-
sures the stability of Europe and the freedom of the states that divide it. Doesn’t each country,
each author, have the same reason to oppose any nation seeking the exclusive right to afect the
studies, works, and taste of others? (cfr. J. Gutiérrez 1992, 19)
In reality, these observations it the evolution of Denina towards a historical-critical concept

of literature, more and more aware of the diversity of literary paradigms. his evolution was
relected in successive versions of Discorso sopra le vicende della letterature (Discourse on the
vicissitudes of literature, 1761) and the treatment given to Spanish literature, even if it doesn’t go
beyond an enlightened historical-critical assessment. However, it was not only an issue of a dis-
tinct artistic sensibility but a matter that entailed a decisive geo-literary dimension, especially
in the framework of literary regalism characteristic of this time period in European culture.
Everything identiied with Spanish literature began to attract attention in an international scene
where the increasing rivalry between France and Prussia was patent.
It is worthwhile to mention in this regard the important inluence of English literary stud-
ies and their role in the vindication of Spanish romances, conceived by homas Percy as primi-
tive expressions of an oriental sensitivity (Wellek 1966, 128–29). In this same vein, and just to
mention an outstanding reference, the Romantic poet Robert Southey, who was inluenced by
Herder’s ideas (as was Bouterwek), would also be devoted to Spanish literature, which wouldn’t
prevent him of being also a conspicuous literary nationalist and disparaging the Neoclassic age
“from Dryden to Pope”, for instance, in his Sketch of the progress of English poetry from Chaucer
to Cowper (Bravo 1981, 131 and f.).
Friedrich Schlegel’s History of ancient and modern literature
he inluence of the chrono-literary interpretation of Iberian literature can be clearly seen in

a systematic, doctrinal, and highly inluential work, Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur
(History of ancient and modern literature, 1815), by Friedrich Schlegel. his work was written
when anti-Napoleonic sentiment was at its highest and signiicantly dedicated to Klemens von
Metternich, the famous chancellor of Francis I of Austria. In it, Spanish literature occupies an
important position, although within a larger teleological scheme which shows the argumenta-
tive, and one could even say strategic nature of this position.
In Schlegel’s work, what we have called the subjectivization of literature is a theoretic prin-
ciple which is based on two pillars. he irst is identiied with national character, though not
considered as a product of external factors such as climate or landscape, nor as a means of
mere individualization. In the irst chapter of Schlegel’s work, the notion of national character
is explained, along with the extent to which a culture can be deined by this principle. One of
the factors he emphasizes is the necessity of overcoming the gap between the writers among the
courtesan and aristocratic class, and the people. his was because an elitist literature implied
cultural alienation, which lessened this literature’s national dimension. Another factor is the
argument of a connection between literature and social-historical life, without which literature
would be less dynamic and have less of an inluence on the nation and the state (Schlegel 1841,
4). In other words, the historical dimension of literature and its capacity of preserving the pro-
foundest memory of a nation were highlighted.
hus, a true national literature would be that which had a deep popular dimension, was
non-elitist, and held a close relationship with the life of the nation. Schlegel’s concept was na-
tional-popular, radically subjective, and vindicated as an axiological principle in literature “the
moral point of view, which commands every thing, from which alone we can discover whether a
literature be throughout national, and in harmony with the national weal and the national spirit”
(Schlegel 1841, 259). his criterion directly opposed the normative value which would ind its
support in “any universal theory of art,” that is, in the principles of classicism and illustrated
aestheticism. For Schlegel, who considered the literature of Spain intimately related to that of
Portugal (Schlegel 1841, 257), Spanish literature was the most national of all modern literatures,
chiely because of its collective identiication with a deined and characteristic subject (Schlegel
1841, 259–60). Predictably, this idea was to be complacently reiterated by important Spanish
historians of literature such as José Amador de los Ríos, Manuel Milá y Fontanals, and Ramón
Menéndez Pidal. At the same time, Spanish literature was also characterized by “the maximum
charm of romanticism,” an idea which Bouterwek and Sismondi had already expressed. At this
moment in time Romanticism had a spatial connotation, as it was identiied with Romance
countries, and a temporal connotation due to its identiication with the past.
National character was the irst pillar of Schlegel’s historiographical doctrine. he second
was the geo-cultural dimension of European literature, again important for Bouterwek and
Sismondi, which now became a pivotal element of the theories which sustained Schlegel’s histo-
riographical philosophy. It is quite clear that as a literary historian, Schlegel worked with carto-
graphic criteria, not literally, but in a virtual and symbolic way. However, it guided many of his
judgments on what exactly was characteristic and valuable in the diferent literatures he studied.
European and extra-European spaces were connected in that the second was the back-
ground that explained the cultural identity of the irst. Extra-European space, due to its an-
tiquity, was identiied with the idea of origin, and by analogy, with that of infancy. Certainly,
Schlegel’s views are not very far from those of Hegel’s philosophy of history. In any case, ex-
tensive areas along with their cultures were sentenced to a condition of belatedness. However,
these areas were also given considerable importance because of their inluence on the modern
development of European literatures and because of their geo-cultural clout. In any case, the
Eurocentric quality of Schlegel’s theories on cultural and literary spaces is evident. Ater all, his
History turns out to be a literary history of Europe above all else.
On the other hand, Schlegel deepened the horizontal division of Europe into North and
South, following the tradition of several French, English, and Scottish authors from the eigh-
teenth century, among them, notoriously, Mme. de Staël. But the German author added a verti-
cal division that deined a Central European area covering Italy, Germany, France, and England,
following a tradition that can be traced also to the previous century. his vertical division let
the Iberian Peninsula, as well as Scandinavia and Slavic Europe, in a peripheral position based
on religious and historical factors. However, the Crusades and the subsequent contact with the
East reinforced the Peninsula’s approximation to the central area of European literary geogra-
phy. Both the Iberian Peninsula and Central Europe had been enriched by an imaginative and
romantic Eastern element, but the Peninsula’s history had caused it to maintain its borderland
position between North and South and between Europe and the East, as well as distinguishing
it for assimilating a great diversity of heterogeneous elements (Domínguez 2006).
Consequently, the Iberian Peninsula, and Spanish literature in particular, faces a unique
position due to its national dimension and geo-literary position. he Peninsula obtained pre-
eminence in both aspects, while its peripheral status and singular position were oten empha-
sized. hese seem like contradictory traits which both reinforce and deny the process of mar-
ginalization that had begun much earlier. In other words, Spanish anomaly and irregularity
were the conditions sine qua non for the Peninsula to occupy the place it held in Schlegel’s
historiographical system. his situation was the result of a radical change in the appraisal of the
symbolic role assigned to Spain in the realm of European literature. It can only be truly under-
stood by perceiving the agenda that justiies an axiological and teleological historiographical
system such as that of History of ancient and modern history.
hus, ater emphasizing the national value of Spanish and English literatures, Schlegel
added the following paragraph:
I am far from asserting that this is the only point of view from which literature ought to be
surveyed. I shall have occasion in the sequel to show that many literatures derive the greater
part of their interest from elements of a very diferent description. For the rest, I am quite dis-
inclined to sustain the historical-national point of view as the only valid criterion to judge the
value of a literature. On the contrary, I will do my best to show in the sequel that it is precisely
the inner struggle that makes a great part of French literature and the whole of German litera-
ture interesting, as far as it is not a struggle either for mean circumstantial interests or political
purposes, but a struggle for renaissance, from which a new epoch of spiritual life must arise
that acknowledges divinity, and for a puriied science. (Schlegel, 1815, trans. 1983, 743)1
What is at stake in Schlegel’s History is the nature of the decisive axiological criteria. We have
already seen the rejection of judgments based on a universal and non-historical theory in favor
of a national-historical point of view. Now we can observe that the true honors were bestowed
on the capacity of projection into the future of these literatures and their ability to inaugurate
a new era. It is also obvious that the struggle for this position is limited to French and German
literatures, relegating all others to the past, especially that of Spain. In light of this, it is inevi-
table to intuit the instrumental signiicance of the other literatures: they are necessary pieces for
the construction of a new historical-aesthetic paradigm in which German literature will occupy
the most outstanding position, or perhaps the only position possible.
1. “Ich bin übrigens weit entfernt, jenen nationalen Gesichtspunkt für die einzigen zu halten, aus dem der
Wert einer Literatur zu beurteilen ist. Vielmehr verde ich mich in der Folge zu zeigen bemühen, wie es ge-
rade der innere Kampf ist, der einem groβen Teil der französischen und der deutschen Literatur ihr hohes
Interesse gibt.” he translation is mine, since the inal remark was introduced by Schlegel in the second
edition of Geschichte (1822) and it is not included in the American translation.
Göttingen, Coppet…
Both Friedrich and August Schlegel’s theories on European literature formed a doctrine that
was shared by historiographies throughout Europe, and very particularly in the Iberian Penin-
sula. his was quite consistent with the importance Spanish literature was given in the context
of European literature. Another important factor indeed was this doctrine’s capacity to become
the dominant ideology of nineteenth-century literary nationalism.
Many of the elements that the younger Schlegel emphasized coincided with those found
in early nineteenth-century literary histories of Spanish and Portuguese literature. hese works
were prior to or contemporary with the writing of History of ancient and modern literature and
with other texts such as August Schlegel’s Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (Lessons on
dramatic art and literature), which was published in three volumes between 1809 and 1811 and
became widespread outside Germany in an 1814 French translation. his is the case with the
two volumes which Friedrich Bouterwek wrote in 1804 and 1805 as part of his History of Euro-
pean poetry. At the turn of the century, Bouterwek had an important position at the University
of Göttingen, which was the birthplace of German Hispanism, and where he formed part of a
‘think tank’ that promoted a Germanic-centered view of Europe in which Iberian culture had an
important role. Bouterwek had a close relationship with both the Schlegel brothers (Hart 1952,
40 f.), and also inluenced George Ticknor during his stay at Göttingen. At the same time, in
Switzerland, Simonde de Sismondi was very close to Madame de Staël and other members of
the Coppet circle, which also included the Schlegel brothers.
hus, Göttingen and Coppet were important geographical centers for the constitution of
Spanish and Portuguese as national literatures at the beginning of the Romantic Age. Of the
two, Spanish literature received much more attention, and in fact, under the prism of exoticism,
it was considered a model of what a national literature should be. his was especially true in
France, where the focus on Spanish literature from a historiographical and comparatist point
of view was very intense, and more so ater the 1840s. For example, João Palma-Ferreira (1985,
13) wrote that Bouterwek and Sismondi “were the irst in Europe who systematically formalized
a theory of the characteristics of Portuguese literature,” and added that they “implicitly negate
the autonomy of Portuguese literature, considering it a marginalia of Spanish literature,” thus
matching the prevalent images of Spain and Portugal in Europe, and particularly in France
(Pageaux 1971; 1984). In this line, Ferdinand Denis criticized in the prologue of his 1826 work
on Portuguese literature a lack of other works dedicated to this nation, especially compared
to the case of Spanish literature, which he considered “more well-known in France than any
other foreign literature” (Denis 1826, VIII). More evidence of this tendency was the 1812 sepa-
rate translation into French of Bouterwek’s volume on Spanish literature, coinciding with the
French occupation of the Peninsula.
Portuguese literature was a sort of terra incognita for European scholars during this period.
he language used by Denis to describe this situation reveals the precarious and peripheral po-
sition Portugal was allocated in Europe, as in reality, was the entire Iberian Peninsula. Denis’s
analogies of coasts, islands, and explorers speak for themselves:
An author compared Portugal to one of those islands whose coastline though glimpsed by
navigators maintained hidden riches. Bouterwek was the irst to lead the way, and Sismondi
followed his track. However, both historians dedicated to Portugal but a small portion of their
estimable works. hey deserve the credit awarded to explorers who irst sight a new territory,
even if only supericially: the literary history of Portugal is still pending. (Denis 1826, ix)
However, this insular analogy was not completely accurate. As we have seen, in this early mo-
ment of literary historiography, Peninsular literatures were oten considered part of a wider re-
gion or territory, which was in keeping with the desire to design a geographical-literary map of
Europe with axiological criteria. hus, for the Schlegel brothers, the Iberian Peninsula formed
part of the literature of the “Catholic countries” of Europe. his was a way of emphasizing the
Southern quality of Spain and Portugal, following the parameters marked by Madame de Staël
in De la littérature (On literature, 1800). As a matter of fact, this concept of a literature of South-
ern Europe including several national literatures was widespread and had enormous inluence.
Besides Sismondi, several other nineteenth-century scholars, such as Abel-François Villemain
(1830), Émile Lefranc (1843), and Eugéne Baret (1857), systematically made use of this character-
ization. At the root of this trend was the strategy of estranging these literatures, which was one
of the reasons why Provençal literature was alienated from French literature by scholars such as
Sismondi, who thought that French literature occupied a unique position, not belonging either
to the North or the South. Another not very subtle hint of these attitudes was the establishment
of Romance studies as something loosely connected to the idea of Romanticism by means of
their Southern, medieval, and past qualities, which was especially important to the Schlegel
brothers. Furthermore, in the case of the Iberian Peninsula, the geographical-cultural trait of
Orientalism was also crucial, implying the Peninsula’s uniqueness because of the Arab occupa-
tion which began in the eighth century.
Wadda C. Ríos-Font (2005, 136) accused Sismondi of committing an “expropriation of
national literature.” It is probably more appropriate to point out that the entire nineteenth-
century concept of national literature relies on this expropriation. We have seen how it was irst
applied – from Göttingen, Vienna, Geneva, London, and Paris – to foreign literatures, and only
aterwards to domestic literature, irst in Germany and then in France, with a clear desire for
hegemonic projection in the future. hat is why one of the most remarkable features of many
these literary histories is their drawing apart of their objects of study, which leads, for instance,
to a “Romanesque” tone in the portrayal of Spanish national literature (Ríos-Font 2005), related
to the exotic qualities it is attributed. his phenomenon occurs with regard to Spanish and
Portuguese literature, and it can be clearly discerned and understood, for obvious reasons, in
Denis’s work on Brazilian literature. he extremely Eurocentric historic discourse of Friedrich
Schlegel, Bouterwek, Sismondi, and Denis not only discovered the existence of scarcely-known
national literatures; it also conferred to them their national quality, though always with the
reference points of French and German literature in mind (Rouanet 1991, 183). his implied the
design of a coherent geo-literary European map in which issues such as religion, race, forms of
government, and the relative position of each nation in relation to the core of the idea of Europe
all played a part.
And Boston
Belonging to this line of non-Peninsular historians, the case of George Ticknor and his 1849
work History of Spanish literature acquires a special relevance. his three-volume work was
much more far-reaching and detailed than other histories of its time. Ticknor, in contrast to
other writers like Bouterwek and Sismondi, had irst-hand knowledge of Spain, Spanish, and
a handful of important Spanish researchers with whom he maintained a close relationship. It
is also to be considered that his work was widely disseminated throughout Europe due to its
speedy translation into Spanish in 1851 and German in 1852. Ticknor was the irst notewor-
thy representative of the inluential branch of North America hispanists, thus broadening the
geocultural scope of the making of Iberian historiography. He was inluential, for instance, in
creating the Department of Modern Languages at Harvard University, where he held the Smith
Chair in French and Spanish beginning in 1819 (J.D. Fernández 2005, 49–50; Jaksić 2007).
Ticknor’s conception of national literature was clearly inluenced by the Göttingen group,
where he studied from 1815 to 1817 and met Bouterwek and the Schlegel brothers (Meregalli
1990, 27; Baasner 1995, 318). his can be seen in his appreciation of French literature, which he
expounded on in his lectures at Harvard as “a literature of elegant society,” in open contrast to
the elements he found attractive in Spanish literature (Hart 1952, 64 f.).
In any case, Ticknor’s writings marked a crucial step in the development of the national
historiography of Spanish literature. Besides his keen knowledge of Spanish literary tradition,
he used some of the basic elements from the preceding European tradition of historians in a
powerfully evoking way that fostered the image of their own literature that Spanish historians
would come to assume. Among these elements was the belatedness of Spanish culture and the
subsequent chrono-political perception of the contemporary situation in Spain, closely con-
nected to a tendency to implement a estranging ictionalization of Spanish nationality. An ex-
ample can be found in one of his letters:
here is more national character here, more originality and poetry in the popular manners and
feelings, more force without barbarism, and civilization without corruption, than I have found
anywhere else. Would you believe it? I speak not at all of the highest class, -what seems mere
iction and romance in other countries is matter of observation here, and, in all that relates to
manners, Cervantes and Le Sage are historians… the people still in that kind of poetical exis-
tence which we have not only long since lost, but which we have long since ceased to credit on
the reports of our ancestors. (Life, Letters and Journal; cfr. S. Williams 1968, 2: 5).
Another characterizing trait we can ind in Ticknor, and which was also present in Bouter-
wek, Friedrich Schlegel, and Sismondi, was the belief in the existence of a genuine literature
free from foreign inluence. It goes without saying that this idea would later become a part of
the national institutionalized version of literary history. According to this view, this genuine
literature was formed during the struggle against the Moors, and, along with Christianity, it
would become one of the founding elements of the notion of a national Spanish literature, even
serving in some cases as a basis for diferentiating it from Portuguese literature (Southey 1809,
269). his conception of the genuine quality of national Spanish literature was based on the op-
position to that other current much more akin to Provençal and aterwards Italian interferences.
For Ticknor, genuine Spanish literature was that which was rooted in the Christian front which
battled Islam and had a decidedly Castilian identity (Ticknor 1849, 1: 5–6). His extremely re-
strictive and identitarian notion of Spanish literature is understandable considering his con-
servative romantic background, and in spite of some reluctant opinions, it it neatly into the
speciic cultural and political circumstances Spain was facing in the mid-nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, Ticknor did not altogether ignore Catalan and Galician literatures. As a
matter of fact, he paid considerable attention to Catalan literature, which he pinpointed in
the restricted area of northeastern Spain and in a precise time period from the twelth to the
iteenth centuries. It should be added that, for Ticknor, the existence of Catalan literature
was connected to the presence in the Peninsula of Provençal literature and language. hat is,
it had to do with an exogenous element that was foreign to the speciic nationality of Spanish
literature, and that began when Ramón Berenguer inherited the throne of Provence in 1116 and
moved its capital to Catalonia. his explicitly contradicted the thesis held by Martín Sarmiento,
Juan Andrés, and Torres Amat that the birthplace of Provençal literature was Catalonia, and
not vice versa. herefore, the explanation for the decline of Catalan literature was that at some
point it was kept apart from its European, extra-Peninsular roots. In his own words, “as might
be expected, the delicate plant, whose lower was not permitted to expand on its native soil, did
not long continue to lourish in that to which it was transplanted” (Ticknor 1849, 1: 322). What
resulted was, then, its absorption by the “vigorous spirit” of Castilian literature. In other words,
Ticknor constructs a narrative in which Catalan literature’s inal decline in the iteenth cen-
tury was due to the triumph of national literature, under favorable political conditions, over
literature that was dependant on foreign inluence. Even so, Ticknor did admit that there was a
kind of interlude in which literature was actually written in Catalan, “the harsher, but hardier,
dialect spoken there by the mass of the people” (Ticknor 1849, 1: 324), and not in Provençal,
especially in Valencia.
With respect to Galician literature, Ticknor considered it an ancient literature which was
maintained in the Portuguese tradition, and, as in the case of Catalan, that political factors
played an important role in its situation. However, Ticknor minimized the importance of me-
dieval Galician literature, a large part of which was still unknown in his time. In accordance
with this position, and in spite of the testimony of Santillana, he also rebuked Sarmiento’s thesis
that Galicia played a leading role in the resurgence of Peninsular poetry, describing Martín
Sarmiento as prejudiced due to his Galician background, just as he had ignored Torres Amat’s
thesis on the origin of Provençal literature because of his “Catalan patriotism.”
he conlict between Peninsular literatures during the Middle Ages was reduced to that of
a confrontation between a northeastern literature with foreign roots and a northwestern litera-
ture which would have originated in the mountains of Asturias and León during the struggle
against the Moorish invasion. Galicia, the true Peninsular northwest, was almost invisible for
Ticknor, except for two facts. he irst is that it was the birthplace of the future Portuguese
literature and language. he second, which Ticknor found baling, was that Alfonso X chose
Galician to write one of the main works of medieval Iberian poetry, Cantigas de Santa María
(Songs of the Virgin Mary), a work in which he found a strong Provençal inluence. hese two
cases of non-Castilian connections alienated Galicia as a peripheral area with little to do with
the national principle of Spanish literature, according to the Bostonian scholar.
Ticknor’s History is a clear example of the Castilian reductionism present in Spanish and
even Iberian literary history that resulted in the omission of some basic features of eighteenth-
century historiography. Such was the case with the thesis of Peninsular liminality and transitiv-
ity, and with the emphasis on the generative momentum of the Galician and Catalan literary
traditions, replaced instead with the generally accepted theory of their dead-end condition and
demise. In a similar fashion, the Arab presence in the Peninsula was converted into a simple
element of opposition which favored the forging of a Castilian spirit. All of these aspects were
oriented towards the establishment of a very speciic concept of literary nationality in a time
when the very notion of Spanish literature was undergoing a process of institutionalization by
the liberal Spanish state that was just beginning to arise.
Literary nations
he positioning of the adjective national to characterize the noun literature is deeply depen-
dent on the development of literary historiography. his idea of nationalism, whether explic-
itly or not, relies on the concepts of birth and origin, which are also related to land (nation),
blood (race), and beliefs (religion). It goes without saying thet this framework is much more
restrictive than that which was used by eighteenth-century historians, which is conirmed by
istances such as the Arabic theses of Martín Sarmiento or Juan Andrés. Although these Arabic
theories never truly disappeared, being conserved even by some canonical historians (Ramón
Menéndez Pidal, Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes), they became subordinate to the notion of a genu-
ine national literature and underwent a process of “estrangement.” Part of this was due to the
fact that language became ever more important as a symbol of identity, with the consequent
assumption in Spain of Castilian as the national language. Besides this, there was the appear-
ance of the igure of the ‘national historian’ who identiies with the object of study because of
birth, language, and objectives.
Derrida wrote (1998, 27) that “an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the
interminable and indeinitely phantasmatic process of identiication endures… in whatever
manner one invents the story of a construction of the self, the autos, or the ipse, it is always
imagined that the one who writes should know how to say I.” he person saying I so irmly in
this case is the national historian, in the same way that the indeinite process of identiication,
by its own phantasmatic nature, leads to the permanent revisio that Miguel Tamen discussed.
Derrida added immediately aterwards (1998, 29) that in order to be able to say I, “the identiica-
tory modality must already or henceforth be assured: assured of language and in its language. It
is believed that the problem of the unity of language must be resolved, and that the One of lan-
guage in the strict or broad sense be given – a broad sense that will be stretched till it includes
all the models and identiicatory modalities, all the poles of imaginary projection in social
culture.” From that monolingual I the past is reconstructed, or even invented, as an obsessive
and reductive idea of identity, and furthermore, the aim is to contain all the means of access to
that “own” past.
Spanish national literary history, with its need for institutionalization, clearly shows this
tendency. But what happens when this monolingualism is, to use Derrida’s terminology, a
monolingualism of the other, in a symbolic sense? We can deine the monolingualism of the
other as a monolingualism that is determined from a position alien to the enunciative position
that is held to be legitimate as well as the concept of identity that this account formulates. his
occurs with many national historians who accepted the theory of a national literature based
on geocultural agendas – German, French, American – which went well beyond the strict geo-
cultural limits of the nation. In a diferent sense, monolingualism of the other can also describe
the ideal “monolingualism” of the dominant national history from the point of view of the
linguistic and literary traditions which were marginalized. he existence of this monolingual-
ism of the other made it very diicult for a perfect discursive institutionalization to occur, and
its weakness and incongruities can be seen in Spanish and Portuguese national historiography.
A consequence among others is the permanent friction between the emphasis on literature as
an expression of national identity and the systematic process of marginalization that literary
comparative historiography has applied to the Iberian Peninsula since this discipline irst began.
he institutionalization of Spanish literature
he crucial moment for the establishment of Spanish historiography from an institutional point
of view was during the 1840s and 50s, when an interesting series of events occurred. In 1843,
Friedrich Schlegel’s Geschichte was translated into Spanish. A little earlier, in 1841 and 1842, José
Lorenzo Figueroa and José Amador de los Ríos had translated and adapted the part on Spain
of Sismondi’s Histoire de las literatures du midi (Romero Tobar 2006, 125–27). In 1844, Gil de
Zárate presented his Resumen histórico. One year later, in 1845, the education law known as
Plan Pidal went into efect, introducing the subject “Spanish literature” into secondary educa-
tion and into the newly founded Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (School of Arts and Philosophy),
although in a limited and oten non-speciic way (Baasner 1995, 403–61). At the same time,
Pedro José Pidal, the minister responsible for this law and political-literary mentor of Gil de
Zárate, had been publishing a series of important works on literary history since the 1830s,
which culminated in the early 50s with several texts in which he put forth a closed doctrinal
view of Spanish literature. In 1849, José Amador de los Ríos, also related to Pidal, took up the
irst professorship of Critical History of Spanish Literature at the Central University of Madrid.
Also in 1849 Ticknor’s classic work was published, immediately drawing the attention of Span-
ish scholars, and was subsequently translated into Spanish by Pascual Gayangos and Enrique
Vedia in 1851. Furthermore, in 1847 the Royal Spanish Academy and the Royal Academy of His-
tory were refounded, and other academies were founded to try to adapt them to the liberal state
so that they could form an institutional body which “meant the government of Spanish culture
by the political and social elite” (Pellistrandi 2004, 117). hese academies, especially the Royal
Academy of History, played a more prominent role than the unstable universities in the histori-
cal revision of Spanish culture, including literature (Cirujano Marín et al. 1988).
he beginning of the second stage of the identitarian process of Spanish liberal national-
ism, according to the historian Borja de Riquer (2001, 72 f.), takes place precisely in the year
1843, once the war with the French and Fernando VII’s reign, as well as the regency of General
Espartero, ater Isabella II’s coming of age, are let behind. his second stage lasts until 1875, year
of the Bourbon restoration ater the failure of the First Republic. According to Borja de Riquer,
this stage is characterized by the development of an orthodox point of view of Spanish national-
ism with hegemonic pretensions:
he oicial discourse of nineteenth-century Spanish nationalism was not based on a strong,
attractive, and eicient institutionalizing process capable of producing consensus, but rather
Spanish national identity was presented as an established and “ancient” fact, so that a historic
point of view predominated, focused on the exaltation of past glories … In this way, the he-
gemonic strain of Spanish liberal patriotism, made up of moderates and conservatives, inally
culminated in a nationalist doctrine that tried to impose its limited vision of the Spanish na-
tion by denying the existence of a variety of identities and cultures, and rejecting decentralized
and pluralized projects and demands. (B. de Riquer 2001, 27)
In the ield of literary historiography, this process can be understood as an appropriation by

a speciic political and ideological program of a characterization of Spanish literature which
was mainly elaborated from an exogenous – French, German, American – perspective. his
process of appropriation can be plainly seen in the sequence of events above, especially in the
translations of histories of Spanish literature, which oten incorporated a parallel discourse to
the original made up of the translator’s omissions, additions, and footnotes. In other words, we
are confronted with a dialectics between the representations of Spain and the Iberian Peninsula
in the well-known works of Friedrich Schlegel, Bouterwek, Sismondi, and Ticknor, and the
process of appropriation carried out with a clearly planned intention by the new liberal Spanish
state. In this process, José Amador de los Ríos, a political conservative, played an important role,
irst as translator of Sismondi and later as the author of the most important work on Spanish
literature written by a Spaniard in the nineteenth century.
Pidal, historian and member of the Spanish government
he historical and interpretive writings of Pedro Pidal may be considered an early paradigm of
this dialectics between representation and appropriation. In this and other ways, Pidal’s writ-
ings on literary history are a precedent of Historia crítica de la literature Española (Critical
History of Spanish Literature, 1861–1863) by José Amador de los Ríos. Coinciding with the irst
stage of the liberal identitarian process identiied by Borja de Riquer, from 1813 to 1843, the irst
signs of German romantic and pre-romantic inluence became apparent, especially in the focus
on Baroque theater and the romancero. his inluence is relected in the writings of the Hanse-
atic consul Nicolás Böhl von Faber, Alberto Lista (Juretschke 1951), Agustín Durán, as well as
José Gómez de la Cortina and Nicolás Hugalde y Mollinedo, both of whom partially translated
Bouterwek’s work on Spanish literature in 1829 (Valcárcel Rivera and Navarro Pastor 2002).
Pidal, on the other hand, was the main protagonist of the second stage, which was character-
ized by a profoundly conservative institutionalization promulgated by the movement known as
moderate liberalism, or moderatism.
Pidal’s theories were not very diferent from those of his contemporary Ticknor or from
those of other foreign authors who were building a nationalist storyline of Spanish literature.
However, Pidal was characterized by overlooking the greater European literary framework,
thereby also ignoring the implications of the sort of national literary history that we can sym-
bolically link with Göttingen. Also, Pidal shared some of Ticknor’s theses, but in a much more
extreme manner. hese two aspects show that Pidal made an efort to present a unitary, Castil-
ian version of the literature of the Iberian Peninsula. In other words, Pidal took advantage of
certain instruments used by international Spanish literary scholars to institutionalize the image
of Spanish literature from a conservative Spanish nationalist viewpoint.
his viewpoint had a Schlegelian foundation, that of literature primarily as the memory of
a nation (Pidal 1890, 1: 36 and f.). Hence, the most highly regarded literature was that which
was supposed to be the most related to the nation’s memory and, therefore, the most untouched
by foreign inluences. In other words, popular literature, as far as it was identiied with the
newsy nature of the romances and the igure of the minstrels, popular singers who marked “the
divisive line which profoundly separated it from artistic and courtesan literature” (Pidal 1890, 1:
213). he antinomy between popular literature and learned literature was one of the main theses
of this school of interpretation of Spanish literature. At the same time, it was also a way of dis-
tancing Spanish literature from its European context, a context which was constantly underly-
ing, as historiographically it was the backdrop against which Spanish literature was instituted.
hus, it is by no means surprising that courtly and scholarly poetry, always suspected of having
a non-native origin, was considered “better itted to the thinking patterns of Europe, and to its
constant progress and development. It became, therefore, less local, less national than popular
literature” (Pidal 1890, 1: 221). Similar statements were made by Teóilo Braga in the ield of
Portuguese literature and F.R. Cambouliu in that of Catalan literature.
According to Borja de Riquer, “Spanish national identity was presented as an established
and ‘ancient’ fact.” We can add that this was a result of a series of resections that removed all
illegitimate and improper elements from national identity; so it was at least for literary histo-
riography. he antiquity which national literature was ascribed was quite peculiar. he Middle
Ages had been a period of great diversity, and yet Pidal characterized the Peninsular literature
of this time as fundamentally Castilian, popular, and Catholic, and so every instance that did
not it this characterization was relegated. As an example, he described Aragonese and Catalan
poetry as akin to the Provençal realm and, in accordance with Ticknor, insisted on the strong
Lemosin inluence found in Alfonso X’s Galician poetry. Pidal also minimized the linguistic
diferences during the Middle Ages, thus emphasizing the nuclear role of Castilian literature in
detriment to Portuguese literature, which was described as “a variety, and not a large one at that,
of Castilian literature” (1890, 1: 308). In conclusion, Pidal’s strategy of nationalization consisted
in minimizing anything non-Castilian, either by incorporating it into the Castilian culture or
by abruptly labeling it “foreign.” In the words of Miguel Ramos Corrada (2000, 41), Pidal “pre-
sented the entire Iberian Peninsula as a territory with certain common characteristics ab initio,
from which any separation could only lead to the collapse of one’s own way of being, to the loss
of one’s own nature, to bewilderment, and to confusion.”
he irst national historian
he theories of Pedro José Pidal might today seem excessively simplistic, if not mere caricatures.
However, it is important to bear in mind that some of his theories, in many cases derived from
Schlegel’s school of thought, formed a solid part of Spanish historiography and philology at
least until the generation of the Seminary of Historic Studies in the irst half of the twentieth
century. his can be described as a habitus, in Bourdieu’s sense of the term, a tendency which
has conditioned the relationship with the Peninsular literary past from an academic perspective.
One of the irst signs of this tendency is Historia crítica de la literatura española (1861–1863)
by José Amador de los Ríos, which deals strictly with medieval literature. his work can be
considered the culminating expression of the second stage described above, particularly its
lengthy introduction. his introduction is a brilliant historical panorama of Spanish literary
criticism and historiography. Yet, a closer inspection reveals that it establishes a geneology of
Spanish historiography, and a historiographical canon, which vindicates some eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century writers, such as the “purely patriotic” Mohedano brothers, Alberto Lista,
Agustín Durán, and Pedro José Pidal, while disparaging many of the eighteenth-century writers,
and in particular Martín Sarmiento, who is described as “excessively fond of the land where he
was born,” in contrast to the more “patriotic” Franciscan brothers of Córdoba. Amador de los
Ríos does the same with foreign authors. He regards German authors favorably, especially their
defense of Spanish popular literature and theater. However, French authors are censured for
their aesthetic exclusivity, although he does admire those French authors from the nineteenth
century who “discovered” foreign literature in order to reconvert that of France into a “national
literature,” such as Louis Viardot, Philarète Chasles, and especially Abel-François Villemain
and Adolf Puibusque (Espagne 1993). Pidal was also very harsh with Sismondi and Ticknor. He
accused them of straying from the “fundamental principles of our civilization” (Amador de los
Ríos 1861–1863, 1, LXXXIX), probably because he considered religious diferences as leading to
misunderstanding and misrepresentation.
Amador de los Ríos’ opinions are an expression of the geopolitical and ideological tension
of the time, but also of his self-vindication at being the irst national historian of Spanish litera-
ture. In several of his comments, registered by Menéndez Pelayo (in Fitzmaurice-Kelly 1901, 14),
it becomes clear that the appearance of Ticknor’s work moved him to write his Historia crítica.
Furthermore, it must be remembered that Amador de los Ríos had translated Sismondi while
still a young a scholar, including very detailed corrections and notes.
In fact, one of José Amador de los Ríos’s most distinctive features is how clearly he ex-
presses his determination to become the irst true national historian. To emphasize this, he
brought to light the deiciencies of the international attempts to write about Spanish literature
and considered them mere initial steps to the theories he himself was outlining:
Most writers agree, no matter how long their works or the purpose of their writing, that with
respect to nationalism, it [Spanish literature] occupies irst place of all the literatures that have
evolved since the fall of the Roman Empire. However, when this statement is made by a for-
eign author, no matter how eager he is to ind the noble truth, surely he has not been able to
penetrate all the mysteries of Spanish culture. It is a reprehensible shame that as yet no Spanish
author of this century has considered mapping the history of our literature, so much more
important for us than any other written by neo-Latin nations. (Amador de los Ríos 1861–1863,
1: II)
Amador de los Rios’s logic is clear: irst, an emphasis on Spanish literature’s privileged position
among all other European literatures (although he was in reality only referring to Castilian
literature); second, foreign authors’ consensus on this aspect; and third, in contrast to the pas-
sivity of his compatriots, his own authority to disesteem foreign authors and proclaim himself
the irst legitimate Spanish historian “in the Castilian language.” José María Pozuelo (2002, 344)
was quite right to identify in Amador de los Ríos the “constituent optimism that the histori-
cal method proposed for itself as opposed to the ‘subjectivity’ which was anchored in foreign
aesthetic models.” his was a new surge of the revisio movement, which saw literary history as a
deliverance from aesthetic dogmatism and as a way of proving the magniicence of Spanish lit-
erature. It was also a way for historians to use their nationality in order to assume the exclusive
privilege of the correct interpretation and deep understanding of a certain culture.
his development was similar to what was occurring in other historiographical traditions.
In the case of Amador de los Ríos it takes on an institutional signiicance, due to his position
of power within the ield of education as a member of the Royal Academy of History and the
irst professor of Critical History of Spanish Literature at the Central University of Madrid. His
work, which bears the same title, was funded by Isabella II and also dedicated to her. From this
position of authority, Amador de los Ríos propagated the nationalist characterization of Span-
ish literature that, as we have seen, had earlier origins. For Amador de los Ríos, the profound
notion of nationality was misunderstood by foreign historians, to the extent that they failed to
apprehend its dependence on the religion and patriotism that were born during the Reconquista
(Pellistrandi 2004, 217). Curiously, the term he uses most frequently in these contexts is that of
“yoke,” so that he recurs to it to refer both to the “Islamic yoke” and the “yoke of exotic precepts”
(Amador de los Ríos 1861–1865, 1: LXIV), since, for him, all forms of religious or aesthetic (irst
Italian, then French) inluence were equally detrimental to the popular expression of national-
ity. In contrast to this were the “independence and freedom” of “national literature” (Amador
de los Ríos 1861–1863, 1: XXXII). It is quite in keeping then that he considered the Middle Ages
to be the height of national literature, compared with the Italian inluence of the 1500s. By the
same token, the interpretive structure of Critical History consists of a series of comparisons
between “national” versus “cosmopolitan” and “popular” versus “aristocratic” literature. It is
also predictable that, in the wake of August Schlegel, the Count von Schak, and Agustín Durán,
Amador de los Ríos highlighted the genre of romances, the theater of the Golden Century, and
Lope de Vega in particular (Pozuelo 2000a; 2002).
Despite the doctrinal basis of his history, Amador de los Ríos’ erudition and his knowledge
of medieval literature were unprecedented, just as unprecedented was Ticknor’s direct knowl-
edge of the texts he referred to in his 1849 work. In fact, some of the later Spanish medievalists,
such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal and his school, were much more reductive in their theories,
probably due to the stricter application of late-romantic logic (Gómez Moreno 2004, 164–65;
Fox 1997, chap. 6).
he concept of Spanish literature clearly depends on the precise epistemology of the his-
tory of literature, and on an ideology and a political project related to the process of cultural
planning. One of the constituents of this process was the identiication of Spanish with Castil-
ian literature. he last pages of Historia crítica are enlightening to this respect. In them, the
Reconquista is considered the moment when the “Spanish people in the true sense of the word”
was formed, although admitting that post-Augustan Latin had also had a national character,
proved by the association of Latin with Catholicism during the conlict with Visigoth Arian-
ism. In these pages, the most inluential circumstance was the appearance of “diverse romances”
spoken throughout the Peninsula, along with their relationships with Arab and Hebrew. At that
point, the text asserts Castilian’s central position and the situation of dependence, marginality,
and “instrumentality” of any other language when compared with the “genius of Spanish.” We
ind, for example:
It is not yet the moment to assess the great contradictions and trials to which Providence sub-
jects Spanish genius by giving it those instruments [i.e., the other Peninsular languages] over
which Castilian has gained supremacy, as central Spain has naturally taken on its role as the
great nationality of the Peninsula. (Amador de los Ríos 1861–1865, 1: XXXII)
he main thesis of this “irst historian” of Spanish literature was that of the profound continuity
of Castilian with Hispanic-Latin and Hispanic-Goth culture, aimed at proving their hegemony
in the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages onward. his rejected the views of earlier his-
torians, who had considered that Spanish literature owed much to the inluence of Arab and
Provençal (Romero Tobar 2006, 141).
Other histories
his historiographical interpretation of Spanish literature soon faced retorts and clariications,
although oten expressed implicitly, that demonstrated the unease with respect to the concept
of Spanish literature and to the correct model for its historiographical representation. his pe-
riod witnessed, in fact, the consolidation of literary history as a discipline at a European level,
in accordance with the emergence in Spain of difering points of view in relation to the mode of
representing Spanish literature. At this time national historiographies of Galician and Catalan
literature were formed, and that of Portuguese was deinitively consolidated. Other literary his-
tories also appeared, such as that of Asturias, although with less of a desire for nationality, and
using less compromising terms, such as país (country ) (Fuertes Acevedo 1885).
In some cases these departures can be judged as mere corrections of emphasis, although
this is also meaningful. Such was the case of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, considered the main
nineteenth-century scholar of Spanish culture. Although he never achieved to write a conven-
tional literary history, he occupied Amador de los Ríos’ position as professor of Critical History
of Spanish Literature ater his death in 1878. he program which Menéndez Pelayo presented
to obtain this position at the Central University in Madrid was quite unlike the prevalent view
at the moment (González-Millán 2006). Menéndez Pelayo (1941) was opposed to some of the
implicit principles of mainstream nationalist literary historiography, and to the literary histo-
riography related with the liberal state, which linked political nationality and literary nation-
ality. Among his ideas were his sound contention about the “Spanish” character of Hispanic
American literature and also about the possibility of there being diverse nations within a single
state, “as occurs in the modern empires of Austria and Russia.” Applying this principle to the
Iberian Peninsula, he found at least three distinct literary nationalities corresponding to the
three main Iberian romance languages and was reluctant to use the term “Spanish language” to
refer exclusively to that of “Central Spain.” Nevertheless, Menéndez Pelayo still referred to all
these literatures as sharing a profound common identity and a “mysterious synchronism,” thus
maintaining them within the framework of “Spanish genius.” Although sometimes vacillating,
he generally excluded from this concept literatures of Arab or Hebrew background because of
their departure from the main Spanish attributes of Latinity and Christianity. Within his pro-
gram on Spanish literature, these were eventually limited to the section on “Semitic inluences.”
Menéndez Pelayo went on to reject the identiication between language and literature, al-
though with some contradictions, such as the inclusion into Spanish literature of the literatures
of the Hispanic American countries. Following to some extent Amador del los Ríos’ example,
he based this on the belief that the concept of identity is more ancient than that of language. For
Menéndez Pelayo, this was almost an epiphenomenon in which cultural Latinity and religious
Christianity played an important role. his is why he criticized Ticknor, who began describing
the history of Spanish literature with the sudden appearance of the Castilian Poema de mio Cid
(Poem of my Cid), a facilitative expedient, which Menéndez Pelayo ironically found “much
more comfortable and artistic, if the art of history were like a poem or a novel” (Menéndez
Pelayo 1941, 11). Menéndez Pelayo’s work was not directly opposed to that of his predecessors.
His main divergence was not addressed, in fact, to historians such as Pidal, Amador de los Ríos,
and even Gil de Zárate, but to the exogenous approach which Menéndez Pelayo coupled with
an epistemological principle, the identiication of language and literature, and an expositive
“romanesque” model.
he diference of Menéndez Pelayo with respect to Pidal and, in a much more nuanced
way, Amador de los Ríos was his emphasis on a multilingual Spanish literature, where the con-
cept of a Catholic and Latin “Spanish nation” embraced the whole Iberian Peninsula, including
Portugal. his position was afected by the historical moment in which it was formulated and
by an integrative and conservative point of view on Hispanic culture. During this time, consid-
ered by Borja de Riquer to be the third stage of the liberal identitarian process, the Borbonic
Restoration was under way. One of the novelties of this period was the appearance of “regional
literatures,” in consonance with the Catalan Renaixença and the Galician Rexurdimento, and of
the proliferation of loral games, which were irst celebrated in Barcelona in 1859 and then in
Galicia and the Basque country. As a matter of fact, Menéndez Pelayo actively participated in
the Floral Games of Barcelona in 1888, and even made a speech in Catalan (Peiró 1995, 92–93).
In this speech he stressed that he was a follower of Manuel Milá i Fontanals, a participant in the
Renaixença cultural movement, and an important igure of Castilian and Catalan literary his-
toriography (Jorba 1989). One of the theses Milá defended was the multilingualism of Spanish
literature. He was supported by Menéndez Pelayo and also by Antoni Rubio i Lluch, another of
Milá’s followers, who was among the irst to systematize the history of Catalan literature (Mas-
sot i Muntaner 1979; Molas 1986, 281; Romero Tobar 2006, 196–98), thus creating a continuous
line up to the present.
However, these theories were not generally accepted at the time. Borja de Riquer (2001, 93)
has characterized this third stage that occupied the last quarter of the nineteenth century with
the triumph of an oicial and conservative view of Spanish identity. At the same time, alterna-
tive points of view were dismissed, although oten they were as conservative, if not more, as the
theories which inally dominated Spanish literary historiography, which deined Spanish iden-
tity as Christian and Castilian. As a matter of fact, this period also witnessed the development
of Catalan literary historiography, because the Renaixença also implied the appearance of a
speciic historiography that shared the ethnic and linguistic national basis of Castilian/Spanish
literature, but applied to a Catalan literary nationality.
It has been held that the various Iberian nationalisms should be considered diferent as-
pects of a collective process, with an evident chronological coherence and constant interaction
among the particular components (B. de Riquer 2001; Martí-López 2005, 156–57). he devel-
opment of literary historiographies is probably one of the best illustrations of this contention.
We have already mentioned the importance of Milá i Fontanals in the early stages of modern
Catalan and Spanish literary historiography, and also how the progressive implementation of
Spanish literature had relegated the other literatures of the Peninsula to determined, though
not equal, positions. One of these positions is that related to their consideration as marginalia,
which subsumes these literatures within the category of regional literature. As a matter of fact,
this idea was partially accepted by the supporters of these literatures and their incipient histo-
riographies. In any case, the emergence of this regional assumption exposes the diiculty to
ind a univocal understanding of the literature of Spain and the fact that those other literatures
(Catalan, Galician, and at irst even Asturian) in part derive from the resistance and tension
facing the creation of a national Spanish literature parallel to the formation of a liberal state
during the same period.
A work that eloquently depicts this situation is La literatura española en el siglo XIX (Span-
ish literature of the nineteenth century) by the Augustan priest Francisco Blanco García (1894).
In its third part it focuses on regional and Latin American literatures. hese were aspects which
could not be ignored, but neither could they be easily assimilated into the concept of Spanish
literature held by Blanco García. hey were apparently marginalia, but with the added value of
determining the understanding of the whole. Blanco García’s attitude towards regional litera-
tures (Catalan, Galician, and Asturian, for he renounced the study of Basque literature because
of ignorance of the language) shows an obvious wariness of possible political implications. he
paradox is that this suspicious attitude is responsible for a number of important historiographi-
cal panoramas which count among the irst approaches to theses literatures.
Pers i Ramona et alii
he irst history of Catalan literature was Bosquejo histórico de la lengua y la literatura catalana
by Magí Pers i Ramona, published in Spanish in 1850 and later expanded into a Historia de la
lengua y la literatura catalana (History of Catalan language and literature, 1857). his irst work
was concise and clumsy but clearly illustrated some of the basic elements that were reiterated in
later works, for example the subordination of literature to language, the awareness of the lack of
adjustment of the political divisions of modern Europe to the geo-political and cultural palimp-
sest that woud be evinced by minor languages and literatures, and the permanent contraposi-
tion between Catalan and Castilian literatures. A few years later, in 1858, F.R. Cambouliu (1910)
published in French another history of Catalan literature, which was later translated to Catalan.
It has been commonly assumed that a sort of belatedness can be noticed in relation to the
publication of histories of Catalan literature – actually, prior to Amador Rios’ and contempo-
rary with Gil de Zárate’s and Pidal’s – with regard to histories from other European nations
(Romero Muñoz 1982, 4; Molas 1986, 257). However, this time lag is not as shocking when
compared to other cases like Portuguese, Galician, and Basque. Besides, it has to be observed
that Bouterwek, Sismondi, and Ticknor had paid considerable attention to medieval Catalan
literature, and that Francesc Jaubert de Passà had already published a brief panoramic vision
of Catalan literature as soon as 1824 (Molas 1986, 274). But the fact is that Catalan historiog-
raphy gained momentum following Pidal’s plan and his speciic proposal for the deinition
of Spanish literature, as well as his oicial endorsement of the academic curriculums to the
detriment of non-Castilian literatures. Pers i Ramona’s history published in 1850 followed this
calendar closely.
Jaubert and Cambouliu were both French writers closely tied to areas historically related
to Catalonia. Cambouliu is especially representative of this initial phase that tried to rebuild
the ideal of a Southern Romanic literary space, while aware of the decline of its previous power
and of its displacement as a consequence of the cultural strategies tied to the modern identity
of Europe.
Cambouliu presented a clear argument about the national character of Catalan literature.
Catalan national literature, like any other, was understood as an abstraction contingent on a
ixed plan of representation and on a epistemology based on identitarian strategies. he process
of identiication of a proper language and by means of this language became a key point leading
to a philological perspective on national literatures and made all the more acute in keeping with
its reagent or contrasting character in the comparison with other competing national literatures.
As summarized by Gayatri C. Spivak (2003, 27): “In order to assume culture we must assume
collectivity. Yet usually we assume collectivity on the basis of culture.” If we substitute culture
for literature, what results is a reasonable description of the metalepsis with which a literary na-
tionality is deined: a given collectivity is assumed as national, based on a literary past designed
from a linguistic identity or predetermined idiosyncrasy. here is no doubt that Cambouliu’s
characterization of Catalan literature as well as Pers i Ramona’s was a reaction to the collective
identity attributed to Catalonia derived from the designs of European, particularly Iberian, lit-
erary nationalities, made up by the classic authors of nineteenth-century historiography.
Cambouliu’s starting point was his rejection of the vision of Catalan literary history ex-
pressed by Bouterwek, Sismondi, and Ticknor, who considered it derivative because of its rela-
tionship with Castilian literature. Consequently, the igure of the irst historian appeared again,
this time as a future historian who was expected to reveal the authentic national identity of
literature. Cambouliu wrote in the irst pages of his book “Catalan language and literature are
still expecting their historian” (Cambouliu 1910, 2). Even if Cambouliu did not introduce him-
self as this person, he did indeed establish the basis by which the work of the future historian
ought to be measured.
Cambouliu founded some basic elements in this respect. First of all, the airmation of the
distinct character of the Catalan nation compared to Castilian through a systematic counter-
representation that fostered the acknowledgement of Catalan nationality and national spirit.
Ater this image, Catalan was presented as the third of the three major Peninsular languages
following Portuguese and Castilian, yet unfortunately lacking its own historiography. On the
other hand, he delimitated the object of this absent historiography by distinguishing between
Catalan and Provençal and consequently by discriminating Catalan’s tradition from that of the
Occitan language. For him, the true milestone of national Catalan literature was King James I
and not the Provençal troubadours. Cambouliu insisted on Catalonia as originally forming part
of “that grand feudal republic that extends from the Loire to the Ebro and from the Alps to the
ocean” (Cambouliu 1910, 15). Nevertheless, he stressed the success of Catalan in consolidating
a form of national unity above the ruins of feudalism and the cultural Provençal area thanks to
James I, who is made to play a role similar to that of Alfonso X in Castile and Louis IX in France.
he dynamics that shaped Catalonian national literature has, therefore, a European dimen-
sion and a basically Peninsular substantiation. It was the triumphant successor of the Provençal
cultural period that transformed into the third national literature of the Peninsula with the
help of an industrious monarch. In this way, the vision of the three literary nationalities of the
Peninsula was endorsed with the exclusion of other possible literatures, as had been sustained
previously by Bouterwek and Sismondi and later by Menéndez Pelayo. By the same token, Al-
fred Morel-Fatio, in Grundriss der romanischen Philologien (Gröber 1897), in the section Die
Literaturen der romanischen Völker, would later dedicate a chapter to Catalan along with Ital-
ian, Provençal, Portuguese, and Spanish literatures, while Galician literature was reduced to a
medieval episode of Portuguese literature.
However, it was evident that Spanish and Catalan literature were not merely parallel phe-
nomena. he institutional support Spanish literature received because of its pertinence to the
state is just one of the reasons for this. Another reason is that from the perspective of European
historiography, the two literatures had always been judged very diferently. Spanish literature
was seen as a paradigm of nationality and as one of the great literatures, that is, a complete liter-
ature with an uninterrupted course from its medieval roots to the present. In contrast, Catalan
literature had always been studied from the viewpoint of its apparent extinction at the begin-
ning of the Modern Age and considering the strong importance of foreign inluences, irst from
Provençal and aterwards from Italian. his is why the airmation by national historiography
of Catalan literature irst had to rebel against the position that it had been given by authors
such as Bouterwek, Friedrich Schlegel, Sismondi, and Ticknor. Of necessity, it also had to reject
the totalizing reference of Spanish literature within the ambit of the Iberian Peninsula and the
Spanish state. his was what Cambouliu intended, in conjunction with the Renaixença move-
ment, hence opening the way for the later historiographical tradition up to the present. It can be
assumed that Spanish and Catalan literature were not mere national creations competing with
each other, since a joint process prevailed which doubted the formation of the historiography of
Spanish literature as understood since the irst decades of the nineteenth century.
his process can best be found in the literary regionalism of Victor Balaguer, a historian
from Barcelona who was also an inluential politician and minister of the Spanish government.
To a great extent he expressed this idea in important forums like the Royal Academy of History
and the Royal Spanish Academy, to which he was elected as a member in 1875 and 1883 respec-
tively. On both occasion and according to the protocol, Balaguer delivered a solemn speech, de-
voting the irst one to “Catalan literature” and the second to “he signiicance and importance
of regional literatures.” Balaguer, who in many senses acted as a mediator between Catalonia
and the capital of the state, introduced in these discourses in partibus inidelium a persuasive
presentation of a series of proposals focused on the cultural and political present as afected by
a past shaped in a literary historiographical way. In the second speech he warned, for instance,
of the danger of reducing Spanish literature to Castilian since, in his opinion, there were ive
Spanish literatures identiied with diferent languages and regions: Castilian, Catalan, Basque,
Galician, and Asturian. Consequently, he claimed a diferent perspective to the predominant
view in writing about the history of Spanish literature. Furthermore, Balaguer insisted directly
on the identifying dimension of this premise, claiming “the emancipation of the mind in litera-
ture that is the symptom of nationality” (Balaguer 1883, 9).
In addition, the irst of the speeches, pronounced in the Royal Academy of History, con-
stituted an example of the historiographical emergence tied to the literary Renaixença. One of
the most signiicant parts of his exposition was the idea shared by other non-Spanish Penin-
sular historiographical proposals that they were connected to an ancient period, which con-
tradicted the borders of the national articulation of modern Europe. Balaguer attributed to
Catalan culture a radically Southern and Mediterranean character, distant not only from the
Castilian spirit but from the dominating Northern cultures of Europe. Balaguer’s six volumes of
Historia política y literaria de los trovadores (Political history and literature of the troubadours)
(1878–1979) were devoted to this cultural area.
his type of historiographical proposal made use of the space let by the leading discourses
regarding the deinition of Spanish literature based on the hegemony of the so-called central
Spain, with an idiosyncratic approach. Balaguer and others found support in Provençal and
European literature to tie Catalan to the origins of modern literature. Catalan literature pro-
claimed itself, alongside Dante and Petrarch’s Italy, as the inheritor of the Provençal world,
which ater the disaster of the anti-Albi crusade gave place to two lines of continuity: one be-
yond the Alps and the other on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees (Balaguer 1878–1879, 1: 378–80).
In this regard, the inluence of the Félibrige movement, by means of Cambouliu and Balaguer,
on the rise of Catalan literary historiography is noteworthy, since what would appear to be a
derivative event – the development of Catalan literature – ended up becoming an autonomous
phenomenon and with a far superior reach to that of Provençal literature, that would result a
mere regional issue with a limited capacity to question the fullness and self-evidence of French
literature. hese dissimilar developments provide telling evidence of the distance that separated
the respective capacities of self-legitimation of Spanish and French literature in the context of
the process of national construction.
he Félibrige movement provided the background for the origin of Catalan national his-
toriography, which immediately established a dialectical relationship with the idea of Spanish
literature, as shown by Balaguer’s public interventions. he responses of José Amador de los
Ríos and Emilio Castelar, in charge of replying to Balaguer’s speeches in both Royal Acad-
emies, demonstrated once more the concurrence of the roles of the politician and literary his-
torian. Eventually, Spanish traditional historiography would end up discarding the challenge
represented by Catalan literary history towards its own founding ideas. In turn, Catalan literary
history was to center itself in the articulation of its identity and autonomy, marginalizing the
question of its position in relation to Spanish literature and the Iberian setting. What is more,
Catalan’s historiographical reason also presented itself as an authoritative reference for other
re-emerging literatures. Besides the emulous efect caused by the Renaixença, we should recall
Balaguer’s insistence on the modern inluence of the Catalan jocs lorals in Galicia and the
Basque country as the detonator for the reappearance of their respective literatures, as well as
on the Provençal character of medieval Galician and Portuguese literature. Present in all this
was a sort of patronizing pretense of promoting other Peninsular literatures and consequently
the desire for a leading role in the incipient revision of the historiographical conception of Pen-
insular literatures, previously designed by Spanish moderate liberalism.
Catalan literary historiography followed a process of consolidation based on the basic
principles we have mentioned, in strict interrelationship with the changing cultural and po-
litical contexts. Some episodes to consider are those constituted by igures like Antoni Rubio i
Lluch, fellow pupil of Menéndez Pelayo and irst professor of Catalan literature in the Estudis
Universitaris Catalans (1903), an institution not ailiated with the state university system; the
nomination in 1954 of Martín de Riquer as the irst professor of Catalan literature in the Uni-
versity of Barcelona; and the increasing demand for manuals and panoramas ater the death
of Franco. Ater Resum de literature catalana (Summary of Catalan literature) by Lluís Nicolau
d’Olwer (1927), some chapters by Jordi Rubiò i Balaguer on Catalan literature were included in
Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas (General history of Hispanic literatures, Díaz Plaja
1949–1968), which was published ater the war. hese chapters, like other sections dedicated to
non-Castilian Peninsular literatures, focused on medieval times, ignoring any speciic refer-
ence to the twentieth century. Història de la literatura catalana (History of Catalan literature,
1954) by Joan Ruiz i Calonja extended up to the Civil War and followed a tradition that started
with Milà i Fontanals and was transmitted from teachers to disciples until the present day. hen,
little by little, some histories proliferated that assumed the idea of synthesis, incorporation, and
a summary of particular advances in the investigation of an epistemological object that is taken
for granted. his is a particular form of literary history, quite diferent from others, that in-
volved the maximum degree of naturalization of historiographical discourse (Vallverdú 1978).
In this form of discourse, revisio decreased once a certain degree of saturation was reached.
he main historiographical point of reference continues to be the work directed by Martín
de Riquer starting in 1964, which evolved into an eleven-volume history prepared by a group
of authors. he introduction holds great signiicance, as it clearly expressed the desire to legiti-
mize the normality of the literature in question, even at the expense of evident contradictions.
Primarily, it is an act of vindication which tried to establish literature written in Catalan as the
object of the historiographic efort rather than the general ensemble of written texts in Catalan
cut of from any artistic aspiration or texts written by Catalonians in other languages (Latin,
Provençal, Castilian, etc.). he philological criteria that made Catalan the literature of not a
country but a linguistic community that included the Balearic Islands, Valencia, and Rousillon
re-surfaced. As noted by M. de Riquer himself (1964–88, 1:9), one of the biggest problems was
that, in spite of the mono-lingual criteria, from a historic perspective, poetry written in Proven-
çal during the Middle Ages was also assumed to be a part of Catalan literature, touching on a
question tackled by Cambouliu that afected the very root of national literature. he exceptions
and levels of tolerance frequently turn out to be quite signiicant.
Suebi and Celts
In the same line, it is also noteworthy that the main nineteenth-century theorist on Galician
culture, Manuel Murguía, challenged in El regionalismo gallego (Galician regionalism) – an
opuscule published in Havana in 1889 – the common assumption that Provençal had a strong
inluence on ancient Galician poetry, adducing its “Suebi element.” Furthermore, and contra-
dicting the polemic anti-regionalist address given by Professor Antonio Sánchez Moguel of the
Central University of Madrid upon his entrance in the Royal Academy of History, Murguía
took up the Celtic roots of Galicia and its culture, an idea which had already been defended by
historians begining in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
In fact, Murguía carried on with Martín Sarmiento’s work in the eighteenth century and
his claim for a speciic geo-cultural position for Galicia, autonomous from the Castilian-cen-
tered predominant historiography of Spanish literature as well as from the Southern and Medi-
terranean orientation of Catalan cultural discourse. Murguía’s position during the nineteenth
century was parallel to the one Martín Sarmiento had assumed a century earlier and anticipated
the so-called “Atlantism,” which was sustained by later intellectuals who also produced notice-
able replicas in literary histories. However, while Sarmiento limited himself to toning down the
Arab and Hebrew inluence and its supposed inluence on the origin of Iberian and European
poetry as he emphasized the Celtic-Suebi dimension of Galicia, Murguía went on to assert a
hierarchical opposition between Aryan and Semitic elements. Murguía’s racial approach was in
keeping with the paradigm generalized during the nineteenth century, which was very much
resorted to by historians of Galician, Portuguese, and later Basque literature as a procedure to
enforce their identity claims.
Consequently, in the irst history of Galician literature, a youthful and uninished work
written by the future Minister of Finance Augusto González Besada (1887), the Celtic charac-
ter was the basis for the literary identity of Galicia, simultaneously with the postulation of an
autochthonous poetry which preceded a phase of puberty identiied with the medieval trou-
badours. his postulation, shared by the Portuguese historiographical tradition, had, from a
geo-literary point of view, the clear function of revising the Romanic and Southern connection
derived from the Provençal poetry of the troubadours of the thirteenth and fourteenth centu-
ries. his thesis became canonical thanks to Murguía and Eugenio Carré, who in his book La
literatura gallega en el siglo XIX (Galician literature in the nineteenth century, 1903) provided
a chronological and canonical sketch of literature which is still somewhat in use today. Carré
(1903, 15) noted “our poets are more alike to the bards of the North than the ones from the
South; due undoubtedly to the ethnicity of our race.” Carré, replicating Murguía, validated the
existence of a profound and ancient tradition that explained the splendor and characteristics
of the troubadours’ poetry as well as the so-called Rexurdimento (Renaissance) of Galician lit-
erature during the nineteenth century. However, this renaissance could only be conceivable in
so far as Galician literature – and therefore Galician language – was considered distinct from
Portuguese, as opposed to the thesis quite prevalent among Catalan and Spanish authors (Vic-
tor Balaguer or Juan Valera) that recognized Portuguese literature as such, as the third grand
Iberian literature together with Catalan and Castilian. In fact, similar claims of Galician speci-
icity were also made by González Besada and Murguía, among others.
In summary, the Northern dimension, the airmation of a popular antique autochthonous
tradition, and the evidence of the Galician origin of Portuguese literature, closely linked to the
defense of the linguistic and literary Galician identity, were three basic factors afecting the
foundation of the “literary autonomy” of Galicia, as stated by Leandro de Saralegui y Medina
(1886, 7), who formed part of the same circle as the previous authors. hese factors were the
expression of the national macro-text that, according to Xoán González-Millán (1994), identi-
ied Galician literature.
he same approach is evident in Resume da historia da literature galega (Summary of the
history of Galician literature) by Florencio Vaamonde Lores (1898), the irst global historic
summary written in Galician. However, historiographical views made by authors from outside
Galicia, which the local tradition has tended to ignore, did not opt for the Celtic thesis. Blanco
García (1894) placed Galician literature as a regional event within the Spanish context. Gali-
cian literary history was also included in Historia de la literatura universal (History of world
literature) by Giacomo Prampolini (1956), in which it was placed amid Iberian literatures. In
Grundriss der romanischen Philologien (Basics of romance philology, 1897) by Gröber, Carolina
Michaelis devoted a part to medieval Galician-Portuguese literature in which the Romanic and
Portuguese setting prevailed since no speciic attention was given to Galician literature as such,
although the Celtic ethnic background of Portugal was mentioned.
Galician historiographical tradition was reassumed at the beginning of the 1950s ater the
Civil War. In 1951, two histories appeared with some characteristics that illustrated the basic ten-
sions of this historiographical model. Both were published in Castilian given the circumstances
of this historic moment. Following González Besada’s footsteps, Francisco Fernández del Riego
(1951) returned to the Celtic hypothesis in Historia de la literatura gallega (History of Galician
literature), one of the irst publications of the publishing house Galaxia, that was very close to
Galician post-war nationalist culture. Going one step ahead, De Riego implicitly assumed that
the basic identity of Galician literature was of a linguistic nature. Benito Varela Jácome (1951),
on the other hand, wrote a considerably more extensive book which, in accordance with the
basic assumptions about a would-be regional literature, included native Galician authors who
wrote in Latin, Galician, or Castilian. Hence, he kept himself at a distance from the philological
mono-linguistic criteria of literary nationalism (Torres Feijó 2002, 34–35).
Francisco Fernández del Riego’s model prevailed but with some adaptations. he presence
of Celtic ethnicity, for example, has been identiied by current nationalist historiography as a
sign of essentialism, characteristic of an incipient literary system or, from a clearly teleological
viewpoint, of a literary proto-system that depended on a subsidiary vision (Torres Feijó). It is
a fact that more recent literary history has almost unanimously distanced itself from the Celtic
thesis. hese historians have tended to exchange the old label of national literature for the more
comforting and shallow literary system, although still characterized by a mono-lingual identity
(Tarrío 1994; Vilavedra 1999; Gómez y Queixas 2001).
However, the primary reference of Galician historiography continues to be Historia de la

literatura gallega contemporánea (Contemporary history of Galician literature, 1975) by Ricardo
Carballo Calero, partially anticipated in 1963. his book covered the period from the start of the
War of Independence (1808) to the Spanish Civil War (1936). It may be considered signiicant
because, like many other literary histories in a similar circumstance, it attempted a global inter-
pretation of a given literature with a high density of value judgments but without renouncing
its pretense of research and difusion, and with a demonstrated capacity to become a reference
for everyone entering a literary ield, extremely frail at the moment.
It also denoted an awareness of certain relevant circumstances not always present in other
histories, not even in some subsequent histories written in a much more settled institutional
framework. From a nationalist perspective it was the irst history that referred to the ethnic
component as secondary, visualizing Galician literature as a contemporary episode under de-
velopment and not as testimonial or depository of ancient identity. his was not inconsistent
with Carballo’s particular understanding that the relationship of modern Galician literature
and medieval literature was a supervened and mediated experience. here was hardly any con-
tinuity that could be reconstructed for a historiographical report, which, to borrow Edward
Said’s expression, strengthened the secular character of Carballo’s approach. Consequently, he
emphasized the “Europeanizing” dimension, at times comparative, of inluential authors in the
process of formation that Carballo tried to represent in his work. It is true that he also showed
some less original features, such as the conlictive consideration of the relation with the ouside
of the monolingual ambit selected. In this way, the idea of marginality and dependence with
respect to other languages and cultural ambits was reinforced, most of the time under the chro-
no-political label of backwardness. Carballo also used a referent which was deeply interiorized
in Galician historiography: the contrasting analogy between the Galician and Catalan literary
positions, which would become the model to follow and the referent that could measure the
suitability of Galician literary development.
he literature of the Portuguese nation
he situation of the historiography of Portuguese literature is obviously very diferent from that
of Galician and Catalan. Consequently, the interdiscoursive relationship between Portuguese
and Spanish literary histories has also its own particularities. Portuguese historiography de-
rived from a speciic tradition of bibliothecae and catalogues of authors which began in the sev-
enteenth century, along with the eight volumes of Memórias de literatura (Memoirs of literature,
1792–1814) sponsored by the Royal Academy of Sciences (F. de Figueiredo 1917). his historio-
graphical tradition was developed in a context of national construction which was independent
from that of Spain, although there were many interferences, parallelisms, and interconnections
between the two (Pinto and Núñez Seixas 1997). he truth is that, just as occurs in the case of
Spanish historiography with the literature of Portugal, within Portuguese historiography the
presence of Spanish literature, whether implicit or explicit, has been a determinant factor, and
probably to a much higher degree than in the opposite case.
It is important to note that the historiographies of both Spanish and Portuguese litera-
ture, as of all Iberian literatures, derived from the general panoramas of Bouterwek, Friedrich
Schlegel, and Sismondi, and in the case of Portugal, also from the contributions, very uneven in
reach, of Southey and Denis. Aterwards, other relevant authors such as Villemain, Baret, Ferdi-
nand Wolf, and Aubrey Bell further outlined the position of Portugal and Spain in the European
geo-literary framework. his circumstance, along with the geo-political situation of the Iberian
Peninsula as a whole and of Portugal and Spain in particular during the nineteenth century,
helps us to understand that, even more so than in Spain, in Portugal there was a tendency to
blame the national deicit of representation on foreign paradigms, and to take the perception
of the decadence of Portugal’s own literature as a starting point for historiographical represen-
tation (Amado 1989). his is just another example of the characteristic dislocation of national
historiographical discourse in the Iberian Peninsula, which was always formulated based on a
deiciency and the assumption of a counter-discursive position.
herefore, there are references common to both literatures, although the position assigned
to each is far from equal. As a matter of fact, those who lamented the subsidiary treatment
of Portuguese literature by European historians and scholars were correct. his explains that
Portuguese literature by Aubry Bell, irst published in 1922, was received as the irst complete
and detailed guide written in English of the literary history of Portugal (Bell 1971, XII). Nev-
ertheless, the autochthonous Portuguese historiographic tradition was in some aspects more
proliic than that of Spain. João Palma-Ferreira (in Braga 1984, 47 f.), who was familiar with
this tradition, distinguished two phases. he irst was called “preparation” and was identiied
with the authors of the 1700s and the Bosquejo by Almeida Garrett (1826). he second was
the phase of Portuguese literary history proper, and was initiated by Freire de Carvalho, who
Palma-Ferreira insists was prior to Denis because Freire de Carvalho wrote in his prologue that
he had initiated the writing of Primeiro ensaio sobre história litteraria de Portugal (First essay
on the literary history of Portugal) in 1814. his defense of Freire de Carvalho as the irst liter-
ary historian was probably due to Palma-Ferreira’s wish to establish an autochthonous tradition
before Denis’s monograph and even before Garrett’s, which would undermine any claim by the
Frenchman of having founded the tradition. Apart from this, the truth is that the nineteenth
century witnessed a series of important historiographical works by Portuguese authors such as
A. Cardoso Borges de Figueiredo (1844), José Maria de Costa e Silva (1850–1855), José Silvestre
Ribeiro (1853), José Maria d’Andrade Ferreira (1872). Moreover, within this context there was
an intellectual debate on the basis and methodology of Portuguese literary history which was
unparalleled in the case of the historiography of Spanish literature.
In the case of Spain, the crucial period for the institutionalization of historiographical
discourse was from the 1840s to the 1870s. However, for Portugal, with the exception of the end
of the 1820 Liberal Revolution and the igure of Garrett, this period can be identiied with the
era beginning in 1868 in which an oligarchic liberalism became dominant and eventually led to
the emergence of a Republican movement with a large base of followers that culminated in the
Republic of 1910 (Pinto and Núñez Seixas 1997, 176–77). During this time, a rich public space
was created, and a national identity was constructed with very speciic characteristics. his na-
tional sentiment was aided by the colonial humiliation and frustration of the British Ultimatum,
that destroyed the hopes of unifying the territories of Angola and Mozambique. Within this
environment, Teóilo Braga was an important igure as the protagonist of the consolidation of
the discourse on Portuguese national literature from an internal perspective. Just like Amador
de los Ríos in Spain, Braga was hailed as the igure of the irst historian, capable of establishing
the principle of nationality as a decisive factor for the understanding of Portuguese literature
and of instituting the historic method as a condition for reaching that understanding. For Braga,
history was opposed to the rhetorical perspective of his predecessors, which he criticized (M.H.
Amado 1989, 202). Once again, this new direction was rooted in the inluence of the German
historiographical tradition, which was later modiied by a strong positivistic tendency.
Although Braga’s historical perspective changed considerably over time, it still remained
diferent from the historiographical interpretation of Spanish literature associated to Pidal and
Amador de los Ríos. Rather than viewing national literature as the hypostasis of a language and
a literature with medieval roots as opposed to others, as occurred in Spain, the essence of Bra-
ga’s viewpoint was to demonstrate the original identity of Portuguese literature and its implicit
diference from foreign literatures such as, speciically, that of Spain. his diferent attitude was
not only due to the proximity of the two nations and to historical events, but also to the fact
that the Schlegel brothers’ literary map included Spanish literature as a model of originality
among Southern literatures, while Portugal had a much more indeinite place. Like many other
literary historians of the time, Braga supported his theories with a type of racial semiotics in
which irst the Mozarabs, with a Germanic element, followed by the Lusitanians and Ligurians,
all played important roles. he result was a dialogue between a national and an antinational ele-
ment (C.M.F. Cunha 2002, 90–100), the latter identiied with erudite literature, which was seen
as a sterile imitation of foreign literatures (Provençal, Breton, Italian, Spanish…).
hese theses, which were presented in Teoria da história literária portuguesa (heory of
the history of Portuguese literature, 1872), received public rejoinders from intellectuals such
as Oliveira Martins and Antero de Quental. Quental’s reply, which was brilliant and knowl-
edgeable, expressed his misgivings about Braga’s national-popular and ethnic doctrinism and
defended a point of view that was much more open to cultural exchanges in a European context
and to the idea of origin as the unique development of foreign elements rather than the repre-
sentation of primogenial elements. Fundamentally, this was a defense of an appropriate image
for the literature of “a nation without an ethnographically designed base, such as Portugal, born
of politics, not nature, of institutions, not race” (Quental 1904, 19). Quental also wrote of Fried-
rich Schlegel’s inluence on Braga in terms which could be applied to many other Iberian his-
torians: “[Braga] made use of an incomplete theory with a very speciic application as if it were
a universal principle which could be applied to all literatures, and with it he created a mould
which Portuguese literature had to it into, coûte que coûte” (Quental 1904, 15).
his diferent perspective also implied a diference of geo-literary paradigms, which can be
measured by the relative value that was attributed to distinct elements: Germanic (Northern)
by Braga, Latin (Southern) by Antero de Quental and Oliveira Martins, and Eastern according
to the greater or lesser importance attributed to the Arab cultural inluence. It is obvious that
this was not merely a matter of defending a literary patrimony; it was in large part an attempt
to establish a group identity position within a European framework interpreted as a code of
geo-literary positions. In determining this position, the place of Portuguese literature within
the framework of the Iberian Peninsula was, of course, crucial.
One of the most striking aspects in this context was the hesitant tone used to airm this
place. Braga, for example, categorically assured that ethnicity was the basis of the identity of
Portuguese culture and literature. Moreover, in some of his theories, this basis actually deined
areas that traversed the strict limits of Portuguese in the Iberian Peninsula. hus, when Braga
formulated a Ligurian ethnic background for Portugal, he extended its inluence to “Portu-
guese, Galicians, Asturians, and Cantabrians,” and also to Extremadura and part of Andalusia.
In so doing, Braga was seeking to reinforce the contrast between a Northern element and an
element with Southern and Eastern characteristics. According to this contention, Lusitanians
maintained the ideal of the Ligurian Northern race, while Iberians were a race “that was a
transition between the yellow race and the Arians,” whose original characteristics would have
been heightened by contact with Arabs and North Africans (Braga 2003 [1909], 70–89). Braga
was also responsible for the principle which held that the characteristics of each era depended
on their degree of proximity to this traditional element. In other words, external inluence was
viewed as a disturbance to national identity, and each period was judged according to its stron-
ger or weaker resistance to it.
hus, it is easy to see an obvious vacillation when establishing the degree of “national-
ity” of Portuguese literature. According to his own criteria, Braga had to admit that the most
visible part of ancient Portuguese literature was the presence of a series of external inluences
from Provençal, Breton, French, and Spanish origins. Consequently, the genuine and national
character of Portuguese literature had to be found in a type of subtext, that of popular litera-
ture – thus following the path of Almeida Garrett’s contentions –, that for one reason or another
played an important role in the identity of all Peninsular literatures. However, as a nationalizing
process, this appeal to popular literature lacked conviction. In this way, the true national era of
Portugal was relegated to a later time. Instead of considering this era the Middle Ages, it was
moved to the phase of quinientismo that ended with the death of Camões, also known as the
Época dos descubrimientos (Age of discoveries).
his delayed epiphany of the Portuguese literary nation holds several timely lessons for the
understanding of this nationalizing process. he most obvious one is that, through literature,
the maturity of the Portuguese nation was clearly connected to its colonial dimension, by relat-
ing it to its geo-cultural position on the edge of the European continent, always distanced from
what was considered the true center because of the uncomfortable presence of Spain. It is a fact,
in this sense, that a number of diferent historiographical approximations, with the validation
of the notion of lusofonia or some other similar concept, seem to be haunted by the motto of
the Salazarist New State – “Portugal is not a small country” –, which was created for the First
Colonial Portuguese Exhibition (1934) and reveals a distrust of the modern idea of Europe
(Pimpão 1947, 1: 9–10). Another important lesson is that this colonialist projection, which was
later omitted from most historiographical interpretations, was a decisive turning point for the
Iberian geo-literary self-image. hus, in Braga’s interpretation, the discovery of America under
the Catholic monarchs, whose reign had been considered by eighteenth-century historians as a
milestone of Spanish literary history, was one of the reasons for the process of marginalization
of Catalan culture. his is because it implied the transfer of the geo-political and geo-cultural
axis to the Atlantic and the hegemony of Castile in detriment to Aragon and its Mediterra-
nean dimension. In this context, it is easy to appreciate the importance for Portugal, and for its
literature, of the discovery of a route to India by Vasco de Gama shortly ater the discovery of
America, which was the main theme of Os lusiadas by Camões.
he role of the ‘other’ Peninsular literature, Spanish, and the representation of the ‘minor’
literatures of the Iberian Peninsula are telling characteristics of the historiographical discourse
of Portuguese literature. As we have seen, on the part of Spanish historiography there have been
many attempts, oten sly and timid, to integrate Portuguese literature as a variety of Spanish
literature. On the side of Portugal, there has always been a tendency to look in the mirror of
those other Spanish literatures, in contraposition to Castilian hegemony, as a way of reairm-
ing political independence and its consequence in the development of literature. An inevitable
reference, precisely because he avoids the strident nationalism of other authors, is Fidelino de
Figueiredo, one of the great Portuguese intellectuals of the twentieth century. Following the
path of Oliveira Martins and sharing many of the founding criteria of Portuguese historio-
graphical discourse (F. de Figueiredo 1927), he made an efort to evaluate the Peninsular literary
community by acknowledging the diferences and autonomy of its speciic literatures. In this
line, he elaborated a contrastive characterization of Portuguese and Spanish literature, which
can be interpreted as a simultaneous vindication of the literary personality of Portugal and of
its normality and harmony with the dynamics of Peninsular and European literature. As a mat-
ter of fact, on this foundation he constructed what is possibly still today the most important
exercise of Peninsular comparative literature, his book Pirene (1935), which is based on a course
he taught at Columbia University (J. C. Martins 2001).
In reality, Spain, and Castile in particular, functioned within Portuguese historiographical
discourse as unheimlich (uncanny), that which should be hidden but makes itself visible with
enduring consequences. his conditioned in large part the geo-literary position of Portugal, the
articulation of its historical development in literary periods, and the representation of its Euro-
pean dimension, which is why it was oten analyzed from a geo-cultural semiotic perspective.
Denis (1826, 2) had already justiied the scant knowledge of Portuguese literature in Europe in
the following way: “his has to do, obviously, with the geographical location of both countries,
and even more with the political relationships between them. he Portuguese, powerful in Asia,
were meaningless in Europe, whilst Spain imposed its rule on neighbouring countries.” From
1580 to 1640, when the Spanish monarchs from Philip II to Philip IV were also head of the Por-
tuguese monarchy, Spain’s inluence was overwhelming. In a symbolic coincidence, this period
begins with the death of Camões and the end of the Época dos descubrimientos (Age of discover-
ies). his is why the heterodox opinions of Camilo Castelo Branco are so striking when in Curso
de literatura portuguesa (Course on Portuguese literature, 1876), a continuation of Andrade
Ferreira, the Spanish Austrian monarchs relativized to a large extent their responsibility in the
supposed decadence of the Portuguese literature of that time, and also in the use of Castilian by
many of the main Portuguese writers of the moment (Castelo Branco 1986, 9–21).
Along with the role of Castilian as a reference, Galician also played an important role as
a repressed element in the national narration of Portuguese literature. In a way, the negation
of Galician worked as a conditio sine cua non of national literary identity, just as Portuguese
nationality depended on the political segregation from Galicia. In other words, it was presented
as the decisive factor for the self-airmation of Portuguese literature as an independent entity.
In this process, Galicia became a kind of negated alter-ego, deined by its frustration, in which
it was very diicult for Portugal to fully recognize its own historic origin (Remédios 1921, 20; F.
de Figueiredo 1930, 8–12; 1927, 11–16). In the same way, it has not been easy for Galician histo-
riography to cope with the fact that the medieval lyric tradition had formed part, by means of
historical continuity, of Portuguese literature rather than of Galician: it has to do with an en-
during and underlying conlict between diferent national reasons (González-Millán 2006, 416).
In Braga’s words (2003 [1909], 66): “As for Castilian and Portuguese literature, they advance
towards aesthetic perfection, whereas others such as Aragonese, Valencian, and Catalan, which
had lourished, are now extinct because the support of nationality was reduced to a regionalism
that revolted against political and administrative incorporation, which can be conirmed in
the case of Galician.” his repeal can inevitably be seen in the usual irst chapter of nineteenth-
century histories, which was dedicated to the language that justiied the identity of the litera-
ture in question, since the connection of Portuguese to Galician was almost always obliterated
in favor of more questionable hypotheses at that historic moment. To give just one example,
Camilo Castelo Branco (1986, 28) committed the anachronism – and blatant incongruty – of
presenting the poetry of the Galician medieval school as a case of hispanization of Portuguese
literature: “From 1580 onwards we continue to be Spaniards in literature, just as we had been
from the Galician school…”
hus, Portuguese historiography was built on a clear geo-literary foundation. his is one
of the most obvious elements of its discourse, and according to diferent circumstances it was
transplanted to the ield of ethnic and racial semiotics, to an Atlantic and colonial perspective,
and to the comparison with other non-Castilian Peninsular literatures. In this element we can
oten perceive the complexity of the identitarian articulatin with Spain and also the diiculties
of inding a place in Europe. his is why a statement as conident as Fidelino de Figueiredo’s
(1927, 18) seems so extraordinary, even considering the attribution of a particular “physiogno-
my”: “Portuguese literature is, throughout most of its history, the relection of general tastes and
of the European and Peninsular movements of sensitivity.” Perhaps this is because of the implic-
it violence in the concept of Europe that serves as a reference for this desire for homologation.
his conlict led to a latent insecurity as to the very discourse of the literary nation, as
we can see in the writings of Teóilo Braga and Camilo Castelo-Branco. Few have exposed
this so clearly and with such a strong comparative viewpoint as António José Saraiva (1946) –
along with Óscar Lopes, author of the most widespread contemporary history of Portuguese
literature – in his essay “Sociology of Portuguese literature.” According to Saraiva’s contention,
there were two great stages of Portuguese literature which were separated by the boundary of
the eighteenth century. he irst was absolutely coherent and gave rise to a steady and regular
tradition, which ranged from medieval troubadours to the learned poetry of the seventeenth
century. his tradition can be explained by its integration in the Peninsular ambit: “until Verney
and the Árcades, Portuguese literature is a province of Peninsular literature” (Saraiva 1946, 53).
Nevertheless, this so-called Peninsular literature was conceived of as essentially aristocratic
and courtesan. Literature of a more popular condition, such as the picaresque novel, would
have been let out of this Peninsular communication, which was limited to the culture of the
court. According to Saraiva’s theory, once these social and geo-political conditions changed,
Portuguese literary tradition became fragmented and lost its ancient homogeneity due to the
inlux of extra-Peninsular inluences (French, English, German), and therefore failing to attain
a true national dimension. Evidently, one can disagree with the details or the whole of Saraiva’s
theory, but there is no doubt that it relects many implicit recurrent elements of Portuguese
historiographical discourse.
Euskal literaturaren historia
he historiography of Basque literature faced a diferent situation (Lasagabaster 2002). Prece-

dents were set in the nineteenth century, such as Francisque Michel’s work. hese were followed
by brief panoramas, such as Pierre Laitte’s (1941) and Nicolás Ormaetxea’s Orixe (2002), writ-
ten in 1927. Nevertheless, there was no true historiographic tradition until the 1960s. his was
when two works with the title Historia de la literatura vasca (History of Basque literature) were
published, the irst by Luis Michelena (1960a), who expanded on a chapter of Historia general
de las literaturas hispánicas (Guillermo Díaz-Plaja 1949–68), and the second by Fray Luis Vil-
lasante (1979), written in 1961. Ten years later, Ibon Sarasola wrote Euskal literaturaren historia
(1971), the irst book-length work written in Basque, which was translated to Spanish by Jesús
Antonio Cid in 1976 with the title Historia social de la literatura vasca (Social history of Basque
literature). In recent times we can mention the works by Jon Kortazar (1993), which focuses on
the twentieth century, the works by Iñaki Aldekoa (2004), and the work coordinated by Patricio
Urquizu (2000). Other recent works are non-specialist panoramas which show the progressive
consolidation of an orthodox narrative of Basque literary history (López Gaseni 2002).
Any study of the historiography of Basque literature should start by highlighting its late
appearance with respect to that of other literatures of the Iberian Peninsula, although the main
histories of Galician literature were also published ater the 1950s. All in all, it is evident that
this characteristic is a sign of the peculiarity with which Basque literature was regarded from
the general ambit of the Peninsula. Because of the linguistic distance of Basque, the scarce
number of translations into other Iberian languages, and its speciic qualities, Basque literature
has rarely been considered in other literary histories. In the cases where it has been mentioned,
it is merely to declare, oten with an overt disdain, the existence of a corpus which is always
surrounded by an air of oddity and uniqueness and which is an exception from more general
relections. One of the reasons for this was the diiculty of positioning Basque literature within
a geo-literary European framework, as it is proved by the vacillation in deining the periods of
Basque literature; which is quite noteworthy considering that periodology was one of the tradi-
tional instruments for the comparative homologation of literatures.
Basque’s own historiography has in large part incorporated this feeling of diferentiation
as well as a clear desire for standardization into its own discourse. A consequence was the
implementation of a philological bias in the consideration of literature. In its understanding
of literature as an action upon language – promoting either a speciic dialectical variant or the
standardization of Basque –, the philological perspective understands literature as a documen-
tation of Basque, which had lacked a standardized reference that was acceptable for all Basque
speakers. his philological bias is a common trait of less established literatures, and became a
recurrent characteristic of Basque literary histories at least until the 1970s. Ibon Sarasola (1976,
31 and 57), for example, introduced his history by warning that the works written in Basque had
almost always been considered “simply as material for linguistic studies,” and later emphasized
that “until now Basque literature has not been an autonomous ield of study” (Lasagabaster
2002, 236).
here is another characteristic which is common in the historiography of peripheral lit-
eratures, and in Basque it is particularly palpable. his is the idea of delay with respect to the
movements that directed the development of European literature (Kortazar 2004). Sometimes,
this delay is represented by historiography as a strict isolation from the general progress of liter-
ature. According to the hegemonic interpretation of academic comparative studies, such as that
of Ferdinand de Brunetière (1900), the European character of a literature could be measured
by its ability to inluence and impose its “nationality” beyond its own borders. According to
Brunetière, this had occurred in a strict chronological sequence divided into periods in which
Italy, Spain, France, England, Germany, and in the late nineteenth century, Norway and Russia,
imposed their own peculiarities. Any other literature was marginalized from Europe due to its
lack of transcendence and incapacity of overcoming its borders, in what can be understood as
an intra-European version of the isolation ascribed by other comparative scholars to some of
the larger Asian and American cultures. his idea was also applied by Brunetière to some of
the “great” literatures, whose works were only relevant from a European point of view accord-
ing to their “consequences”. his assumption led him to neglect authors like Lope and Calderón
and to make light of Spanish inluence because of its supposed excessive singularity. However,
this view had more of an efect on literatures such as Basque and Breton, to name some of Bru-
netière’s own examples.
his context must be considered in order to understand Michelena’s metaphorical descrip-
tion (1960a, 7) of his efort “in measuring the proportions of our literature with an international
measuring stick, the same used for measuring the literatures of Western nations.” It also ex-
plains that one of the most remarkable features of recent histories (Kortazar; Aldekoa) is their
insistence on trying to insert Basque into an international scheme by means of comparison and
contrast with the more canonical references of European literature and the use of a periodologi-
cal framework that deines a sort of international commonality. his inevitably led to an added
awareness of the absence of some of the periods traditionally required for a literature to be
considered complete, such as “medieval literature,” although this was compensated by an impor-
tant oral literature (which was studied and categorized following the parameters established by
Menéndez Pidal for the Spanish romancero). One of the paradoxical results of this perspective
was that the writer held to be the irst author in Basque (at least as far as printing considered),
Bernard Detxepare, who had published Linguae Vasconum Primitiae in 1545, was commonly
presented as an extemporary medieval author.
Basque literature had other outstanding features, such as the change in its geography, with
some connections to the history of European colonialism (Michelena 1960a, 85), which moved
most of its production South of the international border in the eighteenth century from the
North of Bidasoa, where printing irst began, Another characteristic is the late secularization
of literature, which only became independent from post-Tridentine Catholicism at the end of
the nineteenth century, although this process was not complete until the late 1960s. Actually,
except for Laitte, all of the other historians mentioned pertain to the Iberian ambit. Further-
more, we can observe cases such as the prologue to the second edition of Fray Luis Villasante’s
History of Basque literature (1979) which is oddly anxious about what had occurred in the
political and ideological realm since its original writing in 1961, and the irony and distance of
Michelena and Sarasola with respect to the Franciscan historian. hese two instances illustrate
the surge of a new cultural discourse concerning Basque literature, from which a new literary
historiography emerged.
hus, there are certain characteristics of Basque historiographical discourse that form part
of the recurrent dislocation found in Peninsular historic traditions, which can be deined as the
assumption that the literature that is its object of study is in an anomalous situation. Of all the
histories of Basque literature, the polemic history by Ibon Sarasola, which follows the Bordeaux
School in its social orientation, is the one that most tries to search for the causes of this anomaly,
namely diglossia, dialectal fragmentation, division among kingdoms and states of the ‘cultural
nation’. his work also proactively supports procedures which could overcome this anomaly, in
particular the adoption of standardized Basque as the language of culture and the acceptance of
a radically typographic concept of culture.
Perhaps one of the main ironies of the historiography of Basque literature is that it always
contains an implicit comparison with supposedly “normal” literatures, and at the same time it
emphasizes and privileges (Michelena, Sarasola…) learned literature, that is, literature written
with a clear aesthetic value as opposed to the folkloric view of culture and the predominance
of clerical works and essays. Basque historiography adopted a restrictive and orthodox view
of literature derived from the dominant historical discourses due to its reservations about its
own deiciencies. he following quote from Ibon Sarasola (1976, 39–40), for example, is a late-
Romantic lament for the lack of nationalism in Basque literature:
Detxepare ends a stage of Basque literature. From then on, with few exceptions, we will have
to deal with works that the literary histories of other languages would leave aside, that is, with
translations and adaptations of foreign works. his situation has not changed until the present
century and its consequences have been lamentable. he irst is marginalization, that is, the
lack of any relationship between literature and life. Basque literature is unfamiliar with Euro-
pean literatures and their movements. At the same time, and for the same reason, in this cen-
turies-long time lapse, Basque literature has not witnessed the events and problems of Basque
life, and to a lesser degree has it expressed this life… Basque literature is the literature of the
Basque clergy.
Coda
Up to now we have explored some of the key constituents of Peninsular historiographical dis-
course on literature. It should be completed with a relection on what has happened subse-
quently in the history of Spanish and Portuguese literature, which we had let at the end of the
nineteenth century. he truth is that neither of these traditions altered the essential aspects with
which they had developed during the past century. With the exception of the reaction to the
failure of the Restoration and the colonial crisis in 1898 (Cabo 2001), during which there were
repeated protests about the lack of a valid history of Spanish literature, both traditions repre-
sented a process of naturalization of national ideology. In other words, there was a profound
and intimate acceptance of its foundation that made more explicit arguments, which were pres-
ent in the 1800s, unnecessary and even uncomfortable. Proof of this is that, on the one hand,
the historiographical notion of Spanish literature associated itself deinitively with the concepts
of monolingualism and territoriality of the nation-state, thus excluding Latin American lit-
erature and overstating its indiference to other Peninsular literatures, whose historiographies
generally acted in accordance with the same logic (Hooper 2006). On the other hand, Portu-
guese literature seems to have tacitly accepted the pretension of normality that settled ater the
publication of Fidelino de Figueiredo’s work, in contrast to more dramatic positions.
his depiction of Spanish literature is present even in worthwhile histories with innova-
tive intentions such as the one coordinated by Franco Meregalli (1990), which focuses on the
notion of civiltà letteraria and has a slight comparative orientation. As a matter of fact, the only
notable exceptions to this general acceptance were very traditional viewpoints that were based
on Menéndez Pelayo and tried to unite Spanish literature, or simply literature in Castilian, with
Latin American literature (Cejador 1932; Díez-Echarri and Roca Franquesa 1950). Another ex-
ception was the tendency that tried to convert the idea of hispanidad, the third phase in the im-
perial expansion ater that of the region, Castile, and of the nation, Spain, into a historiographi-
cal object in accordance with a clear ideological viewpoint (Giménez Caballero 1965). From an
internal point of view, the only eforts worth mentioning were those that tried to reunite a series
of parallel monographs dedicated to Iberian (Prampolini 1956), Hispanic (Díaz-Plaja 1949–68),
and Spanish (Díez Borque 1980) literary traditions.
Quite diferent was the emphasis placed on so-called regional and local literatures, in
which the system of bibliotecae that began in the eighteenth century was very important, and
which was revitalized from the late 1970s within the territorial design set forth by the Span-
ish Constitution of 1978. his circumstance also had a profound inluence on historiography.
Contrary to what occurred in France, the existence of other national literatures alongside Span-
ish profoundly afected the status of those “other” regional literatures. Not in vain, Catalan,
Galician, and Basque literature had been represented as regional phenomena during the large
part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (with exceptions such as Menéndez Pelayo),
and only aterwards did they consolidate a national statute in what was considered a valuable
process of autonomization. As a consequence, in Spain the term regional literature implied an
axiological inferiority which was far removed from what regionalism meant for the literary
geography of France (hiesse 1993). In contrast, the situation was quite diferent in Portugal, a
mono-linguistic and mono-cultural nation, at least ideally, which explains why literary region-
alism is still a rising phenomenon in this nation.
Perhaps because of these diferent contexts, regional character tends to be extremely luid
and provisional in direct proportion to the geo-literary ambition of each case. While this re-
gional character may be suitable to characterize a certain ambit from a historiographical point
of view as long as one assumes its inscription as a particular element within a larger space, it
becomes reproachable in the measure that the geo-literary position of a certain literature seeks
to pertain to the literatures of the world without irst considering the conceptual intermedia-
tion of Spanish literature. here are many historiographical works dedicated to classifying as
regional the literature of Navarre, Aragon, Extremadura, and León, and even smaller areas such
as cities like Cartagena and Valladolid (Enguita and Mainer 1994). his shows the acceptance of
a subaltern position, but also an implicit vindication of the experience and immediacy of what
is near in contrast to the inherent abstraction of national principles. In some cases, we can also
see the exhibition of geographic uniqueness, such as insularity or the position as a geo-literary
enclave, which illustrates some of the tensions, beyond language, that crossed the consistency
of nationalism.
Despite this, there were naturally important diferences in the ield of Spanish literary his-
toriography throughout the twentieth century. During this period and up to the present, the
work of the Hispanists has been noteworthy, from James Fitzmaurice-Kelly (1898) to research-
ers who head a team of specialists such as Franco Meregalli (Alcina et al 1990), Jean Canavaggio
(1994–1995), and David T. Gies (2004). For the most part, these scholars continued the dis-
course which has already been broadly outlined. his was true even for Gies who, in an elegant-
ly postmodern exercise of captatio benevolentiae, discussed the limits and intrinsic paradoxes of
the work of the historian. here is much variation in both the tone and ideological background
of many of these authors, such as the conservative Catholic Ángel González Palencia (Hurtado
y J. de la Serna and González Palencia 1921), the liberal republicans Ángel Valbuena Prat (1937;
Pozuelo 2000b) and Ángel del Río (1948), the Falangist who ater the Civil War wrote about
Spanish literature from 1898 to 1936, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, and the socialist who wrote in
exile, Max Aub (1974). here were also eforts to create a new historiography from a Marxist or
feminist point of view. Nevertheless, in its essence, the geo-literary background and national-
ism of Spanish literature remained unaltered, although in some cases some speciic chapters on
non-Castilian literature were introduced (Gies 2004, chaps. 33, 36, 38, and 40).
he situation of Portuguese literary historiography was quite similar. For example, Joa-
quim Mendes dos Remédios (1921), Dean of the University of Coimbra and Minister of Public
Education under Salazar, wrote a history which was very inluential in the ield of education
and which had six editions between 1898 and 1931. his work had a schematic and scholastic
design with an aesthetic chronology very similar to Fidelino de Figueiredo’s. It tried to pres-
ent Portuguese literature alongside the great European literatures by means of, among other
things, sections in each chapter dedicated to establishing “literary synchronism” with Spanish,
French, Italian, English, and German literature, in that order. he igure who most tried to natu-
ralize and normalize the history of Portuguese literature was probably Fidelino de Figueire-
do, who distanced himself from identitarian raptures, although he defended this literature’s
speciic character and pertinence to the great European cultural movements. Aterwards, the
20s and 30s gave rise to other historiographical proposals worthy of mention. An example is
História comparativa da literatura portuguesa (Comparative history of Portuguese literature),
by J. Barbosa de Betencourt (n.d.), a manual for middle education which followed the footsteps
of Mendes dos Remédios by reinforcing Portugal’s place in European literature with a very el-
ementary comparative pedagogy.
Nevertheless, the most widespread and inluential manual, from the late 60s, was by An-
tónio José Saraiva and Óscar Lopes. his work reairmed linguistic criteria and social analysis
in a reformulation of Saraiva’s ancient thesis, which we have already discussed. In more recent
times, we must consider two diferent proposals. On the one hand, we have those that imply the
intention of revising and distancing themselves, though oten only slightly, from the canonical
literary history. Examples of these are the work by Maria Leonor Carvalhão Buescu (1994), a
synthesis which focuses on cultural aspects and connections with the Iberian Peninsula and
Europe, and the more ambitious work by Miguel Tamen and Helena Carvalhão Buescu (1999),
which was edited in English. On the other hand, we have monumental works in several vol-
umes with a large number of collaborators that, despite their appearance, denote the clear ex-
haustion of traditional historical discourse. his is the case of the Alfa editorial project (2001),
integrated in a series of histories of literatures in Portuguese, and of that headed by Carlos Reis
(1993–2005), which explicitly follows the anthological intention of critical discourse that Fran-
cisco Rico (1980–2000) applied in the ambit of Spanish literature with great editorial success.
hese examples are evidence of a complete institutionalization and of an efort to overcome and
widen the limits of a stereotyped discourse while accepting its main ideas.
Edward Said (1983, 24) spoke of the “transfer of legitimacy from iliation to ailiation”
which characterized the modern literary critic. he dominant discourse of literary history has
primarily been a discourse of ailiation, that is, of adhesion or adscription to a certain tale, to
a certain ideological concept, to a certain process of institutionalization, and to a certain ideal
monolingualism. However, it has also been a discourse that has drawn its strength from a ili-
ate pretense, that of the naturalness attributed to genealogies and identity when associated to
language and land. Ailiation has disguised itself as iliation. Historians have profusely put this
into practice, such as when they vindicate their own nationality so as to legitimize and give
authority to their shaping of the past and contribute to a irmly located discourse dependent
on speciic circumstances. We must even admit that the model of an Iberian Peninsula with
four literatures, which seems to have gained prevalence with the passing of time, is the result of
a complex discourse that is full of ailiate excisions and artiicial overlaps, and which derives
from limited and hierarchical access to the concept of nation.
Within this plurality ruled by the complacent and tranquilizing acceptance of the restric-
tive principal of literary multi-nationalism, the worst part is not the exclusion and marginaliza-
tion of anything that does not ind its place in one of the Iberian literary nations, such as the
Arab and Hebrew literary traditions. Far worse is the imposition by national historiographi-
cal discourse of a mediation which is impossible to avoid when interacting with the texts and
cultures of the past. his is especially serious in the context of the Peninsula, which has never
fully developed a literary criticism free from the heavy mandates of historical discourse. In
this realm, historiographical discourse, according to its habitual parameters, is a saturated and
intimately conservative mode of discourse, both in its epistemological and ideological premises.
Historiography and the geo-literary imaginary
he Iberian Peninsula: Between Lebensraum and espace vécu
César Domínguez
But what a strange lesson in geography I was given! Guillaumet did not teach Spain to me, he
made the country my friend. He did not talk about provinces, or peoples, or livestock. Instead
of telling me about Guadix, he spoke of three orange-trees on the edge of the town: “Beware of
those trees. Better mark them on the map”. And those three orange-trees seemed to me thence-
forth higher than the Sierra Nevada.
He did not talk about Lorca, but about a humble farm near Lorca, a living farm with its
farmer and the farmer’s wife. And this tiny, this remote couple, living a thousand miles from
where we sat, took on a universal importance . […]
he details that we drew up from oblivion, from their inconceivable remoteness, no
geographer had been concerned to explore. Because it washed the banks of great cities, the
Ebro River was of interest to mapmakers. But what had they to do with that brook running
secretly through the water-weeds to the west of Motril, that brook nourishing a mere score or
two of lowers?
“Careful of that brook: it breaks up the whole ield. Mark it on your map.”
(Saint-Exupéry 1992, 5–6)
Because of its massive structure and its varied climate, vegetation and population, the Iberian
Peninsula is a continent in miniature. A central plateau dominates the whole structure, form-
ing a geographical nucleus and the historical center of gravity of the Peninsula.
(Demangeon 1907, 371)
A comparative history of literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. he spatial formulation that gives
this work its title has an unmistakably systemic appearance, whose exact phraseology would
be staunchly defended by, among others, José Lambert: “I should like to suggest that we speak
about ‘literature in France, in Germany, in Italy,’ instead of German, French, Italian literature”
(1991, 141). It is surprising how many nuances this simple use of a preposition can create. Next
to the adjective of nationality or some other type of spatial allusion (literature of France, of Ger-
many, of Italy), the construction “literatures-in” seems to highlight both the need to question
relationships between literature and sociopolitical structures and a search for the heterogeneity
that the national paradigm has silenced, obscured, and denied.
But what happens when the spatial referent is not national, but rather, geographical? Note
that the title is not – à la Lambert – a comparative history of literatures in Spain and Portugal.
We must, then, question ourselves as to the pertinence of a formula such as “in the Iberian Pen-
insula.” My aim here is not to deal with the answer to this question. Obviously, the reader must
infer the appropriateness (if any) of the adopted approach, from the whole of the information
ofered by this Comparative history of literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. Some possible an-
swers have already been ofered in the preliminary relections on this project. Fernando Cabo
Aseguinolaza, for example, argues that spatial choice means opening various fronts simultane-
ously, including a distancing as regards the traditional, periodological, historiographical model
(thus literary history as revisio), and relection on prototypical historiographical objects to
which the geographical approach has been applied:
54 César Domínguez
In our case […] the spatial setting – the option in favour of localization, a difuse and con-
tentious localization in fact – implies primarily a sharp distancing from the historiographic
perspective that favours periods or movements, tracks that have frequently oriented the march
of comparativism. Actually, if we give it a thought, the resort to geography has been generally
reserved for literatures, if not emerging, at least somewhat reluctant to the periodological stan-
dards of the “great literatures.” (2003, 120)
With respect to this last factor, there is nothing more striking than the central position Iberian
literatures have enjoyed in the history of international comparatism (we could speak of the
myth of the Iberian Peninsula as an emblem of interliterariness) in contrast to the weak posi-
tion that the discipline has occupied in Spain and Portugal until recent years. It is undeniable
that for the few practitioners of comparatism in the Iberian Peninsula, comparison is such only
if it occurs between one of the national literatures of the geographical region and a representa-
tive of the “central” literatures of the European tradition (German, French, English or Italian,
in particular), while the mere possibility of an Iberian intra-comparatism of Castilian/Spanish,
Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Basque literature (the list is not meant to be exhaustive),
whether it opts for a bi- or multi-polar formula, tends to provoke reactions ranging from the
friendly condescension reserved for amateurisme, to skepticism, or, at the extreme, vehement
rejection for its supposed veiled reactionary centralism/nationalism. In whichever conception
of the act of comparison, the epistemological positions are transparent. To illustrate, it is useful
to point out that among Spanish comparatists, only Claudio Guillén has drawn attention to the
importance of the Spanish domain for the revision of traditional periodological schemes: “he
example of Spain is methodologically crucial because in it we see that history is not a series
of disparate periods but rather, the coexistence and confrontation of processes and timespans”
(1989, 203). However, when just a decade later Andreu van Hoot Comajuncosas (1998) carried
out a survey among prominent scholars in Iberian literatures on the subject of the diverse pos-
sibilities of their historiographical approach, support for the comparatist option was merely
symbolic, if not residual.
My aim is a partial examination of the issue of the appropriateness of spatial delimitation.
I call it partial for three reasons. Firstly: because I will focus only on one of the diverse pos-
sible analyses, namely, historiographical meta-geography. Secondly: because I cannot develop
here in all its complexity the exhaustive analysis that this one line of investigation demands. If
studying the geographical imaginary of any one of the Iberian historiographical discourses
would in itself be a diicult task, then the attempt to review comparatively the imaginaries of all
the historiographical discourses of all literatures that have appeared or that right now exist in
the Iberian Peninsula is doubly so. And thirdly: because to my knowledge, it is a ield of study
that is completely unexplored (both on the Iberian level and in other literary spaces.) hus, I
will ofer one possible answer to the thorny issue of geographical pertinence, an answer whose
partiality and provisionality may perhaps be ofset by its novelty and its ability to shed light on
problems that are central to any attempt to write a comparative history of literatures (in the
Iberian Peninsula).
Since we ind ourselves in the sphere of meta-relection (the meta-geography of histo-
riographical discourse), perhaps it would not be irrelevant to mention at this time, as a way
into literary cartography, another dimension of this meta-discursivity, since, as Mario J. Valdés
Historiography and the geo-literary imaginary 55
has indicated, the speciicity of comparative historiography lies in its explicit self-awareness: “a
comparative literary history would have to acknowledge the epistemological limitations that its
hermeneutic situation creates: each historian will be situated as a real person living in a linguis-
tic and cultural community, and it is from that speciic position that he/she can engage what
phenomenologists call the horizon of the past” (1992, 4).
he present Comparative history of literatures in the Iberian Peninsula has been developed
under the auspices of the Coordinating Committee for a Comparative History of Literatures in
European Languages of the International Comparative Literature Association. hus, the spatial
delimitation of the project (the Iberian Peninsula) owes much to the hetero-vision alluded to
earlier, in which geocultural mythologization (the Iberian Peninsula as paradigmatic space of
interliterariness) meets the chrono-politics of exceptionality (Cabo Aseguinolaza 2004a). Of
course, the Comparative history ofered here is a tale that could well corroborate (or question
and modify) the basic presuppositions of this mythologization. However, there is a fundamen-
tal aspect of this hetero-vision that we must not avoid. To highlight it, we might recall the pas-
sage from Conrad’s Heart of darkness in which Marlow shows his childhood passion for maps:
“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. […] At that time there were many blank
spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all
look that) I would put my inger on it and say, when I grow up I will go there” (Conrad 2000,
21–22). he aspect to which I am referring is the fact that the territory in question can only be
a blank space – a concept that Conrad takes from F. Leopold McClintock’s arctic exploration
to Sub-Saharan Africa – for the external subject (imperial, in Conrad’s tale), but never for the
internal subject (the colonized). It is a notable ecology of vision which, in our case, can be put in
the context of the previously mentioned comparatist resistance to cartographic representation.
Indeed, all maps are a technology of power, a form of critical limitation, since they negate other
representations, other perspectives (Gregory 1994, 6).
his (hetero-)vision of the Iberian Peninsula as a blank space susceptible to being mapped
introduces a pre-judgment that should not be overlooked. he question must be asked: would
comparatists on the international stage greet geographical delimitations such as the Alpine
region or Chaco with the same epistemological acceptance as they extend to the Iberian Penin-
sula? Or even, going back to the same geographical category, would they accept a comparative
history of the Italian Peninsula? If the answer is airmative, the efectiveness of the geographi-
cal approach would have to be seriously examined. And if it is negative, we are back where we
started, at the question of appropriateness, which is now deined more precisely as the problem
as to what makes a geographical area a literary zone.
Some of the authors of the comparative histories overseen by the Coordinating Commit-
tee have indicated that the selection of a geographical framework means the beginning of a new
phase in the already long history of this project. hus, for Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neu-
bauer, the irst volume of their history of literary cultures of East-Central Europe “inaugurates
a new subseries on regional histories within the Comparative History of Literatures in Euro-
pean Language, published by the Coordinating Committee of the International Comparative
Literature Association” (2004b, xi). To this new collection will be added, along with the History
of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe, the present Comparative history of literatures in
the Iberian Peninsula and the Comparative histories of Nordic literary cultures. However, the
selection of a geographical domain as a historiographical object had already been carried out
in previous projects of the Coordinating Committee. In 1986, Albert S. Gérard coordinated a
history of writing in European languages in Sub-Saharan Africa and between 1994 and 2001,
three volumes on the literary history of the Caribbean were published, coordinated by A. James
Arnold. To those we can also add, despite the fact that they were not overseen by the Coordi-
nating Committee, the three volumes of Literary cultures of Latin America: A comparative his-
tory, coordinated by Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir, not only because Valdés was one of the
presidents of the aforementioned committee, but also because the History of the literary cultures
of East-Central Europe itself forms a part of the Literary History Project of the University of
Toronto (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2004b, xi), directed by Valdés and co-directed by Linda
Hutcheon, and of which the Literary cultures of Latin America is one of the results. In fact, the
selection of a geographical area as historiographical object is highly indebted to various works
by Valdés (1996, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2002), in which he relects on the applications of Braudel’s
methodology to the literary sphere.
It is clear that in the projects overseen by the Coordinating Committee geographical
delimitation is not restricted to particular continents. It has been applied to zones in Africa,
America and Europe and it is even leading to historiographical studies on a large scale in Asia
(see, for example, Koji, Yuan and Yoshihiro 1995). Here two important issues can be considered.
First: are continental zones comparable? hat is to say, does a découpage like Latin America
obey similar criteria as Sub-Saharan Africa or the Iberian Peninsula? And second: in the case of
Europe, is the principle behind the selection of East-Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula and
the Scandinavian Peninsula as objects of a comparative historiography, not signiicant?
Regarding the irst question, a review of already-published comparative histories shows a
notable increase in meta-relection on the epistemological bases of geographical delimitation.
When, in 1986, Gérard found himself of a mind to justify the existence of a comparative history
of European-language literatures in Sub-Saharan Africa, the fact that the means of expression
of African literatures (European languages) was accepted without great question (obviously,
this is a general problem in the Coordinating Committee’s historiographical project as a whole)
was as suprising as the reasons given for the identiication of the geographical group:
he purpose of the HALEL [History of African Literature in European Languages] project

was to deal with creative writing in European Languages produced south of the Sahara. his
corpus, however, is typically what mathematicians call a fuzzy set. Although it is geographically
well deined, there is neither compelling objective evidence nor unquestioned agreement as to
which works and which authors constitute “African literature.” (Gérard 1986, 23)
hus, a geographical category (Sub-Saharan Africa) is ofered as suicient criterion for delimit-
ing a literary corpus, even if the resulting corpus is nothing but a “fuzzy set.” But fundamental
questions go unanswered, such as which are the bases for the geographical category in question,
especially when racial and religious factors play a role in its identiication? Africa in this con-
text is converted into the scene of a possible clash of civilizations: “it has not seemed possible
at the present stage to integrate Mediterranean Africa in our consideration: for the time being,
it seems best to regard it as part of the Muslim world, which is not to overlook the historical
fact that Islam has also made and is still making deep inroads into Sub-Saharan Africa” (Gérard
1986, 22). he mere fact that it was not deemed necessary to delve deeper into this geo-catego-
rization (Mediterranean Africa/Sub-Saharan Africa) is highly indicative of the underground
workings of meta-geography. In this case these workings lead to a geo-literary equivalence in
which the identiication of African literature with the creative output of Sub-Saharan Africa is
dependent upon the elimination of the geocultural component of the Mediterranean. he con-
comitance between the continentality of this African literature and that of European literature
(with the exclusion of any output beyond the Ural Mountains) as prototypical categories in the
history of comparative literature are obvious.
In the case of A history of literature in the Caribbean, the justiication of the découpage
remains undeined to a similar degree as in the comparative history of the literature of Sub-
Saharan Africa, despite the fact that in this case, a subtitle as explicit as “Charting the Caribbean
as a literary region” has been given to the general introduction. hus, Arnold highlights the
novelty of the project, in the sense that he includes the Greater and the Lesser Antilles within
continental boundaries (1994, xiii), an inclusion which would allow the claim “to present a
contrastive view of how literature emerged as a social institution in the several areas of the Ca-
ribbean region” (xiv). However, nothing is said of the criteria which support this geographical
choice. For this reason, I intentionally employ the concept of découpage, due to its acknowl-
edged weight within the discipline. If the operation in question consists of postulating the ex-
istence of a geographical grouping symbolically separated by a name, then we cannot overlook
its use in the French tradition (from Lucien Gallois) in the development of a regionalization
which pays attention mainly to surface area and, thus, to exploration in linear journeys (D. R.
2003). he basic instrument in this type of regionalization is the geographical map, which, with
its lat shape, reinforces that tendency while at the same time satisfying the desire to turn the
unheimlich into heimisch by illing in the blanks.
All those elements are present in the title: charting, Caribbean, literary region. If I am
not mistaken, it was the irst time that this last concept (literary region) was used in a history
overseen by the Coordinating Committee, a term whose epistemological importance must be
acknowledged when we recall that, according to Cornis-Pope and Neubauer (2004b, xi), the
new orientation adopted by this historiographical project resides precisely in its construction
as “regional history.” Whether the idea of literary region is used a priori or a posteriori, there is
no doubt that it imposes as a territorial imperative the identiication of region with a regroup-
ing between states, an issue to which we must give great consideration. But I must now point
out that within the framework of literary history in the Caribbean, regionalization takes on a
systemic dimension – inherited from the economics of inequality (Werner Sombart) – which
means bringing to the ield of literature a geometry of distance. he implications of this, how-
ever, are not explored in all their complexity, but rather, its operativity seems to answer to its
use in identifying spatial units (centers, thresholds) as collective agents, as Julio Rodríguez-Luis
highlights in the Aterword to the section titled “Islands and territories”: “he primary purpose
of the essays on Islands and territories is to study the literary production of those regions that
are considered to be marginal in relation to a Caribbean center – be it Hispanic, Dutch, anglo-
phone or francophone – and to deine their Caribbeanness” (1994, 96). he ultimate essential-
ism (Caribbeanness) that guides the découpage is no less problematic.
Without a doubt, the comparative histories of literatures in Latin America and East-Cen-
tral Europe are the ones that have most attempted to justify the geographical approach. Hervé
héry is the author of two works fundamental to the geo-literary line of argumentation and
which are contained in Literary cultures of Latin America. In the irst, héry explores the conse-
quences of the singularity of Latin America as one continent (the meta-geographical implica-
tions of this statement are not discussed) whose name refers to the culture that shaped it, which
puts us decidedly within the sphere of cultural geography: “he repercussions of this fact can be
traced not only in the region’s cultural productions (in the usual sense of the term, and notably
in its literatures), but also in its material civilization and geography” (2004a, 3). hus, we can
understand why numerous sections of the work are dedicated to analyzing how Latin America
has been imagined in literature (in the wider sense, hence the resort to the phrase “literary
culture”), an aim that always seems to be guided by the obsession with contextualizing literary
production in its social context (M. Valdés 2004a).
It is perhaps surprising that no reference is made to the fact that Latin America was one
of the irst designations in the category of world regions. his omission means not dealing with
another fundamental issue in the underlying geo-discourse, namely the selection and organiza-
tion of the (geo-)cultural borders. Both absences result in the implicitly postulated naturalness
of the geographical grouping which, in combination with continental borders, give coherence
and unity to the historiographical object. But it is important to remember that Latin America
is a designation coined by French scholars in the mid-nineteenth century in their desire to in-
clude the Spanish-, Portuguese- and French-speaking portions of America (Braudel 1994, 247;
Collier, Blakemore and Skidmore 1985, 9) within the framework of Napoleon III’s imperial proj-
ect (a similar enterprise was the creation of the Near and Middle East by the British Empire).
he supposed conceptual cohesion of the delimitation must be questioned, since its inal
result is the emphasis on religious, linguistic, historic and political ainities through an adjec-
tive (Latin) which speciically denies the indigenous and African-American elements (I use the
term along the same lines as the cultural studies term Black Atlantic). Not to mention – and in
this respect, geographical confrontations are always illuminating – the fact that the supposed
geocultural cleanliness of Latin America as constructed by the French imaginary, when taken
to its logical conclusion, would oblige us to include Québec, as a French-speaking region of
America (M. Lewis and Wigen 1997, 182). his will not be the only occasion where literary and
cultural studies accept a priori geographical boundaries originally set out by imperial thinking
and military strategy, boundaries by virtue of which we can argue the comparability of spaces.
It is interesting to note here that for area studies, whose goal is to trace boundaries based on his-
torical and cultural links and not on geographical formations, Latin America and Sub-Saharan
Africa, signiicantly, are clearly recognizable regional categories, as shown by their use in basic
geographical education, in the media, and in the practice of découpage, now an academic prac-
tice (Institutes of Latin American or African Studies).
héry’s second work (2004b) represents a more resolute attempt to develop a literary geog-
raphy of Latin America, limited to ofering a quantitative and cartographic base for the notion
of cultural center, through the places of birth and death of its authors. he result is an interest-
ing reformulation of the geographical a priori, since, as a function of that variable, cities such
as New York, Madrid and Paris become cultural centers of Latin America on an equal footing
with Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. he nuclear conception of this literary ge-
ography – cultural center – is deined in the introduction to Part III of the second volume of the
History by Eduardo F. Coutinho and Victoria Peralta, for whom “[c]ultural centers are magnetic
poles of attraction of a symbolic-cultural order, exercised by a two-way movement – centrifugal
and centripetal – in the interior region of a given country’s region, but centered around an axis-
city” (2004, 310). It is precisely in that third part that the internal spatialization of Latin America
is discussed, a spatialization highlighted by the transnational factor, since of the eight regions
identiied, only one does not go beyond national borders.
In contrast to the visibility theorized by area studies for Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin
America, it appears obvious that with East-Central Europe we are in a diferent category of
territorial partition. herefore, it is understandable that the History of the literary cultures of
East-Central Europe begins with a detailed argument for the justiication of its geographical
delimitation. Indeed, and I believe that this fact is important, it was the irst history overseen by
the Coordinating Committee that accepted the challenge of delimiting a sub-European space as
opposed to the omnipresent continental borders used by histories that followed a periodologi-
cal formula. Obviously, the greatest diiculties were due to the fact that the literary space se-
lected for the study possessed neither concrete and stable borders, nor a commonly agreed-
upon name that would indicate its separation. In that sense, the uniqueness of this project, as
compared to the previous ones (Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America) and the
concurrent or future ones (Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavian Peninsula), is manifest in its ad
hoc découpage. In contrast to the geo-units of the other histories, which have a recognized and
recognizable tradition in one or more disciplines (from physical and political geography to geo-
history and geopolitics), for which spatial delimitation is an a priori, subject to various refor-
mulations in its literary dimension, this history of literature in East-Central Europe constructs
its own object, creates its partie du monde (part of the world) by the very act of denominating
(East-Central Europe), regardless of whether the community identity contained within the de-
nomination is consciously felt by the population of the territory in question.
We are certainly not talking about a geographical grouping free of ideology here. In fact,
this history invents its space in response to other poetics, like those indicated by Mitteleuropa,
Zentraleuropa, Eastern Europe and Central Europe, with a name in which the adjective “Cen-
tral” implies a shiting of the balance toward the West as against the Slavic, pro-Russian, Asian
drit of “Eastern.” It poses an interesting question with regards to the situation of literatures in
France and Germany, when the position of Central Europe is claimed for these others. And I
cannot help but introduce a new question here: Would a geographical delimitation such as a
comparative history of literatures in the hautes terres du centre (central highlands) be as epis-
temologically acceptable as that of the Iberian Peninsula? In light of the role played by Franco-
German literary interrelations in the history of comparative literature, and by Franco-German
interspatiality in the career of some important founding fathers (from Louis-Paul Betz and
Fernand Baldensperger to Ernst Robert Curtius), the answer is as obvious as the geographical
reference is obscure.
he territorial rebalancing revealed by the title is without a doubt a geo-strategic gamble. I
have already said that it is not a spatiality free of ideology. In fact, in this Central that modiies
Eastern, the dialectic between pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism, between East and West (on
the unsuitability of the Urals as a literary frontier, see Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2004c, 4), be-
tween North and South (a way to refer to the distinction between Eastern and Western Europe
during the Enlightenment) are as much in play as the distance between center and periphery
(M. Lewis and Wigen 1997, 229n37). hus, we can understand why this history is so explicit – it
is by far the most explicit of all those published with the support of the Coordinating Commit-
tee up to now – as regards its extra-academic ends. We are talking about the planning dimen-
sion (I use the concept in the sense of the theory of polysystems) of literary history, in which the
transnational boundaries of the project are as important as the framework of the nation-state
was in traditional history: “he primary inspiration for our project is thus an ethical impera-
tive rather than an epistemological longing. […] A literary history of East-Central Europe will
make sense if it furthers, on however small a scale, the communication between the peoples of
that region” (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2004c, 15–16).
he historical and planning aspects of the justiication of East-Central Europe as a histo-
riographical object are discussed in the General introduction of Cornis-Pope and Neubauer
(2004c), while the works of Paul Robert Magocsi (2004) and Cornis-Pope (2006a) develop the
geographical epistemology that gives meaning to the whole project, and especially to its second
volume. In both works, the abandonment of a regionalization of surface area and linearity in
favor of a geo-phenomenology highly indebted to the interpretive turn (David Ley) and exhib-
ited here through a literary geography created from its own geographical object can be seen. Of
these objects I highlight two (though they are not the only ones that this history ofers). First:
the border. Its problematization, experience, representation and communication testify to the
fact that the border is not a fact, but rather, a construction, as is all of East-Central Europe:
“the borders of East-Central Europe have been and still are multi-dimensional. Depending on
what characteristic one looks at, the region’s borders are simultaneously static, shiting, expand-
ing, contracting, and overlapping” (Magocsi 2004, 19). his is the root of the constructivist ap-
proach. We all achieve our spatial experiences through constant construction of the geographi-
cal object, not in linearity or sequentiality, but rather, in interspatiality, in the interface. Second:
the marginocentric city.
It is their very marginality, […] as well as their multiethnic composition that has allowed these
cities to establish a fertile nexus between Eastern and Western literary traditions. Such “mar-
ginocentric” cities encouraged a de/reconstruction of national narratives, a hybridization of
styles and genres, and alternative social and ethnic relations. (Cornis-Pope 2006a, 4–5)
Obviously, the identiication of marginocentric cities has particular impact within the frame-
work of the inal phase of globalization initiated in 1945 – one of the temporal nodes dealt with
in the irst volume – in that they seem to be objectivizations of the local pole in opposition to
the spatial nodes of the global megapolitan archipelago (Olivier Dollfus). his key concept was
made explicit when Cornis-Pope placed the agenda of the genre of regional comparative history
at an (imagined) equidistant point between the local and the global: “the literatures of East-
Central Europe represent an ideal object of study for a regional comparative history, freed from
nationalistic agendas but also from a leveling notion of globalism” (2006b, 213).
I believe that we have seen suicient information to appreciate the merits of the (new)
role of geography in (comparative) literary history. Nonetheless, I am not sure that we have
arrived at a satisfactory answer regarding the appropriateness of geographical delimitation. By

this, I mean that the answer given by Cornis-Pope only applies within the fuzzy conines of
East-Central Europe or other comparable spaces, although it is highly possible that, when all is
said and done, comparability is nothing but another variant of that extrapolation – Balkaniza-
tion – highly disparaged by Maria Todorova (1997): “Our work as literary historians must […]
consider the implications of spatial deinitions that can become contentious, creating the sort
of predicaments we have witnessed more recently in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, or the Middle
East” (Cornis-Pope 2006a, 1). But the other end of the spectrum is not free from danger either.
If we opt for the geographical route with the sole purpose of highlighting the artiiciality of
previous delimitations taken as natural until now (the nation-state) we may perhaps ind that
the quest for a literary geography is another chimera, that literature does not have its own space
outside of that of words. Between ethics and esthetics there is the constructivist route of the
poetics of space, the one I will take here. Space as an artefact, as a phenomenon that literature
(and literary history), among other discourses, brings out. It is under this approach that the idea
of literary geography highlights another device that is no less important, the now impossible
découpage between objective (geographical) knowledge and subjective (literary) knowledge.
It is at this moment that the irst question mentioned (the comparability of the continen-
tal zonal groupings) shows its inextricable link to the second (the criterion for the delimitation
of sub-European spaces). As I have already said, a good portion of the general argumentation
of the History of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe is implied by the introduction of
the adjective “Central” to the geographical delimitation. Once again, it is (implicitly) a ques-
tion of sketching out the meta-geography of the border between Europe and Asia that estab-
lishes itself here in the literary sense as static and impassable as the border between east-cen-
tral Europe and Western Europe is movable, changeable, and open: “in a purely geographical
sense Eastern Europe extends to the Ural Mountains. Taking that border seriously, one would
have to include Georgian, Armenian and other literatures that had historically relatively little
contact with the European literatures west of Russia” (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2004c, 4).
What is at stake here is nothing less than the airmation of the Europeanness of the literatures
in East-Central Europe (just like the Caribbeanness of the literatures in the Caribbean), an
exorcism of their liminality.
he sub-European spaces of the histories of the Coordinating Committee are continental
thresholds, the South-Western (the Iberian Peninsula), Northern (the Scandinavian Peninsula)
and Eastern (East-Central Europe) periphery of the European Herzland, whose literary can-
onicity has been represented in the secure chronology of periodological succession, from the
Renaissance (Klaniczay, Kushner and Stegmann 1988) to Postmodernism (Bertens and Fok-
kema 1997). Obviously, any of the Coordinating Committee’s future projects that opt for a ter-
ritory within Europe might modify this tendency. But, in any case, the fact that these regional
European histories have made topographical contiguity and topological disjunction their main
geocultural objective appears neither accidental nor free of consequences. his (1) conscious-
ness of writing from the limits is a meta-geographical mytheme whose combination with other
mythemes introduces determining ilters for comparative investigation: (2) continentalism, (3)
internationality and (4) geo-unity.
By continentalism I allude to the fact that none of the sub-European territories selected
is (or is recognized as) transcontinental. he underlying meta-geographical discourse is that
transcontinental countries (Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Kazakhstan) are anomalous, and it can be
extended to include international territories in the vein of the traditions of area studies.
By internationality I refer to the fact that all the selected sub-European territories en-
compass more than one nation-state, which is in keeping with the traditional precepts of com-
parative literature and the opportune transposition to the histories that interest us here of a
geo-international rather than a chrono-international perspective: “We have chosen epochs or
currents which display a correlation of stylistic expression, where the fruitfulness of the inter-
national give and take (as opposed to the idea of national preeminence) can be demonstrated”
(Remak 1986, 5). he underlying meta-geographical discourse is that the nation-state (whether
the literary history be national or international) is a pertinent unit for study, even when we go
beyond its boundaries to recognize that cultural phenomena are rarely contained within politi-
cal territories.
And by geo-unity I mean the persistence of an active environmental determinism, per-
ceptible in a spatial and cultural congruence both on the continental level (think of the African
essence attributed to the literature in Sub-Saharan Africa) and on the level of regional entities.
In that respect, it is signiicant that two of the three sub-European territories are peninsulas, as
if physical perceptibility led to literary perceptibility, and therefore, to the spatial identity of the
literatures of the territory. When the nation-state proves incapable of establishing the systemic
limits of literatures, certain geographical objects prove essential to the logic of separation, clas-
siication, and discrimination. heir appropriateness can be accepted or contested as a function
of the degree of meta-geographical (un)consciousness of each history, an aspect in which the
tendency to identify places as locations of nostalgia, a tendency accentuated by the local/global
dialectic to which I alluded earlier, will certainly play an important role.
he four meta-geographical mythemes that I am identifying in the sub-European regional
histories (liminality, continentalism, internationality and geo-unity) allow me to introduce one
inal meta-relexive comment. As Doreen Massey (1995, 302) has highlighted, criticism of meta-
narratives has been a central argument in the postmodern questioning of certain modern forms
of theorization. he referent, obviously, is Jean-François Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne
(he postmodern condition) and its concept of grand récit (grand narrative). he trivialization
of the adjective grand has led to a boom of petits récits (little narratives) – even as a new nar-
ratological formula for literary history – which has little to do with the incredulity toward the
philosophical-political universalization that Lyotard found in Hegelian and Marxist texts, but
rather has to do with the emergence of the local, or, in more precise terms, with the confusion
of the local and the concrete, which, as Massey airms (2003, 129), is a confusion between geo-
graphical scale and processes of abstraction. he interest in the local has become a new form of
empiricism, whose object (concrete) and analysis (description) has been viewed as punishment
for the supposed excesses of the opposite pole of the spectrum (general theorization).
Narratologically, the histories of the Coordinating Committee are not unrelated to the
encyclopedic model of a sum of petits récits, even though there is a curious chiasmatic structure
in the dialectic between local and global. As regional histories (with their particular use of the
concept of “region”) surpassing national boundaries, they appear to demonstrate the idea that
the (greater) size of the historiographical object makes it more suited for theoretical-compara-
tive analysis (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 2004c, 15 call it “paradigm change”). But their struc-
ture as idiosyncratic texts makes the transnational area – where, it is implicity airmed, inter-
literary relations are situated – a new form of the local, which narratologically corresponds
to micro-analysis: “Volume II […] moves from a focus on the region’s macrostructures to a
microstructural focus on the literary culture of speciic geographical locations” (Cornis-Pope
and Neubauer 2006b, x).
It might be useful to relect on the fact that a city, an intra-national region and a monde
culturel (cultural world; I use the term in the sense ofered in Bonnemaison 2000, 110–11) can
also in itself be a suitable object for a comparative history, since both small and large objects
are subject to theorization when local processes are examined in a national and international
sphere and various levels of change operating in the local area are analyzed. hat being said, it
is undeniable that the selection of international geographical groupings has been closely linked
to another equally interesting chiasm, the displacement of the epic-dramatic historiographical
mood from the object to the subject. he emphasis is no longer on the process experienced
by the literature, as regards organic-heroic development, but rather, on the overcoming of the
dangers and challenges implied by the very process of writing (M. Valdés 2004b, xiii calls it an
“extraordinary story”) as the product of an international and multidisciplinary collective. It is
certainly another variant of the explicit self-consciousness of comparative literary history.
An example of Iberian meta-geography: “he charm of a perpetual enigma”
he igure of English Hispanist Aubrey F. G. Bell (1882–1950) ofers an interesting example of

how meta-geography saturates the historiographical task and gives meaning to its object, creat-
ing and molding it according to an underlying conception of the environment and of those who
live in it. In Bell we have not only a historian and literary critic – with monographs on Castilian
[Spanish] (Bell 1947) and Portuguese (Bell 1924a and 1971) literature and some digressions dedi-
cated to other Iberian literatures – but an ethnographer, geographer, traveller and excursionist
(Bell 1922 and 1924b), all of which add weight to a meta-geographical line of reasoning, and
which are accentuated by his external position (that of the foreigner) – even as an English his-
torian vindicating Iberian negligence of its literatures – which ofers a fascinating point of view.
In 1946 he published a brief note called “he Spanish mosaic” in the special issue of the
Bulletin of Spanish Studies called A record and review of their progress. In the text, which can
be read as a compilation of his ethnocultural impressions about Spain, he combines all the
interests I just mentioned. Indeed, Bell had as much luck in the literary history genre as in that
of travel writing. Perhaps for that reason, these geo-anthropological notes are not lacking in
literary allusions. What is more, I would say that Bell cannot help seeing space and those who
inhabit it through literature. Cadalso serves as an authority to ratify the diversity of the prov-
inces (Bell 1946, 24); Palacio Valdés, Pereda and Blasco Ibáñez for the marked individuality of
the cities (26); Baroja and Fernán Caballero for the solitary and individualistic character, which
has its own literary myths, like El Cid, Santa Teresa and Fray Luis de León (27); Cervantes, Lope,
Calderón, Tirso, Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, Benavente or Azorín for the subtlety of thought (28).
Signiicantly, Bell begins his note with a declaration that is markedly meta-geographical:
“he irst and the most abiding impression that Spain makes on the foreigner is that of spacious-
ness” (24). In what sense is Spain spacious? Of course, a topographical reading would be pos-
sible, which, in fact, Bell himself had carried out eight years earlier in the opening of the irst
chapter of his Castilian literature: “Ater Russia, Spain is the largest country in Europe” (1947,
13). his type of reading could in principle lead us to the association – not infrequent nowadays
among comparatists and literary artists – between large nation-states and canonical literatures,
and, ultimately, between the Kleinstaaterei of the expansionist German geopolitical theory and
the kleine Literaturen. But Bell dissuades us from such equivalencies when, in the opening of
“Some aspects of Portuguese literature,” he introduces the following premise, that the subse-
quent description of literary ethos must justify: “Portuguese literature is the greatest that a small
country has produced, except for Ancient Greece” (1924a, 23). hus, it is a phenomenological,
constructed, spaciousness, perceived by a (foreign) actor who sees Spanish spatiality according
to his scale: “one can live in a land many times the size of Spain and feel cramped and impris-
oned by its very vastness” (1946, 24). We have here, then, an underlying argument whereby
the Iberian Peninsula would be characterized geopolitically and geo-literarily by the size of its
nation-states/national literatures: Portugal (pequeno povo) with a “great literature” and Spain,
spacious, without further detail.
he emphasis placed on the fact that Spain’s spaciousness is an impression experienced by
a foreigner is manifest, which insinuates a question about how the country would be perceived
by the “natives,” and thus, a dialectic between hetero- and auto-vision. hat is why I previously
alluded to the use of the formula kleine Literaturen by some literary artists, which, in contrast to
its highly deterritorialized use in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986), takes on a unexpect-
edly territorialized dimension in the Iberian sphere: a small literature (postulated here solely in
regard to the Basque case, but which has implications in the Galician as well) in an oppressive
base which renders the canonical development of the author unfeasible.
he implications of this spaciousness are equally interesting as they relate to its operativity
in the production of sexual identities and the unequal relationships between the sexes, a matter
completely ignored by criticism of Iberian literary historiography. I am referring to the fact that
a large space with no limit of movements presupposes a gaze not only external, on the part of
the observer, but also masculine, which could well be questioned and negated by a feminine
gaze (a feminist-oriented historiography of Iberian literatures is of course a minor genre if we
go by the number of publications) when the subject inds itself locked in literary domesticity.
And if we accept Massey’s statement that “this gendering of space and place both relects and
has efects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood in the societies in
which we live” (2003, 186), we must ask the consequences of this diferentiation in literary rep-
resentation, which is linked to the relationship between sexual and spatial division of literatures
of the Iberian territory categorized as masculine or feminine.
Now, according to the constructivist principle I defend here, and against subjectivist drit,
we must explore not only how the cognizable object is constructed, but also how it is active
in that process of construction. his aspect can be seen in Bell’s argumentation when he links
Spanish spaciousness with regional diversity in a passage that can be seen as an ideal summary
of Iberian meta-geography:
At the very outset one is confronted by a contrast characteristically Spanish. For this country
which on the map looks so compact, like a solid hide of leather, and is hemmed in its peninsu-
larity by the loty barrier of the Pyrenees and the two seas, this tawny Spain lost in the world’s
debate, with its clearly deined character and its isolated position, is the country of Europe
most divided in race, language and regional geography, a thing almost of shreds and patches.
(1946, 24)
his is not the time to get to the bottom of the underlying meta-geography in terms such as
peninsularity, isolated position or shreds and patches. I would like to point out, in the name
of the illustrative value I have attributed to Bell’s note, that the contrastive diversity of Spain,
derived from its regional make-up, has a clear manifestation in this historiographical task at
the moment of selecting its object. hus, in Castilian literature, Bell (1947, 8) highlights the
precise and clear character of Spain as a whole and of its regions to the point that each Spanish
region is a literary location, whether its language is Castilian (including all Castilian-speaking
regions) or not. For Bell, the cuts he is obliged to make are the greatest testament to the “rich-
ness of the literature of the Iberian Peninsula” (12). he result is that aside from Hispano-Latin,
Hispano-Arabic and Hispano-Hebrew literatures, Bell excludes “the literatures, ancient and
modern, poor or great, of Galicia, Portugal, Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, the Basque Country,
Asturias, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, as well as the vast and rapidly-growing literatures of
Latin America” (12). Bell does not preclude their study in future works, and if all of them should
be examined in one study, there is no doubt that whichever terminology was selected, it would
carry great meta-geographical weight. In keeping with his own conceptual choices, we may
infer that Bell would have opted for a history of the literature (singular) of the Iberian Peninsula,
which would surely have been criticized for its supposed pan-Hispanic zeal.
But to return to the matter of Spanish spaciousness. If, as a historiographer, Bell published
Castilian literature (unique in the Spanish tradition not for limiting the object to literary pro-
duction in Castilian in the region of Castile, but rather for attempting to impose a themato-
logical structure over the habitual structure of literary periods), we must ask how he perceives
Castilian space and, thus, its literature. he answer is given by the sentences which precede the
previously cited passage on the position of Spain among European countries in terms of geo-
graphical area: “he size of Castile (‘Castile is large’) can create a irst impression of monotony,
soon dispelled” (13). Separated from the Iberian branch, Castilian literature is as large as its
geographic area, an esthetic size that is now measured by its assimilating and perfecting capaci-
ties: “he Castilian genius can be called derivative. It rarely creates. he beginnings generally
are produced in the periphery of Spain or come from abroad; their perfecting belongs to Castile”
(25) and “the apparently narrow ield of purely Castilian literature is a deep and fertile soil” (12).
For Bell, composing a history of Castilian literature is like composing a history of the best Span-
ish contributions. Hence the fact that I previously opted to mark with an interrogation point the
linguistic-national adjective attributed to his 1938 monograph (Bell 1947).
It is diicult to say which of the two “national literatures” of the Iberian Peninsula evoked
more fascination in Bell. His conception of Portuguese literature as a branch of the Castilian, by
its inclusion among the omitted literatures of his 1938 monograph, speaks volumes. But of no
less importance is the attraction he felt for Portuguese literature as nova literatura (new litera-
ture; Bell 1971, 3), a term that he never once applied to Castilian literature and which is in large
part due to the discovery of major works of Portuguese literature (the literature of the trouba-
dours, the autos of Gil Vicente) that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In any case, it is certain that Bell wrote independent histories for each of these two Ibe-
rian literatures (with the inclusion of Galician literature, not only in its medieval incarnation
but also up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the history of Portuguese literature),
which is a good sign of the degree of personality he accorded them under the inluence of the
spatiality of the nation-state. his esthetic equivalency through various criteria (literatura nova,
literatura maior, genio derivativo) is relected in one of the most widespread meta-geograph-
ical argumentations of Iberian literary historiography. I am referring to the complementary
quality of Spanish and Portuguese literatures: “Spanish and Portuguese literature complement
each other in many ways, and the comparative study of the two will lead to many unexpected
results” (1924a, 58). his complementary quality – which proves to be a path toward a desired
unity of the literatures in the Iberian Peninsula (Bell 1924a, 59) – also applied to the enigmatic
character that historians imputed to the two (hence Lord Rosebery’s motto adopted by Bell in
Castilian literature and cited here in the epigraph), even though this enigmatic character is not
a hermeneutic dilemma.
When geography matters: Why a meta-geography of (Iberian) literary historiography?
Meta-geography, meta-narrative, meta-history. As Massey (1995, 303) astutely points out, large
is not the only meaning of the preix meta-. In my work on the historiographical discourse
surrounding Iberian literatures, I adopt a geographical focus championed by Martin W. Lewis
and Kären E. Wigen. In fact, it is to them that the concept of meta-geography is owed, which
they deine as follows: “By metageography we mean the set of spatial structures through which
people order their knowledge of the world” (1997, ix). he slightest familiarity with the basic
notions of meta-geography (North/South, East/West, First/Second/hird World, continents,
orientalism and Eurocentrism are just a few examples) leads us to realize that it is a code based
on oppositions that operates on a large scale and over a long period of time, including long
ater the disappearance of the entities to which it refers (in the post-Berlin-Wall era, the ternary
politico-economical division of the world has not been reformulated).
Meta-geographies are, therefore, meta-narrations that tend to be all-encompassing and
exclusionary, spaces of power and strategies of assimilation/exclusion. And despite the explicit
diference signalled by M. Lewis and Wigen between their concept of meta-geography and
Hayden White’s notion of meta-history, in the sense that their “concerns are far more prosaic;
we are largely interested in the primary spatial structures around which we habitually concep-
tualize global geography” (207n2), I believe that meta-geography ends up being another level in
the deep structure through which we select and emplot (literary) material to the end of making
it comprehensible. It is in this sense that I add literary history to the disciplines (history, soci-
ology, anthropology, economics, political science) listed by M. Lewis and Wigen (ix), whose
studies are organized around these unconscious geographical structures. For example, a history
of European literature can only be written if we already have an idea of Europe, constructed
through the meta-geography that pervades history, geography, politics or economics, but also
the preceding historico-literary discourse that has patiently constructed the – to use Franca
Sinopoli’s apt term (1999) – mito della letteratura europea (myth of European literature).
As a function of this understanding of meta-geography as a poetic structure for argu-
mentation, it is obvious that the other great debt I must acknowledge here is to the French
theorists of topo-analyse, an important concept in developing research into the territorial di-
mension of geographical imaginaries, as has been carried out by Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), for example.
Of these theorists, we must especially mention Gilbert Durand and Gaston Bachelard. In fact,
Bachelard’s phenomenological conception of space shows marked ainities with M. Lewis and
Wigen’s proposal: “Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifer-
ent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its
positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination” (1994, xxxvi). hus, we might ind it
striking that M. Lewis and Wigen’s work contains not a single reference to Bachelard (or to any
other theorist of topo-analysis).
I believe that this omission highlights in their argument a basic epistemological discon-
nect between local and global, which can also be found in the French philosopher’s discourse.
For M. Lewis and Wigen, the goal of critically considering meta-geography lies in the creation
of “a more appropriate sociospatial lexicon” (1997, 205) within the framework of a global hu-
man geography (18). On the other hand, Bachelard operates on a microstructural level, in the
sphere of topophilie (topophilia): “the images I want to examine are the quite simple images of
felicitous space. In this orientation, these investigations would deserve to be called topophilia”
(1994, xxxv).
But, is it possible to understand the topophilie of the home in all its complexity without
taking into consideration the geo-sexual distribution of public and private spaces, the subor-
dination of women through the limitation of their mobility (both spatial and identity-related),
the separation between home and workplace or the negation of home/family values of the
country itself by virtue of the regional division of the world carried out by global corporations?
Or, vice versa, the division of the category of Far East, separated into regional complexes such as
South Asia, East Asia or South East Asia, with no regard for the local impact of the application
of patterns of a market economy, the reconiguration of urban networks, the environmental
consequences, the transformation of the idea of family and the commodiication of ethnic dif-
ferences through the creation of cultural parks in areas of “national” minorities in China?
My combination of global meta-geography (via M. Lewis and Wigen) and local meta-
geography (via Bachelard and Durand) seeks to show that rejecting meta-narratives should not
mean rejecting general structures, as long as we recognize their multiple and complex character.
hus, it would be a question of observing the mixture of global and local literary relationships
in their spatial dimension, as processes, and not as static entities, a viewpoint that has tried to
make of place a location of authenticity. Connection and diferentiation: interpreting literature
in space means conceiving literature as a product of the spatial organization of social relation-
ships. As Sheila Hones (2004, 48) airms, a spatial conception of literatures in these terms can
yield a “space of unpredictable proximities and rits.”
Now that I have acknowledged the most important debts, I must point out that the meta-
geography of literary historiography is not of particular interest to either of the two currents. In
fact, M. Lewis and Wigen’s study does not contain any references to the literary aspects of the
geographical imaginary, an issue that has shown itself to be an important ield of investigation
for humanistic geography, particularly for its cultural variant (but which does not deal with
historiographical discourse). And if literary material is omnipresent in Bachelard’s case, the at-
tention he pays to the images of espaces hereux (felicitous space) of the home in itself and in its
sub-units (closets, drawers, chests, corners) is tangential to my objectives here, except for their
methodological productivity or for symbolic extrapolation (for example, the conception of lit-
erary space as home). Without a doubt, the spatial divisions that M. Lewis and Wigen deal with
(continents, areas/regions of the world, nation-state) are more familiar and useful to us. But
their lack of attention towards the operativity of literature in meta-geography and their limiting
themselves to the aforementioned divisions, as well as the nonexistence of related studies in
other cultural areas, means that my examination here of the meta-geography of the historiogra-
phy of Iberian literatures can only be considered as limited and provisional, until such time as
other empirical research can be carried out in this and other literary spaces.
But I have still not answered the question included in the epigraph: why a meta-geog-
raphy of (Iberian) literary historiography? he reasons are multiple, not the least of which is
the marked constrast between the lack of attention paid toward space in literary studies as a
consequence of their prolonged positivist and determinist conceptualization (in the vein of
Taine’s milieu) and its recent rehabilitation – preceded by decades in other disciplines and
inspired fundamentally by Michel Foucault – categorized by Cabo Aseguinolaza (2004b) as
a “spatial turn.”
he answer for which I opt here is as simple as it is infrequent in the meta-criticism of
literary historiography: writing the history of a literature implies underwriting, in terms of an
unconscious underlying framework, the space in which that literature develops. he ways in
which the historian localizes a literature are an inherent part of historiographical logic and lit-
erary hermeneutics. When Francesco de Sanctis, for example, adopts certain linguistic criteria
to deine his historiographical object in the Storia della lettaratura italiana (History of Italian
literature), it is clear that the ultimate emphasis on the Italianness of Italian literature since the
Middle Ages comes from a pre-conception of Italian space, and that at the same time, this liter-
ary Italianness contributes to the creation of space. In the same way, when Bell (1971, 471–86)
chooses to include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Galician literature in the appendix of a
History called Portuguese literature, the geocultural implications for an asymmetrical irreden-
tism are clear and are even stated implicitly in Spanish Galicia: “the Galicians may be described
as Portuguese without the inluence of Africa and the East, just as Galicia is a greener, greyer
Portugal” (1922, 23). his vision of the telluric community of Galicia and Portugal in turn feeds
the argumentation of literary nationality in the description of Portuguese literature: “he most
national of Portuguese writers, Gil Vicente, possessed by nature and to a great degree the two
principal characteristics of the Portuguese people, which also apply to the Galician people: lyri-
cism and satire” (1924a, 36–37).
I believe that one of the fundamental objectives of a Comparative history of literatures in
the Iberian Peninsula must be to recognize the artiicial simpliication of geographical divi-
sions, but also their usefulness for the deeper analysis of literary interrelations. Any questioning
of designations such as “in Spain,” “in Portugal” or “in the Iberian Peninsula,” among others,
would be limited if it did not take on as one of its primary tasks the deconstruction of received
meta-geographical categories, especially those received through literary histories. Tradition-

ally, studies have emphasized how productive history and language have been – and continue
to be – for the national paradigm. More recently, studies have examined the similar functions
that geography has played (Gregory 1994, 42). I believe that the moment has arrived to include
literary history as an “apparatus of cultural ictions,” as Timothy Brennan has termed it (1994,
49). he reasons are obvious: literary histories are basic tools for the construction of a collec-
tive imaginary in which the community is postulated through linguistic cohesion – of which
literature is the greatest expression – and a cohabited space, be it at the regional, national or
international level. To this end, the recent opening lines of a hypothetical history of European
literature can be cited:
he Europe that is being constructed seems all too oten to be essentially political and commer-
cial. It is necessary to airm that a Europe of cultures, a Europe of culture, exists. […]
We must also agree that if the global expression “European literature” is diicult to deine,
it is no easier to understand once split into its two constituent parts. Of what Europe are we
speaking? If on the Atlantic side, the border is clearly marked by the irrefutable presence of the
Ocean, to the East, the borders with Asia have luctuated: the very instability of the Ex-Soviet
Republics continually re-poses the same question about the borders of Europe. Is Turkey part
of Europe? (Didier 1998, 1–2)
We must add to this the strong intertextual and dialogical component of literary historiography.
A historian rarely opts for a pristine approach to the literature that is the object of study. He
or she generally resorts to an already selected corpus, already interpreted in previous literary
histories, which, through their choices on various levels (authors, works, languages, genres,
periods, movements, schools, etc.), transmit meta-geographical information which through
this channel becomes durable, manageable, internalizable, particularly because the sphere of
greatest reception of a literary history is the educational sphere. hrough the institutionaliza-
tion of literary history as a means of access to literature, we can learn not only the great works
of (national) literature, but also how this canon has contributed to forming who we are.
Literary history (comparative as well, we should not forget), just like general history and
geography, shapes a territorial imagination, more powerful when the communal, shared ter-
ritory becomes a linguistic territory. In the case of Iberian literary historiography, this inter-
textuality presents a distinctive, though not exclusive trait, the fact that native historians have
been forced to take into consideration previous histories carried out by foreigners, who were
the founders of the historiographical treatment of literatures in the Iberian Peninsula (recall,
for example, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Bouterwek or J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi), a fact
which introduces an interesting dialectic between auto- and hetero-visions of literary space.
I will proceed to examine some of the most persistent and inluential geo-concepts in the
construction of the geo-literary imaginary of Iberian historiography (regardless of the origin
of their authors). I make no claims to exhaustivity in their presentation, nor will I follow a
temporal logic. My goal is to illustrate the modalities according to which historians have con-
ceived the Iberian territory and to show the implications that those modalities can have for the
conceptualization of literatures. If literature is one of the most inluential discursive forms for
imagining space, its insertion into narratives (literary histories) cannot escape the fact that any
tale (J. Smith 1996) is the story of the struggle between a hero (in this case, literature) and its
environment (its literary space). As I hope to demonstrate, the geo-concepts I will now discuss
are decisive in the categorization of literary histories and their objects according to Northrop
Frye’s modes of iction (romance, tragedy, comedy, irony), and, thus, they ofer an answer – not
the only one, of course – as to the necessity of a meta-geography of (Iberian) literary historiog-
raphy and, inally, they also ofer a not insigniicant contribution to the question of the perti-
nence of the geographical approach for literary study.
Paene-insula: For a pathogenia of the “peninsula efect”
he term “peninsula efect” refers to the bio-geographical hypothesis that postulates a decline in
the quantity of species from the isthmus of a land mass to the tip of the peninsula, due to the dif-
iculties in compensating for local extinction through migration (Á. Ramírez and Tellería 2003).
his decline has also been explained by the “abundant center hypothesis,” which posits a decline
in quantity and density towards the edges of the continental areas of distribution (Sagarin and
Gaines 2002). Whatever the role of either hypothesis in the distribution of species, it is certain
that the peninsularity and continental liminality of the Iberian Peninsula have played a decisive
role in the imagining of its literary (eco-)systems.
In literary terms, I deine the “peninsula efect” as the meta-geographical hypothesis ac-
cording to which the peninsular environment imposes on the literatures developed within it
a clear geo-unity and perceptibility as a consequence of the “natural” delimitation of the geo-
graphical grouping. To the geographical imaginary, peninsulas have visual prominence and are
secure in the constancy of their outlines. In contrast to the historical variability of the borders
of nation-states, a peninsula remains immutable in its static quality, it cleanly delimits a piece
of territory, it singularizes an identity that in appearance is not problematic, it stabilizes mean-
ing. he peninsula thus becomes a celebration of space as stasis, a conception which is currently
gaining renewed intensity in the framework of the local/global dialectic. We can therefore un-
derstand why the peninsula is considered geopolitically as a particular case of insularity (Chau-
prade 2003, 152–53).
In his 1805–06 Vorlesungen über Universalgeschichte (Lectures on universal history), Fried-
rich Schlegel pays special attention to the transformation of international politics during the
third period of the Modern Era (from 1740 on), which he sums up in a reconceptualization of
the notion of a just war, given that it is no longer possible to use defense against an attack by a
savage people as justiication for acts of war due to the advance of the civilising process with-
in Europe. his reconceptualization works because of a bio-geographical concept of the State,
whose autonomy and survival are seen as linked to the coincidence of political borders with
natural ones: “Foreign policy also rests on a very simple principle: to ind the natural borders of
every nation” (F. Schlegel 1983b, 1:262).
It is obvious that we have here the roots of the Kampf um Raum (struggle for space) geo-
political theory, thinking which is very recognizable in Schlegel’s comments on the negative
efects that Switzerland sufers as a Kleinstaat (small state), for example (263). For now, we must
highlight that it is from this point of view that Schlegel understands the instrumental value
of language and national customs, the pillars upon which the national character is built: “he
irst and most complete determination of the natural borders is provided by language, national
character and customs” (262). herefore, although it is not explicity stated, we can see the value
that he assigns to Iberian and Italian peninsularity: “he most perfectly established borders in
all of Europe are those of Italy and of Spain; physical and national borders coincide” (262). It
is possible to appreciate from this passage the way in which geographical design is portrayed
as highly operative as an index of comparability. hus, from the implicit physical similarity be-
tween Spain and Italy (which has so many consequences for the comparison of their literatures)
we can postulate their diference from those states that do not enjoy the security of natural
geographic borders: “he borders between Germany and France are diicult to specify; there
is no geographical conditioning factor and the regions stuck in the middle are of such interest
to both states that they have always been a bone of contention” (262). In this framework, Eng-
land functions as a paradigm of insular stability: “England seems to be suiciently closed and
deined by its geographical borders” (262).
Friedrich Schlegel’s treatment of Iberian literatures is totally in keeping with the premises
of this geographical vision of peninsularity. he entity “Spanish literature” has clearly recogniz-
able borders, those imposed by the geographical environment, which endow it with an identity
that is clearly superior to that of other European literatures. It is these factors that explain how
in Schlegel’s 1803–04 Wissenschat der europäishcen Literatur (Science of European literature),
he approaches Spanish and Portuguese literatures as a unit and dedicates to them a quarter of
the total length of his European literary history. But with all this, we should not side-step the
fact that in Schlegel’s line of argumentation, peninsularity is not a determining code in literary
development. hus, the chapter devoted to Hispano-Portuguese literature begins with a dec-
laration of its diference from Italian literature, discussed in the preceding chapter: “Hispano-
Portuguese literature has a distinct development from Italian literature” (Schlegel 1983a, 1:223).
At no point does Schlegel state explicitly the reasons that move him to consider Spanish and
Portuguese literatures together. In any case, the peninsula efect is a determining factor in his
argumentation. In Wissenschat der europäischen Literatur, one of its consequences is a sort of
evolutionary isomorphism of Spanish and Portuguese literatures – although he does airm the
diferent origins of the latter (226) – which manifests itself in periods of similar inter-literary
development (Camões is studied alongside Cervantes and Calderón). In the Geschichte der al-
ten und neuen Literatur (History of old and new literature), dated between 1812 and 1821, the
peninsula efect is presented as a necessary premise to argue the isolation of Spanish literature,
which, in this case, relects the meta-geography of the peninsula as an almost-island and, there-
fore, the imaginary of a closed, self-suicient world that breaks spatially and temporally with
the continent. From this point of view, literatures in the Iberian and Scandinavian Peninsulas
show some concomitance:
In looking back, one can scarcely help observing a certain resemblance between the old situ-
ation of Scandinavia before the Reformation, and that of Spain. Each of these countries pos-
sessed a high degree of political and intellectual reinement, and each remaining apart, as it
were, from the rest of Europe, formed within itself a complete and distinct whole. he Nor-
mans [sic], like the Spaniards, had their share in the universally chivalrous spirit of the middle
age, which was indeed by no means foreign to their own particular antiquities. hey were also
acquainted with the south of Europe by means of travelling. But neither the inhabitants of the
Scandinavian, nor those of the Spanish peninsula, were ever engaged in any commerce with
any of the other European nations, of so intimate and multifarious a nature as that which con-
nected France with England from the eleventh till the iteenth, or Italy with Germany from the
ninth till the sixteenth century. (F. Schlegel 1841, 232)
As we can see, some physical geographical forms (island, peninsula) are reserved the role of
units of sub-continental segmentation, which, in the case of Europe, is sometimes reconig-
ured as a spatial system based on unequal relationship between sites which occupy the center
(dominating the system) and sites relegated to the periphery. In Schlegel’s model, this systemic
spatiality is closer to the bio-geographical hypothesis of abundant centers than to the thesis of
inequality of economic development and (neo)colonial ties. hus, the center of the idea of Eu-
ropean literature (232) is occupied by English (insular) literature, French and German literature
(of difuse spatiality and disputed interspatiality), and Italian (peninsular) literature, while in
the continental periphery – a liminality accentuated by their peninsularity – we ind Iberian,
Scandinavian and Russian literatures, whose separation from the rest of the continent is due to
geographical and religious reasons: “Among the Slavonic nations, Russia possessed very early
in the middle age a national historian in her vernacular […]. But to say nothing of other causes,
her subjection to the Greek church was alone suicient even in our time to keep Russia politi-
cally and intellectually at a distance from the rest of the Western world” (233). his is how the
exclusion of Russian literature from Wissenschat der europäischen Literatur is justiied. he Ge-
schichte der alten und neuen Literatur also presents serious doubts about the inclusion of Slavic
literatures, due to their limited or nonexistent participation in the crusades, the true core of the
chivalrous spirit that dominates Romance and Germanic literatures (233; see Domínguez 2001).
he use of (pen)insularity as a unit of segmentation puts it into a geopolitical position that
is superior (or at least a priori) to that of the nation-state (as evidenced by the fact that situa-
tions where the borders of the political entity coincide with those of the geographical entity are
much desired), but which ends up having an identical geo-literary position when we argue that
natural/political borders give unity and coherence to cultural phenomena: “Every separate and
independent nation has the right, if you may so express it, of possessing a literature peculiar to
itself ” (F. Schlegel 1841, 226). In any case, it is important to highlight the “jigsaw-puzzle view” of
the world (M. Lewis and Wigen 1997, 11), whereby the European literary map must show a series
of discrete but perfectly interlocking “literary units,” which not only contribute to stabilizing
international literary order, but also aid in the abstraction of units from their context and their
comparison: “We might suggest as a principle that the more diverse and opposing the two pow-
ers being compared, the more fruitful the comparison” (F. Schlegel 1983c, 2:433).
But the conceptual formulations of nation-state and (pen)insula also share, aside from this
simultaneously fragmentary and integrational vision, a place in a hierarchy. hey construct a
meta-structure that, from the continental level, descends to the smallest unit of literary repre-
sentativity. In this respect, one of the greatest attractions of the Iberian Peninsula for historians
of (inter)national vocation lies in the argument regarding the possibility of separation of state
and geographical dominion. For Schlegel, this separation is responsible for the survival of Por-
tuguese literature: “Of all the inhabitants of the beautiful peninsula, the Portuguese alone, as
they continued to be a peculiar nation, preserved a peculiar language and poetry of their own”
(1841, 257). his explanation has underlying meta-geographical considerations that have great
impact on literary comprehension, since they assure an a-regional distribution (for Portugal) as
opposed to the renowned regional variety of Spain, which could easily absorb Portugal as one
more of its natural regions. his is a process of war-like assimilation that lays the foundations
of a systemic intra-Iberian spatiality, which is already perceptible in, for example, F. Schlegel’s
observations on literary interrelations between Castile and Aragon: “Aragon slowly became
subjugated and with the country’s autonomy went its poetry, and, along with Castilian domina-
tion, Castilian poetry also came to embody all the beauty of a poetry that, otherwise, was scat-
tered throughout the various provinces of that poetic country” (740).
Because of this hierarchy, in terms of European literary continentality, the Iberian Penin-
sula is a perceptible, recognizable and coherent unit which relects the attraction of a literature
(the Peninsular) which is immovable in its space. On the next level we ind the “myth of the
nation-state” (Mikesell 1983) as a natural and basic repository of cultural phenomena. hus,
intra-continental relations are perceived in terms of the comparability of nation-states, while
intra-Peninsular relations containing non-national literatures are considered in terms of the
two nation-states, with the consequent tipping of the balance towards the Spanish situation.
In his 1804 Geschichte der spanischen Poesie und Beredsamkeit (History of Spanish poetry and
eloquence), Friedrich Bouterwek makes a notable efort to anchor various literatures to their
spaces, which are resolved into the natural space of the Peninsula and the political space of the
nation-states or the proto-national entities of the middle ages. hus, he expresses the paradox of
a recognizable, delimited spatial area (the Peninsula) whose interior requires a map to untangle
the interlinguistic, and, therefore, inter-literary, relations:
he trouble will be repaid if a glance be now cast on the map, in order to distinguish, with
somewhat more precision than is usually thought necessary, the respective domains of the
three principal dialects of the Spanish tongue; for it is diicult, if not impossible, to form any
opinion on the contest maintained between the Spaniards and the Portuguese relative to the
value of their respective languages, and the inluence these languages have had on the polite
literature of both countries, without a knowledge of the geographical boundaries, which, pre-
viously to the political divisions, separated the Portuguese from the Castilians, and the latter
from the Arragonese. (Bouterwek 1823, 1:6–7)
And the map takes on all its strategic connotations when we observe that Bouterwek thema-
tizes the peninsula efect as a battleground. Peninsularity thus becomes a limit, an uncrossable
threshold that compels endogenic development, meaning that each language and its literature
battle for the territory.
In this battle, languages/literatures that are not widespread are the irst losers: “In these
questions the Biscayan language is of no consideration, as it has only an accidental and unim-
portant connection with the other Spanish dialects, and, besides, bears not the most remote
resemblance to them” (1:7). To this statement of Bouterwek’s, the English translator, homasina
Ross, adds this no less elocuent note on (hypothetical) Basque literature, which summarizes the
information found in Luis José Velázquez’s Orígenes de la poesía castellana (Origins of Castilian
poetry) through Johann Andreas Dieze’s version: “his language [Basque], with the poetry to
which it may have given birth, had no inluence on literature beyond its own territory, and ap-
pears to have had very little even there” (1:7n).
As I have already pointed out, for the geographical imaginary, continents and nation-states
are part of the same naturalized geographical taxonomy, such that the latter should it perfectly
into the former. During the nineteenth century – but also the twentieth – in European literary
histories with an international perspective, each literature is addressed as an esthetic phenom-
enon contained in one nation-state, which can be grouped with others if they, in turn, are
contained in a larger geographical entity. hus, even when each of the two “national” literatures
of the Iberian Peninsula receives individual treatment in those literary histories – as the case
of Bouterwek, for example, whose third and fourth volumes of the Geschichte der Poesie und
Beredsamkeit, devoted, respectively, to Spanish and Portuguese literatures, were later translated
independently in Spain and Portugal, as well as in other European countries, with the con-
sequent limitation of any comparative reading – peninsularity acts as an implicit referent for
literary interaction.
A singular case in this respect is Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi who, through
the narratological construction of his 1813 work De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (On the
literature of the South of Europe), highlights what Derek Gregory (1994, 15) calls the “prob-
lematic of visualization”: “We may be considered as making the tour of Europe for the purpose
of examining nation by nation, and country by country, the efect which was produced by the
mixture of the two great races of men, the Northern and Southern” (Sismondi 1846, 2:86). Ater
France and Italy, his voyage brings him to Spain and Portugal, which is tantamount to saying
outside of Europe: “he literature of the nations upon which we have hitherto been employed
and of those of which we have yet to treat, was European: the literature of Spain, on the contrary,
is decidedly oriental” (2:87).
I will not comment at this time on the subject of this oriental character, which, nonethe-
less, is very relevant to the meta-geography of the continents; I will, however, underline the fact
that the apparent geographical disconnect between the two countries disappears when, via the
peninsula efect, he argues their adherence to Spain, which here seems cloaked in Peninsular
hegemony: “he kingdom of Portugal forms, in fact, only an integral portion of Spain” (2:446).
In literary terms, though, the independence of Portuguese literature is asserted: “Portugal, nev-
ertheless, possesses a literature of its own” (2:446). But this independence is questioned when
the peninsula efect is used to justify a linguistic ainity between Portuguese and Spanish that
makes the former a variant of the latter via a double determination, peninsular and coastal, re-
lated, obviously, to those geographical features: “he Portuguese is, in truth, a sort of contracted
Spanish […]. he language is, moreover, sotened; as is generally the case with all dialects spo-
ken on the coasts and downs, in distinction to the more wild and sonorous forms of speech pre-
vailing in mountainous regions. Such is the relation between the High German and the Dutch,
between the Danish and the Swedish” (2:447–48).
Sismondi ofers us, in short, a framed vision of European literature, an ordered whole
in which each nationalized unit plays its role through its interaction with local ecology: “We
have thus far completed our view of the semicircle which we originally traced out, considering
France as the centre; and we have witnessed the successive rise, progress, and decline of the
whole of the Romance literature, and of its diferent languages and poetry” (2:600). his line of
thought was carried further with the irst literary histories linked to the academic institutional-
ization of comparative literature (Abel-François Villemain, Jean-Jacques Ampère), in which we
can easily recognize the model of tableau and consequently, that of the historian as landscape
painter. And we should not neglect the fact that this national structure allows us to describe the
literary production of each region as the progressive realization of the potential of the national
character, whether the regions be intra- or extra-national. his explains why Sismondi does
not hesitate to include the output of Brazil in his study of Portuguese literature. Various other
historians would do the same, including the Spanish-language literatures of Latin America in
studies on Spanish literature.
he peninsula efect, however, has nothing to do with a deep-rooted mythologization in
one period or of one location (of foreign inluence). A century and a half later, peninsularity is
still the access route to Iberian literatures, especially in the case of Castilian/Spanish literature.
hus, we have a hyper-located literature. Because of a mechanist causality, we can only under-
stand this literature in its space. Gerald Brenan, a historian of the more literary/travel writing
type, conceived his 1951 volume he literature of the Spanish people, for an anglophone audience
who would be interested in Spanish diference: “his book was written with one main goal: to
put the literature of the Spanish people before English and American readers and to show them
how delightful it is and how it difers from all other literatures” (1958, 7). A large part of this
diference in the continental picture is due to a continuity of ethos imposed by the environment
and in which Brenan intervenes in favor of a maximalist approach (represented by Marcelino
Menéndez y Pelayo) in contrast to Américo Castro’s notion of mestizaje.
I have felt myself more justiied in seeking Spanish qualities in some of these other writers
[Latin-language writers in the Peninsula] because the descriptions of Strabo, Pliny, Silius Itali-
cus, Juvenal and other Greek and Latin authors show us that the inhabitants of the Peninsula
already possessed at that time many of their present-day characteristics. […] hat is to say, I
disagree with Américo Castro in the idea that the Spanish character is the result of the mixing
of a romanized people with Arabs, Berbers and Jews. (1958, 8)
Ten years later, Richard E. Chandler and Kessel Schwartz begin A new history of Spanish litera-
ture with a chapter devoted to the geography and topography of Spain. From a geographical
perspective, they defend, based on another famous ethos description (Salvador de Madariaga’s),
Spain’s spatial and temporal rit with the rest of Europe: “It is, indeed, an isolated nation, shut
of from the world on three sides by water, with the exception of its frontier with Portugal, and
on the north by the Pyrenees Mountains” (1970, 3). And from a topographical perspective, they
highlight the diversity within Peninsular unity: “Topographically, Spain is a very diversiied
country, divided by nature into a number of diferent regions. […] he consequence of this
natural division of the land into small portions has been the development of local nuclei and
regional patriotisms” (3–4). he syllogism closes with the preeminence – national but also Pen-
insular – of one of the literatures of the geographical repository, whose esthetic elevation is not
unconnected with its intra-Peninsular position: “Culturally and historically, Castile, located in
the heart of the central plateau, is the center of everything Spanish” (4).
Although many historians who are natives of the Iberian Peninsula have zealously at-
tempted to show the errors of appreciation on the part of foreign historians, in a defensive
tradition that goes back to the dispute between Masson de Morvilliers and Carlo Denina – on
this subject, José Amador de los Ríos’ introduction to the irst volume of the 1861 Historia crítica
de la literatura española (Critical history of Spanish literature) is unique (Amador de los Ríos
1861–65, 1:i-cvi) – it is certain that geographical theories are not the target of their attacks. In
Amador de los Ríos’ Crtical history, the Peninsular framework gives personality to all literatures
developed within it, including Latin, Arabic or Hebrew literature. We see, then, that a History
of “Spanish” literature can include these literatures as its object, reiied as a pre-manifestation of
the Spanish Geist that would later be incarnated in Spanish literature in Castilian: “in the genius
of Seneca and Lucan there are qualities that belong timelessly to the Spanish genius, in the same
way that the Southern climate and the prodigiously fertile ields have always belonged to our
Peninsula” (Amador de los Ríos 1861–65, 1: xcvii). From this point of view, the Historia crítica
brings to a close the failed project of Rafael and Pedro Rodríguez Mohedano’s Historia Literaria
en España (Literary history in Spain).
hree decades later, in the middle of a regenerationist resurgence, Ángel Ganivet develops
in his 1897 Idearium español (Spain, an interpretation) a whole theory centered on the notion
of territorial spirit as an attempt to ind a perennial argument for the Spanish essence: “And as
always, when we delve into the matter we hit the one thing that for us remains timeless, the land,
that nucleus in which the ‘territorial spirit’ is found” (1990, 66). Ganivet’s spatial imaginary is
based on two pillars, the aforementioned territorial spirit and the religious spirit, which in the
Spanish case is deined as a mysticism – variable in the future – heir to the Arab invasion and
the process of Reconquest.
Later on I will deal with the productive amalgam for (literary) historiographical discourse
of geographical structure (the Peninsula) and this vertical orientation that results from the
myth of España perdida (lost Spain). Here I will go into more detail about the territorial spirit,
since it allows for an examination of a large part of this implicit meta-geographical construction
that is analysed here in the sphere of the historiography of the literatures of the Iberian Penin-
sula. Based on unspeciied sources that have been variously identiied as Hippolyte Taine (Fox
1997, 125), Henry T. Buckle (Calvo Carilla 1998, 420) or homas Babington Macaulay (Orringer
1998, 125), Ganivet ofers a physical typology of states, with an obvious determinist slant: “As
there are continents, peninsulas and islands, there are also continental, peninsular and insular
spirits” (1990, 67). he enumeration must not lead us astray, as it is a true hierarchy of the
procedural tendencies, from the quickest (insularity) to the slowest (continentality), by way
of an intermediate stage (peninsularity) (67). his typological hierarchy is most useful for the
economics of Iberian historiography in that, as opposed to the dominant myth of peninsularity,
other literary traditions ind their identity traits in their territorial diference. Concretely, I am
referring to, for example, the potential of continentality for those histories of Basque literature
which airm a territorial unity in terms of a linguistic unity, and thus, a unity built on the his-
torical territories of Hegoalde and Iparralde (Euskal Herria).
But to return to Ganivet. In his argument on milieu, Spain (and not with Portugal) is no
longer a peninsula, but the peninsula, in the sense that its geographical formation in reality
makes it an island (again, with England as a paradigmatic example): “Spain is a peninsula, or,
more precisely, ‘the peninsula,’ because there is no peninsula that is closer to being an island
than ours. he Pyrenees are an isthmus and a wall; they do not block invasions, but they isolate
us and they allow us to conserve our independent character. […] We are an island at the meet-
ing point of two continents, and if, in an ideal world, isthmi do not exist, in the real world there
are two: the Pyrenees and the Straits of Gibraltar” (1990, 71).
he problem of the gateways to the Iberian Peninsula leads us to this vertical orientation of
historiography, which, as I have already said, will be analyzed below. Another similar problem
occurs with Iberian transcontinentality, which introduces interesting digressions about hybrid-
ity (including the literary). It is notable, lastly, that Ganivet’s regenerationist theory is based
on the abandonment of the continental orientation (initiated with Charles V’s foreign policy)
and, ultimately, the return to the essential peninsularity of Spain. As we have seen, this hyper-
peninsularity has a retrospective literary equivalent in the idea of the essential Spanishness of
Latin (fundamentally), Arabic and Hebrew (less so, for obvious reasons) literature. But it is also
present in those literary histories that see in the new literatures of Latin America a continuity of
Peninsular traditions. A good example of all this is the irst volume of Julio Cejador y Frauca’s
1932 Historia de la lengua y literatura castellana (Comprendidos los autores hispano-americanos)
(Desde los orígenes hasta Carlos V) (History of Castilian language and literature – Including
Hispanic American authors – From the beginning to Charles V), for its corpus (which includes
Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin American authors) and its time period (previous to the loss of
the Peninsular orientation?).
In this respect, it is also interesting to observe how some historians – although they accept
the pertinence of the Peninsular structure as an index of singularity and timelessness, in Ama-
dor de los Ríos’ terms – are obliged to introduce chronotopical equivalencies when justifying
exclusions from their historiographical object. One of the most inluential works in higher edu-
cation during the last third of the twentieth century, Juan Luis Alborg’s Historia de la literatura
española (History of Spanish literature), takes for granted the identiication of “Spanish” litera-
ture with “Castilian” (1966, 11), although he is not sparing in justiications when arguing for
the exclusion of certain literatures to which he implicitly denies “Spanish” status: “None of this,
however, means that we fail to recognize the great importance of other literatures produced in
the territory of the Peninsula. Galicia and Catalonia have created literatures of the highest class”
(11–12). Apart from not even the least reference to the omission of Basque literature, it is inter-
esting to note how the peninsula efect (in its hyper-peninsular aspect, to use Ganivet’s terms)
situates Galician and Catalan (and Basque?) literatures in both a chronic anachronism (their
exclusion is for the same reasons as that of Latin, Arabic and Hebrew literatures) and a chronic
anatopism (as non-national literatures, or, more precisely, literatures characterized as unrelated
to the nationalization that goes from the pre-Castilian to the Spanish): “heir exclusion from
these pages is for no other reason than those given for the exclusion of pre-Castilian literatures;
consigning them to brief appendices seems less appropriate than entrusting them to those who
can study them adequately with all required space and with all authority” (12).
But the exclusions can be as important as the identical results they give, even when the
ideological positions are very diferent. Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Julio Rodríguez Puértolas
and Iris M. Zavala do not include Latin, Galician, Portuguese, Catalan or Basque literature in
the Historia social de la Literatura española (en lengua castellana) (Social history of Spanish
literature [in Castilian]) either, with the objective of avoiding any pan-Hispanist tendency, or,
given the terms of their enumeration, pan-peninsular: “Ours is not an imperialist literature”
(1979, 1:38).
Transcontinental hybridity: “he perfumes of the East and the incense of Arabia”
Political maps – with their attractive multicolor palette that invites us to inquire as to the why
and wherefore of national monochromy, as to why Spain is as yellow as Norway and China or
Portugal as pink as Romania or Japan – provoke a worldview based upon, irstly, a contentinal
division of land, and secondly, divisions derived from those sub-units that are nation-states. In
terms of the four root metaphors of our understanding of reality proposed by S. C. Pepper in
World Hypotheses, it is an amalgam of a formalist and an organicist view (Buttimer 1993, 21–23).
he values of this poly- (or politi-)chromy are perhaps one of the irst visual manifestations of
meta-geographical codes that we learn in our education of how the world is made up. Because
when we look at a political map of Europe and observe that Turkey seems faded, we immedi-
ately infer that it is a non-European country. In the same way, shared colors invite us to imagine
orders of comparison according to which, for example, France (purple) is to Europe as India
(also purple) is to Asia.
M. Lewis and Wigen (1997, 9–10) have examined how the continent/nation-state hierarchy
leads to two implicit errors in the codes to which I have just alluded: (1) considering transcon-
tinental countries anomalies as a consequence of their heterogeneity (they are hybrid countries,
with a fusion of the essences of the continents in which they are situated) and (2) spreading
the fallacy of unit comparability, by which a fundamental parity is assumed on various levels
(including the esthetic) between countries on an intra- and inter-continental scale.
Certainly, geographical formations are not unconnected to these criteria of comparability.
hus, to the cases which I have presented here in terms of “literary peninsularity,” we can add
those resulting from geopolitics dealing with the implications, for example, of peninsularity
in Italy and Korea (Ratzel 1987, 74–75). Among the consequences of the irst error we ind the
relegation of Turkey to the periphery (the vision of the Ottoman Empire as a minor European
force or the current diicult negotiations with the European Union) and its consideration as
an unequivocally European country (in the geopolitics of the Cold War) or as a bridge between
West and East (even as a criterion of literary recognition). Among the consequences of the sec-
ond error we have the arguments of historians and critics of Indian literature (see, for example,
Majumdar 1987) according to which a fair comparison of that literature can only be so if it is
carried out with all of European literature, and not with national European literatures one at
a time, which is certainly an interesting meta-geographical counterpoint in what concerns the
assimilation of Europe with India as EurAsian sub-continents.
In this section I will focus on the irst error. I have already discussed the fact that in the
case of the Iberian Peninsula, the values of peninsularity are intensiied precisely because of
its continental liminality. he underlying construction is obvious. Continental essences are in-
carnated in more central areas, while the zones at the periphery are devoid of these essences
as a result of their distance, and are even exposed to contamination by their proximity to the
other continent. It was on this geometry of Raum (space) as Lage (position) that Friedrich
Ratzel would develop his theory of Germany as Mitteleuropa, playing a part similar to China in
Asia, and upon which Karl Haushofer would develop the geo-strategy which would have such
grave consequences in the twentieth century (Bonnemaison 2000, 31). In the case of the Iberian
Peninsula we have, again, both circumstances: distance from the European nucleus, (physical)
proximity to Africa, and (cultural) proximity to America.
We have already seen Friedrich Schlegel’s arguments regarding the existence of a central
European literature (represented by the output of Germany, France, England and Italy) and
another peripheral literature (that of the Iberian and Scandinavian Peninsulas and Slavic Eu-
rope), which implies a vertical view of the continent. His proposal is certainly not unrelated
to the postulates of a horizontal view according to which Europe would be divided into two
geoliterary strata: Nord and Midi. his view plays an important part in the search for a Euro-
pean autochthony (Querelle des anciens et des modernes, Querelle d’Homère [Quarrel of ancients
and moderns, Quarrel of Homer]), which took place during the second half of the eighteenth
century and the irst third of the nineteenth (Domínguez 2001), with the English and Scottish
primitivists (homas Blackwell, homas Reid, Adam Smith, James Macpherson, Hugh Blair)
or the intellectuals closely linked to Switzerland (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri Mallet, Mme de
Staël, Sismondi) as its greatest proponents.
Indeed, the British Isles (Ganim 1996, 148–58) and Switzerland were foci in the battle
against the imperialism (linguistic, political and military) exercised by France (hiesse 1999,
31–33) and the values, inherent in the Ancien Régime, that it personiied. Germany soon joined
those countries, seeking political and literary distance from the French model. hus, it is not
surprising that for Mme de Staël, political legitimacy also implied literary legitimacy. he Eng-
lish parliamentary system was the symbol of a new social contract in the regions of the Nord,
as her literary legacy proclaims: “he poetry of the North is much more suited than that of the
South to the spirit of a free people. […] Independence was the irst and only happiness of the
Northern peoples” (Staël 1991, 206–07).
he meta-geographical reference regarding the Midi may seem abstruse at irst glance, but
it becomes clear when we contrast Montesquieu’s geopolitical theories in L’Esprit des lois (he
spirit of laws) or Hegel’s in the Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Lectures on the
philosophy of history) regarding inherent Asian despotism. he European Midi, the continent’s
edge closest to Asia and Africa, is contemplated as foreign to the true European spirit, repre-
sented by the Germanic genius. And politically, it is precisely in Southern Europe where orien-
tal despotism was most widespread, especially in zones under Muslim rule. Orient, Southern
Europe, and inally, Northern Europe, are thus the chronotopes of universal history understood
as the self-awareness of liberty: “he orientals do not know that the spirit, or man as such, is
free in himself. And since they do not know it, they are not free. […] he awareness of liberty
arose only among the Greek; and thus, the Greek were free. But they like the Romans only knew
that some are free, but not that man as such is free. […] Only the Germanic nations have arrived,
through Christianity, at the awareness that man is free as man, that the freedom of his spirit is
his very deepest nature” (Hegel 1999, 67).
here are various factors that contribute to the transcontinentality of the Iberian Peninsula,
each of which reinforces the rest. Situated in the Midi, very close to Africa, conquered and ruled
for many centuries by Muslims, the Iberian Peninsula is an anatopism. It occupies a space in
Europe when in truth it should occupy a space in another continent (Africa, Asia). he fruit
of this anatopism is the Peninsula’s hybridity as a European space with an oriental spirit that
renders the study of its literatures an anthropological exercise and makes the historian a ield
worker: “In another point of view also, the literature of Spain presents to us a singular phenom-
enon, and an object of study and observation. Whilst its character is essentially chivalric, we
ind its ornaments and its language borrowed from the Asiatics. hus, Spain, the most western
country of Europe, presents us with the lowery language and vivid imagination of the East. […]
We may thus inhale, in a language allied to our own, the perfumes of the East and the incense
of Arabia” (Sismondi 1846, 2:445).
Léon-François Hofmann (1961, 49) has indicated that in the irst quarter of the nineteenth
century, the French romantics found a synthesis of literary Spanishness in three works: (1) Mme
Steck’s 1812 French translation of the Geschichte der spanischen Poesie und Beredsamkeit (2)
Sismondi’s De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe, and (3) Mme de Staël’s 1814 French translation
of August W. Schlegel’s Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (On dramatic art and literature).
Regardless of the exactitude of the identiication of these works, in the sense that other works,
both earlier and contemporary, are in no way less important, it is certain that reading the his-
tories of Bouterwek, Sismondi and A. W. Schlegel would lead to the projection of an organic
image of the Peninsular space by virtue of the complementary quality of their arguments. Said
image can be summarized as the dislocation or anatopism of the Iberian Peninsula as a conse-
quence of its “orientalism” (Bouterwek), understood as the exacerbation of some of the proper-
ties of the Southern geo-literary stratum in which it is inscribed (Sismondi), which manifests
itself in, among other things, a baroque of excess (A. W. Schlegel).
he use of the concept of orientalism to describe Iberian anatopism might attract attention,
to the point that it could be considered a biased extrapolation of the terminology of Edward W.
Said’s famous study of the same name.
his is not my intention, as far as orientalism is precisely the notion used by the literary
histories which I will discuss here to describe the way in which Western Europe relates not to
the Orient, as would have Said’s canonical deinition (1995, 1), but rather, signiicantly, to the
westernmost part of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula. hus, and before proceeding to the analysis
of this orientalist discourse as a strategy of alienation of certain European geo-literatures, I
should point out the fact that in Orientalism, Said makes no reference to Iberia. Obviously, in
making such a remark, I am not attempting to join those who do not cease to insist on schema-
tizing Said’s fundamental opposition (East/West), result of an inattention to, or an ignorance of,
the internal issures of Europe. In fact, Said himself was very aware of the particular status of
Spain in orientalist tradition, as evidenced by his prologue to the new Spanish edition of 2003:
here was another ciriticism that had more foundation: I had said very little on the extremely
complex and dense relationship between Spain and Islam, which, certainly, could not simply
be characterized as an imperial relationship. Since 1978 […] I have realized […] the extent
to which Spain is a notable exception in the context of the general European model broadly
sketched in Orientalism. (Said 2003, 9)
hat being said, Said’s contemplation (2003, 10) of the “exceptionality” of Spain from the view-
point of the mythic Christian-Jewish-Muslim coexistence in medieval Spain, an argument on
which the other literary histories analyzed here also rely to justify Peninsular orientalism, al-
lows us to infer the most important reasons for the absence of Spain as a referent in Orientalism.
First: as with literature on imperialism, privilege has been given to the role played by France,
Great Britain, and, more recently, the United States over that played by Spain and Portugal,
despite the fact that in the sixteenth century, these powers, as Walter D. Mignolo (2000) has
shown, founded the conceptual framework of the modern world-system, based on colonial
diference. In this respect, we should remember that the discovery of America was a highly
orientalist business. Second: the chronological preference is also geographical, in the sense that
imperial practices are conceived as a heterotopic European activity.
he absence of the Iberian referent in Said’s argumentation is more signiicant when we
note that the inventions of the Orient, or, in the terms of Edgar Quinet, chair of languages and
literatures of Southern Europe at the Collège de France (Espagne 1993, 111), the resurgence of
the oriental, and of the Iberian Peninsula as an oriental enclave in Europe, took place toward
the same time (the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century), this last
being a process that includes the gypsy-ization of Andalusia (Charnon-Deutsch 2002, 28). If,
for Said (1995, 42), the tone of the operation of appropriation – territorial and intellectual –
that is orientalism was set in the Near East by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, we
could say the same for the case of the Iberian Peninsula with the Napoleonic invasions of 1807
(the year of the occupation of Portugal)-1814 and the military intervention decreed by Cha-
teaubriand in 1823 with the goal of restoring the Bourbon dynasty, which among other efects
added Spain (and, to a lesser extent, Portugal) to the itinerary of the grand tour, making it a
destination that, due to its greater accessibility (economically, as well) could replace the difuse
spatiality of the Orient.
One of those travellers, Stendhal, said, on the occasion of the preparations for his voyage
to Spain that “Il paraît que je vais aller en Espagne, c’est-à-dire en Afrique” (It appears that
I am going to Spain, that is, to Africa; quoted in Hofman 1961, 81). Of the various connota-
tions of such a geographical relocation, Victor Hugo gives us the key in his prologue to Les
Orientales: “l’Espagne c’est encore l’Orient; l’Espagne est à demi africaine, l’Afrique est à demi
asiatique” (Spain is still the Orient; Spain is half African, Africa is half Asian; Hugo 1971, 69).
All of this should not lead us to believe, however, that Hispanic orientalism was solely a hetero-
imagological venture of exoticization (promoted even by the Napoleonic administration), since
Spaniards exiled in France and England actively took part in its difusion, which in the case
of literary creation was due to strategies for access to the market (the oriental and Spanish
fashions of Paris to which Balzac referred in his article “De la mode en littérature” [On fashion
in literature], published in the May 29, 1830 issue of La Mode). In that sense, the relationship
between the Iberian Peninsula and orientalist narratives is ambivalent, paradoxical, in that its
supposed orientalist otherness was both a hetero-image developed by the rest of Europe and a
self-image that was accepted and promoted or relegated to the deinition of the internal others
(Gypsy-ized Andalusia).
I have already discussed Bouterwek’s likening of the Iberian Peninsula to a battleield. On
this spatialization of Peninsular languages he superimposes in his Geschichte der spanischen
Poesie und Beredsamkeit another pseudo-spatial argument, whereby the deinition of the Ibe-
rian Peninsula as a space of cultural hybridity is a fusion – once more through war – of East
and West:
During the ive centuries of almost uninterrupted warfare between the race of Moorish Arabs
and the Christians of ancient European descent, both parties […] had mutually approximated
in mind and in manners. […] hus arose the spirit of Spanish knighthood, which was, in real-
ity, only a particular form of the general chivalrous spirit then prevailing in most of the coun-
tries of Europe, but which, under that form, impressed in an equal degree on the old European
Spaniard an oriental, and on the Spanish Moor a European character. (Bouterwek 1823, 1:2–3)
From these introductory remarks, we can follow the development and progress of two (na-
tional) heroes, Spanish and Portuguese literatures, to the deinitive decline (Bouterwek 1823,
1:538) of the irst in the eighteenth century, attributed to its “intransitive nationality,” a conse-
quence, in turn, of its oriental ethos: “Spanish poetry is more decidedly national than any other
branch of modern poetry in Europe. […] the Spanish, or, to speak with more precision, the
Castilian poetry […] is a peculiar stream from the romantic Parnassus. […] his orientalism
of Spanish character and poetry has long been disapproved” (1:606). In the development of
narrative, this orientalism had found additional justiications, from the Castilian attraction to
the Arab world to the assimilation of external inluences (particularly, the Italian) by way of
their orientalization.
his orientalization of the moral and literary geography of the Iberian Peninsula was ad-
opted and spread by various French literary histories of the period 1830–49, linked to the chairs
of littérature étrangère (foreign literature), a clear denomination of the centrality of the (nation-
al) spatial referent, whose nucleus France occupied. In 1830, Abel-François Villemain, professor
at the Sorbonne between 1816 and 1830 and Minister of Education between 1840 and 1844, pub-
lished the Tableau de la littérature au Moyen Âge en France, en Italie, en Espagne et en Angleterre
(A picture of the literature of the middle ages in France, in Italy, in Spain and in England), in
which the most important literatures of Mme de Staël’s Midi were singled out (a task already car-
ried out by Sismondi in 1813), with the incorporation of English literature as a consequence of
its hybridity of Northern and Southern elements due to the Norman conquest (Villemain 1875,
1:i–ii and 211). As in Bouterwek’s Geschichte, Villemain insists on the intransitive nationality of
Spanish literature as its deining characteristic: “less varied, less rich than that of other coun-
tries in Europe, it is more indigenous, more local, more historic” (1875, 2:86). And this unique
soin de [elle]-même (unique care of itself; 86) is once more attributed to the oriental inlux, to
the point that the role of Spain in the European sphere becomes the difusion of “heterotopic”
literatures: “we will attempt […] to ind the relection of the Arabic genius in the Spanish, from
whence it passed to the rest of Europe” (1:35).
An identical line of argumentation occurs in other literary histories, and gradually makes
more explicit the productivity of the postulate of Hispanic orientalism in setting the boundar-
ies of French literary geography within littérature européenne. Jean-Jacques Ampère’s lectures
on foreign literatures given at the École Normale from 1830 (Espagne 1993, 34) led to various
publications, such as “De la littérature française dans ses rapports avec les littératures étrangères
au Moyen Âge” (On French literature in its relations with foreign literatures in the middle ages,
Ampère 1867b), dated 1832, or the uninished Histoire de la littérature française au Moyen Âge
comparée aux littératures étrangères (History of French literature in the middle ages compared
to foreign literatures), of which only the irst volume, devoted to the history of the French lan-
guage, was published in 1841 (Ampère 1841).
In “De la littérature française,” Ampère points out how the crusades contributed to the
rapprochement between Europe and Asia, a phenomenon that on European soil would be in-
tensiied, mediated by Spain, with its difusion of oriental traditions that would afect the now
French Midi: “he Orient, that old world, cradle of our world, continued to circle in is faraway
orbit […]. When the time came to take hands with the West, French literature […] found it
in more than one place: the Arabic genius reached Provence through Spain” (Ampère 1867b,
84–85). In the Histoire, Ampère briely revisits Hispanic orientalism, although the weight of
the argument is now directed towards demonstrating the radiation of French literature in the
rest of Europe, with the active role played in this by Provence: “Castilian Spain was more heroic
and religious than gallant; she learned gallantry from the Arabs and the Provençal” (1841, xxix).
In 1842, with his Histoire comparée des littératures espagnole et française (Comparative his-
tory of French and Spanish literature, 1843), Adolphe de Puibusque won the special contest
sponsored by the Académie Française on the theme, “What was the inluence of Spanish litera-
ture on French literature at the beginning of the seventeenth century?” he comparative study
of Spanish and French literatures opens with a linguistic section, also from a comparative view-
point, in which the author highlights the exceptionality – even in genre – of the Spanish ethos
in its “connatural” space, the Midi: “he Spanish language, the proudest and the most male of
all Southern languages, is nervous without harshness, and lexible without sotness” (Puibusque
1843, 1:14). Obviously, the referent to Spanish ierceness and masculinity is given by the French
language, endowed with the best qualities: “purity, lexibility, correctness and above all, clarity”
(14). In literary matters, the Spanish characterization rests once more on its intransitive nation-
ality and its orientalism (1:69 and 2:351). his is a diagnostic that would become common in the
rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) that legitimizes the appropriation of the
backwardness which can only be given a voice through civilization: “and at the center of that
great circle of attentive peoples, France, standing tall like a lighthouse, receiving and relecting
light from East to West, and greeted by all voices with the name of missionary nation!” (2: 357).
In closing this section, I will return to this circular spatialization of the literary world, whose
center is occuped by France-the lighthouse.
Lastly, I will mention Louis Benloew, who in 1849 took up the position in littérature
étrangère in the Faculté des Lettres at Dijon (Espagne 1993, 83), upon which he presented an
inaugural address called “Introduction a l’histoire comparée des littératures” (Introduction to
the comparative history of literatures), which was published later the same year. For Benloew,
just as Ampère had already proposed (1867a) in his inaugurational address to the course in lit-
erature at the Athénée in Marseille in 1830, the comparison of classical and modern literatures is
the foundation for a philosophie de la littérature (philosophy of literature). His program of study
includes both those literatures that have given rise to la grande civilisation (great civilization;
Benloew 1849, 8) and those that have played a minor role, creating no more than an éclat pas-
sager (passing impression; 8), such as Arabic and Spanish literature. As regards Arabic literature,
Benloew refers to the conclusions of the orientalists, which can be summed up as monotony
and decadence (9). For Spanish literature, the old argument of literary hyper-nationality is ex-
pressed in the philosophical term individualisme (17), such that its only possibility for Europe-
anization, that is to say, for shedding its heterotopical character – even though its heterotopism
seems to have been its only way of achieving its own space, if we follow the argument developed
by all these narratives – comes from a contamination by central European literatures, such as
Italian literature (17). On this subject, we should highlight the new turn taken, through Ben-
loew, of the spatial syllogism as a way to conceive Spanish uniqueness on the European stage.
Spanish hetero-topism is, in reality, the morbid manifestation of its agoraphilia, of its fear of
despatialization at the hands of the universal localism of French literature. If France is the patrie
du monde (homeland of the world; 23), Spain, inoculated by its sang presque africain (almost
African blood; 17), opts, like its Golden Age drama, for le monde (the world) as an unité de lieu
(unit of space; 18).
As Espagne (1993, 144) has indicated, it is French literature that in the nineteenth (but also
in the twentieth) century gives a teleological slant to the comparative exploration of European
literatures, such as that carried out by Benloew. his fact is particularly evident in the closing of
his Introduction à l’histoire comparée des littératures, in which, through a now Olympic image,
he lists by antonomasia the traits of each of the literatures that has participated in the universal
relay race, of which France is the last, à la fois phare (Puibusque’s metaphor) and volcan (at
the same time lighthouse and volcano; Benloew 1849, 23). his status of French literature is
obviously the result of its ability to universalize all the localisms that, in the case of Spanish
literature, lie in its variété (23). Orientalism, then, was the rhetorical formula used to con-
jure the pluralism of Peninsular (moral and literary) geography, a sort of charm to guarantee
the manipulability of this internal Other of Europe. he imagination of an oriental home for
Iberian literatures was based on various complementary operations, of which two stand out:
homogenization and revitalism.
hrough homogenization, the contradictory and enigmatic nature of Iberian literatures
slowly became polarized into extreme oppositions, both in an inter- and an intra-literary di-
rection. On an inter-literary level, Peninsular geography is far from being this peaceful home
wishfully constructed by the Bachelard of La Poétique de l’espace (he poetics of space). Rather,
it is a space of conlict in which all types of relationships are plunged, including those regard-
ing gender, with the masculinization of Spanish and the feminization of Portuguese literature.
Literary histories thematize this conlictiveness with the elimination of some of the inhabitants
(particularly, Basque literature, as in Bouterwek) and their gradual reduction into national he-
roes (Sismondi, Bouterwek and Villemain’s Spanish and Portuguese literatures), of which Span-
ish literature becomes a synecdoche for all Iberian literatures (Ampère, Puibusque, Benloew).
In this regard, the intra-Pensinsular functioning of the theory of anatopism is symptomatic,
as it afects Portuguese (to Villemain, a part of the Nord in the Midi) and as well as Catalan
literature, close to Italian due to its limited nationality, according to Bouterwek (1823, 1:15–16)
and applicable to Provençal literature due to its linguistic heritage, according to Villemain (1875,
2:98–99). On an intra-literary level, within the framework of Spanish literature as a synecdoche,
this polarization operates through a regionalistic spatiality that opposes Castile to Andalusia,
rendering the latter an internal Other through the hetero-imagological argument applied to the
Iberian Peninsula as a whole: its orientalism.
Peninsular historiographical self-narrative made this opposition one of the fundamental
criteria for canonization, with the place of honor reserved for those works that would sublimate
Castilian realism (from the Libro de buen amor [Book of good love] and the Celestina to Laz-
arillo de Tormes and Don Quixote), in the face of the exoticism attributed to the descendants of
the Abencerraje. hese spatial projections are in no way exclusive to literary histories, but rather,
they also operate in literary narratives, to the point that we must suppose them to construct a
mutual, self-justifying referent. In keeping with the ultimate goal of orientalism as discussed
by Said (to orientalize the Orient), French translations of Castilian romances, such as those
included in the Bibliothèque des Romans from 1782 to 1784, emphasized oriental color (Hof-
mann 1961, 12 and 49), while, between 1800 and 1850, every theatrical season in Paris ofered at
least one play set in that exotic Spain (16 such plays between 1823 and 1824, 50 between 1830 and
1840, and 12 in 1836, by Hofmann’s calculation [1961, 39]). If the roman noir (black novel) opted
for Moorish Peninsular space to allow free reign to morbid plots, the conte fantastique (fan-
tastic tale), such as Charles Nodier’s Inès de las Sierras (1837), was set in Catalonia, as the least
typically Spanish region. Similar spatial connotations are also related to the characterization of
actantial relations, as evidenced by one of the greatest syntheses of Spanish exoticism, Prosper
Mérimée’s Carmen, in which the fatal union of the protagonist and the Basque don José symbol-
izes both the mortal interstitiality of the Spanish ethos (the nobility of the pure Christian man
and the orientalism of the gypsy woman) and the internal otherness of both minorities, whose
languages (Basque and Caló) are translated by the narrator (Colmeiro 2002).
With respect to revitalism, it is the logical consequence of the reinscription of spatial dif-
ference in temporal distance, which Johannes Fabian (1983) calls “denial of coevalness.” he
intransitive Spanish nationality, its hyper-location and its unsociability (according to a likening
of literatures to individuals, who can enter into relationships), are the result of its slow develop-
ment, of its absolutized past, associated with the middle ages, the peak of spatial orientalization.
he essence of Iberian literatures is understood in light of their primitive origins, of the impos-
sibility of overcoming their orientalist medievalism. Such a temporal paralysis is particularly
visible in certain spaces. If Said pointed out the role that Hiyaz ascribes to orientalist discourse,
where “you can speak about Muslims, modern Islam, and primitive Islam without bothering to
make distinctions” (Said 1995, 235), in the Iberian Peninsula, these chronotopes are represented
by Castile and Andalusia. Hence, Stendhal claims, in his Mémoires d’un touriste (Memoirs of
a Tourist): “Voulez-vous voir le moyen âge? Regardez l’Espagne” (You wish to see the Middle
Ages? Look at Spain; quoted in Hofmann 1961, 87).
he literary correlate of this dismissal of contemporaneity is presented by the theme of
the “last of the race,” studied by Fiona Staford (1994), with precedent such as Sir Walter Scott’s
he Last Minstrel and James Fenimore Cooper’s he Last of the Mohicans, with Peninsular pro-
ductions that I associate with Chateaubriand’s Le dernier Abencérage (he last abencerrage) or
héophile Gautier’s La dernière manola (he last manola). In the Spanish case, those last repre-
sentatives emphasize the imminent disappearance of that imagined geography under the threat
from the Industrial Revolution, personifying Spain and Portugal as the last European refuges of
exoticism. Until that moment, the temporal décalage had allowed French literature, within the
framework of its teleological undertaking, to support Spanish literature, obliging it to view itself
and its readers in the mirror of orientalism.
Lastly, I would not like to conclude this section without making at least some reference
to the spatiality, not only in terms of the content of literary histories, as I have done explic-
itly up until now, but rather, to their enunciation, of which I have already spoken briely. Said
maintains that the type of viewpoint implied by orientalist discourse is panoptic, since “the
Orientalist surveys the Orient from above, with the aim of getting hold of the whole sprawl-
ing panorama before him […] To do this he must see every detail through the device of a set
of reductive categories” (1995, 239). We owe to Michel Foucault and his 1975 Surveiller et punir
(Discipline and punish) one of the clearest analyes of panoptisme, a term derived from panopti-
con, that is, the central tower of the circular structure designed by Jeremy Bentham in the eigh-
teenth century. For Foucault, panoptisme is a tyranny of vision, located in prisons, in hospitals,
in schools or in factories, through which the masses become visible through a reduced number
of people, or even, through a single person.
Another space, literary space, has also been contemplated panoptically, whether it be Ibe-
rian literary space, that of littérature européenne, or that of Weltliteratur, as evidenced by the
conceptual choices – Puibusque’s world as circle and France-the lighthouse, Benloew’s France-
the lighthouse and the brillante lampadophorie des civilisations (the brilliant passing of the torch
of civilizations; 1849, 23), or the various histories that include the notion of tableau (scene) in
their titles, which alludes to a theatrical consciousness of history – and the epistemological
choices of the literatures analyzed, which we can appreciate in the focalizing formulas they use.
In that sense, there are two factors we should not neglect.
Firstly: the spatial organization projected onto them by this panoptic view is highly deter-
mined by their own location. Consider minister Salvandy’s 1838 Ordinance (quoted in Espagne
1993, 42–43), that regulated the distribution of academic chairs in littérature étrangère according
to a regional criterion so that each corner of the hexagon that is France would play host to the
academic study of the foreign literature that was physically closest to it. his meant that the
birth of the discipline of Hispanic Studies would take place in Bordeaux. hus, we can airm
that Iberian anatopism is, to some degree, the product of French regionalism, in the same way
that the homogenization of Slavic literatures was the French answer to the threat it saw in the
uniication of Germany.
Secondly: this panoptic quality of literary histories associated with the chairs in littérature
étrangère is identical to that of the Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, in which
Hegel philsophically ratiies the three-way geocultural division of Europe, with a Midi without
a nucleus, open to the Mediterranean, in which Spain and Portugal lack substance due to their
intrinsic individualism (Hegel 1999, 676), or to that of Carmen, whose narrator-translator could
not help but contemplate in his descriptions both Andalusia and the East. hus, it should be of
no surprise that Carmen was simultaneously accepted as a self-image and relegated to the dei-
nition of the internal Others, as would occur with that imagined home that the literary histories
examined here, among others, projected on Iberian literatures.
“Ah, such a violent passion I feel for Al-Andalus!” (Ibn Khafāja). “Al-Andalus syndrome”:
À la recherche du territoire perdu
he choice of Seville as seat of the East-Western Divan orchestra (since 2002) – as well as of
its associated Foundation (since 2004) – according to its individual (Daniel Barenboim and
Edward Said) and institutional (the Junta de Andalucía) promoters, was due to obvious sym-
bolic reasons geared to an ultimate understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. As was
insistently argued in the media and in the project documents, no other stage could be more
appropriate, since Christians, Jews and Muslims had lived peacefully side by side in that city.
Around the same time, the calls of Al Qaeda – initiated by Osama bin Laden in 1994 – seeking
the recuperation of al-Andalus as one of the “lost territories” of Islam intensiied.
Both proposals share a (geo-cultural) mythologization and a feeling (nostalgia), whose
instrumentalization and legitimacy can be (and are) the object of contention and debate. I do
not aim to take part in this debate (for a relection on abusive uses of the commemorative vol-
umes al-Andalus 92 and Sefarad 92, see M.R. de Madariaga 2000). I only claim to call attention
to the role that this mythologization and feeling have had in literary historiography. To do so, I
will refer to the phenomenon that cultural anthropologist Akbar S. Ahmed has called “Anda-
lus syndrome,” which he deines as “a yearning for a past that is dead but will not be buried, a
fear of an unreliable future which is still to be born” (2003, 160). In its development, Ahmed’s
examination shows itself to be unilateral and exclusionary, as only Muslims (Denny 1996, 1104)
experience that sense of loss (Ahmed 2003, 167) with respect to al-Andalus (for example, Hy-
derabadi descendants who live in Karachi) or other ex-Islamic territories. his approach has
earned Ahmed scathing criticisms in some forums due to the possible links between his char-
acterization of the syndrome and the irredentism of the lost lands that has been identiied as a
trait of Islam (the debate raised by columnist Christopher Caldwell is illustrative in this point.)
For my line of argumentation, I redeine “al-Andalus syndrome” as a neurosis of extinc-
tion, developed in historiographical discourse about the territory (whose borders are not always
clear-cut) and its literary and cultural output. On some occasions, the symptom that points to
this emotional dysfunction is a strange amalgam of déjà vu – like that experienced by Ahmed
(2) on his visit to the mosque at Córdoba – and horror vacui. On other occasions, the syndrome
manifests itself no less obsessively through a minimalist compulsion as a formula guaranteeing
ritual puriication. In either case, al-Andalus presents itself as an (in)visible haut lieu (impor-
tant place), a home to exorcize, an eco-symbol of the inhabited world.
Between 1820 and 1821, the three volumes of José Antonio Conde’s Historia de la domi-
nación de los árabes en España, sacada de varios manuscritos y memorias arábigas (History of
the dominiation of the Arabs in Spain, taken from various Arabic manuscripts and memoirs)
were posthumously published. In the Prologue to the irst volume, Conde summarizes the ulti-
mate factor that guided his work: “his book is like the other side [reverso] of our history, and if
in oicial history little or nothing is said of the succession and order of the Arab dynasties and
Moorish customs, in this history, very little is said of the history of León and Castile” (quoted in
B. López García 2000, 158; italics added). It is understandable that these words by Conde – an
orientalist, liberal and afrancesado – recall both the justiications brought by the feminist move-
ment in its recuperation of the silenced écriture féminine and the calls to de-colonizzare noialtri
europei da noi stessi (decolonize us Europeans from ourselves) (Gnisci 1995) as a requirement
for the conception of a storia diversa (diferent history) (Gnisci 2001). All told, the structure
of Conde’s History is closer to the formulation of a counter-canon than to the post-colonial
expression of the “ininite plurality of discourses and of the inite and redeemable diferences of
cultures that are in communication with each other” (Gnisci 2001, 46).
Conde’s introductory words reveal a double (which turns out to be single) historiographi-
cal fracture: the impossibility of coexistence – so instrumentalized in the apologies regarding
the Black Legend, even by Spanish liberals, who used an Andalusian myth to denounce the
Catholic fanaticism of the absolute monarchy (M.R. de Madariaga 2000, 82) and, more recently,
in the model of the clash of civilizations – of diferent cultures in one and the same historio-
graphical discourse. For the main line of thought in Spanish historiography, the year 711 – the
beginning of the Muslim invasion – was the real annus horribilis, the rupture of Hispania’s
natural chronology. From that moment until the restoration in 1492 (or the ater-efects of later
expulsions), the España árabe (Arab Spain) only counted in its sudden emergence in 711, and,
above all, in its gradual loss/recovery, that is to say, the milestones of its return to Christian
hands (Toledo in 1085, for example), but never in its own development (this is the minimalist
variant of al-Andalus syndrome). It is in this sense that Fernando Wulf (2003, 22–23) spoke of a
historiographical rhythm determined by the invasions, appearing already in the mid-sixteenth
century with Florián de Ocampo’s Los cinco libros primeros de la Cronica general de España (he
ive irst books of the general history of Spain).
For the historiographical trend begun by José Antonio Conde (his is the irst complete his-
tory of Arab domination between 711 and 1492, and has a periodological sequence practically
unaltered even today), “Arab Spain” was a geo-historical object in itself (reverso), which could
manage without the processability of territories in Christian hands (an identical variant of the
syndrome). In either case, we are dealing with endogenous histories, themselves a metaphor for
the basic separation between East and West, to which other histories composed from within
Europe prior to or at the same time as Conde, and later histories carried out from within Spain,
would oppose images of interstitiality (bridge, link). And in all cases, al-Andalus becomes a
region: a region subtracted from a greater territorial entity (not so much the Iberian Peninsula
as, basically, Spain), a region converted into an advance party for Islam in Europe (al-Andalus
as one more country in the Islamic world). We can also add a third level, consisting of the
internal regionalization of al-Andalus, that, symptomatically, converges with the localist and
regionalist wave of the second half of the nineteenth century, and, more precisely, its last quarter
(restorationist historiography), whose causes, among others, were the development during the
eighteenth century of a regional pride in the face of the French cultural invasion (Monroe 1970a,
35) and liberal interpretations of the process of formation of the Spanish state (Peiró Martín
1995, 137). herefore, it should not surprise us that in 1782, one of the Aragonese disciples of
Syrian Maronite Miguel Casiri, author of the 1760–70 Bibliotheca arabico-hispana escurialensis
(Hispano-Arabic catalogue of El Escorial), published a Bibliotheca arabico-aragonensis (Ara-
gonese-Arabic catalogue).
he methodology adopted by Conde, a disciple of Silvestre de Sacy, shows how an endog-
enous history is constructed. As the title itself proclaims, the Historia de la dominación de los
árabes en España uses the Arabic texts themselves, translated by the author (freely, or perhaps
even wrongly, as one his main critics, Dutch orientalist Reinhart P. Dozy, would claim), and
only in extreme cases resorts to a combination of Arabic and Latin sources (Manzanares de
Cirre n.d., 62–63). An identical process (but with exclusive dependence on Latin or Romance
sources) was adopted by the main line of Spanish historiography to which I alluded earlier,
which goes to show the enormous task at the feet of Spanish arabism, since towards the middle
of the nineteenth century the only academic research tool was Casiri’s bibliographical catalogue,
backed by Fernando VI and continued by Francisco Fernández y González in 1861 with the Plan
de una biblioteca de autores árabes españoles (Outline of a collection of Spanish Arab authors)
(Rivière Gómez 2000, 48n46). In this sense, a new treatment of sources would be a clear indi-
cation (at times) of an attempt to overcome historiographical endogenesis. Another of Sacy’s
disciples, Pascual de Gayangos, would take that step by turning to comparison, a deinitive way
of initiating a dominant line of investigation in later arabism – like that of the contact between
Arab and Christian Spains – under the inluence of the emerging theme of tolerance, which
José Antonio Conde himself had defended as a symbol of the struggle between faith and reason
(which in his era manifested itself as the struggle between Church and State). His opting for a
unique source is thus one of the (many) paradoxes of Spanish orientalism, another one of which
is its persistent chronophil/phob-ia, whether we are talking about the Andalusians of medieval
Spain (arabophilia) or of contemporary Arabs (arabophobia).
Similar to the role reserved for the comparison of French literature with foreign literatures
in France, this comparatist impetus was not unconnected to a national(ist) telos in Spain. hus,
having founded the Sociedad Histórica y Filológica de Amigos del Oriente (Historical and
Philological Society of the Friends of the Orient) in 1860, two years later, Fernández y González
sought government funding to carry out an España árabe (Arab Spain), a literary and cultural
undertaking whose interest claimed to be “more national than particular” (quoted in Rivière
Gómez 2000, 50). he referent, obviously, is España sagrada (Holy Spain), the great ecclesiasti-
cal history, initiated in 1747 by Augustinian friar Enrique Flórez, and which just 26 years before
Fernández y González’s petition had been entrusted by reigning queen Maria Cristina of Naples
to the Real Academia de la Historia for continuation (Peiró Martín 1995, 41n83).
España sagrada as opposed to España árabe. hey are not just two erudite labors of docu-
mentary exhumation, one Christian, the other Arab. Both titles preigure an incommensurable
geographical imaginary. In fact, if the subtitle of Father Flórez’s work was Teatro geográico-
histórico de la Iglesia de España (Geographical-historical theatre of the church of Spain) and its
irst volume was presented as a Clave geográica (Geographical key), Fernández y González’s
España árabe – in its irst and only volume, since the only aid granted by the Ministry was
in the form of the purchase of twenty-ive copies – inaugurated a long series of essentialist
presentations that agreed that even when Arabic, Spain had remained Spain (Muslim Spain,
Spanish Islam).
Formulas such as these, and others such as Roman Spain or Gothic Spain had found in
school maps, those icons of the national ideal omnipresent in classrooms until not many years
ago, one of the most efective tools for constructing a collective imaginary in which Spain ig-
ured as a sujeto real (real subject; Maestro González 2005, 161). Spain existed before Spain, a
geo-determinism that explains both the national defense of Spanishness for Latin authors such
as Seneca, Martial and Lucan or Arab authors such as Muqaddam de Cabra – Muqaddam ibn
Mu’āfa al-Qabrī or Muhammad Mahmūd al-Qabrī, perhaps not two but one and the same poet
(Rosen 2000, 186n3 and 170) – and the foreign attack on these authors for their Spanish con-
tamination, à la Marc Antoine Muret, Saverio Bettinelli and Girolamo Tiraboschi (Dainotto
2007, 113–14), among others, who shared a preoccupation with the function of Spain in the
European sphere (Que doit-on à l’Espagne [What do we owe to Spain?]).
In the irst case, these Spanish glories were the symbol of a geo-strategic revolt: Spain had
been at the forefront of the Roman Empire, even in political terms (with Trajan), and ended
by imposing its own norms on the metropolis (Wulf 2003, 117), the norms of the periphery. In
the second case, the ill-fated condition of the genre of the general history of Spain has been at-
tributed to the defensive force, which would bring about the heyday of a cultural history along
the lines of friars Mohedano, Juan Francisco Masdeu, and Juan Andrés (García Cárcel 2004, 27),
in which the “Arab period” was presented as one of the high points of Spanish history. Fernán-
dez y González’s Spain, thus, was as holy as Flórez’s, despite its opposing argument, situating
Spanish national essence in an Afro-Oriental foundation and not in a Roman-Visigothic one,
which is at the heart of españolista theories. He would return to this question in his address
upon his investiture to the Real Academia Española in 1894, an address titled “Inluencia de
las lenguas y letras orientales en la cultura de los pueblos de la Península Ibérica” (Inluence of
oriental languages and literatures on the culture of the people of the Iberian Peninsula). he
third line was, obviously, the one that Américo Castro later developed, situating Spanishness in
medieval mestizaje (mixing). It was a “symbiosis,” to which Claudio Sánchez Albornoz would
later oppose the very clichéd theory of “antibiosis,” that is to say, the negative consequences of
the Muslim invasion (Fanjul 2000, 1).
We can therefore understand why some meta-criticism of Spanish arabism has questioned
its pro-liberalism (Manzano Moreno 2000, 27). Academic arabism and hebraism were born, in
the second third of the nineteenth century, and associated with the construction of the Spanish
national state. If in France and England, orientalism is an instrument of colonial expansion, in
Spain it is an instrument of national expansion. he objective of the move – following the Mar-
quis of Pidal’s 1845 plan – of chairs in Hebrew and Arabic from heology to Faculties of Arts,
lay in a desire to answer the question of what deined lo español (what was Spanish) (Rivière
Gómez 2000, 22).
Linguistic research into Arabic ought to elucidate the Spanish language (for example, Leo-
poldo Eguilaz y Yanguas’ Glosario etimológico de las palabras españolas de origen oriental [Ety-
mological glossary of Spanish words of oriental origin], the reply to Dozy’s attacks on Spanish);
literary research, Spanish literature (recall Fernández y González’s aforementioned induction
speech to the RAE); historical research, Spanish history (Francisco Javier Simonet’s address
on being received into the University of Granada in 1866 was called “Utilidad de los estudios
arábigos para ilustrar la historia de España” [Usefulness of Arabic studies in the illustration
of Spanish history]). Despite the Arabic “inluence” (over eight centuries), Spain had not lost
its essence, and distances (Spanish Islam) from the other Arabs, on the other side of the Strait
(arabophobia), were being marked. It is in this space that Spanish arabism found its disciplin-
ary identity. he year 711 was as unquestionable as its subsequent inluence was questionable,
as could be argued by the invaders’ dwindling numbers (Arabist Julián Ribera’s famous gota de
anilina roja [drop of red dye]) or by the loss of their nationality before the overpowering Span-
ish nationality (Amador de los Ríos, in the case of the Jews).
But additionally, España árabe not only relegated Arab culture to a merely accidental sta-
tus, contrasted with the permanence of all things European (Menocal 2000, 12), but also par-
ticipated – spatially (Arab/Non-Arab Spain) and temporally (Spain before its defeat/ater its
recovery) – in the dualistic dialectic that made self-airmation of identity dependent on the
internal/external opposition of what was Spanish with the Other, regardless of whether this
other were Roman, barbarian, Arab, French, European or heterodox, among other possibilities.
España árabe thus ended up being one more variant of the dos Españas (two Spains; Romero
2006, 50 and 52).
he diiculties felt by general history in representing exogenous causation (Domínguez
2004, 132–34) – that is to say, inding the/a location of what was Arab in the Iberian Peninsula
– were not very diferent in the case of literary history. But they were much greater, which is
another one of the paradoxes mentioned earlier, if we consider that “Spanish arabism, at irst
solely interested in Spanish political history, tends more and more to other, multiple aspects”
(Menéndez Pidal 2001b, 38), which are fundamentally literary and artistic.
To understand these diiculties, the geographical imaginary once again proves to be vitally
important. As we saw in the section devoted to transcontinental hybridity, literary histories
composed from within Europe imagined for Iberian literatures (basically, Spanish) an intersti-
tial spatiality as a consequence of the fusion between Eastern and Western traditions at work
within it. his in-betweenness is one of the corollaries of the union of the myth of continents
and the myth of the nation-state as their smallest unit, which leads us to predicate the anomaly
of transcontinental countries (M. Lewis and Wigen 1997, 9–10). In this respect, one could ob-
ject that the case of nation-states in the Iberian Peninsula is diferent from, say, that of Turkey,
Egypt or Russia. But the border between Europe and Africa in the Iberian Peninsula (whether
the Pyrenees or the Strait of Gibraltar, or, in the extra-Peninsular aspect, the Atlas) is as poetic
as the border between Europe and Asia in the Urals and the Bosphorus or between Africa and
Asia in the Suez Canal.
Good proof of this poeticity is the fact that Spanish literary transcontinentality has al-
lowed to argue as much the non-Europeanness of Spanish literature as the centrality of its geog-
raphy for the European tradition, for having developed within it two of the most idiosyncratic
genres: the court lyric (if not all rhyming poetry) and the novels of chivalry. Neither argument
is biased in favor of or against Spanish literature. With non-Europeanness, one can attack and
defend Spanish literature. With this special centrality, one can maximize and minimize the
value of its contribution to the idea of (a certain) Europe. On this subject, I must underline that
if, for example, for Juan Andrés, all modern European literature had developed in Arabia – that
“obscure peninsula of Asia” (Andrés 1997–2000, 1:106) – and had reached Europe through the
Iberian Peninsula, for Sismondi and Coppet’s circle, the Arab legacy only explains the singular-
ity of literature in the Midi (Dainotto 2007, 160–165), less European, now, than the literature
of the North, Germanic literature: “ater casting a glance over the brilliant period of Arabian
literature, I shall successively take a review of the nations of the South who formed their poetry
in the Oriental schools” (Sismondi 1846, 1:30–31).
But what I would like to highlight here is that the interstitial imagining of the territory of
post-Arab Iberian literatures, conspicuous in the deinition of the Iberian Peninsula as a bridge,
a link between Europe and Africa, East and West, Christianity and Islam, proves in the end to
be an operation of spatial emptying, of geographical denaturalization.
To take the paradigmatic case of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who was the most inluential
personality in the historiography of Spanish literature in the twentieth century, despite never
having written a history of Spanish literature. In his famous study, “España, eslabón entre Cris-
tiandad e Islam” (Spain, a link between Christianity and Islam), Menéndez Pidal proposes a
“spatial expansion” of medieval historiography, as the period in question “must be seen as a
fundamentally Latin-Arab era in any history of a suicient spatial dimension” (2001a, 33; italics
added). In the irst version, of 1929, the transcontinental argument does not stand out explicitly,
but the author turns to the argument in the reworked, expanded version, which was presented
in 1952 as the inaugural lecture of the Egyptian Institute of Islamic Studies in Madrid: “Both
countries [Spain and Egypt] serve as junctions in the two points of contact where the three an-
cient continents in universal history touch, and both play an essential role in the currents of life
that circulate through the diverse nations scattered throughout these immense lands” (Mené-
ndez Pidal, 2001b, 37). It is obvious that it was not merely the opportunity that this occasion
presented that propelled the historian toward the geocultural comparison of Spain and Egypt.
Hispanic interstitiality would become the core of his entire philological labor. In fact, in the irst
version of the text, another geocultural referent (Sicily) was present, showing that Spain had
not been the only place of intercontinental contact and osmosis: “Toledo and Sicily transform
Western thought at a decisive moment” (2001a, 35).
he image of a link, a bridge, does it not implicitly carry with it the message of nec…nec
(neither…nor)? A link or a bridge joins two extremes without being one or the other. Spain
was therefore presented through this metaphorical spatiality as between (Asian-African) Islam
and (European) Christianity, neither being Islamic nor Christian. he heretical component of
this last negation (in its religious aspect, though not its cultural) must have been especially
traumatic for a historian like Menéndez Pidal. hus, he felt himself obliged to counteract the
consequences of interstitiality with a wish for permanence, for continuity. he spatial disloca-
tion of the Spain-link was internally compensated for by the existence of eslabones temporales
(temporal links), that relocated Spain in its own tradition, as he would defend in 1916 with
“Quelques caractères de la littérature espagnole” (Some characteristics of Spanish literature).
Although Spain could be compared to Sicily, both being links between East and West, Spain
was the victor in its wish for permanence-in-time: “he courts of Roger, Frederick or Manfred
seem more invaded by Islamic civilization, for which they provoked great scandal in the Chris-
tian world. […] El Cid also read Arabic books, but he rejected the overwhelming pleasures of
the Moorish courts; that is to say, he felt stronger in his Westernness” (2001a, 35; italics added).
In what sense does interstitiality denaturalize the Arab inluence in Menéndez Pidal’s line
of argumentation? If Spain had geographically become a place of contact between Christian-
ity and Islam, the force of its tradition would from the beginning and without interruption
permeate the cospaciality of both cultures until achieving the Hispanization of Islam. Spain – a
spatial link – de-islamicizes Islam through temporal links, the continuity of pre-Arab traditions.
hus, in another no less inluential study (“Poesía árabe y poesía europea” [Arab poetry and
European poetry]), Menéndez Pidal speaks of the puellae Gaditanae (dancing girls from Cadiz)
of Trajan’s era as links in a chain that continues up to las bailadoras andaluzas de hoy (today’s
Andalusian dancers): “hat is associating fantastically a yesterday and a today separated by two
millennia; it is true. But it is that the links in between do appear, if we consider Andalusian
songs of the eighteenth century, of the seventeenth, and of previous, less documented centuries,
back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, which particularly interest us” (2001c, 354).
hese links horizontally denaturalize exogenous forces, as in the case of the mythic creator
of the muwashshah, Muqaddam ibn Mu’āfa al-Qabrī/Muhammad Mahmūd al-Qabrī: “Spanish
literature always had a tendency to cultivate popular forms and Muqaddam was very Spanish
in that way” (2001b, 39). hese links vertically ensure Iberian endogenesis, even when they are
indemonstrable (that is Pidal’s theory of the estado latente [latent state], which has obvious
connections with Unamuno’s “intra-history,” a Krausist concept). In one direction or the other,
Menéndez Pidal was unable to escape the poeticity of this metaphysical Spain (García Isasti
2004), which, in the case of the puellae Gaditanae, led him directely to the core of the Arabic
thesis (the Arab origin of European poetry).
In the historians that make al-Andalus their geocultural object, geographical denaturaliza-
tion (in other directions) is no less productive. he title and the opening of Adolf Friedrich von
Schack’s Poesie und Kunst der Araber in Spanien und Sizilien (Poetry and art of the Arabs in
Spain and Sicily), are illustrative of this. he realization of a literary history common to Spain
(also Al-Gharb al-Andalus) and Sicily implicitly postulates a communion of the two domains,
which proves to be more geographical than cultural (in fact, the possible literary contacts be-
tween the two spaces, in the sense of genre, are not explored, not even by contemporary ara-
bism, with the exception of Gabrieli 1950 and Menocal 2004). Arabic literature in Spain and Sic-
ily would form a sort of inter-literary community via geo-determinism: the special receptivity
of those spaces for that culture. I am not referring exclusively to the lesser Europeanness of the
South as a factor for that reception – Villemain thus explains the inluence of the imagination
asiatique (Asian imagination) on the imagination méridionale de l’Europe (Southern European
imagination; 1875, 1:115) – but also to the natural idiosyncrasy of those spaces as a determining
factor in the development of Arabic literature in Europe: “he Arabic muse became so natural-
ized on Sicilian soil that even long ater the fall of Muslim power she still made her voice heard
there” (Schack 1988, 223). What other than geographic denaturalization is at work in Sicily, if an
Arabic literature can persist there even without Arabic language and/or culture?
his is one of the variants of geographical denaturalization as spatial emptying. As Schack
airms in 1865, Arabic literature had been born in the least appropriate space: “No nation has
ever grown up on soil less suited to poetry as the Arabs. Sandy, bare hills as far as the eye can
see; rocky mountains whose cracks sprout brambles and other wretched plants, scarcely wa-
tered by the night-time dew; and only in a few places, where a stream runs by, a palm or balsam
shrub and a bit of green grass” (1988, 17). his was an argument that Juan Andrés had already
used in his 1782 Dell’Origine, Progressi e statto attuale d’ogni letteratura (On the origins, progress
and current state of all literatures), as a way of emphasizing the role that Arabic literature would
have to play in Europe: “Arabia, that obscure peninsula of Asia, a barbarian country and throne
of ignorance and rusticity, welcomed the abandoned letters and gave holy asylum to the culture
vilely cast out from all of Europe” (Andrés 1997–2000, 1:106).
Arabic literature is emptied from the space of its birth so as to imply that authentic Ara-
bic literature will be that which is produced in other spaces. Of course, it is possible to invert
the arguments and preach the geographical emptying of Arabic literature in foreign-language
spaces in contrast to the special adaptation of the literature to its territory of origin. Sismondi
used this route to make Arabia disappear (Dainotto 2007, 163) from his theorization of modern
European literature:
he rich countries of Fez and Morocco, illustrious, for ive centuries, by the number of their
academies, their universities, and their libraries, are now only deserts of burning sand […].
he smiling and fertile shores of Mauritania, where commerce, arts, and agriculture attained
their highest prosperity, are now the retreats of corsairs, who spread horror over the seas […].
Egypt has, by degrees, been swallowed up by the sands which formerly fertilized it. Syria and
Palestine are desolated by the wandering Bedouins […]. Bagdad, formerly the residence of
luxury, of power, and of knowledge, is a heap of ruins […]. In this immense extent of territory,
twice or thrice as large as Europe, nothing is found but ignorance, slavery, terror, and death.
(1846, 1:69)
But to return to Schack: the transplantion of Arabic literature from Arabia to al-Andalus not
only did not pose any disadvantages right from the start (1988, 49), but it even led to authentic
artistic progress for that literature, as a result of its adaptation to the new geography:
Although […] the poetry of the Arabs in Spain had many of the same traits as its oriental sister,
it could not help but feel the inluence of Andalusian soil […] hen, it had to describe cheer-
ful gardens infused with the scent of orange blossom, crystalline streams whose banks were
crowded with laurels, sot and unhurried siestas under the shady canopies of the pomegranate
groves, and delightful nightime boat rides on the Guadalquivir. In treating these new subjects,
the poets inevitably had to adopt images unfamiliar to their ancestors, and the state of civiliza-
tion, entirely diferent, also had to be written about in their verses” (60–61).
he mythologization of al-Andalus/Spain/Ishbaniya as an earthly paradise (on the etymology

of al-Andalus, see Sobh 2002, 739), which Schack would use to argue for the artistic elevation
of Arab literature in the Iberian Peninsula, was precisely one of those ideological terms that
general Spanish historiography had used to present Spain under the sign of victimization (laus
Hispaniae [praise of Spain]). In the so-called Bible of the Spanish middle class, the Historia
general de España desde los tiempos primitivos hasta la muerte de Fernando VII (General history
of Spain from primitive times to the death of Ferdinand VII), whose irst volume appeared in
1850, Modesto Lafuente had discussed how the geographical condition of the Iberian Peninsula
(this is a fusion of a political object with a geographical object) assured the achievement of one
unique nation through its natural variety, which had been an incentive for invaders, from the
Iberians and Celts on (Esteban de Vega 2005, 101–03). We see here the resurgence of the España
sagrada, as much in the symbolic sense as in the literal, since this general history would be
directly connected to Biblical history through the supposed arrival in the Peninsula, two hun-
dred years ater the Flood, of Tubal (Celtic) and Tarshish (Iberian), grandsons of Noah. Indeed,
during a large part of the nineteenth century (Maestro González 2005, 160), as well as during
Franco’s regime, sacred history and the history of Spain were part of the same section of the
educational curriculum.
he paradisiacal mythologization of Spain, then, can serve many purposes. For general
Spanish(ist) historiography (Lafuente), it explained the secular dialectic of territorial loss/recov-
ery – whether the threat was located inside or outside – which gave the History of Spain its char-
acteristic epic-dramatic narratological mode. For literary Spanish(ist) historiography (Menén-
dez Pidal) and nineteenth-century Spanish arabism (Fernández y González), it showed the path
of the de-Arab-ization/Hispanicization of Arabic literature in Spain. For orientalism (Schack),
it justiied how Arab civilization had found in Spain the height of its development. And, for An-
dalusian historiography, it legitimized the independent treatment of the literature of al-Andalus.
It is interesting to see how this treatment was argued. here are two notable facts that
cannot be ignored when conducting an examination of Andalusian literature, no matter how
supericial it might be. First: the large number of literary histories written there during the
Middle Ages, contrasted with their practical nonexistence in Christian Europe (including
Spain). And second: the conidence placed in geographical criterion as a way of organizing
authors and works.
A good example is Ibn Bassam’s (Abū l-Hasan ‘Alī Ibn Bassām al-Shantarīnī) Kitāb al-
Dhakhīra fī mahāsin ahl al-jazīra (Treasury of the best of the Peninsula), which was written
between 1106 and 1109 (Zwartjes 1997, 42). It is a literary history of the peninsula (al-jazīra),
a geographical referent in which the meaning Andalusian is taken for granted, that is to say,
the portion of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule. Written in exile, mainly in Córdoba,
because of the Christian conquest of Santarém in 1093, Ibn Bassam claims to demostrate the
literary accomplishments of the Andalusians, who, in his opinion, showed a blind admiration
for metropolitan (Baghdadi) literary traditions: “the inhabitants of our country refuse [to ac-
knowledge beauty] in order to continue following the orientals […]. Such behavior angers me
and my pride is outraged” (quoted in Pérès 1990, 61).
His work seems to be a reply to the airmation found in oriental anthologist Abū Mansūr
al-Tacālibī’s Yatīmat al-Dahr fī mahāsin ahl al-casr (he precious stones of ages), according to
which Syrian poets were better than the rest of the Arab-language poets (including the Andalu-
sians) because they had not been contaminated by foreign languages (Zwartjes 1997, 42). With
this objective, Ibn Bassam organized his work into four sections based on geographical criteria,
the irst three sections being determined by important regions of al-Andalus (1: Córdoba and
central al-Andalus; 2: Seville and Al-Gharb al-Andalus; and 3: Eastern al-Andalus) and the
fourth devoted to the litterateurs of Tunisia (Ifrīqiya), Syria and Iraq – resident in those terri-
tories or established in al-Andalus – that praised the Iberian Peninsula (Zwartjes 1997, 43). he
defense took place through the comparison of Andalusian literature and oriental literature, a
practice that guided even the compilation of personal anthologies, such as, for example, that of
Ibn ‘Abd Rabbi-hi (860–939), who in ‘Iqd al-Farid (he unique necklace) follows each themed
section of classical poetry with his own compositions (Terés 1954, 450).
It is notable that this geographical focus – representative of that internal regionalization
of al-Andalus that I mentioned earlier and that has recently inspired historiographical (Picard
2000) and literary (Soravia 1989) defenses – has called the attention of the audience closer to
the work in a very particular sense. Abū Muhammad cAbd Allāh Ibrāhīm al-Hijārī (Tibi 1999,
315), a contemporary literary igure, expressed surprise at the fact that such a literary history
had not been conceived by an author from one of the major cities (hawādir) of al-Andalus but
by an author from the “periphery” (Al-Gharb al-Andalus, that is, the Algarve).
In fact, the city itself is constructed as a historiographical locus, for example, in Ibn al-
Khatīb’s al-Ihāta fī akhbār gharnata (Comprehensive book on the history of Granada), devoted
to the biographies of all the famous people who resided in Granada (Knysh 2000, 363). Al-Hijārī
himself had given importance to the genius loci (spirit of the place) of each poet’s origin in his
anthology, Kitāb al-Mugrib fī hulā l-magrib (he extraordinary in Magreb’s ornament; Rubiera
Mata 1992, 41). In any case, it is obvious that the political organization of the irst taifas had an
inluence on this type of geographical structuring (Ibn Bassam included long passages from
a history of that period, al-Matīn, written by Córdoban historian Ibn Hayyān), although Ibn
Bassam’s literary zones are much more comprehensive. It is no less interesting to note that Ibn
Bassam was inspired by the anthology of Sicilian-Arab poetry al-Durra al-khatīra fī shucarā’ al-
jazīra (he poets of Sicily), written by his contemporary and fellow Santarém native al-Qattāc. If
we cannot comment on the internal organization of that dīwān, since it only exists in fragments
(Menocal 2004, 118–19), we can clearly see the inluence of both its title – with the signiicant
meta-geographical homonymy of al-jazīra, which refers equally to a peninsula (the Iberian or
Arabian Peninsula) and an island (Sicily) – and the motives for its compilation (Tibi 1999, 315).
In fact, for Ibn Bassam, the literary achievements of the Andalusians were even more deserving
of praise than those of other Arabic poets, because their territory was, ater all, an “island” sur-
rounded by the ocean, Christians, and Goths (Tibi 1999, 313).
Regardless of the origin of this geographical criterion, there is no doubt that its durabil-
ity – whether in Ibn Bassam or al-Hijārī’s version – was assured through the continuations of
their works. Ibn al-Imām de Silves (1155) continued the al-Dhakhīra starting with the follow-
ing generation of poets included by Ibn Bassam, and Abū l-Hasan cAlī Ibn Sacīd al-Maghribi
(late thirteenth century), a poet, historian and geographer, took advantage of the materials
in the Kitāb al-Mugrib fī hulā l-magrib in his anthology Rāyāt al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-
mumayyazīn (Banners of the champions and standards of the elite), which he also organized
geographically, with the irst part devoted to al-Andalus and the second to overseas literature.
Andalusian literature, in turn, is subdivided into four zones, of which the irst three reiterate
Ibn Bassam’s organization (Western, Central and Eastern al-Andalus) and the fourth is devoted
to Ibiza, the only Balearic island worthy of literary mention. Overseas Arabic literature is also
divided into four literary zones (Morocco, Algeria, Ifrīqiya and Sicily). In both geographies, the
second criterion for classiication is by city. he simple comparison of one territory with anoth-
er and the sequencing selected shed quite a lot of light on the literary pre-eminence accorded
to al-Andalus: “he author has laid out this book in an appropriate way so that the verses cited
embellish speech and adorn the conversation” (García Gómez 1942, 125).
he weight of territorial defense in the development of this laudatory historiographical
tradition (that these literary histories are attached to the adab genre seems unquestionable),
and its recourse to the geographical criterion existed side by side with other classiications (in
other histories) or mixed with them (in one common history), like the professional class of po-
ets (princes, viziers, secretaries, judges, Fuqaha), a geographical-professional formula used, for
example, by al-Fath Ibn Khāqān in Qalā’id al-‘iqyān (Golden neckrings) in the twelth century
(Gárrulo 1998, 14) and still used by al-Maqqarī (Heath 2000, 115) in the seventeenth century.
Due to the strong inluence of the geographical element in literary historiography, as in other
genres, al-Andalus – the “Iraq of the West,” al-Hijārī termed it (Pérès 1990, 56) – wore its na-
tional dignity on a level footing with that of other territories of the Arab world, thanks to its
artistic virtues.
According to another tradition (in reference to the mentioned dispute between al-Tacālibī
and Ibn Bassam), this defense of the new (literary) space was initiated by Abū Muhammad cAlī
Ibn Hazm, author of Tawq al-hamāma (he dove’s neckring), who composed the Risāla fī fadl
al-Andalus (Epistle in praise of al-Andalus) in reply to the question of a North African scholar
on the subject of why Andalusians did not feel pride in their own culture. Ibn Hazm begins his
defense recalling that Andalusian intelligence is conditioned by geography, only to argue next
for its excellence due to its privileged situation: “al-Andalus […] is more privileged than most
other countries” (Pellat 1954, 68). And it is this excellent geography that, on the one hand moti-
vates literary excellence (of which a rich selection is ofered), but also on the other explains the
mass arrival of immigrants to al-Andalus, immigrants who, in Ibn Hazm’s opinion, should be
considered Andalusian erudites: “When a man, having emigrated from another country, settles
by us, we more than anyone have the right to claim him; he is one of ours” (Pellat 1954, 70).
To this factor of territorial defense as a way of emulation (Terés 1954) another no less
important factor must be added, the mythologization of al-Andalus from exile (Rubiera Mata
2004, 37), that is, the nostalgia for lost Andalusian paradise transmitted by the irst immigrants
of the thirteenth century, the Granadans of the iteenth, and the Moriscos of the seventeenth.
he loss of al-Andalus intensiied the geographical mark on independent literary histories, a
phenomenon that has its literary parallel in the motivation of al-hanīn ilā l-awtan (nostalgia for
one’s home[land]), whose origins can be traced back to pre-Islamic qasida. On this point, my
argument can be supported by the igure of poet cAbd al-Jabbār ibn Hamdīs (Granara 2000),
who toward 1078 – the climactic moment of the Norman reconquest of Sicily – was exiled irst
in al-Andalus and then in North Africa and Majorca. He never returned to Sicily and during
the sixty years ater his departure, he witnessed the Norman victory and the Christian advance
in al-Andalus. In the approximately thirteen years he spent exiled in al-Andalus, his work ad-
opted the diction, the images and the themes belonging to that territory so celebrated by Arab
poetry. And it is precisely his siqilliyyas (Sicilian poems), compositions articulated around the
opposition home/exile, that present Sicily as a paradise lost, a geo-symbol of the dār al-islām
(the Muslim world): “his is God’s country! If you abandon its spaces, / your aspirations on
earth will be shattered” (quoted in Granara 2000, 389). In Sicily as in al-Andalus, Arab identity
demanded a border superiority, which literary historiography sometimes found in the geo-
graphical factor.
But the use of a label like “Arab identity” should not lead us to mythologizations appropri-
ate to a presentist simplicity. On this subject, the following example may be elucidative. he
tradition of vindicating Andalusian literary merits was unconnected to any ethnocentric feel-
ing, and the histories and anthologies did not exclude the work of Andalusian Jews. In Rāyāt
al-mubarrizīn wa-ghāyāt al-mumayyazīn, Ibn Sacīd al-Maghribi included compositions by the
Jewish poet and religious scholar Abū Ayyūb ibn al-Mucallim (Brann 2000, 436), who, accord-
ing to Moses Ibn Ezra, “brought forth magic in both languages [Arabic and Hebrew] and from
both brought out the deepest parts” (Ibn Ezra 1986, 2:87). If Ibn Sacīd al-Maghribi’s inclusion
is in itself already signiicant (al-Maqqarī would do the same in his defense in the seventeenth
century), no less so is the testimony of the aforementioned linguist, litterateur and Hispano-
Jewish literary critic Ibn Ezra, included in his Kitāb al-muhādara wa l-mudhākara (Book of
dissertation and memory), also known by the title of its Hebrew translation, Širat Israel (he
poetry of Israel).
It is the only known medieval (twelth century) Hispano-Jewish poetic treatise and literary
history. Written in Arabic, it is presented in the dialogic style. In the ith section – in which the
geographic criterion also partially operates – it responds to the question of why the Hispano-
Jewish literature is superior to the rest of the Jewish production: “why was the Andalusian di-
aspora more zealous in developing it [poetry] and more skilled in composing it than the other
[diasporas]” (Ibn Ezra 1986, 2:5). In his answer, Ibn Ezra relies on a double meta-geographical
argument. On one hand, the Hispano-Jewish poets that live in the territory under Muslim rule
have adopted the Arabic language and literary culture: “And – when the Arabs conquered the
Peninsula of al-Andalus […] our diaspora started to take on its their personality, with hard
work it learned their language and became good at it, penetrating the subtleties of its intentions”
(2:61).
his adoption is explained, obviously, by its artistic superiority, which, in keeping with geo-
deterministic postulates I have already examined, was due to the space in which it developed:
“Ease of expression was connatural to them [the Arabs]; men, women, the elderly and children,
disturbed people and fools, the masses and the lowest of the low, [it was like] a git from the
stars, the very temperament of the their region, the climate of their country and of the waters
that dry the moisture on their tongues” (2:32–33). On the other hand, the artistic mastery of the
Hispanic Jews was also explained by the uniqueness of their territory of origin: “the people of Je-
rusalem, to whom our disapora belongs, were the most knowledgeable about correctness in lan-
guage and the trasmission of divine Law, compared to those from other towns and cities” (2:60).
In order to close this section, devoted to the meta-geography of al-Andalus syndrome, it
would be appropriate to recall once more that one of the most deining traits of the geographical
imaginary is its durability, the appeal of its recurrence. If, in the twelth century, for Ibn Ezra,
the literary excellence of the Hispano-Jewish poets shares the geographical myth al-Andalus/
Sepharad, in 1927, Max L. Margolis and Alexander Marx do not hesitate to open the irst of the
chapters devoted to Spanish Jews in A History of the Jewish People with an identical mytholo-
gization and a signiicant fusion/reduction of the geographical and the political in order to un-
derstand their experience: “he peculiar romantic charm which attaches to Spain, the land and
the people, geographically and historically, is also characteristic of Jewish history in the Iberian
Peninsula” (Margolis and A. Marx 1927, 303).
And if, for some literary critics, al-Andalus gave a speciic orientation to the evolution of
the Arabic literary imaginary – think of a treatise like Muhammad Ibn al-Hasan Ibn al-Kattānī’s
Kitāb al-tašbihāt (Book of metaphors), or the Prologue to Abū-l-Walīd al-Himyarī a’s al-Badī‘
fī wasf al-rabī (Book about the wonderful in the description of spring; Pérès 1990, 60–61) – in
1928, Ángel González Palencia does not fail to mention geo-determinism in his presentation of
the general characteristics of Spanish-Arabic poetry: “the Spanish poets […] cannot but sufer
the inluence of the Andalusian environment in which they live” (1928, 35–36; italics added).
he consequences of this recurrence can be measured by recalling that, for Spanish ara-
bism, González Palencia’s Historia de la literatura arábigo-española (History of Arabic-Spanish
literature) – a good example of al-Andalus syndrome in its horror vacui variant, as evidenced
by its understanding of the term literature in its encyclopedic, belle-lettrist sense (poetry, adab,
grammar, history, geography, philosophy, theology, science, exegesis, jurisprudence, mathemat-
ics, astronomy, medicine, botany) – was the reference manual during the last two thirds of the
twentieth century. It is also this geo-determinism that explains how in Juan Hurtado y J. de la
Serna, and González Palencia’s 1921 Historia de la literatura española (History of Spanish litera-
ture), Arab intellectuals are accompanied by other “Spanish” intellectuals, such as Seneca, Lucan
or Quintilian, in keeping with Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s program, to which I will refer below.
Non-independent literary histories are also a good place to gauge the consequences of
meta-geographical persistence. For Andalusian literature, the prototypical historiographical
objects of integration are twofold: the literary language (Arabic, Classical Arabic) and the na-
tional literature (Spanish literature, Portuguese literature).
In the case of the histories of literary language, the predominant choice is to include An-
dalusian literature geographically, as the result of the deep mark of the geocultural mytholo-
gization I have examined, a mark that appears even more palpable when we remark that the
section devoted to al-Andalus interrupts the periodological criterion articulated throughout
the whole narration. It is noteworthy that this method, based on an implicit emphasis on the
territorial identity of Andalusian literature, creates two sensations: the déjà vu which I mention
at the beginning of this section, due to the coexistence of this literature and the other Arabic
literature; and a perception of it as a development cut short (the neurosis of extinction). With
the disappearance of al-Andalus, there is also the disappearance of Andalusian literature, as one
can infer from its exclusion from the periodological sequence of the general process of Arabic
literature. hus, if in 1907, Reynold A. Nicholson (1969, 405–41) devoted an independent chap-
ter to Arabs in Europe (limited, in reality, to al-Andalus), the only section of spatial character in
A literary history of the Arabs, in the sequence that goes from pre-Islamic times to the present, in
1996, Rubiera Mata includes Andalusian literature in La literatura árabe clásica (Classical Arab
literature) in an independent chapter, signiicantly titled: “El Extremo Occidente: la Península
de al-Andalus” (he Far West: the Peninsula of al-Andalus; 1996, 69–77), while Mahmud Sobh
(2002) closes his Historia de la literatura árabe clásica (History of classical Arabic literature)
with a prescriptive chapter on al-Andalus, in its chronological framework of beginning (711)
and end (1492), in a sort of future epiphany of Arabic literature. Compared to this option, ater-
ritorial and purely chronological treatment is clearly in the minority. One example is ofered
by Juan Vernet (1972), who in Literatura árabe (Arab literature) examines the Andalusian in-
tellectuals together with other Arabic intellectuals within each period, and closes his History
with a chapter limited to the relationship between Arabic literature and Hispanic literature (but
not other literatures, despite the general orientation of his work), with special attention paid to
aljamiado literature.
In the case of histories of “national” (Spanish, Portuguese) literature, the enduring quality
of meta-geographical codes can be seen through the persistence of the minimalist compul-
sion, which operates through the exclusion of any reference to Andalusian literature, with the
exception of those texts that had an inluence in terms of genre on some important work of
the national canon, or of the mediating function of Andalusian space in the transmission of
some extra-Peninsular work that ended up afecting national works. One of the results of the
comparatist impetus to which I referred earlier occurred in 1847, when Pascual de Gayangos
compiled a list of the Obras arábigas que pueden servir para comprobar la cronología de los reyes
de Asturias y de León (Arabic works that can support the chronology of the kings of Asturias
and of León), a practice that on the literary level, led to the identiication of the Arabic sources
of El conde Lucanor (Count Lucanor) and Calia e Dimna (Kalila and Dimna). Both these works
were edited and commented by Gayangos, who in 1860 included them in the volume Escritores
en prosa anteriores al siglo XV (Prose writers before the iteenth century) of the Biblioteca de
Autores Españoles. hus, he certiied their canonicity, which is double, because the literary di-
mension is accompanied by a linguistic dimension, similar to the way in which, as I discussed
earlier, the study of Arabic can lead to a better understanding of the history of the Spanish
language. Via direct and literal translations from Arabic to Spanish, the language became ara-
bized, but did not lose its national idiosyncracy, thus, Gayangos corroborated the linguistic
theses that José Antonio Conde had defended in his Historia de la dominación de los árabes en
España (Monroe 1970a, 56). Other, no less important comparatist contributions by Gayangos,
were his arguments regarding the importance of the muwashshah as a link between the Arabic
and Provençal lyric, and his discovery of aljamiado literature, some fragments of which he sent
to George Ticknor, who included them in the appendice of his History of Spanish literature.
his very limited (by nationalization) understanding of Andalusian literature, reduced to
the study of its contact with Spanish literature, had its greatest historiographical expression in
José Amador de los Ríos’ Historia crítica de la literatura española (Critical history of Spanish
literature). In 1845, Amador de los Ríos began the publication of his Estudios históricos, políticos
y literarios sobre los judíos (Historical, political and literary studies on Jews), which was col-
lected into one volume in 1848. In the irst essay he analyzes the relationship between Jews and
Christians in Spain; in the second, Hispanic-Hebrew literature; in the third, Hebrew literature
in Europe. hanks to the irst essay, Amador de los Ríos was named a individuo de número
(member) of the Real Academia de la Historia, for which occasion he composed an address
titled “Inluencia de los árabes en las artes y literatura españolas” (he inluence of the Arabs on
Spanish art and literature), which, in turn, earned him the chair of Spanish literature at the Cen-
tral University (Rivière Gómez 2000, 66). he institutional recognition of his academic works
are evidence of the (national) values recognized in hebraism and arabism. In close contact with
European comparatists such as Philarète Chasles and Adolphe Puibusque, Amador de los Ríos
would express these values in his Historia crítica. he lengthy chapter titled “Sobre la poesía
escrita en los siglos VIII, IX, X, XI y XII: Orígenes latinos del metro y de la rima”(On the poetry
written in the eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelth centuries: Latin origins of meter and
rhyme; Amador de los Ríos 1861–65, 2:303–60) is indicative of the credit given to the theory of
the Arabic origin of poetry and rhyme, which can be appreciated even more through the con-
trast between the treatment given to Hispano-Latin literature, which shared “that internal unity,
that very special unity, that quid hispanum” (298) and Hispano-Arabic literature, excluded be-
cause, like in other things, the inluence of this civilización derivada (derivative civilization) had
been “if not completely insigniicant, then exceptionally minor” (36). he Arab inluence, was
thus fated to a provisional existence, both quantitatively and, above all, qualitatively: “he old
Spanish chansons de geste were enriched by the best of Muslim Arab poetry; but without losing
their primitive essence, without relinquishing their long-standing representation of the people
that developed them” (492–93).
he supposed distance between the minimalist and maximalist uses of Andalusian litera-
ture in histories of Spanish literature is actually one and the same point in a doubled view of
literary space. Next to Amador de los Ríos’s minimalism, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s “Pro-
grama de literatura española” (A program for Spanish literature), presented in 1878 at the com-
petitive examination for the chair of Historia Crítica de la Literatura Española (Critical history
of Spanish literature) at the Universidad of Madrid, which had been vacant since Amador de los
Ríos’s death, can be considered an example of maximalism. his is because the author situates
the genesis of “Spanish” literature in the literature of the Roman Empire, and incorporates into
it, in its medieval phase, literature in Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and Romance languages (Castilian,
Catalan and Portuguese) and, in its modern phase, literature in Castilian and Portuguese. Nev-
erthess, this linguistic richness is reiied in a literary mono-nationalism when we observe that,
in reality, Menéndez Pelayo (1941, 9) was not interested in any of these literatures per se, but
rather, as an expression of “what is most intimate and essential in Spanish civilization”, that is to
say, as manifestations of an ethnic and historical homogeneity (Hina 1986, 220), which is pre-
cisely what is reclaimed from Hispano-Arabic and Hispano-Hebrew literatures: “it is obvious
that their long residence on our soil made them Spanish […]. No one can doubt that their glory
is ours, and that they have the right to their place in the history of our culture, at least as an
antithetical element” (Menéndez Pelayo 1941, 11). Hence the inclusion not of “authentic” Arabic
or Hebrew literature – “a long and separate episode” –, but only of those “genres developed by
Arabs and Hebrews […] that were or could be imitated by Christians” (12). Basque literature
was not so fortunate, once Euskara was categorized as a “separate branch” (9).
Obviously, it was conceptions like these that led to the underdeveloped history of (intra-
Peninsular) comparative literature in Spain, because if there are no other literatures, if all lit-
eratures are Spanish, then comparison is unwarranted. For Menéndez Pelayo, it is not language
that objectiies nationality (which can move from one language to another) but rather, geogra-
phy (Campos F. Fígares 2004, 243), in its particular political reduction (Spain as a synecdoche
for the Iberian Peninsula). hus, there are not two (Romero Tobar 2005) but rather one herme-
neutic tradition in Spanish literature. Pelayo’s plurilingualism and Pidal’s Castilianism are one
and the same literary nationalism and, which is more signiicant for my argument, one and the
same meta-geographical representation of literary peninsularity.
he history of Arabic civilization in Spain is not only the reverse of the history of Spanish
civilization à la Conde, but also its meta-geographical other side. If the vindication of Andalu-
sian literary merits turned to territorial mythologization, the exclusion of Andalusian literature
in non-independent national histories can be explained by an opposite process, which makes
al-Andalus – and other Peninsular peripheries – the (cultural) locus terribilis par exellence. I
will not delve into the intricacies of this particular meta-geography (I have already given some
information about it in the section on the Peninsula efect) but I will give an example which I
ind suiciently illustrative.
In 1920, Menéndez Pidal published another one of his seminal studies (“Sobre geografía
folklórica. Ensayo de un método” [On folkloric geography. An essay on method]), which was
signiicant in the study of the Romancero. Convinced of the applicability of the methods of
linguistic geography to folkloric traditions, Menéndez Pidal concluded that no geographical
study can deal with the entirety of each version. Its object must be, in contrast, the “grouping
of particular variants” (1920, 230), a route through which the real geography of the Romancero
can be ascertained. In this “essay on method,” Menéndez Pidal analyzes the variants and ver-
sions of two romances: La boda estorbada (he thwarted marriage) and Gerineldo. he reader
unfamiliar with the author’s methods will immediately be surprised by the ease with which
certain variants and versions are rejected. he ultimate explanation is, obviously, meta-geo-
graphical, as evidenced by the motive for Menéndez Pidal’s systematic denial of the authority
of the informant; it is none other than his preconception of the literary zone in question. hus,
regarding the version of La boda estorbada sung by an informant from Madrid who “claimed to
have learned the song from other girls from Galicia,” Menéndez Pidal judged that “the romance
obviously its in better in the region of Madrid than in Galicia” (231n1; italics added). Another
version of the same romance collected in Soria, “but from an individual who claimed to have
learnt it in the Valencia of El Cid,” is excluded “for being unconnected to the Mediterranean
region” (231n1; italics added). And Pidal questions the very existence of a version of Gerineldo
that Pascuala Amillategui claimed to have heard as a girl in her hometown (Lekeitio), since “it
is doubtful that in Lequeitio, such a Basque town, they really recite poetry” (231; italics added).
Secure in his zonal distribution of the Iberian Peninsula into a nucleus (Madrid, Soria)
and a periphery (Galicia, the Mediterranean coast, the Basque Country), Menéndez Pidal pres-
ents the double geography of the Romancero, with an obverse (the North-West of the Peninsula:
Old Castile), and a reverse (the South-East of the Peninsula: Andalusia), each one with the cor-
responding “satellites”, namely León, Asturias, Galicia and Portugal for the former, and Murcia,
New Castile, Aragon, Lower Extremadura, Morroco and America for the latter). We have the
notable exclusion of Catalonia, a region characterized as “always very archaic;” and the less no-
table exclusion of the Basque Country, whose non-lieu (non-place) is explained by the fact that
it does not really possess any poetry. And secure in this militaristic scheme (indeed, the epic is
his genre par excellence), Menéndez Pidal attributes the penetration of Southeastern variants
into the Northeast (312) to the geo-functional distribution of both regions: “hese two regions
obey the reality of history, chiely in that they represent the existence of two main centers or
forces in the Peninsula, which act on popular Spanish poetry: Old Castile, predominant in ear-
lier periods, and Andalusia, which greatly inluenced later periods” (313).
he invader Southeast and invaded Northeast of the Romancero mimicked the secular
meta-geography of infamy, the rhythms of purity and contamination, the external or internal
territorial threat that had to be exorcized. With this meta-geographical model, it is normal that
al-Andalus should be excluded or reduced to its lowest expression (the minimalist compulsion)
in histories with a national referent. Whether this exclusion was extreme or not, in any case, it
airmed that Andalusian literature was a literatura muerta (dead literature), only audible, on
occasion, as white noise behind a particular national discourse, as when Menéndez Pidal states
that “[t]he Muslims of the Caliphate of Córdoba were majoritarily of the Spanish race” (1956a,
2:627). In other cases, neither exorcism nor parapsychological mediation (like aljamía) were
possible. he literature of al-Andalus was deceased and without heirs to carry on its legacy. If
Arabic was studied in Spain as a dead language, like Latin (J. Goytisolo 1982), in another Ara-
bophobic variant Hispano-Arabic literature was conined to the category of literaturas cerradas
(closed literatures) (Díez Borque 1980, 10) as a territory unforgivably lost in the past.
Literary chronicles from Liliput: “One knows what it means to be small”
he Committee for the Nobel Prize in Literature commissions ad hoc translations when there
is no member competent enough to appreciate, or when there has not been an English, French,
German or Scandinavian translation of, a shortlisted work. he jury for the Premio Nacional
de Literatura (National Prize for Literature), convened every year by the Spanish Ministry of
Culture, follows the same protocol, except that instead of the linguistic complexities faced by
the Swedish Academy, according to the Constitution of 1978, the possible languages for works
nominated for the Premio Nacional are but four (Castilian, Catalan, Galician and Basque), and
works are always translated into Castilian. In that sense, the explicit recognition of the plurilin-
gual and multicultural dimension of the State made in the Preamble to the call for nominations
for the Premio Nacional, regarding the diferent “Spanish” languages, seems paradoxical.
For many, that adjective would not be strong enough, and they would link that operation
with the Castilian-centrism that still prevails in the conception of the state, and counts as one of
the most resounding failures of the heralded Transition to democracy. Of course, there are many
arguments in favor of this view of the facts. Illustrative in this respect is the case of the Premio
Nacional awarded in 1989 to Bernardo Atxaga for Obabakoak (Individuals and things of Obaba),
a collection of tales (some previously unpublished) published in Basque in 1988. he author
himself has said that it was not until the second call by critic Mercedes Monmany, on behalf of
the Jury for Narrative, that he took seriously the request that he translate part of the work so that
the jury could judge it. he award of the prize was, therefore, indissolubly linked to that (self-)
translation to Castilian, which was published in 1989, as is, no less importantly, the author’s
international renown, since many translations of his work to extra-Peninsular languages were
based on the Castilian version. A review of the list of prizes awarded to works originally written
in languages other than Castilian shows that this case is not unique. We ind other self-transla-
tions with the 1986 prize-winner, Alfredo Conde’s Xa vai o grifón no vento (he Grifon), and
the 1995 prize-winner, Carme Riera’s Dins el darrer blau (In the last blue). On other occasions,
the translations are the work of important igures in the academic and cultural spheres of the
non-Castilian periphery, which could lead us to the phenomenon that Kirsty Hooper (2006) has
analyzed in terms of a “latent network of power relations,” but which, on the other hand, should
not be dissociated – as Hooper does – from planning programs or shortfalls in mediation.
Obviously, it is not my mission here to enter into the motivations behind each one of
these self-translations and their role in the recognition of the peripheral author, though I must
point out that there has been little research done in the ield in the Iberian Peninsula. What I
would like to highlight here is the fact that the national canonization that the prize involves
operates via a Castilian-ization that we can only recognize when we contrast the original and
inal versions. I am not referring exclusively to general lingustic transformation nor to stylistic
elements derived from the passage from one language to another (although that is a substantial
dimension of the problem), but also to other transformations within the work, forming what
Claudio Guillén (2005, 317) has called a “ternary form of communication,” which is manifested
most notoriously through the inclusion of “second-degree paratexts.” With this term I am re-
ferring to those textual pieces of information that present the text to the reader (as argued by
Gérard Genette), but which are second-degree in the sense that they claim to cross the distance
between the original and the inal text. Within the inal text, the paratext enjoys that status, but
when it is compared to the original text, it takes on the condition of “second-degree,” either by
its very existence (since it does not exist in the original text), or by replacing or adapting a pa-
ratext conceived for the original audience. In either case, the goal of the second-degree paratext
is to adjust the text to the new audience and the new audience to the extra-systemic text. But
seeing that a contrastive reading of the original and inal texts is not a habitual practice, this
Castilian-ization is not noticed by the average Spanish-speaking reader, nor by the speaker of a
non-Peninsular language reading a translation based on the Castilian-ized version.
his fact is conspicuous in Obabakoak, with the authorial paratext incorporated into the
Castilian translation under the title of “A modo de autobiografía” (By way of autobiography).
he typeset intentionally blurs the borders between the tales (the text) and the paratext, to
the point that “A modo de autobiografía” can be (is) read as one more tale among the many
meta-literary references that make up the work, from the dialogue of the narrator with Pedro
de Aguerre “Axular,” Doctor Angélico of Euskal Herria, to the famous tale “Para escribir un
cuento en cinco minutos” (How to write a story in ive minutes). In this second-degree paratext
Atxaga declares, “I read Gabriel Aresti at 20; three years later, at 23, I had inished reading all
the Basque literature that the dictator had not managed to burn” (2004, 376). Regardless of the
factual correctness of the reference to Franco, which doubtless plays with the conventions of
magical realism and presents him as a igure of Comala or Macondo (for this geographic gene-
alogy of Obaba, see Olaciregui 2000, 551), there is no doubt of the desired impact – unnecessary
in the case of the Basque audience – on the Spanish audience of the record of a literature that
can be read in all its entirety in three years.
hus, we have the motif of a “small literature” thematized in a hermeneutic experience
impossible for the audience of the “great” literatures. Some sociological referents for this experi-
ence are: (1) between 1545 and 1879, 101 books were published in Euskara, of which only four are
literary (Lasagabaster 2002, 235); (2) Euskara batua (uniied Basque) did not come about until
1968, with the meeting of the Euskaltzaindia (Basque Academy of Letters) in Aranzazu; and (3)
the Euskal Idazleen Elkartea (Association of Basque Writers) currently holds a total of 325 aili-
ated authors. Faced with this scene, it makes sense that another one of Atxaga’s preferred minor
(childhood) images, included in this second-degree paratext, is the game of the goose, which
is ofered as a model for the Basque literary space: “a writer who started writing in Euskara in
the 1970s looks a lot like that teenager pictured on the irst of the 63 squares of the board, who
carries nothing but a bundle [hatillo] with his possessions” (Atxaga 2004, 376).
To extrapolate the mythical geography of Obaba to the cartography of the Basque literary
space does not seem to go too far. he geese from the game that tells of the “birth of the Basque
writer” (I am using Apalategui’s [2000] application of Alain Viala’s formula) ly over Obaba and
are even its narrators, while the literary premodernity represented by the sentimental landscape
(one step further than the genre dealing with local customs through magical realism) has its fo-
cus of tension in Hamburg (literary cosmpolitanism) and, to a lesser extent, in Barcelona (seat
of the publishing houses that produce the Spanish translations of Atxaga’s works). I must add
one signiicant piece of information that Atxaga does not mention: Obaba/the Basque literary
space is an apparently masculine territory, in view of the fact that, according the sociological
proile given by María José Olaciregui (Olaciregui 2000, 539), 90% of current Basque writers
are male. But this is another of the myths of Obaba, a legend that, in the words of Linda White,
“everyone believes because no one has studied the reality” (2000, 265).
he aspect of general Castilian-ization of the Premios Nacionales to which I am referring,
as perceptible in second-degree paratexts (and not just authorial; one example is historian Ibon
Sarasola’s opening editorial paratext), shows that the dual process of adjustment mentioned
earlier requires foreignizing on the part of the Spanish audience and exoticization on the part
of the extra-systemic work. Good proof of this is that Atxaga’s paratext persists in extra-Pen-
insular versions through Castilian translation, which makes the Spanish (but also the French)
an audience as foreign to Basque literature as the English, American, German and Greek, for
example. here is nothing more signiicant on this point than the culinary metaphor used by
Eugenio Suárez-Galbán Guerra in his review of the English translation of Obabakoak, pub-
lished in the June 20, 1993 issue of the New York Times Review, which describes the book as a
“delicious literary paella” (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/). Obabakoak is celebrated as
the regional (though certainly not Basque) dish that foreigners consider most typically Spanish.
Now, the true object of my discussion on Atxaga’s paratext within the framework of my
general argument is to show that neither its form nor its content are unrelated to the second-
degree paratexts of literary historiography. When they abandon the Basque language, literary
works and histories need to be presented, a presentation that is highly geographical and, in
consequence, reveals Euskal Herria as the true terra incognita of the Peninsula. Sarasola begins
the aforementioned paratext to the Castilian version of Obabakoak, called “A modo de intro-
ducción a la literatura vasca” (By way of introduction to Basque literature), by repeating an an-
ecdote protagonized by his fellow historian Luis Villasante and a friend while traveling around
Spain. he friend could not hide his surprise upon seeing him reading a book in Euskara, as
he thought that no one wrote in that language (Sarasola 2004, 7). Next, Sarasola introduces the
following geo-linguistic information, that testiies to the territorial limiting and loss of Euskara:
Euskara has historically been, and is today, a language spoken by a small community which
apparently has never passed the mark of 600,000 to 700,000 speakers. In the Middle Ages it
covered the whole of the Basque provinces, except the far West of Biscay and the Navarran
Ribera, and for a few centuries it even spread to Rioja Alta and the North of Burgos. Since then,
the Basque-speaking area has been steadily diminishing. In the eighteenth century, it lost a
large part of the Llanada Alavesa region and in the nineteenth, Central Navarre. Today, its ter-
ritory has been reduced to a good part of Vizcaya, all of Guipúzcoa, the valley of Aramayona in
the North of Álava, the North-West zone of Navarre, and the whole of the Northern Euskadi
territory (the French Basque Country), except for the urban center formed by Bayonne, Anglet
and Biarritz. […] Today, knowledge of Euskara in the Basque Country and even in the Basque-
speaking zone is in the minority; only a quarter of the population of the country and less than
half of the residents of the Basque area know the language. (8)
Sarasola is obliged to include the same information in the second-degree paratext that intro-
duces the Castilian translation of his Euskal literaturaren historia (History of Basque literature),
as he recognizes that in the original Euskara “facts are taken for granted that the non-Basque
reader would have no way of knowing” (1976, 11). his geographical information is preceded
here by an anecdote – not free of argumentative value – about the man who would become the
translator from Basque to Castilian: “I admit that when I received a letter from Madrid a while
ago from a certain Jesús Antonio Cid […] telling me that he had read my Euskal literaturen
historia (a Galician reading in Basque) and that it would be good to translate it to Castilian,
I was a little perplexed” (1976, 11). Sarasola’s judgment of the tale of Villasante does not seem
inappropriate to his own tale: “he anectode is surely extreme, but not unbelievable” (2004, 7).
And despite the temporal distance, it is no less applicable.
Good proof of this is the territorial emphasis characteristic of histories of Basque litera-
ture. In accordance with Joseba Gabilondo (2008), the canon of Basque historiography – a
canon written in Spanish, a good indication of the role of the “greater” languages in Basque
literature – goes from Luis Michelena and Luis Villasante in the 60s to Patricio Urkizu in the
year 2000 (we could now extend it to 2004 with Iñaki Aldekoa). It is a meta-narrative that for
Jesús María Lasagabaster seems a failure: “I believe to be sustainable the statement that the his-
tory of our literature is yet to be written” (2002, 229). In 1960, Michelena constructs his Historia
de la Literatura Vasca (History of Basque literature) on the pillar that “one cannot write a his-
tory of Basque literature without paying equal attention to the Spanish and French territories”
(Michelena 1960a, 16–17).
his literature, therefore, is situated in both an intra- and an extra-geography that, in this
second dimension, introduces the problem of a possible comparison, especially as regards
neighboring literary systems: “Popular Basque literature, essentially oral, is probably as rich
and varied as that of any other people. High literature, on the other hand, is late-blooming,
sparse, and on the whole, not of very good quality. All in all, there are handful of works in it
that would not be out of place next to analogous works from neighboring literatures” (11). One
year later, Villasante devotes a large part of the irst chapter of his Historia de la literatura vasca,
a chapter titled “General information on the Basque Country, its history and its language,” to
territorial information, introduced with a phrase that seems in keeping with the magical tone
of Obaba: “his small country, straddling the political border between France and Spain, with
the mystery of its pre-Roman language, has done nothing less than attract much attention from
scholars” (1979, 29).
Once again, symbolic extrapolation would not be unjustiied if we recall that in Obaba,
geographical density also plays its part. Esteban Werfell, one of the protagonists and para-nar-
rators of Obabakoak, is a professor of geography, and one of the main endeavors of the local
schoolteacher is to teach the children of the neighborhood of Albania the geography of Africa
and Asia on maps of sawdust. In the historiographical view, this magical territoriality is in-
dissociable from the embodiment of the archaic and eternal values that Spanish nationalism
entrusted to it: “For centuries, Vasconia has been a sort of marginal zone […], corner […] in
which, along with their pre-Roman language, a multitude of relics and customs of times long
past have persisted with incredible tenacity. Perhaps it is partly for this that it is also called ‘a
land apart’ ” (Villasante 1979, 35).
Finally, in the year 2000, the geo-historic information is moved from the irst chapter,
devoted to literature of the oral tradition, to the second, focusing on the fourteenth and if-
teenth centuries: “Toward the ninth century, the Basque Country or Euskal Herria […] had
a monarchical national unity, its irst king, based in Pamplona, being Iñigo Ximenez Aritza.
his kingdom later acquired the ancient county of Álava, which also included the provinces
of Biscay and Guipúzcoa, and later on also gained the other provinces of Vasconia, including
Lapurdi, Low Navarre and Zuberoa” (Urquizu 2000, 107). It is interesting how in opening and
closing the historiographical canon, one insists on the erstwhile natural limits of Basque litera-
ture, which highlights the recourse to space as an argument for the authority and presence of
historical maps (past and future): “he irst thing we will say is that this literature is inscribed in
the so-called Basque Country (Euskal-Herria), which is made up of seven provinces” (Badiola
Rentería and López Sainz 1981, 7).
One of the most obvious implications of this hyper-geography – revealed through the pro-
cess of “adjusting the book to the Spanish-speaking reader” (Sarasola 1976, 11) – is the diiculty
(real, but also well instrumentalized) on the part of the Spanish audience to locate Basque lit-
erature on the Peninsular (and continental) literary map. Again it is signiicant that these dif-
iculties are not very diferent from those experienced by foreign audiences, who, according
to Atxaga’s presentation, in another second-degree authorial paratext conceived for the Eng-
lish translation of Obabakoak, encounter Basque (language and territory) as “[t]he language
of a tiny nation, so small you cannot even ind it on the map” (http://wordie.org/words/oba-
bakoak). he causes of this cartographic imperceptibility of Basque literature are diverse and
richly complementary. I will highlight three: 1) absence due to being treated as an uncharted
territory (the “discovery” of Basque literature by such a prestigious work of reference as he
(new) Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics did not occur until 1993, the year in which the
“new” space is assessed: “here is a widespread idea that the Basque language has no literature,
but the facts prove otherwise” [Aulestia 1993, 126]); 2) exclusion as a consequence of the chosen
cartographical scale (the degree of reduction could eliminate some literary realities); and 3)
anatopism of perception (it is on the map, but the territory cannot be located, as a result of the
meta-geographical imaginary).
Of the irst possibility, I will only say that regarding this absence, internal hyper-geography
(making visible, then, the territorial framework of Basque literature) is as important as the
inter-literary counter-argument. I am referring to a tendency easily recognizable in the latest
Basque historiography, that suspiciously oten highlights the connections of this literature with
an international context that is deined as European in the sense of being neither Spanish nor
Peninsular. Presented here are two examples of this.
In the Historia de la literatura vasca directed by Urkizu, each one of the “historical intro-
ductions” that precede the chapters – even in the case of that belonging to the irst chapter, on
orality, which makes Wilhelm von Humboldt into a sort of mediator between the Basque and
central European linguistic traditions (2000, 26) – talks about the historic milestones and the
chief literary personalities of the European nucleus, which makes it diicult to avoid an implicit
airmation on the subject of the true framework in which we must assess Basque literature.
Aldekoa (2004), in turn, places that type of information in the individual sphere of the in-
luences and contacts with the rest of Europe, such that, through a literary channel, he preach-
es parallelism between the realities of Euskal Herria, Spain and France, just like Lasagabaster
puts it in the aptly titled Prologue, “ ‘Otra’ Historia de la literatura vasca” (“Another” history of
Basque literature):
his new history of Basque literature shows very clearly that […] even considering its minor
and marginal character and the limited number of potential readers, if we compare it with
other neighboring literatures, such as French and Spanish, Basque literature is in a position of
an equal in dialogue with them. he recent award of two National Prizes for Narrative and one
for Children’s Literature to Basque authors reveals that the territory of Basque literature is none
other than that of European literature” (2004, 8).
he use of the National Prizes as an index of the degree of normalcy of Basque literature (the
national canonization of a work guarantees the level of development of Basque literature as a
whole, despite the fact that Atxaga himself [1996] rejects his categorization as a “Basque na-
tional author”) is as signiicant in this passage as is the absence of any reference to an Iberian
interliterarity (neither Catalan nor Galician literature are referenced), which can be understood
as a reaction to the historiographical model that made non-Castilian Spanish literatures a type
of parataxis of the dispossessed. his emphasis on the participation of Basque literature in a
European inter-literary network is indissociable from the role that historians had reserved for
the output in Euskara on the continental side: “continental authors created irst and conserved
better a literary tradition that was never on the brink of termination due to purist preoccupa-
tions, as was the cause among us” (Michelena 1960a, 17). Also important were the theses about
the Basque as “pristine Europeans” and not Spanish, theses that had made possible the break
with the general Spanish historiographical model (Wulf 2003, 157) and had situated the begin-
ning of Europe in the Iberian Peninsula, in the Basque Country: “In Vitoria there were the irst
Basque houses, mixed with cottages and Baroque villas. hus began Europe” (Risco 1984, 13).
As regards the second and third possibilities, I will deal with them together with the aim
of considering the principal geo-mytheme of Basque literary historiography, already forecast in
cited passages by concepts such as hatillo (bundle of belongings), tiny nation (Atxaga), comu-
nidad reducida (small community; Sarasola), pequeño pueblo (small country), rincón (corner;
Villasante) or carácter minoritario y marginal (minority and marginal character; Lasagabaster).
Of the various modern literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, Basque is assuredly the one that
has applied the most insistence and devotion to its self-deinition as a small literature. As we
know, Kaka’s thoughts on kleine Literaturen, a concept unfortunately translated as minor litera-
tures, and not as small literatures, were further developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
whose formulation was privileged by critics, even in the Peninsula. hus, Jon Juaristi does not
hesitate to propose not all Basque literature, but rather, that produced in the dialect of Bilbao, as
the epitome of minor literature: “Minor literatures always propose alternate canons, promoting
in the foreground minor or excluded literary uses. Revolutionary or reactionary, they are always
subversive. […] Turn-of-the-century Bilbao […] ofered the necessary conditions so that a litera-
ture of these characteristics could emerge and take root” (1994b, 52). his minor literature would
be constructed as an alternative as compared to counter-canonical (the ‘98ists) and nationalist
(Sabino Arana Goiri, Resurrección María de Azkue) options at the end of the nineteenth century.
Juaristi’s proposal obviously implies that we accept Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization
of minor literature in a chiasmatic relation with major language: “A minor literature doesn’t
come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major lan-
guage” (1986, 16). In the Basque case, this situation applies to a literature produced in Bilbaoan,
deined as Juaristi as a dialect “of the Castilian spoken in the Basque Country” (1994b, 65). It is
striking that this deinition omits any reference to the bilingual history of Bilbao, whether to
emphasize a majority of Euskara speakers (Kortazar 2001, 91) or to deny the city an Euskaldun
character (Izagirre 1997a, 86). herefore, this Bilbaoan developed in the bosom of a major lan-
guage (Castilian) is formulated as the deterritorialized equivalent of the German spoken by the
Jews of Praque “appropriate for strange and minor uses” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17), which
implicitly relegates Euskara to an identical position with Czech.
I will leave out the fact that Deleuze and Guattari omit completely any relection on the
role of this last language in the development of Prague German as the instrument of a minor lit-
erature – we can say the same of Juaristi and the role of Euskara in the development of Bilbaoan,
as I have indicated – to point out that this view of Bilbaoan situates Euskara in an exclusively na-
tionalist orbit (a “major” language diversiied into four literary dialects: Lapurdian, Zuberoan,
Gipuzkoan, and Biscayan) in keeping with the initial typology of literary alternatives presented
by Juaristi: “Basque writers born around the 1870s […] were faced with three diferent options:
actively participating in the subversion of the national canon, creating a nationalist literature
in the vernacular, or imagining a minor literature” (51). Nonetheless, the information that he
himself provides allows us to see that the situation is much more complex than his typology
would admit. In this respect the fact that Bilbaoan literature disappeared when it lost the sup-
port of the nationalists (81) implies that up to a certain time it was also a model for that literary
alternative, as Castilian and Bilbaoan mono-literariness (Nicolás Viar) or Castilian-Euskara
bi-literariness (Azkue, S. Arana), were nationalist.
Regardless of Juaristi’s proposal of Bilbaoan literature as minor literature, it is certain that
Basque historiography made spatial limitation into a sign of identity for its literature, a concep-
tion of small literature that privileges territorialization, while Deleuze and Guattari denied it.
In fact, this conception is much closer to Kaka’s original one: “he narrowness of the ield, the
concern too for simplicity and uniformity, and, inally, the consideration that the inner inde-
pendence of the literature makes the external connection with politics harmless, result in the
dissemination of literature within a country on the basis of political slogans” (1948, 194; Decem-
ber 25, 1911). his diference is surely due to the fact that Deleuze and Guattari neglected a very
important fact. It is the Jewish, Yiddish-language literature of Warsaw and Prague that inspired
Kaka’s relection (191) in terms of national literature, and not the German-language literature of
Prague, as Juaristi also claims (1994b, 52). And if hyper-geography and the emphasis of Basque
historiography in the inadequate territoriality of Euskara and its gradual reduction are already
proof of recourse to this conceptual view of the literary space as small literature (though never
as a minor literature in the bosom of Castilian as a major language), this intense territorializa-
tion is maximized via linguistic, and therefore literary, insularity.
Seven years before his work on Bilbaoan literature, Juaristi had expressed his doubts about
the appropriateness of the insular metaphor applied to Euskara and its literature, which could
explain his subsequent deterritorializing approach: “We have perhaps abused the metaphor of
the islet – or of the ‘language island’ – but there is no doubt that it still relects quite appropri-
ately the situation of the Basque language” (1987b, 141). In any case, his partial adhesion to (and
dissemination of) the metaphor in another Spanish-language history of Basque literature is a
good indication of its proitability in the economics of Peninsular historiography.
heorized with historical linguistics, the concept of “language isolate” as a language devoid
of a genetic relationship with any other language gave special depth to the meta-geography
of insularity developed by Basque historiography: absolute isolation. he distinctive trait of
Basque literature is its development in insular isolation, due to a lack both of its own clan (nor-
mally guaranteed by language family) and of the possiblity for neighborly communication, mo-
tivated by Indo-European diference. hus it is relegated to the enigmatic company of languages
with no genealogy (forty, according to the calculations of the database Ethnologue, Languages
of the World: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90087), whose uniqueness
resides in the fact that the language itself is the genealogy. Sabino Arana’s Euzkadi was none
other than the people who speak Euskara (L. White 2002, 173).
In opening the historiographical canon, Villasante turns to the igure of Melchisidec to
represent the orphanhood of the language and introduces a clariication that announces the
exact meaning of the inter-literary relations postulated by the latest histories: “When Tovar
speaks of Euskara and its relatives, he makes sure to point out that he is not referring to ge-
nealogical relatives […]; but rather, he is talking about relationships by proximity” (1979, 30).
Twenty years later, Elías Amézaga gives the title “Lengua-isla” (Language-island) to Section 2
of the chapter devoted to Basque literature in his Historia de las literaturas hispánicas no castel-
lanas (History of non-Castilian Hispanic literatures; 1980, 390–92). And, in the canon’s closing
in 2004, Lasagabaster presents Aldekoa’s History as an attempt to separate linguistic insularity
from the authentic literary reality, since the latter would not be a “marginal and ‘strange’ phe-
nomenon, hardly open to the literary sphere in other languages and cultures” (2004, 7). But
without a doubt, and as a consequence of the prolonged inluence of the insular image, it is an
issue not yet resolved in Basque historiography.
Over and above its geo-poetic appeal, similar to that recently invoked by author Harkaitz
Cano (Urquizu 2002, 37) under what Sarasola called the “Sinn Fein syndrome” (Ourselves
alone syndrome), the insular image has gained new impetus in recent years through a systemic
perspective. For example, Olaciregui, one of the collaborators of the History coordinated by
Urquizu, attempted, in 2001, a diicult separation of the literary and extra-literary factors that
explain this insular character – one of the sections of her work is called “he Basque literary
system: an island” – in the following terms: “I think the term ‘isolation’ deines accurately one
of the major problems that the present Basque literary system faces” (2001, 327).
Among the extra-literary factors, Olaciregui includes the “opacity” of the language, the
negative images associated with Euskal Herria (326) and the number of speakers (327), which is
immediately called into question when we recall that another “insular literature” (at least a pri-
ori), Icelandic literature, which has a linguistic community 50% smaller than Basque, does not
seem to have faced obstacles in its international dissemination and recognition. In this respect,
it is striking to me that Olaciregui does not mention an element that I believe to be determin-
ing of this insularity, the geographical limitation established by Article 3 of the Constitution of
1978, which stipulates that while Castilian is the oicial Spanish language of the whole State, the
other Spanish languages are oicial only in their autonomous communities, thereby implying
their de facto minoritization.
With respect to literary factors, Olaciregui (327–29) highlights the singularities of the audi-
ence (the reading public is proportionally much smaller than the number of writers) and media-
tion (there is a notable imbalance between the large number of works translated into Euskara and
the small number of works in Euskara that are translated into other languages). And if I called
the separation between both types of factors diicult, it is because, for example, the geographical
limitation of the constitutional linguistic policy and the projection of Basque literature through
Castilian inside and outside the Peninsula are two sides of the same coin. Consider in this respect
the information provided by Andreu van Hoot Comajuncosas (2001, 52) for the period 1990–98,
which tells us that 95.55% of poetry, novels and stories were translated from Euskara to Castilian
and 4.45% to Catalan, and that there was a mutual ignorance between Euskara and Galician (57).
Without a doubt, the systemic route opened by Olaciregui could in the future lead to an
integrational approach for the understanding of the insularity of Basque literature – beyond the
pedestrian image constructed by literary historiography – in terms of what van Hoot Coma-
juncosas, from a viewpoint exclusively related to the study of translation, has called literature en
formación (in process of being built; 55). Other factors we must consider are “authorial insular-
ity,” not exactly in the Borgesian sense, referring to British literature, but in a necessary national
representiveness, and “monumental insularity,” which makes every work a milestone in literary
development, in large part because criticism does not seem possible in small literatures. In that
light, consider the following words of Jon Kortazar in relation to the panorama of Basque lit-
erature in the year of Atxaga’s “national” consecration: “a literature in which almost everything
appears and presents itself as decisive in the course of the history of the literature. Without
elaborating further, two works published this year have earned, from the generous and friendly
Basque critics, the name of decisive works” (1991, 119). Both insularities bring us back to another
modulation of the kleine Literaturen, this time developed by Milan Kundera through the simile
of the family: “a small nation resembles a big family and likes to describe itself that way. […]
what handicaps their art is that everything and everyone (critics, historians, compatriots as well
as foreigners) hooks the art onto the great national family portrait photo and will not let it get
away” (2001, 191).
he view of Basque literature as an island has clear linguistic implications: only literature
written in Euskara is Basque. his premise has its roots in the thesis of the historical difer-
entiated personality of the territory (Fox 1997, 88), which Basquist general historiography had
consolidated in the language and the system of local government. Geography, language and law
interlaced with each other in a network from which were projected the idealization of the rural
environment (seen as a linguistic stronghold) and the gloriication of the past, both intensiied
by the españolista ofensive at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nine-
teenth, against the antiquity of Euskara and the system of local government. he identiication of
Basque literature with writing in Euskara was silent, like the inclusion in other literary histories
of works written in Castilian and French. For example, in Literatura vasca (Basque literature),
directed by Enrique Ayerbe Echevarria, the section called “Escritores de Iparralde” (Writers
from Iparralde) begins with this discreet declaration: “More than Basque, the writers of Iparral-
de have used French in their works” (Arbelbide 2002, 222). An identical formula is used in the
case of the section devoted to Castilian-language writers. hey do not even hesitate to include
an English-language novelist like Robert Laxalt for his connections with the Center for Basque
Studies of the University of Nevada – without exploring other factors of greater importance,
such as, for example, the Basque colony in the United States and its publishing history – or an
essayist like Roland Barthes, in this case, because of his stay in Iparralde between 1939 and 1940.
All this seems to respond to the need to construct an inter-literary space not for “Basque
literature,” but for the “literature of the Basque people” (Aguirre Sorondo 2002, 206) or, in La-
sagabaster’s contemporary formulation, “the literatures of the Basque people.” Ultimately, the
planning of this inter-literary space that Basque literature would share is a way to exorcize the
danger inherent in the conception of language as genealogy, which Ferdinand de Saussure de-
scribes in the following terms: “he more numerous the terms of comparison, the more precise
these inductions […] We can draw nothing from Basque, because, being isolated, it does not
lend itself to any comparison” (1974, 292). As opposed to the dreams of uncontaminated purity
(Arana’s thesis of maketo [non-Basque Spanish] invasionism) that had magniied the qualities
of the physical environment and the language into an insularity that was imperceptible by the
national scale used (a history that would supposedly break away from the rest, such as A new
history of French literature, directed by Denis Hollier, does not devote a single line to Basque
literature) or by the anatopism generated from the geo-mytheme (requiring new maps in which
to locate this literary island, ultimately displaced toward a postnational Atlantic), the ultimate
inter-literary push of historiography implies recognizing that the future of Basque literature,
like that of other small literatures (see Friggieri 1985 for the case of Maltese literature), depends
on comparison: “a major consequence of the modernisation taking place in the Basque novel
is that any approach must be made using comparatist literary parameters. hat is why, even
though we have deined the Basque literary system as insular, we would have to now qualify the
statement by saying that it is an island where many ships have docked, but from which few have
set sail” (Olaciregui 2001, 331).
In some cases, this comparison takes place within inter-literary groupings connected by
minoritization based on various factors. I will mention as examples the linguistic group of len-
guas moribundas (dying languages), in which the death of Euskara toward the last third of the
twenty-irst century is predicted (Adler 1977, 82), or which applies to Basque writers who write
in Castilian (for Ortega y Gasset, the Castilian learned by Unamuno was a dead language); the
political group of nazioni proibite (forbidden nations), within which Basque literature is likened
to Scottish and Sardinian literature (Salvi 1973, 292); the political planning group of Galeusca
(Annual Meeting of the Associations of Galician, Basque and Catalan Writers) and the literary
groups of the periferia abierta ibérica (open Iberian periphery; Díez Borque 1980, 10), oten
with inexplicable criteria for grouping (an example: Ysern i Lagarda et al. 2004), or the most
confused group, that of the litteraturas mortas (dead literatures) proposed by José Cervaens y
Rodriguez, in which Basque literature lives side by side with Galician, Catalan and Italian, as
broken of branches in the general development of Weltliteratur (1911, 151). In others, the refer-
ent is not small literatures, but “big” ones:
Little by little, all we small ones of the world are getting to know each other. Periodically as-
sembled at meetings, we realize our diiculties in presenting ourselves in an honorable way
before a society that does not admit anything under medium size. […] Perhaps one day we
will manage to break the routine of cofraternization. I mean that someone small hardly has
anything to say to another small person that he has not already heard. Our experiences are
practically interchangeable. he Estonian experience has been the Catalan experience with
variations. What is Irish is Basque. Creole is Galician, and Frisian, Corsican. We all see life
from below looking up. (Izagirre 1997a, 77)
Both directions demonstrate the intense double consciousness of knowing “what it is to be

small” (Izagirre 1997b, 114) and writing (history) outwards.
To close this section, I must clarify the following statement: of the various modern lit-
eratures in the Iberian Peninsula, Basque is assuredly the one that has applied the most insis-
tence and devotion to its self-deinition as a small literature. Although I have been unable to
locate information to conirm this same tendency in Catalan and Galician literature (on which
point we must appreciate the importance given to the medieval period in their repertoire, a
signiicant diference from the Basque case), it is certain that the geo-symbol of the island, as a
manifestation of territorial limitation, is exhibited by other literatures. Which and how many?
I have no deinitive answer, but I do have some examples. I will not analyze them; I will simply
present them briely, due to their embryonic stage (the irst example), or even the total absence
of any historiographical tradition (the second and third). In any case, I believe that the mere
act of including them here is suiciently indicative of the need to rethink the possibility of a
(comparative) history of literatures in the Iberian Peninsula.
In the aforementioned history of Basque literature, Luis Mª Azpilikueta and José Mª
Domench (2002) are responsible for a chapter called “Literatura en Navarra” (Literature in Na-
varre). Given that the authors mentioned in it write in Basque, the reader must immediately ask
him/herself what criterion justiied the excision of Navarran literature from Basque literature,
as this particular status implies an equivalence between Navarre, Hegoalde and Iparralde, in
a projection of the past on the present (the Kingdom of Navarre) or the present on the past
(the Foral Community of Navarre), which ends up being a misrepresentation of both, as when
Andrés Urrutia (1996) presents Bernat Etxepare as the poet of a lengua sin estado (language
without state).
For Azpilikueta and Domench, the irst possibility is the correct one: “the history of the
Old Kingdom, the speciic historical moment, the customs and the character of its acts, gives a
perspective that is transmitted through all types of literature” (214). his brief justiication is fol-
lowed by the list of authors and works, which projects the image of a literature produced in an
independent territorial entity, but with a nuclear role in the very conception of “Basque difer-
ence.” Indeed, Navarre has been one of the principle loci of Castilianist resistance and, through
the exaltation of its particular political tradition (Esteban de Vega 2005, 93), the force behind a
horizontal view of Spain.
In the case of the Materiales para una Historia de la Literatura Vasca en Navarra (Materials
for a history of Basque literature in Navarre), presented as the “irst manual written speciically
about the Basque literature of the Foral Community of Navarre” (Bidador 2004, 9), the second
possibility is the correct one, as we can see in the cited passage. However, despite appearances,
the desired outcome of this proto-history is a cultural reintegrationism, in the sense that the
Administration itself is responsible for promoting an unreal isolationism:
If there exists a Navarran literature in Euskara, without twisting these words too much, it could
also be deined as the literature written in Navarre or for Navarrans in Euskara. No more, no
less. What we should not ignore, either, is the fact that these authors have been, and are, im-
mersed in a greater reality (size-wise) than that of Navarre: Euskal Herria. (10)
In contrast to the Navarran example, the following two examples share the common element of
an absence of historiographical tradition. What is more, they lack a history of literature. In that
sense, their inclusion in a chapter devoted to the geo-literary imaginary may seem incongruous.
However, I believe that it is a risk worth taking, at least for two reasons. First: the absence of his-
tories is not an insigniicant detail. And second: it is obvious that the history of literature is not
developed exclusively from literary histories. Surely an anthology of elegiac poetry must ofer a
richer and more complex history of the lyric than that which we ind in many literary histories.
And, no less importantly, the meta-geography contained in those other discourses will saturate
historiography. hus, we can predict that the persistent insular geo-symbol of Basque historiog-
raphy may be overcome in the future, according to a reorientation in the treatment of linguistic
reality, as described by L. White (2002) and in the novelistic sequence of Txillardegi, Ramon
Saizarbitoria, Laura Mintegi and Atxaga.
In any case, it is undeniable that we ind ourselves now in the realm of hypothesis. For An-
dorran literature, Antoni Morell (2005–06) airms its birth in the second half of the twentieth
century in a space characterized by an insularity caused by features such as “asylum, isolation.
Passages between North and South” (180). But, in contrast to Basque insularity, the Andorran
is a lieu de mémoire (site of memory), the chronotope of the past time-island: “this memory of
mine […] is the present conscience, born in the depths of the brain, of the Andorra (as a liter-
ary myth) that is no more […] I am going back to the Andorra of before. And what does that
mean? Well, sadness, friendship, afection, the little things, the mountains that surround you,
and both protect and isolate you” (179–80). In this short act of baptism, we ind both the asso-
ciation of literary space with the utopian geographies of magical realism (an element that Calin
[2000, 305] inds to be a deining characteristic of small literatures that have emerged from a
process of internal colonialism) and a clear desire for intertextual planning that would conirm
the participation of the Andorran literary space in the worldwide Republic of Letters: “since in
my country there were no direct references until much later than in other countries, until the
whole of literary creation in Catalan, it is Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Catalan classics
all processed through the ‘blender’ of my Andorran dreams” (180). And the inclusion under
the name of intertextuality of Catalan classics is important to the particularity of Andorran
literature within Catalan-language literature, especially if we consider that of the four states
(Andorra, Spain, France, and Italy) in which Catalan is spoken, it only enjoys the status of an
oicial language in the irst.
My third and inal example of a small literature self-deined through the geo-symbol of
an island might be surprising. It is a clear case of a no man’s land, although perhaps this is just
another one of the myths that L. White alluded to with respect to women’s writing in Basque,
which retains its legendary status only because it has not yet been suiciently studied. I am
referring to the plurilingual literature of Gibraltar, written in English (Rock English), Spanish,
Creole (yanito), Ladino, Maltese and Moroccan-Arabic. According to the data I have at hand,
there is not a single reference to Gibraltarian literature in any history of Spanish or British lit-
erature, except, in the case of the latter, as a collateral issue (as post-colonial literature). In fact,
for poet Trino Cruz Seruya (2004), Gibraltarian literature is a literature nonata (not born yet),
which is paradoxical, given that the history of the colony and its “bilingualism” should have
favored the emergence of “literary expression.” he author attributes this resistance to political
forces, which must have blocked “the creative instinct […], resulting in it becoming lost within
itself or moving in circles.”
However, there have been a (very) few attempts to systematize Gibraltarian literature,
though none has been historiographical in nature. Eduardo Fierro Cubiella (1997) includes
in Section 2 of Gibraltar a chapter devoted to literature, situating its institutional beginnings
around 1990, through a list of Spanish-language (Alberto Pizzarello), English-language (Eric
Chipulina, Joseph Patron, Leopold Sanguinetti), or bilingual Spanish-English (Mario Arroyo,
Luis Bruzon) and English-Yanito (Elio Cruz) authors. Part of the appeal of Fierro Cubiella’s
study is that he provides information on the results of the studies carried out by the Equipo
Investigador sobre la Comunidad Lingüística Bilingüe Gibraltareña (Research Team on the Bi-
lingual Gibraltarian Linguistic Community) of the Cádiz University, almost all of which remain
unpublished.
José Juan Yborra Aznar’s 2005 analysis is more ambitious and comprehensive, and al-
though it focuses on literary output in Castilian, it ofers information on English-language au-
thors and even goes so far as to propose a periodological schema that will surely become the
seed of a future history of Gibraltarian literature. It is also especially interesting from a meta-
geographical perspective, because it contains the seed of the hypothetical spatial models of that
future history, distinguished by the concepts of border, liminal reality, which thematize aspects
of Gibraltarian literature, such as movement and inter-cultural contact.
Another interesting perspective is that of Domingo F. Faílde García (1996), who introduces
the problem of “literary reintegrationism” in the sense that in his reading of poetry produced
in the Campo de Gibraltar, he defends the need to contrast literatures from either side of the
border by the symbolic role played by the British colony (singled out in Diego Bautista Prieto
and Lola Peche Andrade’s work): “omnipresent, of course, Gibraltar, the sense of its loss, the
longing for the lost city” (177). María José García Rivas (2003) deals with this issue as well, by
analyzing the role of the border in the spatiality of the short narratives of authors from the
Campo de Gibraltar.
But none of these Spanish-language critical analyses ofers the spatial framework for the
literature of Gibraltar of Philip Dennis and Anne Taylor’s 1994 English-language study, a frame-
work to which I alluded earlier as a collateral issue as related to British literature. It is none other
than the framework of post-colonial literature written in English. In fact, English-language Gi-
braltarian poet Leopold Sanguinetti had already claimed his collection of poems, he Calpean
sonnets (1957), to be “a Gibraltarian contribution to the literature of the Commonwealth” (Fierro
Cubiella 1997, 76), as he symbolically highlights with the poem “Allegiance,” an ode to the Coro-
nation of Elizabeth II: “All the British peoples place their royalty / At the Royal service of Her
Majesty” (Sanguinetti 1957, 70). From the geopolitical viewpoint that makes Gibraltar “a British
dependency at the western end of the Mediterranean,” Dennis and Taylor’s imperial key (585)
places the birth of Gibraltarian literature in 1704, that is, upon the taking of Gibraltar by the al-
lied British-Dutch forces, which is manifested in a military intellectual output matched with the
events of the time. In linguistic terms, Dennis and Taylor consider Castilian to be an instrument
of the past, while English “has become the language most oten used by Gibraltarian writers”
(586), an approach consistent with the use of the term post-colonial by the editors of the work
(Benson and Conolly 1994, xxv) following its deinition by Bill Ashcrot, Gareth Griith and
Helen Tiin in he empire writes back: heory and practice in post-colonial literatures.
he roots of a geographical imaginary for Gibraltarian literature are ratiied in the literary
output itself. In Barbarita, Héctor Licudi’s Spanish-language novel, “Gibramonte” is spatially
deined by a distance of attachment to “Silandia” (a faithful representation of Great Britain
in a double insular reference via Iceland), feared and hated by India, Egypt, Africa and Malta,
and by its isolation in a Spain of linguistic and cultural proximity: “he same soul as always
would never cease to throb in Gibramonte, wrapped up in the language, whose immortality,
more than Latin, Hispanic, was evident, and under which the psychology of this people of Si-
landia expanded into Spain” (Licudi 1929, 70). his participation in the imperial macrospace is
highlighted by the English-language authors, for example, the aforementioned Sanguinetti, for
whom the insularity of Gilbraltar, which “[d]eiantly […] stands aloof. Alone / In battle with
the wind and with the cloud” (Gibraltar; 1957, 1), is transformed into the communion of the
archipelago, in which Gibraltar inds a comparable reality in Malta: “Long live the Island For-
tress, guild her name, / And with the Maltese Cross to them most dear / Let all her soldier sons
know Malta’s fame” (Malta; 9). hus is born a Mediterranean inter-literary network (Ďurišin
and Gnisci 2000), which poet Trino Cruz plans through the translation of Arabic (Adonis,
Saadi Youssef) and Sephardic (Edmond Amran el Maleh, Edmond Jabés) authors for a literary
island, the island of Gibraltar, imagined as “un puente que alcance la noche / matriz inevitable”
(a bridge that reaches the night / inevitable mold) which is un ser-en-devenir (a being-in-devel-
opment): “al saberse espacio / la luz borra los límites de su cuerpo / consciente de que ser nada /
es / un acto de fe” (13; knowing it is space / the light erases the limits of its body / conscious that
being nothing / is an act of faith).
As we can see, insularity is for historiography (Basque), proto-historiography (Navarran)
and para-historiography (Andorran, Gibraltarian) – in a repertoire of literary referents that is
neither exhaustive nor closed (think, for example, of Spanish-language literature in Morocco,
or Mirandan literature in Portugal) – a geo-symbol where closure (the island as a metaphor of
self-suiciency) and longing for communication (the island as the expression of a broader geo-
graphical reality) meet. Extrapolating from the words of Croatian essayist Predrag Matvejević,
we can now understand why there are literary islands “that seem to sink or swim, others that
we think anchored or petriied and which are really only remnants of the continent, detached
and incomplete, separated in due course and always rendered independent, more or less self-
suicient” (1991, 18). If on a planet-wide scale, all earth is surrounded by water, it is not for that
an island. Islands are only those (literary) spaces whose inhabitants, but also whose visitors,
perceive them as such. Again we are dealing with representations, with symbols. hus, we could
say, with Joël Bonnemaison (1991), that what we need to study is the phenomenology not of the
island, but of îléité (island-ness), that is, the experience of (literary) space as an island.
One constant of the geo-symbol of the island is the minimal territoriality, the limitation,
the claustrophobia of the border, which make the space in question a microcosm. “Large” is-
lands cease to be islands and are lived as continents. A literature is (self-)deined as insular
when it presents itself as “small,” and vice versa. In literary insularity there is a break with con-
tinental literature, an identity marked by chronotopic diference. In the multiplicity of insular
imaginaries, Basque literature has made its island-ness a place of mystery, of initiation rites.
Distressed by the specter of minor literary capital, in a curious acceptance of old-fashioned
geopolitical theories that made the Kleinstaat an inviable national entity, the Basque literary
island measures its power with neighboring continents in an attempt at cosmopolitanism. In
its island-ness, Navarran literature manifests the recovery of a lost whole, which is like putting
an end to the absence of a spatial relation. For Andorran literature, island-ness is a condition of
its constitution as a discrete entity in topoliterary terms. And for Gibraltarian literature, island-
ness expresses the dialectic of its closure and opening, interiority and exteriority, the varied
enclave. All this without forgetting that, in Peninsular historiographical economics, island-ness
is in large part the experience of the failure of horizontal historiographical models, which, in
the Basque case, can symbolically express the triumph of Juan de Mariana’s Historia general de
España (General history of Spain) over Esteban de Garibay’s Compendio historial de las crónicas
y universal historia de todos los reynos de España (Historical compendium of the chronicles and
universal history of all the kingdoms of Spain).
“El-Rey de Portugale / Barcas mandou lavrare” (Johan Zorro): A tragical-nautical history
In a letter dated Sept. 13–15, 1971, Jorge de Sena tells his wife Mécia that his “homeland (patria)
is Portuguese literature” (quoted in M. H. da R. Pereira 2006, 270). his identiication was
motivated by the familiar experience of linguistic alienation in American exile, which some
years later would manifest itself poetically in “Noções de Linguística” (Ideas on linguistics; Sena
1989, 145), and we cannot deny, also, the resonance of the famous statement by semi-heteronym
Bernardo Soares, a declared reader not of a literary history, but of the Retórica (Rhetoric), by
Padre Figueiredo, and of the Relexões sobre a Língua Portuguesa (Some thoughts on the Portu-
guese language), by Cândido Lusitano, that is contained in the Livro do Desassossego (Book of
disquiet): “I have a strong patriotic feeling. My country is the Portuguese language. It would not
pain me if they invaded or took Portugal, if they did not personally inconvenience me.”1 We can
say this because even though this work by Fernando Pessoa was not published until 1982, under
the care of Jacinto do Prado Coelho, one of the most inluential Portuguese historians, the frag-
ment in question had already been published in the journal Descobrimento (Discovery) in 1931.
A reading of both texts (Sena’s letter and Soares’ declaration) together brings us face to
face with various mutually illustrative paradoxes and questions. Observe how from Soares-Pes-
soa to Sena, the location of the patria (homeland) has been moved from language to literature,
as if the latter were more solid and long-lasting than the former, as evidenced by the verses of
“Noções de Linguística” on the subject of the inevitable dissolution (dissolveram-se) of identity
in the other country (United States) because of its language (English). But in both authors
there is a deeper, more authentic patriotic faithfulness, guaranteed by the culture (linguistic
or literary), which, in the case of Soares-Pessoa, culminates in a permanent cultural homeland,
even if the other (Portugal) were to lose its independence, and which, in the case of Sena, is
felt from a diasporic collection of nationalities (“Em Creta com o Minotauro” [In Crete with
the Minotaur]).
Perhaps this geo-ideological concept – the non coincidence between political Portugal
and literary Portugal – is one of the most dominant matrices of Portuguese historiographical
meta-geography, which has been obscured, veiled, or nulliied by the most visible and recurring
motive of the pequeno povo (small country). Said motive might induce us to include Portuguese
literature among the Iberian Liliputians. However a reading in the least bit attentive to the (ex-
plicit or implicit) meta-geographical declarations of Portuguese historiography would clearly
show that this is the wrong track. Portuguese historiography has never preached the smallness
of its literature, just of the space of its genesis. And, in a tension identical to that observed by
Victor Hugo – in the letter sent to Eduardo Coelho in 1867 on the occasion of the abolition
of the death penalty in Portugal – between a pequeno povo and its grande história (great his-
tory), literary historiography would locate Portugal between its status as a pequeno povo and its
grande literatura (great literature).
Obviously, the political geo-mytheme of the pequeno povo shows circumstancial modula-
tions, of which, surely, the most noteworthy are those associated with the Philippine Dynasty
1. “Tenho […] um alto sentimento patriótico, Minha pátria é a língua portuguesa. Nada me pesaria que
invadissem ou tomassem Portugal, desde que não me incomodassem pessoalmente.” (Pessoa 2006a, 230)
(1580–1640) and the post-colonial period (1960-), though we cannot underestimate the im-
portance of Iberist movements on either side of the border, or the profound transformations
brought about by entry into the European Union (at that time the European Economic Com-
munity) in 1986. At this point, I would like to underline that last aspect, since it is obvious that
the modiication of European space with Portugal and Spain’s entry together reactivated secular
mythemes of the continental structure and the Peninsula.
A good example is the chapter in which António Costa Pinto and Xosé M. Núñez, in
an comparative study of European cultural policies, analyze the dialectic between auto- and
hetero-vision in an intra- or extra-peninsular bilaterality: “Seen from the outside, the Iberian
Peninsula appears as a geographical, social and historical unit, divided into two diferent states.
But Spaniards and Portuguese have in the past rarely made such comparisons […]. For many
Spaniards, Portugal has been a kind of ‘accident’ of Spanish history which does not deserve
attention. Spain is for many Portuguese the historical enemy, and a continuous referent in af-
irming their national identity” (1997, 172). We can see, therefore, that irrespective of the rela-
tional consideration in which we ind ourselves, the spatial view of Portugal is that of territo-
rial limitation. Intra-Peninsularly, Portugal is an accident of Spain and Spain the great enemy;
extra-Peninsularly, Portugal is absorbed by Spain – and not Spain by Portugal – just like the
other peripheral identities. he logic of the pequeno povo is, geopolitically, that of itting, an
interspatiality that reads ontologically the transformation of large/small scale and converts this
pole into part (regional itting) of that which has attracted onto itself the limits of the next level
of naturalized geographical taxonomy (the Peninsula).
his dialectic can be thought in geo-literary terms. In the center of Europe (Brussels), João
de Barros gives, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a series of lectures at the Université
Nouvelle and the Cercle Polyglotte on the evolution of Portuguese literature. Highly conscious
of his location, Barros cannot ignore the question mark about the reasons for the permanent
ignorance of Portuguese literature on the part of the European audience (specialized or not),
and, which is even more worrisome, the perpetuation of this situation, to the point that the
very existence of Portuguese literature is only assumed. he explanation to which he turns is
not immanent, but rather, contextual. Portuguese literature is unknown because it is produced
in Portugal, a “country […], in truth, too little for us to think of it” (Barros 1910, 12). In this
way, he asserts that the relationship between Portugal and its literature would be comparable
to that of Belgium and its literature (but in the French language), which surreptitiously implies
the conversion of Portuguese into a dialect of Castilian, just as Belgian French has become a
regional dialect. Facing a subsequent and involuntary second outside dialectization, this time
literary, Barros reacts, indicating that such a situation could only be the result of a hetero-vision:
I will begin by warning you against that unfortunate, but so natural tendency, very widespread
abroad, to merge Portugal with Spain, not geographically […] but with respect to the literary
and artistic output of the two countries. here could be nothing more false. here are essential,
congenital diferences between the two countries, diferences of sensitivity and, therefore, of
emotion and attitude towards life and nature. (13)
Of course it is noticeable that he insists that the confusion between Portuguese and Spanish
literatures is not geographical, as if both literatures were not cospatial, that is, as if they did
not share the same space, none other than the Peninsula. But, if it is not geographical, then
to what other factor is the mixing up of Portuguese literature with Spanish due? Barros ofers
no other choices. He only insists on geography. hus, the (European) ignorance of Portuguese
literature is supported by its minimal territoriality (pays trop petit [country too little]), cospa-
tiality (the always imminent danger of literary cannibalism) and a spatial écart that turns out
to be cultural, and, ultimately, symbolic (Cidade’s provincialism [1960, xi]): “we are too far
distant from the center of Europe” (Barros 1910, 12). Some eighty years later, the dangers that
Barros attempted to ward of in Brussels are still alive, now in the framework of political and
cultural integration charted by Pinto and Núñez Seixas as an intra-Peninsular conlict and an
extra-Peninsular convergence.
he meta-geography of limited size, cospatial confusion and cultural distance cause Bar-
ros’s defensive tone, so characteristic of Portuguese literature – as, too, of Spanish literature,
though for very diferent reasons –, though his defense is alternative and complementary to the
defense that had launched Portuguese literary historiography in the nineteenth century. I will
return shortly to the latter.
Barros’s defense aims to make visible those essential diferences between Portuguese and
Spanish literature, which, once again, show themselves to be geographical diferences. he por-
tuguese ethos is lyric – Northern, in meta-geographical terms (Villemain 1875, 2:311) – and in
that we ind the impossibility of its confusion with the Spanish, but also with the French, Italian
or English ethos (15). hus emerges the motive of untranslatability, which is summed up in the
appellation par excellence of the Portuguese sentiment: saudade (nostalgia). Saudade is a spa-
tial feeling. It is felt outside of Portugal, for Portugal, but also from inside Portugal, for Portugal,
because Portugal is always elsewhere. Political Portugal and Portugal of the feelings (including
literary feelings) never coincide. For Barros, this saudade as a perpetual feeling of being-away-
from Portugal, is a product of the Peninsular dynamic, that is, the asymmetry between center
and periphery. With the goal of avoiding the feared confusion of the Portuguese periphery with
the Spanish center, Portugal has been forced to abandon the Peninsula and seek Portugueseness
in a space no longer limited (like the terrestrial), but rather in the mouvance of the (maritime)
edges: “Our geographical situation – we are wedged between Spain and the Atlantic – has put
into us the desire to leave, always latent, always vibrant in the Portuguese soul” (14). he ocean,
or rather, oceans, thus become a Mar português (Portuguese Sea), whose saltiness, for Pessoa,
comes from the “lágrimas de Portugal” (tears of Portugal; “Mar Português;” Pessoa 2006b, 368)
and whose openness contrasts starkly with other, closed expressions of extra-Peninsularity
(Mediterraneanness in Catalan literary historiography, for example).
It is for that reason that saudade is the ethos of monotony: in voisinage et contemplation
incessante de la Mer (14; proximity to and incessant contemplation of the Sea), Portuguese lit-
erature is a constant reiteration of being outside of oneself. And like the chronicle of Bernardo
Gomes de Brito, Portuguese literary history is deined by is tragic mood (intra- and extra-
Peninsular shipwrecks) and its maritime air. his explains how the Portuguese patria (like that
of Soares-Pessoa and Sena) is not in Portugal, but in Portuguese literature, which, even if it were
limited to a single work (Os Lusíadas [he Lusiads], obviously) would be of greater dimensions
than the political territory. Camões represents “a whole literature; […] a whole little homeland,
a whole great and glorious nationality” (37).
While Barros’ defense is a reply to Portuguese invisibility in Europe, the other defense to
which I alluded earlier arose, like popular drama, from the reproaches about the injustices of
those strange people who dared to describe the familiar ethos (Francisco Freire de Carvalho,
in the prologue to the Primeiro ensaio sobre História literária desde a sua mais remota origen
até o presente [First essay on literary history from its most distant origin to the present], speaks
of “interference”). Consider how Almeida Garrett justiies the selection of nossos clássicos (our
classics), that forms the Parnaso lusitano (Portuguese Parnassus), in the preliminary Bosquejo
da história da poesia e língua portuguesa (An outline of Portuguese poetry and language), clas-
siied as the irst Portuguese literary (auto-)history:
Whoever knows that I had to begin a new subject, that no Portuguese had ever written of it, and
the two foreigners Bouterweck [sic] and Sismondi so incorrectly and in such a way that they
confused more what they helped to conceive and evaluate of the literary history of Portugal;
will well appreciate the great and nearly unspeakable labor this essay cost me. (1963, 483–84).
If up to here the defense is similar to that which operates in the Spanish tradition in terms of
an erroneous foreign hermeneutic, in the Portuguese case, it inds its own modulation when
we take into consideration that those same foreign historians had already attacked the Portu-
guese not for the (non-)existence of a national historiography, but rather for the nonexistence
of works of literature themselves.
Sismondi (1846, 2:456), for example, declares that in his case in Italy and France, like in
Bouterwek’s in Germany (1823, 2:5–6; with information about the literary friend that allowed
the superseding of a mere historiographical sketch), the study of Portuguese literature in all its
complexity has been made impossible, since the many works mentioned in annals and chroni-
cles are not part of the collections of European libraries, and not only as concerns early periods,
but even in the case of authors active at the beginning of the nineteenth century (2:595). In
this sense it will be less surprising that when Juan Andrés introduces references to Portuguese
literature in his panorama of world literature, they are limited to a single author (Camões) and
to a single work of his (Os Lusíadas), object “in all nations [of] due praise” (1997–2000, 2:128).
But, within the framework of my argumentation, what I would like to highlight with re-
spect to the positions adopted on the place of Portuguese literature within European literature
is the fact that the vindicative efort of the Portuguese historians has been directed toward the
canon (showing, in Garrett’s terms, the richness of Portuguese literature) and its appreciation,
not toward raising meta-geographical questions.
To return to Sismondi, with a speciic reference to his bibliographical troubles regard-
ing Portuguese literature: “my frequent journeys, and my researches into the most celebrated
libraries […] have enabled me only to procure a very small proportion of their works” (1846,
2:447). I would say that the defensive efort of Portuguese historiography attempted to show
that the “smallness” was not literary (in contrast to the image projected by histories like that of
F. Schlegel, Bouterwek or Sismondi, who devoted ive chapters to Portuguese literature, two of
which ofer passages and paraphrases of Os Lusíadas and one of which is partly an overview of
Camões’ lyric poetry), but rather, spatial, in a geopolitical dimension.
On this subject we should not lose sight of the fact that the historiographical construction
of Portuguese literature as a national literature in the nineteenth century is an act of “invention”
in a much more real sense than with other literatures, especially in the Iberian sphere. For ex-
ample, the great Galician-Portuguese lyric tradition (troubadours), with its approximately 1700
texts, was discovered between 1823 (Cancioneiro da Ajuda [Ajuda songbook]), 1840 (Cancio-
neiro da Vaticana [Vatican songbook]) and 1875 (Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional [National
Library songbook]). We can understand, then, why Juan Andrés could not say anything about a
Portuguese output in the chapter he devoted to the European lyric, although he did not hesitate
to categorize Macías’ cantigas as “Spanish” poetry (1997–2000, 2:342), and why Aubrey F. G.
Bell declared that Portuguese literature was a nova (new) literature (1971, 3).
In the quoted passage by Sismondi, the component of the distance of Portuguese space
with respect to the European nucleus is implicit. But it is a double distance. On the one hand, it
is derived from its lack of communication with the rest of Europe: “its literary treasures were,
in a manner, locked up from the rest of Europe” (1846, 2:447). On the other, it is motivated by
its maritime expansion, that, in keeping with its liminal situation (inis terrae), is interpreted as
continental abandonment: “he Portuguese holding little communication with the more civi-
lized portions of the globe, were too seriously engaged with their views of aggrandizement in
India” (1846, 2:447). In any case, these are two sides of the same coin, and we should not ignore
the role of Castile as a true spatial opponent in a new duality not free from paradox, because if
Castile separates Portugal from Europe, it also, by this separation, gives nationality to Portugal.
In fact, for Sismondi, the true foundation of Portuguese literature takes place in the iteenth
century, when it inds itself “surrounded on all sides by the people of Castile, and no longer
bordered upon the conines of the Moors” (453). Of the great foreign narration on the subject
of Portuguese literature (F. Schlegel-Bouterwek-Sismondi-Ferdinand Denis), it is in the work
of this last author, published in the same year as Garrett’s Bosquejo, that Portuguese segregation
is mentioned most explicitly:
he power of the Spanish oten hindered the military reputation that the Portuguese had built
themselves, and perhaps the same is the case for literature: the two languages had one com-
mon origin, the masterpieces that made their name shone at around the same time; and yet,
Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, were better known in Europe than Sá de Miranda, Ferreira,
and even Camões, who had preceded them. his is certainly due to the geographical posi-
tion of Portugal, and even more to the political relations of the two countries. he Portuguese,
powerful in Asia, were nothing in Europe; Spain imposed its laws and its arts on some of its
neighboring peoples. (Denis 1826, 2)
As I declared earlier, the defensive efort of the irst Portuguese historiography did not take
aim at the meta-geography transmitted by the foreign histories. his statement is valid even
for the more obliquely meta-geographical aspects of literary development, such as, for example,
periodology.
In his reply to F. Schlegel, Bouterwek, and Sismondi, Garrett, free from the bibliographi-
cal troubles of the foreigners, completely transforms Bouterwek and Sismondi’s three-period
sequence, replacing it with six literary periods that, nonetheless, do not alter the underlying
axiology: the rejection of seiscentismo – which would persist into the mid-eighteenth century
– understood as a servile imitation of foreign models imposed by Spanish and Jesuit (ques-
tioned by Castelo Branco 1986, 17–19) power, and the gloriication of the epic cycle of discov-
eries. he inherent spatiality in both orientations is, obviously, that of Spanishist assimilation
(with the consequent negative treatment of literary bilingualism) next to an unlimited maritime
territoriality.
In her recent evaluation of Portuguese literary historiography, Vanda Anastácio (2003)
shows how the invectives against seiscentismo by Garrett and, shortly ater, José Maria da Costa
e Silva in the Ensaio biographico-crítico sobre os melhores poetas portugueses (Biographical-crit-
ical essay on the best Portuguese writers), remained unchanged in the most enduring histo-
riographical work in this ield, Teóilo Braga’s História da Litteratura Portugueza (History of
Portuguese literature, 1870–1913). I would go farther and say that they were intensiied through
his particular mix of romantic and positivist views (Á. Machado 1996, 73), so as to add to “static”
factors (F. Schlegel’s race) “dynamic” elements (Comte’s progress) in literary development.
In the irst volume of the History, Braga summarizes the meta-geographical information
that was scattered throughout the works of Bouterwek and Sismondi, and subsumed into the
periodological argumentation in Garrett’s, in order to produce a completely organic articula-
tion of what Helena Carvalhão Buescu (1997) has called “vertical” and “horizontal conscious-
nesses” of literary nationalism. In its static condition – space as stasis, a space of undoubt-
ful authenticity (Massey 2003, 5) – Portugal occupies a simultaneous double location, in the
Peninsula and in Europe, both mutually determining: “he small country […] occupies the
Western part of Spain, positioning itself as an autonomous nationality among the new Pen-
insular States formed in the twelth century” (Braga n.d., 11). Territorial limitation, liminality,
maritime edges. Portugal discovers its role in the world in the abandonment of the Peninsula
and the return to Europe. Victorious over absorção castellana (Castilian absorption), Portugal
“became renowned by the energy of its race in action on the world scale, responsible for the
great Maritime Discoveries, that initiated the Modern Era of European Civilization” (11). In A.
J. Damasceno Nunes’ Traços geraes da historia da litteratura portuguesa (General lines of the
history of Portuguese literature), this return to Europe and to a position on the world scale are
seen as a Portuguese projection of the mission civilisatrice (1884, 17).
It is noteworthy that despite its de-Iberianizing tendency, the geo-literary imaginary con-
tinue to situate Portugal in the Peninsular “framework.” Like pre-structuralist conceptions of
Weltliteratur, in which entry to the world canon required previous recognition within national
limits, the continental contribution of Portugal is measured by its previous performance on
the Peninsular level, calculated in terms of a necessary counterbalance to temper the tensions
derived from cospatiality: “Among Hispanic literatures, two correspond to the two races, the
Iberian and the Portuguese, who have maintained their diferences from the most remote past
to the most recent historical crises” (Braga n.d., 15). As in insular geopolitics, sharing the Penin-
sula is a cause for conlict, the reason why synthesis is impossible: “his primitive layout of land
shows us how the Portuguese people can be counterbalanced with the Iberian people, whose
characters are cleanly diferentiated by Greek and Roman geographers” (19). In its geo-literary
dimension, the counterbalance is guaranteed through the spatialization of the repertory (the
Portuguese tendency toward lyric next to the Castilian propensity for epic), which is not unre-
lated to meta-geography.
Parallel to his historiographical construction, Braga developed a theory of Portuguese lit-
erary history following Jean-Jacques Ampère’s model, with its program of a science littéraire (lit-
erary science) articulated by both theoretical and historical branches. Between these branches
is located the act of comparison, the only act through which we can appreciate Portuguese
literature no quadro das Litteraturas novo-latinas (in the framework of the neo-Latin litera-
tures; Braga 1896, 3). Again, comparison is posed in two dimensions – the Peninsular and the
European. In the irst case, the consciousness of the diference of Portuguese literature with
respect to Spanish literature is the result of territorial limitation and liminal positioning: “We
are a small nation, […] limited to the provocation of a minimal territory. […] he proximity of
the Atlantic Ocean is what diferentiates us from the Spanish, making the Portuguese a people
of sailors, inspiring maritime discoveries and subsistant economic conditions. he periods of
literary glory are linked to the inluence of other stimuli” (8). And in the second case, its as-
sociations are the “peninsulas of Italy and Greece” (56), which, paradoxically, make Portugal
a peninsula of the Iberian Peninsula. Both dimensions are heir to the systemic concept of the
Peninsular object, which, in Portugal, found one of its chief supporters in Alexandre Herculano:
“his system was the Peninsula, whose movements and revolutions, whose inhabitants, diverse
in race, in customs, in language, linked with each other, in a complex way over time because
of one constant factor – the topographical limits of the vast tract of land between the Pyrenees
and the sea” (1980, 30).
Historiography of Portuguese literature ater Braga is one large paraphrase of his Historia.
And although some of his static components have lost their argumentative force, or even, ac-
ceptability, elements such as race and tradition, the mark of space and its consequent efect on
the elevated nationality of Portuguese literature remain very present.
herefore, it is striking that in the irst anti-Braga revolt, captained by his disciple Fidelino
de Figueiredo, territorial ixation operates as a trigger for “classical literature” (1922–30, 1:7), de-
ined as that literature which “appears between the sixteenth century and Romanticism, inspired
by the imitation of ancient Greek and Latin literature” (1:42), with all that that implies in the
context of the criticisms put forward when the object of imitation is Spanish or French litera-
ture. hrough the periodological sequence whose climax and anti-climax were spatially deined
by maritime expansion and Peninsular absorption, the pequeno povo attracted literature toward
its limits, reducing it to a pequena Literatura (small Literature; Braga 1896, 168), the literature of
national expression. Half a century later, Álvaro Júlio da Costa Pimpão distinguished between
Portuguese works that were national and non-national; of these last, those that were created in
“foreign centers” of culture are less so (1947, 1:9–10). And half a century later, in an eloquent chi-
asm of Manuel de Faria e Sousa’s Europa portuguesa (Portuguese Europe), José Luis Gavilanes
and António Apolinário make European Portugal their historiographical object, from which
they exclude both outside Portuguese output and Castilian output (2000, 7). In this last case, the
exclusion is one of the most conspicuous efects of what I will call the “third defense,” although,
strictly speaking, it was the irst chronologically: the linguistic defense. I am referring to the
rich tradition of the elogio da língua portuguesa (praise of the Portuguese language) (M. H. da
Pereira 2006), begun by António Ferreira in the great century (sixteenth) of literary diglossia.
hat is, precisely the tradition in which Bernardo Soares’ bedtime reading is inscribed.
In the same examination of Portuguese literary historiography by Anastácio, we learn that
only two alternatives to Braga’s great narration arose: the História crítica (Critical history), di-
rected by Carlos Reis, and the series dedicated to the civiltà letteraria di espressione portoghese
(Literary culture in the Portuguese language), coordinated by Luciana Stegagno Picchio.
As regards the História crítica, obviously inspired by the Historia y crítica de la literatura
española (History and criticism of Spanish literature), under the direction of Francisco Rico, its
initial objective does not seem to be deined by an alternative orientation, but rather, a comple-
mentary orientation towards the teleological great narrative: “he História Crítica da Literatura
Portuguesa […] is not a History of Literature ‘of author’ (or authors), in the same sense as are
those of Teóilo Braga, Fidelino de Figueiredo, Mendes dos Remédios or António José Saraiva
and Óscar Lopes […]. I am not claiming to replace conventional Histories of Literature, […]
aiming for anthological collections […] of analyses and essays of various dimensions” (Reis
1998, 7). In that sense, its most noticeable diference comes from its narratological construc-
tion (collective authorship, encyclopedic model, meta-critical dimension), which avoids spatial
questions. In the “Apresentação” (Presentation), Reis does not clarify in the least the identity
of the historiographical object (Portuguese literature), so that the critical air that informs it is
in practice restricted to a textualist, but never contextualist, hermeneutic variability: “being
formulated on an artistic – or literary – discourse, that, by nature, has multiple signiications
and is semantically unstable, critical discourse is always a relative and superable discourse” (7).
hus, it is illustrative to observe how between the considerations that the editor of the volume
devotes to the middle ages included in the introduction, the discussion basically hinges on
a periodological relection separate from the spatialization of medieval Portuguese-language
literature (Dias 1998, 15–25). Said omission becomes signiicant when, in the section devoted
to the Galician-Portuguese lyric corpus, the emphasis is put on the exogenesis of the repertory
(the “transplantation” from Provence to Portugal, in the words of Remédios 1921, 20) and on the
Portugal-France center/periphery dyssymetry, but not on the problems of Galician-Portuguese
cospatiality.
We can say the same of the volume dedicated to the middle ages in the Historia y crítica
de la literatura española (Deyermond 1980), and the result of this was that with this speciic
treatment, both Critical histories ratiied, once more, the complementary character of Portu-
guese and Spanish literatures in the Peninsular framework. he denial, refusal, or incapacity of
contending with the problem of the Galician-Portuguese lyric corpus in terms of what Dionýz
Ďurišin has called complémentarité de la tradition orale (complementary character of the oral
tradition) (1993, 48–49), incorporation subséquente (subsequent incorporation) (68) and bilit-
térarité (biliterariness) (51–52) is one of the most irrefutable corroborations of the Iberian his-
toriographical failure before the (comparative) challenges of cospatiality. One of the relections
of said failure is the spatial role that Portuguese and Galician historiography promoted and
accepted for its “own” and “related” literature. It is nothing less than a sort of literary applica-
tion of the Rostovian model, already announced by Bouterwek: “hat destiny […] by which
Portugal has been from an early period politically severed from the other parts of the Peninsula
could alone have prevented Portuguese poetry from becoming like the Galician, completely
absorbed and lost in the Castilian” (1823, 2:1–2). For Portuguese historiography, Galician litera-
ture ofers the myth of origins, a reliable image of an evolutionary process in its initial phases
(F. de Figueiredo 1948–49, 1:43 and 47–48). For Galician historiography, Portuguese literature
ofers telos, a reliable image of the evolutionary process in its inal phases (Carré Aldao 1911,
15–16), as well as the inherent trauma in the dyssymmetry of their relationships (Pinto and
Núñez 1997, 190).
Without a doubt, the alternative to the traditional great narratives proposed by Stegagno
Picchio is much more drastic, at least in comparison with the other model identiied by Anas-
tácio. Firstly, the historiographical object (Il Portogallo) is considered as a partitioned piece of
a broader space, that of the Portuguese language in Europe, Africa, Asia, and America, and the
Galician problem (or the Portuguese problem) in the medieval repertoire is not glossed over
either: “A particular treatment, in this context, both political and linguistic, is demanded by the
history of Galicia […]. Originally undiferentiated in one single linguistic expression (Galician-
Portuguese: but that too is an object of discussion) in the language that would airm itself as
particular to the Atlantic zone South of the Minho river (Portuguese), Galician has known, over
the centuries, linguistic details that have determined a special Galician cultural history” (Steg-
agno Picchio 2001a, 27–28). In keeping with this linguistic-cultural space, the general series is
articulated in three volumes devoted, respectively, to Portugal until the seventeenth century,
Portugal since the seventeenth century (with the inclusion of Galicia), and Portuguese in Bra-
zil, Africa and Asia. If the distribution and inclusions are already signiicant in themselves in
meta-geographical terms, we cannot make many comments, since to date, only the irst of the
three planned volumes has been published. But, in the framework of literature in Portugal until
the seventeenth century, we can make out the general vocation of the series through the stud-
ies dedicated to Portuguese-Castilian bilingualism and the geography of contemporary Portu-
guese (Teyssier 2001), the meta-criticism of literary mythemes, such as the marine, the national
(Stegagno Picchio 2001b), or the Camõesian (Stegagno Picchio 2001c), and the treatment of
literary output during the Dual Monarchy (Serani 2001).
Nonetheless, and within the framework of the discussion developed here, in addition to
the models of Reis and Stegagno Picchio, there are two other alternative models, not mentioned
by Anastácio, which are especially elucidative from a meta-geographical perspective. I am re-
ferring to the comparative and geographical models. I do not think it appropriate to include
between them a third alternative – the one represented by Tamen and Buescu (1999). Without a
doubt, their relections on the reformulation of Portuguese literary studies (the work is explic-
itly conceived for an anglophone academic audience) are of the greatest importance. However,
and despite their revisionist aims, meta-geography is not among their objectives.
he irst model represents a clearly visible tradition, or at least, much more visible than
in the Spanish case. In that sense, its limited impact is symptomatic. Hence, when in 1999,
a conference devoted to comparative literary histories was held at the Universidade Católica
Portuguesa, the works presented there limited themselves to very speciic cases of comparative
criticism (the Spanish short novel in France during the seventeenth century, translation in ro-
mantic poetry, the reception of Chateaubriand in Portugal, etc.), while only one dealt with the
revision of comparative Portuguese historiography, which in the case in question was limited to
the case of Fidelino de Figueiredo (J. C. Martins 2001).
If the importance of F. de Figueiredo’s undertaking is incontestable, that does not mean
that we can neglect other attempts, for example, those of J. Barbosa de Betencourt, or, much
more recently, Hélio J. S. Alves. In any case – and Anastácio’s omission might be due to this – it
is undeniable that these comparative histories question the bases of great narration to highly
varying degrees. Some insist on its meta-geography and even reinforce it, as was the case with
the independent national histories that share the same support (Bouterwek, Ferdinand Wolf).
One example of this might be the way that Betencourt, who limits his comparative look at Por-
tuguese literature to the literatures of Southern and Western Europe, highlights the dovetailing
of literary development and territorial enlargement in a meta-geographical argument that is
indistinguishable from the ones we have observed up to now in the other histories:
During the iteenth century the Portuguese nation goes through a great period of Renaissance
and the highest peak of its historical development. At the same time the conquest of Africa was
happening and sea voyages were being extended – until, at the end of the century, they reached
their main objective, in India, and took possession of Brazil – literary education was spreading,
which was notable even in the nobles. (n.d., 117)
Others put comparison in a confused substition of the nation for the country as historiographi-
cal object, but they show a sharper consciousness of certain meta-geographical contradictions,
like that implied by locating Portuguese literature in the West (H. J. S. Alves 2006, 7 and 19).
On that situation, Amélia Pinto Pais ofers an instructive opinion on the insuiciency of mere
prepositional games: “Portuguese literature […] would imply not only the literature in Portu-
guese produced by Portuguese authors, but also the literature created by foreign authors in the
Portuguese language […] We will opt for the designation of Literature in Portugal, including
the whole set of Portuguese authors and texts by Portuguese authors” (2004, 12).
he strengthening of the geographical imagining of Portuguese literature through com-
parative history is much more noticeable in the case of F. de Figueiredo, whose work is a unique
example of a meta-geography that is invariable whether the literary history is national or com-
parative. His 1914 work, Caracteristicas da Literatura portuguesa (Features of Portuguese litera-
ture), represents a real tour de force with the tradition represented by Braga, since he argues
its conlicts with the assumptions of Ferdinand Brunetière and its convergences with those of
Hippolyte Taine. His ultimate goal is to appraise the “physiognomy” of Portuguese literature,
which he condenses into seven diferentiating traits: “Portuguese literature, [2] predominantly
lyrical, [3] very frequently epic, [4] rarely dramatic, [5] without criticism, most of the time
tending toward [6] vulgar and confused mysticism to perturb strong and serene objectivity, [7]
does not have a continuity of tradition, or show strong tendencies toward psychological cre-
ation” (1923, 50). he irst of these traits is precisely that upon which the true originality of this
literature depends, according to F. de Figueiredo: “he most diferentiating characteristic, the
one that constitutes the typical originality of Portuguese literature, is of course what we will call
the cycle of discoveries, that is, a set of works that has as its object the maritime discoveries and
their moral and political consequences” (13).
Of this list of seven traits, their meta-geographical dependence is as noticeable as their
implicit referentiality to Spanish literature. hus, we can understand the why of indiferentiabil-
ity in the treatment of the historiographical object, whether it be in a national (the previously
cited Historia da Litteratura Classica, the História literária de Portugal or the História da litera-
tura portuguesa) or comparative (Pyrene) framework. For F. de Figueiredo, the true territory of
Portuguese literature is the Peninsular portion that it occupies, and not the literature in itself.
Once again we see at work that geo-unity and the perceptibility that I prevously deined as con-
sequences of the peninsula efect. In fact, the 1914 characteristics can (and do) reemerge in the
História da literatura portuguesa as well as in Pyrene, a comparative history of Portuguese and
Spanish literature also solicited from outside, as it collects the thirty lectures of the seminar that
F. de Figueiredo gave at the invitation of Columbia University.
In short, for F. de Figueiredo, the inscription of Portuguese literature in the Peninsula is
the frame of both its intra- and inter-literary causation. he Peninsula is a sort of organism
whose spirit experiences linguistic and literary modulations in an evolutionary complentary
way. Because of cospatiality, the literatures create a sort of personal agency, which is distin-
guished in those that have attained national status: “hese characteristics are completed by
those of the other Peninsular literatures, chiely, that which is most opposed to Portuguese
literature: Castilian. he four [which one is omitted?] literatures of the Peninsula together form
a superior literary genius, powerful and diverse as few peoples can boast” (F. de Figueiredo 1927,
25). And in keeping with this view of spatial itting together, he establishes a typology of the
value of literature as a function of the degree of dissemination of the work: national, Peninsular,
global. With some exceptions (Os Lusíadas), according to F. de Figueiredo, it is “too early to
note the universal and Peninsular value of Portuguese literature” (378).
he mytheme of smallness is present once again, predicated on the national territory, and
not on literature, in a comparatist referenciality that now puts the Portuguese in the same cat-
egory as the Swiss, the Provençal, the Danish or the Norwegian, all of which – European Lilipu-
tians – are the paradigm of “small countries [which] manage to enter into the spiritual partner-
ship of the wide world” (1923, 57). his pequeno povo/grande literatura dialectic has its correlate
in the location of the observer, a new key for the understanding of the contradictions imposed
by the Peninsular situation and cohabitation: “Seen from land, from beyond the Pyrenees, over
the Castilian plateau, [Portugal], is the absurdity of isolation, of poverty, of conined mediocrity,
of love of the past and provincialism; seen from the sea, it is the seductive mystery of a dock
where one embarks for all of the places of the world and all the poles of fantasy and heroic dis-
sipation” (1948–49, 3:145).
As I previously stated, regarding the characterization of Portuguese literature, its national
and comparative manifestations are indistinguishable. We can say the same of the character-
ization of Spanish literature, that F. de Figueiredo himself had practiced and simultaneously
published in parts (1935) and as a collection (1971). In this sense, it is signiicant that the char-
acterization, based on the complementary character of Portuguese and Spanish literatures, was
echoed by a simultaneity of criticism, since F. de Figueiredo’s research into the Portuguese ethos
occurred at the same time as an identical undertaking, regarding the Castilian ethos, on the
part of Menéndez Pidal (1918), from 1910 (the introduction to L’Épopée castillane à travers la lit-
térature espagnole [he Castilian epic through Spanish literature]) and 1916 (the lecture given at
the Sorbonne called “Quelques caractères de la littérature espagnole”) in a piece of work subject
to reediting, inclusions – the introduction to the Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas
[General history of Hispanic literatures] (Menéndez Pidal 1949) – and success (its reproduction
and commentary by Alborg 1966).
What is more, we should point out that F. de Figueiredo and Menéndez Pidal found in each
other’s arguments some that supported their own, with the result that these works constituted
the most lasting contribution on the subject of the complementary quality of the two literatures
via quotes from and allusions to each other. From this viewpoint, and remembering the myth of
Pyrene, the fragility of the lover of Hercules metamorphosizes into the always delicate balance
between two literatures whose survival, in one and the same space, depends on the perpetua-
tion of their diference: “and is not all the literary creation of the Peninsula a supreme verbal
expression of heroism and love? A scholarly journey through its two long-lived literatures al-
ways discovers both veins, the celebration of heroic spirit adventuring through the wide central
plateau, and the celebration of lyric spirit pursuing love along the Atlantic coast and in distant
lands and seas” (F. de Figueiredo 1971, 11).
he second model to which I referred earlier is the geographical one. José Osório de Olivei-
ra stands out among its practitioners, next to others in whose work top priority is given to the
metaphorical dimension of the spatial option (for example, Trigueiros 1993), as is not infrequent.
Again we must point out that the external location of the audience, which, in the case of Oliveira,
is Brazilian, plays a role in the search for an alternative epistemology. And the fact that his work
is contemporary to Barros’ proposal in Brussels makes their dialogue especially fruitful.
he book in which Oliveira’s lectures are collected is called Geograia Literária (Literary
geography), a choice of title that is never explicitly justiied, with the exception of Joaquim de
Carvalho’s introductory words: “Hence these essays of Literary geography, not History, […]
where we move clearly through the literary diversity of the areas, be they geographical or esthet-
ic” (1931, xiii). But his reading immediately reveals the meaning of the geographical alternative.
Next to the canon of national literature, Portuguese literature proves much broader, and even
superior on many occasions: “we ind, at the same time as very well known writers, others who
have not received the consideration or the reputation that they, more than the others, deserve”
(Oliveira 1931, 1). he cartography of literary geography thus reveals the verdadeira literatura
portuguesa (true Portuguese literature). he spatial approach destabilizes meaning, restores si-
multaneous multiplicities, paradoxical and antagonistic relationships. In short, it highlights the
importance and the impact of variability, of diferentiation. In the case of Oliveira, this resto-
ration is placed in the counter-canon of exile, internal or external, but always moral exile: “It
is, above all, a moral exile provoked in the deepest sensibilities by the tumultuous agitation of
our country and of the era in which we live” (2). An exile that, in a new, no less fertile paradox,
takes us back to the experience of the return to “literary Portugal” through saudade: “his exile
is not an expatriation, because those who live far from the homeland feel nostalgia [saüdades]
for it” (1).
Of the external exiles, Oliveira discusses the work of Camilo Pessanha and Wenceslau de
Moraes; of the internal, he highlights Jaime de Magalhães. And in the framework of this inside/
outside dialectic, Oliveira reintroduces the factor that had marked the Portuguese historio-
graphical tradition: the external view. his, in turn, raises the question of how to combine geo-
graphical point and internal vision, when we acknowledge that “it is easier to take a combined
view of a foreign literature” (32).
To close this section, I must only point out that the comparative and geographical alterna-
tives do not necessarily need to be viewed as such. In fact, this deep consciousness of exclusion
demonstrated by Oliveira is similar to that of F. de Figueiredo, who had constantly reminded
us that Portuguese was not the only language of Portuguese literature. And if Oliveira inds
the spatial alternative to be a way to restore silenced voices, F. de Figueiredo warns against the
dangers of the base territorial (territorial base) if it acts as an “absorbent spiritual imperialism of
the past” (1971, 19). In this respect, the combination of comparative history/literary geography
obliges us, as recommends J. de Carvalho in his preface, not to stop asking whether it “leads us
[…] to new and useful perspectives” (xiii).
From the disputed Peninsula to the postnational Peninsula
As I stated at the beginning, the documentation is abundant and my focus infrequent. he

omissions, of course, are many and some are very obvious. But my goal was not to carry out
a complete evaluation of the meta-geography of Iberian historiographical discourses through
their history. I have merely tried to show some speciic cases that illustrate the operativity of
spatial codes in the construction of historiography, the fabrication of the canon and the under-
standing of inter-literary relations. he consequences of all this for a relection on the possibili-
ties of a comparative history of literatures (in the Iberian Peninsula) do not seem tangential.
he conclusions of this geographical heuristic are strictly provisional. Barring error in the
analysis, and in the absence of complementary studies, everything suggests that the geographi-
cal imaginary in Iberian historiography has remained unperturbed since its beginnings. his
imaginary has served as a base for both the central position that Spanish historiography has
attributed to literature in Castilian and the subordination that this same historiography has ef-
fected on “peripheral literatures,” including the Portuguese. And while it is evident that the his-
toriographies of these other literatures have contested that axiology on various fronts, it is also
true that geographical questioning has not igured in their counter-narrations, despite playing
such a conspicuous and decisive role.
In the Spanish sphere, the rise of a local and regional historiography in recent decades is a
logical reaction to the neo-imperialist ideology furthered by Franco’s regime and the failure of
a true plurilingual, multicultural and plurinational conception of the State since the Transition
to democracy. However, and signiicantly, this rise was inluenced by the very spatial concep-
tion that had supported the historiographical model these new historiographies were aiming
to overcome. Next to the home of Spanish literature in Castilian, the counter-narrations had
projected their respective homes, the latter, just like the former, being locations – singular and
ixed – of nostalgia. he antagonism of what Antoni Martí Monterde (2004, 108) called comuni-
tats interliteràries en conlicte (inter-literary communities in conlict) lies not in a geographical
reason, because there is but one. Even in the cases of expulsion from their home, the Castilian-
ist ixing of meaning does not seem to have been problematized, according to the information
that Eduardo Mateo Gambarte (1995) gives in reference to the so-called “Generación de los
cachorros” (Puppy Generation), that is, the young authors exiled in Mexico, born between 1924
and 1939. However, this lack of problematization contrasts clearly with the longstanding dif-
iculties in reinserting the output of the exile into the histories of Spanish literature, as we see
in the astute critical analysis carried out by Carlos Blanco Aguinaga (2006). And in the social,
cultural or feminist modulations, whether they operate on the local, regional or national level,
it has been as if the contributions of critical theory on gender, race, or class were irrelevant for
the spatial experience of literatures.
he same imperturbable quality can be found in foreign historiographical traditions. Al-
though the distinction between an auto- and a hetero-historiography is not always clean or
correct, that is no reason to deny usefulness of these concepts in terms of theoretical structural
components. In fact, here we have seen many examples of mutual inluence, including spatial,
in their historiographical operations. Here it is possible to use as the frame of reference the aca-
demic traditions that Joan Ramon Resina (1996) has identiied as “central areas” of the devel-
opment of Hispanism: the German, Spanish and American traditions. Signiicantly, the order
here is neither arbitrary not chronologically inconsistent. At their extremes, which are those of
hetero-historiographies, the respective spatialities represent the arche and the telos of the same
delimitation of the Iberian Peninsula as a historiographical object with coherent limits and de-
termined by the meta-geography of drit, the meta-geography that understands peninsulas as
continental projections and, ultimately, as points of contact with – in this case – the European
and Latin American (but not African) cultural spheres, respectively.
In the German arche, Spanish language in Castilian has absorbed the Peninsular space and,
consequently, has erased any internal diference. Resituated by Romanistik to Romania (Latin
Europe), that supra-national entity with a linguistico-historical base and an intrisically com-
paratist orientation, Castilian-ist Spanish literature came to represent the Other, the French oth-
er side. And if at its external limits, Romania’s European space of transcendence was Weltlitera-
tur, at its internal limits it was supposed to be the exploration of substatal diference, as occurred
in studies of Provençal and Catalan culture by German Romanists of the nineteenth century.
But this program was never carried out, since, in the words of Resina, its “insuicient otherness
makes it unsuitable as an epistemological matrix” (1996, 95) for the German national project.
In the American telos, Spanish literature in Castilian was the object of an identical Pen-
insularist reiication. he very image of otherness was associated with imperial decadence in
the context of New England – the very incarnation of anti-bourgeois values as opposed to the
burgeoning North American expansionism. But when this last identiication was belied by the
gradual incorporation of Spain into Western Europe, otherness was transposed from the impe-
rial to the colonial referent, in which the United States participated (and participates) greatly.
In this regard, there can be nothing more eloquent than two meta-geographical analysts like
M. Lewis and Wigen calling Latin America “the most clear-cut and conceptually cohesive re-
gions of all. […] In some ways, the region may even be said to be more coherent than Europe
or South Asia” (1997, 181). In the Latino cultural system, Spain has become a province of Latin
America, a phenomenon that Joseba Gabilondo (2001) has cleverly identiied as the “Antonio
Banderas efect”: “A heterosexual, Spanish actor, out of the movies of a gay Spanish director,
Pedro Almodóvar, comes to represent Latin American, Latino, or gay characters in every [Hol-
lywood] mainstream ilm portraying such identities.” I will reinscribe the Antonio Banderas
efect in its institutional dimension as the conception that understands “Hispanic” studies as
the analysis of Latin American literature (but not in the Portuguese/Brazilian language, much
less in indigenous languages) and, only secondly, of Peninsular (in Castilian) literature. Para-
doxically, with the absolutization of the Iberian Peninsula as a Latino region by the area studies
of the Cold War, one has erased not only internal diference (Catalan, Galician, Portuguese,
Basque), but also historical diference. he philological reactionarism evidenced by the loss of
ground by medieval Spanish literature as a taught subject testiies to this fact.
In the light of undoubtably meta-geographical reiications, Resina sheds light on an inlec-
tion of Hispanism, a new consciousness that emerges as “meta-Hispanism” and studies “[t]he
cultural system of the Iberian Peninsula, hitherto conceived as a relatively unproblematic con-
tinuum of the ‘Spanish’ tradition, […] as a process of diferentiation of cultures which consti-
tute the system’s internal environment” (89). Resina himself likens this inlection to the postna-
tional paradigm (114) but not to an Atlantism, perhaps as a consequence of the productivity of
the Mediterranean imaginary in the Catalan historiographical economics, whose literature, in
the words of the same author, “represents the largest vacuum in the incomplete, dismembered
Peninsular picture that Hispanic studies presents” (120; italics added).
Nonetheless, I must point out that in recent years exactly such an intersection of the post-
nation with an Atlantic space has occurred, from Galician (Hooper 2006) and Basque (Gabi-
londo 2001, Casenave 2008) literary studies, as a historiographical alternative to the national
model. It is still early to judge whether the referents of Jürgen Habermas, whose proposal on
postnationalism is constructed as a re-reading, strongly inluenced by the German context, of
the Kantian theory of cosmopolitanism, and by Paul Gilroy, who deines an Atlantic – Black,
let us not forget – as “one single, complex unit of analysis [used] to produce an explicitly trans-
national and intercultural perspective” (2000, 15), are inconsistent when applied to the Iberian
sphere, and, therefore, are reduced to a mere metaphorical usage, moved by the desire to over-
come national structures and their particularities.
In fact, the intersection implied by a postnational Hispanic Atlantic has to date only been
considered in one single historiographical project (Gabilondo 2008), in which the new para-
digm is associated with the literary work of Aingeru Epaltza, Joxean Sagastizabal, Jasone Osoro
and Monique Laxalt Urza. We cannot say, then, whether these new Galician (might Carré Al-
dao’s appendices not be a Galician Atlantic avant la lettre?) and Basque Atlantisms signify a true
alternative to the meta-geographical tradition of Iberian historiography. If that were the case,
the Peninsula and its projections would be rethought and programed as an espace vécu (lived
space) (Frémont 1980) in accordance with Deleuze and Guattari’s plateaux (1987), that is, as
the ensemble of the network of places frequented by literature and the social interrelations that
support them. Some historiographical proposals reviewed here that point toward this spatial
experience are noteworthy, but exceptional. If such were not the case, we would then ind our-
selves before a new variant of literary aggressiveness that has made the Peninsula its longtime
Lebensraum (in the geopolitical sense of a space of contention).
In any case, it seems necessary to question the academic and political pertinence of the
search for (comparative) alternatives to national literary histories, including their meta-geo-
graphical constructions. Recall on this point that it is the mediators of “peripheral literatures”
that have proven the most reluctant to face the possibility of a comparative history (van Hoot
Comajuncosas 1998) in the Iberian Peninsula. Said mediators, to extrapolate from the diagnosis
made by Ann Curthoys (2003) for general Australian historiography, seem to be asking: “We’ve
just started making national histories, and you want us to stop already?” Without a doubt, the
underlying argument is that some locations are more apt than others for a comparative episte-
mology. his state seems to be linked to the strength of the national project. But, if going be-
yond the national framework is a luxury that certain locations cannot permit themselves, how
to explain their recent recourse to the postnational paradigm?
his is one of the many ambiguities that both national and comparative histories entail. If
recourse to one or the other historiographical model is presented as an alternative, there are
many diferent factors that can guide the choice, such as the succession of theoretical paradigms,
the internationalization of critical language, the styles imposed by hegemonic academies, or,
why hesitate to say it, the diferential returns of the national and international markets. he
potential audience for a transnationally-oriented study has obvious quantitative and qualitative
appeal. However, even today, the nation is more generous in its personal compensation. Does
anyone think that a comparative historian could achieve the same recognition as a national his-
torian? I recall, in anecdotal terms, the famous visit of don Juan de Borbón and the delegation
of the Real Academia Española to Ramón Menéndez Pidal on the occasion of his ninety-ninth
birthday, upon which they presented him with the relic of El Cid’s skull, which the historian
kissed devoutly (Pérez Pascual 1998, 378).
I prefer to think that analytical depth is not a question of alternatives, but of epistemologi-
cal dependencies. A national literary history absorbed in idiosyncratic absolutization runs the
risk of internalizing a process whose uniqueness is, precisely, the result of its interactions with
the outside. And a comparative literary history could never go beyond national limits and un-
derstand inter-literary processes if what is shared globally were not contemplated from its local/
regional/national idiosyncracy. World literature is no more abstract than the literatures in the
Iberian Peninsula. he literatures in the Iberian Peninsula are no more empirically speciic than
world literature. As Massey (2003, 129) has warned, the opposite would be akin to confusing
“geographical scale with processes of abstraction in thought.”
Section II. The Iberian Peninsula as a literary space
Coordinator: Sharon Feldman
Introduction: he Iberian Peninsula as a literary space

Sharon Feldman
When, in 1955, Maurice Blanchot relected on the notion of literary space in his seminal work
L’éspace littéraire (he space of literature), he developed the idea within the context of read-
ing, artistic creativity, and inspiration. At the root of Blanchot’s discussion, which draws upon
the work of post-romantic writers such as Kaka, Mallarmé, and others, is the presumption of
an “essential solitude,” which he attributes to the domain of literature. his is not, as he puts
it (and, as one might expect), “the complacent isolation of individualism” that is inherent in
the act of writing; rather, he is referring to the very “solitude” that envelops the literary work
(Blanchot 1990, 14). For Blanchot, the work of literature is without origins, without boundar-
ies, without initude. “Solitude” thus refers to the space or gap surrounding the work, which is
neither inished nor uninished; it connotes an absence of deinition, an impossibility. Writing,
for Blanchot, is an incessant endeavor, without limitations: “to write is to surrender to the in-
terminable” (17). It is a perpetually solitary act, and the reader of the literary text takes part in
a process that airms and reairms this solitude. As English translator Ann Smock observes in
her lucid introduction to he space of literature, the literary “domain,” in Blanchot’s view, is a
void, a non-place, much like that which we associate with death. Paradoxically “inaccessible” as
it is “inescapable,” it is a deserted, vacuous realm that is “its very own displacement or removal”
(Smock 1990, 9). his empty space of solitude, nevertheless, is capable of taking on a diverse
gamut of meanings.
Whereas Blanchot conferred upon the notion of literary space a series of psychic, intimate,
or existential dimensions, since the publication of his volume, numerous critics and theorists
have continued to explore the concept, presenting an array of formulations that treat literature
in relation to geographic, political, transnational, social, textual, or even imaginary landscapes.
Such was the approach of the French volume, edited in 2006 by Xavier Garnier and Pierre
Zoberman, titled Qu’est-ce qu’un espace littéraire? (What is a literary space?), which gives due
consideration to Blanchot’s approach, but also moves beyond his work to look at postcolonial,
postmodern, and postnational conceptions of literary space. We might, therefore, designate a
contrast between what would be the Blanchotian view of literary space (interior and hermetic)
and a sociopolitical view (more exteriorized and open).
As we shall see, the essays grouped within the present section on the Iberian Peninsula
as a literary space belong, in large part, to the latter category. How has the Iberian Peninsula
– understood as a spatial image, igure, or notion – been portrayed by those inhabiting the Pen-
insula and those living beyond its borders? What relationships exist between the geopolitical
map and the literary landscapes that are conjured in the mind? What are the spatial parameters
that deine the multiple contexts (Europe, the Mediterranean, the Circum-Atlantic world…) in
134 Sharon Feldman
which we might situate our consideration of the Iberian Peninsula? Must each literary space be
deined vis à vis another contiguous or related space? What are the roles of history and politics
in the process through which literary landscapes are imagined? hese are some of the questions
that these essays explore, both indirectly and explicitly.
Contemporary thinking about geopolitical space has no doubt let an imprint on the inter-
pretation of literary landscapes from all periods. Social theorist Arjun Appadurai (1996), for ex-
ample, has pointed to the formation of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, inancescapes,
and ideoscapes as symptoms of a contemporary subjectivity that would naturally give way to
new readings of the local and the global. Appadurai’s perspective, which posits a move from
the modern to the postmodern, and from the national to the transnational (or postnational),
places into question long-established relationships between nation and territory, and between
nation and statehood. Among the precedents for this type of postnational perspective are the
writings of Hannah Arendt, whose views of Jewishness, as articulated in he origins of totali-
tarianism, underscore the diiculties of statelessness (“a mass phenomenon in contemporary
history”) and the interconnectedness of space with cultural, political, and national identities
(Arendt 1951, 277).
he problem of identity, in efect, has become an intrinsic component of numerous con-
temporary discussions of literary space, as questions of displacement, mobility, migration, and
nomadism have inluenced how boundaries are conceived and how cultures are depicted. Eu-
ropean identity, in particular, has been on the minds of political theorists such as Jürgen Haber-
mas, who has advocated a type of post-Cold War European cosmopolitanism that actively
embraces otherness and diference, overlapping citizenships, cultural indeterminacies, and the
broad complexity of relationships among the global, the local, the national, and the regional.
Habermas’s brand of cosmopolitanism seeks to move beyond the conines of the nation-state
to new paradigms of solidarity and interconnectedness among citizens, without sacriicing the
plurality of cultural and linguistic diferences.
Pnina Werbner has attempted to grapple with the inadequacy of essentialist conceptions of
culture and community, noting that, “despite the illusion of boundedness, cultures evolve his-
torically through unrelective borrowings, mimetic appropriations, exchanges and inventions.”
In what Werbner perceives to be a “culturally hybrid globe,” all cultures can be perceived as luid
entities: “here is no culture in and of itself.” It is impossible to avoid or contain the overlow of
inluences, ideas, images, and languages across spaces and beyond boundaries; and yet, cultural
hybridity, especially in its most “conscious” or deliberate manifestations, is still oten regarded
as an “empowering, dangerous or transformative force” (Werbner 1997, 4–5). Hybridity is an
inevitable, ever-present, and even necessary state of being, which permeates not only the realm
of national cultures, but also that of artistic-literary creation. Perhaps the igure of the nomad,
as conceived in a contemporary sense by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, might be the per-
soniication of this hybrid state: a deterritorialized being, who moves across a smooth, luid
space that is deined according to his or her mobile existence (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 474).
he foregoing perspectives may serve as a frame for considering the literary space of the
Iberian Peninsula and for thinking about how we have come to understand literary landscapes.
In a spatial sense, the Iberian Peninsula is a particularly complex setting, given the plurality of
cultures, languages, identities, nationalities, and nomadic, refugee, or migratory populations
that have inhabited this territory throughout the centuries. Treating questions of history, his-
toriography, hybridity, nationalism, migration, cosmopolitanism, insularity, identity, exile, glo-
balization, as well as the formation of cities and enclaves, the essays included in this section
explore, from a comparative standpoint, the problematic nature of conceiving, articulating,
and/or writing about the space of literature, along with the range of meanings and signifying
practices that the notion of “literary space” entails.
he irst cluster of essays, titled “Identitarian projections: Between isolationism and reinte-
grationism,” ofers a general framework for contemplating identity in both Spain and Portugal.
homas Harrington’s study, “he hidden history of tripartite Iberianism,” illuminates the back-
story and chronicles the history of what he describes as a “tripartite” Iberianist movement; that
is, a brand of Iberianism (originating in Catalonia and conceived, in part, by Catalan intellec-
tual Joaquim Casas-Carbó) that aimed to promote the concept of a culturally and linguistically
plural space embracing “the Peninsula’s three ‘essential’ culture-nations” (Catalonia, Castile,
and Portugal) within a uniied, multinational project. Within the same cluster of essays, Laura
Cavalcante Padilha’s notes on “Lusism and Lusophony” address the geographic, cultural, and
political boundaries of literary production in Portuguese. She looks at the historical trajectory
of the Lusophone literary tradition as it was projected beyond European borders to the colo-
nized regions of America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. For Calvalcante, the sea would become
an ever-present deining feature of the literary imagination of the Lusophone world. Finally, in
his comprehensive study of “Travel Literature,” spanning the Middle Ages to the present, Luis
Fernández Cifuentes reveals the diversity of contributions to the genre, many of which are
routinely absent from literary histories. His study considers the travelogues (written in Span-
ish and Catalan) of soldiers, missionaries, pilgrims, diplomats, scientists, essayists, novelists,
journalistic chroniclers, aristocrats partaking in the Grand Tour, and excursionistas/excursio-
nistes engaged in picturesque voyages, all of whom have recounted under varying guises their
journeys both within and beyond the Peninsula. Foreign travel writers and their strategies in
capturing images of the Peninsula have likewise had a considerable impact on the evolution of
the genre, and Fernández Cifuentes cites as an example the epistolary work Relación del viaje de
España (Account of the voyage to Spain), written by French aristocrat Madame d’Aulnoy, which
enjoyed extensive circulation throughout Europe during the eighteenth century.
he second and largest cluster of essays, titled “Cities, cultural centers, and enclaves,” con-
siders speciic locations, regions, nations, and urban centers situated throughout the Peninsula.
In an essay titled “Empires waxing and waning: Castile, Spain and American exceptionalism,”
Michael Ugarte posits nationality as a cultural artifact and uses this premise as the basis for a
discussion of the metonymic identiication of Castile with Spain. Centering his examination
on the writers of the Generation of 1898, Ugarte’s observations with regard to Castile are en-
hanced by a series of comparisons with Alexis de Tocqueville’s concept of American exception-
alism. he representation of Spain as literary trope, or “the real-and-imagined place of Spain,”
as Ugarte demonstrates, is comparable to the idea of the “immense territory,” that has long been
associated with the American West.
hree subsequent essays in this cluster are devoted to Spain’s so-called historical-nationali-
ties; i.e., the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Galicia. Jon Kortazar’s essay on the literary system
in the Basque Country delineates the role of the city of Bilbao in the process of literary creation.
136 Sharon Feldman
It is an urban center in which two literary-linguistic “systems” come into contact and, at times,
collide: the tradition of writing in Euskara and the tradition of writing in Spanish. his unique
situation leads Kortazar to a discussion of the bilingual character of Bilbao’s literary space and
the degree to which the difering linguistic-cultural perspectives are conditioned by Basque
nationalist views.
In the essay that follows, “Contemporary Catalan literature: fact or friction?,” Dominic
Keown and Jordi Larios consider the literary space of the Catalan-speaking lands (here Cata-
lonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands). heir comparative perspective situates the “stubborn
resilience” of the Catalan language and literature in relation to a spatial contrast between the
center and the periphery. he point of departure for Keown and Larios’s comparison are T. S.
Eliot’s notes towards a deinition of culture, in which he discusses the “ ‘frictional’ rivalry and
mutual inluence” among the nations of the British Isles, as he defends cultural diversity and
mestissage (or hybridity). he comparison leads Keown and Larios to assert that, “had such an
enlightened view about the mutual beneits of national cohabitation formed part of intellectual
thought and practice in Spain, the culture of Catalonia would today enjoy a more robust and
established presence.”
In an essay devoted to Galician cultural production spanning 1840 to 1936, Anxo Tarrío
Varela’s spatial-geographic analysis considers the representation of cities (Coruña, Santiago,
Lugo, Pontevedra, Ourense, et al.), as well as more rural points on the Galician map, such as
the Terra Cha, the Serra do Courel, and the Comarca de Bergantiños. He studies not only the
literary portrayal of these landscapes; but also, the role of these spaces – especially, the more ur-
ban hubs – as centers of cultural production. Tarrío’s discussion of literary invention in Galicia,
takes into account, naturally, the points of tension between the Galician and Spanish languages.
Lee Fontanella’s study of southern Spain, which follows, relects on the ongoing dialogue
among literature, painting, lithography, and photography in the representation of this spatial
domain. For Fontanella, “Although the terms of the mediation […] difer, the level of imagina-
tion […] is surprisingly similar, whether literary or visual.” Beginning with the portrayal of
the medieval Castillo de Álora, which appears in a Spanish ballad, and tracing the depiction
of southern scapes throughout the centuries, Fontanella contemplates their varied expressions,
which include “vivid reportage,” political propaganda (related to the strength of the Empire), a
desire for exoticism, and a portrait of the national psyche.
From southern Spain, we shit to the Atlantic archipelago of the Canary Islands with Ber-
trand Westphal’s “he Canaries or Global Drit.” Westphal describes how the Canaries irst
emerged as a literary landscape in the imagination of classical Greek writers; the islands were
a “fantasy topography” within what the Greeks called Macaronesia. His discussion moves on to
trace the literary-cultural connections that the Canary Islands have forged as they have meta-
phorically drited into the spaces of European, Latin American, and African identity. he pro-
cess, according to Westphal, began in the fourteenth century, when the islands became a hub
of the slave trade. hey have continued to materialize on into the twentieth and twenty-irst
centuries in the imaginary realities of writers such as André Breton, Carmen Laforet, and Mi-
chel Houellebecq.
Inocência Mata returns to the literary spaces of the Portuguese language, with “From Ibe-
ria to Africa: he construction of a literary city.” Mata’s essay, a kind of counterpoint to that
of Calvalcante, ofers a postcolonial, transnational perspective that underlines the dilemmas

implied in the dispersion of the Portuguese language throughout Africa as a result of expan-
sion and colonization. It is a “language that was once imposed but which nowadays, has been
appropriated and nativized in African spaces.” Mata underlines the problems of linguistic and
political hegemony inherent in the “globalizing” notion of what is known as “Lusophone” and
the failure of this notion, as it has traditionally been understood, to capture and portray difer-
ence. She demonstrates how the hegemony of the Portuguese language has been deconstructed
and self-consciously questioned in literary texts originating in the former Portuguese colonies
of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe.
In the inal essay in this section (which can be seen as complementary to Westphals’ dis-
cussion of the Canary Islands), “Insulated voices looking for the world: Narratives from Atlan-
tic Islands (Cabral do Nascimento, João Varela, and João de Melo),” Ana Salgueiro Rodrigues
explores the islands of the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores in their
threefold nature as enclosed spaces, bridging points, and diasporic locations. he island under-
stood in this way becomes a “frontier space” whose cultural identity is fundamentally linked to
travel. Rodrigues discusses these issues in the writing of the Macaronesian authors João Cabral
do Nascimento, João Varela, and João de Melo.
he process of translating a spatial (and, oten, visual) experience into verbal imagery is
always problematic. In efect, W. J. T. Mitchell has suggested that the notion of space, when
viewed from a literary standpoint, might merely be “a dubious iction, a phantom in the minds
of overimaginative readers” (Mitchell 1989, 91). he essays that follow demonstrate how writers
from varied corners of the globe have negotiated the presence of these phantom landscapes,
making the space of the Iberian Peninsula not only a domain of “essential solitude,” but also, a
verbal reality.
Identitarian projections: Between isolationism
and reintegrationism
he hidden history of tripartite Iberianism

homas Harrington
During the last three decades, we have witnessed an important reconsideration of the discur-
sive bases of national identity within the Iberian Peninsula. his revision of time-worn tropes
of “Spanish” (read “Castilian”) national unity occurred in response to two key imperatives. One
was the Spanish constitution of 1978. Its recognition of the “historic” status of the cultures and
languages of Catalonia, Galicia, and Euskadi, within a broader constellation of Autonomous
Communities in Spain, created new intellectual “markets” for non-Castilian conceptions of
corporate identity. he elites of these so-called peripheral culture-nations responded by lo-
cating and circulating long-suppressed documentation of each collective’s unique historical
trajectory. his drive to re-institutionalize the long-submerged national memories of Catalo-
nia, Galicia, and Euskadi on the Peninsula coincided with a strongly renewed fascination – no
doubt linked to a growing loss of faith in allegedly “objective” tools of historical analysis – with
recovering existentially precarious discourses of collective identity in the rest of the world. As
a result of these mutually reinforcing local and global tendencies, the “diferential facts” of the
Iberian cultural matrix are arguably more widely circulated today than at any time in recent
contemporary history. What cultured citizen of the Castilian heartland today does not have
at least some passing acquaintance with the important roles played by Enric Prat de la Riba,
Sabino Arana, Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao, and Fernando Pessoa in underscoring what
these writers viewed as the singularity, and essential self-suiciency, of their native cultures
during the early- and mid-twentieth century?
Yet for all of this apparent movement away from a monolithically Castilian conception of
Iberian life, there remains a striking lack of interest in both scholarly and journalistic circles
about what would appear to be the logical “next step” in the analytical process: tracing the his-
tory of attempts made during the same period to join the Peninsula’s major nationalist projects
together in a united yet simultaneously multi-polar fashion.
his aversion appears to stem from the institutionalized predominance of monistic con-
ceptions of identity within each of the region’s national communities, a tendency which is a
legacy of Castile’s precocious success in the ield of European nation-building. Spain rose to
world prominence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries owing, in no small measure,
to the ability of Castilian elites to present to the world, and the home-borne populations they
sought to mobilize, a compelling illusion of cultural homogeneity. In so doing, they deliberately
conlated the new discourse of state cohesion with existing canons of Christian thought, doc-
trines which, ater several centuries of “dialogue” with the totalizing cosmology of Islam, were
heavily imbued with a unitary and hence fundamentally non-hybridizing and non-dialogic
discursive architecture.
his “religiously-enabled” and monistically-deined model of national mobilization would

spawn numerous imitators and adherents over the ensuing centuries in Europe and the rest of
the world. Among the more surprising of these were the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century pedagogues of nationhood in Catalonia, the Basque country, and Galicia. In efect, na-
tionalist leaders in these communities, which were by then linguistically hybridized, responded
to what they saw as unjust Castilian hegemony by disseminating visions of their own national
epic that were oten as unitarily-deined as those of the centralist oppressor.
During the three “windows” of relative discursive liberty during the Spanish twentieth cen-
tury (1906–1923, 1931–36 and 1978–present), intellectual elites in all three places have worked
assiduously to institutionalize these “stand-alone” renderings of “their” national past. he result
is an intra-Peninsular “stand-of ” between unitarily constituted discourses of national identity
which leaves little room for an analysis of hybrid, overlapping, or multi-polar concepts of the
Iberian past.
When, however, we look beyond this imposing barrier of institutionalized “truths” and delve
into historical archives, we can see that there is, in fact, a rich history of attempts on the part of in-
tellectuals to cultivate the idea of a Peninsula, and at times with it, a transatlantic Hispanic space
that was unabashedly multinational, yet fundamentally conjoined in the pursuit of larger cultural,
economic, and political goals. he prime, though not exclusive point of radiation for this cultural
entrepreneurship, was Catalonia. Starting in the 1870s, Catalan intellectuals, working in concert
with important sympathizers in Castile and Portugal, began the process of re-conceptualizing the
nature of inter-group relations on the Peninsula. In the late 1890s a group of writers with links
to literary modernisme began to separate the issue of intra-Peninsular comity from the oten
uncompromising, and increasingly marginalized, stratagems of the “hard” Republican let. In ef-
fect, the proponents of this new “tripartite Iberianism” sought to steer a middle road between Pi
i Margall’s “old” Federalism, with its heavy emphasis on contractual notions of political solidarity
and pan-Iberian solutions, and the emerging ideology of the Lliga (League), rooted largely in an
historicist understanding of the nation and thus an essentially “stand alone” vision of Catalan
life. hough many Tripartite Iberianists would lend their support to the Lliga over the ensuing
decades, and the Lliga would incorporate Iberianist tropes into its discourse from time to time,
there always remained a fairly clear line of demarcation between the two groups. he key difer-
ence lay in the Iberianists’ consistent and open embrace of heterodoxy, both within Catalonia and
the Peninsula as a whole. In efect, from 1898 to 1924, and with markedly less intensity from that
time until 1960, the movement acted as a refuge for many that embraced key parts of conserva-
tive Catalanism’s world view but were, for one reason or another, fundamentally suspicious of
its tendency to re-create Castilian-style notions of cultural homogeneity. In the following pages
I will reconstruct the trajectory of this still largely hidden movement from its beginnings within
the Penya de l’Avenç (he Avenç Circle) to its conclusion in Gaziel’s wistful but lucid internal exile.
By the mid 1890s Catalanism had evolved from its beginnings as a circumscribed move-
ment of poetic airmation to a transversal social movement containing two major political
tendencies – one on the rise and the other clearly in decline – and a number of cultural “sensi-
bilities” that, while not always frontally political, contained incipient political messages.
he irst great efort to channel Catalanist sentiments into a viable political movement had
been made by Valentí Almirall during the late 1870s and 1880s. Almirall, who entered public life
140 homas Harrington
as a disciple of the great theorist and short-term implementer of Federal Republicanism, Fran-
cisco Pi i Margall, during the revolutionary period, began to understand the inherent limita-
tions of his mentor’s approach to generating social cohesion. While he continued to subscribe to
Pi’s core belief in political voluntarism, he understood (just as Stalin would later on) that gener-
ating a broad and sustainable movement of social change required providing the populace with
“something more” than an abstract belief in decentralization and egalitarian ideals. For him, that
“something more” was the “particular” language and history of Catalonia. Almirall sought, in
efect, to add a strong dash of historicism (a tendency rooted in Romanticism and generally as-
sociated with conservative movements of identity) to his otherwise progressive vision.
In 1887, however, Catalanism’s center of gravity began to move from the let to the right
side of the political spectrum. A key moment in this transition was the break-up of the Centre
Català (Catalan center), which had been founded in 1882 by Almirall as an open and theoreti-
cally non-partisan forum for the discussion and development of Catalanist ideas. hat year, the
organization became divided over the question of whether or not to endorse Catalan participa-
tion in the upcoming Exposición Universal (Universal exhibition) in Barcelona. Almirall op-
posed the idea of collaborating with the central government on the project. he group in favor
of collaborating with Madrid, which included well-known titans of the Catalan bourgeoisie
such as Güell, Domènech, and Guimerà, took the name of the Lliga de Catalunya (he Cata-
lan League). Joining the new organization were the ambitious and energetic members of the
Centre’s youth group (Centre Escolar Catalanista [Catalanist student center]) founded the year
before. his group of young activists, which included igures such as Prat de la Riba, Cambó,
and Puig i Cadafalch would prove to be far more skilled than Almirall had been in the all-im-
portant political arts of public pedagogy and alliance building. As a result, they came to quickly
dominate political Catalanism and frame the debates within it. his had the efect of consigning
Almirall, with his progressive ideology and implied pan-Iberian concerns, to a place of near ir-
relevance within the movement by the last years of the nineteenth century.
he most immediately recognizable “sensibility” within turn-of-the-century Catalanism
was, of course, modernisme. However, it was not, as has oten been suggested, the only signii-
cant engine of innovation within the emergent Catalan cultural system. Beside it, we ind the
Catholic aestheticism of the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluch (he artistic circle of Saint Luke), the
“economism” of igures such as Guillem Graell, who channeled their desire for a greater Catalan
role within Spain into the technocratic language of trade and investment policy. Within this
last tendency, there was also a strong current of neo-imperialist Americanism, perhaps best
represented by Federico Rahola, which held that the resurgence of Catalonia within Spain was
inexorably linked to a Catalan “re-conquest” of Spanish American markets, especially those of
the Southern Cone.
Further complicating matters is the fact that modernisme was itself largely a rhetorical
place holder, that is, a single word used to facilitate the discussion of a highly complex and het-
erodox corpus of tendencies and ideas. hus we cannot, and should not, really speak of a single
turn-of-the century modernista ethos but rather a set of oten quite divergent tendencies linked,
as Alan Yates (1985) has suggested, by a general concern with generating new “stocks” for the
Catalan cultural system.
he most immediately evident of the modernist sub-currents concerned itself with the re-
deployment of public space and was perhaps best represented by the architect Lluis Domènech
i Montaner but also present (though under a distinct aesthetic guises and perhaps lesser de-
grees of civic idealism) in other prominent architects of the era such as Josep Puig i Cadafalch
and Antoni Gaudí. Another was the upper-class bohemianism of Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon
Casas, the founders of modernisme’s two most readily identiiable institutions, Cau Ferrat (he
Iron Lair) and Els Quatre Gats (he four cats). Largely apolitical in nature (though some po-
litical messages can certainly be found in Casas’s non-portrait work), these two artists and the
members of their inner circle were fundamentally concerned with the social validation of art
and the artist in the face of an increasingly homogenizing society. heir eforts in this realm led
them to seek out reinforcing “fraternal” references in other European cultural systems such as
France, Belgium, and Norway. his importation of foreign cultural artifacts opened the door,
in turn, for a re-conceptualization of Catalonia’s relationship with its cultural Others, a ield of
inquiry largely informed up until that point by the imposing mass of Castilian culture. Another
group, the Penya de l’Avenç maintained a fairly luid relationship with the Rusiñol-Casas circle
and shared its fascination with intra-European cultural commerce, giving special attention to
links with the “Neo-Latin” nations of the Mediterranean. A key diference in outlook was the
desire among certain members (most notably Alexandre Cortada and Joaquim Casas-Carbó)
to apply this interest in cultural exchange to the broader and more explicitly political task of
theorizing a new place for Catalonia in the European concert of nations.
Finally, there was the Majorcan branch of the movement. Contemporary treatments of
Majorcan contributions to the development of Catalanism have tended to oscillate between
two extreme postures, one which simply excludes them from the analysis and the other which
presents them as generically Catalan, that is, indistinguishable in their genesis from ideas gen-
erated on the mainland. In fact, however, the work of those Majorcans who contributed to the
broader movement, such as M.S. Oliver, Joan Torrendell, and Gabriel Alomar, was always very
much informed by the peculiarities of the island’s culture. Perhaps the most notable marker of
this outlook was their highly pragmatic language choice; they generally believed that one could
quite efectively “do Catalanism” in Castilian.
One of the greatest of Prat de la Riba’s many gits as a politician was his innate understand-
ing of the symbiotic relationship between cultural production and nationalist mobilization.
While Almirall had been a clear pioneer in this ield, his own personal and ideological rigidity
prevented him from acting as a mentor to those who might otherwise have enlarged upon his
own prodigious legacy. In contrast, Prat believed that the key to strengthening the movement lay
in “acquiring” as many gited cultural producers as possible and deploying their production for
maximum strategic efect. Of course, it was he who would control the wheres and whens of such
deployments, especially ater La Veu de Catalunya (he voice of Catalonia) became a daily in 1901.
As the array of institutions under his efective control grew in the irst decade and a half of the
twentieth century, his role as the main arbiter of the emergent cultural system grew ever-stronger.
For members of the various cultural families of Catalanism described above, the Pratian
cultural machinery constituted a more or less constant pole of inluence in their lives. Some,
such as the members of the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluch were more than happy to be subsumed
into its rhythms. Others maintained much more problematic, on-again, of-again relationships
with the Lliga’s institutional logic. his was the case with the Penya de l’Avenç. And it was at least
in part as a result of this discomfort with the magisterium of the conservative Catalanism in
cultural matters, that tripartite Iberianism emerged as a recognizable strain of thought at the
turn-of-the-century.
In April of 1898, Joaquim Casas-Carbó, a core member of the Penya de l’Avenç, published
an essay titled “Pensant-hi” (hinking about it) in the journal Catalònia, where he refers to the
existence of three essential Peninsular nations: Catalonia, Castile, and Portugal. he essay’s most
evident conceptual premise – made evident when he posits the essential incongruence between
the terms “state” and “nation” – is historicist, and in this way, in concordance with the then fast-
rising conservative strain of the Catalanist movement. At the end of the document, however, he
proposes an idea that had, until that time, been largely associated with the “other” branch of
the movement: bringing the three historically determined culture-nations of the Peninsula to-
gether in a “harmónica confederació” (harmonic confederation) (1898, 15). he idea of bringing
the Peninsular nations together in some sort of union was not, of course, completely foreign to
conservative Catalanism. A year before, Prat de la Riba himself had proposed a “great State that
combined within its boundaries all of the Iberian peoples” (Prat de la Riba 1998, 446). However,
this call and others like it in subsequent years by igures such as Pompeyo Gener, Enric-Josep
Ors, and Eugeni d’Ors, were derived from the emerging imperialist ideal of a Catalonia whose
exceptional skill and vitality would allow it to work as primer inter pares within Peninsular afairs.
In positing the possibility of a “harmonic,” which is to say, a non-coercive meeting of the peninsu-
lar minds, Casas-Carbó was, in contrast, invoking the ghosts of Proudhon and Renan, as well as
their most important Iberian interpreters, Pi i Margall and Almirall, and in this way proclaiming
his belief in the possibility of reconciling historicism with voluntarism in the Peninsular context.
In pursuing his decidedly non-hierarchical “tripartite” vision of Peninsular relations, how-
ever, Casas-Carbó had one important handicap: he lacked irst-hand knowledge of the culture(s)
of Galicia and Portugal. his gap was remedied with the fortuitous arrival to the Penya de l’Avenç
of Ignasi Ribera i Rovira, probably some time in late 1903 or in the spring of 1904.
Ribera i Rovira is one of the more colorful and, it would seem, more unjustly overlooked
personages of turn-of-the-century Catalan intellectual life. Born to a conservative Catalan fam-
ily in Castellbell in 1880, he moved to Portugal in the fall of 1900 when his father, a textile en-
gineer, took a job in the central city of Tomar. By his own admission, at that time he knew next
to nothing of the place that was to become his new home: “I let Catalonia without knowing the
least bit about the welcoming country where I was going to establish my residence. My educa-
tion had told me nothing about Lusitania” (1907a, 45). his ignorance was, however, quickly
replaced by a voracious fascination for Portugal’s culture. With his great linguistic gits and
entrepreneurial energy, Ribera soon established himself as the unchallenged nexus between
the cultures of the eastern and western shores of the Peninsula. In the spring of 1901, he began
writing articles on Portuguese life and culture for Catalunya Artística (Artistic Catalonia) and a
short time later for La Renaixensa (he renaissance). In December of 1902, he begun writing a
regular section called “Crònicas de Lisboa” (Lisbon chronicles) in Prat’s La Veu de Catalunya, a
task he would continue until his deinitive return to Barcelona in the spring of 1904. During the
same period, he published articles in Portuguese for the weekly A Verdade (he truth) of Tomar
and the Diário de Notícias (he Daily News) of Lisbon.
In the scarce critical literature on Ribera i Rovira, one question looms large: when did his
essentially bilateral interest in fomenting cultural exchange and mutual knowledge between
Catalonia and Portugal get “rolled into” the broader framework of tripartite Iberianism? At-
tached to this question is the subsidiary issue of when did his apparent contentment with the
Lliga – as evinced by his regular collaboration with the La Veu – give way to an embrace of
Republicanism?
For Felix Cucurull, who rescued Ribera i Rovira from near complete anonymity in 1967
with his Dos pobles ibèrics (Two Iberian peoples), the answer is clear: Ribera became a Repub-
lican and Iberianist shortly ater his arrival in Portugal, thanks to his assiduous contact with
a Portuguese intellectual class within which both Republicanism and Federalism had a much
greater speciic gravity than they then had in Spain. However, for Víctor Martínez-Gil (1997),
who has studied Ribera i Rovira’s intellectual trajectory more recently, the question is more
complex. He believes that during the irst years of the century, Ribera i Rovira was a Catalan
Lusitanist, that is, a Lliga-oriented nationalist who viewed his second home, Portugal, through
the prism of the conservative party’s incipient ideology of commercial and cultural imperial-
ism. According to this narrative, it was only ater entering into contact with Joan Maragall in
late 1905, when Maragall was writing the prologue to Ribera’s Poesia & Prosa (Poetry and prose),
that Ribera i Rovira put his Lusitanism in the service of what Martínez-Gil portrays as Mara-
gall’s concept of tripartite Iberianism, developed gradually by the great poet between 1902 and
1905. He believes further that Ribera’s conversion to Republicanism came sometime in 1907. In
efect, Martínez-Gil demolishes Cucurull’s vision of Ribera i Rovira as an acolyte and imitator
of Teóilo Braga and the Portuguese Republicans and replaces it with a vision of him as acolyte
and imitator of Maragall.
here are, in my view, a number of solid reasons to doubt this second version of events. he
irst is the fact that if Ribera i Rovira’s voluminous writing reveals anything, it is a very strong
ego, and hence, a complete lack of obsequiousness and/or reverence to more well-known writ-
ers. his is not to say that he was not inluenced by others. Rather, that when he was, he would
acknowledge the reality in a straightforward fashion. he other characteristic that stands out
in his intellectual and vital trajectory was his free-wheeling pragmatism. In a short (seemingly
self-published) autobiographical text, Sergio: llibre prohibit (Sergio: the secret book), Ribera i
Rovira, paints a vivid portrait of his life and his existential outlook during the irst years of the
century. Referring to himself in the third person by his favorite pseudonym, Sergio (which he
used for his Crònicas de Lisboa), he describes a decidedly relativistic young man who subor-
dinated all of his literary activities to the much more important task of “living fully and well”:
What most interested Sergio was life. To live, live, live intensely, passionately. Because of this,
his preferred books were always memoirs. He disdained history because history – he used to
say – living history is, we must admit, equally made of truth and lies, or maybe even more of
lies than truth.1
1. “Lo que més interessava a Sergio, era la vida. Viure, viure, viure intensament, apassionadament. Per aixó,
els llibres que preferia sempre eren ells llibres de memòries. Menyspreava la història, perque la història
– decia – la història viva, entem-nos, tant se fa amb la veritat com amb la mentida, i potser més amb la
mentida que amb la veritat.” (Ribera i Rovira 1920, 19)
And in the same text he uses a quote from Ángel Ganivet to further describe his young self:
I hate our organization and its ininite farces with all of my soul, and I will enthusiastically
watch all the works of destruction, even if I am the irst to perish. I do not attempt to reform
anything, only to protest. I get all worked up, not in order to do nothing, but to not see.2
hese descriptions are accompanied by numerous suggestions of a very active amorous life. he
picture that emerges is someone quite far removed from any strong devotion of the campaign
to re-build Catalonia along the “disciplined” lines proposed by the conservative Catholics of the
Lliga and much more in tune (insofar as he was political at all) with the secular liberalism of the
Republican movements in both Portugal and Catalonia.
he theory of his 1905 “conversion” to Iberianism at the hands of Maragall is undermined
further when we examine the textual markers of the relationship between the men. he sole
mention of Ribera i Rovira in the complete works of Joan Maragall is found in the reprint of the
aforementioned prologue of Poesia & Prosa.
hough clearly greater in number, the references to Maragall are also fairly sparse in Ribera
i Rovira’s writing. his absence is particularly notable in Iberisme, his main compilation of Ibe-
rianist ideas published in 1907. In the book, Ribera i Rovira makes only one reference to Mara-
gall. In it, he essentially refers to the great poet as the mere popularizer of his Iberianist theories:
A clear demonstration that my ideal for the political reorganization of the Peninsula was no
mere caprice came when Joan Maragall ofered it to the masses in the hope that they might
make it their own… Already some time ago, just ater the irst news of my Iberian Federalist
principle began to circulate, Maragall became smitten with it and wrote about it, producing a
beautiful prologue for my book. [italics added]3
Ater many years of silence on the subject, this line of reasoning reappears in a 1924 essay by
Ribera on the great poet. In it, he praises Maragall, for his lyrical sincerity (in contrast to what
he sees as the vacuous formalism of the noucentistas) and for being the purest voice of enyoran-
tisme (longing), the essential spirit of the Catalans, but gives him absolutely no credit for hav-
ing invented or advanced the Iberianist creed. Rather, he once again makes clear that he views
Maragall as his student in things Iberian:
Here I relect upon my old theory that every cultured resident of the Peninsula ought to know
the three Iberian languages – Catalan, Castilian and Portuguese – so as to be able to enjoy the
representative writers of each race in their original authenticity […] In our long conversations
about Lusitanian culture, he [Maragall] listened intensely to me, with his gaze and his thoughts
lost in the ininite distance. [italics added]4
2. “Odio con toda mi alma nuestra organización y sus ininitas farsas y veré con entusiasmo todos los traba-
jos de destrucción, aun que sea yo el primero que perezca. No trato de reformar nada, ni siquiera protestar.
Me lío la cabeza y no para hacer nada, sino para no ver.” (Ribera i Rovira 1920, 12)
3. “Demostració palesa de que no era un ideal insolit aquest meu ideal de remodelació politica d’Iberia quan
En Joan Maragall oferia a les multituts pera que s’assimilessin… Ja temps enrera, quan tot just havia escam-
pada la llevor del meu principi federitiu iberic, en Maragall, se n’enamorà i escrigué, prologant bellament
un meu llibre.” (Ribera i Rovira 1907a, 77)
4. “Aqui penso en la meva vella teoria de que tot peninsular culte hauria de conèixer familiarment el tres
idioms ibèrics – català, castellà i portuguès – per fruir en la seva genüinitat original les obres dels espriptors
Finally, and most convincingly, in Sergio: llibre prohibit, the account of his early years, he speaks
with unmistakable disdain of how “others” stole his original Iberianist ideas and presented
them to the public as their own:
His political writings [those of Sergio, his literary alter-ego], his Iberist theories – he was a
passionate Lusophile – have nourished the thinking of the most noteworthy Catalan propa-
gandists, who have, naturally, attributed paternity to themselves, without ever mentioning my
poor friend.5
In this context, it would not seem unreasonable to view Ribera i Rovira’s seemingly plagiarous
use of Maragall’s words in the title and prologue of La integridad de la patria (he integrity of
the fatherland, 1907b) as a carefully calibrated act of vengeance motivated by his sense of having
had his theories and ideas appropriated by his more famous colleague.
hese clear attempts to distance himself from Maragall on the issue of Iberianist theory
contrast with the open acknowledgment of the mutual inluences between himself and others
in the same line of work. Iberisme carries two prologues. he irst is by Casas-Carbó and the
second by Teóilo Braga, In his introductory essay, Casas-Carbó repeats his conception of a
Peninsula composed of “three neolatin cultures: the Portuguese, the Castilian, and the Catalan
– representatives of the three principle national nuclei that developed parallel to each other” (Ri-
bera i Rovira 1907a, 7) and goes on to describe Ribera as “the most enthusiastic and meritorious
of the Catalan iberists” (9). It is obviously the message of a mentor acknowledging the progress
of the most brilliant and accomplished of his students. Years later, in El problema peninsular
(he Peninsular problem, 1933), his omnibus collection of writings on the Iberianist movement,
Casas-Carbó re-conirms this notion of an Iberianism engendered in skeletal terms by himself
and brought to theoretical fruition by Ribera i Rovira, by calling the younger man his “apostol”
(apostle) (1933, 269). In the same collection, Casas-Carbó praises Maragall’s role in highlighting
Peninsular diversity, but makes it clear that he had little or no role in the development of the
Tripartite movement’s conceptual underpinnings. In his prologue to Iberisme, Braga is similarly
forthcoming in acknowledging Ribera, with his profoundly lived bi-culturalism, as the crystal-
lizing force in the Iberianist movement which Braga himself, and other members of his genera-
tion such as Oliveira Martins and Antero de Quental, had long promoted (albeit with somewhat
diferent structural details) within Portugal:
His knowledge of Portuguese life allows his observant spirit to uncover the moral and social
relationships between it and the political, economic and autonomist life of Catalonia. Out of
this, in turn, comes the revelation of the three unmistakable historical and ethnic realities of
Portugal, Castile and Catalonia and the deinitive conception of the problem of Peninsular
Federalism. (In Ribera i Rovira 1907a, 16–17)
representatius de cada raça. […] En nostres llargues converses sobre la cultura lusitana, ell (Maragall)
m’escoltava absort, perdut l’esguard i el pensament en la ininita llunyania.” (Ribera i Rovira 1920, 23)
5. “Els seus escrits politics, les seves teories iberistes – era un lusóil apasionat – han nodrit el pensament dels
més notables propagandists catalans, que, naturalment, se’n han atribuit la paternitat, sense esmentar mai
el meu pobre amic”. (Ribera i Rovira 1920, 23)
Ribera i Rovira would, in turn, openly acknowledge his own considerable debt to both men. In
the text of Iberisme, Ribera i Rovira openly refers to Casas-Carbó as his “precursor” (1907a, 99)
and goes on to cite the text of his Pensant-hi extensively. He also repeatedly referred to Braga in
his writings and wrote, in nearly apotheosizing tones, of the meeting that took place between
the two men in March, 1907 in Lisbon.
Teóilo Braga received us with open arms, which he then used to efusively embrace the guest,
who now was feeling like a disciple. He sat me down at his side and asked me to speak to him
of Catalonia, that faraway sister whose ideals and politics he intuited as being so close to those
of Portugal as to render possible the beginning of a joint pursuit of the Latin dream. (“El lusi-
tanismo en Cataluña” [Lusitanism in Catalonia], La Cataluña, April 18, 1908)
He then goes on to describe a complete meeting of the minds regarding the desirability of
an integrated, tripartite approach to Peninsular culture and politics. He would re-publish this
same account numerous times in the coming years. he desire to create a line of intellectual
continuity between himself and the Portuguese polymath could not be any more transparent.
In his study, Martínez-Gil suggests that Ribera i Rovira’s irst substantive contacts with the
famous tertulia of l’Avenç came in 1905. It is likely, however, that they came one, and possibly
even two years earlier than this. In an article published in 1931 the Libro-Homenaje for Ribera,
Josep Massó Ventós, the son of one of the Avenç circle’s founders and principle members, Jaume
Massó Torrents, recalls the irst appearance of Ribera i Rovira at the famous bookstore and
publishing house.
One day Ribera i Rovira appeared at the meetings of l’Avenç, the bookstore and publishing
concern begun by my father and Casas-Carbó in the tiny salon of Ronda University. He was
a young man who had just arrived from Portugal with a book of poetry, the irst that was
published in Catalan in Portuguese territory. I remember that the book was called “Els meus
amors” (My loves). I was a boy that listened to the chatter of those gentlemen, who paid very
little attention to me, names such as Joan Maragall, Ignacio Iglesias, Enrique Morera, Pous i
Pages, Pedro Corominas and Alejandro Cortada. I remember that the irst day I saw the “new
gentleman,” that was Ribera i Rovira, I heard him speak of “Iberism,” a mysterious word that
that seemed both strange and suggestive to me probably becasue the, for this “new gentleman”
spoke very well and knew how to convince, and I can say that he convinced me the irst time I
heard him. (In Anon. 1931, 30)
Ribera’s book of verse, Els meus tres amors (My three loves), had been published in Portugal
in 1901. If as Martínez-Gil suggests, Ribera’s substantive engagement with the Penya de l’Avenç
began in 1905, it seems rather incongruous that he should bring as his intellectual greeting card
a book of poetry published in obscurity (and most likely with his own funds) four years before.
In the years between 1901 and 1905 Ribera had published numerous articles and lectures in
Catalan and Portuguese newspapers and magazines, a number of which were already available
in pamphlet or book form.
he idea that Ribera i Rovira was introduced to the Avenç circle in 1905 and was, in ef-
fect, converted to Iberianism by Maragall in the last months of that same year becomes still
more incongruous when one examines the political and administrative context surrounding his
series of eight lectures on Portuguese culture – subsequently published as Portugal Artistic in

mid-1905 – delivered at the Ateneu between January 7 and February 25, 1905.
Ribera i Rovira returned deinitively to Barcelona from Portugal in March, 1904. As he did
so, he continued his active collaborations in both the Portuguese and the Catalan press. He also
started planning for an excursion of Portuguese tourists to Barcelona designed – as had been
the case with a similar, but ultimately still-born, efort in 1902 – to foment greater understand-
ing between the cultures of the Atlantic and Mediterranean regions of the Peninsula. Leading
up to the trip, Ribera had boasted to his Portuguese readers of how the Lusitanian tourists
would be greeted by the City Council of Barcelona and its most important personality, Francesc
Cambó. But when the tourists inally arrived, no such reception took place.
Ribera’s failed rendezvous with Cambó more or less coincided with the advent of tensions
between the eloquent spokesman of the Lliga and an important sector of the Catalan intellec-
tual class. his dissident group, which was to become the nucleus of the Centre Nacional Repub-
licà (National republican center) in 1906, also had very deep ties to two other key institutions
of Catalan culture: El Ateneu barcelonés (he Barcelonan atheneum) and the Penya de l’Avenç.
he precipitating factor in the schism had been Cambó’s decision to contravene an agreement
reached within the leadership of the Lliga and the address by Alfonso XIII during the young
monarch’s April, 1904 visit to Barcelona.
Among the more prominent members of this dissident group was Lluis Doménech i Mon-
taner. In the months following their break with the Lliga, he and other Republican dissidents
worked to establish their own countervailing cultural apparatus. One important step was to
establish El Poble Català (he Catalan people) as a weekly (it would become a daily and the of-
icial organ of the CNR in 1906). Another was to gain efective control of the Ateneu. In the au-
tumn elections of 1904, Doménech and another important member of the emergent Republican
bloc within Catalanism, Lluhí i Rissech, were elected, respectively, president and vice-president
of the cultural organization. Appointed to head up the Ateneu’s literature section under the
new regime, with responsibility for planning the events in this realm over the coming year,
was Massó i Torrents, another Republican dissident and the co-founder (with Casas-Carbó) of
l’Avenç. Massó moved quite quickly to integrate his business partner’s apostol into the institu-
tion’s programming: by November, Ribera i Rovira was announcing to his Portuguese readers
the advent of his upcoming lecture series at the Ateneu (see Martínez-Gil 1997, 177).
Ribera’s ongoing migration toward the people and ideas in the emergent Republican brand
of Catalanism, with its implied belief in some form or another of an integral Peninsular solu-
tion, is underscored by his decision in the late summer and autumn of 1904 to break with the
heretofore conservative and imperialistic tone of his writing and publish laudatory articles in
Catalunya Artística on the two most widely-recognized proponents of the Federalist tradition,
Teóilo Braga and Francesc Pi i Margall (see Martínez-Gil 1997, 176).
Summing up, it seems clear, as Martínez-Gil has argued, that Ribera i Rovira went to Por-
tugal as a young man who, owing to family inluences, was sympathetic to the Lliga’s incipient
imperialistic vision of the intra-Peninsular dynamics. However, as Cucurull long ago suggested,
it also appears that he quickly came under the inluence of Portuguese Republicans like Braga
and others who, in turn, awakened him to the rich vein of Federalist thought in both Spain
and Portugal. Ever the ambitious pragmatist, however, he was careful to keep news of these
new political leanings from the power elites in Barcelona, especially from his editors at La Veu
de Catalunya, who were, at the time, the only people able to ofer him regular, high-proile
assignments in his native language. But as he continued to write for the La Veu and to serve
as an ostensible defender of its hierarchical view of Catalan society and its imperialistic (and
hence, ultimately ad hoc) approach to intra-Peninsular relations, he was actively cultivating ties
to Casas-Carbó and the Avenç circle where, while there was still overall support for the basic
goals of the Lliga, there was also a growing belief in the need to generate a more secular and
egalitarian form of Catalanism that would lead to more fraternal and stable relations with the
Romance nations of the Peninsula as well as the other neo-Latin nations of Europe. Cambó’s
failure to back Ribera’s tourist project combined with the Republican takeover of the Ateneu
and the emergence of the El Poble Català as a possible new venue for journalism in Catalan
appear to have emboldened Ribera to begin showing his long-held Republican and Federalist
sympathies. he success of his lectures on Portugal at the Ateneu (Ribera i Rovira 1905b) during
the irst months of 1905 only consolidated his standing among the now Republican-oriented
membership of the Ateneu/Avenç cultural axis and no doubt further heightened his contact
with Casas-Carbó and his work on a Catalanist “third way.”
he success of the lectures also helped him gain a nearly indispensable chit for a young
writer on the make in Catalonia: a prologue written by Joan Maragall. Martínez-Gil has sug-
gested that that Maragall’s prologue to Ribera’s Poesia & Prosa, written in late 1905, efectively
converted the young Lusitanist into an Iberianist. However, as we have seen, this Saul to Paul
interpretation of Ribera’s ideological evolution greatly undervalues the likely level of dialogue
and collaboration between Ribera and Casas-Carbó in the context of the Avenç circle and also
his involvement with Portuguese Republicanism from 1903 onward. Moreover, it fails to ex-
plain why in later years, both Casas-Carbó and Ribera readily highlighted their collaboration
with the creation of Iberianist ideals while simultaneously relegating Maragall to a position of
absolutely minimal importance in the same project. he Libro-Homenaje, dedicated to Ribera
i Rovira in 1931, is replete with references which refer to him, and him alone, as the creator
of what I have come to call tripartite Iberianism. If Maragall’s prologue did have an efect on
Ribera, it was largely in the realm of enhancing his cultural capital within the Catalan literary
world and thus making him relatively less dependent on the patronage of the Lliga-dominated
cultural apparatus and hence more inclined to let his more let-leaning and federalizing convic-
tions ind their way into print.
Just as Ribera was locating and reining his long-muted progressive voice, the contours
of Catalan civil society were suddenly altered by the Cut-Cut incident. he Spanish military’s
attack upon the oices of this satirical publication in November 1905, led to the formation of
Solidaritat Catalana (Catalan solidarity) in March of 1906 and a subsequent period of social
and political euphoria within Catalanism, a time during which intramural tensions were held
in abeyance.
For Ribera, this meant a reprieve from having to efect a deinitive break from the Lliga
power structure. During 1906 and the irst months of 1907, he continued to enhance his ties to
moderate-let Catalanism and the Avenç/Ateneu circle. However, he also maintained cordial
relations with his old conservative patrons. Proof of his ability and desire to continue play-
ing both sides of the aisle is the fact that he placed one of the “Chairs” in Portuguese Studies
(generated within the framework of the recently-created Estudis Unversitaris Catalans) at the
Ateneu and the other at the Center Autonomista de Dependents del Comerç i de la Indústria, or
CADCI (Autonomist center of commercial and industrial employees), which was then still then
dominated by the Lliga.
he relative distension of the internal political situation during 1906 also had the efect
of bringing notions of Iberian solidarity somewhat more fully into the Catalan political main-
stream. For example, in the inal chapters of La nacionalitat catalana (he Catalan nationality),
Prat de la Riba speaks irst of the need to create a Federació Espanyola (Spanish federation) and
then, a short time later, a Federació Ibérica (Iberian federation). For Martínez-Gil, this is evi-
dence of the growing insinuation of the Maragall formula for Peninsular unity into the highest
levels of the Lliga leadership. More likely, however, it is yet another example of Prat’s extremely
keen strategic mind. As Vicente Cacho Viu has argued, Prat’s team never embraced the idea of
interventionism in Spanish afairs in any precise or substantive way (1998, 119–20). Rather, they
used the rhetoric of a pan-Hispanic regeneration as a way of inoculating themselves against the
Madrid establishment’s endemic charges of Catalanism’s disloyalty to the state. he mentions
of Iberianist solutions at the end of his carefully considered attempt to codify the nationalist
discourse in Catalonia not only served this important purpose but also had the potential of
enhancing support for his policies among a very talented and thus potentially inluential sector
(the Avenç group) of his unwieldy political coalition. he supericial and essentially co-opting
nature of his gambit is readily apparent in the text. While he mentions the possibility of creat-
ing a Federació Espanyola and a Federació Ibérica in two successive chapters, he never explains
the exact nature of either, nor the logical relationship between them. More signiicantly, these
poorly-deined concepts are presented in the context of Catalan imperialism’s uni-polar logic;
the other Iberian peoples in the would-be project are presented as almost wholly inert and
historically vacuous subjects upon whom the Catalans will impose their own vital superiority.
his is quite distinct from the non-hierarchical highly “fraternal” language which animated
Cases-Carbó’s 1898 call for a “harmónica confederació” of the three essential Iberian peoples
and almost all of Ribera i Rovira’s writings on Portugal.
It was nonetheless thanks to a similar, albeit markedly more sincere, desire to generate
cohesion within Solidaritat Catalana (Catalan solidarity) that tripartite Iberianism gained its
irst foothold within the Catalan press. hough largely forgotten today, La Cataluña, a Castil-
ian-language weekly which debuted on October 5, 1907, was extremely inluential in its day. In
the still limited critical literature on the journal it is generally portrayed as a closely monitored,
Spanish-language mouthpiece for the Lliga, and more speciically, its Joventut Nacionalista (Na-
tionalist Youth). his was certainly the case ater its change of leadership in the summer of 1910.
Before that date, however, it was a far more open and heterodox publication in which a wide
variety of voices from the Catalanist family of ideologies were represented.
he failure to grasp the true heterodoxy of La Cataluña in its intital stage (1907–10) is
linked to the almost systematic diminution of the role of Joan Torrendell within the publica-
tion, and within the broader context of turn of the century Catalan culture. Born in Majorca
in 1869, Torrendell emigrated to Uruguay at age 20. here, he quickly established himself as
the country’s leading literary critic. He returned to Majorca in 1895 and became involved with
La Almudaina, the famous newspaper of Miquel dels Sants Oliver, distinguishing himself not
only for his incisive pen but also his let-leaning sympathies. hrough his articles and his well-
received plays of an Ibsen-like social Modernism he – like his friend and colleague at La Almu-
daina, Gabriel Alomar – sought to establish a social space in which a Modernisme, Catalanism,
Republicanism, and Majorcan regionalism/nationalism were seamlessly joined together, an ef-
fort which culminated in the founding of La Veu de Mallorca in 1900.
he journal’s failure ater only three months of publication soon made clear to Torrendell
the limits involved in pursuing serious linguistic and class reform in Majorca, where the central-
ist church and the military held even more sway than they did on the mainland. Torrendell’s
self-image as a hard-charging outsider was further transformed when he was invited, along with
Miquel Costa i Llobera, Gabriel Alomar, Joan Alcover, and Miquel dels Sants Oliver to partici-
pate in a series of lectures organized on Majorcan culture at the Barcelona Ateneu. As a result of
the lectures, Torrendell gained a metropolitan audience for his ideas. He also gained a new job.
Shortly ater his giving his talk at the Ateneu in May of 1904, Oliver was ofered – thanks to the
intervention of Maragall – the job of director of the Diario de Barcelona, a development which,
in turn, catapulted Torrendell to the directorship of the La Almudaina. Aware of the paper’s his-
toric role in binding together a fairly heterodox collection of “Majorquinist” activists he began to
downplay his former push for linguistic and economic reform. In fact, he even begins to court the
island’s powerful business elite. Emblematic of his newly pragmatic approach to generating social
change was the last of his Majorcan enterprises, La ciudad (he city), founded in October, 1905.
While working in Majorca, Torrendell continued to cultivate the contacts made on his irst
triumphant visit to Barcelona. In 1905, he attends the Joc Florals (Floral games) in the city and
in October 1906 participates in the Primer congrès internacional de la llengua catalana (First
international congress of the Catalan language). By the time of this last event, it appears that
he had already decided to move to the Catalan capital (Juan Torrendell, letter to Víctor Pérez-
Petit, December 13, 1905). In December of 1906, he inally moves to Barcelona and begins work
at La Veu de Catalunya while also continuing to work for La Almudaina as a correspondent.
Never content, however, to work solely for others, he joins forces with his fellow Majorcan
and friend Bartomeu Amengual (himself a long-time correspondent of La Almudaina in the
Catalan capital and an important member of the economically-oriented “Americanist” family
of Catalanism) to found La Cataluña.
hanks to Torrrendell’s profoundly “ecumenical” sensibility, forged by his experiences in a
lay and Republican Uruguay and a highly fractious Majorcan political environment, La Cata-
luña in its irst stage (October 1907–June 1910) served as perhaps the closest thing that turn-
of-the-century Catalanism had ever had (or would have) to a broadly-constituted ideological
clearinghouse. In his recent study on the journal, Òscar Costa Ruibal (2002) largely obviates
the role of the charismatic and strong-willed Torrendell in shaping the content of the jour-
nal, preferring instead to underscore the decisive inluence of Cambó and the followers of the
economist Guillermo Graell in the creation of the editorial product. With Torrendell and his
lifelong support of both republicanism and modernist-inspired heterodoxy thus rendered “out
of the picture,” it is possible to place (as Costa does) Ribera’s Iberianist articles in La Cataluña
within the Lliga’s imperialistic framework for intra-Iberian afairs.
However, a close reading of his contributions makes it evident that while Ribera i Rovira
clearly supported Solidaritat Catalana and Cambó’s role as a tactical catalyst within the broad
coalition’s eforts at Hispanic interventionism, he carefully distanced himself from the Lliga’s
view of intra-Iberian relations. In his writings on the subject, the language of imperialist vital-
ism is wholly absent. Quite present, in contrast, is language which repeatedly highlights the
need for a completely non-coercive “fraternalism” between the three naturally constituted na-
tions of the Peninsula. he idea that Ribera i Rovira was working completely within the thrall
of the Lliga during his time at La Cataluña is demolished when we look at an article published
in which he bitterly attacks Eugeni d’Ors, then at his zenith of inluence within the Lliga, for
ignoring his work in fomenting relations between Catalonia and Portugal. At that time, no one
who viewed himself and the future of his political project as being enmeshed in that of Lliga,
as Óscar Costa contends was the case with Ribera, would ever dare to attack d’Ors’s “Xènius”
so publicly. But even more telling than the unusually harsh tone of his attacks on d’Ors is the
vocabulary he employs. In referring to his own Lusism as a “platonic prize in such a ruinous
age of material totalitarianism,” he establishes a line of demarcation between his Iberianism
and the imperialistic version of the Lliga with its strong undercurrent of Catalan commercial
and cultural conquest. And at the end of “El lusitanismo en Cataluña,” he sarcastically implores
Xènius to take note of “from the clamorous heights of his imperialism” of the other people who
had preceded him in the task of “discovering” foreign cultures for the Catalan reading public
(La Cataluña, March 14, 1908). Ribera’s belief in the essential arrogance, supericiality, and in-
sincerity of the Lliga’s self-involved approach to Iberian reconstruction could not be expressed
any more succinctly.
La Cataluña’s role as a relatively free-wheeling ideological space, and hence apt hosting
venue for tripartite Iberianism came to an end in July, 1910, when Torrendell emigrated to the
Americas for the second time. hough the circumstances surrounding his departure are not
entirely clear, it seems that Torrendell’s catholic mindset, which was viewed as a great asset by
the Lliga leadership in the early days of Solidaritat, came to be seen by the same people as a
handicap in the months following the Tragic Week in July, 1909. he outbreak of class-based
violence greatly narrowed the Lliga’s hope of forging an enduring inter-party alliance. Attacked
from both the let and the right for its decision to ally itself with the Maura government’s repres-
sive measures, it underwent a process of internal debate, the end result of which was a decision
to enhance the speciic gravity of its traditional Catholic and noucentista base within the fast-
crumbling coalition. Sensing that his radius of ideological activity would soon be drastically
curtailed by the new policy of Catalunya endins (Inside Catalonia), Torrendell began look-
ing for work in America at the beginning of 1910 (Juan Torrendell, letter to Víctor Pérez-Petit,
March 14, 1910). For his part, Ribera i Rovira signed on with the Unió Federal Nacionalista
Republicana, or UFNR (Republican Nationalist Federal Union), and by so doing, dispensed
with any remaining pretense of wishing to pursue his Iberianist goals in any sort of concert with
the Lliga. And from the other side of the political spectrum the young economist acolytes of
Graell, who had been an absolutely essential element of La Cataluña, also began to make known
their discomfort with the newly “recentered” movement. hey saw Prat’s redoubled emphasis
on cultural and linguistic pedagogy as a de facto abandonment of their own more sweeping goal
of unifying and modernizing Spain’s internal and overseas markets. It did not help that Cambó,
the member of the Lliga leadership who had been most overtly receptive to their program, had
lost his seat in the parliamentary elections of May, 1910.
With Torrendell’s one-time mentor, the ever-more conservative and authoritarian Miquel
dels Sants Oliver installed as the new director of La Cataluña (and the fervently Catholic Ors’s
disciple Ramón Rucabado as his editor-in-chief), tripartite Iberianism once again found itself
without an institutional platform. his did not, however, deter Ribera i Rovira. In the absence
of any oicial support for his vision he redoubled his own personal eforts to bring the glories
of Portuguese culture, and the vision of politically balanced, Tripartite Iberia to the Catalan
reading public. he prime vehicle in this efort was Atlàntiques, a Catalan-language anthology
of contemporary Portuguese poetry.
he Iberianist theories of Casas-Carbó and Ribera had always carried with them an im-
plied belief in the essential cultural unity of Portugal and Galicia. However, it was not until
his triumphant spring 1907 visit to Lisbon (in which Ribera was named an honorary citizen of
Portugal) that he irst articulated the idea of this shared Luso-Atlantic culture, and only then
in very skeletal form. hree years later (on July 2, 1910), however, he published a long article
in La Cataluña entitled Portugal y Galicia: Nación (Portugal and Galicia: nation [published in
book form the following year]) in which he spelled the historical roots of this dynamic. his
new involvement with the question of Portuguese-Galician relations also generated a change
in his gaze upon the Portuguese reality. Up until this time Ribera’s literary contacts in Portugal
had been derived almost exclusively from Lisbon-centered intellectual circles. From this time
onward, however, he would be drawn increasingly into the orbit of Oporto, the northern home
of the Renascença Portuguesa (Portuguese renaissance).
Founded in August, 1911, this civic-intellectual organization sought, as did Ribera i Rovira
and other Catalanist Republicans in Catalonia, to efect a national cultural rebirth by combin-
ing historicism with voluntarism. However, in Portugal, the political calculus was reversed. In
the wake of the Republican revolution of October, 1910, the voluntarists and not the conserva-
tive historicists then held nominal primacy.
Ribera i Rovira entered into epistolary contact with Teixeira de Pascoaes, the prime theo-
rist and leading poet of Renascença Portuguesa in the spring of 1912 while preparing Atlàntiques.
he collaboration between the two men would have far-reaching consequences. As their cor-
respondence indicates, Ribera ceded to Pascoaes’s efective authority for shaping his “repre-
sentative canon” of Portuguese poetry, a power Pascoaes would use to play up the presence of
those poets who shared, or who in some way underscored, his mystical, saudosista (nostalgia-
centered) conception of Portuguese national identity. In return, Pascoaes signed on to Ribera’s
belief in the essential spiritual unity of Atlantic Iberia and the need to insert this historically-
constituted cultural unit into a voluntaristic union with the other “naturally constituted” na-
tions of the Peninsula: Catalonia and Castile. Pascoaes’s staple use of these concepts during the
ensuing decade would gain him the status (which endures to this day) of a cultural icon within
the Galician nationalist movement. More importantly, it would provide the Tripartite Iberian-
ists of Catalonia with a sensation – cratily encouraged by Ribera’s assertion of the fundamental
equivalence between Portuguese saudade and catalan enyorança (nostalgia) in the introduction
Atlàntiques – of having its irst real “branch oice” on the other side of the Peninsula, an entity
capable of recruiting new activists to the cause through its own relational channels.
Ever since Torrendell’s departure from La Cataluña in mid-1910, the followers of the econ-
omist Guillermo Graell had lacked a solid vehicle for espousing their ideas. his problem was
eventually remedied by the founding of the monthly Estudio in January of 1913 under the di-
rection of Aureli Ras, a frequent contributor to La Cataluña during Torrendell’s tenure at the
journal and “the most outstanding in the nucleus of youth that forms the school that surrounds
and follows Professor Graell” (“La juventud y la Economía” [he young and the economy], La
Cataluña, July 29, 1911).
On the irst page of the irst issue there is a somber and digniied photo of Graell, a sight
which surely led many irst-time readers to assume that the journal would be illed with the dry
writing of the ageing dean of Catalan economists. But it soon becomes clear that Graell’s role
in the publication was much more iconic than editorial; he was the prestigious “beard” whose
presence was designed to give cover to a broad and heterodox set of voices joined together by
their shared discomfort in the narrowing of “acceptable thought” within the dominant institu-
tions of Catalanism. As Ras wrote in the advertencia al lector (note to the reader) in the same
inaugural issue of Estudio:
hose of us who are founding this journal belong to the Society for Economic Studies. Many of
our colleagues direct important publications in Barcelona. We sensed, however, that we were
lacking a journal wherein we could publish scientiic, artistic and literary monographs that
explore and relect our orientations in the full range of their complexity. [italics added].
Part of the desired complexity or nuance in Estudio did indeed revolve around economics and
trade policy. However, the collective weight of articles in this area is relatively small, easily
equaled by those on subjects such as pedagogy, geography (Catalan and Iberian), and theories
of nationhood. But what is perhaps even more surprising is the large number of articles not just
on literature but on the textual traditions of the so-called Iberian periphery and the existentially
precarious cultural systems of the rest of Europe. In other words, when it came to structuring
the outsized literary content in Estudio, Ras borrowed almost whole the cloth of the tripartite
vision of the Iberian reality developed by Ribera i Rovira in the pages of La Cataluña, and then
grated on to it the concern with “secondary” cultural systems (Belgium, Norway, etc.) that had
been such an important part of modernisme’s turn-of-the-century Golden Age at Cau Ferrat
and in the oices of l’Avenç. his had the efect of transforming tripartite Iberianism from the
lonely crusade of one man into a movement which would draw the allegiance of the many Cata-
lanists who felt increasingly disafected by the narrow orthodoxies of the post-Solidaritat Lliga.
Emblematic in this regard is Agustí Calvet, better known as Gaziel, who began his ascent
in the Catalan intellectual world under the tutelage of Prat de la Riba, but switched to La Van-
guardia and journalism in Castilian in 1914, a move that efectively barred him from further
access to the many institutions created by the head of the Lliga. For his part, Gaziel always
maintained that the change in his professional language of communication in no way vitiated
his deeply-felt Catalanism; rather it simply provided him with a broader platform for his idea of
a Catalan-led transformation of the Peninsula. So when Gaziel was looking for a place to pub-
lish his doctoral thesis on heterodoxy in the philosophy of the Fray Anselm Turmeda, he turned
to Estudio and was warmly welcomed, with the study being published irst in installments in
the magazine and later as one of the irst titles in the organization’s new line of bound mono-
graphs. Gaziel’s relations with the Estudio circle would, in turn, imbue him with a profound and
long-lasting belief in tripartite Iberianism. We see a similar dynamic played out in the lives of a
number of the other collaborators in the journal, many of whom had also previously written for
La Cataluña. Among the contributors who would channel their discomfort with, or rejection
by, the Lliga in to an embrace of tripartite Iberianism in coming years we ind Alfons Maseras,
Francesc Pujols, Pau Turull, Marius Verdaguer, and Manuel de Montoliu. Also very present in
posthumous (and therefore conveniently polyvalent) form is, of course, the famed spokesper-
son for the Iberianist movement, Maragall, who, it will be remembered, also had his share of
diferences with the activist core of the Lliga in the wake of the social upheavals of the Tragic
Week at the end of July, 1909.
As important as Estudio’s role in efecting this dramatic enlargement of the group of Cata-
lans with an interest in tripartite Iberianism, was its drive to develop and/or recognize similar
Iberianist cadres in other areas of the Peninsula. hough Ribera i Rovira, Casas-Carbó, and
even more famously, Maragall (see Unamuno and Maragall 1971, 97) had all talked about the
need for a three-way cultural dialogue within the Peninsula, none of them had ever really cre-
ated the mechanisms needed for it to take place. Ribera had come the closest to doing so. How-
ever, he had always been handicapped by a tendency to treat Castile’s role in the process in
highly oblique and abstract terms. In Estudio, however, we see a clear efort by Ras to remedy
this by recruiting Madrid-based intellectuals with a genuine interest in Peninsular diversity.
he most important of these was Enrique Díez-Canedo who had shown a truly uncommon
ability, dating back to his 1905 translation of Eugeni d’Ors’s La muerte de Isidro Nonell (he
death of Isidro Nonell), to combine participation in the most prestigious, and thus implicitly
castellanista institutions of the capital, with a very active and sincere involvement with the so-
called peripheral cultures of the Peninsula. he same was true of two other contributors to the
journal, Edmundo and Andrés González-Blanco.
While establishing the bases for luid communication with open-minded elements in Ma-
drid, he also worked assiduously to consolidate the “discoveries” made by Ribera i Rovira in the
course of his work on Atlàntiques. A Àguia (he eagle), the prime doctrinal organ of Renascença
Portuguesa was a regular advertiser in Estudio. Next to Maragall, the Iberian author whose
writing appears with most frequency in the seven-year history of the publication is Teixeira de
Pascoaes. And beside his writings are those of several of his key collaborators from Renascença
Portuguesa: Jaime Cortesão, Augusto Casimiro, Leonardo Coimbra, and Alfredo Brochado.
Estudio also published a number of Portuguese writers who were not formally linked to the
Oporto-based institution. However, when we analyze the list we can see that their inclusion
was by no means a matter of happenstance as each was distinguished by a) having been identi-
ied by Pascoaes and Renascença Portuguesa as spiritual precursors (Camões, Antero de Quen-
tal, João de Deus, and Guerra Junqueiro) to their project of national renewal, or b) their own
long-standing interest in improving Portuguese-Spanish relations (Braga, Eça de Queirós, and
Fidelino de Figueiredo). Among the Galician writers in Estudio we ind Francisco Tettamancy,
one of the earlier theorists of the essential cultural and linguistic unity of Peninsula’s Atlantic
fringe, Xohán Vicente Viqueira, the irst Galician disciple of Pascoaes, and Rosalía de Castro,
whom Pascoaes would famously describe in hagiographic terms some years later.
As mentioned above, Estudio not only leshed out and consolidated Ribera’s Iberianist vi-
sion but added to it the idea of an implied link between the so-called “peripheral” cultures of
the Peninsula and other hybridized and/or existentially-precarious literary systems of Europe.
For example, the writer whose work appears most frequently in the journal (even more than
Maragall!) is the Belgian Verhaeren, closely followed by his countryman Maeterlinck and the
famed Norwegian, Ibsen. Other small-nation writers similarly highlighted in the pages of the
journal were: F. Mistral, Burns, Sienkiewicz, Petöi (a Hungarian), Moreas (a Greek who wrote
in French), Balmont, Bunin, Leopardi, and Carducci.
his broad new emplotment of Catalan culture forged in the pages of Estudio and rooted
in an embrace of tripartite Iberianism in combination with modernista-style diversity, had a
profound inluence on two cultural enterprises established by Catalans in 1918.
he irst of these was Messidor, founded and directed by Pau Turull, a sometime contribu-
tor to Estudio, who was also deeply involved during the same years with Union des nationalités
(Union of nationalities), an international organization located in Lausanne, dedicated to high-
lighting the hopes and aspirations of nations without states. Owing to the breakdown of the
Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Romanov empires during the course of the war, the “nationalities
question” was on everyone’s mind by late 1917. he publication of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen
Points in January 1918, with its enshrinement of the principle of national self-determination,
gave activists from stateless minorities, including those from Catalonia, great hope that their
long-standing of dreams of greater autonomy would soon be realized in the coming, post-im-
perial world. Owing to his own involvement, as well as that of his close friend Alfons Maseras,
in international organizations in France and Switzerland, Turull knew that the success of this
goal was highly dependent on an ability to “sell” an internationally contextualized vision of the
plight of Catalonia to his countrymen, and from there, the international community of politi-
cal operatives. It was toward this end that he launched Messidor in May of 1918. In the words of
Turull, the new multilingual publication edited in Barcelona (but in very active dialogue with
Paris and Lausanne) sought to catalyze:
the puriication and free evolution of the Catalan personality in ways commensurate with that
of other peoples living in full cognizance of their own personality; the realization of the Iberian
Federalist ideal, inspired by Maragall, and inally, the highest possible level of harmonization
with like-minded peoples and with humanity as a whole.
In a way that is even more explicit than that of Ras at Estudio, Turull presents a concept of
culture that is structured in terms of concentric circles. At the center of this system is a bilin-
gual Catalonia. However, he views this “singular” but simultaneously “plural” nucleus as being
inextricably linked to the cultures of the Peninsula which are, in turn, bound “harmoniously”
to other similar (for their precariousness and/or hybridity) peoples around the world. Among
the contributors to the fortnightly publication were several writers from Estudio as well as other
previous Iberianist enterprises. hese include Salvador Albert, Joaquim Cases-Carbó, Teóilo
Braga, Maragall (posthumously) and, of course, the ever-proliic Maseras. Ribera i Rovira re-
turned to active militancy in the Iberianist cause in Messidor with Catalan translations of works
by Pascoaes, Camões, Guerra Junqueiro, Castelho Branco, and Eugenio de Castro. Like Estu-
dio, Messidor had a regular section called “Crónica Internacional” which kept track of events
likely to have an impact on those nations still seeking to gain greater self-determination. It also
sought to showcase the literature of writers from small and/or imperiled cultural traditions of
Europe. Once again present is Verhaeren. However, he is joined by newly-discovered exemplars
of small-nation literary persistence such as Hrand Nazariantz, the Turkish Armenian living and
writing in southern Italy.
he second project founded in 1918, the Maristany circle, was perhaps even more impor-
tant than Messidor for the long-term growth of tripartite Iberianism. In a letter to Pascoaes,
Ribera i Rovira wrote:
his aternoon I spoke of you at length; I read many of your poems to my friend and your
enthusiastic admirer, Fernando Maristany, a poet of considerable talent, who is preparing
and Anthology of Portuguese Poets. He has already published two magniicent anthologies of
French and English poets, and, moved by what he has seen of the very new Portuguese poetry
in my Atlàntiques, he wishes to release an Anthology of Lusitanian poets. He came to ask me
for a prologue which I will write with the utmost pleasure. (Ribera i Rovira, letter to Teixeira
de Pascoaes, February 16, 1918)
In a letter written a month later, dating from March 10, the Catalan Iberianist urges the Portu-
guese poet to cooperate with Maristany, describing him as a “noble, good, and sincere man” and
his proposed anthology as a text of “certain transcendence: it is destined for Spain and Spanish
America, that is to say: it is going to give Iberian-American prestige to the the poets it contains.”
A few weeks later Maristany, enters into direct contact with Pascoaes. In the letter, he summa-
rizes the goals of his book in the following terms:
I hope that Portugal will be welcomed with love, not only in Catalonia, but in all of Spain.
here are very favorable currents of sympathy and very qualiied elements are anxious to tight-
en the bonds between Spain and Portugal. People are beginning to pay attention to Catalonia
in Spain; they are beginning to respect us and appreciate us. We will take these bonds of love as
far as we can… (Fernando Maristany, letter to Teixeira de Pascoaes, March 28, 1918)
In June of the same year, Pascoaes travels to Barcelona to deliver the lectures on Portuguese
culture within the program of Cursos Monograics d’Alts Estudis i d’Intercanvi (Monographic
courses of advanced study and exchange) at the Institut de Estudis Catalans (Institute of Cata-
lan studies). During his stay in the city he has his irst face-to-face meetings with Ribera and
Maristany. Not surprisingly (given the sponsorship of his visit), he also spends time with young
noucentistas (López-Picó, Ribas, Manent, Capdevila, Soldevila, Crexells, Jardi, Galí) whose
concept of Catalan culture tended toward a much more monolingual and “stand-alone” un-
derstanding of the national reality. In the months immediately following the visit, these young
writers working in the orbit of Eugeni d’Ors illed the library of the Portuguese poet in Ama-
rante with texts on the doctrinal bases of Catalanism, especially the writings of Prat de la Riba.
But ater tutoring the Portuguese poet on the singularity of the Catalan people in this way, their
attempts to communicate with him fell of precipitously. For Maristany, however, the meeting in
Barcelona was the beginning of an intensely-lived devotion to Pascoaes, and with it, the cause
of tripartite Iberianism.
he principal platform for Maristany’s Iberianist eforts was Editorial Cervantes which had
been founded in Valencia in 1916 by his good friend Vicente Clavel. By 1918, Clavel had ceded
most of the label’s editorial functions to Maristany, the son of a wealthy merchant who, af-
ter traveling throughout Europe and dabbling in local journalism, decided to devote himself
fully to the cause of writing, translating, and promoting lyrical poetry. Under his leadership,
Editorial Cervantes became perhaps the most important importer and translator of foreign lit-
erature in Spain. His irst major contribution to this project was the aforementioned Castilian
anthology of Portuguese poetry, Las cien mejores poesías (líricas) de la lengua portuguesa (he
one hundred best lyric poems of the Portuguese language), published in late 1918. It was fol-
lowed by texts of a very similar format on French, Italian, Greek, and Latin verse. Maristany
did all of the translations for these texts. In 1920, he published an omnibus volume of the books
under the title of Florilegio. In a letter written to Pascoaes during the course of his work on this
project he lays bare the extra-literary goals behind his work.
At the end of the forward to the Florilegio, which I dedicate to Spain, I am thinking of putting
something like: “In ofering this work to Spain we are sending a fraternal salute to the nations
represented within her, and fervently hope that one day Spanish America and the Luso people
will move closer to the Old Spain, or even better still, the child-like Spain … From our end, we
will continue, God-willing, working toward this beautiful ideal, an ideal whose simple act of
being carries within it the most pure and sublime recompense. (Fernando Maristany, letter to
Teixeira de Pascoaes, October 24, 1918)
Following the success of his foreign language anthologies, Maristany published Las cien mejores
poesías (líricas) españolas (he one hundred best Spanish lyric poems) in 1921. In his letters
to Pascoaes, he makes quite clear that with this volume he seeks to alter operative notions of
“Spanishness” within the Peninsula by substituting great writers from Catalonia and Galicia
(Ausiàs March, Maragall, Verdaguer, Rosalía de Castro, and Curros Enríquez) for some of the
more well-known standard-bearers of Castilian prestige. “In terms of its lyrical concept, the
book will contain an absolutely revolutionary prologue. he critics are sure to come ater me!
But I do believe I am doing my duty.” (Fernando Maristany, letter to Teixeira de Pascoaes, May
19, 1921). Looking at these statements, we can see that for Maristany the Peninsula is a uniied,
but simultaneously diferentiated cultural entity. As was the case with Turull, he adheres to a
concept of culture structured in terms of concentric circles emanating outward from Catalonia.
he only notable diference from the vision profered by the director of Messidor is the insertion
of the “ring” of Latin American writing between the belt of small European literatures and the
universal space of Turrull’s “Humanitat tota” (all humanity).
Maristany’s approach comes into even clearer focus when we analyze another of his major
“product lines” at Editorial Cervantes: the 54 volume collection of “Las mejores poesías (líricas)
de los mejores poetas” (he best lyric poems of the best poets). At irst glance there is nothing
particularly novel about the idea of ofering the Castilian reader a selection of the “best” poets
from around the world. As one would expect, we ind volumes on Verlaine, Shakespeare, Dante,
Horace, Goethe, Byron, Leopardi, and Novalis. he surprise comes with the inclusion of an-
thologies of the work of Maragall, Joan Alcover, Verdaguer, Salvador Albert, Vicente Querol,
Pascoaes, Guerra Junqueiro, João de Deus, Antero de Quental, Gomes Leal, Carrasquilla-Malla-
rino, Gutiérrez Nájera, Gómez Martínez, Gabriela Mistral, Juana de Ibarbourou, Verhaeren, and
Hrand Nazariantz beside those of the “universally” acclaimed igures. In efect, Maristany used
his function as editor and anthologist to subvert long-standing and allegedly “objective” con-
cepts of artistic superiority – rooted in implied notions of Northern European cultural superior-
ity – by practicing “airmative action” in favor of writers from a) Catalonia and Portugal, b) the
existentially precarious literary systems of Europe, and c) the “new nations” of Spanish America.
Maristany’s pluralistic approach is relected in the composition of his team of collabora-

tors, which can be divided into three distinct sub-groups. he irst and most important of these
was based in Barcelona. he second was a small group of intellectuals in Castile and Portugal.
he third was made up of writers spread around the globe, many of whom came from literary
systems that were generally perceived as lacking strong international projection.
he most important members of the Catalan nucleus were Ribera i Rovira, Alfons Maseras,
Manuel de Montoliu, Agustí Calvet “Gaziel,” Salvador Albert, Vicente Clavel, and Francisco
Mirabent. Of the group, Clavel, the publisher, and Mirabent, a philosopher of aesthetics, were
the least interested in efecting a re-alignment of the Iberian literary system. On the other ex-
treme was, of course, Ribera i Rovira. he remaining four seem to have come to the project out
of a certain disafection with the cultural politics of the Lliga. We have already analyzed Gaziel’s
migration to the cause. Similar is the case of Albert, who was the candidate that unexpectedly
defeated Cambó in the parliamentary elections of 1910. hough a ine Catalan-language poet,
he was, from that time onward, largely shunned by Catalanism’s more “oicial” cultural circles,
an injustice that Maristany repeatedly sought to rectify by promoting his work. Montoliu, who
had begun his career in at L‘Avenç and El Poble Català, had never felt fully comfortable among
the young Turks of the reigning noucentista establishment. his initial discomfort was only
enhanced by their rejection of his attempts to become part of the emergent canon of modern
Catalan poetry. As he confessed to Pascoaes in 1921:
he tastes that currently predominate in our local environment do not comprehend sincere
emotion or pure idealism; as a result of this, my poetry fell into the abyss. In my bitterness,
I began to doubt my vocation and to convince myself that I was not a poet and that I best
develop my critical faculties. But my spiritual nature has had its revenge and I now write, oh
mystery of mysteries, my poetry now spouts forth in Castilian, spontaneously, without the least
intervention of my will; it should be mentioned that my upbringing, both in the home and at
school, was intensely Castilian. hese are conidences, my admired poet, that I have shared
only with you and my spiritual brother, Maristany. (Manuel de Montoliu, letter to Teixeira de
Pascoaes, July 29, 1921)
Here again we see a fear of noucentista cultural discipline and a desire to generate a more plu-
ral concept of Catalan literary identity, one that would transcend both exaggerated formalism
(so characteristic of post-1906 Catalan poetry) and enforced monolingalism. Somewhat more
complex is the case of Maseras who, like Montoliu, began in turn-of-the-century modernist
circles. However, owing perhaps to the fact that he did not have Montoliu’s inherited wealth, he
engaged in a number of tactical relationships with the noucentista establishment. He was for-
tunate in that his prime connection to the group was none other than its principal theorist and
spokesperson, Eugeni d’Ors. his friendship with d’Ors, and the fact that Maseras spent long
periods working in France, appears to have spared him many of the bumps and bruises of those
working up the Catalanist cultural ladder at home and without a prestigious backer. In the wake
of d’Ors’s 1920 defenestració (defenestration), Maseras gravitated toward the Maristany Circle as
it ofered him abundant work as a translator and the ability to utilize his international skills and
sensibilities within the Catalan context.
he key igure in the Madrid-based nucleus of the Maristany circle was, not surprising-
ly, Enrique Díez-Canedo. He was joined by another former collaborator in Estudio, Andrés
González Blanco, who, in addition to being the prime translator of Eça de Queirós to Castilian,
had vast experience as an importer of texts from France, Italy, the U.S., and Latin America. Less
intimately involved, but still an important presence in the eforts of the Maristany circle in Ma-
drid was Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, who, in 1906, had been one of the few Castilian intellec-
tuals (along with Unamuno and Menéndez Pidal) to attend the Primer Congrès Internacional de
la Llengua Catalana in Barcelona (First international conference of the Catalan language). he
last important member of the Madrid branch of the group was Valentín de Pedro. An Argen-
tine living in Madrid who would later nearly lose his life in Franco’s prisons in the wake of the
Civil War, he translated Pascoaes Terra prohibida (Forbidden land) into Castilian for Editorial
Calpe in Madrid (with help from Maristany) and served Editorial Cervantes as a key link to the
Latin American writers who were beginning to form the “outer ring” of Maristany’s version of
tripartite Iberianism.
he Portuguese nucleus centered around Pascoaes. However, he eventually drew his good
friend and saudosista collaborator, Leonardo Coimbra, into the mix. Another very important
Portuguese literary igure (also an intimate friend of Pascoaes), Raul Brandão, also entered into
active collaboration with Maristany in the years following 1918. he most important fruit of this
relationship was Ribera i Rovira’s Castilian version of his Humus. Also functioning as a nexus
between the Catalan and Portuguese nodes of the group was Angelo de Morais, a young friend of
Coimbra and Pascoaes from northern Portugal who was pursuing University studies in Barcelona.
hanks to the inluence of Maseras, Maristany inherited Turull’s fascination with the exiled
Armenian poet Nazariantz, eventually including him, as we have seen, in his select series on
the greatest poets of all time. hanks to this same relationship, Maristany entered into contact
with the Italian writers Mario Garea and Cesare Giardini. hey, in turn, entered into contact
with Pascoaes and did much to extend word of “his” Iberianism to their countrymen. However,
perhaps the most interesting of Maristany’s relationships with non-metropolitan European ig-
ures was with Czech writer and translator Rudolf Slaby. Slaby served Maristany as a window
onto the “minority literatures” of both the Slavic and Germanic worlds, selecting, and in almost
all cases translating, works from that area needed to ill out Maristany’s “improved” version of
the canon of “universal” literature. For example, the writings of the Swede Selma Lagerlof and
the Pole Wladyslaw Reymont found their way into Castilian thanks to the eforts of Slaby at
Editorial Cervantes. As with the Italians, Garea and Giardini, the relationship between Slaby
and Maristany led, in turn, to a long-lasting friendship between the central European cultural
entrepreneur and Pascoaes. One apparent result of this relationship was Pascoaes’s translation
of the new Czechoslovakian national anthem into Portuguese!
Maristany, no doubt aware of, and in contact with, the Americanist elements of Cata-
lanism, sought, as we have seen, to extend his project to include writers from the “new” nations
of Latin America. In so doing, however, he largely dispensed with the usual neo-imperialist
emplotment of transatlantic relations, preferring instead to speak in terms of a harmonious
relationship between the “Madre Patria” and her former colonies. he key igure in this efort
was Eduardo Carrasquilla-Mallarino, a poet, translator and journalist who, though born and
raised in Colombia, gained fame as a writer in Buenos Aires and later in Paris. He arrived in
the City of Light in 1912 and from 1914 to 1918 was the Paris correspondent for the Argentine-
based La Razón. While there, he became good friends with Rubén Darío (about whom he
would write extensively) and Alfons Maseras who, in turn, placed him in contact with Marista-
ny. hanks to his contacts, and those of the Argentine de Pedro, a truly impressive, and for the
time, rather unusual, selection of Latin American texts were presented to the Iberian reader
by Editorial Cervantes. hese include works by Eduardo Barrios, Florencio Sanchez, Horacio
Quiroga, Benito Lynch, Vicente Salaverri, José Enrique Rodó, Zorrilla de San Martín, Monteiro
Lobato, and Manuel Ugarte. It is worth noting that several of these writers had markedly trans-
national trajectories or were very interested in engineering what might be termed “platonic”
solutions to the “problem” of national cultural barriers. Perhaps the most impressive element of
the Latin American “list” at Editorial Cervantes, however, was its emphasis on young women
poets. Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarbourou, Delmira Agustini, Gabriela Mistral, María Mon-
vel, Amalia Puga, and Alicia Venturino all saw monographic volumes of their work published
and promoted by Maristany.
he new Maristanian synthesis of Iberianism, pro-peripheralism and pan-Hispanism
reached its height of ambition with the inauguration of the monthly journal Prisma (Prism)
in January of 1922. hough published in Paris under the nominal direction of the young Mexi-
can, Rafael Lozano, the inancing and ideas for the Castilian language journal came directly
from Maristany’s oices in Barcelona. Its intended audience was also clearly Iberian. Here again
we see the names of periféricos such as Albert, Maragall, Maristany, Maseras, Pascoaes, Garea,
Giardini, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Nazariantz, Moreas, and Balmont occupying pages beside
those of metropolitan writers such Montesquieu, Gide, Verlaine, Anatole France, Wilde, Pound,
Shelley, Browning, and Juan Ramón Jiménez. We also see the same emphasis on promoting
relatively young American poets such as Leopoldo Lugones, Alfonso Reyes, Jaime Torres Bodet,
Arturo Torres Rioseco, Baldomero Fernández Moreno, Ramón López Velarde, Olavo Bilac, En-
rique González Martínez, Emilio Oribe, and Xavier Villaurrutia.
Maristany died unexpectedly in April, 1924, at the age of 41. hough Editorial Cervantes
continued operating for several more decades, it never regained the clear literary and cultural
focus that Maristany had provided it during his six years at it helm. It went back to being the
rather loosely-deined general interest publisher it had been before his arrival.
Maristany’s disappearance, combined with Primo de Rivera’s crackdown on the remaining
institutions of non-Castilian culture within the Peninsula, signaled the beginning of the end for
tripartite Iberianism. Its downward spiral was stopped briely, albeit in fairly listless fashion, in
1927 when Màrius Verdaguer, a former contributor to both La Cataluña and Estudio, founded
Mundo Ibérico (Iberian world), whose stated goal was to “collect and comment upon the most
remarkable in Iberian life in its three large sectors of culture and action, well-deined in the
three peninsular languages.” However, the short-lived journal never lived up to this loty goal.
Other than one article by Ribera i Rovira, very little of its content relected the linguistic and
cultural diversity of the Peninsula. A similarly ephemeral evocation of tripartite Iberianism can
be found in an article written by Agustí Esclasans in 1942. In the dedication to his pamphlet
on Iberia Magna: diario lírico de un poeta catalán por tierras de España (Iberia Magna: Lyric
journal of a Catalonian poet in Spanish lands), he writes “Homage to the noble memory of Joan
Maragall, fervently” and then goes on to speak of a Spain formed by, “the Catalan empire, the
Lusitanian empire, and the Castilian empire” (1942, 1). However, it does not appear that Escla-
sans ever pursued this vision in any more signiicant fashion.
Far more substantial were Gaziel’s writings on the subject in the years between his return
to Catalonia in 1959 and his death in 1964. It was in the twilight of his life, ater having been
accused of being a botiler (collaborationist) by many Catalanists in the teens, twenties and thir-
ties, as well as a Spaniard of questionable loyalty by the Franco regime in the forties and ities,
when he returned to his native land to write in his native language. And when he did, he wrote
about many things, including the history of his hometown of San Feliu de Guíxols and the fu-
ture of Europe. But most of all he wrote about Iberia, and more speciically, the contrasts and
similarities between its three principal culture-nations: Catalonia, Castile, and Portugal. In his
Trilogía Ibérica (Iberian trilogy) we listen to the voice of a survivor of cataclysms reairming a
shining vision of his own youth and that of many others within his extraordinary generation of
Catalanist thinkers. For them, the future lay with a tolerant and bilingual Catalonia in perpetual
dialogue with its Iberian brethren, peoples of Europe, and inally, the universal family of man.
It is a vision that A. Calvet more or less summed up in his third-person description of Gaziel’s
literary identity in 1927:
He is a Catalan and from the Ampurdán, which is to say, from the most Catalan place on this
earth. But in spite of this profound catalanness, of which he is quite proud, he has always had
a driving need to surpass the limits of his origins. Spain interests him more than Catalonia,
the Iberian Peninsula more than Spain, Europe more than the Iberian Peninsula, and above
it all, Terence’s all-embracing vision of Humanity. (“Memorias literarias. Autobiografía de un
pseudónimo” [Literary memories. Autobiography of a pseudomyn], La gaceta literaria, July
15, 1927)
In 1924, Ribera i Rovira, who in another realm of his multifaceted life was a true pioneer in the
efort to professionalize journalism is Catalonia and Spain, was invited to give an address at a
ceremony honoring Maragall at the Associació de la Prensa Diária (Association of the daily
press) in Barcelona. hough the essay bears the title Maragall, it tells us relatively little about
the great poet. In fact, the bard of Sant Gervasi is little more than a pretext for Ribera to talk
about his view of the evolution of Catalan culture during the preceding two decades. As noted
earlier, he makes clear in the essay that it was he, and not Maragall, who was the originator of
tripartite Iberianism. He then goes on to level an absolutely harsh and devastating critique of
the theory and practice of noucentisme. For Ribera, the elitist and form-driven movement ef-
fectively robbed Catalan culture of both its natural dynamism and intercultural sensibility. For
him, Catalan culture was born of hybridity, or as he puts it, the “consorci espiritual” (1924, 31)
of Greeks, Romans, Celts, Goths, Normans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Jews, and Arabs. he
noucentistas mistakenly sought to banish this creative and essentially “lyric” sensibility through
a unitary discipline imposed from on high and without imagination. heir closed and stati-
cally-constituted notion of seny (sense) unjustly overshadowed the true spirit of the Catalans
encapsulated in Ribera’s ever-evolving and ever-dialogic concept of enyorantisme, which was, of
course, also the spiritual twin of Pascoaes’s Portuguese notion of saudade.
In conclusion it seems that the so-called noucentista hegemony within Catalonia in the
period between 1900 and 1923 might not have been nearly as monolithic as it has sometimes
been portrayed in recent historiography. While there is no doubt that the Lliga, under the lead-
ership of Prat de la Riba was the prime pole of inluence within the Catalan cultural system,
its dominance was frequently contested (albeit not always frontally or successfully) by other
cultural projects. One of these was tripartite Iberianism, the anti-noucentista essence of which
Ribera was clearly defending in programmatic terms in the talk mentioned above. Born at the
beginning of the century from modernista roots and imbued with a general distaste for the her-
meticizing and homogenizing instincts of conservative Catalanism, it was, at irst, the personal
passion of a few men. During the time of Solidaritat, the heterodoxically-minded Majorcan
Juan Torrendell provided it with its irst institutional platform at La Cataluña. In the wake of
the Tragic Week, and the consequent inward turn of the Lliga, however, it found itself on the
outside looking in. But thanks to a somewhat incongruous partnership with another disaf-
fected element of Catalanism – the Graellian economists at Estudio – the movement gained
strength and redeined itself along more broadly internationalist lines during the First World
War. It reached its height during the six frenetic years of Fernando Maristany’s stewardship of
Editorial Cervantes. Since that time, however, it has existed, (despite the best eforts of Gaziel,
Cucurull, Martínez-Gil, and others) largely as a phantom within the discursive opera of Cata-
lanist thought. It would seem that in this time of a newly plural Spain and the advent of what
some now refer to as the uniied “Iberian market,” maybe, just maybe, the time has come for all
of us to take another, more detailed look at this “hidden” chapter from the early decades of the
twentieth century.
On Lusism and Lusofonia
From identitarian reinforcement to the mapping of diference
Laura Cavalcante Padilha
“A language has no other subject but those who speak it as they are spoken by it.”1
Eduardo Lourenço
Initial considerations
Approaching the question of Portuguese identitarian cartography requires plotting a course

from its imaginary construction to its expansion beyond European geographic and cultural
limits. Literary production in the Portuguese language charts this progession, from the point
of view of what one could call its “luminous” airmation, to its problematization, and inally to
its clash with the ethnocultural diferences of non-European peoples whose symbolic sources
coloniality attempted to blot out (Walter Mignolo 2000). he Portuguese language was – and
continues to be – the cultural element that constitutes one of the main foundations of an iden-
titarian construction built up in the European space, and weaves this layering into what we can
consider to be the plot of diferences in colonized countries where it makes up the national, or
oicial language.
he development of this conceptual framework, layered with the ethical, historical, and
cultural body of Lusitanity, combines two symbolic structures. he irst of these is Lusism, con-
ceived as something which represents the linguistic domain, becoming a mode for its airma-
tion within European space. he second, Lusofonia, is a term that refers to the Portuguese
speaking world, and correlates with the expansion of language and culture outside of Euro-
pean territory, disseminated among peoples of diverse origin throughout America, Africa, and
even parts of Asia and Oceania. In this process of expansion, the Portuguese language gains
other subjects who “speak it, as they are spoken by it,” as Eduardo Lourenço (2004) postulates,
thereby becoming one of the principle threads in the tapestry of the new ethnocultural network.
he sea, already made “Portuguese” both through historical action and the representative
power and aesthetic eiciency of the Camonian epic, becomes the principal route of this identi-
tarian expansion in which, more than a language, a whole worldview was disseminated. Lusism
and Lusofonia intersect each other, the latter being the point of arrival of the irst.
In their own right, literatures produced in the Portuguese language also became an instru-
ment of cultural transmission. In the European case, these literatures embody diverse euphoric
and dysphoric moments of Lusism; in others, they embody serious clashes in which cultures
confront each other in the process of subjugation of unknown peoples and lands, always in ac-
cordance with the dictates of the political economic project of overseas expansion. Because of
this, Lusism and Lusofonia become important operators for researchers who choose Portuguese
language literatures as their research ield. hey can be considered as a sort of counterpoint by
1. “Uma língua não tem outro sujeito senão aqueles que a falam, nela se falando.”
164 Laura Cavalcante Padilha
which clashes are recorded in the constructed cultural space in the Portuguese language, and
are quite valuable when used to study these literatures. his is true both for that which is pro-
duced in Europe – also full of confusion, confrontations, and exclusions – as well as for the ar-
tistic manifestations of dominated peoples who have been excluded from the world of literature
from the outset.
Such operators gain even more theoretical critical weight in current circumstances, when
literary and cultural studies seem to meet on a sort of common ground born out of the po-
rousness of their borders, formerly quite closed. Now, new negotiations are arising in the area
of contemporary literary studies, as a predictable consequence of their dialogue with cultural
studies. his new methodological posture attempts to contribute towards a breaking of the
politics of silence of the “non-canonical,” the pushing to the margins of that which hegemonic
literary culture does not consecrate. Production in the Portuguese language, especially outside
of Europe, was summarily excluded from the “western canon,” quite disputed and opposed by
the “resentful”, as Harold Bloom (1994) describes them, though he being the one who presumes
to establishing this canon.
It is important to clarify here at the outset that my place of enunciation is Brazil. It under-
lies my personal and academic discourse and it conditions, in certain ways, my reading of the
questions to be examined. Furthermore, my research interest is African literatures in/of the
Portuguese language, with special emphasis upon those produced in Angola and Mozambique.
his network of pertinence and selection causes a sort of crossroads of knowledge and cultural
order to occur, which leads me to explore several supplementary paths. hough diverse, these
have a point of convergence: the Portuguese language, that which borders and reinforces my
own subjective, historical, and political experience, as well as that of my imaginary reader. It is
the cause of the following relections.
he purpose of this essay is clear. It seeks to trace the Lusism movement on its surface, as
it has been cartographed by Portuguese literary development, and analyze the question, (an
undisputed one for many experts) of Lusofonia. his construction is sustained by that which
Lourenço classiies as “Lusophone mythology” (2004), an idea that forms the necessary back-
bone for these questions. he starting point, or the irst section of this paper, will be an analyti-
cal reading of Lusism, as it is represented within in the Portuguese ictional network. Here, an
attempt will be made to grasp a historical, symbolic, and cultural chain that moves from the
somewhat euphoric creation and strengthening of the concept of Lusism, to its posterior prob-
lematization, a problematization that still exists today. he idea of Lusofonia will be examined
more in its diferential power than in any presupposition of unity and/or hegemony.
Lusism: Construction, strengthening, and reconiguration
In the linguistic ield, Lusism, according to Antenor Nascentes, signiies a “word, expression,
[or] construction, pertaining to the Portuguese spoken in Portugal” (1972, 4:1015b). Such a
meaning, with merely formal variants, is even registered as an example in the Brazilian edition
of the dictionary of Caldas Aulete, coordinated by Nascentes himself (1958), reappearing in
Antônio Houaiss’s version (2001) and even in those of Aurélio Buarque de Holanda (1988 and
On Lusism and Lusofonia 165
1999). Next to this irst accepted meaning, another is registered in which the word is presented
as a synonym of lusitanidade, i.e., what Antônio Houaiss describes as a “peculiar character or
quality, individualizing that thing or person which is Portuguese” (2001, 1792c). Lusism then
becomes an identitarian construction and here it will be used in this sense.
Keeping in mind that the meaning of the concept has no initial intentions of immutabil-
ity or artiice (Hall 1997), any and all identity presupposes a feeling of belonging, which almost
always originates in confrontation or at least in symbolic negotiation between an “I” and an
Other, or to use the Todorovian expression, between “us and the others” (1989). hus, in order
to be constructed as diference in the Iberian space, Portugal has faced of against Castile ever
since the creation of the irst dynasty by Afonso Henriques (the Afonsinian dynasty). In order
to make himself the master of the land already captured by his father, Henry of Burgundy, he
struggled against his mother and stepfather. From out of this matricidal clash emerges what we
might call, echoing Lourenço (1988), the traumatic origin of the Portuguese state, which has
always marked the “imagined community” (B. Anderson 1983) that we call Portugal.
In the texts of the irst Portuguese medieval chronicler, Fernão Lopes, we ind the founda-
tions of the Lusism construct, which the sixteenth century will then consecrate along with the
Camonian epic poem. It is enough to read the episode in the Crônica de Dom João (Chronicle
of Dom João, 1644) referring to the “Siege of Lisbon,” which shows the strength attributed to
the people inside the city, in order to understand the nature of the confrontation between the
Portuguese and the Castilians. To illustrate this, I quote the description of the young women
ighting for the defense of their territoriality: “And the young women, unafraid, grabbing stones
from the ields, sang loudly: ‘his is dear Lisbon: / Look at it and leave it.’ ”2
A second chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, reemphasizes the Portuguese spatial condi-
tion in Crônica da Tomada de Ceuta (Chronicle of the Conquest of Ceuta, 1644), describing
the land as being squeezed between Castile and the sea, saying: “on one side we are enclosed by
the sea and on the other we have the wall of the Castilian kingdom” (1992, 52). his “enclosed”
territory, with only two frontiers, garners another historical, symbolic, and even geographic di-
mension, upon extending its European spatiality through the colonization of parts of America,
Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
he work that ushers in the moment of expansion and greatness, in which the known world
attains a diferent coniguration, becoming globalized, is undoubtedly Luís Vaz de Camões’s Os
Lusíadas (he Lusiads, 1572). It is not by chance that the modern epic poem, begun in the Por-
tuguese language in the sixteenth century, becomes the great sustaining rock of the Portuguese
imaginary, or its great reference, as Lourenço (1988, 151) accurately observes. he moment of
unmistakable greatness jumps from history to iction, interwoven, as we have already men-
tioned, with the aesthetic eiciency of Camonian prose. he future opens up luminously for
Portugal in poetic writing, only to be closed of abruptly with the death of King Sebastian and
the transfer of political hegemony to Spain (1580–1640).
hus projected greatness through iction is underway, as posterior national history dem-
onstrates. “All Portuguese roads lead to Camões” and to his epic poem, as José Saramago airms
2. “E as moças, sem nenhum medo, apanhando pedra pelas herdades, cantavam em altas vozes, dizendo: Esta
é Lisboa prezada: / mirá-la e deixá-la”. (Lopes 1997, 214)
(1984, 180–81). he text seems to function for everything, ideologies and counter ideologies be-
ing reinforced through it, as we see in the dialogue proposed by Saramago, in his theatrical text,
Que farei com este livro (What will I do with this book?, 1979). his dialogue is staged by Diogo
do Couto, Camões, and Damião de Góis, historically emblematic subjects, and is given in the
tense moment that the epic poet, in the ictional plot of the piece, struggled for the publication
of his book, inding the doors of those who might help him to be closed:
Luís de Camões: However, the book will not be diferent from what it is.
Damião de Góis: he diference will be in the eyes that read it. he part that remains victorious
will cause the book to be read with the eyes that best suit it.
Diogo do Couto: And the defeated part, what will it do?
Damião de Góis: Remain waiting to read and at the same time cause a diferent manner of
reading.3
he European identitarian composition and its textual reinforcement, through the ininite pos-
sibility of readings, transforms the Camonian epic poem into the promise of a future and ofers
meaning for each present lived sinced then, especially when it places the ideology that sustains
the work in checkmate. An auratic past is forged that the Portuguese national imaginary can
always make use of, disseminating it one way or the other. In this way Lourenço (1988, 151) calls
it a work of “unanimous reference of what could be called, in all ambiguity, ‘national spirit.’ ”
he epic text by Camões constructed a stronghold of Lusism, overtaking the contingencies
of time and space, mainly because a supplementary counterpoint referring to the construction
of identity becomes quite clear in the work. Perhaps a better explanation is that the Portuguese
are diacronically shown in Os Lusíadas to be a people that build their identity through facing
and opposing their peninsular neighbor, Castile. Such a proile has one of its strongest traits in
the languages spoken on both sides of the border. At the time of the travels of Vasco da Gama
– having been transformed into synchronic time by narrative contemporization (we must not
forget that he is also one of the narrators of the Portuguese “past”) – diferent Others appear
from outside of the Peninsular and European space, Others that even further intensify the traits
of the Lusitanian identitarian cartography. he south – where Portugal is located, and consti-
tuting its deining factor in European spatiality – searches the spaces of its southermost parts
where the “distinguished barons” could settle, to quote Fernando Gil, in a “surprise provoked
constantly by something absolutely new, as terrifying as amazing” (1998, 37).
Various Others parade through the Camonian poem in this way – Moors, Africans, In-
dians – all helping to reinforce the Lusitanian identity in its imaginistic web through this new
confrontation with distinctive historical cultural subjects that oppose them as diference. he
doors of the colonializing process are opened by which these Others are obliged to exchange
their identitarian mask, in the name of faith and empire, criss-crossing “sociocultural universes
that are radically diverse and even incompatible,” as Antonio Cornejo Polar (2000, 77) remarks,
focusing on the Hispanic colonizing process. In the Portuguese case, this is the moment that
3. “Luís de Camões: Porém, o livro não será diferente do que é. Damião de Góis: A diferença estará nos olhos
que o lerem. E a parte que icar vencedora fará que seja o livro lido com os olhos que mais lhe convierem.
Diogo do Couto: E a parte vencida, que fará? Damião de Góis: Ficará esperando a sua vez de ler e fazer ler
doutra maneira”. (Saramago 1998, 55)
Lusofonia pounds its irst stakes into the cultural soil and begins to construct its future. It is for
this reason that the Camonian text will be called upon in the following sections.
he place of greatness is already questioned in the seventeeth century when, as Boaventura
de Sousa Santos explains, Portugal becomes “a semiperipherical country in the modern capital-
ist system” (2001, 23). he greatness of the sixteenth century, created by history and expanded
by the voice of Camões, soon enters into crisis, becoming increasingly smaller from that point
on, and gaining an unquestionable traumatic dimension in the nineteenth century.
his century saw the collapse of the entire euphoric imaginary construct of Portuguese iden-
tity. In its historic condition as a European imperial country, Portugal would undergo a diicult
experience marked by successive losses in the seventeenth century, leading to what Margarida
Calafate Ribeiro has called a “hangover from a century of trauma” (2004, 55). Ribeiro continues:
Made fragile, struck to the heart of its imperial conscience, Portugal found itself with its small
and marginal European position, without a new space compensating its efectiveness in its eyes
or in those of others, weighing little now in the “Balance of Europe,” in which Garret had both
really and symbolically weighed Portugal. (2004, 55)
Perhaps the Portuguese losses in this “Balance of Europe” are worth taking stock of briely – as
I have sometimes done – by focusing on an internal level, beginning in the eighteen twenties
with the political failure of the liberal’s program, represented by Minister Costa Cabral. In the
external arena, the traumas intensify with the Independence of Brazil (1822); the various abo-
litionist laws regarding slavery; the imprudence of the attempt for territorial realization of the
so called “rose-colored map”; the resulting impositions of the Conference of Berlin (1885), and
inally, with the Proclamation of the Brazilian Republic (1889), which is then followed by what
is known as the English Ultimatum (1890). All of these events begin to create a space of empty
disenchantment that is projected in the literary milieu, just as the euphoric greatness of the
sixteenth century was formed in the Camonian ouevre. his is what we can gather from the
reading of the poem “Sentimento de um occidental,” for example, from O livro de Cesário Verde
(he book of Cesário Verde, 1901).
Two writers in particular ill in the blank pages which resulted from the snuing out of
what was by then imagined greatness: Almeida Garrett and Eça de Queirós. In the work of both
authors, two works stand out as being the most meaningful for the present relections: Viagens
na minha terra (Travels in my homeland, 1846) and A ilustre Casa de Ramires (he illustrious
house of Ramires, 1897). In these works a new form of reading Portugal and its identitarian
cartography is proposed in a moment of symbolic and declared institutional crisis.
Garrett’s Viagens ofer the path of the Tejo, rather that the sea, as the way to Pessoa’s “har-
bor waiting to be found” (1974, 79). he reader is invited by the writer to embark landward in
order to discover the buried myths and understand the meaning of the strength of the people
as a transforming agent of history. In order to carry this out Garrett takes up the perspective of
Fernão Lopes, when, during the scene near the end of the novel, the narrator decides to leave
Santarém, the last river port of this landward trip. In this chapter, he analyzes the degradation
of Portugal itself, beginning with the vision of the degraded tomb of King D. Fernando, a ruler
consecrated in Lopez’s chronicle. he narrator airms, ater investigating where the tombs of
Camões and/or Duarte Pacheco are, that the latter is always more forgotten than the former:
Ten more years of barons and of subjection to the rule of matter and inevitably this agonizing
body that is Portugal will inevitably take the last breath of spirit from us. I irmly believe this.
But, notwithstanding, I hope for better, because the people, the people are healthy […] We,
who are the vile prose of the nation, do not understand the poetry of the people.4
It is interesting to note the fact that the whispered word in the Viagens continues to be derived
from Camões, just like an engine tugging away at past greatness is sought within the network of
the sixteenth-century epic poem. Chapter six clearly shows this game of attraction vs. repulsion.
Here, the narrator airms that he still believes in Camões, and experiences an “intimate feeling
of beauty” (sentimento íntimo do belo) when reading the Lusíadas, although he cannot enjoy
“happiness in the present, in which the love of country” (gozos no presente, em que o amor da
pátria) perhaps cannot be more than “phantasmagoria” (fantasmagoria), therefore hindering
the possibility of “hope in the future” (esperanças de futuro; 1846, 47–48).
he search for past greatness, in moving the Garrettian voyage along in a fashion more
itting of medieval chroniclers than those of Renaissance epic, is announced in the irst chapter
in a positive, cheerful, and even euphoric way. By the end this has disappeared, and yet the re-
demption of the beauty of the land and its myths and buried histories are attained in spite of the
disheartening inal outcome. In the beginning, with usual irony, the narrator, referring to his
ambition, states that “he wants a larger subject” (quer assunto mais largo) and announces that
his “voyage” (viagem) is inspired by the circumstances of the present and not by past memories,
even though the glorious memory of the homeland is praised. He then says: “I am going to, of
all places, Santarém” (vou nada menos que a Santarém). He indicates, continuing, his intention
to “make a chronicle” (fazer crônica) about all that he sees and hears in that city of Ribatejo,
which he considers “the most historic and monumental of our towns” (a mais histórica e monu-
mental das nossas vilas; 1846, 3–4). he result of this journey towards historic and identitarian
recognition, is revealed to be revoltingly melancholy, ending in the form of ruin, made meta-
phor by the city of Santarém, even though as we have seen, the people are gloriied.
Decidedly I shall go, I cannot be here, I do not want to see this. It is not horror that it causes me,
it is nausea, it is disgust, it is anger. Cursed be the hands that profaned you, Santarém… hey
dishonored you, Portugal… hey debased and degraded you, a nation that lost everything,
even the foundations of your history!5
Some ity years later, Eça de Queirós also decides to stage journeys in A ilustre Casa. he irst of
them, imaginary insomuch as the framing story is concerned, appears in the form of a rewriting
of the past by the main character, Gonçalo Mendes Ramires. his rewriting results in the story
4. “Mais dez anos de barões e de regime da matéria, e infalivelmente nos foge deste corpo agonizante de Por-
tugal o derradeiro suspiro do espírito. Creio isto irmemente. Mas espero melhor todavia, porque o povo,
o povo, está são [...] Nós, que somos a prosa vil da nação, nós não entendemos a poesia do povo”. (Garrett
1846, 375)
5. “Decididamente vou-me embora, não posso estar aqui, não quero ver isto. Não é horror que me faz, é náu-
sea, é asco, é zanga. Malditas sejam as mãos que te profanaram, Santarém... que te desonraram, Portugal...
que te envileceram e degradaram, nação que tudo perdeste, até os padrões de tua história!”. (Garret 1846,
374)
A torre de Dom Ramires (he tower of Dom Ramires), originally a romantic poem by Gonçalo’s
uncle that reduplicates the present time of the novel, thereby supplementing it.
Due to the character’s actions, the past returns phantasmatically wrapped up and haunting
the present moment of the narrative. hough it takes the personalized form of a family history,
this is necessary – as the friend and editor of the novel, José Castanheiro, would say – in order to
make Gonçalo write about his ancestors: “to ressuscitate these men […] to an endeavoring soul,
the unbending sublime desire.”6 Camões is again represented, and the desire of Castanheiro
is to recover, through iction, the lost grandeur shaking of “this weak aquiescence we have for
remaining small with the conscience that renews us for our having been so great, […]!”7 he
editorial success of the story, when it is published, shows the fulilment of the desire to “shake
Portugal” (atroar Portugal; 18) feeding the present with the greatness of the past, even if the au-
thor, Gonçalo Ramires, repudiates that past at the end of his writing, when, moved by the cruel
and inhuman death of Lopo de Baião, the Bastard, he unburdens himself: “this punishment of
the bastard let him with an aversion for the remote Afonsinian world, so bestial, so inhuman!”8
On the other hand, this time on a diegetic level, we ind Gonçalo’s second voyage in A
ilustre Casa, bound for Africa, in another of the author’s corrosive ironies, aboard the steamship
“Portugal.” he voyage is clearly the character’s personal project – he is bored in the capital, just
as he was in his Tower on the small Vila de Santa Irinéia, when he felt like someone surrounded
by the holes and walls of his own weakness and lackluster virility.
Gonçalo returns four years later, already transformed by his nineteenth-century colonial
adventure. his adventure complements the example proposed in King Solomon’s Mines by H.
Rider Haggard (1947), a novel adapted by Eça and published in Portuguese in 1891. Gonçalo gets
rich, returning, as we read in a letter written by his cousin Maria Mendonça, in “splendid [con-
dition], [e]ven more beautiful and, above all, more manly. Africa did not come close to tanning
his skin. Always the same whiteness.”9
he biggest nightmare of the white western European was avoided: Gonçalo’s skin was
not darkened in his Mozambican life. He did not cafrealizar (become savage). At this moment,
Eça’s text shows the force of the intrinsic racism (also present in Os Lusíadas) discussed by
Kwame Anthony Appiah (1997), in which the western white historical subject considers his
race to be hegemonic, superior to an Other always viewed as inferior and therefore susceptible
to subjugation.
With today’s perspective we can examine the sudden wealth of Gonçalo, who, striking it
rich on this African mother lode, transforms his metropolitan territory both physically and ec-
onomically. In the play of imaginary schemes, Africa is shown to still be worth the trouble, and
that the character’s dreams of “an African meadow, beneath whispering coconut palms, among
6. “ressuscitar estes varões [...] a alma façanhuda, o querer sublime que nada verga”. (Queirós 1947, 19)
7. “Pela consciência que renova de termos sido tão grandes, [...] este chocho consentimento nosso em per-
manecermos pequenos!”. (Queirós 1947, 19)
8. “esse suplício do Bastardo lhe deixara uma aversão por aquele remoto mundo Afonsino, tão bestial, tão
desumano”. (Queirós 1947, 377)
9. “Ótimo! Até mais bonito e, sobretudo, mais homem. A África nem de leve lhe tostou a pele. Sempre a
mesma brancura”. (Queirós 1947, 409)
the peppery smell of radiant lowers blooming up out of golden gravel”10 are still possible. In
this sense, it is worth citing the essay by Alberto Costa e Silva in which the Brazilian historian
highlights the dubiousness of such a quick gain in wealth, saying: “And if the nobleman of the
Tower became wealthy in such a short time, it must have been due to great luck, abuse, and
guile, or because he oppressed the surrounding towns, taking from them all they could give
and a little more” (2000, 13).
If we recall that Gonçalo was identiied with Portugal by his admininistrator Gouveia for
his “weakness, sweetness, and goodness” (fraqueza, a doçura, a bondade; 1947, 418) and, above
all, for his physical and symbolic reinvigoration, this sudden prosperity can be read as the
possible renovation of the European colonial metropolis. António Cândido sees in Gonçalo’s
reinvigoration “the strengthening of national consciouness that encouraged so many Portu-
guese intellectuals near the end of the nineteenth century and is exempliied in the patriotic
biographies written by Oliveira Martins” (2000, 21). he text, in my way of reading it, with its
corrosive irony and its play of ambiguities, leaves this in suspense. It is like an interpretive path
which is barely navigable. In such a return I sense, purely and simply, the barbed spike of Eça de
Queirós’s irony, a palpable result of his own disenchantment.
In the twentieth century, by way of messianism, Pessoa’s Mensagem (Message) attempts to
call forth past greatness, relying on the strength of symbolic, rather than physical, territory. He
ends the poem, for this very reason, ater having sung of the construction of his “Portuguese
sea,” with the verse, “É a hora!” (it is time) followed by the Latin expression: “Valete, Fratres”
(1974, 89).
Beginning with the Revolution of April 25, 1974, and the independence of the African colo-
nies coming forward at this time, the process of Portuguese self-questioning will experience its
most profound expression, mainly in iction. In the collection of voices which expose the crum-
bling of what we might call euphoric Lusism, it is diicult to choose those which most represent
the search for new ways to respond to the demands posed by divided national subjects in the
throes of identity crisis. If Gonçalo Ramires leaves for Africa on the steamship called “Portugal,”
the narrator of Partes de África (Parts of Africa, 1991), by Helder Macedo, returns from there at
the age of twelve, arriving in Lisbon on another steamship, which, contrary to the irst, is called
“Colonial.” On this return voyage the narrative subject tells us that he has seen the following
places: “Cabo, Moçâmedes, Lobito, Luanda, São Tomé, Madeira.” He goes on to express, as a
consequence of this return, an “undeined feeling of injustice that confusedly feared being able
to correspond to a new way of being in the world.”11
his “new way of being in the world” is one of the distinctive features of the subjects that
populate the works of José Saramago, Helder Macedo, Antonio Lobo Antunes, João de Melo,
and of many others who, recalling the title of one of Melo’s novels, propose a sort of Autópsia
de um mar de ruínas (Autopsy of a sea of ruins, 1984). To carry this out, a journey into the
homeland is proposed, as in Garret, or in the work of José Saramago, be it in Levantado do chão
10. “um prado de África, debaixo de coqueiros sussurrantes, entre o apimentado aroma de radiosas lores, que
brotavam através de pedregulhos de ouro”. (Queirós 1947, 59)
11. “um indeinido sentimento de injustiça que confusamente receava poder vir a corresponder a um novo
modo de estar no mundo”. (Macedo 1991, 13)
(Raised from the ground, 1979), or in Memorial do convento (Baltasar and Blimunda, 1982).
Post-imperial transit and exile may be posed as the only possible response to the splintering
of a subject that no longer identiies himself with a sense of Imperial hegemony. his is the
case of Partes de África and Pedro e Paula (Peter and Paula, 1998) by Helder Macedo, which
points beyond the novel towards a possible paradigm for the problematization of Lusism, at
the time of Salazarist post-fascism. An example of this is found in the novel O esplendor de
Portugal (he splendor of Portugal, 1997) by Lobo Antunes, a title which is a clear reference to
the Portuguese anthem whose lyrics were written by Henrique Lopes de Mendonça. It is not by
chance that part of the anthem is used as an epigraph expressing an undeniably symbolic and
symptomatic reach:
Heroes of the sea, noble people,
Brave and immortal nation,
raise again today
the splendor of Portugal.12
he novel completely undoes the proposed motto when, instead of splendor, the absolute deca-
dence of the overseas imperial dream is portrayed. his is accomplished through narrative ac-
tions that take place in the ex-colony of Angola, now transformed into an independent nation,
and with a spatial shit of focalization towards Portugal, to where the last three descendents of a
white Angolan colonial family move amid the outbreak of civil war. Solitude, pain, madness, ex-
ile, and hallucinated reality mark both spaces, turning the “splendor” into a sea of ruins whose
“autopsy” is carried out in an anguished and surprising way.
Abandoning any sort of linearity, and in order to show the fragmentation of national his-
tory projected metonymically onto placeless subjects, the text is structured around dated frag-
ments and is organized in three parts, according to the point of view of the three brothers of
this colonial family. hey have been exiled in a country which they do not feel is their own,
Portugal, and with which they do not identify. hese three siblings are Carlos (bastard son of his
father, also a mestizo), Rui (schizophrenic son, product of the mother’s adultery), and Clarisse
(the only legitimate daughter of the house). Linking each part, we ind the voice of the mother,
Izilda, from the heart of Angola. Such language is fueled by memory, explaining the various
times of the character’s life in a rural childhood in the Cassanje region.
Contrary to the lyrics of the national anthem, Izilda, a white descendent of Portuguese
colonists, is not a “brightdawn” (aurora forte) but rather immersed in a dark night with no exit.
Her “mother’s kisses” (beijos de mãe) do not protect or sustain the children “against destiny’s
insults” (contra as injúrias da sorte). In fact the contrary is almost the case. In the character’s
mind, the anthem loses patriotic meaning and, in fact, becomes to signify something absolutely
opposite. Since Izilda does not leave her Angolan territory (her “nation”), she obliges the reader
to become immersed in a situation oten eliminated from colonial perspective. Lusism, which
sustained the colonial perspective from the start, reconigures itself in the form of loss when it
is charted in this manner. Here is an explanation given by her father and later referred to several
times, becoming a recurrent synthesis of the ideology projected by the text:
12. “Heróis do mar, nobre povo, / Nação valente e imortal, / levantai hoje de novo / o esplendor de Portugal.”
My father used to explain that what we had procured in Africa was not money or power but
blacks without money and without power that gave us the illusion of money and power, and
that even if we had both of these we would be little more than tolerated, scornfully accepted in
Portugal, seen as we saw the Bailundos […]. My father used to explain that what we procured
in Africa was to transform the vengeance implicit in the act of commanding into what we pre-
tended was the dignity of command.13
he sea doesn´t roar love, as the anthem explains, and Portugal “sufers” in this ruined postim-
perial present, when dreams of greatness become impossible. hose who unsuccessfully lived
the African dream of the “mother lode” repudiate the “joyous future,” exalted in the anthem’s
words and by the symbolic texture of identity, cohesion, and euphoria. his idea is supported by
the construction of the imperial imaginary, which also stresses cohesion and euphoria, exactly
as it is imposed by Salazar.
he death of Izilda, mowed down by Angolan government troop’s machine guns (though
not by UNITA) on Christmas, 1995 – the date of the textual mosaic’s creation – shows her lack
of place, and her exclusion also from Angola – her no-place. he dinner that never occurs in
which the brothers would gather in the European metropolis of Lisbon unravels any hypothesis
on the renewing of afective bonds, with each of the three emerging in an irreversible solitude
that also rejects hypotheses of renaissance. As Maria Alzira Seixo notes, “it is in fact the ques-
tion of ‘agency’ on the postcolonial plane that is debated, which, in this work, leads to a veriica-
tion of strangeness and perturbed identities” (2002, 353).
his “perturbing of identity” ofers keys to the reading of O esplendor de Portugal and oth-
er contemporary Portuguese ictions in which Lusism is reconigured and new meanings are
searched for, still hidden in the margins of a future to come. Perhaps Saramago has conceived
of a possible solution with his Jangada de pedra (he rat of stone), showing the peninsula to
be like “a child formed by travelling who now returns to the sea to be born again, as if he were
inside an aquatic uterus.”14 Here, the new possibility of rebirth points towards a reconigura-
tion of Lusism, sustaining the idea of Lusofonia as a symbolic place to be constructed, once
the rat anchors – here referring to another symbolic geographic coordinate – between Africa
and America.
Lusofonia: Symbolizations and the plot of diferences
At the outset, both Lusism, as it has been already mentioned, and Lusofonia constitute a lin-
guistic fact. Like the former, the latter also signiies, in a more encompassing way, a political
13. “Meu pai costumava explicar que aquilo que tínhamos vindo procurar na África não era dinheiro nem
poder mas pretos sem dinheiro e sem poder algum que nos dessem a ilusão do dinheiro e do poder que
de fato ainda que o tivéssemos não tínhamos por não sermos mais que tolerados, aceitos com desprezo
em Portugal, olhados como olhávamos os bailundos [...] o meu pai costumava explicar que aquilo que tín-
hamos vindo procurar na África era transformar a vingança de mandar no que ingíamos ser a dignidade
de mandar”. (Antunes 1999, 243)
14. “uma criança que viajando se formou e agora se revolve no mar para nascer, como se estivesse no interior
de um útero aquático”. (Saramago 1986, 319)
gesture of airmation of the Lusitanian symbolic-cultural force as it occurs in relation to the

Francophone, the Anglophone, and so on – constructions whose starting point is determined
by the hegemony of the colonizing nations and by their equally hegemonic language, expanded
through colonization.
he research by Ana Isabel Madeira in the Prestige Network has charted “the course of
the emergence of the notion of Lusofonia” (2003, 6). She begins by showing the late registering
of the term in dictionaries, which reveals the equally late entry of the construct in the area of
Portuguese studies. In Brazilian dictionaries, the term Lusofonia appears for the irst time in the
dictionary by Antônio Houaiss. Here it says: “1. Group of those that speak Portuguese, whether
as their mother tongue or not. 1.1. he group of countries that have Portuguese as the oicial or
dominating language” (2001, 1793a). In the electronic version of Aurélio Buarque de Holanda’s
dictionary the following entry appears: “Adoption of the Portuguese language as a language of
culture or lingua franca for those who do not have it as vernacular; this occurs, for example, in
various countries of Portuguese colonization.” he lexicographer acknowledges a second mean-
ing: “Community formed by peoples who habitually speak Portuguese.”
It seems quite clear from the reading of these acceptations that Lusofonia is thought to be
involved in a play of opposites in which the Portuguese language shows itself as: “motherly or
not”; “oicial or dominant”; or even as “of language of culture or lingua franca” (Madeira 2003,
13) his is to say that there is always a diference to be applied in the language’s use and in the
relation of belonging dependent on its use. Returning to Madeira (2003, 13), “the notion of
Lusofonia as a functioning unit in the discourse […] as a trace in the chain of narratives that
articulate the history of the peoples who use the Portuguese language” is once again reinforced.
he “trace” shown by Madeira is too evident in Houaiss’s entry when he explains the “nar-
rative chain” as such:
Outside of Portugal, Lusofonia encompasses the countries of the Portuguese colonial system:
Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe; it also
indicates the speech of the populations of Goa, Daman, and Macau in Asia, and even the vari-
ant of Timor in Oceania. (2001, 1793a)
As regards the relections proposed here, the described space relates to the African countries
colonized in the past by Portugal, whose literature has constituted my main research ield. Bra-
zilian literature will also be included, since Brazil, my own country, is usually held to be part
of Lusofonia. It is to be understood that the section referring to Lusism covered Portuguese
literature. For this reason it will not be the object of analysis from this point onward. Neverthe-
less, it is not possible to conceive of Lusofonia without returing to Os Lusíadas, when literature
in Portuguese is the goal.
he nature of the meeting between the Portuguese and the African Other, found specii-
cally in sixteenth-century epic poetry, is evident in several passages. In this game of represen-
tations, the meeting may become an enjoyable experience, when the possibility of linguistic
communication exists, but it can also turn into a dead-lock when the “foreign people” do not
dominate any recognizable code. here is a question, raised in the minds of the navigators right
at the beginning of the voyage, which opens the scene that depicts the meeting of European
subjects with the inhabitants of a small island spotted by Gama. Here is the question: “What
people is this (they said to themselves) / what customs, what law, what king would they have?”15
he question, put in this way, becomes the motto of the following meetings with other identitar-
ian formations.
Continuing with the scene, and the Lusos introductions: “We Portuguese are from the
West, / We are in search of the lands of the East.”16 To this, the Others respond in Arabic, intel-
ligible for some of the navigators, as the text will clarify several times:
We are, one of the islanders responded,
Foreigners in this land, law, and nation;
Because the locals are those raised by
Nature, without law or reason.17
he African blacks, owners of the already invaded island that we will later know to be Mozam-
bique, are excluded from the scene and reported as beings raised by nature, “without law and
without reason.” he silence of the subject to whom the island belongs is represented here. Only
in Canto 5, and therefore much further along in the armor of the textual spatiality, does Vasco
da Gama mention the existence of an earlier encounter – the irst in the form of lash-back with
the blacks – synthesized metonymically in the igure of one of them, who is described as a “for-
eigner […] of black skin” (estranho [...] de pele preta; 1972, 296; 5.27.6). his “foreigner” will be
characterized in the subsequent stanza as “more savage than Polyphemus the brute” (selvagem
mais que o bruto Polifemo; 1972, 296; 5.28.4).
In this narrative moment, the linguistic breach takes shape and the result is the incommu-
nicability between two ethnic cultural groups who confront each other for the irst time. Vasco
says: “Neither he understand us, nor do we understand him,” (Nem ele entende a nós, nem nós
a ele; 1972, 296; 5.28.3). here is no dialogue or introductory protocol, for no previous knowl-
edge exists of the codes used by one another – which therefore causes the absolute impossibility
of linguistic cohabitation. Inevitably, this is all followed by the irst physical confrontation, with
arrows on one side pitted against irearms on the other. Cultural worlds exclude and confront
each other, precisely due to the inexistence of porous linguistic borders in which they can in-
teract. he curtains open now on the colonial drama at the same time that Lusofonia begins to
make a future for itself. he language of the dominator imposes itself as hegemonic, because it
is the only thing that makes sense of this “strange” world marked by “savagery.”
It is important to clearly state that we, the formerly colonized, speak the Portuguese that
arrived here as the legacy let by the European Other, along with the variants resulting from the
cultural formation of each one of our countries, charted by geographic lines and limits imposed
by the hegemonic colonial power. It is in this Portuguese that we speak and build part of our
national identities.
Emphasizing the strength of these linguistic diversities that distinguish us from others,
the romantic writer José de Alencar looked to lay down the foundations for a Brazilian literary
15. “Que gente será esta (em si deziam) / Que costumes, que lei, que rei teriam?”. (Camões 1972, 71; 1.42.7–8)
16. “Os portugueses somos do Occidente, / Imos buscando as terras do Oriente”. (Camões 1972, 71; 1.50.7–8)
17. “Somos, um dos das ilhas lhe tornou, / Estrangeiros na terra, lei e nação; / Que os próprios são aqueles que
criou / A natura sem lei e sem razão”. (Camões 1972, 75; 1.53.1–4)
nationality as few had done. In the preface of the novel Sonhos dóuro (Dreams of gold, 1872),
he rhetorically inquires: “Can a people that suck (chupa) on cashews, mangos, cambucá and
jaboticaba, speak a language with the same pronunciation and the same spirit as a people that
absorb (sorve) igs, pears, apricots, and medlars?”18 We all know that the verb chupar can be
taken to mean the same as sorver, but between the two terms and their respective signiier and
signiied there is an Atlantic distance separating the gesture and the “taste” of the two actions,
beyond the diferent qualities of the chupada or sorvida fruits.
On the other hand, one must consider that the Portuguese language was brutally imposed
by European domination, as can be seen in the rigid norms of the statutes sustaining the pro-
cess of assimilation in Africa. Assimilation, one must not forget, was the only way the black
could gain access to a gamut of rights by which he could barely reach the status of half-citizen.
Alfredo Margarido describes this in a scathing analysis, saying that the instrument of linguistic
domination based itself on:
Repelling the Other, particularly the groups that European proto-anthropology classiied as
savages: those without territory, without government, without religion, Africans, and Indian
Americans. his by no means implies that Asians wholly escaped this condemnation. Tell me
what language you speak, and how you speak it, and I will tell you who you are not. his could
be the central aphorism associated to Portuguese linguistic practices. (2000, 66–67)
From the idea of linguistic domination, linked to the deliberate extinguishing of autochthonous
symbolic representations – always by imposed European force, it is necessary to include Luso-
fonia in the sphere of the “sociology of absence.” his type of sociology, in keeping with what
Arriscado Nunes and Boaventura de Sousa Santos postulate, must be understood as “a resource
[…] capable of identifying the silences and ignorance that deine the incompleteness of culture,
experience, and knowledge” (2003, 26). his is the space where Lusofonia moves: where silence
is established over what is unknown and which does not wish to be discovered. It must there-
fore be thought of as a political gesture that sustains an entire symbolic structure through which
eforts are frequently made to shut down the diferences that insist, in spite of this, on entering
into the literary network woven by the native producers of the nations colonized by Portugal
in the past. As Cornejo Polar emphasizes, in relation to Latin American literatures – and easily
extendable African ones – these productions create “a wide open area for the insurmountable
heterogeneity of voices as well as plural and dissident letters; to the plural temporalities of a
history which is by far denser and more astonishing than the linear kind of history; and to the
varied, tinged, and confused consciences that cross these voices, granting them stunning con-
sistency” (2000, 84).
Returning to the linguistic question, one basic presupposition must be considered when
thinking about the community of the seven countries where Portuguese is the cultural, oicial,
or dominant mother tongue. his deals with the fact of an existence – within the space of the
language’s intercontinental projection – of a primary diference between what happens in Bra-
zil and in Portugal, and what occurs in the historical social space of the ive African nations. In
this latter case, Portuguese is only one of the existing languages and not the one which confers
18. “O povo que chupa o caju, a manga, o cambucá e a jabuticaba, pode falar uma língua com igual pronúncia
e o mesmo espírito do povo que sorve o igo, a pera, o damasco e a nêspera?”. (Alencar 1953, 88)
national unity. For this reason, there is no way to put aside the question of plurilingualism
when working with the literatures of the ive nations without examining the diversity of its
cultural dimension, widened even further by such linguistic polyphony. Inocência Mata clari-
ies this point:
It is important not to forget that African literatures written in Portuguese, as opposed to their
Portuguese and Brazilian counterparts, form a part (and a signiicant one at that) of the literary
systems in Portuguese of the African countries, in which productions in African – either creole
or indigenous languages – also rank signiicantly. (2004, 350)
his assertion is important when the question of Lusofonia is considered in the African arena,
where Portuguese is the oicial language. Not only are the national or native languages spoken
in some regions – sometimes more than their European counterpart, but there are also literary
works produced (though few) in these languages. Furthermore, they oten confront Portuguese
within the same artistic verbal production, as can be seen in the verses of the Guinean Odete
da Costa Semedo:
Irans of Bissau
of Klikir to Bissau bedju
of Nála and of Rênu
of Ntula and of Kuntum
of Ôkuri and of Bandim[...]
he seven djorson of Bissau
Will be present
he souls of the katanderas
will be present.19
In one of her chronicles, “Lingua materna” (Mother tongue), the Angolan historian and poet
Ana Paula Tavares emphasizes the criss crossing and linguistic supplementation in her cultural
sphere:
I’ve always observed with pleasure the generous alchemy of the Portuguese language, thick-
ening the Umbumdoan song, smiling with Quimbumdoan humor, or incorporating certain
words of the Nyanekan language. he same dynamics also applies to the entire universe of
Bantu languages, and not only for those spoken in the territories where today the Portuguese
language is spoken. (Tavares 1998, 13)
At this time it is worth mentioning the famous “Carta pràs icamiabas” (Letter for the Icamiabas),
one of the chapters of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928), where anthropophagic parody
on language use is undisguisedly present. his is shown in the letter, from the initial fact that
Macunaíma shows the ignorance of the Paulists for whom “Icamiabas” would be another way
of saying “Amazons.” he character tells us this fact in a supposedly erudite and “spurious voice”
(voz espúria; 1978, 59) set in the city of São Paulo, the place where the letter is written from.
he passage below, an ironic quotation of a text by Camões, shows how the question of the use
19. “Irans de Bissau / de Klikir a Bissau bedju / de Nála e de Rênu / de Ntula e de Kuntum / de Ôkuri e de
Bandim / [...] / As sete djorson de Bissau / estarão presentes / as almas das katanderas / estarão presentes”.
(Semedo 2003, 83–84)
of the Portuguese language in the Brazilian modernist project seeks to reinforce the national,
which in turn resumes the project of the novelist José de Alencar, giving it another sense.
Not even ive suns had set since you let us when, […] on a beautiful May night a year ago, we
lost the muiraquitã [a sort of talisman]; which another would write muraquitã and some others,
jealous of the proparoxytone etymologies, would spell muyrakitan, or even muraquéitã. Don’t
smile! […] his word, so familiar to your ears, is virtually unknown around here.20
hroughout the ironic progression of the letter, the existence of two languages is demonstrat-
ed to exist in São Paulo (a metonymic representation of the Brazilian cities, where colonial
strength was most consolidated): an oral (“a barbarous and multifarious language”) and a writ-
ten one, “quite close to the Virgilian […] [a] sweet language, which is called, with great elegance,
the language of Camões!”21 he Brazilian modernist project attempts to erect a diferent locus
of speech which would possibly serve as a new model for the African nations, as a push towards
a divergence from acting European models. An example can be found in the poetry of Manuel
Bandeira, in which he speaks of the people, of their popular proclamations, songs, the “new
rhythm.” hese invade the poetic body, conferring a particularly Brazilian feel to its outlines, as
the irst stanza of “Berimbau” demonstrates:
he white lowered aguapés of the ponds
In the wetlands of the Japurás
Wave, wave, wave.
he saci bird sings: – Si si si si!
– Ui ui ui ui ui! Cries the nymph
In the estuary ponds.
Of the Japurás and of the Purus.22
For this reason, certain African poets such as the Angolans Agostinho Neto, Antonio Jacinto,
and Viriato da Cruz identify themselves with this new rhythm of Brazilian poetry, giving way
to diverse paths and rhythmic modulations particular to a poetic speech in diference. his can
be seen, for example, in “Castigo pro comboio malandro” (Punishment for the misit train) by
António Jacinto – to conine ourselves to just one case – in his explicit dialogue with “Tren de
ferro” (Iron train) by Bandeira. Let us confront both poems:
Cofee with bread
Cofee with bread
Cofee with bread
Virgin Mary, what was that, machinist? [...]
20. “Nem cinco sóis eram passados que de vós nos partíramos, quando [...] Por uma bela noite dos idos de
maio do ano translato, perdíamos a muiraquitã; que outrem grafara muraquitã e, alguns doutos, ciosos de
etimologias esdrúxulas, ortografam muyrakitan e até mesmo muraquéitã, não sorriais! [...] este vocábulo,
tão familiar às vossas trompas de Eustáquio, é quase desconhecido por aqui”. (Andrade 1978, 59)
21. “um linguajar bárbaro e multifário […] mui próxima da vergiliana [...] meigo idioma, que, com impecável
galhardia, se intitula: língua de Camões!”. (Andrade 1978, 107)
22. “Os aguapés dos aguaçais / Nos igapós dos Japurás / Bolem, bolem, bolem. / Chama o saci: – Si si si si!
/ – Ui ui ui ui ui! Uiva a iara / Nos aguaçais dos igapós / Dos Japurás e dos Purus” (Bandeira 1977, 196).
Hey boilermaker!
hrow ire
Into the furnace
Because I need
Great strength
Great strength
Great strength.23
hat misit train
runs
runs forcefully
ué ué ué
hii hii hii
te-quem-tem te-quem-tem te-quem-tem
he misit train
runs.24
African national literary projects oten use the Portuguese language as a way of confronting
dominant forces, of attempting to break normative rigidity, ofering diferent verbal solutions
in order to structure the bases of an artistic production set “in diference.” What is perceived, at
irst glance, is this intrinsic shiting in the sonorous foundations of the language – a process less
and less restricted, even at this phonic level, which moves beyond these foundations and goes
so far as to reach the syntactic and morphologic body of the language. his is what a reading of
the iction of the Angolan José Luandino Vieira, for example, shows. As an illustration of this
aesthetic process, we draw from a passage of his novel João Vêncio: os seus amores (João Vêncio:
his loves, 1979), where once again we ind another problematic hero, like Macunaíma, and his
difering speech in relation to European norms:
I don’t like people – blasted mice! he government should make distant settlements for these
beasts to live in. he city would be only emptied beauty, houses and trees, all the more so. No
one would ruin it with their stench.25
Outside the center where Lusofonia has been born, a network of complicities is formed, exem-
pliied in the importance that the reading of the iction of Jorge Amado has had on the process
of African authors’ literary formation. his is due both to Amado’s representation of the self-
justifying lifestyles of a sample population of Bahia blacks, as well as his use of an aesthetic of
deprivation by which those who are excluded gain voice and demonstrate their diference:
23. “Café com pão / Café com pão / Café com pão // Virge Maria que foi isso maquinista? // [...] Ai seu fogu-
ista / Bota fogo / Na fornalha / Que eu preciso / Muita força / Muita força / Muita força”. (Bandeira 1977,
236–37)
24. “Esse comboio malandro / passa / passa sempre com a força dele / ué ué ué / hii hii hii / te-quem-tem te-
quem-tem te-quem-tem / O comboio malandro / passa”. (Jacinto 1985, 23)
25. “Eu não gosto as gentes – camundongos dum raio! O governo devia de fazer sanzalas longe para irem
morar estas alimárias. A cidade icava só a beleza vaziada, casas e árvores, tudo mais quanto. Ninguém que
vinha-lhe estragar com suas catingas”. (Vieira 1987, 81)
No one paid attention to the arrival of Jubiabá.he macumbeiro spoke: – But he died of an ugly
death. he men had lowered their heads: they knew well that they couldn´t handle Jubiabá,
who was a priest. [...] He then spoke in Nago, and when Jubiabá spoke Nago the blacks began
to tremble: – Ôjú ànun fó ti iká, li ôkú.26
he interviews conducted by Michel Laban with Angolan and Mozambican writers, among
others, demonstrate the importance of the reading of the Bahian author as well as of the Por-
tuguese neorealists in the formative process of the writers of these African countries are made.
he Mozambican Noémia de Sousa conveys this importance to the interviewer, when she re-
sponds as to why she had written “O poema a Jorge Amado” (he poem to Jorge Amado). She
states: “It is because of the books of Jorge Amado: there is a book […] I believe it is S. Jorge
dos Ilhéus that says: ‘Come and sit on the quay my dark one’ […] or is it Jubiabá? I was quite
impressed by Jorge Amado” (Laban 1998, 1:307).
he desire of authors to overcome the authority of the colonizing Other, historically and
literarily, becomes quite clear for the reader of African writings ater the 1940s, transporting the
artistic word to their own symbolic territoriality. With this gesture, they attempt to overcome
authoritative European power by directly confronting it. Out of the written word, which was
“initially the enigmatic sign of power,” as Cornejo Polar has called it, they make a “territory to
preserve or conquer, much like a segment of politics or the economy of appropriations, expro-
priations, and reappropriations, which cause tension and sever the entire colonial life” (Cornejo
Polar 2000, 83). Language is one of the basic elements of this “economy,” whose aim is to change
conceptual worldviews.
José Craveirinha, in “Hino à minha terra,” (Anthem to my land) – a sort of response to
the incapacity of the Lusiadas seafarers to name diference – renames his Mozambican histo-
riocultural universe. His “anthem,” contrary to the deconstructed Portuguese anthem by Lobo
Antunes, bases itself on pride and positivity. he poem opens with an epigraph that functions
as a sort of proposal by which a riddle is told in the African style:
he blood of the names
Is the blood of humans
Drink it too if you´re able
You who love it not
And the poet continues ater this motto/riddle:

It dawns
over the cities of the future
And a nostalgia grows in the name of things
and I say Metengobalame and Macomia
and Metengobalame is the warm word
that blacks had invented
and not another thing is Macomia [...]
26. “Ninguém tinha reparado a chegada de Jubiabá. O macumbeiro falou: – Mas ele morreu de morte feia...
Os homens baixaram a cabeça, bem sabiam que eles não podiam com Jubiabá que era pai-de-santo. [...]
Disse em nagô então e quando Jubiabá falava nagô os negros icavam trêmulos: – Ôjú ànun fó ti iká, li ôkú”.
(Amado 1983, 33–34)
Oh, the lovely lands of my African country [...]

and all of the names I cherish in the Rongan tongue
macua, suaíli, changana
xítsua and bitonga.27
his blood of African names, which brightens so many other languages and cultures of the con-
tinent in its founding ethnocultural diversity, reveals the cosmogonic strength of the African
word, always slightly beyond itself. he visible and non visible are linked through the word, as
so many African scholars have pointed out.
his divergent cosmogonic construction also articulates other symbolizations by which
European-based language areas can be problematized, allowing us to conceive, without falling
into essentialism – which is always a form of shutting down, rather than a strenghtening, as
Edward Said (1993) argues – an Africafonia, ungraspable because it is irreducible to itself. It is
enough to read, for example, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Amós
Tutuola, Luandino Vieira, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Boaventura Cardoso, Paulina Chiziane, Ab-
dulai Sila, Mia Couto, Pepetela, Alda Espírito Santo, and so many other “written voices,” to
understand the meanings this Africafonia contains. In Brazil, we feel its presence in a large
number of works by Afro-descended writers who are dedicated to representing a place always
omitted by the literary canon.
his divergent trace of permanence, outside of symbolic European patterns, scatters itself
in an ample literary constellation. Two poetic works of the Brazilians Edimilson de Almeida
Pereira and Antônio Risério, O livro de falas ou Kalunbungu (he book of tongues or Kalunbun-
gu, 1987) and Oriki Orixá (he poems of the orisha, 1996), serve as more than relevant example
of the symbolic force of this constellation, whose stars are other languages, other cultures, other
knowledge. E. de A. Pereira writes in this vein:
“ ‘Kauô Kabiecile!’ ‘Come see the King descend to earth!’ his is the greeting for Xangô […]
he was at one time the fourth monarch of the city Oyo, and he remains King among the gods”
Celebration
he forge where lightning is made comes to me from an ancient age […] I sufered in the an-
gel’s love, but crowned stone and lightning. Ancient words are queens and forgotten men, the
deciphering of masks.28
Risério adopts a similar perspective, in one of his recreated translations of a Yoruba oriki
(poem), dealing with Xangô as well.
27. “O sangue dos nomes / é o sangue dos homens / Suga-o também se és capaz / tu que não o amas / Aman-
hece / sobre as cidades do futuro / E uma saudade cresce no nome das coisas / e digo Metengobalame e
Macomia / e é Metengobalame a cálida palavra / que os negros inventaram / e não outra coisa Macomia /
[...] / Oh as belas terras do meu Áfrico País / [...] / e todos os nomes que amo belos na língua ronga / macua,
suaíli, changana / xítsua e bitonga”. (Craveirinha 1980, 21–22)
28. “ ‘Kauô Kabiecile!’ ‘Venham ver o Rei descer sobre / a terra!’, eis a saudação de Xangô [...] foi outrora o
quarto / monarca da cidade de Oyo [...] // FESTA // Vem-me de velhas idades a oicina dos raios. [...] Sofri
no / amor dos anjos, mas coroei pedra e raio. Velhas palavras são / rainhas e homens esquecidos, a deci-
fração das máscaras”. (Pereira and S. White 1996, 40–41)
ORIKI XANGÔ 2
Xangô oluaxô sparking beast eye of orobô
Cheek of obi
Fire from the mouth, possessor of Kossô
Orisha who frightens
Punish those who do not respect you
Xangô in ire-red clothes, possessor of the house of wealth
Mouth of ire, feline in the hunt.29
Ruy Duarte de Carvalho efectively clariies the strength of symbolic African sources translated
into texts produced in Portuguese. Showing the entrance of representational forms alien to
Western tradition which give way to other networks of knowledge and cultural belonging, the
Angolan author refers to a procedure which can also be extended to the writings of authors such
as Edimilson Pereira and Antônio Risério.
If it is true that, upon translating and adapting sources of African oral expression for my lan-
guage, I impressed upon them the brand of my own poetic language. Also it is undoubtedly
true that upon doing this, I was placing the brand of an Other imaginary in the Portuguese
language. (R. D. de Carvalho 1995, 75)
he work Ondula, savana branca (Roll on, white savanna, 1982) by the same author, as well as
the works by Pereira and Risério, are concrete proof of this efort in the translation into this
space, considered Lusophone, of something else which, even if written in Portuguese, goes be-
yond a Luso-European symbolic “sonority,” as the long poem “Peul” shows in its closing:
Take, inally, the jujubes stored
in the womb of the world.
Only those who arrived here may reach them.
You are at the edges of men’s knowledge.
From here on out it is divine,
science at your disposal.
Foroforondou will now take care of you.30
he Africafonia construct becomes then, in all its symbolic manifestations, a signiier capable
of encompassing, with regards to the continent, not one, but all the languages spoken in it and,
by extension, all its polymorphic cultures. Literature, therefore, ends up transculturally recu-
perating all these languages and cultures in one of the most stimulating artistic remappings of
the area of Afro-Luso-Brasilian literary and cultural studies. Relecting upon this Africafonia
as it relates to Brazil – my own place of enunciation – I would venture to raise the following
questions, as a way of concluding: are we therefore all Lusophones, passing through Lusophone
29. “Xangô oluaxó fera faiscante olho de orobô / Bochecha de obi / Fogo pela boca, dono de Kossô, / Orixá
que assusta / Castiga quem não te respeita / Xangô da roupa rubra, dono da casa da riqueza. / Boca de fogo,
felino na caça”. (Risério 1996, 133)
30. “Toma, por im, as jujubas guardadas / na matriz do mundo. / Só as alcança quem chegou aqui. / Estás
na fronteira do saber dos homens. / Daqui para a frente é divina / a ciência ao teu dispor. / Foroforondou
agora cuidará de ti”. (R.D. de Carvalho 1982, 65)
places, thinking, loving, believing, living, and creating (and any other verbs we might wish to
apply) in a Lusophone way? Or are we all, we ex-centrics, travellers in a language that dared
to cast anchor in other and distant ports, possessing us and forever keeping us as identities in
diference?
In order to respond to such probing, it is necessary to reiterate the historical-cultural fact
that a fruitful space for mutual possibilities of understanding is created by means of the com-
mon use of our language, in which many complicities and an endless number of intertwined
stories proliferate. In order for this understanding, these complicities, and these stories to be
consolidated, another way of reading and seeing the plot of diferences must be constructed,
so that they may be read and seen without omissions or censorship by hegemonies of a his-
toric, symbolic, and above all, political-cultural character. Only in this way will Lusism fulill its
promise of a new future and will Lusofonia gain new and provocative meaning.
Travel writing
Luis Fernández Cifuentes
he relationship between travel books and national literary histories appears to be trapped in
paradox. On the one hand, as Elsner and Rubiés have noted (1999, 4), “the literature of travel
not only exempliies the multiple facets of modern identity, but it is also one of the principal
cultural mechanisms, even a key cause, for the development of modern identity since the Re-
naissance.” On the other hand, however, literary histories, which ultimately dwell on national
identity, pay due attention to travel books written mainly during the Middle Ages, precisely
when there was no clear conscience of a national identity, national borders were rather perme-
able, and notions of genre and even literature were not yet established with the kind of rigor
they would later acquire. Travel literature at large, which became increasingly important from
the late seventeenth century on, both in the book market and in the coniguration of national
identities, makes little or no appearance in conventional literary histories, particularly in Spain.
hus, two travelogues from the late Middle Ages, Embajada a Tamorlán (A diplomatic expedi-
tion to the court of the Tamberlane), a voyage diplomatique generally published under the name
of Ruy González de Clavijo, and Andanças e viajes de un hidalgo español (Travels and adven-
tures of a Spanish gentleman), by the more modern and independently wealthy traveler Pero
Tafur, became Spain’s two most canonical travel books of all time, receiving more academic
attention than just about any other travelogue in the history of Spanish literature.
Even when mapping the Middle Ages, however, Spanish literary histories tend to be more
exclusive than inclusive. It could be argued that, if it is a matter of tracing and appraising na-
tional identity, its origins, and developments, through a corpus of pertinent and distinguished
texts, literary histories should not limit their attention to travel literature written in the national
language; they should also take into consideration travelogues written by Spanish writers in
languages other than Castilian, as well as travelogues by foreign writers who crisscrossed what
is now deined as Spain’s “national” territory. Another three texts, at least, could then ind their
way into the literary history of medieval travel books. he irst, Liber peregrinationis (he Pil-
grim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela), which became book ive of Liber Sancti Iacobi (Book
of Saint James) in the twelth century, is a pilgrims’ guide more than a strict peregrinatio – a
spiritual journey in search of divine forgiveness, possibly compiled in Latin by Picaud, a French
monk. It names every village on the road to Santiago, the bodies of saints that rest in the shrines
along the way, rivers both poisonous and salutary, hospitals and, with particular alacrity and
verbosity, the oten fearful characteristics of the local folks. he natives of Navarre, for example,
“are a barbarous race unlike all other races in customs and in character, full of malice, swarthy in
color, evil of face, depraved, perverse, peridious, empty of faith and corrupt, libidinous, drunk-
en, experienced in all violence, ferocious and wild, dishonest and reprobate, impious and harsh,
cruel and contentious […], in everything inimical to our French people” (Shaver-Crandell et
al. 1995, 29).1 he second, now simply known as Libro de viajes (Travelogue), was written in
Hebrew by Benjamín de Tudela toward the end of the twelth century. It was published irst in
1. “Hec est gens barbara, omnibus gentibus dissimilis ritibus et essentia, omni malitia plena, colore atra, uisu
iniqua, praua, peruersa, perida, ide vacua et corrupta, libidinosa, ebriosa, omni violentia docta, ferox et
184 Luis Fernández Cifuentes
1543 in Constantinople, translated to Latin in 1575 by Benito Arias Montano, and inally into
Spanish in 1918. Benjamín de Tudela toured the Southern and Eastern European Jewries from
Tudela (Navarre) to Baghdad. Closer to peregrinatio than to the other two modes of travelogue
in the Middle Ages: navigation which focused, like Marco Polo’s, on topography and markets,
and curiositas, which aimed, like Mandeville’s, at entertaining the reader with exotic and mon-
strous phenomena, Benjamín’s book registered with characteristic monotony all distances and
monuments as well as the names of prominent Jews – particularly the most learned – in every
community he visited, with occasional reference to the hardships they sufered in certain anti-
Semitic settings; most poignantly, in Constantinople (Benjamin 1982, 67). he third book, Viaje
por España y Portugal (Journey through Spain and Portugal), was written in Latin in Nürem-
berg by Ieronimus Münzer – a minor humanist, and a pious, anti-Semitic, and puritanical man
– toward the end of the iteenth century. Arturo Farinelli declared it the most interesting travel
report in Medieval Spain (introduction to Münzer 1991, x). It reveals a prosperous, fertile, and
well-populated Spain that the very honest, sober and rich “sarracenos” tend with exemplary
care (Münzer 1991, 299). He writes with indefatigable enthusiasm and detail about temples and
castles, monasteries and palaces (the Alhambra, in particular), cities and gardens, valleys and
mountains, with hardly any of the complaints about impracticable roads and dreadful lodgings
that would plague so many foreigners’ travelogues in the centuries to come. Such a happy, civi-
lized journey is only sporadically disturbed by the brutal detail: two sodomites hanged by the
road on the outskirts of Madrid with their testicles tied around their necks (279).
“Travel literature reached the height of its inluence on Western culture in the period from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, with its largest ever share of the book market” (Stagl
1995, 199). By and large, this travel literature related a new type of journey: “About the year 1550
pilgrimage had ceased to be a plausible justiication for travel. A new legitimation was needed.
It was found in education” (47); and this “education” was grounded in “the idea that there was
a kind of truth about men and nature that was accessible to all, rather than just to a specialized
religious elite, and which rested upon direct observation rather than upon written authority”
(Elsner and Rubiés 1999, 30). hus, all kinds of empirical information started to ind their way
into European travel books. In Spain, however, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
primarily devoted to travels of discovery, Christianization, and colonization, directly linked to
the empire and its monarch. Literary histories generally include limited references to the main
accounts of such travels, although they no longer classify them as “travel books” but rather
as “Histories of the Indies” or “Histories of the Conquest” (Stagl 1995, 50): Columbus’s Diario
(Journal) of his irst voyage to America; Hernán Cortés’s Cartas de relación (Dispatches from
Mexico); Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (Shipwrecks); and Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia de la
conquista de Nueva España (History of the conquest of New Spain). Travel accounts that were
less imperial but no less remarkable – books that did not attest to the expansion of the crown
as much as to extraordinary adventures and the customs of remote folks – were excluded from
literary histories and, more oten than not, from the printing press as well. García-Romeral’s
extensive bio-bibliographies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel books include, next
silvestris, improba et reproba, impia et austera, dira et contentiosa […], nostre genti Gallice in omnibus
inimica.” (Shaver-Crandell et al. 1995, 28)
Travel writing 185
to the canonical texts of the conquistadors, hundreds of manuscripts and a few printed books
by soldiers and missionaries – the two main categories of travel writers at that juncture. At least
four of these books deserve critical attention in a history of travel literature, however short.
he irst, in chronological order, is a page-turner from the seventeenth century published
only in 1900 and known since then as Vida del capitán Alonso de Contreras (Life of Captain
Alonso de Contreras). he book can hardly be called an autobiography, in the modern sense of
the genre: its protagonist never ages or evolves; he does not write about an individual’s identity,
but rather about the endless travels that take him all over the Mediterranean basin and the ac-
tions that these travels entail. In fact, he does not recount the journeys themselves – neither the
places, nor the monuments, the peoples, or their customs, but rather the feats of what José Ortega
y Gasset called “a pure, undiluted soldier-adventurer” of the seventeenth century, forever devot-
ed to ighting the Turks: assassinations, acts of piracy, cold revenges, duels, rogueries, trials, im-
prisonments and all sorts of atrocities – akin to what is now known as tremendismo – in a sparse
and deliberate prose that Ortega found irresistible (epilogue to Contreras 1965, 193–99). his is
how Contreras recounts the end of his marriage to a rich widow who cuckolded him with his best
friend: “since I could not sleep, I kept watchful watch until one morning (bad luck that they had)
I caught them together, and they died. God rest their souls, if at that juncture they repented.”2
he second book introduces a new type of itinerary in Spanish travel literature: the traveler
goes neither east like Tafur and Clavijo, nor west like the conquerors, but everywhere in the
world; moreover, he can be a soldier or a missionary, as the situation demands. It was published
irst in 1614 with a typically prolix title that begins: Historia y viaje del mundo del clérigo agra-
decido D. Pedro Ordóñez de Cevallos (A history of the grateful clergyman D. Pedro Ordóñez de
Cevallos and of his travels around the world). Ordoñez’s is a story of almost pure motion that
only slows down to quote the classics or to insert brief, mostly edifying or fabulous, anecdotes.
Here is a sample of his generally relentless narrative:
His lordship told me one day: Hey! my loyal friend (as he used to call me), let’s go to Spain.
He couldn’t ind a ship so he bought a very large launch, and had it equipped with a deck and
sheer strakes. We set of and were delivered from the ocean in Seville. His lordship gave me that
launch or shoddy boat, and I exchanged it for a British one, paid 800 ducados and prepared to
leave for Ireland.3
Much slower, and considerably richer in narrative and descriptive detail, is the third book, Viaje
de la China (Trip to China), by Adriano de las Cortes, a Jesuit missionary who let Manila for
Macao in 1625, was shipwrecked near the Chinese coast, and spent a year of penuries as prisoner
or slave of the natives. he text ofers, in a well-balanced mixture, a narrative of misadventures
(illnesses, cold, fatigue, bad food…), the disclosure of the narrator’s changing feelings (his fear
2. “Yo que no dormía procuré andar al descuido con cuidado, hasta que su fortuna los trajo a que los cogí
juntos una mañana, y murieron; téngalos Dios en el cielo si en aquel trance se arrepintieron.” (Contreras
1965, 95)
3. “Un día me dijo su señoría: Ea, amigo iel (que así me llamaba), vámonos a España. Y por no hallar navío
compró una barca muy grande y le echaron cubierta y obras muertas. Partímonos y llegamos a Sevilla
en salvamento. Dióme su señoría aquel navichuelo o barca, que troqué por otro inglés y di ochocientos
ducados, y apresté viaje para Irlanda.” (Ordóñez de Ceballos 1942, 79)
of the mandarin’s ire, his surprise at the unexpected kindness of one of his masters, the content-
ment of a good meal…), and the impeccable ethnographic description of local foods, costumes,
economy, administration of justice, education, and architecture, with delicate drawings by his
own hand. he initial, long account of the shipwreck – a common feature in travelogues from
the earliest times until the twenty-irst century (see, for example, Esteva 2006) – stands out as
the work of a masterful narrator in its description of the development of the storm that runs the
ship aground; the passengers who drown in the freezing waters when trying to reach the shore;
the waves that shatter to pieces the already abandoned ship; the growing number of Chinese
people on the beach, watching the spectacle but ofering no help, “for they were not there to
help but to collect the booty”; and, inally, the looting, the random executions, the confessions
in articulo mortis, and the painful march of the surviving prisoners to the interior.
he fourth and last text is the immensely popular but somewhat more conventional trav-
elogue Peregrinación de la mayor parte del mundo (Pilgrimage through most of the World), by
Pedro Cubero Sebastián, irst published in 1682. It includes the predictable listings – the unre-
mitting enumeration of Jerusalem’s churches takes up almost ten pages of not so long a book
(Cubero 1916, 152–62), as well as the usual topographical references, the length of every stage,
measurements of lands, traits of monuments, and social habits of diferent populations. How-
ever, it shares with Adriano de las Cortes’s text, the presence of a singular and modest narrator
who registers his feelings without restraint, from his loneliness and disorientation in Babylon-
like Paris to his dread, superstitious fears, and heartfelt kindness in a perilous journey through
the Lithuanian wilderness (260).
hroughout the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a large number of foreign travelers
let a record of their travels throughout the Iberian Peninsula. hey were mostly voyageurs di-
plomatiques or dignitaries from European courts. hey began to deine and divulge what would
become, in future centuries, the common referents of Spain’s national identity: from the oriental
splendor of the Alhambra to the arrogance, hardihood, and indolence of the Spanish character.
Literary histories remember but one of those travelers, the Venetian ambassador Andrea Nav-
agero, whose relationship with the Catalan poet Boscán had a decisive inluence on the course
of Spanish poetry. His brief Il viaggio fatto in Spagna (he trip undertaken in Spain), however,
is little more than a succinct record of every settlement he found in his itinerary (and he found
many) in 1524–26. Navagero’s pace seems to slow down only to fervently note ancient inscrip-
tions and other traces of Roman or Arab Spain: his was a characteristic peregrinatio academica,
de rigueur at the time among European humanists (Fernández Álvarez 1956, 54–61). His highest
praises go to the Alhambra – without the enthusiastic orientalism that would overcome roman-
tic travelers – and to the sight unseen of Segovia’s aqueduct (Navagero 1563, 21 and 33). Another
three foreign travelogues of diferent length and complexity are considerably more indicative
of this early stage in the construction of Spain’s national identity. Ortega y Gasset quoted with
admiration the work of Francisco Guicciardini, professional historian and Florentine ambas-
sador to the court of Ferdinand the Catholic. he dark perception of Spain and, especially, of
the Spaniards that the reader will ind in his brief and accusatory Legazione di Spagna (Report
from Spain, 1512–13) marks a sharp contrast with the sanguine picture Münzer drew only seven-
teen years earlier. Guicciardini’s is not a travel book as much as an irritated invective, somewhat
similar to those eighteenth-century French and Italian diatribes against Spain, which prompted
Travel writing 187
lengthy responses from exasperated Spanish ilustrados. In the second half of the seventeenth
century, two lengthier narratives would ofer a much more nuanced image of the nation. Dutch
diplomat Antoine de Brunel’s Voyage d’Espagne (A Journey into Spain, 1665) tends to burden the
reader with the intricacies of court politics, but he also inserts here and there superb portraits of
political igures – underlining the general pettiness of the Spanish nobility – as well as poignant
descriptions of a mostly desolate land, its miserable lodgings, precarious buildings, and other
evidence of Spain’s low quality of life. As for the Spaniards’ notorious arrogance or pride, it is but
“a vice proceeding rather from erroneous Morals than an insolent temper,” for the Spaniards do
not travel abroad and thus do not know where they stand with respect to other nations (Brunel
1670, 21)4. Finally, Madame d’Aulnoy’s Relation du voyage d’Espagne (he ingenious and diverting
letters of the Lady: Travels into Spain, 1691), repeatedly printed throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury, was probably the most popular and inluential travel book of the period (Fernández Álvarez
1956, 87–88). D’Aulnoy assures in her foreword to the reader: “I write nothing but what I have
seen or heard from persons of unquestionable credit” (Aulnoy 1691a, n.p.).5 In fact, what she
claims to have seen or experienced – costumes and cosmetics described in minute detail; dread-
ful roads and accommodations; the coarse dishes of the national cuisine; ilthy streets; luxurious
but bloody bullights; penitential processions (where self-whipping penitents deliberately splash
their by-standing iancées with their blood as a perfectly welcomed demonstration of love); the
arrogance and insolence of all Spaniards, from nobles to mendicants; and court protocols – turns
out to be much less original than everything she claims to have heard. D’Aulnoy shows little or no
appreciation for the country at large, but she does highly praise the distinction, intelligence, and
gallantry of Spanish ladies and gentlemen, particularly those who, for mostly aleatory reasons,
join her entourage and alleviate the hardships of her journeys with long, oten improbable stories
of love and death. Madame d’Aulnoy transcribes each and every one of these stories in the form
of elaborate novellas, which resemble those that Cervantes inserted in Don Quijote.
Sometime between 1771 and 1791, the ictional correspondent of Antonio Ponz’s Viaje
de España (Spanish journey) laments the plague of travelogues that were seizing the world’s
imagination (Ponz 1947, 228). hroughout the eighteenth century, European presses published
more than 3,540 travel books – twice as many as in the previous century (Bourguet 1997, 299).
Such proliferation was accompanied by signiicant diversiication. he Enlightenment favored
above all voyageurs scientiiques: physicists, pharmacists, botanists, chemists, geologists, and
engineers who traveled the world over in search of new scientiic information and rare speci-
mens in missions organized by the crown, by learned societies, or by corporations of merchants
(Bourguet 1997, 257 and 261). A case in point: in 1735, the French Académie des Sciences sent La
Condamine to the Andean highlands to measure one degree of the meridian in the proximity of
the Equator. hus began a new era of European expansion, a new connection between science
and nationalism, erudition and national prestige (Pratt 1992, 21). At the time, “the Spanish lim-
ited themselves to accompanying foreign explorers who went to their colonies, keeping track
of their activities but also participating in their projects” (Bourguet 1997, 266). Two oicers
4. “luy vient plûtost d’une fausse Moral, que d’un temperamment insolent.” (Brunel 1666, 35)
5. “Je n’ay écrit que ce que j’ay vû, ou ce que j’ay appris par des personnes d’une probité incontestable.” (Aul-
noy, 1691b, no page number)
from Spain’s Naval Academy, Jorge Juan y Antonio Ulloa, joined La Condamine’s expedition
and published upon their return a Relación histórica del viaje a la América Meridional hecho de
orden de S. Mag. (Historical account of the trip to South America undertaken by royal mandate,
1748). It was not a mere byproduct of La Condamine’s expedition, nor was it one more volume
in the small library of scientiic books that the expedition produced, but its most comprehen-
sive report. It was arguably the most important scientiic travel book of the time, perhaps of
all times, in Spain. To the twenty-irst century reader, however, the report amounts mostly to
a dull register of measurements and calculations, written in a stif, impersonal academic style,
with observations, in passing, about the crops of the lands they traverse; the size of the ports
where their ship moors; tides, forests and their animal life; commerce and climate, buildings
and attires. he ethic and aesthetic sensibility of the travelers, as well as their neocolonialist
bias, can be surmised occasionally from a few references to local idiosyncrasies. Here is their
comment on the speech of Portobello’s natives: “some communities may be characterized by
their arrogance, their sweetness or their conciseness; this one, by a torpid and indolent quality
of voice which is very annoying and unnerving to the listener until habit makes it familiar.”6
Only toward the end of the century, ater Masson de Morvilliers derided Spain in his article
for L’Encyclopédie méthodique, “Que doit-on à l’Espagne?,” the king began to inance Spain’s
own expeditions. Ironically, the best known of these belated scientiic ventures was Alessandro
Malaspina’s, a Genoese mariner who wrote Viaje político-cientíico alrededor del mundo (A po-
litical and scientiic journey around the world; see J. Pimentel 2001).
he Enlightenment favored an educational trip for aluent young men, which became
known as Grand Tour. Unlike the voyageurs scientiiques, the wealthy protagonist of the Grand
Tour traveled with large retinues of servants, instructors, and relatives and spent most of his
time in renowned cultural centers of the European Enlightenment: Paris’ royal academies, and
Rome’s antiquities became for the Grand Tour what the shrines of Jerusalem and Santiago had
been for the medieval peregrinatio. Generally, “the Iberian Peninsula was not a stop on this
educational itinerary du grand monde, which included a two-year or longer journey in foreign
countries” (Soler Pascual 1993, 4). here were, however, young Spanish aristocrats who com-
pleted their education with a characteristic Grand Tour. At least one of them, the Marquis of
Viso, had the good fortune of traveling in the company of an instructor, José Viera y Clavijo,
who wrote a superb account of the tour: Apuntes del diario e itinerario de mi viage a Francia y
Flandes en los años 1777 y 1778 (Sketches from the journal and itinerary of my travels in France
and Flanders in the years 1777 and 1778). Viera, a priest from the Canary Islands, writes with
an uninhibited disposition and a sense of humor that set him apart from the group of better-
known Spanish ilustrados. To be sure, his narrative is still burdened with the conventional
lists of convents, populations, and distances, but there is a lightness and concision to his prose
that, without sacriicing nuances and details, makes both the descriptions and the stories quite
agile and incisive. In Lyon’s textile mills, for example, he observes that “the large spools are
kept in motion by a sort of wheel which is turned from inside by two men, one blind and the
6. “así como hay unos pueblos que tienen arrogancia, otros dulzura y otros brevedad, este tiene una lojedad
y desmayo en las voces tal, que es muy sensible y molesto al que le oye, hasta que la costumbre le va habi-
tuando a ello.” (Ulloa and Juan 1748, 163)
Travel writing 189
other stupid.”7 he book reports with tedious thoroughness the experimental lessons in phys-
ics, chemistry, and the natural sciences, all of which they attended throughout the winter of
1778. Intermittently, however, Viera surprises the reader with curious news from the more pro-
fane activities of the Parisian intellectuals and socialites. He goes to the meetings of numerous
academies, befriends D’Alembert, Condillac, and La Harpe, develops a fondness for the opera
and the Comedie Française, visits the Gobelins factory as well as numerous private and public
collections (assembled with the help of voyageurs scientiiques), stops oten at bookstores, takes
frequent walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, and comments on events large and small, from
Rousseau’s death to the brief apparition of Madame du Barry in one of the windows of her
lodgings. His best moment occurs when, seated on the loor of a crowded hall in the Louvre,
almost touching D’Alembert’s feet, Viera observes Voltaire’s arrival and his moving encounter
with Benjamin Franklin: “the audience applauded again when they embraced and kissed each
other.” Voltaire, dressed in extravagant luxury, was but “a skinny old man, a wrinkled octo-
genarian, who fell sleep as soon as the meeting started.”8 Voltaire died a few weeks later and
Viera – who, unlike most Spanish clergy, never allows himself a touch of reproof toward the
philosophe – records matter-of-factly the diiculties encountered by those who wanted to bury
his body in a consecrated cemetery. Viera also wrote a brief journal of an excursion with his
employers to their estate in La Mancha. Edith Helman considered this book “a most pleasant
and entertaining travelogue and a literary masterpiece” (quoted in Cioranescu’s prologue to
Viera y Clavijo and de Iriarte 1976, 9). Viera’s voice is here more critical of the state of the nation
and less indulgent with the splendors and lavishness of his masters.
Spanish literary histories generally ignore both the travelogues of voyageurs scientiiques
and Grand Tour accounts but pay due attention to another kind of traveler that was particu-
larly representative of the Spanish Enlightenment: the ilustrado who, concerned with Spain’s
underdevelopment, methodically toured the country and catalogued its assets and needs in
every sphere. Ilustrados pursued a double goal: to help the king to improve the state of the na-
tion and to ight foreigner’s (especially the French) inlated, disparaging descriptions of Spain’s
backwardness (Soler Pascual 1993, 3). A lack of intimacy and a frowning obsession with im-
mediate usefulness characterize most of the resulting travelogues. Spanish literary histories
usually canonize two of them: Jovellanos’s Diarios (Journals), comprising the years 1790–1801,
and Antonio Ponz’s Viaje de España (Spanish Journey, 1771–91). Jovellanos’s somber, telegraph-
ic journals – “Clouds; cold. I start my working day in bed. Winterish weather. Long overdue
mail. To the school in the aternoon. Scientiic drawing is taught so negligently! Translation
with the students. To the convent. Rain”9 – is a favorite with most critics, for “they ofer us
irst-hand knowledge both of the period’s realities and of the hopes and reformist dreams of
7. “el movimiento a las devanaderas grandes lo da una rueda o zua que hacen voltear dos hombres dentro de
ella, de los cuales uno era ciego y otro tonto.” (Viera y Clavijo 1849, 28)
8. “se besaron y abrazaron con nuevos aplausos del concurso. […] Viejo laco, arrugado, octogenario […],
[Voltaire] se había quedado dormido desde el principio de la sesión.” (Viera y Clavijo 1849, 115)
9. “Nubes; frío. Empiezo a trabajar en la cama. El tiempo está invernizo. Correo, en que hay mucho atraso.
Tarde, al Instituto. ¡Qué lojedad en la enseñanza del Dibujo cientíico! Se traduce con los chicos. Al con-
vento. Llueve.” (Jovellanos 1967, 20)
that generation. Everything is there” (Morales Moya 1988, 22). Ponz’s eighteen-volume Viaje,
which Menéndez y Pelayo considered a turning point in the history of Spanish culture, starts
with a characteristic claim: the author wrote it to invalidate Norberto Caimo’s “cruel sátira con-
tra la nación” (vicious satire against the nation) in his Lettere d’un vago italiano ad un suo amico
(Letters to a friend from a wandering Italian, 1759–67) (1947, 21). Ponz’s book is a typical relec-
tion on Spain’s “despoblación y decadencia” (depopulation and decadence) and on the need
to bring it back to “su opulencia antigua” (its former opulence). He paid particular attention
to Spanish art and architecture, which he aspired to catalogue “con todos los pelos y señales”
(chapter and verse), and thus he registered every sculpture and every painting in every temple,
large or small, as long as he considered “cosa particular perteneciente a las bellas artes” (that
the item belonged in the domain of the ine arts) (420). Ponz was a purist who admired mostly
neoclassical symmetries and disdained the prolix ornamentation of gothic cathedrals and Arab
palaces. Accordingly, he records his visit to Tembleque without a word about its formidable
medieval square, describes coldly Seville’s Alcazar, and shows no interest in the Alhambra. As
far as he is concerned, Church towers required labor and materials that would have been much
better spent on the bridges that the country desperately needed (24).
he canon so favored by Jovellanos and Ponz could have promoted at least two other trav-
elers of equal or even greater interest. he irst volume of Antonio de Cavanilles’s Observa-
ciones sobre la historia natural, geografía, agricultura, población y frutos del reyno de Valencia
(Observations on the Kingdom of Valencia’s natural history, geography, agriculture, population
and produce, 1795) is, properly speaking, a travelogue, perhaps the most elegantly published
and tastefully written of the century. Frequent topographic descriptions like the following belie
Azorín’s famous assertion that pre-romantic Spanish writers showed no sense of the national
landscape: “Mountains elsewhere cheer your eyes with their green pastures, their woods and
springs; here [in Vistabella], they are but leshless skeletons, and like a battleield where the
elements waged an endless war.”10 Francisco de Zamora, Barcelona’s chief of police (alcalde del
crimen), traveled all over the province in 1785 with a clerk who transcribed somewhat clumsily
and with no adornment his on-the-spot comments. he resulting Diario de los viajes hechos en
Cataluña (Journal of my travels in Catalonia, 1795) is probably the most comprehensive docu-
ment of its kind produced by Spanish ilustrados. Zamora’s likes and dislikes were dictated by
his belief that progress could be accomplished only through industrialization, hygiene, order,
diligence, and the principle of “work well done.” One example:
because of its unfortunate location and poor soil you would expect this village [Copons] to be
still what it always was, one of the most miserable in Catalonia; the resourcefulness and the
diligence of its inhabitants, however, have made it the province’s most distinctive place. All
houses are new, built of stone and good mortar over the past few years [...]. Women wear better
and cleaner clothes here than anywhere else in these mountains.11
10. “Los montes de otras partes ofrecen verdes prados, bosques y fuentes que alegran la vista; aquí [Vistabella]
son esqueletos descarnados, y como un campo de batalla donde lucharon largo tiempo los elementos.”
(Cavanilles 1795, 83)
11. “este pueblo [Copons], según su situación y el terreno infeliz que alcanza, sería como ha sido siempre
de los más infelices de Cataluña, pero por medio de la industria y aplicación de sus vecinos no hay en la
Travel writing 191
In the meantime, abbot Norberto Caimo was not the only foreign traveler to exasperate Spanish
national pride. Scholars appear to agree that French travelers produced the harshest eighteenth-
century criticisms of the nation, while their British counterparts seem more lenient and under-
standing. In fact, the large numbers of travelogues produced at the time by foreign travelers
attest to a more complex situation. Father Jean Baptiste Labat’s Voyage en Espagne et en Italie
(A trip through Spain and Italy, 1730), may represent the presumed derogatory attitude of the
French Enlightenment toward Spain, as much for his incessant, unfavorable comparisons of
everything Spanish with their French equivalent as for his frequent strokes of disdain or conde-
scending sarcasm. One of his typical recommendations reads: “my advice to the readers of these
memoirs is that they do not spend much time in Cadiz, unless they ind there a way to make a
lot of money; that they do not fall sick, because Cadiz’s doctors are as ignorant and expensive
as everywhere else; and especially that they do not die there, because burials are exceedingly
costly.”12 Toward the end of the century, Baron Bourgoing was considerably more cautious –
and more interesting – in his Nouveau voyage en Espagne (Travels in Spain, 1789), where he
claims: “he Spanish nation has almost constantly been treated by the generality of travellers
with a severity of censure extremely displeasing to all those who possess a real knowledge of
its true character” (Bourgoing 1789a, 1:x–xi).13 hroughout the travelogue Bourgeoing remains
true to his promise of “a plain relation devoid of acrimony or enthusiasm” (1:2).14 hus, for ex-
ample, in his evaluation of Spanish character: “he haughtiness of the Spaniard, which would
be noble were it more moderated, and his gravity, which always awes and sometimes repels, are
compensated by very estimable qualities, or are rather the source of those qualities” (2:129).15 In
the same way, he never fails both to admire and to ind fault with all the king’s palaces – as will
occur later with Gautier, particularly Madrid’s Buen Retiro: “Never had a royal mansion less the
appearance of a palace. It is a very irregular building, and exhibits nothing majestic in any one
point of view […]. he gardens into which they have a view are neglected” (1:221).16
heir British contemporaries can be well represented by two remarkable travelogues: Jo-
seph Townsend’s A Journey through Spain in the years 1786 and 1787, and Alexander Jardine’s
provincia otro en que se vea lo que aquí. Todas las casas son nuevas, hechas de piedra y de buena argamasa
de muy pocos años a esta parte […]. Las mujeres van vestidas con más aseo y de ropas más inas que en el
resto de esta Segarra.” (Zamora 1973, 264)
12. “je conseille à ces qui liront ces Memoires de ne pas demeurer long-tems à Cadis, à moins qu’ils ne trou-
vent à y gagner beaucoup d’argent; de n’y être point maladies, parce que les Medicins sont ignorans, and
chers comme par tout ailleurs, et sur tout de n’y point mourir, à cause que les dépenses des enterremens
sont excesssives.” (Labat 1730, 271–272)
13. “On juge presque par-tout les Espagnols avec une séverité révoltante pour qui les connoit et sait les ap-
précier.” (Bourgoing 1789b, I:iii)
14. “naïvement, sans aigreur comme sans entousiasme.” (Bourgoing 1789b, 1:2)
15. “cette ierté qui seroit noble si elle étoit plus modéré, cette gravité que toujour imposse, et quelquefois
repusse, sont compensées par des qualities bien estimables, ou plutôt elles en sont la source.” (Bourgoing
1789b, 2:250)
16. “jamais habitation royale n’eut moins l’apparence d’un palais. C’est un composé informe de pieces de rap-
port qui, d’aucun coté, ne forme un ensemble imposante […]. Les jardins sur lesquels ils ont la vue, sont
négligés.” (Bourgoing 1789b, 1:226–27)
Letters from Spain by an English oicer. Townsend is still the encyclopedic and progressive trav-
eler that characterized the Enlightenment. He was especially interested in mineralogy, but paid
due attention to botany, mechanics, industry, salaries, prices and inances, coins, weights and
measures, and general aspects of the administration. He toured the entire country, from As-
turias to Málaga, from Cartagena to Barcelona, and concluded: “In every country a traveller
can pass through, he will ind some mechanical contrivances, some modes of expediting work,
which are of late invention, or at least new to him; and I am inclined to think that no country,
if thoroughly examined, would furnish more than Spain” (Townsend 1792, 1:146). Townsend
was not quite as proicient in literary matters, though: he spent a night in Puerto Lápice – a
true literary shrine for nineteenth-century travelers – and failed to mention Don Quijote and
the windmills. Jardine warns the reader: “Do not always believe the French when they talk of
Spain or Spaniards. hey generally dislike and misrepresent them” (Jardine 1790, 67). Jardine’s
Spain is no longer an object of enlightened criticisms or rigorous inventories but rather a major
repository of the sublime and melancholy views that would lure nineteenth-century writers and
illustrators: “We now proceed on our diicult but delightful journey, oten along the shore, by
narrow paths, on dreadful precipices, with the additional horror of having those places pointed
out to us, where men and mules, etc., have fallen down, and have been dashed to pieces before
they reached the distant ocean beneath” (43–44). Britain’s wealth and prosperity have no match,
but Spain has a unique merit, due in large part to unremitting decadence and deterioration, for
“the very mention of Spain awakens in the mind, especially of young people, ideas of something
romantic and uncommon” (2). With a reference to Andalusia as “the most interesting part of a
journey through Spain” (120), Jardine rounds up the basic markers of Spain’s national identity
as it would be understood for the next two hundred years, both inside and outside the country.
he nineteenth century brought about dramatic changes in the history of travel, means
of transportation (railroads, steam ships), means of publication (newspapers, illustrated mag-
azines) and general coniguration of traveler and journey (tourism, travel agencies, modern
comforts); yet it yielded neither exceptional nor abundant travel books by Spanish writers.
his national shortage contrasts sharply with the extraordinary quality and quantity of foreign
travelogues: ive hundred and ninety-nine by Foulché-Delbosc’s account, three hundred and
eighteen of which concerned Andalusia. French travelers wrote one third of them; British, one
fourth; Germans, one ith; and Americans, one sixth (López Ontiveros 1988, 132). No less than
forty-ive of these writers were women. All of them contributed decisively to shaping the mod-
ern image of Spain, particularly throughout the irst half of the century. he decline of travel lit-
erature that began around 1850 was linked to the growth of “tourism” and the numerous “tourist
guides” that ensued; that is, there were not fewer travelers nor fewer travel books, only many of
these became but generic scripts that preceded and designed the typical tourist’s journey, leav-
ing little or no room for any personal memoir.
he varieties of travel literature that prevailed during the eighteenth century – and even
some earlier ones – continued to be in existence throughout the nineteenth, although signii-
cantly modiied. Juan Valera’s Cartas desde Rusia (Letters from Russia, 1856–57) is an unusual
account of a voyage diplomatique where the customary attention to monuments, mores, and
political intrigues has been displaced almost entirely by an unremitting party life, full of splen-
did banquets, rapturous loves, and sophisticated conversations, so much so that “always on
Travel writing 193
the move in the ambassador’s company, from one festivity to another, from this gathering to
that one, changing clothes all the time, I hardly ever ind time to write.”17 he voyageur scien-
tiique acquired a torn proile more akin to the romantic hero than to the enlightened scholar.
Among the foremost examples of this avatar were the seven scientists of the ill-fated “Comisión
Cientíica del Pacíico” (1862–65). heir objective was to collect American plants, minerals, and
animals, as well as objects of ethnographic value, all of which would be exhibited in Madrid’s
museums. Unlike Ulloa, Juan, and the entire La Condamine team one hundred years earlier,
the scientists of this “Comisión Cientíica” were badly outitted, and their scientiic training
was largely out-of-date. Furthermore, they traveled as second-class passengers in war frigates, a
mere appendix to a military operation that tried to prop up the crumbling remnants of Spanish
dominance in Latin America. he resulting travelogues acutely relect the decline: the journals
of the new expeditionaries – especially those of Manuel Almagro and, above all, Marcos Jimé-
nez de la Espada – are not a scientiic feat (as were Ulloa’s and Juan’s). hey constitute, how-
ever, a sort of literary accomplishment, for their authors are not only concerned with technical
matters but also with the overwhelming ethic, aesthetic, and even existential aspects of their
mission. his two-minded disposition is neatly summarized in Almagro’s diary: “his trip is
of great interest for both artists and scientists: the irst will ind a wealth of beautiful things in
nature, a great variety of whimsical landscapes, surprisingly sublime and splendid panoramas
that nature has arranged with these gigantic mountains; the second can study rock gradations
as well as beautiful porphyries, granites, basalts, quartzes, and lime stones.”18 Espada deploys in
turn an intimate rupture, an agonizing uncertainty. Upon discovering on the wall of a church
in Quito an alabaster tablet that records in bronze letters La Condamine’s measurements of
Equatorial volcanoes, he writes: “Reading this revered plaque, where a digest of massive and
immensely useful investigations is recorded, I wonder: do the volcanoes care about these me-
ticulous measurements? Do they share my considerate respect for them? A single tremor of
the volcanoes could unsettle the peaks, rearrange highs and lows, and change a triangle from
equilateral to scalene.”19 A greater melancholy will overcome him later, while collecting exotic,
colorful, lively, unique birds that he compares to beautiful jewels: “And we had to kill them in
order to build the collection!”20
17. “de diversión en diversión, de iesta en iesta, vistiéndome y desvistiéndome y acompañando al duque,
apenas tengo tiempo de escribir.” (Valera 1986, 32)
18. “Un artista o un hombre de ciencias encuentra gran interés en tal viaje [from Mendoza to Santa Rosa,
Chile]: el primero encuentra mil bellezas naturales, caprichosos y variadísimos paisajes sorprendentes de
sublimidad y panoramas espléndidos que la naturaleza ha formado en esas gigantes montañas; el segundo
puede estudiar la gradación de las rocas, los bellos póridos, granitos, basaltos, cuarzos y calizas.” (Al-
magro 1984, 33)
19. “Y pregunto yo, delante de esta venerada inscripción, extracto y cifra de inmensos, utilísimos y provecho-
sos trabajos, ¿qué les importan a los volcanes estas escrupulosidades de medida? ¿Tendrán con ellas la
misma consideración y respeto con que yo las miro? Con una sacudida se pueden desquiciar sus cimas,
bajar y subir las alturas y cambiarse un triángulo de escaleno en equilátero.” (Jiménez de la Espada 1928,
76)
20. “Y ¡era preciso matarlos para hacer colección!.” (Jiménez de la Espada 1928, 112)
he Spanish nineteenth century produced at least one variation of a more substantial kind
on the traditional voyageur scientiique. he eighteenth-century “global classiicatory project”
(Pratt 1992, 27) had let but a few uncharted spots on Earth, mostly in Africa, which thus began
to represent the type of “otherness” early European travelers had identiied mostly with America
and Asia (Stagl 1995, 96; Campbell 1988, 3). Africa’s new appeal engendered the mixture of ad-
venturer and voyageur scientiique best represented by British explorers like Livingston, Stanley,
and R. Burton. In due time, European capitalism – or “Euroimperialism” (Pratt 1992, 4) – ac-
quired a strong interest in those legendary African lands that promised enormous returns from
small investments and inanced the expeditions that showed more potential. On a more modest
scale, a few Spanish adventurers-explorers, allegedly inanced by the Spanish government, fol-
lowed suit with similar objectives but more dubious results. First, Godoy’s protégé Domingo
Badía, who spoke Arabic well and, appropriately disguised, managed to pass for Prince Ali Bey,
crossed Northern Africa between 1803 and 1807, took all kinds of gratuitous measurements
with cumbersome instruments, gathered numerous specimens for the crown’s collections, and
sneaked into the shrine of Meca as one more native pilgrim. Burton hailed him as a pioneer
when his travelogue was published in French in 1814 with remarkable success. Juan Goytisolo
– who considers his reports unreliable, derides his prudery in sexual matters, and laments his
emotional restraint as well as his excessive interest in things exotic – admires his painterly eye
as well as an individualistic attitude and aesthetic penchant that would become more accentu-
ated among future travelers (J. Goytisolo, “Prólogo” to Badía 1982). Badía’s prose ofers indeed
a characteristic mixture of scientiic information and aesthetic observations: “It was a ine day,
the barometer was in the morning at 28’ 21/2’. he night was serene and calm; the moon shone
bright. My people had placed my camp on an elevation; it was about 18 feet in diameter at its
base, and 13 feet high” (Ali Bey 1816, 1:53).21 He may not voice his own emotions but he likes
to rouse those of the reader, as in the detailed, gruesome description of a circumcision (10–12)
or in the dramatic account of a storm at the mouth of the port of Alexandria (258–60). Later,
Manuel Iradier – a much more pathetic example of national deiciencies and confusions in the
matter of scientiic expeditions – would author two ive-hundred-page volumes whose subtitles
summarize his double mission: Africa. La exploración del país del Muni, 1875–1877 (Exploration
of the land of Muni) and África. Adquisición del país del Muni [for the Spanish government],
1884 (Acquisition of the land of Muni). Volume I begins with a typical disclaimer: “In this
short book there are no marvelous adventures, important discoveries or dramatic scenes able to
move the most hardened heart […]. It is written with no literary pretensions.”22 he reader will
soon realize, however, that Iradier’s afected prose has obvious literary ambitions and his long
text is particularly rich in dramatic scenes, from terrifying shipwrecks to thrilling hunting par-
ties and devastating tropical diseases. For today’s reader his best pages may be those where he
21. “Le jour fut beau; le baromètre marquoit le matin, chez moi, 28 pouces 2 lignes et demie. La nuit fut sereine
et calme, avec un très beau clair dde lune. Mes gens avoit dressé mon camp sur une hauteur; ma tente avoit
dix-huit pieds de diamètre à sa base, et treize pieds de hauteur.” (Ali Bey 1814, 1:88)
22. “En las escasas páginas de este libro no se verán aventuras maravillosas, descubrimientos importantes ni
escenas dramáticas capaces de conmover al corazón más empedernido […]. Está escrito sin pretensiones
literarias.” (Iradier Bulfy 1887, 1)
Travel writing 195
tries to communicate – among pompous scientiic annotations – his sudden, transitory aware-
ness of the preposterous nature of his voyage: “A soundless voice asked me: Where are you
going? What are you looking for? Turn around, cross the oceans again and fulill your mission
in the civilized countries where you were born.”23 Iradier does not give up; ater three pages of
ominous premonitions, he concludes: “I fought a dreadful, terrifying battle with myself.”24
African wars brought scores of journalists to Moroccan shores. heir early reports are
curiously akin to those of adventurers and explorers. he best of them, Diario de un testigo
de la Guerra de Africa (An eyewitness journal of the African war, 1859), by Pedro Antonio
de Alarcón, announces in its irst pages that in Africa one can ind all that is new, frightening,
strange, and unknown (Alarcón 1943a, 841). he reader realizes in due time that the extent of
Alarcón’s great adventure was limited to walking with the army about ity kilometers on the
well-traveled road that separated Ceuta from Tetuán. Moreover, it was a second-hand experi-
ence in that Alarcón’s views of Africa were entirely predetermined by his extensive readings on
the subject. hus, Tetuán “turned out to be just as I had imagined it […], exactly as historians
and poets had described it to me.”25 Toward the end of the century, a new type of journal-
ism – represented by the likes of Rodrigo Soriano and José Ortega Munilla – would attempt to
disabuse the reader of such romantic African fantasies. Rodrigo Soriano writes: “It is unkind to
disclose that many of the books written about Morocco are beautiful lies, […] sweet love stories,
faux orientalism […]! A book that attempts to describe the true Morocco will have to be a most
cruel and fetid one, a mirror of its miserable, barbarous and corrupt people.” Ortega Munilla,
who starts his African book with contradictory claims similar to Alarcón’s – “For the European,
everything in Africa is a novelty, and Dumas, Gautier, Mérimée and Amicis have pre-digested
our travelogues for us”26 – devotes most of its pages to depicting Moroccan brutality as Soriano
demanded: “A large, athletic black man from Sudan walks the streets of Tangier soliciting alms.
He is not only blind; he has no eyelids. Where his eyes used to be there are now black, appalling
scars. What sort of crime cost him to have his eyes cauterized with a burning spike?”27 A new
perspective on Africa would emerge only in the 1930s and in Catalan. Aurora Bertrana – who
denied then the existence of worthy travel literature in Spain and declared no interest in oicial
politics – traveled alone to Morocco, driven by “indefatigable curiosity.”28 Neither the title of
her book – El Marroc sensual i fanàtic (Sensual and fanatical Morocco, 1936) – nor the initial
23. “Una voz, pero voz sin timbre, sin sonido, me decía: ¿A dónde vas? ¿Qué buscas? Vuelve atrás, atraviesa de
nuevo los mares y cumple tu misión en los países civilizados en que naciste.” (Iradier Bulfy 1887, 104)
24. “Horrible, espantable fue la lucha que sostuve conmigo mismo.” (Iradier Bulfy 1887, 103–07)
25. “resultaba tal como me la había igurado […], tal como me la habían descrito historiadores y poetas.”
(Alarcón 1943a, 997–1000)
26. “Todo es nuevo en África para el Europeo, y Dumas y Gautier, Mérimée y Amicis nos han dado hecho el
sumario de nuestras excursiones.” (Ortega Munilla 1892, 16)
27. “Recorre las calles de Tánger, pidiendo limosna, un negro sudanés de atléticas proporciones. No sólo está
ciego sino que sus párpados no existen. En el lugar de los ojos hay dos costuras negras, de apariencia
espantable. Este hombre sufrió el cauterio de los ojos, aplicándole en ellos un acicate enrojecido al fuego.
¿Por qué delito?.” (Ortega Munilla 1892, 57–58)
28. “infatigable curiositat”. (Bertrana 1991, 101)
layout of her project (“landscapes,” “monuments,” “characters […] portrayed through my own
sentimental and intellectual responses”29) do full justice to the originality and the complexity of
both her involvement and her account of it. Bertrana (1991, 51) found no protocols or instruc-
tions for the appropriate behavior of a woman in her circumstances, but nonetheless pursued
and achieved her goal of total immersion in ordinary Moroccan life, with some emphasis on
the life of women – from brothels and harems to public entertainment, from the zoco to the
intimacy of private homes, from the great cities to the life of the cabilas – reporting on it all in
the best style of the voyageurs journalistes.
he characteristic narrative of the Grand Tour was similarly altered during the nineteenth
century in at least three diferent regards. First, typically, the traveler who undertook the new
educational journey was no longer a youngster with means and a large retinue, but a lone, sea-
soned writer for whom the trip appeared to be but a pretext for a book. Second, these writers
traveled – literally or iguratively – with an extensive library: they traveled to the favorite places
of previous writers, whom they quote while contributing yet new writings, oten called “impres-
sions” (Dumas, then so inluential, called all his travelogues Impressions de voyage) and always
presumed to be strictly personal and one-of-a-kind. he identity of the territory mattered less
than the perception of the writers who traversed it; their erudition, less than their sensibility.
hird, newspapers and, especially, illustrated magazines – La Ilustración Española y Americana,
La Ilustración de Madrid, La Ilustración Artística, La Ilustración de la Mujer, La Ilustración:
Periódico Universal, and scores of provincial Ilustraciones – seldom failed to include “articles”
by travel writers who thus became, in every sense, journalists, oten inanced in advance by
the magazines in which they published their travel accounts before collecting them in a book –
frequently, a book of self-contained fragments. Interestingly enough, many of these magazines
opened their travel sections to women writers (Sofía Casanova, Clotilde Cerdá, Carolina Coro-
nado and, of course, Emilia Pardo Bazán), thus relecting women’s new mobility both in their
homeland and abroad.
he new Grand Tour took travel writers to the traditional destinations but with a difer-
ent balance. Paris still attracted eminent travelers – writers like Pérez Galdós and Pardo Bazán,
painters like Rusiñol, R. Casas, and Utrillo; Italy’s marvels from antiquity and the Renaissance
lured many more, particularly along the routes that Goethe made famous in 1786–88. Such is
the case of Leandro Fernández de Moratín who, still in the eighteenth century, received funds
from the government to complete his education with a tour in Italy in 1873–96. His Viaje de
Italia (Italian journey) is clearly an opinionated product of the Enlightenment, with unwaver-
ing views on every subject, from urbanism to prostitution. His sense of order and propriety, for
example, prevented him from opening up to the charms of Venice’s twisted streets, decayed
palaces, and endless waterways: all he registers is his disgust at the sight of so many cripples and
his admiration for Canova’s sculptures, which he inds superior to Michelangelo’s (Fernández
de Moratín 1988, 219). Even his most personal, humorous, and memorable relections – “ater
dwelling on such profound matters, I will now move on to whores and procuresses” – uphold
the rationalist, taxonomic slant: “window hookers constitute the largest class […]. here aren’t
29. “paisatges,” “monuments,” “tipus […] dibuixats a través de les meves reaccions sentimentals i intel·lectuals”.
(Bertrana 1991, 20)
Travel writing 197
as many street walkers here as in Madrid, for here they feel safer working from the house; no-
body inds it shocking to see them all day long peddling the merchandise from their windows.”30
Even this late-Enlightenment traveler, however, needs to come to terms with the mass of travel-
ogues that hinder the originality or the singularity of the modern travel writer. He relies most of
the time, for orientation and choices, on a number of books, from Ponz’s Viaje fuera de España
(Journey outside of Spain) to Lalande’s Voyage d’un François en Italie (Journey of a Frenchman
in Italy); moreover, he resigns himself to silence in places like Rome, “because I have not seen
everything nor understood everything I’ve seen, and there is nothing in it that has not been ex-
plained and judged already in the many works written to that end.”31 Future travel writers would
ind a way out of this kind of impasse by focusing not so much on the sights worth seeing as on
their most personal and emotional reactions to them – the impresiones of their titles, oten per-
meated by an acute sense of time and history – and by choosing their rhetorical devices accord-
ingly. Moratín, who occasionally manages cautiously to convey certain emotions (for example,
before the ruins of Pompeii: “It is not possible to walk through that landscape without feeling a
sort of fervor that all those objects inspire”32), lacks the kind of afective sensibility and histori-
cal sense that will characterize, sixty years later, the writings of Spain’s most distinguished travel
writer of the nineteenth century, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. His De Madrid a Nápoles (From
Madrid to Naples, 1861) reveals the writer’s constant awareness of his predecessors in a journey
so profusely celebrated in writing and now so heavily trodden by touristes: “I did what every-
body else does.”33 Yet such awareness turns out to be less a defeating obstacle than a manifesta-
tion of his own historical consciousness: he may be retracing the steps of innumerable pilgrims,
but his is now more of an emotional, romantic journey than a pious one – he calls it elsewhere a
“romantic pilgrimage” (Alarcón 1943a, 832). Accordingly, the Vatican Museum will have priority
over Saint Peter’s tomb. At the sight of the Venus Medicea, Alarcón deploys the new traveler’s
prerogatives: “If higher deeds in merit, distance, danger, old age, misfortune, power, uniqueness,
rarity… inspire such great respect in us, the contemplation of ultimate beauty, of paramount
works of art, of human genius at its best, […] should ill us with the greatest pride.”34
Similar dispositions can be found in numerous Travels in Italy by Alarcón’s contempo-
raries. Menéndez y Pelayo found two of them worthy of note: Amós de Escalante, a lesser poet
but a widely quoted traveler, author of Del Ebro al Tíber (From river Ebro to river Tiber, 1860),
30. “después de haber hablado de tan profundas materias, voy ahora a tratar de p… y alcahuetas […]. Las
ventaneras forman la clase más numerosa […]. Estas mujeres no son tan callejeras como en Madrid las de
su oicio, por razón de que estas viven más seguras en su casa; ni aquí escandaliza el verlas todo el día de
muestra a la ventana”. (Fernández de Moratín 1988, 69–70)
31. “porque ni todo lo he visto, ni entiendo de todo, ni hay cosa en ella que no esté explicada y juzgada ya en
las muchas obras que se han escrito con este in” (Fernández de Moratín 1988, 115).
32. “no es posible caminar por aquel paisaje sin una especie de entusiasmo que todos aquellos objetos inspi-
ran”. (Fernández de Moratín 1988, 77)
33. “Yo hice lo mismo que hacen todos”. (Alarcón 1943b, 1454 and 1490)
34. “Si tanto respetamos las supremas jerarquías de la prioridad, del tamaño, de la distancia, del peligro, de la
vejez, del infortunio, del poder, de la novedad, de la rareza… cuanto más no debe envanecernos contem-
plar el colmo de la hermosura, la máxima expresión del arte, el límite del genio humano.” (Alarcón 1943b,
1407)
and, especially, Emilio Castelar, the eminent political orator who let in Recuerdos de Italia
(Remembrances from Italy, 1872) “the least oratorical and most literary pages he ever wrote.”35
Menéndez y Pelayo himself acknowledges that the major obstacle for this kind of travelogue
is to follow in other writers’ footsteps, routinely admiring what has always been admired. Es-
calante’s way of dodging the obstacle is to contemplate Rome not so much as an inexhaustible
showcase of ancient artifacts, but as the “solace of universal sorrows, tomb of mighty races,
monument to heroic memoirs, sanctuary for great misfortunes; Rome, homeland to every un-
fortunate being, CITY OF THE SOUL!”36 Castelar, in turn, resorts to a more immediate kind of
“impression.” In the prologue to the typically disperse fragments of his remembrances he warns
the reader: “this is really not a travelogue; nor did I try to add one more book to the excellent
collection we have in Spanish about the artistic nation.”37 Instead, he tries to communicate the
“deep impression” that certain monuments and landscapes leave in his spirit, for “a trip to Italy
is a trip to all historical eras.”38 he reader may recognize this connivance of afect and historical
awareness in the report of his visit to the Coliseum. Ater explaining that he studied everything
like a natural scientist in a ield trip, he indulges in a sort of reverie under the moonlight, with
church bells tolling in the background: he imagines that the ancient Romans return to life then
and there just to hear his grievances about his contemporaries and his yearning for the great-
ness of times past (Castelar 1852, 50–52).
Perhaps no brand of Spanish travelogue sufered as radical a transformation during the
nineteenth century as those enlightened critical registers that were so common among prac-
tical-minded Spanish ilustrados. hey were replaced now by a type of voyage pittoresque that
consisted mostly of an “excursion” through a small region, oten the writer’s own. Following
the Napoleonic wars (1808–1813), Spain began to enjoy an important, steadily growing low of
foreign visitors, increasingly focused on a given itinerary: the Southern cities of Oriental Spain.
Eventually, conventional tourism inherited and strengthened this single-minded approach to
Spanish national identity. Everywhere else in the nation, Spaniards reacted with a passionate
cult for their mostly ignored province of origin: valleys, mountains, small towns, generally of
the tourist-trodden path but deeply familiar to the native writer who sets out to prove them
marvelously “picturesque” – perhaps the most common adjective in nineteenth-century Span-
ish travel writing – and distinctly honored with historical relevance (see A. Escalante 1956, 325
and 435). hese features are already present in Gil y Carrasco’s Bosquejo de un viaje a una
provincia del interior (Sketch of a trip to an inland province, 1843), perhaps the foundational
excursion narrative. Gil y Carrasco begins with a lament: foreign travelers “refuse to see the
35. “las páginas menos oratorias y más literarias que escribió en su vida.” (Menéndez y Pelayo, prologue to
Escalante 1956, xxi)
36. “la consoladora de las universales tristezas, el sepulcro de gigantes razas, el monumento de heroicas
memorias, el refugio de grandes infortunios; Roma, la patria de todo desventurado: ¡LA CIUDAD DEL
ALMA!” (Escalante 1956, 202)
37. “No es en realidad un libro de viajes. No he intentado añadir una obra más a las excelentes que tenemos en
castellano sobre la nación artística.” (Castelar 1872, v)
38. “un viaje a Italia es un viaje a todos los tiempos de la historia.” (Castelar 1872, v-vii)
Travel writing 199
Spaniards as anything but Arabs”39 and completely overlook a region in the Northeast, far from
the routes to the South but “endowed with every beauty and all kinds of grave, gracious and
wondrous scenery.”40 he sublime and the familiar, the historical and the intimate come then
together harmoniously in Gil y Carrasco’s melancholic but alluring prose:
San Fructuoso found the right spot for his venture in the most secluded nook of that inhospi-
table terrain, bordering a precipice that overlooks a river, beneath a roman fortress or castle
[…], and he established there the monastery of Saint Peter of the Mountains. here is really no
room for mundane afairs and feeble worldly aspirations on that site of forbidding peaks and
forlorn, dark solitude.41
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was, once again, the master who – in Castilian and in a diferent
register – brought the genre to fruition, particularly in La Alpujarra (1874). His premise was
that, unlike nearby tourist-raided Granada, La Alpujarra would be an unexplored, mysterious
territory, worthy of all the dangers, diiculties and sacriices that surely awaited the excursioni-
sta (Alarcón 1943c, 1529 and 1497). he writer, however, soon abandons these expectations and
reports a comfortable, well-charted and fully-monitored journey, with all kinds of dictionaries,
encyclopedias, guides, and travelogues at hand (1535).
Toward the end of the century, excursionismo was practiced in Catalonia with fastidious
nationalist zeal. Abundant and distinguished evidence of its literary outcome can be found
in the Album Pintoresch y Monumental de Catalunya (he Picturesque and Monumental Al-
bum of Catalonia), the Butlletí (Bulletin) and the Anuari de l’Associació d’Excursions Catalana,
Memòries de l’Associació Catalanista d’Excursions Cientíiques (Annual of the Catalan Excur-
sion Association: Memoires of the Catalanist Association of Scientiic Excursions), and similar,
oten long-lived publications (Garolera 1998, 61–63). Jacint Verdaguer’s brief Excursions (1887)
remains the paragon of the genre. hey might remind the reader of Francisco de Zamora’s
“salidas” from Barcelona: like him, Verdaguer takes note of the bearings of villages and rivers,
and admires large panoramas from places high above, but Mosen Cinto, national poet, captures
his native landscape with a delicacy and a melancholy that were mostly alien to the eighteenth-
century chief of police that Madrid imposed on Barcelona. his is Verdaguer at the ruins of
Pallars castle: “Finding a jasmine in bloom hidden in the ruins (I sent a cutting to our great poet
Aguiló) was like balm for my sad and aching heart, for it reminded me that not everything was
dead in that wreckage […]. I will not ind that jasmine lower in every ruin.”42
39. “se empeñan en no ver en los españoles sino árabes” (Gil y Carrasco 1954, 302).
40. “adornado de todas las bellezas y accidentes graves, terribles y risueños.” (Gil y Carrasco 1954, 302)
41. “En el seno más apartado de aquellas asperezas, en un precipicio colgado sobre el río y debajo de un fuerte
o castillo romano […], encontró por in San Fructuoso un paraje acomodado a su intento y allí fundó el
monasterio de San Pedro de Montes […]. A vista de aquellas montañas enriscadas en aquella soledad triste
y oscura […] sobran en verdad los devaneos mundanos y las frágiles esperanzas terrenas.” (Gil y Carrasco
1954, 317)
42. “Un jazmín lorido que encontré escondido entre las ruinas (le envié un esqueje a nuestro gran poeta
Aguiló) fue una gota de bálsamo para mi corazón triste y dolorido, recordándome que no todo ha muerto
allí. […] No en todas las ruinas encontraré esa lor de jazmín.” (Verdaguer 1946, 1086)
Meanwhile, numerous foreign travelers – many of them novelists, poets, playwrights –

toured the Peninsula in the nineteenth century and produced travel literature that is both ex-
tensive and intense, passionate and repetitive, and in a few cases quite decisive for the interpre-
tation and dissemination of Spain’s national identity. Most of them followed as invariable an
itinerary as medieval pilgrims: it began in diferent European cities and moved straight south
to Granada, a secular shrine that rewarded them with access to the (earthly) paradise of the
Alhambra. Around 1870, a widely read, exuberant traveler, Edmundo de Amicis, conveyed his
enthrallment this way: “hat magic word that in every part of the world stirs a tumult of great
recollections in every heart and arouses a sense of secret longing […]; that name at which the
hearts of poets and painters beat faster and the eyes of women lash – ‘he Alhambra!’ ” (Amicis
1895, 2:189).43
Modern Europe’s misgivings about Modernity – “the progress of Romanticism reveals a
disenchantment with the process of Western civilization and its most magniicent outward ex-
pressions” (Elsner and Rubiés 1999, 4) – are at the basis of backward Spain’s romantic aura.
Richard Ford – possibly the best writer of travel guides for nineteenth-century Spain (Azorín,
“Prólogo” to Bayo 2005, 180) – pointed out in 1845 one efect of such disenchantment: “[he
traveler] crosses the Pyrenees, too weary of the bore, commonplace, and uniformity of ultra
civilization, in order to see something new and un-European; he hopes to ind again in Spain
[…] all that has been lost and forgotten elsewhere” (Ford 1855, 3:1103). New and un-European
were now the dangers and discomforts of antiquated modes of travel that kept most organized
tourism away from Spain until later in the century (Brendon 1991, 109). Certain modern travel-
ers, though – héophile Gautier, being the most famous, among Ford’s contemporaries – con-
sidered them a distinctive pleasure of any Spanish journey: “What constitutes the pleasure of
the traveler are obstacles, fatigue or even danger […]. One of the great misfortunes of modern
life is the absence of the unexpected, the lack of adventure […]. A journey in Spain is still a
perilous and romantic enterprise” (Gautier 2001, 214–15).44 Near the turn of the century, when
modern comforts had wiped out almost entirely the treasured shortcomings of traveling in
Spain, two travelers who made famous the title España negra (Dark Spain, 1899) still refused
to let go of the vanishing fantasy: “We were obstinately looking for a stage coach with vicious
mules ready to break the harness, fall down a precipice, and kill the coachman […]. We were
looking for something new, diferent from the mere comfort that is the British travelers’ only
expectation in their journeys.”45
43. “quella mágica parola che in ogni parte del mondo desta in ogni anima un tumulto di grandi ricordi e
un sentimento di desiderio segreto; che dà l’ultima spinta verlo la Spagna a chi a concepito il disegno del
viaggio e non ancora presso la risoluzione della partenza; che fa battere il cuore dei poeti e dei pittori ne
scintillar gli occhi delle donne: l’Alhambra.” (Amicis 1883, 406)
44. “ce qui constitue le plaisir du voyageur, c’est l’obstacle, la fatigue, le périle même […]. Un des grands
malheurs de la vie moderne, c’est le manque d’imprévue, l’absence d’aventures. Un voyage en Espagne est
encore un entreprise périlleuse et romanesque” (Gautier 1856, 260–261).
45. “Buscábamos una diligencia a todo trance con mulas viciadas, dispuestas a rodar por los precipicios, a
romper los arreos y a matar al mayoral […]. Buscábamos algo nuevo y distinto de lo que ambicionan los
ingleses que en sus viajes no buscan más que el confort” (Verhaeren 1963, 23).
Travel writing 201
Spain’s newly acquired prestige among daring foreign travelers can be documented as
early as 1806, in the sumptuous four volumes of Alexandre Laborde’s Voyage pittoresque e his-
torique de l’Espagne (A picturesque and historical journey through Spain). One part of the text
summarizes the historical background; the other glosses innumerable etchings that represent
landscapes and monuments, ancient inscriptions, and building plans. Writer and illustrators
show more ainity for the letter and the spirit of L’Encyclopédie than for the aspirations of the
romantic soul, but a foretaste of newer attitudes can be perceived in Laborde’s observations
about the Alhambra: “Something in the overall look of the Alhambra makes it truly impressive,
and resuscitates an irresistible emotion: the emotion stirred by any monument that embodies
strength, greatness and permanence” (Laborde 1806, 2:17). he classical, geometric illustrations
of Laborde’s travelogue soon gave way to dramatic, afecting views by David Roberts, who illus-
trated homas Roscoe’s guides since 1836, and, much later, by Gustave Doré, who contributed
309 wood engravings to Baron de Davillier’s since 1874. Both were celebrated as much for their
technical skills and for their boundless sense of the “sublime.”
he romantic Weltanschauung that brought about such development shaped, at the same
time, a number of distinct travelogues of singular importance. First and foremost among them
was Washington Irving’s Alhambra (1832), which guided the destination as well as the emotions
of countless nineteenth-century travelers in Spain. Irving’s book ofers an artful interplay of
history and legend, with descriptions of ancient splendors and contemporary ethnographic
observations, but it can be best characterized by his awareness of the insurmountable difer-
ence between the fabulous world of the Alhambra and everyday life in modern times and over-
civilized nations. His last chapter, “he Author’s Farewell to Granada,” begins:
My serene and happy reign in the Alhambra was suddenly brought to a close by letters which
reached me, while indulging in oriental luxury in the cool hall of the baths, summoning me
away from my Moslem Elysium, to mingle once more in the bustle and business of the dusty
world. How was I to encounter its toils and turmoils ater such a life of repose and reverie! How
was I to endure its commonplace, ater the poetry of the Alhambra! (Irving 1865, 493)
Irving’s deinitive orientalization of Spanish identity resonates in the prose of so many trav-
el writers who followed on his footsteps: Gautier, Dumas, Quinet, Ford, Andersen, Amicis…
(Prosper Mérimée is oten included in this list, but his Lettres d’Espagne (1830–1833) (Letters
from Spain 1830–33) are – much like Ganivet’s Cartas inlandesas (Letters from Finland, 1898) –
brief monographic articles more than travel accounts). Moreover, for the next hundred years,
the Southern “oriental standard” (Ford 1855, 1:7) that Irving deployed in his book would de-
termine Spain’s exchange value in the travelers’ market. In 1840, Gautier did not feel Spain’s
magic spell until he reached Despeñaperros – “nothing grander or more picturesque could be
imagined than this gate of Andalusia” (Gautier 2001, 159).46 He then found in the Alhambra the
sublime object of his “passion” (in spite of hordes of tourists) and managed to remain inside
the palace “four days and four nights, which were without the least doubt the most delicious
46. “On ne saurait rien imaginer de plus pittoresque et de plus grandiose que cette porte d’Andalousie.” (Gauti-
er 1856, 192)
moments of my life” (180).47 In 1843, Quinet “crosses impatiently Spain’s great dessert”, anxious
to arrive at the Andalusian paradise, and notes in passing that “the face of Spain starts to turn
African in Toledo”.48 In 1846, Alexandre Dumas, whose Impressions de voyage. De Paris a Cadix
(Impressions of travel. From Paris to Cadiz) inspired seasoned travelers like Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento and Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, was immediately captivated by the entire country
but agreed that it is only in “this much anticipated Granada [that] beloved Spain appears in all
its splendor”.49 In 1862, Hans Christian Andersen, who had no interest in Spain’s northern cit-
ies because they resembled France’s (1870, 11), began to feel the riveting appeal of the Orient in
Elche’s palm gardens (47) and was inally “overcome” by the Alhambra: “the dream was now a
reality” (91).
At least two remarkable travelers of the period managed to circumvent Irving’s command-
ing standard and tone down the delirious enthusiasms of the travelogues he inspired. Early on,
George Borrow, devout admirer of Sterne and Defoe, was a true voyageur romancier: his Bible
in Spain (1843), published irst at Ford’s insistence, is a long narrative account that never fails
to keep the reader’s interest. Granada has no place in his intricate itinerary of traveling seller
of protestant bibles; monuments and landscapes rarely draw his full attention, for he believes
Spain is, above all, “the land of extraordinary characters” (Borrow 1843, 3:26). His fascinating
dialogues with members of the lower classes – especially gypsies – constitute the backbone of
his travelogue. Toward the end of the century, Maurice Barrès, voyageur essayiste in Du sang,
de la volupté et de la mort (Regarding blood, pleasure and death, 1894), is a master of poetic
but unwavering prose that dispenses with news and descriptions to restate instead overarch-
ing conclusions like this: “Spain is a great instrument to ight boredom. I do not know of any
other country where life is so lavorful that it stirs even a man entirely subdued by modern
bureaucracy.”50 For this purpose, however, he considers Toledo – “a site that means something
to the soul, […], an image of rapture in solitude, a cry in the desert”51 – vastly more appropri-
ate than overrated Granada: “Granada is but a tent in an oasis and one of the sotest pillows in
the world, under a delicately embroidered parasol. Neither the fragile ornamentation nor the
sensual comfort can deeply afect the souls; they are more likely to numb them in the long run.”52
Twentieth-century travel writing remains, at best, on the fringes of the Spanish literary
canon, despite the fact that most canonical authors count one or more travelogues among their
47. “quatre jour et quatre nuits qui sont les instants les plus délicieux de ma vie sans aucun doute.” (Gautier
1856, 218)
48. “traverse impatiemment le grand désert d’Espagne”, “l’Espagne commence à prendre dans Tolède une face
africaine” (Quinet 1986, 164and 141).
49. “chère Espagne nous apparaîssait enin dans toute son splendeur.” (Dumas 1888, 1:268)
50. “Pour rompre l’atonie, l’Espagne est une grande ressource. Je ne sais pas de pays où la vie ait autant de
saveur. Elle reveille l’homme le mieux maté par l’administration moderne.” (Barrès 1921, 175)
51. “un lieu signiicatif pour l’âme […], une image de l’exaltation dans la solitude, un cri dans le désert” (Barrès
1921, 32).
52. “elle n’est qu’une tente dans une oasis, et, sous un parasol délicieusement brodé, un des plus mols oreillers
du monde. Ni ce décor fragile, ni ce bien-être sensual ne peuvent toucher profondément les âmes, qu’à la
longue pourtant ils sauraient engourdir.” (Barrès 1921, 54)
Travel writing 203
works (see Villanueva and Santos Zas 1991, 977–79). Most of this production carries on with
variations the tradition of nineteenth-century excursionismo. Over time, the style of provincial
bliss exempliied in the excursions of Gil y Carrasco and Verdaguer began to merge with the
pedagogical bent that characterized the excursions of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza. Una-
muno deined the resulting product as follows: “hese excursions are not only a form of solace,
recreation and education; they are also, and perhaps especially, one of the best means to develop
a love for and an attachment to the fatherland.”53 Unamuno, like most travel writers of his gen-
eration, was the type of voyageur essayiste who limited the amount of news and data about the
journey – “my hatred for information and lack of interest in the news grows every day”54 – in
order to concentrate on transcendental relections which some locales facilitate more than oth-
ers. Medina del Campo, for example, made it easy to meditate on things transient and things
permanent (Unamuno 1966, 366), while Las Palmas did not lend itself to important spiritual
emotions (315). Yet these relections oten produce – or reproduce – merely terse generaliza-
tions, like “el paisaje en Galicia es femenino” (Galician landscape is feminine) or “Portugal es
un pueblo de suicidas” (Portuguese people are suicidal). Unamuno’s transcendental penchant
typically sacriiced the denunciation of the unbearable reality of Las Hurdes to impertinent ru-
minations about the honorable patriotism of the hurdanos who adhered to such a reality (410).
Unamuno – and, indeed, his entire generation – was duly corrected by Luis Buñuel’s documen-
tary on Las Hurdes (1932).
Unamuno’s relective, idealizing manner appears somewhat attenuated in the travel writ-
ings of Azorín and Ortega. In 1905, on the centennial of the irst edition of Don Quijote, ABC
sent Azorín to La Mancha to retrace the knight’s steps. His reports mix historical data, precise
descriptions, and erudite notes about the territory but conclude with patriotic relections that
are characteristic of his generation: “Didn’t this environment facilitate the birth and growth
of adventurers, mariners, and conquistadors with wills of iron, powerful, awesome, but also
solitary and anarchic?”55 Ortega’s multiple Notas de andar y ver (Notes on walking and watch-
ing), published from 1916 in El Espectador (he Spectator), combine lyrical descriptions and
narrative fragments with the type of half-critical, half-whimsical relection that so abounds in
his essays: “Castile is wide and lat like a man’s chest; other lands are more like a woman’s, with
narrow valleys and curved mounds. he world comes in diferent shapes. You can see this in
Castile better than anywhere else; but food is so bad in Castile! And that would not matter at
all if it were possible to think straight in Castile. But there you cannot think straight; more-
over, feelings don’t come easy in Castile.”56 A major exception to this pattern is Ciro Bayo, who
contributed more and arguably better pages to travel literature than any other member of the
53. “Estas excursiones no son sólo un consuelo, un descanso y una enseñanza; son además, y acaso sobre todo,
uno de los mejores medios de cobrar apego y amor a la patria.” (Unamuno 1966, 281)
54. “Yo cada día odio más la información y me interesa menos la noticia.” (Unamuno 1966, 351)
55. “¿No es este el medio en que han nacido y se han desarrollado las grandes voluntades, fuertes, poderosas,
tremendas, pero solitarias, anárquicas, de aventureros, navegantes, conquistadores?” (Martínez Ruiz 1966,
14)
56. “Castilla es ancha y plana, como el pecho de un varón; otras tierras, en cambio, están hechas con valles an-
gostos y redondos collados, como el pecho de una mujer. El mundo es de muchas maneras. En Castilla se
Generation of 98. Bayo, a voyageur romancier in the manner of Sterne and Borrow, returns to
a notion of travel writing that curbs transcendental relections and welcomes instead incisive
stories of happy adventures, amorous escapades, assorted jobs (olive and grape harvester, swim-
ming instructor, mediator between bandits and policemen…), long conversations both humble
and elevated, all interlaced with erudite quotations (Pliny, Virgil, Cervantes), and historical
recollections of a vaguely melancholy character: “In Seville, I paid the little fee, like a gentleman,
to visit the Alcázar, and then I sat on the steps of the Lonja, expecting to see again what is for
ever gone: vendor’s cries, wrought silver and slaves from the Indies, sold right there in public
auction by shrieking auctioneers.”57
Strangely enough, none of the more canonical members of the following generation (1927)
contributed in any signiicant way to the growing corpus of travel literature, with the exception
of García Lorca. Impresiones y paisajes (Impressions and landscapes, 1918), his irst book and
a generational watershed, chronicles a Castilian excursion organized by the Institución Libre
de Enseñanza: García Lorca takes the opportunity to place in condescending opposition his
European bourgeois sensibility and the provincial casticismo of his elders, his modern musical
culture and their dusty erudition, the Andalusian sensuality of his native Granada – displayed
in gardens and palaces – and Castile’s proverbial austerity, so dear to his professor’s generation
but rather loathsome in Lorca’s eyes, at least as he perceived it in the perverse atmosphere of the
monasteries around Burgos. Ater Lorca, the great legacy of Spanish (Castilian) excursionismo
remained somewhat dormant until Camilo José Cela, who wrote no less than 11 travel books,
resurrected it with the most celebrated Spanish travelogue of all times, Viaje a la Alcarria (Jour-
ney to the Alcarria, 1948). Cela’s brilliant prose, however, can hardly override his intolerably
frivolous quirks. In postwar Spain, wretched with poverty and open wounds, Cela indulges
time and again in comments like this:
he traveler is given to understand that long ago, when the simple folk who like a bit of blood
now and then needed to be entertained (bullights hadn’t been invented yet), the lat space on
top of La Horca was used to carry out sentences of those condemned to death. he traveler re-
lects that the site wasn’t a bad choice; there is no doubt that the hill of La Horca has a beautiful
view. he traveler thinks too that it’s a pity they don’t put up gallows on the hill of La Horca; it
would have made a pretty sight.” (Cela 1964, 57; see also Ridao 2003, 101–14)58
Nevertheless, traces of Cela’s style – which are but pale, cleansed traces of Bayo’s prodigious trav-
el prose – are quite recognizable in most of the travel literature that followed, particularly in the
ve mejor que en ninguna parte; pero… ¡se come tan mal! Y esto sería lo de menos si en Castilla se pensara
bien. Pero no se piensa bien y, sobre todo, no se siente bien.” (Ortega 1966a, 255)
57. “pagué mi pesetilla, como un señor, por ver el Alcázar, y me senté en las gradas de la Lonja, esperando
lo que ya pasó para no volver: los pregones de mercaderías, plata labrada y esclavos de las Indias, que en
aquel lugar se vendían a grito herido en pública almoneda.” (Bayo 2005, 245)
58. “Según le explican al viajero, antiguamente, cuando para entretener a las gentes sencillas, que lo que piden
es un poco de sangre, aún no se habían inventado las corridas de toros, se usaba la mesetilla del cerro de la
Horca para ajusticiar a los condenados a muerte. El viajero piensa que el sitio no está mal elegido; sin duda
alguna el cerro de la horca tiene una hermosa perspectiva. El viajero piensa también que es lástima que en
el cerro de la Horca no se levante la iera silueta del rollo; hubiera hecho muy hermoso.” (Cela 1948, 91)
Travel writing 205
1960s, already under the hegemony of so-called “social realism.” Antonio Ferrés and Armando
López Salinas inaugurated the trend with Caminando por Las Hurdes (On foot through Las Hur-
des, 1960), under Buñuel’s guidance. In the same years and with the same spirit Juan Goytisolo
produced Campos de Níjar (he countryside of Níjar, 1960) and La Chanca (1962), “dominios de
hambre y raquitismo, tracoma y lepra” (domain of hunger and rickets, trachoma and leprosy) (J.
Goytisolo 1962, 89). Goytisolo, a traveler from a privileged North (J. Goytisolo 1987, 17), adheres
to the details of Southern misery, avoiding, just barely, Cela’s afectations: “a child is running
around a heap of rubbish – naked, his stomach swollen, his skull black with lies”.59 hree years
later, Ramón Carnicer examined through a similar lens another destitute region in his remark-
able Donde Las Hurdes se llaman Cabrera (Where Las Hurdes change their name to Cabrera;
see Ridao 2003, 47–72). Jesús Torbado, much younger, followed suit in 1966 with Tierra mal
bautizada, an unforgiving exposure of Castile’s squalor in the age of rampant tourism.
One or two generations later, in a more prosperous Spain, romantic excursionismo re-
turned in full force, particularly around the province of León, afresh with memories of Gil y
Carrasco’s native ardor. In Los caminos del Esla (River Esla’s trails, 1980), Juan Pedro Aparicio
and José María Merino embark on a twofold mission. First they search for the true source of
one of the rivers that give León its particular geographic identity; second, they follow the banks
of the river to its mouth, tracking a historical and social identity that the rest of the country
– Madrid in particular – seems to ignore, perhaps on purpose. In El río del olvido (River of
oblivion, 1990), Julio Llamazares returns to the banks of yet another of León’s idiosyncratic riv-
ers – River Porma, where he spent summers as a child – in a typically modern, defeating, mel-
ancholy search: “the traveler recognizes every turn of the road and every hill, and yet he has the
overshadowing feeling that he is returning now to La Mata as a foreigner […]. Perhaps because,
at the end of the day, we are all foreigners in the land of our childhood.”60
Spanish twentieth-century accounts of international travels were fewer and less momen-
tous than excursion books. Members of the Generation of 98 produced signiicant memoirs of
relatively long sojourns in foreign cities, particularly Paris (Azorín [1945], Baroja [1955]). Vicen-
te Blasco Ibáñez may have been the most proliic traveler and travel writer of the period. His last
travelogue, La vuelta al mundo de un novelista (A novelist’s journey around the world, 1924–25),
is a characteristic testimony of the era of luxury liners and of the global fame of Spain’s irst in-
ternational bestselling writer. Prestigious journalists of the same generation – most notably Julio
Camba (1916) – were primarily known for the reports of their travels in Europe and America. In
the wake of the Russian revolution, quite a few travelers with political interests reported their in-
situ assessment of the USSR (a book review in Revista de Occidente declared Álvarez del Vayo’s
La nueva Rusia [he new Russia, 1927] the best of this kind). Ater the Civil War, a few of Spain’s
better-known novelists reported their international travels. hey may be well represented by two
travelogues of 1963: Miguel Delibes’ Europa, parada y fonda (Stop and rest in Europe) and José
59. “un crío corretea desnudo por el muladar, con el vientre hinchado y el cráneo negro de moscas.” (Goyti-
solo 1962, 48)
60. “el viajero reconoce cada curva y cada cuesta, pero a pesar de ello no consigue evitar la sensación de volver
ahora a La Mata como si fuera un forastero […]. Quizá porque, en el fondo, en el país de la infancia, todos
somos extranjeros.” (Llamazares 1990, 69)
María Gironella’s Personas, ideas, mares (Peoples, ideas, oceans). Delibes cautiously alerts the
reader to those European developments that Spaniards under Franco’s regime may ind instruc-
tive for future reference: Italy’s civilized, non-destructive way of overcoming fascism; Germany’s
quick, exemplary recovery from the ravages of war; and France’s sexual liberation. Gironella
expounds his expectations at the beginning: a comparison of Orient and Occident should open
up his mind and help him reconsider the limitations of his background (Gironella 1963, 22). He
proves himself, however, blindly occidental: “Geography shows that beyond the occidental bor-
ders begins a kingdom of misery, stench, and rags […]. Laws, Hygiene, Science, and Technology
thrived in the Occident alone, and occidental progress is close to miraculous.”61 Toward the end
of the century, amid a proliferation of magazines and publishing companies devoted to travel
literature, two modalities of the international travelogue appear to dominate the market. he
forty-one seemingly dispersed chapters of Rafael Chirbes’s El viajero sedentario. Ciudades (he
sedentary traveler. Cities, 2004) are sophisticated relections of a voyageur essayiste on as many
cities – from Salamanca to Peking – for an elite of travelogue readers. he chapter on Salamanca
(Chirbes 2004, 248–49) is characteristic: he revisits the town of his adolescence to validate his
recollection of an incongruity between the sumptuous urban stage and the mediocrity of the
actors who populate it. Statistics show that common travelogue readers prefer the lighter, more
entertaining narratives of a number of voyageurs journalistes. Most successful among them is
Javier Reverte, particularly for his hazardous journeys to the heart of Africa, on the footpath
– both topographical and literary – of great writers and explorers, from R. Burton to Conrad.
Well-worn topoi of nineteenth-century travel literature – like the disappointment with civiliza-
tion’s boredom and vulgarity and the subsequent return to the hardships of primitive journeys
(Reverte 1996, 156 and 169) – resonate, hardly transformed, in Reverte’s deliberately conversa-
tional prose, and give his travel books a quality of déjà vu, which may be at the root of his popu-
lar success. Africa, however, laments Reverte, is no longer what it used to be (169).
Essayiste and romancier, journaliste and philosophe – closer to Verdaguer than Zamora,
to Bayo than Cela, to Chirbes than Reverte – Josep Pla, arguably the greatest travel writer of
twentieth-century Spain, favored two kinds of destinations: minuscule areas of his own prov-
ince and the great cities of the world where he was stationed as a newspaper correspondent.
In either case, he inds no room for Reverte’s (or Ford’s or Gautier’s…) complaint about “the
monotony and vulgarity of the civilized world”; his “civilized” destinations turn out to be fasci-
nating territories that the traveler observes in pleasurable detail and describes in a prose equally
distant from Cela’s smug caricatures and from Unamuno’s willful transcendentalism. In Viaje
a pie (Journey on foot, 1949), a book of excursions to the villages of his native Empordà, he
summarizes his philosophy of travel in the form of advice to young travelers: “heir journey
should have a purpose: to gather information, to learn about the country and the lifestyles of its
inhabitants, to immerse themselves fully in the basic, unassailable, undiluted ways of life of the
human element. A warning: it can be diicult to withstand, not so much for the discomforts of
the journey as for the quantity and quality of the rough, unpleasant, complicated, sometimes
61. “¿Así, pues, donde acaba Occidente empieza el reino de la miseria, del hedor y del harapo? Geográica-
mente así es […]. Sólo en Occidente se han desarrollado el Derecho, la Higiene, la Ciencia y la Técnica y
se ha conseguido un progreso que está alcanzando el puro milagro.” (Gironella 1963, 144)
Travel writing 207
unfathomable information to be found along the way.”62 In Pla’s travel literature – particularly
in his early and acclaimed Cartes de lluny (Letters from afar, 1928) – critics underline two dis-
tinctive features; irst, an idiosyncratic, oten acerbic sense of humor; second, a typical evoca-
tion of the landscape, both lyrical and analytical, inspired by Constable, Lorraine, and the great
Flemish painters of the seventeenth century: “Suddenly, there is an inefable surprise: Chartres’
belfry soars vertically to the sky from the horizontality of the land, like a sharp, airborne and
immensely long arrow. his country, which has no skylines and is lat as a pancake, ofers the
best vertical lines you can dream of: the prodigious belfries of French gothic cathedrals.”63 A
third trait – which he shares with Münzer and Bayo – may be worth noting: a rare ability to
convey the pleasure of traveling: “the pleasure of discovering an enormous, unknown city, with
no help from guides or travelogues, just letting prior readings drive your spirit, is one of the
most pleasant things you can do in life.”64
Foreign travelers in twentieth-century Spain were as distinguished as their nineteenth-
century predecessors but produced a wider variety of travelogues; in fact, they were oten guid-
ed by a will to difer in both their itineraries and their style. “Spain is the discovery of a few po-
ets and painters and lamboyant tourists […]. I am struggling to detach myself from this yoke,”
wrote Nikos Kazantzakis (1963, 92), who did not quite succeed. Consequently, many of these
travelers declared themselves disappointed with the Alhambra, recognized in Spain a rich di-
versity that nineteenth-century orientalism had masked, and gradually – mostly ater the Civil
War – turned their eyes to the country’s evolving present instead of its purportedly standing
past. Before the Civil War, eminent voyageurs essayistes tried to rise above inherited common
places by means of typically intellectual relections on the “essence” of Spain – not unlike those
of Unamuno and Ortega. In 1908 and then again in 1928, Havelock Ellis found in Spain “the
supreme manifestation of a certain primitive and eternal attitude of the human spirit,” which
apparently boiled down to “a perpetual insistence on sufering and death” (H. Ellis 1937, xvi
and 24). In 1910, Ortega himself deplored this kind of abstraction in his review of a remarkable
travelogue, Spanische reise (Spanish journey) by a German art critic, Julius Meier-Graefe, who
he otherwise admired (Ortega y Gasset 1966b, 530). Around 1922, John Dos Passos transcribed
in Rosinante to the Road Again long dialogues and solitary ruminations about Spain’s true iden-
tity. He was oten prompted by his readings of Cervantes, Calderón, Jorge Manrique, and the
Generation of 98. Dos Passos surmised that there were many Spains but they all shared a “basic
fact of Spanish life”: “his intense individualism, born of a history whose fundamentals lie in
isolated village communities – pueblos, as the Spaniards call them – over the changeless face of
62. “Su viaje debería tener un objeto: informarse, enterarse de lo que es el país, de cómo vive en él la gente,
empaparse de la manera de ser básica, inalienable, insoluble, del material humano. Sería – lo digo de an-
temano – un poco difícil de resistir y no sólo por las incomodidades que se irían encontrando, que eso no
sería nada, sino por la cantidad y la calidad de la información que al paso iría saliendo – que sería brava,
desapacible, complicada, a veces de una profundidad insondable.” (Pla 1949, 8)
63. “de sobte, la sorpresa és inefable: sobre l’horitzontalitat de la terra apareix la letxa aguda, aéria, altíssima,
de la catedral de Chartres. Aquest país sense siluetes, pla com el palmell de la mà, presenta les millors
verticals que poden somniar-se: les agulles prodigioses del gòtic francès.” (Pla 1980, 35)
64. “el plaer de descobrir una ciutat enorme I desconeguda, sense guies ni llibres, deixant només lotar l’esperit
en lectures anteriors, és una de les coses més agradables que es poden fer a la vida.” (Pla 1980, 48)
which, like grass over a ield, events spring and mature and die” (Dos Passos 1922, 53). Waldo
Frank, whose Virgin Spain (1926) was as widely read as Havelock Ellis’s he Soul of Spain, de-
scribes the country’s shiting “soul” through a series of ponderous metaphors: in Toledo, for
example, “the soul of the Spaniard becomes a castled mountain” (Frank 1926, 124) while the
“tomb” that he makes of the Escorial amounts to “the ultimate word of Castile” (132). Borrow’s
precedent guides V. S. Pritchet in his unusual itinerary (from Lisbon to Vigo by way of Sala-
manca and León). He walks in the company of shepherds, muleteers, and humble folk; from
the experience he learns to discern the “outside […], that is the crude, oily Spanish body” from
the inside, “the spirit, an exquisite, yearning, knife-like thing, incised with an arabesque of a
brilliant beauty” (Pritchet 1928, 223). Most belligerent among these pre-war travelers is Mario
Praz, whose Peninsola pentagonale (1928) was aptly translated into English as Unromantic Spain
(1929). Explicitly opposing Irving, Gautier, Amicis, and Barrès, Praz (1940, 35) establishes that
“the essence of that country lies in the very antithesis of picturesqueness, namely in the grandi-
ose, overwhelming monotony”65 that the restless European mind inds in the Escorial (40), in
mystical literature (45) and, above all, in the Alhambra, monotonous like the Arabian Nights
(101–03). Even ater the Civil War, there is no shortage of travelogues by eminent authors who
simply refurbish traditional interpretations. Such is the case of James Michener’s Iberia (1968)
but also, although less obviously, of James Morris’s he Presence of Spain (1964), in spite of his
critical portrait of the dictatorship; of Honor Tracy’s popular Winter in Castile (1973), with the
Rastro as a repository of an intact Goyaesque quintessence of the country; and even of Cees
Nooteboom’s Roads to Santiago (1997), whose twists and turns in time and space land him, ater
all, in the same remote, yet undisturbed, past.
However, postwar Spain also attracted a diferent breed of foreign travel writers – roman-
ciers rather than essayistes – who appear more interested in the country’s confusing history-in-
the-making, than in any of its transparent essential traits. he case of Norman Lewis, British
master of modern travel writing, exempliies this new tack: he published Spanish Adventure in
1934, became disappointed with his book ater the wars, and inally published in 2003 an en-
tirely rewritten version, he tomb in Seville: Crossing Spain on the brink of Civil War. N. Lewis
takes here good note of political and social events – particularly, the revolt in Asturias – as they
create a distinct pre-war mood and interfere with the normal course of his journey (delayed
trains, overbooked hotels, restlessness in the cities...). At that juncture, he comes upon a group
of gypsies who camp on the outskirts of Zaragoza. hey are no longer icons of exotic Spain but
a peaceful counterpoint to the general disarray of the country (N. Lewis 2003, 35–36). In 1954,
Gertrude Stein advised Richard Wright to visit Spain because “you’ll see the past there” (Wright
1995, 4). R. Wright traveled dutifully to the Alhambra, only to ind out that “my twentieth-cen-
tury hunger could not be sated there. hese moss-covered ruins were far less interesting to me
than those landscapes of subjective ruins that strew our world today” (192). To visit these other
ruins Wright does not even need to leave his residence: “my pension was a citadel of bad faith
and was populated mostly by lower middle-class men and women lost in anonymity […]. he
entire clientele was a damp, quite nervous lot whose lives were empty, who never raised their
65. “l’essenza di codesto paese si risolva propio nell’opposto del pittoresco, in una grandiosa, possente mono-
tonia.” (Praz 1928, 23)
Travel writing 209
voices, were retiringly polite” (16). Richard Wright’s book, Pagan Spain (1957), alternates stories
of those and other lives with fragments from Formación del espíritu nacional (Development of
national spirit), an oicial civics textbook he received as a git from a female friend. In 2001,
Miranda France would give a new, postmodern twist to this kind of collage in Don Quixote’s
delusions: Travels in Castilian Spain. France alternates fragments of reviews of books related
to Cervantes’s novel, long conversations with friends about the Spain of the day, and poignant
descriptions of life in her neighborhood: “On the street where I lived with Carmen and Alvaro
[Chueca] there were women who were really men. here were men who were in the process
of becoming women. here were housewives who turned into prostitutes at night, a man who
pretended to be Dracula, a child with a Cyclops eye” (M. France 2001, 73).
Latin American travelers in Spain, neither conventionally foreign nor properly native,
contributed a unique point of view that deserves special consideration. A history of their travel
literature, however scanty, should start with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Viajes por Europa,
Africa i América, 1845–1847 (Travels in Europe, Africa and America), in spite of its rather con-
ventional character: bullights have a “sublime charm” (D. F. Sarmiento 1993, 147) and Burgos
turns out to be a “picturesque sight, with its gothic cathedral, rising like a shadow of heroic
times, like the ghost of Spanish knighthood.”66 Sarmiento is convinced that, had he visited
Spain in the sixteenth century, he would have seen nothing diferent, except, perhaps, for mod-
ern, European Barcelona (166–67). Around the turn of the century, the supreme masters of the
modernista chronicle arrived in the motherland with great expectations: “We come to Spain to
take in her secular soul, to enjoy her beauty and to visit her ruins and foundations, like respect-
ful children who take of their hats in the presence of their aging father…”67 Such expectations,
however, were not fulilled: they found a destitute Spain that mostly ignored or looked down
upon them. Moreover, the Spaniards, more interested in their past than in their (or anybody
else’s) present, oten disdained all those modern French sophistications that Latin American
modernistas aspired to. Inevitably, the chroniclers found it hard to breathe and communicate
in typically Spanish environments. Of a visit to the cathedral of Burgos, for example, Manuel
Ugarte writes: “modern man sufocates in that atmosphere of defeat, where everything signals
extinction, gloom, endless death…”68 And yet, they paid considerate visits to literary authori-
ties old and new – Núñez de Arce, Galdós, Valera, Pardo Bazán, Unamuno – and tried to initi-
ate in vain a dialogue with them. A disappointed Darío complains: “To this day Spain has not
bothered to learn about our progress, our accomplishments, while other foreign nations paid
close attention to them, to their advantage.”69 Gómez Carrillo’s La miseria de Madrid (Misery
66. “con su catedral gótica, se levanta cual sombra de los tiempos heroicos, como el alma en pena de la ca-
ballería española.” (Sarmiento 1993, 133)
67. “Venimos a penetrarnos de su alma secular, a recrearnos en sus bellezas y a visitar sus fundamentos y sus
ruinas, como hijos respetuosos que se descubren ante la vejez del padre…” (Manuel Ugarte n.d., 11).
68. “El hombre moderno se ahoga en ese mundo vencido, donde parece que todo es aniquilamiento, tristeza,
muerte ininita…” (Manuel Ugarte n.d., 39)
69. “España no se ha tomado hasta hoy el trabajo de tomar en cuenta nuestros adelantos, nuestras conquistas,
que a otras naciones extranjeras han atraído atención cuidadosa y de ellas han sacado provecho.” (Darío
1950, 50)
in Madrid, 1921) may be the most incisive and poignant narrative of such a disheartening, hu-
miliating estrangement: Madrid is, for a young Gómez Carrillo, newly arrived from Paris, both
his homeland – the capital city of his people and his language – and the theater of the darkest,
most squalid period of his life (Gómez Carrillo 1998, 94 and 134). his very brief history may
be brought to a closure around 1936 with another small masterpiece: Roberto Arlt’s Aguafuertes
españolas (Spanish etchings). In a characteristically coarse and biting prose, Arlt sets out to re-
veal a separate Andalusian reality, hardly ever recorded in classic travelogues. hus, for example,
predictably disappointed with the Alhambra, he chooses to write instead about a barbershop
in the Albaicín:
I approach the cave. I push the curtain aside. I stand facing a cave-like troglodyte’s room. he
barber plays checkers with a buddy under a vaulted ceiling. I request to examine the cave. he
house-cave. here are three rooms hollowed out in the limestone. One bedroom, one kitchen
and the salon where cheeks are chafed and heads are shaved. Low vaulted ceilings. he interior
is dim and cool like a cistern. I ask and get answers. he cave-like house is cool in the summer
and lukewarm in the winter. In each cave there is an electric lamp. I leave.70
70. “Me acerco. Corro la cortinilla. Estoy ante la habitación cavernaria, troglodita. El mozo barbero juega a
las damas con un cofrade, bajo el techo de bóveda. Les pido permiso para examinar la caverna. La casa-
caverna. Son tres habitaciones, excavadas en el interior de la masa caliza. Un dormitorio, una cocina y el
salón de raer mejillas y rapar cogotes. Techos bajos abovedados. Frescura y obscuridad de cisterna allí
adentro. Pregunto y me explican. La casa cavernaria es fresca en verano, tibia en invierno. En cada caverna
una lámpara eléctrica. Salgo” (Arlt 1936, 152).
Cities, cultural centers and enclaves
Empires waxing and waning

Castile, Spain and American exceptionalism
Michael Ugarte
he words España es diferente (Spain is diferent) embody at once a catchy slogan designed to
attract tourists to Franco’s Spain – a land of “law and order” – as well as a deeply ingrained con-
ception in Spanish consciousness promoted by a group of artists known as the Generation of
1898. Also implicit in the adage is the priviledged place of Castile as a geographic shrine within
the Iberian Peninsula. It is a notion of haughty diference from other cultures as well as an idea
of Spanish insularity in a world that does not and cannot understand what it is to be Spanish. In
this ethos, Castile is in a variety of ways the embodiment of Spain as a national and nationalist
construct. his conception almost goes without question for the majority of Hispanists, not
only historians of Spain and other academics who study the Iberian Peninsula, but also for
Spaniards themselves who internalize the idea oten in uncritical ways: the accuracy or truth of
the supposition seems to be less important than the internalization. It is not that citizens and
residents of Spain are uninterested in pondering the identiication – on the contrary; it edges
its way into a variety of discussions on the nature of Spanish identity and national character.
he integral nature of Spain/Castile is taken as a given as comprising one of those notions, or
“cultural artifacts,” that Benedict Anderson singles out as an “imagined community” in his book
of that title:
My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of the word’s
multiple signiications, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular
kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into
historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they
command such profound emotional legitimacy. (B. Anderson 1983, 4)
And in the theoretical context of postmodern critical thought and cultural studies, a (relatively)
new attention to geography and space has arisen as primordial factors in the understanding of
consciousness. Henri Lefebvre (1991), Edward Soja (1989), David Harvey (1989), and Manuel
Castells (1983), among others, represent this late twentieth- and early twenty-irst-century in-
clination to consider space in its ideological, historical, economic, temporal, and sociological
manifestations in conjunction with (not separate from) other areas of investigation such as his-
tory and literature. Space, then, can itself be “produced” through consciousness (as in Lefebvre’s
much discussed he production of space) within a series of social/historical/aesthetic factors
that not only give rise to it but that are themselves informed by space. Edward Soja’s statement
in his hirdspace emphasizes the simultaneities of space as he deines the concept:
[hirdspace] is a place of critical exchange where the geographical imagination can be ex-
panded to encompass a multiplicity of perspectives... It is a space where issues of race, class,
and gender can be explored simultaneously without privileging one over the other... a creative
212 Michael Ugarte
recombination and extension, one that builds on a Firstspace perspective that is focused on the
real material world and a Secondspace perspective that interprets this reality through imag-
ined representations of spatiality. (Soja 1989, 6)
he focus of Soja’s synthesis, not unlike more economically focused conigurations in Harvey, is
what the former calls “real-and-imagined places” (6) thereby allowing for the reality or materi-
ality of a place like Castile, a place conjured up in Miguel de Unamuno’s canonical En torno al
casticismo (Concerning purity).
Similarly, although by no means identically, in North American culture and consciousness
there is an overlapping notion of national “diference” that posits the United States as a nation
following its own historical patterns, born in an age of a collective and willful separation from
Europe and rejection of the colonialist oppression and social hierarchies of the Old World. As
such, the “new nation,” free of feudal and monarchical despotism, forges an enlightened con-
sciousness among its citizenry: the idea of America as a geography of natural equality, the free
market, free enterprise individualism, and a protestant work ethic, all of which account for a
prosperity and general well-being unequalled in world history. In this essay, while I use the
term “America” to refer to the history and culture of the United States (unless stated otherwise),
I do not wish to do so uncritically, for the naming of “America” in reference to one country on
a continent that extends from Canada to Chile is an idea that shapes much of my discussion.
Although the term American exceptionalism is oten attributed to a contemporary po-
litical scientist, Seymour Martin Lipset, it is also on the mind of a variety of canonical Ameri-
can writers (Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and others)
whether as an airmation, rejection, a spiritual marker, or object of ridicule. Perhaps unwit-
tingly Lipset’s political discussion of the idea of America has much to do with cultural space,
as he oten refers to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America of the 1830s, a book that has
had at once mythical importance and a certain empirical reality (a real-and-imagined place).
Tocqueville is, for Lipset and for many other interpreters of American history and society “the
initiator of American exceptionalism” (1996, 18). Moreover, in my view it is not coincidental
that the ethos of diference in both nations took on special cultural historical force circa 1898,
a year that marks a military and ideological clash of these two nations, a once powerful empire
and an empire to be.
It is not my intention in this essay to pinpoint the historical, political, and economic devel-
opments that explain how the concept (“cultural artifact” or “thirdspace”) of Castile or America
came into being – although these processes are certainly part of the discussion – but to explore
the manifestations of these national diferences in inluential literary texts of early twentieth-
century Spain in conjunction with notions of American diference and how both relate to na-
tional self-concepts of empire. hey are at once a similar and divergent historical phenomenon
in the cultural consciousness of the United States. In both cases the sense of place contained in
these two “cultural artifacts” or “thirdspaces” is far more than an evocation of a physical space
(nostalgia, aesthetic recreation of a surrounding); the empire on the wane and the one on the
rise are equally spaces of ideology, a set of political, social, and historical ideas embodied in the
mapping of their respective geographies.
Perhaps Pedro Laín Entralgo (1947) in his seminal work on the Generation of 1898 – an
extended version of which is contained in his also seminal España como problema (Spain as
Empires waxing and waning 213
a problem, 1962) – is the intellectual who most clearly represents not only the airmation of
the existence of a group of Spanish writers whose works are motivated by a conception of the
singularly “diferent” ideals of the Spanish nation but also by the conception of a geographic
space as a “problem.” his “problem” refers to the entirety of Spanish history, not only the recent
past – although clearly the atermath of the Civil War is what most concerns him – but what he
believes are the intellectual roots of the dilemma. One might add that Laín casts the “problem”
within a context, a space that harkens back to the “crisis” that followed the loss of Spanish colo-
nies with the defeat of Spain in the Spanish American War. Indeed the Civil War is something
of a reenactment of the previous “disaster” – a common term used to describe the loss of the
colonies in 1898, akin to 1939’s “un millón de muertos” (a million dead) and the loss of the
Second Republic. he association or identiication of Spain with Castile is both explicit and
implicit in Laín as in the intellectuals whose ideas and works he discusses (Unamuno, Baroja,
both Machados, Azorín, and to a lesser extent Maeztu). he reading of Spanish geography, a
speciic centralist and centering geography as a historical metaphor, is felt on virtually every
page, especially when he discusses Unamuno, whose En torno al casticismo serves as the model
text for everything I have pointed out thus far. Indeed Laín as critic participates in the evoca-
tion: “Our hand takes a thin green-spined book down from the shelf. It is dated 1895. Its title is
En torno al casticismo, its author, Miguel de Unamuno, a Basque recently arrived to Salamancan
teaching. he Basque speaks to us of the Castilian plain” (1962, 20). And further on he will
continue inducing the Spanish landscape in the spirit of Unamuno by picking up another book,
Azorín’s La voluntad (Willpower): “Our hand takes another book down from the shelf. his one
is called La voluntad. It is signed by José Martínez Ruiz and it was printed in 1902” (21). In many
ways Laín’s literary history is a performance, something of an imitation or sacred parody of the
igures – and I mean “igures” literally – whom he analyzes as national symbols, all Castilian
for Laín, if not by birth, certainly in spirit, even Valle-Inclán, despite his Galician chauvinism.
here is no denying that Unamuno’s much discussed Casticismo serves as the arch-text in
the identiication of Spain with Castile, not only in Laín’s reading but in don Miguel’s writings
themselves. A series of ive imaginative essays written around 1898, Unamuno’s Casticismo – the
very term has an air of exceptionalism given that it is diicult to translate for the variety of ideas
and images it conjures up (caste, class, race, Castile, Castilian character, Castilian geography,
Spain/Castile as an ideology, an “ism”) – arguably contains the most deinitive discussion in
Spanish letters of intrahistoria, or the “inner” history that gives roots and meaning to events.
he waves of history, with their rumble and foam reverberating in the sunlight, roll upon a
continuous sea, deep, immensely deeper than the layer that undulates on a silent sea, whose
deepest reaches are never lit by the sun. All that is told daily by the newspapers, the entire his-
tory of the “current historical moment,” is nothing more than the surface of the sea, a surface
that freezes and crystalizes in books and registers, and once crystalized in this way, becomes a
hard layer, nothing more with regards to intra-historical life than this poor crust in which we
live as compared to this immense burning light that it carries within.1
1. “Las olas de la historia, con su rumor y su espuma que reverbera al sol, ruedan sobre un mar continuo,
hondo, inmensamente más hondo que la capa que ondula sobre un mar silencioso y a cuyo último fondo
nunca llega al sol. Todo lo que cuentan a diario los periódicos, la historia toda del ‘presente momento
histórico,’ no es sino la supericie del mar, una supericie que se hiela y cristaliza en los libros y registros,
214 Michael Ugarte
Noteable in this passage, as in many other descriptive evocations in this work, is the geographi-
cal grounding and terminology (history as a body of water) used to explain a philosophical/
historical concept. Moreover, the entire irst essay of Casticismo has a paradoxical lavor, typical
of Unamuno, because as he insists on the universality of his intrahistoria, he lays the ground for
the exceptional traits of Castile and Spain which will follow this irst essay.
In the next essay, “La casta histórica de Castilla” (he Castilian historical caste) don Miguel
ofers his well known (and lyrical) rationale for what has become received knowledge prevalent
in the textbooks of “Spanish civilization”: that in the understanding of Spain as a nation, one
must consider Castile as a microcosm, as an embodiment of something greater than itself. A
good example of this thinking (common to all these essays) is the following passage: “But if
Castile has made the Spanish nation, it has participated in a process of ‘becoming Spanish,’ each
day melding the richness of the variety of its interior contents more and more, absorbing the
Castilian spirit into another superior to it, more complex: the Spanish.”2 he sentence may be
read as a poetic redundancy because to say that Castile is Spain is like saying that Castile is Cas-
tile or Spain is Spain: “they are symptoms of the process of Spain’s ‘becoming Spanish’ ” (2005,
162), this in reference to other “regionalisms” of Spain. He furthers this notion in the following
passage, which he writes as an airmation rather than a criticism: “And so it was that Castile
paralized the regulating centers of the other Spanish peoples [he Basque Country, Catalonia,
Galicia], inhibiting their historical consciousness to a large degree, planting this idea of a con-
quering unitarianism, of a world catholicization.”3 Put another way, Spain’s diference stems
from the notion that Castile imposed itself on the rest of Spain to become Spain, another word
for Catholic, which is another word for universal.
At the same time the imperial designs of the Castilian, Spanish, Catholic nation cannot
be overlooked, and don Miguel takes careful (and passionate) note of them. Castilians are by
nature “warriors,” “reconquerors of their homeland,” and “intolerant” (2005, 211). And this very
nature is what uniies Spanish identity: “he caste wars of our golden age were over religion.
his was the social bond, and religious unity the supreme form of the social. In order to delimit
national unity, Jews and Moors were expelled and the door closed on the Lutherans.”4 Simi-
larly, Unamuno refers to the conquerors of the New World as incarnations of the Castilian spirit,
indeed the Castilian “religion”; the adventurers who went to America looking for riches, and in
the process enslaved (encomendaban [215]) Indians, did so “so that they could teach them the
y una vez cristalizada así, una capa dura, no mayor con respecto a la vida intra-histórica que esta pobre
corteza en que vivimos con relación al inmenso foco ardiente que lleva dentro.” (Unamuno 2005, 144)
2. “Pero si Castilla ha hecho la nación española, ésta ha ido españolizándose cada vez más, fundiendo más
cada día la riqueza de su variedad de contenido interior, absorbiendo el espíritu castellano en otro superior
a él, más complejo: el español.” (Unamuno 2005, 162)
3. “El caso fue que Castilla paralizó los centros reguladores de los demás pueblos españoles, inhibióles la
conciencia histórica en gran parte, les echó en ella su idea, la idea del unitarismo conquistador, la de la
catolización del mundo.” (Unamuno 2005, 166)
4. “Que las castizas guerras de nuestra edad de oro fueron de religión... Esta era lazo social, y la unidad
religiosa forma suprema de la social. Para demarcar, por vía de remoción, la unidad nacional, se expulsó
judíos y moriscos y se cerró la puerta a luteranos.” (Unamuno 2005, 212)
things of ‘our holy Catholic faith.’ ”5 While the tone is celebratory, Unamuno constantly insists
that his purpose is to dig deep under the surface of Spanish history, to ind and expose that lazo
social (social bond), and to regenerate that spirit, not unlike virtually all of the writers whom
we still put into the category of the Generation of 1898. Even someone like Antonio Machado,
whose liberalism turned to committed socialism during the Civil War, inds social and cultural
wholeness in the landscape of Castile in his book of poems Campos de Castilla (he landscape
of Castile) as in his celebrated poem, “El mañana efímero” (he ephemeral tomorrow) which
ends with a synthesis of “idea” and “rabia” (anger), not unlike Unamuno’s evocation of the
warlike spirit of Castile. he ultimate goal in both is to ind unity by celebrating diference, the
Castilian-Spanish exception.
A notable igure and to some extent anomalous among the writers of the Generation of
1898 is Ramiro de Maeztu, whose open and vociferous espousal of fascism in the thirties is
something of an embarrassment to intellectuals like Laín Entralgo, who mentions him several
times in his book on the generation, but does not devote a chapter to him when it would have
been more than logical to do so. Maeztu is not an exception in his call for unity and regenera-
tion, as well as in his search for integrating values not only among Spaniards but among all
peoples of Hispanic lineage as he includes Ibero-America as an integral part of Hispanidad
(Hispanity). His uniqueness stems from his open embrace of an active (or proactive) national
Catholicism based precisely on that notion of unity. he fact that he was executed during the
irst months of the Civil War on the orders of the Republic, along with none other than José
Antonio Primo de Rivera, adds to his uniqueness, as a good number of the members of his
generation became apolitical, feigned being apolitical, or gave lip service to the victors (see
Rodríguez Puértolas 1986 for an inventory of all the Spanish writers who collaborated in one
form or another with fascism and/or the Franco regime).
I am convinced Maeztu would have ultimately become a victim of Franco’s purges, as were
many of his comrade falangists in the atermath of the war. Another factor that makes Maeztu
unique is that he wrote and spoke most openly (at times turgidly, at others crudely) about the
glories of Spanish imperialism; he extols the spirit of Hispania that equally excites the other
members of his generation, but he does so with a call to action. he very title of one of his
main works, Defensa de la Hispanidad (Defense of Hispanicity), a compilation of essays he had
contributed to the fascist journal, Acción española (Spanish action), in the early thirties, reveals
both the tone and the intention of the compilation: Hispanidad is under attack in Maeztu’s “de-
fense,” and the historical moment calls for its rebirth. Indeed, it is the duty of Spaniards to save
it. With the empire, Spaniards forged an ideal (a great family, a community, a race); Hispanidad
is for Maeztu a way of life diferent and speciic to the peoples of the Hispanic world with Spain
at the helm. he modern world is not on its rightful path for Maeztu, who considers himself a
defender of modernity, his modernity: his new Spain based on the old, must not be afraid to
raise its head. A type of false modernity is threatening the Hispanic way of life:
he harm that modern societies must confront is the difusion of lies, slander, defamation, por-
nography, of immorality of all kinds, by agitators and fanatics, by perverts and the ambitious,
5. “para que les enseñaran las cosas de ‘nuestra santa fe católica’.” (Unamuno 2005, 215)
216 Michael Ugarte
who hide behind Socrates and Christ and Stuart Mill and behind all the martyrs of intolerance
and lawyers of liberty in order to extol their falsities.6
Moreover the free press is much to blame for this lamentable present condition, although Maez-
tu also exalts the accomplishments of the French Revolution and its ideals of Freedom, Equality,
and Fraternity: “In our domestic life a kind of formalism is allowed to prosper which, at best,
does no justice but to strangers or enemies.”7 Press freedom or free association, then, is pre-
cisely the opposite (not free, but rather calumnious, false, perverted) if it does not follow the
dictates of Hispanidad or if it is controlled by “strangers” or “enemies.” For Maeztu the phrase
España es diferente, although not explicitly articulated until later, is not only a reality, it is a call
to arms.
he diferences are historical (or “intra-historical”), ethnic, geographical, spiritual, and
even racial. Raza (race) is a term used by many members of Maeztu’s generation, although
today we would do well to consider the understanding of the word in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Spain. It refers to a lineage, traits handed down through the generations,
traits that have both biological and ethnic markers. he dictionary of the Real Academia in-
cludes the word casta (caste) as a synonym. Interestingly it is Maeztu who begs for a clariica-
tion in the use of the word:
“October 12, poorly titled the Day of Race, should be from now on the Day of Hispanidad.”
hese words headline the extra of El Eco de España (he echo of Spain), a modest weekly in
Buenos Aires, on October 12. he words are by a Spanish priest and patriot residing in Argen-
tina, D. Zacarías de Vizarra (note the Basque surname). If the concept of Christianity includes,
and at the same time characterizes all Christian peoples, why would one not coin another word,
such this “Hispanidad,” which also includes and characterizes all Hispanic people.8
Maeztu’s urge for precision synthesizes not only how the term was used but its speciicity, its
“diference,” in relation to other races and to other uses of the word. It is not that Maeztu rejects
racialist constructions; he himself uses the concept in a way that would make any multicultur-
alist uneasy, as in the following characterization of Morocco and Algeria: “We Spaniards also
could have been carried away by Kismet. We would now be something like Morocco, or at
the most, Algeria. Our honor was to embrace the Cross and Europe, the West, and to identify
6. “El daño que han de afrontar las sociedades modernas es la difusión de la mentira, de la calumnia, de la
difamación, de la pornografía, de la inmoralidad de toda índole, por agitadores y fanáticos, pervertidos y
ambiciosos, que se escuden en Sócrates y en Cristo y en Stuart Mill y en todos los mártires de la intoleran-
cia y abogados de la libertad para pregonar sus falsedades.” (Maeztu 1952, 78–79)
7. “En la vida interna se permite prosperar a una prensa que, en el caso mejor, no hace justicia más que a los
extraños o a los enemigos.” (Maeztu 1952, 79)
8. ‘El 12 de octubre, mal titulado el día de la Raza, deberá ser en lo sucesivo el Día de la Hispanidad.’ Con estas
palabra encabezaba su extraordinario del 12 de octubre último un modesto semanario de Buenos Aires, El
Eco de España. La palabra se debe a un sacerdote español y patriota que en la Argentina reside, D. Zacarías
de Vizcarra. Si el concepto de Cristindad comprende y a la vez caracteriza a todos los pueblos cristianos,
¿por qué no ha de acuñarse otra palabra; como esta [sic] de Hispanidad, que comprenda también y carac-
terice a todos los pueblos hispánicos?” (Maetzu 1952, 27)
ourselves with our ideal.”9 Rather, it is that he fuses ethnicity and race – also revealed in the
reference to northern Africa; the characteristics are at once inherent and conditioned. hey
embody Unamuno’s concept of the “eternal,” and they all become one with a geography. hat
Father Zacarías de Vizcarra, the Spanish-Basque priest with a mission in Argentina, serves as
Maeztu’s authority in his association of Raza and Hispanidad could not be more appropriate.
Notions or constructs of Spanish diference were also especially preponderant during and
immediately ater the war with the United States. Among Hispanists it is conventional wisdom
that the loss of the Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines was a “disaster,” the immediate in-
spiration for the many imaginative and pessimistic essays that have made their way into the
Spanish canon (happily for some, lamentably for others such as Juan Goytisolo), and in this
particular instance the religious signiication of the word “canon” is pointedly itting. he Span-
ish-American War is the event that gave rise to the many essays on Spanish patriotism, writings
that demonstrate the importance of nationhood (B. Anderson’s “nation-ness”) not only in the
context of Spanish geography but as a universal phenomenon. Unamuno says as much in his
essay, “La crisis del patriotismo” (he crisis of patriotism), whose irst reference is to the 1898
War as an unfortunate and wasteful venture, “the spiritual treasure of the poor Spanish people
is being wasted.”10 While there is no explicit reference to the colonies in Azorín’s essay, “El
patriotismo” (Patriotism), clearly the “disaster” of that war is on his mind. For both writers “pa-
triotism” is, or can be, honorable, because it uniies human beings within a speciic geography,
yet when it is voiced without thought or without a true sense of belonging, oneness or integra-
tion, it leads to “abulia” or apathy (another idea common to the Generation of 1898), a social-
national malaise. For Azorín, patriotism is bookish: “the most perfect example of patriotism
could be represented by the man who, knowing the art, literature, and history of his homeland,
knew how to integrate a landscape or an old city in his spirit, as states of his soul.”11 In Baroja’s
equally canonical novel, El árbol de la ciencia (he tree of science, 1911), the critique of banal
and false patriotism is set speciically in Madrid at the height of the Spanish-American War
and in the immediate atermath of the conlict, during which his protagonist, Andrés Hurtado,
wonders what the national and nationalist excitement was all about, so short-lived and utterly
forgotten it becomes as Spain falls to the new empire.
On the other side of the Atlantic, patriotic sentiments concerning the war of 1898 were
equally vociferous, if not more so. From the North American perspective much has been dis-
cussed about the Spanish-American War that singles out (critically and uncritically) the nation-
alist war-mongering by the press and by the political interests that led to the conlict. But what
about the cultural, national, and geographical justiication? What about “America” as an “imag-
ined community,” a real-and-imagined space of cultural debate and introspection? he patterns,
9. “También los españoles pudimos dejarnos llevar por el Kismet. Seríamos ahora lo que Marruecos o, a lo
sumo, Argelia. Nuestro honor fue abrazarnos a la Cruz y a Europa, al Occidente, e identiicar nuestro ser
con nuestro ideal.” (Maetzu 1952, 18–19)
10. “se está malgastando el tesoro espiritual del pobre pueblo español” (Unamuno 1995, 8: 357).
11. “El ejemplar más acabado de patriota podríamos representarlo en un hombre que, conociendo el arte, la
literatura y la historia de su patria, supiese ligar en su espíritu un paisaje o una vieja ciudad, como estados
del alma.” (Martínez Ruiz 1964, 44)
218 Michael Ugarte
while distant from Castile – some might say ridiculously dissimilar – beg for a comparison, not
only because of the similar manifestation of patriotic zeal at a crucial moment of their respec-
tive histories, but because in both cultures there is a strong tendency to project a geography of
spirituality, a spatial ideal that at once makes for an independent (diferent) identity along with
the conluence of history with land, however artiicial.
At one point in a well-known anthology of Americans writing on America before the US
Civil War, Antebellum American Culture, David Byron Davis speaks of the importance of land
not only in economic terms, although clearly land is one of the most powerful markers of nine-
teenth-century wealth – no diferent from Europe on that score – but as a symbol of inexhaus-
tiveness, one might add “eternity”: “Land was the great and seemingly inexhaustible source of
wealth and power. Ater the Revolution, the creation of a viable nation depended essentially
on the cession of the western land claims” (1979, 101). Here Davis is preparing the way for the
inal chapter of his anthology on “Transcending Human History: Americans as ‘Pioneers of
the World’ ” (453–68) in which he includes archetypal writers such as Walt Whitman, Herman
Melville, among other, lesser known, igures who are no less in harmony with the notion of
American “manifest destiny.” Whitman writes,
[t]hirty years from this date, America will be confessed the irst nation on the earth. We of
course mean that her power, wealth, and the happiness and virtue of her citizens will then
obtain a pitch which other nations cannot favorably compare with. Her immense territory is
illing up with a rapidity which few eyes among us have realized. (quoted in Davis 1979, 456)
And Melville, a man known in literary histories for his attachment to the “old world,” writes that
America represents the “death of the Past”: “he world has arrived at a period which renders it
the part of Wisdom to pay homage to the prospective precedents of the Future in preference to
those of the Past. he Past is dead, and has no resurrection... And we Americans are the pecu-
liar, chosen people – the Israel of our time” (quoted in Davis 1979, 458–59). For Davis, Melville’s
execution of history is odd given his circumstances, and a Europeanist might even ask if there
isn’t a tone of irony in the quoted passage; still, the notion of a disappearance of history might
be explained as unwitting airmation of intrahistoria, an eternal present (perhaps in America’s
case, an eternal future) embodied in the land, Whitman’s “immense territory.”
Corresponding to Castile as a construct or the real-and-imagined place of Spain, is the
equally powerful notion of the “immense territory,” or in terms more recognizable to the
American self-concept, the “Frontier,” the “West” (in all its “wildness”) which was the scene – a
geography – of “westward expansion.” In his highly inluential book, Virgin Land, and in my
opinion one which is remarkably pertinent to our present global moment, Henry Nash Smith
synthesizes the historical and cultural genesis of the construct of the American West in his irst
chapter – a “Prologue” he titles “Eighteenth Century Origins.” He begins:
What is an American? asked St. John de Crèvecoeur before the Revolution and the question
has been repeated by every generation from his time to ours. Poets and novelists, historians
and statesmen have undertaken to answer it... But one of the most persistent generalizations
concerning American life and character is the notion that our society has been shaped by the
pull of a vacant continent drawing population westward through the passes of the Alleghenies,
across the Mississippi Valley, over the High plains and mountains of the Far West to the Paciic
Coast. (Nash 1957, 3)
And he continues stressing the importance of the myth of the West by asserting that “a whole
generation of historians took over his hypothesis (Frederick Jackson Turner’s statement on the
‘West’ in his essay, he signiicance of the frontier in American history) and rewrote American
history in terms of it” (3). Indeed the mythical, geo-political, and far-reaching concept of the
West (another “real-and-imagined” place) not only contributes to the American exception but
informs it. Having broken from the yoke of old-world tyranny, movement toward the west rep-
resented a national urge, a desire for the perpetuation of independence, along with all the ideals
of the enlightenment, curiously as much a European as an American phenomenon.
Yet, as Nash points out, even before the moment of the break with Europe, the idea of an
American Empire, greater in spirit and motivations than that of Great Britain, was very much
on the mind of the most inluential Americans, including Benjamin Franklin (1957, 8). And
in the period immediately following independence, this idea had taken hold; it was “a proph-
ecy concerning the future development of the new nation that let little to be added by the
philosophers of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s” (9). Indeed, asserts Nash throughout his book,
Walt Whitman’s much discussed notions of the natural abundance, beauty, and innocence of
America (not only in Leaves of Grass but elsewhere in his writings) has much to do with a notion
of a new American empire, albeit imagined and perhaps utopian. Melville’s idea (quoted above)
that America represents an end of history is echoed by Whitman when he invokes the picture
of the children of Adam straying westward through the centuries; the American landscape itself
was in Nash’s reading of Whitman’s poem “Passage to India,” “the new era, begun with the clos-
ing of the cycle of history” (Whitman 1959, 47). What is of interest in these texts – by no means
exceptional in American writing (in fact, the opposite is the case) – is their merging of time and
place, history and space, into a national consciousness. Whitman expressed it in his typically
exuberant way when he wrote in Leaves of Grass: “I swear there is no greatness or power that
does not emulate those of the earth! I swear there can be no theory of any account, unless it cor-
roborates the theory of the earth!” (quoted in Nash 1957, 44). While today’s US fundamentalist
Christians may balk at Whitman’s implied paganism – to say nothing of his homosexuality, the
notion of a natural landscape, great and powerful, able to venture beyond its limits in a gesture
of domination and eventual oneness with the earth (and with its Creator) is not unlike what
many religious right-wing Americans see as the prophecy of America.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the western expansion of America (with excep-
tionalism as its creed) changed course as it reached the Paciic. In 1898 its eyes were looking
southward in search of a project that would unify the entire Western Hemisphere under Ameri-
can tutelage. Just as Unamuno saw all of Spain (including Latin America, Euskadi, Catalonia,
and Galicia; see 1946, 28–34) as something of a microcosm of Castile, the American upholders
of the Monroe Doctrine, a policy designed in 1823 and carried out throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, saw “America south of the border” as the target of further expansion
of the “West” in all its mythical dimensions. In a compelling series of arguments about the de-
velopment and continuation of the Monroe Doctrine – not only as foreign policy but as a map-
ping of identity and ideology – Gretchen Murphy (2005) counters the conventional wisdom
among Americanists and other historians and critics (including Edward Said) that US imperi-
alist expansion, as we know it today in the form of economic and political domination of Latin
America, has its beginnings around 1898. Her arguments are not only that US imperialism has
220 Michael Ugarte
roots that extend prior to that date but also that US thirst to become a colonial power is spatial:
it has to do with conceptions and constructions of geography in line with “exceptionalism”:
“If we take into consideration the construction of space and the various ways that Americans
have mapped their global relations, we can see... [that] the Monroe Doctrine signiied not a
brief lapse into European style imperialism but the very cluster of ideas that attempted to dif-
ferentiate American expansiveness from European imperialism” (158). And at another point
she writes: “he Monroe Doctrine acts as a map and uses spatial constructs to create a world
view” (7).
Following Murphy’s line of thinking – perhaps more of an extension of previous argu-
ments about “Manifest Destiny” than a refutation of them – 1898 might be seen not so much as
a beginning-end, but as a convergence. It is a year that at once launches Teddy Roosevelt’s gun-
boat diplomacy into the domain of articulated US foreign policy and at the same time gives rise
to Spanish introspection (at times ultra-nationalist) about itself, about its “nation-ness,” in An-
derson’s terms, about its “character” in relation to its landscape. Indeed, 1898 is more than a co-
incidence, it marks a time and space in which the past and future of two nations have been and
will continue to be constructed. he diference between the two nations and their geographical
self-constructions is that while the Old World country laments that it has not become what it
could have been, as in José Ortega y Gasset’s phrase from Meditaciones del Quijote (Meditations
on Quixote), “la España que pudo ser” (the Spain that could have been, quoted in Subirats 1995,
56), the New World nation, as self-proclaimed “leader of the free world,” is convinced about its
own potential and will do everything to realize it – as in the US Army’s slogan: “Be all you can
be.” he Old World tried and failed, the New World will inish the job by treading beyond the
Western frontier and becoming one with the entire Western Hemisphere.
he real-and-imagined spaces of Spain-Castile and the US (in all their “diference” or “ex-
ceptionalism”) do not cease to take hold of the consciousness of their respective citizens in
the twenty-irst century. Even with the multifarious phenomenon of globalization, notions of
Castilian-Spanish exceptionalism persist. And in the land of the Reagans and Bushes, the sharp
political turn to the right is no less tied to visions of exceptionalism and empire. he tangible
presence of the political thinker, Leo Strauss (1899–1973) in virtually every dimension of con-
temporary U.S. foreign policy cannot be underestimated. he architects of U.S. interventions
(military, political, economic) in the Middle East, (Irving and William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others) base their notion of America’s
obligation, something of a colonial burden, to dominate world politics on their having been
inluenced by the ideas of Leo Strauss. It is no coincidence that nations whose histories are
wrought with imperial domination (the U.S., Britain, Spain) forged an alliance to invade Iraq, a
nation whose symbolic importance as a bastion of Islamic culture was read (and constructed)
as a threat to that domination. However, in Spain (with Madrid and Castile at the helm despite
the intense questioning of Castilian centralism) one detects a diference within the diference
having much to do with global realities: immigration, terrorism(s), and a post-modern reli-
gious fanaticism linked to world-wide discontent toward the US empire.
On March 11, 2004, the ten bombs that exploded on Madrid commuter trains killing one
hundred and ninety-one people, and wounding one thousand eight hundred made for a des-
perate attempt on the part of high-ranking Popular Party oicials, then in power, to blame
the bombings on an all too familiar Spanish menace, the Basque independence group, ETA
(Euskadi Ta Askatasuna); these were accusations that, within the context of my discussion, have
much to do with Spanish exceptionalism. But it became clear just prior to election day several
days later that ETA was not responsible and that the perpetrators were immigrants and Islamic
fundamentalists of the same ilk as those alleged to have attacked the World Trade Towers in
New York and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001. With José María Aznar’s
alliance with George W. Bush in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Spain entered the world political
scenario in something of an unprecedented way since the Spanish Civil War, and its leaders
seemed unwilling to acknowledge possible consequences. In their insistence that the bombings
were the work of ETA, Aznar and his party were continuing in the tradition of Spanish “difer-
ence”; they were airming that national problems were their own and that any attempt by that
“other” world community to understand them would be fruitless; it was an idea much like, if not
identical to the slogan, “Spain is diferent.”
In the United States, however, critical scrutiny of American exceptionalism and world
domination remains a phenomenon seen as “out of the mainstream.” Indeed even the arguments
among Americans against military intervention are oten well within a conceptual framework
of an “American ideal,” that posits a democratic purity founded on the (ironically) anti-colonial
beginnings of the nation, as in the title of one of the most hard-hitting and popular critiques of
US empire, Dude, Where’s My Country? by none other than Michael Moore (2003). In Spain the
only commentators bold enough to echo (for example) Unamuno’s insistence on the Castilian
ideal of Catholicism (both as a speciic religion and as a universal community) as a viable foun-
dation for foreign policy would be seen as quixotic (in every sense of that word).
Historical comparisons are, as they say, odious, and the ones made in this essay are per-
haps no exception – not because they have no meaning but because one always runs into the
danger of implying that the circumstances of the two historical periods or of two separate geo-
graphical areas are identical. In the comparison I have made in this discussion, I wish to imply
nothing of the kind. Rather, empire – its development, its continuation, its ideological and
representational justiication, and the resistance(s) to it have had comparable patterns through-
out the world and throughout history. hese speciic two, the Spanish and the American, are
particularly worth exploring not only for the rhetorical patterns of their justiication, but due to
a pivotal moment of the histories of both: 1898.
Bilbao and the literary system in the Basque Country
Jon Kortazar
Introduction
Bilbao, a city that plays an important role in Basque literary production, is particularly per-
tinent to the study of languages and literatures in contact, as it constitutes a cultural center
where two literary systems collide with and enrich each other. One of these literary systems is
in Euskara – the Basque language – which has been a qualiier of Basque literature since the
Romantic period, claiming that literature as part of the heritage of the people. he other system
is in Castilian, that is, Spanish, and is known periphrastically as “Basque literature in Castilian.”
Bilbao is a city with many cultural layers, which have mixed over time, leading to a literary
history subject to some friction. his historical evolution is certainly due to the special charac-
teristics of the city: on the one hand, it is the most important city in the Basque Country, from
the standpoint of population, making its cultural signiicance clear. However, it is also a city
with a Spanish-speaking majority coming from the economic and cultural elite, which leads to
a two-sided dilemma. Its symbolic, cultural, and economic importance is obvious, but we can-
not deny its position of lesser importance as regards literature written in the Basque language. It
oten takes a back seat in issues relating to Basque literature to the smaller towns in the province,
or to San Sebastián (Donostia), in the province of Guipúzcoa.
he bilingual or diglossic character of Bilbao is airmed by the foremost authority on the
history of the Basque language, Dr. Luis Michelena, who wrote: “Bilbao has been bilingual, in
indeterminate proportions, since ancient times” (1960a, 5–6). Traveller and philologist Wilhelm
von Humboldt wrote that “the language is highly impure and mixed with Castilian” (1975, 135).
hus, Bilbao is a shaper of Basque literature, of literature written in both Basque and in
Castilian, a space in which important conlicts are raised and resolved, and where changes in
literary perception take place. In the pages that follow, an analysis based on various historical
periods will be carried out, hoping to arrive at a short overview of the evolution of diverse
forms, and of the meeting and separation of writers from both traditions.
However, the analysis is afected by two characteristics that can bias the image we get
of this historical evolution. Firstly, the perspective of current researchers is highly colored by
nationalist views, whose anti-liberal, anti-industrial and, basically, anti-modern conception of
the city has made Bilbao, during the twentieth century, a foreign element to be conquered, but
which is resistant to nationalist ideas. Secondly, Basque literature, as we have already said, is
literature written in Euskara, in the Basque language, for which reason we lend special consid-
eration to that language. Our outlook is “from” the situation of the Basque language, thus we
will lend a lesser importance to the history of literature in Castilian, for reasons which will soon
become apparent.
he irst published works
he irst published works, literary or otherwise, that appeared in the city of Bilbao go back to
the beginning of the seventeenth century. We cannot speak of a literary system existing in that
period. he will of the writer to write made up for the lack of a stable social structure, which
became stronger ater industralization, though Bilbao society remained preoccupied more with
business than with the development of literature. his has not been the case for art since the
beginning of the twentieth century, and even more so at its end.
But let us get back to the irst books published in Bilbao. One of the irst collections of
verses, Refranes y sentencias comunes en vascuence (Common proverbs and maxims in the
Basque language, 1596), an echo to the Basque humanism of the Renaissance, was published
in Pamplona and contained a collection which must have been compiled in the area of Plencia,
very close to the mouth of the great Bilbao river, thirty kilometers from the city.
It is also worth mentioning the Basque language handbook Modo breve de aprender la len-
gua vizcaína (Short course in the Biscayan language) by Rafael Micoleta (1613–?), preserved in
the British Museum and published in 1880. his work stands out for its philological value, since it
ofers evidence of the language spoken in Bilbao. In the appendix, Micoleta ofers some rules for
the composition of poetry, with practical examples, some, it appears, taken from oral tradition.
Some translations of Christian doctrine were also published in the city. In 1596, Joan Pérez
de Betolaza published the Doctrina cristiana en romanze y basquenze (Christian doctrine in Ro-
mance and Basque), and in 1656 Martín Kapanaga published the Exposición breve de la doctrina
cristiana (Brief exposition of Christian doctrine).
Traditionalists and progressive thinkers
In the eighteenth century, the only institution that even slightly represented a somewhat con-
sistent literary system was established around the Church, in the Cathedral of Santiago and the
Monastery of San Francisco close to the Arenal. In that monastery, a group of Franciscan friars
met and formed the irst nucleus, the irst embryonic literary system. It can be referred to as
such because they were concerned with reaching three goals: the writing of sermonizing works,
the composition of grammars and dictionaries, and serious study and promotion of Basque as a
natural language, that is to say, a primitive language that best retained the relationship between
sounds and the objects they represented. hey believed that through an etymological analysis
of Basque words, one could arrive at the exact meaning of the object signiied by the word.
For example, “agurea” (a very old person), would come from “Ai, gurea!” (Oh, our dear one),
a lament exclaimed by family members upon seeing the old one’s impending death. Some of
the Franciscans in question collaborated on Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte’s work on dialects,
either as informants or as translators.
Pedro Antonio Añibarro (1748–1830), Pablo Pedro Astarloa (1751–1821), Juan Mateo Zaba-
la (1777–1840), José Antonio Uriarte (1812–69), and Fray Bartolomé de Santa Teresa (1768–1835)
were linked to this monastery in Bilbao, although they also spent time in other Franciscan mon-
asteries like the ones in Bermeo, Desierto (Sestao), or Zarauz. According to Jon Juaristi (1987a,
224 Jon Kortazar
67), Astarloa “went further than any of his predecessors in the defense of the Basque language
when he maintained that Basque was humanity’s irst language, and he attributed a speciic and
natural meaning to each letter of the primitive alphabet.”
heir literary production was not sizeable and most of it fell within the genre of fables,
which would indicate a certain neoclassical feeling and a conception of literature as a way of ed-
ucating the masses, an idea shared by the group known as Caballeritos de Azcoitia (Gentlemen
of Azcoitia), founders of the Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del País (Royal Basque society of
friends of the country), a literary institution which was dedicated to education in the Basque
Country. he Society maintained a section devoted to literature, in which they composed works
with an emphasis on French neoclassical aesthetics. Some members of the Society were only
tangentially linked to Bilbao. One of these was the fabulist Félix María de Samaniego, who read
his Fables in a meeting of the Royal Society that took place in Bilbao. José Agustín de Rentería
(1751–1826) also wrote fables, following Samaniego’s model.
At that time, the irst conlict appeared between writers who wrote in Euskara and those
neoclassically inluenced, or progressive thinkers, who expressed themselves in Castilian. he
event did not occur in Bilbao, but rather, in Marquina, a town forty kilometers from Bilbao,
where the Count of Peñalorida, Xabier María de Munibe (1723–85), founder of the aforemen-
tioned Royal Basque Society, had a residence, and where the cleric Juan Antonio Moguel also
lived. he latter was the author of a defense of country life, Peru Abarca (Peter Abarca), written
around 1801, but published in 1880. here was a clear ideological schism between the progres-
sive thinkers and the traditionalist clergy, which we can plainly see in this comment by Sa-
maniego in 1786:
Marquina, whose inhabitants believe that there is no other world than the meager lands which
surround its mountains, a world ruled by Astarloas and Moguels. Tell your holy Don Pablo
Pedro, tell him that for a work that I am planning to write about the world before the lood,
he should tell me (since he must know) what they called scribes, tailors, and cobblers in the
Paradise on Earth. (quoted in Juaristi 1987a, 68)
Continuing the comparison
Since the end of the eighteenth century, the Cathedral of Santiago and the Franciscan Monas-
tery in Bilbao published and performed various villancicos (carols) for Christmas. he oldest
date back to 1755 and are written by Oarabeitia (which should be read as Jarabeitia), and the
tradition continued to grow stronger. We can review those written and published by Vicenta
Moguel (1782–1854), niece of Juan Antonio Moguel, who until very recently was thought to be
the irst female Basque writer. In 1804, Vicenta Moguel published a book of fables, Ipui onac
(Moral tales), and she was believed to be the irst Basque woman to have done so, but she has
now been supplanted in that distinction, due to the discovery of a mid-sixteenth century manu-
script by Joan Pérez de Lazárraga which contains a pastoral novel and a collection of poems,
some of which are attributed to a woman writer.
In any case, ater the publication of her book, Vicenta Moguel produced villancicos start-
ing in 1819 (Gabonetaco Cantia, vizcaitar guztientzat euscaldun emacume batec ateria [Nativity
song, written by a Basque woman for all Biscayans]), in the literary context promoted by the
Cathedral and the Franciscan Monastery. Around her and her husband Eleuterio Basozabal,
whose father ran a printer’s shop, a small literary institution grew up, though it was not a very
solid one. Vicenta Moguel translated into Euskara and published the declaration of Luis de
Borbón. Her brother Juan José Moguel (1781–1849), a priest, was part of the group, but his par-
ticipation in the Carlist Wars soon forced him to lee, although he was President of the Biscayan
Council during the Carlist uprising and he seems to be the author of some pamphlets against
the Constitution and the liberals. Pablo Ulíbarri, who attempted to create an Academy of the
Basque Language, was also part of the group. He wrote his letters in Basque, some of which
were decidedly autobiographical and contained many intimate details, and were not published
until 1975.
he Carlist cause, and the conservative and anti-liberal tendencies of the Basque language
writers in Bilbao are obvious in this short overview. he anti-liberal, and by extension, anti-
modern character of Basque literature has been evident throughout its history, which has led
some literary historians, such as Ibon Sarasola (1976 in its Spanish translation) or Jon Juaristi
(1987b) to suggest that due to its impenetrability, the Basque language was used by the clergy as
a wall against liberal and modernizing ideas, in such a way as to become a means of transmis-
sion of conservative, Carlist ideas.
he Carlist writers grouped around Vicenta Moguel did not have literary counterparts in
the iercely liberal city of Bilbao. he liberals preferred to express themselves in Castilian, but
they did not produce a strong literature until well into the nineteenth century.
he creation of a literary system
Ater the revolution of 1868, liberalism began to have more conservative overtones. It was the
time of pacts and the end of ideological intransigence. Following the liberal revolution, writers
tried to establish an unequal pact: from the city they attempted to recreate the country environ-
ment, from an urban vision they attempted to convey the description of an idyllic life where
conlicts were minor, leading a return to costumbrismo (Juaristi 1987a). Interestingly, it was the
Castilian-language writers who were responsible for the creation of a irst, weak literary system,
which was built around three axes: the work of Antonio de Trueba (1819–89), the creation of the
Revista Vizcaya (Biscayan journal, 1885) and the establishment of a small series of publications
around the work of Vicente de Arana (1848–90) and Emiliano de Arriaga (1844–1919).
his would all culminate in the literary igure of Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), one of
the irst writers from Bilbao to gain fame in Europe.
Antonio de Trueba represents the writer determined to relect the popular spirit as it ap-
peared in the daily life of people and their customs. His works Cuentos populares (Folk tales)
or Cuentos populares de Vizcaya (Folk tales of Biscay) aimed to bring the traditional images of
rurality to the city. His 1852 book Libro de los cantares (Book of songs) gained great renown.
Vicente de Arana, cousin of the founder of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, is a distinc-
tive igure in the diverse literary environment of Bilbao. Educated in England, he knew the
work of Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson, of whom he declared himself a follower. His work
226 Jon Kortazar
represents literature in the restoration period (of Isabelle II): a closeness to Romanticism, the
use of various material in the same work, the historical nature of the storylines, and the use of
elements taken from traditional legends in works of iction – in short, tradition and ideological
resistance to change.
His most important works were: Oro y oropel (Gold and gilt, 1876), Los últimos íberos. Ley-
endas de Euskaria (he last Iberians: Legends of the Basque Country, 1882), Jaun Zuria o el Cau-
dillo Blanco (Jaun Zuria or the white lord, 1887), Leyendas del Norte (Legends of the north, 1890).
Although he did not maintain an intense level of literary activity, Emiliano de Arriaga is
of fundamental importance in the establishment of intersystemic relations in Bilbao. He was
the author of works such as Vuelos cortos intentados, emprendidos y realizados por un Chimbo
(Bilbao jaunts, 1893, 1895), a series of markedly costumbrista narrations. But his best recollected
work is a dictionary: Lexicón Etimológico, naturalista y popular del bilbaíno neto (Etymological,
naturalistic and popular lexicon of pure Bilbaoan, 1896), which has been reedited many times.
In the Lexicon, Arriaga ofers “a supposedly exclusive compilation of all the terms presumed to
belong to the Bilbaoan dialect, but also an encyclopedic compendium of geographical, histori-
cal, ethnographical, etc., information on Bilbao. However, above all else the Lexicon represents
the appropriation of the Bilbaoan dialect by Arana’s nationalism” (Juaristi 1994a, 93).
Let us make a historical digression to help us understand that brief description. Emiliano
de Arriaga’s political and ideological position was clearly conservative, product of the Casco
Viejo, a type of oasis free from the class struggle in the commercial area of Bilbao, an area that
would soon be threatened by the arrival of new immigrants and by industrialization. Immi-
grants and socialists were the new threats for a world that appeared stable, and for the privileges
of the dominant classes, to which Emiliano de Arriaga himself belonged. heir function was
to endow Bilbaoan society with identity traits diferent than those of the immigrants. Among
those distinctive traits was language. Arriaga claimed that the Bilbaoan dialect was not the
same thing as the Castilian spoken in Bilbao, but that it was also deinitely a diferent thing from
the Basque language. In fact, it was a mix of both languages, and a characteristic of the original
Bilbaoan identity, pure Bilbaoan, a trait that distinguished its people from the new inhabitants
that arrived to work in mining and industry.
Emiliano de Arriaga ended up at the same place as the assuredly anti-maketo (a pejorative
term for an immigrant) and anti-socialist party, i.e., the Basque Nationalist Party founded by
Sabino Arana. In 1894 Arriaga had founded the Euzkaldunen Batzokija (Basque meeting place),
the seed of what would become the Party founded a year later.
hus, two personalities converged in the creation of a language that owed its power to
the identity it would deine. For Emiliano de Arriaga, the Bilbaoan dialect was a characteristic
of the native Bilbaoan population, for Sabino Arana, Euskara was one of the identity traits of
Basque society. We should point out, in any case, that Emiliano de Arriaga disregarded the
multicultural nature of Bilbao’s business sector, whose members historically came from various
European nations, and that Sabino Arana did not account for the fact that Euskara was the main
language in rural areas, but not in the urban area to which he addressed his attention.
his tendency to emphasize identity carries with it negative attitudes toward the new wave
of immigration and a negation of the socialist ideology that was widespread in many layers of
the community of recent immigrants.
Sabino Arana and Miguel de Unamuno
he establishment of a small literary system around the Revista Vizcaya does not exclude new
attitudes toward the language, which would reinforce the attitudes we have just seen. Sabino
Arana, whose irst language was not Euskara, decided to promote the Basque-language publica-
tion, because he considered the diferent language to be one of the fundamental characteristics
of the Basque people.
Luis Michelena’s words clearly show the importance that this act had in the recreation of
the Basque language:
It is in the last decade of the last century that we must situate the irst obvious signs of the emer-
gence of a new spirit – already suggested in the work of some earlier writers – which would
transform the characteristics of the literature in many ways. Poetry was no longer the only
genre developed sellessly, and works of religious ediication and instruction were no longer
dominant. (Michelena 1960b, 141)
By creating a new political consciousness, Sabino Arana would give birth to this new spir-
it, which consisted of nothing other than giving precedence to Romantic ideology regarding
Basque literature and promoting the Basque nation as a distinct society separate from the Span-
ish nation.
he perception that the Basque language was in decline was a feeling that had taken hold
of Basque society ater the 1876 passage of the law abolishing local law and government (fueros),
which overturned the traditional legal system and created one standard, both economically and
legally, for the entire Spanish State. his loss of laws and privileges led the people to the realiza-
tion of a loss that was not conined to the legal sphere, but that was also personal – the loss of
language and identity.
Sabino Arana conigured an ideological space in which Euzkadi, a new term to signify the
Basque Country, was “he Basque homeland,” and when it came time to develop its symbolic
character, the Basque language – so diferent from Romance languages – would be its distin-
guishing characteristic. Arana also exaggerated the distinctive traits of the language, and, since
he was not a native speaker of the language, but rather had learned it as an adult, he proposed
a language that was even further removed from Castilian, based on two criteria. Firstly, his
lexicon was motivated by such purist ideals that he rejected any word, no matter how com-
mon it was, that resembled the Romance version of the word (and we should point out that old
Euskara contained a multitude of words taken from Latin, and that modern spoken Euskara
was fundamentally marked by words taken from Castilian); he substituted any such term with
invented, though supposedly logical, neologisms. Secondly, Arana argued for the return to the
conception of a natural language, put forward by Añibarro, which would lead to a grammar that
would be natural and logical, yet totally removed from everyday usage.
Despite the diiculties a supposedly learned linguistic register produced for speakers and
readers, Arana decided to expand his political ideas through a number of periodicals, some of
which remained in existence for only a short time. But the most important thing was not Sa-
bino Arana’s own literary works (he was a rather mediocre poet), but rather the boost given to
Basque-language writing and to the language as the main symbol of the Basque nation. At that
228 Jon Kortazar
time, the irst novels in the Basque language appeared, published far from Bilbao, in towns such
as Durango, or in the literary and linguistic journals of San Sebastián.
Miguel de Unamuno’s attitude toward the Basque language and its cultivation as a literary
language appears ambiguous, and there are two important moments in his unique conception
of the function of Basque language in its society. But at this point we will not go into his rich
and wonderful literary production, which he was creating at the University of Salamanca.
But between 1887 and 1892, Unamuno published in the newspapers of Bilbao a series of
costumbrista sketches in which he recreated the language of the Bilbaoans. According to Jon
Juaristi (1994a, 65–85), Unamuno “invented” the Bilbaoan dialect, of which, as we have seen,
Emiliano de Arriaga would be the foremost editor. he term “invented” in this case signiies
that he realized the existence of a colloquial speech other than Castilian:
Just like any local language, Bilbaoan necessarily had its unique points. It is strange, however,
that almost no one, until Unamuno, even acknowledged the existence of a particular dialect
[…] Speaking in strictly temporal terms, we could say that a dialect is born when people be-
come aware of its diference; that is to say, when its speakers perceive qualitatively and quanti-
tatively signiicant diferences with regard to the speech of other speakers of the same language,
who come from other geographical areas. If that is true, we must admit that Unamuno invented
(that is to say discovered) the Bilbaoan dialect when conditions favoured the development of
a consciousness of linguistic diference in the native Bilbaoan population. In other words, he
invented it when emigration made the concurrence of many varieties of Castilian possible in
a small urban area, creating in the host population the need to redeine its collective identity.
(Juaristi 1994a, 66)
Nevertheless, Juaristi acknowledges that in the invention of a dialect there are two variables that
must be considered as one: the linguistic characterization and deinition of the dialect, and the
political purpose behind its deinition.
In 1886, Unamuno published his article “El dialecto bilbaino (RIP)” (he Bilbaoan dialect
[RIP]), in which he compiles the theoretical and paradigmatic bases of the dialect. his article
enjoyed a certain success among the merchant bourgeoisie of Bilbao.
Unamuno enthusiastically worked on deining the dialect at irst, but soon his examina-
tion of its linguistic variables, product of his training as a philologist, led him to believe that
the diferences between Bilbaoan speech and the rest of the variants were insigniicant (1888).
In fact, they boiled down simply to a greater use of hypocoristics and diminutives. Yet he still
continued to defend the pertinence of the Bilbaoan dialect. As we have clearly seen, the political
purpose of defending this special dialect lay in the defense of a collective identity separate from
that of the immigrants:
Unamuno’s alarm at the changes provoked by industrialization, his distrust and even repulsion
toward immigrants, were no less severe than those of a large number of his compatriots who,
years later, would swell the ranks of the nationalists. But – and this is what makes him an ex-
ception – we can sense [...] the relection of a deep internal struggle, the contradiction between
an instinctive xenophobic reaction [...] and an ethical, universalist impulse, that pushes him to
welcome foreign workers and their families. (Juaristi 1994a, 79)
In his thesis, Unamuno realized that the deinition of a dialect led to intolerance toward the
working masses and to the politics of confrontation. herefore, when he began to progress
toward socialism, the political goal of deining a separate dialect became meaningless. hus,
the contradiction presented in the last quote develops into his entry into Socialism and the
“abandonment of nostalgic Bilbaoism.”
At a second important moment, Unamuno took sides in the famous speech of the 1901
Floral Games, on the subject of “the death of Euskara,” where he argued that Basque society
should abandon the use of the Basque language, because it, still in an earlier stage of evolution,
appeared incapable of expressing the complex world of modernity and industrialization. Una-
muno maintained an evolutionist idea of languages, whereby only those that were able to de-
velop, as society did, into modernity should be allowed to survive. In the speech, which caused
great irritation among nationalists, he proposed honoring Euskara with funeral rites and then
quickly moving to Castilian as the language of culture. He developed these theses further in a
1902 article titled “La cuestión del vascuence” (he Basque issue).
he nationalists never pardoned these opinions and for many years they accused the Rec-
tor of Salamanca of blindness toward the possibilities of the language to express the modern
world. As late as 1958, Franciscan scholar Salbatore Mitxelena published a book called Unamu-
no eta abendats (Unamuno and the spirit of the race), in which he studied the theses Unamuno
expressed in the 1901 speech.
hus, nationalism has always held a double opinion on Unamuno: on one hand, it has
accepted the importance of the Bilbaoan’s philosophical discourse, but it has refuted the argu-
ments he ofered on Euskara between 1901 and 1902.
Resurrección María de Azkue (1864–1951): he chair of Basque studies and Euskaltzaindia

(the Academy of the Basque Language)
Along with the opposing positions of the two people just mentioned, we should also discuss the
position of Resurrección María de Azkue (a priest, and male, despite the fact that his name has
created much confusion among those who are poorly read in Basque literature), who remained
devoted to the study of the language and the creation of a school of thought more focused on
the study of the language and its conservation. hough he was a contemporary of Sabino Arana
and Miguel de Unamuno, Azkue’s position is less political and, indeed, less known than that of
the other two. Nonetheless, he is a central igure in the evolution and the study of the Basque
language, as well as its institutionalization.
Azkue shared with Añibarro and Astarloa the naturalist and logical ideas about language,
and in his Euskal Izkindegia (Basque grammar, 1891) he sought a purist, logical structure within
the language, in such a way as to pay more attention to ideas about the natural foundations of
the language, than to a description of the spoken language. Nonetheless, soon aterwards, Az-
kue, due to his Romantic stance, would undertake a systematic collection of traditional material
from oral literature. hus, his greatest works are: Diccionario Vasco-Español-Francés (Basque-
Spanish-French dictionary, 1905–1906), where neither neologisms nor recent words are listed,
Cancionero Popular Vasco (Basque folk songbook, 1922), Morfología Vasca (Basque morphology,
1923), which on this occasion does ofer a description of spoken Euskara, and Euskalerriaren Ya-
kintza. Literatura Popular del País Vasco (Popular literature of the Basque Country, 1935–1947).
230 Jon Kortazar
Azkue also wrote literary prose: the legends Bein ta betiko (For always, 1893) and Batxi Gu-
zur (Batxi the liar, 1897), the epistolary novel Ardi Galdua (he lost sheep, 1919) and the novel
Latsibi, which was not published until 1989. He also composed musical pieces, zarzuelas, operas,
and the play Bizkaitik Vizcayra (What goes from Bizkaia to Biscay). He founded the journals
Euskalzale (1897–99) and Ibaizabal (1902–03).
Azkue was at the center of two of the most important institutions, which from the middle
of the nineteenth century onward, would keep watch over the reconstruction of the social fabric
surrounding Euskara. he Chair of Basque Studies was an initiative of the Diputación Foral de
Bizkaia (Council of Bizkaia), which established it at the Bilbao Institute in 1888. Among the en-
trants in the competition for the position were, curiously enough, Sabino Arana and Unamuno.
Azkue was named to the title and for many years (until 1904) he devoted himself to teaching
the language. It was one of the irst real instances of teaching the Basque language in a public
institution, if only with one humble chair, funded by the administration.
he second important institution involved in the creation of literary systems was estab-
lished upon the foundation, in 1919, of the Academy of the Basque Language (Euskaltzaindia)
in Bilbao, an academy subsidized by the Regional Councils of the Basque Country. Azkue was
its president from its foundation until his death. It would be diicult to sum up here the im-
portance of this type of institution. For now, it will suice to say that from this institution was
to come the necessary push to carry out the uniication of Basque, a language fragmented into
various dialects, in 1968. his uniied version is the one now used in written communication
and literature.
Costumbrismo
Ater analyzing the philological and linguistic structure that was established around Euskara
in the two systems (Castilian and Basque) that existed in that society at the end of the nine-
teenth century, we must turn our attention to the literature being produced in Bilbao. From
the middle of the century onward, costumbrismo was the dominant aesthetic current in Bilbao
society. Philologically, aesthetically, and ideologically, it was overwhelming, and the works writ-
ten in a more realistic tone by Unamuno or Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (who dedicated El intruso
[he intruder, 1904] to Bilbao) must be considered as exceptions. he aesthetic coincidence is
not surprising, if we take into account what we have seen already. Bilbao society was a society
in crisis, searching for an identity it could call its own. Hence, what better than costumbrismo
as an aesthetic outlet, for a literature that wished to correspond to a social hierarchy that would
remain stable in the face of the new social strata of workers, associated with socialism.
Two costumbrista schools existed: the traditionalist, to which the nationalist writers be-
longed (writing in both Euskara and Castilian), and the liberal. Among the costumbristas who
wrote in Basque, we ind the following authors: Domingo Agirre, the irst Basque-language
novelist, a Carlist priest whose novels relect a rural world from a religious viewpoint; José
Manuel Etxeita, whose novels are tinged with autobiography; Ebaristo Bustinza, a student of
Azkue and his successor to the Chair; and Azkue himself.
Trueba’s shadow and inluence are very important in the narrative output of the period,
and among costumbrista authors who write in Castilian we can name Emiliano de Arriaga,
Oscar Rochelt, and Ocharan Mazas.
he liberal authors who belonged to the costumbrismo movement deplored the attitude
of the contemporary bourgeoisie, published in socialist journals such as La lucha de clases
(he class struggle), and sought laicism within nationalism, distancing themselves from the
fundamentalism that tainted Sabinian nationalism from the start and inhibited critical visions
of reality.
Among the most outstanding authors in this vein were Timoteo Orbe and Francisco de
Ulacia, who was ideologically Republican, a promoter of laicism and the founder of two small,
short-lived nationalist parties. In his work Martinchu ta Matilde (Martin and Matilda, 1908),
the naturalism stands out in the sex scenes. However, it was Manuel Aranaz Castellanos who
was certainly the most important writer of this literary movement. His works it into the critical
currents present in Bilbao at the beginning of the century. He published six series of Cuadros
Vascos (Basque scenes) and the following novels: Calabazatorre (1900), Carmenchu (1903), Be-
gui Eder (Our lady of the beautiful eyes, 1919).
Jon Juaristi has written the following about him:
We cannot help but notice that underneath his exquisite and pleasant manners, he was hiding a
great scorn for his bourgeois environment, and that his festive and humorous prose barely con-
cealed the rigid moralist that was fomenting inside him from his irst pieces of writing. His work
still represents today the harshest condemnation of the underworld of Bilbaoan capitalism. But
even with all that, Aranaz was neither a spirited socialist nor an agent of Republicanism. He was
a bourgeois writer, faithful, to the last, to a critical conception of literature as a way to reveal the
power relations, the greed, and the corruption that were lurking beneath the hypocrisy of the
proper society of his time. here is no doubt that within him there was the seed of an extraor-
dinary novelist that was never able to develop fully. he reason may be that Aranaz Castellanos
made the wrong choice of narrative forms, choosing ones that were excessively costumbristas,
thus not allowing us to acknowledge the greater part of his work. (Juaristi 1994a, 236)
he journal Hermes
Jesús de Sarría, a native of Cuba and who ended up committing suicide like Aranaz Castellanos,
founded the journal Hermes (1917–1922), which turned out to be another cultural watershed
in industrial interwar Bilbao. he basic objective of the journal was to construct a cultural im-
age of a cosmopolitan Bilbao, rooted in three main factors: the importance of its contributors
(among whom we ind Ezra Pound), the timely and current nature of its chosen subject matter,
and the attention paid in it to contemporary art. he director and backers were nationalists but
they sought a connection with the European culture of the time.
Pedro Escalante describes the milestones reached by the journal:
Hermes is one of the best national publications of its time, due to the quality of its contribu-
tors and the issues debated within its pages. Unamuno, Baroja, Maeztu, Ortega, Juan Ramón
Jiménez, Basterra – all published articles in Hermes. Zenobia Camprubi’s Spanish translations
232 Jon Kortazar
of Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Laureate in 1913, appeared for the irst time in it [...] and it dealt
with Ezra Pound early on, for he published original articles in the Bilbao journal. Very impor-
tant Basque painting was especially emphasized in Hermes. (P. Escalante 1989, 4)
Jesús de Sarría was a key igure in the development of the journal, since he was its driving force,
and the project went into decline ater his death.
here are four distinct periods in its development. From its inception in 1917 to August 1918
was a period of consolidation for the journal, which was published monthly, and whose focus
was primarily cultural. As of 1918, the journal moved to a bi-weekly schedule, and its nationalist
political leanings became stronger. As of 1920, the focus became Basque art, especially painting
and music. In 1921, the clear political intent of the journal was abandoned, and it returned to a
monthly publication schedule and a cultural focus. But the journal was in trouble and it disap-
peared in 1922. Sarría committed suicide on July 27, 1922. Juan José Lanz tells of the journal’s
landmark importance:
In its ideal of the cultural modernization of Bilbao, Hermes linked up with the pro-European
ideal that the Generation of ‘98 had pioneered, and, like Ramiro Maeztu, would focus on the
admiration of the English way of life, considering England as the most civilized country of the
new continent. he ideals of ’98 reappeared among contributors to Hermes, which included
serious studies on the idea of a volkgeist and the pro-European ideal as a model of progress.
[...] With excessive progress, there was continued change and the birth of a new model for
society, which would become stronger in the period between the wars, among the contribu-
tors to Hermes, and especially among those who would form the Escuela Romana del Pirineo
(Roman school of the Pyrenees) [...] who would seek refuge in what appeared permanent and
immutable, doggedly referring to History and Culture, in an implicit defense of the values of a
class and a social model that were under threat from the very basis – industrial and mercantile
development – of their widespread acceptance. (Lanz 1994b, 203)
he quest for literature
Once the linguistic argument had calmed down, the writers devoted themselves to writing.
hose who created in Euskara would accept Sabino Arana’s thesis and would develop a litera-
ture that followed his neologist premises. he authors producing in Castilian would work on
a neoclassical and traditional aesthetic that would end in aestheticism and, in some cases, cul-
tural projects with close ties to the fascism of the Falange.
From 1920 to 1936, we can identify two groups of writers working in Castilian: those who
belonged to the Escuela Romana del Pirineo (Roman School of the Pyrenees) and those who
belonged to ALEA, the Asociación Libre de Ensayos Artísticos (Free Association of Artistic Ex-
perimentation). he irst group was formed by writers Ramón de Basterra, Rafael Sánchez Ma-
zas, who would later be a Minister under General Franco, Fernando de la Quadra Salcedo, and
Pedro Mourlane Michelena. he main characteristic of the group was its neoclassical concep-
tion of literature; its aesthetic assumptions came from the literature of Eugeni d’Ors, and from a
deep admiration for the aesthetic of the Roman Empire, which some of its members were able
to admire in the ancient city itself, members like Ramón de Basterra, a diplomat in Rome, or
Sánchez Mazas, who witnessed the “Blackshirts” fascists marching on the Italian capital.
Ramón de Basterra might possibly have been “the driving force behind the Escuela Roma-
na del Pirineo” (E. Ortega 2001, 63), an organization created in the image of the Roman School
in Paris. For Basterra, Rome and the Pyrenees were the two key elements on which he based his
poetic oeuvre: La obra de Trajano (Trajan’s work, 1921), La sencillez de los seres (he simplicity of
beings, 1923), Las ubres luminosas (he luminous udders, 1923), Los labios del monte (he lips of
the mountain, 1924), Vírulo, poema de las mocedades (Virulo, a poem of youth, 1924). Accord-
ing to Elene Ortega, the aesthetics of Basterra is very much akin to those of the eighteenth cen-
tury, a neoclassicism that suited his purposes, distanced from nineteenth century Romanticism:
Basterra is a defender of form, of good manners, of beauty, and of measure. In the vein of Euge-
ni D’Ors, Basterra rejects carelessness and spontaneity – the absence of rules [...] Basterra does
not believe in inspiration, but rather in efort and regular work. He does not believe in passion,
but rather in reason. Reason, work, balance, and will are values that Basterra converges upon
one point: Rome. (E. Ortega 2001, 45)
Rafael Sánchez Mazas would come to be one of the main writers associated to the Escuela
Romana del Pirineo. His best known novel, La vida nueva de Pedrito de Andía (he new life
of Pedrito de Andía, 1951) introduces readers to a masterful writer, who places his characters
in an idyllic setting. he novel recreates the initiation of a young man in a Bilbao that fails to
correspond to the Romantic vision that the author had of the city. His Quince sonetos (Fiteen
sonnets) were published before the civil war.
ALEA, on the other hand, was an initiative by a group of writers younger than those who
belonged to the Escuela Romana del Pirineo. Created in the fateful year of 1936, its most no-
table igure was the great poet Blas de Otero, who published his Cántico Espiritual (Spiritual
canticle) in Los Cuadernos de ALEA (ALEA Notebooks) in 1942. José Miguel Azaola, Gustavo
de Maeztu, Ramón de la Sota, Ramón de Ybarra, Jaime Delclaux, Pablo Bilbao Arístegui, and
Regina Soltura were also part of the group.
he group’s literary gatherings were broken of by the Civil War. Although the majority of
the participants were right-leaning, the war not only dissolved the group, but it also had disas-
trous consequences for its members. Jaime Delclaux (whose Baladitas de cristal [Little ballads
of crystal] would only be published in the 1990s) died in 1937, and Azaola and Ybarra were
forced leave Bilbao during the war. Esteban Urkiaga, “Lauaxeta,” the only Basque-language poet
who was close to the group, was executed in 1937 by Franco’s troops.
Admirers of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the group created a structure around literary gatherings
and conversations. hey also followed the early poetry of Lorca, but the group’s most relevant
outcome, Los Cuadernos de ALEA, only appeared ater the war, when a solid aesthetic struc-
ture was no longer possible, and the group was disbanded.
Regarding Basque-language literature, we should mention poets Nicolás Ormaetxea
“Orixe” and Esteban Urkiaga “Lauaxeta.” Until now, we have seen Bilbaoan writers split be-
tween the liberalism of some and the traditionalism of others, but now, the convergence toward
Christian traditionalism would unite the two groups. We have seen that Esteban Urkiaga “Lau-
axeta” participated in the ALEA members’ literary gatherings. Both Orixe and Lauaxeta came
from the Compañía de Jesús (Society of Jesus), where they had been novices together, and also
worked at Euzkadi, the newspaper of the Basque Nationalist Party, as editors of its Basque-
language page, where Lauaxeta succeeded Orixe in the position in 1931.
234 Jon Kortazar
Nicolás Ormaetxea received a more classical education, more focused on reading the
Greek and Latin classics, than his younger colleague. Although he wrote some poetry in the
modern style, he soon changed and his work recalls the neoclassicist style which the writers
of the Escuela Romana del Pirineo shared. In 1931, he gave up his position at the newspaper to
write an epic poem that he inished in 1935, but which was not published until 1951. Euskaldunak
(he Basque people) has many similarities to Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral’s Mirèio, but also
to Ramón de Basterra’s La sencillez de los seres, in its conception of the idyll and the description
of a world full of ethnographic, if not exactly ethnic, elements.
Lauaxeta’s poetry was published in two volumes: Bide barrijak (New directions, 1931) and
Arrats Beran (At sunset, 1935). Esteban Urkiaga was dedicated to modernizing Basque poetry
and bringing it closer to more modern aesthetic currents, which, for him, meant Juan Ramón
Jiménez and Manuel Machado’s modernism and Lorca’s neopopularism. Although he was fa-
miliar with the work of Jean Cocteau, and translated one of his poems into Euskara, he preferred
Verlaine, with some inluence of Rimbaud. Lauaxeta can be counted as a poet who brought the
postulates of symbolism and modernism to Basque literature.
Even if the composition of his poems recalls Parnassianism, Lauaxeta had an elaborate,
cerebral concept of the poem, such that his work does not allow free verse. His pure Catholi-
cism and his religious traditionalism melded with the nationalism that was clearly central to his
life, with the result that his participation in the war on the (Basque) nationalist side led to his
capture and execution by Franco’s troops.
Lauaxeta’s aesthetic ideas were spread in Bibao by the journal Euzkerea, which was also na-
tionalist and purist in its conception of language. But Lauaxeta’s conception of poetry, based in
modernism, evolved with those who continued his work, toward a more formalist conception
of poetry. He was, in fact, very active in the promotion of younger poets such as Sorne Unzueta,
Santiago Onaindia, Eusebio Erkiaga, and Sabin Muniategi.
Under Francoism
Culture in general, and literature in particular, especially literature written in the Basque lan-
guage, sufered greatly under Francoism. In the diicult post-war period, Basque language
writers (Federico Krutwig, Alfontso Irigoien, Eusebio Erkiaga) took refuge in Euskaltzaindia –
which, ater the death of Azkue, fell to the guardianship of presidents who sympathized with the
winning side, who were basically Carlists who spoke Euskara as a irst language – and around a
certain ecclesiatical center, the Parish of San Antón, which was a meeting place for nationalists
and which published some pamphlets in Basque.
On the other hand, the rupture between writers in Castilian, close to the victors, and the
defeated nationalist writers, was more than obvious. hus, relations between the groups would
remain strained until well into the 1960s, when the literary gathering at the bar La Concordia
would unite anti-Francoist writers and would lead to two great Basque writers, Blas de Otero
and Gabriel Aresti, becoming known.
As we know, Blas de Otero composed his poetic works away from Bilbao, and with a great
homesickness for the city. But his literary career took place in a literary system other than that
in Bilbao. At irst, he still maintained relations with the ALEA group, only to break with their
Catholic and traditionalist positions and develop an ideology closer to the Communist party,
ater a crisis of faith which occurred in 1946. At that moment he declared himself “for mankind”
and began a new personal and aesthetic phase. He began to compose Ángel ieramente humano
(A wildly human angel) with a new tone. he voice and diction are also diferent. he existential
change of direction is evident in his poetic voice. His style manifests a coming closer to collo-
quialism, which he expresses in a resounding manner: “Escribo/Hablando (I write/Speaking).”
In 1951, he published Redoble de conciencia (Drumroll of conscience), in which his poetry is
addressed to the masses. In Pido la paz y la palabra (I beg peace and permission to speak, 1955)
his concept of poetry became clearer, he sought the reality of the daily life of his fellow citizens.
He had become a poet linked to the social conception of art. His poetry condemned the so-
ciety created by Francoism, a society that was hypocritical in its attitude toward life, that was
outwardly religious but also opulent, callously allowing the poor to live badly. Blas de Otero
became a social and Marxist poet.
In 1958, Otero published En castellano (In Castilian) and Ancia, a compilation of Ángel
ieramente humano and Redoble de conciencia, with the title being a result of the irst syllable
of the irst of the two titles, and the last syllable of the second. Ancia is the book that dazzled
Gabriel Aresti. he two poets met in 1962, when Blas de Otero returned to Bilbao. he friend-
ship between them would grow stronger and Blas de Otero would even live in Gabriel Aresti’s
house upon his return from Cuba in 1964, and he would become the godfather of Aresti’s
third daughter.
Gabriel Aresti renewed Basque-language poetry and gave the decisive push to the develop-
ment of Basque language and literature through his vast body of work, in which poetry main-
tains a central position. hroughout his life, Aresti was a clear driving force behind cultural and
creative initiatives. He contrasted poetry with social reality and published three of the Basque lit-
erary system’s chief works: Harri eta herri (Stone and country, 1964), Euskal Harria (he Basque
stone, 1967), and Harrizko herri hau (his country of stone, 1970). In these works he harshly
criticized Francoist society, condemned its hypocrisy, and vindicated Euskara. Nevertheless, his
aesthetic and ideological positions would lead to great conlict with traditional nationalism.
he transition years to democracy
Paradoxically as it may be, Bilbao is not a publishing center in the Basque world. It has not
created enough editorial springboards for writers in Castilian either, who have had to further
their personal and creative careers in Madrid or Barcelona. his is the case for authors such as
Ramiro Pinilla, who became a well-known public igure ater winning the Planeta prize in Bar-
celona in 1960. he same happened with younger writers like Fernando Marías, whose recep-
tion of the Premio Nadal in 2001 has had similar results. Jon Juaristi and Amalia Iglesias usually
publish in Madrid, as does Pedro Ugarte. In the early nineteen eighties, the Basque Govern-
ment’s Euskadi prizes helped establish a group of writers, notably, novelists Iñaki Ezkerra, José
Fernández de la Sota, and Mari Feli Maizkurrena, who have since gained more renown through
journalism or poetry prizes.
236 Jon Kortazar
When speaking of cultural strategies that have united writers in both languages, three
initiatives with difering impacts stand out.
From 1977 to 1980, Bernardo Atxaga supported the publication in Bilbao of the journal
Pott (Failure), through which his own work became known, along with that of Joseba Sarri-
onandia and Jon Juaristi, to name a few of its most outstanding contributors. Authors of various
backgrounds participated in the project, and it became a point of contact between writers in
Euskara and Castilian.
Since 1982, the Basque language law of standardization has brought instruction in Basque
language and literature to schools, and has fostered diferent treatment towards writers using
the Basque language, who beneit from institutional support, while writers in Castilian did not
enjoy the same incentives. his gave an important boost to Basque-language writers: they came
to be included in textbooks and their works were assigned as mandatory readings in schools.
hus, the works of Pott writers were widely circulated, and given an extra hand by the success of
Bernardo Atxaga, who let Bilbao ater Pott was shut down, and who in 1999 would receive the
Premio Nacional de Narrativa (Spanish National narrative prize) for his Obabakoak (Individu-
als and things of Obaba, 1998).
he second cultural initiative came about through the journal Zurgai (Wooden material),
edited by Pablo González de Langarika in Bilbao from the irst years of Democracy. he jour-
nal encourages writers in both languages to live side by side and has allowed poets writing in
Euskara and Castilian to publish in its pages and has also devoted monographs to the poetry of
writers who produce in Euskara.
he third, brief initiative was spear-headed by Mari Feli Maizkurrena and José Fernández
de la Sota, who set up the journal Puerta Norte/Ipar Atea (Northern gate) in 2001, which from
its very title communicated the cooperation and collaboration of writers in both languages of
the community. Unfortunately, it was very short-lived.
Additionally, the publishing house Elea (Speech) has been working since 2002 to support
authors living in the Basque Country and its mission statement includes furthering the coexis-
tence of authors writing in both languages. But it is an exception in a landscape where institu-
tional publishing, driven by the City Council of Bilbao, sometimes via its Bidebarrieta cultural
center, or by the Diputación Foral de Bizkaia, occupies a place of importance, though subject to
the limitations usual in all institutional publishing.
he fact is that Basque-language publishing is chiely centered in San Sebastián (Donostia),
and Bilbao specializes mainly in the ields of children’s or young adult literature (Desclée de
Brouwer, Giltza, Gero and Bruño). In this literary system based in the sector of education, we
must mention the Instituto Labayru, a religious establishment that has dedicated itself to pub-
lishing educational, linguistic, and ethnographic books. he powerful publishing house Ibaiza-
bal, which has bookstores in Bilbao, is headquartered near the city, in Amorebieta, and distrib-
utes its textbooks and literary editions through its support base of educational institutions.
Contemporary Catalan literature
Fact or friction?
Dominic Keown and Jordi Larios
he frontiers of culture are not, and should not be, closed.

T.S. Eliot
If literary assimilation is a hazardous activity in cultures of monolingual normality then it is

particularly parlous in the case of linguistic minorities and especially acute with regards to the
polyglossic mosaic of modern Spain. In the course of the last three centuries – and save for the
lacunae of the odd decade of democratic rule – a homogenising authoritarian impulse has been
ixated on the systematic extirpation of any literature not written in the oicial idiom of Castil-
ian. In such an environment not only is autochthonous creativity chronically repressed but it
also becomes fractured, fragmented and, in the worst of circumstances, disappears completely.
However, in spite of such historical adversity, literature in Catalan – throughout its linguistic
area – has refused to acquiesce to any inal cleansing. Indeed, its stubborn resilience might even
allow a vision of its accordance with a provocative and entirely democratic scheme proposed for
the assimilation of a counterpart from a far more established cultural coniguration.
hough T. S. Eliot’s war-time opusculum Notes towards a deinition of culture may seem
dated in some respects, particularly in its enthusiastic advocacy of the centrality of religion to
the modern creative process, it is nothing short of admirable in its defense of democracy and
xenophilia. And these values are nowhere more in evidence than in the poet’s egalitarian delib-
eration on the inter-relationship between the nations of the British Isles and the positive nature
of their “frictional” rivalry and mutual inluence for the betterment of the collective. he poet’s
celebration of mestissage in this respect is shown in his choice of a key passage taken from the
social philosopher A. N. Whitehead as preface to his discourse:
A diversiication among human communities is essential for the provision of the incentive and
material for the Odyssey of the human spirit. Other nations of diferent habits are not enemies:
they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something suiciently akin to be under-
stood, something suiciently diferent to provoke attention, and something great enough to
command admiration. (Eliot 1962, 50)
his formula is then applied schematically to the “particular constellation of cultures which
is found in the British Isles” (Eliot 1962, 53) wherein, far from being decried as a threat to the
unity of the state, the various national rivalries are celebrated as a stimulus for even greater
achievement in the creative ield. Moreover, the antagonism fundamental to this habitual in-
tercourse is endorsed as entirely positive within this vision of a dynamic mosaic whose internal
competition results in a partnership which proves fruitful both to the central and peripheral
(satellite) elements:
he satellite exercises a considerable inluence upon the stronger culture; and so plays a
larger part in the world at large than it could in isolation. For Ireland, Scotland, and Wales
to cut themselves completely of from England would be to cut themselves of from Europe
and the world.
238 Dominic Keown and Jordi Larios
he survival of the satellite culture is of very great value to the stronger culture. It would
be of no gain whatever for English culture, for the Welsh, Scots and Irish to become indis-
tinguishable featureless “Britons,” at a lower level of culture than that of any of the separate
regions. On the contrary, it is of great advantage for English culture to be constantly inluenced
from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. (Eliot 1962, 55)
If it is surprising that this American author – the paragon of “Englishness” in manners, form
and protocol – should be such a passionate advocate of national diference in all its apparitions;
it is even quite astonishing when we realize the date and historic context of these deliberations.
In the dark night of the war against Fascism, when his adopted country stood alone against the
might of the Nazis, a cry for total unity might have been more expected in the ight against the
enemy. Eliot, however, is a much shrewder analyst in that respect and is capable of appreciat-
ing the perils of the homogenizing impulse which had established itself as such a fundamental
feature of the levelling and imperialist designs as imposed by fascist tyranny:
In Italy and Germany, we have seen that a unity centered on politico-economic aims, imposed
violently and too rapidly, had unfortunate efects upon both nations. heir cultures had devel-
oped in the course of a history of extreme and extremely sub-divided regionalism: the attempts
of Germans to think of themselves as Germans irst, and the attempt of Italians to think of
themselves as Italians irst, rather than natives of a particular small principality or city, was to
disturb the traditional culture from which alone any future culture could grow.
(Eliot 1962, 59–60)
In the face of such totalitarian menace, the poet and critic is swit in his eulogy of the com-
petitiveness at the heart of national diference: an engaging “friction” between individuals and
groups which is seen as “quite necessary for civilisation. he universality of irritation is the
best assurance of peace. A country in which divisions have gone too far is a danger to itself: a
country which is too well united… is a menace to others” (Eliot 1962, 59–60). Fundamental to
this view, however, is the awareness of the rewards of a dynamic divergence as opposed to the
stiling efect of homogenization.
he Englishman, for instance, does not ordinarily think of England as a “region” in the same
way that a Scottish or Welsh national can think of Scotland or Wales; and as it is not made clear
to him that his interests are also involved, his sympathies are not enlisted. hus the Englishman
may identify his own interests with a tendency to obliterate local and racial distinctions, which
is as harmful to his own culture as to those of his neighbours […]
It is an essential part of my case, that if the other cultures of the British Isles were wholly
superseded by English culture, English culture would disappear too […] For a national culture,
if it is to lourish, should be a constellation of cultures, the constituents of which, beneiting
from each other, beneit the whole.
(Eliot 1962, 53–58)
here can be little doubt that, had such an enlightened view about the mutual beneits of na-
tional cohabitation formed part of intellectual thought and practice in Spain, the culture of
Catalonia would today enjoy a more robust and established presence. Unhappily, the opposite
occurred when a generation of renowned writers – none of whom could claim any expertise in
the ield of historical analysis – persuaded themselves and their inluential acolytes to reject out
of hand the fundamentally democratic concept advanced by Eliot of a “constant dining with the
Contemporary Catalan literature 239
Opposition” (1962, 84), preferring to insist on its contrary: the imposition of monochromatic
unity across the kingdom with a clear intention to “obliterate local and racial distinctions.” he
imposition of cultural homogeneity as promoted by the infamous “Generation of 1898” in Spain
stands out for its brittle intransigence – an ultimate closure of the frontiers of culture – when
compared to the polyvalent latency ofered by Eliot, whose fundamental tenet in this conigura-
tion is the entirely positive mutuality of friction:
It is a recurrent theme of this essay that a people should be neither too united or divided, if
its culture is to lourish. Excess of unity may be due to barbarism and may lead to tyranny;
excess of division may be due to decadence and may also lead to tyranny: either excess will
prevent further development in culture […] To some it has never occurred to relect that the
disappearance of the peripheral cultures of England (to say nothing of the more humble local
peculiarities within England itself) might be a calamity. It is probable, I think, that complete
uniformity of culture throughout these islands would bring about a lower grade of culture
altogether. (Eliot 1962, 50–58)
Evidently, the vision of the internal rivalry at work within a national culture is a particularly
intriguing concept. In the context of the British Isles, the tensions between the literary endeav-
ours of the Celtic Fringe and the centralist Establishment are legion, and their contribution to
the creative richness of the commonwealth is readily apparent. It is fascinating, in turn, to apply
a similar formula to the experience of the Catalan-speaking areas where, despite the linguistic
repression and cultural extirpation exercized remorselessly throughout the last century, the
same element of friction is seen to prosper.
he opportunity for peripheral reaction – either imitation or rejection of established prac-
tice – is, of course, particularly pronounced in the case of Catalan literature where, far from be-
ing spontaneous and organic, the task of cultural recuperation became programmatic and even
stage-managed. In the early nineteenth century, concomitant with inchoate processes of in-
dustrialization, the irst vestiges of the autochthonous literary revival, or Renaixença, appeared
in poems of clear Romantic nostalgia as transcribed by writers such as Bonaventura Carles
Aribau and Joaquim Rubió i Ors. he most notable aspect of their creation, in this respect, was
the choice of the Catalan language as the medium for expression. Going against the grain of
linguistic substitution elsewhere on the continent, the selection of this idiom and subject mat-
ter, conceived in the manner of Scott, indicate the central tenet of the movement: the desire to
re-constitute the Catalan cultural personality through literature in the vernacular (Terry 2003,
60–61).
By the last quarter of that century, the following generation of writers – Jacint Verdaguer,
Narcís Oller, and Āngel Guimerà – fulilled the initial promise of these aspirations, establishing
“beyond any doubt the possibilities of Catalan as a modern literary language” (Terry 2003, 65).
In the other regions of the Catalan linguistic domain, however, the response had been fragile
and fractured. In Valencia, for example, only two writers of any note, Teodor Llorente and
Vicent Wenceslau Querol, responded to the initiative of cultural recuperation with any degree
of success although, in comparison with the cohesive force attained by their counterparts in
the Principality, their work was not only marginal but conservative and conventional in nature,
paralyzing, as Joan Fuster (1972a, 23) would have it, any innovative thrust. Similarly, Majorca’s
own brand of cultural recuperation was set in motion when Miquel Costa i Llobera and Joan
Alcover decided to abandon Castilian and to switch to Catalan. Both writers are perceived as
the instigators of the so-called “Majorcan School,” an uncomfortable label also applied liberally
to a younger generation, represented by Miquel Ferrà and Maria Antònia Salvà, among others,
and, more problematically, to Gabriel Alomar. Unfortunately, their varying relationship, both
with each other and also with the cultural elite of the Principality, would never ofer the aes-
thetic cohesion which characterized the phenomenon in Barcelona.
By the start of the last century, then, the creative dynamic witnessed in Catalonia had gained
such consistency that it was natural for its exponents to look outside and update their work with
respect to the artistic actuality elsewhere on the continent. And it comes as no surprise to view
familiar names amongst the late nineteenth-century artistic pantheon of Europe as key inlu-
ences on the Catalan scene: Nietzsche, Wagner, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Zola, Hugo, Maeterlinck,
Ruskin, etc. he emergent Zeitgeist was to be dubbed Modernisme which, as the name suggests,
sought to “produce a genuinely Catalan culture: one which will be ‘modern’ in a European sense,
but which will also take into account the traditions and pressures of its own society” (Terry 2003,
74). he inluence of this most vital of tendencies, based on the contemporary international
vogue of aestheticism combined with the familiar domestic obsession with regeneration, was
massive. And it is precisely the programmatic dimension – a conscious imitation of the work
of current European masters set in a Catalan environment – which anticipates the prescriptive
impulse which will characterize indigenous expression for almost the next hundred years.
John Betjeman’s crit de guerre that poetry – and by extension, literature – cannot be writ-
ten to order is thoroughly disputed by what turned out to be Modernisme’s conscious import
and wholesale replication of contemporary literary tendencies from elsewhere on the conti-
nent. he focal point of the new aesthetic was the ultra-modern metropolis of Barcelona which
was, as J. F. Ràfols conirmed, to become a monument to the Modernist spirit: “an eminently
Barcelonese phenomenon” (cited by Fuster 1972a, 23). Indeed, David Mackay’s explanation of
the preoccupations central to the architectural element of the equation might be applied to the
creative experience in general: “It was much more than a local variant of Art Nouveau because
it became a style identiied with a total movement to airm Catalan nationhood and cultural
autonomy, diferentiated from Spanishness and attuned to its advanced European counterparts”
(Mackay 1985, 6).
he heavily metropolitan orientation which had now implicated itself within the the estab-
lishment of an “oicial” creative personality and, indeed, the prescriptive nature of the latter, is
again apparent in the doctrine of Noucentisme which took center stage within the second mo-
ment of the Modernist enterprise in the irst two decades of the last century. Its spiritual pon-
tif was Eugeni d’Ors, whose advocacy of “arbitrary art” continued the attempts to construct a
genuine European culture through the institutionalization of a literary idiom equal in aesthetic
quality to its counterparts elsewhere on the continent.
his mode was to be characterized by a preference for a new “classicism” which would
counter the individualist excesses of the Romanticism prevalent locally in the last decade of the
nineteenth century. his re-imposition of the primacy of tradition is evinced by a curtailment
of Maragall’s poetics of the paraula viva – the “living word” which championed individual spon-
taneity, sincerity, and inspired outpourings – by means of a return to form and technique and a
more general concern with the promotion of an “arbitrary” or “objective” highbrow idiom. he
importance of anti-individualist convention was now to be reiterated by writers such as Josep

Carner, Josep Maria López-Picó, Jaume Boill i Mates “Guerau de Liost,” and their classicizing
instinct is epitomized by the evocation of the cosmopolitan vision of Barcelona as the Ideal
City – a new Athens – imbued with the elitism, of bourgeois civility, thereby underlining the
link between aestheticism and the values of tradition: social decorum, urbanity, and etiquette
conveyed by a sophisticated ironic tone compliant with the formalities of upper-class experi-
ence. hese are elements which characterise the programmatic re-constitution of the Catalan
cultural voice. And it is precisely with these elements in mind that the other areas of the Cata-
lan-speaking geography will ofer their own very particular input and response.
As was indicated above, the somewhat facile label of the Majorcan School is widely used
to designate Catalan literature produced in the Balearics by writers from the second half of the
nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century. In the 1960s, Josep Maria Llompart tried to
establish the remit of such a category and warned that “the word ‘school’ is rather misleading
and the term ‘Majorcan School’ […] has now become so controversial as to be almost always
accompanied by the intention either to praise or criticise” (quoted in Mir 1981, 38). However,
neither the equivocal nature of the term “school” nor the conlicting views on the writers of this
putative grouping deterred him from deining it as “the combination of characteristics common
to Majorcan poets whose output dates between 1900 and 1950 approximately” (quoted in Mir
1981, 38). A few years later Llompart would allege that there is a strong link between this school
and Catalan Noucentisme and would insist on using the label with more circumspection to refer
solely to the Majorcan poets of the early decades of the twentieth century.
Nonetheless, he also speciied – quite unhelpfully in fact – that such a term “has been of-
ten used to refer rather vaguely to those traits considered characteristic of Majorcan verse – or
literature in general – from the Renaixença onwards” (quoted in Mir 1981, 39), a return to his
previous vision of a “one-size-its-all” remit for the phenomenon, which again complicates mat-
ters inordinately.
In the 1970s Joan Fuster highlighted that the Renaixença had been less successful in the
Balearics and in Valencia, where the renascent impulse had only manifested itself through the
work of a handful of poets and had shown “certain peculiarities of its own which never really
managed to it in with those established in the Principality” (Fuster 1972a, 56). hese peculiari-
ties were such that it is possible to identify “an authentic aesthetic school somewhat constant in
stylistic terms which has allowed its poets to be considered as a separate tradition” (Fuster 1972a,
56). One of the most conspicuous of these features would be “the virtue of rhetoric: that is, art,
or artiice, as a fundamental resource of poetry” (Fuster 1972a, 57).
It is this point which allows us to envisage that friction identiied by Eliot, especially in
terms of the contemporary disagreement between Maragall’s poetics, which revolves around
the romantically inspired notion of paraula viva, as opposed to the “objective” aestheticism as
advocated by Costa i Llobera and Alcover. he Majorcan pair were of a more orthodox poetic
inclination which privileged “the canon, for its serenity, its classical – or classicising – aspira-
tion” (Fuster 1972a, 58). Fuster argues that it is their siding with classicism in the face of Mara-
gall’s creative doctrine that made it possible for the Catalan Noucentistes to turn them into
worthy predecessors – a curious example, no doubt, of the center letting itself to be inluenced
by activity from the periphery. What is more, Joan-Lluís Marfany underlines the complexity
of this interface by going so far as to assert that Costa i Alcover were invented as a school by
the Noucentistes in Barcelona in order to legitimise their own aesthetics: “Carner’s young poet
friends needed masters and, above all, standards. And it was thus that the Majorcan School was
born” (Marfany 1975, 89). Ater all, what better justiication for a literary tendency could there
possibly be than precursors of distinction – even if these had little to do with the real state of
cultural afairs on the mainland?
Whilst crediting Fuster for a considerable number of perceptive insights into contempo-
rary Catalan literature, Marfany was not slow to criticize a willingness the critic displayed re-
garding the perpetuation of the “one-size-its-all” perspective: “a traditional view of our recent
literary history which is basically deformed and unsatisfactory” (Marfany 1975, 61). Perhaps
understandably, it is Fuster’s inclusion of Gabriel Alomar in this school, a far more progressive
and radical individual, which provokes Marfany’s disagreement even if it is “only in extremis,
in the dubious and disputable quality of exception which proves the rule” (Marfany 1975, 65).
In general terms, Marfany’s approach is more lexible, accepting that it is less restrictive to
consider the cultural mêlée at the start of the last century as an embodiment of a series of di-
chotomies such as civility/ruralism, cosmopolitanism/regionalism, modernism/traditionalism
or arbitrariness/spontaneity; but he does not believe that these dichotomies can be proitably
subsumed under the all-encompassing classiication of Noucentisme/Modernisme.
For Marfany, the dividing line has little to do with aesthetics and owes far more to ideol-
ogy and, ultimately, politics. In other words, it was precisely Costa’s and Alcover’s conservatism
which attracted the interest of the Catalan Noucentistes in the irst place. Correspondingly, in
keeping with his views on Modernisme and Noucentisme, he advocates a substantial modiica-
tion of the traditional concept of the Majorcan School, a label that would only make sense if
restricted to a very speciic phenomenon: “the group of young writers, friends of Carner and
Guerau de Liost, who collaborated assiduously in Catalunya” (Marfany 1975, 87), i.e., Llorenç
Riber, Miquel Ferrà, Maria Antònia Salvà, and a few others:
his group of writers, an homogenized force, represents, at the turn of the century, the irst
serious, conscious, and organized attempt to actively incorporate Majorca into the heart of a
united Catalan culture, to abandon the Majorcan localism and to choose integration within
the Catalan cultural sphere instead of the Spanish, incorporating itself within it, as a particular
modality of the common culture. (Marfany 1975, 87)
he interface identiied by Eliot between periphery and center is well illustrated by the type of
interaction described here. Indeed, the intercourse between region and capital in this respect
could almost be posited as exemplary. Marfany points out, however, the temporal limitations of
the experience which, unlike the critical position aired most frequently, should not be taken as
beginning with the older pair of writers. He refers to Costa, for instance, as “solitary” and “iso-
lated”: as someone who never stopped being “a priest, somewhat rustic in character, who had
literary pretensions” (Marfany 1975, 88). Similarly, he stresses that Alcover, a writer between
two languages, found it diicult to engage wholeheartedly with the Catalan cause as he never
was able to give up “his provincial dreams about triumphing in Madrid” (Marfany 1975, 88), an
attachment to the creative status quo of the centralist state which will be echoed in turn by the
contemporary anti-Catalan sentiment in Valencia.
Gregori Mir, for his part, has traced the concept of the Majorcan School back to its origins
in the second half of the nineteenth century. he detailed account ofered of its meandering –
and semantic – instability is explained with reference to the work of Josep Lluís Pons i Gallarza,
for whom it meant “the total possible contribution of Majorcans in the cultural revival but […]
always to Spanish culture” (Mir 1981, 84). Naturally, the sense of Madrid exercizing capitality
relects the familiar dichotomy (state capital versus linguistic capital) at the center of cultural
recuperation in the Catalan-speaking periphery. he position of Alcover is particularly reveal-
ing in this respect and betrays a deference to the Ancien Régime prevalent in the Balearics and
Valencia which the nationalist impulse in the Principality had all but eradicated.
However, the more radical equation of the creative re-orientation with Catalonia which
fails to appear in Valencia until ater the Civil War, becomes apparent in the Balearics in the
person of Gabriel Alomar, for whom the school was to be considered “principally in the aes-
thetic or poetic sense, but also with respect to the foundation of Majorca within an integral
Catalonia” (Mir 1981, 85). he notion of an “integral Catalonia” – a full and complete cultural
unit embracing the national wholeness of all its constituent parts – is one of the ideological
tenets that separates Alomar from other Majorcan writers of the period, whom he regarded as
narrow-minded and parochial. As a Catalan nationalist, Alomar saw himself equally dissatis-
ied with those fellow-islanders who unquestioningly accepted the authority of Madrid as with
those whose evocation of the locality and its culture went no further than indulgent and inef-
fectual introspection. He was to speak of:
Two Majorcas equally adverse to my temperament. One is the Castilianized, semioicial Ma-
jorca, totally soul-enslaved, and from which cannot arise even the most feeble spark or the
most humble irely. […] he other Majorca is the minuscule, absurd and migrated regionality
that some would like to erect, separated from all sense of citizenship…, a self-absorbed, self-
nourished Majorca, as small in soul as in material, inspired – what is more – by a sliver of
idolatrous sectarianism that profoundly rejects the wingspan of my spiritual sense. (Alomar
1970, 10)
he introspective irrelevance of Alomar’s two Majorcas were ictionalized subsequently by

Llorenç Villalonga, one of the most signiicant writers of the last century, in his irst novel Mort
de dama (he death of a lady, 1931) in which the narrator pokes fun at the assumed vanity of
the island’s non-existent cultural life, as represented in the following extract by the local Ateneo
and the vernacular magazine Bé hem dinat (We have eaten well):
he two entities organized rhetorical conferences that no one listened to, and short courses
which, for lack of students, were attended by the members of the board, out of discipline and
in order to fulill requirements. heir existence was a veritable lie, and what is a worse, an
unfortunate lie.1
1. “Les dues entitats organitzaven conferències retòriques, que ningú no escoltava, i cursets de llengües als
quals, a manca d’alumnes, assistien els membres de les juntes, per disciplina i per cobrir l’expedient. Llurs
existències eren una veritable mentida i, cosa que és pitjor, una mentida desgraciada”. (Villalonga 1987,
91–92)
As Marfany explains, the Modernist aesthetic in Catalonia had already denounced – in the
most dynamic terms possible – the futile solipsism of such a cultural statement as was seen to
be current in the Balearics:
hese men [the modernists] actually believed that the Catalan culture of their time sufered
two basic ills: it was, on one hand, a backward culture with regards to the European modern
national cultures and, even worse, a traditionalist culture which was tied to this backwardness;
on the other hand, it was a culture that did not aspire to universality, but which was localist in
essence, a culture that had been born as an expression of a regional particularism and which
did not dare to go any further, sacriicing its – shall we say – “ancestral” peculiarities. (Marfany
1975, 16).
As such, Villalonga’s diagnosis of the school’s shortcomings shared the same premises, but his
objectives were radically diferent. he writer’s unsympathetic representation of Majorca’s lo-
cal culture may have been inspired by Alomar’s rejection of such senseless immobility, but this
cannot disguise the fact that Alomar and Villalonga belonged to very diferent camps. As men-
tioned above, Alomar is the irst Majorcan intellectual who believed in an integral Catalonia
and militated towards this new cultural alignment. However, even though he wrote Mort de
dama in Catalan, Villalonga had little time for Catalan culture. He had read – and been per-
suaded by – Ortega’s España invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain) and his perspective on culture
echoes that of the Generation of 1898 with its re-airmation of a centralist Spanish voice. Bear-
ing this in mind, it is not diicult to understand why in 1936, when the Civil War broke out, he
embraced the cause of Spanish Fascism.
It is perhaps not surprising to ind exactly the same ambiguity at the heart of the Valencian
response to the cultural initiative established by Catalan Modernisme. Despite the communality
of a shared history and language and the willing response to the Renaixença by writers such as
Llorente and Querol, the contribution from this region to the recuperation of autochthonous
culture by subsequent generations up until 1936 was so negligible as not to merit more than
a passing mention in any of the major literary histories. In this respect, however, the varying
social tensions – identical to those witnessed in the Balearics – were to play their part in the
stiling of any such initiative.
It is at this time, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards – and in reaction to the
success of the Renaixença – that the irst vestiges of an anti-Catalan sentiment emerged and
were duly nurtured, especially in the city of Valencia. his prejudice has been described in so-
ciological terms as a compensatory reaction to the political, economic, and cultural primacy of
Barcelona as the metropolitan protagonist of the Eastern seaboard. And the inferiority complex
experienced in all areas of social life when compared to the ultra-modern Catalan capital began
to express itself – and to this day continues in the same manner – as an efort to re-emphasize
local prestige by dissociating Valencia from the linguistic and cultural collective to which it
indisputably belongs.
his obsessive secessionism (blaverisme) – entirely unjustiiable, of course, in philological
terms – has been duly studied and a whole host of commentators (Marqués 1975; Aracil 1982;
Ninyoles 1985) have speculated upon the real intention behind the prejudice. he purpose of
this parochial chauvinism may appear supericially to be to champion local pride in the fatuous
division of Valencia from Catalonia. In fact, it instead pays testimony to an essential conformity
with the centralized balance of power within the Spanish state at large as the putative linguistic/
cultural disintegration of the vernacular is held to be indicative of what is considered the real
aspiration of this prejudice. In simple terms, the primary concern of blaverisme is not so much
to elevate the position of Valencia as to weaken, through division, the coherence of the Catalan
vernacular throughout its constituent territories. he net result, is none other than to assure the
maintenance of the linguistic and cultural hegemony of the centralist Spanish state, a position
which, as we have seen, was embodied by the more reactionary elements of the experience in
Majorca as evidenced by their sympathetic ailiation to Madrid rather than towards the Cata-
lan capital.
he formula would admirably describe, for example, the disrespectful attitude toward the
vernacular re-awakening in his own community of an author like Villalonga. he same lack of
conviction in national and cultural re-aligment would be duly relected in the case of Valencia
by the linguistic substitution of an author such as Blasco Ibáñez, who was happy to forsake his
initial essays in the autochthonous tongue to devote himself exclusively to Spanish.
And this bleakest of panoramas in terms of cultural and linguistic revival on the periphery
was to extend throughout the Catalan-speaking areas ater the Civil War. he scorched earth
policy of Franco’s illegal directorate brought about the “complete collapse of Catalan political
institutions and, to a great extent, the cultural tradition which had been patiently built up over
the previous forty years” (Terry 2003, 103). It was in this wasteland that writers like Carles Riba,
Salvador Espriu and J.V. Foix, were to stand out in the 1940s with an attitude of literary deiance
worthy of the highest accolade. In the face of Franco’s thuggery they expressed their dissent
with a radical defense of culture: the most damning response possible to the barbarity of the
invader. In the sparse creative arena of the time one is consistently impressed by the sophistica-
tion and depth of their output: from the Symbolist musings of Riba to the exquisite pure poetry
of Espriu or the haunting, abstruse vanguard elegance of J.V. Foix.
he same basic concern for the defense of Catalonia as a repository of high culture is
continued by the next generation of writers. It is precisely in such an artistic backwater that
the brothers Joan Ferraté and Gabriel Ferrater, along with their Spanish-writing counterparts
Carlos Barral and Jaime Gil de Biedma, conspired in what amounted to a literary confabula-
tion in their attempt to elevate the cultural milieu through the importation and establishment
of an Anglo-American aesthetic. What is fundamental to this entire literary phenomenon is, of
course, the sophistication, erudition and, it is tempting to say, the over-riding cosmopolitanism
of it all. his is very much literature produced for the academy, with its consciously learned
dimension an indicator of an essential urbanity. Barcelona may no longer be the new Athens of
Noucentista idealism; but the virtues of metropolitan existence emerge from the page, whether
from Espriu’s highbrow evocation of the classical polis to Gabriel Ferrater’s combination of
“intimate experience and learned overtones” (Fuster 1972a, 369), Joan Brossa’s esoteric verse
and drama and, later, Pere Gimferrer’s representation of the urban landscape, an element which
becomes a feature of the writing of this entire generation. Leaving aside the highly signiicant
but marginalized igure of Josep Pla, even those writers who have a more complex and critical
attitude towards the city, particularly Mercè Rodoreda, Pere Calders and Pere Quart, still tend
to center their attention on this environment and its values in their creative deliberation on
particularities of the Catalan cultural experience.
It is perhaps only to be anticipated that the dissident response from Valencia, when it inal-
ly appears within the fold of Catalan letters, adopts and even rejoices in a certain rustic belliger-
ence: a friction which begins to express itself around the halfway mark of the last century most
prominently in the creative work of the contemporary pairing of Joan Fuster and Vicent Andrés
Estellés. Indeed, the rural excentricity fundamental to the elaboration of their antithetical posi-
tion to the metropolitan Establishment is evident in one of Fuster’s most celebrated aphorisms,
a crit de guerre directed against Madrid, heart and epicenter of the Francoist “nation” (though,
as we will see, the same sentiment would be frequently lodged against the Barcelona centrism of
the domestic cultural voice): “In Madrid, newspaper editors talk politics and speak about ‘We,
the Spaniards.’ Folks in Sueca work and harvest rice.” It is not surprising, as such, that Fuster’s
ground-breaking monograph on the Catalan origins and nature of Valencia should be entitled
Nosaltres els valencians (We, the Valencians, 1962); though, as might be expected, the study in
itself also underlines the historical particularity of the region within the wider coniguration of
the Catalan-speaking community.
As has been seen, Fuster is essentially an academic but his creative writing also bears wit-
ness to the dismantling of received wisdom, particularly the generalizations surrounding the
concept of national identity. Time and again the specious integrity of the grand narrative is dis-
assembled and exposed in all the bareness of its tendentiousness. As an inveterate francophile,
it is entirely coherent in this respect that the author should adopt the mantle and medium of
the man of the periphery par excellence, Montaigne, in addition to the aphoristic impertinence
of the irreverent La Rochefoucauld. However, the inspiration for one of his most signiicant
collections of essays, the Dictionari per a ociosos (Dictionary for the idle, 1964), is to be found
in yet another well-known dissident voice.
If the French Enlightenment was to become celebrated for its progressive humanitarian
impulse there is an inevitable totalizing instinct also implicit in the movement’s attempt to cat-
egorize all knowledge. In fact, the adoption by the philosophes of Bacon’s arboreal scheme – the
tree of knowledge with its diferent branches of learning – for the ordering of their encyclopedic
investigation implied a certain schematic foreclosure at the very heart of their process of clas-
siication. he savants were not unaware of the globalizing danger evident in the exercise; yet
they envisaged a deconstructive safeguard to any excess of authority or dogma in the capricious
peculiarity of alphabetical order, where the merest mention of such a weighty topic as “majesty”
might wither in stature and signiicance by appearing adjacent to, say, a detailed deinition of
“mayonnaise.”
he most inventive exploiter of such a seditious formula was, of course, Voltaire; and Fus-
ter’s eclectic compendium closely follows the structure and subversive instinct central to the
Dictionnaire philosophique. In this collection of diverse musings, a formula almost unknown to
the contemporary reader, the modern-day author is able to divert the attention of the censor
with the smokescreen of alleged supericiality implied by the title. Meanwhile, the series of pithy
one-liners and erratic academic deliberations are able to ofer a critical revision, dislodging
received wisdom and tendentiousness. To this efect, the spurious construct of nationalism and
national character (Francoist and otherwise) and all its accompanying pomposity is repeatedly
called into question. Similar deliberations on the corner-stones of Western society – love, jus-
tice, ethics, freedom, order – in turn re-examine their relevance as authentic values. heir sig-
niicance is cast further into doubt by a coincidence with cryptic aphoristic speculation on such
lighty topics as strolling, epitaphs, money, and time.
In one of the most disarming deinitions in the collection, Fuster exposes the perils of
non-organic discourse as made patent not only by the nationalist rhetoric of Francoism but the
equally fallacious construct of an oicial Catalan cultural personality. he aptly entitled deini-
tion of “Charlatan” points out the tyrannical dangers of oratory and demagogy with speciic
reference to the evocation of the Mediterranean as the sea of ancient civilization. Along with
other myths of national superiority this trope, with its appeal to rank self-justiication, lays
itself open to manipulative abuse as was evinced by its employment by Fascism as an apology
for abject imperialism.
In this respect, it is perhaps disconcerting to note the tendency of Catalan literature to
indulge in this very practice. here is a similar form of bias evident, for example, in the Noucen-
tista hailing of Barcelona as the Athens of the contemporary world. What is more, during the
Franco period a number of major writers in the Principality – especially Riba, Foix, and Espriu
– were to re-visit the trope. Despite their radically divergent aim of cultural defense, the lyrical
approximation to the nation was communicated time and again in terms of a reservoir of high
culture, a classicizing instinct which excluded the more prosaic immediacy of actual historical
experience.
Fuster seems to take issue precisely with the evocative intricacy of this highbrow literary
convention. With a familiar grass-roots touch the Valencian prefers the intimacy and speciics
of the dialogue of the agora and the polis above the generics of the national or the metropolitan.
In fact, in a manner not dissimilar to the dissident Catalan writer, Pere Quart, he unerringly
brings us back to the immediate rejection of the dangers of the tendentious message at the
word’s most basic level, and in its lowest form:
Mediterranean society, right up to the present time, has organised itself into cities: we have yet
to attain nationhood – I formulate it, like everything, cum grano salis. In a city, the collective
heart is the square. he widespread and united family of the Mediterranean is nothing more
than that, a collection of squares, agoras, or forums […] Freedom in the square, in the agora,
is just the freedom to converse […] For that reason the Mediterranean is a fertile quarry of
tribunes: plebeian in some cases, or tyrannical tribunes in others. But always tribunes: orators,
gossips, charlatans. (Fuster 2006, 25–26)2
he low-key dismissal of the impulse to construct a cultural personality for the nation and
exposure of the dangers of so doing is echoed further by the expression of his Valencian con-
temporary, Estellés, who elicits a defense of the Catalan experience along the more demotic
2. “La societat del Mediterrani, ins ara mateix, s’organitza en ciutats: ni tan sols hem arribat – ho formulo,
com tot, cum grano salis – a la nació. En una ciutat, el cor col·lectiu és la plaça. La dispersa i unida família
del Mediterrani no és sinó això, una col·lecció de places, àgores o fòrums […] La llibertat, en una plaça
– en l’àgora, en el fòrum – , és, simplement, la llibertat de xerrar […] Per això el Mediterrani és, essencial-
ment, una pedrera fèrtil de tribuns: tribuns de la plebs, en uns casos, o tribuns de la tirania, en d’altres.
Però sempre tribuns: oradors, xerraires, xarlatans. (Fuster 1964, 199–200)
lines advanced by Fuster. Insistently, the city of Valencia of two collections written in the 1950s,
the Primer llibre de les èglogues (First book of the eclogues) and the Primera soledad (First soli-
tude), appears as the antithesis of the elevated construct of the Noucentista metropolis. Here
the imagined idyll of convention contrasts starkly with urban actuality as the idealised charac-
ters are replaced by ordinary typists who catch buses to meet their boy-friends in smoke-illed
local bars on the familiar thoroughfares of the city. Similarly, the weighty poetic speculation
of the eclogue and the elevated decasyllables and alexandrines, more usually employed with
princes and afairs of state, are compromised by the banality of the reference to real life of
the post-war period: austerity, shortages, and sordid, clandestine sexuality. High art is thus
brought down to street level in what constitutes a belligerent re-positioning of the practice of
Catalan cultural defense.
Moreover, the non-canonical approach might also be identiied by the insistent preference
for the town as opposed to the city. Estellés will underline Valencian marginality by privileg-
ing the rural life of Burjassot, his hometown in the Horta (Valencian rural region), over that
found in the capital. Signiicantly, this dissident element is further posited in terms of a similar
realignment with the classics. he erudition, lyricism, and mastery so typical of the Catalans’
re-working of convention will be replaced by speculation of an entirely more visceral and in-
novative nature.
In a number of collections Estellés enters proleptically into a symbiotic relationship with
a series of Latin predecessors: Horace, Catullus, and Ovid. As such, through the biological
binary unit of Estellés/Horace, Estellés/Catullus or Estellés/Ovid, the poet can relect in the
most startling of fashions on the timeless immediacy of repression, as well as the perils implicit
in the mythic invention of high-lown nationality and empire, again founded on the notion of
capitality:
…for, instead of to rome, i’m faithful to venusa:
much more than a roman citizen, i feel myself to be from venusa.
rome will be that superior [thing] that unites us, crowns us.
venusa is peaceful coexistence.
venusa is as much to me as sueca is for fuster,
or castelló for ventura,
or burjassot for estellés.3
he dubious relationship with Rome evident here – and concomitant celebration of provin-
ciality – is consitent with the dissident reaction to the doublet which equates metropolis to
nation so prevalent in the modern Catalan tradition. Needless to say, the antagonism refers us
inevitably back to Eliot’s relection on the frictional importance of the region, particularly in its
role as a counter to the pompous homogeneity of centralism, such a dangerous feature of the
right-wing nationalist enterprise.
It is also interesting to note that Estellés’s revision of capitality and aesthetic convention
works along clearly ideological lines. he evocation of the Mediterranean as a repository of
3. “…car, més que no de roma, em sé idel de venusa: / molt més que ciutadà de roma, em pense de venusa. /
roma serà allò superior que ens uneix, ens corona. / venusa és la tranquil·la convivència. / venusa és tant
per a mi com és sueca per a fuster, / o castelló per a ventura, / o burjassot per a l’estellés”. (Estellés 1974, 298)
classical culture (Espriu), a mine for erudite speculation (Riba), or subject of abstruse creative
investigation (Foix) had become a feature of the literary defense of the Catalan cultural person-
ality along exclusively highbrow lines. Here the Valencian’s scouring of the ancient literature of
Rome sets its aim precisely at subverting the attempt to establish the voice of high culture as
representative of the nation. he tension at the interface between the idiom of popular experi-
ence and elitism is illustrated by the binary Estellés/Ovid in the contrast exposed between the
Virgilian celebration of rural life, his First Eclogue, and the apology for Augustinian imperial-
ism which the immortal Roman is seen to have “plucked from up his sleeve” with the epic of
the Aeneid:
it’s hard for me to call him a bastard, but i do believe
at the end of it all i will have no other remedy but to employ
this expeditious and rapid term, suicient, since calling him a kiss ass
would be to excessively allude to his current afairs…
but i will always recall and evoke that irst eclogue of his;
he spoke of his father’s precarious farming goods, spoilt
by war and by soldiers that seized everything.
that, that is the honest Virgil that i remember and love.4
he demotic vitality of the expression is both shocking and charged. To the literary and prurient
academe of established Catalan culture, forged on the central tenets of highbrow creativity and
intellectual speculation, Estellés’s vulgarity and popularism could be nothing short of anathema.
he antagonism between metropolitan afectation and provincial commonness is, of course,
accentuated by the dialectical dimension between the comparatively sot phonetics of central
Catalan and the coarse austerity of the Valencian dialect.
he belligerance might be further exempliied by a poem written on the death of Carles
Riba in 1959 which marked the conclusion of an epoch of conventional poetic practice or, as
Arthur Terry has it: “the Symbolist tradition seemed to have come to an end with its most dis-
tinguished practitioner” (Terry 2003, 104). Rather than elegiac, the Valencian’s reaction is far
more dubious to the passing of this leading light of Catalan letters who was revered generally
as “a irst-rate intellectual” (Ferrater 2007). In “Mort i espant de Carles Riba” (Death and fright
of Carles Riba), however, any putative sympathy for this departed is promptly dissipated by the
most grotesque of imagery and register as it becomes apparent that the poem is directed more
towards eliciting a rival set of aesthetic values than any doleful lament: the coarse unsophistica-
tion of the writer from Burjassot as opposed to the sublimely erudite Professor of Greek of the
University of Barcelona.
You were not made to see death,
the ugly face of the cruel whore
– a hanging eye and the broken mouth
4. “em costa dir-li ill de puta, però em pense que al / remat no tindré altre remei que emprar aquest terme /
expeditiu i ràpid, suicient, car dir-li llepaculs seria / al·ludir massa concretament als seus afers actuals... //
però jo sempre recordaré i evocaré aquella primera ègloga seua; / parlava dels precaris béns agrícoles del
seu pare, fets malbé / per les guerres i pels soldats que tot s’ho varen incautar. / aquest, aquest és l’honest
virgili que jo recorde i estime” (Estellés 1982, 279).
the bloated belly and fallen stockings –

you sweet neighbor of sunset cypresses…
Ah, you, so clear, delicate, most subtle.
Oh what a moment of destruction and abandon.
I cry for you, for the moment of your
death, a death any other.
You were not made to see Death,
the ugly face of the Supreme Whore,
you, inhabitant of Grace, son of… 5
he malicious idiomatic counterpoint juxtaposes the rival aesthetic ideologies. he down-to-

earth colloquial expression and corporality expose the genteel vulnerablity of the academic
whose passing is in no way signiicant – “una mort com aquesta o aquella” – but merely irrel-
evant: with the cerebral intricacy of his philosophy entirely out of place when paired with the
corporal vulgarity of the mortal encounter.
Not unsurprisingly, in terms of collective consciousness, the sentiment is also far removed
from the metropolitan concept prevalent to the north of the Sénia. It is impressive, for example,
to note that the word by Estellés to indicate collective consciousness is, signiicantly, not nation
but poble. he choice is crucial given that in Catalan the word for “people” has the additional
meaning of “town” or “village” which thus posits an immediate contrast with the city. In this
respect, the enormous Mural del País Valencià (Mural of the Valencian country, 1996) – Estel-
lés’s defense of Catalan identity of the local community – is essentially a celebratory evocation
of towns throughout the limits of the Valencian geography. One of the most moving poems on
this subject reiterates the point appropriately:
You will take on the voice of a people,
and it will be your people’s voice,
and you will be, always, people…
What matters is the consciousness
of being nothing, if not people.6
hough never disinclined to celebrate the nature of his city, Valencia is at no time allowed to
become the emblem of national diference as in the manner of Barcelona. he Cants a Valèn-
cia (Songs to Valencia, 1984) refer more speciically to the signiicant presence of the location
from antiquity onwards. And in other writings, particularly in the eclogues, it is precisely the
proletarian experience which is celebrated in the names of streets and squares and the common
activity observed within:
5. “No estaves fet per veure la Mort, / el rostre lleig de la puta cruel, / – un ull penjant i la boca rompuda /
el ventre inlat i les mitges caigudes – , / tu dolç veí dels xiprers al crepuscle… / Ah, tu, tan clar, delicat,
subtilíssim. / Ai quin moment d’enderroc i abandó. / Plore per tu, per l’instant de la teua / mort, una mort
com aquesta o aquella. / No estaves fet per veure la Mort, / el rostre lleig de la Puta Suprema, / tu, l’habitant
de la Gràcia, ill…” (Estellés 1974, 95)
6. “Assumiràs la veu d’un poble, / i serà la veu del teu poble, / i seràs, per a sempre, poble… / Allò que val és
la consciència / de no ser res si no s’és poble.” (Estellés 1976, 39)
I went through Valencia, on the streets of Valencia.

You would modestly say the name of some street,
Pelayo, Gil i Morte… With such intensity
you say them, you name them, you write them!7
here is no greater contrast, for example, between Espriu’s pàtria (homeland), the grandiose
concept of the national cultural heritage stored in the mausoleum of Sinera, and the vulgar life
of the collective as deined in the Llibre d’exilis (he book of exiles), written in 1956 and of a far
more radical bent.
I see, from the terraces – the domestic terraces
where family things, one by one, are displayed,
conjugal things, hygenic things,
and this with a tremulous syntax of the wire –
my pure Homeland, my only Homeland.8
In many ways, the banality of this return to the particular and immediate as opposed to the
monumental and mythical is reminiscent of the equally marginalized, proletarian and female
perspective adopted by Rodoreda in her contemporary tour de force, La plaça del Diamant (he
time of the doves, 1962). he antagonism articulated by Estellés, however, is more provincial
and dialectal as regards the canon, a point duly isolated by Joan Fuster. Not unexpectedly, the
divergence in idiom, ideology, and aesthetics is underlined with all the bluntness of an Estel-
lesian trope as the critic reveals a wounded sense that the lumpenproletarian essence of the
Valencian experience is misunderstood or, to say the least, unappreciated by the metropolitan
academy north of the Sénia river:
And Pompeu Fabra: to what point was the “koine” of the Principat’s “enlightened middle class”
valid to Estellés? […] he tragic historical evolution of the Catalan language makes this appre-
hension of mine that I’m now confessing to be logical: will they understand these poems, will
the people of contiguous dialects understand as they should? his is still not clear to me […]
Our dialect trickles through us. Vicent Andrés Estellés shows up with some relatively dialectal
verses: of his dialect, of our dialect, and it strikes us as intimate and vibrant. How will they read
him, beyond the Ebro or the sea? Will they get to the heart of it?9
he essayist’s fears in the context of mutual appreciation and respect were not unfounded, es-
pecially when taken in light of the paucity of scholarship devoted to Estellés in particular and
7. “anava per València, pels carrers de València. / Modestament diries el nom d’algun carrer, / Pelayo, Gil i
Morte... Amb quina intensitat / els dius, els anomenes, els escrius!” (Estellés 1976, 58–59)
8. “Veig, des de les terrasses – les terrasses domèstiques / on s’exposen, per ordre, familiars assumptes, / as-
sumptes conjugals, higièniques coses, / i això amb una sintaxi trèmula, del ilferro – , / la meua pura Pàtria,
la meua sola Pàtria.” (Estellés 1974, 49)
9. “I Pompeu Fabra: ins a quin punt era vàlida per a Estellés la ‘koiné’ de la ‘mesocràcia il·lustrada’ del
Principat? [...] La tràgica evolució històrica de la llengua catalana fa que siga lògica la meua aprensió que
ara confesse: entendran aquests poemes, els entendran com Déu mana la gent dels dialectes contigus? No
ho acabe de veure clar […] Se’ns esmuny el dialecte. Vicent Andrés Estellés s’hi presenta amb uns versos
relativament dialectals: del seu dialecte, del nostre, i ens resulta íntim i vibrant. Com el llegiran ells, més
enllà de l’Ebre o de la mar? Hi arribaran al fons?” (Fuster 1972b, 26–30)
Valencian Studies in general in the universities of the Principality. Nonetheless, the preoccupa-
tion outlined by Joan Fuster, also the author of Literatura catalana contemporània (Contempo-
rary Catalan literature, 1972a) – still the inest encyclopedic and analytic study of the literary
output in Catalan of the last century throughout all its constituent areas – may also be read
more positively with regard to Eliot’s deliberations. he belligerance isolated here in terms of
aesthetics, class, and dialect corresponds exactly with the Anglo-American’s prescription for
cultural health of a nation: the “vital importance for a society of [having] friction between its
parts” (Eliot 1962, 58).
For a national culture, if it is to lourish, should be a constellation of cultures, the constituents
of which, beneiting from each other, beneit the whole. I now suggest that both class and re-
gion, by dividing the inhabitants of a country into two diferent kinds of groups, lead to a con-
lict favourable to creativeness and progress […] these are only two of an indeinite number of
conlicts and jealousies which should be proitable to a society. Friction, not only between in-
dividuals but between groups, seems to me quite necessary for civilisation. (Eliot 1962, 58–59)
Given the traumatic history of Catalonia in the modern age with all its repression, fractionaliza-
tion, and introspection, even the minimal and hesitant compliance that we have seen through-
out these pages with such an abrasive and thoroughly democratic scheme is in no small way
encouraging.
Literary and cultural production centers in Galicia (1840–1936)
Anxo Tarrío Varela
he north-western area of the Iberian Peninsula, a province which the Romans named Gallaecia
and which phonetic evolution has converted into Galicia, or Galiza, since the Middle Ages, is a
territory measuring some 29,500 km2 of which 1,200 km is coastline. Its relatively small surface
area today is slightly less than what it was as a Roman province. his is because, in 1480, Galicia
was initially divided into ive sections – one for each city represented in the Council of the King-
dom of Galicia (Santiago, Lugo, Betanzos, Tui, and Pontevedra) – then seven sections (with the
addition of A Coruña and Mondoñedo). his situation lasted until 1823, when Galicia was deini-
tively repartitioned into four provinces – A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense, and Vigo – although in 1833
Vigo was replaced by Pontevedra, following the Liberals’ arrival to power and the coronation of
Isabelle II under the regency of her mother, Mª Cristina de Borbón y Dos Sicilias. It is important
to bear these redistributions of territory in mind when embarking on an analysis of Galician
culture in general, and of its literature in particular. his reduction in land, coupled with the fact
that its literature was part of an emerging system, make for some rather surprising observations.
here are clearly many ways of relating a country’s literature with its geography – with
the spaces where its literature has grown out of – which is why there is a relative abundance of
studies and commentaries on the relationship between a natural geography or town and literary
works, whereby the former has served as a poetic or ictional backdrop for the latter. hus on
the one hand we have the lyrical exaltation of Galicia’s natural landscapes, such as the latlands,
A Terra Cha (he lat land), recreated in the verses of the revered poets Manuel María (Outeiro
de Rei, 1929–2005), Darío Xohan Cabana (Roás Costeiro, 1952–) and Xesús Rábade Paredes
(Cospeito, 1949–), the irst of whom chose the “Poetas da Terra Cha” (Poets of the lat land) as
the subject of his formal address to the Real Academia Galega (Galician Royal Academy) on
the occasion of his admittance; the Serra do Courel, the mountain range that has inspired the
inest verses of Uxío Novoneyra (Parada de Moreda, 1930–99) and the best iction of Ánxel Fole
(Lugo, 1903–86); the rough and barren lowland of the region of Bergantiños that the prophetic
bard Eduardo Pondal (Ponteceso, 1835–1917) looked to when composing Queixumes dos pinos
(Whimpering of the pines, 1886); the Comarca de Mondoñedo, the Episcopal city and birth-
place of poets Álvaro Cunqueiro (Mondoñedo, 1911–81), Aquilino Iglesia Alvariño (Seivane–
Abadín, 1909–Santiago de Compostela, 1961), Antonio Noriega Varela (Mondoñedo, 1869–Vi-
veiro, 1947), Manuel Leiras Pulpeiro (Mondoñedo, 1854–1912), Xosé Crecente Vega (Castro de
Rei, 1896–1948), etc.; and the Ría de Vigo, or estuary of Vigo, as sung by medieval troubadours,
most notably Martín Codax, Johan de Cangas, and Mendiño.
On the other hand, there are its cities, whose beauty, monuments, and history have cap-
tivated the interest of locals and outsiders alike. Santiago de Compostela is the favorite among
men and women writers as dissimilar as Gerardo Diego (Santander, 1896–Madrid, 1987), Gon-
zalo Torrente Ballester (Ferrol, 1910–Salamanca, 1999) and Salvador García Bodaño (Vigo, 1935)
to mention but a few of a long list of writers who have chosen this city as their literary object,
as an anthology brought out by the City Council (XAP 2004) demonstrates. Beginning with
Aymeric Picaud, attributed with having organised the Codex Calixtinus in the twelth century,
254 Anxo Tarrío Varela
the anthology takes us up to contemporary writers who have found in Santiago’s streets the
backdrop for their narratives, as is the case of Ánxel Adolfo Rey Ballesteros (Boqueixón, 1952–A
Coruña 2008) and his novel Dos anxos e dos mortos (Of angels and the dead, 1977); Carlos G.
Reigosa (A Pastoriza, 1948) and Crime en Compostela (Crime in Compostela, 1984); Román
Raña Lama (Vigo, 1960) and O crime da Rúa da Moeda Vella (he crime on Old Mint Street,
1989); and Salvador García Bodaño and his book of stories entitled Os misterios de Monsieur
D’Allier (he mysteries of monsieur D’Allier, 1992), to name but a few.
Ourense, too, has inspired many accomplished writers hailing from both the city and the
province ever since the nineteenth century, from Valentín Lamas Carvajal (1849–1906), founder
in 1876 in Ourense of the irst newspaper to be written entirely in Galician (O Tío Marcos da
Portela [Uncle Marcos of Portela]) to contemporary writers such as Bieito Iglesias (Coles, 1957)
and Francisco X. Fernández Naval (Ourense, 1956), and before them such masters and patri-
archs of Galician culture as Vicente Risco (Ourense, 1884–1963), Ramón Otero Pedrayo (Ou-
rense, 1886–1976), Eduardo Blanco Amor (Ourense, 1897–Vigo, 1979), Carlos Casares (Ourense,
1941–Vigo, 2002), and many more. Similarly A Coruña, although to a lesser extent, provided
the setting for poetic narratives and novels written by Emilia Pardo Bazán (A Coruña, 1851–Ma-
drid, 1921) and, more recently, Manuel Rivas (A Coruña, 1957), in Os libros arden mal (Books
burn poorly, 2006); as has Vigo, a large city that lends itself particularly well to the genre of the
thriller, as Manuel Forcadela (Tomiño 1958), amongst others, has proven to great efect.
his may be a common characteristic of emerging cultures, for it is certainly true that in
Galicia there is a propensity to look to local sources for creative inspiration. Historical charac-
ters, writers, and events are oten recreated in the writer’s town or city of birth, so that there is a
plethora of small centers of cultural production. Indeed, the way that Galicia’s spatial organiza-
tion has inluenced its cultural system is worthy of a more in-depth analysis than the scope of
these pages allows for. he small ishing town of Rianxo is thus associated with the medieval
troubadour Paio Gomez Chariño and artists and writers born there, such as Alfonso Daniel Ro-
dríguez Castelao (Rianxo, 1886–Buenos Aires, 1950), Manuel Antonio (Rianxo, 1900–Asados,
1930) and Rafael Dieste (Rianxo, 1899–Santiago de Compostela, 1981); Padrón, by virtue of the
Jacobean tradition, is associated with St. James the Apostle, but also with the melancholy bard
Macias the Enamored (c. 1360–90), the great poet Rosalía de Castro (Santiago de Compostela,
1837–Iria Flavia, 1885), and with Camilo José Cela (Iria Flavia, 1916–2002), Galicia’s only No-
bel prize winner; Celanova is the birthplace of the poets Manuel Curros Enríquez (Celanova,
1851–Havana, 1908) and Celso Emilio Ferreiro (Celanova, 1912–Madrid, 1979), and so is a refer-
ence point for cultural meetings and events; Vilanova de Arousa is associated with Valle-Inclán
(Vilanova de Arousa, 1866–Santiago de Compostela, 1936). And the list goes on of towns and
cities defying globalization in favour of localization, producing cultural acts and publications
on the subject of local renowned literary igures and historical milestones, such as the defeat of
the English navy at A Coruña in 1589 thanks to the heroic achievements of María Pita, or the
defeat of Napoleon’s troops in Pontesampaio, near Vigo, in 1809.
In fact, this connection with natural geography continues to hallmark even the younger
generations, as a poetry group called Costa da Morte (he coast of death) exempliies. It is com-
posed of young men and women poets brought together round the fact of having been born in
any one of the many towns which dot the coastline of the same name.
Literary and cultural production centers in Galicia (1840–1936) 255
Yet it is also clear that the growing relationship between literature and locality is largely a
relection of a perceived need to change the way literary history is narrated (Cabo 2003). I shall
try to discuss this by taking the city as a unit of cultural and literary production and some of
the main cities in contemporary Galicia as my framework, whereby “contemporary” means the
period stretching from 1800 to today, although for this work I will focus predominantly on the
periods 1840–61, known as the Prerrexurdimento (Pre-renaissance period); 1862–06, the years
of the Rexurdimento (Renaissance period); and from 1916–36, generally known as the Época Nós
(the period of the group “Us”).
When talking about “centers of cultural production” I do not mean it in the sense that they
have today (as speciic and physical places or architectural “containers” designed for the realiza-
tion of various activities) but rather as broader and less clearly deined spaces, that is, towns and
cities where, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, popular activities were carried out
constituting what can be loosely described as cultural production: academies, lyceums, discus-
sion groups, printing presses, athenaeums, etc. First, however, let us take a look at some of the
characteristics deining the relationship between literary production and urban space. In mod-
ern Galician culture there is an obvious link between urban growth and literary development,
although this statement is somewhat undermined by the absence in Galicia of great cities like
Berlin, Paris, New York, or Barcelona where much more proitable, stable, dynamic, and avant-
gardist forms of cultural production have always been possible.
he consequences of this limitation are borne out by the fact that during the Época Nós,
for example, publishing initiatives had a hard time surviving and even then it was thanks to vol-
untary aid. Cultural projects in general and literary ones in particular almost always lacked the
nerve to take on board the avant-gardist proposals issuing from Europe in all their radicality.
Unsurprisingly then, abstract art never took hold in Galicia, and certain subjects, speciically
erotic and sexual ones, were never addressed in either the visual arts or in literature, although
the erotic novel did have its moment thanks to writers such as Felipe Trigo and to collections of
short erotic stories (Litvak 1993, 11–79) such as La novela pasional (he pasional novel), whose
cover illustration revealed a somewhat subversive attitude with regard to prevailing bourgeois
tastes. Such limitations were probably an unavoidable consequence of the Galician nationalist
discourse of the time, the architects of which, determined as they were to devise an ethno-
aesthetic with which to diferentiate Galician anthropological art, culture, and identity, could
not allow certain provocations or “excesses” if they wished to succeed in winning the hearts and
minds of a society that was still very backward and conditioned by the morality of the Catholic
church. his is why igurative art always held the upper hand in Galicia and why literature, art,
and sculpture were unable to challenge Catholic values and were conined to the more accept-
able sidelines of artistic renovation during the nineteenth century, partaking in little more than
the move away from photographic mimesis. Had a large city existed, things would surely have
turned out quite diferently.
Nor must we forget the tension that has long characterised manifestations of Galician cul-
ture, for ever since at least the second half of the iteenth century, culture has either been pro-
duced in Galician or in the imposed language – Castilian. Given that the cultural system had
been irmly locked in favour of Castilian, this tension did not openly manifest itself until 1916,
and since then, the situation has gradually reversed to the point when now it is quite rare to
hear Castilian used in cultural acts, whether by representatives of public institutions or private
companies. So although in this article I focus on Galicia’s literary output, one cannot overlook
the hegemony of Castilian in the literary systems of Galicia and Spain during the periods under
study here.
It is also worth remembering that, as in Europe, Galicia’s cities underwent profound chang-
es in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the end of the eighteenth century over 90% of
Galicia’s population was rural. he most important cities then were Santiago de Compostela – a
religious, political, and academic center – and Ferrol, a marine base. he level of urbanization
by the mid-nineteenth century was just 4.2%, a igure well below the national average and one
of the lowest in Europe.
In 1860 Galicia had an estimated population of 1,800,000 inhabitants, and by 1900 this
igure barely reached 2 million (Eiras Roel 1996). It is important to realise the extent to which
Galicia was being drained of its people due to the fact, that, during the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, huge numbers of Galicians were emigrating to Central and South America (mainly to
Cuba and Argentina) to settle in Havana and Buenos Aires, cities that were soon to become
important centers of cultural production, fostering very strong links with Galicia’s inland and
coastal regions thanks to the creation of a network of societies called Centros Gallegos (Gali-
cian centers), two of the most prominent being those of Havana and Buenos Aires. Both of
these published many books, magazines, newspapers, and publications that helped to spread
Galician culture throughout Central and South America. It is worth pointing out here that a
monolingual Galician magazine called A gaita gallega saw the light of day in Havana in 1885
under the initiative of Manuel Lugrís Freire (Sada, 1863–A Coruña, 1940) and Ramón Armada
Teixeiro (Santa Marta de Ortigueira, 1848–Havana, 1920). Some scholars (Kiberd 1995) believe
that this extraterritorial dimension as pursued by certain cultures provides information that is
vital for understanding them in depth, and in Galicia’s case this is certainly true, particularly
during General Franco’s dictatorship, since it was the exiliados who continued the work begun
in Galicia during the Época Nós.
As regards the printing press (always an indication of cultural production) in “continental”
Galicia, we know that perhaps before 1491, and certainly ater that year, the Castle of Monterrei
in the province of Ourense was the scene of much typographical production. Several incu-
nabula that were printed there make explicit reference to the place as housing one of the irst
printing presses in the Peninsula to possess a complete musical typography (Prada Allo 1992).
he only Galician city, however, to pursue a steady publishing activity during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries was Santiago de Compostela, where the existence of presses used by
the Church facilitated production, those of the Franciscan Friars and the Archbishopric being
good examples of this (Cabano Vázquez 2002, 25). he spread of the press was later boosted by
the abandonment of the political structures erected during the Antigo Réxime (Old Regime)
and by the political vicissitudes resulting from the Cortes de Cadiz (1812) and the Trienio Lib-
eral (1820–23), turning points in history which brought about the liting, albeit temporarily, of
the old laws regulating the printing and the censorship of original manuscripts submitted for
publication. It is worth noting that the Cortes de Cadiz of 1810 proclaimed the abolition of exist-
ing censorship before passing the Freedom of the Press Decree in the Constitution of 1812. he
liting of the bans led to a proliferation of graphic art presses all over Galicia in the irst third
of the nineteenth century. Later, with the establishment of the Liberal State (1833–68) under
Isabelle II (Madrid, 1830–Paris, 1904) and coinciding with the new paradigms inspired by the
Romantic movement, press activity spread to Vigo, Pontevedra, Betanzos, Tui, and Monforte
(Cabano Vázquez 2002). Newspapers and books quickly became indispensable tools in the dis-
semination of ideologies and scientiic advancement. As far as literature was concerned, the
expansion of the press obviously helped to turn it into something more than just a minority
interest, attracting increasing numbers of readers to make it the mass phenomenon that it is
today. As Manuel Soto Freire (Lugo, 1826–97), a leading typographer of the nineteenth century
and historian of the press in Galicia, put it: “Without the press, science, history, and ine litera-
ture would still be the preserve of a limited number of people, as they were in the past” (Soto
Freire 1998, 25).
he prerrexurdimento (1840–61)
When in early April 1846 a string of uprisings took place all over Spain against the dictatorship
of General Narváez, the protests in Galicia acquired pro-Galician political undertones even
though Commander Miguel Solís y Cuetos (San Fernando, Cádiz, 1816–Carral, 1846), who led
the detachment in Lugo and was defeated by Isabelle II’s army in the battle at Cacheiras, a vil-
lage near Santiago de Compostela, was not Galician. He nonetheless became the irst modern
hero – aged only thirty – of the Galician cause, along with fellow partisans shot near Carral,
on the outskirts of A Coruña, where an imposing granite monument has stood since 1904 in
memory of the so-called “Martyrs of Carral” constituting the irst symbolic landmark of mod-
ern Galician history.
Around the same time that Solís was rallying support, Antolín Faraldo (Betanzos, 1823–
Granada, 1853) and members of his university circle in Santiago de Compostela proclaimed
through the newly constituted Junta Provisional del Gobierno de Galicia (Provisional Com-
mittee for the Government of Galicia) that this part of the country, reduced for centuries by
the centralism of Madrid to little more than a “colony of the Court,” would rise from its state
of prostration and dejection. hus, a process of provincial construction began (which fought
for the recognition of the old Roman province of Gallaecia) and the hatching of a pro-Galician
discourse that would undergo several stages before reaching the shape it has today, with an
autonomous Galician government on an equal footing with regard to the rest of the comuni-
dades (communities) making up the Spanish state, but with the peculiarity, also shared by the
Basque Country and Catalan Countries, of having its own language and speciic cultural tradi-
tion which have warranted it the title of nacionalidad histórica (historical nationality) in the
Spanish Constitution of 1978.
Since then, the cultural and political prominence of Galicia’s principal cities (Lugo, A Coru-
ña, Vigo, Pontevedra, Ferrol, Santiago de Compostela, and Ourense) has varied, depending on
the period. Any study of Galicia’s literary and cultural history should start out from this fact.
It was in Santiago de Compostela in 1800 that the irst Galician newspaper, El Catón com-
postelano (he Compostelan reader), was set up and where, from 1840 onwards, thanks to the
decisive action of a group of university students led by Antolín Faraldo, a proliic period began
in which the pro-Galician discourse was consolidated and a number of newspapers established,
enabling the dissemination of the main tenets of the “provincialist” movement. Various period-
ical publications soon began to circulate in A Coruña carrying headlines that relected a certain
preoccupation with the afairs of the region: 1841, El idólatra de Galicia (he Galician idolater
[Santiago]), El Iris de Galicia (he Galician iris [Coruña]), Revista de Galicia (he journal of
Galicia [Santiago]); 1842, El emancipador gallego (he Galician emancipator [Santiago]), La
situación de Galicia (he situation of Galicia [Santiago]); 1843, El centinela de Galicia (he cen-
tinel of Galicia [A Coruña]); 1845, El Porvenir. Revista de la juventud gallega (he future. Journal
of the Galician youth [Santiago]), El Porvenir (he future [A Coruña]), La Aurora de Galicia
(he Galician aurora [Santiago]), El Fomento de Galicia (he growth of Galicia [A Coruña]),
among others which, while not alluding directly to the Galician context, served to articulate po-
litical thought in general and “provincialist” thought in particular, as was notably the case with
El Recreo Compostelano (he Compostelan pastime), whose chief editor was Antolín Faraldo.
he rexurdimento (1861–1906)
he prominence of Santiago, which reached its heyday on the occasion of the “Banquete
democrático de Conxo” (he Conxo democratic banquet) in 1856, gradually began to lose
ground to the city of A Coruña, which took up the cause of “provincialist” and regionalist
galeguismo during the celebrations, in 1861, of the irst “Juegos lorales” (Floral games) of the
Modern Age, celebrated in emulation of the “Jocs lorals” or “Jocs de la Gaia ciència” (Gay sci-
ence games) held in Catalonia two years earlier and entirely in Catalan (though the Galician
version difered in that it did not use the autochthonous language exclusively). he Games gave
rise to what is today considered to be the irst anthology of contemporary Galician verse, the
Album de la Caridad (Album of charity, 1862) – which included essays advocating the need to
write a History of Galicia and recreate the myth of Monte Medulio, and reproduced the Games’
award-winning poems and a long “mosaic of the verse of our contemporary Galician bards.”
he anthology inspired that emblematic igure of Galician culture, Rosalía de Castro, to write
the irst monolingual book of Galician poems, the Cantares Gallegos (Galician songs, 1863).
Curiously, it was brought out by a printer called Juan Compañel located in Vigo, for at that time
Vigo was a much smaller city than either Santiago or Ferrol and had virtually no cultural life
worth mentioning.
A Coruña became an important cultural and literary center because a fairly select group of
middle class liberal intellectuals settled there, most of whom belonged to the civil service and
were involved irst with the provincialist movement, then with the regionalist movement, and
were responsible for promoting activities designed to consolidate something as frail and incipi-
ent as the Galician cultural system of the last third of the nineteenth century. Manuel Martínez
Murguía (Arteixo, 1833–A Coruña, 1923), Eduardo Pondal (Ponteceso, 1835–A Coruña, 1917),
Benito Vicetto (Ferrol, 1824–78), Uxío Carré Aldao (A Coruña, 1859–1932), Andrés Martínez
Salazar (Astorga, 1843–A Coruña, 1926), Xosé Pérez Ballesteros (Santiago de Compostela, 1833–
A Coruña, 1918), Salvador Golpe (San Pedro de Oza, 1850–A Coruña, 1909), Evaristo Martelo
Paumán (A Coruña, 1853–1928), Florencio Vaamonde Lores (Bergondo, 1860–A Coruña, 1925),
Manuel Lugrís Freire (Sada, 1863–A Coruña, 1940), Eladio Rodríguez González (Leiro, 1864–A
Coruña 1949), Galo Salinas (A Coruña, 1852–1926), Francisco Tettamancy y Gascón (A Coruña,
1854–1921) and a few others are all key names in any research into A Coruña’s cultural heritage.
It is immediately evident that A Coruña was the favoured destination of a good deal of Galicia’s
cultural elite.
All of the above impressed a markedly liberal stamp on the city and were regular members
of a discussion group that gathered at the back of a bookshop called Librería Gallega. hey
would oten be joined by visiting eminences. he group members were irm believers in the
Celtic origin of the Galician people, and this credence was the bedrock of their discourse, lead-
ing their ideological adversaries to nickname them the Cova Céltica (Celtic cave), a term in-
tended as a parody but which they were quite happy to adopt as their own. A number of cultural
undertakings came to fruition at their instigation, most notably the Academia Gallega, founded
in 1905 and granted royal support the following year, thus prompting it to change its name to
the Real Academia Gallega. he institution was pivotal in the process of the legitimization, con-
solidation, and institutionalization of Galicia’s burgeoning literature and which, already in 1886,
Aureliano J. Pereira, in a conference given at the Círculo das Artes (Circle of arts) in Lugo, had
demanded as essential in order to “elevate Galicia’s literature and endow its intellectual move-
ment with the brilliance it needs” (A. Pereira 2006, 25). In 1895, an committee had been set up
to prepare for the creation of the Academia Galega out of an association called Folklore Gallego
(Galician folklore), chaired by Emilia Pardo Bazán. But this irst attempt failed, even though its
most salient promoters, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Ramón Pérez Costales, were the institution’s
president and honorary academic.
It must not be forgotten, however, that when the Academy was eventually set up, it was
thanks to “extraterritorial” Galicia, and speciically to the emigrants to Havana, where two en-
thusiasts of the cause, the typesetter Xosé Fontenla Leal (Ferrol, 1865–Havana, 1919) and the
poet Manuel Curros Enríquez, founded the Asociación Iniciadora y Protectora de la Academia
Gallega (Galician Academy trust) which took on the inancial responsibility and running of the
institution.
he Cova Céltica was not the only seed of the Real Academia Gallega. he bookseller Uxío
Carré Aldao stocked his shop with several titles that were harder to ind in the more conven-
tional bookshops, whose owners were reluctant to help promote Galicia’s assets and culture. He
also assisted in the setting up of the Revista Gallega (Galician journal), a mouthpiece for the
Cova Céltica’s ideas, by one of his regular clients, Galo Salinas. his, in turn, gave rise to the
creation, in 1903, of the Escola Rexional de Decramación (Regional school of declamation),
the irst, albeit ephemeral, existence of an institution of its kind in Galicia, its objective being
to foment theatre in Galician. It staged several plays written by members of the discussion
group, namely ¡Filla…! (Daughter…!), by Salinas himself, A Ponte (he bridge), Minia and
Mareiras (Heavy seas), by Manuel Lugrís Freire, and Rentar de Castromil (Rentar of Castromil),
by Evaristo Martelo Paumán. Lastly, the Cova Céltica also supported the foundation of the Liga
Gallega whose aim was to defend the moral, material, political, economic, and social interests
of Galicia.
If we look at the igures behind Galicia’s (somewhat precarious) book trade during the
second half of the twentieth century we ind that, signiicantly, A Coruña was home to almost
a third of all books published using the Galician language: of a total of 130 titles, 42 (32%) were
printed in A Coruña (Vilariño Pintos and Pardo Gómez 1981).
Such precariousness is a relection of the publishers’ failure to build up collections of
books written entirely in Galician or, at least, devoted to the subject of Galicia in either of the
languages spoken then, and now, in the region: Galician and Castilian. In fact, throughout the
nineteenth century in Galicia, there was only one publisher committed to the task of promot-
ing Galician culture in its broadest sense (political, economic, literary, etc). It was the Biblioteca
Gallega (Galician library, 1885–1901), founded in A Coruña by the archivist and scholar Andrés
Martínez Salazar along with Juan Fernández Latorre (A Coruña, 1849–Madrid, 1912), former
founder of the newspaper La Voz de Galicia in 1882, who lent his installations so that the books
could be printed. his Galician library inaugurated its collection with a Castilian piece entitled
Los precursores (he precursors) by Manuel Martínez Murguía, widower of Rosalía de Castro
who had passed away the same year as the initiative took of. he collection proved hugely sig-
niicant, for it established the reputation of a number of writers, including his wife.
Cultural life in nineteenth-century Galicia has therefore to be measured in terms of its
(predominantly Castilian-language) journalism. Of the approximately 760 periodicals that
came to light between 1850 and 1900 in both “mainland” and “overseas” Galicia, 121 originated
in A Coruña, which gives a percentage of 16% of the total, a fairly high ratio if we consider how
dispersed the press was in the various cities and towns of Galicia and the diaspora. Certainly,
barring the occasional monolingual publication in Galician, such as the aforementioned O Tío
Marcos da Portela (Ourense, 1876), O Seor Pedro (Mr. Pedro, Santiago de Compostela, 1881), A
gaita gallega (Galician bagpipe, Havana, 1885), A Monteira (he piper’s hat, Lugo, 1889), and
A tía Catuxa (Aunt Catuxa, Pontevedra, 1889), Castilian was the language of the printed word,
though many periodicals were happy to include collaborations in Galician. Interestingly, the
parameters deining the term “Galician literature” applied today are considerably narrower
than they were in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, and would exclude such
cultural icons as Manuel Murguía and Alfredo Brañas (Carballo, 1859–Santiago de Compos-
tela, 1900), both staunch defenders of regionalism, for having written the bulk of their work
in Castilian.
I shall end this overview of the cultural role played by Galicia’s cities during this period
of cultural and literary lowering known as the Rexurdimento (c. 1861–1906) by adding that
other cities, such as Ourense and Lugo, were equally outspoken and polemical in their style of
journalism (see the monolingual dailies O Tío Marcos da Portela and A Monteira, respectively)
and deserve to be studied in more detail than I can allow myself here. Pontevedra, a remark-
ably active city in journalistic terms, saw 127 periodicals brought out during the nineteenth
century (Cabano Vázquez 2002) and holds the merit of having published the irst book (albeit
in a trilingual Castilian, Latin, and Galician edition) in which Galician occupied considerably
more space than the other two languages. he book I am referring to is A gaita gallega, printed
anonymously in 1853 (though generally ascribed to Xoan Manuel Pintos) by José y Primitivo Vi-
las. Lastly, Vigo, more concerned with fomenting industry and maritime traic, engaged in very
little cultural activity during this period, but created, in 1853, what is considered to be Galicia’s
“doyen” newspaper: the Faro de Vigo (Vigo Lighthouse).
he Época Nós
When in 1916 the periodical which was to serve as the mouthpiece of the Irmandades da Fala
appeared, it was with the title of A Nosa Terra (Our land) and the subtitle Idearium da Hirman-
dade da Fala en Galicia e nas colonias gallegas de Portugal e América (Tenets of the brotherhood
of speech in Galicia and in the Galician communities of Portugal and America). he phrase dat-
ed from 1907 when it had been used by Solidaridad gallega (Galician solidarity), a highly active
political organization composed of republicans, federalist republicans, regionalists, and even
traditionalists, united in their desire to ight the local barons and foment agrarian progress. A
Nosa Terra was then written predominantly in Castilian although it did include literary collabo-
rations in Galician until its closure in 1908. When it reappeared in 1916, it was to do so entirely
in Galician. Its base was in A Coruña where, on May 18, 1916, the irst umbrella organization to
act on a pan-Galician level was formed: the Irmandades da Fala. As the subtitle suggests, it was
motivated by the awareness that much of Galicia’s population was dispersed all over the world
and that some kind of cohesive body that allowed all its emigrants to maintain a connection
with their homeland was needed. It is a constant in the history of contemporary Galicia, and
any analysis of Galicia’s cultural – and speciically literary – production cannot ignore a reality
which led to the expression of the “ith province” in reference to the city of Buenos Aires, such
were the hordes of emigrants regularly disembarking there from the mid-nineteenth century
to around 1960, when Galicians turned their attention to European cities in need of manpower.
While inevitably we shall still have to refer back to Galicia’s “extraterritorial” reality, I
would like to turn the focus of this short study primarily to the cultural and, of course, literary
development of Galicia’s seven “territorial” cities (A Coruña, Ourense, Lugo, Ferrol, Pontevedra,
Vigo, and Santiago de Compostela) during the period of the Época Nós (1916–36), when Gali-
cia underwent an important, though insuicient, modernization, ater centuries of prostration,
backwardness, resignation, and low self-esteem.
he irst two cities mentioned, A Coruña and Ourense, clearly pursued nationalist cultural
agendas but with diferent methods. he cultural agitators of the irst actively intervened in
politics (an objective also shared by the nineteenth-century federalist-regionalists of Lugo led,
until 1893, by the charismatic Aureliano J. Pereira [2006, 11–69]), in the footsteps of the city’s
liberal forerunners and of the Cova Céltica, now led by Antón Villar Ponte (Viveiro, 1881–A
Coruña, 1936), whereas in Ourense, where Vicente Risco was the central igure, the approach
was more culture-oriented and in tune with the scepticism that the city’s liberals had estab-
lished in the previous century (A. Pereira 2006, 25).
Soon ater the foundation of the Hirmandade de Amigos d’a Fala Gallega (as it was origi-
nally known), A Coruña city began to register an intense level of political and cultural activity
in all spheres, for as the association’s name relected, the concerns of its founders were not only
limited to the promotion of the Galician language but embraced a wider ield including eco-
nomics, education, art, and philosophy, that is, any discipline, science, or creative manifestation
that had some bearing on the discourse they envisaged would achieve the cohesion of their peo-
ple. heir idea was based on a nationalist theory that went beyond technical formalism and in
which Galicians would recognise their racial (read Celtic), territorial, linguistic, aesthetic, and
cultural characteristics as being diferent from those of other countries and regions of Spain.
To achieve this, the members of the Irmandade da fala in A Coruña set about inding
the resources and tools to implement their ideals; ideals which at that point in the process re-
quired a carefully constructed cultural plan, as understood in polysystems theory, albeit from a
situation of institutional weakness matched only by the zeal of its cultural and political agents.
hus, in 1918, they helped to set up the monolingual Galician publishing house ¡Terra a Nosa!
(Our land), an unprecedented step in the history of contemporary Galicia. hough short-lived,
it succeeded in laying down the direction the Irmandades was to follow; indeed, as soon as
the opportunities presented themselves, they undertook new projects that yielded interesting
and productive results – relatively speaking, of course, the limitations that shackle emerging
cultures such as this, powered by little more than the enthusiasm of a handful of people deter-
mined to put Galicia on the road to progress, should not be forgotten.
A Coruña, a city characterised, as we have said, by a strongly liberal tradition, was, by this
time, one of Galicia’s main powerhouses in the widest sense, enjoying a healthy book trade
until 1936, when the Fascists rose against the Republic. Of the approximately four hundred
books (in Galician or in Galician and Castilian) produced between 1900 and 1936 (although
more markedly from 1920 to 1936), 40% originated in A Coruña, followed by 28% in Santiago
de Compostela, 6% in Ourense, 5.5% in Ferrol, 4.5% in Pontevedra, 4% in Lugo, and a meagre
2% in Vigo (Cabano Vázquez 2002).
A Coruña also saw the creation in 1919 of the Conservatorio Nacional de Arte Galego
(Galician national art conservatory), which changed its name three years later to the Escola
Dramática Galega (Galician drama school) ater a minor crisis. he school was the only one of
its kind, barring the aborted Escola Rexional de Decramación [sic] (Regional school of decla-
mation), also based in A Coruña (1903). he crisis began when the school’s more conservative
sector rejected a work by Xaime Quintanilla (A Coruña, 1898–Ferrol, 1936) entitled Donosiña,
deeming it to be too liberal in matters such as adultery, revealing itself to be at odds with the
universalist and modernising trend of its directors. he experience was positive in that it served
to consolidate the directors’ commitment to modernize the Galician scene, while highlighting
such aspects as the formal aggiornamento, and add to its repertoire translations of works by
acclaimed European writers such as Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Strindberg, and Shakespeare.
In 1922 the Irmandade of A Coruña also propitiated the execution of a project designed
to attract readers, following the success in other parts of Spain of a series of similar initiatives
thought up by Eduardo Zamacois (Granjel 1980) in 1907, when the collection El Cuento se-
manal (he weekly short story) looded the market ofering a range of afordable, pocket-size
short stories for purchase at newstands. he Irmandade’s choice of literature was the Céltiga
collection, which irst appeared in Ferrol and looked very much like Zamacois’s except that it
was written in Galician. Some thirteen pamphlets were printed before the collection became
the responsibility, from 1924 to 1927, of the A Coruña-based publishing house Lar (Home)
(Roig Rechou 1982, 16–23), property of Leandro Carré Alvarellos and Ánxel Casal (A Coruña,
1895–Cacheiras, 1936) (Vázquez Souza 2003), where it went on to reach a very respectable sum
total of one hundred and forty-one numbers, some of which have proved to be of indisput-
able value in the renovation of Galician narrative. Lar also brought out other titles outside the
collection that embraced a number of genres and constitute fascinating examples of Galicia’s
literary patrimony.
Ater dissolving his association with Carré, Ánxel Casal set up by himself another publish-
ing house that printed almost entirely in Galician and went on to become the most emblematic
of all to emerge from the period spanning 1916 to 1936. I am referring to Nós, which, at irst in
A Coruña and from 1931 in Santiago de Compostela, turned out such all-time pillars of Galician
literature as Cousas (hings), by Castelao, O porco de pé (he standing pig) by Vicente Risco,
Os camiños da vida (he paths of life), Arredor de si (Around oneself), A romaría de Xelmírez
(he pilgrimage of Xelmírez), Fra Vernero (Brother Vernero), and O mesón dos ermos (he inn
of the wasteland), by Ramón Otero Pedrayo, and Seis poemas galegos (Six Galician poems), by
Federico García Lorca.
his catalogue of initiatives would not be complete without a mention of Alfar: Revista
Casa América-Galicia (Workshop: Journal of the American-Galician House), an avant-garde
journal established in 1920 which, though written predominantly in Castilian, boasted contri-
butions from amongst the highest ranks in the nationalist movement as well as a few texts in
Galician. Its cosmopolitan character attracted artists and writers from all walks of life, includ-
ing Dalí, Picasso, Barradas, Vicente Huidobro, and Guillermo de Torre. In the words of César
Antonio Molina, editor of the facsimile edition and author of a monographic study on this pub-
lication, “Alfar could be described as an art and literature review of the avant-garde, understood
in the broadest sense” (C.A. Molina 1984, 15).
When the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed in 1931, A Coruña was still a center of
cultural and political production of the highest order. All the main political parties represented
in the Cortes had oices there, although the Partido Galeguista, the only nationalist and exclu-
sively Galician party, moved its mouthpiece, A Nosa Terra, from its A Coruña oices, where it
had been since 1916 (X. Castro 1985), to Pontevedra, the city of the party’s foundation, in 1931. In
1933 it came under the aegis of the Editorial Nós in Santiago de Compostela.
hus, in many ways, during the Época Nós, A Coruña became a city of reference to be
visited by anyone anxious to keep abreast with Galician nationalism, even though it never grew
into a metropolis or even a symbol of Galician culture, perhaps because of its associations with
nineteenth-century liberalism and the pro-Castilianism of its middle class. he enthusiasm of
its political and cultural activists did not prove infectious enough in Ourense, whose intellec-
tuals, under the guidance of Vicente Risco, were more inclined to intervene in purely cultural
aspects for fear that political activity might contaminate the purity of their nationalist ideals.
Indeed, Ourense is another city of great interest, since some of Galicia’s most able and
forward-looking intellectuals were educated there. Until 1916 these had not shown much con-
cern for the Galician cause, being rather more absorbed as they were by exotic cultures and
by the occultist and neosophical practices that deined the aesthetic tastes of the aforemen-
tioned group. However, from 1917, some of the most decisive igures of nationalist literature and
thought during the interwar years began to emerge from this group. hey formed the Cenáculo
ourensán (Ourensan cenacle), otherwise known in Galician historiographic tradition as the Xe-
ración Nós (Us generation): Vicente Risco, Ramón Otero Pedrayo, Florentino López Cuevillas
(Ourense, 1886–1958), Antón Losada Diéguez (O Carballiño, 1884–Pontevedra, 1929), Arturo
Noguerol (Ourense, 1880–A Coruña, 1936), and lastly, Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao, one
of the greatest representatives of galeguismo of all time. Under the spiritual leadership of Vi-
cente Risco, the group founded the review Nós: Boletín mensual da cultura galega (Us: Monthly
bulletin of Galician culture), an indispensable reference in the study of the period in question.
It was a paradigm of honest, rigorous, and responsible journalism for the entire length of its
existence, from 1920 to 1936, barring a hiatus of two years (1923–25) that coincided with the in-
stallation of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–31). he review, written entirely in Gali-
cian, printed articles from the ields of literature, history, archaeology, art, and ethnography –
anything that talked exclusively about Galicia; but it also included a section of reviews of books
published in Europe and other parts. Its main oices were always in Vicente Risco’s own house.
Nós is an unavoidable point of reference in any analysis of the period concerning us. Vi-
cente Risco, who was the director of the journal, published in its pages a foretaste of his Teoría
do Nacionalismo Galego (heory of Galician nationalism), later published in book form in Ou-
rense in 1920. he doctrinaire text provided basic strategic guidance in the elaboration of na-
tionalist discourse. Moreover, one of the members of the Cenáculo Ourensán was Ramón Otero
Pedrayo, an immensely cultured and respected geographer, historian, writer on a wide variety
of subjects, and one of the inest exponents of Galician iction and essay writing up until his
death in 1976, when he was oicially recognised as “Patriarch of Galician Letters.”
In Lugo we ind an interesting and active group which, already in the nineteenth century,
had taken up the most forward-thinking positions of Galician regionalism, accommodating a
federalist and republican front whose best exponent was the aforementioned Aureliano Pereira.
From 1924 to 1936 several charismatic and committed avant-garde cultural igures came to the
fore, responsible for a number of interesting publishing experiences. Young and inspired, they
sought to bring some of the avant-garde trends prevailing in Europe to Lugo. he more out-
standing among them were the poet Luís Pimentel (Lugo, 1885–1958), the musician Xesús Bal
y Gay (Lugo, 1905–Madrid, 1993), the multifaceted writer Evaristo Correa Calderón (Neira de
Xusá, 1899–Pobra de Trives, 1986), Álvaro Gil Varela, the future great patron of Galician culture
(Lugo, 1905–Madrid, 1980), the artist Álvaro Cebreiro (A Coruña, 1903–56), and Ánxel Fole
(Lugo, 1903–86), not to mention their anonymous followers who displayed just as much talent
and dedication. hey designed and executed the publication of Ronsel (he wake), a short-
lived yet nonetheless thoroughly avant-gardist enterprise which boasted columns by Guillermo
de Torre, Cansinos Assens, Gómez de la Serna, Benjamín Jarnés, Teixeira de Pascoaes, Julio J.
Casal, and many others. Years later, half way through the Second Republic, some of these men,
whose circle now included the great poet Álvaro Cunqueiro, went on to pursue other initiatives,
among them the magazines Resol (Relection), Papel de color (Color paper), Galiza, ¡Ahora!
(Galicia, Now!) and Guión (Script), these last two forerunners of Yunque: Periódico de vanguar-
dia política (Anvil: Newspaper of political vanguardism; Alonso Girgado, Moreda Leirado, and
Vilariño Suárez 2006), etc. his is proof that Lugo, too, despite its strongly conservative streak
and small population, was an interesting center of cultural production full of young, artistically
avant-garde and let-wing Republicans.
In the case of Vigo, the city was most active, in terms of the media, from 1916 to 1936. Its
journalists were dynamic and forward-thinking; they relected the burgeoning economy of the
canning industry and maritime traic, and aired the various debates that were popular through-
out the decade in Galicia and Spain. his was particularly true of Faro de Vigo (1853–present),
Galicia (1922–26) and El Pueblo gallego (he Galician people, 1924–79). he discussion groups
attached to the last newspaper included an interesting circle of writers, such as Manuel Antonio
and Rafael Dieste, as well as artists like Carlos Maside, who mounted painting exhibitions and
somewhat invigorated the cultural life of a city which, in publishing terms, was unremarkable
during the Época Nós, although some newspapers, such as El Pueblo Gallego and Faro de Vigo,
lent their printing presses so that the occasional book could be printed. El Pueblo Gallego thus
gave life in 1926 to an important book of stories called Dos arquivos do trasno (contos do monte
e do mar) (From the imp archives [tales of the mountain and sea]), by Rafael Dieste, one of the
newspaper’s more respected collaborators; and Faro de Vigo did the same with Obras teatrales
galegas (Galician theatrical works, 1930), by Avelino Rodríguez Elías, and Pombas e gaviláns
(Pigeons and hawks, 1934), by Johan Vilanova.
Vigo’s negligible book trade, as mentioned earlier in relation to the Rexurdimento, con-
trasts with the active and forward-thinking nature of its journalism, especially notable from
1922. Arturo Casas (2000, 95) has also pointed to in his analysis of the poetry of the Época Nós,
comparing the total of twenty-four collections of poems printed in Santiago de Compostela
during that period with the two that came out of Vigo. his may be because of the importance
given by the city’s authorities to urban development and its industry. In an article published
in 1921 under the title of “Vigo: a cidade” (Vigo: the city) (Nós 2), the public-spirited journalist
Roberto Blanco Torres complained of the city’s increasing neglect of the “spiritual life”, which he
considered to be crucial in the formation of a true civitas, as well as its alienating and excessively
anglophile cosmopolitanism.
In the case of Pontevedra, capital of the province to which Vigo belongs, it also notched up
a few cultural initiatives along the lines of the Irmandades da fala. It was also the proud home
of Castelao, the multifaceted man whose drawings in the Madrid and Galician press during the
Época Nós had earned him considerable popularity, and who had become an indisputable point
of reference in the quest for an honest, sincere, and responsible advancement of Galicia. Such a
sentiment is what led him to engage in politics during the Second Republic and then seek de-
initive exile, passing away in Buenos Aires in 1950 ater professing for the last time his eternal
love for Pontevedra. For in Pontevedra Castelao, along with another key igure of the political
and cultural scene of the Época Nós, the professor of Philosophy Antón Losada Diéguez, had
founded the Coral Polifónica de Pontevedra (Polyphonic choir of Pontevedra), which in 1927
was joined by Alexandre Bóveda, another igure central to the history of the Second Republic
in Galicia for his role in the writing of the Estatuto de Autonomía (Statute of autonomy) and his
subsequent murder by the Fascists in 1936. hree names – Castelao, Losada Diéguez, and Bóve-
da – whom we imagine must have coincided oten and engaged in the debates held daily in the
Café Méndez Núñez or at Losada’s home, would, by themselves, be enough to guarantee Pon-
tevedra a place in the annals of Galician culture. But the city also saw the birth of the Museum
of Pontevedra, the Sociedade Coral e Polifónica de Pontevedra, the study grants of the Deputa-
ción Provincial, the Seminary of Galician Studies (which moved to Santiago in 1923), as well as
two very interesting magazines. One was the short-lived Alborada (Dawn), founded in 1922 by
Luís Amado Carballo and Xoán Vidal Martínez. It was widely distributed and some of Galicia’s
most pre-eminent writers, such as Amado Carballo himself, Ramón Cabanillas (Cambados
1876–1959), Castelao, Losada Diéguez, Vicente Risco and Manuel Antonio contributed articles.
he other magazine was Logos. Boletín Católico Mensual (Logos. Catholic monthly bulletin)
and was somewhat longer-living (1931–36). It was the brainchild of Antón Losada Diéguez and
Ángel Amor Ruibal, who both died before the irst number was brought out. It was continued
by a group of young culture enthusiasts, the most outstanding of whom was Xosé Fernando
Filgueira Valverde (Pontevedra, 1906–96), its chief editor, valuably assisted by Antonio Iglesias
Vilarelle (Santiago de Compostela, 1889–Pontevedra, 1971), co-founder of the magazine, and by
the collaborations of leading Catholic writers such as Vicente Risco and Ramón Otero Pedrayo.
Santiago de Compostela was, during this period, the symbolic center of the nationalist
cause, largely because of its equidistance with respect to the other Galician cities and because
of its Jacobean tradition which, through the igure of its eponymous Apostle St James, was cele-
brated on the saint’s patron feast day, July 25, known as Galicia’s Day. In 1919 Santiago hosted an
assembly of the Irmandades da fala during which the brothers Antón and Ramón Villar Ponte,
Antón Losada Diéguez, Vicente Risco and Ramón Cabanillas, among others, agreed to convert
the day of the Apostle St James to Galicia’s Day, to take efect the following year. A Nosa Terra
celebrated July 25, 1920 as the irst Galicia’s Day, referring to it as a date for the “remembrance
of the natural Fatherland which, since ancient times, as it is now and shall forever be, the only
true homeland of man.” he irst few years saw celebrations all over Galicia and even abroad,
with music and pamphlets propagating the nationalist ideology. A Nosa Terra extolled the cel-
ebration of July 25 and the use of the Galician language. he sense given to “Día de Galicia” was
one of coming together, communion, and joy… for all Galicians: “an external act so that many
of our compatriots may realise what they are and understand that they have a motherland to
which they can return it they wish to be anything. hey will thus awake from their slumber and
work towards a glorious future.” It was a day of faith in the time ahead, in the strength of the
“race,” and in all Galicians.
Naturally, no reference to Santiago de Compostela is complete without a mention of its
university, which, at that time, was the only one in Galicia. Dating from 1495, such an asset
marked the city in a special way, as did the fact that it was also a metropolitan see, with all that
this entails in terms of cultural and religious activity. And so it was that on October 12, 1923,
following a visit to Castro de Ortoño, the place where Rosalía de Castro spent her childhood,
in the vicinity of Santiago, that a group of nine students founded the Seminario de Estudos
Galegos (Seminary of Galician Studies), an institution attached to the University of Compostela
which brought together professors and students, the most outstanding members of the pro-
Galician movement, and many of Galicia’s most learned coteries. Heading the various sections
were the most prestigious intellectuals and scientists of the day. It is worth pointing out that
most of the components of the Seminary were not from Santiago, and either settled in the city
or came frequently to attend meetings, which is an indication of the increasing importance
Compostela was gaining during this period in the ield of culture. Ater numerous ups and
downs, in 1930 the Seminary was given a space of its own in the Pazo de Fonseca, part of the
University (Fernández Cerviño 2006), and was able to devote itself fully to the tasks it had set it-
self, which proved vital in the modernization of the University of Santiago. It brought out many
publications dealing with the most diverse aspects of Galician culture and based on preliminary
studies inspired by scientiic trends in Europe, particularly in France and Germany. As the years
passed, the institution attracted some of Galicia’s most brilliant minds, and their admission was
the subject of ceremonial acts of great symbolic efect. With the Second Republic under way,
the University continued to lead the way in many areas, in contrast with the languor that had
characterised its academic life in preceding centuries, with the exception of occasional mo-
ments during the nineteenth century.
Lastly, it is worth remembering two signiicant facts which exemplify the importance San-
tiago de Compostela was gaining with regards to galeguismo: in 1931 the prestigious publishing
company Editorial Nós, the irst of its class in terms of the production of books in Galician
language, moved from A Coruña to Santiago under the management of Ánxel Casal who, at
the time of its forced closure in 1936, had a collection of seventy-three published titles, includ-
ing the last work written by Federico García Lorca, Seis poemas galegos (Six Galician poems,
1935), which appeared in December 1935. Casal was murdered by the Fascists on a roadside near
Santiago, the city of which he was Mayor at the time, on the same day that García Lorca was
assassinated: August 18, 1936.
Secondly, in 1933, Santiago became the printing place of A Nosa Terra, the mouthpiece of
the Partido Galeguista, whose core members represented the maximum expression of the cul-
tural and political agenda and its intervention in the politics of the Spanish state, at that time
plural, republican, secular, and federalist on the part of the Galician, Basque, and Catalan na-
tionalists, but which would all come to pieces under the dictatorship of General Franco in 1939.
From Iberia to Africa
he construction of a literary city
Inocência Mata
A city-state originates then so far as I can see, because the individual is not self-suicient, but
has many needs which he can’t supply himself.
Plato
he center/periphery dynamic in the world of the Portuguese language
Some years ago, a statement by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto was instrumental in the
proliferation of clichés dealing with both his verbal inventiveness as well as with the reairma-
tion of the imperialism of the Portuguese language, as opposed to the proliferation of diference:
“I ind a motherland in my Portuguese language” (Público, January 16, 2000). his statement
certainly synthesizes the philosophy of liberating empowerment regarding the Portuguese lan-
guage in Africa, even when taking into account this writer’s extreme dedication to the Portu-
guese language, a commitment which he emphasizes on several occasions. his is heightened
given his ethnic and sociocultural background, and the journey which he describes as being
more inside the language than within narrative territory (Laban 1998, 3:1016). As is oten the
case for someone with a certain degree of media inluence such as this Mozambican writer, such
an unusual and notable statement is efusively lauded. Normally, however, few will take the
trouble to delve into the implications of what has been said.
his is what appears to have happened with this statement; it has mirrored the fate of
Pessoa’s original dictum “my motherland is the Portuguese language,” which underwent in its
time the same larger-than-life reading. he generalized interpretation that spread is that the
“motherland of language” blanketed all other entities constituting the ample “imagined com-
munity,” thereby erasing the context of the famous phrase, which pointed toward a sense which
was opposed to the nationalist fervor that resulted from the language being used as an imperial
sign. In fact, speaking with Michel Laban, Mia Couto expresses this preoccupation – referring
to works prior to 1998 as an example – with “taking this possibility for play, experimentation,
and recreation to its extreme, not only in the Portuguese language, but in a language that in the
end is only mine, and for which I must assume responsibility!” (Laban 1998, 3:1016–17).
Despite being unable to conclude whether this is the meaning of Couto’s claim or not, the
statement points to the interpretative deconstruction of the idea of motherland, identifying lan-
guage as the motor of this institution and, therefore, as an important element of this discussion.
he proposal for the deconstruction of the idea of the “motherland of language” introduces the
binomial language/expression into a discussion of the path of dispersion of this Iberian lan-
guage in Africa. hrough this structure it is possible to observe the creative strategies of African
cultures, which, for historical reasons, see themselves becoming internationalized in a language
irst imposed upon them (now appropriated and made native in those spaces) and which then
generated the language of liberation through its calibanesque dynamic. It was within this locus
that a cartography began to form, establishing a dialogue, at times tense, with the original locus.
From Iberia to Africa 269
hus, any generalizing designation, such as the term Lusofonia, which encompasses the Portu-
guese-speaking world with an incontrovertible linguistic economy, even though it can function
politically, and especially ideologically, will weaken the universe of non-European speakers of
the native languages. Its designation parallels other, more imposing, hegemonic forces such
as the French, the English, and the Spanish-speaking worlds. If the imperial and subordinat-
ing “temptations,” exposed by both Eduardo Lourenço and Alfredo Margarido, as well as by
Fernando Cristóvão (in quite diferent ways), are not eradicated, then this space, having since
acquired the name Lusofonia, will not potentiate the diferences that make up its added value,
in spite of the fact that Africans are cultivating their own identitarian territory in Portuguese,
as Mia Couto claims to be the case for Mozambique (2001, 349).
he exclusivity of the determinant “Portuguese language,” in a universe in which the ma-
jority of the citizens in question are not Portuguese speakers, gives credence to those who claim
that a colonial order still exists, only now with new actors, through the indigenization of a co-
lonialism that no longer needs colonists (M. Couto 2001, 349). Mia Couto goes even further in
denouncing the hegemony and exclusivity of the Portuguese language as a “language of culture,”
by considering that many who gravitate towards power (political, sociocultural, and economic)
are only capable of conceiving communication in Portuguese: “Portuguese is the language of
that minority which dreams of and thinks up the national project, the minority which manages
cross-breeding and keeps exchanges alive with the world” (M. Couto 2001, 352).
As one can see, this situation has been a cherished one for the colonizing powers and
dominant forces in Africa, who elaborate arguments and justiications regarding the status of
the Portuguese language in Africa. In this context, it is itting to recall the words of Alfredo
Margarido, who airms in A Lusofonia e os lusófonos: novos mitos portugueses (Lusofonia and
Lusophones: New Portuguese myths):
he creation of Lusofonia seems destined to interrupt the controversial dialogue with Spanish,
even if it attempts to avoid the collisions: Lusofonia is only the result of Portuguese expansion
and of the language that this operation had amply spread throughout the world. […] he cre-
ation of Lusofonia, whether dealing with language or space, cannot be separated from a certain
messianic burden that seeks to assure the uneasy Portuguese, if not of a promising future, then
of reasons and unreasons for defending Lusofonia. (Margarido 2000, 11–12)
In efect, the insistence upon Lusofonia, as if it were an incontestable cultural given, seems to be
closely connected to the territorial design imposed by the former colonial powers. Nevertheless,
it is indisputable that it is mainly due to the Portuguese language that the peoples of Angola,
Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe identify and recognize
each other in their literatures alongside those of Brazil and Portugal. And yet, in spite of this, it
is not easy to avoid shiting the conversation – legitimate, it must be said – onto the hegemonic
and even glottophagic function that the Portuguese language still carries. In one sense, it is
marked by exclusivity in oicial meaning and communication, as well as in socializing practices
and in the expression of oicial culture. In another sense, the arguments center around the
inexistence or ineiciency of linguistic policies that could make African languages “useful” and
digniied, rather than merely being cosmetic identitarian operations used in political dema-
gogy. Accordingly, the only national space in which the Portuguese language does not promote
270 Inocência Mata
inequality and exclusion, nor function as a language of power is, paradoxically, Portugal – the
mother country of the language.
Speaking the language in which one is spoken: he past still has a future
Be that as it may, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe stated in a 1975 article entitled “he Af-
rican writer and the English language” that he did not think it necessary, or even desirable, for
an African writer to learn the English language so as to use it as a native speaker, as would ap-
parently be the case for a British, North American, Australian, or New Zealand writer (Achebe
1993, 433). However, Achebe’s words do not seem to apply to the Portuguese language, unless
considerable ideological engineering is employed. Recalling the controversy with the Kenyan
born Ngugi wa hiong’o (1986), I believe that Chinua Achebe’s statement invites several inter-
pretations, one of which I would like to tap into here: a linguistic competence out of touch with
the cultural, psychological, or even landscaped and mesological reality, is alienating and useless.
Although Achebe’s statement seems to neglect the place in which the Portuguese-speaking
African writer positions him/herself regarding the Portuguese language, my relection corre-
sponds to a similar linguistic philosophy, even if I assume that the Portuguese-speaking Afri-
can writer would not have posed the question in the same terms as those used by the Nigerian
writer. his is perhaps more due to an excessive linguistic zeal than to a real diference in the
paths leading to the conclusion that the ontology of African Portuguese is no longer the same
as European Portuguese. he former carries new embedded “functions” in the measure that it
responds to diferent necessities. In short, “the past still has a future!” (Lourenço 2004, 161). he
African who speaks the Portuguese language is at the same time spoken by it – to use once more
the formula of Eduardo Lourenço. In other words, the African proceeds to construct his/her
very own speech in a conlictive situation of diference and continuity with the colonial system
of social exclusion.
From ancient Iberia, to tropical and equatorial longitudes, the Portuguese language is
transformed into another language, which sparks the beginning of a constellation of diference.
he multiple uses of the same linguistic vehicle – and of diferent variants of the same tongue –
make up a linguistic cosmogony and a galaxy of cultural languages. hus, in contact with other
languages, submitted to subaltern status in the game of socialization, its metamorphosis began
to become the basic material for, and not merely a simple instrument of, cultural representa-
tion. It is worth remembering, though this may go beyond the scope of these relections, that
no contradiction exists between cohesion and diversity: we are dealing with interculturalism,
as a means of consolidating Portuguese as the language present in the symbolic construction of
communities whose particular identities and whose diferences must be recognized. he logic
of this thinking is far from original; it dates back to the fourth century BCE:
A city-state originates then, so far as I can see, because the individual is not self-suicient, but
has many needs which he can’t supply himself. Or can you suggest any other origin for it?
[…] And when we have got hold of enough people to satisfy our many varied needs we have
assembled quite a large number of partners and helpers together to live in one place; and we
give the resultant settlement the name of a community or of a city-state. (Plato Republic, 369b)
he city is really a constellation of diferences and it is here that its essence resides, since “no
two of us are born exactly alike. We have diferent aptitudes which it us for diferent jobs” (Re-
public, 270b). his is why I consider the reference to “the language of Camões” or “the language
of Fernando Pessoa” to be exceedingly cliché, only serving to drain the discussion, making it
overly ideological. Yet, it is heard only too oten, mainly from Africans themselves when speak-
ing about the Portuguese language in Africa.
Portuguese, which is present in the majority of the literature written in the ive African
countries with Portuguese as their oicial language, has always been, as the colonizing language,
the sole means of expression used by the administration. It is also the language of the press, ed-
ucation, and oicial socialization (that is, it was the only language which allowed one to climb
the social ladder). Owing to Portuguese colonial cultural policies, the Portuguese language
worked as a language of assimilation, and was thus a means of cultural uprooting. It exerted a
strange glottophagic efect that was strengthened by measures forbidding the use of local and
creole languages during colonialism. he unequal power relationship between these two groups
(the Portuguese language and the Others) ended up curtailing the development of the latter and
imposed conditions on the symbolic representations that any language has: that of expressing
cultural and historical interpretations of reality, in addition to its communicative function. We
all agree that a language develops through the use it is given by its speakers. On the other hand,
languages are not ixed entities and they do die: language immortality is a myth that universal
history has come to deny. he UNESCO has revealed the fact that languages systematically die
on an almost annual basis. It is therefore common knowledge that the measure of a language’s
vitality resides in how oten it is used and whether it is useful, above all in the technological age
in which we are now living. In his book Linguistique et Colonialisme (Linguistics and colonial-
ism), the linguist Jean Calvet refers to productive forces as a factor stimulating language devel-
opment and concludes that “each society has the language of its production networks” (1974, 39).
Nevertheless, and not withstanding the deep-seated cultural changes that the imposition
of European languages – Portuguese in this case – caused throughout the length and breadth
of Africa, the languages were appropriated and nativized. In this, cleaved open by the desire for
emancipation, a route to wakening awareness about the airmation of identity was mapped in
what Amilcar Cabral took to be “the irst step of the liberation movement” (Cabral 1976, 227).
Like a petard (the metaphor used by Makhily Gassama [1978, 44]), “a war trophy” (Luan-
dino Vieira), or a calibanesque tool, the Portuguese language today has become the language
of millions of Africans who live their lives in diferent ways and update their own historical,
geographical, social, and ethnic diferences which yield diferent senses, lavors, values, and
knowledge. he formation of a literary city presupposes the construction of complementary
connections among the languages that should be given the status of citizenship (something that
the Brazilian dictionary Houaiss da Lingua Portuguesa and the Portuguese dictionary pub-
lished by Academia das Ciências have, to some extent, already done), because these languages
reside in the cultural city where the literatures of these Portuguese-speaking countries have
emerged of. In addition, and it cannot be repeated enough, these literatures are also written in
African languages, whether creole or autochthonous languages (Mata 2004, 350).
272 Inocência Mata
Literary networks: Reinventing the diference
Among the diferent uses a language might have, the aesthetic use ranks as one of its most dif-
ferentiating cultural practices. his is even more applicable in emergent societies, such as in
African countries with a recent colonial past, where literature becomes an extremely important
vehicle and point of reference in the construction of cultural identity. To put it another way,
literary identity becomes a fundamental component of the melting pot of identity which seeks
to become national. his is due to reasons related to the speciicity of the literary processes of
the ive African countries which have Portuguese as their oicial language. his identity, which
must always be conceived in the plural, even in less heterogeneous countries (such as Cape
Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe), is not constructed in only one language. I would perhaps
agree that, given the logic of globalism, whose dynamics make cultural domination a parallel
process, national identities are formed according to a centripetal drive, resisting the erasing of
founding elements and elaborating modules of diference, as a form of preserving the political
frontiers inherited from colonial times.
It would seem that this idea indicates a contradiction in terms, given that it is not unrea-
sonable to airm that the intelligentsia of all the diferent countries contribute to this conspira-
cy for the preservation of the hegemonic place of Portuguese (or any other European language),
even when the question can also be seen as expression of identitarian expansion of the appro-
priation process of the Portuguese language by African and Brazilian writers. In this context
it can be said that African writers have followed the poetic intention of Manuel Bandeira by
transforming “Lusiad syntax” into a language “from the mouth of the people,” “in the wrong
language of the people / he right language of the people”1 (Manuel Bandeira, “Evocação do
Recife” [Evocation of Recife, 1930]). his aim concurs with the statement by the Brazilian José
de Alencar that language is the nationality of thought just as the homeland would be the nation-
ality of the people – responding here to the Portuguese Pinheiro Chagas, who condemned in
1865 the “incorrectness” of Alencar’s use of the Portuguese language. his is both what José de
Alencar’s statement wished to convey in the nineteenth century and what the work of linguistic
reinvention by Lusophone writers so clearly demonstrates today: the need for a new linguistic
geography and a new linguistic ideology which allows the emergence of that which is intimate-
ly unique to those “imagined communities” whose popular and social culture is far removed
from the Iberian space. his “new” language brings about registers that share speciic forms of
enunciation, i.e., statements of diferent knowledge and sensations. As Luandino Vieira, one
of the great reinventors of literary language in Angola, recalls, “the linguistic dimension […]
continues to be, obviously, a valid literary element of characterization in many respects: social
medium, age, etc. his has always been so in any language or in any writer” (Laban 1991, 1:420).
African writers in Portuguese, a great many of them with this language as their mother
tongue, understood this need for the invention from the beginning. his is why the manner in
which African writers position themselves with regards to Portuguese becomes so apparent in
their works, acting like a petard against the language of cultural assimilation. Moreover, and at
a diferent (though nonetheless converging) level of relection – as will be seen later on – the
1. “em língua errada do povo / Língua certa do povo.” (Bandeira 1977, 213)
works of certain writers, revered for the “breakdown” process they hoist upon Portuguese, met-
aliterarily activate this philosophy that deals with a new ontologization of the language.
his attitude, which seems universal to all latitudes where this mapping of diferences
makes itself present, has its maximum exponent in the Angolan writer Luandino Vieira, the
pedagogue of the “linguistic nation.” Luandino Vieira, to whom the phrase “the Portuguese
language is a war trophy” is attributed, was already an established writer and eminent scholar of
linguistic deconstructionism (in the wake of Guimarães Rosa, it is oten observed, even if Luan-
dino read him ater having written Luanda [Laban 1980, 27 and 35]). hough I am not very fond
of this bellicose metaphor attributed to Luandino Vieira, as it implies a quarrel which produces
(and will produce) both victors and vanquished, it does work in a historic situation where the
vehicle of domination turns out to be a vehicle of liberation.
Despite the fact that Mia Couto is a writer widely celebrated in this respect, the most origi-
nal aspect in his work has to do with the force of orality and the recuperation of those voices in a
“state of latent vigilance […] waiting for the bell toll that will awaken them” (Laban 1998, 3:1017).
Before him, Ascêncio de Freitas, the Portuguese-born Mozambican writer, had already labored
in this area of “subversion of language […] through which Mozambican thought glimmers, this
subversion being in addition a formal attempt to literarily recreate the way Portuguese is spo-
ken by the people who are less familiar with it, e.g., the Africans expressing themselves in Portu-
guese […]. It is a fact that the literary recreation of popular speech has enough substance to add
to the plasticity of the cultivated language, being innovative and expressive” (Laban 1998, 1:189).
he challenge of representing cultural discontinuity: Examples of Uanhenga Xitu,

Luandino Vieira, and Mia Couto
Uanhenga Xitu is one of the writers who has been most productive in the representation of
cultural discontinuity resulting from colonial domination, particularly in Mestre Tamoda (he
world of “Mestre” Tamoda, 1974). More than illustrating an evident linguistic tension, the writ-
ings of Uanhenga Xitu denounce the tension present in the expression of the symbolic culture
and existence of the people, whose meaning is not drained in the Africanization of the Portu-
guese language. In efect, this tension represented as an outcome of the politics of cultural as-
similationism, also touches upon the disorder between the cultural homogeneity of Portuguese
and the existence in other non-harmonious places of conlicting diferences: Portuguese and
Kimbundu, and also city and countryside, letter and voice, modernity and tradition. Tamoda,
whom the narrator ironically calls “the new intellectual” (o novo intelectual) since he thinks he
has reached the “peak of the language of Camões” (uma sumidade da língua de Camões) in an
environment where people speak Kimbundu, behaves like a white man according to the locals:
he answers greetings disrespectfully, not deeming to look at the person who has greeted him.
“When he passes us by, he even looks like a white man…”2 Apart from this: “In the meetings
2. “Ele mesmo quando passa na gente parece já é branco...” (Xitu 1977, 27)
274 Inocência Mata
Tamoda used to attend with his colleagues, he made extensive use of unusual words, diicult
even for those who knew more than he did and who possessed a diploma of some sort.”3
herefore, more than showing linguistic tensions, or the “insuiciency” of the code as a
vehicle for otherness in the expression of Angolan realities, perhaps inherent in multilingual
contexts, it seems to me that we are faced with transdiscursive tensions. hese tensions reveal
an identitarian fragmentation in which verbal registers gain meanings that point towards a
conlictive functioning between cultural systems of diferent idiomatic vehicles (Portuguese
and Kimbundu), as we see in Manana (1974). In this text, two linguistic philosophies clash:
written knowledge (represented by Felito) and voice (represented by Manana and his family).
Ultimately, one may conclude that the work of Uanhenga Xitu consisted of the oralization of the
Portuguese verbal system, making it Angolan, transforming it into a “low, unkempt Portuguese
that the people understand” (Laban 1991, 1:130), in a play of diferentiation that aims for an
identitarian airmation by way of speech, as Michel Wieviork reminds us: “he experience of
otherness and diference has been, throughout history, accompanied by tensions and violence”
(2003, 17).
In conclusion, this situation deals with the play of diferences, a game “whose rules are set
in the social struggles by actors who […] have tasted the bitter lavour of discrimination and
prejudice within the societies they live of ” (Gonçalves and P.B.G. Silva 2002, 11). his game,
played in the ield of language, is nothing more than the universe of representations: language
is used to enhance, preserve, and simultaneously transform tradition, which functions as a safe-
house against hegemonic cultural ideology or in other words, Luziication – the conversion to
Portuguese. Needless to say, one of the goals of colonization laid down in the Second Colonial
Act (1933) was “to possess and colonise overseas dominions and […] civilize the indigenous
populations living in them.”
hus, this process of linguistic recreation goes beyond the linguistic code and is expanded,
afecting transdiscursive areas which I understand in this context as being the cultural complex
which encompasses as much onomasiology (especially onomastics and toponymy), as staging
(voice registers, phonological rhythms, and body language) and hints of musicality. hese are
the components of the textual tissue that brand mimetic forms into the narrative and allow
the reader to identify in these literary utterances the interaction between the writing and the
non-written verbal texts incorporated in local cultures which are given in Portuguese outside
of its space. Against the assimilationist project, the work of Uanhenga Xitu operates at another
level as well according to a pedagogical perspective. It goes beyond and transforms not only the
language pattern but also the very tradition itself, making it more dynamic, more suited to the
pressure of present-day demands.
A diferent process of linguistic recreation of the Portuguese language, and one just as ef-
icient in its struggle, is the strategy used by Luandino Vieira. Luandino’s literary language car-
ries the oral substance into writing: his characters are not “confused” nor have they assimilated
academic knowledge poorly in the way that Tamoda has done. Nor are they alienated and full of
3. “Nas reuniões em que estivesse com os seus contemporâneos bundava, sem regra, palavras caras e difíceis
de serem compreendidas, mesmo por aqueles que sabiam mais do que ele e que eram portadores de algu-
mas habilitações literárias.” (Xitu 1977, 11)
complexes in terms of the original culture, such as Felito is. hey are, rather, urbane and aware
that the Portuguese language is a means of ensuring their future as long as it is kept in harmony
with their cultural background. his is João Vêncio and Lourentino’s attitude. We cannot dis-
miss what Luandino Vieira once said to Michel Laban in an interview back in 1988 about the
interferences of the people’s oral language during the years of resistance which “are not visible
today because they have been perfectly integrated and have become diluted in the discourse
[…] freed from the aggressive overtones they once had” (Laban 1991, 1:418–19).
his is why I think that we cannot speak about a Babel-like dimension in Luandino Vieira’s
work like we can in Uanhenga Xitu’s writings. he reinventive uniqueness in Luandino Vieira
consists in drawing his characters out of a mostly monolingual context where they have re-
ceived regular schooling and have been brought up in an urban culture which is the natural
outcome of a transcultural process. Luandino’s characters, deconstructors of language, possess
an academic education which they use in favour of the quest for political, social, cultural, spiri-
tual, and psychological freedom. Look at the following dialogue between two young Angolans,
Tomás and Paulo, in “Em Estória de Família (Dona Antónia de Sousa Neto)” (In family story
[Dona Antónia de Sousa Neto]), one of the three stories in Lourentinho, Dona António de Sousa
Neto & Eu (Lourentinho, Dona António de Sousa Neto, and I, 1981). Here, Tomás – who thinks
that “without [António de] Assis [Júnior] there wouldn’t be any Angolan poetry” – uses the
word miseke (shantytowns) in his poetry instead of the Portuguese-inluenced word in the plu-
ral, musseques, out of respect for the “sacred heritage of our far-of ancestors”:
Tomás – [...] Have you met Assis?
Paulo – Which Assis? he musical one?
Tomás – Musical, rot! he dictionary Assis. No? Incredible! Well, my boy, number one: buy
Assis. Number two: read and meditate over the dictionary. Call me a prophet, but the truth is
this: without Assis there will be no Angolan poetry!
Temístocles – Here, here! Make room for the notable Angolans! Assis had a brilliant spirit, he
was an outgoing man…
Damasceno – A patriot of the irst order, a cultivator of this beautiful Portuguese language
which is our native Kimbundu.
Tomás – Indeed. he plural of musseque is miseke, boy. Mi-se-ke. With a K. Trade secret, and
what’s more: I corrected it before leaving home!
Paulo – But, do you mean you write poems with a dictionary?
Olga (interrupting) – What about that word you found that was so poetic, Totó?…
Tomás – It’s true! I wasn’t even looking for it, just paging through our Assis, when I came across
this terriically poetical word: masôxi. Má-sô-txi! he dictionary, young comrade, is irreplace-
able for stocking up on poetic reserves…4
4. “Tomás – (...) Conhece o Assis? Paulo – Qual Assis? O das musicadas? Tomás – Quais musicadas! O
dicionário do Assis. Não? Incrível! Pois jovem, conselho numar um: compre o Assis. Numar dois: leia e
medite esse dicionário. E talvez eu lhe pareça profético mas a verdade é esta: sem o Assis não haverá poe-
sia angolana! Temístocles – Bravo! Lugar aos angolenses ilustres! Assis era um preclaro espírito, homem
lhano em seu trato... Damasceno – Um elevado patriota, cultor dessa bela língua portuguesa que é nosso
quimbundu materno. Tomás – Pois. O plural de musseque é miseke, jovem. Mi-se-ke. Com cápa. Segredo
artesanal, ainda lhe digo: emendei antes de sair de casa! Paulo – Mas, quer dizer que faz os poemas com
o dicionário? Olga (interrompendo) – E aquela palavra, Totó, tão poética, a que encontraste?... Tomás
276 Inocência Mata
What Luandino Vieira is doing here is renovating a meta- and inter-linguistic awareness, inte-
grating language, social culture and ideology into a literary performance by resorting to discur-
sive strategies to say the (hitherto) unsayable.
In both Uanhenga Xitu and Luandino Vieira, however, the intention is anti-colonial. heir
stress is neither on the explicitly social nor adheres to a neo-realist aesthetic programme based
on the struggle and the airmation of identity, but rather, through the peculiar workings of the
language, one of the most powerful signs of cultural assimilation and therefore colonial domi-
nation. Nevertheless, in Luandino Vieira, the reinvention is also metalinguistic. It is a path to
resistance and an enhanced awareness against an unbearable surrounding environment causing
inner and spiritual pressure, and sociocultural and political oppression.
Mia Couto, on the other hand, reconciles these two reinventive philosophies, which show
a country in the process of making itself. In this setting, the networking of knowledge comes
together from diferent sources, generally moving inwards from the fringes of the nation. In
fact, the nation has only revealed itself through literacy, while the voice, if it can be termed as
such, continues to be subalternized. In A varanda do frangipani (he frangipani tree veranda,
1996), we see the thinly veiled contempt with which Vasto Excelêncio treats the old men at the
home, or the distance separating Inspector Izidine Naíta (the incarnation of Ermelindo Mu-
canga) who comes from Maputo to investigate Mucanga’s murder. We note that their behaviour
betrays both a hierarchical cultural pattern (Vasto Excelêncio), and a diferent ontology of the
(same) language that everybody else speaks (Izidine Naíta).
Little by little, I’m losing the language of men, overtaken by the ground’s accent. I leave my
last dream, the frangipani tree, on the bright veranda. I’m going to remain in the sound of the
stones. I’ll lay myself down older than the earth. From now on, I’m going to sleep, more quietly
than death.5
here is no linguistic (syntactical or morphological) “subversion” here, only a diferent nature

that is imbued in the words, a diverse symbology and imagery… Upon relecting on the object
sought by European and (black) African writers, the Senegalese author, Makhily Gassama, said
that while the latter seeks out new modes of expression, the former looks into the material.
he search does not come to them in the same way: the African writer has an African culture
behind him/her which is transmitted orally, while the European writer has a Greco-Roman
culture as a background that is transmitted in writing, passed down through the generations
(Gassama 1978, 21).
his is also Mia Couto’s metaliterary philosophy and, as has already been mentioned, he
admits that he has a privileged relationship with the language in which he makes his search
for “unruliness”, thereby building another language about the country (see Laban [1998, vol. 3]).
he translinguistic revitalization therefore takes the form of driving the multicultural signs
– É verdade! Sem querer, a desfolhar o nosso Assis, dou de caras com aquela palavra altamente poética:
masôxi. Má-sô-txi! O dicionário, jovem camarada, é insubstituível para acumular reservas poéticas.”
(Vieira 1981, 109–10)
5. “Aos poucos, vou perdendo a língua dos homens, tomado pelo sotaque do chão. Na luminosa varanda
deixo meu último sonho, a árvore do fangipani. Vou icando do som das pedras. Me deito mais antigo do
que a terra. Daqui em diante, vou dormir, mais quieto que a morte.” (Couto 1996, 152)
fermenting in Portuguese, transposed by narrative speech in the labyrinths of many tongues

as a way of resisting annihilation in memory and tradition: traditional voices, gnomic knowl-
edge (“simple forms,” according to André Jolles), obliterated stories, time torn apart by colonial
ideology, whispered voices as if plunged into the darkness of the colonial night (see Fernanda
Cavacas 1999, 2000, 2001). Whatever the case, it is yet another proliic reinvention of the signi-
ier and the signiied, an inventiveness that goes beyond that of a language, and into its very
expression and substance, and therefore arriving at speech itself.
It is interesting to think about how paradoxical the consolidation of the Portuguese lan-
guage has been throughout the world, owing to its centripetal dispersion. In fact, its scope is
mostly cultural (unlike the mostly pragmatic nature of English). It has both its preservation
and its identity as its important loci, both being necessary for the homogenization of the sys-
tem, while not doing away with the various cultural properties that the intimate uniqueness
that speakers’ – whose receptor spaces include other languages besides Portuguese – acquire
and update in using the language. A language which has the aim of conveying the philosophy
of linguistic cosmopolitism, or cosmopolitanism (in the twofold sense as Appiah understands
it [2006]), has to reconcile its globalizing dimension with the singularity of its own nature. On
the one hand, this “essence” must mean an epistemology inviting attitudes that serve diferent
goals, as much in connection with the linguistic system itself, as in its relationship with the cul-
tural system of the same language. On the other hand, it implies an exploration of the speciic
nature of each of the national varieties which literature captures in order to acknowledge and
learn about close cultural realities, strengthening familiarity with the several varieties of the
same means of cultural expression used by other peoples. he others using this language make
up the segments of a plural universe that took shape in the voyages going out from Iberia in
search of other ports of call in the odyssey of Portuguese expansion. Certainly, this was not an
expansion celebrated by everyone, since such a discovery should be bilateral, and in this must
lie one of the loci of respect and recognition. In a modiied version of the inal lines of A jangada
de pedra, we read “he peninsula did [not] come to a halt. […] he journey continues […] Men
and women […] will travel on their way, who knows what future awaits them, how much time,
what destiny.”6
6. “A península não parou […] A viagem continua […] Os homens e as mulheres, estes seguirão o seu camin-
ho, que futuro, que tempo, que destino” (Saramago 1986, 340–41). he original text does not negate this
irst sentence.
Southern Spain
Lee Fontanella
Of all the regions of Spain, the South has been the most visited, the most cultivated and de-
scribed, although it may not necessarily have been the most contemplated by Spaniards them-
selves: Castile, for reasons of identity and political focus, has sometimes enjoyed this status
from the viewpoint of the Spaniard. Largely for this very reason, the South has become a con-
summate imaginary space, celebrated (and criticized) in letters and in visual arts. he latter has
been especially true since the discovery of photography, which is also imaginary representation
in considerable degree. he imagined spaces that we may read about in literature, both ictional
and non-ictional, are, by this reasoning, more equivalent to the spaces that we ind represented
in the visual arts than one would suspect. Although the terms of the mediation of those spaces
difer, the representation of those spaces is surprisingly similar, whether literary or visual. he
observations and opinions that follow rest signiicantly on this premise.
Interestingly, Ramón Menéndez Pidal noted how the telling of the tale of the Castle of
Álora in ballad form, just ater the incidents of May 1434, “achieves an actualization, before our
very eyes, of the exciting episode of ighting and betrayal” (1959a, 273–75). his exceptional rhe-
torical example from medieval Spain is famous mostly for its coupling of the epithetical “la bien
cercada” (the well-surrounded), in reference to the castle, and the direct address to the castle:
“tú que estás en par del río” (you, who beside the river stand). he efect of the epithet plus the
situational “estás en par del río,” which in this example makes the castle scenic, and the almost
odic “tú…” (you), which distances the subject scopically, serve, perhaps ingenuously, to con-
stitute an early case of literary scape. It stands out in the corpus of Spanish medieval balladry
for this very reason. he Andalusian castle (in the province of Málaga) seems more concrete,
more intimate to us than do the walls of Córdoba, when the poet Luis de Góngora y Argote
(1561–1627) laments a homeland somewhat in decline, while aggrandizing it in his memory, in
his sonnet “A Córdoba” (To Córdoba):
Oh glorious wall, oh towers crowned
In honor, in majesty, in glory!
Oh grand river, grand king of Andalusia
Of sands noble, though no longer golden!
Oh fertile plain, oh range of mountains high,
Privileged by the heavens and by the day turned golden!
Oh fatherland mine, ever glorious,
By virtue of both letters and swords!
If among those ruins and remains
hat the Genil enriches and the Dauro bathes
Your memory was not my very breath,
1. “¡Oh excelso muro, oh torres coronadas / De honor, de majestad, de gallardía! / ¡Oh gran río, gran rey de
Andalucía, / De arenas nobles, ya que no doradas! // ¡Oh fértil llano, oh sierras levantadas, / Que privilegia
el cielo y dora el día! / ¡Oh siempre glorïosa patria mía, / Tanto por plumas cuanto por espadas! // Si entre
Southern Spain 279
May my absent eyes never deserve

To see your wall, your towers and your river,
Your plain and your mountains; oh fatherland, oh lower of Spain!1
His contemporary Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645) used scape much more meta-
phorically, in order to moralize about the “fatherland,” in his sonnet “Miré los muros de la
patria mía” (I gazed upon the walls of my fatherland), which ends in a vision that sees death in
all things:
I gazed upon the walls of my fatherland,
which, if one time strong, were now diminished,
tired from the race of age
made such as if by one whose valor wanes.
I walked out onto the ields; I saw that the sun
was drinking up brooks unleashed from ice;
and that the mountain, plaintive the herds,
shadowing these, stole the light of day.
I walked into my house; I saw decrepit
what was once my living space, now bits and pieces,
my walking stick more bent, and less supportive.
Defeated by age, I touched my sword;
And I found nothing at all on which to rest my eyes,
that was not a reminder of death itself.2
his disparaging comment on the decrepit, hopeless condition of the Spanish state is achieved
by using scape metaphorically. It turns the substantive world into death, forcing us to focus not
on something like Góngora’s glorious, scenic “walls,” but rather on the conceit of vanity, waste,
decrepitude and, eventually, nothingness.
I have purposely forced the issue a bit by opening with three very early examples that
might give rise to some distinction about how Spain is viewed literarily, and, most of all, the
mechanisms used to produce the desired efect in each case: in the irst, vivid reportage; in the
second, reinstatement of past glories through the recollection of a speciic geography; in the
third, moralization of the most seriously critical sort, based on the dissolution of a substan-
tive world into death. he balladeer wants to make the scene present for us so that we can get
a sense of “being there,” much as we perceptually require the same from today’s media. We are,
ater all, citizens on the tail end of the “second orality” that began in romanticism, medievalism
aquellas ruinas y despojos / Que enriquece Genil y Dauro baña / Tu memoria no fue alimento mío, //
Nunca merezcan mis ausentes ojos / Ver tu muro, tus torres y tu río, / Tu llano y sierra, ¡oh patria, oh lor
de España!.” (Góngora y Argote 1976, 54)
2. “Miré los muros de la patria mía, / si un tiempo fuertes ya desmoronados / de la carrera de la edad can-
sados / por quien caduca ya su valentía. // Salime al campo: vi que el sol bebía / los arroyos del hielo
desatados, / y del monte quejosos los ganados / que con sombras hurtó su luz al día. // Entré en mi casa: vi
que amancillada / de anciana habitación era despojos, / mi báculo más corvo y menos fuerte. // Vencida
de la edad sentí mi espada, / y no hallé cosa en que poner los ojos / que no fuese recuerdo de la muerte.”
(Quevedo 1999, 103–04)
280 Lee Fontanella
having been on the tail end of the irst, pre-Guttenberg orality (Ong 1971). But actualization was
scarcely the aim of the seventeenth-century Quevedo, the walls of whose patria (homeland) are
almost “invisible,” because they are intentionally so broadly metaphoric.
he distinction should not be viewed merely as a function of a diference in centuries,
for in the century prior to Góngora’s pathetic sonnet and Quevedo’s despairing moralization,
there had been a notable efort to depict a number of southern sites in a manner remarkably
concrete for the time, if only in visual form. Anton van den Wyngaerde (Antonio de las Vi-
ñas), a Flemish artist, was employed by Philip II irst to depict the sites the king had seen in
England when he married Mary Tudor (1554), then to depict sites in Spain, beginning in 1561.
he deluxe edition, with foldouts of many of the drawings, and with text by Richard L. Kagan,
was published by Ediciones El Viso in 1986. Except for Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, the Basque
country, the Pyrenees, and southern Levante, Wyngaerde depicted numerous cities and towns
all over Spain, to which we might add Gibraltar and the northern coast of Africa. Our concern
here is the lack of southern Levante. Wyngaerde is said to have painted stage scenery and pal-
ace murals with cityscapes, and some of his depictions have signiicantly more detail than oth-
ers. It seems that his rather fundamental scapes became progressively more detailed as king-
dom and empire grew in signiicance for Philip II, and as it grew correspondingly important
to Wyngaerde to connote that importance in his drawings. Ernst Gombrich has pointed out
that not only in the case of maps, but also in the more general course of depiction, when what
is depicted matters to us, when it acquires deep-seated value, then abstraction and minimalism
do not suice, and we tend to require progressively heightened representational detail (1965, 7).
his is just one possible level on which to explain the modus operandi in these depictions, and
it will serve us more directly here, as it applies to both visual and literary examples, Gabriel
Miró in particular. In the southern peninsular empire of Philip II, Wyngaerde drew the follow-
ing scapes (I exclude non-scopic views of some of the sites; those which do not view the site
in considerable perspective): Córdoba (1); Úbeda/Baeza (1); Jaén (1); Granada (7); Alhama de
Granada (1); Antequera (2); Ojén (1); Gibraltar (3); Tarifa (3); Zahara de los Atunes (1); Cádiz
(3); Puerto de Santa María (3); Jerez de la Frontera (3); Sanlúcar de Barrameda (1); Seville/
Triana (3); Itálica (1); Carmona (1). Quite apart from the fact of their now antique aesthetic,
there is no doubting the utilitarian aspect of these geographic drawings: commissioned out
of Philip’s profound interest in geography, and for a practical purpose. In the main, these are
meant to be non-imaginative, visually speaking, and they are certainly not literary scapes, their
copious handwritten notes notwithstanding. hey were meant to be indicators for practical
purposes, proportioned, with one object in reasonably correct relation to another, unpeopled
with imaginary igures; in fewer words, useful and telling. hey were not expressions of the
imaginative spirit, nor were they expected to prompt emotional responses on a par with those
of the artist.
Such aspirations were let to the later depicters of scapes, both in literature and art – the
Álora ballad notwithstanding – and they came to typify the eforts of very late eighteenth-cen-
tury writers and, especially, those of romantic writers and graphic artists. Because of the enor-
mous interest that southern Spain prompted in visitors to that region during that period, the
distinction acquires particular importance. Even in the romantic period, the taste for exactitude
had not died. It is arguable that it was not even on the wane, but rather interestingly conlictive
Southern Spain 281
with the mode we might think of as imprecision, this conlict being the basis of serious critical
– and creative – development. It was, of course, one of the best reasons why photography came
about in the 1830s, and why, consequently, photography was easily incorporated into the more
antiquated methods of Wyngaerde and other geographers of Philip V, surpassing them, not on
the basis of astonishing efect – for both were astonishing – but on the basis of sheer technique,
inconceivable until that point. Southern Spain, along with other Spanish locations and areas in
France, Switzerland, and Italy, became the stuf of the truly stunning (sometimes aerial!) scapes
by Alfred Guesdon (1808–76). In discussing the phenomenon of Guesdon, one must bear in
mind that urban geography may still have mattered at least as much as the land, and so, we are
still not signiicantly in the realm of the imaginary scape of southern Spain in a generalized
way, neither in visual nor literary arts. he city had mattered ostensibly more than the land in
Wyngaerde’s sixteenth-century depictions, aimed more at giving information than at fulilling
artistic inspiration.
In periodic publication, Guesdon issued views in L’Illustration, Journal Universel (he Il-
lustration, universal journal) between July 1853 and November 1866. How could such a thing
as aerial scapes, so technically beyond Wyngaerde’s (and sometimes Guesdon’s, too) vantage
points from harbors and hillocks, have been achieved, yielding almost incomprehensible (even
for us today!) detail in the scape? he answer lies with what was known as a “Montgolier,” an
aerostatic balloon, in which he would be accompanied (at least in Madrid) by the photographer
Charles Cliford (1819–63), and sometimes also by Jane Cliford, Charles’s wife. his occurred
as early as the beginning of the decade of the 1850s, but the year of publication of Guesdon’s
lithographs of Spain, “L’Espagne à vol d’oiseau” (Spain: bird’s eye view) is thought to be 1860
(Fontanella and Kurtz 1996). A great number of Guesdon’s scapes were made not by balloon,
rather from mountaintops. here were at least ten of southern Spain, plus three of Gibraltar:
Cádiz (2), Málaga, Granada (2), Seville (2), Alicante, Córdoba, and Jerez.
Yet none of the above represents what we customarily assume to be the fundamental busi-
ness of imagined landscape, and it falls to us to inquire as to why not. Not long ago, I advanced
the argument that there existed no real tradition of landscape photography in Spain, at least not
as one usually thinks of landscape, until late in the century, and that that genre lourished espe-
cially during Spain’s pictorialist photography, well into the mid-twentieth century (Fontanella
2004, 163–77). I argued that it was peripheral Spain, especially coastal areas and islands, where
photographic landscape seemed to take root most readily; that foreign tourism in the latter
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries advanced photographic landscape; and that, contrary
to the notions espoused by a vociferous few, Spanish photographic pictorialism became the
mode through which landscape was expressed in the most signiicant manner. hat is, it was
expressed manifestly as an artistic solution to deep-seated national psychological problems,
whereby Spanish landscape truly mattered for once, and so became an expressive need, rather
than a token or adopted style for experimentation. hese arguments are bold, and by them one
may correctly infer that I do not subscribe to current loose concepts of “landscape” as expres-
sion of and use of space, very broadly understood. Rather, I think of it in a more traditional,
narrower sense, and my foregoing remarks about predecessors to the artistic expression of land-
scape in southern Spain are evidence of as much. So, I do not speak of southern Spain in terms
of just any type of space; I am concerned more strictly with the visualizing of southern Spain in
282 Lee Fontanella
scope, especially where it is evident that scope is primarily concerned with a vista of the land,
the place, as opposed, for example, to people, monuments, and historical symbols.
We simply do not ind in Spain a sweeping cultural phenomenon – that is, rooted in the
national psyche – with respect to landscape prior to the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free
institution of teaching), founded 1876, and the leaders that it nurtured. he countries noted
for the natural sublime, such as Switzerland or Britain, were responding wholeheartedly, quite
on their own, to natural scapes nearly a century before the phenomenon could be said to have
become generalized in Spain. As we are about to see, Spain’s leading painters recognized at
mid-century that they had better wake up to the potential of landscape cultivation. Even so,
they were ahead of the photographers (and I shall speculate as to why). hey may even be said
to have been ahead of writers, although for southern Spain there were notable exceptions, such
as the Swiss-born Cecilia Böhl von Faber (“Fernán Caballero,” 1796–1877), so complex in her
own right, due partly to the admirable cultural complexity of her background (her father was
German-born Johann Niklaus Böhl von Faber, ardent mouthpiece in the then Germanic style
for the essence of the Spanish Golden Age). When we think, for example, of her masterpieces,
La gaviota (he Seagull, 1849) and La familia de Alvareda (he Alvareda Family, 1849), we are
struck by her ability to create a space with true southern lavor, and she is especially adept at
this in restricted spaces, the opening of La familia de Alvareda notwithstanding:
If one follows the curve that is formed by Seville’s old walls, which gird the city like a stone
skirt, one comes upon the San Fernando gate, upon leaving the river and Las Delicias of to the
right. From that gate there extends in a straight line along the plain, and up to the base of the
hill called Buenavista, a road that passes along a stone bridge over a creek and climbs the rather
steep incline of the hill, to the right of which one sees the ruins of a chapel. As we contemplate
that road from the air, it looks like an arm that Seville extends toward those ruins, as if to draw
attention to them, because those ruins, however small and utterly lacking in artistic merit, are
a religious and historic reminder. hey are a legacy of the great King Ferdinand III, so integral
a part of the popular mind, and who is revered as hero, venerated as saint and loved as a king,
thus achieving the status of grand historical icon of the popular Spanish ideal. Ater climbing
to the top, the road dips again down the other side, reaching a vale through which runs a brook.
his brook has washed so clean its bed that the bottom is lined only with shiny, round stones
and golden sand.3
3. “Siguiendo la curva que forman las viejas murallas de Sevilla, ciñéndola cual faja de piedra, al dejar a la
derecha el río y las Delicias, se encuentra la puerta de San Fernando. Desde esa puerta se extiende en línea
recta sobre la llanura, hasta la base del cerro llamado Buenavista, un camino que pasa sobre un Puente
de piedra el riachuelo y sube la cuesta bastante pendiente del cerro, a cuya derecha se ven las ruinas de
una capilla. Al contemplar ese camino a vista de pájaro, parece que es un brazo que extiende Sevilla hacia
aquellas ruinas como para llamar la atención sobre ellas, porque esas ruinas, aunque pequeñas y sin ves-
tigio de mérito artístico, son un recuerdo religioso e histórico, son una herencia del gran rey Fernando
III, cuya memoria es tan popular, que es admirado como héroe, venerado como santo y amado como rey,
realizando así esa gran igura histórica del ideal del pueblo español. Después de subida la altura, el camino
la vuelve a bajar por el lado opuesto y llega a un vallecito por el cual pasa un arroyuelo. Ha lavado éste tan
primorosamente su cauce, que sólo se compone de brillantes guijarros y dorada arena.” (Böhl von Faber
1979, 73)
Southern Spain 283
Of course, this is precisely what the Institución was soon to recommend: the close observation
of the details of God’s creation, in order to better understand it, thus to understand God, and –
here was the most daring venture of the Institución – our own selves, both individually and as
a nation. It may have taken until Américo Castro to do a proper job of speaking for the many,
but Spain – all of Spain, not just southern Spain, although Castro was certainly very attentive to
southern Spain and its Moorish roots – was well on its way by the Generation de 1898. Fernán
Caballero, as scenically engaging as the opening of La familia de Alvareda may be, does not
escape – nor does she want to escape – the historical symbolism that an incident of landscape
presents to her. It was not a question of the land, not even of space, in and of itself, as an in-
ternalized psychological element. It is signiicant that La familia de Alvareda bore the subtitle
“novela de costumbres contemporáneas” (novel of contemporary manners), as did a huge por-
tion of the novelistic publications of that time; a subtitle that was rivaled only by the contender
“novela histórica original” (original historical novel). Such statistics are in themselves very tell-
ing. hey hint to the fact that prose was not oten primarily concerned with depicting scapes,
at least not on the level of artistic expression that might satisfy a psychological requirement of
both artist and national reading public.
Writers such as José Martínez Ruiz “Azorín” (1873–1967), a native of Alicante, were primar-
ily concerned with the country as a whole, with focus oten on Castile, although the writer’s
attention may be directed regionally. So, in El paisaje de España visto por los españoles (Spain’s
landscape as seen by Spaniards), a third of the regions on which Azorín focused were southern
Spain: Murcia, Alicante, Córdoba, Seville, Granada. And in Azorín’s Los pueblos (he villages),
subtitled “Essays on provincial life,” the author had devoted a signiicant chapter of the book to
southern Spain: “La Andalucía trágica” (tragic Andalusia). What was tragic about Andalusia in
April 1905, when the chapter was written, was the basic human want that resulted from poverty.
But this is set against something vital, substantial, and beautiful: the landscape, which we are
enticed rhetorically to look at from the very beginning, and to which we are, from time to time,
brought back, as in a closing ploy: “Briely, you look out again through the opening in the walls:
the river, tragic river, glides along silently in the far distance; the brown hawks twist and turn in
the air, slowly, sotly shiting their wings.”4
So it ends. In the most characteristic of rhetorical modes, just as Azorín uses “el boquete”
(opening in the walls) at the end, he had used the train window in the beginning. Later on, he
commands us to observe, to observe and to keep on observing:
Stick your head out of the little window of the coach; allow your glance to comb the coun-
tryside, so gentle, limpid, pleasant, comforting, unimaginably sweet. We are no longer in the
steppes of central Spain, barren, gray, vermilion, and yellowish. Here the sky does not stretch
out above us uniformly, with its intense, unyielding blue. No longer do the far horizons radiate
overwhelming and inaccessible to us. It is the dawning of day. A subtle, opaque light falls over
the ields; the horizon wears the violet color of mother-of-pearl; a tenuous mist halts our vision.
And it is against this difuse, sweet, soothing background that the white houses and the town
stand out, and we can perceive the pointed, proud, airy outline of a church tower, and here and
4. “Un momento tornáis a asomaros por el boquete de la muralla: el río, infausto, trágico, se desliza callado
allá en lo hondo; los gavilanes pardos giran y giran en el aire, lentos, con sus aleteos blandos.” (Martínez
Ruiz 2002, 176)
284 Lee Fontanella
there emerge a few lone, curved branches of palm. What can there be in this landscape that
summons us to dream for a moment, and which brings to our spirit a rapture and profound
suggestiveness?5
No matter where in his country Azorín is, no matter his vantage point, his rhetorical riggings
are, for the most part, the same, and he even applies them in his novelistic prose. His descrip-
tions are heartfelt, profound, not in imitation of another’s style. We read his prose, and we iden-
tify it with him. Perhaps because of the times in which he lived, perhaps due to the inluence of
certain intellectuals in his circle, he interweaves sensations apart from the visual – playing of
the auditory and the olfactory – in order to enhance our sense of the view. In Arcos de la Fron-
tera (we have now let Lebrija), the same admixture of highly adjectivized substantives is there:
here is simply no more picturesque town along these mountaintops. On the peak, the jumble
of small Moorish houses are bunched together and run on in a line stretching four or more
kilometers. he town starts on the gentle hillside, then dips downward and away; then it begins
to move up the sharp embankment, along the high mountain; farther on, it drops down again
and extends for a brief stretch along the plain and eventually fades out on the lank of another
rise. And there are, high up, in the center, in the most genuinely old portion of the city, some
narrow, winding streets that twist in upon themselves, and which get suddenly cut of in right
angles, paved with shiny, slippery cobblestones. As you pass, of in the distance, beneath your
feet, you can see a green, rolling meadow or a bit of a river that relects the sun. he sound of
the steps of a passerby echoes sweetly every now and then. You pass before the dark entryway
of an old estate house, where, through the half-open door, within, in the narrow courtyard,
somber and shadowy, an orange tree boasts its enameled foliage with spheres of gold. Sus-
pended in the air is the faint aroma of orange blossoms...6
5. “Asomaos a la ventanilla del coche; tended vuestras miradas por la campiña; el paisaje es suave, claro,
plácido, confortador, de una dulzura imponderable. Ya no estamos en las estepas yermas, grises, bermejas,
gualdas, del interior de España; ya el cielo no se extiende sobre nosotros uniforme de un añil intenso,
desesperante; ya las lejanías no irradian inaccesibles, abrumadoras. Son las primeras horas del día; una luz
sutil, opaca, cae sobre el campo; el horizonte es de un color violeta nacarado; cierra la vista una neblina
tenue. Y sobre este fondo difuso, dulce, sedante, destacan las casas blancas del poblado y se perila pina,
gallarda, aérea, la torre de una iglesia, y emergen acá y allá, solitarias, unas ramas curvadas, unas palmeras.
¿Qué hay en este paisaje que nos invita a soñar un momento y trae a nuestro espíritu un encanto y una
sugestión honda?” (Martínez Ruiz 2002, 151)
6. “No hay en esta serranía pueblo más pintoresco. Sobre la cumbre de la montaña, la muchedumbre de casi-
tas moriscas se apretuja y hacina en una larga línea de cuatro o más kilómetros. El pueblo comienza ya en
la ladera suave de una colina; después baja a lo hondo; luego comienza a subir en la pendiente escarpada
por la alta montaña; más tarde baja otra vez, se extiende un breve trecho por el llano y llega a morir en la
falda de otro altozano. Y hay en lo alto, en el centro, en lo más viejo y castizo de la ciudad, unas callejuelas
angostas, que se retuercen, que se quiebran súbitamente en ángulos rectos, pavimentadas de guijos relu-
cientes, resbaladizos; al pasar, allá en lo hondo, bajo vuestros pies, veis un rodal de prado verde o un peda-
zo de río que espejea al sol. El ruido de los pasos de un transeúnte resuena de tarde en tarde suavemente.
Pasáis ante el obscuro zaguán de una casa solariega: por la puerta entreabierta, dentro, en el estrecho patio
sombrío, penumbroso, un naranjo destaca su follaje esmaltado de doradas esferas. Flota en el aire un vago
olor a azahar.” (Martínez Ruiz 2002, 173)
Southern Spain 285
How, we might be tempted to ask, might this writer from the Levante, so ostensibly concerned
with Castile, gain the proper perspective on Andalusia: its details and its generalities, its inter-
nal tragedies, etc.? hese questions become almost unimportant and, at the very least, explain-
able, if we accept as fundamental that landscape must matter to the culture in question, in order
to stand on its own, as it does here. here is a genuine preoccupation for the situation of the
country, which is lived by this writer; it is a part of his existence. hat situation is customarily
set against a carefully observed backdrop, the scape, and so tragedy might be combined with
beauty, as in this case. here are, Azorín insists toward the end of his chapter on Granada, in-
cluded in the book El paisaje de España visto por los españoles (Spanish landscape as seen by the
Spaniards, 1917), certain images that even time cannot erase, despite some alteration in detail
within those broader spaces; landscape has essentials which, when stunning, do not change. It
relects, incidentally, Azorín’s primary argument in his rather philosophical “Las nubes” (he
clouds), and it is, in efect, the conviction whereby he paints scopic spaces that stand for his
land; it is his way of constituting Spain through depiction, in order to concretize its essence;
deining the national self by orchestrating the myriad particulars of his acts of observation.
Again, I am insisting on this degree of artistic activity, in order for there to have been a
landscape of southern Spain. Azorín’s rhetorical modus operandi was, throughout his career, to
make manifest in literary art the tenets of the comparably liberal individuals who constituted
his intellectual circle; that is, as one clear indicator of continuous observation and ruminations
on that basis, to cultivate a prose, whether reportage or novel, in which the substantive world
is highly adjectivized, as if analogic to the strokes of a painter. For southeastern Spain, I think,
there is no one who achieved this more masterfully, more complexly, more thoroughly than Ga-
briel Miró (1879–1930), and I explained many years ago some of the mechanisms by which Miró
wrought his depiction of his native place, and to what perceptual end he did so (Fontanella
1979, 209–24). It would be hard to dispute that the late Edmund L. King was the consummate
connoisseur of Miró’s creations, the critic (and frequent translator) who best understood the
creative process of that diicult but great writer.
he Orihuela region that is relected in his writings is achieved through some of the same
mechanisms applied by Azorín, although what is so characteristic of Miró is his use of a seeming
ininity of exotic substantives that are native to place. Place is constituted on the basis of these
substantives, as if each one were a visual element to be woven into a tapestry; a kind of nominal-
ist plastiication, whereby the written word is the thing “made lesh,” rather than just standing for
the thing in the real world. We read Gabriel Miró, and we can be nowhere, imaginatively, but the
place he depicts; we are stopped from departing from that place by the richness of substantive
detail and, especially, by something I would call the nominal substantive power that is the stuf
of his prose. With something akin to Lockean conviction, it would appear, he made by naming;
in the minutia of naming, Miró created. Forcing the issue a bit, he was the pointillist of Spanish
narrative prose, although Azorín’s prose was a foretelling of that “painterly” method.
Observation and artistic recording of human experience of the southern peninsula as
space and land, such as we ind it in these two prose artists, was not exactly the representation
of that region in the nineteenth-century. To be sure, southern Spain was visited and remarked
upon more than any other single Spanish region, due largely to the early enthusiasm of foreign
visitors to that land. he reports of such visitors to southern Spain are numerous, and for that
286 Lee Fontanella
region in particular, we have, early on, studies that assessed the relative weight of the responses
of famous visitors. Many of these show interest in particular southern locales. For example,
Alfonso Gámir Sandoval presented “Los viajeros ingleses y norteamericanos en la Granada del
siglo XIX” (English and North American travellers in nineteenth-century Granada) at the Uni-
versity of Granada in 1954. he lecture took into account the eighteenth-century visit (1775–76)
of British Henry Swinburne, the residence of Washington Irving in the Alhambra, and Richard
Ford (1831–33), who wrote his famed A Hand-book for Travellers in Spain… (1845). For pres-
ent purposes, it is notable that Gámir Sandoval bore in mind studies such as “Granada en la
literatura romántica española,” (Granada in romantic Spanish literature) a lecture by Melchor
Fernández Almagro upon his induction into the Royal Spanish Academy (1951).
Precisely because southern Spain was the land of choice for so many foreigners, its land-
scape was represented most oten as seen by foreign eyes; many more foreigners in search of a
romantic Spain remarked on the South than did Spaniards themselves. he phenomenon was
unforgettably mapped out by Léon-François Hofmann in Romantique Espagne (1961). One in-
terpretation was that foreigners sought the Spain of Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (1845); another,
that they sought, as did Byron, the Spain of heroic rebellion against tyrannical monarchism
(Greece being for him a model of the same). his foreign enthusiasm alone, in favor of a ro-
mantic Spain, must be reckoned with as one of the deining forces in the artistic imagination
of landscape in Spain prior to end-century. At end-century, the direct experience and sincere
expression of Spaniards like Azorín or his contemporary Ángel Ganivet (1865–98) could dis-
place the view expressed by those non-Spaniards who of course would “live the myth of Spain”
under the guise of objective record, partly because of the romantic vision on which they were
nurtured, and of which their own observations became part and parcel. Both philosophically
and by profession, Ganivet was an international igure. Having satisied a consulship in Hel-
sinki (1895–98), he was stationed as consul in Riga, where he committed suicide. In Finland, he
had written considerably and produced Granada la bella (Beautiful Granada, 1896) in honor of
his home city. Before the latter part of the nineteenth century, Spaniards themselves partook
of certain foreign visions as models, and that in itself yielded a cultivation of landscape – in
the visual arts if not also in some literature – that was not naturally born of itself. Again, this
was noticeably true of southern Spain, because of the high degree of foreign interest there (for
reasons already mentioned). And again, this is an undeniable determinant, especially for the
modalities of southern Spanish landscape, and especially as that was represented in visual me-
dia (painting, lithography, photography).
No one has shown this in more detail, more detly with respect to conclusions, than
Andrew Ginger. In his book Painting and the Turn to Cultural Modernity in Spain: he time
of Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1850–1870), he points out that the “establishment of a school of
landscape painting was a fundamental prerequisite of a properly modern visual culture,” and
that “the cultural prestige of the liberal state hinged to a signiicant degree on the development
of landscape painting” (2007, 231). Elements of Ginger’s chapter title, “Landscapes, Seascapes,
Poverty, and Nationality,” are, in efect, coincidental with those presented by Azorín in “La
Andalucía trágica.” his was the crux of the address by painter Carlos de Haes (1829–98) to
the Academy in 1860. It occurs to me that this approach to developing a school of visual land-
scape was strikingly analogous to the insistent importation of a philosophy for Spain in the
Southern Spain 287
manner of Krausism, championed (ploddingly) by Julián Sanz del Río at mid-century, an intel-
lectual importation that eventually led to the founding of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza
(1876). Ginger shows that Jenaro Pérez Villaamil (1807–54) had been inluenced by British artist
David Roberts (1796–1864), with whom Villaamil traveled through Spain, and that this inlu-
ence might be noted in Villaamil’s España artística (1842f.) lithographs. Ginger’s purpose is to
demonstrate that the “conjurings” of artist Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1817–70), his sometimes
“murky visions,” were a means to undermine the fantasized nation that was created in the visual
tradition of a Villaamil, and thereby Lucas criticized the state of the nation; so, the ultimate
concern was this, while ostensibly, landscape tradition was being altered, even as it loundered
to become an integral part of Spanish culture. Ginger recognizes what I have been saying here:
without being scientiically realistic in its depiction of the external world, signiicant landscape
could provide transcendence of the individual, the nation, and the environment (2007, 237).
If one subscribes to this, then importations and imitations of schools that were not largely
sui generis could not have constituted a genuine Spanish landscape school. I suspect that Pedro
de Madrazo (1816–98) must have known this rather early on, and that de Haes was, in efect, a
ratifying voice for such a stance. Under de Haes, Ginger explains, Spain may have begun to re-
alize that the natural language of God was best perceived and comprehended through sobriety
– through the exactitude of detailed reproduction – as opposed to the “dreamy fantasy” in which
Villaamil, for example, had indulged (2007, 241). On a level of the non-sublime, the revised ap-
proach eschewed the vision of an imaginary Spain, while it prompted a critical view of Self and
Nation, thus the eventual importance of the stylistic subversions of Lucas Velázquez. Fantastical
(unjustiiably dreamy?) synthesis is broken down into particularistic analysis, wherein prosaic
banality and murkiness eventually acquire some degree of voice, although without supplying a
real alternative to those two contentious extremes of landscape depiction.
Evidently, the opinion that held was that one had to abandon romantic fantasizing in
order to be modern, but Spain was let beret of a national cultural replacement for romantic
fantasy. If this was so, then southern Spain, whether represented in literary or visual arts of
any sort, must have had a more diicult time than any other region of Spain in the abandon-
ment of romantic interpretations of its land, since there had been so much reportage and com-
mentary on it that it became diicult for one to tell the prosaic truth about it – that is, without
having one’s impressions clouded by fantasy and legend. In other words, it was diicult to
relect the then-prevailing concept of “modern” with respect to southern Spain’s landscape.
Above all, this is due in considerable part to the inluence of interpretations from the outside
(Hofmann 1961). It is my contention that such a diiculty was overcome, for most intents
and purposes, in the course of the assimilation of Krausism and “panentheism” (a lexical
contrivance to indicate something akin to “God permeating Nature”) by the Institución Libre
de Enseñanza, and the resultant Generation of 1898. he nominalist substantiveness, as I have
chosen to call it, of a writer like Gabriel Miró, is the prosaic particularism which, ater a con-
siderable number of decades, was to undo the “dreamy fantasy” that characterized Villaamil’s
work; so, Azorín was a stepping-stone – a not at all wobbly stepping-stone – along the way to
Miró, stylistically speaking.
What I want to impress upon the present reader is that southern Spain, for reasons ex-
pressed here, was the consummate measure of that success, because it would seem the region
288 Lee Fontanella
least likely to be able to overcome in representation the aspects of landscape that were thought
by “modern” Spanish artists at mid-century to be undesirable. Some of the same must have held
true for literature, as a result of foreign writers having interpreted Spain’s landscape, customs,
and people from their vantage points as outsiders. However, the Spaniards’ assimilation of
those writers’ foreign languages was nil or not as rapid as would have been their assimilation of
foreigners’ interpretations of those physical and cultural aspects of Spain in the visual arts. his
is why, perhaps, a description of Seville by Fernán Caballero – her own foreign birth notwith-
standing, of course – or even one of Granada (1852) by José Zorrilla from Valladolid (1817–93),
may have been comparably less inluenced by outside sources than Villaamil might have been
ater sojourning on several occasions with David Roberts. Indeed, we ind notions of southern
Spanish space in literary places we least suspect; for example, in Don Álvaro, o la fuerza del sino
(Don Álvaro, or the force of destiny; 2.3), Duke of Rivas’s famous play, inspiration for La forza
del destino (1862, Giuseppe Verdi), premiered in 1835.
here was scarcely a place in which southern Spanish landscape could have been more in
evidence – although in fact it was not – than in photography. More foreign photographers went
to southern Spain than to any other area of the country, and quite pointedly to Granada and
Seville; and within those two cities, speciically to the Alhambra (straight to the Patio de los Le-
ones) and to the Alcázar (straight to the Patio de las Doncellas), respectively (Fontanella, García
Felguera, and Kurtz 1994). In Seville part of the attraction was the social (possibly inancial)
patronage of the Duke of Montpensier and his spouse, the sister of the Queen. Patronage of this
category was just a further draw to the southern Spanish territory about which foreign visitors
were reading so much – legendary or otherwise. hey were also seeing visual representations
of this space, especially ater traveling artists such as Roberts turned their work into widely dis-
seminated lithographs, or photographers such as Charles Cliford and L.L. Masson sold their
photographic interpretations of Spain beyond the Pyrenees. Works by both were sold to the
South Kensington Museum (today, Victoria & Albert), as the Museum’s registries of incoming
purchases and their unique “Robinson’s Reports” clearly show. he Museum was just one of
the many purchasers of these visual documents (Fontanella 1999; Fontanella and Kurtz 1996).
he photography of southern Spain is, ater all, artistic interpretation, although it had one foot
in objective reportage. But just one, for the photography of Cliford is, time and again, an in-
dication that he was paying tacit tribute to his patrons: to the Queens Isabella II and Britain’s
Victoria, to the Dukes of Osuna, Frías, and Montpensier, and to the Marquis of Mirabel. He did
so by photographing sites that were symbolic, and, when possible, buildings (even monumental
trees!) that were symbolic: of history, of wealth and power, and of the concept of Empire. Of
his 800-odd pictures, a shockingly small percentage was scapes. his was not, I would insist, a
matter of style, rather these choices relected what subjects photographers considered photog-
raphable, what they chose to report visually, or the implicit message they wanted to deliver. It
is certainly worth comparing with Britain, where photographers were indeed in tune with sub-
lime nature as photographic subject, in a way they were not when on Spanish soil.
Not only was a large portion of Cliford’s photographs devoted to southern Spain; his inal
(some say most accomplished) suite of photographs were of Andalusia and Murcia, making the
southeast coast where Azorín and Miró would be born in the following decade among the very
last of Cliford’s subjects. here can be no doubt that Azorín and Miró depicted the southern
Southern Spain 289
Spanish landscape more and better than Cliford, and perhaps more and better than most Span-
ish painters. Eduardo Rosales Martínez (1836–73) depicted landscape in Murcia, and the painter
Mariano Fortuny Marsal (1838–74) was inspired by the Grenadine landscape, where he lived
for a while (beginning in 1868) with his bride, Cecilia Madrazo, daughter of painter Federico
de Madrazo y Kuntz (1815–94). Rosales and Fortuny, nearly exact contemporaries, were excep-
tional, insofar as they depicted southern Spain in painting, in the decade when de Haes was
calling for a painterly cultivation of landscape, and not long ater writers like Cecilia Böhl von
Faber were depicting southern spaces in prose. Between the third and fourth quarters of the
nineteenth century, then, a sincere, heartfelt strain of landscape was developing in the literary
and visual arts.
In photography, development of the same was slower, and I suspect this had more to do
with the nature of the medium (partly rooted in everyday life); the photographer of that time
wanted to record spaces with meaning for the public, not simply to imagine them, and sublime
natural landscape seemed not the most suitable subject for that aim; structures and people did.
his may be true on a theoretical level, but there is some evidence that photographers of the
category of Cliford recorded landscape in southern Spain. We have the examples of Masson
(ca. 1859), Ch. Maufsaise (ca. 1862), Juan Laurent (ca. 1865), George Washington Wilson (1871),
and the Count de Lipa (ca. 1870), all of whom, around the time of Fortuny’s Grenadine sojourn,
made photographic scapes of Granada. (All are examples used to illustrate an essay by Javier Pi-
ñar Samos, co-author with José Tito Rojo and Juan Manuel Segura Bueno, in Antiguos cármenes
de Granada [Old houses of Granada, 2004]. Fittingly, the paintings of cármenes tended to depict
restricted spaces, limited as opposed to scopic, intimate as opposed to vast. he truly indig-
enous photography of scapes was not yet a signiicant part of the culture.)
Maybe for southern Spain, there will always be a certain fantastical aspect, especially for
the foreign viewer. I recall that one of my irst impressions of southern Spain was from a car
window, in the area of Motril, in the spring of 1962. I thought that the hillsides of calculatedly
spaced olive trees looked like some of the individual frames from my childhood View Master,
which to my best recollection was given to me in 1947. Despite the passing of iteen years, I had
not forgotten the enchantment of peering into a three dimensional make-believe world that I
knew was unreal, but in which I indulged willingly and thoroughly. he hills outside Motril
yielded a similar feeling. It may be that southern Spain possesses a bit of the make-believe as a
constant characteristic. A playful Washington Irving, almost in spite of the importance of his
oice, may have been prompted to perceive it that way, just because of his enchantment with
the Alhambra. To judge by the countless early twentieth-century travel books by writers who
sojourned in the south – which, ater all, is literature in its own right – the fantasy space is what
many chose to perceive. My own childhood and adolescent experiences aside, I know now that
the landscape in literature and visual arts through which southern Spain was represented be-
came a focus of true, problematic concern for writers and artists in the decades when “Roman-
tic Spain” would inally cease to have primary meaning. My Motril experience suggests that that
interpretation of space in southern Spain may never disappear entirely, but that it takes a back
seat to higher thoughts: to introspective matters of self and nation, in proportion as writers and
artists can objectify southern Spain, even while it serves them as philosophic inspiration for
self-betterment.
he Canaries
Between mythical space and global drit
Bertrand Westphal
Macaronesia: From fantasized to referenced space
At the beginning of the world, the Canaries did not exist. hey were not even conceivable. For
the Greeks, who marked out the boundaries of the West, the known universe was certainly ex-
tendable, but not indeinitely so. he oikoumene irst encompassed the region of the Aegean Sea;
it then extended from southern Italy to the eastern conines of the Euxine Sea (Black Sea). Each
time the unknown became part of the luctuating domain of geographical and anthropological
knowledge, myth strove hard to explain the change. Incidentally, myth was not a iction with
ornamental efects: it was the vehicle for the story of the enchantment of the world, of its being
taken possession of by bold minds. In the ancient times of which Homer wrote, which we will
take care not to situate too precisely in time, two magical sites marked the conines of the uni-
verse: to the east was Aia, land of the Golden Fleece, over which Aeetes and his daughter Medea
watched; to the west was the isle of Aeaea, which Circe dominated with all her numerous and
varied powers. Aeetes and Circe were the children of Helios and Perse. he Greek world spread
from the east of Colchis (the kingdom of Aeetes) to the west of Aeaea. It took two famous voy-
ages to reach the bounds of this world: one more or less voluntary, the eastern expedition of Ja-
son and the Argonauts; the other endured, the western journey of Ulysses and his companions,
which took place a generation later. Jason and Ulysses had opened new maritime routes. heir
exploits were a prelude to colonial conquest, to the establishment of Greek trading posts as far
as the banks of the Caucasus on one side, and to the Magna Graecia on the other. But there had
at yet been no reference to the Canaries, at a time when the heroes were living the account, the
mythos, of this irst geo-cultural extension of ancient Greece.
In actual fact, this gradual increase presupposed a most subtle dialectic. he boundaries of
the world were indeed not only geographical: they were above all ontological. hat which was
included in oikoumene was human, that which was not was inhuman, with the double meaning
of non-human and essentially dangerous. In the course of his exploration of the boundaries,
Ulysses continually tested the threshold between that which was part of human nature and that
which escaped it. he farther he strayed from the center, the more he was exposed to the risk of
crossing the frontiers of the human, of intruding in the kingdom of the monstrous or, simply, in
the animal kingdom. Circe the Sorceress does not “transform” men into pigs. At the very edge
of the world, her island marks the threshold between the human and the animal; to tread on
the soil of Aeaea means to leave the human kingdom and enter an extra-human realm, beyond
the horizon, beyond what the gaze can encompass. It takes all the science and compassion of
Hermes for Ulysses to learn to stretch the world a little and thereby cling to the sphere of the
human. he episode of the arrival of Ulysses and his companions on Aeaea falls within the
movement of exokeanismos that marked Greek thought. he world opens up from east to west.
he quest for the new and the exploration of the extra-human follows the same movement. he
rosy ingers of dawn appear in the east. It is from here that Aphrodite, Astarte, and the nymph
he Canaries 291
Europa proceed – from eastern footholds of a Greece that, through these feminine igures, af-
irms itself as a western projection. his translation towards the west, towards that which the
river Ocean demarcates (ex-okeanismos), is not the exclusive hallmark of discovery; it also acts
on the Greeks’ representation of the beyond. I said earlier that the extra-human lies outside the
limits of the known. It is there that the animal and the monstrous, the non-human, exist. But it
is also there that life post mortem, with its privileged places, must be played out.
It is as if two dimensions characterized unknown places: one dysphoric and liable to be
subject to the passing of time (the atemporal animality that conquest – by Odysseus, by the
Argonauts – will place in the orbit of human time); the other is euphoric and entirely unknown
to the calendar (the kingdom of souls). So, a double geography lies out of bounds, that of the
anima and that of the animal. he Greeks always pushed the kingdoms of the euphoric beyond,
back to the extreme limits of what they could conceive of in terms of space. First there were the
most remote lands of what for us is the Adriatic Sea. But they ended up being explored. And,
quite obviously, the kingdom of souls had to remain, by deinition, beyond. So the various is-
lands which were attributed to the Blessed continued to be “exoceanised,” and the Elysian Fields,
the Fortunate Isles, the Garden of the Hesperides were increasingly projected as lying further
away. he Greeks would inally sail through the Pillars of Hercules. hey occupied this part of
the world lying in the unknown, or rather unexplored, waters of the river Ocean. here, islands
and archipelagos had yet to be discovered. But it mattered little: the Greek imagination had
constructed in this emptiness – which would eventually be illed! – a fantasy topography that
Canarian researcher Marcos Martínez summed up under the term Macaronesia. It would not
be long before Macaronesia, “territory of the islands of the Blessed,” would have competition
from real, or in any case, objective, geography, including the Canary Islands, the Savage Islands,
Madeira, and the Azores archipelago.
How did Macaronesia enter the sphere of the real? Very slowly, one would presume, and in
little bursts. Marcos Martínez drew up a list of the irst references to the archipelago in two very
precise works: Canarias en la mitología (he Canary islands in mythology, 1992) and Las islas
Canarias de la Antigüedad al Renacimiento (he Canary islands from antiquity to the Renais-
sance, 1996). It would be suicient to refer to these essays for a signiicant bibliographical survey.
But several direct indications are not uncalled-for, due to the fact that the irst mention of the
Canaries in History, in Antiquity, guided many a subsequent imaginary construct. From very
early on, myth rode on the back of reality… whenever the opposite was not the case. he Pillars
of Hercules were not an extreme limit for all; Cádiz (Gades) was for many a starting point. Car-
thaginian sailors, of whom the legendary Hanno was the best known, had from very early on
plied their trade along the Atlantic coasts of Africa. Some maintain that Hanno’s voyage pushed
on as far as modern day Cameroon. he Canaries were and are still located on the maritime
routes leading to the tropics. hey were undoubtedly known. Hanno alludes in his Periplus (8)
to the island of Cerne, just as the Pseudo-Scyllax had before him: it was in a way the extreme
edge of the West. For some, Cerne was Herne, an island of the bay of the Río de Oro, for oth-
ers Tenerife, Fuerteventura or, better yet, Ferro (El Hierro). Two later references seem to point
to the reality of a Canarian archipelago. In the irst century BC, in his Life of Sertorius (8–9,1),
Plutarch noted that during his stay in Gades the eponymous Roman general learned of the ex-
istence of two Atlantic islands that would later be identiied with Lanzarote and Fuerteventura
292 Bertrand Westphal
(…or Madeira and Porto Santo). According to Pliny, to whom we will return presently, Juba II,
king of Mauritania and vassal of Rome, also organized a “Canarian” expedition (undoubtedly
shortly before the beginning of the era dealt with here).
Whatever the case may be, the irst immediate reference is to be credited to Pliny the Elder,
in 79 AD. In his Natural History (6.37), Pliny established a plausible geography of the Canaries,
of which he seemed to give the names of several islands. Indeed here we have the appearance of
Canaria, perhaps Gran Canaria, the etymon of the entire archipelago. To this was added Nin-
guaria (which became Nivaria for Solinus), which could refer to Tenerife and the snow-capped
Teide. Capraria, Junonia, Pluvialia and the other place names provided by Pliny are too vague
for a link with the Canaries to be made. In book V, Pliny also mentioned mysterious inhabit-
ants (Berbers), the “Canarians” (Canarii), who more surely inspired the name Canaria than
canis, the “dog” to which the derivation of the archipelago is sometimes (even by Pliny himself)
reduced. Ptolemy conirmed Pliny’s geography a century later, writing of a Canaria and ive
other islands, followed by Solinus – the very man who established a fabulous link between the
foundation of Oulissipona-Lisbon and Ulysses (Bedon 2006, 21–37). here were others as well:
in the Adversus Nationes (6.5.2), Arnobius, a professor of Christian rhetoric originally from
Numidia, made, in the early fourth century, the sole mention of the Canaries (Canarias) in the
plural until the Middle Ages.
In any event, the irst references to the Canaries all shared the principal of exception-
ality. For most authors, “Macaronesia” continued to be a possible moniker for the Fortunate
Isles. he reference to islands of the coast of Mauritania encouraged the idea that the Insulae
Fortunae had been located. Alternatively, even though the two approaches were compatible,
it was considered that the western extremity of the world had been moved to the theoretical
level of the modern day Canaries. So the process of exoceanization continued. he allusion to
the island of Cerne has something of the nature of this concern, as does that which Arnobius
reserved for the Canarias, which for him were one of the cardinal points of a cartography of the
limits, encompassing hule to the north, the Seres (perhaps associated with the Chinese) to the
east, and the Garamantes to the south. We will see that, far later, the Canaries continued to play
this role of pivot between the known and the unknown, between the center and the peripheries
of the world. A remark to conclude this quick survey of the beginnings: the Atlantis myth had
not yet reached the Canaries over the course of Antiquity, and for a rather simple reason: the
Canaries were unknown to the Greeks and the Romans did not believe in Atlantis.
he Canaries exist: hey have found them…
he archipelago’s inclusion in an “objective” geography was preceded by its having been almost
completely forgotten. Ater the fall of the Roman Empire, the Canaries had let the common
encyclopedia, while leaving their traces on maps, which were generally inspired by older works
(for example, in the thirteenth century, Vincent de Beauvais was still describing the Canaries
based on the models let by Pliny and of Isidore of Seville, whose nomenclatures had deep re-
percussions on the entire Middle Ages). Basically, part of the world had been mislaid! However,
this oblivion was not present in all traditions, truthfully speaking: it is highly probable that the
he Canaries 293
Arabs had retained a memory of the Canaries and had even visited them, though without ever
settling there. here was even a Viking presence, according to Marcos Martínez and others.
hese hypotheses are diicult to verify. So far, archeology afords us little information.
he Canaries were inally discovered, or “rediscovered.” Here again, the circumstances of
this triumphant return are diicult to reproduce with accuracy. One thing is certain: it was
a Genoese who made the announcement. It was either one of the Vivaldi brothers in 1291, or
Lancelotto Malocello in 1312, who gave his name to the island of Lanzarote. And in keeping
with well-established tradition, literature had soon seized hold of the event. In Canto 26 of the
Inferno, Dante narrates the second voyage of Ulysses, that which leads him within sight of the
mountain of Purgatory:
My mariners and I were old and slow
when at last we reached that narrow channel lined
by Hercules with his marks so men would know
that they must not go beyond the bounds assigned.
On the starboard side Seville now disappeared,
on the other Ceuta already lay behind.” (Dante 2002, 293)1
He then follows the sun’s course in the unknown Atlantic in the direction of the “dark moun-
tain,” until a storm causes the shipwreck and death of Ulysses and his aging crew. It would be
vain to claim that Dante deliberately sent the hero in the direction of the Fortunate Isles, how-
ever it is reasonable to think that the new Odyssean voyage is closely related to the adventure
of Vadino and Ugolino Vivaldi. hey too failed to return from their Atlantic (and Canarian?)
voyage of 1291. It seems that this episode had a certain resonance in Italy, a little more than ten
years before the Florentine poet began his masterpiece. It was on board their two ships that
the Vivaldis had had the ambition to reach India by attempting to circumnavigate Africa, two
centuries before Vasco de Gama. One will consider in any event that Ulysses, in his capacity as
explorer of the extreme Occident, has a prime spot in the pantheon of “Macaronesia.” It is also
noteable that the freshly rediscovered Canaries greatly interested the Rinascimento. Petrarch
mentions them leetingly in his De vita solitaria, shortly ater Boccaccio gave the Latin account,
entitled De Canaria et de insulis reliquis ultra Hispaniam in oceano noviter repertis, of the voy-
age that Nicoloso da Recco, another Genoese, had really made to the Canaries in 1341. Boccac-
cio was particularly struck by the description of the Guanches.
he Canaries entered European history in the fourteenth century. What does this mean?
hey were immediately transformed into a hub in the slave trade: the Guanches aboriginals
were victims of the trade from the efective discovery of the islands. Secondly, they were colo-
nized at the very moment when their importance was conirmed. In 1402, the Norman adven-
turer Jean de Béthencourt “conquered” Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, and Ferro in his name and
that of Henry III of Castile, who thrust upon him the title “King of the Canary Islands.” While
Béthencourt was the irst king, there had been before him a “Prince of the Fortunate Islands,”
namely Louis of Spain. Petrarch was present at his coronation in Avignon in 1344. Béthencourt
1. “Io e’ compagni eravam vecchi e tardi / quando venimmo a quella foce stretta / dov’Ercule segnò li suoi
riguardi, / acciò che l’uom più oltre non si metta: / dalla man destra mi lasciai Sibilia, / dall’altra già m’avea
lasciata Setta.” (Dante 1991, 222)
stayed on these islands several years, peopling them with Normans, before leaving his place to
Maciot de Béthencourt in 1406. he extermination of the Guanches gathered pace, while the
Franciscan fathers Pierre Bontier and Jean Le Verrier were inalizing Le Canarien (he Canar-
ian), a chronicle of Jean de Béthencourt’s exploits. he Spanish consolidation of the Canar-
ies was consolidated in 1479. In 1483, the remaining islands of the archipelago were colonized.
Genocidal practices with respect to the Guanches reduced the race to those who had collabo-
rated with the apprentice conquistadores. In 1504, according to the hastily created bishopric of
the Canaries, there remained barely one thousand two hundred Guanche families in the entire
archipelago (Aznar Vallejo 1983, 152–53).
In 1492, Christopher Columbus called at La Gomera before continuing on his route to
“India.” Legend has it that he had enough time to ind a mistress there. he story might be a
happy one, were it not for its coincidence with the beginning of a new massacre: that of the
“Indians” of the Americas. he Canaries had progressively taken the place of the Fortunate Isles;
misfortune had crossed their path. Indeed, all of Macaronesia had entered into European his-
tory and geography in the irst half of the 15th century: Madeira was taken by the Portuguese in
1419, the Azores between 1427 and 1452, the Savage Islands in 1438, and Cape Verde in 1456. It is
noteable that the Spanish were quicker to include the Canaries on the map than the Lusitanians
were elsewhere in Macaronesia. But, in any event, the “real” had only gained a limited foothold.
he myth of the Fortunate Isles was indeed running out of steam: Petrarch wondered whether
the inhabitants did not sufer from their isolation; already Solinus had reckoned that the shores
must be foul-smelling due to deposits of seaweed and animal remains. But new legends came to
feed the Macaronesian imagination, thereby demonstrating its incomparable vitality.
In the sixth century, Brendan, an Irish monk, had decided to leave on a quest to the Land
of Delight. his is at least what is held by the manuscripts narrating, with many variations,
the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (Voyage of Brendan), which was quite well-known throughout
the Middle Ages. It was said that Brendan traveled up and down the Atlantic; his journey was
measured by the liturgical year. He discovered the Insula Deliciarum and returned to Ireland
ater having conversed with Judas, exiled on a lost islet. But, as fate would have it, he forgot the
co-ordinates of the island paradise. Nevertheless, the search was on for the isle of Saint Brendan,
thought to be located somewhere to the south. Here again, “objective” geography was subject
to the inluence of what was not considered a simple iction (the limits between the “real” and
“iction” turn out to be awfully movable when you consult the history of geography). he famous
Hereford Mappa Mundi, made by Richard of Haldingham around 1280, went as far as to super-
impose the isle of Saint Brendan and the Fortunate Isles, at a time when Irish myth was gaining
ground on Greek myth. As Marcos Martínez reminds us, Paolo Toscanelli situated the island
to the east of Cape Verde in 1476, and Martin Behaim to the south-west of the Canaries in 1492.
Let me say in passing, Toscanelli, like Behaim, led Christopher Columbus to forge his idea of
the world, a rather woolly idea. Leonardo Torriani even drew up a map of the isle of Saint Bren-
dan, which became San Borondón, ater having carefully mapped the Canary archipelago in the
1580s. In short, exoceanization was following its course: as Macaronesia had been “re-centered,”
new, mysterious, or in any case utopian, lands were being situated at its fringe. For many, the
isle of Saint Brendan had a unique characteristic: it was a loating island, which was sometimes
assimilated onto the back of a whale (the Torriani map vaguely calls to mind a whale shape).
he Canaries 295
It thus lay in the prestigious wake of other mobile islands: the isle of Aeolus in the Odyssey or
Delos. he legend’s roots were deep. Again, in 1721, the Captain General of the Canaries orga-
nized a large expedition to ind it, the last it would seem. Marcos Martínez goes on to elaborate:
Nevertheless, in certain atmospheric conditions, the island, according to some, continue to
appear from time to time, and has even been photographed – as the ABC of Madrid claimed
in an edition on August 10, 1958. Nevertheless, is that the phenomenon has ceased to worry
recent generations, considered now to be an optical illusion and an efect of light refraction.
According to some, it is actually a relection of the island of La Palma. (M. Martínez 1992, 97)
In his Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent fait en 1799–1804 (1807) (Personal
narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of the new continent during the years 1799–1804,
1807), Alexander von Humboldt explained that the leeting apparitions of an island of the coast
of the Canaries (where he had stopped over in 1799) had to do with an optical phenomenon, but
the legend was already deeply rooted. Here is what Antonio Tabucchi, a great Genoese writer
(do Ligurian navigators henceforth prefer voyages of the mind?), wrote a propos of the Azores,
in Donna di Porto Pim (he woman of Porto Pim, 1983):
In the course of this incessant volcanic activity, the landscape of the Azores has risen, notably
changing, and innumberable oxbows have emerged and disappeared. he most interesting fact
under examination is described by the English captain Tillard, who, aboard the war vessel
Sabrina, witnessed in 1810 the birth of a small island onto which he commanded two men with
the English lag, taking possession of it in the name of England and baptizing it “Sabrina.” But
the next day, prior to hoisting anchor, Captain Tillard must have realized with disappointment
that the island of Sabrina had disappeared and that the sea had become as calm as always.2
While explorers did their utmost to ix the position of San Borondón on the world map, another,
quite ancient, myth began in turn to concern the Canaries: the inescapable myth of Atlantis. In
ancient times, the parallel between the Canaries, the Fortunate Isles, and Atlantis was improb-
able, indeed impossible: it would have been tricky to associate the Macaronesian utopia and the
dystopia of Atlantis in a single space. But the discovery of the existence of the Guanches, in the
fourteenth century, advanced the situation, just when the archipelago was seeming less idyllic
than when it was a mere projection of fantasy (for a descriptive summary of the Guanche civi-
lization, read, for example, Antonio Tejera Gaspar, 1992).
he history of the Guanche aboriginals is not known for certain. However, it has been
conirmed that they are of Berber origin and that they peopled the archipelago from Antiquity.
A paradox seems to hold: how could islanders living on the small territory of the various Ca-
nary islands fail to know the basic techniques of navigation? Several answers can be considered,
some likely. Others refer to myth, to which we tirelessly return in this part of the world. We
2. “Nel corso di questa incessante attività vulcanica, il paesaggio delle Azzore ha subito notevoli mutamenti
e innumerevoli isolotti sono aiorati e sono scomparsi. Il fatto più curioso in proposito è descritto dal
capitano inglese Tillard, che a bordo del vascello di guerra ‘Sabrina’ assistette nel 1810 alla nascita di un’iso-
letta sulla quale egli fece sbarcare due uomini con la bandiera inglese prendendone possesso in nome
dell’Inghilterra e battezzandola ‘Sabrina’. Ma il giorno dopo, prima di salpare le ancore, il capitano Tillard
dovette constatare con disappunto che l’isola di Sabrina era scomparsa e il mare era ritornato tranquillo
come sempre.” (Tabucchi 1983, 95)
therefore think of Atlantis, of which the Guanches are supposedly the descendants. his new
grating of the fantastic onto the real is more recent than that of the isle of Saint Brendan. We
owe it in particular to the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher who, in his Mundus Subterraneus (Subter-
ranean world) of 1664, paints the Guanches as the last Atlanteans and the Canaries as the re-
mains of Atlantis. Others subsequently drew this parallel, such as the Istrian Giovanni Rinaldo
Carli in his Lettere americane (American letters, 1770–81) or the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer
in L’Atlàntida (Atlantis, 1877).
However, the Fortunate Isles would continue to be mentioned throughout the Renais-
sance and the real pitted against the imaginary. A variant of the myth was even found in the
seventeenth century. When the king of Portugal Don Sebastian was defeated at Alcazarquivir,
in Morocco, by the Sultan Abd-el-Malik, in 1578, he disappeared without a trace. According to
a new legend, he had found refuge on the Fortunate Isles. On a misty morning, he was to have
returned to Lisbon to sound the reveille of the Portuguese troops and bolster the national pride
damaged by the Spanish occupation, following the army’s routing. And so “Sebastianism” came
into being. But to this day Don Sebastian has still not returned to his country.
At the time of the king of Portugal’s disappearance, Tasso was composing the inal lines of
his Gierusalemme liberata (Jerusalem delivered, 1575–80), in Ferrar. Renaud, a hero of this epic
poem, is kidnapped by the sorceress Armide and transported to a garden on the Fortunate Isles.
Two of his companions then set out to ind him and discover an archipelago of seven islands,
sure to be the Canaries, which were starting to become well-known at the time of Tasso, but for
the poet were still the equivalent of the legendary islands of Macaronesian myth. In Jerusalem
Delivered it is written: “You are seeing now the Fortunate Isles, about which there comes to you
a report widespread but dubious.”3
Dubious… perhaps not entirely! In the 1590s, the Canaries produced their own epic via
Antonio de Viana, a doctor of Tenerife, who practiced medicine in Seville and then on Gran
Canaria. In Antigüedades de las Islas Fortunadas (Antiquities of the Fortunate Isles), published
in Seville in 1604, Viana depicts the landing of the Spanish on Tenerife, the battle of La Matanza,
the mores of the Guanches, for whom he proposed an onomastic (thereby misleading several
historians, including Viera y Clavijo, whom I will mention presently), before composing a pas-
toral of which the Guanches, treated here with great humanity, were partially the protagonists.
Lope de Vega had admiration for the young Viana: “Sing in sweet and sot verses / the history
of Canaria and Tenerife / […] in another age you will be his only Atlantean.”4 But Viana never
knew the destiny that Lope de Vega promised him in the sonnet that opens the epic.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century, as voyages to the Canaries were growing in num-
ber, the geographical and poetic descriptions diverged, that is, as far as concerns the Fortunate
Isles. For the rest, there was still leeway for active imaginations. San Borondón continued to
occupy the minds of some and Atlantis drove them as far as obsession. In his Noticias de la his-
toria general de las Islas Canarias (Notes for a general history of the Canaries), don José de Viera
y Clavijo, the most famous representative of the Enlightenment in the archipelago (Tenerife,
3. “L’isole di Fortuna ora vedete, / dicui gran fama a voi ma incerta giunge.” (Tasso 1987, 328; 15.37)
4. “Canta con versos dulces y suaves / la historia de Canaria y Tenerife, / en otra edad serás su Atlante solo.”
(In Viana 1991, 58)
he Canaries 297
1731–Gran Canaria, 1813), submitted the hypothesis that the Canaries were long ago a peninsula
of Africa, that the great lood transformed this peninsula into the Platonic Atlantis and that,
as a result of the catastrophe that engulfed the area, only the highest summits remained above
water, in other words the seven islands and their satellites. While the attempted connection
between the Canaries and Atlantis was almost standard at his time, Viera y Clavijo introduced
a new element which would repeated several times in the twentieth century: the geological,
indeed cultural, kinship between the Canaries and Africa. French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Bory
de Saint-Vincent, who lived on Tenerife in 1800, published three years later Essais sur les isles
Fortunées et l’antique Atlantide ou Précis de l’histoire générale de l’Archipel des Canaries (Essays
on the Fortunate isles and ancient Atlantis or explanation of the general history of the Canary
Archipelago), wherein he set out an extraordinary version of the myth, which deserves a brief
summary (for further reading on French travelers to the Canaries, see Pico and Corbella 2000).
he Atlanteans lived on a vast island corresponding almost exactly to Macaronesia. But they
were not the only ones to occupy this area. For example, to the south, in the province “known as
Gorgon,” (Bory de Saint-Vincent 1803, 453) in the space occupied by modern-day Cape Verde,
lived the Gorgons, rivals of the Atlanteans and themselves subject to the murderous incur-
sions of the Amazons. First ravaged by eruptions, Gorgon inally collapsed when Perseus killed
Medusa, queen of the Gorgons, who in any event were destined to die out as they were unable
to reproduce (like the Lemnians, whom Jason and the Argonauts encountered on their way to
Colchis). As for the Atlanteans, their fate was also sealed. he Amazons, led by Queen Myrine,
had managed to bring all of Atlantis to its knees, before the Mediterranean lake (!), overlow-
ing its banks due to increasingly violent seismic tremors, opened up a passage to the Atlantic
(and Atlantis), at the same time erecting the pillars of Hercules and enguling the great island,
the continent of Atlantis, with its waters. Meanwhile, the Atlanteans had attempted to conquer
Libyan lands, indeed even Egypt, under pressure from the Amazons. But, pushed back by the
Athenians, they returned home, just when the catastrophe was at its height. heir only option
was to invade the few archipelagoes corresponding to the peaks of the volcanoes. Bory de Saint-
Vincent goes on to explain:
hey must have thought that the entire universe had sufered the same fate as their island, and
to have alone escaped universal destruction. his quite reasonable opinion lasted longer than
the memory of the physical revolution that had ruined Atlantis; hence the Guanches thought
they were the sole people of the world when the Europeans arrived on the Canaries and com-
pleted what the ire of the volcanoes, the waves of the sea, and the arms of the Athenians had
started: the full destruction of the last children of Atlas. (Bory de Saint-Vincent 1803, 458–59)
he Guanches were therefore their descendants, becoming essentially “the last children of the
Atlanteans” (460). heir extermination found itself thereby doubly denounced: in itself, but as
well in the fact that it signiied not only the ultimate break with the protohistory of the Canaries,
but with an entire exoceanized West.
In concluding this rapid overview of these “irst” Canary Islands, the identity of which was
then being formed, it would be a shame not to mention an endeavor that places the process of
exoceanization in a strange light. In 1634, while a signiicant battle was raging to set a reference
longitude that would have made it possible to better determine the position of new discoveries,
Cardinal Richelieu decided that the island of Ferro, the westernmost (and smallest) of the archi-
pelago, was to house the meridian that would divide the world into two: the Old World to the
east and the New World to the west of the imaginary line. One of these discoveries, that of the
ixed point, is described in Umberto Eco’s L’isola del giorno prima (he island of the day before,
1994), where the island of Ferro is mentioned, since the novel takes place in 1642. But it is in the
coral waters of the Salomon archipelago that Roberto de la Grive, the novel’s hero, discovers
“the island of the day before.” Truthfully speaking, Richelieu’s idea was not new. In Le Grand
Insulaire of 1555, the king’s cosmographer André hevet remarked: “he Isle de Fer is renowned
above all the other Canaries in that on this island passes the mid-day line, which divides lon-
gitudinal space, that is from east to west, as it is noted on our maps” (Pico and Corbella 2000,
xxxix). Ferro, according to Richelieu’s mathematicians, also had the advantage of being exactly
20° west of Paris. he idea of having the prime meridian pass through the Fortunate Isles had
in fact been expressed by Ptolemy, who, “for so long the greatest of geographers,” as wrote Bory
de Saint-Vincent, “made the Canaries famous, by counting its longitude of the meridian of
Ferro, the westernmost of the Fortunates” (1803, 14). Ferro had become La Isla del Meridiano
and the Canaries no longer represented the edge of the world: they now adjoined the center
of the world and were the last frontier of the Old World! In so doing, Richelieu pitted himself
against those who would have preferred having the line pass through the Azores. But he did
not keep the Dutch from choosing another landmark not far away: the summit of Teide. In any
event, from 1884, the prime meridian was oicially assigned to Greenwich, on the territory of
the main colonial power of the time. “By preserving the former prerogative of Ferro, no nation’s
susceptibilities were ofended and maps maintained a quite desirable uniformity,” noted the
scientist René-Primavère Lesson in 1823, fearing that each nation would have the meridian pass
through its own capital (Pico and Corbella 2000, xl). Apparently, in 1884, the question was no
longer put in the same terms.
Canary: A dance the name of which is presumably derived from the Canary Islands...
Over the centuries, the Canaries never tired of dancing through maps and minds, as Henri
Estienne seems to have understood, in his dictionary of 1578, from which part of the deinition
that serves as my sub-heading is borrowed (Corbella, G. de Uriarte, and Curell). he path of
the meridian should have warded of fate, slowed this dizzying ballet, and calmed imaginations.
Once el punto ijo (ixed point) was a reference to the Canaries, the archipelago would have
to crystallize within a stable geographical reality, within the sensible routine of cartographic
evidence. But this did not happen. When the Canaries were not prey to the compulsive fantasy
of increasing numbers of others, they forced themselves to stick to a deliciously complicated
choreography. One thing alone was now certain: they were no longer a inis terrae teetering on
the edge of the void, in these faraway waters where the world had long ago risked toppling into
nothingness; they had become a pivot between the Old and New Worlds, in the divide through
which ships now sailed quite regularly. Around the end of the nineteenth century, the Canaries
directed their gaze beyond the horizon line, towards the setting sun. On a modern application
of the principle of exokeanismos, they projected their own Fortunate Isles in the direction of
he Canaries 299
Cuba and as far as South America, to Venezuela in particular, “the eighth island of the archi-
pelago,” as some called it.
Canary islanders lived for the most part in abject misery, at this period that was to con-
tinue. In 1900, more than seventy percent of them were illiterate. “American” emigration was
for many a natural course of action. Hence the inhabitants of the formerly Fortunate Isles were
forced to go seek their fortunes elsewhere. In fact, the Canarian presence in the Americas was
already notable in the eighteenth century. Simón Bolívar was of Canary origin, and, it was said,
was not a descendant of the hidalgos, but of the Guanches! “Guanche blood ran through the
veins of the Liberator. In efect, his maternal grandmother, doña Francisca Blanco de Herrera
came from the primitive Canary nation, for she was the granddaughter of Juana Gutiérrez, of
the ‘Guanche nation’ ” (W. Férnandez, quoted in Hernández García 1989, 25). By a rather com-
plicated logic, it would seem that the Canarians, unable to assert a strong awareness of their
identity in their archipelago, gained in personality overseas. hey were incidentally assisted
in this by the “Americans.” In Venezuela, Congress was openly in favor of immigration from
the Canaries, “because,” speciied an 1831 decree, “their religion, language, and customs are the
same, because their economy and hard work are certain means of prospering, being already
experienced in our fertile ields” (1989, 15). As an indirect consequence, the emigrant Canary is-
landers ended up distinguishing themselves from the Spanish and inding their heroes in Latin
America. One of the major concerns of Julio del Pino Hernández García, to whom I owe some
of the information supra, was to draw up a list of all the minstrels of Latin American identity
whose roots were in the Canaries: Bolívar, of course, but also José Martí, Fidel Castro, and two
of Che Guevara’s companions, to name but a few.
In the 1890s, the use of the image of the Guanche was repeated in an attempt to sketch out
a Canarian identity, or canariedad. Bolívar had, in a manner, shown the way. In 1897, Secundino
Delgado Rodríguez, a Canarian journalist “exiled” in Venezuela and a proponent of the au-
tonomy movement, founded the journal El Guanche in Caracas. At this time, in Tenerife, Luis
Rodríguez Figueroa was inishing his work El Cacique, under the pen name “Guillón Barrús.” In
this novel, which belongs to the naturalist, or verist, movement, the author, who was twenty-six
at its publication in 1901, viciously denounced the “political” system applied in the rural areas
of the archipelago. Young Juanillo is a victim of harassment by don Oroncio, the cacique of the
valley of the Orotava. Ater having ruined and despoiled chó Sixto, Juanillo’s father, for having
announced he would vote for the opposition, and causing the death of Juanillo’s mother, the
cacique inds a way to get Juanillo out of the picture so as to seduce his iancée Micaela. Juanillo
is to be enlisted in the Canarian battalion sent to Cuba, at the time of the war, in 1898, but he
manages to desert in Venezuela, where he awaits the pardon that would enable him to return
home. Having got wind of don Oroncio’s intrigues, he nonetheless decides to bring forward
his return to Tenerife to avenge his family and restore his honor by killing the cacique. He fails.
Wrongly accused (on the basis of false testimony contrived by don Oroncio) of Micaela’s mur-
der, he is condemned to a long prison sentence, despite his obvious innocence. his quick sum-
mary gives an idea of the novel’s tone, which is also highly educational. In keeping with the logic
of a Secundino Delgado, Rodríguez Figueroa plants the archipelago’s identity in its Guanche
past. hat which is speciic to the Canaries is Guanche; that which is harmful is Iberian. he
narrator notes that “[i]n this land of Guanches that which is typical, totally autochthonous, has
been lost: the simplicity of customs and the temperament of character.”5 And conversely: “his
here is a consequence of the Peninsula, and it stinks just as bad, even though it doesn´t reach
such enormous responsabilities.”6 Accordingly, it is unsurprising that chó Sixto and his son
are considered descendants of the Guanches and that the cacique descends from the “bando
conquistador” (conquering band) characterized by “la sed de rapiña y el hambre de cópula”
(the thirst for pillage and the hunger for sex) (34). he narrator, the author’s double, concludes:
“his sums up the moral and historical substance of those raiders that devasted the New World
and planted the perverse seed in Plato’s Atlantis, the weed that poisoned Gaunche homes and
caused the beginnings of a pernicious political feudalism to form.”7 he entire novel is built on
this binary system, which leaves the islanders but one outlet: emigration/exile in Venezuela,
or even Morocco, because “there are those who believe that it is preferable to live in Morocco”
(14). In this book, Rodríguez Figueroa ofers pertinent illustrations of the way in which foreign
myths can be appropriated for the most concrete of political purposes.
he Republican Rodríguez Figueroa did not survive the advent of Francoism. In October
1936, he was taken of the coast of Tenerife by the militia, struck with the butt of a bayonet and
drowned (like so many Guanches at the arrival of the conquistadores). Others met a similar
fate. he coup d’état of the caudillo (who started his nefarious reach for power in the Canaries,
where, as military governor, he had been imprudently relegated and forgotten by the Republic)
spurred a new exodus to the Americas. Latin America has continued to serve as a western
reference point to the present day. Some of the work of Juan Jesús Armas Marcelo, one of the
biggest authors of detective novels in Spanish, who was born in 1946 in Las Palmas, attempts to
throw up a bridge between the archipelago and Cuba, where the action of several of his novels
unfolds. Two of his novels are devoted to Cuba: Así en La Habana como en el cielo (In Havana
as in heaven, 1998) and El niño de luto y el cocinero del Papa (he child in mourning and the
Pope’s cook, 2002), as well as the essay Cuba en el corazón (Cuba in the heart, 1999). J. J. Armas
Marcelo also devoted a study to the Canarian diaspora in Latin America: El otro archipiélago
(he other archipelago, 1988). Furthermore, he continued the tradition of imaginary Canary
islands. We ind echoes of San Borondón in his Salbago, the starting point of the Conquistadores
de las naves quemadas (Conquerers of burning ships, 1982) and stage for the events described in
El árbol del bien y del mal (he tree of good and evil, 1995).
he Macaronesia of the Ancients thus continued its process of exoceanization. In so doing,
it changed names. Since about the 1980s, it has been Canamérica. But it had been Canamérica
for longer, ever since Fortune had elected domicile on new islands, in a new water and earth
universe, to the west – always further to the west. his projection is not the exclusive fantasy
of the Canarians: the link has also been established the other way round. For example, Mario
5. “En esta tierra de guanches se ha perdido lo típico, lo netamente autóctono: la sencillez de costumbres y el
temple de carácter.” (Rodríguez Figueroa 1988, 16)
6. “La de aquí es una secuela de la Península, y como ella, huele tan mal, aunque no la alcanzan tan inmensas
responsabilidades.” (Rodríguez Figueroa 1988, 34)
7. “En sí reasumía la sustancia moral e histórica de aquellos forbantes que asolarán el Nuevo Mundo y sem-
brarán en la Atlántida de Platón la semilla perversa, la mala hierba que envenenó los hogares guanchescos
e hizo arraigar en ellos el germen de un feudalismo político pernicioso.” (Rodríguez Figueroa 1988, 35)
he Canaries 301
Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian writer, who by the way, had no Canarian grandmother or uncle,
recalls his irst stay in Madrid:
It always surprised me that the Spanish would ask if I was Canarian, because I later found out,
once I had gone to the Canary Islands, that in fact our way of speaking, our phonetics, and our
verbal tenses were practically the same. Furthermore, the balconies of many of the cities in my
country and some of those displayed on the façades of Canarian cities are the same or very
similar. (quoted in Hernández García 1989, 12–13)
he community of identities is also established by the similarity of balconies!

Canamérica is also manifested in literary production, in particular that of the seventies,
through the contribution of South American magical realism. It was over the course of this
decade that Canarian literature experienced one of its most prosperous periods with the emer-
gence of novelists such as Rafael Arozarena (Tenerife, 1923), Luis Alemany (Barcelona, 1944,
then Tenerife), Víctor Ramírez (Gran Canaria, 1944), and J. J. Armas Marcelo, among others,
who were quickly categorized as narraguanches, a nickname referring less to the Berber ab-
originals than to a Latin American model inherited from Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos
Fuentes. In his introduction to Diosnoslibre (Heaven forbid, 1984) by Victor Ramírez, Angel
Sánchez incidentally denounces the use of this label considered to be simplistic: “It was an issue
of efectively spreading what was called ‘los narraguanches’ by those in the metropolis, with an
ethnic excess in the name, testing the level of Peninsular unfamiliarity with the literature of the
islands. It is clear that our narrative seemed to emerge from the Stone age, such was the Islands’
scarce contribution to the Spanish narrative up to these dates” (A. Sánchez 1984, 11). But the
link with Latin America was not called into question. For example, the area of Los Riscos, in Las
Palmas, described by Ramírez, is unhesitatingly compared to a “Macondo real” (real Macondo)
by Sánchez (1984, 17) in much the same way as the Femés that Arozarena situates on Lanzarote,
in Mararía (1973) (Torres Stinga, in Arozarena 1983, 20).
Exoceanization nevertheless has its limits, unless it is absolute; for regardless of whether
the Ancients like it or not, one will admit that the world is round. By gazing always in the same
direction and following a permanent line of light, one ends up chasing one’s tail. For the café
customers described by Rodríguez Figueroa, a preference for life in Morocco as opposed to
island life marked by the scheming of the cacique and his partisans was not a complete para-
dox. Even though the Canary archipelago looks to the Americas, it is still African, at least in its
geology. In an article devoted to Canarian art from the 1970s to the 1990s, Antonio Zaya made
a fundamental remark:
But if the Canaries have been absent from any stage, it is precisely the one which it belongs to
geographically: Africa. his syncretism with Europe ater the iteenth century and the natural
movement towards Latin America has made the Canaries into a paradigm where the only pre-
dictable factor is a mystery to its drit, to the direction, of its utopia that is emerging from the
occidental African coast in a permanent crossing of diferences and identities. (Zaya 1993, 5:35)
he dance of the Canaries. Canamérica, perhaps; Canáfrica, certainly. From the late eighteenth
century, Viera y Clavijo had spoken out in favor of the Canaries being joined to Tingitane (Mau-
ritania), and explained their supposed “Americaneity” by the fact that all the islands located to
the west of the Strait of Gibraltar were unduly assimilated to the Americas and their inhabitants
to “Indians” (and Asia claims its share too!). It was undoubtedly more worthwhile to follow
the movement of exoceanization than to swim against its current. From ancient times, Viera y
Clavijo was among the irst to claim the “Africaneity” of the islands. Perhaps the fact that he was
born there had something to do with this vision of geography. But as we’ve seen, African roots
were not necessarily ends in themselves: it was with the aid of these roots that we return to the
myth, to this Atlantis that at least had the merit of bringing together lands that History seemed
to have deinitively torn apart. Africa, Atlantis, and the Canaries – three stubborn points of
reference once again combined in 1992 by Isaac de Vega in Tassili. In this novel, De Vega, one of
the great Canarian authors (Tenerife, 1920), imagines that young Silvestre, born in the Spanish
Sahara to a Spanish father and a Saharan mother, discovers in the desert the rock paintings of
Tassili that would establish a link between the African terra irma and the archipelago located
of its coast. he connection is once again assured by the Atlantis myth. What’s more, in the end
Silvestre identiies with the victim of a sacred ritual practiced long ago in this legendary land.
he “Africaneity” of the Canaries also happens to be the subject of genuine claims, and
it appears as an end in itself and not as the basis of a myth (even though, for Isaac de Vega,
it is rather the myth that provides the basis of the alternative identity). his hypothesis is in
particular borne out in Los ojos del señor Cabra (Una ruta canario mauritana) (Mr. Cabra’s
eyes [a Canary Mauritanian route], 1998) by Manuel N. González Díaz. “he hidden objective
of the journey is the Taureg soul and its Canarian copy, or perhaps viceversa?”8 emphasized
Francisco Javier González, in his preface to the book. González Díaz notes for his part: “What
are the Canaries? What have they become? What has Lanzarote really become? A German
housing development, with a haltime British population, 33.33 percent of one nationality, 33.33
percent another, the rest Scandinavian, a few Italian, some French, and in the summer months,
the Spanish.”9 In the author’s view, this two-way ignorance serves as an impossible binder
between the various groups. he theme of the dispossession of identity, at the time of the book’s
publication (I will return to this shortly), had been inluential for many years. In this sense,
González Díaz had hardly innovated, but he is among those who proposed a return to potential
African sources to put some order in the dance of identities. Moreover, this coming together of
the Canaries and Saharan Africa took a radical political turn: the Polisario Front found circum-
stancial allies in the Canaries; the Movimiento por la Autodeterminación e Independencia del
Archipiélago Canario (MPAIAC, Movement for Canarian archipelago autodetermination and
independence) of Antonio Cubillo, supported in Algiers by the Algerian government. To those
who prefer a more neutral discourse, I recommend passing through the pretty village of Haría,
in the north of Lanzarote. Perhaps the elements have not yet worn away these verses painted on
a white wall of the central square:
8. “El objectivo recóndito del viaje es el alma tuareg y su trasunto canario ¿o, quizà, la viceversa? (F.J. González
1998, viii)
9. “¿en qué se han convertido las Islas Canarias? ¿en qué, concretamente, la isla de Lanzarote? Una urban-
ización alemana, a tiempo parcial británica, 33,33 % de una nacionalidad, 33,33 % de otra, el resto escan-
dinavo, pocos italianos, apenas franceses y, en los meses de verano, los españoles.” (González Díaz 1998,
59–60)
he Canaries 303
I am from here
I am basalt, dragon tree, gorse
Flowering tamarisk and almond tree
I’m the wind and the savin juniper
I am ravine, cloud, and sun.
From my hands run the paths
of the towns I inherited
and in the river of my blood
the future and yesterday run.
I am America and Europe
my root is Berber
I am Atlantic and seed
I am tradewinds and honey.
I am from here, I am from a land
where the sea imprisons the sun...
With the world as a border
being Canarian is my reason.10
Facades in the Canaries are covered with interesting creations (graiti, tags, etc.), which would
undoubtedly merit being noted, but in this case it is the 1994 popular song “Soy de aquí” (I am
from here) by Benito Cabrera.
We should point out that myth did not give out entirely under the pressure of these poetic,
geopoetic, and geopolitical transatlantic drits. Inspiration was never lacking, and new declen-
sions of the myth were even created. Lanzarote, which, as I speciied, must undoubtedly owe
it name to its Genoese (re-)discoverer, was coupled with the Lancelot of the Arthurian leg-
end by Agustín Espinosa, a Canarian modernist poet (Tenerife, 1897–1939), in Lancelot, 28°–7°
(1929). Ater Saint Brendan, the Celtic world reappears in the archipelago! Espinosa explains:
“My intention is to create a new Lanzarote. A Lanzarote which I invent […] For this reason I´ve
replaced a Lanzarote that today communicates nothing, and that has lost its efective emotion,
with Lancelot.”11 Full of an ironic concern with respect to the institution of tourism, which
was however at that time only in its early days, Espinosa even sees the possibility of opening a
Lancelot Museum that would have housed the ivory comb of the hero or, further, portraits of
Arthur and Guinevere:
An integral archeology of Lanzarote would not forget Lancelot’s tomb. When Lanzarote’s Tour-
ist Board become aware of the potential of this site, they will build Lancelot’s sarcophagus and
will indicate it in capital letters in the new tour guides […] hey will ind the house where
Lancelot died. His shield. His weapons. he traces of his aternoon walks. His beach of African
summers. he Lancelot Museum will be created: the table he ate at; the low valetudinarian bed;
10. “Soy de aquí / Soy basalto, drago, aulaga / tarajal y almendro en lor / soy el viento y la sabina / soy bar-
ranco, nube y sol. / Por mis manos van las sendas / de los pueblos que heredé / y en el rio de mi sangre / va
el futuro y el ayer. / Soy América y Europa /mi raíz es bereber / soy atlántico y simiente / soy alisio y miel.
/ Soy de aquí, soy de una tierra / donde el mar cautiva el sol… / Con el mundo por frontera / ser canario
es mi razón.”
11. “Mi intento es el de crear un Lanzarote nuevo. Un Lanzarote inventado por mí […] Por eso sustituyo un
Lanzarote que hoy ya nada dice, que ha perdido su sentimiento efectivo, por Lancelot.” (Espinosa 1929, 14)
the old and well-worn tournament grounds; the ivory comb and the golden curl; the portraits
of Arthur, the cuckolded, and of Guinevere, the beloved.12
In spite of such innovative eforts – although this one was, to my knowledge, to be short-lived –
“traditional” myths continued to survive. he Fortunate Isles particularly inspired painters, such
as Ildefonso Aguilar, Cesar Manrique, originally from Lanzarote (1919–1992), and Pepe Dá-
maso. According to Fernando Castro (1993, 3:33),
the myth of the fecund vegetation of the Garden is also entombed by the river of the petriied
lava that makes up an eloquent metonymy of the Canarian landscape. It is what remains of the
paradise, described in a poem of Pedro García Cabrera: “the lava was the stone / hat searched
for freedom and burned in the wings / of the irebird: all that remains / of a paradise of golden
apples.” (“la lava fue la piedra / que buscó la libertad y ardió en las alas / del pájaro del fuego:
eso que resta / de un paraíso de manzanas de oro”).
he shortcut taken by Castro via García Cabrera, a modernist poet of La Gomera, is strik-
ing. While lava irst transformed the utopian landscape of the garden of the Hesperides into a
radical dystopia, a locus horribilis, this same lava ends up symbolizing a new, this time verti-
cal, projection: that of stone, a bird of ire ascending towards a sky of freedom. he Fortunate
Isles thereby gained a new fertility through the worship of the stone saturated with life. he
locomotive of this surprising metamorphosis was undeniably André Breton, who in chapter 5
of L’amour fou published in 1937, ater having evoked the free light of the “original canary of
the island” (what does the falsehood matter?) gives an account of his ascension of Teide in the
company of Jacqueline Lamba. Breton eroticizes the mineral landscape, sings a hymn to the
obsidian, to, in short, the transformation of Tenerife, above all the area of Las Cañadas, into an
antonomasia of surrealist space. And once again a part of the Canaries dodges reality. Breton,
with the support of Benjamin Péret, had even considered screening Buñuel’s he Golden Age in
the Canaries, in May 1935, but this plan fell afoul of the censors. he Golden Age in the Garden
of the Hesperides! Carmen Laforet took over in a manner where Breton let of. he author of
Nada (Nothing) came to live in Las Palmas with her family when she was only two years old
(in 1923) before returning in 1944 to her native Barcelona for her studies. In 1952, she devoted
La isla y los demonios (he island and the demons) to Gran Canaria. In this novel, of which the
heroine is young Marta Camino, the islands take on a surrealist hue and the Guanches and their
god Alcorah return to center stage.
12. “Una arqueología integral de Lanzarote no olvidaría el sepulcro de Lancelot. Cuando la Sociedad Pro
Turismo de Lanzarote se dé cuenta de este imperativo turístico, ediicará el sarcófago de Lancelot que
señalarán con mayúscula las nuevas guías […] Se encontrá la casa donde murió Lancelot. Su escudo. Sus
armas. Su pista de los paseos de la tarde. Su playa de los estíos africanos. Se hará el Museo Lancelot: la mesa
en que comía; el bajo lecho de valetudinario; el viejo y labrado yermo de los torneos; el peine de maril y
el rizo dorado; los retratos de Artús, el cornudo, y de Genievre, la amada.” (Espinosa 1929, 17)
he Canaries 305
Tourism or the globalization of drit
Since, under the sun of the Canaries, anything and everything is bound together by tension, the
politico-economic contingencies of the twentieth century were sure to be no diferent. While,
on the political level, the islands had been Spanish since the end of the iteenth century, on the
economic side the situation turned out to be more unstable. When Spain lost the Philippines
and Cuba, the British conirmed a certainly discreet but long-standing hold on the Canaries.
In late 1898, as Leopoldo O’Shanahan notes, “it might be said that the Canaries enter into the
the orbit of British interests, of which they have been subject to for over 300 years, with Spain
providing the legal framework, as well as its practical apparatus” (O’Shanahan 1988, 227). his
presence had not let writers indiferent. For example, in 1919, Alonso Quesada (Gran Canaria,
1886–1925) mocked the cosmopolitan, and above all English, milieu of Las Palmas in Crónicas
de la ciudad y de la noche (Chronicles of the city and of the night, 1919). hen, in an additional
historical irony, Fyfes, a fruit depot that had belonged to an English company, became a fear-
some prison for the Republicans arrested by fascist factions during the civil war. hings devel-
oped with the coming of mass tourism, from the sixties and especially the seventies. Henceforth
Englishmen were less targeted than were… Englishwomen. In Los puercos de Circe (Circe’s pigs,
1973), Luis Alemany, described young students of his island who, otherwise unoccupied, found
new prey. Referring to the female foreign visitors of Puerto de la Cruz, Miguel Ángel, a char-
acter of the novel, whispers to César: “What you are saying […] is that English girls are much
like prostitutes, but with a touch of mist, and for free.”13 In Tassili, twenty years later, the hostil-
ity becomes vague. All tourists were the cause of complaints regardless of nationality. Isaac de
Vega wrote a scene in which the wife of a doctor speaks to the mayor in these terms: “ ‘You must
prohibit these people from clouding up the water,’ she vehemently said to the doctor, ‘people of
their ilk do not belong there.’ To which he responds: ‘It’s a delicate matter, madame. I too would
like this, but it can’t be done.’ ”14 It is true that some literary tourists paid the islands back in kind:
in pesetas? Pounds sterling? A Swedish krona, perhaps… Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the
spiritual parents of police captain Martin Beck, the most famous policeman of Sweden before
Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, still associate the Canaries with suntans, seen in this ex-
ample from Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Terroristerna (he terrorists): “ ‘How do you manage to be so
tanned?’ ‘Canary Islands,’ answered the witness laconically.”15 he relationship becomes more
complex from the nineties onward. “Complex” is saying a lot: the Canaries found themselves
simpliied to excess and, paradoxically, the supposed paradise of tourism was transformed into
a real locus horribilis.
Why do we go to the Canaries? his is what David Lodge in herapy (1995) and Michel
Houellebecq in Lanzarote (2002) explain. In herapy, Lodge gives us the neurotic character
13. “Tú lo que dices […] es que las inglesas son una especie de prostitutas pero con niebla y en gratis.” (Ale-
many 1983, 72)
14. “Tiene usted que prohibir a esa gente que enturbie las aguas – decía vehemente al alcade del barrio – No
son quién ellos para meter ahí sus cuerpos” / “Eso es muy delicado, señora. Yo también lo quisiera, pero
no se puede.” (De Vega 1992, 134)
15. “ ‘Hur kann ni vara så solbränd? – ‘Kanarieöarna,’ sa vittnet lakoniskt.” (Wahlöö and Sjöwall 1975, 48)
of Lawrence “Tubby” Passmore, who, when his wife Sally leaves him, decides to spend a long
weekend with Amy, with whom he had until then had only Platonic relations. Where to go?
Amy resumes her proposal in this way: “I said anywhere, as long as it’s abroad, and preferably
warm” (1995, 150). Lawrence too is dreaming of the (not so) faraway and makes the arrange-
ments, as Amy explains: “Well, we’re going to Tenerife, I’m afraid. Lawrence went to a travel
agent and said he wanted somewhere warm abroad but not long-haul and that’s what they came
up with. I wish I’d made the arrangements myself now” (151).
I do not know whether Houellebecq read Lodge; it was surely not indispensable to resort
to the charms of inter-textuality to arrive at the same kind of introduction. I do not hesitate to
quote in extenso the following anthological fragment where the narrator of Lanzarote, who is
depressed in France, recalls the beginnings of his trip, in a Parisian travel agency:
She came back and sat opposite me and in a frank – and markedly diferent – tone asked me:
‘Have you thought about the Canaries?’ Faced with my silence, she explained, with a profes-
sional smile: ‘People rarely think of the Canaries… It’s an archipelago of the African coast,
warmed by the Gulf Stream; the weather is mild all year round. I’ve seen people bathing there
in January…’ She gave me some time to digest this information before continuing: ‘We have
a special ofer for Bougainville Playa. One week, all-inclusive, 3,290 francs; departures from
Paris on the ninth, sixteenth, and twenty-third of January. Superior four-star hotel. All rooms
with en-suite bathroom, hairdryer, air conditioning, telephone, TV, mini-bar, room safe, bal-
cony with pool view (or sea view for a supplement), 1000 m2 swimming pool, Jacuzzi, sauna,
hammam, itness centre, three tennis courts, two squash courts, miniature golf, table tennis.
Traditional dance shows, excursions from the hotel (details available on site). Travel/cancel-
lation insurance, all-inclusive. ‘Where is it?’ I couldn’t help but ask. ‘Lanzarote’ (Houellebecq
2004, 4–5)16
he equation is simple: each island of the Canaries is worth about iteen or so lines of consum-
erist description, which sometimes resemble the siren’s fatal song to the exoticism of mass tour-
ism. Because, in Lodge, we learn more about the four-star hotel Tenerife style: “Well, given a
choice between the Siberian salt mines and a four-star hotel in Playa de las Americas, I’d choose
Siberia any day” (Lodge 1995, 152). Amy goes so far as to wish for Mount Teide to erupt and
wipe Playa de las Americas of the map. Houellebecq is not as severe as Lodge perhaps because
he perceives with greater objectivity.
16. “Elle revint s’asseoir en face de moi et d’un ton direct, très changé, me demanda: ‘Vous avez pensé aux
Canaries?’ Devant mon silence elle abattit, avc un sourire de professionnelle: ‘Les gens pensent rarement
aus Canaries… C’est un archipel au large des côtes africaines, baigné par le Gulf Stream; le temps est
doux toute l’année. J’ai vu des clients qui s’étaient baignées en janvier.’ Elle me laissa le temps de digérer
l’information avant de poursuivre: ‘On a une promotion pour le Bougainville Playa. Trois mille deux cent
cuatre-vingt-dix francs la semaine tout compris, départs de Paris les 9, 16 et 23 javier. Hôtel quatre étoiles
sup., normes du pays. Chambres avec salle de bains complète, sèche-cheveux, air conditionné, téléphone,
TV, minibar, cofre-fort individuel payant, balcon vue piscine (ou vue mer avec supplément). Piscine de
1 000 m2 avec jacuzzi, sauna, hammam, espace de remise en forme. Trois courts de tennis, deux terrains de
squash, minigolf, ping-pong. Spectacles de danses typiques, excursions au départ de l’hôtel (programme
disponible sur place). Assurance assistance/annulation incluse.’ ‘C’est où?’ ne pus-je m’empêcher de de-
mander. ‘Lanzarote.’ ” (Houellebecq 2002, 10–11)
he Canaries 307
a nebulous variety of tourists – Anglo-Saxon OAPs rub shoulders with ghostly Norwegian
tourists […]. Is there anything, in fact, of which Norwegians are not capable? Norwegians are
translucent; exposed to the sun, they die almost immediately. Having established the tourist
industry in Lanzarote in the early ities, they deserted the island, located to the far south of
their desires – as André Breton might have said on a good day. (Houellebecq 2004, 11–12)17
For Lodge, as for Houellebecq, the Canaries constitute an erotic space, an almost vague variant
of the vast Sea, Sex, and Sun ensemble, stretching from Cuba to the Canaries (Canámericas
of a new sort!) and, from there, to all the seas located to “the far south of their desires.” his
game seems to entertain Houellebecq’s protagonist. Of course, he visits the volcanic park of
Timanfaya, but, on an isolated beach, he also visits the anatomy of a couple of German tourist
girls giving themselves over unreservedly to the joys of bisexual love. “A week on this island
would probably be bearable ater all. Hardly fascinating, but bearable” (2004, 21).18 Such is not
the opinion of Lodge’s Amy and Lawrence, whose frustration is growing. On all levels, their
intimate weekend turns into a iasco. All Amy can do is to conclude, philosophically and sym-
pathetically: “It’s not you, it’s this ghastly hotel and the dreadful place it’s in, it’s enough to make
anyone impotent” (1995, 161). I would point out that Lawrence had chosen to read Fear and
Trembling by Kierkegaard beside the pool. Tenerife or the concept of dread?
With a humor that is theirs alone, Lodge and Houellebecq explored a new Canarian para-
digm, which seems on its way to becoming established. Lorenzo Silva is currently among the
most prominent detective iction writers of the Iberian peninsula, the least of whose merits is
not to have remembered that as a spatial referent of a detective plot the Baleares (in El lejano
país de los estanques [Distant land of ponds, 1998]) and the Canaries (in La niebla y la don-
cella [he fog and the maiden, 2002]) are worthy alternatives to Barcelona or Madrid (see also
Lourdes Ortiz, Picadura mortal [Mortal sting, 1979]), and Luis León Barreto’s Los días del paraí-
so (he days of paradise, 1988). Silva’s recurring protagonists are two police oicers: Sergeant
Bevilacqua, an intellectual keen on psychology, and his deputy Chamorro, who, over novels
and investigations, have distinguished themselves by their irreproachable chastity. While, in La
niebla y la doncella, Chamorro remains a paragon of virtue, Bevilacqua (whom almost everyone
calls Vila) inally gives in to the charms that his colleague Ruth Anglada, posted to Tenerife
and La Gomera, unhesitatingly deploys before his eyes. he novel’s plot essentially takes place
on La Gomera. he Canaries are straightaway a disappointment, especially when they land on
Tenerife. “We had already let the airport grounds, and the upcoming sight of the tall develop-
ments intensiied my overwhelming feeling,” comments Vila.19 La Gomera is slightly better, of
course, but no one is spared any unpleasant surprises: the famous silbo, a whistled language, is
17. “une population équivoque de retraités anglo-saxons, lanqués de fantomatiques touristes norvègiens […]
De quoi, en efet, les Norvégiens ne sont-ils pas capables? Les Norvégiens sont translucides; exposés au
soleil, ils meurent presque aussitôt. Après avoir inventé le tourisme à Lanzarote dès le début des années
1950 ils ont déserté l’île, située à l’extrême Sud de leur désir – comme l’aurait dit André Breton dans un de
ses bons jours.” (Houellebecq 2002, 17–18)
18. “Finalement, une semaine dans cette île, ça devrait être supportable. Pas vraiment passionnant, mais sup-
portable.” (Houellebecq 2002, 27)
19. “Ya habíamos salido del recinto aeroportuario, y la visión de las apiñadas urbanizaciones próximas inten-
siicó mi sensación de agobio.” (Silva 2006, 63)
in a state of collapse due to the proliferation of cellular phones! Nonetheless, the fact remains
that La Gomera has preserved part of its identity, something which Vila picks up on: “I began
to get used to the landscape of the dry part of the island, its mountains and gorges of African
harshness. For it was as if the island was nowhere, and only identical to itself. But if forced to
connect it with a continent, we were in Africa.”20 he island’s authenticity, the timeless purity
of the scene, is in a way safeguarded. Vila was admittedly unable to resist the iery invitations
of Anglada, but his infatuation can be explained. Indeed, it is this colleague, presented as a bi-
sexual (here again!) she-wolf, who led the network of drug traickers it was her job to combat.
She will not survive her act of treachery, and above all her night with Vila (narratologically as
dangerous for her, loved by him in his weakness, as for James Bond on other islands). In the end,
morality is upheld, but it would not have taken much for the Canaries to have gotten the better
of the integrity of the most virtuous policeman of Spain.
Perhaps we have witnessed the end of the process of crystallization in the Canaries of the
Atlantic drit of the imaginary, ushering forth the coming of a pure process of stagnation, of the
archipelago’s integration into a globalizing stereotype, negating all of its own identity, if it ever
existed. Perhaps Sergeant Bevilacqua had not even been aware of the extraordinary favor he
had done for all those for whom the Canaries, despite everything and everyone, are something
other than a formless lump of cement announcing to those arriving in the islands that they’ve
“come to Pitsville,” (153) to use the elegant phrase of Lodge’s Amy.
20. “Comenzaba a habituarme al paisaje de la parte seca de la isla, a sus montes y desiladeros de aspereza
africana. Porque aquella isla acaso fuera en cierto modo ninguna parte, sólo idéntica a sí misma; pero si
había que vincularla a algún continente, estábamos en África.” (Silva 2006, 220)
Insulated voices looking for the world
Narratives from Atlantic Islands (Cabral do Nascimento, João Varela,
and João de Melo)
Ana Salgueiro Rodrigues
But there is no one, except for myself, whose exile is

In his own homeland, and feels that odd nostalgia
hat in my heart morbidly grows
Sometimes, when of an evening I lay my eyes on the distance:
Homesick for a country, more vague than a dream,
Which I’ll never see and whose hiding place I’ll never ind…
(Roberto de Mesquita, “Exiled”, 1973)1
Island, migration, ex-île
On her relection on the island, Anne Meistersheim deines the island space and its îleité (this is,
the experiences, the culture, the worldview created by the island universe) as complex realities
(Morin 1990) characterized by a paradoxical ambiguity and a labyrinthine density (Meister-
sheim 1997). An understandable proile if we take into consideration that the island, isolated/
insulated from the rest of the world by the liquid hiatus involving it (lake, river, or ocean),
emerges from the human imaginary as an ambivalent igure – either centripetal or centrifugal.
his is in accordance with the way one perceives its territorial discontinuity, its geographical
coordinates (complete isolation or proximity to other lands), its orography (wide or restricted
territorial dimensions, possibly with or without ports/airports), and its housing conditions, ei-
ther as barriers or as bridges. he former describes how the island is excluded from contact with
the Other, acting as factors of oppressive enclosure and/or as protection of the island’s integrity,
leading to the paradigm Frank Lestringant (1995, 91) deines as “Île-Monograme,” – consisting
of simple and homogeneous human/cultural content. Conversely, it is possible to understand
these conditions as bridges which open the island to universal plurality by promoting the en-
counter with other worlds and creating what Lestringant deines as the “Île-Monde” model.
In fact, given its (ultra)peripheral situation, clearly delimited by the border its beaches or
clifs create, as well as its territorial discontinuity in relation to other spaces and its condensed,
round nature (Bachelard 1994, 232–39), the island comes into view as an autonomous micro-
universe, as an imago mundi in miniature, as a world apart which is, however, only perceived
as such when placed in relation to other spaces (the sea, the continent, other islands). In other
words, the island shapes itself as an alternative microcenter to other extra-insular centers, as
an exilic prison or as an idyllic refuge, as the original cradle or as a warehouse of miscegenetic
transit, and as a space of identity consolidation or as a threat to the individual’s integrity.
1. “Mas ninguém há, como eu, que o seu exílio tenha / Na própria pátria, e sinta essa saudade estranha / Que
no meu coração morbidamente avulta // Por vezes, quando à tarde o olhar nos longes ponho: / Saudades
dum país mais vago do que um sonho / E que eu nunca hei-de ver, nem sei onde se oculta...”
310 Ana Salgueiro Rodrigues
herefore, just as Anne Meistersheim (1997) has correctly pointed out, every island is bi-
nary: unity and plurality, rupture and continuity, acceptance and exclusion. Hence it is enough
to remember that islands, originally uninhabited, are sociocultural spaces of migratory con-
struction where travel is of profound importance, but they generally manifest a strong identity
consciousness and a certain autonomous spirit, as well as a deep and rooted connection to the
insular space.
hese features could initially seem non-conciliatory if we take into account what Helena
Buescu (2005, 261–62) recalls about the two traditional paradigms of human habitation/con-
nection to land, both structuring cultural identities: the sedentary paradigm, which creates
strong symbolic bonds between man and land, encouraging man to settle down and denying
digression; and the nomad paradigm, whose space of reference is no longer the physical space,
due to the constant drit from space to space, but that of the sociocultural matrix space, al-
ways in movement. We can thus say, along with Helena Buescu, that there are cultures whose
imaginary draws an ambivalent relationship with the native place, forging a third in-between
paradigm that reconciles those two ancestral anthropological models. We shall call this third
paradigm – which can be found in societies/cultures marked by migration – diasporic.
he concept of diaspora seems quite efective in this context. According to some migration
studies, it implies the conluence of three crucial phases in the structuring of that ambivalent
relationship between homeland and origins (Brah 1996; Rocha-Trindade et al. 1995): social em-
bedding in a native land; physical migration from that original place; and prolonged habitation
in a speciic place of the Other’s space, nevertheless maintaining a deep connection in terms of
identity to that ethnic-cultural homeland while in the new place of arrival. Here the migrant
tries to update his original homeland in an attempt to provide an alternative possibility for so-
cial insertion into that new space.
his diasporic paradigm seems to be particularly applicable to insular reality. But there are
two further elements that should not be neglected. First, islands, initially uninhabited, were/
are usually places of diasporic habitation, either at the moment of their initial colonization or
currently under globalization and massive tourist traic. Second, their history is signalled by
a constant emigration lux, which creates multiple diasporic and insular communities outside
the island. Maybe it is because of his awareness of this diasporic nature of both insular society
and culture that Alberto Carvalho (as far as Cape Verde is concerned, though we can extend
his conclusions to other islands, especially to Madeira and the Azores) argues that the plight
of the emigrant islander is, in fact, a furtherance of the island’s historical reality (A. Carvalho
2005, 40).
he feeling of telluric connection may thus cease to be necessarily understood as static,
monocentric, constrained by a real insertion and permanence in tellus mater, being experi-
enced instead as a rather elastic and lexible link to the native physical place. Contrary to the
nomad paradigm, in these cases the maternal sociocultural universe presents itself as a concrete
physical place the islander feels to be his homeland. Nonetheless, given the resilience previously
mentioned, which does not it into the sedentary paradigm, this feeling of mutual belonging
between inhabitant and island will make the locus nativus work as a structuring axis of refer-
ence (to which other axes external to the island will join). his axis will make it possible for the
islander to experience the double movement of departure and return (that can indeed never
Insulated voices looking for the world 311
take place, except in symbolic terms) without ceasing to feel connected to his solus mater in its
physical absence. his space of identity no longer has the exiguous nature of a place or site, but
rather extends itself from that center and travels among and through multiple margins.
In this regard, it is necessary to scrutinize an usual behavior in diaspora situations that
feeds this paradoxical feeling of connection with the home, even if in absentia. he procedure
we are referring to, though it is not only peculiar to the insular emigrant communities, has spe-
cial relevance to the study of îleité, if we consider (as we have already noticed) that immigration
and emigration phenomena are a permanent feature of an island’s reality. We are referring to
the attempt at reproducing the place of origin in the land of arrival: both at the sociocultural
level (family, social, and religious organizations; recreational institutions and institutions of so-
cial support; schools where the language and culture of origin are taught; festivities; cultural ac-
tivities…) and at the material level (gardens; housing architecture and decoration; clothing…).
herefore, what is at stake is the unfolding of the native place (center A) and the creation
of a possible replica of that matrix (translocal center A1/B1) in the new place of arrival (cen-
ter B), to which a variable dose of acculturation is not alien. he objective is to reconcile the
maintenance of the inherent bonds to identity insertion in the migrant’s homeland (even if at
a distance) with the need to survive in a strange milieu which somehow also becomes a part of
the migrant’s identity (Rocha-Trindade 1988).
Contrary to the sedentary and nomad paradigms that structure themselves on the basis of
a circular and monocentric conception of cultural space, it is clear that the diasporic identity
paradigm is based on a diferent geometry: that of bipolar ellipsis or, to be more precise, of a
multiple and partial superposition of ellipses. Bipolar cultural geography is well represented in
the creation of identitarian tags by means of hyphenation, which highlights the two elliptical
foci of that cultural space (Anglo-Madeiran, Luso-Cape-Verdean, Azorean-American).
Conceptualizing culture as a geometric form of ellipsis, as David Damrosch (1995) propos-
es, for example, allows us to understand in more depth the way transcultural identities function,
this being, in our opinion, the particular case of insular/diasporic identities. In these cases, the
circular, monocentric model is no longer operative, since the migratory movement and inter-
section inherent to them makes the way these transcultures work more complex. It requires
a reconiguration of the cultural space that is created by the permanent gravitational tension
between two centers apart from each other and which gives both place in the ellipsis igure:
center A (the island) and the translocal center A1/B1 (the diasporic community settled on an
extra-insular place), or even the translocal center B1/A1 (foreign, diasporic communities settled
on the island). Centers A1/B1 and B1/A1 also function, in their turn, as foci in gravitational ten-
sion to center B (the extra-insular place of arrival, or even the place of departure of intra-insular
diasporic communities).
his scheme becomes even more complex if we take into consideration that site A is indeed
hardly just A and site B is hardly just B. A and B are also foci in gravitational relation to other
cultural centers they are bound to – no longer by means of emigration but of immigration – and
with which they are set to draw other elliptical places of identity.
herefore, those individuals whose identities circulate in these complex, transcultural
macro-spaces could draw closer to center A (the island) or to center A1/B1 (insular diaspo-
ra-communities), or even to center B. While the irst case substantiates a more conservative
positioning closed upon itself, the second and third ones acquire a more open and cosmopoli-
tan proile. hough these places work as foci in permanent tension, it becomes understandable
that, due to the possible variation of coordinates within the very same elliptical and cultural
space, individuals may experience each of these gravitational centers as either periphery or true
centers, according to the focus closest to them.
hus, we hold that the insular complexity deined by Anne Meistersheim is to a great ex-
tent the result of what Bachelard describes as a dialectic of inside/outside and open/closed
(1994, 211–24). his dialectic, though not restricted to the island-space, manifests itself more
acutely due to both a permanent migratory movement and the imposing presence of a liquid
border. A frontier that produces both isolation and rupture with territorial continuity, creating
at the same time an irresistible allure to the Other (space, man, culture…), even when absent
and apart (Seixo 1998, 30).
his Other is oten conceived as an Other-I, not completely dissociable from the insular
cultural identity, once the young collective memory of the island (the Atlantic Islands, for ex-
ample, have only been inhabited for about ive hundred years) – fostered by endless narratives
that depict the migratory process responsible for the topogenesis of the island as an anthropo-
logical and sociocultural reality – underlines the heterogeneous nature of their formation. Be-
fore the recreative and centralising unfolding at work on the island, the alterity now perceived
as such would have corresponded to the identity of some migrant elements founded in the
island community. his is a fact which leads the islander (both on and away from the island) to
a paradoxical oscillation between identiication with and diferentiation from that Other.
he island’s cultural identity manifests itself as an in-between reality, as inhabiting a fron-
tier-space, a condition which, according to Bachelard, ensures a permanent tension between
one place and another, one attitude and another, from which a constant unfolding of identity
occurs. In fact, interior and exterior, just like open and closed, are correlative but also specular
and, consequently, contradictory dimensions (1994, 211–24).
his cultural identity is forged as a true archipelago of cultures: a plural, complex, and
dynamic unit in constant mutation and re-elaboration, whose genesis is intimately linked to
the concept of travel. It is even more so for islands that, ater the globalising movement of
European Renaissance expansion, witnessed a transmutation of their status as formally remote
spaces of varying access (and even uninhabited), represented in the universal cartography as
spaces of constant transit or as entrepôt. In these cases peoples and goods (both material and
cultural-symbolic) are interwoven in a continuous miscegenetic process of negotiation and re-
elaboration. In fact, ater this period of discoveries and encounters, all islands, corresponding
to the “île-monograme” paradigm mentioned by Lestringant were relegated to a utopian status.
he Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores, which concern us the
most, are prime examples of that melting process, in particular some port towns of those is-
lands: in Madeira, Funchal; in Cape Verde, irst the town of Ribeira Grande (Santiago) and then
Mindelo (São Vicente); in the Azores, the towns of Angra do Heroísmo (Terceira Island), Horta
(Faial), and Ponta Delgada (São Miguel).
hese places are compulsory stops for all boats circulating through the main Atlantic
routes since the iteenth century until at least the opening of the Suez Channel in 1867. hese
three Lusophone archipelagos (together with the Spanish Canaries) saw some of their islands,
empowered with important maritime ports, emerge as peripheries of the powerful Europe, si-
multaneously airming themselves both as microcenters, and as spots of strategic anchorage
where, for centuries, the most important transoceanic (intercontinental) routes were based
(Pires 1990; Carita 1999; P. M. Rodrigues 1999; Albuquerque and M.E.M. Santos 1991; A. de F.
Meneses 1993).
his centrality is clearly represented in the cartographic iconography of Renaissance pla-
nispheres which, since the very irst years of insular colonization, show the Atlantic Islands in
the middle of both maps. he transcontinental routes, more in their natural, oceanic location,
appear slightly decentered (further West and South) in relation to the centralizing European
continent. hese dichotomous cartographic images, along with other discursive images, such
as those found in the ancestral European myths about islands (e.g., Atlantis and Hesperides), or
in more or less historical travel narratives, were incorporated into the thesaurus of the island’s
conceptual makeup. hose images contribute decisively to the restructuring of what Gilbert
Durand designates as a cultural, collective unconscious; something which will obviously mani-
fest itself in the îleité of the Atlantic Islands (Durand 1996a and 1996b).
his is all about islands that were engendered socio-culturally ex nihilo, in the course of the
Discoveries (through the encounter of biological, material, and symbolic substances from dis-
tinct worlds). hus, they have cultural memories that have structured identities endowed with
an acute consciousness of their ambivalent, dynamic, and paradoxical place in the world (center
and periphery; port of arrival and departure in constant transit; continuity and rupture con-
cerning other cultures). Similar to Roland Greene’s remarks about other islands that were also
culturally devised by the Renaissance (2007), the Atlantic Islands also depict in miniature the
architecture of a new concept of world and man, born with the globalized transit of people, cus-
toms, languages, and cultures. From a medieval paradigm that would draw both man and the
world as unique, monocentric, well-deined, and ixed realities, we gradually turned to another
modern paradigm that conceives them as plural, relative, polycentric, luid, and open realities.
In this sense, analyzing the identity of the lusophone Atlantic Islands under study (empiri-
cally more and more in accordance with Lestringant’s “îles-monde”) implies questioning the
limits between the I and the Other, between what is mine and what is not. According to Alberto
Carvalho, as far as Cape Verde is concerned (though we can extend his words to the remaining
archipelagos of lusophone Macaronesia), the ethnic-cultural consciousness that progressively
structured itself within these points of intersection cannot stand the emptiness of a past without
history or myths. his vacuum must be recreatively illed in through the confusion/negotiation
of fragments resulting from multiple cultures of departure (A. Carvalho 1995b, 37). We shit
from a multicultural situation, in which the cultural question rises as a tangential coexistence
of cultural plurality on equally asymmetrical power terms, to a more complex situation: a trans-
cultural one which no longer implies the coexistence of those multiple situations, but rather
the genesis of a new, hybrid culture based on the metamorphosing negotiation which partly
translates its underlying plurality (Bhabha 1994, 223).
We can thus say that travel and migration, as well as the search for a new physical, social,
and cultural space, as an alternative to the one let behind, preside over the topogenesis of the
island as an anthropological and sociocultural reality. hey remain in the insular imaginary as
myths permanently updated on artistic and literary levels, as well as on the level of the daily
praxis of islanders. Jankélévitch (1963) distinguishes the ancient periplus in opposition to mod-
ern travelling. he latter is almost always an uninished course, corresponding to an essential
movement of human enquiry directed towards the desire/need of dialogue with the alterity. On
this matter it is important to note that it was this conception of modern travel that gave rise
to colonization and to the social, economic, and cultural development of the Atlantic Islands,
which seem to have inherited that very same travelling spirit and need for encounter/confronta-
tion with the Other.
In the islander’s imaginary, especially the Macaronesian one, arriving and departing are
understood as two phases of one single and reiterated endless journey, as complementary and
seasonal movements. One action implies another action and neither of them is understood as
an end unto its own. It is about a cyclical movement which is understood, on the island, present
in as natural a way as the surge of the waters that surround its beaches. he iterative nature of
arriving and departing, according to Moles and Rohmer (1982, 266), institutionalizes them as
two phases of the same sacred ritual that shapes the transcultural identity of islanders. here
are those who leave the island and those who stay behind, witness to the absence of their fellow
citizens. It is a dynamic that, as Alberto Carvalho has noted, goes back as far as the beginning
of the settlement of the island and which, in a void of passivity, models itself “by awaiting and
expecting” news from those remote worlds (1995a, 11).
hus we can verify that, even when under negative forms (either stopping or settling
down), migrant travel is always present in the daily imaginary and experience of the insular
inhabitant. As Maria Alzira Seixo underlines, stopping (intra- or extra-insular, in the case of
the islander) – more than a suspension of movement – corresponds to the moment in which
the individual who travels/traveled, and who, invested with the status of a perceiving entity, has
gathered together the conditions to introduce him or herself as a travelling-subject. In other
words, when travel comes to an end a new consciousness of dislocation emerges (as individual
or collective subject), and the meaning of the migrant’s transit is examined, and his or her place
(physical, anthropological, sociocultural) in the world is rethought (Seixo 1998, 22–25).
In constant crossing, even when anchored to an island or in a diaspora (another kind of
island), the islander discovers the distinctive nature of his identity by confronting himself with
the Other’s diference. Nonetheless, the permanent contact with the space of this Other (both
inside and outside of the island), insistently (re)visited and for this reason actually appropriated
by the islander (though sometimes in a fragmented and distorted way), determines the island’s
cultural identity, structuring it as a transcultural and dialogical reality. his process can be seen
as a macrotext where it is possible to recognize, more or less clearly, the echoes of the multiple
voices which the islander has partly appropriated throughout history.
By equating the margins that deine the proile of his identity, the islanders of lusophone
Macaronesia, when conscious of the history and geography of their communities, recognized
themselves as part of elliptical cultural spaces: hybrid, transcultural, and transnational spaces
situated between multiple gravitational centers. his is a situation whose transgressive and dy-
namic nature encourages what Homi Bhabha calls an “anxiety of reference and representation,”
which oten creates an identity crisis (1994, 216–21). In these cases, individuals experience the
vertigo of a decentering brought about by a surplus of centers. In permanent transit between
several spaces and times, these individuals have lost a irm point of anchorage, a fact which
sometimes leads to a feeling of exile: when they are on the island, they sufer the distance of the
worlds that were at their origin and across which they spread aterwards; when in diaspora, they
sufer from the absence of the island to which they constantly think of returning.
It is true that the experience of diaspora does not have to be necessarily traumatic nor
exilic, especially when the migrant integrates satisfactorily into the cosiness of the diasporic
asylum-community, feeling it without any kind of drama, as if it were his own home, even
though an incomplete one. As Eva Hofman underlines (1999, 39–41), exile is not only a social
situation, but above all an inner experience lived by those who, within and outside national
frontiers, feel alienated and see the bond of belonging to a community and to a place destroyed.
his is what happens when the insular, diasporic individual, conscious of his trans-identity
and excessive eccentricity, acutely feels the in-between condition, without being able to iden-
tify with the new milieu in which he is inscribed. In this situation, the islander, dominated by
the insularity of an identity crisis, sees this condition as diasporic subject transform into that
of an exiled individual. hus we are before an excessive homelessness (Bhabha 1994, 227) that
may have catastrophic consequences. It can either result in the shattering implosion of the I, or
be the critical condition for the fostering of a dialogue between the I and the Other, between
memory and invention, between assimilation and resistance.
Deterritorialized and free from ilial loyalties that would keep him in a single source com-
munity, the insular subject who feels exiled and in transit between multiple spaces, assumes, as
Edward Said points out (2001, 185), a wider angle of vision concerning himself and the world.
Having the possibility of choosing provisional ailiations in a world without ixed frontiers,
his discourse assumes an eccentric, prismatic, “contrapunctual” nature (Said 1999, 103): either
giving voice to one perspective or to another; while simultaneously working with and against
each one of them. It is, according to Said (1999, 109–10), to do with voicing a worldliness, a sub-
jectivity that reacts against the spatial, temporal, cultural, and even linguistic boundaries that
daily oppress. A voice that erases and surpasses those limits, allowing the exiled to delineate
and boast about his/her heterogeneous, deterritorialized identity in permanent re-invention.
Deprived from the possession of land, conscious of the unfolding of his identity and his
oblique place in the world, there is nothing let to the exile but to (re)create alternative discur-
sive worlds within which he can live so as to ill in the unbearable identity vacuum that domi-
nates him. According to Adorno, “for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a
place to live” (1974, 87). In other words, writing seems to be able to help redeining the frontiers
of his identity, as Michael Seidel comments (1986, x–xi), the exile’s task is to transform rupture/
loss into (re)connection/(re)encounter through a creative, imaginative process that relocates
and repairs the tumultuous and traumatic experience of the exile. he basis of this process is the
knowledge and experience accumulated throughout the exile’s long itinerancy. From homeless
subject he then turns into a cosmopolite, a citizen of a new homeland (his own writing), which
is engendered through the elements negotiated during the visits paid to multiple sites, eras,
cultures, and languages.
When the islander, perceiving the conined limits of his island and simultaneously the wide-
ness and ambivalence of his own identity, notices the feeling of exile setting in, writing emerges
as a possible asylum capable of verbalizing and delimiting (if only provisionally) his translo-
cal, transcultural, and even sometimes translinguistic trans-identity. At the content and/or the
expression level (Hjelmslev), writing will reveal that ater all the true matrix island of the insular
man, his true place of belonging is indeed that of an ex-île, given the ambivalence, plurality and
eccentricity that that (elliptical) space manifests. his writing will consequently and necessarily
be cosmopolitan, if we want to recover Goethe’s concept, recently updated by Damrosch (2003).
Îles-monde, archipelagos of cultures: he insulated voices of Cabral do Nascimento, João

Varela and João de Melo
hough they belong to diferent generations and archipelagos, João Cabral do Nascimento (Ma-
deira, 1897–Lisbon, 1978), João Varela (São Vicente, 1937–2007) and João de Melo (São Miguel,
1949; presently living in Madrid) not only have in common the fact that they are all Macaro-
nesian authors, but also possess the long experience of living outside their islands in an ex-île
space where they acquired a solid humanist background (developing a productive dialogue
with multiple cultures), as well as the creation of a form of writing that relects upon the insular
condition and its îleité. We can thus argue that Cabral do Nascimento, Varela, and Melo are real
insular authors, insofar as their personal itinerary and their literary careers form an elliptical
curve, which characterizes the cultural space of identity to which each one of them belongs.
hough we do not intend to ind any kind of explanation for our reading of their works in
examining the biography of these three authors, it is important to underline that the experience
of the ex-île most certainly must have constrained the centrifugal and centripetal vision that
these authors had of their islands. heir texts give voice to three macro-discourses centered on
the igure of the island and on that of the insular/insulated man, these texts showing however
the impossibility of being simply circumscribed to the island. hey thus conirm Marx and En-
gels’s assertion regarding the globalizing power created by the continuous traic of goods and
people on a worldwide scale: “national one-sidedeness and narrow-mindedness become more
and more impossible” (Damrosch 2003, 4).
In other words, the works of Cabral do Nascimento, Varela, and Melo delineate authors
whose identity is simultaneously inside and outside the island, in the present and outside that
moment, involved in a permanent desire to enter into dialogue with the Other. hey present
themselves as dynamic and ambivalent authorial identities who, like the igure of the exile and
that of the translator (in constant transit between multiple places, epochs, cultures, and lan-
guages), assume themselves as true mediators. Translators who, when rewriting the texts and
cultures of the Other, rewrite/recreate their own (individual and collective) identity as well, and
then relate it to the Others’ (insular and extra-insular) identities. (Re)writing represents there-
fore, on the one hand, the possibility for these writers of overturning the feeling of exile and,
on the other, a form of identity anchorage. Once they embrace that role, under the signature of
a single authorial igure, those multiple elements converge into one macro-textual unity that
exhibits itself as trans-local, trans-temporal, trans-cultural, trans-linguistic, and trans-textual.
here are many examples in the works of these authors that conirm the existence of a very
strong tendency towards the dissolution of frontiers and to the convergence of diversity into
unity. João Varela will possibly be the one whose literary production reveals greater complexity
at this level. Due to his early unfolding into three pseudo-heteronyms (A. M. S. Rodrigues 2003,
10–19), each trying to give voice to three diferent ways of being Cape-Verdean, but also due to
the linguistic multiplicity he uses when producing and publishing books in Portuguese, French,
and English. Under the name of João Vário, Varela creates poetry in those three languages and
gives expression to the igure of the Cape-Verdean as citizen of the world; under the anthro-
ponomy Timóteo Tio Tiofe, he represents (in Portuguese) the image of the Cape Verdean who
intends to inscribe himself within the African universe, even though his discourse, given its
numberless quotations and allusions to the Western culture, also locates him in a cultural space
of European heritage. With his third pseudo-heteronym, G. T. Didial, whose iction (also in
Portuguese language) is centerd on the Cape-Verdean updating of the Atlantis/Macaronesia
myth, Varela created the Atlantic-Creole, who inds in that myth the explanation for and the
legitimation of his own identity, distinct from that of Europeans or Africans, though still con-
nected to them.
Nevertheless, this investment in a conception of plural literature and cultural identity re-
sulting from the dissolution of frontiers also manifests itself at other, diferent levels, this be-
coming also evident in Cabral do Nascimento and João de Melo. On the one hand, one employs
a plurality of discursive genres, some of them visibly hybrid. Cabral do Nascimento prefers lyric
poetry (2003), but also enters into chronicle writing (with regular collaborations in the Madei-
ran press in the 1920s), “short epic poem” (1917), literary criticism (through the prefaces of the
several anthologies he organised), historiographic and genealogical registers (part of his activ-
ity as historian), and also the novel and short-story, which he produced as translator of more
than one hundred and thirty texts, the vast majority in English language (his second mother
tongue, as he belonged to a Luso-British Madeiran family). Varela varies between the short
story (Didial 1992 and 1999), novel (Didial 1989), epistles (Tiofe 1979), epic poetry (Tiofe 1975),
narrative poetry (Vário 2000), art criticism (Didial n.d.), and essay (Tiofe 1985), to which we
can still add the academic discourse of a researcher in medical and biological sciences (Varela
2000). João de Melo, in his turn, ranges between novel (2001), autobiographical and testimonial
narrative (1977), short story (2003), lyric poetry (1980), dictionary entries (1994), essay, and
literary criticism (1982).
he search for converging multiplicity can still be veriied by the frequent appropriation of
the word of the Other, patent in the texts of these three authors. On the one hand, we have the
translation activity signed by Cabral do Nascimento and his pseudonym Mário Gonçalves. On
the other, we ind the compilation of anthologies, a practice developed by this Madeiran author
and also by João de Melo: sometimes these are collections of texts only by insular authors (Melo
1978), sometimes texts by authors who wrote about the island (Nascimento, ed. 1958). On other
occasions, these anthologies gather non-insular, national authors (Melo 2002) or foreign au-
thors (Nascimento 1946), but always under the inclusive and mediating perspective of turning
the work of Others into their own work and showing/teaching Others what the (individual or
collective) I achieved. Finally, we can still recognize their aptitude for textual rewriting when
we analyse the style of each author and realize that one of their common features consists in the
use of a dialogical discourse: either through the inclusion of diferent linguistic varieties (dia-
lectical and/or historical) within the same text (Nascimento 1917; Melo 1984), or through the
use of an intertextual dialogue comprising authors from diverse origins (by means of quotation,
paraphrase, imitation, parody, among other processes). here is still the case of narrative texts
(particularly in Varela and Melo) which alternate between diferent narrators who, polyphoni-
cally, include diferent perspectives in contrapunctual dialogue regarding the narrated facts
(Melo 1984; Didial 1989).
here are several illustrative examples of this complex, hybrid, and dialogical nature, these
corresponding to the three narratives we have selected for analysis here: the epic poem Além-
mar (Overseas) by the monarchist Cabral do Nascimento, written in 1916 and published in
1917, on the eve of the commemoration of the ive hundredth anniversary of Madeira’s oicial
discovery (1920) and in the sequence of the implementation of the Portuguese Republic (1910);
the short story “As inscrições” (he inscriptions), by G. T. Didial, published in 1992, but pro-
duced between 1975–78, during the years that immediately followed the national independence
of Cape Verde (1975), when the position this archipelago occupied in the world was still eagerly
discussed somewhere between Europe and Africa; and the novel O meu mundo não é deste
reino (My world is not of this kingdom), edited by João de Melo in 1983, three years ater the
earthquake that struck the Azores islands, destroying a signiicant part of the Terceira island, in
a period during which, ater the abolition of the overseas empire, the (insular and non-insular)
Portuguese people questioned their own identity.
hese works, quite distinct in terms of length and genre features, are drawn together by the
fact they were all produced in critical moments of the history of insular communities, where
authors promoted the questioning of their islands’ collective identity. Following the tradition
inaugurated by Gaspar Frutuoso by the end of the sixteenth century, which intertwines histori-
cal data with literary work in the search for the origins of the Atlantic archipelagos (Bettencourt
2003), Cabral do Nascimento, João Varela, and João de Melo also create discourses that travel
back to the time of the foundation of those insular communities. hey thus attempt to break
with temporal borders and act as mediators between past and present in an attempt to rebuild
the identity of their islands.
hrough the ictionalization of their history and, in the case of Cabral do Nascimento and
Melo, through the recreation of the linguistic variety produced during the insular colonization,
these three authors reshape the image of their native islands, constructing it as a space simul-
taneously centripetal and centrifugal and as a place of multicultural crossroads. In those three
narratives, the insular identity (and even island literature) is not dissociable from those cultural
encounters that are the result of the migratory movements presiding over their genesis.
As suggested by the long and archaising title Além-mar. Poemeto épico que fez Joam Cabral
do Nascimento para narrar a história tormentosa das Caravelas que aportavam à Ilha do Senhor
Infante na madrugada do século XV (Overseas. Short epic poem which Joam Cabral do Nasci-
mento made to tell the tormenting story of those caravels which landed on the island of lord
prince Henry at the dawn of the iteenth century) is a twenty-strophe epic poem that invites
readers to accompany a double journey to an island: the empirical journey, marked by João
Gonçalves Zarco’s fears, dangers, and “overseas” dreams, as well as an oneiric journey which
eventually leads the protagonist to a mythical island, where he sees the British shadow of Ana
d’Arfet. his girl then tells her tragic love and exile story with Roberto Machim to the Portu-
guese sailor and future coloniser of Madeira. hose two lovers, even before the arrival of the
Portuguese expedition, would have been “the only and complete past” of the insular beaches,
the place where the British exiles found death’s asylum (1917, 8). Contrary to the Além-mar
version reedited in 1931, the 1916 text, which concerns us here, is ambivalently centered on the
igures of Zarco and Ana d’Arfet, two characters who, for diferent reasons (a quest for love, in
Ana d’Arfet’s case; a quest for ininity, in Zarco’s), share the same non-conformist spirit. Refus-
ing the conined stability of a home, Zarco and Ana take up the challenge of going overseas to
conquer the world, bringing down its barriers and overcoming its hiatus.
So this nameless island, which Zarco deines as “a mais divina terra que hei sonhado” (the
most divine place I have ever dreamt of) (Nascimento 1917, 8), emerges as a possible shelter
for all those who were exiled, who walked the path of the “angustia triste” (sad anguish) (10)
caused by indecision and fear. A place that, wrapped “entre nuvens que ao longe eram castelos”
(in clouds that far below were castles) (9), emerges as a real far-beyond-place where all frontiers
and hiatus that divide past/present, dream/reality, life/death can be overcome. It is an island
of encounters symbolized in the inter-world dialogue that takes place between the Portuguese
Zarco and Ana, the dead British woman. A space which, so much dreamt about – “fecham os
olhos para ver melhor” (they close their eyes to see better) (13) – gradually materializes until the
“bruma aos poucos se descerra” (mist dissipates little by little) and, in the end, those travelers
“open their eyes to see the land!” (abrem os olhos para ver a terra) (14).
To the insular eye of the Luso-British Cabral do Nascimento, it will be with this mythical
island that the true face of Madeira will identify itself. According to his literary reading of the
archipelago’s history (that the poet-historian revisits/rewrites), the island that Zarco found gave
way to an identity which is characterized, ab initio, by the germ of the migratory journey, the
search for a further-beyond, the refusal of constraining, ixed frontiers, and the eagerness for a
recreative plurality.
We can ind a similar coniguration of the island as île-monde in Didial’s short story “As
inscrições.” he narrator tells of the discovery and the subsequent ecdotic treatment of three
archaic stone inscriptions. hese inscriptions ictionally represent the mythical origins of Mac-
aronesia and its capital city, Micadinaia, these being the two axial topos that structure Didial’s
entire iction – both novel (1989) and short stories (1992; 1999) – and present themselves as
ambiguous, ictional representations of Cape Verde and Mindelo, respectively.
Rebuilt, translated, studied and commented on by several scholars, these chronicle frag-
ments are written in italics within the narrator’s speech, who then fulils the role of translator
and heir of the ancient scribes. Once these had taken up the role of keeping alive, through their
writing, the collective memory of the islands, the narrator is also in charge of not only translat-
ing (in a domesticating way), but also of rebuilding those origins:
translating a text from the past and making it intelligible, I repeat, to the men of our century
[…] Sometimes, it is no longer about translation, but about reconstitution, a task similar to that
of the palaeontologist who tries to represent the general appearance of a missing animal from
a fragment of its skeleton. (Didial 1992, 17)2
he representation of this “missing animal” that the narrator tries to reconstruct, which is in fact
a metaphor for the insular identity of Macaronesia, is based on the quotation of the translation
2. “[T]raduzir um texto do passado, tornando-o inteligível, repito, aos homens do nosso século [...] Por vezes,
não se trata já de tradução, mas de reconstituição, um trabalho semelhante ao do paleontologista que tenta
representar o aspecto geral dum animal desaparecido a partir dum fragmento do seu esqueleto.”
of those chronicle stone fragments, as well as on the ecdotic analysis of those texts. Both the
ancient accounts and the scientiic comments on those texts reveal an original Macaronesian
identity that, similarly to Além-Mar, is represented by a multicultural plurality, indebted to the
migratory transit that gave birth to it and that Didial ictionally traces back to a period previous
to Portuguese colonization.
As regards the decoding of those inscriptions in the short story, scholars have discov-
ered that they were written in an archaic language, close to the one that would be spoken in a
“strange community, Rizar, already missing for several centuries and which […] was located in
Minor Asia” (Didial 1992, 21).3 A language still familiar to the Greeks at the time of Aeschylus,
an author who would, in Syracuse, have become acquainted with the Macaronesian story of
the Princes Macero and Micanor, appropriating that story and translating it later into the story
of Polynices and Eteocles, the brothers-sons of Oedipus. Some scholars argue that Macaro-
nesia was never actually colonized, but simply served as a regular stopping point for “luxos
migratórios” (migratory luxes) coming from the Mediterranean, and that the stone-engraved
texts must have been the product of “fantasia de escribas” (scribes’ fantasy), those who would
accompany “navegadores ou aventureiros” (sailors or adventurers) (27). Others, on the contrary,
defend the existence of a Macaronesian native people that, once eradicated by the divine wrath
(like the people of Atlantis), spread across the Mediterranean world, hence contributing with its
history and culture to the enrichment of its contemporaneous Hellenic world.
Regardless of any of these theses, the genesis of the archipelago is associated to migration,
even though the short story ends with the fantastic testimony of an old man who assumes
himself to be the reincarnation of the author of the stone engravings and tries to conirm this
last perspective:
I was the one who wrote those texts thousands of years ago […] Only one of the chronicles is
partly true […] that invented piece of writing displeased the king […] and so irst I was kept
away from the palace and then expelled. I lived far away from Macaronesia, in exile, until my
death (Didial 1992, 29).4
Nonetheless, the transgressive nature and adversity of the incarcerating frontiers are not re-
stricted to geographical limits, extending themselves to a political and ethical-religious subver-
sion. hose three chronicle fragments depict a given time-frontier: the mythical moment in
which we witness the ruin of a past time (the Golden Age, in which harmony, abundance, and
beauty were divine gits paid at the expense of the human subordination to the gods’ determina-
tions) and the instauration of a new insular era, which deines a renewed and mythical proile
for the Macaronesian (1992, 14).
his new era corresponds to the era of chaos, because, just like the heretic Atlantes, the
Macaronesian also moved irremediably away from their god-creator, whose tyranny tried to
conine them to his rules. he (re)founding fathers of the Macaronesian community repudiated,
however, those diiculties and decided to recreate their own human proile. Free, irreverent,
3. “numa comunidade estranha, Rizar, desaparecida há vários séculos e que [...] icava na Ásia Menor.”
4. “Eu é que escrevi esses textos há milhares de anos [...] Só uma das crónicas é, em parte verídica [...] essa
obra inventada desagradou ao rei [...] e fui, primeiramente, afastado do palácio e desterrado, em seguida.
Vivi longe de Macaronésia, no exílio, até à minha morte.”
transgressive, and unstable, the new insular man becomes lord of his own destiny, even if at
the expense of “calamidades” (calamities) provoked by “ira dos deuses” (gods’ wrath) (1992, 18):
“pragas de lagartas e de gafanhotos” (plagues of earthworms and grasshoppers), “erupções vul-
cânicas” (volcanic eruptions), “extensas secas e grandes fomes” (extensive droughts and huge
famines), “fortes ventos” (strong winds), “enxurradas e quebradas” (downpours and slopes)
(13–14), as well as fratricidal wars (20).
he island is then an ambivalent reality: a space of perdition, but also of free recreation. A
renewed universe from which emerges (if grotesquely) a new man, symbolised by the oedipal
father of Macero and Micanor. his man insinuates himself as archetype of the true Macaro-
nesian subject, because, in his ight “for freeing Macaronesia from the subjugation of the great
eastern island” (“para que Macaronésia se libertasse do jugo da grande ilha a este”) (Didial 1992,
19), he was capable of providing “the irst right responses to the opprobrium, setting the archi-
pelago free, though losing his soul” (“as primeiras respostas correctas ao opróbio, libertando o
arquipélago, embora perdendo a alma”) (1992, 29).
his same chaotic and grotesque proile is assigned by João de Melo to the island he de-
picts in O meu mundo não é deste reino. Travelling back to the “momento da criação do mundo”
(moment of the creation of the world), undertaken by the sailor companions of the miserable
captain Diogo Deniz Faria de Paes (Melo 2001, 12), the narrator then goes through multiple ep-
ochs that extend for more than 500 years. Still, his chaotic discourse does not clearly deine the
transition between those diferent times. An achronic temporality is then created, contributing
categorically to the presentation of the island depicted in O meu mundo não é deste reino as a
fantastic space.
As suggested by the title, that island is a world apart, excluded from the order of a kingdom
and ignored by men and God. A world where the “primeiros nómadas do mar” (irst sea no-
mads) (2001, 12), running away from “trabuzanas e dos temporais” (storms and gales) with “as
goelas secas de muito grito e nenhum socorro” (their throat dry from screaming and without
help) tried to forget “asinha a memia dos seus anteriores lugares” (switly the memory of their
former places) (12) and ignore “uma certa voz lonquínqua e com segredo de búzio dentro” (a
certain distant voice which carried hidden meaning) (13).
hese founding-fathers, in illo tempore, have recreated the island “tal como o izera Deus”
(just like God had done), but staying away from Him, because they are only “a certeza de ser
novamento ilhos dos homens” (sure of being once again sons of men) (Melo 2001, 15). None-
theless, in that genesiacal moment, the fear of the treacherous sea makes them deny the “voon-
tade de partir im demanda das outras estranhas terras a que iam mandados todos” (willingness
to set of in their quest for the other strange lands to which they were all sent) (14). By settling
down on the island, these men deny their travelling spirit, condemning themselves to the de-
spairing, corrosive silence of an insulated geography away from contact with the Other.
In this sense, Diogo Paes presents himself as a mythical archetype, later updated by his
future compatriots. He was the “haughty captain of the seas” (“altivo capitom dos mares”), al-
ways “very convinced of his ability to ind men and missing animals on the other side of silence”
“muito crente de poder achar homens e animais perdidos no outro lado do silêncio” (Melo 2001,
13); the man who started dying when he discovered the cosmic solitude he was condemned to in
that island, a world where it was impossible to ind “bárbaros alguns nem outra qualquer gente
deste mundo” (any barbarians and any type of people from this world) (2001, 13). Similarly, his
contemporaneous and future compatriots experience obliteration and decay when they fail to
ind a dialogical link to the exterior of the parish of Our Lady of Rozário (11).
his toponym, also central to the novel Gente feliz com lágrimas (Happy people with tears,
1988), similarly to that of Micadinaia by Didial, was created by J. de Melo to ictionally and freely
represent his homeland: the village of Achadinha (São Miguel island). he Rozário then desig-
nates an ambiguous, apocalyptical universe, in which the human permanently lives on the edge
of an abyss: devoured by isolation, by the fear of an oppressive sea, by the fear of deluging rains
that fall over its exiguous space, by the terror of telluric perturbations provoked by volcanoes
and quakes, and by the tyranny of men that consider themselves lords of their conined world.
However, as suggested by the epigraphs opening the novel, this space of perdition and
death may become a space of resurrection, as long as it opens itself to the world (as it will al-
ways, throughout the novel, in liminal moments). Only in this way can the insular inhabitant
break with the frontiers that imprison, freely fulilling a diasporic destiny. For the island to be
reborn it will then be necessary for the rooted “diggers” of the insular land to let themselves be
possessed by the spirit of the “birds” that inhabit it and navigate “mundo todo enquanto voam”
(all over the world while they ly) (264).
his is the lesson with which the narrator closes the book, in a chapter entirely written
in capital letters, in which the enunciating voice assumes itself as one of those “PÁSSAROS-
AÇORES DE UM MUNDO SEM REINO” (goshawk of a world without kingdom) that “UM
DIA” (one day) also let itself be seduced by “TERRA-POUCA COM O SEU TÃO INFINITO
DESERTO DE ÁGUA EM VOLTA” (little land with its so endless desert of water all around)
(Melo 2001, 256–66). By making use of capital letters, this narrator cries out his ambivalent
identity as a goshawk (the wordplay being lost in translation, it links the name of the island,
Açores, with that the goshawk, or açor, in Portuguese). Against the silence of so many years –
“NADA AINDA FORA ESCRITO ACERCA DESTES PÁSSAROS” (nothing had yet been writ-
ten about those birds) (265) – the narrator assumes the task of showing to the Azorean people,
ab initio, that “TODA A TERRA É POUCA” (all land is little land) (265). he sea, “INFINITO
DE FICAR E MORRER” (endless to stay and die) that brought him close to the islands and
whose salt “FORMA, ENFORMA, DEFORMA E DEPOIS DEVORA OS OSSOS E O OLHAR”
(forms, extends, deforms, and then devours the bones and the gaze ) (266), also represents the
promise of a renewed and tempting encounter with the “OUTRO LONGÍQUO OLHAR” (other
far-of gaze ) (266).
his will be the same goshawk journey that Cabral do Nascimento, João Varela, and João
de Melo will perform all over the world at the moment of creating their narratives, claiming
discursive materials from diferent times, spaces, and cultures. Hybrid and transgressive texts
are then created, and opposed to the transcultural identities that, at the content level, they as-
sign to the Atlantic Islands.
In Além-mar, we can hear the echoes of historiographic Renaissance narratives on the
discovery of Madeira and its colonization, patent in the archaism of the language used and in
terms of the narrative content, as well as in the graphics of the book cover that reproduces those
of the Renaissance chronicles. Another presence soon manifested by the title is that of epics: ob-
viously Camões, due to the formal adoption of 8-line decasyllabic strophes and the evocation of
the enchanted island, but also of other poets that worked on the epos about the origins of the ar-
chipelago (e.g., Manuel Tomás, seventeenth-century Insulana, and Francisco de Paula Medina
e Vasconcelos, nineteenth-century Zargueida). We can still ind lyrical echoes in Nascimento’s
updated promotion of the legend of Machim and Ana d’Arfet, a story that any Madeiran knows,
particularly ater the publication of the lyric Epanáfora Amorosa (Love Anaphora) by Francisco
Manuel de Melo in the seventeenth century.
On the other hand, in G. T. Didial, the inscription of the Other’s voices in the narrator’s
discourse is more complex and subversive. His point of departure is the platonic myth of Atlan-
tis, transposed to the geographical and cultural horizon of Cape Verde; he goes as far as to the
myths of the oedipal cycle updated in the fragment of the third stone chronicle. He also goes
through the Book of Jeremiah of the Old Testament, whose style “impregnado de religiosidade e
do ímpeto habitual dos textos sagrados” (impregnated with religiosity and the usual impetus of
sacred texts) (Didial 1992, 17) is reproduced in the fragment of the irst chronicle. Didial mainly
focuses his attention on the discursive parody of the history of Cape Verde, when the author
reverses the true historical process of textual inluence of Sophocles and Aeschylus. hus, the
parodied inversion manifests itself when Didial’s text ictionally defends that these Greek au-
thors would have written their oedipal tragedies only ater learning the story of the two broth-
ers (Macero and Micanor) and of their respective progenitors. Implicitly, Didial, ironically and
subversively, questions the colonial vision of the relationship between Cape Verde and Europe:
who contributed the most to the identity construction of those cultures: the European, African,
or Cape-Verdean people?
As far as João de Melo is concerned, the rewriting of other texts is also crucial to the
structuring of O meu mundo não é deste reino. Noticeable are: the epigraphic quotations from
Ruy Belo and Baudelaire with which he opens the novel; the reproduction of ancient chronicles,
either in the archaising language sometimes used or in the way the narrator begins each chapter
with a summary-epigraph highlighted in capital letters; the numberless biblical allusions visible
in the characters’ anthroponomy (John Lazarus, Sara, Jeremiah, …); the reproduction of the
repressive oicial speech of the Portuguese fascist state, Estado Novo (and of all the other forms
of dictatorship), transposed with the edicts of the despotic Goraz; the updating of the Oedipus
myth through the igure of Jorge-Maria; or still the echoes of a fantastic Latin-American real-
ism in the neo-baroque representation of a grotesque insular world, where natural/supernatural
and real/oneiric mix together.
he intentionality underlying the choice for dialogical palimpsest seems to be the same
in the three authors: to create a literary cartography that, when drawing the identity of those
islands, makes use of a discourse that exemplarily testiies those transcultural identities. his
is, to show at the expressive and poetic level what Meistersheim defends when she argues that
the island is always more than the island itself (1997, 113). To Cabral do Nascimento, João Varela,
and João de Melo, the Macaronesian cultural identities also extend far beyond the present mo-
ment and the conined insular territory, their islands being “îles-monde.”
Section III. Multilingualism and literature in
the Iberian Peninsula
Coordinator: Ángel López García
Introduction: Multilingualism and literature in the Iberian Peninsula

Ángel López García
Comparative Linguistics is supposed to refer to a certain branch of the Humanities while Com-
parative Literature allegedly would refer to a diferent one. Both started in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Comparative Linguistics, whose methodology was established by German authors like
Franz Bopp, compares a set of languages in order to discover the features they have in common.
For example, by considering Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Ancient Iranian, Germanic, and Baltic
these researchers inferred the existence of Indo-European, a previous linguistic stage all the
others had sprung of. Comparative Literature looks for literary topics of a national literature
that inluence other literatures, as when it follows the myth of Don Juan, that irst appeared in
the work of the Spanish dramatist Tirso de Molina, and then in Molière, Byron, Mozart and
so on. Nevertheless nineteenth-century Comparative Linguistics and Comparative Literature
also share some characteristics. Actually, most of the corpus of classical Comparative Linguis-
tics was a sampling of ancient literary texts (like Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland [he song of
Roland], the Niebelungenlied [the Song of the Nibelungs], or the Poema de Mío Cid [Poem of
my Cid]). It is no wonder that the scholars working in Comparative Literature were the same
as those working in Comparative Linguistics, as was the case with Jakob Grimm and August
Schlegel, among others.
Much has changed in the past two hundred years. Comparative linguists are now typolo-
gists, while Comparative Literature has transformed into Cultural Studies. As a consequence
no methodological relationship can be found between these branches and one would be hard
pressed to ind a researcher that works in both because the irst is mainly interested in the gram-
matical structures of illiterate languages, while the second is interested in texts. he current
division in the Humanities relects this situation at present, linguists are no longer philologists,
and scholars belonging to the realm of Cultural Studies are not philologists either. he question
remains whether it is possible to ind an area of endeavor where the study of languages and
literatures interact once again.
he studies that follow show that interlinguistic texts could be just such an area. Interlin-
guistic texts are texts where several languages coincide, sometimes because they have been writ-
ten in more than one single language, and sometimes because the only language they consist
of mirrors the textual and the grammatical structures of fragments that are obtained via trans-
lation. A multilingual text situation predominantly characterizes the approaches of Videira,
Marcos and Gallego, whereas a translated text situation prevails in the approaches of Estellés
González and Pérez y Durá, Salvador, and Rotaetxe. In any case, interlinguistic texts are not
326 Ángel López García
used to provoke awareness of their hybrid nature. With prompt recognition of their hybridity, a
new metalinguistic perspective opens as is shown by Wright and Romo.
Intercultural and interlinguistic are not synonymous terms. An interlinguistic text is always
an intercultural one, but the opposite does not necessarily hold. his means that interlinguistic
situations like those we are describing here must be deined explicitly. For example, the melting
pot (which characterizes the USA according to many scholars) may be considered a cultural
mix, but immigrants coming from many cultures are expected to melt into a single language,
English. However, the situations described below are interlinguistic. Either the writers are bilin-
gual, they live in a bilingual country, or they possess the other language as a writing tool though
they are unable to speak it. hus, Castilian authors that wrote in Galician in the Middle Ages
like Portuguese writers that used Spanish in the sixteenth century were bilingual. People who
employ Basque or Catalan as a literary language today live in a bilingual society even if they
never write in Spanish. People that beneited from the Latin, Arabic or Hebraic tradition surely
knew these languages quite well, but could not speak them luently.
Interlinguistic cultures represent a speciic attitude towards linguistic diversity. Every lan-
guage in the world varies in three directions: diatopic variation is the divergence of linguistic
patterns throughout a geographical domain; diastratic variation is the stratiication of language
according to social levels; diafasic variation is the adjustment of language style in keeping with
an external situation. Due to variation, the set of utterances constituting every language is not
homogeneous, although speakers feel as it were. Speakers know that divergent linguistic fea-
tures of a language cannot be considered to be similar, but they act as if they were the same.
Once this feeling of sameness weakens, every set of varieties converts into a new language.
hus, classical Latin already incorporated some grammatical, phonological, and lexical varia-
tion throughout the territory of the Roman Empire, but people thought it did not matter. he
birth of Romance languages can only be proclaimed ater the speakers of Latin reached to the
conclusion that the varieties of a certain province were not the same as the varieties of another
province, can we announce.
Close attention must be paid to the fact that neither linguistic nor interlinguistic spaces
are factual, but conceptual. Benedict Anderson (1983) proposes the term imagined communi-
ties to characterize those realms of homogeneity a person is convinced he or she belongs to.
In relation to language, people who use a common linguistic code think they all possess the
same communicative tool, even if they haven’t actually put it to the test. hey realize that the
linguistic variety of their neighbours, of their relatives, of their friends, and of their job mates is
the same they use. However, they only imagine that other people living in their own town or in
their own country also speak as they do. he lack of a material boundary in language space al-
lows a linguistic domain to grow and envelope several external languages as well as to internally
disintegrate into the creation of new languages. his means that linguistic evolution, although
usually diversifying a language into derivative branches, sometimes joins several languages to-
gether within a new interlinguistic space:
INTERLINGUISTIC SPACE
language A
language A language B
II
I
language C language D
a1 a2 a3 a4
Figure 1
As shown in Figure 1, language A splits into four varieties (trajectory I) that give rise to four
new languages: a1, a2, a3, a4. In another evolutionary development (trajectory II), language A ap-
proaches languages B, C, and D in order to constitute an interlinguistic space. his was the case
with Latin. First, it split into the Romance languages and it joined the interlinguistic space of
the Toledo school of translators together with Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish. It is very common
that some of the branches resulting from a previous diversiication process again coincide with
the mother tongue when they enter an interlinguistic space. hus, Romance languages consti-
tuted such a translation space jointly with Latin during the Middle Ages and even beyond. his
evolutionary pattern can be seen in Figure 2:
language A
language A language a4
II
I
II
a1 a2 a3 a4
Figure 2
Another common pattern joins some of the daughter languages in an interlinguistic space. his
was the case with Castilian and Galician in the Middle Ages, or with Castilian and Portuguese
in the sixteenth century as is shown in Figure 3:
language A
language a3 language a4
II
a1 a2 a3 a4
Figure 3
his pattern represents a situation where both languages A and B are only mastered by a cultural
minority. However, when the linguistic communities live together in a single country two alter-
native bilingual patterns arise in keeping with the extension each language occupies in relation
to the other. For example in the Romance bilingual areas of Spain (Galicia, Catalonia, Balears
and Pais Valencià) and in Euskadi the current situation is for the time being like in Figure 4,
whereas in the nineteenth century and earlier it was more like Figure 5, with some people still
monolingual in the minor language:
major language
major language
minor language
minor language
Figure 4 Figure 5
he igures above describe several multilingual situations. However, it must not be taken for
granted that any multilingual society gives rise to an interlinguistic space. Interlingual com-
munities are multilingual domains where every person is sensitive to the other language(s),
which are at least understood (albeit scarcely). In order to evaluate an interlinguistic space
it is important to change the common point of view. Languages are generally valued to the
extent of people’s ability to speak them and seldom to the extent that they can be understood.
he question we ask when interviewing someone for employment is Do you speak Russian, and
never Do you understand Russian? Understanding is not considered worthy of emphasis. his
is a typical L1 (mother tongue) approach. All of the native speakers of a linguistic community
possess a similar ability to understand (and to read) the language, but speaking (and writing)
are aspects in which some native speakers excel. his is not the case in some societies like that
of China where the community greatly values the ability to read its ideograms, but the Western
world, as Derrida (1967) has shown, has given priority to meaning over form. hus, the speech
act begins with a meaning the speaker intends to communicate while for the hearer it starts
with a form he/she must grasp.
Interlinguistic spaces take a typical L2 approach where understanding is very important
and people feel completely integrated socially because they can understand its members. he
position of the speaker is a centrifugal one for he/she aims to stand out and to move away from
the others. he position of the hearer is, on the contrary, a centripetal one for he/she intends
to approach others. Adopting the hearer’s position helps constitute a broader linguistic space.
Listeners make an efort to ignore diferences and to hold on to resemblances.
hese considerations allow me to now describe several bilingual literary situations that
developed in the Iberian Peninsula. It is interesting to point out that these introduce several
types of diglossia that are not fully covered by the diglossic patterns linguists describe (Fer-
guson 1959; Fishman 1967): literary sacred diglossia, literary social diglossia, literary formation
diglossia, literary disjoint diglossia, and literary unknown disglossia. Some of these were entirely
interlinguistic, while others were so only during a period of time. As for literary sacred diglossia,
María Ángeles Gallego establishes an opposition in the Arabic-Hebrew-Romance continuum of
al-Andalus by diferentiating Muslims – who fully assimilated a diglossic perspective because
Arabic was considered a sacred language – from Jews and Christians – who extended their
linguistic scope to other languages. Estellés González and Pérez y Durá point out a similar op-
position in the history of Iberian Latin, but now on chronological grounds: Vulgar Latin and
Medieval Latin weren’t completely diglossic due to the continuous switching between the many
levels of Latin-Romance proiciency. he Latin of Humanists however, was conceived through
imitation of sacred models. Sacred language is like a shell that protects other language aspects
from being inluenced by the linguistic environment while itself remaining aloof from the same
environment:
sacred language
vulgar language
Figure 6. Literary sacred diglossia
Graça Videira Lopes, in her section analysing Galician-Portuguese as a literary language of the
Middle Ages, introduces a genre perspective by emphasizing that the cantiga de amor was a
masculine text while the cantiga de amigo a feminine one. his means that variation does not
necessarily remain as a diatopic feature in the multilingual literary space of the Iberian Penin-
sula. Diastratic features, like genre for example, can also divide this imagined space, sometimes
in a balanced manner and sometimes in an unbalanced one. his can be observed in Fernando
Romo’s consideration of the uses of regional varieties of Spanish like the Spanish of Basques or
Galicians as signs of rudeness or as a comic motif in the so called “género chico.” Literary social
diglossia can be represented thus:
popular genre
men’s genres women’s genres
Dialect
Literary genres Everyday language
Figure 7. Literary social diglossia Figure 8
A rather diferent situation is described by Ángel Marcos when he considers the relationship
between Spanish and Portuguese in the sixteenth century. During this period, writers were
bilingual because they learnt Spanish or Portuguese, together with its literary tradition in a spe-
ciic context in the other country – usually in a convent, a university, or in the court. It follows,
therefore, that literary diglossia can also be formatively rooted. While in the previous period
(Videira) the language of a text carried a cultural meaning (sentimental novels or cavalry novels
are supposed to it better in Portuguese), during the sixteenth century a work’s language was
indicative of the context in which the author acquired Spanish or Portuguese. Nevertheless,
dramatical plays and spiritual literature preferred Spanish (Marcos).
Country A Bilingual Country B

Language A institutions Language B
Languages A and B
Figure 9. Literary formation diglossia

A third type of literary diglossia would be what I have called literary disjoint diglossia. he pa-
pers by Vicent Salvador, on Catalan literature, and by Karmele Rotaetxe, on Basque literature,
exemplify this diglossia in a detailed manner. Salvador speaks of a satellization of Catalan texts
due to the cultural inluence of Spanish over a period of time (basically in modern times);
Rotaetxe does not employ this term but her description of Basque texts demonstrates that they
were made Spanish and French satellites by their cultural schemes throughout this period. In
the Iberian Peninsula these countries are certainly bilingual, but this is not the most relevant
feature. he important fact is that another language – in this case Spanish – always remains in
the background, providing the textual models any genre should follow, as well as a large amount
of technical vocabulary and even some phonetic patterns. he position of language practitio-
ners has been to refuse satellization, which implies an efort to move Catalan or Basque beyond
the sphere of Spanish inluence. Sometimes they succeeded, but oten they failed. Disjoint di-
glossia can be represented by a bitensional scheme where both languages, the inluential and
the inluenced, are alternately brought together and moved apart:
influential influenced
language language
Figure 10. Literary disjoint diglossia
Literary unknown diglossia is a very interesting phenomenon. he preceeding types describe a

situation where both linguistic varieties, no matter how intertwined, are conceived as diferent.
In this case, as Wright has carefully shown, people are not aware that the linguistic modality
they are employing is no longer a variety of Latin, but a Romance language:
A A
B B
Figure 11. Literary unknown diglossia
Figure 11 shows that the low variety B of the language (represented it by the dotted line of the
circle) is still thought to be a dialect of the high variety A, but in fact it has transformed into a
new language (represented by the continuous line) in a diglossic situation.
he section I am introducing here would be incomplete without a brief consideration of
the metalinguistic beliefs that the diglossic situations of the Iberian Peninsula have produced
on behalf of the bilingual speakers. Expressing an opinion about a language belonging to oth-
ers ofers a kind of picture that compiles a rather complex set of information, attitudes, and
thoughts. he paper by Romo explores this topic thoroughly. hese metalinguistic statements
belong to a mental reality that does not coincide with the imagined space of the object language.
As proposed by A. López García (2007), what characterizes the homo sapiens sapiens (a human
who knows that he/she is knowing) is a double sided communicative tool. his duality is pos-
sible because the two cerebral hemispheres process language at the same time, as the Focusing
Hypothesis (Wray 1992) correctly highlights. Whilst the right hemisphere globally recognizes
the units of each level, the let hemisphere, when necessary, knows them analytically. he latter
occurs only when necessary, however. In normal discourse, this analytical ixation does not
occur and the metalinguistic conscious remains in the background as a series of unrealized pos-
sibilities. However, in a bilingual space the duality always enters into play. Speakers or writers
that perform their activity in an interlinguistic domain are aware of the social implications of
the use of each language, and even of each type of text in a given language. his means that the
interlinguistic space does not consist of two languages, but of two languages plus two metalin-
guistic consciousnesses, that shadow them as indicated below:
language language
A B
metalanguage metalanguage
A B
Interlinguistic metaspace
Figure 12. Interlinguistic metaspace

Bilingualism and Diglossia in Medieval Iberia (350–1350)
Roger Wright
Introduction
Bilingualism is a word used to refer to the co-existence of two languages in an individual or in

a state. It is possible for a person to be fully bilingual, in the sense that they can operate equally
efectively as a native speaker in two diferent languages; more commonly, bilinguals are more
luent in one of their languages than the other. In this less demanding sense it seems probable
that the majority of the world’s population, both now and in the past, are and have been bilin-
gual. If there are more than two languages involved we can speak of multilingualism, although
more precise terms such as trilingual are also used.
heoretical linguists sometimes imply that the “ideal speaker-hearer” beloved of their
perspective is (“ideally”) monolingual. his seems a natural assumption to the inhabitants of
rural Castile or Gloucestershire, but the facts indicate otherwise; large numbers of people are
and have been able to work practically in more than one language. Two such contexts are late
Medieval Britain, where French, Latin, and English (and Welsh and Gaelic) were all essential
components of the sociolinguistic mix; and Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, where Arabic, Romance
and Hebrew co-existed as essential components of the culture.
States are less likely to be bilingual than individuals are. In the twentieth century, for exam-
ple, the only indigenous languages of the Americas to become in any sense oicial were Guaraní
in Paraguay and Quechua in Peru, despite the fact that several hundred indigenous languages
are still spoken. Conversely, oicially bilingual or multilingual states do not necessarily con-
sist of individuals competent in both or all the languages involved, and the social relationship
between two languages in a bilingual context can vary. Oten one of the languages is generally
accepted to have greater sociolinguistic prestige than the other, and since the late 1960s such
circumstances have tended to be labelled as examples of diglossia. As a vague and general term,
applying simply to bilingual contexts in which one of the languages is used for serious purposes,
such as in writing, in government, and in religion, and the other language is used essentially
for conversation and domestic interactions, this concept has proved a useful invention. Arabic
and Romance were in an essentially diglossic relationship in al-Andalus, for example. In such
cases, diglossic bilingualism tends not to involve biliteracy; that is, the inhabitants of Toledo in
the central eleventh century were probably all bilingual in speech, but if they were literate at all,
they were literate only in Arabic (whatever their religion).
Unfortunately the word diglossia has been extended to refer to contexts in which dif-
ferent sociolinguistic varieties of the same language have diferent prestige. his use of the
concept introduced extra and largely unnecessary complications which, in retrospect, several
sociolinguists now feel we would have been better of without. he idea that diferent socio-
linguistic varieties, social and geographical, can be neatly delimited and distinguished from
each other is implicit within this perspective, but highly problematic in real life. In real life,
dialect boundaries, and dialects themselves, are now realized to be oversimpliied constructs
imposed by linguists on a reality that luctuates and shits. Isoglosses (between diferent
334 Roger Wright
realizations of the same entity) are more real than whole dialect boundaries, but within a
dialect continuum even isoglosses represent transition zones rather than deinitive frontiers.
Similarly, the porousness of sociolinguistic stratal distinctions has been becoming ever more
obvious over the past two decades, as sociolinguists realize that separating everybody neatly
out into social “classes” rather than luctuating continua misrepresents social realities and
therefore also the sociolinguistic realities based on them. Marxist analysts took such class
divisions as given, and this assumption lay behind much sociolinguistic analysis, including
that of diglossia, until relatively recently; then the ebbing tide of Marxism let behind the
realization that the several sociolinguistic contexts which have been labelled as diglossia tend
in fact to be all signiicantly diferent from each other, and that the term has become so elastic
that almost any linguistic community could be called diglossic. All communities contain so-
ciolinguistic variation, naturally, and that realization is also becoming increasingly important
in the philological analysis of the past. Meanwhile, as with other words which once had a
precise and useful function in linguistics (such as discourse and structural), the term diglossia
is sometimes now imported into the soggy morass of literary criticism, where it is little more
than a symptom of woolly thinking.
Bilingualism, however, has a precise meaning. Yet this word too depends on a prior as-
sumption: that we know how to distinguish whether two related linguistic modalities are two
diferent languages or variants of the same language. his problem, as we will see, lies at the
heart of the diiculties inherent in attempts to analyze the linguistic state of the Iberian Penin-
sula in the Middle Ages before 1350 (and to some extent even beyond). Some distinctions must
always have been clear, of course. Arabic and Romance could hardly have been seen as vari-
ants of the same language; similarly Basque and Latin, or Arabic and Hebrew. But studying the
data let behind by the Iberian Middle Ages is complex even in these relatively obvious cases.
Sociolinguistic sensitivity has to be allied to philological expertise in a combination which we
can call Sociophilology. In this case, the recognition of bilingualism is clouded by the fact that in
al-Andalus and later it seems that any language might be written in any of the available alpha-
bets. In particular, Jewish scholars tended to write in Arabic using the Hebrew alphabet. Later,
Romance was oten written in the Arabic alphabet (aljamiado), and since this tended to omit
all vocalization and word boundaries, there can be wide scholarly disagreement over whether
certain words in ostensibly Arabic texts are or are not Romance. Later still, ater the expulsions,
Judeo-Spanish Romance was usually written in the Hebrew alphabet. hese diiculties are most
obvious in the study of the kharjas, and it is likely that it is only the simultaneous existence of
more legible kharjas in Hebrew characters that has led to a consensus that some words are in-
deed Romance, if not yet to a consensus on the more detailed cruces.
Within the Medieval Iberian Latin/Romance continuum, the problem of identifying sepa-
rate languages, as opposed to normal sociolinguistic variation, remains acute. We can be sure
that by the fourteenth century there were several related, but thought to be distinct, Romance
languages in the Peninsula; at least Portuguese, Galician, Castilian, Aragonese and Catalan,
which were distinguished conceptually not only from each other but also from Medieval Latin,
which continued to be used as a separate entity. A case could be made for others, although the
identiication of Leonese, Asturian, Andaluz and other candidates as medieval languages rather
than dialects tends to have depended on the modern political axes which it would be best to
Bilingualism and Diglossia in Medieval Iberia (350–1350) 335
refrain from grinding here. hese fragmentation processes were as politically loaded in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as they are now.
In the Roman Empire, Latin was conceived of as a single language. Variation existed, natu-
rally, and to some extent they were aware of that, but there is no historical or philological evi-
dence to suggest that it was not still seen as one language when the Roman Emperors withdrew
their protection from the Peninsula at the start of the ith century. Modern linguistic recon-
struction techniques have demonstrated that the Latin of the ith century was probably difer-
ent in many respects both from that of Cicero’s time and from that of the later Twelth-Century
Renaissance, but not that there was any kind of conceptual distinction between Latin and Ro-
mance at the time. he identiication of Latin and Romance as separate entities came later than
that, and the identiication of separate Romance languages, came some time ater that again.
hus unless we are referring to the coexistence of Latin (or Romance) with Basque, or with
Greek, or with Arabic, or with Hebrew, it will be inappropriate to think of bilingualism as be-
ing a sensible label for their sociolinguistic state until such time as we have evidence that they
thought that way themselves. he world is full of cases of linguistic fragmentation; the separate
current existence of the Indo-European languages, all descended from the one Proto-Indo-
European, is only the most obvious example of this; but the world is also full of cases of wide
variation within a monolingual continuum, and the modern speech communities of English,
Spanish and Chinese are obvious examples of that. In the case of Latin, which was thought of
as being one language in the ith century but came to be thought of as being at least six difer-
ent languages in the Iberian Peninsula alone in the fourteenth century (as well as many more
outside it), we have a unique chance to use textual data of the time to see how the changes
happened as seen by the speakers who talked and wrote as the fragmentation was taking place.
he early Middle Ages: Complex monolingualism (350–711)
Before the Romans brought Latin into the Peninsula as the language with sociolinguistic pres-
tige, in the third century B.C., several other languages were spoken there. he most important
was the Punic (Phoenician) spoken by their Carthaginian rivals in the South and East. Iberian
was also spoken, probably over much the same area as Punic. Celtic, or perhaps several Celtic
languages, was spoken in central, Northern and Western parts. here were probably other pre-
Indo-European languages spoken in addition to Iberian, one of which was Old Basque (also
known as Aquitanian), more spoken then North of the Pyrenees than to the South. Long periods
of bilingualism probably ensued during and immediately ater the extension of Roman power
to an area, but in due course all the other languages seem to have stopped being used by the
fourth century A.D.; with the well-known exception of Basque, and perhaps for a while Celtic.
Outside the Basque-speaking region, it is reasonable to see the Peninsula between 350 and 711
A.D., the Early Middle Ages, as being monolingual; we can call their language Late Latin or Early
Romance, but these two names merely represent two ways of looking at the same phenomenon.
It was, however, a complex monolingualism. his is not surprising; sociolinguistic com-
plexity is only to be expected in a wide and sophisticated speech community such as theirs.
he complexity was not primarily due to geography. here is no reason for us to postulate wide
336 Roger Wright
diatopic variations between the speech of diferent regions in those centuries, and every reason
not to do so. It is, for a start, notoriously diicult even for expert Romanists to assign an Early
Medieval text to a particular geographical area of origin for its composer (or scribe) on linguis-
tic grounds alone. Some of the Romanists’ diiculty is due to the standardization of education
and training over and ater the Empire, which encouraged all literate speakers to converge in
writing, wherever they were, as they style-shited to the same morphosyntactic norms and learnt
the same orthographical and morphological details. Some of our problems here are due to the
Christian texts, Biblical and liturgical, which were used as models everywhere. However, some
of the diiculty is also due to the efects of the linguistic convergence which almost certainly
occurred in fourth-century Latin speech. It was evolving considerably but still took essentially
the same direction in all geographical regions. Yet even if diatopic variation was still not sui-
cient in those centuries to impede communication as speakers traveled through the huge dialect
continuum of Late Latin (Early Romance), we can still see variation of other kinds, even in the
written evidence. In the Peninsula, Prudentius (born in or near Zaragoza) wrote his hymns,
Egeria wrote her Peregrinatio (Pilgrimage, probably in Galicia) and Orosius wrote his History
Adversus Paganos (Against the Pagans, possibly in Menorca) near the start of this period. Genu-
ine linguistic diferences are visible between these texts, but these are due to their personalities
and to the genres they worked in rather than to their geography. It would probably be most ap-
propriate to analyze their diferences in terms of registers. Egeria’s work is almost certainly the
closest of these three registers to speech, and since spoken registers can at times be relatively
literary it might even be right to see her Peregrinatio as good evidence – we exploit it with all
the care that is required in any such sociophilological enterprise – of features of her speech. It
is illuminating, then, to see that the statistics concerning the relative order of Subject, Verb and
Object in Egeria’s writing are more or less the same as they are for thirteenth-century Romance
texts from the Peninsula. his discovery alone shows that changes in textual conventions and
changes in speech are not directly related. It is generally realized that whereas language changes
constantly in speech, the requirements of writing do not change until somebody with prestige
deliberately changes them, but the converse is also true; the much later change in writing mode
from Latin to Romance did not necessarily coincide with any change at all in speech.
he ith century saw many Germanic groups come into the Peninsula. hose that eventu-
ally took the reins of power were the Visigoths. hey had been in the Empire since long before it
crumbled, and spoke Latin already before arriving in the Peninsula. here is still scholarly con-
troversy over whether they still then spoke their Germanic also; but even if they did, it seems
almost certain that this Latin-Germanic bilingualism did not last into the seventh century. Un-
like other Germanic groups they do not seem to have wanted to destroy the Roman civilization
which they met. Instead they wanted to preserve it, but with themselves in power at the top. So
once in a position to do so, they were able to oversee the cultural revival of the seventh century
which is sometimes called the “Visigothic Renaissance,” but it would be misleading to imply
that there was anything Visigothic about this phenomenon, either linguistically or culturally.
Its greatest representative, Isidore of Seville (who died on 4th April 636), wrote a History of
the Goths, true; but then he wrote about almost everything, and his own cultural inluences
are more Byzantine than Gothic. Isidore’s name is Greek, and his elder brother Leander had
personal contacts in Constantinople, but he did not necessarily know more than a little Greek
himself. he African grammarians and scholars who underlie some aspects of this Renaissance,
some of whom may in fact have moved in person to the Peninsula would have spoken the Early
Romance (Late Latin) of their time, which was still the most widely spoken language along the
North African coastline when the Muslims moved in there in the late seventh century.
he educational system of the Romans broke down, but Isidore and his colleagues restored
much of it along traditional lines, so their texts are still intended to follow the traditional norms
of grammar and orthography. here were seventh-century grammarians, most notably Julian
of Toledo, and poets, even among the bishops, and naturally there were also lawyers; and a
great deal of their written material has survived, all in the traditional Latin mode. But there
are also symptoms of a wider spread of literacy than merely the documentation of the Law, the
Church and the Teachers: in particular, the “Visigothic Slates.” hese stones, dating from the
seventh and eighth centuries, astonish all those who see them. hey come from dry rural areas,
mostly in the modern provinces of Salamanca and Ávila, and on them are scratched a variety
of texts, mostly short but some longer, oten with numbers, including accounts, documents and
prayers. he slates show that functional literacy was not the exclusive preserve of the select few
whose documentation was to be deliberately preserved for posterity; they show that it would
be misleading, even in the seventh century, to postulate any kind of strict diglossia between the
literate and the illiterate. And even Isidore, in his own writings, implies that his own language
is the same language as that of everybody else of his time and place, despite his own recherché
idiolect. hus the whole is still a case of complex monolingualism.
he central Middle Ages: Multilingual, but with one Romance continuum (711–1080)
Apart from the Basque areas, then, we can see the Peninsula as being monolingual rather than
bilingual or diglossic in 710 A.D. Whether modern philologists and historical linguists call their
language “Late Latin” or “Early Romance” is essentially a matter of taste, but at the time the
speakers still called it lingua latina (pronounced by them as [ladína]). hen came the invasion
of 711; and for the linguists and philologists, at least, the so-called Pirenne thesis, that the An-
cient World efectively lasted right up until the Arabic takeover of the Mediterranean, is a reality.
he efect of even this geopolitical transformation, however, need not be exaggerated.
Christian Latin culture has a continuing line of descent from the Visigothic scholars through to
the start of the second millennium, to the South of the religious divide as well as to the North.
here is no evidence to lead us to postulate isoglosses, let alone dialect boundaries, coincid-
ing with the shiting borders between Christian and Muslim Spain. Linguistic and historical
evidence alike tell us that Romance speakers could communicate with each other across that
ostensible frontier. Modern Romanists have adopted the term mozárabes to refer anachronisti-
cally to Christians in Muslim Spain, and by extension to the Romance speech of that region, but
the use of this term risks giving a false picture of polarization. In practice, the more that mod-
ern investigators look at it the less there seem to have been clear divisions between the Romance
speech of North and South. It is also a mistake to imply that there was a close link between
language and religion in the South. Possibly from the eighth century itself, most inhabitants of
al-Andalus were bilingual (Arabic-Romance). Most of the original settlers were male, so their
338 Roger Wright
descendants commonly had indigenous mothers, so the Muslims tended to know Romance.
Conversely, most of the indigenous Hispano-Roman population came in time to learn Arabic,
for practical and social reasons. Probably even the professional Christians knew Arabic also.
he self-consciously atavistic Samson of Córdoba, writing in the 860s, tells us, for example, that
he had worked as a translator. he large Jewish community seems also to have been bilingual,
Arabic-Romance, since Hebrew was used as a written language alone (although it was regularly
recited aloud of the liturgical page). hus the only linguistic border that corresponded to the
geographical border across the centre of the peninsula was one between monolingualism to the
North and multilingualism to the South.
Álvaro de Córdoba’s famous complaint, that young Christians preferred Arabic to Latin
culture, refers only to writing. It has oten been mentioned by modern analysts, but rarely seen
in context. He wrote that in 854, shortly ater his colleague Eulogio de Córdoba returned from
a visit to the Pyrenees with a caseful of venerable ancient texts. Eulogio had intended to go
further North into Francia, but that journey turned out to be impractical. He had stayed in
the Pyrenees for a while, and chatted with his ecclesiastical colleagues there with no hint of
any diiculties of communication caused by dialect diferences; and then he had returned with
those texts. We can tell from both his voluminous subsequent writings and those of Álvaro that
they were consciously trying to imitate the highly stylised registers of those books themselves,
and wanted to persuade their other Christian colleagues to do the same. But this seems to have
proved too diicult for most of them, who instead preferred to imitate the styles of the socially
superior culture, Arabic. his question probably could not have arisen before 850. his was a
classic instance of the Law of Unintended Consequences, since the long-term result of their in-
sistence on imitating ancient esoteric and recherché registers was to discourage Christians from
writing Latin at all. Some of them could probably read it still, but towards the end of the ninth
century the habit of writing long texts in the traditional mode lapsed. As a result of which, most
people of all religions in tenth- and eleventh-century Muslim Spain were bilingual in Arabic
and Romance, but literate only in Arabic if literate at all. Many of the indigenous population
who stayed in Toledo ater the Leonese conquest of 1085 preferred to write in Arabic until well
into the thirteenth century.
he famous kharjas are sometimes called “bilingual.” his may be an exaggeration. he
Romance elements, even if they have been correctly identiied as such, are no more than one
or a few words at a time. he kharja, which is the refrain at the end of the longer moaxaja, is
usually in a deliberately colloquial register of Arabic, and in al-Andalus such registers were in-
evitably full of words of Romance origin. Our modern technical scholarly tools of “diglossia,” or
of “code-switching,” are probably too heavy-handed to deal with the simple unremarkable fact
that colloquial Arabic included a large number of Romance borrowings. In which case these
poems are best categorized as monolingual, although drawn from a generally bilingual milieu.
Eulogio had chatted cheerfully with his hosts in the Pyrenees. Many others, including
cratsmen, builders, merchants, scholars, scribes, farmers, and Kings in search of medical
advice, crossed the frontier and communicated successfully on the other side. Some of the
scribes of the Northern documents of these centuries, particularly in Galicia, had come from
the South. Some sign with Arabic names. As the requirements for literacy in Latin came to
seem at once onerous and unnecessary in al-Andalus, in the late ninth century, Christian texts
were translated there into Arabic. Books and scribes came north, including those which Eu-
logio had taken to Córdoba from the Pyrenees, now migrating to Oviedo; and the Acts of the
Christian Church Council of Córdoba of 839 were brought north to León. In the North, un-
like in the bilingual South, they had no linguistic alternative. In order to write at all, Northern
scribes still had to aim for the traditional written Latin spelling and grammar, even though
their speech had by then evolved so much that many of the details of the written norm were
less than obvious.
Outside Catalonia, which was within the Frankish cultural sphere, in this period (up to
the 1080s) it would be an anachronism for us to visualize Northern Christian society, states
or individuals as yet being bilingual, Latin-Romance. Menéndez Pidal, in fact, visualized their
society as being trilingual: Latin, Romance, and an intermediate form which he sometimes
called “Leonese Vulgar Latin.” It is not easy to defend this perspective in the light of subsequent
sociolinguistic advances. he essential variability in their documentation, which Menéndez
Pidal discovered and analyzed so acutely in his masterpiece, Orígenes del Español (Origins of
Spanish), is easier to understand from a modern viewpoint which takes into account recent
progress in the understanding of both sociolinguistic variation and the relations between writ-
ing and speech. In the North of the Peninsula in these years, except in Basque-speaking areas,
they had one language, which we can call Romance or, if we prefer, Ibero-Romance, written by
scribes of varying expertise and sophistication. here is as yet no reason for us to visualize a
separate “Medieval Latin” language co-existing with this (Ibero-)Romance.
Nor is it yet likely that there were serious distinctions made on a diatopic basis between
diferent Ibero-Romance languages. Within the Latin-speaking Empire, it had always been pos-
sible for soldiers, businessmen, scholars and others to move around and communicate without
great problems. In the sixth century, Martin of Braga came from Pannonia (in the Balkans) to
Galicia to preach; we can tell from his writings that any linguistic problems he had were stylistic
rather than diatopic. Seventh-century Visigoths and Franks negotiated and intermarried with
no sign of a need for interpreters. Eighth-century ecclesiastics led from the Muslim invasion
to join fellow-Christians in Gaul or Italy, and managed to communicate there. Textual analysis
suggests that – if the question had arisen – a visitor from Córdoba could have understood the
Strasbourg Oaths of 842. It is possible that from the tenth century, and more so the eleventh,
a general idea was growing that Gallo-Romance, Italo-Romance and Ibero-Romance formed
some kind of separately distinguishable entities, but even then, with a little practice, speakers
from the separate areas communicated with each other as successfully as speakers do now from
Chicago and Liverpool, or from Montevideo and Madrid. Mutual intelligibility does not imply
similarity; and conversely variation need cause no problem for communication.
A fortiori, then, within the Peninsula it would be anachronistic for us to project back be-
fore the twelth and thirteenth centuries the modern situation in which Portuguese, Galician,
Leonese, Castilian, Navarrese, Aragonese, and Catalan are relatively distinct units. his is not,
of course, to imply that the individual dialectal features did not themselves exist in the elev-
enth century. Such variations as the relative Galician, Castilian and Catalan continuations of
Latin [pl-], respectively as ch-, ll- and pl-, would already have existed then; but, if noticed at all,
these would have been treated at the time as internal monolingual variants rather than markers
of separable whole dialects. Scholars employed in modern “autonomías” sometimes have an
340 Roger Wright
interest in claiming otherwise – e.g., that Asturian or Galician, etc., existed as a unit in the ninth
century – but all that existed then were several of the individual varying features within what
was still a complexly monolingual whole.
Accordingly, if it is an anachronism to see separate Romance languages as having been in
existence within the Peninsula before the 1080s, then the concept of bilingualism between, for
example, Leonese and Catalan at that time is itself anachronistic. When a Catalan was appoint-
ed bishop of Oviedo in 1023, he did not have to learn a whole separate entity called Leonese to
supplement his native Catalan; he and his new interlocutors all spoke Ibero-Romance, in difer-
ent ways which were probably noticeable but which caused little practical diiculty.
Towards the end of this period, the late eleventh century, we begin to glimpse important
changes. Even if Ibero-Romance still remained one unit, Gallo-Romance was becoming in-
creasingly diferent from it, and at the same time French visitors were turning up in the Penin-
sula more than before. he French had by then become used to distinguishing conceptually be-
tween Latin and Romance, and probably also between French Romance and Occitan Romance,
in a coherent way that the Ibero-Romance speakers remained relaxed enough not to bother to
do. French, Occitan and Medieval Latin already had their conceptual separateness reinforced
by the existence of separate ways of writing by the middle of the eleventh century; while Ibero-
Romance speakers had nothing comparable, still being able to operate with the old system. As
the whole of Christendom began to become enveloped in the throes of various reforming pro-
cesses in the late eleventh century, the Peninsula came to be increasingly afected by them, and
among many other new ideas the idea of separate languages arrived then also.
he celebrated Glosses of San Millán and of Silos, datable to the 1070s, have sometimes
been said to attest Latin-Romance bilingualism. hey have also been described as the “birth
certiicate” of the Spanish language. his idea is not so much erroneous as meaningless, for
languages do not get “born” that way. However, they certainly attest the birth of something.
hey are written in a new scripta, that is, they show us the start of a new idea, the idea that
their Ibero-Romance language could be written in a diferent way rather than continuing to be
misrepresented through the Procrustean necessities of the Donatus tradition. What Romanists
refer to as a new scripta involves the use of an existing alphabet (no new letters are introduced
in these Glosses), with the existing correspondences between sounds and letters (most of the
correspondences used in these Glosses already existed, such as ue representing [we]), to spell
existing words in a new way. hus [lwégo] could be written lueco rather than the traditionally
correct loco (the correspondence between -c- and [g] having long become normal). At the time
of writing, that was all that it was thought to be, that is, a new way of writing the same language.
It was to take a while before such new spellings came to be thought of as belonging to a new
language. he motivation for doing this at all may have been inspired by a knowledge of what
the French were already doing; or it may not.
he introduction of bilingualism (1080–1256)
he 1080s were a signiicant and turbulent time in Iberian history. It also represents an im-
portant turning point for the historical linguist, for two main reasons. In the irst place, the
distinction which the French had already established between Latin and Romance as separate
languages was oicially imported and established as part of the Gregorian Reform. his aspect
of the Reform was not, it seems, intentional. he immediate point at issue involved the intro-
duction of the Roman Liturgy to replace the traditional one established four centuries earlier
by Isidore of Seville and his colleagues (oten now misleadingly called “Mozarabic” because of
its eventual survival among the Mozarabs of Toledo). he Roman liturgy, as also used by the
French since the ninth century, required the reading aloud of established texts according to
the method which we have all used ever since in the reading of Latin, that consists of allotting
a sound to every letter. his technique was designed to standardize performance, and had the
consequence that all Church Latin contained noticeably diferent pronunciations of some words
from those which they had in real life colloquial usage, and this distinction had been the initial
impulse in ninth-century France for the new perception that Church Latin and normal vernac-
ular were actually separate languages. When some writers in France began to write vernacular
compositions in a new way, with a new scripta, this visible diference reinforced that perception,
until by 1080 the speakers of French and Occitan Romance (and perhaps those of Catalan Ro-
mance also) already thought of Latin and Romance as being diferent languages. hus, this idea,
and the separation of the two in practice, was introduced into the rest of the Iberian Peninsula
at that time, although it was to take another century to lead to any kind of deinitive general
establishment of either a new written mode or any concept of Latin-Romance bilingualism.
Catalans had both the Roman liturgy and written Romance before the 1080s, but since the
Romance mode adopted by the Catalans was in essence that of Provence, the relevant texts are
not always now allocated to Catalan culture. his does not seem to have bothered them at the
time so long as Provence was ruled from Barcelona. But this came to an end with the battle of
Muret in 1213, ater which, and to a great extent as a consequence of which, the Catalans devel-
oped their own way of writing, and the related idea that Catalan was a diferent language from
Occitan, which would probably not have arisen if Provence had remained within the Corona
de Aragón.
he other events of the 1080s to have important consequences were the Leonese capture of
Toledo in 1085 and the subsequent invasion of the Peninsula by the Almorávides from Morocco.
he Almorávides were serious Muslims, aggressively monolingual. Multilingual Muslim Spain
evaporated. Christian exiles came north. Romance was spoken decreasingly in Muslim Spain
ater the 1080s. he presence of Arabic-Romance bilinguals thus became rarer, allowing those
that remained to exploit their skills more when needed.
he twelth century in the Peninsula presents a kind of patchwork, as the reforms intro-
duced ater 1080 were pursued more enthusiastically in some places than in others. Where
the reforms were introduced, a distinction between Latin and Romance was likely to follow.
At this point sociophilology, the mutually illuminating simultaneous pursuit of both philol-
ogy and sociolinguistics, can help the historian. Before the introduction of the reforms into a
particular centre, its documentation will continue to look like that of the previous centuries.
hat is, except in the formulaic sections, the vocabulary, syntax and nominal morphology of
a text will look more like that of the writer’s natural Ibero-Romance than like that of standard
Latin, even though the intended spelling is still that of the venerable pedagogical tradition. And
then at some chronological point there is oten a marked change in the linguistic features of
342 Roger Wright
that centre’s documentation, as the vocabulary, syntax and nominal morphology suddenly look
more like traditional Latin. As Menéndez Pidal pointed out long ago, this kind of change can
only be the result of educational reforms. hese can oten be allied with the presence of reform-
ing bishops in the centre concerned; sometimes these were French, or more oten trained in
France. he efects can be seen in the surviving production of several cathedrals and monaster-
ies, where the unprecedentedly “correct” Latin can be simply attributed to its being written by
scribes who have been educated in the new way. hey would probably not yet have described
themselves as bilingual, Latin-Romance, but here is another important step taken towards the
deinitive conceptual separation of Latin and Romance which had to take place before we can
visualize the presence of bilingualism involving these two languages.
From a sociolinguistic point of view, the establishment of Romance as a distinct indepen-
dent entity depended crucially on the relative prestige it was given in the Royal Chancery, and
on whether the new written Romance mode was acceptable there. his was not an exclusively
Iberian question. At the end of the twelth century and the irst two decades of the thirteenth
there was an ultimately decisive movement taking place in chanceries and scriptoria over the
whole of Western Europe, not only in the Romance-speaking countries, to transfer at least some
of the documentation from Latin to a written form of the regional vernacular. Written vernacu-
lar was already used in France, North and South, mostly for relatively trivial literary works, but
even there it was not until c.1200 that important documents came to be written in Romance.
he French and Occitan writing systems were based on essentially the same letter-sound cor-
respondences as were established during the Carolingian standardization of Medieval Latin in
the early ninth century, and can thus come under the heading of being initially a new scripta
for an existing language rather than a new language. he establishment and acceptance of such
alternative methods of writing seem to have been the most crucial steps in the emancipation of
Medieval Latin and Romance from each other, and it was the new written mode that seems irst
to have been given the name Romance. he precise correspondences used at the lexical level in
written Romance in France would not have been much use in the Iberian Peninsula, but the
idea of developing a new written mode certainly seems to have spread from France to the other
Romance-speaking regions.
hus the establishment of potential bilingualism depended directly on the existence of
two alternative writing systems, rather than vice versa. Modern specialists in linguistics tend
to resist such a conclusion, since they tend to see speech as the essential focus of all serious lin-
guistic study and writing as a contingential accretion, if it exists at all. But in this case the new
Romance writing systems do seem to have been the crucial factor in the conceptual fragmenta-
tion. his is not to say that the arrival of the individual features that distinguish Romance from
Latin (in syntax, morphology, vocabulary, phonology, and phonetics) coincided with the arrival
of the irst whole texts in Romance. Many of these features had been present in speech, if only
as available alternative variants, for several centuries; and what those texts encouraged was the
spread of the idea that the contemporary collection of features that characterized the speech of
c.1200 formed some kind of collective unit deserving of a separate concept and its own name,
separate from Latin.
he Royal Chanceries of León and Castile had an important role to play here. he two king-
doms, and their chanceries, were united until 1157. Ater they were separated, the Leonese seem
to have been keener on using the newly reformed Latin than the Castilians were. Castile was dif-
ferent for a variety of reasons. One of these lay in the sociolinguistic situation in Toledo, where
Arabic continued to be widely used in speech and writing to the end of the twelth century and,
to a lesser extent, for most of the thirteenth. he Archbishop of Toledo from 1192 to 1208 was
Martín López de Pisuerga, who patronized what may have been the irst oicially encouraged
use of written Romance in formal documents, in Toledo in the 1190s. his assessment relies
on the view, which seems justiied but is not yet generally accepted, that those Romance fueros
(local law codes) which carry a twelth-century date are in fact thirteenth-century translations
of twelth-century fueros originally written in Latin, which naturally keep their original date in
the later faithful romanceamiento. he need for modern analysts to keep the original context in
mind is clear here. he earliest written documents in Menéndez Pidal’s Documentos Lingüísticos
(Linguistic documents) are those from Toledo in the 1190s, and the individual circumstances of
Toledo help the sociophilologically inclined investigator to understand why.
hese matters tend to become political. On 1st July 1206 King Alfonso VIII of Castile made
the Archbishop, and henceforth all Archbishops of Toledo ex oicio, administrative head of his
Royal Chancery. However, by then written Romance had already taken a great step forward
under his direction. he Tratado de Cabreros (Treaty of Cabreros) of 26 March 1206 was writ-
ten in Romance, the irst nationally and internationally important legal document ever to be so
written. his Treaty, drawn up between Castile and León, paved the way for the eventual deini-
tive reunion of the two Crowns, which in the event only happened in 1230. It was prepared by
the Castilian Chancery, but scribes from both the Castilian and the Leonese Chanceries wrote
separate texts, each on a single parchment, perhaps at the same dictation. he Kings, Archbish-
ops and many nobles signed it. A more explicit authorization of the validity of the new mode
could hardly have been contrived.
But the deinitive establishment of written Romance as an equally valid mode as Latin had
to wait another half century, as a result of the vicissitudes of power struggles in the Chancery,
the Archbishopric and the Court. In retrospect, the oicial switch to Romance documentation
seems inevitable. It probably did not seem that way between 1208 and 1240, since the most pow-
erful intellectual personalities of the age in Castile were hostile to the use of written Romance.
Chancellor Diego García, who let oice in 1217, and Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, Archbishop
of Toledo from 1208 to 1247, themselves wrote long works in impressively old-fashioned Latin.
here seems to be no surviving Castilian Chancery documentation in Romance between 1208
and at least 1217. In the Chancery of León, no surviving document was written in Romance
before the reunion of 1230 other than the Tratado de Cabreros itself. However, the Acts of the
reforming Council of Valladolid of 1228 were recorded in Romance, as were totally new munici-
pal franchises (also known as fueros) such as the lengthy Fuero de Alcalá of 1235, and eventually
in the 1240s many centres switched from producing documentation mainly in Latin to writing
a majority in Romance.
his was not an independent social or linguistic process, of course; it was moved forward
by powerful individuals. he most powerful of these individuals was King Alfonso X of Castile,
who reigned from 1252, was deposed in 1282, and died in 1284. Subsequently, although not at the
time, he was referred to as El Rey Sabio; but we should probably interpret sabio here as mean-
ing “intellectual” rather than “wise.” His most decisive role in the establishment of Romance to
344 Roger Wright
a level of prestige equal to, or even preferable to, the prestige of Latin came before he ascended
the throne, in the 1240s, when he and his colleagues collected together many of the older fueros,
sponsoring translations into Romance if necessary. his was not out of mere intellectual or lin-
guistic curiosity, but as a consequence of his apparently lifelong desire to produce a uniied law
code for the vast and potentially ungovernable kingdom being amassed by the military skills
and diplomatic successes of his father, Ferdinand III. He seems to have decided from the start
that this enterprise would be undertaken in Romance rather than in Latin. he irst fruit of this
process was the Fuero Real, which seems to have been prepared by 1255 and then promulgated
in 1256. his event is seen now, and was probably seen then, as inally giving full oicial status to
Romance as an independent legally valid written form, ity years ater the Tratado de Cabreros.
Literature in Romance presents a remarkable parallel to the legal documentation in Ro-
mance, at least as regards time and place. he irst legal texts of any length in Castile in Romance
come from Toledo in the 1190s; and the Auto de los Reyes Magos (Play of the three wise kings) is
datable to Toledo, c.1200. here are two surviving long legal texts in Romance written down in
1206 and 1207, the Tratado de Cabreros and the Acts of the irst Cortes of Toledo held in January
1207; and there are probably two long surviving literary texts from Castile written in Romance
in those years, the Poema de Mio Cid (Poem of my Cid), written down only in 1207 even if it had
been composed earlier, and the Libro de Alexandre (Book of Alexander [the Great]; although
some scholars still prefer to date this to c.1230). Both these texts have acquired scholarly polem-
ics over recent decades concerning the nature of their composition, which will not be pursued
here; but the latter is of particular signiicance to our theme of the rise of Latin-Romance bilin-
gualism, being adapted into Ibero-Romance from a model in the French style of Medieval Latin
alexandrines. Both genres then stop being produced in Romance for at least a decade.
here may be a reason for this apparent chronological coincidence. Toledo and Palencia
were the seats of Castilian intellectual activity in those years. he school at Palencia was being
promoted to what we would call a University. Modern historians oten refer to this promotion
as happening in 1212, but Ximénez de Rada’s reference merely suggests that it had occurred by
then, probably having started a few years earlier. Ximénez de Rada was a patron of the nascent
University as well as (ex oicio) head of the Chancery, and it may have been his decision to
discourage written Romance in both centres. here is certainly a connection of some kind
between the Poema de Mio Cid and Toledo. he enormous inal court scene of the epic is set
in ictitious Cortes of Toledo, and it has been proposed that the written version which we have
(only surviving in a later manuscript) was prepared initially for a irst performance at the very
Cortes of Toledo of 1207 whose deliberations were also recorded in Romance. here is almost
certainly a connection between the Libro de Alexandre and Palencia, being either written there
or by somebody trained there.
In any event, there seems to be a lack of written Romance literature in Castile between
1208 and the accession of Ferdinand III, as there is of written documentation in Romance in
the Castilian Chancery, and this can be attributed to Ximénez de Rada’s dislike of the mode.
his disapproval would itself, though, also have encouraged the nascent perception that these
two might be separate languages rather than two ways of writing the same language. When the
reforming Council of Valladolid of 1228, hosted by the Chancellor of the time, had its Acts re-
corded in Romance, the distinction between Romance and Latin must have been clear enough.
Ater that Council, and perhaps because of it, Gonzalo de Berceo, who had been educated either
in Palencia or by somebody from Palencia, and who had started working as a notary in San
Millán in 1221, began to write the four-line Alexandrine stanzas in Romance which probably
seemed a mildly eccentric form at the time but in the end have made him more read, and more
famous, than Ximénez de Rada himself.
Berceo prepared documents in Latin and verse in Romance. he genre and the language
go together, but even so this probably qualiies to be regarded as genuine bilingualism; although
naturally there are strong signs of Latinism, usually deliberate, in the verse. he author of the
Libro de Alexandre was copying a Medieval Latin verse form used in France, so he could prob-
ably be described as bilingual, or perhaps trilingual, since he probably also knew French. Even
the author (and/or the scribe) of the surviving version of the Poema de Mio Cid is likely to have
known some works in Latin and (/or) French, although this in itself need not imply that he
knew either of these languages well enough to qualify as bilingual. In general, through at least
the majority of the thirteenth century, anyone who knew how to write and read in Romance
already knew by deinition how to write and read in Latin, having been taught that irst. his is
bilingualism, then, but not yet complete emancipation of the two.
Berceo explicitly called his verse romance (or romanz). here is no sign at all, before the
reign of Alfonso X, that it was normal to distinguish between diferent Ibero-Romance lan-
guages. Words such as castellano, leonés, or riojano existed as toponymic adjectives, but had
not yet been nominalized into language names. Romance itself existed as a reality by then, and
maybe Ibero-Romance was separate from other varieties in the minds of many, but within the
Peninsula there were no further distinctions made before 1250 that we can see, apart from Cata-
lan. So it is anachronistic for us to refer to Berceo’s verse as being in castellano, as literary critics
tend to do. He was not himself Castilian, nor even working in Castile, and even though he was
a Riojan working in the Rioja it seems even more anachronistic to refer to his work as being in
riojano. We can assume that he knew what he was doing when he called it Romance rather than
any more geographically precise name. he ladino used by the Jewish translators of the Bible in
the thirteenth century was similarly undivided along the geographical lines we have become
used to since that time. It has seemed plausible to many modern Romanists to see gallego (oten
also now called gallego-portugués) as being a separate conceptual entity before Alfonso X, but
even this is not easy to substantiate. It would probably be an anachronistic mistake to visual-
ize any Ibero-Romance with Ibero-Romance bilingualism as meaningfully existing before 1250.
his also means that it is misleading to refer, as some scholars do, to Castilian inluence in
twelth-century Leonese documents, or to use any such phrasing which implies that there was
at that time a clear distinction to be drawn between two independently existing and internally
coherent dialectal units with geographically-based names of this kind. What there was wide
variability in the realization of some individual features, with geographical transition zones
between variants rather than borders, and each zone endowed with isoglosses which usually
refrained from coinciding with each other on the ground into any kind of coherent diagnos-
tic bundle within the dialect continuum. he phenomenon thus referred to as being “Castil-
ian inluence” in a Leonese document of the twelth century merely attests to the existence in
León of variants similar to those also used more commonly in Castile, which is not in the least
surprising.
346 Roger Wright
his lack of clear intra-Romance frontiers in the Peninsula is attested in a spectacular way
in the two versions of the Tratado de Cabreros itself. One was written by a chancery employee
from Castile, the other by an employee of the Chancery of León. he words are essentially the
same in the two versions, but oten spelt diferently. We can be sure that this was the case, even
though the surviving Castilian version is a coetaneous copy rather than the original. he two
texts can only be described as Leonese and Castilian in a strictly geographical and political
sense, however; minute analysis of the linguistic diferences in the texts shows that these only
rarely correspond to actual diferences in the morphology or phonetics used in León and Cas-
tile. he diferences are more likely to reveal that the Castilian Chancery had already decided
how to spell various Romance words before this date, and the Leonese had not, or had taken
a diferent decision; for example, concerning whether or not to write a letter h- at the start of
words beginning phonetically with a vowel, a decision which corresponds to no spoken feature
and to no isogloss on the Castilian-Leonese border. Not only is there no clear distinction that
can be made here between two separable dialects, but there is no coherence within Castile either.
Analysis shows that the scribes of the Castilian version of the Tratado, of the Poema de Mio Cid,
and of the Posturas of the 1207 Cortes de Toledo were intelligent and competent at their task,
but did not coincide with each other when deciding how to spell several individual words and
morphemes. he idea of written Romance is certainly there, but not yet a general Castilian plan
on how to put it into practice. he idea was also present at oicial levels in Portugal in those
years, as we can see, for example, from the will of King Afonso II of 1214; although in Portugal
the deinitively established use of written Romance had to wait for several decades ater that.
Raimbaut de Vaqueyras’s famous Descort of 1199, Eras quan vey verdeyar (Now when I see
grow green), has sometimes been adduced as evidence of the conceptual independence of at
least ive Romance languages. It is not quite that. he poem is composed in ive stanzas written
successively in ive separate scripta, which we can identify now as being Occitan, North Italian,
French, Gascon and Ibero-Romance. he sixth and inal stanza contains two lines in each of
these modes in the same order. But the literary point of the poem depends on the listener being
able to understand every part of it. here would have been little point in presenting successive
stanzas in ive languages which really were separate; say, in Occitan, Arabic, Basque, Dutch and
Hungarian. A modern equivalent would be an English poem in stanzas successively imitating
the speech of Liverpool, Chicago, Australia, Pakistan and South Africa. hat is, in both the
Romance and the English case the dialectal diferences were and are obvious, but the whole is
still a single speech community, containing wide sociolinguistic variation in an entirely normal
way. he words in Raimbaut’s poem (which is technically brilliant) are chosen deliberately in
order to accentuate the geographical diferences, and even so the whole was generally compre-
hensible. It is also clear that the Ibero-Romance stanza is no more precise than that. It contains
some features characteristic of Catalonia, others of Castile, others of Galicia, but this variation
is a symptom of Raimbaut’s inexperience in intra-Hispanic dialectology. He had never been to
the Peninsula, and just wanted to sound generally Hispanic rather than anything geographically
more limited. he modern attempts to rewrite these lines as if they had been distinctively Gali-
cian from the start are anachronistic to the point of absurdity.
Raimbaut’s poem is, even so, another important step in the gradual development of difer-
ent modes for Romance in diferent areas and the possibility of Romance-Romance bilingualism.
he Gascon stanza’s spellings may have been his own invention, and they led in due course to
wider exploitation. his poem was to become famous for its virtuosity. Later imitators such as
Cerverí de Girona in c.1269 make clearer distinctions between diferent Romance languages,
but by 1269 he was writing in an environment where the diferent languages were acquiring
conceptual independence, so even by then the sociolinguistics were diferent.
he later Middle Ages: Bilingualism and multilingualism (1256–1350)
It might not have been necessary for Latin and Romance to split conceptually at all, but the
reforms which developed formal Medieval Latin had probably made that split inevitable. Even-
tually, during the Twelth-Century Renaissance, Latin became a foreign language for all, even
for those whose manner of speech descended directly from the spoken Latin of the Empire. As
a result of this development all those who knew Latin were henceforth by deinition bilingual,
speaking Latin and their vernacular as well.
But the split of Ibero-Romance into the separate Ibero-Romance languages was not in the
least inevitable. It was thought desirable for mere political reasons, similar to those which have
motivated some autonomías in the Modern Spanish state to claim that they have an indepen-
dent and hitherto unappreciated Romance language of their own which they wish to signal with
an independent mode of writing. he same reasoning previously also led to the establishment
of the diferent conceptual status and written norms which now characterize Judeo-Spanish as
a non-Christian non-Peninsular unit; even though in each case, with at least a little practice, in
conversation with Castilians they can usually understand each other without great diiculty.
In the thirteenth century, each political unit wanted their own language, marked as such
by a separate scripta. he Catalans consecrated their own ater the separation from Provence;
otherwise they could have carried on writing the old Occitan way. he Galicians and Portu-
guese developed their own way of writing, and then, when Portugal and Galicia deinitively
separated from each other politically, they established separate norms which from a purely
linguistic viewpoint seem unnecessary even now. Leonese sufered the converse fate. here are
symptoms of thirteenth-century attempts to write Leonese, but the uniting of León with Castile
in 1230 had the efect that only one language was needed politically, and Leonese as a distinct
written unit largely disappeared before the fourteenth century. Aragonese survived separately,
but remained unstandardized since the standard languages of the Corona de Aragón were Cata-
lan and Latin (and most of the writers of Aragonese of that age worked North of the Pyrenees
anyway). he newly reconquered territories of the south still had their local Romance at irst,
but this lacked any prestige and seems soon to have disappeared as a distinct entity. Despite
modern attempts to claim otherwise, the Portuguese of the Algarve derives from the Portu-
guese brought south during the Reconquest, the Catalan of Valencia derives from the Catalan
brought south at that time, and Andalusian Spanish derives from the Castilian that was taken
there rather than from the mozarabic Romance spoken there previously, with the exception of
some items of vocabulary and many toponyms. In Andalusia some of the previous bilingual
Arabic-Romance speakers remained, but Muslims increasingly moved to Granada or to Africa
ater the 1260s; both Romance-speaking Andalusia and Arabic-speaking Granada seem ater
348 Roger Wright
that to have become more markedly monolingual. Even so, Arabic-Romance bilingualism in
the Christian areas seems to have continued in Valencia, even into the sixteenth century.
he spread of Castilian as the main written form in Alfonso X’s Castile, and the Romance
with sociolinguistic prestige, was a deliberate and successful policy of Alfonso X. His choice of
Castilian for the practical, legal, diplomatic, and intellectual textual production of his kingdom
– even at times to the extent of being used for letters sent abroad – was not only a sign of the
backgrounding of Latin, which became conined to Church and University, but of a conscious
decision to give it more prestige than the Leonese and Galician which might otherwise have
been also used in his huge kingdom. Alfonso X wanted to raise the prestige of Castile in all ways
at once, and the language was a part of the project.
It would be a misuse of the term to say that the literate inhabitants of his realm in Oviedo
were bilingual Leonese-Castilian. A more appropriate description would be “bidialectal.” We
can, however, sensibly refer to bilingualism between Castilian and Galician. he early part of
Alfonso’s reign saw the deinitive establishment of written Castilian as an independent entity
for prose of several kinds, but the genre of lyric poetry escaped this castilianization. In the
1270s, Alfonso himself gave this role to Galician. he prestige thus acquired by Galician from
its written use in Alfonso X’s Cantigas can only have been crucial in its sociolinguistic elevation
to the status of a language as opposed to a dialect (a fact for which Galicians seem strangely
ungrateful). We can only speculate, but it seems likely that without this endorsement Galician
would have been backgrounded much earlier than it eventually was, during the iteenth cen-
tury. However, the independent status Galician acquired in the thirteenth century was enough
to preserve it as a separate language, and thus for Galician-Castilian bilingualism to continue to
be a valid concept, in exactly the way that Leonese-Castilian bilingualism has not been.
In the latter part of the century, written Castilian was becoming for the irst time indepen-
dent of written Latin in the practical sense that, as one result of Alfonso X’s educational reforms,
it came to be possible to learn to write Castilian without necessarily learning to write Latin irst.
Previously, this necessity had meant that reading and writing Latin had seemed easier to many
than reading and writing Castilian, since they had learnt it irst. Berceo’s Romance production
of the previous age (writing from c.1230 to c.1254) probably seemed like the slightly eccentric
production of somebody who could easily have written in the traditional Latin mode if he
had wanted to. Berceo did not want to, because the texts were intended to be read aloud to the
non-Latinate. Once there was a silent reading public for written Castilian separate, at least in
part, from the reading public for Latin, the mutual emancipation was more or less complete.
hose who knew Latin well enough to write it, and to speak it with, for example, visiting foreign
monks, thus qualify from the late thirteenth century to be called fully bilingual.
he neatest symptom of the separation lies in Juan Manuel’s apparently unembarrassed
declaration, in c.1340, that he wrote in Castilian because he never had the Latin. He was a royal
prince, diplomat and educator, who also knew some Arabic, so this is an interesting claim (un-
less it is no more than an untypically convincing modesty topos). His contemporary, the author
of the Libro de Buen Amor (he book of good love), who called himself Juan Ruiz, certainly
knew Latin, but then he was probably trained by the Church, whether or not he was in reality
the Archpriest which he claimed to be. Juan Ruiz was aware of dialectal variation, and his ser-
ranas have hypercharacterized speech features, but this kind of variation was language-internal.
he lyrics included in the Libro are in Castilian, the irst written Castilian lyrics that we know of,
so Alfonso X’s model as a Galician-writing Castilian was not in the event destined to be gener-
ally followed outside Galicia itself.
By the time of the Black Death (1348–50), which heralded the end of what subsequent
generations were to call the “Middle Ages,” Portuguese, Galician, Castilian, Aragonese, Catalan,
and Latin had separate status as independent languages, and those who knew and used more
than one of these can be classed as bilingual. Linguistic features characteristic of other areas
existed in speech without being regularly recognized in writing, and thus remained diatopic
variants subsumed in their greater diasystem. Accordingly, a native Leonese, Navarrese, Mur-
cian, Cordoban, etc., who also knew and used Castilian cannot be described as bilingual rather
than bidialectal.
Most Basque-speakers were probably bilingual. Being unrelated to Romance, Basque
could never have been seen as part of a wider unit, but neither did it have yet the sociolinguistic
status that would later accrue to it from being endowed with a writing system. his may mean
that the situation in the Basque country was the only one in the Medieval Peninsula, outside
Muslim Spain, which can sensibly be described as “diglossic”; although iteenth-century Gali-
cia also comes close.
Otherwise, bilingualism in 1348 was a feature of individuals rather than of societies or
states. Many in Northern Catalonia, Aragón, Navarra, or along the camino francés to Santiago
de Compostela, knew French. Bilingual guides in Santiago, indeed, were apparently available
for speakers of several Northern European languages, including Breton. he Catalan habit of
sending young men to study in Italy had already begun, so a number of Catalan-Italian bilin-
guals were beginning to import the earliest stages of the Italian Renaissance into the Peninsula.
Kings oten married foreign queens, who tended to arrive at Court with a local entourage which
added to its cosmopolitan nature. Alfonso X, in particular, also recruited foreign scholars, art-
ists, architects and scientists to his court. Nevertheless, that trend had been set earlier by the
magnetic force of the Toledo translation enterprises from Arabic into Latin, which were carried
out by Germans, French, English, and Portuguese scholars as well as the local Toledan experts.
Toledo was a multilingual community ater 1085. Jewish scholars, doctors and other profession-
als were common and even powerful in the Medieval Peninsula, and oten spoke more than
one language; Hebrew was only a written language at the time, but was still recited in the syna-
gogues. he common idea that Judeo-Spanish had a separate existence in the Peninsula even
before the tragic expulsions of and ater 1492 seems, however, to be a mirage. hey probably
spoke at times about matters exclusive to themselves with some idiosyncratic vocabulary, but
using the Romance of their time and place. Arabic remained in Granada, and in a decreasing
number of communities in the reconquered areas, but ater the 1260s Romance-Arabic bilin-
gualism was never again to be a widespread phenomenon.
Even ater 1350, the Romance languages of the Peninsula were not always kept conceptu-
ally apart. In the sixteenth century, King Charles I apparently saw Castilian and Portuguese as
variants of the same language, and Gil Vicente’s ability to write in either cannot have helped
people to be disabused of that idea. In Western Asturias there are transitional dialects between
Galician and Asturian which are best seen as single entities rather than as mixtures of the
neighbouring two. Similarly, some Pyrenean speeches such as benasquès and chistavino are
350 Roger Wright
best categorized as transitional dialects rather than as mixtures of Aragonese and Catalan. hat
is, the Ibero-Romance dialect continuum remains a reality even now, although largely obscured
by the separate standardizations of a few politically salient dialect areas within the continuum.
It was more of a reality in the late Middle Ages, of course, which implies that the politically
motivated prominence given to selected parts of the continuum is something of a mirage which
sociophilologically inclined investigators need not be confused by, and is which produced by
the inevitable fact that all our direct data are in written form. What might seem to us like Ro-
mance-Romance bilingualism might have seemed to the speakers more like mastery of separate
parts of the dialect continuum, had they had the sociolinguistic sophistication to appreciate
the diference.
Selective bibliographical notes
he best concise work on the nature of spoken Latin is that of Herman (2000). he best, and
very detailed, work on the language of the writers of the Early Middle Ages comes in the “ret-
rospective sociolinguistics” practised by Michel Banniard, most notably in Banniard (1992). A
wide overview of Latin through this whole period, containing both general assessments and de-
tailed analyses, can be found in Wright (2003). For the Iberian Peninsula in the earliest period,
a summary of various scholarly assessments appears in Quilis Merín (1999), and the slates are
studied by Velázquez Soriano (1989). For the Latin writers of Muslim Spain, see V. Gil (1973).
he subsequent centuries are still best analysed in Menéndez Pidal (irst ed. 1926); Wright (1995)
updates this but does not supersede it. Both include studies on the Riojan Glosses. he arrival
of the distinction between Latin and Romance was the main focus of Wright (1982). his, and
the subsequent fragmentation, have since been well studied by Lleal (1990), and, with speciic
reference to Portugal, by Emiliano (2003). González Palencia (1926–30) prints Arabic docu-
ments from Toledo, and Menéndez Pidal (1966) contains early Romance documents. Wright
(2005) considers whether Raimbaut’s Descort is multilingual. he transitional stage to vernacu-
lar documentation all over Europe is the focus of Goyens and Verbeke (2003). he manuscripts
of the Treaty of Cabreros (1206) have been edited by Wright (2000). An excellent analysis of
pre-Alfonsine written Romance is now available in Torrens (2002); the most acute of the many
studies of Alfonso X’s work is that of Márquez Villanueva (1995). Varvaro (1987) considers the
status of Judeo-Spanish. For an up to date, nuanced and satisfying account of the role of histori-
cal sociolinguistics in the study of the development of Spanish, and of the factitious nature of
supposed “dialects,” there could hardly be anything better than Penny (2000).
he impact of Arabic diglossia among the Muslims, Jews and Christians
of al-Andalus
María Ángeles Gallego
he most remarkable characteristic of the Arabic language from a sociolinguistic perspective

is the co-existence of two varieties of the same language within the Arabic speech community
with very distinct roles: classical/standard Arabic, used for formal purposes including most
literary production, and dialectal Arabic used as an everyday spoken language. his linguistic
situation is called as a diglossia in modern linguistic terminology, and it is one which is not, of
course, unique to Arabic. In fact, another well-known example is that of Latin/Romance di-
glossia which existed in medieval Europe until Romance dialects acquired the status of literary
languages and displaced Latin as the sole language of culture.
One of the ideological pillars upon which Arabic diglossia is based relates to the sacred
status that classical Arabic holds as the language of Islam, since for Muslims this is the lan-
guage through which God chose to reveal His Message, the Qur’ān. Classical Arabic is thus the
Muslim language par excellence. he strong religious connotations of this variety of Arabic
has had several implications in the way that it has been employed by Muslim and non-Muslim
religious communities since the Middle Ages. Whereas the spoken/dialectal Arabic does not
seem to have provoked resistant attitudes in the members of other religious groups in the Me-
dieval period (at least as far as we know), the use of classical Arabic has not always been easily
accepted by other groups, due to its marked Muslim identity and to the fact that speakers tend
to mark ideological positions in writing rather than in oral speech. In a society, such as that of
medieval Iberia, in which the individual’s social identity was deined by religious ascription we
can assume that language use by Muslims, Jews, and Christians was afected by the religious
connotations of classical Arabic. his aspect of the history of medieval Iberia has scarcely been
addressed in depth by scholars though such a project must surely help us to construct a more
accurate picture of Andalusi society.
he language situation in medieval Iberia has captured the attention of scholars for other
reasons, notably with regard to the degree and dates of Arabization of the local population
and the survival and extent of the use of Romance in al-Andalus. hese questions have been
addressed mostly for the sake of the historical implications derived from its conclusions: deep-
er Arabization means a higher degree of acculturation/Islamization of the Iberian peninsula,
whereas weaker Arabization and extended use of Romance imply a supericial acculturation
of the native population and, thus, a continuity in the history of the Iberian peninsula from
Roman to present times, as part of the Western world. Most scholars today agree that by the
eleventh-century Andalusi territories were thoroughly Arabized and that most of the popula-
tion, if not all, was monolingual in Arabic by the thirteenth century. It is important to note that
the extent of the use of Arabic was not a response to any linguistic policy on the part of the
Muslim authorities who, on the contrary, were occasionally reluctant and suspicious to people
of other religions using “their” language. Rather, it was the lure of the Arabic language as the
language of Islam for Muslims and the language of prestige, administration, and high culture
that made it attractive to speakers among both Muslims and non-Muslims.
352 María Ángeles Gallego
In this study I intend to analyze sociolinguistic aspects related to the use of Arabic by Mus-
lims, in comparison to Christians and Jews. Considering the religious connotations embedded
in Arabic diglossia, I will use this linguistic condition as the theme for the present analysis.
For this purpose I will start by describing the most relevant aspects of Arabic diglossia and its
speciic characteristics in the Middle Ages. A discussion of the way Arabic diglossia operated
among Muslims as compared to how it operated among Christians and Jews will follow. he
level of acceptance and assimilation of the division of registers between classical and dialectal
Arabic and the inclusion and use of other languages in this diglossia paradigm will prove to be
key factors in religious linguistic diferention in al-Andalus.
Arabic diglossia
When we refer to Arabic without any other speciication we are very likely referring to what the
Arabs label as al-‘arabiyya al-fusḥa (the eloquent Arabic), usually translated into English as clas-
sical Arabic or standard Arabic, as opposed to al-‘ammiyya (the common language), the general
name for the diferent Arabic vernaculars, usually referred to as colloquial Arabic, dialectal Ara-
bic or Arabic dialects. he diferences between these two types of Arabic, classical and dialectal,
resemble in many ways those between the written and spoken forms of any language although
in a more acute and complex manner. his situation, as we have seen, linguists categorize as a
diglossia (Ferguson 1959 and 1991; Versteegh 2001, chap. 7 and 12).
he term diglossia was coined by scholars of Greek linguistics at the end of the nineteenth
century, to describe the language situation in modern Greece, that is, the existence of a literary
variety of Greek, used for written and formal registers, and a colloquial variety of Greek, sub-
stantially diferent from the former, used as an everyday language. It was a few decades later, in
1930, when this term was applied to Arabic for the irst time by Willian Marçais, presumably
having in mind the case of North Africa, where the gap between the formal language and the
colloquial dialect was especially acute. It was, nonetheless, Charles Ferguson’s generalist for-
mulation of diglossia in his article published in 1953 that profoundly marked the ield of Arabic
linguistics. He deined the term as follows:
DIGLOSSIA is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dia-
lects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very
divergent, highly codiied (oten grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle
of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another
speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written
and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary con-
versation. (Ferguson 1959, 336)
Ferguson labeled H(igh) the variety of the language used in formal contexts and L(ow) the col-
loquial variety, relecting the speakers’ perception of the former as the prestigious form of the
language and the latter as vulgar or common speech. In his characterization of this linguistic
situation, Ferguson depicted four clear-cut examples: classical Arabic/Colloquial Arabic, Ger-
man/Swiss German, French/Haitian Creole, and Literary Greek/modern Greek.
he impact of Arabic diglossia among the Muslims, Jews and Christians of al-Andalus 353
he two varieties of the language in a diglossic situation difer from each other in linguis-
tic and non-linguistic aspects. In the linguistic realm, High (H) has a more complex nominal
and verbal inlectional system than Low (L). In the speciic case of Arabic, noun declension
and verbal inlection are considerably reduced in dialectal Arabic by comparison with classical
Arabic: cases have been replaced by a ixed word order, gender and number agreements simpli-
ied, and verbal tenses are marked by particles, among other linguistic phenomena. hese lin-
guistic characteristics place colloquial Arabic within the analytical type of languages, whereas
classical Arabic belongs to the synthetic type, in a manner similar to the way Romance dialects
relate to Latin.
he lexicon is largely the same in both varieties, but some vocabulary is almost exclusively
ascribed to one variety or the other, as is the case with highly technical or high culture terms
that belong to H. Another typical phenomenon related to the lexicon is the existence of paired
terms with similar meanings; although the use of each of them is completely identiied with H
or L. As an example we can mention the verbs shafa and ra’a in Arabic, having diferent senses
of the verb “to see,” both existing in L and H, though the use of the former would undoubtedly
allocate the speech in the dialectal register whereas the use of the latter for an Arabic speaker
is a clear sign of using classical Arabic. Finally, the phonology of H and L can be considered a
single system, though there might be a simpliication in L, lacking some phonemes of High. In
the speciic case of Arabic, for instance, in most dialects the interdental phonemes have shited
to dentals (/t/ to /t/ and /d/ to /d/).
Among the non-linguistic characteristics of diglossia the most relevant one is the special-
ization of function of H and L. H is used in formal contexts including most writing, religious
addresses, political speech-making, administration, university lectures and news broadcast;
whereas L is the medium of everyday oral communication: conversations in the street, at home,
at work, etc; and it can be occasionally used in some kind of literature. his functional spe-
cialization is related to the speakers’ perception of H as superior to L, a superiority sometimes
related to religious ascription, as is the case in classical Arabic. Classical Arabic is considered by
Muslims to be a sacred language, given the fact that it is the language chosen by God for deliver-
ing His message, as it is stated in the following exemplary passages in the Qur’ān: “he speech
of him [Muḥammad] at whom they falsely hint is outlandish, and this is clear Arabic speech”
(Qur’ān 16:103, my emphasis); “And if We had revealed it unto one of any other nation than the
Arabs” (Qur’ān 26:198); “And if We had appointed it a Lecture [Qur’ān] in a foreign tongue they
would assuredly have said: If only its verses were expounded (so that we might understand)?
What! A foreign tongue and an Arab?” (Qur’ān 41:44).1
he superior status that language users give to H is correlated to the dismissive and pejora-
tive view of L, as vulgar or corrupted language. In the case of Arabic, this view was held by some
of the foremost Arabic intellectuals in the Middle Ages. For instance, the great historian and
sociologist Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), who states in his renowned Muqaddima that the diferent
Arabic dialects are the outcome of the corruption of the pure language, ater coming in contact
with the non-Arabic peoples of the Islamic Empire:
1. Translation by Pickthall (1992).

Later on [ater a period of poetry cultivation], corruption afected the language of the Arabs.
he various later dialects difered according to the (more or less close) contact with (non-
Arabs) and the (larger or smaller) admixture of non-Arab (elements). As a result, the Bedouin
Arabs themselves came to speak a language completely diferent from that of their ancestors
with regard to vowel endings, and diferent in many respects with regard to the (conventional)
meanings and forms of words. Among the urban population, too, another language originated,
which was diferent from classical Arabic with regard to vowel endings, as well as most mean-
ings and grammatical inlections. It difers also from the language of present-day Arab Bedou-
ins. Again, it difers within itself according to the (diferent) terminologies of the inhabitants
of the various regions. hus, the urban population of the East speaks a dialect diferent from
that of the Maghribîs. And the language of the urban population in Spain difers from both of
them. (Ibn Khaldūn 2005, 457)
Another non-linguistic characteristic of diglossia situations is that High varieties have to be

acquired through formal education, contrary to Low varieties, which are learnt in the normal
way a mother tongue is learnt and not by going to school. High has an established norm for or-
thography, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, along with a long tradition of grammati-
cal study. Low varieties, by contrast, lack written grammars though they have been occasionally
(especially in recent times) the object of descriptive studies. In the speciic case of Arabic in the
Middle Ages, aspects of dialectal Arabic are described from a negative angle in a literary genre
known as Laḥn al-‘āmma, that is, treatises on the errors of language made by the common
people. As can be inferred from the title, these treatises were composed with the aim of prevent-
ing the cultivated class from being inluenced by colloquial Arabic and making mistakes when
using the literary language. he linguistic ideas expressed in these works reveal the prevailing
feelings of the Arabic speech community with regard to the colloquial variety. he earliest work
of this kind is the Laḥn al-‘awāmm, by the Andalusi grammarian al-Zubaydī (928–989). In the
preface of his work, the author expresses his views on the diferences between the literary and
the vulgar language:
It is a question of alterations, owed to our ‘āmma [common people], which has modiied the
pronunciation (of certain words) or adapted the meaning, and has been followed in this prac-
tice by a great many people, to the point where these incorrect usages have iniltrated into the
works of poets, and the most eminent scribes and functionaries include them in their cor-
respondence and make use of depraved expressions in their conversations. (Pellat 1986, 606)
One might think that diglossia situations would tend historically towards a resolution of the
disjunction between the two varieties. On the contrary, however, diglossia situations tend to
be stable and to endure typically for several centuries, as in the case of Arabic. he origins of
Arabic diglossia could date as far back as pre-Islamic times according to some scholars such as
Corriente (1971 and 1975). his view holds that in pre-Islamic Arabia there already existed two
linguistically diferent forms of Arabic: one a prestigious poetic language and the other a spo-
ken colloquial Arabic. his view, however, is not universally accepted. What seems to be clear
is that in pre-Islamic times there already existed important diferences between the literary and
spoken forms of Arabic, the latter showing trends towards the simpliication of the case system.
With the rise of Islam and the fundamental fact of the revelation of the Qur’ān in (liter-
ary) Arabic, this form of the language, whether it was similar to the colloquial Arabic of that
period or an artiicial poetic language, became the sacred language of Islam. From that moment
onwards, the literary language became sealed of from the evolution of spoken Arabic. Literary
Arabic, as relected in the text of the Qur’ān, was considered to be the purest form of the lan-
guage and had to be preserved in that state for literature and formal purposes.
he normal gap existing between the literary and spoken varieties of any language became
wider in this case, as spoken Arabic developed into an analytic type of language, in contradis-
tinction to the synthetic nature of classical Arabic. Two main explanations have been given for
this linguistic evolution. he prevalent opinion among modern Arabists is that the changes that
Arabic underwent in the post-Islamic period were the natural continuation of linguistic trends
already existing in pre-Islamic times, derived from the fact that the case system in Arabic is
highly redundant (Corriente 1971). he view of other scholars and of the Arabs in the Middle
Ages was, however, quite diferent. As we have seen above in the citation of Ibn Khaldūn, for the
Arabs the origin of the divergence between literary Arabic and the diferent kinds of colloquial
Arabic was due to the mingling with non-Arabs, which led to the corruption of the Arabic lan-
guage during the expansion of the Islamic Empire, when they came in contact with “barbaric”
nations (Versteegh 2001, 93–112; Blau 1977). For them, dialectal Arabic was, therefore, corrupt
or imperfect Arabic, a view that still exists in the Arabic world.
Grammar, according to Muslim medieval scholars, was precisely invented in order to stop
the spread of mistakes made by non-Arabs and Arabs contaminated by the speech of the for-
mer. he most popular account of the birth of Arabic grammar is connected to the scholar Abū
l-Aswad al-Du’ālī (b.c. 688). he legend, recorded by Ibn al-Anbārī (b. 1119), has it that the
governor of Basra asked him to codify the language, since “these foreigners have become nu-
merous and corrupted the language of the Arabs.” Al-Du’ālī refused to do it at irst since he felt
unworthy of setting the rules of the language of Revelation. Nonetheless, he eventually accepted
the task ater hearing all the mistakes in declension made by somebody reciting the Qur’ān (see
Arabic text in al-Anbārī 1963, 6).
his traditional account of the origins of grammar is clearly a topos and its in with the
linguistic notions typical in a diglossic situation: Arabic used to be a pure language that has
become distorted and deteriorated by the speakers, who have to be reminded of its rules and
proper use; while grammar is invented to protect the language from deterioration and in order
to return it to its origins. In reality, the irst attempts to describe and codify the language are to
be found closely related to the discipline of the interpretation of the Qur’ān. For the believer to
fully comprehend the sacred text (revealed by God with those exact words), Arabic vocabulary
and language functioning had to be exhaustively investigated; and this became more the case
as the spoken Arabic increasingly difered from the literary form. Consequently, grammar was
not a mere codiication of the Arabic language and its rules in a irst stage of its development,
but an essential tool for the hermeneutics of the Qur’ān (Versteegh 1997, 11–22). Not surpris-
ingly, Christian and Jewish medieval authors who could master classical Arabic did not write
any grammar or Arabic linguistic study.
Finally in this section, two inal remarks have to be made with regard to Arabic diglossia.
In the irst place, it must be noted that the dichotomy described above between classical and
colloquial Arabic is in fact an ideal diglossia that cannot exist in a pure state in any speech
community. Rather, it represents the two poles of a continuum on which the speaker positions
himself. Modern native speakers of Arabic, for instance, when using the colloquial language
do oten introduce classicizing features, whereas when speaking or writing in classical Arabic
they can hardly avoid the inluence of their own dialect, unconsciously employing non-classical
forms and vocabulary. We obviously do not have records of the way people spoke in the Middle
Ages, apart from scarce references, but the numerous literary works produced in this period,
allegedly written in al-‘arabiyya al-fusḥa (classical Arabic), oten relect the colloquial language
or include pseudocorrections, that is, forms that arise from the author’s eforts to correct a col-
loquial trait, in an unnecessary way or insuiciently, thereby creating forms that do not exist in
either variety of the language.
he second observation that needs to be made to complete our picture of Arabic diglossia
is related to a later contribution that Fishman made to the original deinition of diglossia by us-
ing this term to refer to linguistically unrelated varieties (for example English (H)/(L) colloquial
Arabic). In Fishman’s deinition of diglossia the key characteristic of this linguistic situation is
the social compartmentalization of function and language. By using this extended deinition we
may include linguistic situations in which classical Arabic shares its functions of High language
with other languages such as English and French in the modern Arabic world, or Hebrew and
Latin in the Middle Ages. In the case of medieval Jews, for instance, their linguistic situation
was invariably of diglossia between two or more languages since Hebrew always held a superior
status and was used as a High language in some domains, whereas the colloquial language was
identical to that of the rest of the population (dialectal Arabic, Romance, Aramaic, etc.).
Arabic diglossia among the muslims of Al-Andalus
he number of native Arabic speakers who took part in the invasion of the Peninsula in 711 or
arrived subsequently as the Islamic rule came to be established, was very limited. he army that
crossed to the Peninsula was mostly composed of Berber males from the North of Africa who
must have spoken some form of Berber language and maybe some form of Latin. In spite of
the numerical disadvantage, however, Arabic made its way and eventually prevailed over any
of the other languages used by Muslims, including Romance and Berber, in oral speech, and
Latin in the literary production. his is a similar process to that which had taken place in most
territories conquered by the Muslim armies: Islamization and Arabization of the majority of the
population, as two parallel and joint processes.
Arabization was a wider societal process than Islamization since it reached population
groups that did not convert to Islam, including the entire Jewish community living in al-Anda-
lus and presumably Christians, though to a lesser degree than Jews, as can be inferred from the
written evidence available to us. hough establishing the dates and extent of the use of Arabic
is not the goal of this article (Zwartjes 1997, 5–22; R.I. Burns 1984, 172–92), it can be assumed on
the basis of existing evidence, that there was extensive Arabization by the eleventh century and
general monolingualism with Arabic from the thirteenth century until the end of the so-called
Christian Reconquest of Islamic territories in 1492.
Arabization was a twofold process since, on the one hand, people learnt colloquial Arabic
as a living language and, on the other, classical Arabic through education and formal tuition.
he Arabs who settled in the peninsula spoke a variety of dialects, mostly south Arabian dia-
lects of a conservative linguistic nature. he contact among all these Arabic dialects, inluenced
by the Romance spoken by the native population, developed into one broad entity that we know
as Andalusi dialect. his was the Low variety within the diglossia paradigm, and it was acquired
in a natural process, as a mother tongue is usually learnt.
Education in classical Arabic, as in the rest of Muslim territories, was carried forward
through the study and memorization of the Qur’ān. his began in childhood in the mosque.
Learning by heart their sacred book, as is traditional among Muslims to this date, was usually
accompanied by the familiarization with the rudiments of Arabic grammar. hose who wished
to pursue further study of the language could do so with private teachers and by joining a circle
of learning.
A Muslim had unquestionably to become acquainted with the language of the Qur’ān, even
if it was at an elementary level, since recitation of parts of it were an integral part of Muslim
liturgy. We may assume that before the Arabization of the native Andalusi population was com-
plete, new Muslims (muwallads) had Romance as their spoken colloquial language while being
familiarised to some degree with classical Arabic. his would account for occasional references
to individuals using Romance in Muslim courts, and judges replying in this same language in
the ninth and tenth century, as reported by Ibn Ḥ ārith al-Khushanī (d. 971–972) in his Book of
the judges of Córdoba (J. Ribera 1914). In one case, for instance, a man called Yenayr “known
among the people for his good conduct and [Muslim] orthodox belief,” replied in Romance
when he was asked his opinion about a judge’s conduct (J. Ribera 1914, 96–118). In another
case a woman pleads her case in Romance to a judge, who replies, also in Romance, that the
only unlucky being is not she but a mule tied all day long at the mosque’s door (J. Ribera 1914,
139–79). In all these stories, Romance conforms to the Low language role in a diglossia, as a
colloquial variety, and language related to “funny” or folkloristic events. We learn from the way
these anecdotes are told, that there were no restrictions or prohibition on the use of Romance
as an oral language. Contrary to what happened in a later period of Andalusi history, we do not
even ind derogatory comments about its use, probably because it was not related to any threat
at this early stage. here is, however, implicit contempt in the term that Arabs use to refer to
Romance and to other non-Arabic languages, namely, ‘ajamiyya, that is, “foreign,” “barbarian,”
“non-Arabic language,” from the root ‘ajam, related to the meanings of having a speech impedi-
ment when using Arabic or not speaking Arabic with clarity.
hough it seems clear that part of the native Muslim population still had Romance as their
everyday language in the ninth and tenth century, there are no references or any written sources
reporting Muslims using any language other than classical Arabic for literary and formal pur-
poses. If we think of the linguistic situation of al-Andalus from the perspective of religious
communities, as I suggest we should, between 711 and the middle or end of the tenth century
there existed at least three diglossia situations within the Muslim community: classical Arabic/
dialectal Arabic, classical Arabic/Romance, and classical Arabic/Berber; the latter two belong-
ing to the category described by Fishman as diglossia with bilingualism, since the functional
division of registers happens between two diferent languages rather than between two varieties
of the same language.
hat classical Arabic was the language that all Muslims considered to be their language
above any other becomes evident when, in the eleventh century, a ierce intellectual encounter
between native Iberian Muslims (muwallads) and Arab Muslims took place in al-Andalus, with
language being one of the issues at stake. he ethnic tension between the two groups had been
preceded by similar confrontations in the Eastern side of the Muslim world, notably among
Persians in the ninth century, in what is known as the shu‘ūbiyya movement. Ater undergoing
what non-Arab Muslims considered discrimination and humiliation by the Arab aristocracy,
shu‘ūbiyya defenders asserted the superiority of their local culture in their writings and de-
manded social equality with the Arabs.
he foremost representative of this movement in al-Andalus was Abū ‘Āmir Ibn Gharsiyya
(García), a Muslim of Basque origin, who wrote a shu‘ūbī tract against the Arabs around the
middle of the eleventh century. Numerous refutations were written in response to Ibn Gharsi-
yya, some of them during his lifetime. What is of interest for us here is that when the argument
comes around to linguistic issues, Andalusi Muslims do not claim any prestige for Romance
or Latin, as native languages of the Peninsula. Rather, they accept Arabic as the most eloquent
language, try their best to master it, and ask that pure Arabs to be understanding of their mis-
takes and grammatical errors: “Even the elegant in speech may sometimes lapse into error, so
do not accept the modest, well-meant work other than with afability.” By the same token, the
pro-Arab faction attacks non-Arabs for having spoken barbaric languages in the past and not
being grateful enough for receiving the Arabic language, as in the Refutation by Abū al-Ṭ aiyib
‘Abd al-Mun‘im ibn Mann Allāh al-Qarawī: “Did they [the Arabs] not endow you with a pure
language ater your foreign babble? Did they not cause you to speak clearly ater your linguistic
barbarism?” (Monroe 1970b).
Even more signiicant is the refutation by Abū Yaḥya ibn Mas‘ada in which he includes
further linguistic arguments:
You muttered in the Arabic language yet you wearied of the Arab’s wisdom; you uttered their
war cry, imitated their poems, and brayed among their asses, though your brand is not like
their brand. Did you not perfect your intelligence ater having spoken in your defective tongue
and foreign babble? […] Did you and your ancestors, O base one, O you who have avoided
the prescribed castigation, ever have a language to speak and did your non-Arab rulers have a
grave in Jilliq [Syria] to mourn over, or a grammar in your tongue for us to record, or a babble in
your previous condition to inlect and decline? (Monroe 1970b, 32–33; emphasis added)
In addition to reminding the Andalusi muwallads that it is thanks to the Arabs that they have
their present language, the author points to the characteristics that, in his view, Iberian Mus-
lims’ old tongue (Romance) lacks vis-à-vis classical Arabic: grammar, inlection and declension.
he perception of Romance among Arab Muslims, and very likely among non-Arab Muslims
as well, accommodates to the diglossia paradigm in which a Low language is perceived as im-
perfect and deteriorated, in this case as a language lacking a proper grammatical structure. he
author of these linguistic statements does not realize, however, that those characteristics that
put the native Iberian tongues at a lower level than Arabic, do at this stage apply to colloquial
Arabic as well, since its inlection and declension had also been considerably simpliied or com-
pletely lost (Corriente 1992, 28–29). By “Arabic,” he therefore means classical Arabic, the variety
of Arabic that Abū Yaḥya considers the only “real” version of Arabic.
he fact that in these dialectical disputes non-Arabs address all kinds of insulting remarks
to the Arab people (being ignorant, camel herders, children of a slave woman) but Arabic is
never the object of attack, shows that the religious nature attached to it as the language of Islam,
prevails over its ethnic component. For Muslims of Iberian stock the Arabs can be ridiculed
for many reasons, but Arabic remains as an object of veneration regardless of a Muslim’s origin.
In his Letter, Ibn Gharsiyya not only uses a lawless classical Arabic but also alludes to topics
and traditional Arabic literary symbols, showing his command of the language and its classi-
cal literature. His Letter is symbolic of the nationalistic thinking of Andalusi native Muslims
concerning the Arabic language: rather than showing any rejection of it, Andalusi attempt to
master Arabic language and literature to a higher degree than Arabs themselves. hat is the real
challenge: surpassing an Arab in the knowledge of his language.
Several examples of this attitude can be found in the biographies of Andalusi grammarians
recorded by al-Zubaydī, as in the case of the confrontation between the Arab Abū Muḥammad
al-A‘rābī al-‘Āmirī and the ninth century Andalusi grammarian Yazīd ibn Ṭ alaḥa (Gallego 2003,
123–24). he Andalusi had been asked to give his opinion about a grammatical question that
had caused an argument between al-A‘rābī and an Andalusi individual who had dared to cor-
rect his language. he ine arguments that Yazīd ofers show that he is right and that his knowl-
edge of the classical language is more comprehensive than that of the Arab. Similarly, to the
great delight of the Andalusi, in the biography of the Andalusi grammarian ‘Ufayr ibn Mas‘ūd
(d. 919), it is told that the Andalusi teacher witnesses how all his students leave him when an
Iraqi scholar comes to al-Andalus and starts lecturing on the Arabic language. he only loyal
pupil who does not ly of with the rest, is asked by his teacher to attend the Iraqi’s lectures and
report to him aterwards. To the student’s surprise, however, during the lecture he has to correct
the Iraqian up to three occasions on grammatical questions and, as a consequence, the rest of
the students lose conidence in the new Arab teacher and never go back to his lectures (Gallego
2003, 123–25).
In addition to writing grammatical works and showing a command of the classical lan-
guage through their linguistic skills, Andalusi Muslims mastered classical Arabic in their cul-
tivation of poetry, which is considered the Arabic national art. Writing Arabic poetry entails a
deep knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of classical Arabic, along with a deep knowl-
edge of the literary tradition of the Arabs. Poetic works were produced in al-Andalus since a
very early period and blossomed in the eleventh century. More than two hundred poets were
active during this period in al-Andalus. he number and quality of these works attests to a pro-
found cultural Arabization by this date, at least in the urban population.
We may assume that only two diglossic pairs existed from the eleventh century onwards
among Muslims: a predominant classical Arabic/Andalusi Arabic diglossia and, in a much re-
duced scale, classical Arabic/Berber diglossia among part of the population of North African
origin. Sharing classical Arabic with Romance as a regular linguistic practice seems very un-
likely at this stage, given the fact that Romance was increasingly identiied as the language of the
Christian enemy. Evidence for the shared identity of being a Christian and being a Romance na-
tive speaker is found, for instance, in the use of the term ‘ajamī to mean both. hough originally
a linguistic term meaning foreign language speaker and non-Arabic language speaker, ‘ajamī
was used in al-Andalus with the two meanings of being a Romance speaker and as a synonym
to naṣranī, that is, Christian. A very clear example of the use of the term with a religious sense
is found in the episode narrated by the eleventh century Andalusi historian Abū Marwān Ibn
Ḥ ayyān, relating to the surrender of a rebellious group of Christians and Muslim converts (mu-
wallads) to the vizier Hāshim ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azīz, in 875. Hāshim, who clearly intended to kill all
the men, pretended to try and ind out who was a Muslim and who was a Christian in order
to get rid of the Christians. According to Ibn Ḥ ayyān, the exact question he asked each of
them was the following: “muslim anta am a‘jamī?” (= Are you Muslim or Christian (Romance
speaker)?), that is, using a‘jamī as a synonym to Christian, as becomes clear from the context.
To those who answered “a‘jamī” (=Christian/Romance speaker) Hāshim ordered to kill them
on the spot. To those who answered “Muslim” Hāshim asked them to recite a chapter of the
Qur’ān and then another one, and another one… until they hesitated or made a mistake, giv-
ing Hāshim an excuse to kill them, saying “Did I not tell you that he was Christian/Romance
speaker (a‘jamī)?,” until all the men were dead (Vallvé 1994, 21–22; Gallego 2003, 129; Lapiedra
1997, 264–65).
As the Reconquest advanced, the attitudes towards Christians and their language sharp-
ened in critical ways. he topos of the corruption of classical Arabic due to contact with non-
Arabs during the expansion of the Islamic Empire, adopted speciic nuances in the writings of
Andalusi Muslims who wanted to explain their own “incorrect” Arabic. he reason for making
errors and not speaking pure Arabic, in the view of several Andalusi personalities, is related to
their peripheral situation with regard to the cradle of the Arab nation and, above all, to their
proximity to the non-Arabic people of the Peninsula. As we have seen, the non-Arabs who
inhabit the Peninsula are also identiied not only with people of a diferent race and language
(who could be Muslims as well), but with people of a diferent religion, namely, Christians. Cor-
rupted Arabic speech is therefore related to being close to Christianity and Christian languages.
he negative efect of the contact with the non-Arabs/Christians of the Peninsula appears,
for instance, in the letters of two secretaries-courtiers of the Taifa period, as recorded by the
twelth-century historian Ibn Bassām. he clearest statement in this regard comes in the words
of the Toledan courtier Abū al-Muṭarrif ibn Muthannā (d. 1066), who complains about hiring
slave women from the North for the raising of Andalusi noble children:
Aren’t we, people of this peninsula which is far away from the best nations, neighboring the
non-Arab (al-‘ajam) masses, aren’t we the worthiest of excuse for [our] incorrect speaking
[…]? Because, isn’t it true that since one of the sons of your nobility starts to hear when he
is born […], he does not hear but the words of a despicable, Romance speaking (a‘jamiyya),
simple minded slave-woman, and the baby does not suckle but from her breast, and does not
acquire but her incapability of expression, and is not calmed but in her lap, and is not trained
but under her direction? To the point that when he becomes a man, culminating his growth, he
is in touch with the Christian Kingdoms since he speaks to them in their languages, he makes
an efort in keeping their language, he is concerned about their social classes and tolerates their
habits. (Abbās 1975, 402; Lapiedra 1997, 273–5)
he fact that from the eleventh century onwards Romance did not form part of any stable lin-
guistic situation among the Muslims of al-Andalus, does not mean that there were no Muslims
who knew and were luent in this language. Sporadic cases of Muslims knowing or speaking
in Romance are reported in Andalusi chronicles up to the twelth century. For instance, in 1170
an Andalusi accompanying the Almohad leader Abū Sa‘īd, is reported to know Romance and
understand the speech of the Christian king, Ferdinand II, with whom they met to sign a pact
(Gallego 2003: 132–3). As a low-status language, no formal tuition existed for Romance, though
the diferent Romance varieties could be learnt through personal contact with Christians of
the Northern Kingdoms. As becomes clear from Abū al-Muṭarrif ’s letter, Christian women
played a signiicant role in this linguistic transmission, due to their close contact with children
in their irst years of life. Muslim children could even adopt a Romance nickname, as was the
case of Muslims whose mother had a Romance/Christian origin, or those who had been nursed
by a Christian slave. he latter is the case of the Andalusi scholar Abū Muḥammad al-Rushāṭī
(b. 1133), whose nickname al-Rushāṭī had its origin in the afectionate name (Rushaṭello) that a
Romance servant gave to one of his ancestors when he was a little child, in reference to the big
mole (rūsha/rosa in Romance) that he had on one of his cheeks (Molina López and Bosch Vilá
1990, 18).
As may be expected, Romance was never used as a speciic literary language among the
Muslims of al-Andalus. here are, however, some samples of Romance vocabulary and verses
included in the Arabic literature of Muslims. he best known case is that of the Romance inal
couplets (kharjas) inserted in a special genre of Arabic poems known as muwashshaḥ. he
norms of the genre dictate that the inal verses should constitute a ludic, frivolous element, to
create a contrasting efect with the poem in which they are inserted. he function that these
inal verses play requires, therefore, a low status language like Romance or Andalusi dialect,
whereas the corpus of the poem is written in classical Arabic. he Romance kharjas represent
only a minor fraction in the whole of the muwashshaḥ genre but from a sociolinguistic point of
view their presence is quite signiicant, for they attest to the extended diglossia that must have
existed at one stage within the Muslim speech community, having classical Arabic as a language
of culture and Romance as a Low language.
Romance vocabulary can be found in Arabic scientiic treatises, more speciically in phar-
macological works. here, translations of the names of plants are given in a variety of languag-
es including diferent Romance dialects, Berber and Andalusi dialectal Arabic. he practical
goal of these works, namely, their use by herbalists in their preparation of medical remedies
throughout al-Andalus and other Islamic territories, accounts for this lack of prejudice against
including low status languages. It is, however, unlikely that this inclusion of Romance names
for plants relected actual knowledge of the language at the time of the composition of some
of these pharmacological works. hese materials were usually transmitted from one author to
another regardless of the actual linguistic knowledge of these languages among their readership,
the same way that learned languages like Greek or Latin are also included as part of pharmaco-
logical knowledge transmission without there necessarily being any expectation that the reader
know any of them. he composition dates of some of these works up to the thirteenth century,
should not lead us to think that the use of Romance among Andalusi Muslims was part of any
stable linguistic situation by this time. Even if Romance was occasionally spoken, we may as-
sume that by the eleventh century Andalusi Arabic had already become the most widespread
spoken language of al-Andalus.
Information on the evolution and use of colloquial Andalusi Arabic is, however, scarce. As
corresponds to its status as a Low language, the domains of use of the colloquial variety rarely
form part of the literary sources (belles lettres) transmitted to us. he only literature written in
the Andalusi dialect belongs to the realm of popular literature including proverbs and a poetic
genre known as zajal. he rest of Arabic literature produced in al-Andalus contains only oc-
casional quotations and vocabulary in the colloquial language in spheres of usage that coincide
with those of Romance, conirming the low status shared by these two linguistic varieties. As
mentioned above, Andalusi colloquial Arabic, along with Romance, was used as a ludic or folk-
loristic element at the end of the muwashshaḥ poems, whereas vocabulary of colloquial Arabic
was included, along with Romance and Berber terms, in pharmacological treatises.
he study of the Arabic language in al-Andalus, as in the rest of the Muslim world, was
restricted to classical Arabic, whereas the dialect was only described in negative ways, that is,
to show its incorrectness and in order to prevent the learned class from making mistakes. his
is the goal of the so-called laḥn works. he low esteem in which colloquial Arabic was held is
relected in the names that it received in linguistic and non-linguistic literature: al-‘ammiyya
(vulgar/popular language), less frequently laḥn (ungrammatical/erroneous speech) and in a few
instances lugha ahl al-Andalus (language of the people of al-Andalus).
his variety of Arabic was considered a corrupted version of the pure language that arose
as a consequence of the intermingling with non-Arabs and, in the speciic case of al-Andalus,
was reinforced by their proximity and contact with them. Part of the topos of the origins and
use of the colloquial variety was to consider it the language of the lower class; whereas, in reality,
colloquial Arabic was the spoken language of everybody outside formal contexts. Even the most
learned men made mistakes and could be inluenced by dialectal Arabic in their writings. here
is a telling anecdote in this regard related to the Andalusi grammarian Abū Mūsā al-Hawwārī,
who is reported by one of his contemporaries as a person who used to speak in classical Arabic
(al-‘arabiyya) to the people who had a command of it, but employed colloquial Arabic (laḥn)
with those who did not know the classical language. When he was asked why he used any laḥn
at all, he replied that doing the opposite and speaking in ‘arabiyya to somebody who was not
skilled in it would be a lack of respect for the speaker and for the language itself (Ibn Ḥ ārith
al-Khushanī 1992, 235).
his episode relects the prevalent linguistic ideas with regard to the use of colloquial Ara-
bic as a phenomenon of the common class but to which learned men should avoid using. Very
signiicantly, al-Hawwārī needs to give an explanation for using the low register of Arabic. As
a learned person he is expected to speak exclusively in pure Arabic and show contempt for the
use of the colloquial language. His acknowledgment and acceptance of the actual linguistic situ-
ation constitutes a rare case deemed to be commented upon in his biography by al-Khushanī.
To sum up, the linguistic situation of the Muslims of al-Andalus was determined by the
central role and dominance that the Arabic language played within Islamic culture and, more
speciically, by the role played by classical Arabic as the language of the Qur’ān and the language
of culture and high registers. We may assume that in an early period the majority of the local
Muslims (muwallads) kept their native Romance variety for oral communication but learnt
classical Arabic as part of their new religious ailiation; giving place to an extended diglossic
situation having two languages, rather than two varieties of the same language, in the speech
distribution of high and low functions. his is similar to what happens to new Muslim converts
in non-Arabic countries today, who retain their native language (English, Spanish, etc.) but
learn classical Arabic as a means to deepen and reinforce their Muslim identity. It must be
noted, however, that in the Middle Ages Arabic was far more than the language of Islam. It was
the vehicle of high culture and the language of Islamic administration and the high stratum of
power. It naturally emerged that colloquial Arabic, as the variety associated to classical Arabic,
prevailed as well as the most widely spoken language, especially but not exclusively, among the
Muslim population. In the particular case of al-Andalus, the Christian character that Romance
adopted as the Reconquest advanced was also a determinant factor for the classical Arabic/Ro-
mance diglossia to be replaced by a classical Arabic/Andalusi Arabic language distribution that
prevailed until the end of the Christian Reconquest of Iberian Islamic territories.
Arabic diglossia among the Christians and Jews of Al-Andalus
he veneration of Muslims for classical Arabic, as the sacred language of Islam, was an alien
concept to Christians and Jews in al-Andalus for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, its lure as the
language of the most advanced culture of the time and a language associated to political power
and prestige, led to its widespread knowledge and use among Andalusi non-Muslims as well. As
for colloquial Arabic, it became the most common and natural language to use in casual spo-
ken interaction ater a period of coexistence with other low status linguistic varieties, notably
Romance and Berber.
he displacement of Romance and Latin by colloquial and classical Arabic did not provoke
any negative reaction among Iberian Jews, in keeping with their general receptiveness to Arabic
Muslim culture and political rule. his was not the case among Christians, as relected in the
oten cited statements of Alvarus of Córdoba in 854, harshly complaining about the neglect and
oblivion of Latin by Christians. Further, Andalusi Christians (mozarabs) are reported to act as
translators and political intermediaries between Muslim authorities and Northern Christian
dignitaries, proving their preservation of Romance for several centuries and, what is more, the
religious identiication of this linguistic variety as a Christian language.
he high registers of language use (literary composition, formal interaction, legal con-
tracts, etc.) are those in which religious ascription played a more signiicant role. he reason for
this phenomenon is the already-commented-upon deep Islamic nature of classical Arabic, in
addition to the fact that many of the formal linguistic registers pertained to religious domains,
including liturgy, marriage contracts etc. he autonomous status of non-Muslims communities
for ruling their own afairs within the Islamic state could not but favour independent linguistic
usages of each religious community, in the same way that they had their own justice and ad-
ministrative structure.
he Christians of al-Andalus had Latin as their language of culture until the end of the
ninth century (Gil 1973). It must be noted that the religious signiicance of Latin was not by far
like that of Arabic in Islam or Hebrew in Judaism. Arabic was the language that God had em-
ployed for transmitting His message in Islam and Hebrew was the language of the old Hebrews
and the language in which the Scriptures had been written, whereas Latin was associated to
Christianity on weaker grounds. Latin was the oicial language of the Church from the fourth
century and it had been used and praised by important Christian personalities such as Isidore
of Seville and Saint Jerome. he Gospels, however, had been transmitted in Greek and Jesus had
spoken Aramaic.
Latin was displaced by Arabic by the end of the ninth century, proving the efective Ara-
bization of the Christians of al-Andalus who, by this date, even needed Arabic translations of
the Bible. heir Arabic production however was very scant and in only two cases can we speak
of belles lettres as such: the work of the two eleventh-century poets Ibn al-Mir‘izī and Abū
al-Qāsim ibn Khayyāt. With the exception of these two poets, the rest of the Arabic writings
cannot be said to be composed in pure classical Arabic. In these writings the authors include
elements of the grammar and vocabulary of colloquial Arabic to a higher degree than in the
writings by Muslims. Furthermore, since many of these texts are translations from Latin, there
was interference from the language of origin in areas such as vocabulary and grammar (Van
Koningsveld 1994; Kassis 1997; Versteegh 2001, 123–25).
As for Jewish language use in high registers, three diferent linguistic varieties need to be
mentioned: classical Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew. Classical Arabic was used for interac-
tion with the Muslim community in formal contexts such as administration (letters to the ruler,
legal procedures, etc.). In this regard, it is worth mentioning the legendary case of the Andalusi
Jew Shemuel ibn Naghrella who served as a wizier for the ruler of Granada in the irst half of
the eleventh century. His deep knowledge and command of classical Arabic was even acknowl-
edged by Muslim scholars such as the Andalusi historian Abū Marwān Ibn Ḥ ayyān, who refers
to him as someone who,
knew the literatures of both peoples. He went deeply into the principles of the Arabic language
and was familiar with the works of the most subtle grammarians. He spoke and wrote Classical
Arabic with the greatest ease, using this language in the letters which he wrote on behalf of his
king. He used the usual Islamic formulas, the eulogies of God and Muhammad, our Prophet,
and recommended to the addressee to live according to Islam. (Schippers 1994, 54–55)
In their scientiic writings (philosophy, medicine, grammar, etc.) and also in personal writings,
Jews employed Judeo-Arabic. When we refer to medieval Judeo-Arabic, we could best deine
it as a variety of classical Arabic used by Jews for internal consumption, whose main char-
acteristics are the use of Hebrew script, a signiicant input of Hebrew lexicon, and the use of
registers close to the colloquial Arabic. he irst two characteristics are shared by several Jewish
languages including Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, and Judeo-Persian and stem from the Jewish high
esteem for their sacred language. Employing registers of colloquial Arabic relects the lenient
attitude towards the norms of classical Arabic and occurs in some of the foremost Jewish schol-
ars whose command of classical Arabic could not be questioned, such as Yonah ibn Janāḥ or
Maimonides, and demonstrates the existence of a linguistic ideological attitude rather than any
deicient knowledge of the language (Gallego 2006, 34–42).
Finally, (biblical) Hebrew was used in al-Andalus in accordance with its status as the sa-
cred language of Judaism and as the most eloquent and perfect language in the view of Jews.
Andalusi Jewish authors gave Hebrew a new vitality as a literary language ater centuries of be-
ing used almost exclusively for religious writing (Sáenz-Badillos 1997). In the wake of the con-
cept of ‘arabiyya, prevailing among Andalusi Muslims, which claims the superiority of Arabic
language and culture, Jews made Hebrew their object of linguistic praise and gave it a new life.
Apart from extensively studying and analyzing their language, as the Muslims were doing with
Arabic, Jewish scholars in al-Andalus used biblical Hebrew for the composition of philological
works and, very particularly, for the composition of poetry. he amount and quality of the He-
brew works produced in al-Andalus in the tenth- through twelth-century period have made it
to be rightly considered a Golden Age of Hebrew letters.
In conclusion, the ascription of diferent linguistic varieties to high and low communi-
cation registers in al-Andalus was marked, in my view, by the religious character of classical
Arabic, to which Muslims, Jews and Christians responded in diferent ways. Native Iberian
Muslims fully assimilated the classical Arabic/colloquial Arabic dichotomy, whereas Christians
and particularly Jews, nuanced and extended its linguistic scope to other languages of signii-
cance in their respective religious traditions.
he Jewish Literature in Medieval Iberia
Mariano Gómez-Aranda
he arrival of the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula in 711 marks the beginning of an era of cul-
tural interaction among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. he Arab conquerors were welcomed
by the Jews, who had previously sufered the oppresion of the Visigoths, and their process of
Arabisation took place soon ater the conquest. he Jews adopted the values and styles of the
ruling class, and beneited from the brilliant intellectual life of Andalusian Arabic culture. hey
learned the Arabic language and assimilated Arabic literary traditions by sinthesizing them
with their Jewish literary heritage; creating a new Hebrew literature that derived many of its
themes, ideas, principles, images, and even rhythms from the Arabic models.
In tenth-century caliphate of Córdoba, there was a circle of wealthy Jews, thoroughly
educated in Arabic languages and literature, skilled in professions, and holding positions of
responsibility and power in public life, who were also pious, learned, and iercely loyal to Jew-
ish interests. hese Jewish intelectuals, known as Andalusian Jewish courtiers, synthesized the
dominant Arabic-Islamic culture with Jewish religious and literary traditions. heir aim was to
be part of the highest level of a society that judged a man largely by his social graces, linguistic
skills, and literary taste (Scheindlin 1986).
From the tenth to the twelth century, the Golden Age of Hebrew literature lourished in
al-Andalus. Poetry enjoyed enormous prestige, and became the inest expression of the Jewish
literature; but almost as remarkable were the achievements in other literary disciplines, such as
narrative, philosophy, linguistics, biblical exegesis, religious controversy, and science.
Hebrew poetry in the muslim context
he Hebrew poetry that emerged in tenth-century al-Andalus utilized Arab forms deriving
from the pre-Islamic literary tradition. Islamic motifs and conventions were adopted by the
Andalusian Hebrew poets and interwoven with Jewish traditions, producing a new poetry re-
markable both for its brilliant adaptation of Arab themes and for its skillful interlacing of the
philosophical and scientiic concepts of their time.
he stylistic training of the Hebrew Andalusian poets was considered of primary impor-
tance, especially by Moses Ibn Ezra (c. 1055–1138), who wrote a treatise on how to compose
Hebrew poetry in the Arabic style entitled Kitab al-Muhadara wa-l-Mudhakarah (he book of
discussion and conversation). In this Hebrew poetics, almost unique in medieval Jewish litera-
ture, Moses Ibn Ezra deals with the igures of speech and provides Arabic examples from the
Qur’ān and from Arabic poetry in order to show how stylistic devices are found in the Hebrew
Bible and especially, in contemporary Hebrew poetry.
he Andalusian Hebrew poets endeavoured to use the language of the Bible to express con-
cepts and ideas borrowed from Arabic poetry, and thus, the original meaning of certain Biblical
expressions was oten transposed to a completely diferent context. Moses Ibn Ezra put together
he Jewish Literature in Medieval Iberia 367
the language of the Bible and the themes of Arabic poetry in order to show the parallels and to
explain Scripture (Schippers 1994).
Biblical poetry had neither meter or rhyme, relying instead for poetic efect upon the use
of parallelism. he Andalusian Hebrew poets adopted the prosodic types of the Arabic poetry.
One was the qasida of the pre-Islamic tribes, a monorhymed poetic structure that is recited in a
monotonous rythmical tone. Another form adopted for poetic purposes was the muwashsha, a
new type of strophic verse – introduced by the Andalusian Arabs of the tenth century – which
consists of ive or six stanzas and inal couplet, written either in the vernacular or in Romance.
In medieval al-Andalus, poetry was composed for amusement. he Andalusi courtiers,
both Muslim and Jewish, entertained each other by listening to poetry, reciting their own verses,
discussing those of others, and setting themes for each other’s improvisation for one another.
hese poems dealt, generally, with the pleasures of life enjoyed by the courtiers, and the regret
that life is short and pleasures temporary.
Members of Andalusian Arab upper classes used to organize wine parties, in which they
passed the night drinking wine, and enjoying the performances of dancers and singers. he par-
ticipants in these parties also entertained themselves with poetry. hey recited and discussed
other’s poems, displayed their own compositions, and played improvisional poetic games
(Scheindlin 1986). Wine drinking was a favorite topic for improvisation, and we ind Jews com-
posing wine poetry similar to that of the Arabs, which lead us to assume that they participated
in wine parties together with the Arabs. he Hebrew poets followed the models of Arabic wine
poetry, and especially that of Abu Nuwas (757–814), the greatest classical Arabic poet who de-
voted much of his literary works to wine drinking and its associated worldly pleasures. Many
of the images, moods and situations evoked in his poems were imitated by Andalusian Muslim
and Jewish poets.
Wine poems usually describe the wine and the circumstances surrounding its drinking;
and include meditations of the poets about friendship, the pleasures of life, and the fate of hu-
man beings. hey also contain exhortations to friends to participate in wine parties and to share
the pleasures of wine drinking. One poem by Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1020–1057), describing
the experience of sharing a party with companions, includes relections on the pleasures of
wine drinking beyond death:
O my friend, lead me to the vines and give me drink so that I will be illed with joy;
When the cups of your love reach me, perhaps they will chase away the sadnesses;
When you drink eight cups of your love for me, then I will drink of my love for you eighty
times.
If I die before you, o my friend, then dig my grave between the roots of the vines.
hen perform my funeral washing with the water of the grapes,
and embalm me with grape kernels and all kinds of species;
Do not weep or mourn because of my death, but play the lute and the organ and stringed
instruments.
Do not put dust on earth on my grave, but new jugs together with old ones.
(Schippers 1994, 120)
In the Arabic Andalusian poetry of Ibn Quzman (d. 1160), we ind the poet asking his friends
to bury him between grape vines:
368 Mariano Gómez-Aranda
When I die, then my manner of burial will be,

hat I will sleep in the vineyards between the grape vines,
While leaves will surround me as a shroud
And around my head will be a turban of the shoots of a grape-vine. (Schippers 1994, 119)
his motif is also found in a traditional popular Spanish song:

When I die, I have ordered
in my will that I should be buried
in a wine cellar, at the foot of a barrel,
with a bunch of grapes in my mouth.1
Like the wine poetry to which it is closely related, Hebrew love poetry is conventional in con-
tent and stylized in form. Its themes and rhetorical igures are drawn from the Arabic literary
tradition. he typical medieval Hebrew love poems are short, and are composed in the classical
prosodic patterns of quantitative meter and monorhyme borrowed from Arabic. In addition
to these short poems, there exists a rather large number of muwashshas devoted exclusively to
love (Scheindlin 1986).
In Arabic and Hebrew poetry, much space is devoted to the rethorical description of the
beauty of the beloved. he description consists of comparisons and igures of speech generally
drawn from a traditional repertoire. he beloved person described is a woman or a boy, and is
compared with a male or female gazelle. he stature and shape of the beloved may be compared
with to a work of art in ivory: the eyebrows are shaped like bows, the cheeks are like roses, and so
forth. he image of the eyes shooting arrows that wound or kill the lover is typical of Arabic love
poetry, and is found in a poem by the Andalusian Hebrew poet Samuel ha-Nagid (993–1055), who
says “Did you prepare sharp arrows on the bows of your eyelids, to shoot therewith the hearts of
lovers?” (Schippers 1994, 174). In Arabic love poetry, the motif of the beloved imprisoned in the
heart of the lover is quite a popular theme. In a poem by Bashshar ibn Burd, we ind the following
line: “A girl among you has stolen my heart, so that half of it is with her, and the other half with
me” (Schippers 1994, 171). he Hebrew poet Judah ha-Levi (c. 1070–1141) describes how his heart
is traveling with the beloved who has gone away: “Where can I ind rest ater you have gone away?
You are travelling around and my heart is travelling with you” (Schippers 1994, 172).
One of the topics of the Arabic love poetry is a description of the remnants of the encap-
ment of the beloved’s tribe ater its departure. he Medinese poet Umar ibn Abi Rabiah uses
this topic in the following way:
Whose are these remnants, as if they were lines whose signs are neglected and uncovered by
the East wind? […]
he abodes of the tribe have now been deserted ater having been inhabited: in the evening
gazelles and cows walk through it;
Ater their departure from this site, the members of the tribe changed abode, then the adversi-
ties of Time altered the place, and thereupon repeated its vicissitudes.
I was halting there a long time in order to interrogate the campsite, although the site has no
knowledge or information. (Schippers 1994, 155–156)
1. “Cuando yo me muera, tengo yo dispuesto / en mi testamento que me han de enterrar / en una bodega, al
pie de una cuba, / con un ramo de uvas en el paladar.”
In the poems of Moses ibn Ezra we ind the departure motif to express his own feelings of being
abandoned by his friends and family. Several of the images used by Umar ibn Abi Rabiah, such
as the inexorable forces of Time and the questioning of ruins, are also found in Moses ibn Ezra’s
following lines:
he dwellings of my beloved people are abandoned like ruins, and their palaces have become
again like deserts;
As a meadow they were prepared for the daughters of the does and as a place for the treading
of lesser cattle they were claimed for the young gazelles;
Between these places lie nowadays panthers and amidst them are roaring cubs of lions;
And gardens where swallows and cranes made their nests; now there are assembled vultures
and owls to mourn;
I wander around now above destroyed walls and go along broken fences which are cast down;
And I have some compassion for the dust of these places and I want stones to be revived from
their barren lands;
I shed brooks of blood from my eyes, so large that no sailor can traverse them with boats;
I speak there, but no one is listening and only the serpents answer, utter lamentations;
With its mighty hand and stretched out arms Time threw their inhabitants away.
(Schippers 1994, 159–60)
Nature description is another genre of Andalusian Arabic and Hebrew poetry. his particular
type of poetry includes descriptions of cultivated gardens, which are usually compared to a
beautiful woman. In Arabic poetry we ind images such as the following: the perfumed wind
blows through her hair, the lowers are her pearls, the tree branches move in the wind, the
doves coo, and the waves of water applaud. Descriptions of heavens, rain, night, stars and other
elements of nature are used to describe the poet’s feelings and mood. he same types of nature
descriptions are found in Hebrew poetry. Moses ibn Ezra sees armies of stars passing over the
cloudy heaven and compares them to a garden with blossoming lowers. Solomon ibn Gabirol
also describes the stars as a lock guided by a shepherd. Judah ha-Levi identiies himself with
the daughters of the Great Bear who are separated, while being jealous of the Pleiades who are
together for eternity (Schippers 1994).
Although war poetry is one of the favorite genres of traditional Arabic poetry, among the
Andalusian Hebrew poets only Samuel ha-Nagid wrote poems of this type. He was actually a
commander of the army of the Zirid king of Granada, and participated in several expeditions
against the enemies of his kingdom. In a short poem he describes war as follows:
War at irst is like a young girl
With whom every man desires to lirt.
And at the last it is an old woman.
All who meet her feel grieved and hurt. (Goldstein 1965, 57)
Samuel ha Nagid’s war poems contain meditations on the fate of human beings and the fugac-
ity of earthly things. he following poem derives from a personal experience of the poet, as his
troops are encamped on the ruins of a great city:
I bade my troops encamp once at a town
hat enemies had razed in ancient times.
We pitched our tents and slept upon its site,
While under us its former masters slept.

hen to myself I mused: “Where are the folk
Who long ago inhabited this place?
Where are the men who built and those who wrecked?
Where rich, where poor, where slaves, and where the lords?
hose who begot and those beret, and sons
And fathers, mourners, bridegrooms – where are they?
And generation ater generation, born
As centuries succeeded years of days.
Upon the face of earth they used to live,
And yet today they lie within its heart.
hey’ve changed their palaces for sepulchers;
hey’ve moved from lovely mansions into dirt.
But should they lit their heads and leave those graves,
How easily they’d overwhelm our troops!”
Never forget, my soul, that one day soon
his mighty host and I will share their doom. (Scheindlin 1986, 155)
he motif of the transitoriness of human things is oten found in Arabic war poetry, as we see
in the following poem by Ibn al-Rumi, in which the destroyed city is personiied as a woman:
Where are those palaces and mansions that were in her? Where is that well-secured ediice?
hose places have been changed into rubbish-mounds of ashes and heaped dust;
Flood and ire have been given authority over them, and their columns have crumbled down
in utter destruction,
hey have become empty of those that dwelt in them, and they are desolate; the eye descries
nothing amongst those mounds,
But hands and feet parted [from their bodies], lung aside amidst them skulls split asunder
And faces smeared with blood – may my father be a ransom for those bloody faces! –
Trampled down perforce in contempt and humiliation, ater they were so long magniied and
revered. (Schippers 1994, 218–219)
Professional poets, dependent on the whims of their patrons, oten wrote panegyrics as well
as special poems for family occasions. One that had great social importance was the elegy or
formal lament for the dead. Apart from containing expressions of grief and sorrow for the
deceased, these elegiac poems also contain meditations on the brevity of life and on the impla-
cable forces of fate. Upon the death of his patron, Yequtiel Ibn Hassan, the Hebrew poet Solo-
mon Ibn Gabirol composed a moving elegy in which nature is described as participating in his
distress over the deceased sponsor and protector’s passing:
Behold the sun at evening, red
As if she wore vermillion robes.
Slipping the wraps from north and south
She covers in purple the western side.
he earth – she leaves it cold and bare
To huddle in shadows all night long.
At once the sky is dark; you’d think
Sackcloth it wore for Yequtiel. (Scheindlin 1986, 152)
Ibn Gabirol’s poem resembles an elegy by the Arabic poetess Al Khansa, in which she describes
the sad reactions of the heaven and the earth to the death of her brother:
he face of the sun is obscured because of his death, and the moon is not in good harmony;
And people weep, losing their head, and the jinn help the sleepless in their grief;
And the wild animals have wept from sadness, since the notice about his death arrived.
(Schippers 1994, 251)
Exclusive of the Andalusian Hebrew poetry are the themes of exile and redemption of the Jew-
ish people. Judah ha-Levi is the Hebrew poet who best expresses the lament for the lost glory of
the Jews and the hope of future redemption. He wrote a collection of odes to Zion in his mature
years, when he decided to emigrate to Israel. One of them is perhaps the most famous of all
medieval Hebrew poems:
My heart is in the East and I am at the edge of the West.
hen how can I taste what I eat, how can I enjoy it?
How can I fulill my vows and pledges
While Zion is in the domain of Edom,
And I am in the bonds of Arabia?
It would be easy for me to leave behind all the good things of Spain;
It would be glorious to see the dust of the ruined shrine. (Gerber 1994, 73)
Linguistics and exegesis
he beginnings of Jewish exegesis and Hebrew linguistics in medieval Iberia should also be
understood against the background of the lowering of the Jewish culture in its contact with the
Muslim culture. he Jews recognized the progress made by Arab grammarians in the knowl-
edge of the Arabic language, and the advantages of their systematic philological interpretation
of the Qur’ān. hey soon realized the utility of philological exegetical techniques for the inter-
pretation of the Bible. he Jewish exegetes sought to understand the biblical text by analyzing
its grammatical aspects down to the smallest details, and by deining the precise meaning of
every word occurring in Scripture. his kind of literal, philological interpretation of the Bible
may be considered as a new type of exegesis that difered from traditional rabbinical methods
(Saenz-Badillos 2000a).
Arabic grammar arouse mainly from the need to establish a deinitive text of the Qur’ān,
and to preserve the language from the corrupting inluence of an ever-increasing number of
non-Arabic-speaking Muslims (Carter 1990). If, for Arab grammarians, the text of the Qur’ān
became the archetype of the purity and eloquence of the Arabic language, Hebrew philologists
sought in the Bible the model for the purity of the Hebrew language. he unusual forms and
the irregularities of the Biblical text were two of the most complicated questions they had to
face. Most of the Andalusian Hebrew grammarians made use of comparative philology in order
to ind the cognates in Arabic and Aramaic of the diicult Hebrew words. Only Menahem ben
Saruq and his disciples, in tenth-century Córdoba, were opposed to this methodology, probably
for religious reasons: to compare the Hebrew language to conventional languages could mean
to reduce its character as a “holy language” (Saenz-Badillos 1997).
Judah Hayyuj, who lived and worked in Córdoba in the last third of the tenth century,
constituted a turning point in the development of Hebrew linguistics and biblical exegesis. Fol-
lowing the model of Arabic philology, Hayyuj founded the theory of the three-consonant He-
brew root. he grammatical principle that every Hebrew word has a root composed of three
consonants laid the basis for the analysis and understanding of the biblical lexicon with regard
to its etymology, morphology and semantics (Maman 2000).
In the eleventh century, Hebrew grammarians, like Jonah Ibn Janah, Moses ibn Chiquitilla,
and Judah Ibn Balaam, continued to use the linguistic theories of their time to interpret the
biblical text. hey were profoundly inluenced by the Arab grammarians in the use of basic
linguistic theories as well as in terminology and style. Jonah Ibn Janah explicitly stated that
Arabic contributes greatly to the understanding of Hebrew, and that he would not refrain from
comparing Hebrew to Arabic because of the close relationship between the languages. he Arab
grammarian who had the greatest inluence on Ibn Janah was al-Mubarrad (d. 898). In cases
like the morphology of verbal forms or the plural and dual category, Ibn Janah copied whole
sentences and passages verbatim from al-Mubarrad’s grammatical treatise Muqtadah. However,
in the deinition of the three parts of the speech – namely, noun, verb and particle – and in sev-
eral syntactic and semantic rules, he followed the theories of Sibawayhi (d. 796) and al-Zajjaji
(d. 951) (Becker 1996).
Moses Ibn Ezra recognized the importance of Greek and Arabic learning, including liter-
ary criticism, poetry, Qur’ānic exegesis and philosophy, to elucidate Scripture. According to
him, the Hebrew Bible airms Greek mastery of philosophy and science as well as Arabic talent
in language and literary expressions. In his exegetical writings, Moses Ibn Ezra tried to recon-
cile Greek and Arabic learning with rabbinic tradition. He followed Arabic sources to establish
that if a biblical verse, phrase or word contradicts reason, it must have a meaning other that
its literal sense and is a majaz – a word normally translated by “metaphor.” However, Ibn Ezra
applies it to a wide range of non-literal language. In the expression “hey saw the God of Israel”
(Exod. 24:10) the word “saw” must be interpreted in a non-literal sense since God is invisible
(Cohen 2000). his exegetical method was later developped by Maimonides.
Abraham ibn Ezra, who was born in Tudela (Navarre) in 1089 and died apparently in
London in 1164, was a proliic polymath. He was a liturgical and secular poet, a philologist
and translator, a mathematician and philosopher, an astronomer and astrologer, and, above all
else, a biblical commentator. Although he based his exegetical methods on the rules of Hebrew
grammar, he also used a variety of disciplines for the rational interpretation of biblical texts.
In the introduction to his commentaries on the Pentateuch, he airmed that “Reason is the
foundation, since the Torah was not given to those who have no knowledge, and the angel [i.e.
mediator] between human being and God is his intelligence” (Simon 2000, 379). In his com-
mentary on Ecclesiastes, Abraham ibn Ezra stated that this biblical book deals with the laws of
nature, althought these laws are not explained in the book in a clear and evident manner, be-
cause the purpose of its author was not to teach science. Consequently, the object of the exegete
was to uncover the scientiic theories hidden in the biblical text and show that the knowledge
provided by the Bible conforms to that provided by profane sciences. Abraham Ibn Ezra found
in Ecclesiastes allusions to several theories of medieval scientiic thought and dealt with ideas
such as the four elements that compose all created beings, the peculiarities of the movements
of the sun and the other heavenly objects around the earth, the sublunar world as a model of
the superior world, the dependence of time and space on the stars’ movements, and the depen-
dence of a person’s destiny on the position of stars and planets in heaven (Gómez-Aranda 2006).
In Qur’ān exegesis, Muhammad b. Umar al-Razi (1149–1209) used an exegetical methodology
similar to that of Abraham ibn Ezra. In his Mafatih al-ghayb (Keys of the unseen), he intro-
duced lengthy discussions on physics, metaphysics, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, medicine,
and logic to prove the harmony of natural and mental sciences with theology. According to al-
Razi, the Qur’ān, or the word of God, and the universe, the work of God, together attest to the
existence and operation of the Divine Being (J. Burton 1990).
Abraham ibn Ezra’s exegesis inluenced the sixteenth-century Spanish humanists. Fray
Luis de León (1528–1591) wrote a number of biblical commentaries in which he explicitly cited
Abraham ibn Ezra among other medieval Jewish exegetes. Ibn Ezra’s linguistics explanations are
especially relevant in Luis de León’s commentaries on the Song of Songs and Job (Habib Arkin
1966). Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598), the irst director of the Escorial Library and chief edi-
tor of the second Biblia Polyglotta, is the author of a Latin translation of Ibn Ezra’s commentary
on the ten commandments, entitled Decem praecepta cum expositione sapientissimi Aben Ezra.
hese humanists are only a few examples of the impact of medieval Jewish culture during the
Spanish Renaissance.
he Jewish philosophers of eleventh and twelth centuries, like Solomon Ibn Gabirol,
Bahya Ibn Paquda, Judah ha-Levi, and Maimonides, incorporated interpretations of biblical
words, expressions, isolated verses, passages, and even entire chapters within their philosophi-
cal and theological discussions. he greatest medieval Jewish philosopher and jurist, Moses ben
Maimon, Maimonides (1138–1204) included large parts of biblical exegesis in his legal writings,
in his epistles, and especially in his philosophic-theological work Dalalat al-ha’irin (Hebrew
More nevukhim; he guide of the perplexed). In the Introduction to the Guide, Maimonides
presented the exegetical theory underlying his biblical exegesis. According to his theory, there
are certain words in the Bible with multiple meanings, and in order to understand them, it is
necessary to recognize their nature, and to apply them in a proper manner and in a proper
context. He also recognized that in the Bible there are very obscure parables which have not
been explicitly identiied as such, because their hidden meaning has not been found. He also
airmed that certain biblical words should not be interpreted literally but iguratively. his is,
for example, the case of the verbs ra’oh (to see), habbit (to look at), and hazoh (to vision), which
are normally applied to the sight of the eye, but in certain biblical passages “they are used igu-
ratively to denote the grasp of the intellect” (Maimonides 1963, 27).
he Qur’ān itself recognizes the existence in the book of “some clear verses that are cat-
egorical and others allegorical” (Qur’ān 3:7). he Arab philologist and exegete Abu’l-Qasim
Mahmud b. ‘Umar al-Zamakhshari (d. 1143) airmed that “categorical verses” are those “whose
diction and meaning are suiciently clear that they are preserved from the possibility of dif-
ferent interpretations and ambiguity”, “allegorical verses” are those “that are ambiguous in that
they allow difering interpretations” (Peters 1990, 2: 144–145). Averroes (d. 1198), with whom
Maimonides coincided in many points, also spoke of the apparent meaning of the words of
the Qur’ān, and airmed that, if this apparent meaning does not accord with the conclusion
of philosophical demonstration, there is a call for “allegorical interpretation,” which is deined
as “the extension of the signiicance of an expression from real to metaphorical signiicance,

without forsaking therein the standard metaphorical practices of Arabic” (Peters 1990, 2: 155).
Jewish philosophy
During the Golden Age of Jewish culture in medieval Iberia, the Jews encountered Muslim
theology, together with Muslim ascetic literature, Greek and Hellenistic philosophy translated
into Arabic, and Arabic philosophy. In philosophy, they became familiar with the writings of
both the neo-Platonic and the Aristotelian schools. he Arabic environment also inluenced
the written language of the Iberian Jewish philosophers: because Arabic was the language of
cultural discourse and the spoken language of the Jews during that period. Iberian Jewish phi-
losophers wrote their works in that language. he philosophical issues raised in the context of
Islamic thought – the nature of the divine, creation, prophecy, providence, human perfection,
and immortality – determined the concerns of Jewish thinkers.
Classical culture was not considered alien wisdom by Islamic philosophers, who felt them-
selves ailiated with “the sciences of the ancients,” namely, the Greeks, Indians, and Persians.
Islamic philosophers believed that the Greeks derived their wisdom from the East, and in con-
sequence the study of ancient thought was considered a renovation rather than an innovation.
he Arab philosopher al-Farabi (d. 950) located the origin of philosophy in Iraq, whence it was
transmitted to Egypt, then to Greece, and inally rendered into Syriac and Arabic (Kraemer
2003). A similar concept is found in the writings of Hellenistic Jewish philosophers, who were
likewise interested in proving that scientiic and philosophical knowledge came from the Jews,
and speciically from Abraham and Moses. Philo of Alexandria even accused the later Greek
philosophers of stealing ideas from the Jews. his theme was developed by medieval Jewish
philosophers as part of their polemics against attacks on the study of philosophy by their core-
ligionists (Roth 1978). Shem Tov ben Joseph Ibn Shem Tov (d. ca. 1440) wrote in his Sefer ha-
Emunot (Book of beliefs):
he truth is that the philosophers stole wisdom and forget it [has another origin], for there is
no doubt that the ancients of Israel composed many books. […] And when our fathers were
exiled to Babylon […], the Chaldeans and aterwards the Persians, and aterwards the Greeks
took a little from them, and showed themselves wise, and pretended that it came from them-
selves. (Roth 1978, 55–56)
Plato’s philosophy was received by Muslim and Jewish philosophers through the prism of a Neo-
platonic tradition. Neoplatonism was congenial to religious sentiment, because one of its goals
is humanity’s assimilation to God as far as attainable. he intense spirituality of Neoplatonism
inspired the kind of synthesis with religious beliefs that we ind in the intellectual mysticism of
Muslim philosophers like Avicenna and Ibn Tufayl (Kraemer 2003). he Neoplatonic principle
that the knowledge of the science of the soul opens up to human beings the knowledge of the
world and of God is present in Solomon ibn Gabirol’s Fountain of life:
he knowing part being the best of the human being, that which human beings must seek is
knowledge. What he must especially seek to know is himself, in order to arrive at knowledge of
other things that are not himself; for his essence comprehends all things and penetrates them,
and all things are subject to his power. As well as this, he must seek to know the inal cause for
which he was created, so that he may attain supreme happiness; for human existence has a inal
cause for which he was created, for everything is subject to the will of the one God.
(Sirat 1993, 71)
he earliest appearance of an ascetic current in Judaism, inspired by a similar movement in

Islam, took place in the eleventh century. Bahya ben Joseph Ibn Paquda, who lived in Zaragoza
in the second part of the eleventh century, is the author of one of the most celebrated books of
pietism, Hidaya ’ila Fara’id al-Qulub (he book of direction to the duties of the heart). he es-
sential aim of the work is to call the attention of the faithful to the “duties of the heart,” among
which the following are included: “to believe in the Creator of the world, who brought the world
into existence from nothingness; to believe in pure monotheism, free from a belief in any other
gods; to assent to obeying God in our hearts; to meditate upon the wonders of creation in order
to arrive at a knowledge of God” (Bahya ben Joseph Ibn Paquda 1973, 87). he plan of the book
is borrowed from the Arab mystics and their ascetic theology, but the ideas of the Unity of God
and the examination of created things are Neoplatonic in spirit and probably drawn from the
Ikhwan al-Safa (he encyclopaedia of the brethren of purity), a collection of treatises on secular
sciences and Muslim theology (Sirat 1993).
Apart from writing much poetry in Hebrew, Judah ha-Levi wrote a philosophical work
known as Kuzari in Arabic. he character of the book is regarded as apologetic, because its in-
tention is the philosophical defense of Judaism in contrast to Christianity and Islam. Inluenced
by the Muslim philosopher Ibn Bajja (d. 1138), Judah ha-Levi expounds a certain current of An-
dalusian Aristotelian philosophy. Ibn Bajja defended the unity of the souls in their conjunction
with the Active Intellect, which implied that the main goal of human life is the conjunction of
the human three souls with the knowledge of the eternal laws of nature. In the Kuzari, religion
is the political law permiting the organization of human society so that the perfect man, the
philosopher, may live in it and attain his ultimate end: a conjunction with the Active Intellect
(Sirat 1993).
he Kuzari, however, includes critiques of medieval philosophy, and especially Aristo-
telian theology and its metaphysics. Apparently inluenced by al-Ghazali’s he incoherence of
the philosophers, Judah ha-Levi airmed that only mathematics and logic have been genuinely
demonstrated by the philosophers. In physics, the philosophical theory of the four elements is
empirically unsubstantiated. In psychology, the theory of the Active Intellect entails numerous
absurdities and lacunae, and in metaphysics the views on divine causation are riddled with
inconsistency. he most we can know here is that God governs material things by determining
their natural forms. Because philosophy ofers little wisdom about matters of great importance
in living, a return to the divine wisdom embodied in Israel’s ancestral tradition is called for. Ju-
dah ha-Levi concluded that a turn toward ancestral tradition can only be completed by a return
to the ancestral land of Israel (Kogan 2003).
Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, is the culmination of the Judeo-Arabic philosophical
tradition; with him one period comes to an end and another begins. His inluence extends be-
yond Jewish philosophy, for his efect upon Christian thinkers such as homas Aquinas is evi-
dent. Maimonides has been traditionally considered the epitome of Aristotelianism in Jewish
philosophy. However, if you examine Maimonides’s philosophical theories closely, such as has
negation of the eternity of the world and of the impossibility of miracles, you will conclude that
he disagrees with Aristotle on many points. As D. Frank points out,
Maimonides is indebted to Aristotle for his mode of discourse, argument forms, and philo-
sophical vocabulary. […] Maimonides is not an Aristotelian on account of any agreement with
Aristotle on substantive issues, but rather on account of his creative use, and adaptation, of
Aristotelian categories and argument forms “for his own purposes,” the main purpose being of
course the explication of his own religious tradition. (D. Frank 2003, 144–145)
Maimonides’ main philosophical ideas are put forward in his Guide of the perplexed. His most
famous philosophical doctrine is the so-called negative theology, which D. Frank summarizes,
Given that God is utterly trascendent, irreducibly to anything material on pain of idolatrous
anthropomorphism, Maimonides ofers a critique of divine language, that is human discourse
about God. Such discourse cannot describe God in any straightforward and direct manner,
and hence a variety of periphrases are required to render divine language logically perspicuous.
All purported essential predications about God, that It is one, eternal, etc., must be understood,
and hence reparsed, as denials of imperfections of It. (D. Frank 2003, 148)
Maimonides’ Guide has many points in common with the works of Hellenistic and Muslim
philosophers. Apart from Aristotle, other Greek intellectuals such as Plato, Epicurus, and Ga-
len are mentioned several times in the Guide. Among Muslim philosophers, al-Farabi is the
one whom Maimonides held in highest esteem. he philosophic position with respect to the
problem of the eternity of the world and the theory of prophecy as part of a political philoso-
phy were described by Maimonides in a style and a mode of exposition similar to those of al-
Farabi. he philosophic thought of Maimonides was to a considerable extent determined by
the necessity to face the challenge ofered by the Muslim and Jewish theologians known as the
Mutakallimum. In this respect, al-Farabi was of great service, because some of his works ex-
posed deinitions and descriptions of the purpose, attitude, and methods of the Mutakallimum
(Maimonides 1963).
Maimonides also adopted several philosophical ideas of Avicenna. he cardinal point of
Maimonides’ negative theology, that is, that God should not be regarded as having any positive
atributes pertaining to His essence, and that He should only be described by using negative
attributes, was taken from Avicenna’s philosophic system. Avicenna’s inluence can also be rec-
ognized in Maimonides’ statement that the prophets can reach knowledge of reality without
having previously grasped the apparently necessary theoretical premises of this knowledge. Par-
allels to this view can be found in Avicenna’s Book of the healing of the soul (Maimonides 1963).
Maimonides follows the Aristotelian Muslim philosopher Ibn Bajja regarding the idea that
the intellect is the only portion of the human being that survives bodily death, and that nothing
individual remains ater death (Maimonides CIII). In contrast to al-Farabi, who considered that
political activity was every philosophers most essential duty, Ibn Bajja defended the idea that
the philosopher should choose solitude and loneliness in his own country in order to achieve
humanity’s supreme goal: the union with the Active Intellect. Maimonides echoed Ibn Bajja’s
views when he described a prophet as the highest form of humanity in terms of a perfect solitary
igure who regards the other “as either domestic animals or beasts of prey” (Maimonides CVII).
Ater Maimonides, Jewish philosophy took various directions. In Islamic countries, philos-
ophers incorporated the teachings of Maimonides into an ascetic, mystical system very similar
to Suism. In Christian countries, the translation of the Guide of the perplexed into Hebrew gave
birth to a controversy on the legitimacy of studying philosophy and the natural sciences. Cer-
tain Jews even declared the writings of Maimonides as heretical, and the Guide of the perplexed
was burned in public by Franciscan monks.
In the fourteenth and iteenth centuries, Christian Scholasticism, mostly that of Duns
Scotus and the school of Parisian physics, had a strong impact on Jewish philosophy. he ma-
jor fourteenth-century Jewish philosophers of northern Spain and Provence were involved in
Christian polemics, and they soon felt the neccessity to engage Scholasticism in order to ad-
dress the challenges posed by Christianity. he Scholastic method inluenced Spanish Jewish
philosophers, like Hasdai Crescas (1340–1412) and Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), who organized
their discourses thematically as a set of disputed questions following the same order of exposi-
tion found in Scholastic texts. T. M. Rudavsky claimed that Scholastic inluences upon four-
teenth- and iteenth-century Jewish philosophy can be seen in the increased attention paid
to Scholastic logic, in the increased analysis of the logical and theological status of future con-
tingents, in metaphysical concerns having to do with identity and individuation, and in the
development of non-Aristotelian physics (Rudavsky 2003).
Jewish sciences
In his introduction to his translation of Ibn al-Muthanna’s commentary on the astronomical

tables of al-Khwarizmi, Abraham ibn Ezra presented his own interpretation of the process of
transmission of Hindu and Greek astronomy to Islam, and of the role of the Jews in this pro-
cess. He also included a valuation of the contribution of the most important Greek and Arabic
astronomers known in his time. Ibn Ezra’s account of this process may be summarized as fol-
lows: he irst Abbasid caliph (ca. 750) had heard of Indian sciences and wished to have some
of their books translated into Arabic, for profane sciences were unknown to the Arabs at that
time. He was not sure whether this was religiously permissible or not until the angel of dreams
assured him it was. He sent for a Jew and told him to go to Ujjain (in west-central India) to
bring back an Indian scholar, which by some subterfuge the emissary managed to do. he Jew
served as an interpreter between the Indian, Kanka, and the Arab who translated the book of
Indian astronomy, containing the tables of the seven planets, the rising times of the zodiacal
signs, the arrangements of the astrological houses, and some other data relevant for the practice
of astronomy (Ibn al-Muthanna 1967, 147–48).
In this account, prominence is given to a Jew who acted as an intermediary between two
cultures: the Indian culture and the Arabic culture. In the process of accepting Greek learning
and its integration into Arabic culture and language, the Jews played an important role through
their cooperation with the Muslims powers in scientiic and cultural matters. During the Mid-
dle Ages, we ind several examples of outstanding Jewish scientists who worked for Muslim
caliphs as astronomers, astrologers, physicians, and translators. One of the most prominent
Jewish scholars in the art of medicine was Hasday ibn Shaprut, who worked for the Umayyad
caliph of Córdoba, Abd al-Rahman III, around the tenth century. Ibn Shaprut was responsible
for the translation into Arabic of Dioscordes’ famous book on pharmacology, Materia medica.
his work had already been translated in Baghdad in the eighth century by the well-known
Christian translator Hunayn ben Ishaq. However, this irst Arabic translation contained a large
number of plants with strange and unfamiliar names that were impossible to identify in Spain;
some names of plants were not even translated but only transliterated. herefore, another trans-
lation was needed. he merit of Hashday ibn Shaprut, and of other physicians who worked for
him in the translation, was to have been able to identify a large number of plants in the Greek
book of Dioscorides, and to ind equivalents in the Arabic language (Gómez-Aranda 2003).
Abraham ibn Ezra’s translation of Ibn al-Muthanna’s commentary on the astronomical tables
of al-Khwarizmi is one of the most remarkable works in the history of medieval science, for it
shows the inluence of Hindu astronomy on the procedures and methods used to elaborate as-
tronomical tables, which, until the time of al-Khwarizmi, followed the rules of Greek-Ptolemaic
astronomy. In this sense, Ibn al-Muthanna’s commentary is also an attempt to harmonize the
two major sources of Arabic astronomy: the Hindu and Ptolemaic sources. Abraham ibn Ezra
mentions in his introduction the great contribution of al-Khwarizmi to the history of math-
ematics and astronomy. Abu Jafar Muhammad b. Musa al-Khwarizmi (d. ca. 850) introduced
Indian numerals and the decimal positional system into the Arabic mathematics. In his work,
preserved only in Latin manuscripts, Algoritmi de numero indorum, al-Khwarizmi explains the
decimal place-value system of numeration, using a small circle for zero. his work inluenced
Abraham ibn Ezra’s Sefer ha-Mispar (he book of the number), a textbook dealing with the
basic arithmetic operations, in which Ibn Ezra explains the decimal positional system invented
by the Indian sages. his was one of the irst works to introduce the arithmetic of al-Khwarizmi
into Europe. Here, Abraham ibn Ezra also recognizes the importance of al-Khwarizmi’s astro-
nomical tables, because they are based primarily on Indian rather than Ptolemaic astronomical
principles, and because they are presented in a didactic manner. However, Ibn Ezra seems con-
cerned about al-Khwarizmi’s lack of a rational basis for his tables, and in this sense, he especial-
ly values Ibn al-Muthanna’s rational explanations of al-Khwarizmi’s theories, for “he included
short proofs and diagrams whose principles are taken from the Almagest” (Ibn al-Muthanna
1967, 149). Ibn al-Muthanna’s treatise also exerted inluence on Ibn Ezra’s De rationibus tabu-
larum (he book of reasons of the astronomical tables), a scientiic work aimed at providing
astronomical and astrological theoretical knowledge for whoever might be interested in using
the astronomical tables (Ibn al-Muthanna 1967, 176).
With the arrival of the Almohads in the Peninsula in the twelth century, and their policy
of intolerance towards Jews and Christians, many Jewish scientists emigrated to Christian lands,
thus spreading to deliver the scientiic knowledge they had acquired in al-Andalus north of the
Peninsula and into other European countries. From this moment, Arabic was no longer the
exclusive language of science, and Hebrew and Latin acquired this status.
Abraham bar Hiyya (ca. 1065–1140) is probably the irst medieval Jewish intellectual to
write scientiic works in Hebrew for a Jewish audience in the framework of Greek-Arabic sci-
ence. His astrological work, Megillat ha-Megalleh (Scroll of the revealer) was designed to fore-
tell the exact date of the coming of the Messiah by means of Scriptural data; it also includes a
Jewish and universal astrological history up to the coming of the Messiah (Sela 2005). his book
belongs to a branch of medieval astrology known as historical astrology, which consists in the
predictions of various conditions or changes regarding dynasties and religions, wars and con-
quests, by means of eclipses, conjunctions, periods, revolutions of years, and other astronomi-
cal factors. he Arabic astrologer Abu Mashar (787–886) is probably the most important rep-
resentative of this branch of astrology in the Middle Ages. His Book of religions and dynasties
(on the great conjunctions) was a major source for the works of medieval Jewish astrologers like
Abraham bar Hiyya and Abraham ibn Ezra.
Abraham ibn Ezra is the author of a large corpus of scientiic works whose contents and
modes of expression relect his times. According to Sela, Ibn Ezra’s scientiic contribution may
be understood, on one hand, as one of the irst stages of the rise of medieval Hebrew science,
and on the other hand, as another step in the process of transmitting the Greek scientiic world
to scholars of Western Europe, ater being irst adopted, reined and extended by Islamic culture
and the Arabic language (Sela 2003, 17). Several of his works – like Sefer ha-Mispar (he book of
the number), Sefer Ta‘amei ha-Luhot (he book of the reasons of the astronomical tables), and
Sefer Keli ha-Nehoshet (he book of the astrolabe) – were written not only with the purpose of
providing pure theoretical knowledge in mathematics or astronomy, but also with the purpose
of explaining and teaching the use of scientiic tools and instruments in order to solve technical
astronomical problems arising from astrological praxis (Sela 2003, 19).
In his book devoted to the Jewish calendar, Sefer ha-Ibbur (he book of intercalation), Ibn
Ezra deals with the controversial question of the length of the solar year, and presents the opin-
ions of several astronomical schools regarding this matter. He concludes that, since Greek and
Arabic astronomers were unable to determine the exact length of a year, Jews should only trust
in the opinion of the sages based on tradition, which one of the pillars of Judaism.
he main part of Ibn Ezra’s scientiic writings consists of a series of astrological treatises
in which he deals with astrological matters and ideas similar to those of Arabic astrologers. In
his Book on the great conjunctions, Abu Mashar analyzed, among other things, the inluence of
the planets on the origin and development of diferent religions. He airmed that diferences of
religions may be ascertained by looking at the conjunction of Jupiter with another planet po-
sitioned in the ninth horoscopic house, and added “if Jupiter is joined with Saturn, it indicates
that the faith of the people of that religion is Judaism, which is similar to the essence of Saturn”
(Abu Mashar 2000, 44). In Greek and Arabic astronomy, Saturn was considered the most ma-
lignant of the seven planets, and was associated with destruction, diseases, exile, poverty, fear,
death, and other terrible things. How was the idea that the Jews were connected and governed
by such a malignant and wicked planet accepted in the Middle Ages? In Muslim circles, it pro-
moted anti-Jewish sentiments; however, Ibn Ezra was able to transform this negative concept
into a positive one. In his Sefer ha-Moladot (Book of nativities), he dealt with the question by
pointing out that the new-born is determined by the coniguration of a celestial sphere at the
instant of birth, and airmed “if Saturn is in the ninth horoscopic house of a Jew, his religious
faith will be strengthened, but if Saturn is in the ninth horoscopic house of a Christian or of a
Muslim, their religious faith will be weakened” (Sela 2003, 156). According to Ibn Ezra, Saturn
performs a double function with regards to religious faith. On the one hand, it plays its regular,
unfavorable role in the private horoscope of a Muslim and of a Christian, and behaves as the
most malignant planet. But, on the other hand, Saturn is a star which exerts a special collective
inluence over nations and religions, and it is regarding this special quality that Saturn is con-
sidered as the planet of the Jews. hat is to say, while Saturn damages the Muslim and the
Christian as mere individuals, Saturn favors the Jew as a member of a nation or religion. In
consequence, as Saturn is not the planet of the Muslims nor of the Christians, the maleic planet
behaves towards them in a regularly damaging way, and causes harm to their religious belief.
But since Saturn is the planet of the Jews, the maleic planet does not exert on the Jews its typi-
cal, adverse inluence, and does not molest them in the observance of their religious beliefsIn
his astrological treatises, Abraham ibn Ezra also used the theories of Masha’allah (762–815), a
Jewish convert to Islam, who wrote several works on the inluences of stars on some speciic
moments in the life of a person. In his Sefer ha-Te‘amim (Book of Reasons), Ibn Ezra considered
Masha’allah as the highest authority in the ield of astrology, similar to Ptolemy in the ield of
astronomy. Masha’allah’s opinions on how to choose the most auspicious moment for accom-
plishing a speciic act are oten quoted in the Sefer ha-Mibharim (Book of elections) and in the
Sefer ha-She’elot (Book of interrogations).
In the ield of medicine, the most important igure in the Middle Ages is Maimonides. His
medical works, written in Arabic on the request of high dignitaries, sultans, and viziers, are
part of Arab medicine, which is a continuation of Greek medicine, and especially that of Galen
and Hippocrates. he general ideas of Arab medicine, such as its theory of the four humors or
luids – according to which blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile are the basic constituents
of the body; and imbalances among these humors are responsible for disease – are present in
Maimonides’ medical treatises. In his Treatise on the regimen of health, he stresses the idea that
the principles of psychology should be applied in the study and treatment of physical diseases.
He also emphasizes that preventive medicine and mental hygiene are factors of fundamental
importance in the maintenance of health (Gómez-Aranda 2003).
In Christian Spain, the process of translation continued in the thirteenth century under
the patronage of the king of Castile, Alfonso X, who promoted the so called “Toledo School of
Translators.” Works on astronomical and astrological subjects, such as the anonymous Picatrix,
were translated from Arabic into Latin. Jewish scholars like Judah ben Moses and Isaac Ibn Said
participated in the translations, together with Christian and Muslim partners, and contributed
to the elaboration of the so called Tablas alfonsíes (Alphonsine tables), a set of tables indicating
the positions of stars and planets in heaven as observed in Toledo in the year 1252, and accom-
panied by instructions containing much astronomical information. hese Jewish scholars also
participated in the preparation of the Libro del saber de astronomía (he book of astronomical
knowledge), a compilation of treatises on the construction of astronomical instruments and
calculation instruments such as clocks and astrolabes, as well as explanations of their use (Ro-
mano 1992).
Peter IV of Aragon tried to emulate Alfonso X of Castile, and promoted the study of as-
tronomy and medicine, as well as other sciences, including the occult sciences, in his kingdom.
In 1375, two important Jewish scientists, Abraham Cresques and his son Jafuda Cresques, elabo-
rated an atlas of the world as it was known at that time, that is, from Spain to India. It includes
illustrations of the kings of the most important countries, and texts about legends, traditions,
anecdotes, and religious ideas. In the area around the Mediterranean sea, the authors indicated
the names of the coastal ports and cities, so that the map could be used for navigation purposes.
During the iteenth century, the most relevant igure in Jewish science was Abraham
Zacuto (1452–1515). His main work on astronomy written in Hebrew, he great composition,
was soon translated into Castilian and later into Latin with the title Almanach perpetuum (he
perpetual almanach). It contained a new series of astronomical tables, which were considered
as an improvement over the Tablas Alphonties (Alphonsine tables). Zacuto’s tables permitted
sailors and navigators to oriente themselves during their voyages by determining the position of
the sun with great accuracy. hey were also used to calculate solar and lunar eclipses.
Judaism’s controversies with Islam and Christianity
Religious controversy is an important part of Medieval literature, originated in the continuous

competition among diferent cultures. Medieval literature relects a polemical interaction be-
tween Judaism and the other two major religions, Islam and Christianity, with respect to their
diferent concepts of monotheism, prophecy, and Scripture. Lazarus-Yafeh states:
For Christianity, polemics with Judaism were integral to Christian theology from its very be-
ginning and played a central role in its internal development. […] In contrast, Muslim polem-
ics against Judaism are much less abundant and were never really considered important by
Muslim authors. his may be because there was little competition between these two religions,
or perhaps because of their great similarity to each other as the two strictly monotheistic reli-
gions of law. (Lazarus-Yafeh 1992, 5–6)
he famous Muslim polymath Ibn Hazm (d. 1064) composed a series of polemical treatises in
which he attacked Judaism vehemently. According to him, Jewish law had been abrogated by
Islam and ceased to be valid, and the Bible had been corrupted by the Jews in the course of his-
tory. Ater Moses’ death, there existed only one single copy of the Bible, to which only the High
Priests had access, and in consequence they had ample opportunity to tamper with it. he fact
that the common people had no access to the text meant that there could not be uninterrupted
transmission, which is the ultimate guarantee of authenticity. Ibn Hazm also believed that, in
their hearts, many Jews acknowledged the truth of Islam, but were too proud and stubborn to
exchange their religion for Islam (Adang 1996).
his challenge to the very foundation of the Jewish faith could not remain unanswered; but,
as C. Adang states, it is surprising that we have to wait until the thirteenth century for the irst
systematic refutation to be elaborated in the tract of Solomon ibn Adret. Ibn Hazm’s refutations
of Judaism do not seem to have elicited any written response among his Jewish contemporaries.
Adang believes that “a possible explanation may be that Jews living under Islamic rule were cau-
tious, in view of the fact that the punishment for blasphemy and ofending the Prophet Muham-
mad could be death. Ibn Adret, living in Christian Barcelona, had no such fears” (2002, 185).
In his response, Ibn Adret aims to demonstrate, on the basis of biblical texts, that there
were multiple copies of the Bible available, and that the Jewish nation was aware of its contents,
something that had been denied by Ibn Hazm in his writings. Against the Ibn Hazm’s accusa-
tion that Ezra produced a corrupt text of the Bible, Ibn Adret credited him with preventing the
Bible from falling into oblivion by transmitting it to future generations (Adang 2002).
Among the major Jewish-Christian disputations that took place in the Middle Ages, two
of them took place in the Iberian peninsula: the Barcelona Disputation of 1263, and the Tortosa
Disputation of 1413–14. In the Barcelona Disputation, the conditions of debate were relatively
fair. here was a freedom of debate due partly to the fact that the king, James I of Aragon, pre-
sided over the sessions, and due partly to the fact that Moses Nahmanides, the representative of
the Jewish side, had great personal presence and social status (Maccoby 1993).
he debate was centered on the question of whether the Jewish writings prove that the
Messiah had already come or not. According to the Christian participants, the fundamental
dogma of Christianity could be proven from the Jewish writings, including the Talmud. Moses
Nahmanides, however, rejected the Christian interpretations, and attacked some of the Chris-
tian dogmas, including the divinity of Jesus. here exist two written versions of the disputa-
tion: Nahmanides’ own account, and an anonymous Christian summary of the discussions.
Nahmanides’ account is a long, detailed and profound representation of the issues at stake in
the confrontation. He presents himself as an authentic hero who seemed to have defeated his
Christian opponents. According to Maccoby (1993, 75), “its vividness and drive put it into a
class by itself in the literature of religious polemic.” However, the Christian account, which was
an oicial document prepared by the Dominicans and ratiied by King James I of Aragon as the
correct account, is a brief and badly composed document. he issues of discussion here have
been compressed and jumbled to such a degree that the succession of the argument and the
relevance of the topics are oten unintelligible. In the Christian version, Nahmanides appears to
have been completely defeated, reduced to silence on some points, caught in obvious inconsis-
tencies, and inally to have led from the scene in confusion.
Hebrew narratives
In the twelth century a new literary ield emerged in the domain of Hebrew literature: narra-
tives written in rhymed prose interlaced with metrical poems, intended for secular entertain-
ment or for instruction through entertainment. Although Hebrew narrative is anchored in
biblical literature, in talmudic and rabbinical writings, and in oral tradition, some of the best
known works produced in the Midle Ages were modelled ater the Arabic genre of the maqa-
ma (Pagis 1978). he Arabic maqamas tell the adventures of a narrator protagonist, a wander-
ing roguish poet, who tries to impress the reader with his wit, inventiveness, and eloquence.
he maqama genre form entered al-Andalus in the eleventh century, but it was in Christian
Spain, from mid-twelth to iteenth centuries, where the most important Hebrew maqamas
were produced.
he main Hebrew author of maqamas was Judah al-Harizi (1170–1235). His major work
was Sefer Tahkemoni (he book of Tahkemoni), in which he followed the models of the Arabic
maqamas of al-Hamadhani (967–1007) and al-Hariri (1054–1122). In the introduction to his
book, al-Harizi complains that the Jews of his time have not produced anything brilliant in the
Hebrew language, and says that he has composed his Tahkemoni “to raise Hebrew’s holy tower
to show our holy folk her suppleness and power” (Judah al-Harizi 2001, 15). Al-Harizi insists
that his composition is wholly original, owing nothing to the Arabs, an ironical claim, because
many of the themes, structures, and motifs of Tahkemoni were borrowed from the Arabic
maqamas, and specially those of al-Hariri, that al-Harizi had previously translated into Hebrew.
As Pagis remarks, in al-Harizi’s Tahkemoni we ind the interplay between the real world
of the author and the ictitious world of the story. In the irst chapter, the narrator retells what
al-Harizi allegedly told him, namely, that he, the author, happened to be at a gathering of Jew-
ish scholars, where a brilliant “Hebrew lad” praised al-Harizi’s maqamas. he intrusion of the
author as author into the world of his characters was also used by Cervantes in his Don Quixote,
and much earlier, by Chaucer in his Canterbury tales (Pagis 1978, 96–97).
In the twelth century, Joseph Ibn Zabara wrote Sefer Sha‘ashuyim (he book of delights), a
collection of tales which was widely popular in Catalonia and Provence. his work, which may
be considered one of the irst steps in the process of creation of Hebrew novels, utilized the nar-
rative techniques of the Arabic collections of tales Kalilah wa-Dimnah and Sendebar (Navarro
Peiro 1988). Some of the tales of he Book of Delights may have served as inspiration for Don
Juan Manuel in his Conde Lucanor.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Judah Ibn Shabbetai composed an important
work in the ‘misogynist’ genre, Minhat Yehudah (he ofering of Judah), in which he satirizes
the weaknesses and defects of women. As in the case of al-Harizi’s Tahkemoni, we ind the motif
of the author openly entering his story and commenting upon it. In one occassion the author
even explains that the characters are ictitious and were invented by him. Some scholars have
seen in this a strikingly modern technique, akin to Unamuno and Pirandello (Pagis 1978, 95).
Hebrew poetry in the Christian context
Hebrew poetry in Christian Spain began to lourish in the second half of the twelth century,
following the arrival of the Almohads in al-Andalus and the subsequent emigration of Jew-
ish intellectuals to Christian territories. he importance of poetry increased in the thirteenth
century, retained its inluence into the fourteenth century as well as making notable achieve-
ments as late as the iteenth century, although by that time Hebrew literature showed signs of
fatigue. he Jews of Christian Spain met with intellectuals and poets from various cultures and
writing in diferent languages, such as in high-standard Romance Popular, the folk language of
the Juglares, the lyrical poetic language of the time, and the language of the troubadours from
Provence. Under these inluences, Hebrew poetry in Christian Spain began to develop new
literary directions against the backdrop of the Andalusian school, on the one hand, and in con-
nection to contemporary Spanish-Christian literature, on the other (Doron 2000, 213).
he Hebrew poet Solomon Bonafed (ca. 1370-ca. 1448) describes his sources of inspiration
in classical Hebrew poetry, and in Romance and Arabic literature as follows:
Of the very ancient brook I draw out poetry,
he verses of Judah ha-Levi are my quarry;
In Romance poetry my heart seeks advice with care,
And if the light shines, the Arab has pitched his tent there. (Saenz-Badillos 2000b, 352)
In Christian Spain, Hebrew poets expressed a complex relationship to their poems. he poets
addressed the poems themselves, in the second person, asking them to obey them to be created.
A dialogue between the poet and the poem thus emerged. In a poem of Meshulam de Piera, one
of the most original Hebrew poets of the thirteenth century, the poet requests the words to obey
him, so that he can continue his work, and states “I will sing – my lute shall not answer me /
and the voice of my hymns have not yet bellowed!” (Doron 2000, 218). A similar appeal to the
poem can be found in dialogues of Christian poets with their poems, a characteristic of twelth-
and thirteenth-century Provençal literature which later reached the Spanish poets (Doron 2000,
218). Solomon Bonafed established a close relationship to his poetry, describing it as a woman
to whom he has married (Saenz-Badillos 2000b, 350).
Aviva Doron states that Andalusian poetry emphasized prosodic modes of formation and
poetic adornments. Hebrew Andalusian poets followed a system of conventions, including pre-
determined contents and motifs. he Hebrew poetry written in Christian Spain, however, em-
phasized the importance of ideas and contents. his emphasis led the Hebrew poets to demand
that literature should express truth. Meshulam de Piera expressed this idea as follows “My ears
are made to hear truth and my heart abhors false words… for how else shall I confront the
man who has faith in me.” he same idea is expressed by the Christian poet Gonzalo de Berceo
(Doron 2000, 221).
Todros Abulaia (1247–1306) expressed in a poem that he had renounced the use of ex-
ternal ornamentation in favor of expressing the truth of the events of his life. In his opinion, a
poem should be “beautiful, clean of vain words and empty comments and unworthy discourse.”
When the poet wished to express himself and relate his own experiences, Abulaia considered
that only truth should be written and “deceit be absolutely avoided” (Doron 2000, 222–223). In
the introduction to his Cantigas de Santa Maria (Songs of Saint Mary), Alfonso X also stressed
the criterion of clarity for composing good poems: “Since composing a poem creates a concep-
tion of an idea, each poet must absorb the idea, be a guard over it, express it clearly and in an
orderly manner, so that he will know how to deliver the idea, thus shall good verse be com-
posed” (Doron 2000, 223).2
In the case of love poetry, Hebrew poems written in Christian Spain circulated in the orbit
of the love literature in Romance languages, and were particularly inluenced by the Spanish
Cancioneros and the amour courtois of the Provençal troubadours (Saenz-Badillos 2000b, 355).
Saenz Badillos found several coincidences between the love poems of Solomon Bonafed and
those of Andreu Febrer, a Christian poet who lived in the Aragonese kingdom of Alfonso V the
Magnanimous. Bonafed’s love poetry also contains some of the characteristic features of the
poetry of the troubadours, like the concept of “love service” and the idea of attaining physical
consummation (Saenz-Badillos 2000b, 360–361).
2. “Porque trobar e cousa en que jaz /entendimento, poren queno faz / a-o d’aver e de razon assaz, / per que
entenda e sabia dizer / o que entend’e de dizer lle praz, / ca ben trobar assi s’a de fazer.”
Conclusions
Andalusian Hebrew poetry borrowed themes, ideas, principles, images, and even rythms from
Arabic models. he images used to describe the pleasures of life in the Hebrew wine poems fol-
lowed the models of Arabic wine poetry. Hebrew love poetry also imitated Arabic love poetry
in the rethorical descriptions of the beauty of the beloved, and in the expression of the feelings
of the poet ater the departure of the beloved. he description of the poets’ feelings and mood
by using images of nature was common to both Arabic and Hebrew poetry. he meditations on
the fate of human beings and the transitoriness of earthly things found in Samuel ha-Nagid’s war
poems is a characteristic of Arabic war poems. Exclusive to Andalusian Hebrew poetry are the
themes of exile and redemption of the Jewish people, as is attested in the poems of Judah ha-Levi.
he Jews recognized the advances made by Arab grammarians in the knowledge of the
Arabic language and in the philological interpretation of the Qur’ān, and utilized these instru-
ments for the interpretation of the Bible. Jewish exegetes like Abraham ibn Ezra also used a
variety of disciplines for the rational interpretation of the biblical text in order to prove that the
Bible conforms with the knowledge provided by secular sciences. A similar idea is found in the
Qur’ānic exegesis of al-Razi. Both Muslim and Jewish philosophers coincided in considering
that the biblical text should not be interpreted literally, for it contains expressions of metaphori-
cal signiicance.
Medieval Jewish philosophers followed their Arabic partners in the adaptation of Neopla-
tonic and Aristotelian systems to their own philosophical and religious needs. he philosophi-
cal issues raised in the context of Islamic thought – such as the perfection of the soul in order to
attain knowledge of God, the belief in pure monotheism and in the creation of the world, and
the description of God by using negative attributes – determined the concerns of Jewish phi-
losophers like Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah ha-Levi, and Maimonides. Under the inluence of
Christian Scholasticism, the major fourteenth- and iteent-century Jewish philosophers were
able to address the challenges posed by Christianity.
In the process of transmitting Greek and Arabic sciences to the Western world, the Jews
played an important role as intermediaries. Jewish scientists like Abraham ibn Ezra and Abra-
ham bar Hiyya assimilated the contents and ideas of Arabic mathematics, astronomy, and as-
trology, and contributed to spread them into European countries. he progress made by Jewish
scientists in Christian Spain in the development of astronomical tables and geographical maps
had an enormous impact on navigation.
he religious controversies of Judaism with Islam emphasized the neccessity of defending
the very foundation of the Jewish faith from the Muslim attacks. In their controversies with
Christianity, however, the Jews rejected the idea that the Messiah had already come, and at-
tacked essential Christian dogmas such as the divinity of Jesus.
In Christian Spain, the Hebrew narratives written in rhymed prose interlaced with metri-
cal poems followed the models of Arabic maqamas. he Hebrew authors used modern narra-
tive techniques like the intervention of the author in the ictitious world of the story, a device
which was later used by Cervantes. Hebrew poets in Christian Spain share many themes and
ideas with Christian poets like Garcilaso de la Vega and Gonzalo de Berceo, and incorporated
many characteristics of troubadour poetry.
he Latin language, a European linguistic continuum
he Hispanic-Portuguese contribution.
José María Estellés González and F. Jorge Peréz y Durà
he aim and the scope of this essay is to investigate the use of Latin as a literary language in the
Iberian Peninsula from the ith to the nineteenth centuries. he analysis is divided into four
temporal frames: Visigoth period, Middle Ages, Renaissance and Humanism, and the Enlight-
enment. he objective is not a comprehensive survey of all authors who have written in Latin
but rather to grasp a sense of continuity favored by this use both in the Iberian Peninsula and
the European context.
Visigoth period
Contrary to popular belief, as proved by recent studies (Bustos Tovar 2000), the Visigoth period
(sixth-seventh centuries) witnessed a modest recovery of Latin culture, whose foremost repre-
sentative is the great compiler Isidore of Seville.
Manuel Díaz y Díaz (1960) rightly poses the question as to whether the Hispanic Visigoth
world is continuist or innovative. It is still an open debate, in which he sums up both the factors
of continuity and innovation. he continuist posture, in his opinion, insists upon the persis-
tence of ancient elements, as much in the social organization, for example the nobility’s in-
dependence with regards to the monarchy, as in the political-administrative structure, which
maintained some of the parameters of the fourth century, among which territorial divisions,
communication networks, farming, and the important opposition between the city and country
must be highlighted.
Latin appears as the backbone element in the aforementioned factors, with the double
function of being both an essential vehicle of day to day communication as well as serving as
a support to a literary culture anchored in traditional rhetorical forms. Furthermore, the most
important representative of the culture during this time, Isidore of Seville, strove to transmit,
according to his contemporaries, the doctrines and testimonies of the ancients. It was a large in-
tellectual program that “was presented to all Europeans from the eighth century onwards, and
is also presented to us, based on the strictest and healthiest literary and doctrinal continuism
of Antiquity, taken as a permanent value and inexhaustible quarry from which the extraction
of certain materials demands the knowledge of that age and of later ones” (Díaz y Díaz 1960, 6).
In contrast to the continuist argument, the innovative hypothesis is based, according to
Díaz y Díaz, in the empowerment of the Visigoth monarchical institution, manifested in the
consecration of Toledo during the middle of the sixth century as a political and ecclesiastical
capital, like Rome or Byzantium. he great importance that Isidore of Seville had in the forma-
tion of this new concept of monarchy, that even managed to inluence Charlemagne, should
not be overlooked.
In order to deal with the linguistic issue, it should be pointed out that the Goths that
settled in the Iberian Peninsula were already Latinized by the end of the ith century. Latin in
he Latin language, a European linguistic continuum 387
these villages was the “only vehicular language of communication” (Díaz y Díaz 1960, 34) in
spite of having maintained certain elements of their original Germanic language. he Latin of
ancient Roman Hispania presented certain traits inherited from the Roman occupation; for ex-
ample, archaisms and dialectical elements that tended to disappear. Compared with the sparse
Romanization of the villages surrounded by the Cantabrian Sea, the rest of the Peninsula was
very Latinized. Nevertheless, it is evident that already in the ith century the indigenous lan-
guages had disappeared, save for certain exceptions, making it possible to see a certain equality
in the use of Latin.
Díaz y Díaz (1960, 36) stresses, in this sense, the “diferent Latinization between the people
of the city and the people of the country.” It is precisely for these reasons that preachers had
to resort to a linguistic standard which the social stratum composed of a populace – named
rustici – lacking education could understand. his variant of the Latin language is known as
rusticus sermo, of which remain few examples. hat is the reason why one must examine literary
texts of the age in order to deduce popular characteristics, recognizing beforehand the enor-
mous diiculties that this involves. In short, were common linguistic expression and literature
closely linked? his and other questions are put forth by Díaz y Díaz, who concludes that a
consciousness of linguistic diversity did not exist.
But an issue which should not be overlooked is the fact that literary texts tried to raise the
standards of the age, something they achieved by “making present the past”, in other words
giving a “look back towards the ancient world, which coincides with the continuist spirit of the
school and the type of formation – the knowledge and imitation of the ancient writers – pro-
pounded therein” (Díaz y Díaz 1960, 51). Schooling contributed greatly towards encouraging
this admiration for ancient writers by including them within a canon of compulsory readings.
hey were the models to be followed, the indisputable auctoritates for illustrating any texts
whose highest representatives are Biblical and Latin writers. he existence of diverse anthologi-
cal repertoires made contact easier. Recent investigations have highlighted that libraries were
rapidly gaining in importance, even though Díaz y Díaz does not share this opinion. If we take
a moment to point out the list of ancient writers consulted, it is itting to allude not only to the
universally celebrated pagan ones (Virgil, Lucan, Horace, Ovid, Sallust, Pliny, and technical,
grammatical, and legal writers), but also to Christian authors like Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen,
Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great. Disticha Catonis also enjoyed widespread readership
thanks to its moral and didactic aspects, becoming required reading in all schools.
If there is a writer of reference of this age and even following ages it is, as it has been
said, Isidore of Seville (556–636). Out of the entirety of the Isidorian work, the Etymologiae
(Etymologies) are an impressive work for the knowledge of the time, as the numerous editions
that have been dedicated to it since the iteenth century can attest to. Of particular interest is
another one of his works, De uiris illustribus (On famous men), a compendium of brief biogra-
phies (Codoñer 1964).
Alongside this preeminent igure, other names deserve to be mentioned, such as Severo
of Malaga and Liciniano of Cartagena, sixth-century writers of the eastern part of the Penin-
sula; Iohannes of Víclaro (540–621), Leander of Seville (536–600), Braulius of Zaragoza (d. 651),
Eugenius of Toledo (d. 567), Ildefonsus of Toledo, Iulianus of Toledo (644–690), Fructouosus
of Bierzo (600–665) and Valerius of Bierzo (625–695). In the Lusitanian zone, Martin of Brage
388 José María Estellés González and F. Jorge Peréz y Durà
(c.510/20-c.570/80), who wrote religious works such as the Sententiae Patrum Aegyptiorum
(Maxims of Egyptian Fathers) and De Ira (On anger); Pascasius, deacon of Braga, who wrote
the Verba seniorum (Sayings of the Fathers); and Fructuosus, bishop of Braga, who wrote the
Epistolae (Epistles) to Braulius and to the king Reccesvinthus, as well as the Regula Monacho-
rum (Monastic rules).
Medieval period
According to Antoni U. Fontán and Ana Moure Casas (1987, 11), “of all historical and cultural
elements […] of the Middle Ages, one can scarcely ind one that has been more operative […]
than this unique ideological, linguistic, literary, and social aspect that is known as medieval Lat-
in.” his statement places the importance of medieval Latin within its correct limits, although it
does not appear to have been something evident for philologists and scholars of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, who, in their zeal to study medieval Latin, established the stick-
ing point in the question of whether or not medieval Latin was a living or dead language. Stem-
ming from this point, to cite a few names, Ludwig Traube considers this type of Latin to be a
dead language, not ixed. Paul Lehmann, on the contrary, considers it to be a living language
though subject to certain limitations and Karl Vossler adopts an eclectic position. Amidst all
this, the problem lost virulence with the studies of Strecker, Van de Woestijne, Löfstedt, Noir-
berg, and Mohrman among others, who argued that medieval Latin is the normal continuation
of classical Latin in the evolved form used by writers of late Latinity. his is the same deinition
we ind in Fontán and Moure (1987, 15). It is scarcely a step away from this position to the one
that states medieval Latin is, as Meister calls it, a “language of transmission” (Traditionssprache).
Nevertheless Christine Mohrmann (1958, 265) proposes that the best way to approach this
problem is through what medieval scholars themselves thought on the matter. Given that me-
dieval Latin was a cultivated language, Mohrmann believes that medieval scholars used to think
about a continuity with the classical tradition, and that both the great pagan authors as well as
the Christians were the object of veneration and imitation. herefore, this idea of continuity
is what clearly indicates that these medieval scholars did not consider the Latin they used to
be essentially diferent from that of Antiquity. It is an evolutive normativism that dominated
throughout the Middle Ages. In short, Mohrmann (1958, 270) believes “that Löfstedt was per-
fectly right when he placed the emphasis on continuity and when he considered the transition
from late Latin to Medieval Latin as slow and gradual.” Relative to the linguistic phenomenon,
Mohrmann is in favor of deining medieval Latin as a “stylized language” (Kunstsprache) more
than a “literary language,” a qualiier that is applied to those languages that are not based only
upon an ethnic community, but which rest upon the tradition of a collectivity, as is the case with
the language of Greek epic poetry (Mohrmann 1958, 272).
Within the Iberian Peninsula, according to Joan Bastardas Parera (1960, 235) medieval
Latin “ofers very peculiar characteristics to the spoken language with its tendency towards the
archaic.” he Visigoth period began a large cultural movement that is represented in the num-
ber of writers and in its geographic extension. Furthermore, medieval Latin, although it does
not have the characteristics of classical Latin, ofers elements of great correction and continuity.
It is a mistake, on the other hand, to assume that the Arab invasion destroyed the Visigoth
literary tradition. he existence of autochthonous Latin cultural forms, in spite of the enormous
inluence of Gallia, above all in Catalonia, is acknowledged. Furthermore, the new conquering
people were at the outset tolerant towards the cultural and religious manifestations of the in-
habitants of the region. Consequently, the cultural isolation of almost all of the Peninsula and
the conservative character of the kingdom of Asturias explains the persistence of the Visigoth
tradition. However Bastardas Parera (1960, 255) indicates that “persistence and decadence are
intimately connected,” in that “the larger the grammatical insecurity of a writer and the less
solid his knowledge of the Latin language, the more he depends on his models, which produces
a more living sensation of continuity.”
We discover among the Mozarabs (Christian inhabitants of the areas dominated by Mus-
lims) factors which would have worked against the traditional Latin culture, such as its intellec-
tual isolation, the unquestionable attraction of the Arab civilization, and the formal adhesions
to that culture. On the contrary, in the territories of the unconquered Spanish villages, cultural
and linguistic models from the preceding century continued to be used. hus, the literary ac-
tivity of the independent Christian peoples, from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, ofers
evident symptoms of a gradual decadence, in spite of eforts to maintain an elevated style ac-
cording to traditional rhetorical parameters. It would not be until the eleventh century that new
ways emerged, above all, due to Cluniac inluences.
An area which presents substantial diferences from the rest of the Peninsula is known as
the marca Hispanica (Hispanic Marches) – a series of bufer states set up by Charlemagne to
prevent the Muslims from advancing into the Frankish Empire. Since its origins the Hispanic
Marches maintained important connections with Gallia and later with Italy, without sacriicing
the traditional forms of the Mozarab culture. In any case, Charlemagnian Latin found in this
Northeastern zone was of a very low quality during the ninth and throughout the middle of
the tenth century. It was precisely in the last third of the tenth century, the signs of change can
be connected to an important cultural center, such as the Catalan monastery of Ripoll, whose
library boasted two hundred and ity volumes in the middle of the previous century, and whose
intense growth, in all aspects, owed itself to the Abbot Oliva.
An author that deserves special attention is Álvaro of Córdoba (d. 861), who made use of
a great number of classical sources in the Vita Eulogii (he life of Eulogius), or argued against
the Qur’ān in Indiculus luminosus (Luminous breviary). Several historiographical works have
been attributed to the king Alfonso III (866–910), such as the Chronicle of Albelda, the Prophetic
chronicle and the Chronicle of Alfonso III. In the seventh century the Chronica Adefonsi Impera-
toris (Chronicle of Alfonso the emperor) describes the conquest of Almería in poor Latin. Con-
nected to this Chronica is the Carmen de expugnatione Almariae (Poem of Almería), considered
by all scholars an epic work of the highest quality in Latin Hispanic medieval poetry. In the Gali-
cian-Portuguese area, Álvaro Pelayo (1275–1350), a prominent theologian and eminent lawyer
who taught in Bologne and Perugia, wrote the De statu et planctu Ecclesiae (Of the state and com-
plaint of the Church) to defend ecclesiastical rights. he whole of his ample production mani-
fests a theoretical relection very much indebted to the late-medieval Galician circumstances. In
the thirteenth century, in the area of the Catalan monastery of Ripoll, the Gesta Roderici (Deeds
of Rodrigo), a story of Cid in prose, is related to the Carmen Campidoctoris (Poem of the Cid).
Renaissance and Humanism
As Jean Claude Margolin (1991) states, Renaissance and Humanism, in spite of the intentions
of both historians and specialists in general, always end up being overloaded concepts that fuel
bitter controversies. What seems to be clear is that an elemental distribution can be made at the
outset: for Renaissance we understand a concrete period of the history, while Humanism makes
reference to a speciic intellectual activity of the age. his would coincide with the famous coor-
dinates so oten referred to: the Renaissance would constitute a diachronic axis, while Human-
ism would refer to the synchronic axis.
Perhaps among the most founded objections to this distinction is the one that shows that
an excessive construction of schemas oten leads to error. Both the Renaissance and Human-
ism participate on these two axes, and in certain cases can be perfectly interchangeable. How-
ever, considered from a purely practical point of view, it is a methodology that can attain in-
teresting levels of efectiveness. However the tendency is to cause both concepts to coincide in
the sphere of the possible, though without managing to confuse them. he words of Francisco
Rico (1985, 13) are quite signiicant, and in many ways exciting: “it is licit to describe as human-
ism a perfectly deined historical tradition, a continuous line of men of letters who exchange
knowledge between one another and feel themselves to be heirs to the same legacy and who
are connected, though at times controversially so.” He concludes that “Humanism is only con-
igured before our eyes if we adopt a long diachronic perspective and if we worry ourselves less
about abstracting its essential constants” (1985, 13). It is evident that Rico is working with the
celebrated binomial, taking a clear position in the matter, not that distant from his condition as
a predominantly literary historian.
Ángel Gómez Moreno (1994) also echoes the problem, arguing that the term Renaissance
is more complex than Humanism, being even larger and more universal, for it encompasses
both the arts as well as the history of ideas. he title that Jacob Burckhardt gave his monumental
monograph – Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ein Versuch (he civilization of the Renais-
sance in Italy) – corresponds to this approach. Likewise Gómez Moreno points out that “the
components common to both concepts […] have caused more than a few critics to use the two
terms as synonyms vel quasi” (1994, 24).
Along the same lines we turn to Paul Kristeller, whose authority is hardly worth emphasiz-
ing, when he airms that “for Renaissance I mean that period of history of Western Europe that
extends, approximately, from 1300 to 1600, without allowing myself any preconceived notion
with regards to the characteristics or merits of this period or of those which preceded or followed
it” (1979, 33). It is evident that for Renaissance a historical period is understood. Nevertheless,
Humanism has other implications, sometimes exaggerated, as Kristeller (1979, 38) points out:
For many historians, in knowing that the term Humanism has been traditionally associated
with the Renaissance, and seeing that certain traits of a modern notion of humanism could
have their counterpart in the thought of that period, they have loosely applied the term Hu-
manism, in its vague modern sense, to the Renaissance and to other periods of the past, speak-
ing of Renaissance Humanism, Medieval Humanism, or of Christian Humanism in a way that
deies any deinition and seems to conserve very little or not at all the classic fundamental
meaning that humanism had of the Renaissance.
Further along in the text Kristeller goes on to specify that “for Humanism we wish simply to
indicate the general tendency of this age to give greater importance to the study of the Classics,
considering Classical Antiquity to be the norm and common model to guide all cultural activi-
ties” (1979, 119). It is certainly a danger that should be highlighted from the beginning. he term
Humanism refers to a project, moreover to an idealized program of education, in whose base,
and forming a fundamental part, the Greek and Latin authors are to be found. Furthermore,
it was carried out by a small number of individuals who were capable of leaving an indelible
imprint on their age and on those who would follow. hat is why it is diicult to enclose within
an arch of three hundred years. he idea of imitation, assimilation, and recreation of classical
Antiquity is something inherent from the very inception of Humanism, leading up until the
nineteenth century.
he Media Tempestas (Middle time) did not fail to read Aristotle and Cicero, through
whatever channels possible, even fragmented; however in reality, what occurred was that they
were read in a diferent way than the Humanists read them. We could also say the same of the
authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who wrote in Latin. If authors such as
Manuel Martí or Gregorio Mayans, for example, are considered less important, it is because
they have not been read or, if they have been, not as they should be. hey are authentic Human-
ists, something that can only be said with diiculty of homas Aquinas, despite his merits. Cur-
rently there exists a serious and rigorous attempt to examine authors who, in a certain age, some
considered marginal or second-rate, an approach which has yielded excellent results.
Similarly to what happened with the term Renaissance, the term Humanism, despite what
is commonly believed, was coined at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the German
Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer with the hope that secondary education would focus on
Greek and Latin classics, in opposition to a society demanding that it be more practical and
scientiic. For this reason, the term Humanist in the nineteenth century applied itself to the in-
tellectuals of the age of the Renaissance who defended the central role of the classics within the
curriculum. It is, as Kristeller (1982, 39) stresses, “a program and an ideal of classical education.”
Rico (1980) through his essay entitled “Temas y problemas del Renacimiento español”
(hemes and problems of the Spanish Renaissance) has attempted to apply this controversial
issue to the Spanish situation. Ater describing the various transformations which both terms –
Renaissance and Humanism – have sufered, he highlights (10):
Presently, the contributions of Kristeller, Garin, and other specialists allow for an adequate
judging of the reach of Humanism. Born around 1300 in the Italian comuni, in whose ac-
tive urban life school syllogisms served little purpose when concerned with an open learning
towards more ample personal and collective experiences, the Humanistic movements, in the
fourteenth, iteenth, and sixteenth centuries aimed to restore the educational ideal of Antiq-
uity, orienting itself, like the old paideia, towards giving a person a certain type of “general cul-
ture” through the studia humanitatis, i.e., fundamentally, through language arts, acquired via
reading, exhaustive commentary, and the imitation of the great Greco-Latin authors, especially
the poets, historians and moralists.
What was the intention of this irst group of Italians and what is the path they laid down for
those that followed? What were the objectives they studied and wrote towards? A review of
literature dealing with these issues shows the abundance of subjects covered by the Humanists:
philosophy, art, politics, law, religion, and literature. Names taken at random such as Petrarch,
Boccacio, Valla, Pomponius, Laetus, Politian, Vives, Erasmus, T. Moore, Budé, Nebrija, the Bro-
cense, Palmireno, Núñez, Arias Montano, can be placed in any, or more than one, of these
categories. Nevertheless, there is a basic theme that informs and transcends all of the catego-
ries, and without whose presence, as the basic component of any activity, both of a literary or
scientiic order in the period under question, nothing can be understood. It is, evidently, the
linguistic aspect.
If the idea of the imitatio was clear for Humanists, it is not surprising that they tried to
imitate those authors which they felt to be models. Many academics have stressed the fact of the
existence of a speciic linguistic modality, calling the language they use as Humanistic. his is a
highly debated problem: the labeling of Latin, spoken or written, of diferent periods. Only with
great diiculty can one admit a term such as Humanistic Latin, charged with historicist compo-
nents and placed within narrow temporal limits. Methodologically, it could be interesting and
convenient, though relatively inaccurate. he Latin used from the fourteenth century until the
nineteenth century is exactly and nothing more than Latin – the Ciceronian – modulated ac-
cording to genres and depending on the particular temperament of the individual writer. his
requires that an analysis of, for example Juan Luis Vives, gives priority to the author’s intention
and the literary genre used. herefore perhaps it is possible to diferentiate between Vives as
a philologist – in the broadest sense of the term – in his Augustinian Commentarii, Vives as a
philosopher in De disciplines or in In Pseudodialecticos, and Vives as a letter writer. he same
could be said for all the Humanists.
he adjective Humanist should not have a diferentiating efect, but rather an agglutinating
one. One cannot, nor should, brandish the term in order to use it confrontationally. Lorenzo
Valla, Erasmus, Vives, and Nebrija knew that they wrote in Latin only. Let us not forget that one
of the big controversies of the epoch centers itself in the authors’ Ciceronianism or Anticice-
ronianism. When the Humanists tried to surpass their medieval forefathers, they did not do it
because they were searching for a diferent individualized expression, but because they believed
that the language had deteriorated to unbearable extremes, and that they had to return to the
source: the ancient classic writers. In conclusion, Humanistic Latin may be used as a referent
for a certain historical moment, but using Humanistic as a difering linguistic trait, as little as it
may be, is inadequate and lacks precision.
Humanism describes the period that ends in the iteenth century, which refers to the par-
ticularly “philological” aspect of the Renaissance. A need to return to ancient art and thought
is pervasive, in order to prevent the disappearance of everything – an exaggerated conception,
for Humanism cannot be understood without its intimate relation to the medieval period, as
Kristeller has demonstrated – with the aim of searching for manuscripts and giving their au-
thenticity back to authors, all this with a critical stance towards the medieval period and Scho-
lasticism. Although what kind of Scholasticism? he one that has been accused of causing the
decline. Vives is the greatest exponent of this negative conception of the Middle Ages.
Humanism seeks, above all, to re-conquer a knowledge which is manifested into a spiri-
tual activity geared towards the development of the human personality through the use of a
liberty of thought united with the beauty, morality, and doctrine that the ancients had let as
much in their literary works as in their lives. From a terminological point of view, the humanae
litterae are the writings of the ancients as a whole and the studia humanitatis – a Ciceronian
expression – consist of the aspirations to assimilate its spirit in order to make themselves mor-
ally better, understanding the word humanitas in the sense of “education.”
his strong interest towards Antiquity was a consequence of the enormous intellectual
awakening that occurred ater the year 1000 in all ields of human activity. hus, one can per-
haps speak of a “medieval Humanism,” as when in the twelth and thirteenth centuries school
teachers encouraged the study of the classics. his awakening would reach its full and conclu-
sive development in the iteenth century, in Italy, ater building up for centuries.
To close this section, reference should be made to the aforementioned exceptional hu-
manist Juan Luis Vives (1492/93–1540). here is no doubt that Vives forms part of what could
be called “Spanish Humanism,” being even for some academics its main representative. his
is true if we focus on where he was born (Valencia), something which should be given its full
importance. But putting aside the beginnings of his studies in the Estudi General of Valencia
(University of Valencia) when he was sixteen or seventeen (the fact that he belonged to a Judeo-
Christian family is not unrelated to this), his education also took place in Louvain, Paris, and
Bruges, where he acquired the knowledge that makes possible to include him in the Humanist
movement on the European scale. his does not mean to say that Vives was not personally con-
nected to his country and all of its problems. Valencia appears everywhere throughout his work;
inquisitorial problems and those that are deduced from the expansion of the Erasmist concep-
tion that occurs in Spain deserved his opinions and judgments; even the fact of having been on
the verge of being called to succeed Nebrija at the University of Alcalá speaks in favor of the
prestige that he had in his country. His marriage to a member of a Valencian family conirms
that above all he did not want to break ties. Finally, one should not disregard the fact that the
Duchess of Calabria was his protector during the diicult inal years of his life.
However, the Vives we know would not be the same without his contact with Erasmus,
More, and Budé. he same could have occurred with Nebrija or Sánchez de la Brozas. He is not
the only example, another Valencian, Furió Ceriol, could be catalogued in the same way. Fur-
thermore, Ricardo García Cárcel (1992, 46) provides us with this eloquent data:
In the irst half of the sixteenth century, eight Spanish scientists had been professors in Paris,
two in Montpellier, two in Brussels, and one in Toulouse, i.e., a total of twelve distinguished
professors [catedráticos], three more than in Italy. According to López Piñero, of the Spanish
scientists, a total of thirty-eight studied in French universities (of these, twenty-ive in Paris),
fourteen in Italian universities, and ive in Louvain. Of the one hundred and thirty Spanish
scientists that traveled or resided in Europe, thirty-four did it in France, ity-seven in Italy,
twenty-two in the Netherlands, nine in Germany, ive in Portugal, and three in England. […]
from 1503 to 1558, three hundred and ten Spaniards studied medicine in Montpellier (216 from
the Crown of Aragon).
Vives joined the ranks of the Parisian students, though he would never obtain a permanent
position in any place.
But Vives has many points of intersection, as has been already mentioned, with the thought
process of people like Erasmus and Budé. hese authors were the result of the conditions of the
letters of their own countries. hey were autodidacts, who believed that intelligence should not
be enclosed within borders, but rather that it should be cosmopolitan because their readers
came from all across Europe. hese readers normally occupied privileged positions in society,
as they were wealthy bourgeois, being conspicuous members of universities and courts, either
secular or religious, and could count on a large number of unconditional followers, such as
priests or schoolmasters. Vives, Erasmus, and their colleagues are the great defenders of the
studia humanitatis; what is more, they themselves are the studia humanitatis.
Humanists were convinced that they were at the doors of a new golden age, which would
come into being thanks to the power of the eloquentia. It is precisely Vives who made the
great project for the future, and which was accepted by all: the De disciplinis (On the disci-
plines), published in Antwerp in 1531. For Vives knowledge is based on three main elements:
language (uerba), reality (res), and the way of life (mores). If one of these elements fails, the
remaining ones make no sense. Use is the support to the practice – to the point that learning
Latin and Greek must fulill some purpose. Vives is a irst-order intellectual who dedicated
his tormented life to attempting to put Humanism into practice (Estellés González and Pérez
y Durà 1992, 1:159).
It is now the moment to ofer a brief perspective on Spanish Humanism. Gómez Moreno
(1994, 36–37) states that the coordinates for Hispanic Humanism are:
Until the beginnings of the iteenth century, Peninsular letters received a strong inluence by
their closest trans-Pyrenean neighbors, French and Provençal […] For this reason; it is not
strange that Romance philology studies of the seventh to the thirteenth centuries are centered
above all on French and Provençal literary creation. Nonetheless, since the epoch of don En-
rique of Villena, literature returned its attention towards Italy.
he dependence upon Italy is something beyond all doubt, as is that, sometimes, Italy assimilat-
ed ideas coming from the Iberian Peninsula in spite of the unfavorable judgments cast upon the
region, based more on political than on intellectual reasons. It is evident that Spanish Human-
ism was one more manifestation of a pan-European phenomenon. he Mediterranean does not
separate, but rather connects. If in Italy, already in the second half of the fourteenth century,
studies on Antiquity emerged and were consolidated, at the beginning of the iteenth century
this new conception was visible in the cities and republics, and throughout the iteenth century
this cult of the past imposed itself as the aesthetic norm in all of Italy and Europe. Exactly the
same thing happened in Spain, due to the fact that the inluence from Italy on the Peninsula was
always immediate. In the same way, paralleling this, new cultural tendencies appeared which
coexisted as cause and efect with the new mentality: such as a growth in the number of readers
– an increase resulting from the production of books and an increasingly accentuated dedica-
tion to the collection of books, both printed as well as manuscript copies.
Antonio Fontán (1974, 279–80) argues that three schools of thought can be distinguished
in Spanish Humanism. he irst one, devoted to “grammatical and philological renovation,” in-
cludes Nebrija, Francisco Vergara, Hernán Nuñez, Alonso López Pinciano, Francisco Sánchez,
el Brocense, Antonio Agustín, and Luis de la Cerda. he second one is qualiied with the Eras-
mist expression Philosophia Christi, including Vives, Juan and Alfonso Valdés, Juan Vergara,
Francisco de Enzinas, Bartolomé de Carranza. he third one, pompously called “national pa-
triotism,” includes Alfonso García Matamoros, Diego López de Zúñiga, Pedro Mexía, Álvar Gó-
mez de Castro, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Furthermore, each school had its particular objective:
the philological school entered into contact with the scientiic problem, the Erasmist school
with the religious, and the patriotic school with the “national problem.” Fontán adds that these
three schools should be considered neither as isolated nor as disconnected from each other.
In addition to the authors mentioned by Fontán, there are other authors that should be
taken into consideration, such as Juan Fernández de Heredia, Bernat Metge, Antoni Canals,
Joan Margarit. Nevertheless it was in the sixteenth century when the Humanistic eclosion took
place in Spain with the appearance of such preeminent igures as Vives, Andreu Sempere, Pere
Joan Nunyes, Francisco Sánchez, Nebrija, Furió Ceriol, Pere Joan Olivar, Joan Baptista Anyés,
Juan Lorenzo Palmireno, Pedro Simón Abril. As for Portuguese Renaissance, such important
writers as the doctor Amado Lusitano, André de Resende, the preceptor of rhetoric André de
Évora, António de Gouveia, Bartolomen dos Mártires, the historian Damiāo de Góis, Diogo de
Teive, the poet Diogo Pires, the grammatician Manuel Álvares, Jorge Coelho, the poet Enrique
Caiado, the philosopher Jerónimo Osório, should be taken into consideration.
he Enlightenment
he Enlightenment is completely indebted to all the Humanistic projects. Some writers of this
period continued using Latin as a vehicle for written expression. In this way Manuel Martí and
Gregorio Mayans, for example – two Enlightenment Valencians – justly achieved the highest
praise of European critics. Some studies, such as the ones by Antonio Mestre (1999 and 2002),
have awakened an unprecedented interest in delving into the Spanish Enlightenment in gen-
eral and the Valencian in particular (see also Batllori 1987; Codoñer 1972; Gil Fernández 1981
and 2003; Maestre Maestre 1987 and 1990; Maravall 1984; and Estellés González and Pérez y
Durà 1998).
To the names of Martí, the driving force behind the use of Latin during the Enlightenment,
and Mayans, many other authors must be added, for example those known as novatores, such
as the scientists Juan Bautista Corachán and Tomás Vicente Tosca, the linguist Francisco Pérez
Bayer, the historian José Manuel Minyana, Francisco Cerdá y Rico, Josep Finestres, Antonio de
Valcárcel, Count of Lumiares, whose works, also in Latin, are quite signiicant in the distinct
ields in which they worked and excelled.
It is diicult to maintain that the Latin employed by the Humanists and Enlightenment au-
thors may be classiied with the criteria we have used to deine Visigoth and medieval Latin. It
was not another level of the language but rather a use of Latin that attempted to imitate its own
models to the maximum level – in this case, and above all else, Cicero. he diference can be de-
tected between the extreme roughness of a Petrarch, if we compare him with Politian, and the
perfection and exquisiteness of a Manuel Martí contrasted with the sluggishness of a Minyana,
but in nothing else. Neither from a lexical, nor from a syntactical point of view, will one ind
substantial diferences, except for those existing between two classic authors. he particular
genius and the level of learning and assimilation of each one are the crucial factors.
Galician-Portuguese as a literary language in the Middle Ages
Graça Videira Lopes
he language we now call Galician-Portuguese was one of the Iberian languages that resulted
from the transformations of Latin during the High Middle Ages in the north-eastern Iberian
Peninsula. In order to be more precise, we could say that more than standing for a language, the
expression Galician-Portuguese designates a phase of this evolution, whose later development
will lead to the diferentiation between today’s Galician, and Portuguese. he question as to the
efective diferentiation between these two languages continues to raise controversies (above
all in Galicia, where certain, more radical sectors grant a status to Galician resembling that of
Brazilian Portuguese, considering Galician to be a variant of Portuguese and not a diferent
language). Despite the socio-political components that such subject inevitably contains, this is
a question that we will not concern ourselves with here. Independently of the claims to be made
as to its subsequent evolution, Galician-Portuguese should be understood as a language spoken
in the western strip of the Iberian Peninsula, in the period spanning (broadly speaking) from
the middle of the ninth century until the middle of the fourteenth century. Documents prove
that during this period, and with some small regional variations, the language spoken to the
north and to the south of the Minho river was perceptively the same – a language whose own
physiognomy “is traced in the Hispanic west, already in Roman times” (Maia 1986, 884). he
Arab invasions of the eighth century, and especially the so-called Christian reconquest, quite
advanced in this part of the Peninsular northwest (where the efective Arab occupation of the
territories was sporadic) – separating the region from the autonomous kingdom of Navarra
in the east – contribute to a more precise delimitation of the Galician-Portuguese space: “And
therefore, during this period, the language of Galicia and Northern Portugal at the western
edge north of the Douro acquires its own physiognomy, distinct from that of Spain” (Maia 1986,
884). Not even the political borders that begin forming during the middle of the twelth century,
which cause the formation of an independent southern Portuguese kingdom, appear to imme-
diately afect the linguistic and cultural unity of ancient Gothic Roman Gallaecia. Similarly, the
extension of this new Portuguese kingdom up to the extreme southeast of the Peninsula until
1250, especially in the Christian movement of reconquista, can be understood in this irst phase
as a natural enlargement from this unique linguistic and cultural space. Carolina Michaëlis de
Vasconcelos comments on the broad meaning given by the Galician-Portuguese term:
Such an extension is justiied by the uniformity of the language from the extremities of Galicia
up to the edges of the Algarve, scarcely with any provincial variants, and within a common
type. he great similarity in the ways of living, feeling, thinking, and creating poetry is also
evident in a uniformity and similarity that speaks eloquently in favor of the primitive ainity
between Lusitanians and Galicians. (C.M. de Vasconcelos 1904, 2: 780)
It can accurately be said that, parallel to the independency of the kingdom of Portugal, is the
progressive and slow dislocation of the political centre of Christian Hispania from northeastern
Galicia-Leon to Castile (namely ater the conquest of Toledo in 1085, and later, in the conquest
of Seville in 1248), which will gradually lead to the rupture of such unity, by promoting the
development of the two languages which most immediately corresponded to autonomous na-
tional entities: the Portuguese and Castilian. Beginning in this moment, situated in a generic
form in the middle of the fourteenth century, Galician-Portuguese is no longer an operational
designation. In fact, at the same time that Galicia enters the cultural period oten labeled the
“dark ages,” with the accelerated Castilianism of its elites and without a true cultural production in
its own language, Portuguese takes on its own linguistic and cultural identity, sharing the Iberian
cultural space with Castilian (and to a certain extent with Catalan). It will not be until the nine-
teenth century that the language spoken north of Minho River gradually regains its own cultural
dimension, beginning mainly with the work of Rosalía de Castro and her friends of the Galician
Rexurdimento (Renaissance). However, this is another story that we will not hereby analyse here.
he period from the tenth to the fourteenth century was the era par excellence for Gali-
cian-Portuguese, which becomes, along with Castilian and Catalan, one of the three main lan-
guages of the Iberian space. An essentially oral language in its early phases (as is the case for
all languages), few written documents exist until the twelth century. We will see a little further
along that it is possible that even in this irst phase, Galician-Portuguese had been a vehicle for
poetry of popular expression, which the endings in Romance languages (kharjas) of certain
bilingual compositions of Arabic and Jewish poets from this time seem to testify. In any event,
beginning in the end of the twelth century, Galician-Portuguese is airmed and becomes the
literary language par excellence in a process that continues until around 1350, and although
this also includes manifestations in prose, it reaches its most notable expression in the poetry
let to us by troubadours and minstrels, be they Galician and Portuguese, but also by Castilian,
Leonese, or even Navarran.
Medieval poetry in Galician-Portuguese
It should be said, for reasons which will be discussed further along, that Galician-Portuguese
overlows the limits of the region in which its language of expression was spoken, the north-
east Peninsula, expanding to almost every Iberian Christian kingdom (with the exception of
Catalonia, politically and culturally much closer to the Provençal regions). When we speak
of medieval Galician-Portuguese poetry we must keep in mind that we are speaking less in
spatial terms than in linguistic terms. We are essentially dealing with poetry made in Galician-
Portuguese by a collection of Iberian authors, in an enlarged geographic space, which inds two
of its most creative poles in the Castilian courts of Fernando III and Alfonso X. As a matter of
fact, this stands out clearly not only when we analyze the data we have on the multiple spatial
origins of the troubadours and minstrels, but also when we read Galician-Portuguese compo-
sitions which have been brought to us, in light of the spatial coordinates which they transmit.
herefore, the numerous toponyms show a geography that abundantly includes, next to Galicia
and Portugal, the kingdoms of Leon and Castile, extending itself to occupy those very uncer-
tain border territories: the southern areas of the Christian reconquest. As troubadour activity
is indissociable from the cultural centers that make it possible – knightly courts and above all,
royal courts – the mobility of the cultural producers closely accompanies the mobility of these
courts, quite clearly including the military advance to the south.
398 Graça Videira Lopes
he reasons that may explain this utilization of Galician-Portuguese (and not of Castilian,
for example) as the lingua franca of lyrical, satirical, and even religious poetry in large parts
of Iberian medieval space namely in Leon and Castile, are still object of discussion today. he
analysis of the origins and the initial development of troubadour activity in the Peninsular
space, although slightly nebulous in shape, might aid in this explanation. his is why it is com-
mon to point out the central role of Santiago de Compostela in this process, not only as the age’s
most important European pilgrimage site, with the inherent cultural opening that the Camino
de Santiago allowed, but also from a political point of view, as one of the most frequent bases of
Leon and Castile’s royal power throughout the twelth and part of the thirteenth century (Pena
2002, 54). In this inal aspect, the inluence of certain Galician lineages, namely the Trava, on
the Peninsular political stage should not be forgotten. According to Ramón Pena, these lineages
fulill “a continuing function as educators of successive monarchs until the end of the reign of
Alfonso X (1284)” (Pena 2002, 56). Educated in Galicia, many of the Castilian monarchs would
also spend many years immersed in its language, as was the case of Fernando III, in whose court
the troubadour’s art experienced a remarkable development, as in that of his son Alfonso X, he
himself one of the most noteworthy troubadours.
he religious, cultural, as well as political clout of Santiago de Compostela in the irst cen-
turies of the Christian reconquest was certainly one of the factors that most contributed to-
wards conferring a prestigious status upon Galician-Portuguese as a language of culture and
a privileged vehicle for early poetic experiences “in a Provençal manner” in vernacular and
in the Peninsular space. Although this was certainly not the only factor, for it might be said
that the Portuguese are the authors of the oldest Galician-Portuguese poetic compositions that
have come down to us, a fact that seems to point also to the importance of the troubadour’s
movements in more extended spaces, where the inluence of Provençal culture was becoming
apparent. hus, exiles, journeys, and even the extra-Peninsular matrimonial alliances of the
diverse Iberian crowns have contributed a great deal towards the understanding and adoption
of this new culture that Europe would gradually make common, and whose initial vehicle in the
Peninsula was Galician-Portuguese.
herefore, and regardless of the reason that may justify the expansion of the Galician-
Portuguese cultural space to a considerable part of the Iberian Peninsula, what seems to be
indisputable is the inluence of Provençal troubadour art in the initiation of its Peninsular con-
gener – an inluence which was certainly direct, in many cases. In fact, in the years immediately
preceding the appearance of the irst Galician-Portuguese cantigas (songs), we are aware of the
presence of a signiicant number of Provençal troubadours and minstrels in Peninsular courts.
he earliest of these reports dates back to 1140, although it is from 1170 on that occurred what
Resende de Oliveira classiies as a “true explosion of the Provençal presence in the Peninsular
kingdoms” (A. R. de Oliveira 2001, 72), exempliied by the work, among others, of the trouba-
dours Peire d’Alvernha, Uc de Saint Circ, Guilhem Magret, Elias Carel, Savarie de Mauléon, and
Marcabru. Knowledge of the Provençal troubadour art and even of the trouvères of northern
France in Iberian courts was more widespread, even in this irst stage, as one might conclude
by the diversity of models which were apparently followed in early compositions, namely in
the irst one hich can be dated (circa 1200), Ora faz host’o senhor de Navarra, by the Portuguese
João Soares de Paiva.
he Galician-Portuguese troubadour art takes on many of its own characteristics, which

considerably distinguish it from its Provençal congener, although it undoubtedly accompanies
a wider European movement of adoption of Occitanian poetic, and more generically, cultural
models. We shall now approach its modes and forms more speciically.
Medieval poetry in Galician-Portuguese passed down to us is constituted by two distinct
groups of compositions. he irst, around 1,680 profane songs, pertaining to three larger genres:
cantiga de amor, cantiga de amigo, and cantiga de escárnio e maldizer (song of love, song of
the lover, and satirical song), authored by close to 187 troubadours and minstrels. he sec-
ond, a group of 420 religious songs praising the Virgin and narrating her miracles, the Can-
tigas de Santa Maria (Songs of Saint Mary), attributed to Alfonso X. Having a language and
similar spaces of production in common, the profane troubadour songs and the Cantigas de
Santa María indicate nevertheless, very distinct cultural spaces, which we will elaborate upon
separately.
Profane lyric poetry
In essence, we learn about Galician-Portuguese profane cantigas from three manuscripts. he

oldest, dating back to the beginning of the fourteenth century (and therefore, the only one
contemporary to the last troubadour generation), is the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (Songbook of
Ajuda, or A). A richly decorated manuscript, it is also the most incomplete, containing only
310 compositions, almost all of the same genre – cantigas de amor. he other two manuscripts,
known as the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional (Songbook of the National Library, or B), the
most complete, kept in Lisbon, and the Cancioneiro da Vaticana (Songbook of the Vatican, or
V), kept in the Vatican library, are manuscripts copied in sixteenth-century humanist Italy by
order of Angelo Colocci, based on one (or two) primitive collections which have since disap-
peared. he questions surrounding the manuscript tradition of these songbooks are not easy
to sort out and continue to raise doubts (and research). It seems to be clear is that D. Pedro,
Count of Barcelos and natural son of D. Dinis, was the compiler of the lyrics that still survive,
and perhaps the inal one, if we accept, as Giuseppe Tavani believes, that the court of Alfonso
X would already have carried out an initial compilation (1986, 65–66). Nevertheless, one can
always highlight the sixteenth-century work of Angelo Colocci, a work without which our vi-
sion of Galician-Portuguese lyric poetry would be limited to the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, i.e., to
the nearly 310 aforementioned compositions of love, rather than the almost 1680 of the myriad
genres currently at our disposal.
Unfortunately, none of these three great songbooks compiles the music of the cantigas;
although in A a great deal of space had been let for musical transcription which, for unknown
reasons, was never written in. In any event, the music of the profane Galician-Portuguese can-
tigas is not totally unknown. Along with these three large collections, two other testomonytes-
tomonies have come down to us – these with musical notation: the so-called Pergaminho Vin-
del, a sort of lealet discovered in Madrid in the beginning of the twentieth century and datable
back to the end of the thirteenth century, containing lyrics and music of six cantigas de amigo
of the Galician minstrel Martim Códax (as well as the text to a seventh); and, more recently,
and dating back to the same period, the so-called Pergaminho Sharrer (Sharrer parchment), a
quite damaged document, discovered in 1990 in Lisbon in the archives of the Torre do Tombo
by professor Harvey Sharrer, containing seven cantigas de amor by D. Dinis, with musical nota-
tion. In total, we now know of the music of thirteen profane Galician-Portuguese compositions,
although medieval notation only allows us an approximate understanding, and one which con-
tinues to be the object of research (M.P. Ferreira 2005).
he Arte de Trovar (he troubadour’s art of songs) underlying the profane Galician-Portu-
guese lyrics is the material for a small anonymous treatise written in the opening pages of the
Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional. Although the initial chapters are missing, the Arte de Trovar
– more practical-didactic than strictly theoretical – provides us with a picture which generically
corresponds to the songs that have been passed down to us, namely regarding those genres
which were more cultivated by troubadours and minstrels. hese were three genres: two strictly
of love lyrics, the cantiga de amor and the cantiga de amigo, whose most striking distinction lies
in the lyric voice expressed therein, masculine for the irst and feminine for the second; and
the satirical genre – the so-called cantigas de escárnio e maldizer. Parallel to these three “major”
genres, the troubadours and minstrels still cultivated, although only sporadically, some other
“minor” genres such as the pranto (lament), lais (lays), or the pastorela (pastoral).
A irst and immediate peculiarity of Galician-Portuguese medieval love lyric poetry can
be found, as can be seen, in the existence of a genre that does not correspond with the poetry
of the Provençal troubadours: the cantiga in a feminine voice, or the cantiga de amigo. Indeed,
if the Galician-Portuguese cantiga de amor very clearly follows the Occitan canso model, even
with speciic Iberian traces, as we will soon see, the cantiga de amigo, whose characteristics and
speciic universe go far beyond the voice that sings, is one of the great originalities of trouba-
dour Peninsular poetry. his has, of course, caused several explanations. herefore, and despite
a consensus which is far from being reached among specialists, the most common explanation
of the origin of this genre is that the cantiga de amigo reveals an earlier model of autochthonous
popular lyricism in a feminine voice (woman’s lyric), which troubadours and minstrels have fol-
lowed and even adapted to the courtly and palatial universe that was their own. he discovery
made by S.M. Stern, in 1948, of the already mentioned kharjas – small strophes in Romance
language (many of them probably in Galician-Portuguese) that end Arabic and Hebraic poems
dating back to the Iberian tenth and eleventh century, appear to conirm the existence of this
popular, certainly even older, autochthonous lyricism, to whose compositions such authors
would have to go for material for their kharjas, just as Galician-Portuguese troubadours and
minstrels would have done. In fact, feminine voices appear in these kharjas, in a song that sty-
listically and thematically resembles those that we later ind in the cantigas de amigo.
In any event, regardless of its origins, it is evident that the Galician-Portuguese cantiga de
amigo, even in its placement in a universe distant from Provençal models, undoubtedly consti-
tuted one of the most notable legacies of Medieval Iberian culture.
he two largest genres of Galician-Portuguese are not merely distinguished by the voice
in the song, as succinctly tell us the Arte de Trovar. In fact, if this lyric voice was, as we said,
distinctive – masculine in the cantiga de amor, feminine in the cantiga de amigo – there is an
entire group of other thematic, linguistic, and even technical indicators that designate the nor-
mative horizon both in the cantiga de amor and in the cantiga de amigo, which give each one
of these two genres its own and irreplaceable universe. hus, the masculine lyric voice of the
cantiga de amor more clearly follows the universe of Provençal in’amor, in a form that follows
the conventions of, in the everyday (inexact) use of the term “courtly love”, deining the rela-
tionship between men and women in new cultural and social molds, in terms of the man as the
poeta servidor (humble courting poet) and his senhor (beloved lady). Preferably following the
later models of the Occitanian canso, the Galician-Portuguese cantiga de amor presents us with
an essentially sentimental masculine voice, which sings the beauty and the quality of an unat-
tainable and immaterial senhor and the correlative coita (sufering) of the poet – compositions
in which the body (his own or that of the beloved) is practically absent. If the senhor is, as the
rules dictate (as paradigmatically described by D. Dinis), “melhor das melhores” (the best of
the best), the most “fremosa” (beautiful), if she “fala bem e ri melhor” (speaks well and laughs
the better), is the most “mesurada” (has the most poise), is the most courteous and the most
prized, then nothing of her and of her body reveals. More than a determined human character,
the senhor in the cantiga de amor appears as a place, or a function, if one will: that of the lover
to whom the song is addressed. Any referential register is therefore excluded, being the secret of
her identity one of the central themes. However, this masculine lyric voice does desire and re-
peatedly asks for the good from his senhor (the satisfaction of her desires), and in this aspect, the
cantiga de amor is not declaredly platonic or purely spiritual – it is a profane song. Furthermore,
the euphemism good, for being oten repeated, is transformed essentially into the code for the
coita, the unrequited or unconsumed love. his is the motif, par excellence, of the in’amor in its
Galician-Portuguese version. he song of consumed love, of Provençal joi (joy) – as mans sotz
son mantel (the hands under her cloak) as the irst troubadour Guilhem de Poiters sings – does
not form a part of the universe of the Galician-Portuguese cantiga de amor, save for very rare
exceptions.
Even though it should be noted that the authors of the compositions are exactly the same,
the universe of the cantiga de amigo is quite diferent. Indeed, the lyrical feminine voice that the
troubadours and minstrels make sing in these compositions points to a universe which is al-
most always deined by the woman’s eroticized body (which is now not the senhor, but the dona
virgo), placed in a space, generally open and natural, where love occurs in bodies and gestures,
which are sung almost exclusively in the moment of the erotic initiation of love. In this way, the
velida (beautiful), the bem-talhada (well-shaped body) dances, washes her hair in the fountain,
bathes in the sea, lies down under several types of trees (some of these, like the hazelnut, are
symbolically nuptial), brings candles (which the mother must light) to the gatherings, sings,
and goes in search of water. She exteriorizes and materializes in various forms – forms which
are enclosed in a quotidian and popular life, her emotions that sing of joy for the coming ar-
rival of the lover, of sadness, or of yearning on his behalf, in anger for his deceit – the feelings
that the troubadour or minstrel makes her sing. As the Portuguese critic António José Saraiva
(1990) points out, there is obviously a theatrical side to these cantigas, in which the feminine
voice which is heard is not completely hidden within the mark of the masculine voice that
constructed it, the feminine lyric “I” in the songs of amigo can be understood as a “you” that
troubadours and minstrels play and give voice to.
Opening up to the space of medieval quotidian life (popular and not courtly), these can-
tigas de amigo reveal a colored and active feminine universe in the staging of the lyric voice of
a young woman. his voice, although not concerned with an abstract sentimental place, like in
the cantiga de amor, but here with the voice of a corpo velido (beautiful body), it is generally also
not that of a body in an individualized register. hus, the fremosinha (literally “the little beauty”)
is also a type, paradigmatically and summarily deined in this famous dialogued cantiga by Ber-
nardo de Bonaval: “Oh, my beauty, by God, far from the village, who do you await? I came to
wait for my love.”1 All the fremosinhas are this voice: the voice of a young woman’s body singing
in open and rural space (longi da vila), and charged with eroticism by the wait (or because of
the presence) of the amigo (lover).
To inish, Galician-Portuguese cantiga de amor and cantiga de amigo generically follow
diferent formal patterns. he irst frequently follows the model de mestria (avoiding the use of
a refrain) of the Provençal canso, with far fewer strophes and without some of its characteristic
elements (such as the spring-like opening, the inal concluding tornada, or the senhal [signal]).
he cantiga de amigo includes generally a refrain, oten using a technical and stylistic resource
designated as parallelism (a sequence of distichs, with a refrain, repeated in a speciic order). A
particular characteristic of Galician-Portuguese poetry is, nevertheless, the level of formal con-
tamination between the genres: in fact, we see that in spite of the all the norms of the Provençal
song of love, almost half of the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amor passed down to us present
refrains; in much the same way, cultivated forms such as the song de mestria can also be found
in a large number of the cantigas de amigo.
he third major genre used by the troubadours and Galician-Portuguese minstrels are
the cantigas de escárnio e maldizer, which represent more than a fourth of the total sum of the
cantigas passed down to us. In the aforementioned treatise on the Troubadour’s Art with which
B opens, the anonymous author deines them generically as cantigas that the troubadours made
when they wanted to dizer mal (to speak ill of someone), immediately establishing a diference
in what is said regarding the mode: thus, while the criticism is direct in the cantigas de maldizer,
in the cantigas de escárnio the criticism is subtler, made “of covered words that have two mean-
ings” (i.e., of a double meaning, or a “mistaken,” equivocatium register, in the words of the same
anonymous author). Even though these two modes are in fact detectable in the cantigas, at the
terminological level this distinction can nevertheless be considered more theoretical than prac-
tical: in fact, the troubadours oten use the generic designation cantigas de escárnio e maldizer
to designate this genre, which is clearly distinguished from the other two lyrical love genres,
and which we can simply classify as satirical. One might add that, even though the Arte de Tro-
var does not explicitly refer to it, laughter is also of fundamental importance in the troubadour’s
maldizer, which seems to conirm the opinion of certain specialists regarding the intimate rela-
tion that these lyrics established with the world of the Carnival (Tavani and Lanciani 1995, 82).
In truth, if the speciic term satire is strange to the universe of medieval troubadours, who never
used it, the Horatian notion of ridens dicere verum certainly is not. In the Galician-Portuguese
dizer mal, where the ludic and carnivalesque dimension is certainly a factor to be considered,
the notion of criticism by the word and by laughter is implicit, even though in practice this
aspect fails at times (namely in cantigas against soldadeiras, or courtesans, for example), giving
way to ludic and inconsequential laughter.
1. “Ai fremosinha, se bem hajades, / longi da vila, quem asperades? / Vim atender meu amigo.”
In any event, the model used does not follow the homologous Provençal sirventês directly.
he Galician-Portuguese satirical cantiga takes on quite its own characteristics, which seems to
indicate the existence of an earlier satirical tradition from which the troubadours had drawn,
namely by almost exclusively adopting a model of personalized satire, closer to the notion of
invective than that of the traditionally moral or political Provençal sirventês. In fact, the can-
tigas de escárnio e maldizer, with rare exceptions, are always directed at someone in particular,
and in the majority of the cases they use the person’s name (which generally appears in the irst
strophe, where the person and theme are introduced). Apart from the above, formally, these
cantigas which could be de mestria or de refrão, the irst with a considerable less number of
strophes compared with the Provençal model, in no way distinguish themselves from the rigor-
ous poetics of the other two lyric genres. he capacity with which troubadours and minstrels
demonstrate, in the satirical use of the numerous technical resources at their disposal (dobre,
i.e., repetition of words, refrains and parallelism, as examples), their capacity to “speak ill of
someone” in an unexpected and almost always extremely imaginative ways is particularly re-
markable. he clearest Provençal inluence seems to be the tenção, or the dispute dialogue, in
which we ind a little more than thirty examples in the Cancioneiros. But here also the Galician-
Portuguese troubadours and minstrels proceed to an adaptation of their model, not only reduc-
ing the number of participants to two, but also by “specializing” the tenção – which in Provençal
art is satirical as well as lyrical, even philosophical, in an almost exclusively satirical form.
In its own universe, quite distinct from the grand lyrical art of the cantiga de amor and
the cantiga de amigo, Galician-Portuguese satirical art has let us with a vast collection of texts,
notable for their great diversity, where troubadours and minstrels laugh, criticize, do combat
personally and politically, giving free reign to a comic and satirical vein that continues as a ma-
jor inheritance of the Peninsular Middle Ages (G.V. Lopes 1998, 43f.). hematically, this is the
universe of the realist portrait, where the troubadours and minstrels, following their program of
“speaking ill of someone” of what they wish to criticize, give reign to their power of observation
of facts, as well as of people, in their individual materiality. As expected, the feminine igure
is amply represented, in a vast collection of compositions that mark a sort of portrait in nega-
tive of the senhor or of the dona virgo of the two love lyric genres, not only through abundant
and clearly sexual references, but through the historically identiiable and imperfect bodies
(the ugly, fat, or the poorly dressed) and the stories of daily life they protagonize, generally
expressed with what we might consider to be a remarkable liberty of expression. Almost all the
social groups are combined in this great gallery of igures, with special emphasis on those that
represent the troubadour’s most immediate context: nobles and penniless or miserly knights,
libidinous or politically compromised clergy (including bishops and even the Pope), as well as
merchants, judges, doctors, and even the selfsame troubadours and minstrels, self-portraited
in a collection of cantigas, where private life mixes with questions regarding the talent and
knowledge of troubadour art. For this reason they are precious documents for our understand-
ing of Galician-Portuguese art. Even without the predominance that we can observe in Occita-
nian poetry, political questions are also not absent from the cantigas de escárnio e maldizer, in
which we can see a signiicant part of the conlicts and tensions that Iberian medieval society
undergoes (the Portuguese civil war of 1246–47, the repeated conlicts of Alfonso X with part
of his nobility, or his diicult succession, for example). In this respect, it would be justiied to
emphasize a collection of Alfonso X’s own cantigas (he was one of the most prolix troubadours
in the satirical genre), in which the King strongly criticizes what he considers treason and cow-
ardice in some of his knights in the struggle against the Muslims, and which constitutes a mag-
niicent portrait of the daily life in the ields of the Andalusian Reconquista.
Love lyrical or satirical, the nearly 1680 Galician-Portuguese compositions that were trans-
mitted to us by the three songbooks compose one of the treasures of Iberian medieval heritage.
As above-mentioned, they are the work of a diverse group of authors who ind an audience
and support to their art in the royal courts of Castile-Leon and Portugal, and later in some
noblemen’s courts. However, this is not merely external backing: the great Iberian nobleman
are not limited solely to a protective and encouraging role for the troubadour’s art, as they are
themselves, at times, its most brilliant producers. As stated earlier, Alfonso X and D. Dinis are
counted among the best Peninsular poets in the Galician-Portuguese language, in a noteworthy
group including a very signiicant part of the principle igures of the Iberian nobility of the time.
Next to this group of noblemen, designated as being speciically troubadours and understand-
ing the Arte de Trovar – at least regarding its great principles – as a non-proitable activity, we
ind another group of artists, the minstrels from the popular classes, who were not limited to
the social role of musicians and instrumentalists that would normally be bound to. hey also
composed lyrics and their troubadour’s art was an activity through which they not only hoped
to gain the recognition but also social advantage. In a society as profoundly hierarchical as the
medieval, the proximity between troubadours and minstrels, not only physical, does not fail
to surprise. hey oten faced each other poetically in the tenções – these songs which place
them momentarily on the same level, as competitors, creators of such difering social rules. It
is this proximity that appears to give ‘school’ its precise meaning, aiming for an art structured
in ixed rules and where merit could be recognized in the capacity and talent to follow them,
independent of the social position of those who cultivated them (see G.V. Lopes 1993: 12). his
does not mean that minstrels were not mocked by their troubadour superiors, which is a theme
which creates a large part of the satirical songbook. But the fact that many of their songs have
survived intact, collected, without any sort of distinction in the great Cancioneiro collections,
demonstrates that the recognition of their merit was, in practice, real.
he Cantigas de Santa Maria
Running parallel to the profane cantigas, a second group of cantigas of religious character un-
doubtedly constitutes one of the greatest legacies of medieval literature in Galician-Portuguese.
Contemporaries of the irst, the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Songs of Saint Mary) can however
be considered an autonomous project whose theme, internal coherence, and even manuscript
tradition profoundly difers from the other troubadour compositions.
hus, and even though the Cancioneiro of Lisbon’s National Library transcribes one of his
compositions and a small fragment of another, the Cantigas de Santa Maria arrive to us via a
separate tradition, whose richness and careful execution clearly distinguishes the manuscript
tradition from the profane cantigas. In fact, today we know of 420 Marian compositions from
four testimonies, all datable to the end of the thirteenth century: the codex of the National
Library of Madrid, previously kept in Toledo (TO, the oldest collection, with only one hun-
dred cantigas), the two codices of the Escorial (E and T, the irst being the most complete,
containing 402 texts), and the codex of the National Library of Florence (F, let uninished).
he last two codices (T and F), which correspond to two volumes of the same large collec-
tion, are among the most precious manuscripts of the Peninsular Middle Ages, considering
that its illustrative program included a vast collection of illuminations of notable artistic and
documental value. Contrary to what occurs with the profane cantigas, the manuscripts of the
Cantigas de Santa Maria still include the musical annotations of all but ive of their composi-
tions, thereby composing the biggest and most important repertoire of conserved European
medieval music.
All of this seems to conirm the opinion of Elvira Fidalgo that this is “an initiative caressed
by the Castilian king” (Fidalgo 2003, 12). he care invested in the preservation of the texts
and melodies, the luxury of its editions – certainly destined to be seen (and not merely as an
instrumental recollection object) – points to a project thought of as a whole and carried out as
a double “monument” to both the Virgin and to the monarch’s prestige and to the court that
upholds it.
Despite the fact that the collection begins with a poetic declaration of intentions by Alfon-
so X, designating himself as the troubadour of the Virgin, and the fact that the autobiographical
references are repeated in other compositions, the question regarding the authorship of the
Cantigas de Santa Maria raises several questions among specialists, divided between accept-
ing Alfonso X as the sole author or defending the notion of multiple authorship, under the
monarch’s coordination and general orientation. It is the large number of lyrics, together with
the parallel established with the remaining Castilian works in prose “by” Alfonso X, such as a
General Estoria (General history) and the Siete Partidas (Seven-part code) (those in which the
king was certainly more controller than author) that some specialists base their opinion regard-
ing whether or not the king had really personally written and set to music the 420 composi-
tions. For these authors, the compositions should be understood as a collective work of a sort
of “poetic oice,” composed of numerous collaborators, though under royal direction. Contrary
to this opinion, Pena (2002, 207–08) advances a series of arguments in favour of attributing
the totality (or at least the large majority of the cantigas) to the king, namely his own status as
troubadour, demonstrated in the profane cantigas or in the extension of the poetic work kept
by his grandson D. Dinis (137 profane cantigas, perhaps many more at the time). In fact, the
Cantigas de Santa Maria, thought to have been written throughout a longer period, stretching
from 1263 to 1284 (the year of the monarch’s death), beyond the mentioned autobiographical
and family references, also reveal a visible group unity, which seems to support the thesis of the
personal authorship of Alfonso X, even if helped by a numerous team (of research and transla-
tion). Furthermore, it is at this level of personal creation that we can establish some relation
between these Cantigas de Santa Maria and the remaining Galician-Portuguese poetic produc-
tion, as a certain parallelism between the troubadour’s profane and religious posture seems to
be proven in verses like: “Rose of roses and Flower of lowers / Lady of all ladies, Beauty of all
beauties […] his lady that I have as Senhor / is why I wish to be a troubadour, / if I could but
have her love / I would give to the devil all others!”2 Describing himself therefore, as a servant of
the Virgin, the Lady of all ladies, while singing her praises, Alfonso X bridges the gap with the
Galician-Portuguese cantiga de amor, whose tradition and structure “takes a detour” towards a
religious function, though not losing the troubadour status, singing not just any lady, but rather
the “Lady of all ladies”, the perfect lady. A vast work, no doubt, but one which a poet of Alfonso
X’s quality would have no trouble carrying out.
he aforementioned cantiga is the tenth of a minority series of compositions which are
included in the collection and are normally designated as Cantigas de loor (Songs of praise). In
fact, the Alfonsinian project of praise to the Virgin essentially takes structure around the narra-
tion of her miracles (of proit and example), in compositions of narrative character which con-
stitute the bulk of the collection, interwoven with lyrical compositions. Milagres (miracles) and
cantigas de loor follow in an exact order (nine miracles, one song of praise), the work opening
with an already mentioned prologue-cantiga and closing with a inal Petição (petition), request-
ing galardom, or recompensation, for the extensive work carried out – a structure which proves,
once more, the internal coherence of the project. To praise the Virgin through the narration of
her miracles was in no way unheard of in the thirteenth century, a time in which all Europe
experiences the lowering of the Marian cult. In addition to the numerous Latin collections
(which certainly would have been inluence for Alfonso X), there were other highly appreciated
works, such as: Milagros de Nuestra Señora (Miracles of our lady), the Loores (Praises) of Berceo
or the Miracles de Nostre Dame (Miracles of our lady) by the French troubadour Gautier de
Coinci. Certainly, these works would have also inspired the author of the Cantigas de Santa Ma-
ria, but through a bigger project, whose even sheer size seems to have the ambition of becoming
a summa for the genre (Bertolucci Pizzorusso 1993, 143).
hematically, the miracles are extremely varied, going from the most trivial stories (per-
haps even a little less “miraculous”), such as the return of a lost falcon to its owner, to the most
marvellously imaginative (such as the well-known story of a monk who enters a state of ecstasy
ater hearing a birdsong and only returns to himself three hundred years later), touching nu-
merous historically and geographically localizable references, on which the Virgin acquires a
dimension of extreme proximity in relation to mortals’ daily life. hus, and although the loca-
tion of such miracles is not exclusively Iberian, it seems certain that many of these stories oten
had local sources, especially the many miracles related to Peninsular Marian sanctuaries. Glob-
ally, the narrative compositions dealing with the miracles of Mary ofer us an extremely colorful
picture of medieval Peninsular life and culture, which the codices’ magniicent illuminations
help to visualize. he cantigas de loor introduce a lyrical dimension into the whole through their
variety of metrical and rhythmic structures, which contrast with the much more ixed structure
of the miracles (organized with an initial refrain, followed by a varying number of strophes, also
with refrains, but always with an identical metrical and rhythmic scheme).
In addition to the undeniably devotional character of the work of Alfonso X, Pena calls
attention to the political dimension that a “monumental” work of this nature can encompass.
herefore, noting the numerous Andalusian toponyms found in Milagres (there are twenty-three
2. “Rosa das rosas e Fror das frores / Dona das donas, Senhor das senhores (…) Esta dona que tenho por
senhor / e de que quero ser trobador, / se eu per rem poss’ haver seu amor / dou ao demo os outros amores!”
compositions related only to the recently conquered Alcanate and Puerto de Santa María), and
also recalling the diicult process of repopulating this area ater the Christian conquest, Pena
believes he can prove that there is a deliberate politico-religious strategy in the Cantigas de
Santa Maria (or at least in a large portion of it):
Efectively, when we read the ample number of texts which reference Andalusian places, we
can see how the special emphasis of the Virgin making the conquered land hers is described in
great detail. hus, the message might well be addressed, in a primordial way, to all who heard
the call but whom, in light of events, showed symptoms of fatigue or fear […]. Also, we might
consider it as being an attempt to convince the population – or at least its more important
members – of the better quality ofered by the Christian religion. (Pena 2002, 218).
his human or even political face of the Virgin, invoked by a royal servant under a complex and
unstable human order could not avoid to it in with the remaining miracles.
Prose
Although medieval literary prose in Galician-Portuguese does not present the originality of the
poetic production we have just referred to – especially if we only take into account the surviv-
ing testimonies, we ind that these testimonies demonstrate an identical synchronization with
contemporary European literature. In this area it is important to point out that this aforemen-
tioned linguistic specialization by genre can no more be veriied, as Castilian is also assumed
from the beginning as a literary prose language (and of epic poetry, in fact). he most evident
example of this diversity may be the production of the court of Alfonso X, in which prose texts
are always written in Castilian. It is certain that the texts of the copyists of Alfonso (at least
those texts which have been passed down to us) are in the majority of cases juridical, historical,
or didactic-recreational, and not exactly literary. Nevertheless, in regards to prose, Galician-
Portuguese seems to coincide, in a more strict way, with its geographic zone of inluence, i.e.,
Galicia, and in particular, Portugal.
Although various testimonies would seem to prove a precocious administrative usage of
the vernacular in this zone of the Iberian Peninsula, namely the will of the Portuguese king
Afonso II, or the well known Noticia do Torto (a sort of private memoir of outstanding events in
Northern Portugal), both documents dated back to 1214, to which specialists have been adding
some small earlier texts (I. Castro 2005), Galician-Portuguese testimonies of literary activity in
prose date to the middle of the thirteenth century. he most important of these literary testi-
monies, the chivalric romance, refers to the genre that then spread all over Europe, especially in
the ambit of the so-called matter of Brittany.
In fact, the adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table appear to have
been known and appreciated early on throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Several references,
made by troubadours, both in the profane cantigas and in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, to
facts and Arthurian characters (Lancelot, Merlin and also Tristan) are proof of this. he pro-
fane Cancioneiros B and V open with a grouping of ive lais whose universe is exactly Arthu-
rian (anonymous lais, even though its authorship is attributed to the characters: Elis, Marlot
d’Irlanda, Tristan, and the maidens of Lancelot). In addition to these testimonies, other external
information conirm the popularity of the genre during the middle of the thirteenth and sub-
sequent centuries, as is the case of the onomastic, of which Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconce-
los quotes numerous Peninsular examples (even having a reference to a falcon named Galvan,
referred to as belonging to D. Henrique, brother of Alfonso X) (C.M. de Vasconcelos 1904, 2:
507). he igure of the Portuguese monarch Afonso III (a contemporary of these earlier ones) is
oten referred to as having played an important role in the divulgation of the matter of Brittany
in the Iberian Peninsula. Having spent a signiicant part of his youth and the beginning of his
adult years in the French courts of Louis the VIII and Louis the IX, together with his maternal
aunt, the energetic queen Blanche of Castile, in the exact moment and in the space in which
the Vulgate in prose of the matter of Brittany was written and profusely read, it seems plausible
that his return in 1245 (in order to assume a throne which was originally not destined to him)
marked the beginning of the long Iberian difusion of French texts which he probably brought
along with him. hus, evidence suggests that it is from this time, or over the following years that
the translations were carried out, based on the various (and confused) French cycles narrating
the adventures of King Arthur’s knights.
In Galician-Portuguese, we thus have the Demanda do Santo Graal (Quest for the Holy
Grail) which is perhaps the only European medieval testimony to the original French text dis-
appeared, and whose manuscript is kept in the Vienna Library, as well as José de Arimateia
(Joseph of Arimathea), translated, as Ivo Castro believes, by a Portuguese knight of the Order of
Santiago, Frei João Vivas, whose manuscript is kept in the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon. here is
also a fragment of Merlin currently in Barcelona, and even a fragment of Tristan (unfortunately
lost, today, though there are photographs of the manuscript, taken by J.L. Pensado for his 1962
edition). Besides these surviving texts, there have certainly been other Galician-Portuguese
and Iberian translations, as the references in catalogues for some royal libraries show (such as
that of the Portuguese D. Duarte), as well as the several Castilian translations that we have. In
this respect, specialists have been debating the priority of the Galician-Portuguese and Castil-
ian translations of Arthurian material, which seems to have been reached a general consensus
that the Castilian Lancelot is a translation from an early Galician-Portuguese version now lost.
hematic relations that can undoubtedly be established between the knightly world of these chi-
valric romances and the in’amor adopted by Galician-Portuguese troubadours and minstrels
lends plausibility to the Galician-Portuguese troubadour context as an initial space of difusion
of the Arthurian universe in the Peninsula.
his same debate regarding the original language of certain literary texts in prose contin-
ues in what is said to be one of the most well-known Iberian novels of chivalry, Amadís de Gau-
la. In fact, we acknowledge nowadays that the Peninsular taste for the genre is not limited only
to translations of Arthurian texts profusely read throughout Europe, but that it also gave rise
to the creation of an original novel which, despite being geographically and culturally related
to the Arthurian universe, is truly an Iberian creation – something which has not restrained it
from going beyond the Peninsular borders and becoming one of the most read and translated
European novels of chivalry of all time. Origin of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and highly praised
by him (to the point that the book opens with a series of poems “authored by” the main char-
acters, fact oten ignored by current editions), Amadís is also one of the few novels of chivalry
to escape the bonire to which the author of Quixote cheerfully sends the hundreds of later epig-
ones of the genre that proliferated in the Peninsula till the seventeenth century.
Unfortunately, the original text of Amadís de Gaula did not reach us, as we only know the
Castilian version by Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo. Although Montalvo explicitly tells us in his
Prologue that he composed his novel out of earlier novels “that went about quite corrupt and
vicious,” it is clear that, up until the moment, only a few early fragments dating to the beginning
of the iteenth century, also in Castilian, were discovered. By external references (like allusions
to the title or to the characters, for example), it is nevertheless known that the original Amadís
de Gaula dates back to the end of the thirteenth/beginning of the fourteenth century, though
its original language is not known. he thesis for the Galician-Portuguese origin of Amadís has
had its fervent supporters, particularly among Portuguese specialists (Carolina Michaëlis de
Vasconcelos, Rodrigues Lapa), the same way the Castilian specialists defended its Castilian ori-
gins (like the recent editor of Montalvo, Cacho Blecua), though it has been impossible to reach
a deinitive conclusion. Without further discussion on the arguments of one side or the other,
we shall say that in the medieval Galician-Portuguese space, Amadís certainly had enormous
repercussions, demonstrated at least by the inclusion of a poetic composition that would form
part of its primitive version, the Lais de Leonoreta, in the Cancioneiro of the National Library of
Lisbon (B), and whose authorship is attributed to the Portuguese troubadour João de Lobeira
(active in the court of D. Dinis).
Finally, from another knightly medieval universe that also had a considerable European
repercussion, discovering and transforming classical epical (from Roman de Troie by Benoit de
Saint Maure, poem from the end of the twelth century), we can ind, today, two translations in
Galician-Portuguese, the most well-known, named História Troiana, was written in Galicia in
the end of the fourteenth century, although it is possible that another Galician version existed,
the Crónica Troiana (Trojan Chronicle), in which the surviving Castilian version was based.
hough these two translations are later, this is a universe that was certainly equally familiar to
the troubadours, as the allusions to some of their characters can also be found in the Galician-
Portuguese cantigas (as is the case of Paris, in one of the few cantigas de amor of Alfonso X).
References and even short extracts of all the aforementioned novels can also be found in
the historiographic Galician-Portuguese texts. In fact, parallel to the speciically literary works,
Galician-Portuguese prose is rich in another group of texts which ind in History their pri-
mary vocation, but equally share a ictional universe and can be considered, in certain ways,
to be literary. he oldest texts of such type which come down to us are the so-called Crónicas
breves de Santa Cruz de Coimbra (Brief chronicles of Saint Cruz of Coimbra) (particularly from
the third to the fourth), containing the oldest narratives in Galician-Portuguese on the life of
the irst Portuguese king, D. Afonso Henriques. Even though its origin is somewhat nebulous,
since we only have a copy from the second half of the iteenth century, the Crónicas breves de
Santa Cruz de Coimbra can be dated from the middle of the fourteenth century, and the fourth
Chronicle, the oldest, could even be a fragment of a more complete, though now lost, version of
the Crónica galego-portuguesa de Espanha e Portugal (Galician-Portuguese Chronicle of Spain
and Portugal), dating to the end of the thirteenth century. Intimately mixing iction and his-
tory, the two small surviving chronicles compose a miscellaneous narrative which is not only
very interesting, but also stylistically accomplished. he assumption of António José Saraiva
that some of its episodes, especially the legendary ones, might be the result of a prosiication
of ancient lost Galician-Portuguese cantares de gesta (songs of heroic deeds) (most of them –
but not all – regarding Afonso Henriques) though attractive, unfortunately lacks documented
proof (Saraiva 1979).
he same interesting mixture of legend and historical narrative can be found in many of
the narratives woven into the Livros de linhagens (Books of genealogy), a collection of genea-
logical texts relative to the Hispanic nobility as a whole, of which the last version, dating back
to the middle of the fourteenth century, is attributed to D. Pedro, Count of Barcelos (the afore-
mentioned son of D. Dinis, also a troubadour). Merged throughout the lineages is a vast col-
lection of stories, of diferent types and origins (from the Iberian Peninsula and international)
composing an inexhaustible literary and cultural repository which has served as source for
many further authors (namely romantic authors, such as the Portuguese Alexandre Herculano
and Almeida Garrett).
To D. Pedro can also be owed the oldest Galician-Portuguese chronicle still conserved
today, the Crónica geral de Espanha de 1344 (General Chronicle of Spain of 1344) (only the
reworked version of 1400 has come down to us, even though we know the text of the original
version in the Castilian translation) which is still a fundamental text for knowledge of medieval
Peninsular history. Using diferent materials, including, among others, the Crónica do Mouro
Rasis (Chronicle of the Moor Rasis) (a translation which his father, D. Dinis, ordered from an
original Arabic text), probably the aforementioned missing text, Crónica Galego-Portuguesa de
Espanha e Portugal, and namely, from the Crónica general written by his grandfather Alfonso X,
the Count of Barcelos constructed a coherent collection (though sometimes historically impre-
cise), where the tendency “to exalt the Portuguese regional contribution in the construction of
Peninsular history” is already notorious (Kruz 1993, 190). he unity of the Galician-Portuguese
cultural and linguistic space begins, in fact, to be diversiied.
As in all Europe, Galician-Portuguese was also a vehicle for a group of texts of religious
and hagiographic character, many of them following the tradition of the ample Latin literature
of the genre. From the works passed down to us, the oldest is the Vida de Santa Maria Egip-
cíaca (he life of Saint Mary the Egypcian), a translation of a Latin text dating back to the end
of the thirteenth century (which was translated from a Greek original) and which had a great
popularity. From the remaining, almost all from the end of the fourteenth century, it is pos-
sible to point out the Bosco Deleitoso (Garden of delights), a praise of hermit life and mystic
isolation-characteristics, despite the anonymous author’s knowledge of Dante and Petrarch; the
Horto do Esposo (Orchard of the husband), a moral and edifying text which has its origins in a
compilation of stories and traditional tales, but with a strong allegorical tendency (the husband
being Christ); the Visão de Túndalo (Tundalo’s vision), a marvellous journey of an Irish noble
through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; or even the Vida de S. Barlaão e S. Josafate (Life of Saint
Barlaam and Saint Josaphat), which is the only text where the author, Fr. Hilário da Lourinhã,
is known. It is a curious Christian adaptation of the life of the Buddha (and of which there are
also Castilian and French versions). All of these texts have an obvious literary interest, namely
for the construction of a miraculous imaginary, where visions and dreams construct a space
which can, at certain moments, almost be classiied as surrealist.
In a more historical way, the Vida e milagres de Dona Isabel, Rainha de Portugal (Life and
miracles of Dona Isabel, queen of Portugal) arrives to us from the fourteenth century (Isabel of
Aragon was the wife of D. Dinis). Also from the end of the fourteenth century, the Miragres de
Santiago (Miracles of Santiago), an original Galician version of the Liber Sancti Jacobi or Códice
Calixtino, but which extends the original text to an immense miscellany which goes as far as to
including an extensive narrative of the supposed adventures of Charlemagne in Spain. he titles
of many other texts, now missing, appear in Portuguese royal library catalogues, demonstrating
the great difusion that the Galician-Portuguese religious prose had.
Finally, and as a part of the didactic prose, even though in practical terms it is fair to
quote the Livro de albeitaria (Book of equestrian lore Albeitaria – Arab pharmacist) by Mes-
tre Giraldo, who was D. Dinis’s physician, explicitly dated back to 1318. It is a translation of a
Latin text by Teodorico de Bolonha, based on the popular text, De medicaminibus equorum
(Of equestrian medicine), by Jordanus Rufus, stable manager to emperor Frederico II. here
is also a later Galician translation of this text, the Tratado de albeitaria, from the beginning of
the iteenth century.
he inal period
Except for the explicitly ictional prose of the chivalric romances it is possible to verify, as we
have seen, that the remaining medieval Galician-Portuguese prose (historiographical, religious,
or didactic), even because it appeared later, seems to present already a deinite national char-
acter. he last work referred to, the Livro or Tratado de Albeitaria (where the same original in-
spires two independent versions, one Portuguese, which is earlier, and a later Galician version)
seems to be paradigmatic of the cultural distance that gradually was being established between
the societies to the north and to the south the Minho River. In fact, beginning in the mid-four-
teenth century, during the consolidation of the political division between the kingdoms of Por-
tugal and Spain, a rupture of the linguistic as well as cultural unity of Galician-Portuguese can
be seen. It is a process that obviously occurs within a long period but which becomes especially
visible in the paths followed by Galician-Portuguese poetry ater the medieval Cancioneiros.
In fact, the world of the Peninsular troubadours, whose inal years are usually placed
around 1354 – the year of the last troubadours, D. Pedro, the Count of Barcelos’ death – does
not end abruptly, but instead, it slowly transformed into another world, whose primitive poetic
features are still written in Galician-Portuguese. Nevertheless, even in this matter the courses
in Galicia and in Portugal are also diferent, mainly if we take into account the remaining docu-
ments. hus, in Portugal, ater D. Pedro’s death, the poetic production appears to sufer a total
eclipse: in the later century, i.e. until around 1450 (probably the date of the oldest compositions
of the Cancioneiro Geral de Garcia de Resende [General songbook of Garcia de Resende], pub-
lished in 1516, and with a clear Castilian inluence) not only do we lack any poetic compositions,
but we also have no news of any activity produced in this area (with the exception of two or
three names). Although the disturbed political period in Portugal beginning in 1380 is some-
times used as a plausible explication for this silence, the development of the troubadour tradi-
tion in Galicia might lead us to conclude that the lack of documents is essentially the reason
that would explain this long period in which Portuguese poetry is absent. In view of the above,
the scenary in Portugal ater Count D. Pedro’s death may have been similar to what we ind in
the north of the Minho River.
In fact, the troubadour’s world, as documented in Galicia, does not appear to have disap-
peared overnight, but instead began to adapt slowly to the new paradigm, whose centre of
irradiation now seems to be mainly located in the Castilian court. he Cancionero de Baena
(Baena songbook) is the best (though not only) example of this new paradigm. his work is a
collection carried out by D. Juan Alfonso de Baena around 1430 and it compiles poetic composi-
tions between 1360 and 1425 – in their majority Castilian – although it also includes a collection
of Galician-Portuguese poems. he title given by its main scholar, Ricardo Polín, to his book
Cancioneiro Galego-Castelán (Galician-Castilian songbook) (Polín 1997) already aims to refer
to this signiicant alteration in the politico-cultural geography of the Iberian Peninsula in com-
parison to the preceding age. his alteration marks, to a large extent, the progressive ascension
of Castilian to the status of prestigious language of culture. In fact, more than an outbreak of
a “Galician-Castilian” school in an hybrid language, we witness the coexistence of two worlds,
as Pena (2002, 280) mentions: the Galician-Portuguese troubadour tradition in decline, and
that of a new cultural taste, of Castilian language origin, now in fast expansion throughout the
Peninsula. Spread throughout the Cancionero de Baena, or in other songbooks of the time (de
Palacio, Gallardo or Real Academia de Historia) nearly 73 Galician-Portuguese compositions of
various genres can be found, by roughly 30 authors (none of them of Portuguese origin, one
should note) among which Macías the Enamored as well as Villasandino stand out. Pena pre-
cisely describes the situation and the paradigm shit that can be seen in Iberian poetry in the
end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the iteenth century, and of which these song books
serve as testimony “in an analysis of the conserved texts, it is perceptible the way in which the
troubadour’s song opens to the dezir. Poetry destined for song lends a foothold to poetry meant
to be read, and the Galician-Portuguese vernacular loses its position to the Castilian romance
which inally generates the emerging form of the moment” (2002, 282). For this new evolving
cultural world, the new Italian-inluenced taste for the dolce stil nuovo, which begins to impose
itself over Europe, contributes in great way. However, contrary to what occured with ancient
Occitan culture, its adoption in the Iberian Peninsula will now be deinitively undertaken in
the diferent national languages. Nevertheless, although stylistic and thematic features of the
Galician-Portuguese troubadour world remain, not only in the poetry of this transition phase,
but also during the sixteenth century (namely in compositions of the Cancioneiro Geral de
Garcia de Resende or in the theatre of Gil Vicente). he Galician-Portuguese world gives way, in
a real and igurative sense, to a new Iberian cultural and linguistic paradigm – the New World
of the Renaissance.
Castilian and Portuguese in the sixteenth century
Ángel Marcos de Dios
Up until the seventeenth century, Portuguese and Castilian were much more similar than they
are today. his similarity refers both to linguistic aspects and the languages’ speakers. Linguisti-
cally, Portuguese and Spanish shared a common morphology, syntax, lexicon, and phonetics.
he phonetic revolution in Spanish in the sixteenth century began to accentuate their difer-
ences. As for speakers, the Portuguese and the Spanish shared far more cultural ainities than
they do today. An example of this is the use of both languages in literature. As early on as Can-
cionero de Baena (he Baena songbook, 1445), Castilians wrote verse in Galician-Portuguese,
and in the sixteenth century nearly all Portuguese authors also published in Castilian.
Portuguese-Castilian bilingualism lasted in Portugal for two and a half centuries, from
the middle of the iteenth century to the last generation born before the Restoration of 1640.
During this period most of the educated men from both countries spoke both languages. his
was a phenomenon of great importance in Portuguese culture, and shows that Portuguese and
Castilian did not clash in the context of that time. In fact, the two countries only faced friction
in the political sphere.
he most important quantitative example of the adoption of Castilian by the Portuguese
cultured classes can be found in the Catálogo razonado biográico y bibliográico de los autores
portugueses que escribieron en castellano (A reasoned biographical and bibliographical cata-
logue of Portuguese authors writing in Castilian) (Garcia Peres 1890). Despite the limitations
inherent to the age in which it was published, this work was the only serious attempt at docu-
menting the relationship between the two languages. Based on it, Martínez Almoyna and Vieira
de Lemos (1968) published La lengua española en la literatura portuguesa (Spanish language in
Portuguese literature). Most of the texts mentioned in the Catalogue are literary because practi-
cal and scientiic texts were written in Latin. Although it encompasses the time up to its date
of publication in 1890, most of the works included in the Catalogue are from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (mostly published in the seventeenth century, although a greater num-
ber of them were written in the sixteenth century). his period saw the height of Castilian in
Portugal. Garcia Peres compiled his Catalogue by consulting the most important bibliographi-
cal collections available at the time, accompanied by patient visits to libraries and public and
private institutions. His research yielded more than 600 Portuguese authors and thousands of
works. he result, although not exhaustive, is proof of the social prestige of Castilian in Portugal.
his prestige can be accounted for by speciic geopolitical, social, economic, and educational
circumstances.
he status of Castilian in Portugal
Two works can serve as examples of Castilian’s prestige in Portugal. he irst is Carta de Mestre
João (A letter from Mestre João), the doctor and surgeon on the expedition led by Pedro Álvares
Cabral, who discovered Brazil in 1500. It was written in Castilian but riddled with Portuguese.
414 Ángel Marcos de Dios
he second is Auto da Visitação or Monólogo do Vaqueiro (Play of the visitation or he mono-

logue of the cowherd). Gil Vicente, the father of Portuguese theater, made his theatrical debut
with this play written in Castilian. It was performed in 1502 by the author himself in the cham-
bers of the Castilian Queen, Doña María, to celebrate the birth of the future King John III.
hese two works serve to show Castilian’s prominence. Both are dated in the sixteenth century,
the moment when this prestige reached its peak in Portugal.
Following Spanish military conquests, Castilian became a lingua franca in Europe, mainly
in commercial exchanges. Many Jews of the Iberian Peninsula moved to Amsterdam and used it
as a commercial language. he use of Castilian as lingua franca especially lourished in Portugal.
he Portuguese had important trade relations in the North with the French ports and with the
Netherlands (from where they reached outward to Central Europe), and in the East with Seville,
Valencia, Barcelona, Marseille, and Genoa. However, there were several factors which worked
against this inluence. he nationalist fervor that followed the creation of the modern nation-
states fostered the prestige of national languages. Nebrija expressed this with a well-known
phrase in the prologue of Gramática castellana (Castilian grammar) “language has always ac-
companied Empire,” and Portugal was also building its empire during this period. he identii-
cation of a language with a nation became more common, and many grammars were published
at this time: Gramática da Linguagem Portuguesa (Grammar of the Portuguese language, 1536)
and Cartinha (A primer, 1539) by Fernão de Oliveira; and Diálogo da viciosa vergonha (Dia-
logue of corrupted shame), Gramática (Grammar), and Diálogo en louvor da nossa linguagem
(Dialogue in praise of our language, 1540) by João de Barros. hese last two attempted to dem-
onstrate Portuguese’s superiority over Castilian, because of its closer proximity to Latin. At
the same time, post-Tridentine Catholicism fostered biblical and liturgical Latin. Nonetheless,
none of these factors managed to delect the prestige of Castilian in Portugal.
We shall mention several clear examples of this prestige in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Gil Vicente, the oicial playwright of the Portuguese court, portrayed popular Por-
tuguese-speaking characters from the low and middle classes in Auto da Barca do Inferno (he
boat to hell) and Auto Barca da Purgatório (he boat to purgatory). However, in Auto da Barca
da Glória (he boat to heaven), in which characters form part of the civil (emperor, king, duke,
and count) and ecclesiastical (Pope, cardinal, archbishop, and bishop) hierarchies, besides be-
ing bound for heaven, all the characters speak exclusively in Castilian. In Comédia da Pastora
Alfea (he comedy of the shepherdess Alfea) by Simão Machado, the cowherds and goatherds
always speak in Portuguese, while the rich owners speak either Portuguese or Castilian. John
IV, king of Portugal ater the nationalist and anti-Castilian rebellion of 1640, wrote Defensa de
la Música (In defense of music, 1649) in Castilian.
Castilian acquired such esteem in Portuguese upper and middle class society that all men
of culture could speak it luently. As for men of letters, we know of only two Portuguese authors
of the sixteenth century who did not write in Castilian at all. hese were António Ferreira and
Fr. Agostinho da Cruz, both of whom held decidedly anti-Castilian views. Castilian’s prestige
had been built on several mainstays: matrimonial alliances and the arrival in Lisbon of the
sumptuous retinues of the Castilian queens, the political unrest of the second half of the if-
teenth century (which meant that the supporters of the third duke of Bragança, who had been
put to death, sought refuge in Castile), the successive waves of Jews leeing Spain and taking
refuge in Portugal and Europe, the parallelisms in the discovery, conquest, and evangelization
of the New World, the prestige of the University of Salamanca in Portugal, and, towards the very
end of the sixteenth century, the union of both monarchies under the same crown. Paradoxi-
cally, the middle and upper bourgeoisie, which had gained more power ater the anti-Castilian
crisis of 1383–85, had already been using Castilian in their relations abroad. he consequence
of all this was a cultural and linguistic communication of such importance that we can well call
the sixteenth century the Golden Age of Castilian. We shall now analyze in further detail some
of its most relevant signs.
Ater several truces following the crisis of 1383–85 and the extinction of the Burgundy dy-
nasty, Portugal and Castile signed a peace treaty in 1411 which was periodically renewed, and
which led to a series of arranged marriages. he court of Lisbon became the home of Castilian
princesses and infantas. From the second half of the iteenth century, this policy of matrimo-
nial alliances led to more intense political and commercial relations between the kingdoms
of Portugal and Castile, with the balance of commercial relations clearly in favor of Castile. A
irst consequence of this was that the Portuguese court became bilingual. Adding to this, the
prestige of Castilian literature grew, as it was undergoing an especially brilliant moment due
to the cultural activity in the court of John II of Castile, which was continued by the Catholic
Monarchs. his period coincided with the decadence of Portuguese courtly poetry (only the
poetry of the Cancioneiro geral [A general songbook] is worthy of mention). he efect was that
knowledge of Castilian became a mark of noble distinction. In fact, it had long been a language
used by the nobility. Members of Portuguese royalty such as Constable D. Peter of Portugal and
King Afonso V had already written in Castilian as early as the iteenth century.
John II and his son Afonso, the latter married to Isabella of Aragon and Castile, the daugh-
ter of the Catholic Monarchs, held dreams of a political union with Spain which later failed.
hey desired the succession in the Spanish monarchy of a Portuguese heir married to a Castilian
princess. he fourteenth, iteenth, and sixteenth centuries nearly witnessed this uniication a
dozen times, but the marriages never achieved the union of the two kingdoms except by force
in 1580, and paradoxically with quite a diferent result than expected. Isabella, the daughter of
the Portuguese Manuel I, married Emperor Charles V, thus making it possible for Philip II of
Spain to accede to the Portuguese throne. he result was the union of both kingdoms under
Spanish rule, a situation that lasted until 1640. he Portuguese freed themselves at the irst
available opportunity by taking advantage of Spain’s weakness, thus deepening the moral sepa-
ration between the two peoples.
he sixteenth century witnessed the apogee of Castilian and was also the century par excel-
lence of bilingualism in Portugal. he irst half of the seventeenth century was more productive
in terms of works published in Castilian, but the second, owing to the Restoration of 1640, saw
Castilian’s prestige decline due to political factors. Moreover, many of the works published in
the seventeenth century had been written in the 1500s. An example is Auto del-Rei Seleuco
(King Seleucus) a work written partly in Castilian by Camões, which was printed for the irst
time in 1644–45. Consequently, there was never a time before or ater the sixteenth century
when cultural identity was so complete between the Spanish and Portuguese. It was the fruition
and the epitome of a community of family, political, and economic interests.
Intercultural exchanges
Many of the works from classical antiquity and the middle ages were only available to the Por-
tuguese in their Castilian translations. Gil Vicente’s readings in Castilian may serve as an ex-
ample. He read Alonso Fernández Alemán’s translation of Andrea da Barberino’s Guerrino il
Meschino (Wretched Guerrino), he used Savonarola’s Castilian translation as inspiration for his
paraphrase of the psalm Miserere, and he preferred the Castilian translation of Vita Christi (he
life of Christ) to the Portuguese version (Teyssier 2002). Pious works and works of Christian
ediication, biblical translations; and glosses and lives of the saints were frequently translated
into Castilian even by Portuguese writers, such as the Lisbon Jesuit Francisco de Antonio, who
was a professor at Coimbra, missionary of the Company in Italy, and counselor and confessor
of the empress Mary of Austria.
Intercultural exchange was common among the literary set of both countries. Sá de Mi-
randa was a friend of Juan Boscán (Joan Boscá) and of Garcilaso de la Vega and ater his trip to
Italy (1521–1526) he stopped in Barcelona to visit the former. He was also a friend of Antonio de
Nebrija and of Aires Barbosa, a professor at the University of Salamanca. Nebrija in Spain and
the Italian Cataldo in Portugal dealt with the common theme of the marriage of Prince Afonso,
son of John II, and Princess Isabella, the eldest child of the Catholic Monarchs. Cataldo made
numerous references to Spain in his works. he frequent marriages between the two courts
gave rise to a court literature which was particularly rich during the reign of John III (1521–1557),
married to a sister of Charles V, Catherine of Austria, whose retinue brought two Castilian hu-
manists to the Portuguese court: the brothers Rodrigo and Pedro Sánchez (Ramalho 1988, 187).
Universities
he University of Salamanca was another factor which contributed to the prestige and expan-
sion of Castilian in Portugal, and from its founding in 1218 it played a major role in Portuguese
culture. During certain periods Salamanca hosted up to a third of all Portuguese university
students. As a matter of fact, the Studium of Salamanca was not even considered a foreign
university by the Portuguese until 1640, and for many students it was the closest university
geographically.
Although the University of Salamanca attracted Portuguese students from its founding, it
took on special importance in the sixteenth century for three main reasons. First of all, the uni-
versity had a large number of Portuguese students. he enrollment books preserved, which date
from the second half of the sixteenth century, reveal an average of over 500 Portuguese students
a year, in spite of the obstacles placed by the civil and academic authorities in Coimbra between
1537 and 1580 to keep students from abandoning this Portuguese university. Second, Salamanca
had licentia ubique docendi (recognition of its degrees in all other universities in Christendom,
except Paris and Bologna), a distinction which it only shared with Paris, Bologna, and Oxford.
his was due to the scientiic prestige of its illustrious professors throughout the sixteenth cen-
tury. Salamanca’s prestige was so great that in 1537, in the inal transfer of the Portuguese univer-
sity from Lisbon to Coimbra, John III endowed it with statutes and professors from Salamanca
(and also from Alcalá), of both Portuguese and Castilian descent. Among them were Martín
de Azpilcueta (“Doctor Navarro”), Juan de Mogrovejo, Martín de Ledesma, Manuel da Costa
(Ramos 1997, 989–92). here is one inal reason for Salamanca’s popularity. Up until 1640, the
School of Medicine of Salamanca had a higher enrollment of Portuguese students than Coim-
bra. his is due to the fact that Portuguese Jews, outstanding students of the School of Medicine
(and also highly represented in other ields), were not persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition
and there was no extradition treaty with Castile. here is conclusive evidence for this policy:
among university documents there is not a single denial of admission for not having “pure
blood” (Marcos de Dios 1989).
In the sixteenth century, the Golden Age of the University of Salamanca, notable Por-
tuguese professors taught there, such as Aires Barbosa, Pedro Margalho, Manuel da Costa
(“Doctor Sutil”), Aires Pinhel, Heitor Rodrigues, Ambrósio Nunes, Francisco de Salazar, Luis
de Lemos, Henrique Jorge Henriques, as well as many other illustrious professors who used
the university to launch their more prestigious and better paid political-administrative careers.
It is perhaps among the ecclesiastical hierarchy and in medicine that we ind the most
prominent representation of Portuguese alumni in Salamanca. Among the former there were
several bishops and archbishops, such as Diogo de Sousa, who also studied in Paris, Archbishop
of Braga; D. Manuel de Sousa, Bishop of Silves and Archbishop of Évora; Gonçalo Pinheiro
(also a student in Paris), Bishop of Saim, Ambassador to France, and Bishop of Viseu; Jerónimo
Osório, Bishop of Silves; Frei Bernardo da Cruz, of Santo Tomé; Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, the
irst Bishop of Brazil; D. Martim Afonso Foito, Bishop of Leiria, Lamego, and Coimbra and
Secretary of State in Madrid, to mention a few. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there
were also some Portuguese bishops in Spanish dioceses: Estêvão de Almeida, Bishop of Carta-
gena; Pedro da Costa, irst Bishop of Porto and then of León and Osma; Bernardo de Ataíde,
Bishop of Astorga and Ávila; Jerónimo Mascarenhas, Bishop of Segovia and the author of Vida
de Juan Grande (he life of Juan Grande).
Medicine was one of the most popular ields of study at the time, and the University of
Salamanca was highly esteemed both for its religious tolerance and its qualiied training as
compared to the University of Coimbra. Proof of this is the fact that the most illustrious Portu-
guese doctors of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (Amato Lusitano, Zacuto
Lusitano, and Antonio Ribeiro Sanches, respectively) studied in Salamanca, just as the irst doc-
tors born in Brazil chose Salamanca for their medical training (Marcos de Dios 1976).
Several writers wrote and published their works in Salamanca. João de Barros, the human-
ists Jerónimo Cardoso and Diogo de Teive, António Mendes, João Salgado de Araújo, António
Raposo, Domingos Antunes Portugal, Francisco de França da Costa, João Sucarelo Claramonte,
and Francisco Fernandes Prata are just some examples of Portuguese authors in Salamanca.
A complete list of distinguished alumni would be endless, but we cannot fail to mention
Mem de Sá, the brother of Sá de Miranda and third Governor General of Brasil, in honor of
whom the poem De Gestis Mendi de Saa (On the heroic deeds of Mem de Sá) was published.
Also worthy of mention is the diplomat Baltasar de Faria, the jurists Bartolomeu Filipe and
António da Gama, and the magistrates Simão da Cunha and Baltasar Fernandes de Meneses.
Royal and ecclesiastical representatives, ministers of state, ambassadors, diocesan dignitaries,
magistrates, judges, and others formed part of the educated elite in Salamanca. However, the
ones most responsible for the expansion and prestige of Castilian were the anonymous masses
of people who promoted Castilian culture in Portugal. here were more than eight thousand
Portuguese that we know of by name living in Salamanca during the sixteenth century, which
is quite a large number considering that the enrollment record preserved begins in the second
half of the century.
he University of Coimbra, on the other hand, had very few Spanish. his was also the case
with the University of Évora, which was founded by the Jesuits under the protection of Cardinal-
Prince Henry, brother of John III and great-uncle of King Sebastian. his university was oi-
cially inaugurated in 1559. Its studies were limited to arts and theology and it did not ofer law or
medicine, in spite of the usual practice at the time. In April 1560 it already had 600 students and
by the end of the century this number had risen to 1600 (Ramos 1997, 605–606). his university
had a high number of Spanish students and professors, especially during its irst few years.
Religious orders
Yet another notable contribution to Portuguese-Castilian bilingualism was the intense exchange
that took place between Spanish and Portuguese members of religious orders, mostly between
Dominicans and Jesuits. Spanish clerics were present in Portugal because of the reformation of
the observance of their orders’ rules, and to a lesser extent because of the introduction of the
Company of Jesus into Portuguese territory.
Within the Dominican order there was a fruitful exchange of Spanish and Portuguese cler-
ics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. he reform of the Dominican order led many
illustrious Spaniards to spend time in Portugal, such as Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, Jerónimo
Padilla, Martín de Ledesma, Chair at the University of Coimbra for thirty years, Tomás Man-
rique, future Magister Sacri Palatii (Master of the Sacred Palace) and, therefore, the Pope’s per-
sonal theologian, Juan de la Cruz, Mateo de Ojeda, Alfonso de Oviedo, Francisco de Bobadilla,
and Cristóbal Balbuena. During the same period, a dozen Portuguese Dominicans from the
convent of San Esteban in Salamanca returned to Portugal. Other Portuguese Dominicans re-
mained in Spain, mostly in Salamanca. Some entered the order in the convent of San Esteban,
while others went to Salamanca to complete their studies. Other prominent Spaniards who
moved to Portugal were Juan de Salinas, Juan de las Cuevas, who went to live in the same con-
vent as Fray Luis de Granada, and Father Diego Ramírez, prior of Salamanca who was named
provincial of Portugal.
he case of Fray Luis de Granada is paradigmatic. He was the most proliic religious writer
of the Golden Age, the author of several dozen volumes. He went to Portugal at the end of 1550
or the beginning of 1551, when the provincial of Portugal was the Castilian Francisco de Bo-
badilla (Fray Luis de Granada himself was named provincial from 1556 to 1560), and settled in
Évora. He lived in Portugal for thirty-eight years and died at the Dominican convent in Lisbon.
He wrote all his works in Portugal, and partly in Portuguese. His mastery of the language can
compare to that of the best Portuguese prose writers of the age.
he Franciscan and Augustinian orders faced a similar situation. he Franciscan Pedro
de Alcántara reformed the lesser Franciscan friars in Portugal, founding the Arrabidos or
Alcantarines. In 1535 John III entrusted the Augustinian Luis de Montoya with the reform of the
order in Portugal. he Portuguese Augustinian Aleixo de Meneses, Apostle from the East, was
named royal preacher by Philip II and died in Madrid in 1617, ater serving as Archbishop of
Goa and Braga. he Archbishop of Évora, Teotónio de Bragança, a student at the monastery of
Santa Cruz in Coimbra and at the Sorbonne, maintained a close correspondence with Teresa of
Avila, whose irst published work, Camino de perfección (he way to perfection), was published
in Évora in 1583 at the urging of Teotónio. Diego Ortiz de Villegas traveled to Portugal with the
retinue of Juana La Beltraneja and was named Bishop of Ceuta and Viseu. He wrote Cathecismo
Pequeno (he little catechism) in 1504.
In 1555, the Jesuits took on the direction of the Colleges of Arts of Coimbra and Évora,
and founded the College of the Holy Spirit, which was promoted to a university in 1559 with
the favor of King Sebastian. From its very beginnings, this university had Spanish students and
professors such as Fernando Pérez, Chair of Vespers and Prime of Dogmatic heology between
1559 and 1571 and later Rector of the College of Jesuits in Coimbra; Pablo Ferrer, professor of
Holy Scriptures; and Luis de Molina from Cuenca, Chair of Vespers and Prime of Holy Scrip-
ture between 1567 and 1584, and also well known for the doctrine that bears his name, Molin-
ism. At age fourteen, the polyglot José de Anchieta, the Apostle of Brazil, enrolled in Coimbra’s
prestigious College of Arts in 1548, which was also the year of its founding by John III. hus, the
Jesuits, twenty years ater entering Portugal, had already founded a second Portuguese univer-
sity and also taken over the most important university colleges. Francisco de Borja, a lay person
who was married to a Portuguese woman, was the commissioner of the Company of Jesus in
Spain and Portugal. In the documents preserved, it is clear that the college of the Company of
Jesus in Salamanca received several Portuguese, both priests and laypersons (among other irst-
hand documents, it is useful to consult ms. 1547 of the University of Salamanca library).
Portuguese and Spanish Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Augustinians came togeth-
er in the evangelization of the East and West Indies. Eastern-bound missionary activity was
based in Portugal, from where missionaries of diferent nationalities sailed. he Franciscan
order was a pioneer in the missions of the East and West, hand in hand with the Portuguese.
Dominicans were present in the East from the very beginning of missionary activity. In
1548, Diego Bermúdez sailed for Goa leading a group of eleven other Dominicans. hree Span-
ish Dominicans founded a convent of their order in Macao in 1587: Antonio de Arcediano (who
came from the convent of San Pablo in Valladolid), Bartolomé López (from San Esteban in
Salamanca), and Alonso Delgado (from the convent of Peña de Francia in Salamanca). Most
Dominicans were from Portugal, which naturally led to the cultural and linguistic dominance
of Portuguese. Nevertheless, it is not easy to ind texts written in Portuguese, since they were
generally published in Latin (the language par excellence of men of letters such as Martín de
Ledesma) or in Castilian (such as the works of Juan de la Cruz, of Talavera). he Dominican
from Lisbon John de S. Tomás (1589–1644), for example, published all his works in Spain, where
he lived. His theological and philosophical works were published in Latin, while his letters from
China were published in Castilian.
Francis Xavier let for India in 1541 and died in Japan in 1552. His correspondence in Por-
tuguese with John III is well known, and over half of his texts were also written in Portuguese
(Alonso Romo 2000). Other Spanish Jesuits served as missionaries in the East, such as Jerónimo
de Cuenca, Francisco de Carrión, Pascual Catalán, Miguel Barul, and Alfonso López, and they
wrote texts in both Portuguese and Castilian (Alonso Romo 2002, 141–67). Pedro Páez (1565–
1622) from Madrid worked in Ethiopia and wrote a history of the country (História da Etiópia)
in Portuguese. he Catalan Antonio de Monserrat (c. 1536–1600), born in Vic, wrote texts about
the Moguls in Portuguese. he irst Jesuit to go to Brazil, the Portuguese Manuel da Nóbrega,
wrote in both Portuguese and in Castilian, and the great apostle of Brazil, the Spaniard José
de Anchieta, born in the Canary Islands, wrote texts in Castilian, Portuguese, Latin, and Tupi.
In the sixteenth century it was common for Portuguese clerics like the Franciscan António
de Portalegre to publish in Castilian. his may seem surprising to us today in light of several
questions. Did religious writers not write for the people? Did everyone understand Castilian?
However, it was quite natural to publish in Castilian given the context of Portuguese-Castilian
bilingualism that Portugal experienced during the sixteenth and irst half of the seventeenth
century, which reached its zenith during the sixty years of dual monarchy. In this way, Castilian
spiritual literature penetrated Portugal at an early period and became an important factor in
the expansion of the language.
Literary genres and biligualism
Castilian literature had already gained prestige and readers in Portugal by the end of the four-
teenth century. In the iteenth century, Prince Peter of Portugal wrote rhymes in Castilian,
although Galician-Portuguese had been the exclusive language of poetry until just a century
before. A very clarifying example is Cancionero de Baena (he Baena songbook, 1445), where
the older compositions of the poet Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino, born in Burgos, are in
Galician-Portuguese (the traditional language for lyric poetry) and the more recent in Castilian,
which had begun to gain ground on Portuguese. In the sixteenth century Sá de Miranda wrote
almost half his poetry in Castilian. As a matter of fact, all the Portuguese poets of the sixteenth
century also wrote works in Castilian, with the sole exception of António Ferreira.
Portuguese-Castilian bilingualism played a prominent role in the theater of the classical
age. Menéndez y Pelayo (1941) came to consider, quite emphatically, that there was but one
theater in the Iberian Peninsula: “there is no Portuguese theater, or Castilian, or Catalonian
theater, but rather Spanish theater, the sum and compendium of the ideas and feelings of the
race, as Camões was in the erudite and second-hand epic […] hat theater was one because
it responded to what everyone thought and believed.” Notwithstanding the relative scarcity of
Portuguese playwrights, the Portuguese public was notoriously fond of theater. López Pruden-
cio mentions that in the irst half of the sixteenth century the Portuguese traveled to Badajoz
to attend performances of farces next to the Cathedral. Although not numerous, there were
some Portuguese characters in Castilian works who spoke Portuguese, for example in several
of Diego Sánchez’s plays. Nevertheless, it was much more common to ind cases of Portuguese
characters speaking Castilian in the works of both Portuguese and Castilian authors, as we
shall see. It is absolutely necessary to highlight the fact that in Portugal, ater 1580 and during a
large part of the seventeenth century, works in Castilian by Castilian authors were represented
in patios (the Pátio do Borratém and the Pátio das Arcas date from around 1590) and corrales
(courtyards), set up in Spanish style. hese works had national and peninsular subject matter
and Lope de Vega was a favorite playwright.
Teyssier has studied the bilingualism of vicentine and post-vicentine theater in the six-
teenth century (especially Teyssier 2002). As for Gil Vicente himself, of the forty-six autos
(plays) that he wrote, approximately one third of his verses are in Castilian. here are iteen
plays written entirely in Portuguese (for example, Auto da Barca do Inferno [he boat to shell],
Farsa de Inês Pereira [he farce of Ines Pereira], and O Velho da Horta [he old man of the
vegetable garden]), twelve entirely in Castilian (for example, Auto Pastoril Castelhano [Castil-
ian Pastoral Play] and Dom Duardos), and nineteen bilingual autos (for example, Auto da Índia,
Auto dos Físicos [he physicians] and Floresta de Enganos [he forest of deception]). Gil Vicente
was perfectly familiar with the Castilian literature of his time (Juan del Enzina, Lucas Fernán-
dez, Amadís, Primaleón, Propaladia, La Celestina, etc.), which inspired some of the themes,
plots, and situations of his works. he corpus of post-vicentine theater, which was mainly writ-
ten for the general public, consisted of some forty plays by approximately ten authors, some of
them anonymous. hese works maintained the tradition of Portuguese-Castilian bilingualism.
he inluence of the erudite and Italianate theater of Sá de Miranda (Os Estrangeiros [he
strangers] and Os Vilhalpandos [he imposters]), António Ferreira (Bristo, Cioso and Castro),
and Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos (Eufrosina, Ulissypo and Aulegraia) counterbalanced in writ-
ten literature the original Spanish theatrical sources. his erudite theater abandoned the use of
Portuguese-Castilian bilingualism: only three secondary characters in the plays of Jorge Fer-
reira de Vasconcelos speak Castilian.
he dramatic works of Camões (Auto del Rei-Seleuco [Play of the king Seleucus], Auto dos
Enfatriões [Play of the two Amphitruos], and Auto de Filodemo [Play of Filodemo]) and Simão
Machado (Comédia de Diu [Comedy of Diu] and Comédia da Pastora Alfea [Comedy of the
shepardess Alfea]) synthesized the theater of the vicentine and Italianate traditions, although
in the case of Camões, the use of Castilian is not very representative. he theater of Simão
Machado, who, as a Franciscan friar, lived in Spain, is in a certain way indebted to that of Gil
Vicente, and has a signiicant Castilian component.
he bucolic and sentimental romance, which had not originated in the Iberian Peninsula,
did acquire a special nuance in Spain and Portugal thanks to the experimental blending of dif-
ferent inluences that took place in the western half of the peninsula; for example, elements of
Byzantine romances and books of chivalry were incorporated. he bucolic or pastoral romance
of the Greek-Latin tradition adopted Arcadia by Sannazaro as its immediate reference point,
but it acquired a new quality through contact with the literature set in the rural world of Tor-
res Naharro, Juan del Enzina, Lucas Fernández, and Gil Vicente. In this way a characteristic
pastoral romance was born. Its most notable representatives are Menina e Moça (he book of
the young girl), by Bernardim Ribeiro, Los siete libros de la Diana (he seven books of Diana),
by Jorge de Montemor, a Portuguese who signed his name as Montemayor, and Galatea, by
Cervantes, closely related to the work of Montemor. At the same time, the sentimental novel of
the Iberian Peninsula inherited a rich European tradition (Fiammetta by Boccaccio, Historia
de duobus amantibus [he story of two lovers] by the future Pius II, El siervo libre de amor [he
free servant of Love] by Rodríguez del Padrón, and the French writers Jean Froissart, Guillaume
de Machaut, and Christine de Pisan), but in the peninsula it was reformulated and extended to
the rest of Europe: Cárcel de amor (he prison of love) by Diego de San Pedro was translated
into Catalan in 1493, into Italian in 1515, into French in 1526, into German in 1530, and into
English in 1549. Menina e Moça (he book of the young girl) was also inluenced by the novela
sentimental (sentimental novel), and it is representative of the bucolic and sentimental novel in
the peninsula.
he Castilian and Portuguese cancioneros (songbooks) were the depositories of traditional
peninsular poetry as opposed to the Italianate forms of the Renaissance. Both the Portuguese
and the earlier Castilian cancioneros had a powerful inluence on the most important poets
of both literatures (Camões, Rodrigues Lobo, Lope, Quevedo, Góngora…). he Cancioneiro
Geral (he general songbook) of Garcia de Resende, which was published in Lisbon in 1516
by Germão de Campos, is an unavoidable reference point as a symbol of Hispano-Portuguese
collaboration, which excelled within the literary ield, as we have already mentioned. he Can-
cioneiro Geral, which includes compositions from between 1449 and 1516, is in the traditional
line of the Castilian books of verse of the iteenth and sixteenth centuries (Baena, 1445; Stúñiga,
1458), although its immediate model is that of Hernando del Castillo (1511). It is the main meet-
ing point for peninsular poetry of the iteenth century for several reasons: i) although most
are Portuguese, it includes some Castilian poets (Juan de Mena, Jorge Manrique, etc.), as well
as the initiator of Castilian-Portuguese bilingualism in Portuguese letters, Constable Peter of
Portugal; ii) seventy percent of the poets included wrote in Castilian; iii) fourteenth percent
of the nearly one thousand pieces that it includes are in Castilian; iv) it is the best exponent of
intertextuality and blends glosses or vueltas, stanzas with a motto, in Portuguese and in Castil-
ian, of known and anonymous poets. Its compiler, Garcia de Resende, was the irst author to
try to mythologize the theme of Inês de Castro, with long-lasting repercussions in the literature
of many nations besides Spain and Portugal. he Cancioneiro Geral includes mainly lyrical and
satirical poetry; and religious, epic, and moral poetry to a lesser extent. he previous Castilian
songbooks, the most important being Baena, also exhibited this bilingualism and variety.
Chivalric romances were widely read in the Iberian Peninsula in the iteenth, sixteenth,
and seventeenth centuries. As a matter of fact, Teresa de Avila famously regretted the time that
was wasted reading them. Although these works were not of Iberian origin, one of the most
important works of the genre was produced here, Amadís (Amadis of Gaul). his work was
inspired by the romances of the Brittany (Arthurian) cycle, mainly by Tristan and Lancelot.
In spite of the fact that readership reached its peak in the sixteenth century, this work was
written during the Middle Ages of the Iberian Peninsula and dates from before 1325. his date
marks the beginning of the reign of Afonso IV, who, as prince, had ordered a correction in the
episode of Dona Briolanja. As in the case of the Trojan chronicles, the lives of the saints, and
so many other medieval texts, we do not know its original language, although in this case it
seems that we should give priority to the Portuguese text. he earliest literary form that has
been preserved is the Castilian edition of 1508, published in Zaragoza by Garci Ordóñez de
Montalvo, who, according to his own confession, was familiar with both the primitive text and
the reformed one.
Portuguese-Castilian matrimonial alliances were not only common between royal fami-
lies; they were also popular among the nobility. Hence nobles from both countries shared an
interest in sports such as hunting, and also in the related works that nobles wrote and read.
Examples are Livro da Falcoaria (he book of falconry) by Pêro Menino, and Livro da Mon-
taria (he book of hunting) by John I, which were translated into Castilian several times in
the iteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. hey were irst translated at the end of the
fourteenth century by Pero López de Ayala, a prisoner at Óbidos ater the Castilian defeat in
Aljubarrota. Curiously enough, these same works were sometimes retranslated into Portuguese,
as translators were unaware of their Portuguese origin. he treatises of Menino and Ayala had
unique two-way journeys. In the iteenth century, the Portuguese bishop João da Costa or-
dered that all the texts of falconry in Sloane treatise 821 be copied. he third part consisted of
a Portuguese rendering of Ayala’s Castilian version (fs. 73–131), whose translator was unaware
that Ayala was following the original text by Menino (which, besides, was also present in the
same codex, fs. 5v-20). In 1616, Diogo Fernandes Ferreira wrote a work on falconry and in-
cluded the full version of Ayala’s Castilian translation, which he re-translated into Portuguese
without ever realizing that the true author was Menino. Aterwards, in 1625, Juan Bautista de
Morales translated Ferreira’s work (ms. 4241 of the National Library in Madrid) into Castilian,
unaware that Ferreira had taken it from Ayala and for this reason, Morales himself was translat-
ing it back into the original Castilian. his is just one episode among others that demonstrates
the permeability of languages and themes.
he only Trojan chronicle preserved in Portuguese, La Coronica Troiana em Limguoajem
Purtugesa (he Trojan chronicle in Portuguese), considered until recently the translation of
Historia Destructionis Trojae (History of the destruction of Troy) by Guido de Columna, is in
reality the translation of Crónica Troyana (he trojan chronicle) in Castilian, which had iteen
editions between 1490 and 1587. Concretely, it is the translation of the 1527 edition, from which
the translator worked directly. his is conirmed by the crossings-out in the Coronica manu-
script, which prove that he translated as he read this version (García Martín 1998).
Seventeenth century
he political repercussions of the Restoration caused Portugal and Spain to turn their backs
on each other, similar to Siamese twins. However, this was not the case in the cultural milieu,
where the social and literary prestige of Castilian continued for decades. During the second half
of the seventeenth century, the compositions of the Academia de los Singulares de Lisboa (Acad-
emy of Illustrious People of Lisbon) were published twice, and Góngora was all the rage (Ares
Montes 1956). Some thirty members of the academy read their poems and speeches in Castilian
(Garcia Peres 1890, 6). John IV himself, now king, published Defensa de la Música moderna (In
defense of modern music) in Castilian. Furthermore, many works were published in Castilian
in the second half of the seventeenth century, as mentioned above.
In the Portuguese court there were many female authors who wrote in Castilian. Most of
them wrote during the seventeenth century, such as Ângela de Azevedo, Luísa de Azevedo, Juli-
ana Maria de António, Soror Violante do Céu, Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda, Sor Maria do Céu,
Isabel Correa, Leonarda Gil da Gama (pseudonym of Glória Magdalena Eufemia), and Maria
Josefa Caetana Guerra Pitta, among others.
Portuguese Jews and Castilian
Portuguese Jews received the greatest beneits from Castilian’s universality, and also from the
fact that the Inquisition in Castile was not as harsh as in Portugal, although it had adopted
Spanish methods in the second half of the sixteenth century. hus, a signiicant percentage of
the Portuguese who were writing in Castilian were Jewish. Castilian ofered them renown in
Europe, and there were numerous publications in this language. Many Portuguese and Spanish
Jews, such as Spinoza, published works ater their exile to the Netherlands, France, or Italy. he
“Report of the Spanish Royal Academy to the Catálogo of Garcia Peres” echoes this point in the
following terms:
But this synthesis will not be so brief as to not expressly call attention to another of the high
qualities that recommend it, and that is the bibliographical register and examination of Hispa-
no-Rabbinical literature, whose elements this Dictionary provides as does no other of our own
or foreign. No one of importance is unaware that most Jewish and Judaizing writers were born
in the kingdom formed by Alfonso Enríquez, having preferred Castilian for their publications
for propaganda purposes, since knowledge of Portuguese has also been very, very scarce in
Europe. (Garcia Peres 1890, 8)
Because of Castilian’s ability to be understood abroad, many works of a practical nature, such as
medical books, were written directly in Castilian by Portuguese authors, and in many cases by
Portuguese Jews. hese works were oten printed in Portugal. For example, in 1601 Ambrosio
Nunes, professor of medicine in Salamanca, published in Coimbra a treatise on the plague in
Castilian: Tractado repartido en cinco partes principales que declaran el mal que signiica este
nombre Peste con todas sus causas… (Treatise in ive principal parts that declare the vileness that
this name Plague signiies with all its causes…). Henrique Jorge Henriques, also a professor in
Salamanca, published in this city Tratado del perfecto médico, dividido en cinco diálogos (Trea-
tise on the perfect physician, divided into ive dialogues, 1595), one of the irst works on medical
ethics. Another notable Portuguese, Juan Méndez Nieto (which is how he signed his name), a
Jew from Miranda do Douro who practiced medicine in the New World, wrote Discursos Me-
dicinales (Medical discourses) in Castilian. Cristóvão da Costa, who accompanied the Viceroy
Luís de Ataíde to India following the example of Garcia de Orta (whom he praised profusely),
wrote Tratado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales, con sus plantas debuxadas al
bivo por Chistoval de Acosta… (Treatise on the drugs and medicines of the East Indies, with its
plants drawn from live samples by Chistoval de Acosta…, 1578).
Translations
It may seem apparent that Portuguese authors were held back by their bilingualism from ren-
dering their works in Portuguese or other languages into Castilian. Nevertheless, we can name
several examples. As early as the iteenth century, we ind the self-translation by Constable
Dom Pedro de Portugal of his work Satira de Infelice y Felice Vida (A satire of unhappy and
happy life). In the sixteenth century, for the purpose of greater difusion, Pedro Nunes, among
others, published in Antwerp a self-translation of a work initially written in Portuguese
although never published, Libro de álgebra en aritmética y geometría (Book of algebra in arith-
metic and geometry).
Furthermore, translations from Castilian to Portuguese were also scarce, and quite oten
translations into Portuguese from other languages were biased by previous Castilian renderings.
We have no evidence, for instance, that Martín de Azpilcueta, “Doctor Navarro,” self-translator
of his works from Latin to Castilian, translated his works into Portuguese, in spite of having
been a professor at Coimbra between 1538 and 1555. he irst translation of a work as important
as Don Quixote dates from 1794, almost two centuries ater its publication in Spain. Dom Pe-
dro, the irst Duke of Coimbra, used Diego de Cartagena, Bishop of Burgos and a diplomat in
Portugal, as a model for his translations of Cicero’s De senectute and De oiciis. he printer and
translator Valentim Fernandes de Morávia, who had printed in Lisbon Glosa famosísima a las
Coplas [de Jorge Manrique] (Very famous gloss to the stanzas [by Jorge Manrique], 1501) and
Proverbios (Proverbs, 1501) by Marquis of Santillana, translated himself Reportorio dos Tempos,
trasladado de Castelhano en Portugues per Valentim Fernãdez Alemão […] con outras adições
que não ha no Castelhano (Repertoire of the times, translated from Castilian to Portuguese by
Valentim Fernãdez Alemão […] with other additions that were not in Castilian) (Lisbon, 1518).
Besides, Fernandes de Morávia reveals Alfonso de Palencia’s inluence in the preface to Livro
de Nicolao Veneto (he book of Nicolao Veneto), in which he partially translated that which
Palencia had written in 1457 for Batalla campal de los perros contra los lobos (A pitched battle of
the dogs against the wolves) (Fernández Sánchez and Sabio Pinilla 2003: 213).
Most of the works translated into Portuguese fall under the category of religious literature
(lives of the saints, books of devotion, biblical fragments, moral works, etc.). Even so, in the
sixteenth century translations into Portuguese were not as proliic as those into other languages.
he widespread knowledge of Castilian (the best exponent of which is the theater in Castilian
that the common people were so fond of), along with abundant Castilian translations, saved
them this efort. In fact, during the periods of Humanism and the Reformation, the only Por-
tuguese translation of a book of the Bible was O Livro do Eclesiastes (he book of Ecclesiastes)
by Damião de Góis (1502–1574). his manuscript was in the library of All Souls College at the
University of Oxford until T. F. Earle published it in a critical edition in 2002. Contemptus
mundi (Contempt of the world) by homas à Kempis was translated into Portuguese at the end
of the iteenth century (and in 1670 by Diogo Vaz Carrillo), but it circulated in Portugal in a
Castilian translation beginning in 1542. Ater 1555 Fr. Luis de Granada’s Castilian translation
prevailed, and was re-edited twelve times before 1631. Furthermore, the works of this Spanish
Dominican, who lived in Portugal from 1550 until his death in 1588, were published twice in
Latin, sixteen times in Castilian, and four times in Portuguese (A. A. G. Rodrigues 1992, 28).
he Augustinian from Porto, Fray Sebastião Toscano, was the author of the irst translation into
Castilian of the Confessions of St. Augustine, published in Salamanca in 1554. his work was
read by St. Teresa (as she stated in Libro de la vida [her autobiography]) and by other Spanish
mystics of the Golden Age.
Printing
he printing of Portuguese books in Spain and Castilian books in Portugal in both languages
was common practice. In 1605, two editions (and a re-edition) of Don Quixote were published
in Lisbon. We should also mention editions which were preserved in one country and not the
other. One very peculiar case is that of Audi, ilia, by St. John of Avila. Its irst edition, published
in Alcalá in 1556, was destroyed by the Inquisition and today only two copies are preserved,
both of them in Portugal (in the National Library of Lisbon and in the Public Library of Évora).
Camões
Although the number of Castilian writers using Camões’s language was not large, there were
many who read and emulated this great epic writer. It has been written that if it had not been
for Camões, the traditional poetry of the Iberian Peninsula would have been lost. Although this
statement is an exaggeration, it does shed some light on his excellence in cultivating traditional
meter. Camões’ mastery in Renaissance lyric and epic poetry is also legendary.
A short time before Camões’ death in 1580, Fernando de Herrera, commentator of Gar-
cilaso’s poetry and himself a well-known poet, referred to the Portuguese author with encomi-
astic terms in Anotaciones a Garcilaso (Notes to Garcilaso): “Luis de Camões also touched this
place in Canto I of his beautiful and elegant work, Lusíadas.”
he irst translation of Os Lusíadas (he Lusiads) into Castilian was by a Portuguese, Ben-
to Caldeira (known as Benito Caldera in Castilian), in 1580. It preceded that of Luis Gómez
de Tapia of Seville by a few days. he most illustrious commentator of Portuguese epic and
lyric poetry, Manuel de Faria e Sousa, wrote his commentary on this work in the language of
Cervantes. By the time Os Lusíadas had reached three editions in Portuguese, it had already
reached them in Castilian (those of Benito Caldera in Alcalá and Luis Gómez de Tapia in Sala-
manca, both from 1580, and that of Enrique Garcés, in Madrid in 1591).
Camões’ Rimas (Rhymes) was read and emulated in Spain by great poetic geniuses like
no other work from Portuguese literature. Quevedo imitated several of Camões’ sonnets, in
some cases slavishly as in “Amor é fogo que arde sem se ver…” (Love is a ire that burns without
lame). Lope de Vega, the “Prince of Spanish Wits,” quoted Camões in his epic and lyric poetry
many times, and reproduced some of his verses. Cervantes, who was inluenced by another
Portuguese writer, Jorge de Montemor (or Montemayor, as he signed his name), when writing
La Galatea, refers in this same work (book VI, “Canto a Calíope” [Song to Calliope] l. 273) to Os
Lusíadas as “the unique treasure of the Portuguese.”1 In addition, in Don Quixote (part 2, chap.
LVIII) he wrote: “We have studied two eclogues, one by the famous poet Garcilaso and the
other by the superb Camões,”2 both of whom were quite possibly the greatest lyrical poets of the
Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century. he Aragonese Jesuit, Baltasar Gracián, a writer who
1. “de Luso el sin igual tesoro”

2. “Traemos estudiadas dos églogas, una del famoso poeta Garcilaso, y otra del excelentísimo Camoes, en su
misma lengua portuguesa.”
inluenced authors of universal renown such as Voltaire, La Rochefoucault, Schopenhauer, and

Nietzsche, transcribed twenty-some fragments of Camões in two of his most important works,
El Criticón (he faultinder) and Agudeza y arte de ingenio (he wit and art of genius). hese
fragments, almost all of them from his lyric poetry, are included as models worthy of emulation.
Gracián described Camões as afectionate, immortal, famous, witty, great poet, serious and
subtle, celebrated, always sharp. Camões’ sonnet “Sete anos de pastor Jacob servia…” (Jacob
served as a shepherd seven years…) was widely disseminated in Spain, and it was admired,
translated, and imitated by many Castilian poets.
In his prologue to the translation of Os Lusíadas by Luis Gómez de Tapia, Francisco Sán-
chez, “El Brocense”, wrote the following: “such is my impression of Luys de Camões the Portu-
guese, whose subtle wit, upright doctrine, and knowledge of languages clearly show that noth-
ing is lacking in the perfection of so great a reputation.” his period saw the debut, with an ode
in proparoxytones, of a poet who would later become very famous, Luis de Góngora. here
were several epic poems written in Spain that echoed Os Lusíadas (Jerusalén conquistada [Jeru-
salem conquered] by Lope de Vega, Historia de las cosas del Oriente [A history of things of the
Orient] by Antonio Centeno, La restauración de España [he restoration of Spain] by Cristóbal
de Mesa, El Macabeo [he Maccabee] by Miguel de Silveira). he Salamancan Baltasar de Vi-
toria quotes no less than twenty fragments from Os Lusíadas in the second part of Teatro de los
dioses de la Gentilidad (heater of the gods of gentility), a kind of mythological dictionary for
use by poets (“not all poets have news of Latin”). he same work cites other Portuguese authors
worthy of emulation, such as André de Resende, António Ferreira, and Rodrigues Lobo, which
sheds light on the relationship between the two literatures.
hus, epic and lyric poets, grammarians and literary theorists (El Brocense and Cascales,
for example), and scholars and writers of all kinds (Luis Vélez de Guevara, Saavedra Fajar-
do, and D. Francisco Manuel de Melo), praised the great Portuguese bard. On the other hand,
Camões was also inluenced by Castilian poets like Garcilaso, Boscán, Jorge Manrique, and
Castillejo (Camões 1929).
hemes
he Portuguese and Castilian languages can both be found in the Romancero, a collection of
ballads of Castilian origin. In fact, the two countries have oten shared themes throughout the
diferent genres of their literature. One such theme is the story of the ill-fated love between the
future Peter I of Portugal and a lady of his court, the Galician Inês de Castro. his has been a
constant theme in Portuguese literature, and can also be found in Spanish authors like Gabriel
Lasso de la Vega, Lope de Vega, Jerónimo Bermúdez, and Vélez de Guevara. Another shared
theme is Sebastianism, which deals with the death of the Portuguese King Sebastian in the
battle of Alcazarquivir, causing Portugal to become subject to Spain from 1580 to 1640. Sebas-
tianism was a theme with lasting echoes in both literatures from the outset. Fray Luis de León,
Fernando de Herrera, Luis Barahona de Soto, Lope de Vega, and Jerónimo de Cuéllar, among
others, contributed to its difusion in Spain. Of all the genres in which Portuguese themes can
be found, their presence was most notable in the Spanish drama of the Golden Age thanks to
authors like Lope, Tirso, and Calderón. he great critic and contemporary historian of Portu-
guese literature António José Saraiva has summarized this commingling of realities, desires,
and intentions thus:
It has been said, although in general it has been forgotten, that until well into the eighteenth
century Portuguese literature was a regional expression of a peninsular whole. Castilian au-
thors and their interpreters did not feel foreign in Portuguese territory, just as the Portuguese
did not feel foreign in Castilian territory. (Saraiva 1946, 53)
Literary language and diatopic variation
Catalan literary cultures
Vicent Salvador
Introduction: Linguistic variation, history, and cultures
It is an undeniable fact that natural languages are at the same time historical languages. his
means that what we might perceive today as a single well-deined language, endowed with
structures that can be described by linguists as static, is really nothing more than the visible
outcome of a long process positioned somewhere on the coordinates of history. From this point
of view, linguistic variation (which may be diachronic, geographic, social, or functional) should
not be seen as the exception but rather as the norm, that is, something usual and to be expected.
he history of a language includes the linguistic changes that have taken place because of
variations in certain structures. It also includes the changes that have come about due to the
instability of the social usages the language is put to and also to the modiications that occur in
the linguistic consciousness of (groups of) its speakers. hus, issues such as the perception of the
unity of a given language, the social prestige granted to the use of certain varieties over others,
and the employment of speciic discursive genres (along with the particular registers within the
language that are associated with each genre) are substantial facts in the history of the language
in question (Nicolàs 1998). To these elements we can also add the distance existing, for each pe-
riod and genre, between literary written language and oral discourse. hese facts have a decisive
efect on the discursive praxis that makes up a language’s literary tradition and canon of values,
that is, the archive of literary texts that remains operative in the memory of a cultural-linguistic
community (Salvador 2001).
In the case of Catalan, things are no diferent from what we have outlined above. Like
English or Spanish, in medieval times Catalan also built an image as a language of culture in
the eyes of its speakers and its neighbors who spoke other languages. hroughout history, the
perception of Catalan has undergone luctuations (which have been more pronounced than
those of English and Spanish) that range from the language being considered a single unit to
its being seen as a set of registers and varieties. Catalan has been used in a number of literary
genres, in some of which the dialectal variation used by the author or authors, as well as by the
readers who enjoy these works, is allowed to show through.
Nevertheless, the history of Catalan and its literary tradition obviously display certain
characteristic features. his is especially true with regard to those concerning certain centuries
(roughly those of the Modern Age) in which the awareness of sharing a single language and
cultural communication between the diferent regions was notably weakened, in spite of the fact
that the geographical framework of Catalan is much smaller than that of other European lan-
guages. he historical conditions of a language that had always lacked a state of its own undeni-
ably play a part in this anomaly. Likewise, the inluence exerted for centuries by Castilian (either
because of legal imposition, the demands imposed by the editorial market, or due to the seducing
efect it exercized over the Catalan-speaking community) is a key aspect that cannot be neglected
when it comes to explaining the ups and downs of the history of Catalan language and culture.
430 Vicent Salvador
Besides the inluence of Spanish language and culture, we should also take into account
that of other neighboring languages and cultures. In the Middle Ages, contact with Arab culture
and, to an even greater extent, with Provençal had a deep impact on the literary development
of Catalan. Moreover, the inluence of French on the language spoken in North Catalonia or
the impact of Italian on that used in the Sardinian town of l’Alguer are signiicant phenomena
in the history of Catalan and its dialects. he repercussion of these two literatures on Catalan
was decisive at diferent moments in the history of its literature. he efect of Spanish, however,
was far more important because it lasted for centuries over a large part of Catalonia, not just
in bordering regions. his was the result of a campaign to expand the use of Spanish, which
let its mark on the structures of the language and inluenced important areas of usage over the
years. Another factor not to be overlooked was the powerful attraction of neighboring litera-
tures, especially as far as the Renaissance and Baroque periods were concerned, which eventu-
ally gave rise to a satellization of Catalan literature, as we shall see. he permanent presence of
Spanish is responsible for heterogeneity and plurality in the Catalan literary tradition, far more
so than diatopic or dialectal variation. It is beyond doubt that the geographical distribution of
the inluence of Spanish culture, which was more prominent in the Valencian region than in
other regions, is one of the factors determining the heterogeneity of Catalan and its literary
tradition. According to scholars such as Jordi Rubió i Balaguer and Joan Fuster, the history of
Catalan culture cannot be explained without taking into account the works of Catalan writers
in other languages ranging from Provençal to Arabic and Castilian, the latter being obviously
the most important.
hus, the history of Catalan as a standardized language, provided with models for literary
usage, is a complex conjunction of several factors: a) diatopic variation; b) the inluence of Cas-
tilian as a language in contact (and sometimes in conlict) with it; c) the degree of detachment
between oral and written discourse within the framework of the evolution of literary genres
(where popular theatre, for example, is more tied to oral discourse than other genres, and is
therefore more permeable to diatopic variation). hese factors are interrelated, developing over
time in the concrete historical context of each period.
he supradialectal model in the Middle Ages
Josep M. Nadal (1992, 88–101), following Rogert Wright, drew attention to the complexity in-
volved in realizing that Romance languages were diferent from Latin. Written Latin had been
perceived for centuries as another level of one’s own language, that is, of each of the dialects that
had their own way of “saying” the written word they all shared in. Indeed, the discovery that
Latin was a dead language – an alterity – was a decisive step for medieval linguistic culture. It
spurred the cultivation of vernacular languages as a vehicle for the production of learned prose,
a notion that Dante had defended. Similarly, the consolidation of learned written discourse in
Catalan throughout the fourteenth and iteenth centuries represented a qualitative change in
the history of this language.
From the year 1344 onwards, medieval Catalan, which naturally presented diatopic varia-
tion in spoken language, had an institution created by King Peter the Ceremonious, that uniied
Literary language and diatopic variation 431
the written language used for more learned purposes: the Cancelleria Reial (Royal Chancellery).
Its main purpose was to unify the way oicial documents were written in the Kingdom of Ara-
gon, that included the Catalan-speaking realms. he Chancellery served as a reference point
not only for the administrative domain but also for literary writings. Ultimately, there can only
be a supradialectal model for written language if there is a standard for professionally produced
writing, which in the days before the printing press was set by professional scribes (Cameron
1995, 42).
he eforts of this institution to unify learned prose were so efective that it has become
controversial to assign a particular geographical region as the origin of certain works. his was
the case with the anonymous iteenth-century chivalric romance Curial e Güelfa (Curial and
Guelfa), that literary historians have attributed to authors of widely varying geographical ori-
gins, arousing iercely disputed debates among specialists.
As far as poetry is concerned, a large part of medieval Catalan lyrical work was composed
in Provençal. his language was highly esteemed by troubadours, and was decisive in the adop-
tion of a diferentiated code for the creation of lyrical works. he Catalan poets Guillem de
Berguedà (c1138-c1196) and Jordi de Sant Jordi (latter years of fourteenth century-1424) are
two notable examples of this practice. Poets gradually began to adopt Catalan as part of the
processes of deprovençalizing and then catalanizing their writings. he poetry of Ausiàs March
(1400/1401–1459) is usually cited as marking a turning point in this development. he language
of this great iteenth-century Valencian poet, who played a key role in the spread of petrarchism
throughout the Iberian Peninsula, still contains certain features that are close to the language
of the troubadours. Nevertheless, March seems to have been determined to shape a voice of his
own in Catalan, which he used to express his powerful subjectivity, his passion in love, and his
discerning relections on existence. Lexical historians have noted the use of some distinctive
features from his own dialect, that in no way respond to a will to dialectize, since the language
he uses is cultured and its the model developed by the Chancellery; rather, it is a result of the
porosity of his language with respect to certain commonplace words in the Valencia of that time.
Ramon Llull (c1232-c1315) was another poet, although he was far more productive in prose.
A proliic writer and encyclopedic and insightful thinker, Llull was born in Majorca and, in ad-
dition to Catalan, also used Latin, Provençal, and Arabic in his works. Historians consider Llull
the writer who most contributed to the shaping of Catalan prose. His inluence has oten been
compared to that of King Alfonso X in the case of Castilian. Another parallel could be drawn
between Llull and a great English writer of the same period, Chaucer, whose literature has gone
down in the history of the English language not only as narration, but as one of the milestones
in the use of English for expressing scientiic discourse (Halliday 1993).
One signiicant episode in the literary language of the late iteenth century is the use of
the expression “valenciana prosa” to describe the afected Latinized writing style of a group of
authors from that period, whose most eminent representative was the Valencian Joan Roís de
Corella (1435–1497). he fact that a particular way of writing was labeled “Valencian” has caused
debate among linguistic historians over whether (and to what extent) this expression referred
to a geographical variant or to nothing more than a “style” that was more or less systemized and
received this name because its chief exponents were Valencians. During the iteenth century
the city of Valencia underwent a period of social and cultural splendor and, consequently, its
432 Vicent Salvador
citizens commenced a rivalry with Barcelona. One of the outcomes of this competition was
probably the tendency to encourage citizens to be proud of the name of their language, which
was oten called “Valencian,” but without breaking down the conception of the whole Valen-
cian-Catalan linguistic continuum as a single unit. he denomination “valenciana prosa” could
undoubtedly be linked to such an attitude. It is not my intention to go into this controversial
issue here, and, in any case, I do not believe it is especially relevant to the subject matter at hand.
However, what is beyond a doubt is that Corella’s contemporaries were aware that a group of
Valencian writers had elaborated a particularly reined literary discourse that was comparable
to that of Juan de Mena in the Castilian literature of the same period. It is also clear that this
literature sought to give prestige to works written in vernacular romance, and that it attempted
to resemble Latin by emulating its syntax and using hyperbaton, which produced a somewhat
unnatural efect in Catalan. he very position of the adjective “valenciana” before the noun,
which is its normal position in English, seems undeniably contrived in Catalan and gives the
expression “valenciana prosa” an iconic nature that illustrates its ornateness and its detachment
from oral language. Present-day linguistic historians use precisely this term, “ornate,” (“artitzat”
in Catalan) to refer to the writings of these authors (Nadal and Prats 1996).
he modern age: Castilianization, dialectalization, and oralization of literary Catalan
he advent of the printing press was a turning point in the history of languages of culture.
Printing, which operates according to market demands, introduced commercial feasibility into
the literary sphere. Moreover, and in accordance with the very principles of business logic, it
reduces the variation among languages and strives to establish a homogeneous, practical stan-
dard as a sort of lingua franca. In the history of the English language, the assortment of dialects
that were used in the literature of Chaucer’s time gave way to a tendency in Shakespeare’s age
to prefer the language of the court and the merchant class of London. his standardizing ideol-
ogy, which was fostered by printing houses and the emerging igure of the copy editor, led to a
gradual decline in dialectal variation. Style became a kind of residual variation, the last sanctu-
ary of the writer’s linguistic optionality. However, this sanctuary was conditioned by the con-
ventions of each literary genre and by the space that each genre grants to dialects. hese factors
generated the illusion of a homogeneous, generally valid model of language, which reinforced
the perception of the unity of language.
he case of Catalan in the Modern Age was quite diferent. he printing houses did not
successfully fulill the agglutinating role they ought to have played as heirs to the unifying
procedures of the Royal Chancellery. his was because, in certain kinds of publications, Latin
competed for some time with Romance languages on account of its immense potential for in-
ternational distribution and its capacity to increase the output and proitability of the printing
business. When Romance literatures inally entered the publishing scene, Catalan was a late
starter – in the sixteenth century it no longer possessed the creative vigor its literary production
had achieved during the previous century (Fuster 1992). he writings of classic authors from
the iteenth century such as Ausiàs March and non-literary works of a more functional nature
(particularly devotional literature) were published, but as far as literary creation was concerned,
Castilian and its brilliant literature of the Golden Age rose to take the lead. Furthermore, be-
ginning in the irst decade of the sixteenth century the free commercial circulation among the
diferent realms under the Spanish monarchy facilitated the distribution of books in Castilian.
In any event, the implementation and development of printing had a wide range of con-
sequences for Catalan. According to Ferrando (1999), on the one hand, it allowed the survival
of certain models of a language of culture throughout the centuries when Castilianization (the
spread of the Castilian language in the Catalan-speaking territories) was at its strongest. On the
other hand, the search for stylistic modernization induced by the Renaissance brought learned,
written discourse closer to colloquial language, which entailed making certain concessions with
respect to dialects. Obviously, Catalan did not have a igure like the Castilian grammarian An-
tonio de Nebrija, who played a crucial role in optimizing the possibilities ofered by printing
to serve the interests of a national state. Catalan did not have access to such possibilities and,
ater Regles per a esquivar vocables o mots grossers e pagesívols (Rules for avoiding rude and
provincial words or expressions) – a kind of “style guide” that ofered rules for keeping Catalan
as pure as possible –, it did not even have any proposals for uniied models of language ofering
supradialectal guidelines. In such circumstances, the degree to which printing allowed dialectal
diferences to emerge was inversely proportional to the cultural and aesthetic ambition of the
works that were published. At the same time, printing helped to reduce these diferences.
As we have already mentioned, during this time Castilianization was an important process
that partly had its origins in literary discourse. Literature, due to its linguistic ornateness, was a
ield in which many writers deserted Catalan in favor of Castilian, as was the case of the Catalan
Joan Boscà (or Juan Boscán, in Castilian). he prestige of the Spanish literature of the time and
the fascination with Castilian were extremely powerful incentives for this change within poetry
and other genres. In fact, Castilian literature in the sixteenth century was associated with mo-
dernity, with the new times. Some of the most important compilations of Spanish poetry of that
period, such as Cancionero general (General songbook, 1511) by Hernando del Castillo and Flor
de enamorados (Lovers’ lower, 1562), compiled by the Valencian Joan Timoneda (1518/20–1583),
were published in Valencia and Barcelona. Although both works also include poems in Catalan,
there was clearly an overwhelming preference for Castilian lyrical poetry. his was not the case
of the Majorcan printing houses, where the dissemination of Castilian was much slower.
he Castilianization of the Valencian Court of the Vicereine Germana de Foix, the sec-
ond wife of Ferdinand the Catholic Monarch, had an important efect on the production of
bilingual literature. Something similar can be said of Valencian drama in the sixteenth century,
which included some of the most prominent playwrights of Spanish literature. In fact, the city
of Valencia led the way in the process of Castilianization of literature and the court, which
was to occur much later in other parts of the linguistic territory. With the introduction of Ba-
roque trends in the Sacred Oratory and the tendency toward the artistic elaboration of sermons,
preaching became more frequently viewed as a mere literary exercise. hus, concern for the
religious eicacy of the sermon gave way to a progressive identiication of religious sermons as
an opportunity for the orator to display his virtuosity. In this context, it was easier to launt one’s
oratory skills in Castilian than in the colloquialized Catalan used in the tradition of Sant Vicent
Ferrer (1350–1419). Consequently, the audience gradually yielded to the language declaimed by
Castilian preachers.
434 Vicent Salvador
One of the most typical genres of the Renaissance, sometimes linked to Erasmism, is the
learned colloquy. One of its most notable examples is that written by Cristòfol Despuig (1510–
1574) for printing in 1557 (although it was not published until 1877) entitled Los col·loquis de
la insigne ciutat de Tortosa (he colloquies of the very distinguished city of Tortosa). In this
work, the Tortosa-born author deals with the dialectal diferences and the unity of the Catalan
language, among other matters. he language used in the work displays a wish to dignify the
Romance languages by the careful elaboration of a noble, select language that is not free of some
Latin syntactic devices. At the same time, the attempts to give the appearance of naturalness
and dialogism that are so characteristic of the Renaissance colloquy fostered a certain tendency
toward colloquialism, which allowed the author to occasionally make moderate use of turns of
phrase typical of the dialects of Tortosa and Valencia (Badia Margarit 2003). Of course, we must
not mistake this elaborate, elegant prose for the versiied discourse of the popular colloquies of
later centuries, oten published on loose sheets, which gave free rein to colloquial and decidedly
dialectal expressions.
he Baroque tendencies that favored the substitution of the language in the Sacred Oratory
also fostered the development of popular literature within the mass culture of the Counter-
Reformation period. he erotic production of the Baroque period – which was not at all subver-
sive – continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesc Vicent Garcia
(1578/79–1623) from Tortosa and the Valencian Pere Jacint Morlà (?-1656) are prototypical ex-
ponents of the subordination of this type of poetry to the Baroque trend in Spanish literature.
Morlà, the author of festive poems and colloquies, employed many Valencian dialectal turns of
phrase, as well as lexical and syntactic elements borrowed from Castilian, in his verses. Garcia,
better known as the “Rector of Vallfogona,” became a legendary igure to whom was attributed
the authorship of many burlesque works that were oten steeped in eroticism and more than a
few scatological references. More importantly, this author oten used play on words typical of
Spanish Baroque poetry. García’s most venerated models were Francisco de Quevedo (1580–
1645) and the conceptist, humoristic verses of Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), which can clearly
be seen in some of his poems, such as the sonnet devoted to a pock-marked maiden, which is
practically a correlate of the sonnet Quevedo dedicated to a nose. he same resources are used:
hyperbole, wit, amphibology, and development of a single theme (the efects of smallpox on a
face, in one case, and the disproportionate nose, in the other) with the intention of humiliating
his subject matter.
At this point in time we ind a transposition of Spanish models into the Catalan language,
demonstrating the literary subjection of Catalan to Castilian in the cultural diasystem of the
Spanish monarchy of the time. We could therefore speak of a satellite literature that orbited
around the dominant models of an alien literature, even though it continued to use its own lan-
guage. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the learned dramatic production of the Barcelona-
born playwright Francesc Fontanella (1622–1681/85) and the Minorcan Joan Ramis (1746–1819).
he former was clearly inluenced by the Spanish comedy of Lope and Calderón. Ramis, on the
other hand, imported the model of French neo-classical tragedy with Lucrècia (Lucrece), that
he wrote in 1769 while Minorca was under English rule. Although he also wrote in Castilian
and Latin, this work shows the author’s interest in European culture. His later dramatic works
were to follow the model of Spanish comedy.
Ramis usually wrote in a rich and balanced literary Catalan, but he occasionally included
traces of the dialect spoken on the island of Minorca. For example, in his play Rosaura o el més
constant amor (Rosaura or the irmest love), which is set in the court of Lisbon and follows the
canons of Lope de Vega’s comedies (including the igure of the “gracioso,” a character that seeks
the complicity of the audience), the servant Vinblanc uses the Minorcan dialect instead of the
cultured Catalan spoken by the characters of the court. he introduction of a local variant of
the language is a result of an internal movement within theatrical semiotics; the words of the
servant are fully functionalized as a register of colloquial sincerity, as he tells everyone the score
in a burlesque, jocular tone. Several diatopic variations of a lexical and morphological nature
(the Balearic verb morphology and the use of the “salat” article, which comes from the Latin
ipse) are good examples of the dialectal color of a character who, from the point of view of
Baroque ideology, ought to be characterized as an upholder of a colloquial plainness linked to
popular sincerity. Not even the ornateness of the verse prevents this semiotic efect from show-
ing through. However, we must keep in mind that this is merely a literary efect.
During this period, Catalan can clearly be labeled a “satellite culture” with respect to
Spanish. his can be deemed not only by the massive inlux of Castilian in the editions printed
in the Catalan-speaking territories from the sixteenth century onwards, but also by a more
subtle invasion, a sort of literary colonization, achieved through works written in Catalan. We
have mentioned only a few examples of the many Catalan works of the Baroque period that
came under the subjugation of Castilian themes and models. Portugal faced a similar situa-
tion, and both Catalan and Portuguese literature entered the orbit of the Baroque style of the
Hispanic monarchy.
In the history of the spread and ascent of these Spanish literary models, one very interest-
ing but complex case deserves further attention. his refers to the narratives written by the
Valencian friar Lluís Galiana (1740–1771), who in 1768 published a particularly ornate short
story in line with the rococo style in vogue at the time (Rossich 1990). he author uses a series
of adages, idioms, and locutions, undoubtedly with the intention of recording them within a
literary text and thus saving them from ephemeral orality. His intention is signiicant because
phraseological units are one of the most easily recognizable deposits of group identity. Further-
more, Galiana did not undertake his venture by simply elaborating a narrative fabric in which
to lodge the idiomatic expressions, as though in some efectual formaldehyde; instead he sought
to “dignify” the operation by explicitly resorting to two distinguished representatives from the
neighboring literature that lay at the very heart of the diasystem: Quevedo’s Cuento de cuentos
(Tale of tales) from the seventeenth century and Historia de historias (Story of stories) by Diego
de Torres Villarroel from the eighteenth century.
By imitating these authors, Galiana, although he claims to have done it in jest, shows a
clear dependence on Castilian literature. While the context of Spanish literature could aford
the luxuries of metalinguistic mockery (the Diccionario de Autoridades [Dictionary of Authori-
ties] hastily included Quevedo’s joke), Galiana carried out the fundamental task of collecting
within his narrative discourse the valuable turns of phrase he sought to salvage from oblivion.
Paradoxically, Galiana’s Rondalla de rondalles has stood the test of time better than his Castilian
models and is more widely read today than Quevedo’s work and especially than the wearisome
text by Torres Villarroel (Salvador 2001: 81–101).
436 Vicent Salvador
Galiana’s work was very unusual in the context of Catalan literature of that time, in which
Valencian scholars such as Gregori Mayans i Siscar (1718–1801) preferred to remain silent in
Catalan and write in Castilian. Nevertheless, this was a time in which the isolation of the Valen-
cian cultural media began to break down thanks to the relations established among the erudite
igures of Catalonia and Valencia, mostly through epistolary channels. However, Galiana’s pro-
posal, which was intended for the ield of learned literature but enjoyed extraordinary popular
acceptance, did not prosper. he author was aware of his prowess and of the diiculty entailed
in writing in a language which had seen previous splendor, as can be deduced from the pro-
logue of his work, which is subtle and full of irony. In it, Galiana confesses to copying the
Castilian models. his was the perfect alibi for his intentions, since in this way he compared
himself – and the language he used – with the paradigms of the dominant language, allowing
him to legitimize his work within the learned spheres as a Baroque game of wit. At the same
time, Galiana cashed in on the complicity aroused by the dialectal phraseology and the oper-
ability of his narrative rhythm, which made his work popular among readers.
All of the episodes mentioned above, along with many others in the history of Catalan
language and literature in the Modern Age, have traditionally been classiied under the label
“Decadència” (Decline). Eminent igures of the Renaixença (Catalan cultural resurgence) used
this title to describe a dark period of Catalan history in order to contrast it with the cultural
awakening they represented. he term is no longer used today except as “the so-called Decadèn-
cia.” Present-day historians of Catalan literature prefer to use terms that express a more neutral
judgment and which are more easily comparable with those employed in European literatures,
such as Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-classicism, and so forth. he reason is to prevent the isola-
tion of Catalan critics and the prejudices inherent in such a highly subjective term. From his
viewpoint as a social historian of language, Joan Fuster (1986) has pointed out that the essential
feature of this period was the phenomenon of Castilianization – at least with respect to litera-
ture – as a step toward a much broader process of linguistic substitution. Other factors which
aided this process were the disintegrating dialectalization of the language and the increasing
oralization of the most common literary genres, as in the case of popular poetry (lyrics in honor
of the Virgin and narrative dialogues in verse). he political and administrative transforma-
tions that came about as a consequence of Philip of Anjou’s victory in the War of Succession,
which marked the end of the era of foral, or statutory autonomy and the beginning of a period
of centralism and a progressively restricted use of Catalan, must also be considered. Catalan
linguistic historiography rejects the victimist approach and has chosen to analyze the very dif-
ferent factors (which oten originated internally) that drove the Castilianization of Catalan-
speaking territories. We must also mention the important efect the legal and administrative
changes resulting from the French-Castilian victory in the early days of the eighteenth century
had on the social history of Catalan language and literature. We will now examine all of these
elements from the perspective adopted in this study.
Albert Rossich (2004), one of the chief detractors of the historiographical term decadèn-
cia, claims that widely varying phenomena were gathered under this label. Some examples are
the movement to restore the Catalan poetic tradition during the late sixteenth century (seen
in Ausiàs March’s high standing among Renaissance spheres), the recatalanization of early Ba-
roque literature in the irst half of the seventeenth century, the introduction of literary turns
of phrase from Castilian in the second half of the century in order to enrich literary Catalan,
the philological work performed by the Acadèmia de Bones Lletres (Academy of Literature) in
Barcelona throughout the eighteenth century, and the expansion of dialectal literature in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
All of these aspects were speciic, historically situated phenomena that must be evaluated
with deliberation and insight. he continued use of the unifying label decadència simply acts as
a conceptual burden which hinders this task. Rossich considers that the analysis of these his-
torical complexities must be set in motion without preconceptions and must take into account
the persistence of Catalan in its written form throughout the entire period.
he perception of Ausiàs March during the Renaissance was complex. Catalan speakers of
the sixteenth century considered his verses obscure partly due to the concepts expressed, and
partly because the language was considered a remembrance of the past, a return to medieval
poetry and troubadour-style imagery. his explains why the editions and translations of this pe-
riod included glossaries and sometimes displayed a dubious understanding of the original text.
March’s poetry was made more diicult by the fact that Catalan was viewed as something linked
to days gone by, to an ancient language that began to be called, on clearly mistaken philological
grounds, llemosí (a derivative from Limoges, used as a synonym of Provençal). In this way the
Catalan people originated a series of linguistic misconceptions about their own language.
In spite of this situation, Ausiàs’ works enjoyed great fame and were widely read through-
out Spanish and European Renaissance circles. Ausiàs is accredited with bringing petrarchism
to Spanish poetry and reviving the Catalan poetic tradition. he importance of Ausiàs can
be seen in the many translations of his works. One example is the humanist Vicent Mariner’s
translation into Latin, published in France in 1633, although the translator appears to have mis-
understood many of the expressions used by the author (Coronel 1997). True recognition and
acceptance of Ausiàs verses, which sufered highs and lows (especially among his fellow Valen-
cians), was inally consolidated during the Renaixença and by the poetry of the twentieth cen-
tury. Carles Riba (1893–1959), Josep V. Foix (1893–1987), and Vicent Andrés Estellés (1924–1993)
considered Ausiàs March a source of intertextuality and a poet who is highly esteemed for hav-
ing expressed his subjectivity (Salvador 2001, 237–247).
he dialectalization of literature in the eighteenth century was intimately related to the
processes of oralization of literature and social Castilianization. Two concepts played a role in
the relationship between Castilian and Catalan, interposition and intromission. he irst refers
to the fact that for a long time Spanish was a mediator linking Catalan and other international
languages of culture, acting as an interposed language. his is obvious from the relations be-
tween the Catalan-speaking community and languages such as French or English, in which
Castilian translations and Spanish assimilation of international cultural streams usually served
as a bridge to facilitate such relationships. It is for this precise reason that the case of Ramis’s
Lucrècia is so remarkable, since the model of Racine’s tragedy was incorporated directly from
French literature into Catalan literature.
he concept of intromission complements the one described above. Deprived of a shared
reference model, dialectal variations drited further and further apart, and speakers of Catalan’s
diferent dialects automatically turned to Castilian to communicate with each other. Factors
that contributed to this include the diiculties of intercomprehension, the mistrust towards
438 Vicent Salvador
those of diferent dialectal communities, and, above all, the negative attitude toward their own
tongue’s ability to act as a language of culture and exchange. hus, Castilian became a supradia-
lectal standardized variety and surreptitiously worked its way into the sphere of interdialectal
communication.
Dialectal diferences became more pronounced in the eighteenth century and began to
appear in discourses about culture. Ater the War of Spanish Succession, foral legislation and
autochthonous administrative documents, which had traditionally been written in Catalan, be-
gan to be written in Castilian. In the Roussillon region of Northern Catalonia, which was ruled
by France at the time, Louis XIV had applied a similar policy (N. Iglesias 1998). During this pe-
riod, the diferent Catalan-speaking areas were socially and culturally isolated from each other.
he political provincialization derived from the Nueva Planta decrees (New Political Order)
intensiied this tendency toward fragmentation. Moreover, interdialectal prejudices continued
to exist. his can be seen in the defenses of the language written at the time, in which there is
excessive praise of each author’s own dialect (Ferrando and Nicolàs 2005, 254–256).
he dialectalization of the literary language was a longer and more gradual process than
has sometimes been suggested. Written Catalan maintained a high degree of coherence and
respect for the literary tradition throughout the modern era. Moreover, the lack of determina-
tion shown by what the Italian Renaissance called the questione della lingua – the conlict over
the valid model of language and its relation to the medieval tradition – nourished the process
of fragmentation of the language and the dialectalization of writing (Feliu 2004). hus, what
Nadal (1992, 103–155) has called the barrera llemosina (“the barrier of Provençal language”)
forced those authors who did not choose to write in Castilian or in archaic Catalan to bring
their writing closer to the spoken word of their times and, consequently, to the corresponding
dialectal variations.
his drit toward the dialectalization of literary language did not take place in a chaotic
fashion. Instead, it adjusted itself to certain regional traditions. An example is Valencian, which
ofered some degree of coherence. In the eighteenth century Valencian had adopted a spell-
ing system that relected the “apitxat” pronunciation typical of the central regions where the
Valencian dialect is spoken (Rafanell 2000, 35–78). his pronunciation had arisen historically
(with, it must be noted, a very questionable timeline [Colón 2003]) as a simpliication of the
phonological system by unvoicing certain consonant sound pairs, and was parallel to what
has is known as “the sixteenth-century phonetic revolution” in Castilian. his style of writing,
which attempted to reproduce apitxat pronunciation, ofered the practical advantage of being
easier to read for people who had learned to read in Castilian. However, it had no chance of be-
ing successful as a norm for Valencian writing, since it was rejected by the Valencian-speaking
inhabitants of other areas where the apitxat pronunciation was not present.
he fact is that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, literature became open to
dialects, at least in certain “minor” genres that were oten close to the spoken language, such as
popular colloquies, scenes of manners, and popular theatre. hus, the Majorcan burlesque the-
atre of the eighteenth and irst half of the nineteenth century, studied by Serrà Campins (1987),
ofers a rich array of dialectal turns of phrase. hese phrases are used by popular characters that
appear in the entremesos (a kind of short comedy) in everyday situations, in which the use of di-
alects implies colloquial language. In these works, vividly represented conversation was required
for greater theatrical efect. Nevertheless, as Serrà Campins points out, there remained a certain
stylistic idealization that oten replaced the salat article (es, sa, ets, ses) with the standard, or
literary, article (el, la, los, las). In fact, and although these entremesos were sometimes transmit-
ted orally, written language restricted the potential use of dialects. Many theatrical genres such
as the entremés, the sainet, and the longer comedy were torn between the demands of linguistic
credibility and dramatic efect among local audiences, and the possibility of wider dissemina-
tion by using a written language that imposed restraints on dialectal freedom. In the second
half of the eighteenth century, Goldoni, with respect to his Veneto dialect and his ambition to
become a pan-Italian author, found himself facing exactly the same dilemma (Stussi 1993).
In nineteenth-century drama, the Catalan Frederic Soler (1839–1895), also known as
“Serafí Pitarra,” and the Valencians Josep Bernat i Baldoví (1809–1864) and Eduard Escalante
(1834–1895) portrayed the dialects they spoke in their plays. heir writings ofered an alterna-
tive to the standard model of language and turned everyday life into a spectacle by iltering it
through the stereotypes that delighted audiences. hese authors contributed to the creation of
the colloquial and dialectal stereotypes that make up social imagery. Aterwards, the brothers
Serafín and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero, and Carlos Arniches, who was a Valencian from Ali-
cante, did the same by creatively elaborating an image of the spoken language of Andalusian
and the pure speech of Madrid, respectively.
he process of Castilianizing the Catalan-speaking territories, in some ways related to that
of dialectal disintegration, was long, winding, and heterogeneous with respect to its geographi-
cal dimension. It irst took place in Valencia, followed by Catalonia and aterwards Majorca and
the other Balearic Isles (Miralles 2001). he diferences in attitude of the Catholic Church were
one of the factors accounting for this geographical diversity: the Valencian clergy was less faith-
ful to its own language than that of other regions. Furthermore, the existence of a strongly Cas-
tilianized nucleus in the court of early sixteenth-century Valencia was, as we have seen, a strong
force driving Castilianization both within the city and in the area that came under its inluence.
We have also mentioned the legislative and administrative modiications introduced at the be-
ginning of the eighteenth century. Of special interest are the efects on the literary language – a
domain in which (due to its intrinsic ornateness as the product of a highly conventionalized
social ritual) modiications can take place faster than in other areas of usage, where changes re-
quire a very lengthy time span. he register used in educated literature, radically diferent from
that of colloquial literature, apparently allows for more whimsical adhesions and defections.
Other factors, such as the norms of social prestige and the marks of social status and class, can
also exert an efect, as was the case in eighteenth-century Russia, where the aristocracy adopted
French as the language of intragroup communication. he Castilianization of the sixteenth-
century Valencian Court of the Vicereine Germana generated this prestige efect that prompted
change in other social spheres. he phenomenon can still be perceived – and condemned – in
Escalante’s sainets, where the author presents the middle class of the city of Valencia as seeking
to adopt Castilian (at least in certain situations) as one of the keys of climbing the social ladder.
his was undoubtedly an open road toward linguistic substitution that the eforts of linguistic
normalization have attempted to neutralize in recent decades.
he process of substitution underwent long periods of diglossia, or social bilingualism. he
classical term diglossia, which was introduced by Ferguson, has recently been taken up again
440 Vicent Salvador
by Catalan linguistic historiography and applied to the functional specialization of Castilian

and Catalan, the two languages in contact within the Catalan-speaking territories throughout
the Modern Age and the better part of the nineteenth century (Marfany 2001). It has even been
suggested that the true diglossia of Catalan society occurred from the end of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries onwards (Rafanell 1999). From this point of view (which is the one
that predominates today), there is an insistence on the diglossic ideology of the great igures
of the Renaixença, in contrast to the traditional view that considered them to be leaders of the
revival of the historical splendor of the language. Indeed, writers such as Bonaventura Carles
Aribau (1798–1862), who in 1833 wrote the famous ode “La Patria” (“Fatherland”), which was
considered a symbol of the resurgence of Catalan language and literature in the era of Ro-
manticism, are today conceptualized as exponents of a diglossic mindset. his way of thinking
restricted Catalan to non-formal usage, rather than allowing it to fully play the role of a mod-
ern language of culture. As compensation, Catalan was used in the lyrical poetry of socially
insigniicant cenacles, such as those of the Jocs Florals (loral games), an institution that in the
nineteenth century revived the ancient tradition of poetic jousts or contests.
he contemporary age: Ways of standardization
he Renaixença cannot be easily explained without taking into account the Romantic Move-
ment. It was in the heart of this movement that literature, although mainly in Spanish, began to
turn toward the expression of subjectivity, on the one hand, and the medieval past when Cata-
lan literature had reached its splendor, on the other. European Romanticism penetrated the
literary circles and printing houses of Barcelona and Valencia, producing Spanish renderings of
Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Victor Hugo, to name a few, that were sometimes transformed by
the inclusion of important adaptations. his was one of the most clearly visible stimuli of Span-
ish Romanticism and at the same time a boost for the Catalan Renaixença. On his return from
exile in France, the publishing activity of Mariano de Cabrerizo in Valencia acted as a detonator
that triggered the Romantic Movement in Spanish literature (Salvador 2001, 103–22). his activ-
ity was also an indispensable precedent of the reminiscence of the glorious past portrayed by
the historical novel and of the lyrical expression of the self, linked to a language felt to be one’s
own, one’s “mother” tongue.
During the Romantic Movement in Spanish literature, Catalan poets such as Aribau
shared the same themes: Catalan as a maternal language, as the language of the homeland, of
innermost dreams, and of lyrical poetry as the highest literary genre. Underneath this we can
perceive the diglossic ideology that rejected functional plenitude of the language by praising it
as a compensatory mechanism, and in doing so, relegating it to sporadic, socially insigniicant
lyrical exaltations. It is true that the Renaixença did give rise to other historical consequences
such as Modernisme and Noucentisme, movements that lourished in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, and which fostered the recovery of the long ill-treated and silenced
language. his process was not free of linguistic controversies, as we shall now see; it could not
have taken place without a clearly politicized impulse and it was not a uniform process through-
out the whole of the Catalan-speaking territory – for example, the Renaixença in Valencia was a
late phenomenon and did not manage to achieve the political impetus it had stirred in Catalo-
nia. All of these factors have led a large part of literary and linguistic historians to question the
very concept of the Renaixença. his has sometimes been done by highlighting the importance
of industrialization and the end of the ancient regime (as far as the periodization of the history
of Catalan is concerned), which resulted in the reconiguration of the relations between the
symbolic and functional spaces of the language within liberal society (Murgades 1996, 29–47;
Ginebra 1999, 33–64). In any case, if the denomination Decadència is a distorted label, since
(as we have just seen) it corresponds to a period of continuity of the language and of literary
complexity, and if the Renaixença does not represent any kind of immediate change of direction
in the linguistic and literary history of Catalan, then the very legitimacy of the label, which in
practice is diicult to obviate, becomes a matter of debate.
In addition to the historiographical inertias that do not allow this historical denomina-
tion to be obviated, we must also add the parallelisms it has with the Galician Rexurdimento,
which took place throughout the whole of the nineteenth century but more especially in the
second half. he similarities and diferences between the two historical-linguistic processes are
very enlightening and we will now go on to examine them in further detail. On the one hand,
the Galician movement, which was still in an earlier stage of dialectal fragmentation in the
1830s, later began to establish itself more irmly by declaring itself independent from Spanish
(of which it had been considered a mere archaistic diatopic variant) and with a learned literary
production that was generally restricted to lyrical poetry. he progressive unveiling of its bril-
liant medieval literary past and of its common origin with Portuguese was to reach its highest
point in the 1880s, giving rise to avid debates about setting an autonomous model of learned
Galician. hese debates tried to ind the balance between contemporary Galician and the res-
toration of an ancient, prestigious language that was shared with Portugal (Monteagudo 1999,
361–72). he separation from the traditional Galician-Portuguese stem inevitably brought with
it a strong tendency to move closer toward the structures of the Spanish language.
In the case of Catalan, the igures of the Renaixença were more aware of the earlier literary
splendor of the language and did not come up against an international barrier like the one that
divided the Galician-Portuguese linguistic territory from the sixteenth century onwards. he
Catalan linguistic domain beyond Spanish borders was limited to the small enclave of l’Alguer,
which belonged to an Italian state that was founded during the latter half of the nineteenth centu-
ry, and to North Catalonia (the Roussillon region and the Cerdagne Valley), which had belonged
to France since the seventeenth century and did not have a demographic or cultural potential
comparable to that of Portugal. It must also be pointed out that North Catalonia became part
of a French state with an established tradition of centralism that, from the 1789 Revolution on-
wards, was to take even greater pains to discard languages other than French. At the same time,
the monolingual Portuguese state put the instruments of the powerful Portugal of the Modern
Age at the service of the language shared with Galicia. he Renaixença and the Rexurdimento are
not, therefore, comparable situations in this sense. If there is any similarity to the situation of
the self-proclamation of Galician with respect to the original language shared with Portugal, it is
with Valencia. On occasions it has even been suggested that there was a risk of “Galicianization”
that could lead to linguistic secessionism and, in a parallel manner, to the acceptance of interfer-
ence that could disigure the real physiognomy of the language. In the Renaixença period, the
442 Vicent Salvador
Valencians’ traditional attachment to giving their variety of Catalan a particular name – that is to
say, “Valencian” or “Valencian language” – joined forces with the situation of dialectalization of
the popular literary genres, which was stronger in the Valencian area than in other parts of the
Catalan linguistic domain. As we shall see, this issue was raised in the linguistic debates of the
time, but ater the 1930s it was settled in favor of a single literary language.
From the perspective we are dealing with here, what is relevant is that both the Rexurdi-
mento and the Renaixença (and subsequent periods up till the completion of Pompeu Fabra’s
codiication in the 20th century) were frameworks in which a great deal of controversy was
generated regarding the model of literary language. Opinion was divided between the respect
for the prestige of the ancient language of culture, which was more uniform, and the atten-
tion paid to contemporary speech, which was needed for the language to be fully functional
but far more sensitive to dialectal diversiication, besides being more Castilianized. he debate
raged between those in favor of reviving the classical Catalan language and those who opted for
“Catalan as it is spoken now,” as an unprejudiced way of approaching contemporary colloquial
speech. he irst point of view involved hypostasizing a medieval model of language that, de-
spite its undeniable brilliance, turned out to be incapable of meeting the challenges of contem-
porary communication and had to limit itself to the more traditional genres, mainly archaistic
lyrical poetry. he second point of view, which held the popular theatrical work of Pitarra as its
emblem, had to part from a series of colloquial practices that were under strong threat of being
Castilianized and which were also subject to the constrictions of local areas of usage: colloquial
usage is not likely to travel beyond dialectal boundaries, whether it be Valencian, Barcelona
dialect, or any other diatopic variation of the spoken language.
Proof of this is that, in the controversies about these issues, which the Valencia of the early
twentieth century experienced somewhat later than Catalonia, the advocates of the “Valen-
cian as it is spoken now” (who were known as “canvas-shoe poets” in reference to their low
social extraction) cultivated with great zeal the short play and the short narrative but in many
cases ended up following the path of linguistic secessionism. Nevertheless, it is also true that
the defenders of the opposite pole, the “gloved poets,” led by the eminent conservative Teodor
Llorente (1836–1911), gave rise to a sort of poetic elephantiasis that did little to further the mod-
ernization of Catalan as a language that was fully capacitated for communication in our world.
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was an attempt to standardize spelling in the
pages of the modernist review L’Avenç (Advance) with the help of the linguist Pompeu Fabra
(1868–1948), who was to become the main instigator of the codiication of the language in the
following century, by then within the dictates of Noucentisme. In Catalonia the excellence
achieved in previous decades by the narrative and theatrical production of authors such as
Narcís Oller (1846–1930), Víctor Català (1869–1966), and Àngel Guimerà (1845–1924) made
it necessary to establish a common supradialectal model that channeled this production. he
modern codiication of Catalan attempted to transcend the dispute between the “Catalan/Va-
lencian/Majorcan/Roussillonnais dialect as it is spoken now” and the proposals for a more “aca-
demic” Catalan. Defenders of the latter sometimes pointed not only to the medieval tradition
as an example, but also to the language of one of the great poets of the period, Jacint Verdaguer
(1845–1902), who retrieved authentic features of the language from the speech of rural folk (Fer-
rando and Nicolàs 2005, 335–39).
he Fabrian codiication (lexicographic, orthographic, and grammatical elaboration),

which was carried out during the irst third of the twentieth century under the auspices of the
Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC, founded in 1907), set out a series of supradialectal norms in an
intelligent and adequate manner. his Catalan codiication occurred much later than the aca-
demic ixation of Spanish, which dates back to the eighteenth century. Fabra tried to establish a
balance between a compositional procedure (with the participation of all Catalan dialects) and
the inevitable priority of central Catalan, whose disproportionate demographic weight pre-
disposed it as the foundation of the standardization. he resulting model is without a doubt
extremely uniform; it is respectful toward the history of the language and its dialectal variations,
especially as far as spelling is concerned (it does not aim to match the pronunciation of central
Catalan), and it is relatively lexible in certain morphological and lexical aspects. Orthography,
which is not anchored in the oral language but rather “graph centered,” became a guarantee of
the social perception of Catalan as a whole (Nadal 1999).
he establishment of a solid uniform model of Catalan was crucial for the history of the
language. Due to it, the long repression of the regime of General Franco (1939–1975), which
banned the oicial use of Catalan, barely had an afect on literary written Catalan. Fabra’s codi-
ication was accepted and implemented by nearly all writers throughout the entire linguistic
dominion. Debates still arise from time to time in Valencia with regard to the uniformity of the
language (oten due to political interests that exaggerate the idiosyncrasies of the language in
order to support an unworkable linguistic cantonalism), but the formal acceptance of the IEC
Norms by Valencian intellectuals and writers in Castelló in 1932 put an end to the quarrels about
the learned literary language. Legitimate dialectalism persisted in the literature of manners,
such as the narrative scenes by Joaquim Amo (1873–1914) in the extreme south of the Valencian
region, and those by Josep Pascual Tirado (1884–1937) in the Castellón area. heir texts (which
were standardized to a greater or lesser extent) have been reprinted up to the present day. It is
beyond a doubt that Catalan dialects managed to ind a place in the world of written discourse
and literature. he same has happened in Catalonia and in Majorca, where the Rondalles (a
kind of oral folk tale) compiled by the lexicographer Antoni M. Alcover (1862–1932) constitute
a great monument to the identity of the Majorcans. However, we can say that dialects occupy a
subordinate position within the Catalan literary ield, and are restricted to minor genres close
to colloquial discourse.
Other literary genres have made use of a convergent language where dialectalism is limited
– as in any contemporary literary tradition – to leaving evidence of intimate testimony in lyrical
poetry or to endowing theatrical works and the dialogues in novels with local lavor. It is true
that Majorcan writers from Llorenç Villalonga (1897–1980) to Blai Bonet (1926–1997) to Carme
Riera (1948) have let tokens of dialectal turns of phrase in their works. When Estellés portrays
the everyday milieus of post-war Valencia and uses a dialectical expression as a semiotic de-
vice, he is being no more a localist than Salvador Espriu (1913–1985) and J. V. Foix when they
use turns of phrase typical of the language of Barcelona. he success of present-day Catalan
literature in the publishing market has proved that dialects are not barriers that prevent readers
throughout the whole territory from understanding Catalan poetry.
Authors writing historical novels in the 1970s and 80s had to reconstruct the atmospheres
of times gone by with a certain local lavor to them, and writers of detective novels had to
444 Vicent Salvador
capture the speciically colloquial language used by the Barcelona or Valencia underworld. Joa-
quim Ruyra (1858–1939), a Catalan author who wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, lightheartedly incorporated the language of Blanes (Girona) into his narratives, al-
though he fully accepted the oicial norms. he novelist Jesús Moncada (1941–2005) portrayed
the northwestern dialect in his texts as an enrichment of standard Catalan. he great founders
of modern Catalan literature, such as the Majorcan Miquel Costa i Llobera (1854–1922), the
Catalans Josep Carner (1894–1970), Carles Riba (1893–1959), and Josep Pla (1897–1981), and the
Valencian Joan Fuster (1922–1992) included local turns of phrase in their discourse knowing
that they were contributing to a profoundly uniied common language.
In this way, diatopic variation has found its place as a stylistic choice within the Catalan
literary landscape. All the same, past controversies concerning colloquial Catalan and classical
Catalan continue to appear from time to time, such as the debate that arose in the 80s concern-
ing the simpliied version of Catalan, “Català light,” advocated by some as a way of increasing
readership at a time when Catalan faced considerable sociolinguistic pressure from Spanish.
Murgades (1999, 147–149) judiciously stated that interference from Spanish is sometimes not
a direct process. Instead, this interference is oten indirect, produced by an eagerness to emu-
late and compete; writing leans toward ornate usages, as if seeking to compensate for the lack
of a more culturally reined register in Catalan. his attitude, identiied with the movement
called Noucentisme, revived the populist reaction that called for an approximation of Catalan
to ordinary everyday speech with its dialectal and Castilian turns of phrase. hese ideas have
indeed provided food for thought for directors of linguistic planning, writers of style guides,
and journalists. However, the ield of literature seeks unconditional autonomy, a capacity for
stylistic diversity that reaches out to all the devices that provide freedom in artistic discourse.
Rather than see dialects as a limitation of the author due to his or her geographical origins or
his or her attachment to a diatopic variety of the language, we must grant them their place as an
expressive resource that can be used artistically.
Basque as a literary language
Karmele Rotaetxe
Introduction
First of all, it is important to clarify whether works written in the languages in contact with
Basque (Spanish and French) should or should not be included in this topic. he same must be
done for non-literary works written in Basque. In both cases the answer is airmative. Spanish
and French works help us to understand the context in which Basque writings appear. In addi-
tion, Spanish and French were the languages used by most educated Basques, perhaps because
they had developed a literary form, and this leads us to believe that diglossic readers have
probably existed for quite some time. Regarding the case of non-literary works, we will include
works that do not present poetic language as described by Roman Jakobson. hese works exem-
plify a cultured variety that searches for correctness. hey have the merit of having used Basque
to express complex grammatical relationships which were usually borrowed from Latin and of
having created neologisms to designate abstract concepts. In spite of this linguistic value, the
purpose of these works difers from that of a work of art. hey are written in the style of theses
that defend an idea so as to drive home a lesson or, alternatively, constitute defensive discourses.
heir interest lies in the portrayal of the intellectual environment of Basque society and in the
way in which writers worked on the language.
his decision allows us to take into account some of the irst texts written in Basque, that
were religious texts used to evangelize the mainly illiterate and monolingual Basque people.
hese books were written by clerics in order to help with the pastoral work of other clerics
(Juaristi 1987b, 13). Although most Basques were monolingual in Basque, the privileged classes
were bilingual and diglossic. his situation is the same as that described by Rotaetxe (1983) in
the Basque-French regions and leads us to diferentiate two social situations with respect to the
languages in contact: “diglossia and bilingualism” for the higher classes and “diglossia without
bilingualism” for the ordinary people (Fishman 1971, 31, for the combination of parameters). In
both cases Basque was the dominated language, for it had not penetrated to the higher classes
and it was not an oicial language. he clergy were not interested in promoting Euskera (the
Basque language), although the opportunity for such promotion lay in their hands. Instead,
they limited its use to religious education. Even so, the lower classes, illiterate as they were,
possessed a rich oral literature. Fragments of lyrical songs and funeral laments or eresiac have
been found which testify to great popular creativity. In addition, similarities have been pointed
out between Basque works and those of other regions, a case in point being the verses of the
lament that Sancha Ochoa de Azaeta wrote for her husband, Martín Bañez de Artazubiaga, and
the song about death of the knight Guillén Peraza, who died during the conquest of the island
of Palma, one of the Canary Islands (Juaristi 1987b, 15).
Some authors, such as Larramendi, wrote in Spanish because they could not write in
Basque or did not wish to do so, but they were interested in clarifying certain qualities of this
language such as its ancient origins and purity. In fact, the work of these apologists encouraged
the development of an ideology that admired and defended the Basque language, and took a
446 Karmele Rotaetxe
sense of pride in its possession and its use as a symbol. Perhaps there is not much sense in using
this kind of work as a reference when examining the literature of other languages, but in the
case of Basque there has traditionally been a mixture of ields that has been clearly harmful to
Basque literature itself (Sarasola 1976, 31). his paper will be divided into three parts: a short ty-
pological characterization and a discussion of the current social situation of Basque; the Basque
language and literature up to the sixties; and the Basque language and literature ater the sixties.
he language
Latin was the language imposed by the Roman Empire and, although it eliminated many of
the native languages of the occupied areas, Basque was an exception. It had survived the Indo-
Europeanization of the European continent in the same way the Romanization of its western re-
gion, even though it adopted numerous borrowings which are still in use today. In fact, Basque
survived among the lower social classes but the price was its isolation from international cul-
tural movements. Consequently, high culture was irst manifested in Latin and then in the
Romance languages.
Nowadays the Basque language is spoken by approximately seven hundred thousand peo-
ple and its regional extension covers both sides of the western Pyrenees, which is apparently
where it has always existed. his territory – known as the Basque Country – is distributed
between France and Spain and has approximately 3 million inhabitants, of which only a part
speaks Basque. Currently, the advance or recession of the language depends on three admin-
istrative systems: the Basque Autonomous Region or Euskadi, where Euskera is a co-oicial
language and is positively promoted, the Foral (a medieval system of rights) Community of
Navarre, where Basque has a co-oicial status in three regions and which has a laissez faire,
laissez passer attitude, and France, which rejects Basque as an oicial language. Basque, like
other natural languages, has several geographically distinct varieties, among which the follow-
ing have been used in literature: Biscayan, Guipuzcoan, Laburdian and Suberoan. Since 1968 a
corpus planning process has led to a standard form (euskara batua) which was developed and
disseminated by the Royal Academy of the Basque Language (Euskaltzaindia). Attempts to ge-
netically situate the language have failed. Basque remains isolated from other linguistic families,
and has characteristics such as agglutination and ergativity that are non-Indo-European. his
brief typological reference indicates the great distance that separates Basque from the languages
it has had contact with throughout history: French and Spanish. As a consequence, the study of
Basque as compared to Catalan, for example, is much more diicult.
Due to the fact that no state has ever covered the entire region in which it is spoken, the
Basque language has not obtained oicial recognition until fairly recently. It has survived side
by side with languages which were much stronger both from a political (oicial languages) and
a sociological (number of users) point of view. In fact, Euskera has always been the language of
a marginalized minority, having fewer users than the contact languages (Rotaetxe 1994, 79, for
demographics and migratory movements). Basque has been dominated, excluded, and even
forbidden from higher social domains. For this reason it has lacked a formal administrative
variety until recent times. he notion of diglossia as explained by Ferguson (complementary
distribution of varieties and functions) and Fishman (a system of shared attitudes and beliefs
towards varieties/languages and their functions) is fully applicable to the social situation of
Basque before linguistic planning. his situation is particularly worrisome. Other languages
may undergo diglossia in certain areas, such as Spanish in the United States, yet they have a
model that is free from the pressures of other dominant languages available to them within
their own community. he crisis which Basque faces is that it only exists in a diglossic situation.
All of these negative factors have almost surely bred feelings of self-preservation and linguistic
pride. Transmitted orally from generation to generation, the Basque language has survived in
spite of numerous ominous predictions.
In France Basque has no oicial status, even though the teaching of the language is subsi-
dized to a certain extent. Although France initially signed the European Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages (Conseil de l’Europe, 1992), it presented numerous and important reserva-
tions when it was time for the same document to be ratiied (Rotaetxe 2001). In Spain, due to the
diverse Statutes of the Autonomous Regions that date to 1979, Spanish shares a co-oicial status
with the so-called autonomous languages in the diferent regions where these languages exist.
As a consequence, Basque is a co-oicial language in Euskadi (the Basque Country) and Navarre.
Spain was a very early signatory of the European charter mentioned above and ratiied it without
reservations. In fact, the speakers of the languages in question had already obtained linguistic
rights in their statutes and laws that were greater than those outlined in the European Charter.
Obviously, the situation of these languages has improved since 1979 thanks to several leg-
islative measures. We will limit our discussion to the Basque Autonomous Region because it
is the most important demographically, economically, and socially, and also because it pres-
ents the most signiicant changes. Some of these measures are the Statute of Autonomy (1979)
which established Basque as a co-oicial language, the Law for the Normalization of the Use
of Euskera (1982) which describes the social domains in which the language is oicial, and the
1989 Law for the Basque Public Service, together with its diferent Decrees and 1997 modiica-
tion. To illustrate the positive efect of these laws, we can cite the improvement in knowledge
of the language. From 1981 to 1991, igures for children ive to nine years old who knew Basque
showed an increase from 20% to 40.7%, making it the group with the highest igures due to the
efect of immersion programs and other pedagogical measures. In general, an estimated 29%
of the Basque Region’s population speak Basque. However, its usage remains at approximately
20%, depending on the diferent social domains (Rotaetxe 1997). he increase in speakers is,
nevertheless, encouraging since it occurs especially among the young. According to the latest
data from the Basque Government survey (Administration of the Autonomous Region of the
Basque Country 2003, 47–48), in 2001 the percentage of bilingual and passive bilingual speak-
ers had increased among young people between the ages of sixteen and thirty ive. he results
obtained for young people currently between the ages of sixteen and twenty four are even more
encouraging, with 48.5% and 20.2% respectively in the Basque Autonomous Region. However,
the increase in bilinguals and passive bilinguals is very poor in Navarre and it is on the decline
in France. With regard to use, the same survey in 1991 indicated an average of 16.5%, while
the current survey shows an average of 18.5% of users within the same age span with equal or
greater competence in Basque as compared to Spanish. As we shall see below, the situation with
regard to literature has also improved.
Basque language and literature up to the sixties
Linguae vasconum primitiae (Early fruits of the language of the Basques), printed in Bordeaux
in 1545 and written by Bernard Dechepare (XV c.–XVI c.), is considered the irst book ever
published in Euskera. hough it may seem paradoxical in view of what was pointed out earlier,
this is not a prayer book but a collection of poems to be recited and sung by cratsmen and peas-
ants. his work contains courtship poems, a poem about the author’s stay in prison, and another
popular poem which calls for people to use the language in public and to make it well-known
by using the new invention of the printing press. However, the contents of this book cannot
be considered representative, since seventy eight of the eighty four works written in Basque
between 1545 and 1880 are religious in content (catechisms, sermons, Saints’ lives, etc.). Dur-
ing the Old Regime, 60% of the works written in Basque can be attributed to clerics and were
published in the territories to the north of the Pyrenees.
From the beginning of the sixteenth century, monarchs who favored reform sponsored
biblical translations into vernacular and minority languages. Joanes Leizarraga, minister of the
Reformed Church (1516–1601), translated a series with which Juana de Albret, Queen of Na-
varre and Lady of Bearne, wished to spread Protestantism in Basque-speaking areas. hese
works, Iesus Christ Gure Iaunaren Testamentu Berria (New Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ),
Kalendrera (Calendar), and Abc edo Christinoen Instructionea (Abc, or instruction for Chris-
tians) were published in La Rochelle in 1571. Leizarraga was merely a translator and used a
somewhat singular linguistic variety. In efect, he wanted to coin a standard on the basis of a
number of diferent dialects and neologisms derived from Latin. His ambition was to come up
with an exact language that would be true to the original text and yet, at the same time, be acces-
sible to those subjects of the queen whom he wished to instruct. His “idiolect,” which difered
greatly from the oral language, has not had any followers.
In the seventeenth century, we can focus on Pedro de Axular (1556–1644), whose prose has
been a model in the standardization of Euskera. From 1600 until his death, he was the parish
priest of Sara, a village to the north of the Pyrenees. He wrote only one book, Guero (Ater),
which was published in Bordeaux in 1643. his book is an ascetic work which warns against the
dangers of laxity, and seems to have been addressed to Basque priests. he importance of the
book from a literary point of view is no greater than that of many other ascetic works of the
time. But Guero is almost unanimously considered as the pinnacle of Basque literature simply
because of the language used and not for its literary importance. Luis Villasante, for example,
did not hesitate when asserting: “he variety used by Axular is clear, understandable for most
Basques and suitable for use as a common literary language” (1961, 82). All in all, however, it is
unrealistic to expect that the idiolect of a sixteenth-century author could neutralize all of the
changes that every natural language undergoes, due to the simple fact that they are used in so-
ciety and that language itself is a dynamic phenomenon. It is true that Axular’s prose is rich and
features an outstanding use of synonyms (Sarasola 1976, 45), allowing readers to locate the most
familiar term for them within a non-uniied language. his richness in terminology has usually
been attributed to the author’s baroque style but, regardless of this, it undoubtedly demon-
strates a deep knowledge of the Basque language. Axular’s language is elegant and is addressed
to readers with an average cultural level. he author had a circle of friends which encouraged
him to write the work. Most likely, Joanes d’Etcheberri and the translator of spiritual works,
Sylvain Pouvreau, were members of that circle.
Arnaut Oïhenart (1592–1667) is the only secular poet of the seventeenth century and the
only one mindful of literature and the written word without being inluenced by catechetical
interests. He wrote mostly in Latin, writing very little in Euskera. His major work is in French,
Les proverbes basques recueillis par le Sr. d’Oihenart, plus les poésies basque du mesme auteur
(Basque proverbs gathered by Mr. d’Oihenart, together with Basque poems by the same author).
We should also mention Jean de Tartas (b. 1610), who wrote Onsa hilceco bidia (he way to die
well, 1666). From then onwards, the number of writers from the French region started to de-
cline and writers from the south become more prominent.
At this point we should mention the irst essay on grammar, Modo breve de aprender la
lengua vizcaína (Short method for learning the Biscayan language), written in 1653, but not
published until 1880. According to Villasante (1961, 98), it was written by Rafael de Micoleta
(Bilbao, b. 1611). In a similar vein, we have Escuararen Hastapenac (Beginnings of Basque, ca.
1716), whose author, again according to Villasante (1961, 104), is Joannes d’Etcheberri (1666–
1749) from Sara. It is an apology written in Latin and Basque that attacks those who deprecate
the Basque language.
In the eighteenth century, the defense of Basque became prominent with the impressive
igure of the Jesuit Manuel de Larramendi (1690–1766). he growth of the apology as a genre
had already begun with Esteban de Garibay (1533–1599), who airmed that Basque was the irst
language in Spain in Compendio historial de las crónicas y universal historia de todos los reinos
de España (Historical synopsis of the chronicles and universal history of all the kingdoms of
Spain, Antwerp, 1571). He suggested that it was Tubal who brought this language to Spain ater
the chaos of the Tower of Babel, and that it was the irst and universal language of the entire
Peninsula until the arrival of the Romans, who conined it to its current regional limits. Like
his contemporaries, Esteban de Garibay was strongly convinced of the purity and immutability
of the Basque language (Juaristi 1976) compared to other languages which were corrupt and
mixed. We might note in passing that the ideological need to defend a unique and pure original
language associated this language with the Garden of Eden and resulted in a long period of his-
tory in which linguistic ideas maintained the theory of Hebrew monogenesis. Among Garibay’s
followers we can include Andrés de Poza (ca.1530–1595), who wrote De la antigua lengua, pobla-
ciones y comarcas de las Españas (Concerning the ancient language, population, and regions of
Spain, Bilbao, 1587), Baltasar de Echave (1548-ca.1620), Joanes d’Etcheberri (according to Caro
Baroja 1973, 195–6), Manuel de Larramendi, and many more.
he work of Larramendi inluenced Southern Basque literature and it can be said that it
continued to defend a purist ideology. It was not until 1876 (Villasante 1961, 140) that literary
production freed itself from this inluence. Larramendi’s attitude seemed to be a reaction against
those who considered Euskera an uncultured and even uncivilized language. With them in mind,
Larramendi asserted in his book De la antigüedad y universalidad del bascuence en España: de
sus perfecciones y ventajas sobre otras muchas lenguas (Concerning the antiquity and universal
nature of Basque in Spain: Its perfections and advantages over many other languages, Salamanca,
1728) that Basque was the purest language in the world, and also the best because it was the most
rational. A year later, he published a grammar to demonstrate that Basque also followed its own
norms: El Imposible Vencido: Arte de la Lengua Vascongada (he impossible vanquished. he art
of the Basque language, Salamanca, 1729). He also created a Diccionario Trilingüe del Castellano,
Bascuence y Latín (Trilingual Spanish, Basque, and Latin dictionary) to prove that Basque was
a cultured language. In order to achieve this objective, Larramendi did not hesitate to adapt the
language to suit his needs when the language did not meet his requirements. hus, his Diction-
ary is brimming with terms specially invented to prove his point. he entries are in Spanish
and the Basque translations are oten pure fantasy. We should also mention the Corografía o
descripción general de la M.N. y M.L. Provincia de Guipúzcoa (General description of the very
noble and very loyal province of Guipuzcoa) (Barcelona, 1882), which is a racist work according
to Villasante (1961, 134). Larramendi opened the way for pseudo-etymologists and established
an ideology based on the sacralization of Basque that has now fallen into disuse. In fact, he did
not even apply it himself as we can deduce from the titles mentioned above.
Other Jesuits who were followers of Larramendi wrote in Basque. Agustín de Cardaberaz
(1703–1770) and Sebastián Mendiburu (1708–1782), for example, wrote in a mainstream ver-
sion of the language rather than the version defended by Larramendi and gave rise to the great
tradition of religious literature in the Southern Basque Region. Nevertheless, the most impor-
tant contribution of the eighteenth century was Acto para la Nochebuena (Sacramental play
for Christmas Eve) by Pedro Ignacio de Barrutia (1682–1759). Although it must have been per-
formed between 1711 and 1759, it was not published until 1897. For Juaristi (1987b, 67) the natu-
ralness of the language distinguishes it from other works of its time. Sarasola (1971, 58), however,
is not of the same opinion.
he genre of the apology continued to grow with writings by Pablo Pedro Astarloa (Duran-
go, 1752–1806), who maintained that Euskera was humanity’s irst language, and Juan Antonio
Moguel (1745–1804), who is actually better known for his work El doctor Peru Abarca, catedráti-
co de lengua bascongada en la Universidad de Basarte. Diálogo entre un rústico solitario bas-
congado y un barbero callejero llamado Maisu Juan (Doctor Peru Abarca, professor of Basque
language at the University of Basarte. A dialogue between a Basque peasant and a street barber
named master Juan, ca. 1802), which is known as Peru Abarca and was not published until 1880.
For the irst time in Basque literature, a writer had turned to the peasants’ sphere in search of
reasons for the regeneration of the Basque people. In Peru Abarca, the metalinguistic function
clearly dominates because the main idea is to explain why certain concrete names need to be
referred to with one pure Basque name rather than another. If it is considered a novel, it would
be the irst to be written in Basque. Peru Abarca has been compared to Emile by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau because of the primitivism of the main characters: Peru and the noble savage. How-
ever, both works are diferent. Peru Abarca presents a thesis defending the conservative ideol-
ogy prevalent at the time, which argued that the way of life and language of the peasants should
be a model for all Basques. he rural way of life was considered the essence of the Basque soul,
an idea that came to the fore at a historical time in which the great development of Bilbao and
the industrialization of Biscay were just beginning. In this way the ideology in question, which
still exists today, turned its back on history.
he date of the abolition of Basque franchises in 1876 is said to mark the beginning of the
Basque Literary Renaissance. During this time there was a new functional limitation placed
on Euskera. Peru Abarca had had no followers and stories written in Spanish now encountered
great success. Amaya o los Vascos en el siglo VIII (Amaya or the Basques in the eighth century,
1879) by the serial-writer Navarro Villoslada (1818–1895) is an example. he use of Basque re-
mained almost exclusively limited to poetry, to the point that Basque-Navarre literature was
considered to be at its height when written in Spanish. he poetry written in Euskera revolved
around the Itz-jostaldiak (loral games) organized in 1879 by the city hall of San Sebastian,
which imitated the Jocs Florals (Floral Games) of Barcelona. However, it appears that the orga-
nizers did not seem to hold literature in high esteem because at one of the competitions the irst
prize for poetry held the same value as the second prize for the competitions among pelotari
(Basque handball players).
hroughout the nineteenth century there was an increase in secular literature. At the same
time, devotional literature continued its course with works by Fray Bartolomé (1503–1576),
Astarloa (1752–1806), Lardizabal (1806–1855), and others, written in very high quality prose.
However, the distinguishing characteristic of the period (Sarasola 1971, 68) was the spread of
secular literature that relected social change. In fact, the inluence of the clergy – which had
always been enormous – was less obvious, and lead several clerics to publish religious and po-
litical works which irrationally defended the Catholic faith as an inherent characteristic of the
Basque people.
his antagonism was short-lived, however. At the end of the eighteenth century, the
Basque Nationalist Party was founded (1895) by Sabino Arana (1865–1903), who made Catholi-
cism one of the pillars of its ideology. He also promoted an awareness of the dignity of the
language, its symbolic potential, and the value of its literature. We know that he introduced
new graphemes, and that he was concerned with grammar and especially vocabulary, creating
numerous neologisms that were not always justiied. He borrowed the notion of the purity of
Euskera from Larramendi and he devoted himself to maintaining lexical purity, a feature which
has survived up to recent times. Apart from the political momentum he provided, Euskera and
Basque culture also became important objects of research. he monumental work Gramática
de los cuatro dialectos literarios de la lengua vasca (Grammar of the four literary dialects of the
Basque language) by Arturo Campión (1854–1937) was published in 1884 and reached a wide
audience. At about the same time, the works of one of the giants of the Basque language began
to appear: Resurrección María de Azkue (1864–1951) the published Euskal Izkindea/Gramática
Eúskara (Basque grammar, 1891), the as yet unrivaled lexicographical work Diccionario Vasco-
Español-Francés (Basque-Spanish-French dictionary) (Tours, 1905–1906); and the excellent and
original Morfología vasca (Basque morphology, 1923). He was a co-founder of the Academy of
the Basque Language in 1918, and also its irst president. We must also mention the erudite Julio
de Urquijo (1871–1950), whose patronage permitted the publication, from 1907 onwards, of the
Revista Internacional de Estudios Vascos (he International Review of Basque Studies), which
received contributions from famous linguists such as Meillet, Schuchardt, and Meyer-Lübke
among others. he rise of philology represented by these linguists contrasts with the sterility of
the literature of the time.
Novels from the irst quarter of the twentieth century continued to have a historical quality
and show an interest in local customs and legends. Examples are Blancos y negros (Whites and
blacks) by A. Campión and the stories by Evaristo de Bustinza – known as Kirikiño (1866–1929),
Abarrak (he branches, 1918); and Bigarrengo abarrak (he second branches, 1930). Special
mention must be made of Domingo Aguirre (1864–1920) and his work Kresala (Saltwater, 1906),
which is considered the irst folkloric Basque novel. In brief, the narrative of this time shows
a limited concern with formal problems, although it is mainly represented by the historicists
and folklore writers of the so-called “Basque Renaissance.” hese writers explored rural topics
with a tendency towards the idyllic or with a realism that excluded unpleasant aspects of real-
ity. heir motivation was ideological, and the characteristics of this literature endured up to
the Civil War. According to Juaristi (1987a, 94), the novel Uztaro (Harvest time) by Tomás de
Aguirre (1898–1982), which was published in 1937, is in no way diferent from its predecessors.
Poetry remained at a standstill until 1927, when the Euskaltzaleak society was founded
in order to promote language and culture. Its most prominent igure was José María de Agu-
irre (1896–1933), who would become an important poet under the pseudonym “Xavier Lizardi.”
Although he was an important member of the Basque Nationalist Party, Lizardi let behind a
collection of poetry that had no political connotations. He held a primitive view of nature that
allowed him to create a motley rural mythology. Lizardi died young, having written only one
book of poems, Biotz-Begietan (In the heart and eyes, 1932). His friends from the Euskaltzaleak
society posthumously edited a volume of unpublished poems, Umezurtz-Olerkiak (Orphaned
poems), and a collection of his articles, Itz-lauz (In prose).
Esteban de Urquiaga (1905–1937), who wrote under the pseudonym “Lauaxeta,” was also
a poet and a known militant of the Basque Nationalist Party. His poetry, like Lizardi’s, was un-
touched by his political beliefs. Lauaxeta also made nature the main theme of his poetry, prob-
ably because he gave ideological priority to the rural world rather than to industrialized areas,
as did Lizardi. For Lauaxeta, the countryside provided a means of escape to an ideal world that
was ending elsewhere. A poem from his irst book, Mendijetara (Towards the mountains) was
entitled “I escape to the mountains” in its Spanish version. he poetry of these authors was not
modern in either content or form. his is noteworthy when we observe that the irst Manifeste
du surréalisme (First surrealist manifesto) by André Breton was published in 1924 and the sec-
ond in 1930. Lauaxeta became the most cultured poet of his generation with his second book
of poems, Arrats-beran (he close of the evening, 1935). His poem Langille eraildu bati (To a
murdered worker) is the irst example of social commitment in Basque literature.
One last inluential poet was Nicolás Ormaetxea, known as “Orixe” (1888–1961). He wrote
a 1200 verse poem called Euskaldunak (he Basques) at the request of the Euskaltzaleak society,
that wanted an epic poem about the Basque people. he poem’s language is currently consid-
ered excessively inluenced by the purism of Sabino Arana.
he linguistic variety used throughout this period was the one spread by Sabino Arana, but
its artiiciality was beginning to receive criticism. his can be seen in the article “La vida del
euskera” (he life of the Basque language), published in the magazine Euskera in 1933 by Severo
Altube, a member of the Academy of the Basque Language. In 1935, the book Genio y lengua
(Genius and language) by Justo Mocoroa, known as “Ibar,” drew attention to the same problem.
By 1937, the generation of the Euskaltzaleak had dissolved. Of the authors we have men-
tioned, Lauaxeta was executed by Franco’s regime and Orixe went into exile ater spending time
in prison. Franco’s victory marked the beginning of a diicult period for Basque language and
literature. We must stress the importance that the survival of a few isolated writers of the post-
war generation had for literary continuity in Basque.
Basque language and literature ater the sixties
he late 1960s marked a great improvement for the Basque language. Schools that taught in
Basque reopened and in 1968 a non-governmental group of people (K. Rotaetxe, A. Irigoyen,
etc.) organized the First Week of Basque Culture in Bilbao, which was a great success among
the public, despite the large deployment of police. Also in the fall of 1968, Euskaltzaindia (the
Royal Academy of the Basque Language) began the process of language standardization. In
1969, Minister of Education Villar Palasí began to speak of vernacular languages and in 1970
the General Law of Education permitted the teaching of Basque culture classes in the “native”
language rather than just in the “national” language. he Academy of the Basque Language im-
proved its status by maintaining a more pragmatic doctrine that led it to condemn, in 1958, the
purism advocated by Sabino Arana. From the Manuel de Larramendi Chair at the University of
Salamanca, Antonio Tovar (1911–1985) promoted Basque studies.
A new group of writers came to the scene that were neither purist nor orthodox, yet fol-
lowed the criteria laid down by Euskaltzaindia. In this respect, mention can be made of Ga-
briel Aresti, José Luis Álvarez Emparanza, and Jon Mirande. he latter (1925–1972) was very
popular among younger readers, possibly because of his heterodoxy. He published his only
novel in 1970, Haur besoetakoa (he goddaughter). In 1957, Euskaltzaindia published Álvarez
Emparanza’s irst novel, Leturiaren egunkari ezkutua (he secret diary of Leturia). his author,
also known as “Txillardegi,” (San Sebastián, 1929) was an advocate of Sartre’s ideology, and he
defended the intellectual’s commitment to the struggles of his time. He inluenced the stan-
dardization of Basque and the development of a literary language that was beginning to become
a reality at that time.
Gabriel Aresti (Bilbao, 1933–1975), author of Maldan Behera (Downhill), a 2000 line poem,
is the great poet of the period. he poem’s symbolic complexity and richness in literary refer-
ences makes it a cryptic text associating the descent to hell (or death) of the main character’s
voyage with a double crisis: that of the poet and that of Basque society. Aresti was also able to
relect the social conlict of the sixties in the greater Bilbao area, a city which had received a
huge number of immigrants who lived in precarious conditions and resisted integration. Harri
eta Herri (Stone and country, 1964) refers to this phenomenon. Aresti’s poems circulated widely
in new Basque songs dealing with a rural component in the radical – and thus revolutionary –
nationalism of ETA at that time. In 1967 and 1970 he published the poems Euskal Harria (he
Basque stone) and Harrizko herri hau (his country of stone) respectively, both of which pres-
ent a touch of bertsolarismo (Basque popular poetry). Aresti believed in a possible synthesis of
Basque and Spanish culture based on a revolutionary solidarity among workers and peasants,
and his voice was perceived as a message of fraternity between two worlds divided by language.
He was much more than a social poet. Juaristi (1987b, 123) emphasized that Aresti, generous
beyond his limited means, edited and promoted authors who shared neither his political nor
his poetic ideas. He was an important igure in the standardization of the language. Aresti also
touched the areas where Basque literature most needed him, by writing plays, narratives, and by
translating into Basque works by Brecht, Bocaccio, and Eliot, among others. He was a symbol
of Basque cultural resistance under Franco, and his death – shortly before that of the dictator –
shocked the country. All of the authors who experimented with new ways of writing ater 1968
were inluenced by his works. Juaristi (1987b, 123) appropriately applies to them an old medieval
saying: “We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of a giant.”
Ramón Saizarbitoria (1944) belongs to a later group of novelists. He published Egunero
hasten delako (Because it begins each day) in 1969, which broke with the narrative tradition of
Txillardegi and substituted the existentialist novel with the nouveau roman. In 1975, Saizarbito-
ria published 100 metro (A hundred meters, 1985), a bilingual Spanish-Basque narration in the
second person. He complained that political events of the time, such as the 1970 court-martial
in Burgos and the social situation leading up to the 1977 amnesty, fostered social poetry rather
than an independent literature.
he message and form of poetry also changed. Juan Mari Lekuona (1927–2005) published
volumes of his poems such as Muga beroak (Hot borders, 1973). In Mikel Lasa’s (1938) Poema
bilduma (Collection of poems, 1971) we can see the inluence of Baudelaire. It is not feasible to
refer to all the writers of this period due to their great number, but we can mention Arantza
Urretabizkaia (1947) and her poem San Pedro bezperaren ondokoak (What followed the eve of
Saint Peter’s, 1972). Also, Bernardo Atxaga (the pseudonym of Joseba Irazu, 1951) – who will be
discussed below – published his only book of poems to date, Etiopía (Ethiopia) in 1978, and he
later published Poética (Poetics) (Atxaga, 1986). He had already used all of the resources avail-
able to the poetry of his time. he author Koldo Izagirre (1953) bridged several tendencies and
his book Gauzetan (In things) is, according to Kortazar (1990, 133), the irst step towards the
introduction of a fantasy-based reality into Basque stories.
here are many other authors worth mentioning. Anjel Lertxundi (1948) wrote Hunik ar-
ratsartean (From here to evening, 1970), a collection of stories including elements from South
American literature. Joseba Sarrionaindia (1958) wrote Lagun izoztua (he frozen friend, 2001).
Atxaga also stands out for the quantity and the quality of his production. In addition to poetry,
Atxaga wrote novels such as Bi anai (Two brothers, 1985) and an ambitious work about a mythi-
cal world, Obabakoak, written in 1988 (Obabakoak: A novel, 1992). his book consecrates him
as one of the most outstanding contemporary writers, having gone through twelve editions and
translation into twenty diferent languages. Atxaga’s merits have achieved recognition. He has
received the Spanish Critics’ Award, the Spanish National Prize for Literature, and the Euskadi
Award. Finally, it would be unfair not to mention Xavier Gereño (1924) and Gotzon Garate
(1934), who have dedicated years of labor to writing detective and spy novels, an element of
popular literature that is needed in every linguistic community.
As Basque speakers we enjoy the possibility of using poetic language. his variety is dis-
cussed in numerous essays on poetics. he number of books about our literature has also in-
creased. he irst of these was arguably Historia de la literatura vasca (History of Basque litera-
ture, 1960) by Luis Michelena (Koldo Mitxelena, 1915–1987), and the most recent histories are
those of Iñaki Aldekoa, Historia de la literatura vasca (History of Basque literature, 2004), and
Patri Urkizu (1946), Historia de la literatura vasca (History of Basque literature, 2000). Also to
be found are Luis Villasante’s (1928–2000) Historia de la literatura vasca (History of Basque
literature, 1961) and Ibon Sarasola’s (1946) Euskal literaturaren historia (History of Basque
literature, 1971), the irst to be written in Basque, with a Spanish version in 1976. One must
also mention Jon Juaristi (1951), who discarded the word “history” from the title of his work
Basque literature (1987). Soon aterwards, Jon Kortazar (1955) published a more synchronic
study (Kortazar, 1990) which focused on the twentieth century as a period worthy of study in
itself. Hopefully, this will continue to be the case in the twenty-irst century, that is, Basque
literature will not only have cultured writers as it currently does, but it will also continue to
have many readers.
Ideology and image of Peninsular languages in Spanish literature
Fernando Romo Feito
he structure of a language, its syntax and phonological system, does not in itself lead to speciic
interpretations. However, speech, the production of discourse, always occurs among socially
situated individuals, and their social positions are relected by the signs they use. As Bakhtin
stated (1977, 102), we do not actually pronounce and understand words, but rather things which
are true or false, good or bad, important or trivial, pleasant or unpleasant. In other words,
Saussure’s langue is transparent because it is a linguistic abstraction, but speech is not. Speech
expresses a myriad of value judgments, which are seldom created by individuals, but rather
signs of a socially-mediated intersubjectivity. hese judgments are an important part of what
we call ideology. Moreover, just as languages permit us not only to speak about the world, but
also to even have a world, as Gadamer stated, they are also in themselves objects of which to
speak, a property known as relexivity. his relection has produced the grammatical tradition,
and it has also given way to numerous value judgments – linguistic prejudices – which are an
expression of the tension among groups which are in close contact and speak in diferent ways.
he Spanish literary canon oten contains – many times with no relation to the authors’ birth-
place – images of the peninsular languages, including Spanish and the other languages which
have come into contact with it. his is what we will now further analyze.
First we must go back to the dawn of modern time, usually thought to begin with the reign
of the Catholic Monarchs, who married in the year 1469. It is beyond a doubt that the current
language distribution in the Iberian Peninsula originated in the Middle Ages as an outcome of
the North-South deployment of the Reconquista, in contrast to the geographical structure of the
land, from which we would expect an East-West development (López García 1985, 32). During
the Middle Ages, the peninsula was polyglot, giving rise to the peculiar situation in which a
literary genre was tied to a language, so that Alfonso X the Learned, who spoke Castilian, wrote
his lyric poetry in Galician-Portuguese. he dynastic union between two peninsular kingdoms
achieved by the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, their conquest of
the Muslim reign of Granada, and their support of Columbus’ enterprise all served to deine
and consolidate the spread of Castilian across and beyond the peninsula, i.e., its conversion
into “Spanish.” his spread modiied the status of the other Romance languages spoken in the
peninsula, and it also changed the way they were perceived. Due to these changes, the word
“Spanish” acquired a political meaning, despite having an earlier origin. he Catholic Monarchs
had political interests which led them to become actively involved in Italy, and thus to intensify
contact with the language then known as “Tuscan,” the common language of the home of Hu-
manism. For this reason we shall focus on the developments following their marriage.
In 1490 or 1491, Gonzalo García de Santa María, a convert from Aragon, became the irst
to make a defense of the Spanish language as a companion of Empire, even prior to Nebrija.
Within his defense we can already see some of the guidelines which would deine the future
relationships between languages and the way they are perceived:
One can ind within Castile, where diverse kingdoms are united in one, some such rude and
abrupt languages as Galician, Biscayan, Asturian, and Tierra de Campos; neither these, nor
Andalusian are considered an elaborate tongue. he irst are so crass and vulgar so as to be
incomprehensible, and the second has so many Moorish words that not even Castilians can
understand it. Language should be like currency, with the proper material, weight and stamp,
so that it is not rejected in any of the lands which the prince has fought for. In this way, words
and expressions which are solely Andalusian, and which cannot be understood except by those
who live there, should be rejected, just as if they were money of uncertain shape and stamp.
(Frago 1986, 113–14)1
his is not a literary text, but it is quite eloquent. here are now several kingdoms gathered in
one, García de Santa María says, and within them he discerns the “rude and abrupt” northern
linguistic varieties in contrast to the Andalusian variety, which is inelaborate, and is esteemed,
we can suppose, to be inseparable from the enemies of race and religion. his idiomatic situ-
ation is portrayed with an economic simile that would have delighted Marx: a unitary king-
dom – and market, we may say – demands a single and genuine currency, and also a linguistic
medium which facilitates exchange rather than hindering it. Only one year later Nebrija would
complete the scenario with the other aspects in the foreword to his Gramática. His purpose
was to provide norms that would allow the written text to endure, as the written texts in Latin
and Greek endured, “because they were subjected to art.” Furthermore, his grammar would
not only enable the conquered to learn the language more easily, “but the people from Biscay,
Navarre, the French and Italian, and all others who have contact and conversation with Spain,
and need our language” would also beneit, for “language has always been a companion of
Empire,” in keeping with the principle of translatio imperii (Nebrija 1992, 108). hus, the image
of language turns out to be bivalent. he Catholic Monarchs’ intervention in Italy was received
as a renewed barbarian invasion and the Italian chroniclers were ordered to write in Latin,
while humanists were invited to the court and Nebrija would try to “enlighten” the vernacular
language (Álvarez Junco 2001, 51). We have an excellent document of this ambivalence in
Diálogo de la lengua (Dialogue of language, 1535), with which we begin to deal with works that
comprise the canon of Spanish literature. Juan de Valdés (1969, 43–44) did not want to speak
about his language, “because I have learned Latin from art and books, and Spanish by use,
and so I could speak about Latin because of the art and the books from which I learned, and
about Spanish only because of the common use of speaking.”2 According to him, “everyone
1. “Ay aliende esso enla misma Castilla, como son diuersos regnos en vno ayuntados, algunas tan grosseras y
asperas lenguas como es Galizia, Vizcaya, Asturias y Tierra de Campos, que ni aquellas ni lo muy andaluz
es auido por lenguaje esmerado. Ca lo vno de muy gruesso y rudo se pierde, y lo otro de muy morisco
en muchos vocablos a penas entre los mismos Castellanos se entiende. Ca el vocablo deue ser como la
moneda, de tan buena liga, peso y cuño, que en ninguna tierra de las mismas del principe que la batio se
rehuse, y luego que el mote o palabra es de muy andaluz cerrada, que a malaues en el mismo Reyno, saluo
en aquel lugar solo donde le hablan, se entiende; luego le rehusan como a dinero que tiene cuño y forma
no conocida” (Frago 1986, 113–114).
2. “porque he aprendido la lengua latina por arte y libros, y la castellana por uso, de manera que de la latina
podría dar cuenta por el arte y por los libros en que la aprendí, y de la castellana no, sino por el uso común
de hablar.” (Valdés 1969, 43)
458 Fernando Romo Feito
must enlighten and enrich their natural language, the one imbibed with our mothers’ milk.”3
Still, Spanish faced a certain degree of inferiority with respect to Latin, which was considered
a more perfect language because of its permanence and subjection to art – Dante Alighieri had
said something similar in De vulgari eloquentia. What is more, even if the Spanish language
may have been as “elegant and genteel” as Tuscan and very rich in vocabulary, it was also
considered more vulgar, since the latter had been enriched by the prose of Boccaccio and the
verse of Petrarch. Both authors had been proposed by Cardinal Pietro Bembo in Prose delle
volgar lengua (Prose on the vernacular, 1525) as models to follow in order to elevate the Tuscan
language to the same level as Latin.
In consequence, Tuscan and Spanish shared their inferiority with respect to Latin, but
Spanish was much freer from comparison with the classical language (D. Ynduráin 1982; Wein-
rich 1989). his favored its defense and emulation, and later promoted the development of
grammars and lexicons which accompanied its spread through Europe. Nevertheless, Spanish
was less cultivated than Tuscan, and this fact moved poets like Garcilaso and prose writers
like Boscán, who translated Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (he courtier) in order to enlighten the
language with new works. Italy certainly exerted a true cultural and literary hegemony, and the
exchange between Italy and Spain was constant for centuries. his fact explains the existence of
bilingual literature, and even the fact that Spanish authors occasionally used Italian. Elvezio Ca-
nonica de Rochemonteix (1997) has studied this phenomenon in the lyric genre, and has found
examples from authors such as Marquis of Santillana, Torres Naharro, Francisco and Cosme
de Aldana, Lope, Quevedo, and Bocángel. Even Garcilaso used Italian sentences, and we could
also add Góngora to the list.
At the end of the century, Fernando de Herrera (1580) was able to admit that Tuscan might
be “very lorid, plentiful, sot, and composed,” but he added that “our language is deep, religious,
honest, high, magniicent, sot, tender, very warm and rich in feelings, and so plentiful, that no
other language can vaunt that richness and fertility so fairly” (Herrera 1972, 313).4 Moreover, it
was common to claim, as did Juan de Horozco y Covarrubias – brother of Sebastián, to whom
we will refer later – in Emblemas Morales (Moral emblems, 1591), that “our language is so wide-
spread, that it is as common as Latin, and some people even think it is more common, or will
be more common than Latin soon” (E. Torre 1984, 112). And so, the inferiority complex with
regard to Latin and Tuscan had waned or vanished before the formidable imperial spread of the
Spanish Habsburg dynasty. Don Quixote says (II, xvi) in one of his lucid statements:
he great poet Homer did not write in Latin, because he was a Greek, nor did Virgil write
in Greek, because he was a Latin; in short, all the ancient poets wrote in the language they
imbibed with their mother’s milk, and never went in case of foreign ones to express their sub-
lime conceptions; and that being so, the usage should in justice extend to all nations, and
3. “todos los hombres somos más obligados a ilustrar y enriquecer la lengua que nos es natural y que mama-
mos en las tetas de nuestras madres.” (Valdés 1969, 44)
4. “Muy lorida, abundosa, blanda y compuesta […] la nuestra es grave, religiosa, honesta, alta, magníica,
suave, tierna, afectuosísima y llena de sentimientos, y tan copiosa y abundante, que ninguna otra puede
gloriarse de esta riqueza y fertilidad más justamente.” (Herrera 1972, 313)
the German poet should not be undervalued because he writes in his own language, nor the
Castilian, nor even the Biscayan, for writing in his. (Cervantes 1993, 1:679)5
So, theoretically there would be no reason to ridicule someone because of the language they
used. José Luis Girón Alconchel (1990) remarked that language is the main topic of the book of
books, Don Quixote, – we could also add that language is the topic of the whole of Cervantes’
work – and he cited the rejection of Latin and Latinisms, the use of proverbs as a sign of natu-
ral manners, and the consciousness that the historical languages are essentially heterogeneous
codes as examples. his is the reason why Cervantes did not identify one correct manner of
speaking with any speciic place – it was usually said to be Toledo – and he recorded all kind of
linguistic varieties, from Latin to Arab to Italian, and even included criminal slang.
Nevertheless, statements like the aforementioned did not stop Cervantes – still within Don
Quixote – from making fun of Biscayans because of their way of speaking Spanish, and this kind
of attitude reappeared in the interlude El vizcaíno ingido (he fake Biscayan). He was relecting
a new value, namely that of speaking clear and proper Spanish – Góngora would later be criti-
cized for obscurity –, and also introducing one of the most characteristic, comic literary igures
of the Spanish Golden Century, and even aterwards. However, he was not the only one doing
so. he so-called teatro menor – a forerunner of género chico – was teeming with a whole series
of characters created to amuse with their incorrect and ambiguous way of speaking. hese char-
acters also appeared in works by authors such as Cervantes, Góngora, and Quevedo, and they
make up the best ield within which to seek the perception of a language. he languages found
in the literature of the time are known as “minority,” “marginal,” or “special” languages, indicat-
ing that along with the use of “Biscayan” – the most frequently depicted language –, Catalan,
and Galician, these works also depict the speech used by blacks, gypsies, and Moors, along
with Sayagués, criminal slang (germanía), and Fabla antigua (Salvador Plans 2004). he irst
three languages are of special interest because they exist today and we can credit the spread of
Spanish as the cause for their minority or marginal being. he need to communicate with other
regions and foreign countries, the growing importance of the court, and the Catholic Monarchs’
policy that encouraged the conversion of the feudal nobility into courtesans, all explain the
spread of Spanish as a true koine (A. López García 1985). As a result, with the rise of what José
Álvarez Junco (2001, 62) calls “ethnic patriotism,” other modes of speech began to be called
“rude tongues,” the speech of the coarse and vulgar villages, the opposite of courtly life. In this
way the literary cliché contrasting court and village strengthened the ield of sociolinguistics.
How was Basque portrayed in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? It
is easier to discuss the image of the Biscayan people than their language. Miguel Herrero (1966,
249) has listed the main features of Biscayans found in the literature of the seventeenth century:
they were of noble origin, modest, lacked character, were good secretaries (because of their
nobility) and sailors, were excessively fond of wine, and were quick-tempered. Nevertheless,
5. “El grande Homero no escribió en latín, porque era griego,” “ni Virgilio no escribió en griego, porque era
latino; en resolución, todos los poetas antiguos escribieron en la lengua que mamaron en la leche, y no
fueron a buscar las estranjeras para declarar la alteza de sus conceptos; y siendo esto así, razón sería se
estendiese esta costumbre por todas las naciones, y que no se desestimase el poeta alemán porque escribe
en su lengua, ni el castellano, ni aun el vizcaíno que escribe en la suya.” (Cervantes 1993, 1:679)
their irst appearance in literature was even earlier, as Francisco Ynduráin (1951) reminds us by
providing several examples of lyrics that probably date back to 1500. Likewise, Manuel Ferrer
Chivite (2001, 24) inds the same igure in the comedy Tinellaria by Torres Naharro (1517). Al-
though the Biscayan shares his roughness with other kinds of comic igures and therefore lacks
this as a distinctive trait, the presumption of nobility and linguistic characterization are unique
to Biscayans (Ferrer Chivite 2001, 34). he irst has been associated with an obsession with pure
blood – the Moors did not reach that region –, exempliied by the Ordenanzas de Guipúzcoa
(Guipuzcoa ordinances), that in 1463 banned all converts from entering the region. However,
we are more interested in the linguistic characterization.
One of the characteristics of the use of Basque in literature is that the term used is always
“Biscayan,” and never, or rarely “Basque,” “Guipuzcoan,” or “from Álava.” “Biscayan” is given
a generic value which encompasses the other place names. In Tesoro de la lengua castellana o
española (hesaurus of Castilian or Spanish Language, 1611), Sebastián Covarrubias included
a reference to “the Cantabrian” in the entry “Guipúzcoa,” as a term embracing Biscayans, Gui-
puzcoans, and “the people from Santillana,” because of their proximity. A second characteristic
is the assumption that Basque is the oldest language in Spain, where it would have been irst
introduced by Tubal, Noah’s great-great-grandson (Covarrubias 1979, 995), and remained with-
out mixing with other languages. his idea, defended by Juan de Valdés in the sixteenth cen-
tury, who preferred Greek as the language of origin, was generally accepted by the seventeenth
century.
Two other linguistic traits are the shortness of words and unconventional syntax. Due to
this, it is surprising that in the Middle Ages the presence of Basque elements in Spanish texts
was considered prestigious (Echenique Elizondo 2004, 67). he spurious sequel of Guzmán de
Alfarache (Guzman of Alfarache, 1602) explains that if Biscayans were thought to be dull it is
only because of the uniqueness of their language: “And Biscayan cannot be transformed easily,
because of its complexity, they [Biscayan people] therefore usually speak a broken Castilian that
leads them to be considerd obtuse.”6 his means that bilingual Basques who could not master
Castilian were thought to make errors as a result of the complexity of Basque itself, which is why
Biscay is a “land where [poets] can not be found”, according to Quevedo. In fact, the Biscayan
squire’s reply when Don Quixote (DQ I, viii) questions his being a knight is a good example: “I
no gentleman! – I swear to God thou liest as I am Christian: if thou droppest lance and drawest
sword, soon shalt thou see thou art carrying water to the cat: Biscayan on land, hidalgo at sea,
hidalgo at the devil, and look, if thou sayest otherwise thou liest” (Cervantes 1993, 1:100).7 Que-
vedo also theorized humorously about Basque’s diiculty in his festive prose, concretely in Libro
de todas las cosas (Book of all things, 1631): “If you want to know Biscayan, exchange the irst
and second person with the verbs, and feel Biscayan, like Juancho: ‘Remove leagues, walk well
6. “Y, porque la lengua vizcaína no se puede trocar fácilmente por ser intrincada, y suelen tropezar y hablar
cortamente en la castellana.” (Luján de Sayavedra 2007, 362)
7. “¿Yo no caballero? Juro a Dios tan mientes como cristiano. Si lanza arrojas y espada sacas, ¡el agua cuán
presto verás que al gato llevas! Vizcaíno por tierra, hidalgo por mar, hidalgo por el diablo, y mientes que
mira si otra dices cosa.” (Cervantes 1993, 1:100)
Biscayan,’ and from time to time add a ‘Juanguaycoa’ ”8 (Quevedo 1984, 121). But note that, apart
from “Juanguaycoa,” the caricatures deal with word order and syntactic disorder, meaning that
it is only a morphologically and syntactically distorted Spanish. he point is that, even keeping
in mind the occasional insertion of some Basque terms, “what is relected in a literary way is
how bilingual Basques speak by expressing themselves dimly in an oicial language, which has
been incorrectly assimilated by them” (Frago 1986, 104). Nevertheless, Lope de Vega included
a refrain and a comment with a few other words in Basque in Los ramilletes de Madrid (he
bouquets of Madrid, 1618). his example is unique, showing that Biscayan was restricted to
dramatic genres such as the interlude, and Canonica de Rochemonteix (1991, 490) ascribes it to
a momentary “setting of atmosphere,” because Lope did not speak the language.
he case of Galician is diferent, for Galician had a noteworthy literary tradition, Galician-
Portuguese medieval lyric poetry. Alfonso the Learned had composed his cantigas (songs) in
Galician, but by the fourteenth century Castilian had taken its place, so that the main part of
Cancionero de Baena (Baena songbook) was written in this language (Lapesa 1997, 254). Ater
the defeat of the so-called irmandiños revolt in 1469, the Catholic Monarchs centered their ef-
forts on converting the Galician nobility into courtesans and “breaking in Galicia,” as the his-
torian Jerónimo Zurita graphically describes in Anales de la Corona de Aragón (Annals of the
Kingdom of Aragon, 1562–1580). he unequal distribution of the land, which was in the hands
of the Church and the nobility, caused a massive emigration of Galicians in miserable condi-
tions (Caramés 1993, 56), leading them to occupy the lowest job categories. hey were associ-
ated with footmen, servants, handymen, barmaids (oten prostitutes), drudges, and washer-
women. Galician men were branded dirty, miserable, wily, skeptic, and indiscreet, and Galician
women hety, ugly and lustful. he view of Galicians was mostly negative, and this can be seen
in the proverb antes puto que gallego (better to be a bastard than a Galician), in the proverbial
coz galiciana (Galician kick) ascribed to them, or in the deinition of Galicia provided by Es-
tebanillo González: “Tail of Castile, servant of Asturias, and sewer of Portugal.”9 For Caramés
(1993, 227), who provides many examples, the image of Galicians is the most negative one in
Spanish literature, only comparable to the image of Moors. his was only a literary cliché, and
didn’t relect reality. Góngora is known as the most virulent author; however, there are also
plenty of positive passages, mostly in Tirso de Molina, and occasionally in Lope de Vega, where
the Galician nobility is treated with respect. his said, negative opinions were much more fre-
quent, and the noble characterization which was ascribed to Biscayans is missing.
Our focus is the image of the Galician language in literature. Caramés (1993) focuses on
chronicling the perceptions of the Galician people, and he inds that image less present in the
sixteenth than in the seventeenth century, particularly in proverbs. He also edited some com-
edies from the seventeenth century. Picaresque, festive prose, poetry, and the new comedy genre
portrayed Galicians in a negative light, but their mode of speech was not relected at all. Gali-
cian was simply compared to Greek as the height of opacity. Lope de Vega criticized Góngora in
poem number 73 of his Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos (Human and
8. “Si quieres saber vizcaíno, trueca las primeras personas en segundas con los verbos, y cátate vizcaíno, como
Juancho: ‘Quitas leguas, buenos andas vizcaíno’, y de rato en rato su ‘Juanguaycoa’.” (Quevedo 1984, 121)
9. “Rabo de Castilla, servidumbre de Asturias y albañar de Portugal.” (Anon 1990, 32)
divine rhymes of the graduate Tome de Burguillos, 1634): “If languages do not keep knowledge’s
company, / it makes no diference whether to know Greek or Galician” (ll 13–14).10
Teijeiro (1996, 209) has ventured that “the diiculty and the practical uselessness of Gali-
cian might have been an insuperable obstacle and, from time to time, a distinguishing feature,
which would lead more to servility and lack of understanding than to conidence and solidarity.”
A curious fact is that those who were familiar with Galicia were aware of the linguistic proxim-
ity between Galician and Portuguese, as is stated by a character of Tirso de Molina in the play
Mari-Hernández la gallega (he Galician Mari-Hernández): “With its suit / Portuguese doesn’t
look bad / for it is not easily distinguished / from the Galician language”.11 And Portuguese did
not merit, at least for Cervantes, a negative opinion. Madrigal, a character from La gran sultana
(he great sultana, II, ll. 1530–1557) who boasts about knowing all the languages in the world
and promises to teach an elephant to speak, mentions several languages, including Biscayan,
unique because of its age, and explains that, in case all the diferent languages he has mentioned
be too tough for the animal, “I will teach him the sugary / Valencian and Portuguese”.12 “Sugary”
here is not a negative description – the Portuguese had a reputation for easily falling in love.
It is interesting that for Lope, Galician simply didn’t exist, but Portuguese did. According to
Canonica de Rochemonteix’s exhaustive study (1991, 280 f.), Lope knew Portuguese well, and
he had the same attitude his contemporaries had: Portuguese was no foreign language, he knew
and was able to cite it and even emulate many authors, above all Camões. Lope especially liked
Portuguese and associated it with music, and he considered the Portuguese a boastful people
who easily fell in love.
In short, the fact is that if we go to the collection of popular sayings and to samples from
teatro menor, it is possible to ind characters speaking Galician with varying degrees of linguis-
tic realism which is not conined to the syntactic disorder of Biscayan, since the realism is also
lexical: aínda, teño, máis, and includes popular phonetic features.
It is natural that, when creating characters in keeping with comic igures, there would be a
diference between the more artiicial and afected tongue of the blacks and Moors, and the lan-
guage of the Galician-Portuguese. his is why there are “plenty of passages from theatrical plays
of the 17th century, and also humorous songs and carols, in which Galician and Portuguese
characters speak quite correctly” (Frago 1986, 111). he example that he gives, however, is taken
from Portuguese and not from Galician. In any case, the idelity to Galician was never perfect,
and the negative portrayal was predominant. On the other hand, Forneiro (2004) points out the
existence of a rich collection of ballads – ca. six thousand texts and one hundred and seventy
themes – which were transmitted orally and endured until the eighteenth century. Linguisti-
cally, it is a “mixed” collection, and it proves the Hispanicization of the popular sectors, but in
it the Galician component is likewise important.
he people of Catalonia were portrayed quite diferently. Herrero (1966, 284) distinguishes
three qualities: their love of liberty, strength in friendship, and violent revenge when afronted.
10. “Si a las lenguas la ciencia no acompaña, / Lo mismo es saber griego que gallego.” (Teijeiro 1996, 209)
11. “Con su traje/ No dice mal el portugués lenguaje, / pues se distingue poco/ de la lengua gallega.” (Mari-
Hernández la gallega cited in Teijeiro 1996, 209)
12. “Mostraréle las melosas / valenciana y portuguesa.” (Cervantes 1995, 3:518)
Cervantes’ praise of Barcelona is well known: “he place where courtesy is kept” (Cervantes
1993, 1:1089). Also famous are the image of a Catalonia subjected to the violence of political
parties, and the banditry of characters such as Roque Guinart (DQ II, lx). Praise of Barcelona
is not scarce in Lope de Vega and Castillo Solórzano, nor is the aforementioned reputation for
being violent and vengeful. Herrero (1966, 291) mentions that both Rojas Zorrilla and Calderón
include verses “from a short ballad in Catalan, which must have resounded from the open-air
theaters in Madrid to the Coliseum in Seville” in El catalán Serrallonga y bandos de Barcelona
(Serrallonga the Catalan and the gangs of Barcelona). Today the play is attributed to a collabora-
tion among Antonio Coello, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, and Luis Vélez de Guevara.
Nevertheless, it is signiicant enough that someone as meticulous as Herrero provides only
this example, unlike the countless references to Galicians, Basques, and Andalusians, and the
many references to the Valencian people. he truth is that in the previous century the poet
from Barcelona Juan Boscán, a friend of Garcilaso, only included two verses in Catalan in the
whole of his work, although the Catalan literary tradition was at least as rich as the Galician-
Portuguese one. Martí de Riquer (1964–88, 3:574f) deals with the decline of Catalan literature
in a particularly unbiased way. While the Middle Ages saw a balance between literature written
in Spanish and Catalan, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries there was a clear
fall “in the literary intention, and when this intention existed, there was a fall in the tone.” In
Catalonia and in Valencia, this decline coincided with population growth, an increase in the
wealth of the bourgeoisie and the welfare of cratsmen and artisans, a rise in the production of
printing presses – Don Quixote (II, lxii) visits one in Barcelona –, the work of artists, and the
establishment of libraries. Above all, “Catalan was still what we could call the oicial language
of the viceroyalties, and not the slightest restriction or opposition was imposed on it” (M. de
Riquer 1964–88, 3:575). Martí de Riquer rejects the enthronement of the Castilian dynasty of
Trastámara as the cause for the decline, and assigns the causes to the absence of the royal court,
the weakness of the University, which lectured in Latin, and the bourgeoisie’s lack of interest in
literature. he fact is that Catalonia had no great writers either in Catalan or in Spanish, unlike
Valencia, which had a noteworthy school. Catalan remained a familiar and popular language
that the non-Catalan courtesans ignored, and which was defended mainly for use by those of
humble origin who did not master Castilian. herefore, although a Cervantine character from
La Galatea (Galatea) says that “many armed people came to the beach, whose dress and tongue
implied they were Catalan”13 (Cervantes 1994, 2:295) when he arrives at the Catalan shore, wit-
nesses of the time observed Catalan’s fall into disuse by the royal court, and – perhaps as a
consequence – a weakened presence in Spanish literature. It is signiicant that Canonica de
Rochemonteix identiies Catalan and Valencian, and that he is surprised at the weak presence
of the latter in Lope’s works, having lived in Valencia for ive years. His conclusion is clear: Lope
took his linguistic material from a literary background, and it is evident that for him “Catalan
literature, which was not practiced by the poets of that time, had lost all its prestige, and there-
fore it did not deserve to be staged” (Canonica de Rochemonteix 1991, 487).
13. “Acudió a la playa mucha gente armada, cuyo traje y lengua dio a entender ser catalanes.” (Cervantes 1994,
2:295)
From what we have said up to now, one should not deduce that the “polyglot character”
of the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was limited to Basque, Catalan, and
Galician. We can say that at that moment “Castilian became Spanish. […] he other forms of
Spanish […] become diatopic variations of the Spanish language” (Gauger 2002, 683). he other
peninsular languages remained within the familiar, mainly rural sphere, not because of political
policy but rather as a result of the process of separation of classes along with the spread and
prestige of Spanish, which was used in the court, throughout the diferent regions, abroad, and
in the Indies. “Ethnic patriotism,” the cultural and racial pride emerging around the Catholic
Monarchs, cannot be considered either nationalism or pre- or proto-nationalism. here are
“two crucial connections” missing: “the irst, between an oicial culture and the state; the sec-
ond, between the legitimacy of the latter and its sanction by the collective or popular person-
ality” (Álvarez Junco 2001, 63). For this we have to wait until the nineteenth century, but this
did not impede this ideology, on which subsequent nationalism would rest, from beginning to
develop. An example is Quevedo’s treatment of Arabic: to learn it “all you have to do is bark, for
it is a dog’s tongue, and so you will be understood at once” (1984, 121).14
he presence of the peninsular languages in literature can be seen in varying degrees.
Sometimes they are simply mentioned, other times they form part of the speech of diferent
characters, and in the case of lyric poetry they are used in multilingual poems. In prose they are
usually used to evoke certain atmospheres, as in Viaje de Turquía (Voyage to Turkey, 1557–1558)
and in Don Quixote, where Ángel Rosenblat (1978, 205) pointed out that each character speaks
according to his or her origin, which explains the presence of the Biscayan’s speech, along with
some solitary words in Arabic, Italian, German, and Catalan.
Peninsular languages were also present in satire, festive prose, picaresque, and in drama
following the examples of Torres Naharro and Gil Vicente, where they became so common
that Quevedo ridiculed this tendency. We have already mentioned that the languages included
are not only Basque, Galician, and Catalan – the latter being less frequent – but also special or
marginal dialects, from fabla antigua to (germanía) criminal slang, including Sayagués, and the
jargons used by blacks, gypsies, and Moors. hese languages oten performed a double func-
tion (Canonica de Rochemonteix 1991). he communication diiculties that arose between the
characters and the audience were utilized in plots, and a comic efect was achieved. Lope de
Vega was a master of this technique, which was also used by other playwrights of comedia nueva.
In the lesser dramatic genres such as the interlude, playwrights had comic characters
speak these diferent languages as a means of stereotyped characterization, along with the use
of names and the attribution of collective defects. he use of these languages depended on the
knowledge the dramatist had of each language, and was determined by literary cliché. here-
fore, the degree of linguistic realism was highly uneven (Frago 1986). We have already men-
tioned that Biscayan was reduced to syntactic disorder. Valencians were characterized by the
pronunciation of the Spanish c or z as s (seseo), and gypsies pronounced s as c or z (ceceo), and
so on. In all these cases the idea was to include features perceived as “incorrect language.” his
demeaned the character, making him the butt of other characters’ jokes.
14. “No es menester más que ladrar, que es lengua de perros y te entenderán al punto.” (Quevedo 1984, 121)
Besides Biscayan, omnipresent Italian, and Portuguese – understood by everyone –, the

most intense linguistic presence was Andalusian, mostly among people of culture. Juan de
Valdés despised Nebrija’s Grammar because Nebrija was Andalusian. Fernando de Herrera
changed his spelling according to his Andalusian language. his altered spelling was also com-
mon in the speech of comic characters, since many of the phonetic features characterizing the
minor languages, like the pronunciation of s as c or z, elle as ye (yeísmo), and the neutralization
of /l/ and /r/, resembled Andalusian (Frago 1986, 113–114).
he ascension to the throne of the Bourbon dynasty from France brought about a change
in the relationships among peninsular languages. Between 1707 and 1716, ater his victory in
the War of Spanish Succession, Philip V enacted the Decretos de nueva planta (Decrees of
new establishment), by which the traditional statutes and franchises of the Crown of Aragon
(Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and Majorca) were fully or partially abrogated. he Crown of
Aragon, in general terms, had resisted Philip V’s succession in order to protect its charters, and,
as a result of the new regime, Aragon came to lose its political, administrative, iscal, and judi-
cial institutions, which were replaced by others aimed at ensuring an increasing centralization.
Here we can see the fulillment of projects, ideas, and tendencies which were already present
in the previous dynasty.
he Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), one of the new regime´s cultural institutions, was
founded in 1713 with the motto “limpia, ija y da esplendor” (to cleanse, ix, and give splendor),
“with a very speciic inality: to regulate a language, which – according to the members of the
Academy – had reached its ultimate perfection in the 17th century” (López Morales 2004, 919).
In the years 1717 and 1718, the king enacted decrees abolishing the higher educational institu-
tions of Catalonia (there were four, in Barcelona, Tarragona, Lerida, and Gerona, plus one other
in Vich); and the University of Cervera, which lectured in Spanish, was founded. he new
decrees, the establishment of the RAE and of the University of Cervera were part of a plan to
guarantee monarchical absolutism, not only within the legal sphere, but also within the cultural
sphere, with Spanish as the linguistic medium, and now the oicial main language. Neverthe-
less, there was no coercive measure against Catalan or Valencian in the everyday sphere, or
even against their use to address the king (Juárez Medina 2002). Within this policy, it is diicult
to determine which measures were meant to contribute to a centralized and national image of
Spain and Spanish, and which were meant to contribute solely to dynastic interests. In either
case, as a result of Philip V’s decrees, Catalan, which had lost ground throughout the seven-
teenth century, began to gain ground again (Álvarez Junco 2001, 164), which is quite signiicant.
In keeping with a period characterized by the dogmatic word of rationalism, didactic lit-
erary genres proliferated, especially those focusing on the Spanish language. hey had titles
such as Teatro crítico universal (Universal critical theater) by Feijoo, Oración en que se exhorta
a seguir la verdadera idea de la elocuencia española (Petition for the following of the true idea
of Spanish eloquence, 1727), Orador cristiano (Christian orator, 1733) and Rhetorica (Rhetoric,
1757) by Mayans, Plan de educación de la nobleza (Plan to educate the nobility, 1798) and Memo-
ria sobre la educación (Report on education, 1802) by Jovellanos. Lapesa gave the name “mod-
ern Spanish” to the language of this period. If the point was to “ix the language” by purifying
it from the corruption and excesses of the Baroque period, then there was a need to broaden
it with neologisms and vulgarisms, or with Gallicisms, for at the time French – and in general
France and French customs – was “the third party,” and a subject of discussion throughout the
century. France was imitated and envied for its development, rationalism, and fashion, but it
was also an object of criticism. French fashion introduced “neoclassicism, and the concept of
Golden Age, the acceptation of rules, and the elevation of the 16th century as the canon of the
Spanish language” (Lázaro Carreter 1985, 235). At irst, the RAE did not have an attitude of
rejection toward writers of the seventeenth century, and Luzán’s Poética (Poetics), generally ac-
cepted as marking the beginning of neoclassicism in Spain, was published in 1737. However, this
attitude would change. According to Lázaro Carreter (1985, 259), there arose a conlict between
the trend to keep with the castizo (inborn) characteristics of the Spanish language and what was
conceived of as corruptness – deined as parting from the language of the sixteenth century. he
negative form of the castizo trend would be “purism,” which rejected the introduction of any
new word or expression, whether Gallicisms or of other origins.
he genres of the eighteenth century, in which we can recognize the seeds of the modern
essay, reveal a concern with language as a means of enlightenment and of fostering social mo-
bility, exchange, and scientiic progress. One had to learn Spanish, along with French and Eng-
lish, and not Latin, Jovellanos would say. here was, hand in hand with pride for the language, a
consciousness of underdevelopment which had to be made up for, and this was a cause of much
debate throughout the century. he “national” language wanted to cut its umbilical cord with
Latin and to become the backbone of the cultural canon of the enlightened monarchy (Álvarez
Junco 2001, 79). In fact, the erudite – including Valencians, such as Mayans, or Catalans, such
as Capmany – worked for the spread of Spanish.
How were the other peninsular languages, which had had such an important presence in
the literature of the Golden Age, portrayed in the eighteenth century? he fact is that while this
period had an impact on the image of Spanish, we have to wait for the new aesthetics of Ro-
manticism to ind changes in the image of the other languages. It is diicult to assess the efect
of the works of the erudite upon the people, since about eighty percent of the population was
illiterate. However, the dramatic genres that had existed since the previous century remained
unchanged. hese include mainly the genres of teatro menor: sainetes (one-act farces that were
a continuation of seventeenth-century entremeses, or interludes) and tonadillas (popular songs).
In Don Ramón de la Cruz’s farces and in género chico, which was popular at the height of the
eighteenth century, Frago (1986) has indeed found the same clichéd types of comic intention,
with a similar linguistic characterization as in the previous century.
We can date the end of the Ancien Régime and the start of the Contemporary Age in 1808.
his also marked the beginning of nationalism in its present-day meaning, which was aided by
the Liberals. he nationalism of the oicial culture clashed with a plural and fragmented history.
At the same time, the attention paid to Volkgeist, which concerned all things natural, spontane-
ous, and popular, led to a new view of the peninsular languages.
he best example of these new tendencies can be seen in the Galician and Catalan literary
resurgences, and also in the literature of manners, or costumbrismo. Frago has noted that this
last tendency was “in general of mediocre artistic value, marked by linguistic regionalism, and
oten with strong folk textures. […] Such ideas favored a greater linguistic realism far from the
previous cliché of strongly stereotyped idiomatic features” (Frago 1986, 91). Frago cites José Mª
de Pereda, who used phonetic idioms and Cantabrian lexis in his scenes of manners and in his
post-romantic novels Sotileza (1885) and Peñas arriba (Rocks above, 1895) in order to record,
in a respectful way, the speech of mountain dwellers and seamen from Santander. For example,
Sotileza was published with a “Glossary of some technical and local words used in this book for
‘non-specialist’ readers’ understanding.” For Pereda, the popular sectors of society represented
that which was spontaneous and pure, and not contaminated by the corrupting culture of Ma-
drid. he idyllic aesthetic that can be seen in many authors of the time shows that aesthetics
became, along with ideology, a determining factor in the appraisal of languages. In other words,
we face the “verbal-analytical” tendency of representing foreign discourse (Bakhtin 1977, 179),
which emphasized the enunciation of discourse rather than its meaning.
Within género chico there remained a multi-linguistic set of characters tied to humor and
mainly Andalusian cliché, but this was not true of regionalist lyric poetry, costumbrismo, or
the novel, which didn’t seek to make fun of other ways of speaking, or at least not in such a
simplistic way as in the previous centuries. In any case we should diferentiate between the
characteristic “local color” of costumbrismo, and the characteristic credibility of the great realist
novel. Meseguer (2002, 5) cites Pérez Galdós, perhaps the most important representative of this
movement, and his work Episodios nacionales (National episodes, 1873–1912). hese episodes
were constituted by a large series of over fourty novels seeking to record the history of the
Spanish people throughout the nineteenth century. To be precise, Meseguer (2002, 5) cites La
campaña del Maestrazgo (he Maestrazgo campaign), in which Cabrera, a legitimist Carlist
guerrilla leader, addresses his men in perfect Catalan. Meseguer states: “it is a realist narrative
method, and increases authenticity by using limited and speciic fragments written in direct
speech (and therefore oral and linked to concrete characters).” Meseguer also inds this method
in Pío Baroja and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Languages are, in these cases, “natural” ways of expres-
sion. he most signiicant case is that of Basque, which, as we know, had been widely satirized
in the seventeenth century. In Pérez Galdós Zumalacárregui, for instance, the guerrilla and
Carlist combatants speak Basque. Most noteworthy is the radical diference drawn to Spanish;
Basque is inscrutable: “He stared at the women, who were in the water washing the clothes and
talking in their Basque jargon, of which he didn’t understand a single word.”15. In another pas-
sage an old woman encourages some guerrillas towing a large gun:
Get moving, get moving right now, mutillac! And be aware that you take to his palace the King
himself. Heavy it is? Heavy it is? It’s all right, then. With this cannon, which you carry, God
will want Don Tomás to shatter the blacks… Tired are you? You can’t be tired. hink about it,
then, and God may give you the strength, God may make that you strength have like oxen and
horses… Get, get moving!16 (Pérez Galdós 1990, 143)
15. “Viendo a las mujeres con media pierna dentro del agua, golpeando la ropa, y charlando en su jerga vas-
cuence, de la cual no entendía una palabra.” (Pérez Galdós 1990, 257)
16. “¡Arrear, arrear ya, mutillac! Y háganse cargo de que al propio Rey a su palacio llevan. ¿Pesa, pesa? Ya vale,
pues. Con este cañón que llevar hacéis, ya querrá Dios que D. Tomás hacer polvo a los negros… ¿Cansar
hacéis? Aquí no cansar ninguno. Pensar, pues, que a rastra llevar el mismo religión, y quitar el de herejes…
Pensar esto, pues, y Dios ya dará fuerazs a vos, hará que fuerzas tener como bueyes y caballos… ¡Arrear,
arrear!” (Pérez Galdós 1990, 143)
he portrayal of Basque again uses the technique of syntactic disorder. he diference here is
the author’s attitude towards the old woman. Rather than make fun of her, he gives her a truly
epic appearance, which is signiicant considering that Pérez Galdós, a liberal, openly opposed
the Carlist cause, since he thought it was pure fanaticism. Nevertheless, this did not hinder his
appreciation of the popular energies devoted to the cause. In a similar way, he wrote about the
“Hiújujú, characteristic of the Cantabrian and Basque races, a wild, pastoral, warlike neigh, ex-
pressing and saying everything without saying anything.”17 he cry may be described as a neigh,
but it is considered a pastoral, warlike, and expressive one.
We have already mentioned the Catalan, Galician, and Basque regionalist or nationalist re-
surgences – renaixença or rexurdimento – at the middle and end of the nineteenth century. Ac-
cording to Álvarez Junco (2001, 593f.), these peripheral, and at irst mainly cultural, movements
gained nationalist political tension as a result of the discrepancy between the geographical
sources of economic power, Barcelona and Bilbao, and the source of political power in Madrid,
that was an insigniicant city at the time except for its status as capital. Ater the defeat of Spain
by the United States in 1898, a great failure for the Spanish Restoration state, the peripheral na-
tionalisms became popular movements and began to challenge the center. Central nationalism
also became “reactive,” taking the form of a unitary and authoritarian obsession, prone to mili-
tarism that inally expressed itself in the civil war between 1936 and 1939, and in the subsequent
dictatorship of General Franco (1939–1975). his obsession remains latent still today, and some-
times it becomes more apparent. he fact is that both kinds of nationalism established a new
system of relationships among languages, leading us to the present time. And the case is that,
while in non-didactic genres the image of languages showed a primordial aesthetic dependency,
in the didactic genres, as a consequence of the author’s public role, nationalisms were important
enough to prompt a more inmediate and apparent relection on linguistic policy.
Galicia took on a new image, if we consider the statements recorded by Xesús Alonso
Montero (1974). he image of Galician, which was mostly negative during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, became more varied in the nineteenth century. As far as Galician un-
derdevelopment and misery were taken into account, a tendency to sympathize with its people
arose. heir virtues of diligence and thrit were emphasized, quite oten with a patronizing
attitude, and those who exploited them, especially the Castilians, were chastised. Rosalía de
Castro (1837–1885), a great poet both in Galician and Spanish, was a decisive igure in constru-
ing a more favorable and proactive image. Within the sphere of Spanish literature, Ribera Llopis
and Rodríguez González (1999, 75) mention the attack of the Spanish restoration intelligentsia
on Galician regionalism. he cases of Núñez de Arce, for whom only Catalan or Basque were
valid, and of Valera are examples of this attack. However, it is important to bear in mind that
Emilio Castelar, a prominent igure who had been prime minister, wrote an admiring preface
to Follas novas (New leaves) by Rosalía de Castro in 1880 and that Francisco de Paula Canalejas,
an inluent scholar, had reviewed Cantares gallegos (Galician songs, 1863) very positively in 1864.
he thoughts of Castelar, Rosalía, and the great Galician novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán can
be used to outline a dialectic of linguistic images, which I believe is still valid beyond Galician.
17. “Hiújujú, característico de las razas cántabras y éuskaras, relincho salvaje, pastoril, guerrero, pues todo lo
expresa y dice sin decir nada.” (Pérez Galdós 1990, 150)
In the preface to her irst book of poetry in Galician, Cantares gallegos, Rosalía complained of
the anti-Galician legend and compared it to the legend forged in France against Spain. With
this, she contributed in building an image of mater dolorosa that was parallel to the Spanish one,
a victim mentality which would characterize hispanic nationalisms from that point on (Álvarez
Junco 2001, 599). For Castelar, “her speech must be Latin made Romance by the Swabian peo-
ple,” and he and others used adjectives such as “melodious,” “sweet,” “archaic,” “natural,” “mys-
terious,” “close,” and “poetic” to recall Galician’s medieval lyric tradition. Regarding Galician
literature, “it must coexist with the national literature, without damaging the fatherland, which
gets bigger as his children grow […] Rosalía, thanks to her Galician poem books, is a irst-rate
star in the vast horizons of Spanish art” (Romo Feito 2000, 450). Castelar, a republican who op-
posed federalism, believed in what we can call the ideal of harmonic contribution. In this ideal
Galician and its literature were a part of Spanish art, since Spanish – an embracing term – was
broader than Castilian. But Pardo Bazán in De mi tierra (Of my land, 1888) considered Galician
to be a patois, an artiicial translation, typical of a rural backward state, and “she proposed not
to use it, and to devote herself to the globalization of culture by means of literary expression in
Spanish” (Ribera Llopis and Rodríguez González 1999, 76). Similar polarities would be found
several years later between the young and the mature Unamuno (Resina 2004).
he verbal-analytical tendency continued in the novel and within the typical comedies of
género chico, where night watchmen and porters were in general still from Galicia or Asturias,
even if as a whole the castizo tendency from Andalusia and Madrid predominated. At the end
of the nineteenth century this coexisted with the growing sentiment of peripheral authors that
the languages other than Castilian were their true languages. Examples are the dedication of
Follas novas, the Nós Group in Galicia, or the case of the Catalan poet Joan Maragall (1860–1911),
who explained in Spanish:
I’m telling it to you in your language, can you understand it? I tell you in your language, but
– ah! – don’t build your hopes up, I think it in my language, and all I do is translate. We have
spoken to you this way, translating, for centuries, and our language did not die; here it is, as
alive as Portuguese, which is still alive; as alive as Castilian, which is alive in your lips, but not
in my lips… only in my pen – at this moment.18
Maragall himself considered that in the Iberian Peninsula there were three national families
deined by their romance languages: Galician-Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. hey corre-
sponded to the three parallel strips into which the Spanish map could be divided (Ribera Llopis
and Rodríguez González 1999, 80).
Rosalía’s work had an enormous inluence on the authors of the Generación del 98 (Gen-
eration of ’98), such as Unamuno and Azorín, and their positive viewpoint of Galicia, and it
may also explain the origin of Federico García Lorca’s Galician poems. As Resina (2004, 145)
pointed out, Unamuno’s attitude of understanding and even sympathy towards Galicia (the
18. “Os lo digo en la vuestra [lengua], ¿lo entendéis bien?, os lo digo en la vuestra, pero ¡ay! no os hagáis ilu-
siones, lo pienso en la mía, no hago más que traducir. Siglos y siglos os hemos hablado así traduciendo, y
la lengua no ha muerto; aquí está; tan viva como la portuguesa, que allí está; tan viva como la castellana,
que ahí está, en vuestros labios; no en los míos, sino sólo en mi pluma… ahora.” (quoted in García de Nora,
1993, 173)
poem Galicia of 1912) coexists with his categorical statements about Spanish being the only na-
tional language in Su Majestad, la Lengua Española (Her Majesty, the Spanish language, 1908),
a revealing title. In the opposite direction, this radicalism seems a counter-image of the openly
racist radicalism revealed in the writings of Sabino Arana Goiri, founder of the Basque Nation-
alist Party.
Far removed from these extreme tendencies, Valle-Inclán created a true idealization with
the aesthetic of symbolism. He contrasted the meaning of words with their musicality, where
their spirit and life reside: “there are three Romances in Spain: the Catalan of sailors, the Gali-
cian of farmers, and the Spanish of subduers. he three proclaim what they were, none of them
heralds what will be.”19 Valle-Inclán described the “integrity and mental chastity” of Basque,
the “rough condition of Catalan,” the “urgency and good legislative sense” of the medieval Old
Castile, and the agrarian and mythical, Georgics-like world of Galicia. In other words, the spirit
of each land corresponded to its language, whether Romance or non-Romance, and according
to him, all the languages in Spain expressed an acute sense of decay. But Valle-Inclán elaborated
more extensively on the case of Spanish, which dated back to the iteenth century and the im-
perial gesture of the Catholic Monarchs. He also condemned the casticist (purist) drit and took
pity on the grandchildren of the “Latin wolf,” if they were not able to engender a new series of
dialects in the future. In this he showed an attitude which is rarely found in the Spanish authors
who faced the evolution of American Spanish. With the exception of Pérez Galdós in Episodios
nacionales, other writers seemed to ignore its existence. Despite Valle-Inclán’s progressive stance,
he would later make fun of the “Catalan vowels” of Father Claret, Queen Isabella II’s confessor.
To complete the scenario we must mention the exceptional case of Belarmino y Apolonio
(Belarmino and Apolonio, 1921) by Pérez de Ayala. he plot includes a true outline of a philoso-
phy of language. Belarmino, a shoemaker, identiies the dictionary with the universe, because
he believes that words and things are one and the same, and since we use words without paying
heed to them, we do not understand the world. Knowing is creating, and so Belarmino under-
takes the task of modifying words to make them meaningful. Sometimes one seems to be read-
ing an ironic version of Gadamer’s statement: “the cognizable being is language.”
here was, then, a plurality and a polarity of positions which coexisted in the years preced-
ing the civil war of 1936, known as the “Silver Age” of Spanish literature. his was a historical
moment, in which the government of the Second Republic (established on April 14, 1931) gave
for the irst time political and legal form to Spanish linguistic pluralism by passing the statutes
of autonomy, which declared Catalan, Basque, and Galician co-oicial languages in its territo-
ries. his arrangement, however, was devastated or dispersed by the military uprising that led
to the Spanish Civil War.
During the dictatorship of General Franco (1939–1975) the statutes of autonomy were
abolished and public use of languages other than Spanish was prohibited under the slogan:
“If you are Spanish, speak the language of the Empire.” In contrast, “the Catalan and Basque
nationalisms […] by confronting the Franco regime, found themselves anointed with the holy
oil of democracy and modernity, so far from their Carlist origin, and from the brutal methods
19. “Tres romances son en las Españas: catalán de navegantes, galaico de labradores, castellano de sojuzga-
dores. Los tres pregonan lo que fueron, ninguno anuncia el porvenir.” (Valle-Inclán 1960: 51)
still used by the radical Basque nationalism” (Álvarez Junco 2001, 606). During the period of
repression, which began to abate towards 1960, speaking languages other than Spanish became
a militant act of political resistance instead of a practical mode of speech. he identiication be-
tween dictatorship and “Spanish” led to the preference, still alive today, for the term “Castilian”
in contexts in which the other languages are mentioned. It also led the political opposition to
prefer the term “Spanish state” over “Spain,” since the former better expressed the artiicial and
overbearing nature of this political entity. hese factors contributed to a diicult and uncom-
fortable situation for the many Catalan, Galician, and Basque writers who were able to express
themselves more or less naturally in Spanish. In many cases these were the most important au-
thors of the time. he repression of bilingualism, which would inally fail, helped constitute the
current equation for the diferent nationalisms that expect – against all historic evidence – each
nation to have one territory, one political power, and one language.
he framework and the confronting theses during the post-war period are the continu-
ation of those already outlined during the time of the Republic. he diference lies in the in-
creased radicalization, a backlash against the brutality of the regime, and also the growing inlu-
ence of linguistics on many writers. During this period the aesthetic principle also persists, as
authors develop all of these topics in their works.
A case in point, for instance, is Viaje al Pirineo de Lérida (A voyage to the Leridian Pyr-
enees, 1963) by Camilo José Cela, a Galician who always wrote in Spanish. Cela states that “if the
Catalan are to speak better Spanish, it would be sensible to teach them Catalan at school, and
not only Spanish” (Andrés-Suárez 1993, 227), and he concludes that the oicial and overbearing
character of Spanish has an adverse efect on the language. In 1970, José Mª Pemán, who was
clearly in favor of the regime, stated in the April 19 issue of the conservative journal ABC that
Catalan and Galician are beyond a doubt languages and not dialects, with literary traditions,
and that it was natural to use them in speech. his is the continuation of what we have referred
to as the ideal of harmonic contribution.
he 1960s saw a slight openness develop in Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country,
leading to the publication of La plaça del diamant (Diamond square) by Merce Rodoreda in
Catalan in 1962 and of Harri eta herri (Stone and country) by Aresti in Basque in 1964. Writ-
ers began to have a choice of language. he idea that Catalan literature is literature written in
Catalan, as is that of Galicia and the Basque Country, was consolidated. Bilingualism became
a favorite topic of discussion, more complicated in the Basque Country since Basque was not
always a irst language even for those who used it like Aresti. he Catalan Àlex Broch (2002, 79)
puts it plainly: “we are the irst generation born in the post-war period, which clearly choose
our Catalan cultural identity irst, without having to reject Spanish culture”; and he adds: “In
our case we belong to the Catalan culture and coexist with the Spanish one. here is not a ho-
mogeneous bilingualism, although there can be bilingualism in our daily life.” he link between
language and identity, therefore, was established, bringing with it the notions of “roots” and
“memory.” his situation gives rise to various types of choices and stances, and also to criti-
cism and a lack of understanding. here are quite a few examples, such as Pere Gimferrer’s “I
knew I was Pere and not Pedro.” He irst wrote in Spanish in Arde el mar (he sea burns, 1966)
and then switched to Catalan in 1970. Other examples are Llorenç Villalonga’s luctuations, the
consistent Spanish of Juan Marsé and the “Barcelona School,” and also of the Basque poets Blas
de Otero and Gabriel Celaya. here are also attempts at bilingualism by distorting Spanish,
Catalan, or even Arabic, as does Juan Goytisolo. Some authors write essays or literary criticism
in Spanish, while opting for a diferent language for literature. here are many cases of authors
who translate themselves – such as Carme Riera from Catalan into Spanish, Bernardo Atxaga
from Basque, and Manuel Rivas from Galician, but also modifying the source text to adapt it
for Spanish readers. Canonica de Rochemonteix and Rudin (1993), and Arnau i Segarra, Joan i
Tous, and Tietz (2002) ofer many other examples. Mention must be made of those who dispute
and criticize the attempts at linguistic normalization which try to broaden the diference with
Spanish – and in the case of Galician, with Portuguese – by making somewhat artiicial word
choices which are far removed from the colloquial language in actual use.
An opposing point of view has also come to the fore recently. his position criticizes the
version of history as told by the nationalisms, which is based on a categorical opposition be-
tween a mythical “Madrid” and an oppressed nation. Félix de Azúa represents this perspective
in his novels Cambio de bandera (Change of lag, 1991) and Momentos decisivos (Decisive mo-
ments, 2000), which are critical of Basque and Catalan nationalism respectively. he following
passage from Historia de un idiota contada por él mismo (Story of a fool told by himself), argu-
ably his best novel, is quite eloquent:
Franco had crushed without astuteness, in a rude and primary way, everything that sounded
Catalan, Basque and Galician, with the help of the Catalan, Basque and Galician upper classes.
hese were willing to exploit the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia, as soon as the Master
disappeared. hey had only to SAY that they had not been the oppressors of the Basque Coun-
try, Catalonia and Galicia, but that these had been some strange people from Madrid – who
were, for their part, Basque, Catalan or Galician – and that THEY would now rebuild the
Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia.20
Apart from explicit discussions, however, there is the problem of the languages used in ic-
tion, in which aesthetics also plays a factor. he most frequent object of study is Catalan. For
Arnau i Segarra (2002, 147) the presence of diferent languages in literary texts is small, and he
records an extensive and lucid quote by the novelist Josep Palou pointing to a strange situation
in which the readers of Vázquez Montalbán’s novels will believe that all of Barcelona speaks
Spanish, while the readers of any writer in Catalan will believe just the opposite. Both presup-
positions are false. his is why La gallina cega (he blind chicken, 1993) is multilingual. We can
infer from this that the aesthetic of realism is still operating, and with it, satire and irony. For
example, Félix de Azúa includes in Diario de un hombre humillado (Diary of a humiliated man,
1987, 99) digressions such as “he says cecs and it sounds like sexs, like a slap,” “ell mateix sounds
like a sneeze,” and so on. Of course, this does not mean that the tradition, prominently found
in minor theatrical genres, of seeking comic efects through mode of speech has ceased to exist.
20. “Franco había aplastado sin la menor astucia, a su manera borde y primaria, todo cuanto sonara a catalán,
vasco y gallego, contando con la colaboración de las clases altas catalanas, vascas y gallegas. Estas mismas
clases altas estaban dispuestas a quedarse en usufructo el País Vasco, Cataluña y Galicia, en cuanto des-
apareciera el Amo. Para lo cual bastaba DECIR que no habían sido ellos los trituradores del País Vasco,
Cataluña y Galicia, sino unos extrañísimos hombres de Madrid (que a su vez eran vascos, catalanes o
gallegos), y que ahora ELLOS iban a rehacer el País Vasco, Cataluña y Galicia.” (Azúa 1993, 115)
We have mentioned that in post-war literature there was an abundance of discussions in-
volving linguistics to a certain degree. More speciically, in the mid-50s there was a well-known
controversy as to whether poetry was an instrument of communication or knowledge. he for-
mer position attributed a kind of inter-human immediacy to the genre, while the latter distin-
guished between representation, which actually constitutes the poem, and the spiritual complex
to which it belongs. here was a similar emphasis on the communicative function within the
realist novel. In later years and especially ater the rise of democracy in 1975, however, the phi-
losophy of diference reached Spain and found its relection in literature. he equation “empiric
author equals narrative or poetic voice” vanished and made way for the present-day devotion
to the use of masks. As a inal thought, we can refer to the blend of fascination, inferiority, and
rejection which is felt for English. It is “the third party” of the present day, just as French was in
the past. his, however, is ground for another study.
Section IV. Dimensions of orality
Coordinator: Paloma Díaz-Mas
Introduction to Dimensions of orality

Paloma Díaz-Mas
Literature which is transmitted orally has traditionally not been included within the literary
canon. It has oten been considered a form of folklore rather than literature, placed along-
side traditional dance, cratsmanship, ceremonies, and popular religion. Literary studies have
tended to ignore a whole area of literature, not because of its internal characteristics, but due
to the mode in which this literature was preserved and transmitted. Consequently, texts which
have not been preserved in written form but in the memory of a people, and which were not
transmitted by reading but by telling, have come to be considered non-texts. his idea is so
engrained that even today there are specialists in literary studies who believe that the denomi-
nation oral literature is an oxymoron. From their point of view, whatever is oral is not literature,
because only that which is written can be truly called literature.
Nevertheless, literature is the art of words, regardless of whether they are expressed orally
or in written form, and a text is a statement, whether it is written down or spoken from mem-
ory. hus, the expression oral literature holds no contradiction: it refers to literature which is
preserved in the memory and is mainly transmitted orally. his oral mode of transmission
decisively inluences not only the spread and reception of a text, but also its very characteristics,
the relationship with its users and recipients, and the evolution and process of elaboration and
recreation of the text itself.
In the Iberian Peninsula, the treatment of oral literature has been exceptional compared
with that of other European literatures. It has received the attention of many well-known special-
ists from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, which has contributed to its greater
prominence in literary studies. his prominence has especially privileged oral literature in verse
(traditional lyric poetry and the romance, or Hispanic ballad), to the detriment of prose genres
such as stories and legends. he romancero (Spanish balladry) has received special attention due
to its ties to medieval epic, and thus to the literature associated with the formation of national
identities. As a result, the romancero is the only genre of oral literature that has entered, al-
though timidly and incompletely, the literary canon, not only through academic studies, but also
by being included in student textbooks and occasionally used in song form as didactic material.
A comparative history of the literatures of the Iberian Peninsula could not overlook the
genres which are mainly transmitted orally. In the study of these genres, it is indispensable to
apply comparatist methods in order to discover the relationship between oral texts in diferent
languages, in diferent cultures, and even those belonging to diferent genres.
he section “Dimensions of orality” of this book includes six chapters which undertake,
from diferent perspectives, the comparative study of several manifestations of oral literature
476 Paloma Díaz-Mas
in the Iberian Peninsula in diferent languages (Portuguese, Galician, Castilian, Catalan, and
Basque, in their diferent varieties), together with their spread abroad and their relationships
with the oral and written literature of other languages and cultures.
In the irst chapter, “Comparativism and orality: Critical approaches to the ballads La boda
estorbada (he thwarted marriage),” Paloma Díaz-Mas conveys the general need to apply com-
parativism to the study of oral literature and analyzes the diferent ways in which scholars have
carried out these comparatist studies, oten from opposing ideological and methodological
viewpoints. his is illustrated by reviewing the diferent studies published on the romance La
boda estorbada from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty irst century. In all of these works,
a comparatist outlook can be perceived, regardless of the methodology applied.
he following chapter, “Epic and ballad in the Hispanic tradition,” by Samuel G. Armistead,
examines several problems in the study of Spanish epic and balladry and points to the existence
of two very diferent and oten opposing schools; that of the individualists and that of the tra-
ditionalists. his chapter ponders the diiculty of studying traditional Spanish epic due to the
lack of primary texts. In fact, Armistead shows that most epic stories have survived through
secondary sources or in their account in the epic romancero of the diferent Iberian traditions
in diferent languages, citing that “the Pan-Iberian romancero can conidently be characterized
as the largest and most geographically diverse of all the European ballad traditions.”
In “Iberian traditions of international folktale,” José Manuel Pedrosa analyzes the charac-
teristics of the traditional Spanish story, which he distinguishes from other forms of oral nar-
rative such as the legend. Pedrosa ofers a brief synopsis of the investigation of this genre and
then goes on to the study of one story in particular, number 1419 of the Aarne-hompson-Uther
index, “Woman warns lover of husband by singing song.” He does this from a comparatist
viewpoint which takes into account both its European equivalents (such as one of the stories in
Boccaccio’s Decameron) and its versions in the Iberian Peninsula in Castilian, Catalan, Galician,
Portuguese, and Basque, which are also related to a popular song found in Asturias, Salamanca,
Burgos, and León that was mentioned by Federico García Lorca.
he chapter entitled, “he traditional Iberian lyric of the Middle Ages and the Golden Age:
a comparative view,” by Margrit Frenk, ofers a comparative study of several traditional songs
ranging from the origins of Iberian romances until the seventeenth century. Frenk deals with
the sources which have preserved ancient lyric (although its transmission was mainly oral)
as well as the formal aspects and content that the diferent Iberian linguistic traditions share
(Mozarabic, Galician, Portuguese, Catalan, Castilian, and Basque), by analyzing the diferent
devices employed (such as the use of meter and parallelism), the common themes, the use of
similar symbolic elements, and textual coincidences.
he subjects of languages in contact, linguistic borders, and the coexistence of languages in
the oral texts of the Iberian Peninsula are dealt with in “Linguistic borders and oral transmis-
sion.” In this chapter, José Luis Forneiro provides interesting examples of the linguistic transfer
between Castilian and Galician or Portuguese in the bordering areas between León, Asturias,
and Zamora, in order “to illustrate the exchange of traditional narrative poems despite lin-
guistic boundaries,” while insisting that “from the beginning, linguistic boundaries have never
prevented the Spanish ballad collection from adopting songs, plots, and themes from faraway
countries with very diferent languages.”
Introduction to Dimensions of orality 477
he section “Dimensions of orality” of this book concludes with the chapter “Literature
and new forms of orality: Invisible realities,” by Luis Díaz G. Viana. In it, Viana analyzes from
an anthropological perspective the new forms of folklore, and thus, of oral literature, from the
loose sheets printed in the sixteenth century up to the twentieth century, with its manifesta-
tions of “juvenile poetry” (such as the “inscriptions that students write in their classmates’ note-
books”), urban legends, and the folklore spread by the internet (also called netlore) and through
cell phone text messaging.
hus, in the section “Dimensions of orality” we have striven to bring to light the diferent
methods involved in the comparative study of oral literature. Furthermore, this study has taken
into consideration diferent time periods (from the origins of Iberian romance to the very re-
cent manifestations of orality on the internet), diferent Peninsular languages and their varieties,
the Iberian Peninsula and its inluence on the New World and other diasporic communities,
diferent literary genres (lyric poetry, narrative poetry, prose), and the connections between
Iberian literatures and other European literatures in diferent languages.
Comparativism and orality
Critical approaches to the ballads of La boda estorbada
(he thwarted marriage)
Paloma Díaz-Mas
Regarding the concept of oral literature
he expression oral literature has ceased to seem contradictory for some time now. Contrary to
the traditional conception of literature as the “art of the written word,” the idea that literature is
purely and simply “the art of words” – independently of whether the produced artistic (literary)
work has been conserved and transmitted through the written word or through other means –
has prevailed.
hus, whatever its formal characteristics may be – origin, author, function, etc. – any liter-
ary work that has been transmitted through the living voice and has survived up to the present,
persevering for a relatively long time in a medium as fragile as the human memory, is included
under the rubric of oral literature.
How such oral literature is transmitted varies: narration from memory, recitation, song,
improvisation, theatrical or para-theatrical performances in which actors do not use a written
text but rather improvise or memorize it. In short, it may include any type of performance in
which a text is reproduced verbally. When, based on that performance, receivers memorize
the text in order to transmit it, and this process repeats itself over time establishing a chain of
broadcasters-receivers which may go back centuries, it is referred to as traditional literature. In
other cases, literature is produced and transmitted orally in a given moment without this giving
rise to a broadcaster-receiver chain, in which case we speak of non-traditional oral literature.
Examples of traditional oral literature include folktales, legends that are transmitted orally
from generation to generation, popular songs, ballads, urban legends, jokes, songs and verses
that accompany certain children’s games. Examples of non-traditional oral literature are, bal-
lads composed by blind poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (distributed in
print but composed orally by people who, deprived of sight, were unable to write, since at the
time there were no methods for teaching blind people to read or write), or the activities of
popular singers who even today compose improvised decimas in the Canary Islands, Brazil, and
in various Latin American countries, such as Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, and Mexico (to
learn more about these improvisational poets, with recordings included, see Trapero 1994 and
1996, and Trapero, Santana, and Márquez 2000).
In turn, oral literature (both traditional and non-traditional) has multiple connections
with writing. On the one hand, it is not unusual for an orally transmitted literary work to oc-
casionally be put into writing; it only requires that one transmitter learn the text by hearing it
and decide to write it down in the hopes of remembering it better or transmitting it to others
through the more ixed, stable medium of the written word. his is precisely how examples of
oral literature from past centuries have been preserved. Some of these works are medieval epic
poems which were sung or recited by minstrels and occasionally written down in thorough
manuscripts in order to conserve them or in little handbooks that minstrels would carry with
Comparativism and orality 479
them to help them remember; examples of ballads and traditional songs that poetry aicionados
between the iteenth and seventeenth centuries copied in their cartapacios (personal manu-
scripts); the printing of traditional ballads on chapbooks or in printed compilations (ballad
songbooks) to facilitate their circulation among an urban public with an appreciation for the
genre in the sixteenth century; and, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the
printing of ballads composed by blind poets on printed chapbooks that the sightless authors
would sell on city streets or in small towns to earn their sustenance.
he opposite phenomenon can also be observed: the oralization of texts originating in writ-
ten literature, transmitted through their being read out loud, through song, theatrical production,
their performance in public festivals, or through their insertion into the celebration of religious
or rite of passage festivities (Frenk 1997, Zumthor 1983 and 1987). Sometimes, a traditionalization
process begins from that oral performance, when some receivers memorize the text and simul-
taneously transmit it orally, thereby initiating a chain of broadcaster-receiver-transmitter of the
traditional type. For example, one only need recall that poems of one of the most important
authors of the Spanish Golden Age literary canon, Lope de Vega, have been sung from memory
up to the very twentieth century – of course, without singers being conscious of the original
authorship – in Andalusia and among Moroccan Sephardic Jews (M. Alvar, 1970 103–22).
In the case of traditional oral literature, the actual form of transmission imposes a series
of characteristics upon the text. As opposed to the stability of the written text (handwritten or
printed), the orally transmitted text is subject to continual changes. Of course, in the written
text, reading, memorization, or writing errors occur every time the text is re-copied (making
this phenomenon precisely the basis of textual criticism as a discipline), but it does not change
every time it is read. However, in oral transmission, any broadcaster or transmitter can introduce
changes due to a mistaken hearing, mistakes in memorization or broadcasting, or, sometimes, to
voluntary intervention. For example, in an orally transmitted text the omission of fragments oc-
curs frequently; there are changes in the order of verses, stanzas, or entire series of lines; misun-
derstandings or poor memorization, reductions and/or ampliications cause the change of verses,
stanzas, entire series, word or formulation substitutions; and there are contaminations (that is,
the contagion of verses from other similar compositions because they have the same metric form,
similar rhymes, or similar formulations or content). Even a mnemonic device like rhyme can be
afected by the variability of oral transmission. hus, we have cases of poetic compositions meant
to be sung that have been completely reformulated and have adopted a rhyme scheme that difers
from the original. At the same time, receivers can hear, understand, or memorize parts of the
texts wrongly, afecting how they transmit it. It is as if in every oral performance the transmitter-
broadcaster and the receiver rewrite the text. he so-called traditionalist school defends the idea
that traditional literature is – in practice – the work of an author-legion. hat is, a text is continu-
ally recreated throughout an entire chain of transmitters (Menéndez Pidal 1953, 1:44–50).
All of this also determines the methodology necessary for the study of oral literature. One
must begin by understanding that when studying orally transmitted literary works, it is impos-
sible to focus on one text, but rather one must deal with whole series of versions that relect a
continuous recreation of themes, motifs, and formulations; diferences between versions are
usually called variants. he idea – also expressed by Menéndez Pidal (for example in 1953, 1:39–
44) – that the traditional text “lives in variants” is derived from this. hat is, a study cannot be
conducted on the basis of a single text, nor can an original text be reconstructed; instead, the
diferent versions and variants must be taken into account.
his leads inevitably to comparative study. At least since the dawn of the twentieth century
it has been so. Studies about popular tales, ballads (and their Hispanic manifestation, the ro-
mance), traditional lyric poetry, legend – everything that is usually called folk literature – begin
with the comparison of versions and variants from diferent geographic and linguistic tradi-
tions. While in the case of literature of essentially written transmission comparative study is one
of many possible methodological options, in the case of oral literature studies, comparativism
is an obligatory point of entry whatever the methodological approach may be (Díaz-Mas 2004).
When discussing oral literature of the Iberian Peninsula and its spread abroad, linguistic
variation must also be taken into account. Many tales, ballads, lyrics, and legends have their
counterparts in other European traditions in several languages, including several Peninsular
linguistic varieties such as Galician, Portuguese, Basque, and diferent varieties of Catalan and
Spanish. As a result, the comparative study of Iberian oral literature must also be faced from a
multilinguistic point of view.
In order to illustrate these ideas I have selected a ballad with a wide geographical and tem-
poral reach. More than a ballad it is a series of ballads that are oten grouped under the generic
title La boda estorbada (he thwarted marriage) and it includes several diferent poems, as we
will later see. As the exploration of this ballad unfolds, we will demonstrate how, from the irst
years of the twentieth century up to today, diferent critical approaches to these ballads, even
those based on very diverse concepts and methods, have emphasized comparativism between
diferent versions of the same ballad, between geographic traditions, between diferent bal-
lads that tell the same story, between works composed in diferent languages, between literary
genres, and between literature and other types of artistic expression.
La boda estorbada: Ballads from the iteenth to the twentieth century
We have already mentioned that the romance is the Hispanic variety of ballad, taking “ballad” to
mean a type of narrative poetry that is fundamentally transmitted orally, oten sung, whose origins
go back to the Middle Ages but which has survived in the oral tradition up until very recent times.
Ballads exist or existed in practically all European languages. In the case of romances, they
extended throughout the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), the Mediterranean and At-
lantic Islands in which Iberian languages are spoken, Latin America, and Spanish or Portuguese
speaking populations in other areas of the world (for example, the Hispanic population of the
United States, the descendents of the Portuguese in Canada, and the Sephardic Jewish commu-
nities in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa). Romances have a characteristic metric
form: generally, octosyllabic verses with assonant rhymes every two verses, though there are
cases of hexosyllabic romances, or ballads with verses that are longer than the octosyllabic or
which use a metric form closer to closed strophic rhythm (a synthesis of these questions can be
found in Díaz-Mas 1994, 3–48).
La boda estorbada develops an old theme deeply rooted in folkloric tradition: the husband
who is absent at war for many years returns just in time to prevent his wife – who believes
herself to be a widow – from remarrying. It is, evidently, the same story as the second part of
the Odyssey, with the return of Ulysses to Ithaca to prevent Penelope from marrying one of her
suitors; and it was probably already a folktale in the time of Homer. It is collected in hompson’s
index of folk motifs as N681 “husband returns home just in time to forestall wife’s marriage to
another” and, as we will see below, it inds its expression in diverse European literatures.
In the Hispanic ballad tradition, La boda estorbada has various manifestations. he old-
est, which is oten called El conde Dirlos or Conde d’Irlos (Count Dirlos or Count of Irlos) is
a long composition of almost seven hundred octosyllabic verses which had an early and wide
circulation in print. It already appeared around 1510 in a chapbook printed in Zaragoza by Jorge
Coci and it was included in at least six other chapbooks from the sixteenth century (Rodríguez-
Moñino 1997, 29 and nos. 1119–23 and 1172). It was also frequently included in the printed ballad
compilations that proliferated starting around the mid-sixteenth century. It is precisely with
this ballad that the oldest of these compilations began: the Cancionero de romances (Songbook
of ballads), printed by the printer Martín Nucio in Antwerp in an unknown year (though prob-
ably 1547 or 1548). he same ballad was included again in the reprint of this songbook, also in
Antwerp, in 1550 (and in its successive reprints), and in other widely distributed collections, like
Silva de romances (Anthology of ballads) from Zaragoza (1550) and Silva de varios romances
agora nuevamente recopilados (Anthology of diferent kinds of ballads newly collected) from
Barcelona (1561), which also had multiple reprints up to the end of the seventeenth century
(Rodríguez-Moñino 1973, references in vol. 2:510–11).
Certain stylistic and thematic characteristics and even the length of the ballad Conde Dir-
los demonstrate that the conserved form is the result of a reworking by an anonymous minstrel
– from the end of the iteenth and in the very irst years of the sixteenth century – of a theme
that must have existed in the Castilian oral tradition to which elements of the Carolingian epic
were incorporated. he result is an authentic novella in verse by an anonymous author that be-
gins with the story of how Count d’Irlos receives letters from the Emperor Charlemagne calling
him into combat against the Muslims:
Estábase el conde Dirlos sobrino de don Beltrane
asentado en sus tierras, deleitándose en caçare
cuando le vinieron cartas de Carlos el imperante.1
hese letters hurt the protagonist because he is recently married:

El conde que esto oyó tomó tristeza y pesare
no por miedo de los moros ni miedo de peleare,
mas tiene mujer hermosa, mochacha de poca edade;
tres años anduvo en armas para con ella casare
y el año no era complido, della lo mandan apartare.2
1. Count Dirlos, the nephew of don Beltran / was in his land enjoying the hunt / when he received a letter
from the Emperor Charlemagne.
2. he Count, when he heard this, was saddened / not because he was afraid of ighting the Moors / but
because he had a beautiful and young wife; / he had struggled for three years for the honor to marry her /
and they had not been married a year when they sent him away from her.
It continues with a long absence at war and a premonition warning the knight that his wife is
about to marry another:
Durmióse con pensamiento y empeçara de holgare
cuando hace un triste sueño para él de gran pesare:
que veía estar la condesa en brazos de un infante.3
Joined by his fellow knights, Dirlos embarks on a journey back to his land where he arrives just
as his wife is about to marry Prince Celinos. Without identifying himself (he has changed phys-
ically over time), he challenges Celinos. Aterwards the ballad describes at length the knightly
struggles between Dirlos and his men and Celinos and his supporters.
he ballad El Conde Dirlos has not been preserved as such in the Peninsular or American
modern oral tradition, but among the Sephardim of the Eastern Mediterranean some of the
ballad’s irst verses have indeed been conserved, describing La partida del esposo (he husband’s
departure). hey also oten appear as the beginning of another ballad, La vuelta del hijo mal-
decido (he Accursed Son’s Return), derived in turn from a Greek ballad (we cite the Salonica
version published in D. Catalán 1969–72, 3:101):
– ¿De qué lloráx, blanca niña? ¿de qué lloráx, blanca lor?
– Lloro por vos, caballero, que me dexáx y vos andáx;
me dexáx niña y muchacha y chica de poca edad.
me dexáx niño en la cuna, llora y demanda pan.
[…]
– Si a los siete [años] no vengo, a los ocho me esperáx;
si a los ocho no vengo, a los nuevo vos casáx;
vos casáx con un mancebo que sea tal y cual,
le daréx mis vestidos sin sudar y sin manchar.–4
he same theme from La boda estorbada appears in another three ballads that have only been
documented in the modern oral tradition. hat is, they do not appear in the printed collec-
tions of the sixteenth century, though that does not necessarily mean that they did not exist at
the time, but rather that they failed to attract the attention of printers, who surely found the
minstrelesque revision of Conde Dirlos more attractive and in accordance with the tastes of the
moment. hose three traditional ballads about the theme of the thwarted marriage are usually
called La vuelta del navegante (he mariner’s return), El conde Antores (Count Antores), and La
condesita or El conde Sol (he little countess or Count Sol).
Versions of La vuelta del navegante have been collected in ield work throughout the twen-
tieth century in places as scattered as Brazil, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Portugal, Zamora,
Galicia, Catalonia, and the Sephardic communities of Bosnia, indicating that it must have been
an old ballad which spread in the iteenth century from the Iberian Peninsula to the Atlantic
3. He fell asleep worried and, when he began to rest, / he dreamed a sad dream that caused him great pain: /
he saw the Countess in the arms of a young noble.
4. – Why do you cry, fair girl, why do you cry, white lower? / – I cry for you, sir, you leave me and go; / you
leave a young girl, / with a baby in the cradle that cries and begs for bread /…/ If in seven years time I have
not returned, wait for me until the eighth; / if in the eighth I have not returned, marry again./ Marry a
young man who is so and so; / give him my garments clean and unused.
islands, America, and the Sephardic community by means of the successive emigrations and
exiles of Peninsular peoples. It tells how a man embarks on a journey which takes many years
and, when he returns to his land, he is told that his wife is just about to marry another. When he
learns this, he begins to serenade his wife in front of her house so that she recognizes him (we
cite from a version in Catalan from Majorca published by D. Catalán 1969–72, 3:26–27):
La vida de les galeres ès molt mala de passar.
Set anys ha que vaig en elles i altres set n’hi he d’anar.
Me’n vaig anar a ca del Rei, llecència vair demanar […]
– No em dirieu vós, mare, ma enamorada, què fa?
– Ta enamorada, Lluís, amb altre s’ha d’esposar.
– Donau-me sa mà, ma mare, donau-me sa mà a besar.
Donau-me les mies armes que solía manetjar,
i també la mia roba que jo solia portar,
també la mia guiterra que jo solia sonar.
Me’n ‘niré tocant per vila, mem si’m coneixerá.5
he ballad called El conde Antores does not appear in the older collections either, but versions
have been collected in the Iberian Peninsula (especially in the northwest: Santander, León, Gali-
cia, the Portuguese region of Trads-os-Montes, and Extremadura) and among the Sephardic
Jews of Morocco. It tells the same story as the old Conde Dirlos: the husband is absent and when
he returns to his land he discovers his livestock branded diferently than before; he is informed
that the livestock now belongs to a man who is going to marry his wife, and he appears at the
wedding banquet just in time to prevent the new wedding (citation from a Portuguese version
from Trads-os-Montes, published by D. Catalán 1969–72, 3:174):
Lá se vai o conde Flores por capitão-general […]
– Ò cabo de sete anos eu por cá hei-de voltar. –
Já se acabaram os sete, ele volta ò lugar.
Ao entrar numa deveza e ò salir dum ramalhal,
encontrou uma vacada mudadinha do sinal.
Procurou ò boierinho, respondeu-le o azagal:
– De quem é esta vacada, mudadinha de sinal?
– É do Condaninho que hoje foi a casar.6
However, the most widely spread ballad with the theme of the thwarted marriage is one that is
usually called La Condesita or El conde Sol. Hundreds of versions of the ballad have been col-
lected in Spain (where it has probably been one of the best known ballads up to recent times)
5. Sailing in galleys is a very bad way to spend a life, / seven years I was in them and another seven I must be.
/ I went to the King’s house and asked for permission [to go] /…/ – Won’t you tell me, mother, what my
beloved is doing? / – Your beloved, Lluis, is to marry another. / – Give me your hand, mother, give me your
hand so I may kiss it; / give me the weapons that I used to carry, / give me the guitar I used to play. / I will
go play through the town to see if [my beloved] recognizes me.
6. here goes Count Flores of the ield marshal. /…/ – Ater seven years I’ll come back here. / he seven years
have now ended and he returns to the place./ On entering a pasture and coming out of the thicket / he found
a herd of cows with the brands changed. / He asked the herder and the boy responded: / – Whose are these
cows that don’t have the same brands they once did? / – hey belong to Count Niño, who marries today.
and among the Sephardic Jews of Morocco, while only a few have been collected in Portugal
and in the Canary Islands. In La condesita there is a curious role reversal, in which the wife goes
in search of the husband who has been of to war for many years, and it is she who arrives – nor-
mally disguised as a pilgrim and for that reason unrecognizable to her own husband – just in
time to reveal herself and stop him from marrying another (citation from a version from Lugo
published in D. Catalán 1969–72, 4:26–27):
– Dame limosna, ¡ay!, buen conde por Dios y la caridad,
que algún día en tu palacio limosna solías dar […]
– ¿Dónde es la peregrina tan graciosa en el hablar?
¿Dónde es la pelegrina tan graciosa en el mirar?
– Soy allá de la Barría de aquella noble ciudad.
– Ya que es de la Barría, ¿qué se cuenta por allá?
– De Conde Laro, señor, poco bien y mucho mal,
que ha dejado a su mujer de quince años y no más.-
Al oir estas palabras se cayera desmayado:
nen con vino ni aguardiente non pudieron recordarlo […]
– Levántate de ahí, conde, por Dios y la caridad,
que aquí están tus lindos ojos, con que solías mirar,
que aquí estan tus lindos labios con que solías besar,
que aquí están tus lindos brazos con que solías abrazar.7
And thus, “the role reversal eliminates the knightly rivalry between the two husbands; in its
stead we have a tender scene, in which the abandoned wife regains her forgetful husband as a
prize due to her heroic idelity and the solicitous pilgrimage in search of her absent husband”
(Menéndez Pidal 1971, 9).
To further complicate the gamut of varieties and ramiications of the theme of the thwart-
ed marriage in Hispanic ballads, La condesita is oten found along with another: Gerineldo,
an old ballad that appears in chapbooks and sixteenthcentury collections (Rodríguez-Moñino
1997, no. 836, and 1973, references in vol. 2:562) and is well circulated in the modern oral tradi-
tion. Gerineldo recounts – in a more or less conventionally Carolingian environment – how a
princess courts her pageboy (citation from an artiicial version corresponding to the Granada
tradition, according to D. Catalán 1969–72, 5:28–29):
– ¡Gerineldo, Gerineldo, príncipe y galán lorido,
quién te pillara esta noche tres horas a mi albedrío!
7. – Good Count, I beg of you a little money for God and for charity, / as in another time when you were in
your palace, you would give charity /…/ – Where do you come from, pilgrim, you have such a graceful way
of speaking / and such a lovely gaze? / – I am from Barría, a noble city. / – If you are from Barría, what is
the news from there? / – Of Count Laro they say nothing good and a lot bad: / that he let his wife when
she was only iteen. – / On hearing these words, the Count fainted / and they could not wake him either
with wine or with liquor /…/ – Get up Count, for God and for charity / here are the lovely eyes you used
to look into, / here are the lips you used to kiss, / here are the arms that used to embrace you.
– Como soy vuestro criado, señora, burláis conmigo.

– No me burlo, Gerineldo, que de veras te lo digo.8
And what occurs when the king discovers the deed:

El rey, lleno de sospecha, al cuarto ‘la infanta ha ido;
los ha encontrado durmiendo como mujer y marido.
– Si mato a mi hija la infanta, queda mi reino perdido,
¡y si mato a Gerineldo que lo crié desde niño!
Meteré mi espada en medio y servirá de testigo […]
El rey estaba al acecho, se hizo el encontradizo:
– ¿Dónde vienes, Gerineldo, marchito y descolorido?
– Vengo del jardín, señor, de coger rosas y lirios,
una rosa muy fragante el color se me ha comido.9
In some versions, the discovery of the seduction of the princess by the pageboy (or rather the
opposite, as the princess is the true seductress) results in the king allowing the unequal mar-
riage of the lovers, but, as soon as they are married, Gerineldo must go of to war:
A otro día de mañana una quinta mandó echar,
le ha tocado a Gerineldo de capitán general.
La princesa, como niña, no hace más que llorar:
– Si a los siete años no vengo, niña, te puedes casar.10
And from here on the story of La condesita continues: the husband’s extended absence, the loyal
wife who dresses as a pilgrim to go in search of him, and the inal meeting and reunion of the
spouses.
Diferent critical approaches to the same ballad
1. Pioneering studies
In addition to being one of the most widely extended ballads in the Castilian tradition, La
condesita (alone or with Gerineldo) has also been one of the most studied throughout the
8. Gerineldo, Gerineldo, young and handsome as a prince, / would you spend three hours with me tonight
and do as I wish / – Madame, you mock me because I am your servant. / – I don’t mock you Gerineldo, I
speak sincerely.
9. he King, who was suspicious, went to the princess’s room / and found them sleeping as if they were man
and wife. / – If I kill my daughter the princess I will bring on the downfall of my reign [because I have no
other successor] / and how can I kill Gerineldo, when I have raised him since he was a child? / I will put
my sword between them so it serves as testimony [that I have been here] /…/ he king stood by and then
acted as if he ran into [Gerineldo] by chance: / – Where do you come from, Gerineldo, looking so terrible
and so pale? / – Sir, I have been collecting roses and irises in the garden / and a very fragrant rose has stolen
the color from my face.
10. he next day [the King] ordered an army to gather / and Gerineldo was to be captain. / he princess, being
so young, cried endlessly / – If in seven years I have not returned you can marry another.
twentieth century. Other ballads with the theme of La boda estorbada, like Conde Dirlos and
the traditional La vuelta del navegante and El conde Antores, have also received critical attention.
We will prove that in practically all the approaches (not only in studies, but also in publications,
anthologies, and even catalogues), the work done has had a comparatist bent, as oten occurs in
studies about traditional oral literature.
Versions of the ballad La condesita were published in Wolf and Hofmann’s supplement
to Primavera y lor de Romances (Spring and lower of ballads, 1856), included in Antología de
poetas líricos castellanos (Anthology of lyric Spanish poets) by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (see
1999, 176 for an Asturian version), and could be found among the handful of traditional ballads
published by Alonso Cortés (1920). Nevertheless, the irst relevant study was done by Menén-
dez Pidal in 1920 (reprinted in Menéndez Pidal, Catalán, and Galmés 1954, 1–41, and in Mené-
ndez Pidal 1973, 217–323). Menéndez Pidal was the irst to apply geographic linguistics, at the
time a novel method, to the study of traditional poetry. he ballads that were used as examples
of this new methodological treatment were La condesita, Gerineldo, and versions in which the
two ballads appear combined, one as a continuation of the other. In light of the 164 oral versions
then known of La condesita (with or without Gerineldo), Menéndez Pidal analyzed the diferent
versions by grouping them according to geographical area, identifying what kind of variants
characterized each tradition, which traditions tended towards the archaic as well as which ones
were more innovative, and how the circulation of the ballads might have functioned. He then
speculated on their possible origins and age:
he ballad La boda estorbada is not old; it must have originated between the 15th and 16th cen-
turies in the area close to the Mediterranean sea, in the farther Catalan and Moroccan reaches
of which the most archaic versions are today conserved. It probably originated as an imita-
tion of some song from northern Italy, if indeed the theme appears today better poeticized in
ballads than in the similar songs of Piamonte or Monferrato. What I suspect to be an Italian
origin seems to be conirmed with the original name of the protagonist of the ballad, “Count
Lombard.” (88–89)
One of the most important contributions of this article is also the deinition of what we call
today vulgata versions or what Menéndez Pidal calls the inlux of “the invading Southeast” (27).
hat is, it deines the phenomenon by means of the varieties of the ballad from the southern
part of the Iberian Peninsula that spread vigorously to other zones – surely aided by the use of
attractive and catchy melodies, since balladry is above all poetry that is sung – “invading” other
traditions and even replacing traditional versions from those areas with new importations from
the Andalusian region. Today this is a veriied and well-proven phenomenon, afecting even
those traditions that are considered conservative like that of the Sephardic Jews in Morocco.
However, it was precisely in this study by Menéndez Pidal that this tendency was irst pointed
out and was demonstrated with reliable evidence, using the comparison of diferent versions
of La condesita.
Menéndez Pidal’s article also ofers interesting observations on the roles of the individual
and the collective in the spread of variants and the distinct categories of variants in the geo-
graphical areas of Peninsular balladry. He also refers to questions relative to memory and the
invention of traditional texts in the transmission and recreation process, the persistence of es-
sential structures underlying all versions, and how modern oral tradition might help shed light
on older ones. It is certainly an invitation to apply the geographical method to studies of bal-
ladry in particular and oral poetry in general, but the study itself is also based on a whole series
of comparisons: between versions of the same ballad, between the ballad of the modern oral
tradition and its equivalent (Count Dirlos) in the old tradition, and between diferent geograph-
ical zones through maps that show the territorial extension of motifs and concrete formulations.
he consequences of this article have been countless, to the extent that it can now be said that
most of the works on traditional balladry have an element of comparatist geographic study.
2. In the twentieth century: he 30s and 40s
A series of important works that treated the study of the ballad La boda estorbada using diverse
comparative approaches came to light between 1930 and 1950. At that time, the works of Wil-
liam J. Entwistle – which were oriented towards establishing the connections between Spanish
and international balladry – were fundamental. It was Entwistle who, for example, stressed the
relation between several Hispanic ballads and other European ballads inspired by the Arthu-
rian legend (1925), or between the ballad La bella en misa (he beauty in church) and Catalan,
French, and Greek ballads (1938). hrough these brief but revealing articles, Entwistle created
a school of comparative studies that has persevered to this day and whose most outspoken
representatives have perhaps been professors Samuel G. Armistead and J.H. Silverman (see Ar-
mistead and Silverman, 1982, for their comparative studies of ballads and Sephardic lyric poetry
with the ancient oral tradition of other peoples and languages).
Entwistle dedicated three articles to the ballad which concerns us here: one on Conde Dir-
los and its European counterparts (1941), another speciically on El conde Sol, or La condesita
(1949), and another on the parallels between the ballad Conde Dirlos and he Odyssey (1950).
In the irst one he begins by analyzing the sixteenth-century versions of Conde Dirlos (with
special attention to the oldest one, printed in a chapbook by Jorge Coci circa 1510) and versions
from the modern oral tradition of El conde Antores, La vuelta del navegante, and La condesita.
However, the principle contribution of Entwistle’s article was to locate the Castilian ballad in
the context of European balladry, signaling parallels between diferent languages and conirm-
ing the thesis that the Carolingian setting of the old printed versions of Conde Dirlos must be a
product of a sixteenth-century revision:
he ballad is one of the far-lung Moringer series, irst attested in Germany in the twelth cen-
tury and to be encountered in England, France, Germany, Moravia, Greece, Serbia, Rumania,
Russia, and Scandinavia, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula. In none of these places is it a
Carolingian story, but in Serbia it has been attracted into the cycle of Marko Kraljevic (as well
as remaining separate in other versions), and in Russia it is a bylina of Kiev. he attraction into
the Carolingian cycle efected by Spanish sixteenth-century printers must be deemed a later
modiication of the Peninsular tradition. (Entwistle 1941, 6)
In his 1949 article, Entwistle pointed out that the role reversal in La condesita with respect to
Conde Dirlos – in which it is the woman who goes in search of her husband and prevents his
wedding another, while in Dirlos it is the husband who arrives in time to prevent his wife’s wed-
ding – can also be seen in oral narrations from other European traditions. Entwistle analyzed
the path of the motif of the woman who follows the man that has let her – ater marrying or
seducing her – until she wins him back, following it through a Greek epic (where it is presented
as a love story between a Saracen woman and the captive Christian who abandons her ater she
sets him free), through medieval English ballads and stories, Scandinavian ballads and Italian
songs, and presumably a medieval French link which resurfaced in a Canadian song. He con-
cluded that the narration must have its origin in the Middle Ages in the border area between
Greek Christians and Islam in the Eastern Mediterranean, from where it must have spread to
France in the thirteenth century and from there to England. From this missing French link de-
rived, independently, the Scandinavian ballads and those of the southern Mediterranean, found
in the Iberian Peninsula and Italy.
he same researcher returned to the ballads of La boda estorbada in his contribution to a
collection of studies dedicated to Menéndez Pidal (Entwistle 1950). here he compared the nar-
rative sequences of the ballad with the narration of Ulysses’s return in he Odyssey, concluding
that Homer was surely inspired by a pre-existing popular tale that must have survived and given
rise to a Greek ballad between the ninth and tenth centuries. From this Greek version would
later derive, directly or indirectly, the distinct recreations of the theme in European balladry,
including Castilian ballads:
heir distribution in other European countries is naturally explained by the great routes that
begin in Constantinople and go towards Russia, Germany, the Balkans, and the shores of the
western Mediterranean. Here I only try to demonstrate the identity of incidences of the old
epic and medieval ballads, a deduction made from the deviations imposed by the technique of
the heroic genre. (Entwistle 1950, 273)
It was also in the 40s that Paul Bénichou began his studies on balladry. Bénichou, a literary
theorist and specialist in French romanticism, was attracted to traditional literature by the work
of the romantic poet Gérard de Nerval, a collector of popular songs and stories. Bénichou’s
interest in Sephardic balladry was also personal: born Sephardic in French Algeria to a family
from Tétouan, he was exiled in 1942 from Vichy France while teaching literature in Paris and
sought asylum in Buenos Aires. here, in addition to working as a professor, he came into con-
tact with Algerian relatives who had emigrated to Argentina before him. It was this biographi-
cal circumstance that compelled him to collect examples of Moroccan Sephardic balladry from
his own relatives.
Paul Bénichou’s approach to the Hispanic ballad is that of a literary theorist. His book on
poetic creation in balladry (1968a), in which he studied the poetic art of traditional ballads in
the same way that poetic resources are analyzed in written literature, is fundamental.
Bénichou’s irst publications date from the 1940s. In 1944 he published his collection of
Sephardic ballads with brief but lucid comments (it was later reprinted with appendices, 1968b).
In general, Bénichou analyzed every romance, comparing versions collected in Oran (where
there were Sephardim from Tetouan) with those that he had collected in Buenos Aires from
Tetouani women. It is therefore a comparison between diferent versions from the same geo-
graphical tradition and, in addition:
some general observations that emerge from the comparison of our text with the best-known
written versions and other Iberian or Jewish oral versions of the same ballad accompany each
of the ballads that follow. (1968b, 15)
One of the ballads published is La condesita (1968b, 235–38). In the commentary that follows it,
Bénichou compared versions of this ballad with the minstrel ballad Conde Dirlos and with other
versions from the Iberian Peninsula “far from the Mediterranean.” He signaled the reduction
and revision process that Conde Dirlos experienced in the oral tradition, with the substantial
change of the wife going in search of her husband, and noted that “this transformation possibly
occurs under the inluence of a similar international theme” (128). He accordingly observed the
connection between ballads in Spanish and those in other languages, and inally focused on the
stylistic and narrative role that some motifs have in diferent versions, such as that of the beauti-
ful dress that the loyal wife conceals beneath her pilgrim’s robes when she sets of in search of
her husband, which in some versions serves as a sign of recognition between the spouses.
It was also in the 40s that the irst non-philological comparative studies of La boda estor-
bada appeared, particularly in the ield of musicology. his was because Entwistle (1941, 11–13)
ofered some observations on the melody of the Catalan versions, and above all because Vicente
Mendoza considered Spanish and Mexican versions of La Condesita (or El conde Sol) in his
comparative musicological study between Hispanic ballads and the Mexican corrido (1939). It
is interesting to note that one of the versions of El Conde Sol that Mendoza had in mind was an
artiicial one published by Ramón Menéndez Pidal in his anthology Flor nueva de romances vie-
jos (New lower of old ballads, 1928). Flor nueva is a popularizing anthology collected by Mené-
ndez Pidal mainly to entertain himself during a period of convalescence, and the texts that it
includes are reconstructed somewhat artiicially by the collector himself, though of course they
are based on versions of old and traditional balladry. he book was widely distributed in Spain
and Latin America in the 30s; some of its ballads were set to music by Eduardo Martínez Torner
and reached traditional life, with the result that some of the oral versions that circulated in the
Iberian Peninsula up until the end of the twentieth century came precisely from the tradition-
alization of that artiicial collection, a matter we will return to below.
3. he 1950s
he 1950s saw Mendoza (1955) return to the ballad El conde Dirlos in a short article about the
motif of messages and messengers in traditional Mexican poetry. Here he again took into ac-
count ballads as well as lyric songs and corridos.
Also dealing with the connections between traditional poetry and music is the work on old
Spanish lyric poetry that Margit Frenk has been publishing from the 1950s to the present (see
her fundamental Nuevo corpus, 2003, of old lyric poetry). Although they are not musicological
studies, the use of musical sources is always fundamental in them (songbooks, music books,
sung parts of comedies, etc), providing much information on sung poetry between the iteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
Frenk ofered interesting observations on the ballad La condesita in an article (1952, re-
printed in 1978, 175–211) that deals with various music books from the sixteenth century. She
focused on a gloss included in a book of polyphonic music by Juan Vásquez, Recopilación de
sonetos y villancico a quatro y a cinco (A compilation of sonnets and carols for singing by four
and ive voices, Seville, 1560), that says:
– Digas, el pastorcico,
galán y tan pulido,
¿cúyas eran las vacas
que pastan en el río?
– Vuestras son, mi señora,
y mío es el suspiro.11
Frenk correctly noted (1978, 199–200) the resemblance of this passage to a similar one in La
condesita in which the protagonist arrives in the land where her husband has settled and is
about to marry another, and asks a shepherd to whom the cows she sees grazing belong. He
answers with the name of the owner, who is in fact her husband, and incidentally mentions his
imminent marriage. (As we have seen, this sequence also appears in versions of Conde Antores.)
Frenk deduced that, although only modern oral versions of La condesita are known, Vásquez’s
gloss might ofer an echo of an old, lost version of the ballad:
Could it not have to do with the ballad La boda estorbada? It is known that old versions of this
ballad no longer exist, despite their evident antiquity. In contemporary versions from Tangier
and Catalonia, the countess who goes in search of her husband encounters a page leading some
horses and she asks him to whom they belong […] In Andalusia and Murcia there are versions
in which the countess comes upon a herder who is leading cattle (cf Primavera, 135, vv. 19–21:
‘Little herder, little herder, – in the name of the holy trinity… / to whom do those little cows
belong – that are in these mountains?’), and Menéndez Pidal believes these to be posterior to
the others: ‘the meeting of the countess with the page lost its reference to aristocratic life and
was replaced by a herder tending a herd.’ Could not these verses, reproduced in the middle of
the 16th century by a man who spent his whole life in Andalusia, lead to the revision of the idea
that the Andalusian versions are posterior? In any case they show that inquiring ater the cows
is an old characteristic. It is also noteworthy that the response of the shepherd in the ballad
(‘hey belong to Count Sol, Milady,’ Primavera) seems to have turned into a polite lirtation in
Vásquez’s gloss.
Frenk’s article suggests, therefore, a new comparatist and interdisciplinary focus in the study
of our ballad. Starting from musical sources, she approaches a literary study, suggests the com-
parison between a lyrical composition destined for a polyphonic song and a ballad, brings an
old text face to face with modern oral versions so that one sheds light on the other and vice
versa, and enters the debate concerning scholarly poetical creation (since that is, without a
doubt, what Vásquez’s gloss is) and its possible oral origins.
Some of the main works on balladry in general and La boda estorbada in particular, were
also published in the 1950s. In 1953, a fundamental book appeared: Romancero Hispánico: His-
pano-Portugués, Americano y Sefardí (Hispanic balladry: Spanish-Portuguese, American, and
Sephardic) by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who in the title declared his comparatist intentions by
indicating diferent geographic and linguistic traditions. In various sections he deals with the
thwarted marriage ballads. In the epigraphs 7.13–14 (1:275–89), he analyzes the characteristics
and the phases of formation of Conde Dirlos, its relation with ballads in other languages, and
the common and diferentiating elements between the old version of the thwarted marriage
11. Tell me, little shepherd, / so comely and handsome: / who owns those cows / that graze beside the river?
/ – Madame, the cows are yours / but the sighs are mine.
(Dirlos) and those of the modern oral tradition. hroughout the two volumes our ballad reap-
pears in varied motifs and is approached from diferent perspectives such as observations about
its printed distribution in the sixteenth century (2:67), its spread in America (2:231 and 246), its
dramatization in the comedies of Lope de Vega and Guillén de Castro (2:174), and its inclusion
in the costumbrista literature of the nineteenth century (2:287). It also documents for the irst
time the inclusion of Conde Dirlos among the incipits that indicated the melody with which
Eastern Sephardic Hebrew hymns of sixteenth century (2:221) should be sung.
Another relevant step in the study of balladry was the republication in 1954 of an old article
by Menéndez Pidal (1920) on linguistic geography, followed by a new work by the researchers
Diego Catalán and Alvaro Galmés in which they applied Menéndez Pidal’s methodology for
the geographical study of Gerineldo, La condesita, and the versions in which one and the other
ballad appear together. Here they also take into account many more versions collected ater
Menéndez Pidal’s pioneering work. In their study, D. Catalán and Galmés also introduced a
diachronic element, contemplating not only the geographical distribution of the variants, but
the phases of evolution of the ballad in the tradition:
he abundance of versions has permitted us to classify the material applying a series of tem-
poral criteria. In consequence, the geographical method that studies the versions and variants
and their spatial projection, has turned out to be complemented by their temporal study, to
such a degree that we can give shape in maps to four or even ive successive moments in the
evolution of ballads […] ater various attempts we have tried out a new representative method
that graphically solves the problem, raised in 1920, that one must study a ballad by break-
ing it down into its variants and that “only ater analytical examination can one arrive at the
examination of the spread of the variations on the whole.” Our method consists of plotting
out on the same map the maximum area of all important variants, and this way the massive
representation of variants is equivalent, actually, to a representation of complete versions (it is so
much so that one can almost read every version simply by looking at the map), but considered
analytically, that is, as conglomerations of variants, independent in their geographical expansion.
(Menéndez Pidal, D. Catalán, and Galmés 1954, 147)
he work of D. Catalán and Galmés provoked much controversy – which can still be observed
a half a century later – with both enthusiastic defenses of and resounding detractions to the
geographical method they proposed. It inspired contradictory reactions immediately ater its
publication: on the one hand a well-balanced article-review by Jules Horrent (1955), in which
he brought forward numerous observations and details with a generally approving tone; and a
virulent article against it by the always polemical Daniel Devoto (1955).
For many decades Devoto was one of the experts in comparatist studies as applied to tra-
ditional Hispanic literature and, within that, balladry. His unforgettable articles on the motif of
the seven laps around a building as a way of breaking a magic spell (1959), on the motif of the
bad hunter in Hispanic and pan-European poetry (1960), and on songbirds as messengers of
love in old and modern European and American literature (1990) are essential pieces in com-
parative studies of themes and motifs in literature. In his reply to the work of Menéndez Pidal,
Catalán, and Galmés from 1954, Devoto attacked what he considered to be weak points in the
geographical method as applied to the study of balladry and traditional poetry, pointing out
its methodological and conceptual inconsistencies. He began by reproaching Spanish scholars
of balladry for their excessive focus on national historic material in ballads and their disregard
for poems that did not have roots in the national epic, that is, precisely those poems that might
have more parallels with European ballads. He declared that what he called “adventure ballads,”
that is, what we today call “novelesque ballads” or ballads that tell invented stories without any
epic or historical referents, are especially adequate for a comparatist study with the interna-
tional ballad. He pointed out the frequency of inter-inluences and communications between
diferent genres of traditional literature such as songs that are actually rhyme formulas inserted
into stories, the intrusion of prose explanations in the recitation of Hispanic and English bal-
lads, and ballads that become stories and are narrated in prose:
he ballad thus ofers, in its condition as epic-lyrical song, an ideal ield of study, halfway be-
tween the purely lyrical song and the prose narration, to which it is – in terms of genre – pre-
sumably the antecedent. (Devoto 1955, 239)
According to Devoto, the geographical method requires a substantial mobilization of energy

and material and only obtains poor results:
[he result]… does not correspond to the efort required and the enormous quantity of maps
and pictures produced. In the irst place, these conclusions do not ofer more than what the
data itself gives us, and the operation of arranging all the ballads on a map is more similar to a
mere census than to a scientiic investigation. (Devoto 1955, 250)
Devoto advocated an analysis of balladry that paid more attention to psychology – to the func-
tion of the ballad as a manifestation of desires and individual impulses – and to the study of
how variants function from this perspective. Signiicantly, Devoto invoked not only the work
of Bronislaw Malinowski, but also that of Paula Lombroso, Freud and his followers in questions
of mythology and folklore, and even a Freudian analysis of the Carolingian ballad El sueño de
doña Alda published in Revista de Psicoanálisis from Buenos Aires by the psychiatrists Marie
Langer and Tristán Fernández. He inished by defending the following:
he focus of the investigation should be placed, above all, on the individual folkloric act, and
the conduct of that subject, of the subject as such, capable of varying the ballad every time
he or she brings it to life (since the ballad only survives because of these performers) is what
should be closely studied, since it operates, in him and by him, as a mechanism that governs
all folkloric manifestations. (253)
his is therefore a proposal for a psychological review of balladry and traditional literature in
general, which Devoto exempliies by analyzing the use and meaning of some of the motifs in
the ballad La infantina, in a traditional story (Las tres naranjas) and, above all, in the ballad
Gerineldo (both independent versions and versions contaminated by La condesita). An example
is the dialogue between the king and the page in which the page – who has just slept with the
princess – exonerates himself with double meanings (he comes from delowering a rose, he has
just returned from the hunt, back from the garden, etc.) to explain why he is “so sad and pale.”
Although the psychological approach has not been a major trend in the study of Hispanic
ballads, works with this focus have occasionally been produced. In terms of the ballads we are con-
sidering here, more than thirty years ater Devoto, Alonso Hernández (1989) once again proposed
a psychoanalytic reading based on the comparison of diferent versions of the ballad Gerineldo.
Geographical methods received other critiques from diferent perspectives as well. Other
examples can be found in the aforementioned Bénichou himself (1968a) and in Giuseppe Di
Stefano. Although Di Stefano’s eforts were mostly dedicated to the printed tradition of balladry
(see his articles from 1971, 1977, 1990a and 1990b, 1992, 2003, etc.) and to their historiographic
sources (1988a and 1988b), his irst important work (1967) analyzed the old and modern oral
tradition versions of the epic ballad El rey moro que reta a Valencia (he Moor that challenges
Valencia) from a position close to that of Antonio Gramsci. Here he focused on the pressure
and inluence of hegemonic culture on popular culture. Di Stefano was also very critical of the
traditionalist school of Menéndez Pidal and, in particular, of the method of linguistic geography
applied to balladry. Nevertheless, geographical studies have continued to have a great inluence
upon works on Hispanic balladry up to the present. As recently as 1989 Petersen made a deci-
sive defense of the application of the geographical method using computerized tools. Further-
more, comparing versions in order to establish a territorial distribution of variants has become
a part of what we could call the “routine methodology,” constituting a point of departure for
many studies, even when such geographical analysis is used to support other critical approaches.
4. he study of La boda estorbada in the 70s
Ater the controversy over Menéndez Pidal, Catalán, and Galmés’ book, studies of the ballad
La boda estorbada seemed to go into a period of hibernation, therefore, we do not ind any new
relevant oferings in the 1960s. In the 1970s, however, new work appeared that represented an
advance and the opening of new perspectives. Ruth Webber (1978) ofers a good summary of
the diferent critical and methodological approaches up until the 70s. Using principle studies
that had appeared up until that moment on El conde Sol (La condesita), Gerineldo, and other
ballads, she exempliied diferent methods for the analysis of ballads, taking into account verbal
details and aspects of plot and fabula.
he publication by Diego Catalán et al. (1969–1972) of three volumes of Romancero tradi-
cional (Traditional balladry) dedicated to the so-called “Odyssean themed ballads” – that is,
those that tell a story similar to that of the Odyssey, with the departure of the husband to war,
his long absence, and his return – was fundamental for its vision of the distinct manifestations
of La boda estorbada from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.
Menéndez Pidal started to publish the Romancero Tradicional de las lenguas hispánicas
(Traditional balladry of the Hispanic languages) series in 1957, beginning with two volumes
(Menéndez Pidal 1957 a and b) dedicated to the epic theme: the irst on the cycle of King don
Rodrigo and of Bernardo de Carpio, and the second on ballads of the Counts of Castile and
the Infantes of Lara. In 1969, Diego Catalán and his team of collaborators took charge of the
work’s publication, continuing the work of Menéndez Pidal and publishing a total of 13 volumes
by 1985 (the last one, dedicated to the theme of La muerte ocultada [Hidden death] was pre-
pared by Mariscal 1984–1985). In each volume, all of the then-known versions of a ballad were
properly identiied (with the date of the source if it was written down; or of the collector, the
informant, the location, and the date of collection, etc., if it was a version collected from the oral
modern tradition). It ofered artiicial versions representative of each of the geographic tradi-
tions, which were elaborated on the basis of a comparison of the diferent traditional versions,
while a detailed and generally enlightening study accompanied the text. he result was at the
same time an analysis of the ballad, an exhaustive publication of all known texts, and a com-
parative study of the diferent versions and diferent traditions, connecting the romance with
equivalent ballads in other languages when pertinent.
Of the Romancero tradicional’s three volumes dedicated to Odyssean themes, the irst (vol.
3 of the series) is dedicated to the oldest ballads: La vuelta del navegante, El conde Dirlos, La
partida del esposo, and El conde Antores, in addition to another ballad La vuelta del esposo (he
husband’s return), in which the theme of the thwarted marriage does not appear. his tells how
a husband goes of to war and, when he returns unrecognizable or in disguise, he subjects his
wife to a test to assure that she has remained loyal. It sometimes appears to be contaminated
by Gerineldo. he next volume (the fourth of the series) collects versions of La condesita, as
an autonomous ballad together with La partida del esposo, which sometimes serves as its in-
troduction. Finally, volume 5 is dedicated to composite versions of Gerineldo and La condesita,
contemplating not just those coming from the oral tradition, but those popularized through
print. he ballad was successful in print form, as can be observed through its appearance in the
printed chapbooks and romantic pastiches in periodicals like El almanaque de la Ilustración
(which published a version in 1888); in theatrical representations, such as a comedy that de-
buted in 1908 in the Teatro Español in Madrid; and in the already mentioned artiicial anthol-
ogy by Menéndez Pidal, Flor nueva de romances viejos. Among the chapbooks and pastiches can
be found a false ballad included by Agustín Durán in his Romancero from 1849–51 and another
one reproduced by the costumbrista Serafín Estébanez Calderón in Escenas andaluzas (Anda-
lusian scenes); La condesita served as a basis for school performances from 1932 onwards and,
in 1933, was set to music by Eduardo Martínez Torner. It was then traditionalized and, as noted
above, one of the versions collected in Mexico by V. Mendoza in 1939 was, precisely, a product
of the written version’s traditionalization.
he three volumes of ballads concerning the “Odyssean theme” are, therefore, much more
than just the publication of known texts. hey comprise an authentic comparatist work that, in
addition to ofering the possibility of comparing versions from diferent geographical regions
and linguistic varieties, situates the theme of La boda estorbada in its context, and establishes
links between distinct variations of the same narration, between oral and written literature; and
between diferent forms of distribution and representation of the ballad.
In the same decade there were other interesting contributions to the study of our ballad.
One of them follows the lines already laid out by Entwistle, establishing the ballad’s connections
to other narrations in European verse of medieval origin. Alvaro Galmés’ article (1971), empha-
sized the plot similarities between Gerineldo-La condesita and the heroic medieval French song
Hörn et Rimel, noting that, in efect, it ofers a combination of the two stories – that of the seduc-
ing page, and that of the husband that goes of to war and returns ater many years just in time
to prevent the marriage of his wife to another. he same theme is the case in El conde Dirlos
and El conde Antores, although with the variation that he arrives disguised as a pilgrim, as in La
condesita. his ofers a possible contradiction to what Menéndez Pidal suggested in his 1920 ar-
ticle and what Galmés and Diego Catalán suggested in 1954. It challenges the thesis that the ver-
sions which unite Gerineldo with La condesita are not products of a late fusion between the two
themes, and suggests that they are a primitive variation of the story, seen in the double ballads
as well as in the French chanson de geste. hough Galmés referred to a more detailed study in
the progress of the theme, as far as we know, he never published it, nor has any other study
returned to the subject. Nonetheless, what interests us here is, again, how another comparative
study of the ballad was established, this time with medieval French chivalrous literature.
However, the most innovative shit in studies of the 1970s with regard to our ballad was the
application of new technologies to the study of balladry, more concretely to geographic studies.
he utilization of rudimentary computers introduced a new course both in terms of the possi-
bilities of data management that computerization allows, as well as in the possibility of adapting
the use of new tools to the study of the poetics of the ballad.
In fact, in their 1973 article (republished in Catalán 1997, 89–110), Diego Catalán and Te-
resa Catarella presented balladry as an open system, based on a synchronic and diachronic
study of a chivalric border ballad, Don Manuel de León y el moro Muza (Manuel of León and
the Moor Muza). Ater analyzing how the traditional poem is remade through a combination
of diferent types of linguistic variations, they concluded:
he comparative examination of the various old and modern manifestations of a ballad show
that a traditional ballad is an open system (not an organism or a closed structure), both ver-
bally and poetically as well as thematically, and that its evolution depends on the adaptation
of that open system or subsystem (poem) to the environment: to the linguistic, aesthetic, and
ethical system of the human group in which it is sung, in which it is reproduced. he change is
clearly ecosystemic. (D. Catalán and Catarella 1973, 205)
In a 1975 article published as a tribute to Rodríguez-Moñino, Diego Catalán announced that

he was committed to “the ambitious project of editing and studying systematically all of the
versions of ballads, unpublished or published, that have ever been put into writing between
now and the iteenth century” (158), with the intention of analyzing the poetics of balladry and
modes of traditional text creation and recreation. He states his purpose clearly:
My purpose is, on the one hand, to describe the “language” or system of poetic communication
in balladry, determining the properties of its simple and complex units of expression, and on
the other, to compare genetically related structures in order to specify how poems are repro-
duced and how the interaction of poetic heredity functions in the environment. To complete
such a systematic study, we must analyze a rather wide and suiciently diversiied sampling of
traditional balladry, so that the “universe” studied is representative of the whole of oral tradi-
tional balladry and not simply of a particular type or types of ballads of certain “branches” of
Hispanic balladry. (1975, 160)
Diego Catalán shared the same premise that Paul Bénichou’s studies had inspired regarding po-
etic creation in traditional balladry, though in a diferent methodological direction: that literary
criticism had not given the same attention and consideration to the methods of creation of oral
poetry as to studies of the poetics of written canonical literature. Catalán elaborates:
Oral poetry, the poetry of most of the human population, has not been analyzed with the
same rigor as written poetry, poetry created by and for a small minority within the minority of
peoples who have been able to develop a literary culture. As a result, we are far from being able
to write a Poetics of traditional poetry and, far worse, we have not yet been able to even develop
appropriate methods for the analysis of that poetry. I think that we should make this efort,
with the object of being able to describe a mechanism of one of man’s artistic activities that is
most closely related to his condition as homo loquens. he most salient feature of oral poetry
with respect to written poetry is that its habitual mode of transmission makes it impossible for
the creative process to ever be considered inished at any given moment. he traditional poem
is always an open system (not an organism or closed structure), both verbally and poetically
as well as thematically; it is a subsystem in continuous adaptation to the environment, to the
linguistic, aesthetic, and ethical system of the human group in which it is sung, in which it is
reproduced. Consequently, a descriptive study of a traditional poem cannot ignore the most
outstanding characteristic of the object of study: its variability. (1975, 157)
he six hundred and thirty two then-known versions of the ballad La condesita (as an inde-
pendent ballad and together with Gerineldo) published in volumes 4 and 5 of the Romancero
tradicional were the corpus selected as the object of the irst “pilot project” for the application
of computerization to the study of the poetics of balladry, begun in 1970 (Catalán 1975). his
pilot project was the doctoral thesis of Suzanne Petersen, later published by the University of
Wisconsin (Petersen 1976a). Not much later, in a colloquium at the Universidad Complutense
in Madrid on the application of computers to linguistics, Catalán (1976) published another ar-
ticle in which he defended the use of computers for the semiotic analysis of balladry. Suzanne
Petersen (1976b) wrote another article in the same volume presenting the methodology of her
doctoral thesis, in which she dwelt speciically on the use of computerized applications for the
geographical method. She also returned to the same theme in her 1978 and 1979 works.
At the same time, and using more traditional instruments, Mercedes Díaz Roig initiated
a study of the creative methods of the oral tradition, though also with deep comparatist roots.
In her magniicent 1977 article, she studied the contradictory tendencies of innovation and
conservatism in the process of the continuous transmission and recreation of a traditional text,
noting the paradox that the conservative tendency can at times produce innovation:
One of the manifestations of the conservative force is the desire to clarify those elements that
seem obscure or incoherent to the eyes of certain transmitters. hese transmitters see the bal-
lad as a story that follows a logical and intelligible development, and they try to correct any ir-
regularity that might threaten that conception. Due to the intervention of these kinds of trans-
mitters, less usual terms are substituted by more usual terms (that do not run the risk of being
deformed so easily), deformed words are replaced by more intelligible forms, semantic content
in doubtful form is reinforced, and those contexts that do not go along well with the expressed
idea are modiied. his restoration process usually serves its initial purpose of lending coher-
ence to the story, but it does not always succeed in replacing what has been lost, and it can
become yet another factor of variation. In other words, even this essentially conservative efort
can sometimes give way to innovative changes, oten due to mistaken interpretations of what
has been heard, falsiied reconstructions of motifs, or forgotten verses. (Díaz Roig 1977, 460–61)
She went on to ofer various examples of these cases, one of which (463–64 and note 6) is the
matter of the varied and diverse birthplaces suggested for La condesita in our ballad: Seville,
Lombardy, France, Valencia, La Barría, Navarría, Ormandía, Hungary, Junquillo de la Mar, La
Mansedumbre, El Paraíso, La Pausa, Bombardillo, Tierras Brillantes, Las Sindalias, Hombrías.
Another great innovation in balladry studies in the 1970s was the publication of the
catalogue of balladry and Sephardic narrative poetry by Samuel G. Armistead and a team of
collaborators in 1978. In principle, it was presented as a catalogue-index of a very concrete

corpus: that of the collection of Sephardic ballads and songs conserved in the Menéndez Pidal
Archive of Madrid (AMP in its Spanish initials). his was a product of ield work carried out
between 1904 and 1956, with an important increment in the twentieth century thanks to the sys-
tematic ield work in the Sephardic communities of the East (in 1911) and Morocco (1915–1916)
conducted by Manuel Manrique de Lara with a grant from the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios.
However, the importance and interest of this work exceed the efort – important in and of itself
– to classify a concrete collection which representing a speciic tradition. To begin with, it is the
irst systematic catalogue of a corpus of Spanish ballads. In addition – and this is what interests
us most – it was elaborated using comparatist criteria.
In this catalogue of the AMP’s Sephardic collection, the theme of La boda estorbada is
present in numbers 1.5 (El conde Antores), 1.7 (El conde Sol, or La condesita), and 1.8 (La vuelta
del navegante), and 1.6 collects La partida del esposo, derived from the initial fragment of the
old ballad of Conde Dirlos, as we know. A repertory of the versions of each ballad contained in
the Menéndez Pidal Archive is ofered, with an indication of the irst and last verse and infor-
mation on the informant, the collector, the place and date it was collected, and related to all the
other ballads in the catalogue. here is also information on contamination from other ballads,
musical transcriptions when they exist, and a bibliography of versions of the ballad. he book is
complemented by the publication of ity texts that are especially rare or of great value (among
them, an especially interesting version of La vuelta del navegante collected in 1911 in Sarajevo),
indexes of collections, informants, proper names, titles and irst verses, as well as glossaries.
It would seem diicult to create a catalogue with a comparatist focus, but the bibliography
of versions that accompanies each ballad clearly indicates this tendency. It includes biblio-
graphic references of published versions not only from Sephardic traditions of the Eastern
Mediterranean and Morocco, but also from other Spanish peninsular, insular, and American
traditions in Spanish, Galician, Portuguese, and Catalan. here is a bibliography of versions
of sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of corresponding relevant bal-
lads from other traditions, such as Scandinavian, Germanic, French, Italian, English, Greek,
and Balkan traditions. herefore, merely consulting the catalogue of the Sephardic collection
favors and facilitates a comparatist study of the Hispanic balladry, ofering information that
permits access to old and modern versions and to counterparts in the balladry of diferent
European languages and their spread to areas in America, such as Quebec or the United States.
It is, therefore, a fundamental instrument for the comparative study of balladry in an interna-
tional framework.
5. Studies in the 80s
he 1980s were marked by the application of structuralist analysis to Spanish balladry. he

structuralist studies of the 80s recovered Catalán and Catarella’s conception of balladry as an
open system (1973), with its maximum expression being the Catálogo general del romancero
(General catalogue of Spanish Ballad, CGR in its Spanish initials) compiled by Diego Catalán
and his team of collaborators. It consists of three volumes published between 1982 and 1988; one
volume which presents the methodology used appears as an English-Spanish double version.
he CGR is an attempt to elaborate a catalogue of traditional balladry which is not lim-

ited to ballads exclusively known through old printed or handwritten texts, and is based on a
semiotic analysis of levels of discourse, plot, fabula, and on the actantial model. herefore, an
exhaustive repertory of all the existing formulations of the known versions of each ballad is
provided, and grouped by plot sequences that aid the development of the ballad’s fabula.
he published volumes of the CGR were only able to include ballads “with a historical
national referent,” so La boda estorbada appears only marginally. he borderland ballad Río
Verde is included, with the indication that some of its verses appear in versions of La condesita.
Also, in the theoretical part of the work, La boda estorbada is used to exemplify some aspects of
traditional ballad structure.
However, the elaboration of CGR served as a basis for Catalán’s 1989 article on the poetics
of balladry, in which among other things he stated:
he study of balladry, like that of other creations of popular culture, demands a great and
humble efort of adaptation for those of us who have been brought up in an oicial, urban
civilization if we truly wish to understand the language that those creations use and not merely
collect strange artifacts. (D. Catalán 1989, 4)
To this end he referred to the need to take up a series of tasks: a) to collect versions of ballads
in collections and create archives of recordings – not only of texts – since it is important to
pay attention to the performance of the ballad; b) to publish the texts; and c) above all, to at-
tempt a description of the poetics of balladry. As an example of the latter, he analyzed igura-
tive language by examining diferent formulations where the same motif or sequence appears
in diferent versions of a ballad. One example of this is the variety of discourses with which
the following plot sequence “the countess dresses as a pilgrim to go in search of her husband”
develops in versions of La condesita. he diferent discourses vary from the merely descriptive,
to a listing of the rich clothes the countess removes to dress as a pilgrim, to the appeal to her
father to buy her the clothes (only describing them in passing): hus, Catalán shows that this
“variability clariies the expressive function which those forms of discourse have with respect to
the invariable semantic content of the plot” (12).
6. From the 90s to the present
he two fundamental volumes of Arte poética del romancero oral (Poetics on oral Spanish bal-
ladry) by Catalán (1997–98) build upon these tendencies in the study of the poetics of balladry.
hese volumes collect previously published articles (some of them simply reprinted and others
corrected and revised), while also including new work in the same line. In general, the work
on the poetics of balladry is always based on the comparison of versions of the same ballad, or
of motifs and sequences in diferent ballads. hroughout the work included in this book, the
ballad La condesita is used as an example of geographical variability or of the function of motifs
and formulas (Vol. 2, 149–158).
he 90s were also characterized by the publication of a documental corpus of ballads re-
sulting from local ield collection (such as Catalán et al. 1991–95 for the tradition from León,
or work on Andalusian balladry by Piñero and Atero 1986, 1996), or by the production of
catalogues and anthologies of local traditions such as that of Galicia (Valenciano et al. 1998)
and Asturias (Suárez López 1997). Of these catalogues, the one with the most comparatist focus
is that of Manuel da Costa Fontes (Fontes 1997) for the Portuguese continental, insular, and
Brazilian traditions. It emulates the catalogue model that Armistead (Armistead et al. 1978) pre-
pared for the Sephardic holdings of the Menéndez Pidal Archive, with the innovation that there
is a representative version in Portuguese of every ballad. Appearing in this catalogue are ballads
from the La boda estorbada series in numbers 17 (O conde Flores, the Portuguese equivalent of
the Castilian Conde Antores), 18 (O conde Sol, Count Sol or La condesita), and 19 (A volta do
navegante, he mariner’s return).
he Luso-Brazilian catalogue, like the Sephardic one, has a comparatist orientation, be-
cause it ofers a bibliography of versions from other geographical and linguistic traditions in
equivalent international ballads. Among the comparatist details are multiple indexes and sup-
plements that enrich the work and make it more useful as well as a section elaborated by Samuel
Armistead (2:624–44) with the “pan-European analogues” of ballads and a list (2:622) of “cor-
respondences with folktales.” his is in addition to comparative graphs of the presence of each
ballad in the pan-Hispanic tradition (in Galicia, the Spanish-speaking area of the peninsula,
Catalonia, the Sephardic Jewish areas, and Spanish America), “correspondences” of the Por-
tuguese ballad “with the Galician and Leonese ballad”; and the geographical “Luso-Brazilian
distribution” of each ballad. Manuel da Costa Fontes’s catalogue of the Portuguese tradition
(Fontes 1997) therefore serves as an instrument for the comparative study of balladry and as
a complement to Armistead’s catalogue for the Sephardic tradition that served as its model.
Indeed, there are ballads that appear in the Portuguese tradition and not in the Sephardic one
and vice versa.
he 1990s also consolidated a change in the treatment of balladry that, in a certain way,
encouraged a comparatist orientation through the anthologies of texts. Of all traditional or
orally transmitted literatures, the ballad is practically the only genre that has become a part of
the Spanish literary canon. he inclusion of this speciic genre of “folkloric” literature in the
canon – and not of others – is due in great part to the prestige it was granted by the studies of
Menéndez Pidal, who related balladry to genres linked to the origins of national literatures like
the epic. herefore, as early as the 1920s, balladry entered the books of scholarly reading and
university teaching, whereas other genres of folk literature like the folk tale, legends, and the
songs of the modern oral tradition were hardly mentioned. Ballads were even taught at schools,
where they served as a basis for scholarly activities, as Pelegrín has indicated (1996, 253–54) in
a wonderful book on children’s folklore in which he alluded to the theatrical performances of
ballads (among them our ballad La condesita) in the 30s by students of the progressive school
Instituto Escuela de la Institución Libre de la Enseñanza (Institute school for the free institution
of teaching) and, ater the Civil War, in the Teatro para Niños (heater for children) of the Sec-
ción Femenina (Feminine division) of the fascist movement Falange Española.
One consequence of the “canonization” of balladry is that throughout the twentieth cen-
tury numerous anthologies of ballad texts were published for an academic audience. Nonethe-
less, up until the 1980’s a paradox existed. he research on balladry emphasized questions such
as the variability of texts, the need to study romances known through written sources from the
iteenth to the seventeenth centuries in relation to in contrast with the versions of the modern
oral tradition, the comparison between variants belonging to distinct geographical areas and
diferent languages, the connections between Spanish balladry and other ballads, variation as
the primordial element in the process of poetic creation, the vitality of balladry in the modern
oral tradition, the necessity of doing ield work hand in hand with rigorous studies using other
methods. However, anthologies systematically presented a vision of a genre fossilized in the
texts of old Castilian balladry and exclusively collected sixteenth-century versions from chap-
books and printed collections, oten ofering them in bare text form without any type of annota-
tion or explication. hat is, these anthologies ofered an “antiquarian” vision of balladry, pub-
lishing only versions from sixteenth-century sources and displaying contempt for the modern
oral tradition, while depriving these older texts of the academic treatment appropriate to their
publication, which would normally be accompanied by explanatory notes or by some kind of
clarifying interpretation or analysis. Also, by not including texts from the oral tradition, those
ballads which were not documented in older sources and are known to us exclusively through
their modern oral versions (like La condesita, La vuelta del navegante, La partida del esposo, and
many others) were systematically let out of the anthologies.
Only the anthology by Michelle Débax (1982) broke with this inertia by including some
versions from the modern oral tradition (among them, various versions from León of El conde
Antores and of La condesita) together with some explanations of each ballad. hen, in the 1990s,
two anthologies appeared almost simultaneously which collected both old texts and those of
the modern oral tradition, ofering them with explanations and annotations. Giuseppe Di Ste-
fano’s anthology (1993) was the irst to be published and, though it followed the traditional
practice of favoring ballads from old handwritten and printed sources, it included a section on
“Ballads from sources ater 1605” made up of ballads from the modern tradition, among them
a few in Portuguese.
Only a few months later the Romancero by Díaz-Mas (1994) appeared, in which ballads are
presented thematically, including texts that come from old sources as well as from the modern
oral tradition. he irst edition of the volume (it was republished in a reduced version in 2001
and 2005) was accompanied by a CD with documental recordings collected in diverse ield
studies, although it included versions only in Spanish and not in other Peninsular languages.
his anthology published two versions from the modern Iberian tradition of La condesita (one
of them with a CD recording). Díaz-Mas’s way of presenting balladry materials was emulated by
Piñero (1999), who included two versions of La condesita: one combined with Gerineldo (99a)
and one as an independent ballad (99b).
In any case, what it is important for us to highlight here is that since the mid-1990s, ballad
anthologies have broken with the habitual practice of ofering a vision of balladry as a collection
of fossilized texts. hey invite a comparative vision of the genre, bringing together old texts and
texts of the modern oral tradition as well as texts from diferent geographical traditions and, in
some cases, in diferent languages. Some studies on speciic aspects of balladry also take into
account the La boda estorbada series, such as Cándano Fierro’s article (1992) on the motif of
disguise which, while not exhaustive, is based on the comparison of various versions of three
diferent ballads (one of them La condesita).
he latest contributions to the study of La boda estorbada ballads indicate other compara-
tive approaches. he works of Forneiro (2000, 2004, and his collaboration in this volume), for
example, focus on the question of bilingualism and languages in contact with oral literature,
taking as a model the ballads of Galicia. It is not a coincidence that the irst of the cited books
begins with a chapter dedicated to situating Galician balladry in the pan-Hispanic context and
in the framework of the pan-European ballad, and only later moves on to consider the use of
the Galician and Castilian languages in the balladry of Galicia, while analyzing extra-textual
factors (geographic, gender and age of the informants, the period in which the collection is
done) in relation with the language of the text. Forneiro uses versions of El Conde Dirlos collect-
ed in the same place in diferent periods to exemplify how the versions collected more recently
have less presence of Galician than the older ones (274–76). He uses versions of La condesita
to show the presence of Galician even in themes that were introduced recently in the Galician
tradition (277–78) and he cites texts of La vuelta del navegante as an example that the language
of the interviewer does not necessarily inluence the greater or lesser presence of Galician in the
collected versions (297–300).
Conclusions
he ballads of La boda estorbada and its variations have been a pretext for us to make a survey
of balladry studies from 1920 to the present. hrough them we have examined the diferent ele-
ments that can be studied in a ballad. Our examination has ranged from its sources and origin
to the variety of some of its manifestations in the oral tradition; from motifs to structures; from
themes and motifs to the question of languages in contact; and from poetics to its relation with
other genres. In order to follow the course of speciic studies on La boda estorbada, we have also
looked at how studies on balladry have evolved throughout the century, from linguistic geogra-
phy to semiotic analysis set at the service of the study of the text’s poetics. We have also looked
at the study of the genre in the framework of international balladry, and in the use of computer-
ized applications for the cataloguing of the corpus. We have also demonstrated the possibility of
approaching the study from other disciplines, such as musicology. However, we would mostly
like to stress that, despite the diversity of possible theoretical and methodological approaches,
comparativism is an obligatory condition; the oral text cannot be studied in isolation without
establishing a network of comparisons with other similar texts, with other traditions, and even
with other genres.
Epic and ballad in the Hispanic tradition
Samuel G. Armistead
here are many problems and many issues that need to be addressed in regard to the study of
medieval epic and traditional ballad poetry on the Iberian Peninsula (Armistead 1981, 1986–87,
1994, 2007; D. Catalán 2000; Katz 2007; Webber 1989). he present chapter will be concerned
with only one of these problems: the direct and genetic relationship between epic and ballad in
oral tradition, a relationship which, thanks to recent discoveries, can, I believe, now be seen not
merely as an interesting and suggestive theory, but as an established fact.
One of the major, if not the most crucial problems – let us say the most important prob-
lem – for the study of medieval epic poetry in the Iberian Peninsula at least, is the massive loss
or the apparent non-existence of primary texts (Menéndez Pidal 1980, xiii–xxii; Deyermond
1995). he most striking of many contrasts between Medieval French and Castilian epic po-
etry is the extreme disparity in the number of textual witnesses available for the study of these
two traditions. By Joseph Duggan’s authoritative calculations, France has given us no less than
ninety-ive percent of the existing Romance epic texts. here are a total of two hundred and
ninety-seven manuscripts of epic content in Old French, representing some one hundred and
twenty diferent chansons de geste and not one of these MSS is a direct copy of any of the others
(Duggan 1982). In stark contrast to these impressive statistics is the fact that, in total, only three
Castilian epics have survived in their original poetic form. None of these MSS is complete and,
indeed, one of them is only a very brief, exiguous one hundred-verse fragment. hey are Cantar
de Mio Cid (Poem of my Cid), Mocedades de Rodrigo (Youthful adventures of the Cid), and the
one hundred-verse Roncesvalles fragment (representing a highly distinctive Medieval Spanish
recension of the Song of Roland) (Menéndez Pidal 1944–46; 1980, 257–89; 1976, 7–102). We
would also, I believe, be fully justiied in adding to this truly pitiful repertoire the incomplete,
but still very substantial poetic passages from the Second redaction of the cantar de los Infantes
de Lara (Song of the Lords of Lara), fortunately so badly prosiied in two fourteenth-century
chronicles – in the Count of Barcelos’s Crónica geral de Espanha de 1344 (General Chronicle of
Spain) and in the Interpolación de la tercera crónica general (Interpolation in the third general
chronicle) – passages in which the original assonant text is preserved essentially intact as part
of the chronistic prose (Menéndez Pidal 1980, 199–236). But, even if we were to vindicate these
chronical passages, we would still have a total of only four poetic texts – and, even so, all of them
only fragmentary – four epic poems (cantares de gesta) to contrast to France’s astoundingly
bountiful corpus. We can also, of course, partially reconstruct, to various degrees, the narratives
and even some of the verse of several other medieval Castilian epic poems from chronicle prosi-
ications: Fernán González (Song of Fernán González), the Infantes de Lara (Lords of Lara), the
Partición de los reinos (Division of the kingdoms), the Jura de Santa Gadea (Oath at St. Agatha’s
church), the Cerco de Zamora (Siege of Zamora), and a few other vestiges (Menéndez Pidal
1980, 34–256; 1973, 89–106; Reig 1947; for the Infantes, also Menéndez Pidal 1971). What is more,
just knowing these narratives and their structure shows us, for example, that the Infantes and
the Cerco must both have been – like the Cantar de Mio Cid – magniicently crated epic poems.
However, Spain, in contrast to France, is, to say the very least, still gravely disadvantaged.
Of course, we can always hope that some electrifying discovery – such as that of the Ronc-
esvalles fragment or the Nota emilianense (Marginal note from the Monastery of San Millán; D.
Alonso 1954; Menéndez Pidal 1959b; 1960) – may perhaps, by chance, come to shed a bit more
light on what Joseph Duggan has aptly called “the debris of the medieval Spanish epic” (Duggan
1982, 29). Some electrifying inds, in other areas of Medieval Iberian literature, have indeed re-
cently come to light: Harvey Sharrer’s dramatic discovery of Dom Dinis’ cantigas d’amor – with
contemporary musical notations, no less; José Labrador’s inding a sixteenth-century version of
the ballad of “La muerte del príncipe don Juan” (Death of Prince John); and Encarnación Marín
Padilla’s uncovering of a new, previously unknown romance (Hispanic ballad), El Arçobispo de
Çaragoça (Archbishop of Saragosa), dating from 1429 – just eight years younger than the very
earliest romance that we know of: Jaume de Olessa’s La dama y el pastor (he Lady and the Shep-
herd), dating from 1421 (Sharrer 1991; Labrador, Zorita, and DiFranco 1991, 188–89; Marín Padil-
la 1997; Díaz-Mas 1994, 332–33). In the light of such astounding recent discoveries, it is not totally
unreasonable to hope, perhaps, that there may still be an outside chance we could possibly ind
another Nota emilianense (our very own Hague fragment!) (D. Alonso 1954; M. de Riquer 1952,
364–77). But as of now, these are only dreams. It is safe to say that whatever happens, whatever
may be discovered later on, our textual knowledge of the Castilian epic will never reach com-
petitive levels even remotely comparable to our command of the Old French chansons de geste.
To complicate matters even more, in regard to the study and editing of Medieval His-
panic epic poetry, criticism and theory in this ield have long been at loggerheads; they have
been characterized by a sometimes bitter confrontation between two radically diferent schools
of thought: individualism and traditionalism. he individualists have believed that the epic is
essentially a learned genre, created perhaps by lawyers or clerics, a relatively late genre, and,
in Spain at least, also very much of a secondary, derivative genre, essentially inspired by and
dependent upon Medieval French models, a genre whose very irst manifestations are contem-
porary with the very irst texts that have survived. So, in an individualist perspective, palpable
documentation is seen as an exact, accurate testimony to what actually existed in medieval
times and secondary evidence and the possibility of lost texts counts for little or nothing. As
positivists were wont to say, “Avez-vous un texte?” (Have you a text?). For the individualist per-
spective, see C. Smith (1983, 1988). For traditionalists, on the other hand, the epic is essentially a
popular, traditional genre, a type of poetry whose oral – not written – origins go back to a date
much earlier than that of the twelth-century Cantar de Mio Cid. Traditionalists strongly believe
that the paucity of epic texts from Medieval Spain is, in great part, due to a massive loss of texts
and to the fact that, as essentially oral poetry, many versions of medieval epics many not have
been written down at all. Traditionalists further argue that, if there are similarities between
Spanish and French epics – and there certainly are many – these agreements can easily be ex-
plained in terms of professional exchanges between far-traveled epic singers (minstrels, juglares,
joglars, jongleurs), French, Provençal, and Spanish, who journeyed frequently and extensively to
and from both sides of the Pyrenees, and indeed throughout Western Europe and the Mediter-
ranean World as well (Menéndez Pidal 1957c; Faral 1970; Webber 1986). As Southworth (1989,
139–41) shows, Spanish entertainers not infrequently igure in English records of payments to
minstrels, musicians, tumblers, and the like. Defenders of both these critical perspectives – in-
dividualists and traditionalists – have made and continue to make invaluable contributions to
504 Samuel G. Armistead
the study of medieval epic poetry. And, in fact, we are now seeing a healthy attempt to reconcile
– to a degree at least – both perspectives and to go on to study other aspects of the epic genre.
It is also important to bear in mind that, together with other aspects of their critical approach,
individualists have been reluctant, at the very least, to see any direct, genetic connection be-
tween the epic and the traditional ballad. Such a relationship, obviously, would suggest that the
epic, just like the ballad, is an essentially oral, traditional form, an idea which is fundamentally
repugnant and antithetical to individualist criticism.
So where do we go from here? We can, of course, choose to lavish scholarly attention
on the few known Spanish epic texts and, in this regard, we have recently seen splendid new
approaches to Cantar de Mio Cid, speciically Joseph Duggan’s and Michael Harney’s books
(1989; 1993), and the monumental estado de la cuestión embodied in Alberto Montaner’s new
edition of Cantar de Mio Cid (1993) or again homas Montgomery’s far-ranging explorations
of the mythic pre-stages of Castilian epicry (1998). For Mocedades de Rodrigo, Matthew Bailey
has brought together a splendid collection of innovative studies (1999) and his new edition
and translation of the poem is now available (2007). Leonardo Funes’ rival edition, with Felipe
Tennenbaum, also of excellent quality, has just been published in London (2004). My own edi-
tion, essentially inished a number of years ago, is still waiting for me to prepare it for press. My
study of the epic tradition of Mocedades was brought out at Salamanca in 2000. Recently, too,
Diego Catalán has edited the irst volume of Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s monumental history of
the Spanish epic (1992) and he has now published his own pathinding interpretation of the epic
genre in a total of 1021 pages, a real tour de force (D. Catalán 2000). But is there any hope of
actually expanding the corpus of known Castilian epic texts, even if we are condemned to work
solely with secondary evidence? I believe there is.
Enter the Romancero – that is the vast and still only partially studied corpus of Hispanic
traditional narrative poetry – ballads as we would call them in English. I am including here,
indispensably, not only sixteenth-century and modern Spanish ballads, but also evidence from
all the other national, regional, linguistic, and ethnic units that make up the Pan-Iberian world.
I include not only the most obvious components – Spain, Portugal, Catalonia, the Spanish and
Portuguese Atlantic Islands, Brazil, all of the Spanish American republics, and the U.S. South-
west, but also some of the smallest, most “exotic” and culturally isolated Iberian outposts, where
“full” texts or exiguous fragments of romances may be or may have been collected: the Catalan-
speaking town of Alghero (Sardinia), Portuguese-speaking Goa (India), the Philippines, Guam,
the Creole-Portuguese community of Malacca (Malaysia), the Hispano-Muslim settlements in
Tunisia, and the descendants of Canarian colonists in Louisiana, all bring us evidence of a for-
mer and even a present-day knowledge of Hispanic ballads (Armistead 1978a, 1992b). he two
diferent communities of Spanish Jews, who have kept their archaizing Spanish dialects alive al-
most or even down to the present day, illustrate in especially eloquent terms the vast geographic
extension of the Pan-Iberian Romancero. From the Eastern Mediterranean Sephardim, we can
document romances from Bosnia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Turkey, and Israel,
as well as from no longer extant communities in Syria and Lebanon. Starting in the early twen-
tieth century and particularly ater World War II, Eastern Sephardic Jews took their distinctive
ballad traditions to Spain, France, England, Canada, the United States, Hispano-America and,
of course, to Israel, where ballad singing continued to survive up to the late twentieth century.
he same can also be said of Spanish-speaking North African Sephardim in the Moroccan towns
of Tangier, Tetuán, Xauen, Arcila, Larache, and Alcazarquivir, as well as in the Spanish en-
claves of Ceuta and Melilla, in Oran (Algeria) and in British Gibraltar (concerning both major
Judeo-Spanish traditions, see Armistead and Silverman [1989]; for other areas where Sephardic
romances have been collected, see Armistead [2004], Bénichou [1968b], Anahory-Librowicz
[1998]). Besides these two major branches of the Judeo-Spanish tradition, we have additional
evidence of other Sephardic communities where romances must have been sung in earlier times.
here are three ballad texts from the seventeenth-century Hispano-Jewish community of Am-
sterdam; there is a brief fragment of a Sephardic ballad from the Island of Djerba (Tunisia;
Fiore 1969, 897–98); and, on the evidence of ballad incipits used as tune markers in a collection
of Hebrew hymns, it is likely that Hispanic ballads may also have been sung in Fez (Morocco),
where Judeo-Spanish was still spoken as late as the eighteenth and perhaps even into the early
nineteenth century (on Amsterdam and Fez, see Armistead and Silverman [1980], [1973]). he
local Judeo-Arabic dialect of Fez abounded in speciically Judeo-Spanish loan words (Brunot
and Malka 1940). Concerning the Romancero’s astounding geographic scope, Menéndez Pidal
concluded: “he [Hispanic] traditional ballad exists wherever we are able to look for it in the
vast territories where Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan are spoken and, where we [still] have no
reports of its existence, a skillful investigation will indubitably discover it” (1953, 2:358).
Taking into account all its overseas extensions – comprising communities on ive conti-
nents: Europe, Africa, Asia, and North and South America – the Pan-Iberian Romancero can
conidently be characterized as the largest and most geographically diverse of all the European
ballad traditions. And though now gravely endangered by a complex constellation of twentieth-
to twenty-irst-century cultural innovations, there are still numerous areas of the Iberian world
where the tradition continues to be very much alive and where, even now, ield work has suc-
cessfully been carried out in the last few years. Only recently has collecting again been carried
forward in such areas as Huesca, Salamanca, and Zamora in Spain (2002–2004), on various
Canarian islands (Trapero 2000a; 2000b; 2003a; 2003b; Armistead 2003) and in Cuba (Portnoy
2005), with consistently interesting results. See also Suzanne Petersen’s ongoing Pan-Hispanic
Ballad Project website for recent inds: http://depts.washington.edu/hisprom/espanol/.
Unlike most Western European ballad traditions, the Hispanic Romancero – both the
sixteenth-century and the modern traditions – abounds in allusions to epic narratives and the
adventures of almost all of the heroic igures whose deeds were recounted in the medieval epic:
Fernán González, who won freedom for Castile; the Infantes de Lara, betrayed by their villain-
ous uncle and killed in heroic battle against the Moors; the Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the
great Castilian champion and the conqueror of Valencia; Bernardo del Carpio, who defeated
Charlemagne, seen as a foreign invader, at Roncevaux; and also numerous French heroes: Ro-
land, Olivier, Renaud de Montauban, Garin d’Anseüne, Ogier le Danois, Gaiferos, Montesinos
(Aiol), Floovant, Charlemagne himself, and a number of others. Various female characters, well
known to us from medieval Spanish and French epics, have also survived, many even down
to the present: the Cid’s wife, Jimena; Princess Urraca, famous and infamous at the siege of
Zamora, the implacable Doña Lambra, who impels Ruy Velázquez to betray his nephews, the
Infantes de Lara; Roland’s beloved, Aude, who exists only to die of sorrow on hearing of his
death; Galiana, the Saracen princess, who will become a Christian and marry Charlemagne;
Melisenda, Charlemagne’s supposed daughter, who, in the company of Gaiferos, will escape
from Moorish captivity and return to France. A number of these heroes and heroines, so abun-
dant in the sixteenth-century tradition, have disappeared from the modern oral Romancero, at-
testing to a pronounced, systematic drit away from the epic and the heroic and toward an ever
more novelesque, sentimental, and erotic reinterpretation of those epic-based ballads that have
come down to us, through direct oral tradition in an ongoing evolution, during seven centuries
of traditional development (Bénichou 1968a, 145–59; D. Catalán 1969, 213–314; 1997–98, 1:58–59,
60–63; and Armistead, Silverman, and Katz 1971–2008, 2:270–73). All the same, the Cid is still
present in a number of modern romances, as is also Bernardo del Carpio. he French-based
Carolingian epic narratives have fared even better: Charlemagne is still abundantly present, as
are all the heroes and their ladies mentioned above.
How did all these heroes get into the Romancero? Some Romantic critics – perhaps in-
luenced by now long-outdated theories about Homer and the Homeric Question – dreamed
of hypothetical proto-romances that pre-dated the epic (Menéndez Pidal 1953, 1:20; Foley 1988,
2–8; F.M. Turner 1997, 123–45). One might indeed also suppose that some of these romances
were derived “second-hand” from epic narratives picked up by medieval chronicles, as in fact
is the case of the somniferous sixteenth-century compositions of Lorenzo de Sepúlveda, who
re-versiied numerous epic stories absorbed by the chronicles (Menéndez Pidal 1953, 2:111–12).
But such is not the case and, as we shall see, numerous romances that still perpetuate pieces and
parts of epic narratives have survived from the Middle Ages almost down to the present day,
during ive centuries of unbroken oral tradition.
So how was the Romancero able to carry over a series of epic episodes, separated from their
original, detailed epic context, and then transform these epic fragments into independent and,
in many cases, very successful poems in their own right? Many years ago, thinking of the inal
centuries of the medieval Spanish epic tradition (1300s and 1400s), Menéndez Pidal developed
an original and quite efective theory that has withstood the test of time and which continues
to suggest very precisely the conditions under which the culminating, most dramatic, and most
exciting segments of a long, detailed epic narrative may have broken away from such a poem,
to become a shorter, more compact, and even more dramatic autonomous poem, coinciden-
tally similar to the strophic ballads that were developing throughout the rest of Europe at the
very same time. Menéndez Pidal evoked the following hypothetical performance by a Spanish
minstrel, and the reaction of his listeners, during the last years when the epic continued to be
popular in Spain (Menéndez Pidal’s lectures were translated into French by Henri Mérimée
1910, 159–60; the Spanish original was not published until 1945):
And so it happened that during the extreme decadence [of the epic], when the nobility became
bored with the old literary genre, the general public continued to listen, with faithful interest,
to the minstrels who came to recite for them late recensions of the old poems. he audience
would have asked the minstrel to repeat the most attractive part of the poem; this they learned
by heart and, when they themselves sang it, they popularized it, forming, with those few verses,
a separate song, independent of its [original] context: a romance. Such a romance sometimes
conserves, more or less, essentially intact the verses of the epic poem, but, in other cases, it
transforms the fragment’s epic style into a new epico-lyric style. his is to say that the episode’s
detailed narrative or fragment broken away from the epic poem is replaced by a brief intuitive
vision or by an evocative impression suggested by the episode, only preserving a few verses of
the original narrative. (Menéndez Pidal 1959c, 139)
Initially, Menéndez Pidal’s theoretical reconstruction of a medieval minstrel’s recitation and his
audience’s reaction was looked upon with skepticism by certain scholars. he great American
Hispanist, S. Griswold Morley, and the great British ballad scholar, William J. Entwistle, both
took exception to Menéndez Pidal’s suggestion. Discounting the profound transformation im-
plicit in recreating an epic fragment as a new and independent poem, Morley and Entwistle
both insisted that, if the ballads actually were epic fragments, then there would have to be
much greater verbal agreement between the epic sources and their balladic derivatives (Morley
1925–28; Entwistle 1951, 168–69). Yet, when we take into account that, very obviously, none of
the various romances that today can be identiied as having epic origin derive directly from any
of the three (or four) epic texts now available to us (Cantar de Mio Cid, Mocedades de Rodrigo,
Roncesvalles, Infantes de Lara) and that these same ballads must have originated in now lost and
perhaps radically diferent variants of these same epics (as well as in other epics which have
been lost and do not survive in their original form), then Morley’s and Entwistle’s insistence on
a high degree of verbal agreement becomes untenable. Such an objection is further conirmed
by those Hispanic ballads that derive, indirectly of course, from Old French epics. In this case,
we have only the French “parent” texts, while the ballads obviously derive from long-lost Span-
ish adaptations, possibly and very probably profoundly diferent from the French sources that
inspired them. If, in addition, we realize that wide variation is the very essence of a ballad’s and
an epic’s traditional life, then the Morley-Entwistle argument collapses of its own accord. All
the same, various individualist scholars have continued to insist that Menéndez Pidal’s theory is
unacceptable. But Menéndez Pidal, with his profound and thorough knowledge of the nature of
traditional poetry – both epic and balladic – went on to identify numerous instances of a direct,
genetic relationship between sixteenth-century and modern traditional romances, on one hand,
and Medieval Spanish and French epic poems, on the other (1953, 173–300). Menéndez Pidal’s
conclusions, as we shall see, have impeccable scholarly underpinnings and are unassailably con-
vincing in every case. In a study originally published in 1992a (and later revised in 2000, 121–
27), I again approached the problem of the Romancero’s epic origins from a comparativist and
multi-cultural perspective. I discovered that the same process of fragmentation, suggested by
Menéndez Pidal for the iteenth-century Spanish epic, was an essential feature of a geographi-
cally and linguistically diverse array of recent or even contemporary modern epic traditions,
ranging from nineteenth-century Russia to modern sub-Saharan Africa. hus, in Russian by-
lina, in eighteenth-century Greek epic poetry, in modern Egyptian epics, contemporary Zairian
kárisi, lengthy heroic poetry coexisted side by side with briefer ballad-like renditions based on
the same narrative. In addition, I uncovered a previously unnoticed Old French example that
would also seem to support Menéndez Pidal’s proposal. So Menéndez Pidal’s theory essentially
becomes a reality as soon as we look beyond the hypothetical Medieval Spanish context.
In 1957, I began a collaborative project with my late friend Joseph H. Silverman and with
Israel J. Katz, who works on the ethnomusicological component of Hispanic balladry. Our proj-
ect was aimed at collecting, editing, and studying the traditional ballad repertoire of Sephardic
Jews from North Africa, the Balkans, and the Near East. Aside from many other forms of oral
literature, we have so far brought together, in our ield work, just under 1500 texts of romances,
representing some 185 diferent text-types, sung by Spanish-speaking Jews from Macedonia,
Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Israel, and Morocco (Armistead, Silverman, and Katz 1971–2008, 2:4–
18). So far, we have published ive of the sixteen volumes which will comprise our edition and
study of our complete ballad collection: 1–5 are already published; 6, 7, and 8 have also been
written, but must still be edited and indexed. Of these volumes, 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7 are devoted
almost exclusively to Judeo-Spanish ballads of epic origin. he Sephardic tradition, originat-
ing in archaic lateral areas of the Hispanic world, is highly conservative and relects an earlier
stage in the Romancero’s development than is present in most other geographical modalities of
the Pan-Hispanic tradition. In preparing our edition, we have, then, been obliged to confront
systematically Menéndez Pidal’s indings concerning the origins of a majority of the epic-based
ballads known in the modern oral repertoire. In these volumes, we studied a total of eighteen
diferent Judeo-Spanish ballads in relation to their putative epic congeners. (In the Appendix, I
have listed these ballads under their Spanish titles, followed by the titles of their Old Spanish or
Old French epic counterparts.) Having at hand a signiicantly greater number of ballad versions
than were available to Menéndez Pidal in 1953, and in some cases better and more recent edi-
tions of the pertinent epics, the results of our studies have turned out to be intensely interesting.
In all instances, our work has conirmed Menéndez Pidal’s earlier indings and in various cases
we were also able to supplement his identiications with new discoveries of our own.
In one instance, without having surveyed in detail the pertinent sources, Menéndez Pidal
supposed that a certain ballad (“Guarinos” = “Garin d’Anseüne”), did not go back to an epic
ancestor, but was “de invención muy libre” (freely invented) (Menéndez Pidal 1953, 1:264). Al-
though here Menéndez Pidal turned out to be wrong, his own theory came to the rescue and
the ballad could be shown to depend on a now lost *Chanson de Garin d’Anseüne (Song of
Garin d’Anseüne), essential features of which are clearly reconstructible from scattered refer-
ences in other Old French epic poems (Armistead, Silverman, and Katz 1971–2008, 3:71–76). So,
even when Menéndez Pidal was wrong, his theory proved to be right. In another instance, we
have tentatively suggested that a ballad which Menéndez Pidal did not study, “La cabalgada de
Peranzules” (Peranzules’s ride), may also ultimately be based on an Old French epic poem, that
of Aliscans (Armistead 2000, 121–27). Earlier on, Menéndez Pidal had published an invaluable
study indisputably linking the Spanish ballad “Belardo y Valdovinos” to a Medieval French epic
poem, La Chanson des Saisnes (Song of the Saxons) (1956b, 175–209). In a crucial supplement to
our own work, Manuel da Costa Fontes has studied the modern Portuguese ballad of “Flores-
vento” and has speciied its genetic relationship to the Old French epic of Floovant (Fontes 1985).
To sum up: in studying our eighteen Judeo-Spanish romances and their possible epic
sources, in no case could we come up with any evidence that would have conlicted with or
negated Menéndez Pidal’s discoveries, which, in various cases, we have been able to strengthen
and conirm by uncovering additional positive testimonies. It will be diicult now, I believe,
for individualist critics to adduce evidence that could counter Menéndez Pidal’s and our own
discoveries. he evidence is too abundant and too complex to be easily refuted. As of now, we
can only agree with the great Spanish critic, Dámaso Alonso, who, in a posthumous review of
Menéndez Pidal’s work, concluded: “the traditional transition from epic poems to epico-lyrical
ballads has been surely proven” (D. Alonso 1970–71, 45). And, as Menéndez Pidal himself (1953,
1:193) summed it up: “all the epic poems became ballads; the epic became the ballad.”
Appendix
Epic ballads in Armistead, Silvesman, and Katz 1971–2008, 2–3, 5–7:

In each case the ballad title is followed by that of its epic source.
Vol. 2 (1986):
2: “Quejas de Jimena”: Mocedades de Rodrigo.
3: “Rey Fernando en Francia”: Mocedades de Rodrigo.
4: “Almenas de Toro”: Cerco de Zamora (?)
5: “Destierro del Cid”: Cantar de Mio Cid.
6: “Búcar sobre Valencia”: Cantar de Mio Cid.
Vol. 3 (1994):
7: “Almerique de Narbona”: Mort Aymeri de Narbonne.
7: “Roncesvalles”: Roncesvalles.
8: “Cautiverio de Guarinos”: *Chanson de Garin d’Anseüne.
9: “Sueño de doña Alda”: Ronsasvals + Rhymed Roland.
9: “Muerte de don Beltrán”: Roncesvalles.
Vol. 5 (2005):
12: “Gaiferos y Melisenda”: Waltharius (Gualter del Hum).
12: “Floresvento”: Floovant.
13: “Melisenda insomne”: Amis et Amiles.
Vol. 6 (in preparation):
15: “Nacimiento de Montesinos”: Aïol et Mirabel.
Appendix: “Cabalgada de Peranzules”: Aliscans.
Vol. 7 (in preparation):
17: “Moriana y Galván”: Aye d’Avignon.
18: “Caza de Celinos”: Beuve de Hantone.
18: “Galiana”: Enfances de Charlemagne.
English and Spanish summaries of each of these ballads and essential bibliography are included
in Armistead et al. (1978).
he traditional Iberian lyric of the Middle Ages and the Golden Age
A comparative view
Margit Frenk
Sources of old peninsular traditional lyrics
he texts of the old Iberian lyric folk songs are known to us mainly through three series of docu-
ments in various languages of the Peninsula:
1) he Mozarabic kharjas (jarchas), or inal verses of Arabic and Hebrew poems called
muwashshahas composed in the tenth to thirteenth centuries in the regions of the Peninsula
occupied by the Muslims. hese inal verses could be composed in Arabic or in Hebrew, but the
ones that interest us here are some 63 pieces in Mozarabic, the language mostly spoken by the
Christian and Jewish population of that area. Mozarabic was a Romance language – some call it
a dialect – older and more conservative than the contemporary Castilian. he Mozarabic khar-
jas are miniature poems of two to six lines. Many of them seem to be remnants or imitations of
still older folk songs (D. Alonso 1949; Menéndez Pidal 1951; Frenk 1985), which could go as far
back as the beginning of the Romance languages themselves.
2) A number of Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries composed by court poets and jongleurs who used contemporary folk songs as a
source of inspiration (Asensio 1957; Rodrigues Lapa 1929; Rodrigues Lapa 1966; Reckert and H.
Macedo 1976; Beltrán 1987; Lorenzo Gradín 1990; Schafer 1987).
3) A great amount of multilingual – Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese, and Galician – folk
poems and their imitations, written down from the last quarter of the iteenth to the end of
the seventeenth century (for the sake of brevity, I shall here speak of he Golden Age period).
hey became fashionable at the courts and in the cities. hey are preserved, in manuscript or
printed form, in musical sources, in poetic anthologies and broadsheets, as well as in collections
of proverbs, dramatic and narrative works, treatises of diferent kinds, etc. (Frenk 2006, 58–96).
About 3800 of these poems have been gathered, classiied, and edited in my Nuevo corpus de
la antigua lírica popular hispánica: Siglos xv a xvii (New corpus of old Hispanic folk lyric:
iteenth to seventeenth century; Frenk 2003); besides the texts and their diferent sources and
variants, the work includes other pertinent data that will interest us here, and I shall refer to it
by the letters NC and the number of the poem.
With some rare exceptions – the very few songs registered in chronicles – there obviously
are not, and could not be, any direct medieval documents of old oral lyrics. What we have from
the medieval period are mostly poems that point to the existence of those songs, revealing a
number of their features and, from the late iteenth century onwards, a large number of poems
related to the medieval oral tradition, which were adopted, and oten adapted and imitated, by
composers, literate poets, etc. (Frenk 1984, 21–25). Some of these Golden Age poems show very
archaic features, while others were clearly inluenced, at least to some extent, by medieval and
Renaissance courtly poetry, and it is not always easy to establish a clear line between both types.
Nevertheless, and in spite of what some scholars believe nowadays, there do exist quite a few
texts for which we have reliable evidence of their being sung by the rural population at least
he traditional Iberian lyric of the Middle Ages and the Golden Age 511
from the iteenth century onwards, and most probably before that (Frenk 2006, 275–94; Frenk
1984, 25–29).
Be that as it may, there can be no doubt about the existence of a very rich oral lyric reper-
toire in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages and ater, probably covering the whole of
the Peninsula, in its various languages and dialects. We must imagine a panorama much more
vast and complex than that which our three kinds of sources allow us to envision. Some poetic
traditions seem to have spread over a large part of the Peninsula; others must have been limited
to a certain region and perhaps even to smaller areas, but we have very scarce information
about that. Many songs were surely never written down. Modern ieldwork in Spain, Portugal,
and among the Sephardic communities in the Near East and the north of Africa has brought to
our knowledge a number of songs and ballads that were not recorded in old times, but whose
archaic form, language, motif, and style are clear evidence of their antiquity.
As a matter of fact, modern ieldwork conirms the existence of many of the songs regis-
tered in old sources, as well as of their themes, motives, literary techniques, and stylistic fea-
tures. As John G. Cummins wrote (1977, 2):
he relatively conservative character of Spanish rural society has enabled such folk songs to
survive in Spain in a much more lively state than the literature of other rural cultures, so that
ield-work can still add to our knowledge of the tradition, revealing startling links between
the lyrics current today and those preserved in published or written form from earlier periods.
he same is true, to be sure, of Portugal and of the Sephardic communities.

It is my endeavor here to show many of the relations found between the old lyrics com-
posed in diferent Iberian languages and dialects. hese relations, no doubt, are oten due to the
existence of the same poetic oral traditions covering large parts of the Peninsula. We will see, in
my fourth and last section, the astonishing survival in Portugal and Galicia, and even in Cata-
lonia, of songs formerly only known to us in old Castilian versions; they prove the existence,
in ancient times, of precisely those songs also outside Castile. And since many of them have
equally been found nowadays in Asturias and other Castilian-speaking regions, that survival
also proves the existence of a common repertoire in the Peninsula, at least from the iteenth to
the twentieth century.
But besides the textual coincidences between songs existing in the diferent languages of
the Peninsula, there are other kinds of coincidences. hus, for instance, all kharjas, all cantigas
de amigo, and a great many of the folksong-like poems written down during the Golden Age are
women’s love songs. hey thereby contrast with the almost exclusively masculine courtly lyric,
while coinciding with the medieval French chansons de femme and the German Frauenlieder
(Frenk 1985; Frenk 2006, 527–31; Lorenzo Gradín 1990). he words of the girls whose voices we
hear in the Iberian songs oten address their mother, a feature absent in other European regions.
And the Iberian girl frequently speaks of herself with a clear “narcissistic pleasure” (Reckert and
H. Macedo 1976, 106). Our second and third traditions also share a most important feature: the
existence of archaic symbols, which account for some of the most beautiful poems of all Iberian
medieval literature; we will see some of them in our third section. he formal aspects and the
thematic coincidences will occupy us in the next two sections of this chapter.
512 Margit Frenk
Formal aspects
From the point of view of form, the medieval and Golden Age traditional poems share a typical
brevity (they are what Stephen Reckert called lyra minima), that is, the existence of a nucleus
of mostly two to four lines, which may or may not have been developed in one or more stanzas
in the traditional style, according to two diferent structures. Another peculiarity of this poetry
is its original versiication, with its oten uneven lines. It has been called “rhythmic” or “luc-
tuating” or “irregular” (Henríquez Ureña 1933) and in any case it mostly depends on rhythmic
rather than syllabic patterns (Frenk 2006, 497–515). Here we have another contrasting feature
with regard to courtly poetry, with its syllabic regularity.
Monostrophic songs
he kharjas consist of only one little stanza, without anything following, and they may well
have been monostrophic songs, like the modern Aragonese jotas, whose lines, when sung, are
repeated several times according to deinite patterns. As examples of kharjas I shall quote num-
bers 14 and 16 of S.M. Stern’s collection (1964):
¿Que faré, mamma?
Meu al-habib est ad yana. (Frenk 2001, 4)1
¿Qué fareyu, o qué serad de mibi,
habibi?
¡Non te tolgas de mibi! (Frenk 2001, 19)2
he great majority of extant folksongs written down during the Golden Age period consist of
only one couplet, tercet, or quatrain; they were oten used by contemporary poets as a starting
point for a longer poem that adjusted to the norms established by the courtly poetry of the
period. hose little stanzas have always been considered as only the nucleus of longer folksongs
whose continuations were omitted, and this must have been true for many of them. In fact,
contemporary sources reproduced a number of traditional developments, as we will see. But
we should not exclude the possibility of a part of them being only monostrophic songs. On the
other hand, we cannot exclude either the possibility that the original kharjas were followed by
any of the two types of development common in medieval Iberian folk poetry (D. Alonso 1949).
he two types of development of the lyrical nucleus
In one of the two types of structures the poem starts with a little stanza – sometimes the nucleus
of a folksong, or an imitation – followed by another one which, according to a well known par-
allelistic technique, repeats the irst one, changing its rhyme, that is to say, with slight variations.
1. What shall I do, mother? / My lover is at the door.

2. What shall I do, my friend, / or what will become of me? / Do not leave me!
Ater these two stanzas, there oten follow other two parallelistic stanzas which apply a tech-
nique called leixa-pren (leave-take): the irst line(s) of the new stanzas repeat(s) the last line(s)
of the previous ones, adding another line or lines. A poem may thus extend for over four, eight,
or more stanzas. All of them were, it seems, sung with one and the same melody.
he parallelistic structure is characteristic of the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo
inspired by folksongs. A ine example is the following one, by King Dinis (fourteenth c.), which
includes leixa-pren:
Ay lores, ay lores do verde pyno,
se sabedes novas do meu amigo?
Ay Deos, e u é?
Ay lores, ay lores do verde ramo,
se sabedes novas do meu amado?
Ay Deos, e u é?
Se sabedes novas do meu amigo,
aquel que mentiu do que pos commigo?
Ay Deos, e u é?
Se sabedes novas do meu amado,
aquel que mentiu do que m´ha jurado?
Ay Deos, e u é?3
As can be seen, the initial stanza “is spun out on an alternating pattern of advance and regres-
sion, […] so that the efect is that of a doubly interwoven chain” (Cummins 1977, 35). Many
cantigas, like this one, include a short refrain ater each stanza, and some of these refrains may
also have been remnants of lyric folk poetry.
We know some medieval parallelistic poems in other Peninsular languages (Asensio 1957,
200–04). From as early on as the twelth century is the following Castilian pseudo-historical
song quoted in a chronicle and discovered by Francisco Rico (1975):
Cantan de Roldán,
cantan de Olivero,
e non de Çorraquín Sancho,
que fue buen caballero.
Cantan de Olivero,
cantan de Roldán,
e non de Çorraquín Sancho,
que fue buen barragán.4
3. “Ah lowers, lowers of the green pine (branch), / have you news of my friend (love)? / Ah God, and where
is he? // Have you news of my friend (love), / of him who lied about what he promised (swore to) me? / Ah
God, and where is he?” (Reckert 1993, 52)
4. hey sing about Roland, / they sing about Oliver, / but not about Zorraquín Sancho, / who was a good
knight.
514 Margit Frenk
A satirical parallelistic ditty appeared in the Portuguese chronicle by Fernão Lopes in reference
to events of the late fourteenth century: “Se quiserdes carneiro / qual deram ao Andeiro? / Se
quiserdes cabrito / qual deram ao bispo?” (Frenk 2001, 57).5
Written down by the great Gonzalo Correas in his seventeenth-century collection of prov-
erbs (Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales), we have this shepherd’s song:
Ovejita blanca,
requiere tu piara:
en hora mala hubiste
pastora enamorada.
Ovejita prieta,
requiere tu cordero:
en hora mala hubiste
pastor carabero. (NC 1156 A, B)6
And also this jolly song of maumariée:

Lloraba la casada
por su velado,
y agora la pesa
de que es llegado.
Lloraba la casada
por su marido
y agora la pesa
porque es venido. (NC 242)7
here must have been many more parallelistic songs in the Middle Ages and the following cen-
turies – see, below, the seventeenth-century Galician song “Salí da ribera” – but it seems they
let very few written traces at that time. A proof of their abundance is the remarkable corpus
of Sephardic or Judeo-Spanish songs – oten wedding songs – that were originally sung before
the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Judging by the very interesting Sephardic survivals
registered by modern ield-workers, their language was a particular variety of Castilian. Most
of the Sephardic songs basically follow the pattern of the parallelistic cantigas de amigo with
refrain, though oten in a more irregular way, and we even ind leixa-pren in some of them
(Pedrosa 1998, 195–97). his is a wedding song from Morocco:
Debajo del limón la novia,
y sus pies en el agua fría.
Y debajo de la rosa.
5. Would you care for mutton, / like the one they gave Andeiro? / Would you care for kid, / like the one they
gave the bishop?
6. Little white (dark) sheep, / go and join your lock (your lamb), / it was bad for you that your shepherdess
(shepherd) is in love (distracted).
7. he married girl wept / because of her [absent] husband, / and now she is sorry / he has come back.
Debajo del limón la novia,

y sus pies en el agua clara.
Y debajo de la rosa.
– ¿Adónde, mi novia querida?
– A formar con vos guarida.
Y debajo de la rosa. (Frenk 2001, 608)8
And inally, in present day Iberian folk songs we may still ind not only the typical parallel-
ism but, in surprising cases, its combination with leixa-pren and with a refrain (Pedrosa 1998,
185–93).
he second of our two types of structure is called villancico in Spanish and vilancico or
vilancete in Portuguese. We have early examples of this structure in at least two Peninsular
languages, as we will see, but during the Golden Age it became the almost exclusive form of de-
velopment we ind in our sources, and this may be partly due to the inluence of contemporary
court poetry and music. On the other hand, of the almost 3,800 traditional songs registered
in the Nuevo corpus – which does not include any literate development – the great majority,
as I said before, consist of only one little stanza and there are less than 300 that follow the old
popular villancico patterns.
he villancico starts with a couplet, tercet, or quartet which constitutes the “head” of the
composition, also called estribillo, and is followed by the glosa (gloss), one or more usually lon-
ger stanzas, each of which ends with a partial repetition of the head stanza. he glosa expands,
in diferent ways, the content of the estribillo (Frenk 2006, 413–47). he music, on the other
hand, repeats the head in its entirety, covering the last part of the stanza as well. It is a “circular”
form, as compared to the “linear” structure of the cantiga de amigo, which, in its turn, could be
called “headless”.
Here are some traditional villancicos taken from sixteenth-century sources, the irst and
the second in Castilian, the third in Galician, the fourth in Portuguese (with leixa-pren), and
the ith in Catalan. If closely observed, each gloss is of a diferent kind:
a) ¿Agora que sé de amor
me metéis monja?
¡Ay Dios, qué grave cosa!
¿Agora que sé de amor
de caballero,
agora me metéis monja
en el monesterio?
¡Ay Dios, qué grave cosa! (NC 208)9
—
b) A mi puerta nace una fonte:
¿por dó saliré que no me moje?
8. Under the lemon tree, the bride, / and her feet in the cold (clear) water. / and under the rose bush. // –
Where are you going, my fair bride? / – To build us a dwelling. / And under the rose bush.
9. Now that I know about love / you want me to be a nun? / What a terrible thing! // Now that I know the love
of a gentleman / you want me to enter a monastery? / What a terrible thing!
516 Margit Frenk
A mi puerta la garrida
nace una fonte frida,
donde lavo la mi camisa
y la de aquel que yo más quería:
¿por dó saliré que no me moje? (NC 321)10
—
c) Miño amor, dexistes “¡ay”!,
veño a ver cómo vos vay.
Miño amor tan garrido,
irió’s vuestro marido.
Veño a ver cómo vos vay […]. (NC 442)11
—
d) Não me irais, madre,
que eu direi a verdade:
Madre, um escudeiro
da nossa rainha
falou-me d’amores,
vereis que dezia.
Eu direi a verdade.
Falou-me d’amores,
vereis que dezia:
“Quem te me tivesse
desnuda em camisa!”
Eu direi a verdade. (NC 288 C)12
—
e) En clavell, si m’ajut Déu,
tan belles olors haveu!
En clavell verd i lorit,
ma senyora us ha collit.
Tan belles olors haveu! […] (NC 1263)13
Two of these villancicos have a parallelistic gloss: they repeat the stanza with new synonymous
rhyming words: in c), “Miño amor tan lozano, / irió’s vuestro velado. / Veño a ver cómo vos
vay”; in e), “En clavell verd i granat, / ma senhora us ha segat. / Tan belles olors haveu!” Here,
the parallelistic development depends on the head stanza, while in the cantiga structure there is
10. “At my door a spring gushes out: / how shall I get round it dry? // At my bright colored door / a cold spring
gushes out / where I wash my own shirt /and the shirt of him I love best. / How shall I get round it dry?”
(Reckert 1993, 62)
11. My love, you said “ah!” / I have come to see how you feel. // My beautiful love, / you were hurt by your
husband. / I have come to see how you feel.
12. Do not hurt me, mother: / I shall tell the truth. // Mother, a gentleman, / not from this village, / talked to
me about love, […] // hear what he said: / ‘I wish I could have you naked in my arms!’
13. Sir carnation, so help me God, / you smell so beautifully. // Sir carnation, green and lowering, / may lady
has plucked you. / You smell so beautifully.
actually no head stanza. In a number of villancicos of the Golden Age period, parallelism com-
bines with leixa-pren, as occurs in several cantigas. One could interpret this as an overlapping
of the two types of development. A famous iteenth-century song is:
Al alba venid, buen amigo,
al alba venid.
Amigo, el que yo más quería (amaba),
venid al alba del día (a la luz del alba).
Al alba venid.
Venid a la luz del día (alba),
non trayáis compañía (traigáis gran compaña).
Al alba venid. (NC 452)14
his beautiful poem was once considered an imitation of Galician-Portuguese cantigas de ami-
go, but it turns out that its pattern also existed in early songs in other Peninsular languages. A
Catalan song by the thirteenth-century poet Cerverí de Girona advises a woman not to take a
bad husband. It starts with the head stanza “No·l prenatz lo fals marit, / Jana delgada” (Do not
take the false husband, / delicate Joana), and goes on developing this idea in six parallel and
leixa-pren stanzas that describe the villainous husband (Asensio 1957, 198; Frenk 2001, 54).
Another proof of the early existence of the combined pattern belongs to the end of the
fourteenth century: it is the famous – and mysterious – cosaute “A aquel árbol que vuelve la foja
/ algo se le antoja” (hat tree that turns its leaves / does want something), by Diego Hurtado de
Mendoza (Frenk 2001, 55). In this case, besides parallelism and leixa-pren, the gloss includes
the refrain “algo se le antoja,” taken from the head stanza. he villancico structure being as old
as that of the cantiga, this could account for the above-mentioned overlapping of the two forms
of development.
hroughout the centuries, the “linear” structure endured in Iberian folk poetry, with some
important changes (Frenk 2006, 462–69), while the villancico form disappeared in the seven-
teenth century, leaving nevertheless some astonishing remnants in modern Iberian folklore.
A series of archaic Portuguese vilancico-like songs, with parallelistic glosses following the old
techniques, were still sung at the beginning of the twentieth century at one particular festivity
in one particular village of Algarve (Frenk 2006, 147–55); in the last section of this chapter we
will be seeing some of them, as well as some other archaic glosses still sung in Portugal. In a
quite important recent study, José Manuel Pedrosa (1998) quoted a considerable number of vil-
lancico-like songs, with parallelism and sometimes leixa-pren, in complex combinations, found
not only in modern Portugal (1998, 197–98, 210–14), but also in several Spanish provinces, like
Burgos (198–200), Soria, La Rioja, Cantabria, and Asturias (203–09).
14. Come at dawn, my good friend, / come at dawn. // Friend whom I loved most, / come with the light of day,
/ come at dawn.
518 Margit Frenk
hematic coincidences
Continuing with the comparative overview of old Iberian folk lyrics, I will now address them
from the point of view of some of their concrete thematic coincidences. I say “concrete,” be-
cause we must here try to exclude universal themes, whose reappearance does not necessarily
imply some sort of association or dependence between our Iberian traditions.
Starting where I should start, that is, with the Mozarabic kharjas, I must point to certain
thematic coincidences with songs written down at a later time and in other Iberian languages.
hese coincidences conirm the fact that many kharjas in some ways relect the native Romance
traditions and also point to the existence of a common Iberian background of traditional songs.
Let us irst quote number 9 of the Stern collection, an octosyllabic quatrain quoted at the
end of a Hebrew muwashshaha by the great twelth-century Jewish poet Yehuda ha-Levi:
Vai-se meu corachón de mib:
ya Rab, ¿si se me tornarad?
Tan mal mi doled li ’l-habib:
enfermo yed, ¿quánd sanarad?15
he motive of the departure of the lover is, certainly, a universal one, but the way it is expressed,
alternating statements with questions, does make us think of this other quartet written down
in Castilian four centuries later by another great poet, the Portuguese playwright Gil Vicente:
Vanse mis amores, madre,
luengas tierras van morar;
yo no los puedo olvidar:
¿quién me los hará tornar? (NC 523)16
Referring to this song Stephen Reckert (1993, 45) said that, though in Castilian, it is “numi-
nously Portuguese.” And in fact, I have found a similar sixteenth-century Portuguese song;
notice the coincidence of the irst two lines and, again, the appearance of a question starting
with “Who…?” in the second half of the quatrain:
Vão-se meus amores
as partes dalém:
quem me dará novas
de todo meu ben? (NC 526)17
hus, we have equivalent poems in Mozarabic, Castilian, and Portuguese, probably based on
one common Iberian tradition.
15. “My love is going away from me: / Ay, will he come back? / So sore aches [my heart] for my friend; / it is
sick, when will it be cured?” (Reckert 1993, 21).
16. “My love is going away, mother, / to dwell in far-of lands; / I cannot forget him./ Who will bring him back
to me?” (Reckert 1993, 45).
17. My love is going away / to far-of lands; / who will bring me news / of the one I love best?
In kharja number 14 of Stern, quoted above, the girl asks her mother what to do, because
her lover is at the door (“at yana,” from the latin ianua for ‘door’). A Castilian song states almost
the same problem:
Gil González llama a la aldaba;
no sé, mi madre, si me le abra. (NC 189, source B)18
And in another lovely Castilian song of the same period we hear the girl saying:
Llaman a la puerta,
y espero yo a mi amor.
¡Que todas las aldabada
me dan en el corazón! (NC 292)19
Another kharja, number 17:

Al-sabah bono,
garme d’on venis.
Ya lo sé que otri amas,
a mibi non queris. (Frenk 2001, 20)20
he motive of the lover’s absence is, of course, very frequent and can be found in cantigas de
amigo and in Golden Age traditional poetry, but the emphasis here seems to be on jealousy, and
there is a sixteenth century Castilian song which reminds us more directly of this kharja:
¿De dónde venis, amores?
¡Bien sé yo de dónde!
Caballero, de mesura,
¿dó venís la noche escura?
¡Bien sé yo de dónde! (NC 575)21
Still another kharja (Frenk 2001, 3) starts with a motive I will approach below: “Non dormireyo,
mamma, / a rayo de mañana […]” (I shall not sleep, mother, / at the dawn’s beam […]).
Turning now to the Galician-Portuguese poetry linked in some ways to old folksongs, the
thematic coincidences with poems recorded in Castilian two or more centuries later become
more numerous. As could be expected, there are quite a few cantigas de amigo about the sea,
like this one by Martin Codax:
Ondas do mar de Vigo,
se vistes meu amigo?
E ay Deus, se verra cedo?
18. Gil Gonzalez is knocking [at the door]. / I don’t know, my mother, if I should open him.
19. Someone is knocking at the door, / and I am awaiting my love. / Every rap with the knocker / does hit my
heart!
20. Beautiful dawn, / tell me from where you come. / I know you love another, / you do not love me.
21. From where are you coming, my love? / I well know from where! // My lord, be kind and tell me / from
where are you coming in the dark night? / I well know from where!
520 Margit Frenk
Ondas do mar levado,

se vistes meu amado?
E ay Deus, se verra cedo? […]. (J.J. Nunes 1926, 491)22
he same theme appears in the gloss to the Castilian villancico NC 519 B:

Dígasme tú, el marinero,
que Dios te guarde de mal,
¿si los viste a mis amores,
si los viste allá pasar?23
And in a similar way in this other sixteenth century gloss:

Dime, marinero
del cuerpo garrido,
¿en cuál de aquellas naves
pasa Fernandino? (NC 642 B)24
And even closer to the thirteenth century cantiga, modern folk songs like this one:
Todas las mañanas voy
a las orillas del mar
a preguntar a las olas
si han visto mi amor pasar. (In NC 519 B)25
With a similar motive, we have another cantiga, by Nuno Fernandez Torneol (J.J Nunes 1926, 79):
Vi eu, mia madre, andar
as barcas eno mar […].
E non o achei i
[o] que por meu mal vi.
E moiro-me d’amor.26
Same idea, with textual coincidences, in the head of a sixteenth-century Castilian villancico:
Vi los barcos, madre,
vilos, y no me vale. (NC 536 B)27
And look at this other song:

Alcé los ojos, miré a la mar,
vi a mis amores a la vela andar.
22. Waves of the sea of Vigo (the high sea), / did you see my friend (lover)? / Oh God, will he return soon?
23. Tell me, mariner, / so God help you, / if you saw my true love, / if you saw him passing.
24. Tell me, mariner, / handsome mariner, / in which of those ships / goes Fernandino.
25. Every morning I go / to the sea shore / to ask the waves / if they saw my love go by.
26. Mother, I saw the ships sailing on the sea […] / And I did not ind him there / the one whom I saw for my
ill luck. / And I die of love.
27. I saw the ships, mother, / I saw them, and it does not help me.
Aún no son partidos, y tengo deseo:

¡qué hará desque haya mar en medio!
¡Oh, mar!, ¡oh, mar!, si te secase[s],
¡no dieses lugar a que te navegase(s)! (NC 539)28
A very well known Castilian tercet of the same sixteenth century is:
Estas noches atán largas
para mí
no solían ser ansí. (NC 585 A)29
And a cantiga de amigo by the Galician-Portuguese poet Juião Bolseiro starts with exactly the
same line and expresses the same idea with other words: “Aquestas noites tan longas / que
Deus fez […] / por mi, […] as non fazia / no tempo que meu amigo / soia falar comigo” (J.J.
Nunes 1926, 405).30
Let us now observe what happens, in terms of our comparative approach, within the mul-
tilingual corpus of folksongs and their imitations during the Golden Age. here are certainly
themes and motives that appear in diferent Iberian languages, equally pointing to a tradition
that covered much of the Peninsula. Because of its thematic classiication, the Nuevo corpus
provides many examples of these types of coincidences. Here I can only give a few of them.
he theme of the unwise mother sending her daughter to fetch water or olives is present in
both Castilian and Portuguese songs, for instance:
Enviárame mi madre
por agua sola:
¡mirad a qué hora! (NC 315 A)
A que horas me mandais
aos olivais! (NC 316)31
he lack of sleep of people in love, that we already saw in a kharja, is a recurrent motive both in
Portuguese and in Castilian:
Não posso dormir as noites,
amor, não as posso dormir. (NC 301)32
Quien amores tiene
¿cómo duerme?
28. I raised my eyes and gazed at the sea; / I saw my love sailing along. // He is not yet gone, and I feel desire: /
what will happen once the sea is between us? // Ah sea, ah sea, I wish you would dry out: / you would not
allow to be sailed upon!
29. hese nights that are so long / for me / did not use to be like that.
30. hese long nights, which God made […] for me […], / he did not make them like that / when my friend
used to talk with me.
31. My mother sent me / to fetch water, alone. / Look at what hour! // At what hour are you sending me / to
the olive grove!
32. I cannot sleep by night, / love, I cannot sleep.
522 Margit Frenk
Duerme cada quien

como puede. (NC 296)33
his song takes us back again to the thirteenth century, when a pastourelle by the troubadour
and priest Ayras Nunes makes a maiden sing; “Quem amores á / como dormirá, / ay bela frol!”
(in NC 167).34
An important element is sometimes added to this motive, that of solitude: “La niña que
amores ha /¿cómo dormirá solá?” (NC 167), or “Que non dormiré sola, non, / sola y sin amor”
(NC 168; see also NC 579–83 B; Reckert 1993, 46).35 We easily understand that water, because it
sleeps alone, wakes up frozen:
Porque duerme sola el agua
amanece helada. (NC 166)36
he motive of solitary sleeplessness appears in a beautiful Catalan poem of the early iteenth
century, which I shall quote in its entirety, with its leixa-pren and parallelistic gloss:
No puch dormir soleta, no.
Què·m faré lassa
si no mi’s passa?
Tant mi turmenta l’amor!
Ay, amich, mon dolç amich,
somiat vos he esta nit.
Què·m faré lassa?
Somiat vos he esta nit
qu·us tenia en mon lit.
Ay, amat, mon dolç amat,
anit vos he somiat.
Anit vos he somiat
qu·us tenia en mon braç.
Què·m faré lassa? (NC 302 bis)37
he dream motive, related to the idea of sleeplessness, appears in another lovely – and mysteri-
ous – Castilian song (NC 302 C):
33. Whoever sufers from love / how does she (he) sleep? / Each one sleeps / as she (he) can.
34. Whoever sufers from love / how will she (he) sleep? / ah pretty lower.
35. he girl in love / how shall she sleep alone? – I shall not sleep alone, no, / alone and without a lover.
36. Because the water sleeps alone, it wakes up frozen.
37. I cannot sleep alone, no. / What shall I do, poor me, / if this does not change? / So much torments me love.
// Ah my friend, my sweet friend (lover), / last night I dreamt of you […] / that I had you in my bed (my
arms).
No pueden dormir mis ojos,

no pueden dormir.
Y soñaba yo, mi madre,
dos horas antes del día
que me lorecía la rosa,
el lyino so el agua frida.
No puedem dormir.38
Night and dawn are associated, on the other hand, with the woman asking her lover to leave her,
because the cocks are crowing. hus, this early sixteenth-century Castilian song:
Ya cantan los gallos,
buen amor, y vete,
cata que amanece. (NC 454 B)39
And this lovely Catalan song of the iteenth century:

Anau-vos-en, la mia amor,
anau-vos-en.
Que la gent se va despertant,
e lo gal vos diu en cantant:
“anau-vos-en.” (NC 459)40
What is more, a modern Portuguese version of an old ballad includes the refrain “Já os gallos
cantam, / o meu amor, vae-te” (in NC 454),41 a textual reminiscence of our old Castilian song.
Symbolism
he above mentioned contrasts between old Iberian folk lyric and contemporary courtly po-
etry are a proof of the former’s relative autonomy. And one may mention other contrasting
characteristics, like simplicity versus sophistication of style and, especially, the use of symbols,
mainly of natural symbols, deriving from archaic traditions that spread throughout Europe and
far beyond, to India, Indonesia, China, Japan, and Australia. hrough these symbols nature
(represented by the four elements, the sun and the moon, plants and animals) is identiied with
human sexuality and fertility. Nature in folk poetry does not appear as such, but is always as-
sociated with some aspect of human love.
Natural symbols are absent from the Mozarabic kharjas we know, but are very present in
Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo and in many of the multilingual songs written down
during the Golden Age. his is certainly one of the more interesting and valuable aspects of
38. “My eyes cannot sleep, / they cannot sleep. // And I dreamt, mother, / two hours before daybreak, / that the
rose bloomed for me / and the lax under cold water. / hey cannot sleep” (Reckert 1993, 46).
39. he cocks are crowing, / good love, go away, / see it’s daybreak.
40. Go away, my love, / go away. // For people are waking up, / and the cock tells you in its crowing: / ‘go away.’
41. he cocks are crowing: / sweet love, go away.
524 Margit Frenk
Iberian folk lyrics, and a considerable amount of research has explored many of its fascinating
aspects (Asensio 1957; Cummins 1977; Deyermond 1979–80; Frenk 1993 (and 2006, 329–52);
Masera 1995; Méndez Ferrín 1966; Morales Blouin 1981; Olinger 1985; Reckert 1970; Reckert
1993). Of this large ield, I shall here concentrate on symbols that, from what we know, have
found expression in more than one Iberian language throughout the centuries.
Water is probably the most important archaic symbol. Its presence in various contexts
points to love and fertility. In Iberian lyric lovers meet at the spring or the river-bank, and “their
erotic connotations are oten strengthened by such elements as the stag disturbing the water
[…], the washing of the girl’s hair in the stream […], the bathing of the lovers together” (Cum-
mins 1977, 60), with the washing of the shirts of one or both of them implying their intimacy.
he washing of the girl’s hair is a favorite motive in the parallelistic Galician-Portuguese
cantigas de amigo, like this one by Joam Soarez Coelho:
Fui eu, madre, lavar meus cabelos (mias garcetas)
a la fonte e paguei-m’eu d’elos (d’elas)
e de mi louçãa.
A la fonte [e] paguei-m’eu d’eles;
ala achei, madre, o senhor d’eles,
e de mi louçãa […]. (J.J. Nunes 1926, 122)42
In the Castilian tradition we have a little nun washing her hair: “Cómo lo tuerce y lava / la mon-
jita el su cabello…” (NC 18).43 But more frequently we hear of girls washing their shirts, as in the
beautiful poem quoted above, “A mi puerta nace una fonte”: “A mi puerta la garrida / nace una
fonte frida, / donde lavo la mi camisa / y la de aquel que yo más quería […]” (NC 321).
In another Castilian poem this motif is combined with that of the little doe troubling the
water:
Cervatica, que no me la vuelvas,
que yo me la volveré.
Cervatica tan garrida,
no enturbies el agua fría,
que he de lavar la camisa
de aquel a quien di mi fe.
Cervatica tan galana,
no enturbies el agua clara,
que he de lavar la delgada
para quien yo me lavé […]. (NC 322)44
42. I went, mother, to the spring to wash my hair / and I was pleased with it / and with myself, youthful girl. //
here I found the master of my hair / and of myself […].
43. How twists and washes / the little nun her hair.
44. “Don’t stir it up, doe / I’ll stir it up myself. // Gaily-colored doe/ don’t trouble the cold water: / I have to
wash the shirt / of him I pledged myself to. // Gaudy water beetle / don’t trouble the clear water: / I have to
wash my shirt / for him I washed myself for […].” (Reckert 1993, 62)
here is the famous cantiga by Pero Móogo (Peter the Monk): “Levou-s’a louçana, / levou-s’a
velida, / vai lavar cabelos / na fontana fria […] // […] passa seu amigo, / que lhi ben queria […]
// o cervo do monte / a augua volvia” (J.J. Nunes 1926, 415),45 studied by many scholars, like Alan
Deyermond (1979–80).
But lovers also wash each other: “él a ella y ella a él / lavan la niña y el doncel” (NC 2), “El
galán y la galana / ambos vuelven el agua clara” (NC 1), “[…] cuando la niña y el caballero /
ambos de iban a bañar” (NC 4 B).46
In a Sephardic wedding song lovers meet at the river-bank: “Fuérame a bañar / orías del
río, / ahí encontrí, madre, / a mi lindo amigo: / él me dio un abrazo, / yo le di cinco […]” (in NC
72 D). An old Castilian song simply said: “Ribericas del río, madre, / lores de amor nacen” (NC
310); and a Portuguese one, “[…] Polo longo de um rio / canaval vi lorido” (NC 311),47 where
the reed ield (canaval) in bloom next to the river stands for happy love.
At the riverbank the virgin plucks lemons: “Por las riveras del río / limones coge la virgo”
(NC 8),48 and the rhyming words río-virgo reappear in NC 353 B. hey were already an impor-
tant element in a Galician-Portuguese cantiga by Joan Zorro:
Pela ribeira do rio
cantando ia la dona virgo
d’amor […]. (J.J. Nunes 1926, 386)49
he wind is another important erotic symbol in Iberian lyrics. Stephen Reckert (1993, 54–59)
wrote an interesting analysis of King Dinis’s cantiga “Levantou-s’ a velida, / levantou-s’ âlva
[…]”, which he synthesizes thus: “he fair maid rose at dawn and went to wash her clothes on
the hillside; the wind blew them about and she was vexed” (54). he wind, he says, is a “concrete
symbol of the sex drive conceived as a superior force and principle of Nature that is at once al-
luring and alarming” (57).
In Golden Age sources we have a number of short Castilian songs where the wind plays the
main role (Frenk 1993, 8–12). It sways the leaves of feminine plants, like the rose, the mulberry,
and the poplar, “as a lover excites his girl when he comes to see her” (9); it plays with the girl’s hair
(11); it lits the girl’s skirt and caresses her face (10); it darkens the skin of virgins, making them
experienced in matters of love, as in this splendid song, which also involves the “river of love”:
Por el río del amor, madre,
que yo blanca me era, blanca,
y quemóme el aire. (NC 136)50
45. “he fair girl has risen; / she goes to wash her hair / in the cold fountain / joyous for love. // Her friend
passed that way / who loved her dearly: / the mountain stag / stirred up the water.” (Reckert 1993, 57)
46. he girl and her lover / he washes her and she washes him; – he young man and the young girl / they both
disturb the clear water; – when the maid and the gentlemen / went to bathe together.
47. I went bathing / at the riverbank, / there I found, mother, / my lovely friend; / he gave me a hug, / I gave
him ive – At the riverbank / grow love lowers – Along a river / I saw a reed ield in bloom.
48. By the riverbank / the virgin plucks lemons.
49. By the riverbank / singing went the virgin / of love.
50. On the river of love, mother. / I was white, white, / and the wind burnt me.
526 Margit Frenk
herefore, the warning in this recently found Galician villancico, with a parallelistic gloss, writ-
ten down in the seventeenth century, where the wind is replaced by the sun:
Salí da ribera, branquiña fror,
salí da ribera, darch’á o sol.
Branquiña fror tan galana,
salí da ribera de mañana.
Branquiña fror tan garrida,
salí da ribera por el día. (NC 136 bis)51
It is the sun, in fact, that makes fair skin turn dark, as in this ditty sung in a comedia by Lope
de Vega (NC 137):
Blanca me era yo
cuando entré en la siega,
dióme el sol, y ya soy morena.52
he sun is another erotic symbol, connoting masculine force. And the morena, a widely spread
motive of old Castilian lyric, is, we must remember, the sexually experienced girl. She is proud
because her color is that of the earth or the wheat: it is dark and still produces white bread (NC
140), like in this modern Galician song:
Chamácheme moreniña,
moreniña, tanto e tanto;
tamén o trigo é moreno
e fai o molete branco.53 (In NC 140)
Vegetable symbols are very important in Iberian folk lyrics. he trees considered “feminine” are
identiied with the woman in love: they are swayed by the wind, as we saw. he lowering of
trees is that of love: “Ya lorecen los almendros, / y los amores con ellos, Juan” (NC 460); in a
cantiga de amigo by King Dinis: “Amad’ e meu amigo, / valha Deus!, / vede a frol do pinho, / e
guisade de andar […]” (J.J. Nunes 1926, 21).54 Lovers meet under a tree: “Orillicas del río / mis
amores, ¡e!, / y debajo de los álamos / me atendé” (NC 461); “Y los dos amigos / idos se son, idos
/ so los verdes pinos (NC 5 B).55 he olive tree and the olive grove are a favorite place still in
twentieth century Portugal: “Olival, olivalinho verde! / Oh que tã verde e verde olival!” which
reminds us of a Golden Age Portuguese song:
51. Leave the riverbank, little white lower, / leave the riverbank, the sun will burn you. // Little white lower,
so lovely, / leave the riverbank at dawn (by daylight).
52. “White was I / when I went to the reaping; / I caught the sun and now I am dark.” (Reckert 1993, 55–56)
53. You called me little dark girl, / little dark girl, once and again; / the wheat is also dark / and produces white
bread.
54. Almond trees are in bloom, / and with them, love – My beloved and my friend, / so help me God!, / look
at the lower of the pine tree, / and let us walk away.
55. “By the bank of the river, / my love, eh! / And under the poplars, / wait for me” – “And the two friends /
have gone away, they are gone / under the green pines.” (Recker 1993, 92)
Olival, olival verde,

azeitona preta,
quem te colhesse! (NC 254)56
Here the fruit itself is identiied with the girl, as may be the case of the song of the three Moorish
girls quoted below. And in modern folksongs we may ind similar identiications: “Corazón de
avellana, / pecho de almendra, / naranja valenciana, / ¡quién te comiera!” (in NC 254).57
he orange is a fruit to which Stephen Reckert dedicated some revealing pages (1993, 67–
72). his symbolic fruit appears in similar contexts in Golden Age Spanish and Portuguese tra-
ditional poetry and in modern Sephardic, Castilian, Galician, and Portuguese folksongs as well.
Our next to last example, “Um amigo que eu havia / mançanas d’ouro [that is, oranges] me envia
[…],” (NC 382) and its equivalent Sephardic wedding song are good proof thereof. Oranges are
given as a token of true love, they are thrown into the air as a symbol of the girl’s freedom to love,
and they are exchanged by the lovers in this extremely popular Golden Age song:
Arrojome las naranjillas
con las ramas del blanco azahar,
arrojómelas y arrojéselas
y volviómelas a arrojar.58
Its many variants, imitations, religious contrafacta, mentions, and survivals may be seen in
NC 1622 A and 1622 B, the latter starting with “Que arrojóme la portuguesilla / naranjitas de su
naranjal.”59 In 1622 C the lovers throw apples at each other. Lemons are also part of the Iberian
tradition: remember “Por las riberas del río / limones coge la virgo” and the Sephardic song
“Debajo del limón la novia,” where the bride sits under a lemon tree with her feet in the cold
water, a sensuous and symbolic image (in NC 7).
he rose and the rosebush are most important symbols in Iberian, as well as in European,
folklore. In a lovely old Castilian song, a girl tells her mother she is going to die (of love) in the
garden, in the rosebush, where she went to pluck roses and where she found her lover:
Dentro en el vergel
moriré,
dentro en el rosal
matarme han.
Yo me iba, mi madre,
las rosas coger,
hallé mis amores
dentro en el vergel. (NC 308 B)60
56. Olive grove, green olive grove, / dark olive, / wish I could pluck you!
57. Heart of a hazelnut, / breast of an almond, / Valencian orange, / wish I could eat you!
58. She threw me little oranges, / with the branches of white orange blossoms, / she threw them to me and I
threw them to her / and she threw them back to me again.
59. “he Portuguese girl threw me oranges: / little oranges from her orange grove.” (Reckert 1993, 67)
60. Inside the lower garden / I’ll die, / inside the rosebush / they’ll kill me. // I went, my mother, / to pluck
roses, / I found my lover / inside the garden.
528 Margit Frenk
Plucking roses is always dangerous for the girl: the Moors will capture her (NC 497), or she will
have to pay a pawn, a ribbon, even her shirt, to the keeper (NC 314 C). herefore, we know that
the Portuguese vilancete found in recent years (NC 314 bis), where the girl only mentions she
went to pluck roses on a cold morning, “under the olive tree” is a fragment of a lost poem.
One kind of plant interests us here especially, because several similar varieties appear in
short sixteenth-century poems, both in Castilian and Portuguese (Frenk 1993, 13–15). hese po-
ems all mention waterside plants, rushes, reeds, willows, and do little more than enigmatically
mention them; in Castilian, the small rushes: “Junco menudo, junco, / junco menudo” (NC 304
D), or the osiers: “Mimbrera, amigo, / so la mimbrereta” (NC 5 B), or the trefoil: “Trébol lorido,
trébol, / trébol lorido” (NC 1249); in Portuguese, the herbs and the reeds of love: “Ervas do
amor, ervas, / ervas do amor” (NC 312), “Canas do amor, canas, / canas do amor” (NC 311). All
these plants that luxuriantly grow on humid soil symbolize “sprouting abundance, especially
erotic fulillment” (Danckert 1976; 3:882).
Concerning animal symbolism, I have already referred to the phallic stag that disturbs the
water in Pero Móogo and its feminine Castilian version. I must now add a brief reference to two
birds identiied with the man in love and a beautiful woman. In a famous Castilian song we ind
three geese troubling the girl:
Tres ánades, madre,
que van por aquí,
malpenan a mí. (NC 182 A, B)
In a contemporary Portuguese text, the girl is followed by two goshawks, one of them, she says,
will die of love:
A mi seguem os dous açores.
um delles morira d’amores. (NC 181)
he woman, on the other hand, appears as a pega, a magpie, in another Portuguese vilancico:
Volaba la pega e vai-se:
quem me la tomasse!
Andaba la pega
no meu cerrado,
olhos morenos,
bico dourado.
Quem me la tomasse! (NC 252)61
All of our symbolic songs have the general characteristics of Iberian oral lyric: brevity, conden-
sation, intensity. As John G. Cummins wrote years ago (1977, 19): “he habitual brevity of the
lyric leaves no room for verbosity, and means that, if the tiny poem is to say anything very much,
it must employ a language of association and allusion and so transcend its formal limitations.”
61. he magpie lew away: / wish I could catch her! // he magpie was / in my fenced in ield, / dark eyes, /
golden beak. / Wish I could catch her!
Textual coincidences
We sometimes ind surprising textual coincidences between diferent Iberian languages and
even periods. hey may consist of only one line, like that of the beginning of the Galician-
Portuguese cantiga by King Dinis quoted above, “Ay lore, ay lores do verde pinho […]” and the
beginning of a Castilian song written down more than two centuries later: “¡Oh pino, oh pino,
pino lorido! / ¡Maldita sea el ave que en ti hace nido! […]” (NC 797).62 Or they may consist of
several lines; thus, this fourteenth-century refrain of a poem possibly by Raimbaut de Vaquei-
ras or else by an anonymous Catalan poet, “Et oy, déu d’amor! / Ad hora’m dona joy et ad hora
dolor” is almost identically found in Castile two centuries later:
¡Oh, falso amor!
Algunas veces das placer
y algunas dolor. (NC 754 B)63
One of the most beautiful Castilian songs whose text and music was recorded in the sixteenth
century is:
¿A quién contare mis quejas,
mi lindo amor?
¿A quién contaré yo mis quejas,
si a vos no? (NC 380)64
It also goes way back to at least the fourteenth century, when King Dinis wrote, addressing his
lady: “[…] por Deus, senhor, […] a quen direy o meu mal / se eu o a vós non disser?” (J.J. Nunes
1926, 33). Incidentally, one century earlier in northern France people sang: “Qui lairai je mes
amors / amie s’a vos non!” (in NC 380).
A somewhat peculiar case: the pattern of a cantiga de amigo is maintained in a later recorded
Castilian song. It is a dialogue, with textual coincidences, between mother and daughter on the
motive of the “false excuse,” which in each case is a diferent one. he cantiga, by Pero Móogo:
– Digades, ilha, mia ilha velida (louçana),
por que tardastes na fontana fria (na fria fontana)?
Os amores ei.
– Tardei, mia madre, na fontana fria (na fria fontana),
cervos do monte a augua volvian (volvian a augua).
Os amores ei.
– Mentir, mia ilha, mentir por amigo (amado):
nunca vi cervo que volvess’o rio (o alto).
Os amores ei. (J.J. Nunes 1926, 419)65
62. Ah pine, ah pine, lowering pine / accursed be he who makes a nest on thy branches […].
63. Ah false love! / You sometimes give pleasure / and sometimes pain.
64. Whom shall I tell my sorrows, / my beautiful love? / Whom shall I tell my sorrows / if it is not you?
65. – Tell me, daughter, / my lovely daughter, / why did you stay so long at the cold fountain? / I am in love. //
– I stayed so long, mother, at the cold fountain, / [because] the mountain stags troubled the water […] / –
You lie, my daughter, you lie because of your friend; / I never saw a stag troubling the river […].
530 Margit Frenk
he Castilian song, registered in Hernán Núñez’s 1555 collection of proverbs:

– Dezid, hija garrida,
¿quién os manchó la camisa?
– Madre, las moras del çarçal.
– Mentir, hija, mas no tanto,
que no pica la çarça tan alto. (NC 1651)66
In the Golden Age the same, or almost identical, little poem oten appears complete in several
Iberian languages, above all in Castilian and Portuguese. A few examples: Castilian “No me
iráis, madre, / yo os lo diré: / mal de amores he” (NC 288 B, A) and Portuguese, quoted above,
“Não me irais, madre, / que eu direi a verdade” (NC 288 C).67 Portuguese “Quem vos anojou,
meu bem, / bem anojado me tem” and Castilian “¿Quien os ha mal enojado, / mi buen amor? /
¿Quién os ha mal enojado?” (NC 446, 445).68 “Arded. corazón, arded, / que no os puedo yo valer”
and Portuguese “Arder, coração, arder, / que vos não posso valer” (NC, 602 A, B).69 In this last
case, and perhaps in some others, it seems most probable that the Portuguese text was a literal
translation of the very famous Castilian one. Nevertheless, it could very well be that the song
was originally sung in both Spain and Portugal.
In another example, the Portuguese version is:
Com que olhos me olhaste
que tam bem vos pareci?
Tan asinha m’olvidaste?
Quem te disse mal de mi? (NC 484 A)
Compare the Castilian version, which is found almost identically in modern Spain and in
Argentina:
¿Con qué ojos me miraste,
que tan bien te parecí?
¿Quién te dijo mal de mí,
que tan presto me olvidaste? (NC 484 B)70
A sixteenth-century song with erotic connotations said:

No sé qué me tengo
en el carcañal,
que no puedo andar. (NC 1645 B)
66. – Tell me, my lovely daughter, / who soiled your shirt? / – Mother, the blackberries of the blackberry bush. /
– To lie, daughter [is all right], but not so much: / the blackberry bush doesn’t sting that high.
67. Don’t hurt me, mother, / I’ll tell you: / I sufer of love – Don’t hurt me, mother, / for I’ll tell you the truth.
68. He who made you angry, my love, / has made me most angry – Who has made you angry, / my sweet love, /
who has made you angry?
69. Burn, my heart, burn, / because I cannot help you – Burn, my heart, burn, / because I cannot help you.
70. With what eyes did you look at me, / that you found me so nice? / So soon did you forget me? / Who has
spoken bad of me? – With what eyes did you look at me, / that you found me so nice? / Who has spoken
bad of me, / that you forgot me so soon?
A variant started “No sé que me pica” (what stings me), and in Miranda do Douro, Portugal,
they recently still sang: “Picou-me una china / no (neste) carcaranhal, / pica-me una china, / no
puedo andar, / (e) no puedo andar” (NC 1645).71
Another modern Portuguese song is: “Oh, ares da minha terra, / vinde por aqui, levai-me, /
que os ares de terra alheia / não fazem senão matar-me.” It is almost the same as the seventeenth
century Castilian song “Aires de mi aldea, / venid y llevadme, / que los aires de ausencia / son
malos aires” (NC 934).72
A song registered in the seventeenth century, “¿Si nos dais posada, / la mesonerita, / si nos
dais posada / en vuestro mesón?” (NC 1035 A),73 is still sung nowadays in Miranda do Douro:
“Se mos dais pousada / nel santo Antón, / se mos dais posada / no vuestro mesón, / an troca vos
damos / vida y corazón.”74
Again, we come across Portuguese survivals of a peasant song of which we had only one
Castilian version, “Estoy a la sombra / y estoy sudando: / ¡qué harán mis amores, / que andan
segando!” (NC 1095):75 “Oh, que bela calma cai, / eu à sombra estou suando: / que fará o meu
amor, / naquele campo ceifando,” “Valha-me Deus, tanta calma! / Mesmo à sombra estou su-
ando: / que fará o meu amor, / que anda por lá trabalhando” (in NC 1095).76
A frequently quoted song related to the festivity of St. Joan, “Si queréis que os enrame la
puerta, / vida mía y de mi corazón, / si queréis que os enrame la puerta, / vuestros amores míos
son” (NC 1248 A),77 still exists nowadays in a Portuguese version (in NC 1248 A), and in yet
another one it curiously maintains a seventeenth-century gloss (NC 1248 B).
he Portuguese living in Canada sing
– Mira, meu Miguel, como vou de bonitinha:
saia de burelas e camisa d’estopinha! […]
his is another breathtaking literal survival of a song we ind in only one old Castilian source
of the seventeenth century:
71. I don’t know what is the matter / with my heel bone, / that I cannot walk – I was pricked by a stone / on my
(this) heel bone, / I was pricked by a stone: / I cannot walk, / and I cannot walk.
72. Oh winds of my country, / come here and take me with you, / for the winds of a foreign country / do not
but kill me – Winds of my home town, / come by and take me with you, / for the winds of absence / are
bad winds.
73. Would you give us shelter, / sweet innkeeper? / Would you give us shelter / in your inn?
74. If you give us shelter / in the Saint Anthony, / if you give us shelter / in your inn, / we will give you in ex-
change / our life and our heart.
75. I’m in the shadow, / and I am sweating: / what with my lover, / who is harvesting?
76. Oh what beautiful calm weather! / I, in the shadow, am sweating: / what with my lover, / in that ield, har-
vesting – Oh God, how much calm! / Even in the shadow am I sweating: / what with my lover, / who is
there, working?
77. If you wish me to surround your door with lowering branches, / my life and life of my heart, / if you wish
me to surround your door with lowering branches, / your love is mine.
532 Margit Frenk
Mírame, Miguel, cómo estoy bonitica:

¡saya de buriel, camisa de estopica! (NC 1882)78
Also from the Portuguese in Canada:

Santo António está à porta
com uma capinha devota,
preguntando aos meninos,
os meninos do Jordão,
se sabiam a oração […].79
While its old Castilian equivalent, according to the great playwright Calderón de la Barca, was:
“San Cristóbal estaba a la puerta, / con su capillita cubierta, / y rogando y suplicando a las mon-
jas del Perdón / que le digan la oración” (NC 2066).80
Ater all these Portuguese remnants of old songs we only knew in Castilian versions, here
are two more collected in modern Galicia. he irst is about a lazy spinner and her excuses:
“Perdín a roca, o fuso non acho: / tres días hai que lles sigo no rastro.” It is an exact reproduction
of this old one:
Perdí la rueca
y el huso no hallo:
tres días ha
que le ando en el rastro. (NC 1585 A)81
he other Galician song: “Cómprem’unha saboyana, / señora, ¡válgame Dios!, / cómprem’unha

saboyana, / que as outras teñen a dous” was known to us only through an old Castilian text:
Compráme una saboyana,
marido, assí os guarde Dios,
compráme una saboyana,
pues las otras tienen dos. (NC 1793)82
Also in Galicia, they sing this proverb:

Quérenme mal as miñas comadres,
porque lles digo eu as verdades. (In NC 2013)83
In Castile they sang: “Mal me quieren mis comadres, / porque les digo las verdades” (NC
2013 A). And this other old song: “¡Arriba, zancas, / que este mundo todo es trampas!” (NC
78. Look at me, Michael, how lovely I am: / skirt made of kersey, shirt of burlap!
79. Saint Anthony is at the door, / covered with a devout small cape, / asking the kids, / the kids of the Jordan, /
if they knew the prayer.
80. Saint Christopher was at the door, / covered with a small cape, / begging and imploring the nuns of Par-
don / to tell him the prayer.
81. I lost my distaf / and I can’t ind the spindle: / it’s now three days / that I’m following its trail.
82. Buy me a Savoyard skirt, / husband, so God help you, / buy me a Savoyard skirt, / because the others have
two.
83. My friends don’t appreciate me, / because I tell them the truth about them.
2041 bis) is now sung in Galicia “Arriba, pernas, arriba, patas, / que ’n este mundo non hai
sinon trampas.”84
he refrain of a modern Catalan ballad says: “On són les meves amoretes? / Ai, a on
són?”(in NC 519 A),85 which reminds us of a sixteenth-century Castilian song:
¿Dólos mis amores, dólos?
¿Dólos mis amores, he? (NC 519 A)
It is even stranger to ind a survival of an old Castilian ditty in a modern Basque one. he former
said:
– Vámonos a acostar, Pero Grullo,
que cantan los gallos a menudo.
– Hilar, hilar, Teresota,
que si los gallos cantan, no es hora. (NC 1730 C)86
In a Spanish translation, the Basque song goes as follows: “– Oh, Pedro, Pedro, tengo sueño,
y ¿podré acostarme? – Hila, y luego, luego, luego, hila, y luego sí… – Oh, Pedro, Pedro, ya he
cosido y ¿podré acostarme? – Ya es de día, …y luego, luego, sí” (in NC 1730 B).87
I shall inally quote a few exceptional examples: the survival of an entire traditional vil-
lancico, with its gloss, in a language diferent from the one in which it was written down in the
sixteenth century. One extraordinary example is that of the famous song of the three Moorish
girls, “Tres morillas me enamoran / en Jaén”:
Tres morillas m’enamoran
en Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Marién.
Tres morillas tan garridas
iban a coger olivas
y hallábanlas cogidas
en Jaén:
Y hallábanlas cogidas
y tornaban desmaídas
y las colores perdidas
en Jaén:
Tres moricas tan lozanas
iban a coger manzanas
84. Legs up! / For this world is full of pitfalls.

85. Where is my sweet love? / Oh God, where is he?
86. – Let’s go to bed, Pero Grullo, / for the cocks are crowing / all the time. / – You spin, spin, Teresota, / for if
the cocks are crowing, / it is not time (to go to bed).
87. – Oh Peter, Peter, I’m sleepy, can I go to bed? / You spin, and then, then, then, spin, and then, you may. //
– Oh Peter, Peter, I’ve sewn, can I go to bed? / Day has come; and then, then, you may.
534 Margit Frenk
[y cogidas las hallaban]

[en] Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Merién. (NC 16 B)88
here are only a few references to this song in sixteenth-century Spain and none that we know
of in Portugal. So, it was really astonishing to ind that it was sung in twentieth-century Bragan-
ça and with a very similar text: “As meninas todas três Marias, / foram-se a colher as andrinas. //
As meninas todas três Joanas, / foram-se a colher as maçanas. // Quando lá chigaram, acharam-
nas colhidas, / quando lá chigaram, acharam-nas talhadas” (in NC 16 B).89
Another almost incredible case is that of a song only quoted in a play by the great Portu-
guese playwright Gil Vicente:
E se ponerey la mano en vós,
garrido amor?
Um amigo que eu havia
mançanas d’ouro m’envia.
Garrido amor.
Um amigo que eu amava
mançanas d’ouro me manda.
Garrido amor.
Mançanas d’ouro m’envia:
a milhor era partida.
Garrido amor. (NC 382)90
Its parallelistic gloss reappeared in a Sephardic wedding song collected in the twentieth cen-
tury: “Un amor que yo tenía / manzanitas de oro él me vendía, / cuatro y cinco en una espiga, /
la mejorcita d’ellas para mi amiga; / cuatro y cinco en una rama, / la mejorcita de ellas para mi
amada” (in NC 382).91
Our last example comes from Algarve, Portugal. here they still sang in the early twentieth
century at a particular festivity the following song:
Chovia e anevava
pela noite escura,
88. hree Moorish girls made love to me / in Jaén: /Asha, and Fatima, and Marién. // hree so lovely Moorish
girls / went to pluck olives / in Jaén: /Asha, and Fatima, and Marién. // hey went to pluck olives, / and
they found they’d been plucked already, / and they returned swooned / and colorless, / in Jaén: / Asha, and
Fatima, and Marien // hree handsome Moorish girls / went to pluck apples / [and found they had already
been plucked] / in Jaén: / Asha, and Fatima, and Merien.
89. he lasses all three called Mary / went to pluck sloes. // he lasses, all three called Joana / went to pluck
apples. // When they arrived there, / they found they’d already been plucked (cut).
90. Shall I put my hands on you, / bonny love? // A friend that I had (loved) / sends me golden apples, / bonny
love. // Sends me golden apples, / the best of them was cut in two, / bonny love.
91. “A lover that I had / sold me golden apples, / four and ive on a single stem, / the best of all for my friend.”
(Reckert 1993, 69)
e a ná’que vai no porto

corre la fortuna.
– Que me digas, marinhêro,
que navegas no rio,
na qual daquelas naus
vai o seu diamigo.
– Que n’aquela diantêra,
mastro erguido![…]. (In NC 942 B)92
he whole text of this song is an astonishing survival of a villancico documented in the sixteenth
century which in one Castilian version said: “Llueve a menudo / y hace la noche escura; / la
nave al puerto / y el viento a la fortuna. // – Dígasme, marinero, / que andas por la mar, / si me
traes nuevas / de amador leal. / Darlas he, señora, / de tu desventura. / La nave en el puerto / y
el vento a la fortuna” (NC 942 B).93
his last example strongly reminds us of several songs I quoted before, composed in dif-
ferent Iberian languages and covering no less than seven centuries: the thirteenth century Gali-
cian cantiga de amigo, “Ondas do mar de Vigo / se vistes meu amigo”; the modern Castilian
folksong “Todas las mañanas voy / a las orillas del mar / a preguntar a las olas / si han visto mi
amor pasar”; and the two addresses to the sailor “Dígasme tú, el marinero, / que Dios te guarde
de mal, / ¿si los viste a mis amores, / si los viste allá pasar?” and “Dime, marinero / del cuerpo
garrido, / ¿en cuál de aquellas naves / pasa Fernandino?” To these, we may now add the above
Castilian villancico of the sixteenth century and the archaic Portuguese vilancete sung in the
twentieth century. If I am not mistaken, this proves the existence of a solid tradition of Iberian
lyric folk poetry covering at least a large part of the Peninsula and having the strenght and the
beauty necessary to continue existing over large periods of time.
92. It rained and snowed / in the dark night, / and the ship that goes to harbor, / depends on its good fortune. //
– Please, tell me, mariner, / you who sails on the river, / in which of those ships / is my friend. / -In that of
the front, / straight master.
93. here is a small rain, / and the night is dark; / the ship to the harbor / and the wind to its fortune. // – Tell
me, mariner, / you who sails on the sea, / if you bring me news / of my loyal lover. / – I’ll give you the news
/ of your ill luck. / he ship to the harbor / and the wind to its fortune.
Linguistic borders and oral transmission
José Luis Forneiro
One of the most interesting phenomena resulting from the contact between languages and cul-
tures is, without a doubt, the exchange of oral literary texts among diferent communities. We
must remember that many of the spoken languages in the world lack a written code and litera-
ture (Ong 1996, 17) and that it was not until the nineteenth century, and then only in the most
developed countries of the west, that literacy took hold in a general way. However, as authors
such as Roger Chartier, Julio Caro Baroja, and Margit Frenk have noted, the relatively recent lit-
eracy of the lower classes in these western societies does not mean that the written text was not
present in these folk cultures. All that was needed was for one literate person to read a text aloud
to reach illiterate audiences, which could include individuals without an active oral competency
in the language the text was written in, as was the case in bilingual and multilingual countries.
he literature passed down by oral transmission was exchanged among diferent linguistic
communities in a cultural context characterized by illiteracy and a lack of institutionalized
knowledge, that is, without the instruments that nowadays seem essential for the teaching of
foreign languages such as language schools, textbooks, and audiovisual material. he truth is
that acquisition of foreign languages and hence, translation, are inherent to human beings, in
spite of those who would deny the possibility of translation, or at least of literary translation.
Nevertheless, the physical and intellectual development of humanity has taken place thanks to
the translation of all types of technological, scientiic, and humanistic knowledge, including
literary knowledge. Illiterate communities and social classes have not been alien to the transfer
of literary genres of oral tradition. hus, we can nowadays talk about pan-European drama,
short story, and ballad (Juaristi 1987b, 28). he division of the Iberian Peninsula into two na-
tions in which several languages coexist shows the lack of coincidence in political, cultural, and
linguistic boundaries. Alongside Spanish, the oicial language throughout the Spanish terri-
tory, we can also ind Aragonese, Leonese, Catalan, Basque, and Galician-Portuguese. While
the irst two have limited legal recognition, the other languages share oicial status: Catalan in
Catalonia, the Valencian Community, and the Balearic Islands, Basque in the Basque Country
and Navarre, and Galician in Galicia. Meanwhile, Portuguese, the oicial language of Portu-
gal, coexists in small areas alongside Mirandese, a variation of Leonese with oicial language
status. his lack of strict boundaries is oten an unpleasant concept for nationalists, because it
questions the equivalence of political and cultural community, and for regionalists, because it
reveals how the illiterate lower class speakers of “marginal” languages preserved texts which
were passed down in the oicial language of the state.
his work will only deal with the pan-Iberian collection of ballads known as Romancero, and
mainly with those versions collected in the Galician-Portuguese linguistic areas, so as to illustrate
the exchange of traditional narrative poems in spite of linguistic boundaries. One of the reasons
for this choice is that this collection of ballads is the most studied genre of traditional Iberian
literature. Additionally, within the non-Castilian ballad traditions, Galician, and Portuguese folk
ballads have been well collected and studied over the last decades, whereas less efort has been
made in the study of ballads from the Catalan-speaking regions during the same time period.
Spanish balladry, as is well known, originated from the epic poems which were sung in
medieval Castile. Minstrels repeated the scenes audiences liked most and it was not long be-
fore this new narrative genre of octosyllabic verses with the same rhyme throughout became
enriched with new meters and material from the rest of Europe. In this we can see how, from
the beginning, linguistic boundaries have never prevented the Spanish ballad collection from
adopting songs, plots, and themes from faraway countries with very diferent languages. As
Giuseppe di Stefano remarked, ictional, chivalresque, and Carolingian ballads tended to pre-
dominate over historical and epic ones in the collections of ballads from the sixteenth century.
his predominance becomes clearer in the broadside ballads, commonly recited by blind people
of the time and undoubtedly closer to popular taste (Di Stefano 1977, 390). he strong iden-
tiication of Spanish balladry with its epic Castilian origin explains, among other things, the
uneasy relationship which certain intelligentsias from the Iberian periphery (Portugal, Cata-
lonia, Galicia, and now Asturias) have had with this narrative genre at certain stages. his is
manifest in the versions resulting from the linguistic translation of Castilian terms, the creation
of false text, and the lack of interest in the collection and study of this genre. Besides, the fact
that epic songs appeared in the irst place and that only versions in Castilian Spanish are pres-
ent in contemporary balladry both give evidence to the weight of the vision bestowed by the
Spanish Generation of 1898 with regard to Spanish ballads. hus, in modern tradition, ictional
or “novelesque” ballads continue to dominate compared with the scarcity of epic ballads. Many
of the more beautiful forms of the Iberian ballad archive have come to us through versions in
Galician-Portuguese, Catalan, and the peculiar Castilian of the Sephardic Jews.
According to the master of ballad studies, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, a Romancero may be
found anywhere in the world where an Iberian-Romanic language is spoken, even precariously,
as in the case of the Philippines or Guam. he truth is that evidence for Guam’s Romancero is
not very clear and it has not been proven that Castilian ballads have taken root in the Philip-
pines in the same way as they have among the Leonese or Cuban people (J.A. Cid 1991, 527).
he Romancero tradition does not seem to have prospered in the former Portuguese colo-
nies either; we know only of several examples from Goa, a few fragments from Ceylon, two
poems in Malaccan Creole, and a text partially rewritten as prose from the Cape Verde Islands.
he latter is quite a surprising nugget of information, proof of the great richness of the oral tra-
dition in this archipelago, which also has an extensive repertoire of popular European-rooted
short stories. Iberian ballads do not seem to be present in the other Portuguese-speaking coun-
tries (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Macao, and Timor) (Fon-
tes 1997, 8). In any case, the main exception to Menéndez Pidal’s theory can be found closer to
home, since traditional Iberian narrative poetry has not been genuinely adopted in the Basque
Country, apart from some fragmented modern versions of a supericial repertoire (J.A. Cid
1991, 551–52).
It is worth pointing out the inexistence of a Castilian Romancero in the Basque regions for
several important reasons. Firstly, these territories had already been integrated in the reign of
Castile from the thirteenth century onwards. Secondly, Castilian was the only language of cul-
ture in the Spanish Basque Country for centuries. Finally, identiication of Basque and Spanish
elements took place during the modern age in the same way as Spanish and Andalusian ele-
ments have been identiied in the contemporary age. What is more, whereas the traditional
538 José Luis Forneiro
Basque ballad owes nothing to Iberian balladry, ballads from the north of the Basque Country
were inluenced by French and Occitan collections, mainly by means of the action of a sort of
modern ‘juglaría’ that operated in the French side of the Basque country during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries (J.A. Cid 1985, 345–46). he relationship between Basque folk bal-
lads and traditional Castilian and French ones gives ample proof that linguistic, cultural, and
political borders do not necessarily coincide, and that no matter how diferent two neighboring
languages are, the exchange of oral literature is possible.
In the case of traditional Basque narrative poetry, Basque bilingualism with either French
or Castilian favored the translation of oral literary texts from one language into another. Al-
though territorial continuity favors the transmission of versions, variations, and themes, it is
also possible that a traditional text can be exported to remote regions. In the same way, the con-
tact between erudite literatures is not always necessarily related to any other types of contact.
he linguistic barrier, if there is one, does not impede the oral transmission of texts, but it does
make it diferent from that which occurs in neighboring regions, where the bilingual bearers of
the tradition intervene. Ramón Menéndez Pidal put it well when he indicated that the transla-
tion carried out in distant countries with diferent languages did not happen in a single step, but
in an act prior to the oral transmission. his would be perfectly comparable to the translation of
a poem or narrative text from a learned literature into another one, that is, “the transplantation
of a ballad is a cultural phenomenon, not merely a vegetative one” (Menéndez Pidal 1968, 324).
We could illustrate this phenomenon with the ballad “La hermana cautiva” (he captive
sister), a derivative of “Kudrun,” an Austrian poem from the twelth century from which many
ballads have derived in Germanic and Slavic-speaking countries but which is hardly known
in France and Italy. he conirmation that this Iberian song was more similar to the original
medieval poem and closer to its old hexasyllabic form in northern Spain led Menéndez Pidal to
conclude that the theme traveled from Eastern Europe to the western half of the Iberian Penin-
sula by way of a pilgrim to Santiago (1968, 325).
Other ballads show us how a romance can penetrate in diferent ways, and once intro-
duced, can be inluenced by foreign versions of the same theme arriving in waves from diferent
territories. his is the case of the ballad entitled “Espinelo,” which incorporates very diferent,
almost incompatible elements from a twelth-century French-English song and a iteenth-
century Italian ballad (D. Catalán 1997, 231–33). Another example is “La muerte ocultada” (he
concealed death), which exhibits inluences from Breton, French, and Scandinavian ballads
(Mariscal de Rhett 1984–1985, 32, 55–56). hus, we can see how traditional narrative poetry
in the Iberian Peninsula has been inluenced by ballads from other European countries – of
similar or very diferent languages – beginning from an early age. Spanish balladry has also ex-
ported some of its pieces to European countries. Likely examples are “El conde Alarcos” (Count
Alarcos), “El conde Arnaldos” (Count Arnaldos), “Bernal Francés,” “La aparición” (he appari-
tion), and “La infantina” (he little princess), to name a few (Menéndez Pidal 1968, 355–56).
he preservation of these collections of ballads among the Sephardic Jews and the expor-
tation of this original Spanish genre to other Iberian-Romanic speaking countries is evidence
that this genre, and its linguistic elements, was able to adapt to the culture which inherited and
preserved it. he Sephardic Jews’ conservation of the language, oral literature, and other cul-
tural Hispanic elements has traditionally been considered evidence of an unblemished Spanish
patriotism in these descendants of the Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of
the iteenth century. However, we are more inclined to think that Sephardic Jews preserved
their Iberian legacy not out of an anachronistic patriotic feeling, but rather to maintain their
cultural identity within the Christian and Muslim religious communities that welcomed them.
As regards those ballads passed down by Sephardic communities, Samuel Armistead has re-
cently shown evidence of both their medieval heritage and the cultural and linguistic elements
from the societies that welcomed them which were incorporated over the centuries (1999, 66).
For this reason, alongside themes of Hispanic origin and Jewish creation, we can ind transla-
tions from French, Italian, and, above all, Greek songs, along with Turkish, Greek, and Arab
words and refrains (Díaz-Mas 1993, 155). In Samuel Armistead’s words: “Judeo-Spanish ballads
act, therefore, as a faithful mirror of all the cultural contacts experienced by the Sephardic Jews
for half a century since they let the Iberian Peninsula” (1999, 67). his description could also
apply to those ballads from bilingual regions. An example of the adaptability of the genre to
the cultural and linguistic environment surrounding it, is the collection of ballads from the
Galician colony of Salvador de Bahia, which incorporated Brazilian elements into the origi-
nal Castilian-Galician bilingualism. Further examples include the Castilian romances known
as “joporás” (a combination of Castilian Spanish and Guaraní) from Paraguay (Granda 1994,
368–82) and the substitution of the word “faca” for “knife” among the Portuguese in Canada for
purposes of decorum (Fontes 1979, L).
In the case of bilingual areas in the Iberian Peninsula we know that Castilian ballads were
sung in their original language in both Catalonia and Portugal in the iteenth and sixteenth
centuries. herefore, neither political nor linguistic borders were an obstacle for the new genre’s
integration into the oral culture of the other Romanic languages of the Iberian Peninsula. It is
worth pointing out that ballads were introduced into the intellectual and court environments in
the Catalan-Aragonese and Portuguese kingdoms through music and song prior to the inven-
tion of printing. From the beginning, the versions that entered these regions were embellished
with features from the autochthonous languages. his can be evidenced by the number of Cata-
lan terms present in the irst traditional ballad which was put into writing: “La dama y el pastor”
(he lady and the shepherd), copied in a notebook by the Majorcan Jaume de Olessa in 1421
with other texts when he was studying in Italy. hanks to Gil Vicente’s focus on popular lan-
guage and literature, we can estimate that ballads started to be translated into Portuguese dur-
ing the irst decades of the sixteenth century. In Auto da Lusitania (Lusitanian play) (1532) two
Jewish tailors sing the ballad “El moro que reta a Valencia” (he moor that deied Valencia), in
the poetic “Cid” tradition (Menéndez Pidal 1968, 209–10) in a combination of languages. his
linguistic adaptation of Castilian ballads in Catalonia and Portugal its the description that Wil-
liam Entwistle made about this process: “the strongest themes travel from country to country
without passports and interpreters. It is not a translation, but a substitution of words or phrases
in the process of oral communication in bilingual regions” (Massot i Muntaner 1959–1960, 68).
According to this theory, ballads are translated gradually and, once they are completely trans-
lated, they present strong similarities with the poem they derived from originally. he Mexican-
American scholar herese Meléndez demonstrated the remarkable similarity among the ver-
sions of the ballad “El caballero burlado” (he fooled knight) in Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese,
French, and Italian (1977, 6–7).
Nevertheless, strictly speaking, none of the present Iberian-Romanic ballad traditions

from the diferent regions of the Peninsula have managed to “forget” their Castilian linguistic
origin. It could be said that in general the Portuguese tradition is nowadays monolingual in
Portuguese. However, we can still ind some isolated Castilian terms in Portuguese ballads, as
well as Castilian or bilingual versions in towns located near the Spanish border. In Catalonia,
the Castilian romances have, for the most part, been passed down in bilingual versions, al-
though we know of monolingual versions in Castilian or Catalan. he presence of Castilian in
Catalan balladry is not limited to songs of Castilian origin (which make up the majority); there
are also Castilian terms in native Catalan ballads and even in French ones. In contrast, Galicia,
like Portugal, lacks its own themes as we can only name a few pieces of Lusitanian origin (Fon-
tes 1997, 10–16) apart from the ballad at the end of La tragicomedia de Don Duardos (he tragic
comedy of Don Duardos) (c.1525) by Gil Vicente, which became part of the Portuguese, Spanish,
and Sephardic traditional archive. In the Galician ballad collection the predominant language
is Castilian. Although the Galician tradition presents the same language combinations as Cata-
lan, the presence of the Galician language in texts is not as strong as the presence of its Catalan
counterpart in the ballads from Catalan-speaking regions. Finally, the presence of autochtho-
nous languages in regions where Aragonese or Leonese is spoken (Asturias, northern Leon, and
Miranda do Douro) is virtually nonexistent and only noticeable in comic pieces. he conclu-
sion we reach ater an analysis of this linguistic diversity is that folk ballad tradition is a clear
relection of the socio-linguistic history of the Iberian Romance-language speaking countries.
Nevertheless, non-Castilian speaking Iberian regions have been pervious to the inluence
of the Castilian-inclined upper class and neighboring Castilian areas, against what was postu-
lated by respective nationalist and regionalist movements, who described their communities
as impermeable to any social or geographical Spanish inluence. his fact, apart from refuting
the afore-mentioned nationalist socio-linguistic cliché, discredits other related manipulations,
such as that which states without reliable evidence that there is a collection of ballads in the
Asturian language which has been concealed (J.A. Cid 1991, 141–44 and 153). It also avoids the
presumption that the Castilian inluence on Galician society over the centuries has been super-
icial and limited to the presence of Castilians born in positions of power (Banhos 1995, 270–73).
It seems evident that the weak presence of Castilian in Portuguese and Catalan ballads is due to
their oicial status up to the beginning of the eighteenth century and to the continuity of their
literature during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries despite the strong com-
petition with Castilian literature, especially in the case of Catalan. In the same way, the reduced
inclusion of Galician, Leonese, and Aragonese would be the consequence of their lacking an
oicial status and literature of their own for centuries. Consequently, we venture to conirm that
if “cultured” literary texts composed during the modern age in Leonese, Aragonese, or Galician
appear in the future, they will not be proof of a solid or autonomous literary system which was
lost ater a certain time. hese texts will perform the same literary and linguistic function as
those compositions from the same period that we know of so far, which is that of a literary game
consisting of writing in a language that is foreign to the printing world.
As we have pointed out, old romances soon added linguistic features from the communi-
ties that adopted them. he same process can apply to minor genres such as the popular ballad,
which was created at the end of the sixteenth century, and whose pieces have been partially or
totally translated into Catalan and Portuguese. Some ballads which have recently been found
conirm that elements from the native language were introduced. hus, a version of “El conde
niño” (he boy count), collected from a village in Lugo in 1983 and divulged by the educational
system in the last few years, has verses which show Galician elements:
Esa non lle é a serena, madre, nin o seu bello cantar,
que ise élle o conde Olinos
que por meus amores penando está.1 (Forneiro 2000, 279)
he same phenomenon can be found in the vulgatas, texts composed in the south of Spain
which spread throughout the country and took the place of traditional regional verses due to
their easy melodies. he following example, obtained in Portugal, is a case of Portuguese lin-
guistic intrusion in the irst verses of “La hermana cautiva” (he captive sister):
No dia dos torneios passei por a mouraria,
Ouvi cantar una mora ao pé d’una fuente fría.
– Apártate, mora bella, apártate, mora linda;
Deja beber mi caballo nessa i-água cristalina.2 (Fontes 1987, 74–75)
According to the theory of rapid linguistic adaptation of ballads to adoptive cultures, the oldest
ballads would be those which were totally or almost completely translated into the other Ibe-
rian-Romanic languages. his reasoning, undoubtedly logical, does not correspond to reality,
for Catalan ballads present more Castilian elements than Portuguese ones, although songs in
Castilian Spanish reached both territories at the same time. Moreover, Manuel da Costa Fontes
has observed that those Castilian terms found in Portuguese ballads do not always indicate a re-
cent transmission. he version of “El moro que reta a Valencia” (he moor who deied Valencia)
from Auto da Lusitania (Lusitanian play) (1532) by Gil Vicente was almost completely translated
into Portuguese whereas the versions from the Azores and Madeira contain an abundance of
Spanish terms. In contrast, the beginning of “La bastarda y el segador” (he illegitimate girl
and the harvester) is usually found in Castilian in continental Portugal although its existence
in Madeira implies that the poem must have been introduced into the Portuguese ballad ar-
chive centuries ago (Fontes 1997, 9). he preservation of Castilian linguistic terms is even more
surprising when we consider that in recent centuries these ballads were passed down primarily
by rural or common people who in many cases had a weak command of Castilian Spanish, if
any. Furthermore, the main conveyers of these songs were women, who traditionally had less
contact with the Spanish language. It is a wonder that these communities did not translate all of
the romances they knew into their own language.
In our opinion, bilingualism and multilingualism in non-Castilian Iberian-Romanic re-
gions it Ana Valenciano’s description of the ballad as “a conservative recreation” (Valenciano
1992, 40). hus, Castilian Spanish would initially be associated with the conservative aspect of
1. hat is not the siren, mother, nor her beautiful singing / hat is Count Olinos / Who for my love is
sufering.
2. On the day of the tournaments I dropped by the Moorish quarter / And there by a cold spring I heard a
Moorish woman sing / Stand aside lovely Moorish lady, stand aside beautiful Moorish lady; / Let my horse
drink in such crystal-clear water.
the genre, whereas native languages would be identiied with the renewal of texts. Likewise,
the collection of Spanish ballads relects a common situation in the study of bilingual texts in
written literature, where the combination of languages is considered another type of aesthetic
feature. his situation is also relected in sociolinguistics, which has shown that in bilingual so-
cieties the mastery of a language does not automatically imply its use, much less its use in every
situational context (Rojo 1981, 283). However, the prejudices and idealisms about folk culture
have not acknowledged this condition. here are still those who think that oral literary texts
are merely colloquial, relecting only the language of the people, and are not conscious that
popular literature, being a “literature,” is in itself aesthetic. On the other hand, urban scholars
who defend rural conservationism – nationalism in some societies – have been too simplistic
to imagine linguistic and cultural purity in rural communities and have condemned the use of
foreign languages, literacy, and, in general, the improvement in the standard of living, attributes
which would be considered positive in urban intellectual environments
If we take into account the presence of foreign languages or even incomprehensible dis-
courses in the literature of monolingual cultures (Forneiro 2004, 38–39), it is logical that the
Castilian language would still be present in ballads from bilingual or border communities. Any
combination of two or more languages in multilingual ballads is, obviously, incorrect from a
grammatical point of view. However, this linguistic mistake does not lessen the literary aesthet-
ics or cultural function of the texts. Next, we are going to illustrate this point and others with
some cases taken from the Galician ballad collection and that of neighboring regions. We have
chosen Galicia because it is the only region where contact between languages has been studied
systematically in the approximately 6,000 texts found in Galician territories (Forneiro 2000
and 2004). We do not intend to start a thorough analysis of the Galician corpus in Asturias,
León, and Zamora, whose high number of versions, at one point forced us to leave the study of
these texts aside; we only propose to illustrate the relationship between languages and ballads
within the Galician administrative boundaries, “exterior Galicia,” and northern Portugal.
As a starting point, we could presume that ballads from the “exterior Galician” territory
would ofer the same degree of Galician adaptation as those within Galicia, since these areas
only began to belong to other provinces or regions about two hundred years ago, but not even
within the four Galician provinces do all pieces ofer the same linguistic situation (Forneiro
2000, 233–49). To explain the higher iniltration of Castilian in Galician texts in Asturias, León,
and Zamora we must mention the close ties that these territories have had with the Spanish
language throughout history. hese ties have been both geographical and, in the last two centu-
ries, administrative, in areas where Galician is only a minority language. hus, in some ballads
obtained outside Galicia, the Galician language is absent, in contrast to the versions obtained
in the neighboring territories of Lugo and Ourense. A case in point would be the old and rare
“Pérdida de Don Beltrán” (Don Beltran’s loss) and “La Caza de Celinos” (Celinos’s hunt).
Only two versions of the romance “Pérdida de Don Beltrán” have been found in the Gali-
cian province of Ourense (Valenciano 1998, 188–89 and Said Armesto 1997, 124), and they were
probably imported from Portugal. Both were passed down in Galician but with some Castil-
ian terms (Forneiro 2000, 63–64). On the contrary, the only version obtained in the Galician
Bierzo area presents only a few Galician words (D. Catalán and De la Campa 1991, 56–57). he
same phenomenon occurs in the Galician versions of “La Caza de Celinos” (Celinos’ hunt),
which were collected in the western parts of Ourense and, above all, in Lugo. he texts of this
medieval ancestral ballad present here a more or less equal combination of Galician and Castil-
ian, in contrast to the Castilian Spanish linguistic predominance in the versions originating in
Galician-speaking Asturias:
Version of Sisterna (Ibias, Asturias)
El conde marcha a misa, la condesa queda en casa,
2 y cuando viene pa casa la condesa estaba mala.
¿Pero qué te pasa, condesa, te dejé buena y estás mala?
4 – Es que me hallo embarazada de dos horas para acá.
– Si te hallas embarazada algo se te apetecerá.
6 – En los montes de Guarinos un ciervo oí bramar,
Si no como de ese ciervo yo pienso de arreventar;
8 si quieres ir a matarlo deja las armas quedar.
Vete con palo en la mano como el que va a pasear.–
10 Dio gusto a la condesa, dejó las armas quedar,
dio una vuelta por las tiendas, otras nuevas fue a comprar.
12 – ¿Tú qué vienes aquí, conde, a los miós montes cazar?
– La tu esposa condesina, marido me va a llamar.–
14 Sacaron las espadas, se pusieran a pelear
y le cortó la cabeza pa la condesa cenar.
16 – Aquí tienes, la condesa, el ciervo que fui cazar.
– ¿Pa qué lo mataste, conde, que esa no te hacía mal.
18 – No tengas pena, condesa, que lo vas a acompañar.–
Y lo cortó la cabeza, la tiró en un biseiral:
20 Querervos y abrazarvos, ¡que ahora vos doy lugar! (Suárez 1997, 131–32)3
Version of Veiga de Forcas (Pedraita, Lugo)

– ¿Tú que tienes condesiña, que no cesas de llorar?
2 – ¿Que hein de ter de min, marido? Para ti ningún pesar,
ben sabes que estou encinta da noite de Navidad.
4 – Se sabes que andas encinta, tratarás de te cuidar,
– E no monte de Celinos un ciervo se suele andar,
6 se non me trai– la cabeza malparir ou rebentar,
e se ma has de traer, armas non has de levar.–
3. he Count goes to mass; the Countess stays at home, / and when he came home he found the countess ill. /
What’s wrong with you, Countess? I let you well and now you’re ill. / ‘It’s because I am pregnant since two
hours ago’, / ‘If you are pregnant there must be something you fancy’ / ‘In Guarinos lands I heard a deer
howling, / if I don’t eat from that deer I think I will burst. / If you want to go and kill him let the weapons
stay, / go with a stick in your hand as if you were going for a walk’ / He did what the Countess pleased;
leaving his weapons behind, / he went around by the shops new ones he went to buy. / ‘What are you doing
here, Count? Hunting in my lands? / Your wife the little Countess will call me her husband’ / hey took
out their swords and started to ight / And he beheaded Guarinos for the Countess’ dinner / ‘Here you are,
Countess, the deer I went to hunt.’ / ‘Why did you kill him, Count, this one did not do you any wrong’ /
‘Do not pity him Countess, as you are going to accompany him’ / And he beheaded her and threw her head
in a ield / Love and hug each other, now that you can!
8 Deixou as que tiña na casa i– autras novas foi comprar;

Á salida daquel monte e á entradita daquel val
10 se encontrara con Celiños que mui preparado está.
Tiran una espada al aire, comenzan de pelear,
12 i– a cabeza de Celiños logo caerá ó chan;
la cogió por los cabellos y a su esposa se la trai.
14 – Toma a caza, condesiña, que me mandache ir buscar.
– Esta caza, meu marido, eu non cha mandei buscar,
16 de tres hermanos que teño esí non chà de pasar.
– Pues que pase, que no pase tu razón no les has dar. –
18 Le quitara la cabeza y las puso par y par.
Bicaivos e abrazaivos qu’ahora déixovos lugar.4 (Amigo 2001, 65–66)
It is worth mentioning the ballad “Durandarte envía su corazón a Belerma” (Durandarte sends
his heart to Belerma), as an example of the higher degree of Castilian iniltration in the texts
outside the Galician borders. It is unknown in the Galician tradition, and has only been pre-
served in northern León, among the gypsies of southern Andalusia, and in Galician-speaking
parts of Asturias, where the autochthonous language is practically absent in the diferent ver-
sions (Suárez 1997, 115–18).
he ballad “Conde Alarcos” (Count Alarcos) is rich in information relating to the mat-
ters discussed here. As we have already mentioned (Forneiro 1990), traditional Galician and
Portuguese versions of this poem present similar characteristics which diferentiate them from
the Castilian traditional song, where this theme is not only less vital but also more faithful to
the sixteenth-century text. We do not know for certain if the new elements of this ballad ap-
peared in Galicia and were then taken to Portugal or vice versa. However, the latter seems to
be more likely. Jesús Bal y Gay and Eduardo Martínez Torner claimed that this Galician ballad
was of Portuguese origin because of the use of the word “sinos” (bells) and the parallelism of its
last verses. hese ethnomusicologists are probably right considering that, from medieval times,
Portugal has had more political and cultural power than Galicia. he substitution of the word
“sinos” (rare, if not unknown, in the Castilian-inluenced, present-day Galician language) for
the Castilian campanas or the hybrid campás, or other meaningful (auxilios, alto da serra) or
meaningless (seno, hilo, silva) terms would indicate a Portuguese exportation to Galicia:
Moito tocan as campanas, ay, Jesús, quen morrería5
(Confurco, San Cristobo de Cea, Ourense)
4. What’s wrong with you, little Countess, why can’t you stop crying? / ‘What am I to have, my husband? For
you there is no grief, / you know well I am pregnant since Christmas night.’ / ‘If you know you’re pregnant
you‘ll take care of yourself.’ / ‘On Celinos lands a deer usually walks around, / if you don’t bring me his
head I’ll have a miscarriage or burst, / and if you are to bring it to me no weapons are you to take.’ / Leaving
his weapons at home new ones he went to buy; / at the end of that wood and beginning of the valley / He
met Celinos who was all set indeed, / hrowing a sword into the air they started to ight, / and Celinos’s
head soon was on the ground; / he took it by the hair me, my husband, I did not send you to bring, / For
the three brothers I have you will not get away with this.’ / Whether I do or I don’t you won’t say a word. /
He cut her head of and put both next to each other.
5. he bells are tolling all the time, oh my God! Who could have died?
– Tocan no alto da serra. –Oh, Jesús, ¿quién moriría?6

(Foilebar, Incio, Lugo)
– Toca a silva na serra, ¡Jesús! ¿quién se moriría?7
(“It should be bell.” Comment made by informant.)
(Xestoso, Monfero, A Coruña)
Tocan os hilos en las montañas, toucan as campanas na serra8
(Morcelle, Becerreá, Lugo)
– Tocan al seno y al seno. ¡Mi Dios! ¿Quién se moriría?9
(A Cancela, A Fonsagrada, Lugo)
– Como tocan auxilios na serra, ay de Dios, quen morrería?10
(Os Pretos, Vilalba, Lugo)
Contrary to the theory of Portuguese origin and a later spread to Galicia, the hybrid language
of Galician versions supports the premise of Galician or Spanish (of the Galician-Portuguese
variety) roots, with a later translation into Portuguese. However, the Galician tradition, like
Catalan in its adaptation of French ballads, would not solely have made use of the autoch-
thonous language in the traditional adaptation of its texts but would also have employed the
Castilian language, identifying it as the original source of the genre. his can be veriied in the
minor genre of popular ballads (created at the end of the sixteenth century and spread mainly
through the tradition of blind people bearing broadside ballads), which has become remarkably
traditional in Galicia although it hardly uses the Galician language.
he ballad “El conde Alarcos” (Count Alarcos) belongs to the group labeled “hybrid lan-
guage ballads” in our linguistic classiication of Galician ballads (Forneiro 2000, 133–203). his
group seems to have more of an archaic and traditional lavor within the Galician archive than
the “Galician language ballads” group. he reason for this is that when the latter become fully
traditionalized, they only appear in one or two (probably Lusitanian) versions, and if found
in many versions then we are dealing with burlesque or pastoral romances. Hybrid language
ballads are characterized by a predominance of dialogue and longer extension. hese traits,
although not exclusive, are useful to distinguish them within the Galician repertoire (Forneiro
2000, 174–80).
Next, we ofer two versions of “El conde Alarcos” collected from two towns near a Gali-
cian-speaking area in the Leonese region of El Bierzo. Whereas the irst version shows the
typical innovations of most Galician and Portuguese versions (the beginning with Silvana’s
incipit and the happy ending in which the count doesn’t kill his wife), the second one its the
Spanish pattern (the Count kills his wife according to the king’s orders). Both texts illustrate
how a language or several languages are associated with a certain text and not with a ballad or
6. hey toll at the top of the mountain, oh my God! Who could have died?
7. he blackberry bush tolls in the mountain. God! Who could have died?
8. he threads toll in the mountain, the bells toll in the hill.
9. hey toll to the heart and the bosom my God! Who could have died?
10. How the last rites toll in the mountains oh my God, Who could have died?
plot, and at the same time relect the reality of two neighboring languages in a borderland like
El Bierzo.
Version from Aira da Pedra (Paradaseca, León)
Subiendo doña Silvana por un corredor arriba,
2 tocando nunha guitarra ¡ay qué bien la repartía!
– Todos los condes se casan, para mí no hay valía,
4 no siendo el conde Flores que era padre de familia.
Mándelle usted llamar, padre, de su parte y de la mía,
6 y para que venga pronto póngale pena en la vida.
– ¿Qué me quiere, señor rey, que me llama tan deprisa?
8 – Que mate-la túa muller e te cases coa mía illa.
– Eso sí que no lo hago, eso sí que no lo haría,
10 eso sí que no lo hago, que ella non mo merecía.
– Mata, conde, mata, conde, que a vida che costaría.–
12 Marcha o conde pra súa casa con tristura y angonía.
As once, non son as doce, mandan poñe-la comida,
14 ni conde ni su mujer ni uno en el otro comía.
– Dime, conde, dime, conde, tu tristura, mi angonía.
16 – Como cho hei decir, muller, se o corazón non podía.
– Dime conde, dime conde, tu tristura, mi angonía.
18 – Anda, vamos a la sala ya llí te lo diría:
Mándame o rei que te mate pa casarme coa súa illa.
20 Colle o neno más pequeño, aquel que de peito tiña.–
Empezou a pasealo do corredor á cociña.
22 – Mama, niño, mama, niño, esta leche de amargar,
que mañana de estas horas me llevarán a enterrar.
24 Mama, niño, mama, niño, esta leche de amargura,
que mañana de estas horas ya estaré en la sepultura.–
26 As once, non son as doce ya redoblan las campanas.
– ¿Quién murió, quién no murió? -Murió la doña Silvana.
28 – Murió la doña Silvana, que delito cometía:
deshacer un matrimonio, cosa que Dios no quería. (D. Catalán and De la Campa 1991, 220–21)11
11. Lady Silvana was going up along a corridor / Playing the guitar Oh how well she played! / ‘All Counts
get married there is not one worthy for me, / If it weren’t for count Flores who father of a family is he. /
Call him, father, on your behalf and mine / and to make him come soon put his life on reward / ‘What do
you want from me, my King, to call me in such a hurry?’ / ‘I want you to kill your wife, and marry my
daughter.’ / ‘hat I can’t do, that I wouldn’t do, / ‘hat I can’t do, she wouldn’t deserve it.’ / ‘You must kill,
Count, you must kill, or it will cost you your life.’ / he Count let for home with sadness and anguish /
At eleven not at twelve they ask to have their dinner served, / neither the Count nor his wife, neither of
them was eating. / Tell me, Count, tell me, Count, your sadness is my anguish. / ‘How can I tell you wife,
if my heart won’t allow me / Come, let’s go to the sitting-room and there I’ll tell you: / the King ordered me
to kill you to marry his daughter.’ / She took her younger child, the one still breastfeeding / She started
to walk him from the corridor to the kitchen. / Drink, child, drink, child, this milk of bitterness, / hat
tomorrow at this time I will be in the grave.’ / At eleven, not at twelve bells already start to toll. / ‘Who
would have died, who didn’t die? Lady Silvana died. / Lady Silvana died. What crime had she committed?
/ To spoil a marriage, something that God didn’t wish.
Version of Tejeira (Villafranca del Bierzo, León)

El rey tenía una hija, mucho la quiere y la estima,
2 vestida la trae de oro, calzada de plata ina.
Él la quería casar y ella dice que es muy niña.
4 Pasan tiempos, vienen tiempos, la niña por casar inda.
Bien la oía su padre cómo suspira y gemía.
6 – ¿Por qué lloras, la Silvana, por qué lloras, hija mía?
– Como no hei de llorar, padre, si me hallo por casar inda.
8 – Cuando te quise casar, dijiste que eras muy niña,
y ahora igualanza contigo no había,
10 si no fuera conde Flores, hijos y mujer tenía.
– Mándelo llamar, padre, para una rica comida;
12 en el medio de la comida háblale de parte mía,
Si se acuerda de algún tiempo, si se acuerda de algún día
14 cuando los dos retozamos en los campos de verde oliva,
yo con mi blanco jubón, él con su blanca camisa.
16 – De esos modos, la Silvana, tu honra ya está perdida,
– No están, no, mi padre, que eso nadie lo sabía. –
18 Mandara llamar al conde por un paje que tenía
– Me manda el rey que lo llame, yo no sé que le quería.
20 – Yo aquí vengo, buen rey, por ver lo que me quería.
– Lo que te quiero, buen conde, bien no te parecería,
22 que mates a tu condesa y cases con mi infantina.
– ¿Cómo hei de matar, buen rey, a quien tanto me quería?
24 – Si no la matas, buen conde, pagarás por la tu vida.–
Se volviera para casa más triste que salira
26 A condesa pone a mesa e o conde non lle comía.
– Dame de tu pesar, conde, dareite de mi alegría
28 – Alegría que che hei dar, bien te parecería,
me manda el rey que te mate, y case con su infantina.
30 – Por Dios te pido, buen hombre, que no me quites la vida,
yo a mis hijos y los tuyos yo a criarlos sería.
32 – No puede casar el conde ‘tanto la condesa viva.
– Por Dios te pido, buen hombre, que no me quites la vida,
34 yo iréme a un desierto y allí vida santa haría.
– No puede casar el conde ‘tanto la condesa viva.
36 – No me mates con el cuchillo, que muerte puerca sería;
ahógame con un pañuelo, que dulce muerte sería.–
38 Echó mano al bolsillo a un pañuelo que tenía,
Estando en estas razones, diera habla una niña,
40 que para tener dos meses aún le faltaba un día:
– ¡Adiós, querida mi madre, cómo me quitan la vida
42 por dar gusto a un traidor y a una puerca cochina! –
¡Válgame Nuestra Señora, válgame Santa María! (D. Catalán and De la Campa 1991, 221–22)12
12. he king had a daughter, whom he loved and cared for, / he had her dressed in gold ine silver on her
shoes / He wanted her to get married she said she was only a girl. / Time passed; time went the girl has
he same informant of this Castilian version, Bárbara Poncelas, passed down the only text col-
lected in the Galician Bierzo of “Alabóse el conde Vélez” (he boastful Count Vélez) in 1985. he
fact that this woman passed down the Castilian version of “Conde Alarcos” and that “Alábose
el conde Vélez” is absent in Galician ballad collections could lead us to think that this jewel
of Gonzalo de Berceo’s tradition was passed down in Castilian. he truth is that the version
is remarkably Galician-like, which would show the loyalty of tradition bearers to the original
language of the text they learned (this would explain that an informant would not adapt all of
his or her repertoire to Galician or Castilian). It would also account for Galician forming part of
those traditional ballads from outside the Galician borders, and unknown in Galician territory.
his is the version of “Alabóse el conde Vélez”:
Alabouse conde Félix e alabouse o gran traidor,
2 que no hay doncella ni dama que le negara el honor.
Pone tienda sobre tienda, por riba un rico cordón.
4 Todas damas e doncellas iban tratar ao cordón.
también la hija del rey fue tratar al cordón.
6 – ¿Cuanto vale o cordón, Félix, Félix, que vale o cordón?
– Nin se paga con diñeiro nin tampouco con doblón,
8 págase co teu honor drento do meu corazón.
– Non che quero o cordón, Félix, Félix, non che quero o cordón,
10 que meu padre vai en Francia, outro me traerá tan bon,
que si no me lo trouguera que no me lo traiga, no. (Catalan and De la Campa 1991, 242–43)13
yet to be married. / Her father well hears how she sighs and sobs. / Why are you crying Silvana? Why are
you crying, my daughter? / Why am I not to cry, father if I haven’t yet married. / ‘When I wanted you to
get married, you said you were only a girl, / And now there is no one who could be your equal if it weren’t
for Count Flores who already has wife and children. / ‘Order him to come, father, for a delicious meal, / in
the middle of the meal talk to him on my behalf, / if he remembers some time, if he remembers some day /
when the two of us romped in olive-green ields, / I was wearing my white bodice; he had his white shirt on
/ ‘If I say that Silvana, your honour will be lost.’ / ‘It will not, my father nobody knew about it.’ / he Count
was called through a pageboy the king had. / ‘he king sends me to call you I don’t know what he wants. /
‘Here I am, my good King, to see what you need from me.’ / What I want, good Count, you wouldn’t like
well, / I want you to kill your Countess and marry my daughter. / ‘How can I kill, my good King the one
who loved me so much?’ / ‘If you don’t kill her, good Count, you will pay for it with your life’ / He went
back home, sadder than he had let. / he Countess lays the table, and the Count would not eat anything. /
‘Give me from your grief, I will give you my joy / ‘Joy I am to give you well would like it / he King orders
me to kill you and marry his little princess.’ / ‘For God’s sake, I beg you, good man, not to take my life away,
/ My children and yours I would live to bring them up.’ / ‘he Count can’t marry while the Countess is alive’
/ ‘For God’s sake, I beg you, good man, not to take my life away / I will go to a desert and there holy life I
would have.’ / ‘he Count can’t marry while the Countess is alive’ / ‘Don’t kill me with a knife, that would
be a horrid death; / Drown me with a handkerchief, which would be a sweet death. / He put his hand in
his pocket to get a handkerchief he had, / and meanwhile he was at that his little girl started to talk, / she
was to be two months within one day / Goodbye, my dear mother, how they take my life away / To please
a villain and a ilthy pig! / Save our Lady Save Holy Mary!
13. Count Felix boasted that villain he boasted / that there was no maid or lady who refused to give him her
honour. / He put shop over shop a beautiful braid on top / all ladies and maids went to haggle over the
braid. / he king’s daughter also went to try to get the braid. / ‘How much is the braid, Felix, Felix, what’s
the braid worth?’ / ‘You can’t pay for it with money nor with doubloon either, / it’s to be paid with your
We can ind another similar case in the version of “El moro que reta a Valencia” (he moor who
deies Valencia) collected in Hermisende (Zamora) by Aníbal Otero in 1934, in which Galician-
Portuguese is combined with Castilian, as can be seen in the last verses:
– Buenos días tengáis, morillo, larga é a túa tardada,
18 sete anos vai para sete que eu por ti visto delgada.
– Otros siete va, señora, que eu por ti no rapo barba.
20 Se lo dices de veras, échate de esa ventana,
te cogeré en los mis brazos y en la lor de la mi capa,
22 y si lo dices de burla, en la punta de mi espada.
– A Babeca, oh, morillo, o en silla o cabala.
24 – Nin teño medo a Babeca nin tampouco a sua armada,
teño medo o illo da eugua que se me perdeu en Granada.
26 – Ese illo, oh, morillo, mi padre le daba cebada.
– Buenos días tengáis, meu xenro, larga i-é i-a túa tardada,
28 máis antes que me lo seas hemos de xoga-la espada. (Requeixo 1996b, 60–61)14
However, in the only version of this ballad collected in Galician-speaking Asturias, the text
hardly includes any Galician linguistic features (D. Catalán 1998, 8).
he romance “Don Manuel y el moro Muza” (Don Manuel and the moor called Muza),
unknown in the Galician archive, is found in Leonese, Cantabrian, and Asturian traditions. In
the only version obtained in Galician-speaking Asturias the autochthonous language can be
seen in these verses, taken from the 26 which compose the poem:
4 – ¡Caballeros de Castilla, salide conmigo al campo,
que vos darei a entender si sois de valor obrados.
6 seis caballeros saliron, todos seis había matado,
y estando en estos encuentros, al bon rey ha desiado.
[…]
12 Miran unos para otros, todos oyeron, callaron,
Si nun fora don Manuel por punto y iel fue nombrado.
14 – Si el rey me presta sus armas y el sou pulido caballo,
Hei traer a súa cabeza o deixar la mía en pago.
[…]
– Dios le guarde a usted, don moro! – Ben venido seas, cristiano!
20 Si quieres lograr tus días vólvete y deja el cabalo. (Suárez 1997, 92)15
honour inside my heart / ‘I don’t want your braid, Felix, Felix, your braid I don’t want, / that my father is
going to France he’ll bring me another as good, / And if he doesn’t bring it to me I won’t have it.
14. Good morning to you, moor, long have you been away, / It’s been nearly seven years I’ve kept myself thin. /
– Its been seven years, lady, that for you I haven’t shaved my beard / – If you say that truthfully throw your-
self out that window, / I will take you in my arms and in the lower of my cloak, / but if you are not serious
it’ll be on the edge of my sword. / – To Babeca, my little moor, on saddle or on horse. / – I am afraid of the
foal of the mare that I lost in Granada. / – To that foal, oh my little moor, my father gives barley. / – Good
morning to you, my son in law, long have you been away, / but before you should be so we must use our
swords.
15. – Knights of Castile, come out with me to the ield / and I will let you know if you are brave. / Six knights
went out, all six killed he, / And while in these encounters, he deied the good King […]. / hey all looked
he Leonese language is barely present in the remaining Asturian versions or in other tradi-
tional pieces from the Asturian ballad archive.
Galician penetrated more strongly in some oral texts from regions outside the Galician
borders than in those within the four Galician provinces. For example, the ballad “La serrana”
(he highlander), a rare song in Galicia with little Galician vocabulary, is found almost entirely
in Galician in Sanabria (Zamora). his could be explained by the closer ties of Galician-speak-
ing Sanabria with Portuguese areas rather than with neighboring Spanish towns; in fact, some
of these towns belonged to Portugal until 1640 (Vázquez Cuesta 1971, 73). his close relationship
with Portugal would account for the presence of songs in the village of Trás-os Montes which
are unknown in present-day Galicia. It also draws our attention to the strong presence of Gali-
cian in the text “La pobreza de la Virgen recién parida” (he poverty of the Virgin who just
gave birth) obtained in the village of Calabor, Sanabria (Cortés Vázquez 1981, 134–36), whereas
in versions within Galicia, the Galician language barely appears in the irst verses of the ballad.
he weaker presence of Galician in the minor genre of religious ballads is, in my opinion, due
to the active role of the church in the linguistic Hispanicization of Galicia from the sixteenth
century to the present day.
With regard to the connection between the Galician tradition and its Portuguese counter-
part, Ana Valenciano stated that one hundred and twelve of the one hundred and sixty eight
ballads found in Galicia are also alive and well in Portugal, having all been collected in the
towns of Bragança, Trás-os-Montes, or neighboring areas (Valenciano 1999, 46). We have al-
ready indicated that it is very possible for “El Conde Alarcos” to have originated in Portugal and
then spread to Galicia. Similar examples include two of the few pieces to be fully expressed in
Galician, “Pérdida de don Beltrán” (Sir Beltran’s loss) and “Floresvento” (Forneiro 2000, 63–64),
along with the Portuguese-like “La muerte del príncipe don Juan” (he death of Prince Juan),
all of which were mainly collected in the province of Ourense. Some versions found close to
the border present Portuguese linguistic elements, as can be seen in two versions which were
obtained by Aníbal Otero in Verín, Ourense (Requeixo 1996b, 68) and Ponteareas, Pontevedra
(Forneiro 2000, 188–89).
What does not seem so clear is whether the Galician tradition spread in the same way to
Portugal, acting as an intermediary between the Castilian original focal point and the Portu-
guese territory. At times of political unity between Spain and Portugal (1580–1640), Spanish
balladry was popular with all the social classes, demonstrated by the many editions of poems,
ballad collections, and, particularly, the broadside ballads distributed by blind people, which
we know were read and printed in Portugal. herefore, the spread of a good deal of the Span-
ish Romancero in Portuguese lands must have been carried out during this period through
contact between Spanish-speaking and Portuguese people without the need for Galician inter-
vention. It is diicult to know the extent of Galician mediation between Castile and Portugal in
terms of Spanish balladry, because in Galicia the songs were primarily passed down in Castilian.
at each other, all heard, all kept quiet, / If it weren’t for Sir Manuel who was named loyal / – If the king
lends me his weapons and his good horse / I will bring him his head or leave mine in return […]. / – God
save you, little moor! – You are welcome, Christian! / If you want to live out your days go back and leave
the horse.
Versions from the Portuguese border do not show enough linguistic signs to denote their Gali-
cian roots. However, it seems that connections exist between the southern part of Galicia and
the Portuguese tradition: “Out of the 36 Galician pieces belonging to this group, only 11 (all
collected in Ourense) have crossed the border; dominating the Portuguese repertoire are those
like ‘La difunta pleiteada’ (he deceased defendant) ‘Celos y honra’ (Jealousy and honor), and
‘La infanticide’ (he infanticide), which show a longer traditional life” (Valenciano 1999, 47).
he fact that the people of Galicia are culturally and linguistically closer to the Portuguese
than those of other Spanish regions has not been enough to raise their standing in Portugal.
he backwardness and marginality of Galicia in modern Spain explain why, starting in the
eighteenth century, people from the two southern provinces emigrated to Portugal (mainly
Lisbon), where they traditionally worked as waiters, water carriers, and errand boys. hus, for
the Portuguese, Galicians held comical and rural connotations, as can be observed in many
literary and popular Portuguese works from the last three centuries. Consequently, it is highly
probable that this characterization extended into the ield of traditional oral culture, as seems
to be indicated in the following version of “Xan Guindán,” a well-known humorous song in
Galicia. his version, collected in Rio de Onor (Bragança) in 1980, combines Galician, Castilian,
and Portuguese elements:
Xan Guindán quer-se casar e não tem uma mulher buscada;
2 foi-lhe pedir em namoro a ilha da tia Joana.
– Boas noites, tia Joana; donde le foi a rapaça?
4 – Foi buscar o vaso p’rà noite, já le parece que tarda.–
Estando en estas razones, entra nena pela porta para dentro.
6 – Boas noites, Xan Guindán, trago-te no pensamento.
– E tu dirás de risa, mas eu digo-to deveras:
8 Já vai um grande pedazo que estoy quentando as canelas.
– Se queres que eu te quiera, hás-de dar-me o que te pida:
10 manda hacerme ua casa que tenha dois mil doblones,
que tire para la calle, ventanas y corredores.
12 dentro do meu corredore hás-de plantar-me ua parra
para cuando me levante não me de o sol en la cara.
14 – Vai-te embora, Xan Guindán, não me estejas a tentare;
inda sou muito crianza não pensei em me casare. (Fontes 1987, 533)16
We have noted here some of the linguistic features of Spanish balladry in northern Portugal and
areas outside the Galician borders, and their links with the ballad heritage of the four Galician
provinces. It would be desirable to initiate a systematic global study of several other perspec-
16. Xan Guindán wanted to get married and he hadn’t found a wife / He went to ask aunt Joana’s daughter to
be his wife. / ‘Good evening, aunt Joana, where’s your daughter gone?’ / ‘She went to get the glass for to-
night but seems to be taking long.’ / While saying these words the girl comes in through the door. / ‘Good
evening, Xan Guindán, I was thinking of you’ / ‘You must be joking but I tell you very seriously / It is been
a year that I am burning coals for you.’ / ‘If you want me to love you you must give me what I ask for: / build
me a house which costs two thousand doubloons / with windows and corridors facing the street. / Inside
the corridor you must plant a vineyard / so that the sun won’t be in my face when I get up. / ‘Go away now,
Xan Guindán, don’t be tempting me / I am still very young I haven’t thought about getting married.
tives, such as the language of the ballads from Galician-speaking areas in Asturias, León, and
Zamora, bilingualism in Catalan balladry, the presence of Castilian in the Portuguese ballad
tradition, the presence of Leonese and Aragonese in their respective territories, and the foreign
elements found in the various traditions of the Sephardic world. Learning about the contact
between languages in the traditional narrative poetry of the Iberian regions seems essential
not only for the study of Spanish balladry as a genre, but also for a more precise account of
the literary and linguistic history of the communities which have passed down this traditional
knowledge over the centuries.
Iberian traditions of international folktale
José Manuel Pedrosa
We may deine a traditional folktale as an anonymous and ictional narration that is transmitted
orally from one person to another and from one generation to another within a community or
between diferent communities.
Traditional folktales difer from legends – the other major genre of traditional narrative –
in several aspects. Folktales have plots with extensive and complex sequences which oten in-
clude motifs and peripeteia, they are ictional and perceived as such by those who participate
in their transmission, and they do not specify place and time in their stories (Once upon a
time…, far, far away…). In contrast, legends usually have shorter plots with fewer motifs, relate
extraordinary events considered possible or real by both storytellers and listeners, and their
plots take place in a known place and at a time considered historical by the community in
which they’re narrated.
he determining factor behind the poetics, plot organization, and sociological function
of traditional folktale is its oral transmission. Considering its production and transmission, a
folktale type may be deined as a form of discourse (or as a basic unit of plot construction) that
holds a potential for a variety of performances, as many as the number of versions that may
be produced and collected, or as the number of informants and individual performances that
may be involved in the process. he analysis and study of a traditional folktale is extremely
complicated due to this discursive dynamism and to the fact that we can never deine absolute
prototypes nor reach a ixed, complete, and deinitive text, for even written and audiovisual re-
cordings are merely versions of a tale. Nevertheless, these aspects also enhance folktales’ literary,
sociological, anthropological, and psychological perspectives of analysis.
Applying the methods of comparative literature to the study of traditional folktales is es-
pecially useful if we consider their migratory nature, as well as their unpredictable process
of transmission and their inexhaustible textual vitality. Just as occurs with traditional songs,
romances, legends, proverbs, and riddles, it is diicult and rare to ind isolated versions of a
folktale type in one sole cultural tradition or to ind them arbitrarily located in distant areas.
Most of the time it is possible to ind more than one version of a folktale type within the same
geographical, linguistic, and cultural area; usually more versions of the same type can be docu-
mented in contiguous or proximate traditions.
Folktale catalogues allow the reconstruction and tracking of related families of tales. heir
location, branches, and type variants are sometimes organized in a homogeneous, predictable
way, which allows us to visualize a certain pattern projected on a speciic geography of more
or less ixed boundaries. hat is why it can be said that in the European tradition of storytell-
ing there are certain types and variants of tales which are clearly diferent from – yet share
certain aspects with – the Chinese, Indian, and Sub-Saharan traditions. It is also easy to detect
that some folktale types, with speciic characteristics, have been more frequently documented
either in Eastern or Western Europe. Moreover, within the Iberian tradition there are tales that
are typical of a linguistic and folkloric area or tales that show characteristics speciic to each
sub-tradition.
554 José Manuel Pedrosa
he methods of comparative literature ofer, without a doubt, the most appropriate and
efective approach for the study of the families and branches of folktale plots. hey are also
useful for reconstructing the pattern of the textual evolution of these plots over time, as well as
for distinguishing their literary relations and links with other local or international traditions.
he study of the Iberian folktale tradition must take into account the history and progress
of the study of international folktales. During the nineteenth century and the irst decades of
the twentieth century, linguists, mythologists, and anthropologists (from the Grimm brothers
to James George Frazer) were the ones who made the greatest efort in applying comparative
analysis to the study of tales, most of them with an evolutionist perspective. However, it was not
until the beginning of the twentieth century when literary critics – with methods based on a
textual approach and plot analysis – included the study of folktales in the paradigm of compara-
tive literature and not only in that of anthropology or, in recent times,cultural studies.
Between 1913 and 1932, Johannes Bolte and Georg Polívka worked on the development of
a monumental treatise on ancient and modern parallelisms, both European and non-Europe-
an, of the Grimm brothers’ tales. In the same years, the so called Historic-Geographic School,
mainly represented by the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne and the American Stith hompson,
set the foundation for the monumental and essential catalogue he Types of the Folktale, the
latest version of which was revised and extended by the German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther and
published in 2004. Also in that period the renowned Morphology of the Folktale (1928) and he
Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale (1946) by Vladimir Propp were published for the irst time.
However, the theories developed by Propp in these studies are in less use today than the Aarne-
hompson-Uther catalogue.
At a later date, during the 1960s and 1970s, the works of various French critics such as Lévi-
Strauss, Barthes, Greimas, Bremond, or Durand attempted to describe the “logic” of mythical
and folktale discourses based on theories ranging from anthropologic comparative literature to
philosophic abstraction.
In the Iberian Peninsula, almost none of these ambitious theoretical quests have taken
place. As a result, the Hispanic-Portuguese cultural tradition is characterized both by the pro-
fusion and quality of its documented tales (possibly the richest and most interesting repertoire
collected in Europe), and by the underdevelopment of its classiication and study, which have
always been out of date and based on models and methods previously developed in other coun-
tries (especially by Anglo-Saxon scholars).
he reference model for Iberian scholars is and has undoubtedly always been the great
catalogue begun by Aarne, continued by hompson, and extended by Uther. he three major
studies on the Iberian traditional folktale that have been published up to date are three cata-
logues that closely follow this model. he irst is Catálogo tipológico del cuento folklórico español
(Typological Catalogue of Spanish Folktale) by Julio Camarena and Maxime Chevalier, the irst
four volumes of which were published between 1995 and 2003 (Julio Camarena delivered the
ith volume for publishing just before his death in 2004, while the data for the sixth and last
volume is available only on manuscript cards). he second catalogue is Index of Portuguese Folk-
tales by Isabel Cardigos; its irst volume is currently being published, while the second and third
volumes will be published between 2005 and 2007. he third is Índex tipològic de la rondalla
catalana (Typological Index of Catalan Folktales) by Carme Oriol and Josep Maria Pujol (2003).
Some older catalogues are currently out of date and no longer in use. Such is the case of the
catalogues of Spanish tales by Boggs (1930), of medieval tales by Keller (1949), of Spanish tales
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Childers, and of Mexican tales by Robe (1973), all
of which are also based on the model proposed by Antti Aarnes’ catalogue.
Besides the three major catalogues mentioned, many important collections of storytelling
ethno-texts of the Iberian Peninsula have been written and published. he monumental col-
lections of Aurelio M. Espinosa (both father and son: 1946–47 and 1987–88 respectively) have
become classics not only because of the amount of ethno-texts they gather, but also due to the
sharp comparativist comments they include. here are other collections of great importance
such as the Majorcan texts of Antoni Mª Alcover (1996–98), the Catalan texts gathered by Joan
Amades (1950), the Basque texts by Resurrección Mª de Azkue (1947) and José Miguel de Ba-
randiarán (1973), and the Portuguese texts gathered by Adolpho Coelho (1879), Teophilo Braga
(1914–15), F. Xavier d’Athaide Oliveira (1900–1905), José Leite de Vasconcellos (1964–66), and
by Alda da Silva Soromenho and Paulo Caratão (1984–86).
here are some other recently gathered collections which stand out for the quality and
quantity of their texts as well as for their updated methods of study, for example the collections
of tales from the provinces of Ciudad Real and León edited by Julio Camarena (1984 and 1991),
the collection from Seville by José Luis Agúndez (1999), that of Burgos by Elías Rubio, José
Manuel Pedrosa, and César Palacios (2002), the Galician collection by Camiño Noia Campos
(2002), that of Galician erotic tales by Antonio Reigosa, Xoán R. Cuba, and Xosé Miranda
(2001) among others, and the Asturian tales tracked back to the Golden Age of Spanish litera-
ture by Jesús Suárez López (1998).
Many other ethno-text collections have been gathered and published in other parts of the
Iberian Peninsula, as well as in other Spanish and Portuguese traditions, for example in Latin
America, Brazil, and the Sephardic communities of Morocco and the Middle East. heir quality
is uneven depending on the methods used for registering texts, publishing requirements, and
the scientiic or non-scientiic purposes of the collections. A detailed bibliography of these
works may be found in the Typological Catalogue by Julio Camarena and Maxime Chevalier
(1995–2003).
here are also other useful reference studies and editions of Iberian medieval tales by
María Jesús Lacarra (1999) and Harriet Goldberg (1998), of tales from the Golden Age of Span-
ish literature by Maxime Chevalier (1983, 1999), José Fradejas Lebrero (1985), and José Manuel
Pedrosa (2004a), and of tales of the nineteenth century by Montserrat Amores (1997).
How can we describe the life and transmission of a traditional folktale in the Iberian Pen-
insula? What are the characteristics it acquires in each cultural area and what are the relations
amongst them? here are many examples we could analyze due to the sheer number and qual-
ity of the folktale types registered in the entire Peninsula. Each tale included in the Catálogo
tipológico del cuento folklórico español by Camarena and Chevalier is followed by an impressive
set of notes in which we may ind information about its variants in the Castilian, Catalan, Gali-
cian, and Basque linguistic areas, as well as in the Latin American, Portuguese, and Judeo-
Spanish traditions. We can also ind detailed information about the literary versions that Ibe-
rian authors have written of each tale. Tracking a tale in this catalogue is the most reliable way
of understanding the ties among the Iberian folktale traditions and their distinctive features.
To exemplify this method, I shall track the historic evolution and geographical dissemina-
tion of tale number 1419H in the Aarne-hompson-Uther catalogue, which they referred to
as “Woman Warns Lover of Husband by Singing Song.” he irst registered source of this tale
is the text that Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in Decameron VII:1, which he probably took from a
former oral tradition, and which is entitled “Gianni Lotteringhi heareth knock at his door by
night and awakeneth his wife, who giveth him to believe that it is a phantom; whereupon they
go to exorcise it with a certain orison and the knocking ceaseth” (Boccaccio 2003, 323). We may
summarize this tale as follows:
Gianni Lotteringhi was a rich and dumb Florentine merchant who had a wife, beautiful and
shrewd, who also had a lover. While the husband remained in the city, the woman went to a
country house where she met with her lover, certain that her husband rarely abandoned the
city. he adulterous woman and her lover had agreed on a way to know if it was safe to meet: if
the donkey skull that was on a stick looked to one side or the other, would mean whether the
husband was or was not in the house.
One day the husband arrived unexpectedly, and the wife, who already had dinner on the
table in the garden, didn’t have time to warn her lover. As soon as the married couple went to
bed, the lover knocked on the door. he woman pretended to be scared and claimed that the
one who knocked was a phantom that other nights had come to frighten her. herefore, she
started to say aloud some kind of spell that worked as a code to warn her lover of the danger.
He understood the warning, enjoyed dinner by himself, and came back some another day.
he traditional folktale which was the source for Boccaccio’s literary version during the Ital-
ian Middle Ages has also been registered in many other traditions around the world, as shown
by Aarne-hompson-Uther’s catalogue. Yet it seems that the traditional life of this tale has
been particularly intense in the Iberian Peninsula and its linguistic and cultural areas (in
Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Basque, and Catalan). here’s an overwhelming interest in
some of the versions registered in these areas due to their similarity to Bocaccio’s version,
such as the following Catalan tale documented in the remote town of Baells (Huesca) in the
late twentieth century:
Un lloc n’hi havia un mossen i s’estimava una senyora i cada dia quan marxava l’home, que era
viatjant i marxava de viatge, pués lo capellà si veu que hi anava, allí. I pa sabre la cosa li va dir:
– Com ho sabrem?
Diu:
– Pués, mira, a la ventana posarem un os. Si no trobes l’os, torna-te’n.
Si estava l’home, lo sacava, i sinó el dixava. I hie va anar una nit que hi estava l’os. Com no es
va acordar aquella dona de sacâ’l, pués lo capellà va puiar. I se sintiva un soroll per casa, un
soroll per casa. I:
– Qué sirà això?
– Ai, vols que li diga una oració, jo? Això són els mals esprits que tornen – diu –. Vo(l)s que diga
una oració, jo? – li va dir la dona.
Diu:
– Més val, que sinó, no mos adormirem avui.
I diu:
– Ánima que aneu perduda,
torneu-se’n al bon repós,
que ha vengut lo meu marit

i no hai pensat de treure l’os.
I lo capellà se’n va entornar.1
Many versions of this folktale type have been collected among the diferent oral traditions in
the Iberian Peninsula, mainly in the form of short stories and songs. In most of them the adul-
terous woman is bringing up an unweaned child, therefore the song with which she warns her
lover turns out to be an ironic lullaby. he following Galician tale, collected in the province of
Pontevedra in 1999, is an example of the short story versions of this type:
Habíache nun lughar, así nunha aldeíña, unha rapasa que se chamaba Carmiña que era moi
festeira. Non había donde botaran un foghete que ela non estuvera. Pero cheghou un día un
moso que era mariñeiro, enamorouse dela, e díxolle:
– Bueno, ¿casámonos?
E díxolle Carmiña:
– ¡Casamos!
Pero di que o que boas mañas ten, ou tarde ou nunca hase topar coa verdá, xa. E ela, mentras
el iba para o mar, pois buscaba salida como podía. Xa me entendes, ¿non? Resulta que xa tiñan
un meniño, pero ela seghíache nas andadas. E cando o home marchaba para o mar, viñan os
compañeiros pa xunta ela á casa.
Pero un día, o home enfermou e non puido ir ó mar. E colle e di ela: “¡Ai, Dios mío! Dentro de
pouco vén o outro, pétame na porta e quere entrar e o meu home está na cama, ¿como fagho?”
E como che era moi inxeniosa, colle un banquiño, sentouse nun banco. Tamén lle chamaban
tallo, que eran uns banquiños que tiñan un oco no medio, así baixiños, e sentábanse, que eran
os que se sentaban para darlle de mamar ás meniñas. Eu inda me acordo que na casa da miña
abuela había un e eu tiña dous anos e aínda mamaba. E disíalle eu, íba a buscar e disíalle eu:
“Abuela, dame o tallo,” que a miña nai me daba a teta. Acórdome inda cando me quitaron a teta.
E resulta que ela sentouse, dixo que lle iba a dar de mamar ó meniño e sentouse porque antes
nas habitasións pois había unha saliña, que era todo o que había, e unha cosiniña e namais, e
sentábase. Conforme se senta, cando o sinte. E ela: “Ahora, ¿cando me libro eu desto?”
Colle o meniño como aquel que ela que estaba acunando o meniño, e pónselle a cantar:
– Home de fóra, pisa na lama
que está o pai na cama.
Home de fóra, pisa pouquiño
que está o pai do miniño maliño.
Pero sintía ighual ó outro andar e disía ela: “¿E como fagho?” Empesa:
– Ou ti non me entendes,
ou eu non me explico
1. In a certain place there was a priest who loved a woman. Every morning when her husband went away (for
he was a merchant and traveled), the priest went to see her. And to arrange the matter he asked: – How shall
we know? She answered: – Well, we’ll place a bone in this window; if you don’t ind it go away. When the
husband was in the house she hid the bone; if he wasn’t there she placed it outside. One night the woman
forgot to hide the bone, so the priest saw it in the window and knocked on the door, and the sound was
heard in the house, the sound in the house. he husband asked: – What may that be? – Oh! Do you want
me to say a prayer? – answered the woman– , hose are the evil spirits that return. Do you want me to say
a prayer? hen the husband said: – You better do so, otherwise we won’t sleep tonight. She said: – You soul
that are lost / go back and rest / for my husband is home / and I forgot the bone. / So the priest went away.
que che dou a volta ó pai do meniño.

O run run esta noite non.
E non sedes parvo e comprendedes,
hoxe marchades, mañán volveredes.
O run run esta noite non.
E así Carmiña solusionou o seu problema. (Noia Campos 2002, 315–316)2
he versions of this tale in song and those in which the singing episode is the structural core of
the tale captured Federico García Lorca’s attention. In a very famous lecture on Spanish nannies
he made very interesting comments about the Peninsular spread of this tale and even collected
some of its versions. As an example of a comparativist exercise we quote some paragraphs from
García Lorca’s lecture:
We still have to comment on an extraordinary kind of song of which there are examples in
Asturias, Salamanca, Burgos, and Leon. his lullaby is not limited to a particular region, but
extends throughout the northern and central regions of the Peninsula. It’s the lullaby that the
adulterous woman pretends to be singing to her child, and with which she warns her lover.
It has a mysterious and ironic double meaning that always surprises those who hear it. he
mother frightens her child by telling him there’s a man at the door who must not come in. he
father is in the house so he can´t come in. he version from Asturias reads:
El que está en la puerta
que non entre agora,
que está el padre en casa
del neñu que llora.
Ea, mi neñín, agora non,
ea, mi neñín, que está el papón.
2. Once there was a place, in a small village, a very merry girl named Carmiña. here wasn’t a party with
ireworks that she didn’t attend. But one day came a young sailor who fell in love with her and asked
her: – Well, shall we marry? And Carmiña answered: – Let’s get married! But it is said that those who are
skilled shall meet the truth either late or never. And she, while he went sailing, did what she could to do
what she wanted. You get me, don’t you? So, they already had a child, but she kept doing this, and when
the man went sailing her companions came to her house to meet with her. One day her husband was sick
and couldn’t go sailing. So she thought: “Oh my God! Soon my companion will come: he will knock on the
door and will want to come in. My husband is in bed, ¿what should I do? But she was very clever, so she
took a small bench and sat on it. here were these very small benches that had a hole in the middle; women
sat on them to breastfeed their children. I still remember there was one in my grandmother’s house, I was
two and they still breastfed me. And I said, “Grandma, give me the bench, because my mother still breast-
fed me. I still remember when they weaned me. So, the woman sat down and said she was going to feed
the baby, because in those times, in the houses there were only a living room and a small kitchen, nothing
else. And when she sat down, she heard her companion and thought: “How will I get out of this? She took
the baby as if she were cradling him and started singing: – Outsider: watch your step, / the father of my
child is in bed. / Outsider: stand still, / the father of my child is ill. / Till she heard him walking outside. She
thought: “What can I do? and then said: / You either don’t understand me, / or I don’t make myself clear, /
that the father of my child is here. / here will be no ‘run run’ tonight, / don’t be a fool and understand, /
today you’ll go; tomorrow you’ll come back. / here will be no ‘run run’ tonight. And in this way Carmiña
solved her problem.
El que está en la puerta

que vuelva mañana,
que el padre del neñu
está en la montaña.
Ea, mi neñín, agora non,
ea, mi neñín, que está el papón.3
he adulterous song from Alba de Tormes is more lyrical and subtle than the Asturian one:
Palomita blanca
que andas a deshora,
el padre está en casa
del niño que llora.
Palomita negra
de los vuelos blancos,
está el padre en casa
del niño que canto.4
he variant from Burgos –Salas de los Infantes– is the most explicit of all:
Qué majo que eres,
qué mal que lo entiendes,
que está el padre en casa
y el niño no duerme.
Al run run, run run del alma,
¡que te vayas tú!” (García Lorca 1996, 128–30)5
Some other versions of this plot and tale have been registered in the Portuguese-Brazilian tradi-
tion, both as songs and short stories. hey seem to be closely related to those in Spanish and
Galician. José Leite de Vasconcellos posited that the versions sung in Portugal were in fact
Spanish lullabies, suggesting that they had come directly from Spain (Vasconcellos 1938, 851,
858, 910).
he following is a Portuguese version registered as a song in the region of Trás-os Montes;
it was recorded by Michel Giacometti and Anne Caufriez, who in 1960 included it in a cata-
logue. his extract is from Ana Paula Guimarães’ edition (2000), which is a meticulous study of
this song in the Portuguese tradition. In the quotation I have omitted the chorus between the
stanzas that reads: “Oh! ró, ró! / Oh! ró, ró! / Q’agora, nó!… / Oh! ró, ró! / Oh! ro, ró! Q’agora,
nó!” Some of its dialectal particularities seem to reveal Spanish inluences:
3. You at the door / don’t come in now, / that of the crying baby / for the father is home. // Oh my child, not
now! / Oh my child, daddy is home! // You at the door / come back tomorrow / for the father’s child / to
the mountain will go. // Oh my child, not now! / Oh my child, daddy is home!
4. White little pigeon / that late at night lies, / at home is the father / of the baby that cries. // Black little
pigeon / of white feathered wings / at home is the father / of the child whom I sing.
5. How handsome you are / yet of little understanding, / for the father is home / and the child is not sleeping.
/ To the ‘run run’, ‘run run’ of the soul, / you should go.
Cabeça de burro,
bocê nu m’antende?…
Al pai del nino
na cama se ‘stende…
Bocê nu m’antende?…
Cabeça de burro,
al pai del nino
ouserba tudo…
Se tu quíêres I yöu quíêro,
todo se há-de arranjar(i),
sou mulhíêr suberciente
para casa gobernar(i).
Yöu manhana,
bou pal molino;
se me quíês algo,
sal-m’ al camino!…
Anda daí, ben-te comigo,
garra la capa i bamos…
El camino yé de todos,
la capa yé de nós ambos…
Canta i galho, yé de dié,
reloijo dels namorados!…
Acorda tu miu amor(i)
nu mos áche descuidados.6
A documented ballad from the Basque tradition seems to be linked to the traditional folktale
type that we’re analyzing, particularly to its sung lyric branch. What stands out in these versions
is that the adulterous woman who cradles the baby refers to him as the son of her lover instead
of her husband:
Untzi bi agertu zirian
santa Manterion parian,
nere anajia etorriko da
batian edo bestian.
–Nere anajia, ze barri dezu
Motriku erri onian?
–Berriak onak, berriak txarrak
Ana Juanitan gaiñian.
6. Donkey head, / don’t you understand me? / he father of my child / on the bed lies. / Don’t you understand
me? / Donkey head, / the father of my child / watches everything. / If you want to and I want to / every-
thing will work out right, / for I am such a lady / as to keep my house all right. / Tomorrow / I shall go to
the mill; / If you love me well / on the road ind me you will. / Go away now, come with me, / pick up your
cape and go… / the road has no owner / your cape belongs to both of us. // he rooster sings, it’s already
dawn, / this is the clock of lovers… / Remember this, my love, / we shouldn’t be caught careless.
Ana Juanita ezkondutzen da

amaren da aitaren bozian,
amaren da aitan bozian eta
bere desborondatian.
Despedidako gabien ere
txorruetara giñian,
urragorrizko yoyia bere
imiñi notsan bularrian.
Bateorrek agur, bestiorrek agur,
alan despedidu giñian,
eguna b’izan seiñaladua:
santa Luzia gabian.
– Galai gaztia, neiku al dezu
gab’onetako koplarik?
Nere senarra daukat entzuten
kuartoko bentanillatik.
Zure semia besuan daukat,
senarra aldamenian,
orain tertzio txarra du eta
erdu tertzio onian. (A. Zavala 1998, 289–290)7
hese extracts are no more than a sample of an entire phenomenon; nevertheless, we may say
that the diferent linguistic and cultural areas of the Iberian Peninsula possess a repertoire of
similar traditional folktales rooted in a shared group of tale types. his repertoire presents a
very large number of versions, as well as ties and relations with the repertoires of its neighbor-
ing cultural traditions, such as the, the North African, and the Latin American, and even with
traditional folktales from the rest of the world.
Even though the methods used for its recollection and study haven’t always been the most
appropriate, the traditional folktale repertoire of the Iberian Peninsula has stood out for its pro-
fusion and quality, at least until the last decades of the twentieth century, when its decadence
was stressed by the process of globalization. In any case, applying the methods of comparative
literature makes it possible to contrast the diferent versions of folktale types that have been
documented in Peninsular cultural areas of dissimilar prominence. Moreover, these methods
allow us to distinguish the innovations and particularities of those versions as well as to ind
the links and similarities among the frequently overlapping repertoires of folktales that exist or
existed in the Iberian Peninsula.
7. Two ships arrived by Santamanterio. / My brother shall come in one or the other. / My brother: what news
do you have from the noble town of Motriko? / Good news, bad news, from Ana Juanita. / Ana Juanita is
getting married / by command of her father and her mother, / by command of her father and her mother,
/ yet against her own will. / We even met the night before I let / and I placed a golden jewel on her neck.
/ I said ‘agur’, she said ‘agur’, / and in this way we said goodbye. / Even the day was signiicant: / the night
of Saint Lucy. / Young man, those are enough verses for tonight. / My husband is listening from the little
window that is in the room. / I’m cradling your baby and my husband is next to me. / his is a bad time,
come back another day.
Literature and new forms of orality
Invisible realities
Luis Díaz G. Viana
Folklore and popular culture at present
he coinage of the term folklore in the nineteenth century and the intensity with which it began
to be practiced at the time respond to very speciic circumstances: the historical moment of the
“discovery of the People” by some European elitists (Burke 1981, 4–22). Folklore thus constitutes
the historically documentable beginning of the perception of popular culture, and represents
the expression of a new sensitivity – almost an aesthetic change of direction – in its approach.
his is because, rather than a discovery of the People, what took place was a rediscovery, seen
from a benevolent and idealized point of view. At any rate, popular culture had already existed
– and it still does. he expression “popular culture,” which arose later and is a more inclusive,
integrative term than folklore, generally comprehends everything let outside the “dominant” or
“hegemonic” culture; in other words, outside culture in the most oicial sense of the word. his
does not mean that – as Burke also pointed out – the elitists were not familiar with or didn’t
use this kind of neglected culture. To talk about popular culture is, fundamentally, to talk about
and deal with how culture itself works, because the “culture of the educated,” considered to be
traditional, and the culture known as “mass culture” interrelate with and interinluence each
other in the laboratory of the popular.
In the original context of discovery and appreciation of the popular, orality was usually as-
sociated with folklore, and this continues to occur. Perhaps this is because folklore, in its most
traditional and “traditionalist” sense, is still oten characterized in Europe – and particularly
in Spain – by features, or “marks,” denoting its romantic origin, such as orality, ruralism, and
ancient material. However, not all orality is necessarily folklore (for example, that of the theater,
academic lectures, or public readings of an educated work), nor is folklore always oral. In fact,
folklore and other forms of popular literature have oten been transmitted both orally and in
handwritten or published form. his was the case of the so-called Cordel or Chapbook Litera-
ture, which was frequently disseminated orally, but was mainly conserved on printed sheets
and handwritten copies hanging from cords in street markets. his fact shatters many stereo-
types about what “literature of the People” truly is and, on the other hand, helps to show how
European culture has been created and disseminated for centuries, facing pressure from both
conservative and subversive positions (L. Díaz 2000, 14–38).
Antonio Gramsci pointed out that there were two main forms of folklore: one, the survivor
of past knowledge, more conservative and we could even say reactionary, and a second that
would produce answers for the present, with an innovative, oten subversive character.
Likewise, it is necessary to distinguish between diferent strata in this sphere (popular): fos-
silized, which relect conditions of past life and are therefore – oten – conservative and reac-
tionary, and others that are a series of innovations, creative and progressive, spontaneously
Literature and new forms of orality 563
determined by forms and conditions of developing life, and are in contradiction to or simply
discrepant with the morals of the governing strata. (Gramsci 1988, 490)
It is also important to point out that both types of folklore frequently coincide and inluence
each other. he irst type ofers content and formulas from the past in a historical context that
no longer exists, that in which they were irst created. his is the folklore oten identiied with
“traditional-rural culture,” and which we will refer to as substrate-folklore. he second type takes
advantage of formulas from the past in order to innovate and inluence contemporary imagina-
tion. his is the folklore identiied with popular culture in general, and which we will call in-
novation-folklore following Gramsci’s example. he irst type, although sometimes modernized,
deals with times gone by and frequently with remote characters and uses. he second mainly
deals with current happenings. We can also distinguish a third type of folklore in the cur-
rent panorama, that which refashions substrate-folklore, and which we will refer to as remade-
folklore. his folklore oten overshadows innovation-folklore, which ceases to be gathered and
in many cases becomes invisible. For example, in Spanish folklore collections there is a lack of
innovative children’s and juvenile folklore. hese collections usually include only century-old
versions of songs. he scant data recorded in these songbooks reveals that the informants are
frequently between seventy and ninety years old. It is obvious that we are dealing with children’s
songs that are remembered by individuals who were children many decades earlier.
Visibility of folklorism and invisibility of folklore
By contrast, remade-folklore is highly visible, to the point that the other types are currently
eclipsed by it. Remade-folklore, although vindicating and reairming the marks of orality, rural-
ism, and antiquity of the pure folklore mentioned above, takes on the form of merchandise and
the value of a consumer product, accommodating itself to sales demand. Folklorism contributes
to the circulation of remade-folklore on the global market with rather contradictory arguments,
supposedly in its defense. One of these is that folklore needs to be rescued and defended from
the pressures of mass communication and technological innovations. However, the associations,
groups, and centers that become involved in this “defense” oten resort to these very same com-
munication methods and technology in order to gain publicity and funds for their mediation and
propaganda activities. hese centers create websites and make constant use of the media they so
frequently slander. Another contradictory argument used is the supposed local and identiiable
character they ascribe to remade-folklore, when in reality it is decontextualized and forced to
compete in the global market. Finally, it also seems paradoxical that the defenders of such re-
invented folklore, sometimes called “the custodians of tradition” (L. Díaz 1999, 79–80), present
their interest as a type of faith which they hold sacred and wholeheartedly believe in, although
they obsessively seek scientiic acknowledgement for their collections and popularization articles.
In this work we deal with folklore in an updated form, closer to the second type Gramsci
mentioned than to the irst. In fact, we are going to try to incorporate the three types of folk-
lore mentioned above: folklore as substrate, as innovation, and as remade. And it should be
noted that the term remade is not necessarily meant derogatorily, but rather as its etymology
suggests: “remake.”
564 Luis Díaz G. Viana
Gramsci’s distinction between types of folklore basically implies distinct ways of under-
standing it. hese diferent understandings of folklore, besides weakening or even discrediting
the term since its reinvention, have given rise to other tentative classiications and taxonomies
that irst identiied it with “traditional culture” and then with “ethnographic patrimony” and
“popular culture,” although to a lesser extent (V. Prat 1999, 87–109). At any rate, it seems that if
folklore is understood as a product – the viewpoint taken by collectors of the traditional and
many of its mediators – it must be tied to the past. If we understand it as the capacity for artistic
communication of “the People” (of all of us), then it happens in the present, at any given mo-
ment, and does not necessarily have to be oral and rural.
Our approach to folklore thus lies in the line of straightforward deinitions (lacking the
“marks” or characteristics with which it was adorned in the past), such as “artistic communi-
cation at the heart of small groups” (Ben-Amos 2000, 50). Likewise, we could deine it as the
“creative code” that makes popular culture possible (L. Díaz 1982, 147–55). In other words, folk-
lore is the capacity of creating and transmitting artistic aspects of individuals’ culture, of “the
People’s” culture. he question is: who are these people? Are they only old peasants? No, the
answer is “we are,” which is the same reply Alan Dundes made to the question “Who are the
folk?” (Dundes 1977, 17–35).
To a certain extent, those selling remade-folklore act as mediators between the urban
and rural worlds. Nowadays, to be sold successfully, a product should appear to be even more
unique than it actually is. he marks of “ancient folklore” now serve precisely to make what is
claimed as characteristic seem exotic. his constitutes another of the great paradoxes of folklor-
ism, as I have pointed out elsewhere (L. Díaz 1985, 53–55). his should not surprise us; ater all,
folklorism is not only a naïve interest in folklore but a reconstruction of identity and a manipu-
lation of tradition as well (1989, 98–111). Or, as Josep Martí indicated, it is “the experience of an
experience” that is reproduced in a diferent temporal-spatial context from that in which it was
habitual (J. Martí 1990, 320). Moreover, folklorism constitutes the version of a recovered iden-
tity to which an exotic quality is added; this oten leads to invention and evident falsiications.
For this reason Dorson called it fakelore or “false folklore” (Dorson 1969, 56–64). However,
folklorism is not reduced simply to this. If we analyze the marks that folklorism borrows from
the folklore it attempts to remake, we ind that these marks also serve to characterize otherness.
Firstly, the otherness of space, because folklore recognized as such is rural, while the interest
it arouses and its potential consumers are generally found in urban areas. Secondly, temporal
otherness, as this folklore is supposed to come from another time period (thus, antiquity is
required for it to be of interest). Lastly, the otherness of the method of transmission, an oral
tradition with no connection to the urban, technical, postmodern world we live in.
Folklorism expressed through remade-folklore serves to set the stage for a “representation”
of the people. his makes it an apt strategy for controlling, perhaps not the people themselves
directly, but a pseudo-romantic, reactionary idea of them, that of the spectacular, contemptible
puppet or fantoccini of the popular. For this to work, the people must be far removed, at the
greatest possible distance. hat is why remade-folklore meticulously reconstructs all the classes
of otherness mentioned above. Nevertheless, nothing in them is what it seems. Let us attempt
to ind out why.
Folklore of present-day youngsters: Inscriptions and phantom-poetry
As we have already mentioned, the folklore being created today is oten completely overlooked,
children’s and juvenile folklore being a prime example. Folklorists insist on collecting children’s
songs from 80-year-old “children,” while stating that today’s children and youngsters don’t sing
or invent anything that could be considered folklore. his is just not true – as demonstrated
in some of my published collections of what children sang only a few years ago. he Spanish
generations of the last few decades were not lacking in folklore; quite the contrary. hey created
and transmitted a folklore which mainly consisted of parodies of fashionable songs, including
parodic lyrics to the Spanish national anthem which made reference to the deceased dictator
Franco (L. Díaz 1997b, 40). Later surveys about urban legends among iteen to seventeen-year-
olds carried out in Catalonia by Pujol and his collaborators (Pujol 2002, 65) revealed the falsity
of this belief that folklore had been exiled from the tastes of modern youth. he problem did
not lie with children and young people, but among folklorists, who could not encounter the
“old traditional folklore” they were looking for in that group. In fact, although it may not be pre-
cise to insist that contemporary legends constitute the favorite genre at the end of the twentieth
century (Fine 1992, 1), it is no exaggeration to recognize that this genre is especially popular
among adolescents.
We had not then discovered the folklore that little or nothing is known about; indeed, even
children’s teachers are not acquainted with it, in spite of having it right in front of their eyes.
he reason is that most of the current “juvenile poetry” in Spain is transmitted in written form,
rather than orally, in the inscriptions that youngsters write in their friends’ school notebooks.
he longevity of this traditional tendency makes it clear that popular circulation is not only
“horizontal,” among same-age friends, but also occurs between diferent age groups, in a “verti-
cal,” or transgenerational, way (Gómez Cabia and Heredero Salinero 2001, 29–31). What is quite
surprising is that many of these examples seem to draw on a much older tradition. In fact, the
inscriptions are suspiciously similar to those which have been collected in many popular song-
books since remote times. his should not seem strange to us, as this continuity through time of
knowledge is exactly what characterizes folklore. However, the discreet and almost clandestine
character of the transmission of this heritage is curious. It is also striking that recent methods
of circulation use print instead of speech, in spite of a clear oral origin. Even more signiicant is
the fact that the informants of the few collections of this material airm they have found them
in many places and by various means:
In addition, this neo-orality to which we refer leaves in passing another interesting signal about
the way adolescent poetry is transmitted. In the survey we constantly refer to, our sources say
that they discovered the inscriptions though various means. Some learned about them from
their older siblings, some confess they had read them written on restroom walls or doors, while
others remember having discovered them through some older adolescent, spending the sum-
mer in their village, who read them to the younger ones. Almost all the sources report that these
were read publicly, grouped in circles, at school or in the streets, everywhere and at any time.
(Gómez Cabia and Heredero Salinero 2001, 29)
In efect, such inscriptions are found in many places and in diferent versions. he legends
spread on the Internet are folklore as well, the folklore many folklorists don’t see or would
rather not see. In recent times the signed inscriptions that students write in their schoolmates’
notebooks seem to be more common among girls than boys. When boys do participate, they
almost always use a jesting tone that can reach mockery. Sandra Laguna, an adolescent who was
fourteen at the time she helped me with my modest “collection,” managed to bring together a
fair number of inscriptions from boys and girls in Valladolid in 2003.
We can easily ind connections with the oldest popular poetry, especially when the subject
matter is love, one of the most popular inscription themes, or at least, with that considered
“traditional”:
Grabé tu nombre en un árbol
y sin querer yo te amé,
clavé los ojos al cielo
y pensando en ti, lloré.1
Other examples of the same subject matter having a “traditional” style are frankly humorous:
Cuando pasé por tu casa,
me tiraste una lor,
pero la próxima vez
sin maceta por favor.2
here are also others that put “lovesickness” into the proper perspective:
Por un chico no llores,
por un chico no mates,
porque este año están
al precio de los tomates.3
Many inscriptions make reference to the academic world, with elements such as school and
teachers, or they are parodies of school subjects like Physics, Math, and Literature:
Si los cerdos volasen,
la sala de profesores sería un aeropuerto.4
TEOREMA DE TALES:
Prohibido joder en los portales.5
TEOREMA DE CUPIDO:
Todo cuerpo sumergido en el amor
experimenta un atontamiento
directamente proporcional
1. I carved your name on a tree / and fell in love without meaning to, / I ixed my eyes on the heavens / and
thinking about you, I cried.
2. When I passed by your house, / you threw me a lower, / but the next time you do, / do it without the
lowerpot, please.
3. Don’t cry over a boy, / don’t kill over a boy, / because this year they’re available / at the price of tomatoes.
4. If pigs could ly, / the Faculty Room would be an airport.
5. THALES’S THEOREM: Screwing is forbidden at the gates. [he two lines rhyme in the original.]
al amor que se siente

por el chico al que se quiere.6
Ya lo dijo Cervantes:
Hoy se jode más que antes.7
New folklore transmission methods: Popular resistance in times of globalization
hese popular expressions, hidden until recently, prove that the supposed collectors of chil-
dren’s folklore have ignored the creation of the folklore that is right before them. However,
it is true that children’s folklore does have a certain taste for discretion; it becomes invisible,
ubiquitous, and hides from spotlights and labels. his is in keeping with the nature of folklore,
which, besides being anonymous, is multiple in space and time. In the face of translocalization
of information and knowledge, new folk have transcended physical limits to communicate in
virtual space. hey respond to the sweeping forces of globalization with its own weapons (L.
Díaz 2003b, 129–33). Folklore, like folklorism, currently uses new technologies, but not to ask
for funding or create a webpage proclaiming its intermediary achievements. Rather, technol-
ogy is used to create folklore. Virtual reality means that materials that circulated orally are now
propagated at great speed over the Internet. An example is the case of urban legends: some of
the urban legend collections made in Spain credit the Internet as their source (Ortí and Sam-
pere 2000; Pujol 2002), although most generally ignore it.
he folklore on the Internet frequently takes on the form of parody or rumor; it deals with
current events such as Bin Laden, the Prestige oil spill, and the war in Iraq. he Internet now
boasts a complete repertoire of the diferent types of folklore we mentioned at the beginning of
this chapter, which all appear in this emerging netlore of the “telectronic age” (Dorst 1990, 179–
90). hus, there are “traditional” legends grouped by regions and countries, remade legends,
and contemporary legends that circulate wildly in the form of the latest rumors. Faced with
the “local self-diferentiation” industry (V. Beck 1998, 87), today’s netlore – which is neither a
representation nor an imitation of ancient folklore – is globalized. However, netlore is not alone
in its globalization. Even traditional instruments like the handwritten sheets still used in some
parts of Brazil are used to turn troubling current events into globalized folklore. For example,
a pamphlet published in Salvador de Bahía (Brazil) in 2003 titled “G. W. Bush, o anjo do mal”
(the Angel of Evil) says, among other things:
Ese tal de W. Bush
Presidente americano
Devia está no inferno
Que é lugar de tirano
6. CUPID’S THEOREM: Every body submerged in love / experiences stupefaction / that is directly propor-
tional / to the love felt / for the boy who is loved.
7. As Cervantes said: / Today people screw more than before. [he two lines rhyme in the original.]
Por querer a todo custo

O petróleo iraquiano.8
More evidence of the globalization of folklore is that in many cases globalization itself and its
ramiications are the principal objects of parody and relection. he focus goes beyond global-
ization as a process to include the causes that have made the globalizing low – what some call
“globalism,” “neo-capitalism,” etc. – become what many consider to be a new form of oppression.
A worthwhile example is the old joke, recycled on the Internet, we received in an e-mail on
March 3, 2004, seven days before the terrorist attack that took place in Madrid. It can be read
in a tone of foresight:
Un niño le pregunta a su padre:
– Papá, ¿qué es el capitalismo? Su padre lo mira y le dice:
– Bueno, trataré de explicártelo de esta forma: Yo alimento a esta familia, así pues digamos
que yo soy el Capitalismo. Tu madre supervisa nuestro dinero, por lo que podemos llamarla
Gobierno. Los dos estamos aquí para ocuparnos de tus necesidades, de manera que te llamare-
mos Pueblo. Consideraremos a la niñera como clase trabajadora y a tu hermanito pequeño lo
llamaremos Futuro. Ahora quiero que pienses y lo relaciones.
El niño se va a la cama y piensa en lo que su padre le ha dicho. A las 2 de la mañana oye a su her-
mano llorando y se levanta para ver qué le pasa. Se acerca a la cuna, le levanta el pañal y se da
cuenta de que hay que cambiarlo. Va al cuarto de sus padres y encuentra a su mamá dormida,
para no despertarla va al cuarto de la niñera y ve que la puerta está cerrada, se asoma por la
cerradura y ve a su padre dándole a la niñera un buen revolcón, piensa en tocar la puerta pero
se rinde y se va a dormir de nuevo.
A la mañana siguiente el niño le dice a su padre:
– Papá, creo que ya he comprendido el concepto de Capitalismo.
– ¡Vaya, pues me alegro! Explícamelo para ver si lo has comprendido bien.
– Bueno, mientras el Capitalismo jode a la clase trabajadora, el gobierno está dormido, el pueblo
es ignorado y el futuro huele a mierda.9
Written jokes “frequently reproduce, without stylist pretensions, oral jokes” (Vigara 1994, 41),
and such is the case with this one, which had previously circulated in oral form. Many of the
8. hat so-and-so W. Bush / American President / Should be in Hell / Which is the place for a tyrant / For
wanting at any cost / he oil in Iraq.
9. A little boy asks his father, “Daddy, what is capitalism? he father looks at him and replies, “Well, I’ll try
to explain it this way: I feed this family, so we can say that I am Capitalism. Your mother looks ater our
money, so we can call her the Government. We are both here to take care of your needs, so we’ll call you
the People. We can consider the maid as the working class, and we’ll call your little brother the Future.
Now I want you to think about this and connect it all. he little boy goes to bed and thinks about what his
father said. At 2 o’clock in the morning, he hears his little brother crying and he gets up to see what the
matter is. He goes to the crib, lits up his brother’s nappy and realizes that it needs changing. He goes to his
parents’ room, but his mother is asleep; so as not to wake her up, he goes to the maid’s room and inds the
door locked. He looks through the keyhole and sees his father giving the maid a good roll in the hay. He
thinks about knocking at the door, but he decides to go back to bed. he next morning the little boy tells
his father, “Daddy, I think I understand the concept of Capitalism now. “hat’s great!” his father answers,
“Tell me about it so I can see if you understand it correctly.” “Well,” replied the little boy, “while Capitalism
screws the working class, the government sleeps, the people are ignored, and the future smells like shit.
thousands of jokes on the Internet originate in this way, so it can be ventured that Internet folk-
lore shares the two categories of literary orality which Zumthor distinguished from primary or
pure, calling them mixed and mechanically mediatized or techniied (Zumthor 1983, 36–37). In
the case of Internet folklore these orality types also include the interactive characteristic that
Zumthor grants orality itself: “he listener-author is no less an author than the executant. his
is the derivation of the explicitness of the phenomenon of reception in oral poetry” (Zumthor
1983, 234).
Following the terrorist attack in Madrid on March 11, 2004 in which terrorists detonated
bombs on suburban trains at rush hour, killing nearly two hundred commuters and injuring
several thousand people, this orality acquired a special signiicance, as the Internet and cell
phone text messages were used to organize popular demonstrations two days later, on March
13, the eve of general elections. he slogan of the demonstrations, “your wars/our deaths,” had
already permeated Spanish consciousness by March 12. Many of these demonstrations took
place in front of the oices of the ruling People’s Party (P.P.), as the rumor that the government
planned to delay elections and stage something similar to a “self-coup” began to spread. As the
previous joke relects, the climate was already one of distrust towards politics, the economy, and
the media. he people were being, or seemed to be, ignored. And the people, or more exactly, a
“popular” method for vocalizing, appeared on the scene. hose who have analyzed the subject
from the point of view of communication (such as Sampedro, Jerez and López Martín) speak
about the activist hubs that encouraged the popular reply, “it was enough for them to disguise
themselves as a democratic vigil, as if it were an old-fashioned burial where mourning is mixed
with the banquet and the party” (Sampedro 2005, 302), which is a good portrayal of popular
feelings. Another description of how the movement worked also points in this direction: “irst,
a military ring was formed and it later overlowed outward to the crowds” (Jerez and López
Martín 2005, 107). Rather than a reaction from the crowds, who would not be able to organize
“from the bottom up,” what occurred was a mobilization encouraged by an elaborate network of
small groups, by a complex constellation of “conidence networks.” hese groups had previously
been consolidated by the angry reactions to the Prestige oil spill and the Spanish government’s
active participation in the preliminaries of the Iraq war. his chain reappearance of the popular
voice, which found its own method of transmission in the immediacy of “techniied orality,”
was due to, among other things, “the failure of the channels of democratic representation and
debate” (Sampedro 2005, 302).
he underground world we walk over: Rats, dogs, and the mentally ill in urban legends
In an earlier publication I pointed out how the same story can possess a double meaning by
means of a simple variation introduced in one of its versions (L. Díaz 2003b, 168–69). he varia-
tion makes a single story become two complementary, and at the same time diferent, stories,
which are like parts of a symphony. his seems to be the case of the two modalities of an urban
legend about a dog brought from abroad which turns out to be a rat. he narration, depending
on its source country or the animal’s behavior, has been assigned diferent names by various
Spanish collectors: “he Dog from the Ganges” (L. Díaz 1997a, 153), “he Foreign Dog” (Ortí
and Sampere 2000, 285–86), “he Killer Rat” (Halperín 2000, 17–32), or an even more general
label, “Exotic Pets” (Pedrosa 2004b, 199–201). his tale of a Chihuahua has become well-known
within the sphere of Anglo-Saxon folklore since Brunvand published it as “he Mexican Pet”
(Brunvand 1986, 21–23). Also referred to as the “misleading pet” (L. Díaz 2003b, 163–78), it
has been interpreted as a fear of immigration, for example in Ortí and Sampere (2000, 287).
However, the two versions of the atavistic, unrecognized rat and of the mutant animal actually
confront us with a double fear: of what comes from behind and of what could appear, of tradi-
tion and progress, of the past and the future.
hese concepts, and our doubts about their role in today’s world, are the main ideas behind
these two versions of the same story. In other words, the variations reveal our suspicion of a
perverse manipulation of both tradition and progress, leading to “otherness” as individuals and
as members of society. Signiicantly, in these stories rats, dogs, and people are interchangeable.
In the irst version, the dog and the rat are a clear metaphor for immigrants, expressed quite
palpably and almost explicitly in some of these tales. In the second type of version, in which the
tourists bring the strange pet from a country considered to be “advanced” such as Germany or
Japan, the animal is usually no longer a giant, exotic rat, but is now a product of genetic muta-
tion (Ortí and Sampere 2000, 286). However, in the following example, collected in Catalonia
and entitled “El gos del Japó” (he Japanese Dog) by its collectors, the rat is not yet a mutant:
Una parella de turistes catalans van al Japó, i en un carrer de Tòkio troben un gosset petit i de
pèl molt curt que els segueix continuament i juga amb ells. Li agafen afecte, veuen que està
abandonat i se lémporten. A lávió, aconsegueixen pasar-lo en una bossa, sense que el gos els
delati. Un cop a casa veuen que li surt bromera de la boca i decideixen portar-lo al veterinari.
El vetereinari observa lánimal amb sorpresa: no es tracta pas dún gos sinó dúna espècie
exótica -i molt grossa- de rata de claveguera. (Pujol 2002, 178)10
We turn now to other, less-known tales, such as the mutant Russian woman who becomes an
urban vampire and the madman who pretends to be a dog. hese stories can clarify some as-
pects of the possible “hidden meaning” in the narratives about a pet that is actually a mutant
animal. Although they have been catalogued as distinct stories in the collections, in our opinion
they have much to do with the same theme. he source of the irst of these tales was a teenage
girl in the Catalan town of Vic:
Després de léxplosió de Txernobyl, una persona sámaga en un contenidor de residus tòx-
ics i és enviat a Nova York. Sálimenta dels residus i es transforma en un ser abominable que
sálimenta de la sang de les persones i animals. Viu a les clavegueres i cuan ataca deixa el senyal
dúna sangonera. La gent atacada es mor. (Pujol 2002, 44)11
10. Two tourists from Catalonia visit Japan. In a street in Tokyo they ind a dog with very short hair that keeps
following them and they begin to play with it. hey become fond of it and as they can see it has been
abandoned, they take it with them. hey manage to smuggle it onto the plane in a bag, and the dog does
nothing to betray its presence. Once back home, it begins to foam at the mouth, and they rush it to the
veterinarian. he vet examines the animal with great surprise: it isn’t a dog; it’s an exotic – and very large –
species of sewer rat
11. Ater the explosion in Chernobyl, a woman hides herself in a container of toxic residues and is sent to New
York. She is forced to eat the residues and is transformed into an abominable creature that feeds on the
In this story the protagonist is a victim of technological excess, which is another recurring
theme in the tales we are dealing with. here are no mutant rats, but the Russian woman lives
like a rat in the darkness of the sewers. he metaphor is clear: both tales deal with the invisible
world beneath us, with the underground reality on which our society of well-being is based. No
rats are present in the following story either, but it does contain a “real” dog and a madman who
is no less authentic. he story constitutes a further “turn of the screw” of our interpretations. It
is hardly irrelevant that the two versions of this truly terrifying story published by Pedrosa and
Moratalla (one of which is included below) were transmitted by informants who were eleven
and twelve, and another version also collected by Pedrosa was told by a nineteen-year-old girl
(Pedrosa 2004b, 214–15):
Era una noche oscura. En una casa apartada vivía una familia compuesta por el padre, la madre,
la hija de 10 años y el perro, Rex. Aquella noche los padres tenían que ir a una cena de trabajo.
La niña insistía en que no llamaran a la canguro. Decía que, si tenía miedo, no tenía más que
bajar la mano de la cama y Rex se la lamería para darle seguridad. Sus padres no la hubi-
eran dejado sola si hubiesen sabido que, ese mismo día, se había escapado del manicomio un
perturbado.
Los padres se fueron y la niña dejó de oír ruido en la casa. De repente, empezó a oír un
goteo dentro de la casa. La niña bajó la mano de la cama y el perro se la lamió. La niña se le-
vantó y miró el grifo del cuarto de baño más cercano. Lo apretó con fuerza y volvió a la cama.
Una vez allí volvió a escuchar el goteo. La niña volvió a bajar la mano de la cama y el perro se la
lamió volviéndole a dar seguridad en sí misma. La niña se levantó y fue a la cocina, y aseguró
todos los grifos. Volvió a su cama pero el goteo seguía sonando por toda la casa. La niña se
decidió a ir por última vez: si no conseguía cerrar el grifo culpable, intentaría ya dormir con
ese ruido. Bajó la mano de la cama y el perro volvió a lamérsela. Sólo faltaba mirar el cuarto de
baño de sus padres. Seguramente era allí, porque el goteo era más fuerte conforme se acercaba.
Abrió la puerta del cuarto de baño y dio un grito aterrador. En la bañera estaba colgado el perro,
totalmente despellejado. Su sangre goteaba produciendo ese aterrador sonido.
En la pared, escrito con la sangre del perro, pudo leer: Los locos también sabemos lamer.
(Pedrosa and Moratalla 2002, 203)12
blood of people and animals. It lives in the sewers and leaves the mark of a vampire when it attacks and
kills its victims.
12. It was a dark and stormy night. In a solitary house lived a family: the father, the mother, the 10-year-old
daughter, and the dog, Rex. hat night the parents had to go to a work dinner. heir daughter insisted that
she didn’t need a baby-sitter. She said that, if she became afraid, she only had to lower her hand to the side
of the bed and Rex would lick it to reassure her. Her parents wouldn’t have let her alone if they had known
that a disturbed individual had escaped from the hospital that morning.
he parents let and the house grew silent. Suddenly, the little girl began to hear the sound of a drip
in the house. She lowered her hand and the dog licked it. he child got up and looked at the tap in the
nearest bathroom. She tightened it as hard as she could and went back to bed. But she began to hear the
drip again. She lowered her hand and the dog licked it again, making her feel safe once more.
he girl got up and went to the kitchen, and she tightened all the taps there. She went back to bed,
but the drip still echoed throughout the house. She decided to try one last time: if she wasn’t able to ind
the dripping tap, she would just try to ignore it and go to sleep. She lowered her hand over the side of the
bed and the dog licked it again. he only place let to check was her parents’ bedroom. Surely that was it,
because the dripping sound got louder and louder as she approached. She opened the bathroom door and
he madman, by deinition, is outside society, and the chilling phrase “we also know how to lick”
can be understood to mean that, in spite of mental illness, “we also know how to be afectionate.”
hat is, the humanity of mentally ill people should be recognized and accepted at least as much
as that of household pets. he madman who replaces the pet by killing it terriies us not only by
the harm he causes but also by the afection he seems to seek so desperately.
However, in these stories the afection that creatures (oten confused with pets) produce
in us is proved to be totally mistaken: in the irst case, we are dealing with animals from exotic
countries whose species cannot be correctly identiied; in the second they cannot be recognized
because they are species that have sufered some strange mutation. his is also the case of an
urban legend about the chickens sold by Kentucky Fried Chicken. In early rumors and urban
legends these chickens were in reality rats; later they were presented as aberrant genetically
manipulated beings. Following that, in an equally biased recent e-mail, the focus is on the raw
material used by the same fast-food chain:
KFC does not use real chickens. hey actually use genetically manipulated organisms. hese so
called “chickens” are kept alive by tubes inserted into their bodies to pump blood and nutrients
throughout their structure. hey have no beaks, no feathers, and no feet. heir bone structure
is dramatically shrunk to get more meat out of them […] I ind this matter to be very disturb-
ing. I hope people will let other people know. Please forward this message to as many people
as you can. Together we can make KFC start using “real” chicken again. (Wiebe 2003, 60–61)
he narrative of the Japanese rat-dog is more intimately linked to that of the Russian woman
who escaped from Chernobyl (because of the mutations sufered by both protagonists) and to
the tale of the madman (in the common eagerness of the mentally ill individual and the rat to
be considered pets) than other “traditional” tales that are formally very similar. It is a common
error to place this more traditional type of legend, such as that of the woman who mistakes a
bear cub for a puppy, in the same category (Pujol 2002, 50–51).
hese narratives of dogs, rats, and madmen are legends about globalization itself. hey
portray the risks of easy circulation of people and things between very diferent worlds. he
fact that the Russian mutant travels in a container as if she were merchandise is also signiicant
given that this is precisely the transportation so oten used by many immigrants who serve as a
cheap source of labor for rich countries. hese legends also speak to us about the fear of change,
whether technological or cultural. he madman in the tale is representative of all the people
who are marginalized by the current system of globalization because they are not productive,
much like children and the elderly.
hese legends, called contemporary or urban, reveal another invisible truth that sneaks
into our comfortable “developed-world” lives. hose who tell these tales, as terrible as they
seem, are mostly children and adolescents. his is perhaps a sign that this age group sees the
future less clearly and full of threats and uncertainties.
gave a terriied scream. he dog was hanging from the shower head, his skin totally ripped of. His blood
dripping down produced the horrifying sound. On the wall, written with the dog’s blood, she could read:
We madmen also know how to lick.
Conclusions
hese many examples show that the theme of otherness with which certain strands of folklor-
ism try to characterize – and remake – folklore is really an invention. Folklore is formed and
transmitted in the present, not in some ideal past time, and the young play the most dynamic
role in this process. he environment where folklore is found is no longer limited to the rural
sphere, and now includes virtual and globalized spaces in which the new folklores communi-
cate. Orality continues to be the main method of communication, but it is now characterized by
the evasive and ephemeral quality of inscriptions, or uses the word of mouth of the Internet and
mobile phones to spread rumors and legends. In short, current folklore is mainly created and
disseminated by children and youngsters in a non-geographic territory through an orality per-
meated with new technology. he trees we call substrate-folklore and remade-folklore frequently
block our view of the forest, of this reality.
Now more than ever, the mutual inluence between rural and urban spheres is a fact, and
the mixture between the two continues to grow. he supposed antiquity of folklore is not real,
because although its origin may be ancient, any antiquity virtually disappears by means of con-
stant updates. Lastly, orality, far from having disappeared, has acquired new forms of expres-
sion and previously unknown means of transmission. We can say that orality and writing (the
rural and the urban, the ancient and the modern) go through almost continuous encounters
and missed encounters within the new spaces of globalization. Furthermore, as pointed out
in an earlier publication (L. Díaz 2003a, 29–46), folklore propagates itself, almost unnoticed,
throughout the information superhighway, silently galloping over invisible networks and tak-
ing cover under the shelter of the “phantom-villages” that globalization itself has built.
Section V. Temporal frames and literary (inter-)systems
Coordinator: Fernando Gómez Redondo
Introduction: Temporal frames and Literary (inter-)systems

Coniguration of historical comparative methods
Since their very origins, the irst attempts in the Iberian Peninsula at writing a vernacular literary
history have used comparative criteria. his was what Enrique de Villena, in his work Arte de
trovar (Art of poetry; c. 1416), and Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana, in Prohemio
e carta (Preface and letter; c. 1446), did when they deined the order of the poetic creation, ap-
plying the knowledge that both of them had acquired from their contact, in diferent periods,
with the Aragonese court, and thus with the set of values comprehended in the Occitan artes
(poetry treatises). Both authors followed the mechanical description of the enarratio poetarum
that grammarians used in their general studies for the commentary or exegesis of texts, which
consisted of compiling and organizing an active process of theoretical ideas and of concrete refer-
ences concerning poetry, with the purpose of delivering it to a speciic addressee. hus, Enrique
de Villena sent his Arte to Íñigo López de Mendoza, in the same way that the latter wrote his Pro-
hemio for the young Peter, constable of Portugal, who would reign in Catalonia from 1464 to 1466.
As in no other historical period, during these ity years of the iteenth century, there was a
continuous transfer of topics and ideological structures between the diferent Iberian languages.
he purpose of this was to conigure and transmit a courtly model of thought that was also a
political model. It was exactly at this moment that the history of comparative literature was
born in the Iberian Peninsula, along with the necessity of explaining the origins of poetry and
the very roots of the system of knowledge involved in the rítmica doctrina (doctrine for rhythm;
Arte de trovar) or the ingimiento de cosas útiles (the faking of useful things; Prohemio e carta).
Enrique de Villena recalled that the consistory of the gaya scienza (gay science) was formed in
the city of Toulouse, France, and he added his own thoughts to the treatises that contained the
results of that consistory. hus, he wrote the irst diachronic survey of literary references with
historiographic criteria and with enough scope to comprehend both Catalonian and Provençal
traditions. Íñigo López de Mendoza followed this same method, but his survey was much more
ambitious. He situated the origin of poetry – deined as literature with meter – in the Bible,
recalled the antique forms of Latin and Greek literature, and evoked the protection that certain
kings – still close in time to him – gave to poets, for example the bind between Petrarch and
Robert of Naples, and the link between Boccacio and John of Cyprus.
he fondness of those kings for the gaya scienza showed the necessity of demonstrating the
courtly power of their political realms with the use and mastery of poetry, and with the knowl-
edge that this poetry ensured and transmitted. Nevertheless, Íñigo López de Mendoza’s true
aim was to point out the moment in which that knowledge was acquired by the romancistas or
576 Fernando Gómez Redondo
vulgares (writers in vernacular languages). his is why he ordered the confection of these early
comparative notes, not only because of the number of literary realms compared (Provençal,
Italian, French, Catalonian, Valencian, Aragonese, Castilian, and Galician), but also because
they constituted a quest for the clues of poetic creation, clues that can only be understood by
comparing the poetic procedures applied in one language with identical procedures applied in
another. hrough these comparisons he concluded, for example:
I prefer the Italians over the French – unless someone wiser thinks diferent – only because
their works come from the brightest creative minds, that enhance and decorate them with the
most beautiful and unique stories; but I prefer the French over the Italians in their way of car-
ing about the rules of art: Italians never mention those rules and are barely concerned about
meter and rhyme.1
He traced and recreated the panorama of the poetic languages of the Peninsula with similar
intentions, naming the poets that he considered most original in each. hus, he distinguished
the clerical poetry written in cuaderna vía (a verse form of four-line stanzas, 14 syllabes to the
line) from Galician-Portuguese poetry, which was deeply rooted in some of the courts of the
Iberian Peninsula until a new Castilian system of poetic thought was developed during the
reign of Henry III of Castile. Santillana tied this new system of poetic thought to the members
of his lineage in an attempt to validate his own courtly and aristocratic realm, so diferent to the
one that was being established in the court of John II of Castile. In order to maintain these ideas,
it was necessary to think about the historical present using a wider notion of time; this notion
intended to make sense of the ongoing times and to enable the comprehension of certain poetic
values through the comparison of authors and works in diferent languages.
We may ind the same comparative ideas in Juan del Encina’s Arte de la poesía castellana
(Art of Castilian poetry; 1496), a handbook addressed to Prince John, and in Discurso sobre la
poesía castellana (Discourse on Castilian poetry; 1580), which Gonzalo Argote de Molina in-
cluded in the irst pages of his edition of Don Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor (Count Lucanor).
In order to explain the value of the closing lines of each of the exemplos (exempla), the Sevil-
lian humanist suggested an ambitious history of meter, in which he compared four rhythmical
schemes, those of the copla castellana redondilla (stanza of four trochaic lines), of the twelve-to-
fourteen syllable versos grandes (mayor lines), of the italianos (Italian’s lines), and of those lon-
ger than twelve syllables. He also included a large number of literary references and discussed
Turkish poetry, along with making the irst observations on West Indian poetry.
Space vs. temporality: A new descriptive order
here was a common concern in all of these early treatises on poetics. he diachronic surveys
that they proposed, which recalled a series of viewpoints and guidelines for literary thought,
1. “[L]os ytálicos preiero yo – so emienda de quien más sabrá – a los françeses, solamente ca las sus obras se
muestran de más altos ingenios e adórnanlas e conpónenlas de fermosas e peregrinas ystorias; e a los fran-
çeses de los ytálicos en el guardar del arte: de los cual los ytálicos, synon solamente en el peso e consonar,
no se fazen mençión alguna.” (López de Mendoza 1988, 446)
Introduction: Temporal frames and Literary (inter-)systems 577
intended to create a spatial dimension that gave meaning to the literary works of each of their
authors. he noblemen Enrique de Villena and Íñigo López de Mendoza built their own iden-
tity as literary creators based on their own systems of reference. he humanists Encina and
Argote de Molina relected on the subject of poetry and its metrical schemes by comparing
Castilian poetic procedures with those of other languages, especially Italian. Any relection on
a literary past requires the establishment of either frameworks or spaces that can explain the
reasons that gave rise to a particular creation (Cabo Aseguinolaza 2003).
Identifying those spaces is one of the main purposes of this Section of A Comparative His-
tory of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, titled Temporal frames and literary (inter-)systems.
he Section is divided into eight chapters that present diferent approaches – diachronic solely
in their order of appearance – to eight systems of literary production, always considering them
from a spatial and geographical perspective. Two diferent literary courts are studied in order
to show the relationships between the creative processes and the schools of thought that existed
during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Fernando Gómez Redondo
studies the cultural model of the court of Alfonso X (1252–84) through the ambitious project
that this monarch promoted: the production of a series of prose works that intended to delin-
eate the diferent aspects of the social and moral reality in his reign. his project gave rise to
continuous revolts because neither the diferent sectors of the Church nor the aristocracy were
willing to accept this regulation of ideas. Nevertheless, through a careful plan of translations,
Alfonso X shaped a speciic linguistic system for the political and geographical space of his
time. he lenguaje de Castiella (Castilian language) was his greatest contribution to the history
of Peninsular culture.
Victor de Lama studies the problems related to bilingualism during the reign of the Catho-
lic Monarchs. One of the most palpable results was the decline of Galician-Portuguese literature
and especially of Catalan literature, which was attracted by the sphere of inluence of the Tras-
támara dynasty, that reigned in Aragon from Ferdinand I of Antequera to his grandson Ferdi-
nand II the Catholic. his study shows how a literary space is built by displacing a previous one
whose principles have no place in a new political system of thought. he speciic analysis of the
igure of the poet Torrellas, or Torroella, provides us with the most controversial issues of this
scenario: the arguments in favor of and against women.
But not only the chronological study of the court spheres is important; a particular date
might also have a strong impact on the construction of these wide dominions of cultural ref-
erences (Gutiérrez García 2004 and Domínguez 2004). Such is the case of the years 1230 (the
unity of Castile and León: predominance of the irst curia), 1369 (Montiel: establishment of a
new dynasty), 1385 (Aljubarrota: exclusion of the Galician-Portuguese language), 1479 (unity of
Castile and Aragon: new imposition of Castilian culture), 1520 (enthronement of the Austrian
dynasty in the Peninsula: assimilation of humanistic European values), and 1580, chosen for
study in Temporal frames and literary (inter-)systems. It was in 1580 that the annexation of Por-
tugal by the Spanish crown was completed, along with the irst attempt to deine an Iberianism
that intellectuals of both countries have been searching for up to the present. Tobías Branden-
berger analyzes the political strain caused by the annexation of territories by Philip II ater the
death of King Sebastian of Portugal. his author also studies the creation of zones that worked
as literary cores. hese zones either accepted or rejected the new external conditions for literary
production, and forced into being new pragmatic conditions that included a diferent spatial
conception in which bilingualism had no place.
In addition to the study of these important dates in which crucial historical events took
place, it is necessary to explore the spaces which are used as cultural paradigms in any history
of literature in the context of broad labels such as Renaissance, Neoclassicism, or Romanticism..
Spaces are not only social or political; they might also be literary if they have a physical and
material dimension, as in the case of theater stages. It is with this perspective that Raquel Bello
considers the relationship between the Spanish and Portuguese theater to study how Spanish
dramatic models persisted in Lusitanian territories. he author starts by explaining the inten-
tion of the Portuguese Enlightenment scholars to create a new scenic system, and then exam-
ines the conlicts produced by this situation. Even though this circumstance only existed during
a brief period of time (1734–93), it illustrates the confrontation of two diferent conceptions of
the world, each of which tried to prevail over the other.
Leonardo Romero Tobar, in consonance with Baudelaire’s ideas, locates in the concept of
modernity the foundations for the construction of the Spanish literary system in the nineteenth
century. his term merges the review of the past (from the nostalgic recreation of primitive
spaces to the gallant culture of the Enlightenment) with the expectations for future artistic
experiences. herefore, it becomes possible to create binds between diferent historiographic
notions such as Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and in de siglo (in de siècle),
for these are not artistic movements that refuse the principles of the previous ones, but speciic
orientations of the same literary discourse, the discourse of modernity.
he political options originated by nationalism constitute peculiar cases of spatial repre-
sentation, as demonstrated by José-Carlos Mainer in his analysis of the dialogue between the
diferent literary nationalisms of the Iberian Peninsula during the irst half of the nineteenth
century, along with the long process of political transformation and changes of government.
he author emphasizes and clariies the concept of cultural asymmetry maintained by the dif-
ferent languages of the Peninsula and their corresponding identities: two of them reinforced by
an abundant literary production, and the other three in a process of deining their own world
while exploring it in order to create a historical conscience.
he same process of national deinition is studied by Randolph Pope, but during the so-
called transition to democracy (1975–82). his author shows how the ideological construction
of a nation is achieved through its literary landscapes and its artistic and non-artistic languages.
He considers the continuous recreations of the past during this period and the rise of new cre-
ative attitudes determined by literary awards and the mass media.
he inluence of the literary systems
At the same time that spatial domains are studied through a chronological survey, this Sec-
tion must consider each author as a result of the theoretical and conceptual ideology that s/he
receives through her/his readings and experiences, which s/he adjusts to her/his own creative
process and communicates to other authors through her/his own works and through the an-
swers that these works give to diferent problems. his historiographic perspective is especially
important for the study of the Middle Ages – analyzed here in the court of Alfonso X – and for
the understanding of the beginning of the Renaissance, represented by the court of the Catholic
Monarchs. In these cultural realms, it is diicult to ind an individual will of authorship itted
with a conscientious style. Quite the contrary, an author was either someone who promoted a
literary production with political and ideological imprints – as in the case of Alfonso X –, or
someone who acted as a mediator of values at the service of precise ideological models which
he helped to deine and communicate.
he literary systems are always more important than these wills of authorship, and it is
only by means of comparative methods that their formation process can be reconstructed. It is
unthinkable that an isolated language could shape its own sphere of creation; there are several
factors that have a role in the materialization of such a sphere. Every language – including, of
course, the Iberian ones –, must explore its expressive possibilities by comparing itself with
previous models (as in the case of the vernacular languages with regard to Latin) and with the
models from which it wishes to diferentiate itself (Galician and Catalan from Castilian), and
by validating itself according to the political and social strains of its evolution. As formerly
explained, Castilian was imposed in 1230 and in 1479 not only as a linguistic standard, but also
as a stylistic paradigm. he same occurred in 1580 with the confrontation between Spanish and
Portuguese. Temporal frames and literary (inter-)systems takes into account these strains, con-
siders their causes and earlier states, and describes the changes that the texts present as a result
of their adaptation to new principles or as a consequence of the authors’ association to a par-
ticular ideological trend. For example, when Diego de Gumiel printed Tirante el blanco (Tirante,
the white knight) in Valladolid in 1511, due to the purpose of this edition he did not mention
the double authorship of the work (Joanot Martorell and Joan de Galba) or its original language
(Catalan). he same occurs with Gil Vicente and Jorge de Montemayor, two Portuguese au-
thors who adjusted their works to their courtly and cultural spheres. hus, independently of his
grammatical or rhetorical skills, an author is usually subject to the references and the literary
system of the language in which he writes.
Promotion and reception of texts: he pragmatic strains of literary creation
he comparison of linguistic realms that eventually confronted each other as a result of social
conlicts or territorial and political expansion makes it possible to recognize speciic historical
circumstances in which some cultural images are introduced into new linguistic spheres. For
example, the marriage of Alfonso VIII and Eleanor of England eased the arrival of the Matter
of Britain to the Iberian Peninsula, in the same way that the marriage of Blanche of France and
Fernando de la Cerda – Alfonso X’s irstborn son – resulted in the transmission of the Matter
of France. In the same way, the double union of the Catholic Monarchs’ children, Don Juan
and Doña Juana, with the descendants of Maximilian I of Habsburg, Margaret of Austria and
Philip the Handsome, favored the development of Burgundian subject matter amongst brief
chivalric tales that deined new schemes of social relations. Occasionally, the clash of values that
result from the confrontation of two political domains also provoked rivalry between literary
styles. Humanism, for example, was never cultivated in Castile because its essential ideas were
previously developed in Aragon and the knowledge of the ancient world was already a main is-
sue of that court’s ideology. hat is the reason for the strict and moral nature of the Castilian ic-
ción sentimental (sentimental romance) – Rodríguez del Padrón and Diego de San Pedro –, in
contrast with the satiric, ludicrous, and sensual iction from Aragon sucha as Triste deleytaçión
(Sweet suferings) or Juan de Flores’ works. Every literary system possesses, thus, a speciic way
of organizing ideas that depends on the promoters and addressees of the texts; these pragmatic
strains are part of the mechanisms studied here.
Each author has the option to either attach her/himself to these external conditions or to
attempt to modify them based on other creative schemes. In the eighteenth century, for example,
Italian drama was decisive for the establishment of a Portuguese drama that moved away from
Spanish values. During the same period, French culture made it possible for the Enlightenment
to reject the anomalous and exuberant Baroque creations. In the same way, German philosophy
became the basis for the ideological changes instigated by the authors of the Generation of
1898 and the Generation of 1914. his mobility of cultural trends has a direct impact on speciic
works that present a transfer of motifs when translated from one language into another.
he process afects both the author and his texts; it is possible that there existed a Portu-
guese version of Amadís de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul) of which nothing has been preserved, in
the same way that not even a passage of the irst drat of Crónica de 1344 (Chronicle of 1344), by
Pedro Afonso, count of Barcelos, survived. he Calila e Dimna (Calila and Dimna) translated in
the court of Alfonso X was not the same as the material used for the Exemplario contra los en-
gaños y peligros del mundo (Exempla against world’s dangers and deceptions) printed by Pablo
Hurus in 1494, because the latter was a reconstruction of the original made by John of Capua
and included in his Directorium humanae vitae (Guide for human life) between 1273 and 1305.
he Historia de la donzella Teodor (History of Maiden Teodor) that was written during the irst
half of the thirteenth century is diferent from the one printed c. 1498, as well as from the story
that Lope de Vega wrote for the stage, and even from the one printed in the Brazilian folhetos
(chapbooks) during the irst half of the twentieth century. here is no diachronic survey that
can explain the kind of changes that texts experience while moving from one system to another
and while they are adjusted to a series of new pragmatic conditions. On the other hand, the
spatial criterion provides a useful methodology for the reconstruction of frameworks wherein
literary works recover the original meanings with which they were created.
Applying these methods, it is possible to recognize the new values that the literary works
acquire during their process of transmission, as well as the textual changes that result from
that process. For example, in order to appreciate the changes that the igure of the Cid presents
during its textual evolution, it is necessary to reconstruct the historical frameworks of Alfonso
VIII – Poema de Mio Cid (Poem of my Cid; 1207) –, of Alfonso X – prose version of the epic
poem in Estoria de España (History of Spain) –, of Ferdinand IV – recreation in Cantar de
las mocedades de Rodrigo (Song of Rodrigo’s youthful deeds) –, of Philip III – Mocedades de
Rodrigo by Guillén de Castro –, and even of the Franco period – with peculiar reconstructions
such as Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar by María Teresa León and Anillos para una dama (Rings for
a lady) by Antonio Gala. A whole literary matter is adjusted to the pragmatic process that takes
part in its recreation. Temporal frames and literary (inter-)systems will provide the reader with
those temporal/spatial frameworks that determined certain creative attitudes, generated the
images used in texts, and provoked the modiication of works originally written with diferent
cultural references. From this perspective, the author is not as important as the recipient, since
it is to the ideas of the latter that the text has to be adapted. It is convenient, thus, to consider
the addressees of a literary works as a collective, as if constituting a real and live whole that
determines the production and transmission of literature.
To summarize, we may say that a dynamic history of literature must consider all of the
factors that determine a literary creation (M. Valdés 2004c), which is the purpose of the eight
chapters of this Section. To do this, it must leave aside the individual intentions of the author,
who is no more than an interpreter of the cultural reality that surrounds her/him and that sets
the conditions for the guidelines of her/his thoughts and creative activity. Such a history of
literature must distinctly describe the mediation of values that makes the constant exercise of
interpreting the past with the purpose of deining the present possible. he act of writing always
involves a process of commenting on and analyzing the linguistic realm and the references used
in any literary work. Such realms and references usually come from other thoughts and com-
mentaries posed by previous texts, which make up the meanings, forms, discourses, and genres
that can only be analyzed, or at least recognized, by using comparative (interliterary) criteria.
Building a literary model
Prose in the court of Alfonso X (1252–84)
Beginnings of the Alphonsine cultural model
he irst great mediation of cultural values among the diferent literatures of the Iberian Pen-
insula took place in the court of Alfonso X the Learned. It was throughout his reign that a
literary identity was formally developed, as a result of both the national unity awareness – the
unity stated between Castile and León in 1230 – inherited from his father Ferdinand III, and
a political doctrine that deined a new way to govern the reigns, a new understanding of the
relationship between aristocracy and nobility, and a coniguration of a new court’s model with
an integrating quality that relected the wisdom and authority of the ruling monarch.
Alfonso X conceived a vast structure of works and genres of learned discourses, and means
for producing and transmitting literature, with the object of giving sense to the geopolitical
map his father consolidated throughout his reign, specially during Alfonso’s formative years
as an infante. In his education we ind the basis for his open attitude towards the diferent cul-
tural values of the Iberian Peninsula: born in Toledo, November 23, 1221, he was put under the
tutelage of Don García Fernández, steward of Doña Berenguela, and husband of Doña Mayor
Arias in Allariz. In this Galician enclave he spent his early years. In 1240 Ferdinand III gave him
a house of his own as well as the income of several villages of León and Andalusia; due to this
monetary independence he was able to gather together a group of young aristocrats that in the
future would be the basis for his court. As the second royal lieutenant since 1242, he success-
fully took part in several military campaigns (such as the occupation of Murcia in 1243) and
arranged important agreements with other Iberian kingdoms, such as Almizra with James I of
Aragon. He also took part in the conquests of Jaén (1246) and Seville (1248) with his father. Next
year he married Doña Violante, daughter of James I, and immediately returned to Seville, where
his father awaited him to perform the repartimiento (distribution) of the city.
hus Alfonso X was educated in a Galician-Portuguese surrounding, inherited a Castilian
political ideology, took part in the Andalusian campaigns and married an Aragonese infanta.
We must add to these relationships his maternal kinship to the Staufen lineage, which would
turn him, to his own detriment, into a strong candidate for the imperial crown. All of these
ideological systems were incorporated into the thinking of this monarch and became the lead-
ing patterns with which he would try to govern and, at the same time, construct a framework of
court relationships that would relect this knowledge. Jofré de Loaysa, the Latin historian and
Doña Violante’s tutor, portrayed Alfonso showing this plurality of characteristics: “Since his
childhood he was very liberal, he loved and enforced justice, he was well built and of gracious
aspect; before his reign began he had already conquered all of Murcia’s reign by the power of
arms” (Loaysa 1982, 77).
he value of law was therefore based on the dominium of the liberal arts, thus produc-
ing this way a igure provided with the necessary virtues to lead a court and a kingdom that
were entirely new and a result of a totally diferent linguistic consciousness. When Alfonso
Building a literary model 583
established schools (especially in Toledo and Seville) to encourage the translations of Arabic
and Latin works in the creating the vernacular texts, he had the clear intention to deine and
reinforce nuestro lenguaje de Castiella (our language of Castile), as the foundation of the cul-
tural identity that his reign needed. his is a constant of all his works, which he successfully
maintained in spite of the diiculties he faced from the beginning of his rule.
he instruction of the king: he integration of knowledge
Alfonso X’s cultural imagery is based on the schemes of the scholarly clerisy of his education.
One of the irst Castilian prose texts that can be traced back to Ferdinand III’s period is Se-
meiança del mundo (A description of the world), an encyclopedic repertoire that may give us
an idea of the instruction process of the monarch’s progeny, especially of his irstborn son. his
is a work of prime importance because it conforms the knowledge of natura (nature) grounded
on the idea of a world (universe) ordered by the four elements, including the teachings of the
Imago Mundi (Image of the world; c.1100) by Honorius Inclusus and of the Etymologiae (Ety-
mologies) by Isidore of Seville, whose work is translated literally.
In Semeiança del mundo we can appreciate the idea of cultural transference bound to the
need of constructing a notion of space, a map – even a real one: Mapa Mundi – that made pos-
sible a chrono-political order. he title refers to the method of enseñar por semejanças (teaching
by similarities), that is, by the ability to put forward images, to create comparative sequences in
order to make the description of a speciic reality easier, as in the following example:
So far you have already heard how the Earth had been ordered and how it was divided in three
parts [...], you also heard about the provinces [...] and about all its islands. Now you have also
heard about all the mountains around the world, the names of the greatest ones, the origin of
their names and the lands in which they lay. And now, for the pleasure and service of those for
whom this book is made, even when it is very expensive and diicult to translate it from Latin
to Romance, we should examine the nature of the most valuable stones, of the most appreci-
ated and noble ones, according to the teachings of Saint Isidorus, as well as their virtues and
the places in which they are found.1
he Semeiança holds the best synthesis of the knowledge that Alfonso would develop through-
out all his works. In this treaty we may ind all the guidelines (the geographical and historical
notes, the lapidary, the brief astrological handbook and, some notes on the heathens) with
which the court clerisy was to be shaped, enhanced by the king in order to sustain the ideology
that he needed to impel his model of political relationships.
1. “E ya oístes fasta aquí de la tierra, cómo era ordenada toda e cómo se departe toda en tres partes [...] e desí
oístes de las provinçias [...] e desí oístes aí luego de todas sus islas, e desí agora ençima oístes de todos los
montes que son por todo el mundo de los mayores qué nonbres avían e por cuál razón, e en cuáles tierras
eran. Agora por que fagamos mayor plazer e mayor serviçio a aquellos por que lo fazemos, maguer que
sea muy grand estudio e muy gran lazerio en trasladar de latín en el romançe, veamos de una manera de
natura de piedras que son tenidas más en caro e son más preçiadas e más nobles entre las otras piedras, e
veamos, según que nos enseña Sant Isidro, qué virtudes an e en qué lugar son falladas.” (Bull and Williams
1959, 104–05)
he regalism: he shaping of the court reality
he regalism with which Alfonso X governs is also an ideological notion consolidated during
Ferdinand III’s rule by the unity of kingdoms achieved in 1230 and secured by the efective mili-
tary campaigns of conquest: Úbeda (1232), Córdoba (1236), Murcia – Alfonso occupies it with-
out ighting in 1243), Jaén (1246) and Seville (1248). he regalist power of Ferdinand III is based
on the support provided by political and military structures that, at the same time, determined
his political decisions in politics. He builds an efective chancellery that provided an image of
a new and powerful kingdom with conquest ambitions and an open policy towards vernacular
forms of expression. It is no longer a curia but a court, a term that names a concrete reality with
a social order and a body of posts and oices that surround the king. his ideological system
required an initial illustrated text production to represent it. It would not be represented by
chronicles, but by the laws and the translations of Oriental texts. All of these aspects helped
Alfonso’s thought into that model of juridical and doctrinal relationships.
he information given by history acquires a special signiicance because it is now used for
the reconstruction of a cultural past. he translation into Romance of Lucas of Tuy’s Chronicon
Mundi (Chronicle of the world; 1236) and Archbishop Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada’s De rebus His-
paniae (History of Spain; 1243) was essential for the construction of the historiographical vision
of the Learned King, as he points out at the beginning of the Estoria de España (History of Spain):
“We have taken the facts of Spain from the chronicle of the archbishop Don Rodrigo, who wrote
it under the commandment of the King Don Fernando, our father, and from the one by Maestre
Lucas, bishop of Tuy.”2 he Chronicon Mundi was written on the command of the queen Doña
Berenguela to provide her son with a historical speculum (mirror) with which he could learn how
to govern the kingdoms, giving special importance to León’s ideology. Ximénez de Rada’s texts
are diferent because they truly shape Castilian identity, hence the importance granted to Gothi-
cism as the foundations of a reign that had been secured with Don Rodrigo’s own help, both as a
participant of the military campaigns and with the activities he impelled from Toledo’s archdio-
cese. he prologue of his work is based on the idea of writing as an efective method to preserve
the memory of the past: “We are even more committed to its authors because it is through their
teachings that we may study the past in depth.”3 hat past is no longer a chronicle but a history,
that is, the narration of certain facts that must be itted to the reality of the time in which it is
written. Such is Alfonso’s perspective for his historiographical production beginning in the 1270s.
he translations from Arabic: he cultural transference
he Alphonsine court is also a sphere for translations, which are ordered since Alfonso’s child-
hood. he translation of the Calila e Dimna (Calila and Dimna), for example, was ordered
2. “Et tomamos [los fechos d’España] de la crónica dell Arçobispo don Rodrigo, que izo por mandado del
rey don Fernando nuestro padre, et de la de Maestre Luchas, obispo de Tuy.” (Alfonso X 1977, 1:4)
3. “Quibus, eo quod scripserunt, tanto amplius obligamur, quanto per eorum doctrinam in preteritorum
noticia innovamur.” (Ximénez de Rada 1987, 6)
around 1251; that year establishes the beginning of an efort to give a new sense and importance
to the lenguaje de Castiella (Castilian language), with the intentions of turning it into a proper
tool for knowledge that will also organize the political and ideological dimensions of the court.
Calila is built of exempla, texts that belong to an age-old tradition that should be considered the
origin of the work, and that are organized and told in narrative frames. Characters make use of
those exempla. During this initial period, in which the Castilian prose discourse is being built,
translating a book implies its re-creation, the appropriation of the conceptual, discursive and
formal systems with which it was originally written. he concepts of production and reception
implied in this compendium acquire, therefore, a special signiicance, because they evidence
that a translation is only done when it is justiied, that is, when there are readers that need that
translation in order to understand, based on its ideas, the reality in which they live. Calila is
actually a very useful handbook of court relationships, focused in the ones held between the
king and his ministers or advisors.
he translating process of the Sendebar (Tales of Sendebar) during the early days of the
Alphonsine reign attests to the tension between diferent cultural models. Derived from the
Oriental tradition, this translation was commissioned by the infante Don Fadrique, Alfonso X’s
brother. he prologue emphasizes that its sponsor was son of the very noble and fortunate king
Don Fernando and of the very saintly queen Doña Beatriz, and that he commands its translation
from Arabic into Castilian in order to warn the deceived and expose the shrewdness of women
(Lacarra 1989, 63–64). he book was translated in 1253, one year ater his brother Alfonso was
crowned. here were three main reasons for Don Fadrique’s interest in supporting this transla-
tion: 1) building an identity of his own just when his mother had pointed him out to reign the
Duchy of Suabia; 2) his concern for knowledge as an ideological system and as a reason for social
supremacy and 3) the religious aspect (the pursuit of eternal life) that demands warning about
women’s tricks, for the Sendebar contains a doctrine that may lead its reader to perfection, to
secure the salvation of the soul. As a result, the infante becomes a igure that holds the position
of mediator of values and that also shapes learned identities, concerned about building his own
concept of courtesy.
he third translation from Arabic that we may consider in this arrangement of cultural
transferences is the Escala de Mahoma (Muhammad’s ladder). he Castilian text has not been
preserved; we only have the French and Latin versions that are derived from it. he Arabic
original told how Muhammad received the Qur’ān from God, that is, the basic principles of
Islam. his book provides evidence of the cultural coexistence and religious tolerance that Al-
fonso manages to build around him from the beginning of his reign, especially during his stays
in Seville. A harmonious relationship and exchange of values and ideas between Arabs, Jews
and Christians is consolidated during those early years. Without those relationships it would be
impossible to understand the group of translations and scientiic works that the king promoted
in order to further the court clerisy upon which he based his politics. herefore, the Escala is
another of the Oriental tradition books that, through iction, transmits an ideological back-
ground which is helpful to enhance both reason and the ability to understand the principles and
customs of the surrounding cultures.
he wisdom literature: Knowledge as an ideological system
he main topics of the wisdom literature also take part in the construction of this court clerisy.
his is made clearly evident by the Libro de los doze sabios (he book of the twelve sage men). Its
prologue tells that Ferdinand III had summoned twelve sage men to write a handbook for him
that contained “all those things that a prince and a governor of a kingdom should observe in his
own person, as well as the appropriate behavior he should have towards the circumstances that
concern him.”4 his book develops two main ideas: 1) An illustration of the monarch’s virtues
(the ones that lay in his “self ”) and 2) the behavior his post and state demand of him. It is pos-
sible that this work was not really ordered by Ferdinand III, but by his son Alfonso as a way to
remind his subjects that he was the inheritor of his father’s deeds when Don López de Haro lead
the irst insurrection of nobles in 1255. In those times of social tension, Alfonso X’s stand is di-
rected by the advice of sages that had summarized his father’s ideology, the very same ideology
that would allow him to take action against the same treacherous nobles and princes. Knowl-
edge becomes then a ruling and political instrument for a king determined to demonstrate that,
in spite of his youth, he can still be guided by good and true advice.
his idea then prompted many translations or adaptations of some of the most important
collections of wisdom texts: Flores de ilosofía (Flowers of philosophy) – in which Castigos del
rey de Mentón (King Mentón’s advices) was based –, Poridat de las poridades (Secret of the
secrets) – an important work for the difusion of the “matter of Alexander and Aristotle” –,
Secreto de los secretos (Secret of the secrets) – an extended version of the preceding collection,
translated by Philip of Tripoli in the thirteenth century –, Libro de los buenos proverbios (Book
of good proverbs) – which presents, next to each proverb, a matching narrative exemplum –,
Bocados de oro (Golden morsels) – in fact a history of philosophy –, and above all, the Libro de
los cien capítulos (Book of one hundred chapters), a miscellany that establishes the relationship
between knowledge and nobility more irmly as the base for the social chivalrous dimension
that the king was pressed to build in order to oppose the rebellions of the main aristocratic
groups. his collection aims to demonstrate that there are more important qualities than lin-
eage: enseñamiento (learnedness) and seso (good judgement) were the qualities with which the
king intended to build a model of his court’s knight. In this way, it was clearly pointed out that
“learnedness is better than lineage”, and that “learnedness signiies courtesy.”5
he purpose of this book, then, was to present a coherent body of ideas with which the
concept of seso (judgement) deined by the necessary relations between rhetoric (chap. 22) and
versiication (chap. 23), speaking (chap. 24) and remaining silent (chap. 25), patience (chap. 26)
and sufering (chap. 27), good-temper (chap. 28) and good manners (chap. 29). his learned
work intends to resolve one of the most serious tensions during Alfonso’s reign by urging the
nobility to abandon their immoderate and haughty behavior for opposite virtues supported by
the value of words. he Libro de los cien capítulos expresses the desire to build a a model for
social reality based on a courtly behavior that aristocracy must acquire, and that was founded
4. “E señor, a lo que agora mandades que vos demos por escripto todas las cosas que todo prínçipe e regidor
de reino deve aver en sí, e de cómo deve obrar en aquello que a él mesmo perteneçe.” (Walsh 1975, 71)
5. “Más vale enseñamiento que linaje [...] El enseñamiento es seneicança de la cortesía.” (Rey 1960, 26)
on seven attitudes deined in detail: frankness, courage, sufering, patience, truth, humility,
and chastity.
Regulation of society: he juridical order
he production of juridical works also takes part in the foregoing project of social deinition. It
is convenient to begin this analysis with the Setenario (Spanish law code), a text that worked as
a link between the reign of Ferdinand III and that of his son Alfonso. he period during which
it was written and its intentions are both closely related to the ones of the Libro de los doze sabios
and it was also composed from the same perspective. he work that was promoted by the father
in response to speciic social deiciencies had to be inished by the son as a proof and display of
the qualities and virtues with which he should rule. In the Setenario we can also appreciate the
incipient properties of the prose that would sustain the Learned King’s most important works:
an etymological concern, an expositive didacticism, and the construction of a textual body rich
in perspectives and in complex narrative organization. Hence, the Setenario is clearly a work of
political and social propaganda of his sponsor. It defends an ideology; it praises a lineage and
claims dynastic rights; and it is all comprised with one main argument in mind: the apologia of
the Christian laws as opposed to the other laws.
he Elogio de Fernando III (Praise of Ferdinand III) is of special interest in this juridi-
cal work constituted by eleven laws. he irst ive deine the qualities of the king (grounded
on paternal virtues); the next ive the model of a kingdom (the court, that due to its virtues,
should support chivalry, in order to secure the conquest of the kingdoms as well as military
expansion); and the last one is dedicated to the construction of knowledge. he title of setenario
is appropriate for this ley xi (eleventh law) because it is concerned with the transmission of
the seven liberal arts. he subjects of the trivium (language arts disciplines: grammar, logic
and rhetoric) are contained in the so-called sabiduría del corazón (wisdom of the heart) while
the arts of the quadrivium are relected in the knowledge of física (medicine) and metaphysics.
he authenticity of knowledge, the basic principle of all the works that Alfonso X promoted, is
therefore essential: “Because it is by these seven disciplines called ‘arts’ that men get to know
God and all the things he created, what they are and how they work.”6 From the eleventh law on,
the Setenario is a treaty on religion in defense of Christian law and adjusted to Ferdinand III’s
projects of expansion of in North Africa. His son took on this military campaign at the begin-
ning of his rule, but it was interrupted by the rebellions of the nobility. his collection includes,
as guidelines for his later cultural model, an encyclopedic vision and constant references to
mythological motifs and characters.
Yet it is the Espéculo (he mirror) that best summons best the model of royal authority
with which Alfonso wanted to rule his kingdoms before they ofered him the imperial crown
in March of 1256. his juridical project shows, overall, a concern to bind the king to an idea
of a legislative wisdom, that turns knowledge into the core of a justice that emerges from the
6. “Onde por estos siete saberes a que llaman artes sopieron los omnes conosçer a Dios e a todas las cosas que
Él izo, cuáles son en sí e cómo obran.” (Vanderford 1945, 39)
entendimiento (reason) of the monarch. he laws in this compilation are dictated from a nós
(we) that will always interpret the meaning of rules and the way of solving problems. his com-
pendium’s project included seven books; only the irst four were ratiied by the monarch, while
the ith remained articulated and the material for the sixth and seventh was only compiled.
his form of organization comes from the Setenario and is also used later in the Siete partidas
(Seven-part code). he main novelty of the Espéculo is that the character of the king is used as
a mediator of cultural values and as a strong guarantor of justice.
hus, the irst three books show, systematically, the attributes and characteristics of royal
authority. As the juridical code begins in the fourth chapter, its ideas are understood in the con-
text of the former perspectives of regalism. A whole system of juridical thought lay in this com-
pendium. he three titles of Book I present an image of the king as a promoter of the law; the
sixteen titles of Book II make of that king the center of the court; while the eight titles of Book
III explain how that king protects the kingdom. he meaning of the disposition of these ideas
is evident. Alfonso X deines a personal space for his knowledge and then shows his aptitude
to guard the kingdom as a ruler. Hence, one of his main aspirations is to explain the right that
he has, as a monarch, to dictate laws and to state how they should be understood and obeyed.
Law comes from the very center of the court that represents the royal will, and at the same time
secures the maintenance of his señorío (lordship) in peace and legality.
Finally, the Siete partidas are the great compendium of medieval juridical science, a monu-
mental articulation of laws of an encyclopedic nature in which is precisely deined the cultural
identity that the Learned King wanted, not only to govern the Spanish kingdoms, but also to
defend his right to the imperial crown. he production of the Espéculo was interrupted when
Alfonso was claimed, for he was a Staufen, by the Italian Ghibellines as a candidate to rule the
Empire. At this stage, the Espéculo was extended in the so-called Libro del fuero de las leyes
(Book of laws), compiled between 1256 and 1265. While Alfonso is already legislating as an
emperor, he formulates Book I (the only one preserved is manuscript A, that is, the Partida I,
ms. British Library, Add. 20787) that contains a fundamental treatise on canonical law, a subject
that had been let out of the Espéculo. It is reasonable to think that in so doing Alfonso meant to
show himself as a defender of clerisy, whose duties and rights he will deine.
here was a second legislative project developed later, between 1272 and 1275. Book I is
preserved in it, but with some corrections that show the progressive deterioration of royal au-
thority. his is an aspect best observed in Partida II, a text where the authority of the monarch
is undeniably at the service of the nobility’s interests. his second writing is afected both by the
insubordination promoted against Alfonso by the principal groups of the nobility in 1272, and
by the peace agreements he was forced to sign with them in a time when he wanted to be seen
as a conciliatory and diplomatic monarch, right ater the death of Richard, earl of Cornwall,
his rival for the Imperial Crown. It is out of these tensions that the Título XXI (Section 21) of
Partida II, a treatise on nobility law, is written, because it would have been unthinkable in the
ideological model defended in the Espéculo. Here, the social order rests not on the king, but
on the chivalry, that in this way recovers some of the prerogatives contained in the old codes.
he remaining partidas are adjusted to the ambitious legislative project Alfonso had pro-
moted ever since he was crowned in 1252. Some of the topics that were already in the Fuero
Real (Royal fuero) or in the Espéculo now acquire now a inal and unifying sense. Partida III
concentrates on procedural law as a consequence of the former two: the social order secured by
the church (canonical law: Partida I) and assured by the grandes señores (great lords) (nobiliary
law: Partida II). Partida IV, regarding marital law, discusses issues that concern the construc-
tion of lineage; and Partida V concerns mercantile law matters. hrough the court, Alfonso X
fully recovers his presence and his voice rises again, materialized as the legislating nós (we),
and the same happens in Partida VI, regarding testamentary law. Even when the Partida VII
discusses matters related to penal law, it is also, intentionally, a code for chivalry regulation
formulated to shape a concrete court model that necessarily describes a series of human rela-
tionships of social coexistence.
he magniicent juridical framework of the Partidas projects its inluence over the follow-
ing centuries, adopted and renewed by those monarchs particularly concerned with building a
irm structure of court relationships. Alfonso XI ratiies some of its laws in the Ordenamiento
de 1348 (Code of 1348), while Isabella I, ater the Cortes held in Toledo in 1480, secured her
reign by urging her best legislator, Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo, to compose the so-called Orde-
nanzas reales de Castilla (Royal code of Castile), taking as a reference the juridical doctrines of
the Partidas.
he deinition of the present: he chronicle compilations
he historiographic production promoted by the Learned King is what best shows the tensions
that Alfonso had to overcome in order to build a literary system that relected his authority and
knowledge. In fact, none of the two great compilations he promoted – the Estoria de España and
the General estoria (General history) – were inished, due to the serious problems that emerged
during the 1270s: the nobility’s revolt of 1272 – in which his brother Philip took part – and his i-
nal renunciation of the Imperial Crown ater meeting Gregory X in Beaucaire in 1275, followed
by the death of his irstborn son, the infante Fernando de la Cerda.
he Estoria de España was also not inished due to the relevance that the king gave to his-
tory and to the roll that the monarch should play as the magister historiarum. he irst version
of the Estoria de España was well advanced by 1271, when Alfonso had to order its division
into chapters in a royal codex, and leaving it suspended in the middle of chapter 616, assuredly
due to the nobility’s revolt in 1272. his would be the Versión primitiva or regia (Primitive ver-
sion, or Royal version). From out of this model would be written the Versión concisa or vulgar
(Simpliied version, or Ordinary version), although extrinsic to the king’s guidance. During the
last two years of the king’s life, while he was in Seville and in the middle of the civil war against
his son Sancho IV, Alfonso promotes the Versión Crítica (Critical version) that constitutes one
last and deinitive reconstruction of the past in order to defend himself from the hostilities of
the present.
he main patterns of the Estoria de España, as conceived by Alfonso, contain a complex
proposal to deine the space of the Iberian Peninsula by making a methodical revision of all
the cultures that participated in the creation of Hispanic reality by marking out their military
and territorial domains. Hence, in the prologue he declares his intention to elucidate Spaniards’
origins and point out those who have mistreated Spain. he irst part is, therefore, dedicated to
ancient and Roman history; the second part to Barbarian and Visigoth history (paying special
attention to the “nobleness of the Goths”); the third part to the history of Asturias and León
(starting from the destruction implied by the Arab invasion); and the fourth to the history of
Castile: “how God joined it, by which ways and in what time, which kings earned the land as far
as the Mediterranean Sea as well as all the things each one of them did, and how they followed
one another up to our time.”7
For Alfonso X, it was fundamental to reach that “present time”, in which, inally, ater
all the fatigues and calamities, a monarch with the necessary knowledge would be capable of
restoring the political and national identity of the kingdom, and therefore deserving the Impe-
rial Crown. In the Estoria de España, Alfonso claimed his lineage rights as the principal heir to
the imperium that the Romans had brought to the Iberian Peninsula and that the Goths had
bounded to Christianity. he laudatory poem in Latin that opens the royal manuscript written
in Alfonso’s time gives us a very precise image of his cultural identity by ending as follows:
Oh, Spain, if you take the gits the king’s wisdom gives you, you shall shine with fame and
grow in wisdom! he king, Spain’s beauty and treasure of philosophy, gives teachings to the
Hispanic people: the good people shall take the good lessons, and the bad lessons shall be let
for the bad people.8
It is only by the historical knowledge that Alfonso promotes (commissioning the search for
books and watching over the work’s composition process) that Spain will achieve the social and
political identity that it historically deserves, while the king will be able to become the noble
prince (that decus Hesperie) that the beginning of this work praises.
Finally, the General estoria is the most ambitious work promoted by the Learned King and,
at the same time, the text best shows his political and cultural project. All the illustrated produc-
tion he promoted acquires sense in the magniicent structure of wisdom and knowledge that
gives shape to this work, planned as a monumental incursion through the history of ancient
cultures. he preface of the General estoria and that of the Estoria de España share a concern
for transmitting a moral and political identity to his subjects. It aspires, precisely, to capture the
past in order to take advantage of its knowledge in the present. Only historical knowledge of
the past is certain and not the knowledge of the present or speculation of the future. Hence, it
praises the efort of “learned men who write down the facts that have happened so that we may
be able to remember them, and those who come ater may know them in such manner.” his
exercise of memory intends to establish some guidelines of an exemplary nature: “And they did
so in order that men have an example from the deeds of good people, and that, warned of the
deeds of evil people who were punished, they learned to not do the same.”9 his compilation is
7. “Et después cuémo la ayuntó Dios, et por cuáles maneras et en cuál tiempo et cuáles reyes ganaron la tierra
fasta en el mar Mediterráneo, et qué obras izo cada uno, assí cuemo vinieron unos empós otros fasta’l
nuestro tiempo.” (Alfonso X 1977, 1:4)
8. “Si capis, Hesperia, que dat tibi dona sophia / Regis, splendescet tibi fama decus quoque crescet. / Rex,
decus Hesperie, thesaurus philosophie, / Dogma dat hyspanis; capiant bona, dent loca vanis.” (Alfonso X
1977, 1:2)
9. “Onde porque el saber del tiempo que fue es cierto e non de los otros dos tiempos, assí como dixiemos,
trabájaronse los sabios omnes de meter en escrito los fechos que son passados pora aver remembrança
related as well to the lineage pretensions that assisted Alfonso X in laying down claims to the
imperial crown. In the irst part of the General estoria, he turns the Staufens (for he was one of
them) into the heirs of a wisdom and authority of deep mythological roots, linked to the igures
of Jupiter and Alexander through the kings of Troy.
In this way, between 1270 and 1280 – the only date contained at the end of the Cuarta parte
(Fourth part) manuscript –, Alfonso set his schools to work in the two historiographic projects:
one on Spain, and one on the world in general. Both were motivated by a desire to construct a
knowledge structure in which the Peninsular political present (so vehemently counterblasted
by the nobility) matched the very divine designs of the creation of the world, that is, with that
succession of señoríos that made Alfonso the chosen prince to govern all the kings of Europe.
Both works were born conceived as being interwoven and, perhaps, the logical sequence in
which both presented their arguments deinitively linked them. he General estoria nulliied
the project on Spain merely because it absorbed all of its materials, as stated at the end of its
preface, where is also stated the monarch’s desire to reach nuestro tiempo (our time). Obviously,
the facts that were being compiled in the Estoria de España would end up included in the uni-
versal one as soon as the latter inished telling the estorias de la Biblia (stories of the Bible). his
was about to happen in the Sexta parte (sixth part), which was interrupted just prior to telling
of the Virgen’s birth. It is impossible to know how much of the General estoria had yet to be
completed; perhaps not much if we take into account that it would include all the information
that had been already written for the Estoria de España, in which most of the Romans’, Goths’
and Arabs’ histories had been already gathered.
Furthermore, the General estoria developed a compiling system that alternates biblical
with secular stories. Divided into six parts, it intended to register the facts of the six ages of
the world, yet each edad (age) and each parte (part) do not match exactly in the chronicle. In
this way, the Primera parte contains information about the irst two ages and some of the third,
which begins with Book IV of the Genesis, abided by the chronological perspectives of the ive
sacred books. his subject is expounded in twenty-nine books up to the inal years of Moses.
he Segunda parte expounds the remainder of the third age, alternating the Book of Judges with
books of antiquity, such as the Estoria de Ércules (History of Heracles) or the Estoria de Troya
(History of Troy). he Tercera parte, that comprehends the fourth age, includes from the Psalms
to Ezechiel; in this section the histories about the kings of Britain derive from Geofrey of Mon-
mouth. he Cuarta parte marks the beginning of the ith age and comprehends the Babylonic,
Persian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman empires, paying special attention to Alexander’s life. he
Quinta parte, in which the ith age continues, makes use of manifold material of the Estoria de
España, focusing in the history of Rome, and with a complete translation of the Farsalia by Lu-
can, that completes the biblical story of the Maccabees. Finally, the brief fragments of the Sexta
parte announce the beginning of the sixth age, which was the one that should have reached the
time of the Learned King. However, his death also determined the interruption of this work.
d’ellos como si estonces fuessen e que lo sopiessen los que avién de venir assí como ellos [...] Et esto izieron
porque de los fechos de los buenos tomassen los omnes exemplo pora fazer bien e de los fechos de los
malos que recibiessen castigo por se saber guardar de lo non fazer.” (Alfonso X 2001, 1:5)
he alterity of historiography: he other peninsular models
As Castile deines its political identity in the chronicles commissioned by Alfonso X, the re-
maining kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula will justify their present by devising a past that
will require the construction of other general chronicles. hese followed diferent channels of
thought from those employed by the Learned King and were closer to the guidelines deined by
Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, of Navarre. Such is the case of the memories that James I dictated for
the writing of his Liber gestorum or Llibre dels fets (Book of deeds), in Aragon. What we ind in
it is not just the creation of a mode of national thought, but also, and mainly, the construction
of a monarch’s igure that wants to give an account of his decisions and undertakings in order
to ix a testimony of his scrupulous fulillment of royal duties:
And so that all men may recognize and know, when we have passed from this mortal life, the
deeds that we have done with the help of the powerful Lord, in Whom is true Trinity, we leave
this book as a record for those who might wish to hear of the mercies that Our Lord has shown
us, and to give an example to all the other men in this world so that they should do as we have
done and place their faith in this Lord Who is so powerful. (James I 2003, 16)10
James I secured for Aragon a military expansion similar, due to its geographical and political
value, to that achieved by Ferdinand III for Castile. It is because of this that he is an itinerant
king, forced to build a large court around him that was open to the diferent values of his king-
doms. his is what the own king recognizes in the strong allocution he makes when censored
for including experts in law among his retinue:
hat, [...] we could not be held, because in all courts of kings it is necessary that there are
decretalists, lawyers and fuero lawyers, because there always appeared cases of all these types;
[now that God’s mercy has given us three of four kingdoms, these cases come to us in many and
diverse ways]. And if we did not have in our court those who could resolve them it would be
to the embarrassment of our court, because neither laymen nor we could know all the writings
that there are of law in the world. hus, so that they could help us when it was necessary, we
had to take them with us; and, because our dominions do not have one law-code or custom.
(James I 2003, 295–96)11
As we may see, Alfonso X did the opposite of his father in law, for he tried to build a unitary
vision – historical and legislative – that represented his knowledge and authority.
10. “E per tal que els hòmens coneguessen e sabessen, quan hauríem passada aquesta vida mortal, ço que nós
hauríem feit ajudant-nos lo Senyor poderós, en qui és vera trinitat, lleixam aquest libre per memòria, a
aquells qui volran oir de les gràcies que Nostre Senyor nos ha feites, e per dar exempli a tots los altres hò-
mens del món, que facen ço que nós havem feit de metre sa fe en aquest Senyor qui és tant poderós.” (Jaime
I 2003, 3)
11. “E Nós, la mercé de Déu, que ens ho ha donat, havem tres o quatre regnes, e vénen-nos pleits de moltes
maneres e diverses. E si no haguéssem en nostra cort ab qui ho poguéssem delliurar, seria vergonya de Nós
e de nostra cort, car nos ni els hòmens llecs no sabríem en les escriptures que són de dret pel món, e per ço
que ens en poguéssem ajudar quan mester fos, los havíem a menar ab Nós, e per les senyories nostres, que
no eren d’un fur ne d’un costum.” (Jaime I 2003,146–47)
In the Galician-Portuguese case, the historic dimension of Portugal was built during the
reign of Dinis, Alfonso X’s grandson, who seems to have embodied the main virtues of his
grandfather. hat is what the opening biographical sketch of his Crónica (Chronicle) tells us: a
righteous king, follower of the law, truthful in his word, enhancer of faith, defender of justice,
guardian of the peasants and, overall, promoter of knowledge of which all his subjects were
beneiciaries and that was relected in his court.12 his fact is important because one of the most
unique adaptations of the learned King’s historiographical thought was the work of one of Dinis’
sons, Pedro Afonso, count of Barcelos and bastard son of the Portuguese king. He commis-
sioned the translation of the Alphonsine general chronicle that is preserved in manuscripts A
(Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, 8817) and A’ (Biblioteca de Palacio Real, II-910) under the title
of Versión gallego-portuguesa de la Crónica general (Galician-Portuguese version of the general
chronicle). One of the sources he used for this translation included the chronicle’s expanded
version of 1289, which followed a very diferent ideological perspective from the original one of
Alfonso X, because it was composed under the inluence of his son Sancho IV. Hence, we have
the following account of the late years of his father’s reign:
And so the Pope of Rome sent for this king Don Alfonso to crown him Emperor of Germany,
for he was of the emperor’s lineage. And he went to the Pope’s court and let his son Don Fer-
nando de la Cerda as governor of the kingdoms of Castile and León. But the Pope got to know,
truthfully, from the archbishop of Santiago, Don Gonzalo Gómez, and from the bishop Don
Martín de León, how the king encroached on the rights of his people, and so he refused to give
him the empire; he gave him something and sent him back to his kingdom. And his son, the
Infante Don Fernando de la Cerda, died before he did. And later, this king Don Alfonso per-
petrated a great injustice against his people: he demanded that all of those who had two silver
marks should give him one of them. So his subjects were very ofended and they all raised in
rebellion along with the Infante don Sancho, his son, and they all fought against him for two
years. And so he was deprived of his kingdoms during those two years, holding on to only
Seville with a few castles. At the end of these two years he died in 1312, in April.13
12. “E ele era mais justo e derejto Rey, em todolos seus feytos segundo achamos em esprito, e sempre porem
em todo con piadade, onde comprja de a auer. E era asy verdadejro, que numqua em ele foy achada men-
tira. Sobre todalas cousas amaua mujto a justiça, e defendja mujto hos lauradores, que lhe não izesem
mal, e auja gram saber. Aos proues e mjnguados sostinha. Ele foy de gran gouernamento em sua fazenda,
emquanto reynou. E todolas lejs, que punha por prol de sua terra, fazia mujto beem guardar.” (Tarouca
1947, 77–78)
13. “E enviou o papa de Roma por este rrey don Afonso por lo fazer enperador de Alemaña porque era do
linaguẽ dos enperadores, e elle foy alla corte do papa e leyxou seu illo infante don Fernãdo Guedella por
gouernador dos reynos de Castela e de Leon. E o papa soube en uerdade do arçobispo de Santiago don
Gonçalo Gomez e do bispo don Martiño de Leõ en commo desaforaua seus poboos, e nõ lle quiso dar o
enperadgo, e deulle algo e enuioo pera sua terra. E este seu illo infante don Fernã Guedella morreu ante
quelle. E depoys este rey don Afonso moueuse pera fazer hũ grãde agrauamẽto a seus poboos que quẽ
ouuese ualia de dos marcos de prata que lle dese uno; e os poboos teuerõse ende por muyto agrauados
e alçarõse todos cono infante don Sancho seu illo e guerrearõ con el dous anos, e elle foy exardado dos
reynos estos dous anos saluo Seuilla en que icou con algũos poucos castelos. E a cabo destes dous anos
morreu ena era de mill e CCC XXII anos no mes de Abril.” (Catalán 1962, 351–52)
herefore, we must consider this Count of Barcelos, Alfonso’s great-grandchild, as the irst one
that deined an “ideological Portuguesism” guided by an open hostility against the Castilian dy-
nasty of the thirteenth century. With this guideline in mind, he compiled the so-called Crónica
geral de Espanha de 1344 (General chronicle of Spain of 1344) during his exile in Castile be-
tween 1317 and 1320. Paradoxically, the irst Portuguese version of this work was lost and only
the Castilian one is preserved. he Lusitanian version of this important chronicle dates from
the beginning of the iteenth century, when the Portuguese inluence over other Peninsular
kingdoms began, being motivated by the Castilian defeat at Aljubarrota in 1385. In the end, the
irst general chronicle designed by Alfonso X to resolve social tensions ended up generating
historiographical conlicts that favored the creation of new chronicle models. History could not
be a always told in the same way nor be always adjusted to the same guidelines.
Conclusions
A comparative analysis is fully functional when applied to the study of the Alphonsine cultural
model. With a universal view – derived from his Staufen status –, Alfonso X embraces illus-
trious projects that require a ceaseless process of translation and collation, not only between
works, but also among various linguistic systems that will enrich the new lenguaje de Castiella
as a new combined system of thought: knowledge, laws, history, science, and harmony of the
court are topics that have to be necessarily re-created.
Even the work of each of the Alphonsine auctores (authors), ayuntadores (researchers),
componedores (compilers), trasladadores (translators), and capituladores (those who divided
the work into chapters) gives us an account of an illustrated production of works in which vari-
ous ideological systems are submitted to continuous comparison in order to adjust them to a
speciic political and cultural plan. his is why we may ascribe to the Learned King a precise
consciousness of authorship, bound to the authority that he wanted to project as rex litteratus
or decus Hesperie. he ideological perspectives of this monarch will determine all the aspects of
the writing process. he prose works of Alfonso X made possible the construction of a textual
space adjusted to a new linguistic and social identity. he concept of text is for the irst time
raised to the status of a learned discourse capable of containing the main guidelines for political
and religious thought, some of them which, like the historiographic discourse, even opposed to
interests of other Iberian kingdoms.
Literature at the crossroads of politics
Spain and Portugal, 1580
Tobias Brandenberger
Frame
In 1557, a crisis regarding the succession to the throne of Portugal was seemingly averted when
Sebastian, grandson of the deceased Portuguese King John III and still an infant at the time, was
crowned king. Twenty years later, in the summer of 1578, the young monarch’s fatal decision
to go to war against the Moors resulted in disaster for the Portuguese at the Moroccan city of
Al Qasr al-Kabir. he king and the elite members of the Portuguese nobility died, the invading
army was annihilated, and many Portuguese were captured, their freedom ransomed at horren-
dous cost. he fact that the throne passed to Sebastian’s nearly seventy-year old, childless great-
uncle, Henry I, aroused the Spanish monarch, Philip II’s, aspirations. As the son of Portuguese
King Manuel I’s daughter, Philip II was able to successfully assert his claim to the throne in a
battle against an illegitimate grandson of Manuel I’s, António, Prior of Crato, and against Duch-
esse Catherine of Bragança, despite a deeply rooted anti-Castilian sentiment in large sectors of
the Portuguese population. Ater a complicated judicial battle, ater António’s futile proclama-
tion, and ater the Spanish military intervention in 1580, the Cortes in Tomar recognized Philip
II of Spain as king Philip I of Portugal on April 16, 1581. He would subsequently reign as king of
Portugal for nearly 18 years, followed in 1598 and 1621, respectively, by his son, Philip III of Spain
(II of Portugal), and grandson, Philip IV of Spain (III of Portugal). During the so-called Philip-
pine period, the power in Portugal was exercized mostly by viceroys or governors; this period
ended ater six decades in 1640 with the Restauração, the restoration of Portuguese autonomy.
Spain’s annexation of Portugal and its incorporation into a new whole – the Monarquía
Dual (double monarchy) – around 1580–81 marks a political turning point of considerable im-
portance for Iberian history and culture. It is the longstanding, deinitive sanctioning of a po-
litical and, above all, dynastic development that uniies and thus signiicantly changes the map
of the Iberian Peninsula.
hese events, which have been well-investigated by historians (for example, Danvila 1954
and 1956; Godinho 1968; Bouza Álvarez 1987; A. de Oliveira 1990; Carabias Torres 1994; Serrão
1994; Pérez-Prendes Muñoz-Arraco 1998; Valladares 1998, 2000 and 2002; Schaub 2001), have
let diverse traces in the Ibero-Romance cultures and especially in their literatures. However,
these discursive sediments, with which we concern ourselves here, have only been partially
examined in a scientiic manner (Cidade n.d.; Vázquez Cuesta 1988; Bouza Álvarez 1998; Mar-
tínez Torrejón et al. 2002).
Focus
We will analyze a question that goes beyond the purely historical, dynastical, and politi-
cal: in this context, what exactly is the relationship between literature and politics, since it so
596 Tobias Brandenberger
obviously exists? Which phenomena, developments, and tendencies can be observed in their
interrelationship?
In the sixteenth century, the three language areas (Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese) are
both united and divided into various political constellations. A comparative examination of the
literatures of these language areas will systematically and synchronically demonstrate whether
and how literature (and more precisely, literature in this context and moment) anticipates, ac-
companies, and/or reacts to politics. Inevitably, such a perspective will also show that the com-
monly and unquestioningly accepted practice of limiting literary research to literature in the strict
sense of the word is at least worth discussing. Although everyday writings are not the primary
focus here, they must remain present as a background for poetry, theater, and narrative literature.
his survey is structured diachronically and contrastively, and deines the decisive years of
the annexation as a turning point in the division of three phases: the gradual rapprochement of
the Portuguese and the Spanish crown in the irst three quarters of the sixteenth century; the
years between 1578 and 1581 that included Spain’s annexation of Portugal and Philip II’s appoint-
ment as king of Portugal; the development of the cultural and particularly literary union during
the Interregno (inter-reign).
Dynastic interweaving and literary relations
One pivotal factor shaping cultural relations between Spain and Portugal since the end of the
iteenth century, though dealt with by historical research at length, has so far received little
attention in literary historiography: the increasing dynastic interweaving of the Spanish crown
and the Portuguese royal house of Aviz. During the entire sixteenth century princesses were
constantly intermarried between the two countries: Isabella (1470–98) and Mary of Aragon and
Castile (1482–1517), daughters of the Catholic Monarchs, were wives of the Portuguese King
Manuel I (1469–1521), who later married their niece Eleanor of Austria (1498–1558); John III of
Portugal (1502–57) was husband to Catherine of Austria (1507–78), sister of Charles I of Spain
(1500–58), who for his part married John III’s sister Isabella of Portugal (1502–39); in the follow-
ing generation the Portuguese princess Maria Manuela (1527–45) was married to the Spanish
heir to the throne Philip II (1527–98), and the Portuguese prince John (1537–54) married his
Spanish cousin Joan (1535–73).
he role of these women as cultural mediators must not be underestimated: they enjoyed
particularly favorable conditions for inluencing artistic and intellectual life due to their social
status and their privileged economic situation, and at the same time they guaranteed latent or
open bilingualism at court. he same holds true for another phenomenon of cultural transfer:
publishers’ increasing cross-border mobility in the Iberian Peninsula. Both factors (see Bran-
denberger 2007) explain the fact that even before 1580 there occurs a convergence of Spanish
and Portuguese literature, which underlines and advances parallel developments of these two
systems due to constant interaction. Examples are the longer narrative genres (chivalric and
sentimental romances) showing late-medieval inluence, which in both countries reach their
peak simultaneously (and are each received in their neighboring country), as recent critical
literature demonstrates (Lucía Megías 2001; Brandenberger 2003 and 2005).
Literature at the crossroads of politics 597
he area of lyric poetry also evidences a comparable, albeit temporally delayed, adoption
of Italian patterns by outstanding igures such as Juan Boscán, Garcilaso de la Vega, Francisco
Sá de Miranda and Luís de Camões; and in the dramatic genres, the eminent igure of Gil Vi-
cente contributes vital pieces simultaneously to the Spanish and the Portuguese repertoire.
In this phase the problem of bilingualism is of particular importance. Political and histori-
cal developments and literary interaction promote the tendency towards unimpeded usage of
two languages; conversely, this bilingualism (investigated by Vázquez Cuesta 1981; A.I. Buescu
2000; and I. Castro 2002) is also facilitated by the unproblematic mutual intelligibility of the
linguistic codes employed, which cause hardly any problem for the reader and speaker due to
their close relationship and great typological closeness (in the phonetic-phonological area in
particular, Spanish and Portuguese had at that time not yet distanced themselves from each
other as strongly as they have today).
he increasing Spanish-Portuguese bilingualism in the sixteenth century is, however, im-
balanced: Spanish is widespread in Portugal as a positively marked colloquial language and an
elevated language of the upper social strata, whereas Portuguese, though easily understood or
read in the neighboring country, does not enjoy any special prestige. he extent of bilingualism
is veriied irstly by the great number of Spanish texts in Portugal, which are not only circulated
and read there but also printed by Portuguese publishers themselves. It is conirmed secondly,
and even more clearly, by the frequency of an actual literary bilingualism.
Even before the union of the thrones there are numerous Portuguese authors who write
partially or entirely in languages other than their own. Whether they live, write, and publish in
Spain as literary emigrants like Jorge de Montemayor, or whether, even in their home country,
they sporadically, temporarily, partly, or predominantly use the neighboring country’s language,
as did Gil Vicente, Francisco Sá de Miranda or Luís de Camões. Spanish as a literary language
is also an obvious option for the Portuguese, even if a few authors make decidedly nationalistic
comments in favor of Portuguese (for instance, António Ferreira in his Poemas lusitanos [Lu-
sitan poems] or Pêro de Magalhães Gândavo in the Dialogo em defensaõ da lingua portuguesa
(Dialogue in defense of Portuguese; 1574), which was preceded by João de Barros’ Dialogo em
louvor da nossa linguagem (Dialogue in praise of our language; 1540) (I. Almeida 2002; T. Pin-
heiro 2005). Garcia Peres (1890), and Martínez-Almoyna and Viera de Lemos (1968) have com-
piled impressive bibliographies about this phenomenon. he reasons for a partial or complete
change of language need to be examined individually in each case: besides the criterion of genre,
economic considerations must certainly have played an important role as well, particularly as
texts in Spanish could hope for a wider circulation.
Homogenizing the map
Despite the considerable intensity of the process of the convergence of Spanish and Portuguese
literature even during the irst three quarters of the sixteenth century, one must bear in mind
that an even stronger interweaving of the two cultural spaces and their manifestations can be
observed beginning with and particularly during the phase, which was in the oing and was
inally realized, involving the political annexation of the smaller country by its bigger brother.
he uniied Spanish-Portuguese Dual Monarchy is relected in an increasingly homogeneous

cultural map. At the same time, there is an increase in the number of texts in which the new
political situation becomes an important factor.
his becomes especially apparent in the area of the production of rather practical everyday
texts and texts serving a mainly political purpose. Immediately ater Sebastian’s death, a period
of lively activity begins in favor of a Spanish succession to the throne, absorbing both authors
and publishers for political propaganda and resulting in an augmented production of legal trea-
tises seeking to support Philip II’s claim to the Portuguese throne.
Authors and publishers are working at full steam, while the Spanish monarch commits
an army to Portugal (under the Duke of Alba) to ight against António, his iercest rival in the
battle for control over Portugal; at the same time, he also undertakes a campaign in Portugal of
his own (a de facto invasion with a belated appointment).
As Fernando Bouza (1998, chapters 4 and 5) has examined in detail, judicial, and genealog-
ical texts are published that present the Spanish king as a legitimate sovereign on the deserted
Portuguese throne. hese texts function irst as propaganda, later as a safeguard for a militarily
and diplomatically achieved position, and inally as a support ater Philip is proclaimed King.
Followers and sympathizers of the Habsburg monarch circulate these texts in Portugal. During
Philip II’s invasion, calls for the arrest of António and amnesty decrees are also printed and put
into mass circulation. his collaboration of the powerful with the publishers for political pur-
poses functioned because of the existence, even then, of a tradition of Spanish presence in the
Portuguese market; at the same time, this collaboration had a strengthening inluence on the
implementation of cultural structures.
On both sides, other less pragmatic genres with a stronger aesthetic claim (epic poetry,
drama, and above all lyric poetry) make reference to the union of thrones; and such refer-
ences are not always positive, particularly in Portugal. In addition to panegyric texts that
celebrate the new monarch, numerous satirical poems speak out against the Spanish and
Portuguese sympathizers, as documented by Bouza Alvarez (2000, chapter 1) and Martínez
Torrejón (2002).
Changing (literary) languages and images
With the union of the thrones it becomes even more natural for Portuguese authors to com-
pose their productions not (only) in Portuguese and Latin but (also) in Spanish or to translate
them into the language of their larger neighbor for publication. his option is used more and
more oten. In this way, religious, didactic, philosophical, or historiographic literature, as well
as novels, narratives, drama, and poems from Portugal are easily accepted into Spanish litera-
ture; however, at the same time, this enrichment of Spanish literature entails a quantitative as
well as qualitative loss for the production of texts in Portuguese – a development from which
Portuguese literature ater 1640 recovers only hesitantly.
From 1580 onwards, however, the new political constellation also inevitably inluences
each nation’s particular image of its neighbor. he image of Spain or the Spanish people as
constructed in Portuguese literature, and, relatedly, the image of Portugal or the Portuguese
Literature at the crossroads of politics 599
people as constructed in Spanish literature are topics complex enough to deserve their own
monograph. Here we will simply point out some milestones.
In connection to the Habsburgs’ enthronement and with the Spanish king’s crucial Jorna-
da Regia de Sucesión (royal succession day), particularly deserving of recognition are the king’s
letters to his daughters from the years 1581 until 1583 (edited by Bouza Álvarez 1988); they are an
interesting testimony of cultural contact in a special situation of political annexation.
Yet Portugal is omnipresent not only in contemporary documentational testimonies but
also in Spanish literature in general from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the sev-
enteenth century: as a setting for the plots of novels and plays (Miguel de Cervantes Persiles is
only one of many such texts); as a quarry of historical topics (for example Vélez de Guevara’s
dramatization of Inês de Castro-Stof ’s Reinar después de morir (Reigning ater death) and sev-
eral of Lope de Vega’s and Tirso de Molina’s plays); or, and this is particularly noteworthy, in
the emergence of Portuguese characters who, through various stereotypical traits, are portrayed
in a strange otherness and whose contrast with the Spanish allows interesting conclusions to
be drawn about the auto-perception and hetero-perception of each identity. his is also by far
the most extensively investigated part of the rich spectrum in which the literary expression of
Spanish-Portuguese cultural contact becomes apparent (see Zamora Vicente 1948; Cantel 1949;
Glaser 1954; J.M. Viqueira 1960; and Palomo n.d.).
Such Lusitanic topics and characters, represented from a Spanish perspective, are supple-
mented in manifold ways from the Portuguese side during the years of the Interregno. his study
has already referred to circumstantial poetry; and one should further point out the Portuguese
authors’ documentary and debate-oriented contributions addressing the various issues raised by
the intensiied contact between Spain and Portugal, resulting from the new political situation.
Outstanding texts from the former area are, for example, Tomé Pinheiro da Veiga’s detailed ac-
count of his stay in Valladolid and the idiosyncrasy of daily life in a metropolis (Fastigínia) or
Pero Roiz Soares’ Memorial (Report) about the events in connection with the Spanish occupa-
tion. Works from the latter area appear later, such as António de Sousa Macedo’s Flores de España,
Excelencias de Portugal (Flowers of Spain, Excellences of Portugal; 1631), João Salgado de Araújo’s
Marte portugués contra emulaciones castellanas (Portugal Mars against Castilian emulations; 1642)
or Frei Francisco de Sto. Agostinho’s Philippica portuguesa contra la invectiva castellana (Por-
tuguese philippica against Castilian invective; 1645), in which the two traditionally competing
kingdoms are pitted against each other. In many cases, drama and novels avoid this delicate topic.
In summary, the following can be concluded about Iberian literatures before and ater
1580: the conditions of text production and text difusion evidence the tendency towards a lev-
eling out of cultural diferences in the area of literature and towards a stronger coherence of
the Iberian Peninsula as a geographical-political-cultural space. During the Dual Monarchy,
Portuguese and Spanish authors write and publish, independently from their origin and native
language, in a literary context with a decreasing degree of internal diferentiation.
However, this tendency contrasts with an increased engagement with the other, and with
a sharpened awareness of, and greater interest for, the diferent neighbor, who has, in the mean-
time, become familiar. Both of these tendencies seem symptomatic of the historical situation of
the two Iberian countries in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century: they are on their
way to a unity which is, admittedly, oten still regarded as precarious.
Only with the Restauração of 1640 will Portuguese and Spanish literatures gradually begin
to distance themselves from each other again and what was slowly welded together over decades
breaks up again in a kind of belated echo of the political reversal. his clears the way for litera-
tures of a kind that we nearly take for granted at present: those written in national languages.
he political union of two Early Modern nations with their cultures and literatures, which
are characterized diferently but are also increasingly interrelated, creates a diverse group of
scenarios of literary communication that mark a clear-cut break in the literary history of both
traditions. he fact that this phenomenon has not yet received the attention it is due says much
about modern reluctance and probably also about feelings of resentment yet to be overcome. It
is, in any case, evidence of the dangers of restrictive perspectives, which a true Ibero-Romance
focus can counteract.
he court of the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1504), or the break in the
equilibrium among Peninsular languages
Víctor de Lama de la Cruz
he previous inheritance
he linguistic and cultural identity of the Iberian Peninsula that was dominant throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was shaped during the last part of the iteenth century.
During this period, a new articulation developed as a consequence of the tensions that arose
and were resolved in the Peninsular kingdoms.
he court of Queen Isabella inherited the literary and cultural models that were irmly es-
tablished in the courts of her father John II (1406–54) and her brother Henry IV (1454–74). Both
monarchs were enthusiasts and patrons of literary culture (as authors and addressees of many
literary pieces), and supported the writing of poetry by the nobility as an unmistakable sign of
the highest aristocratic distinction. his explains the magniicent proliferation of poets (more
than seven hundred were registered in the census of the last Dutton catalogue) that seemed to
ascribe to the ideas of Juan Alfonso de Baena, for whom the art of poetry was,
[a]n art of such elevated understanding and subtle genius that no one can learn it or reach it
or know how it should be except the man who possesses the highest and most subtle creativ-
ity, discretion, and sound judgment, and he who has heard and read many diverse books and
scriptures and speaks many languages, and he who has visited the courts of kings and great
lords, and seen and spoken of many of the world’s events, and inally, he who is a noble, and
is courteous and measured and chivalrous and gracious and polished and witty, and who has
honey and sugar and salt and air and grace in his reasoning, and he who is a lover and who
is always proud of being in love, because many wise men believe that a man in love, who
loves who he ought to and how he ought to and where he ought to, knows the highest of all
doctrines.1
Most authors of the time belonged to the aristocracy and many of them were poets, though only
in a broad sense of the term.
For ity years in the mid-iteenth century, Castile underwent a period of relative peace
with the Islamic community, though witnessing hundreds of civil revolts. During this time Cas-
tile enjoyed a revival of the Provençal courts of the twelth and thirteenth centuries. his last re-
appearance of Provençal poetry in the Castile of the iteenth century was a result of Catalonia’s
1. “Arte de tan elevado entendimiento e de tan sotil engeño que la non puede aprender nin aver nin alcaçar
nin saber bien ni como debe, salvo todo omne que sea de muy altas e sotiles invençiones e de muy elevada
e pura discreçión e de muy sano e derecho juicio, e tal que aya visto he oído e leído muchos e diversos
libros e escripturas e sepa de todos lenguajes, e aun que aya cursado de reyes e con grandes señores e que
aya visto e platicado muchos fechos del mundo e, inalmente, que sea noble hidalgo, e cortés e mesurado
e gentil e graçioso e polido e donoso, e que tenga miel e açucar e sal e aire e donaire en su razonar, e otrosí
que sea amador e que siempre se preçie e se inja de ser enamorado: porque es opinión de muchos sabios
que todo omne que sea enamorado, conviene a saber, que ame a quien debe e como debe e donde debe,
airman e dizen qu’el tal de todas dotrinas [es doctado].” (Dutton and González Cuenca 1993, 7–8)
602 Víctor de Lama de la Cruz
preservation of certain literary models and practices during the late fourteenth and early if-
teenth centuries. hese models were introduced in the Castilian court when the Trastámara
dynasty (settled in Castile since 1369) was instilled in the kingdom of Aragon by Ferdinand
of Antequera ater the Compromiso de Caspe (Caspe Agreement, 1411). It was during the reign
of his son, Alfonso V the Magnanimous (king of Aragon from 1418 to 1458 and also of Naples
from 1442), that contact with the Italian humanists was reinforced. his eventually introduced,
irst in Aragon and aterwards in Castile, new models (mostly Dante and Petrarch) and diferent
attitudes towards Greco-Latin authors (such as translation and the study of the classics) which
were considered very modern in Castile. he introductory labor of Francisco Imperial and the
later teachings of Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana, and Juan de Mena brought
to Castile both a Provençal heritage and a pre-renaissance Italianism that survived until the
sixteenth century.
he decadence of Galician and Catalan literature
Galician and Catalan literature faced a very diferent situation during the reign of the Catholic
Monarchs in the last quarter of the iteenth century from that of the reign of the irst Trastá-
maras in the second half of the fourteenth century. Even more remote was the literature that
had been sponsored by King Alfonso X the Learned in the second half of the thirteenth century.
In 1354, the death of Pedro, count of Barcelos, had marked the end of Galician-Portuguese lit-
erature. Lacking the patronage of igures like Alfonso X or King Dinis, the Trastámara dynasty
exerted its inluence from 1369 onwards over the aristocracy with courtesan manners (Henry
II was called de las Mercedes for his generosity with the nobility that had supported him in his
fratricide struggle against Peter I of Castile) and exerted a supremacy in all the Iberian Pen-
insula that afected other areas besides literature. hough Catalan literature still experienced
a few brilliant moments during the iteenth century, Galician literature underwent a process
of abandonment and a long period of silence that lasted until the nineteenth century. From
the Trastámara instauration in Castile in 1369 to the death of John II in 1454, Galician poetry
continued to be irregularly cultivated by the Gallego Castilian school, (to use the term created
by Lang 1902). he Galician language of this last century, which lacked authentically inspired
poets, lost its purity and correction. he replacement of one linguistic model for another caused
the interference of Castilian terms in Galician poems, and of Galician terms in poems which
were originally Castilian. his poetry continued to have the same traditional verse and stylistic
patterns (paralelism, leixapren, etc.), but lacked its original freshness and originality. he poets
that wrote poems in Galician or in Castilian with Galician terms in the Cancionero de Baena,
from Macías to Villasandino to Garci Fernández de Gerena, composed poems which lacked the
elegance and gracefulness of the old school (Lapesa 1953–54).
his Galician literary decadence had political and social causes. As Anxo Tarrío Varela
(1988, 37) pointed out:
we shall remember the few fortunate occasions in which the Galician nobility decided to posi-
tion itself; irst that of Don Pedro de Borgoña in opposition to Don Enrique de Trastámara, and
later Juana la Beltraneja opposing Isabel. Galicia always did the opposite of what it should. If
he court of the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1504) 603
we add to this the desperate irmandiñas battles that caused the failures of the Galician iteenth
century, we have here the causes of the gradual decline.
In the area of literary historiography the decline of Galician poetry was already notorious by
1430 when Juan Alfonso de Baena compiled his cancionero (songbook). he year 1483 has con-
ventionally been established as the symbolic start of the Dark Age, the date in which Don Pedro
de Cela and his son were decapitated in the public square of the Episcopal town of Mondoñedo.
hough not directly related with literature, it is true that from this year on administrative texts
stopped being written in Galician in favor of Castilian. Relegated to a minor language, Gali-
cian was restricted to family relationships. In any case, the validity of its ancient poetry was
maintained in some popular and academic examples and especially with the presence of certain
parallelistic songs similar to those of the old Galician-Portuguese school which can be found in
the Cancionero municipal de palacio (Municipal palace songbook; compiled from 1505 to 1520),
in the Cancionero de Upsala (Uppsala songbook; compiled at a later time, but with a contempo-
rary repertoire), in that of the Biblioteca publica Hortensia from Elvas, and in various musical
cancioneros of the mid-sixteenth century.
he decadence of Catalan literature occurred later than that of Galicia, as throughout the
iteenth century there was still a wide range of poets and prose writers similar in quality to
those of Castile. Some examples are Jordi of Sant Jordi, Ausias March (to many critics, the
most inspired and innovative poet of the Hispanic iteenth century), and Joan Roís de Corella,
along with numerous Valencian writers. In any case, the authors that wrote in Catalan in the
Golden Age (Pere Serai, the Rector of Vallfrogna, Francesc Fontanella) are, in words of Martí
de Riquer, of “third or fourth quality.” Furthermore, there were no great Catalan authors (with
the exception of Juan Boscán) writing in Castilian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in
comparison to the many Valencians, such as Timoneda, Gil Polo, Rey de Artieda, and Guillén
de Castro, who were prominent Castilian-writing authors.
Economic factors were not the cause for Catalan literary decline. In fact, ater the reign of
Isabella and Ferdinand the population grew, the bourgeoisie became richer, the printing houses
of Barcelona, Valencia, and Zaragoza published many books in Castilian and Latin, and para-
doxically, Catalan remained the oicial language of the viceroyalty, where “it was not met with
the slightest restriction or opposition” (M. Riquer 1964–88, 4:435). he arrival of the Trastáma-
ras to the throne in 1412 with the coronation of Ferdinand of Antequera was of great importance.
hough in Spain it was usual for the new foreign king to adapt to the local language, the op-
posite happened in the case of Ferdinand of Antequera. All the kings of Aragon in the iteenth
century had Castilian as a mother tongue, and their wives were also Castilian. he key factor is
probably that from the twelth century onwards, Catalan existed side by side with Aragonese
in the kingdom of Aragon, and in the iteenth century these languages were not very difer-
ent. Latin was also used for diferent functions. Legal scribes probably knew Aragonese, which
was considered a variety of Castilian, so it is not diicult to understand that many Catalan and
Valencian authors wrote sporadically in Castilian during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs.
Martín de Riquer mentions how bilingual writers like Mossèn Avinyó, Simón Pastor, Joan de
Masdovelles, Pere Torroella, Romeu Llull, Francesc Moner, Francí de Castellví, Narcis Vinyoles,
Jaime Gassull, Jeroni d’Artés, Bernat Fenollar, Joan Escrivà, Jordi Centelles, and Jaime d’Olesa,
among others (without forgetting several bilingual anonymous authors), generally belonged to
the upper class. he Catalan and Valencian popular classes were a bit slower in the assimila-
tion of Castilian: already in the early years of the iteenth century there are testimonies of, for
example, the romancero (ballad collection) being hummed. While Ferdinand of Aragon still
reigned, the Cancionero general (the most monumental collection of Castilian poetry printed
before the twentieth century) was printed in Valencia in 1511 by Cristobal Kofman. hree years
later, the Valencian second edition of the mentioned cancionero was printed by Jorge Costilla.
In the court of Naples, culture was fostered by the patronage of the Magnanimous, “lover
of literature and very clever in his use of politic propaganda” (Beltran 2002, 28–29), and the dif-
icult linguistic equilibrium was resolved in favor of Castilian. According to José Carlos Rovira
(1990, 154), “[i]n Naples there was the Latin of the humanists, the Castilian of the poets, and
the Catalan of the royal chancery. Catalan maintained its administrative status with the same
cultural and social strength of the Catalan in the peninsular territory. However, in the ield of
poetry, Catalan faced a irst defeat.” In fact, in the Cancionero al amor de Lucrecia d’Alagno y
Alfonso V de Aragón (Songbook for Lucrezia d’Alagno and Alfonso V of Aragon’s love), edited
by Rovira (161–208), we ind three texts in Latin, four in Italian, ten in Castilian, and only three
in Catalan, two of them by Ausias March. Various cancioneros which were linked to the Naples
court (especially RC1, MN54, VM1, and ME1) contain a large amount of poetry. As Beltran
(2002, 30) pointed out, in Naples “poetry in Castilian was solidly implanted and by this means,
it became one of the poetic fashions of the Italy of the second half of the iteenth century.”
he devotio moderna and similar religious trends
It is relevant to mention that during the Middle Ages there was one only literary culture. Ma-
rio Praz (1948, 148) airmed that “Chaucer and the major fourteenth-century Italian writers
spoke diferent languages, but their culture was one and the same.” his statement can explain
the literary productions of the region in the time of the Catholic Monarchs. Along with the
obvious Romanic inluence, in religious matters there was also an Anglo-Saxon inluence of
devotio moderna. In the last years of the iteenth century it generated new religious attitudes
and literary works that broke away from the typical medieval patterns of religious poetry. he
cultural lag of the Peninsular kingdoms is proven by the fact that the lives of the saints and the
miracles of the Virgin were nearly the only topics in Hispanic religious narrative prior to the
iteenth century.
he life and passion of Christ had already started being transmitted by the Franciscans in
other countries in the thirteenth century by means of Meditationes vitae Christi (Meditations
on Christ’s life), which inluenced works in prose, verse, drama, and painting. he Meditationes
vitae Christi, of Franciscan origin, can be found in various countries in the fourteenth century,
and reached Catalonia in the inal years of the century. However, it was necessary to wait until
approximately 1470 for the appearance of this type of subject matter in Castilian literature.
he works Coplas de vita Christi (Stanzas on Christ’s life) by the Franciscan Íñigo de Men-
doza, Passión trobada (Poem about the passion) by Diego de San Pedro, Coplas sobre diver-
sas devociones y misterios (Stanzas on several devotions and mysteries) by the Franciscan Fray
Ambrosio Montesino, and Trovas de la gloriosa Pasión (Poems about the glorious passion) by
Comendador Román all feature this theme. In Valencia, Isabel de Villena wrote Vita Christi
(Christ’s life), which is surprising for its originality. Although it is not easy to tell if this Pen-
insular renovation was due to a European inlux or to Franciscan inluence, there is no doubt
about the link between the retoric imaginerie (rhetorical images) of these Vitae Christi and the
inluence of the reforming sermons of the Franciscan order, especially on Mendoza and Mon-
tesino. Íñigo de Mendoza’s work only covers events between the Incarnation and the Slaughter
of the Innocents, and the irst version was written between 1467 and 1468. Because of its satiric
technique, dramatic dialogues, and comparisons (many of them extracted from everyday life),
these Vitae Christi have the appearance of a versiied series of sermons about the Annunciation,
Nativity, Circumcision, etc. he author also uses every opportunity to condemn the most com-
mon vices and the attitudes of his political opponents (this aspect becomes more unsubstantial
in the second and in the inal version, which was sent to print in 1482). he incorporation of
a dialogue in sayagués (rustic language) about the birth of Christ among the shepherds links
the works of Mendoza to subsequent theater pieces that systematically adopted this language
for the dialogues between peasants and shepherds (works by Juan del Encina, Lucas Fernández,
and others of the sixteenth century).
hough the evangelical gospels are the basis of all these pieces, those of Mendoza and San
Pedro follow them more closely than those of Montesino. Román borrowed certain elements
from the apocryphal gospels. In all of them we can ind very expressive details that reach their
most arresting point in the horrendous and morbid description of the Cruciixion. Because of
their realistic descriptions and dramatic qualities, the works of Mendoza and San Pedro were
the most popular.
his genre of the Vitae Christi was a favorite of Queen Isabella, as proven by the fact that
the Vita Christi by Ludolphe de Saxe, translated by Brother Ambrosio Montesino, was the work
chosen to launch Alcalá de Henares’s irst printing press in 1502. It was printed by Estanislao
Polono, who went to the Castilian city by invitation of the Toledo Archbishop Francisco Jimé-
nez de Cisneros. he low or null beneit obtained by its main investor, the merchant García de
Rueda, was probably due to the luxurious details with which Cisneros (conidant of Isabella in
religious matters) had ordered it made. his Vita Christi expressed very well the preferences
of the powerful in religious matters, and was a worthy predecessor of a massive project, the
Polyglot Bible, which was not carried out by Polono, but by Arnao Guillén de Brocar (who a few
years later would become the best printer in the peninsula).
his new wave of spirituality reached Catalonia, which already possessed a religious tradi-
tion that had begun in the last years of the fourteenth century. he Catalan translation of the
Bible, attributed to Bonifaci Ferrer (brother of Saint Vincent Ferrer), which must have been
written between 1396 and 1404, was published in Valencia in 1478, and is the irst Bible pub-
lished in a Romance language. In those inal years of the iteenth century, its style, very faithful
to the original text, must have seemed strange to the public; only its condition as a religious text
made it acceptable for some years.
Isabel de Villena (1430–90), the illegitimate daughter of Enrique de Villena, was the abbess
of the Convent de la Santíssima Trinitat in Valencia. Around her there formed an interesting
group of authors which included prominent igures of Valencian literature of the second half
of the iteenth century like Jaume Roig and Joan Roís de Corella. his enlightened woman
composed for the nuns of her convent a Vita Christi in Catalan where women played a relevant
function, especially in the relationship they had with Christ. Although her knowledge of Holy
Scriptures was suicient for her work to have been more faithful to the original and to the spirit
of the gospel, her conception of the text’s limited circulation and her intellectual independence
as an aristocratic woman allowed her to elaborate a feminist speech in which the presence of
everyday life reminds us of the Castilian Franciscans.
here is no doubt that the literary conception of Sister Isabel de Villena was very similar to
that of Queen Isabella. his explains why the queen, ater Sister Isabel’s death in 1490, asked her
successor, the Abbess Aldonça de Montsoriu, for a copy of the text. he work was published in
Valencia in 1497 because the abbess wished that everyone, not only the nuns, could appreciate
its elegant and sweet style and collir fruyt de proitosa doctrina (take doctrinary proitable fruit).
his Vita Christi, the only known work of Sister Isabel de Villena, is unique in that it includes
many details, tales, and themes from diferent sources, and at the same time bypasses events
from the four evangelical gospels. Many miracles and parables of the New Testament are not
mentioned, but biographical gaps in the life of Christ are illed in with information from the
apocryphal gospels, especially the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (De Santos 1956, 191–257), and
other traditions. here is a disparity with the biblical text in the detailed account of the birth
and childhood of Jesus and the Virgin, while much less attention is paid to the plights of Jesus.
he part relating to Jesus’s childhood is full of unearthly episodes and devout digressions that
are aimed at exalting the nuns’ fervor, who were the intended audience of the text. here are
also many speciic details, oten picturesque, that remind us of the works by Íñigo de Mendoza
and Montesino, as they all humanize aspects of the life of Christ.
In a similar line to the works of Sister Isabel, and several years before Ambrosio de Mon-
tesino, Joan Roís de Corella began the most ambitious and extensive of his translations, the
Catalan version of the four parts of the Vita Christi by Ludolph of Saxe. he third and fourth
volumes were published in 1495, the irst in 1496 and the second in 1500. he desire to be
faithful to the original text did not lead the author to introduce interpolations or digressions,
as occurred in other translations. Rather, there is a tendency to abbreviate and to avoid the
ornaments of the valenciana prosa (Valencian prose) and any colloquial expressions that could
ofend the strict ministers of the Valencian Inquisition, who in 1498 abolished the Valencian
Bible by Bonifaci Ferrer. Valencian readers were thus able to read Ludolph of Saxe’s work in their
own language and compare it with the peculiar version of Sister Isabel de Villena. Corella’s was
not the only translation of a religious text. Following an entrenched tradition in Catalan litera-
ture, Joan Roís had translated Psalteri (he Book of Psalms) into Catalan, which was probably
printed in Venice in 1490. his work too was written in measured and balanced prose, far from
the rhetoric acrobatics of his other works.
he innovative ideas of the German mystic homas À Kempis (1380–1471), whose Imatio
Christi (Imitation of Christ) soon spread through Europe both in Latin and in vernacular trans-
lations, contributed to this new religiosity. It was translated into Catalan by Miquel Pares with
the title Menyspreu del mon (Contempt of the world; 1482). But the biggest representative of
devotio moderna was Espill de la vida religiosa (Mirror of religious life) by Miquel Comalada, a
work also known as El destijós (he eager one; published in Barcelona in 1515), which was later
translated into Castilian and other languages, and became very popular until the nineteenth
century. Its main character, the hermit Desitjós, undergoes an allegoric pilgrimage that passes
through three ascetic-mystic paths (purgative, illuminative, and uniting).
Pedro Torrellas/Pere Torroella, a bilingual poet in the nucleus of the pro and antifeminist
controversy
he growth of neighboring literatures in constant interaction oten produces the phenomenon

of an author writing his texts in two diferent linguistic codes. he cancioneros of the second
half of the iteenth and irst years of the sixteenth century record various poetic compositions
and some texts in prose attributed to Mossèn Pere Torroella (sometimes Torrella) when the
manuscripts are in Catalan, and to Pere Torrellas when the poems are in Castilian. It seems
clear that it refers to the same poet because in the Castilian version he is sometimes mentioned
as Mossèn Pere Torrellas, catalán; there are also other signs that conirm his bilingualism. His
peculiar position as cultivator of poetry in Castilian and in Catalan allowed him to participate
in the afairs of the Castilian court, the Navarre court of Charles of Aragon, Prince of Viana, the
Naples court of the Magnanimous, and that of Aragon in the service of John II. hese relation-
ships illustrate the vitality of a generation of bilingual courtesan poets and the lack of tension
between two linguistic systems just before Catalan lost its struggle for dominance in the Pen-
insula in the last decades of the iteenth century. On the other hand, thanks to his openness,
Torrellas was inluenced by poets from Castile (Juan de Mena for example), Catalonia (Ausias
March), as well as Italy, and France, as we will see. He is also one of the few poets of the period
who have had their works published in the twentieth century.
Torrellas was born around 1410, probably in an area of Girona where western Catalan was
spoken. He probably lived until 1475, when John II of Aragon ordered the inhabitants of Ampu-
rias to swear idelity to Pedro Torrellas, though some biographers think he may have lived until
1486. he cancioneros that collect his works are from the period of Henry IV and of the Catholic
Monarchs. His Castilian literary activity was mainly during the reigns of John II, Henry IV, and
the Catholic Monarchs. His poetic writing became richer thanks to his origin and his political-
military career, with his participation in the courts of Charles of Viana, Alfonso the Magnani-
mous, and John II of Aragon.
Some disperse data allows us to outline his biography. In 1438 he was a squire and steward
of the Prince of Viana in the court of Navarre. In 1441 he fought alongside John II of Navarre in
Medina del Campo and in 1445 he traveled to Naples to take important information to Alfonso
V the Magnanimous, but he remained at the Navarre court from 1446 to 1450, a period during
which he wrote the Castilian piece Complaynta sobre la muerte de Ynés de Cléves (Complain
about Ynés de Cléves’ death), the wife of Charles of Viana, who died in Olite on April 6th, 1448.
He remained faithful to Charles of Viana for a long time and in 1460 he and other followers
encouraged the Prince to head the government of Navarre. Before this date he had returned
to Naples, where Alfonso V named him Seneschal of the Sicilian army. During his stay at the
court of Naples he befriended some humanists, most especially Giovanni Pontano, who would
dedicate to him his Liber de laudibus divinis (Book in praise of God) and some laudatory po-
ems. As a signal of gratitude to Alfonso V, he wrote the Castilian poem Maravilla a los absentes
(Wonder for the absents) in praise of Lucrezia d’Alagno, as did many other poets of the court
of Naples. Ater the death of Magnanimous in 1458, the author returned to Aragon where John
II granted him the manor of Ampurdán, along with various privileges and titles as a reward for
the important diplomatic and military service he had paid until at least 1475, a year ater Isabella
of Castile proclaimed herself queen in Segovia.
A good example of the poetic knowledge and multilingual literary atmosphere of Torrel-
las’s time is his 682-line poem that begins “Tan mon voler s’és dat amors” (Alas, my will has
surrendered to love) and has the peculiarity of including love lines of many poets who wrote in
various languages. Torellas identiies with the sentiments of these poets as if they had foretold
the feelings that he was now sufering. Martí de Riquer gives us the list of authors that he quotes,
which include the troubadours Peire Vidal, Pons d’Ortafà, Blacasset, Arnaut Daniel, Bernat de
Ventadorm, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, and Guillerm de Berguedà, to whom he attributes a line
that in another cancionero is attributed to Peire Vidal. he Catalan poets quoted are Jacme, Ar-
nau and Ausias March, Luís de Vilarrasa, Martí Garcái, Francesc Ferrer, Andreu Febrer, Jordi de
Sant Jordi (to whom he attributes a line by the troubadour Peire Cardenal), and the unknown
Joan de Castellví. he French poets quoted by Torrellas are Guillaume de Machaut, Oton de
Grandson, and Alain Chartier (from whom he copies some lines of La belle dame sans merci
[he beautiful lady without mercy]). he Castilians quoted are Lope de Stúñiga, Íñigo López
de Mendoza, Pedro de Santa Fe, Juan de Torres, Juan de Dueñas, Macías, and, with lines from
poems which have not yet been identiied, Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino and Juan de Mena.
Francesc de Mèscua is also quoted with some lines in Catalan. Each poet is quoted in his origi-
nal language: the troubadours in a Provençal that the copyists have sometimes catalanized, the
French in French, and the Castilians (including the Galician Macías) in Castilian. Jordi de Sant
Jordi had already quoted troubadours and French and Catalan poets in Passio Amoris (Passion
of love), but what is surprising in the poetry of Torrellas is that the number of Castilian poets
(eight) surpasses the seven Provençal and three French poets, and is only surpassed by the
nine Catalans. It is important to mention that all the Castilian poets were related to the courts
of Navarre (Lope de Stúñiga, Juan de Torres), Aragon (Juan de Dueñas), or to both (Pedro de
Santa Fe). he presence of the Galicians Macías and Villasandino with lines in Castilian and the
fact that various poets linked to Navarre and Aragon use this language indicates that around
1440 (Riquer dates Tant mon volver between 1436 and 1445) the preferred language for poetry
was Castilian. We must not forget that Alfonso V of Aragon, son of Ferdinand of Antequera,
continued the authoritarian and Castilianist politics of his father.
he Catalan poetic production of Torrellas is mainly amorous and is dedicated to a woman
who is hidden with the senyal (coded message) of Bé de mos mals (Good of my evils). his use
of a senyal is proof of the inluence of Ausias March and the previous Provençalism, but also of
the Castilian use of a sacred hyperbole. Torrellas uses religious terms to express his great love
for his lady and declares that, if God has reserved a place for him in heaven apart from her, he
would rather be expulsed, as for him there is no better paradise than to be in the company of
his beloved.
Torrellas’s willingness to be one of the inhabitants of the many Iniernos de enamorados
(Hell of lovers) is reminiscent of Dante, whose work was well-known in the iteenth century
thanks to the writing of Íñigo López de Mendoza and Garci Sánchez de Badajoz.
In Torrellas’s amorous songs in Catalan we can appreciate courtesan praises that celebrate
the virtues of the lady, but this perfection is not always free from ingratitude and cruelty. Tor-
rellas is not very diferent from the Castilian poets that wrote about love, which is why the
misogyny he exudes in Maldezir de las mujeres (Against women; also known as Coplas sobre las
calidades de las donas [Stanzas on women’s qualities]) should be considered in context.
Some of Torrellas’s festive compositions, like one dedicated to an unknown countess (Ri-
quer 1964–88, 4:28–29), approach in tone the poems that were later compiled in the burlesque
section of the Cancionero General (General songbook; 1511). In them, insolence and coarseness
are mixed with pornographic details. An example is the poem in which Torrellas narrates his
visit to a casa stimada (beloved house) and the attitudes of the clients he inds there: a doctor, a
false pedagogue, a converse, a chaplain, a Florentine merchant, etc.
In the metric aspect, Torrellas was faithful to the Catalan tradition in the use of the deca-
syllabic coblas (stanzas), frequently used by the troubadours, without forgetting the balada or
the lai, of French origin.
His relationship with the Italian poets of the iteenth century could have been closer dur-
ing his stay in Naples, but Torrellas was still able to adopt a form as promising as the sonnet,
while maintaining an aesthetic model that did not break with the conventions of the Peninsular
poetry of the cancioneros. His is the most ancient sonnet we have knowledge of in Catalan (Pus
no us desment ignorança l’entendre [Understanding does not refute your ignorance]), contem-
porary to the ones written by Marquis of Santillana between 1438 and 1444.
It was for his Castilian poetry that Torrellas earned his long-lasting fame. In these brief
poems, light and agile, he demonstrates his perfect control of the metric and stylistic conven-
tions of the Castilian amorous poetry of the iteenth century. M. de Riquer points out that
just as La belle dame sans merci by Alain Chartier triggered all kinds of positive and negative
responses in the French poetry of the iteenth century, so Maldezir de las mujeres produced a
long controversy and for many years was considered the paradigm of antifeminism. However,
Torrellas’s poem was not so unusual as to generate such tremendous opposition. Bach y Rita
(1930) pointed out, followed by Riquer, that the piece gathered the many clichés against women
that can be found in Catalan poetry in the late fourteenth and early iteenth century. Its suc-
cess probably owes more to the timing of its publication, a moment of great poetic activity in
Castile, and its cheerful sonority and luid versiication, than to the originality of its contents
or intrinsic poetic quality.
Torrellas enumerated the many laws of women, who according to him were capricious,
vacillating, selish, deceitful, unfaithful, secretive, etc. he literary controversy that followed
lasted many years. Montoro, Suero de Ribera, and Gómez Manrique all wrote criticisms of
the poem and of Torrellas, and Gómez Manrique even responded Torrellas verse by verse in a
poem with the same rhyme and meter.
For an author to write both in favor of and against women was not strange at the end of
the Middle Ages. Boccaccio had written against women in Corbaccio and in praise of them in
De claris mulieribus (Concerning famous women). Torrellas was forced to defend himself and
wrote in prose Razonamiento de Torrella en defensión de las donas, por satisfacción de unas co-
plas que en decir mal de aquéllas compuso (Torrellas’s reasoned defense of women, in response
to verses which he wrote against them). he piece by Fray Íñigo de Mendoza, dated in the irst
years of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, Coplas que izo frey Yñigo de Mendoza, laire menor,
doze en vituperio de las malas hembras, que no pueden las tales ser dichas mugeres, e doze en loor
de las buenas mugeres, que mucho triumpho de honor merecen (Verses written by Fray Yñigo
de Mendoza, twelve in censure of evil women, and twelve in favor of virtuous women), can
give us an idea of how commonplace this literary game of a double attitude towards women
actually was.
Like many other Castilian poets, Torrellas participated in the genre of questions and re-
sponses that, although usually identiied with poetry in the time of the Catholic Monarchs
(for example, the questions and responses that Jorge Manrique exchanged with Guevara, Juan
Álvarez Gato, etc.), was also frequent in prose. In Retorica prosa catalana (Catalan rhetorical
prose), Torrellas responded to Francesc Ferrer. He also exchanged letters in Catalan with Bernat
Hug about which is irst, love or hope, that were collected in the anonymous cancionero titled
Jardinet d’Orats (Little garden of fools), compiled in 1486. We also conserve in Castilian four
prose letters from Torrellas to Pedro de Urrea and their three responses, to which we can add
the consolatory letter in Castilian addressed to a lady as a result of the death of Martí d’Ança, a
friend of Torrellas.
Some intertextual modalities between Castilian and Catalan poetry
here was a strong bond among the Peninsular languages during the Middle Ages, proved by
the exchange of literary forms and genres. In the case of the poetry of Provençal origin, we have
seen how irst Catalonia and later Castile carried out the relay of the vigorous Galician-Portu-
guese school that had been active since the end of the twelth century, but was starting to show
signs of its demise at the beginning of the iteenth century. Furthermore, in the case of speciic
compositions, it was not strange to observe a “back and forth” phenomenon. Sometimes it was
a melody, a circumstantial success, a transcendent topic, or a simple title that encouraged an
author to rewrite a composition with a new meaning by means of using diferent words and
another language.
his was the case of the Catalan version of the Castilian Coplas de la Panadera (Stanzas on
the baker woman), as Riquer points out (1964–88, 3:481–82). he poem was written as a satire of
the cowardice of certain nobles (with the exception of Álvaro de Luna and John II) that fought
in the battle of Olmedo on May 19, 1445, and spread rapidly throughout the Peninsula.
he anonymous poem whose author only identiies himself as Obra feta per [a] lo capellà
Fajadell, beneiciat en la Seu de Barcelona (Work for the chaplain Fajadell), are conserved in the
cancionero of the University of Zaragoza (Baselga y Ramírez 1896, 73) in a deteriorated state,
but are far more legible in the cancionero of the Ateneo de Barcelona (Aramon i Serra 1964, 155)
with the unmistakable title Maldit (Vituperation). he list of insults in the Catalan version is as
prodigious as that of the Castilian original. Its eight-syllable lines end with a rhyme in – era and
are followed by the expression La panadera. hey conserve the structure of the original Castil-
ian verses and probably reproduce their music.
Another anonymous poet wrote a poem against a person he describes as a hypocrite. He
even compares him to the Antichrist and thinks that he has been created by the devil o lo rabí
de Cervera (or the rabbi from Cervera). It is a composition of 99 lines, divided into 11 stanzas
and is also included in the cancionero of the Ateneo (Aramon i Serra 1964, 51).
A third Catalan poem, based on the Castilian verses of La Panadera, was composed against
an unknown person identiied as Mallol in protest for his having been absolved of a certain
crime. he basis of the composition, which consists of seven lines, is the humoristic enumera-
tion of juridical precepts and the mention of several characters who are diicult to identify (M.
de Riquer 1964–88, 3:482).
Álvaro de Luna, who was mentioned as one of the brave participants of the battle of Ol-
medo in 1445, also played an important role in later works. In 1453, and separated by only ive
days, two events that let a deep mark on the Christian kingdoms took place: the 29th of May,
Constantinople fell to the Turks, resulting in a lurry of crusade songs in Catalan (M. de Riquer
1964–88, 3:484–86), and the 3rd of June, Álvaro de Luna, permanent enemy of the princes of
Aragon, was decapitated in Valladolid. In Castile many poems were dedicated either to the
defense or condemnation of this powerful man. One example of the latter was the famous Doc-
trinal de privados (Doctrine on counselors), composed by the Marqués de Santillana against his
main politic enemy. In Catalan, Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles, who had written some exalted
lines about the fall of Constantinople for a contest, also dedicated a song to the death of Álvaro
de Luna. his work encouraged the powerful to learn from the death of this rich man and to
follow his example by not falling into the temptation of tyranny.
We have already mentioned how the adulterous love afair between Lucrezia d’Alagno and
the Magnanimous while Queen María was in Valencia was the subject of songs in both Catalan
and Castilian, and Italian and Latin, from 1450 until about twenty years later. Furthermore, the
work Triunfo de les dones (Triumph of women) by Joan Roís de Corella (the title was inspired by
Triunfo de las donas by Juan Rodríguez del Padrón) was very popular among the Catalan poets
and was dedicated to the queen. It must have been written between 1441 (date in which he be-
came a novice) and 1445 (year in which the queen died). he works of Corella form part of the
pro-feminist and antifeminist controversy, and blamed men for their ostentatious chivalric dis-
plays (the exaggerated pasos de armas [tournaments]), attitude that seems contrary to certain
parts of Tirant lo Blanc (Tirant, the white knight). Citing the common clichés of these pieces,
Riquer points out that Triunfo de les dones is reminiscent of Razonamiento en defensión de las
donas (Argument in defense of women), which Torrellas had written in Castilian (pretending
to make amends ater his Maldezir de mujeres), and also of some lines of verse 295 of Mena’s
Laberinto de Fortuna (Fortune’s labyrinth).
he romancero at the end of the iteenth century and its peninsular languages
he romancero (ballad collection) and its multilingualism at the end of the Middle Ages deserve
a separate chapter. he ease with which the romancero was transmitted from one geograph-
ic and linguistic territory to another gives us an objective vision of the literary relationships
among the languages of the Peninsula better than any other genre. It is well known that the tra-
ditional romancero soon extended beyond the Peninsular territory and was not limited to the
Castilian language; romanceros were also written in Catalan, Galician, and Portuguese. Some of
these romances (ballads) have corresponding versions in the Castilian romancero, while others
do not. As for what is referred to as geographic development, the romances in Castilian existed
side by side in Catalonia and Galicia with other romances composed in the autochthonous lan-
guages. Furthermore, romanceros have been found in the Canary Islands, America (including
Brazil and the United States), and in Sephardic Jew communities in North Africa, Asia, and the
Netherlands.
he most ancient romances that we have knowledge of are the ones called romances viejos
(old ballads), a term that already appeared in early written romances; it has been used to refer to
those of medieval origin, though it is also used for many written in the sixteenth century. Our
knowledge of the romancero viejo is undermined by two circumstances: a) that it was sung po-
etry and its transmission was mainly oral; b) the late and sporadic nature of the witnesses that
we have. hus, what we know of as romancero viejo only includes the works found in the oldest
documents, although some witnesses are from much later: a few were copied in manuscripts
in the time of the Catholic Monarchs, and the others had already been printed by the sixteenth
century. We also have to add the problem that some surely proceed from the Middle Ages (like
Don Bueso in the Catalan tradition, which we will mention later), but were not copied until
the iteenth and sixteenth centuries due to lack of interest or censorship. If these romances are
suspected of having been composed in the Middle Ages, they are also considered a part of the
romancero viejo.
Among the most ancient romanceros in Castilian we can ind the artful and troubadour
romances composed by a collection of courtesan poets that followed the fashion of the court of
the Catholic Monarchs. On the one hand, this fashion included polyphonic music, for which
poets wrote or adapted romances, and on the other, an interest for what was considered popular,
which made them compile and gloss genres that were considered vulgar up to that time, for
example the case of traditional lyric or even of the actual romancero. Authors as renowned as
Juan del Encina and Gil de Vicente wrote artful romances, generally with lyrical content. he
same trend was followed by the authors of the Cancionero General (1511), where we ind, for
example, Otro romance de Diego de San Pedro contrahaciendo el viejo que dize “Yo me estava
en Barvadillo en essa mi heredad” (Another ballad by Diego de San Pedro inspired by the old
one that begins “I was in Barvadillo”). his piece emulates the complaints of Doña Lambra in
the Romancero de los Siete Infantes de Lara (Ballads on the seven infantes from Lara). Another
work is Otro del mismo San Pedro, trocado por el que dize “Reniego de ti, Mahomad” (Another
ballad by San Pedro, inspired by the one that says “I renounce Muhammad”), which belongs to
the cycle of Roncesvalles.
he romances that have survived in Catalan all proceed from the modern oral tradition,
and most of them were compiled by famous scholars like Marian Aguiló and Milà i Fontanals
in the second half of the nineteenth century. No Catalan texts from the iteenth or sixteenth
century have been preserved, unlike in the Castilian romancero. M. de Riquer describes three
elements in the formation of the Catalan romancero: French and Provençal, Castilian, and au-
tochthonous elements. he French-Provencal inluence seems to date from the iteenth cen-
tury and the Castilian from the mid-sixteenth century. An exception was the Majorcan Jaume
d’Olesa, who copied a peculiar version of the Castilian romance De una gentil dama y un rústico
pastor (On a kind woman and a rustic shepherd) in the workbook where he copied his poems in
1421. he text, which has a great number of Catalan linguistic forms, is the irst dated example of
a romance. Another text written in Catalonia was a Castilian romance which refers to the Prince
de Viana, who led to Naples when he fell out with his father in 1456. his romance must have
been well known in Catalonia, as it was compiled in the cancionero of the Ateneo, where poems
in Catalan prevail. he poem, entitled Romans (Ballad), shows the unmistakable features of
narrative poetry, the same as the typical Castilian romance. he same occurs in a passage of
Tirant lo Blanc, where the author alludes to a known romance in which Ypòlit, before parting
from the Empress, begs her un romanç ab baixa veu de Tristany com se planyia de la llançada
del rei Marc (to quietly sing a ballad on Tristan complaining of king Mark’s lance). here is no
doubt that he is referring to the romance in Castilian Ferido está don Tristán de una mala lan-
zada (Tristan is wounded by a lance).
he Castilian origin of many Catalan romances is proved by the incorporation of words
and even lines in this language. In fact, many romances are bilingual. A version compiled by
Milà i Fontanals of the romance of Saint Catherine contains whole lines in Castilian. Another
version collected in Minorca, with a much purer Catalan language, has a plot that is much more
faithful to the more popular Castilian version.
Another romance which shows a strong Castilian inluence is Els dos germans (he two
brothers), also compiled by Milà. It is a version of the romance in Castilian Don Bueso, and
both are remotely derived from the Austrian poem Kudrun from the thirteenth century. he
presence of this topic in both Catalan and Castilian literature shows the underlying problematic
issue of the survival of the roman (romance), or learned narrative in verse, in the Iberian Penin-
sula and, more speciically, the spread of the translations and adaptations of European romans
in Iberian territory. he presence of Don Bueso would probably be a topic present in a work on
pan-European balladry, as the ballad is a type of narrative poetry that was sung and was spread
mainly by oral transmission. he romance was a speciic form with which the ballad manifested
itself in the Peninsula.
here are cases of versions of romances in diferent languages in which the plots are altered
and the name of the main character is usually changed. he Count of Alarcos appears in some
Catalan versions as the Count d’Alarcos, d’Alarca, de Raixa, Florispan, etc. Related to the ine ro-
mance of Count Olinos is the one known in Catalonia as Don Lluis and in Majorca as La vida de
les galeres (Life in the galleys). he famous Castilian romance by Gaiferos has, in Catalan, many
known versions with other names (L’Escrivaneta [he little scribe woman], La illa del Carmesí
[Carmesí’s daughter], La illa del Mallorquí [he Majorcan’s daughter], etc.).
Because all the romances compiled in Catalonia belong to the group of traditional romanc-
es, it is not easy to determine when they were composed or adapted to Catalan. M. de Riquer
posited that the most ancient romances are probably those which conserve the highest degree of
linguistic purity, and that the ones which incorporate more words and phrases in Castilian are
the most recent. However, the process by which works in one language are adapted to another
is one of great complexity and subtlety. his makes us credulous of the overall simplicity of
Riquer’s thesis according to which the higher degree of linguistic purity is directly proportional
to the greater antiquity of the adaptation.
heatrical repertoire models in Portugal
Conlict and circulation (1737–93)
Raquel Bello Vázquez
he ield of theater is a highly plastic space that allows us to understand how close and conlic-
tive the relationships between the two main cultural systems of the Iberian Peninsula were dur-
ing the eighteenth century. he kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were the only ones to count on
political institutions that could warrant the independence of their own intellectual ields from
others. he persistence in Portugal of successful Spanish theatrical models that were at the time
prestigious for the cultural elite was to condition the renewal strategies of theatrical repertoires
operated by diferent enlightened groups and the importation of models elaborated in opposi-
tion to the Spanish one, mainly from Italy and France.
In pages to follow, we ofer a brief panorama of the state of Portuguese theater during the
second half of the eighteenth century, presenting information on the progression of Spanish
theater in Portugal and trying to explain the ways new models were imported and supported
by diferent groups, and thus derive from the theatrical issue some conclusions regarding the
functioning of the intellectual ield and the theatrical subsystem.
his period begins in 1737 with the polemic that arose between two members of the Real
Académia de História (Royal Academy of History), the Marquis of Valença (Francisco de Por-
tugal e Castro, 1679–1749) and Alexandre de Gusmão (1695–1753), over Spanish and French
models. he date of its end, 1793, is that of the inauguration in Lisbon of the Teatro de São Car-
los (heater of São Carlos), which signalled the triumph of the Italian comedy theatrical model
over other genres and origins. his model was to be maintained until the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury when new attempts to renew the Portuguese theatrical repertoire were made by Almeida
Garrett responding to aesthetical, sociological, and political patterns completely diferent from
those conditioning theatrical quarrels during the Age of Enlightenment.
From this point on, we will refer to theater as a subsystem integrated in the intellectual
ield of the age. When discussing the eighteenth century, it is not easy to decide which term is
most convenient to refer to the ield that literary productions are considered to belong to. his
is because on the one hand, the eighteenth century’s concept of literature is not equivalent to
the current one and on the other, it is hard to perceive the level of autonomy a literary ield
could have at the time, considering that it was still distinguishing itself from other ields (politi-
cal, economical, scientiic, religious) and intellectual products (music, epistolography, sermon,
scientiic or pedagogical essays). As a result, we opt for using the term intellectual ield instead
of literary ield, understanding that a more extensive denomination provides us with a better
approach to eighteenth-century reality by enabling us to more precisely analyze diferent varia-
tions which condition quarrels within the ield. We believe that the use of a broad label is even
more necessary in the case of theater, for we will discuss not only – or preferentially – theater
as text, but also its communicative virtual quality derived from its unique characteristics as a
public performance.
In order to better understand the transcendence of this genre/performance, we must bear
in mind that during the eighteenth century, theater was the spectacle with the most number
heatrical repertoire models in Portugal 615
of spectators and one of the few forms of entertainment available in the Portuguese capital
(M. Figueiredo 1804–10, 8:219). his was due, perhaps, to its being the only format capable of
being adapted to audiences from diferent social backgrounds, incorporating variations for the
highest social elite (i.e. through court theater), for economically and academically deprived
groups, and for the intermediate social ranks. he plays performed could be adapted to the
expectations of audiences with very diferent backgrounds. Public theaters (which were open to
anyone who bought a ticket) had reasonable prices available for middle groups, and there were
also popular private theaters with even lower prices which were located closer to their potential
audience, allowing the attendance of a segment of the population that lived far away from the
city center (Lousada 1995, 315).
hese two aspects, which are directly linked, make distinction mechanisms function with
great dynamism. In order for everyone to access the theatrical spectacle, it was necessary to
diferentiate groups by printing the text in Portuguese or another language, by varying the
opening location, by selecting certain authors rather than others, etc. On the other hand, con-
trol of the theater and all its levels was a central aspiration for the diferent groups confronting
each other in the intellectual and political ield, because reason is that all kinds of repertoire
elements (aesthetic, behavioral, ideological...) can be promoted through theater by adapting its
speech to the audience’s educational level and to diverse aims. his is especially important if
we bear in mind that at this precise moment what we know of as public opinion was being con-
structed (J. A. dos S. Alves 2000), and that the early written press (mostly in Portugal) still faced
the handicap of a widely illiterate population that could hardly access its contents.
In order to correctly assess the disputes in the theatrical ield during the mentioned period,
we must mark yet another fundamental aspect: the period of Portuguese dominance by the
Spanish crown from 1580–1640, the so called double monarchy or Philippine period. his time
span largely matches the period of greatest success of the theater of the Spanish Golden Age. As
a result, Spanish theater companies circulated freely in Portuguese territory, enjoying an enor-
mous success among audiences of all social ranks that lasted until the beginning of eighteenth
century. From 1730 onwards, this became a problem for the Portuguese social and intellectual
elite, who saw the triumph of the seventeenth-century Spanish model in Lisbon theaters as a
negative heritage of the period of dependence. he elaboration of a national theater that was
diferent from that of Spain was considered a priority by several intellectual groups and lasted
the rest of the century. All of these elements will help us to better understand the dimension
reached by the polemic in the theater during the mentioned period.
It is commonplace among literature and/or theater historians to talk about the conlict be-
tween several more or less homogeneous theatrical models during the eighteenth century: the
popular Portuguese model, the Italian model, and the French model (Braga 1870–71 and 1984;
Carreira 1988; D.I. Cruz 2001; Picchio 1964; C. González 2002). Apparently, the Spanish model
would have dislocated the Portuguese from the stage, the Italian would have victoriously faced
the Spanish, and the French model – opposed to the Italian – would have been the favorite for
Enlightened elitist groups, although barely successful among the audience. We can think of
well-known authors representing each one of these models: Gil Vicente, Pedro Calderón de
la Barca, Carlo Goldoni, and Molière would probably be the most obvious selection. However,
this perfectly structured scene starts fracturing when observing the reality of the time.
616 Raquel Bello Vázquez
We shall see that it is not possible to discuss national, originally homogeneous models, and
likewise we cannot consider them as such on their reception in Portugal. In the same way, the
opposition between Portuguese groups defending each of the existing options cannot be simpli-
ied, as was traditionally done, by equating the Spanish and popular Portuguese models to the
lower social ranks, the Italian model to the Pombalian elites, and the French one to the enlight-
ened bourgeois sectors. Of course it is possible to ind these equivalences in certain cases, but
it is also true that the models imported from Italy were adapted for the most varied audiences
and that their function (and even their ideological orientation) radically changed. he same
occurs with models from France, as the reception of Molière’s model was diferent to that of
Voltaire’s. On the other hand, the Spanish model was judged not only in function of its national
origin but also according to its level of adaptation to the ethical and aesthetical parameters of
the Enlightenment. Finally, the names of Gil Vicente and António José da Silva (1705–39) are
always depicted as examples of authentic Portuguese theater, while forgetting about the model
function that António Ferreira (1528–69) and his work A Castro (For Castro) might have had
for certain groups.
In the same way, we ind some methodological problems in the deinition of repertoire
models according to their geographical origin, which we must irstly clarify before using terms
such as Italian theater, French theater, or Spanish theater. Firstly, we must relect on what can
be deined as theater during the eighteenth century, keeping in mind a well known fact that it is
scarcely taken into account in the analysis of the mentioned period: the need for a global study
of what we conventionally call theater and what we know of as opera. here are diferences
between them, but the imprecise limits between diferent kinds of stage performances make it
necessary to analyze them as one (for more details on diferent terms used at the time, see M. C.
de Brito 1989, 2). Maria Alexandre Lousada (1995, 296) draws attention to the need to tackle the
whole of musical-theatrical spectacles developed during this period:
During the eighteenth century theater and opera were very close to one another; they still
constituted two hybrid forms of performance (including the semi-operatic genre of zarzuela
and other kinds of musical-theatrical performances such as the presépios), which attracted
sociologically similar audiences and which struggled in a long rivalry from which opera was
to come out victorious.
Consequently, we understand that the study of eighteenth-century theater must be broadened

to include opera. In no other way can the introduction, presence, and success of Italian works
in Portugal be understood. In this sense, we must consider that during this period, musicians
and not playwrights were the true stars of opera, with some well-known exceptions. Manuel
Carlos de Brito (1988, 14) points this out in his introduction to the catalogue of librettos kept in
the Library of Ajuda:
excluding some signiicant exceptions (such as Pietro Metastasio and Carlo Goldoni), it seems
playwrights did not receive much acknowledgement in literary circles, especially during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when their works were frequently adapted to be pro-
duced in a diferent city, most times implemented with texts from a diferent origin or even
written by a local writer.
We should add to these names Gaetano Martinelli, who prevailed over Metastasio in a number
of performances during the 70s and mainly the 80s. According to the information ofered by M.
C. de Brito (1989), twenty-eight productions by Martinelli were performed during the period
1781–93 in opposition to a total of ity-six operas by Metastasio.
Once we have clariied this idea, we must also establish that, as is well known, Italy was
involved in a process of renovation of the repertoire models that constituted its theater, rep-
resented, among others, by names like Apostolo Zeno, Carlo Goldoni, Pietro Metastasio, and
Niccolò Jomelli. Logically, transferences from Italian theater to the Portuguese stage did not
reproduce the complexity of this process. In this sense, we bring to mind Daniel-Henri Pageaux
(1994) and Itamar Even-Zohar (2001), who discussed mediation and transferences respectively,
clarifying the behavior and functions these can have in the destination literature.
However, there is yet another factor that complicates the study of Italian transference and
presence in Portuguese theater: that of adaptations in the Portuguese style. his label encom-
passes a series of theatrical texts written in Portuguese and usually published as chapbooks
that use titles, characters, part of the stories, and sometimes even the authors’ names, which
apparently remind us of the original Italian texts but which, in fact, manipulate topics and tales,
adapting them to the audience’s supposed preferences. Although they have not been suiciently
studied (see Sampaio 1920; M.J.M. Santos 1987; Barata 1992; Nogueira 2003 and 2004), these ad-
aptations are very interesting for the study of this period’s intersystemic relationships. A closer
look shows that, in most cases, the elements incorporated were perceived as characteristic of
seventeenth-century Spanish theater. Manuel de Figueiredo (1804–10, 12:539–40) deined these
texts in this way:
Back then they used to talk about Gongora, today about Pidaro, back then about Calderon,
today about Molière, back then about he Castro by Doctor Antonio Ferreira, today about
Sophocles’s Oedipus: but have a look at what they write, and you will ind Gongora, Calderon,
and Ferreira; and if you ever hear that theaters are illed it is to see D. Ignez de Castro, D. João de
Espina, he Charms of Medea, Belisario, etc. From then till now the Portuguese take an opera by
Metastasio, put in two or four lunatic and dirty funny characters, give it the name of Comedy
about someone somewhere in the Portuguese heater style, and print it.
What we have seen up to this point about Italian theater can also be applied to the repertoire
models imported from France. On one hand, these models were not all written by living or
relatively contemporary French producers, as was the case of seventeenth-century writers such
as Molière and Racine. On the other, proposed models functioned in a diferent way in France,
because in no way could plays modeled on Molière (bourgeoisie comedy censorial of aristocra-
cy and wealthy bourgeois customs) be equivalent to Racine’s tragic model, which incorporated
many elements from classic Greek tragedy. We must also add that the success of playwrights
such as Molière and Voltaire in eighteenth-century Portugal contradicts the impression of rela-
tive failure of this repertorial model found in the common bibliography (for a complete vision
of Molière’s reception in Portugal, see Ciccia 2003; for Voltaire, F. Brito 1991).
As indicated above, ater the Spanish dominion over Portugal, and coinciding with the pe-
riod of most success of the Spanish theatrical repertoire, particularly Calderón de la Barca’s pro-
ductions, this kind of spectacle occupied a privileged place in Portuguese theater and was not
only popular, but also held prestige among the cultivated elite. he fact that Spanish theater still
occupied a privileged place in courtly performances is established by the titles of some of the
works performed in the royal theaters at the beginning of the eighteenth century: Elegir al inimi-
go (To choose the enemy), Loa para la comedia (In praise of comedy), Fabula de Acis y Galatea
(Fable of Acis and Galatea), Fabula de Alfeo y Aretusa (Fable of Alpheus and Arethusa), El poder
de la armonía (he power of harmony), El imposible mayor en amor, le vence amor (he most
diicult thing about love is vanquished by love), etc. (Brito 1989, 123–24). his seemed to start
changing in 1737, with the irst known adaptation of a Molière script into Portuguese: Georges
Dandin ou le mari confondu, in Portuguese O marido confundido (for details on the Portuguese
adaptation and diferences with the original version, see A. C. Martins 1969). he fact that Alex-
andre de Gusmão, an extremely important personality in Portugal’s political and intellectual life
at the time, translated (with some adaptations) Molière’s text can not be considered, as José da
Costa Miranda (1983) indicates, a simple coincidence. his is reinforced by the fact that in 1739
the Marquis of Valença responded to Gusmão’s adaptation with a defense of Spanish theater,
which he believed was threatened by the French repertoire model. At that moment, Gusmão’s
position still seems to have been held by a minority, but it was representative of a certain elite
that was familiar with French works. his group also included Conde da Ericeira (1674–1743), a
member of the Real Académia de História (Royal Academy of History), who was a patron of the
theater of Rua dos Condes and who had translated Poétique, by Boileau, into Portuguese in 1697.
his work circulated in handwritten form for nearly a century until it was inally printed in 1793
by the members of Nova Arcádia in Almanaque das Musas (Calendar of Muses).
Let us point out that the seventeenth-century Spanish model was privileged by the leading
elites, as only the Marquis of Valença’s texts were printed, while those that were anonymous and
attributed to Alexandre de Gusmão remained handwritten. On the other hand, we must remark
that the Marquis’s irst published text was preceded by a highly favorable review written by Jo-
seph Barbosa (1674–1750), clergyman, censor, chronicler of the Bragança family, and member
of the Real Académia de História (Royal Academy of History). It is well known that one of the
several functions of a censor was to write a prologue to the censored text, mostly when this
was about matters considered priorities by the crown and/or the censorial institutions, or even
promoted by them.
In Barbosa’s review, which is just as relevant as the text it introduces in understanding
the conlict of repertorial models, the censor comments on the origins, in Valença, of a fam-
ily opposed to the Spanish king, probably to separate his defense of Calderón’s model from
that of Spanish dependence. From this text, we can also assume that the three foreign models
struggling for preeminence in the Portuguese theatrical sub-system at the time were those that
would rule the Portuguese scenes nearly until the end of the century: Spanish (at the time still
dynamic), French, and Italian. It is to be noted that from the point of view of an aristocratic
producer such as the Marquis of Valença or the censor Joseph Barbosa, the existence of a valid
Portuguese model was not even pondered, considering the other three as the only existing
models, despite the declaration: “each nation has its own theater, and each one tries to defend
its uses, because they do not want to imitate nor follow anyone” (Portugal e Castro 1739, iii).
In the end, the suggested model used by each opponent is linked to a concrete ethical
model, deriving from two programs with diferent deinitions of honor and particular behav-
ioral proposals. he Spanish model is identiied by the Marquis of Valença with an inlexible
control over emotion, with maintaining hierarchical structures (i.e. he criticizes Ximena’s inti-
macy with her nanny, in Le Cid by Pierre Corneille), with respect for parents over partners, and
with the defense of chivalrous honor without considering the consequences (Valença considers
it dishonorable for an old man to ask his son to get revenge for an ofence rather than doing
it himself, despite his physical limitations). Valença identiied what he considered the larger
permissiveness of French theater with a moral relaxation, characteristic of French habits. In the
ironic words of the Marquis of Valença:
Let us state that France is like the tales of Pandora: all the gods have given her perfection, ex-
cellence; except for Apollo, who gave her none of his arts, because he was a doctor, a musician,
and a poet, and French does not have Asclepius, to heal, nor Orpheus, to sing, nor Homer, to
write poems. (quoted in Portugal e Castro 1747, 16)
hus, we can assume that for some sectors (of which Alexandre de Gusmão could be representa-
tive), the aesthetic and ethics transmitted through the Spanish model were already outmoded,
and Gusmão’s criticism of Valença’s gothic taste must be understood in this sense.
Regardless of the resistance of the Marquis of Valença and others supporting his stance,
the fact is that at the time the Spanish theatrical model was already on its way to losing the priv-
ileged position it had occupied, if not disappearing from the Portuguese sceneries. While the
Valença-Gusmão polemic was still raging, the irst edition of O verdadeiro método de estudar
(he true method of study) by Luís António de Verney was published in 1746. his fundamental
work is written as if an Italian Barbadinho were writing a series of letters analyzing Portuguese
reality, in which critiques against the Spanish theater were common, with Verney (1747, 1:220)
airming that “I will say nothing of the dramatic poem, as the Portuguese do not cultivate it in
the belief that drama is not as funny in Portuguese as it is in Spanish”. From Verney’s point of
view, the Spanish were responsible for fabricating a theatrical model (which he assigned to Lope
de Vega) that moved away from the classical Greek pattern; was characterized by the absence of
realism and the inclusion of love afairs; and which he judges opposite to the pedagogical func-
tion of a theatrical performance. In order to substitute the Spanish repertoire, he defended the
incorporation of some elements of Italian comedy, praising its simplicity (Verney 1747, 1:222).
Two years later, Francisco José Freire (1719–73), known by the pseudonym Cândido Lu-
sitano, published Arte poética ou regras da verdadeira poesia (Poetics, or he rules of true po-
etry). Some years before the foundation of the Arcádia Lusitana, which he was part of, he had
expressed worries about theatrical aesthetics in Portugal, and had dedicated the second of the
three volumes of his work (Freire 1748, 173–297) to theater and its diferent expressions. Freire’s
proposal focused on recovering the Aristotelian canon and rejected the Spanish model of the
adventures comedy, while also criticizing the Italian model because of the presence of music
in theater. For Cândido Lusitano (Freire 1748, 238–42), the use of music was legitimized by
classical theater but it ought to occupy a discreet second place, and thus his disapproval of the
prominent use of music in melodrama.
A decade later, between 1757 and 1758, Correia Garção (1724–72) read a series of papers and
dissertations at the Arcádia Lusitana where he discussed some of the problems that, from his
point of view, were afecting mid-century Portuguese theater, and explained what he thought to
be the basis for a new kind of dramatic art. Garção proposed, just as Freire had previously done,
the classical canon as a model for the elaboration of theater, but he claimed that French theater
was the only modern literature that truly followed this model.
In order to fully understand the link between both models, we must bear in mind that
Greek tragedies were read in Portugal through their French translations or adaptations (oten
done by well-known French authors such as Voltaire or Racine, but mostly by Anne Dacier
[1654–1720], the most popular translator of the age, who specialized in classical literature), for
the Greek language was generally unknown and was not a part of the Portuguese syllabus. With
Garção we enter a period where the vindication of a national Portuguese dramaturgy gained
importance but far from accepting certain models (classical Greek, Spanish, Italian...), elabo-
rated an essentially Portuguese repertorial theatrical model. As we have indicated above, in Lis-
bon theaters there was already a model traditionally considered Portuguese which, by adopting
repertorial elements found in the theater of Gil Vicente, successfully lasted until the eighteenth
century with the support of António José da Silva. his model faced diiculties in order to be
accepted by the Arcádia Lusitana, an association that, in many senses, was representative of the
Portuguese crown’s oicial line. In the irst place, this model completely incorporated important
elements taken from the Spanish theatrical repertoire (it is important to remember here that Gil
Vicente wrote part of his works in Spanish). Secondly, this theater was in all likelihood a popular
spectacle – although there is no consensus on this particular point – but, in any case, it was not
elitist. herefore, when Garção chose a Portuguese model, he returned to the sixteenth century,
a time of political and economical success for Portugal, and looked to A Castro, by António
Ferreira, as a reference for Portuguese enlightened theater.
Another member of the Arcádia Lusitana, Manuel de Figueiredo, dedicated part of the
prologues of his works to diferent aspects of theater, although he did not publish any work spe-
ciically dedicated to literary criticism. His brother Miguel Coelho de Figueiredo edited these
prologues as a book in 1804, although some of them had already been published in the 1770s
while the author was alive. Even at that time, Figueiredo felt the need to criticize the Spanish
theatrical model, blaming it for Portuguese drama’s decadence:
I know too well the reasons given to excuse this disgusting dissimilarity; but see how they can
survive, still attacking one another, these Spanish, on the sceneries even nowadays with sword
and dagger, with so much passion and vehemence they even frighten the spectators.
(1804–10, 6:n.p.)
In opposition to this, Figueiredo’s reference was fundamentally the seventeenth-century French

model, in particular the playwrights Pierre Corneille for tragedy and Molière for comedy, both
of which were translated by Freire.
Despite the growing criticism of Spanish theater throughout the century, the decade of
the 1740s brought an important change in Portuguese drama, beginning a period of Italian
dominance not only in repertorial models, but also in the success of Italian companies in Lis-
bon theaters. Repertorial Italian models had already been successful the previous decade. he
Paghetti theatrical company had settled in Portugal in 1735 and “O Judeu” had used elements of
Italian theater for his joco-sérias (humorous-serious) operas. However, in the latter case, Por-
tuguese elements (fundamentally drawn from comedies by Gil Vicente) were used alongside
typically Spanish repertorial elements, and although in the irst case we ind proper Italian
forms (meaning texts of Italian origin, in Italian, and performed by Italians), in both cases the
destined audience seemed to be of low social level, and a doubt arises because there seems to
be no univocal opinion about the social distribution of theatrical spaces (Câmara 1996; Câmara
and Anastácio 2004; M. V. de Carvalho 1990). In any case, regardless of the kind of audience
that attended these companies’ performances, the truth is that there was no royal theater in Por-
tugal where the royal family and the aristocracy could carry out their social and political strate-
gies, and where certain producers, products, or theatrical repertoire could be established. It was
not until the reign of Joseph I that theater received public recognition from the king, and the
chosen model was, precisely, that of Italian sung tragedy, as can be seen in the correspondence
of Queen Marianne Victoria of Bourbon, published by Caetano Beirão (1936).
his double aulic and popular dimension of Italian theater allows us to deduce that it was
not a unique and homogeneous repertoire. On the contrary, we can verify two diferent entry-
ways for Italian repertoires. Firstly, Joseph I, and aterwards his Spanish wife Marianne Victoria
of Bourbon, tried to import opera into Portugal as one of the fundamental elements of Euro-
pean aristocratic sociability. By the middle of the century, the Italian Pietro Metastasio was the
most prominent author, but his fame was due to his presence in the Austrian court. Secondly,
there was a period in which Spanish companies easily circulated from one Peninsular kingdom
to another. From the second third of the century, it was the Italian companies that started am-
plifying their tours and even establishing themselves permanently in these territories. It was at
this point that the Spanish and Italian models came into conlict, which was no doubt resolved
in favor of the Italian model, although the latter ended up incorporating elements from the
Spanish model that were still very successful among Portuguese popular audiences. his was
the key to the famous adaptations “in the Portuguese style.”
By precisely deining the existence of two diferent Italian models, we intend not only to re-
ject some existing studies of this theater, but also to readdress our own analysis (Bello Vazquez
2005, 179–217), which we now ind more to the point. Previously, we did not see that it was the
existence of two diferent models with two diferent ways of entrance that explained the appar-
ent paradox in the reception of Italian theater by diferent social or political groups.
Regarding the irst way of entrance, although diferent models of musical-theatrical spec-
tacles of Italian origin had been introduced in the Portuguese court since Mary Anne of Aus-
tria’s arrival in 1708, early performances, as M. C. de Brito (1989) reports, had Spanish titles
and patterns (i.e. zarzuelas). In 1716 the irst serenatas were registered, which were performed
by very prestigious European musicians such as Domenico Scarlatti, who let Rome in 1719 to
become Master of the Royal Chapel (Brito 1989, 7). As M. C. de Brito suggests (9), the rapid
introduction and success of Italian spectacles in the Portuguese court possibly had something
to do with the presence of musical-theatrical Spanish spectacles (mainly zarzuelas), because
during the 30s and 40s these spectacles were exclusively comical, while in the rest of Europe it
was the so-called serious opera which was performed for monarchs and their courts.
Some members of the nobility also promoted this model in public theaters that were ex-
clusive enough to perform operas (the Academia da Trindade until 1738 and the heater of
Rua dos Condes aterwards), and were also responsible for the edition of the texts in Italian or
bilingual versions:
It is in public theaters, like those of the Academia da Trindade and Rua dos Condes – the latter
built on a piece of land belonging to the Count of Ericeira – and with the unmistakable sup-
port of certain members of the nobility, that those true apologies of enlightened despotism,
like Metastasio’s dramas, became known in Portugal. Out of the 24 operas, all of them of the
serious type, to be performed in those two theaters between 1735 and 1742, three-quarters were
Metastasio’s texts. Literary divulgation of those texts occurred through the bilingual edition of
librettos, in which some aristocrats, such as the Marquis of Abrantes, were directly involved.
(M. C. de Brito 1991, 315)
During the 1740s there was an important interruption in courtly and public performances be-
cause of the king’s illness, which lasted from 1740–42 until his decease in 1750. Aterwards,
Marianne Victoria of Bourbon (who married the future Joseph I in 1729) became the patron of
opera and appointed Italian musicians such as Gicieli, Cafareli, Raf, Baptistini, and Leonardi
to her orchestra. Beginning in the 30s, Italian works were no longer just imported, as some
Portuguese authors began writing in this model. Some of the Portuguese opera composers of
the time were Francisco António de Almeida (1702–55, author of the music for La pazienza di
Socrate [Socrates’ patience], by Alexandre de Gusmão), João de Sousa Carvalho, Pedro Avonda-
no (1714–82), António Teixeira (1707–59, who wrote, among others, the music for As Variedades
de Proteu [Proteus’ varieties], by António José da Silva), David Perez (1711–78, Italian composer
who developed his long musical career in Portugal), José Joaquim dos Santos (1747–1801), and
Marcos Portugal (1762–1830).
his model had its greatest success on March 13, 1755, when Joseph I fulilled his wish of
giving Lisbon a Royal heater. On this date, the Casa da Ópera, later known as Ópera do Tejo,
opened with a performance of Alessandre nel Indie (Alexander in the Indies), with text by Pietro
Metastasio and music by David Pérez. As it is well known, the king’s project was short-lived,
since a few months ater its opening, Ópera do Tejo was damaged due to the powerful earth-
quake that devastated Lisbon on October 31. In fact, only one other opera was performed at the
site that should have served as the social gathering place for the Portuguese elite: La Clemenza
de Tito, also written by Pietro Metastasio.
Despite the failure of one of Joseph’s most important projects, Italian opera still held a
privileged place in the leisure time of the court, although it faced a new interruption in Lisbon
from the date of the earthquake until 1763, during which performances only took place at the
Royal heater of Salvaterra. Tshu, between 1764 and 1765, Carlo Goldoni – who lived in Paris at
the time – was still receiving commissions from the Portuguese court through the ambassador
(Barata 1991, 126), and more or less at the same time, the Italian Giuseppe Gorani tells of his at-
tendance at several performances of this kind, always referring to the royal presence.
Several times I went to the Italian opera, at the Royal performance room. I would enter freely
and the spectacle was of a great beauty and good organization. It used to become uncomfort-
able because, on entering and exiting at the beginning and the end of each act or dance, it was
compulsory to bow in front of the royal box. (Gorani 1992, 140)
In 1769, the Portuguese court hired Niccolò Jomelli “with the only stipulation that he should
write two operas each year, one serious and the other comic, either for the King’s or the Queen’s
birthday, and some a capella masses, psalms, sequences, or motets, for the Royal Chapel” (M.C.
Brito 1989, 40–41). he contract ended in 1774, among other reasons because the composer had
not completed all of the works commissioned.
he arrival of Queen Mary I to the throne can be considered the end of royal opera in
Portugal, but not for ideological reasons (it has oten been written that the Queen hindered the
development of theater in Portugal because of her extreme Catholicism), but economical ones.
he court seems to have embarked on a course of relatively strict economy […]. he Queen
ordered that the court’s servants, who had not received their salaries for fourteen years, should
immediately be paid […]. Bullights were suppressed and there was also talk of doing away
with hunting and opera […]. In fact, for the irst three years of the new reign there were no op-
eratic productions, with the exception of the one-act componimento drammantico Il ritorno di
Ulisse in Itaca by Perez […]. Furthermore, during the sixteen years between 1777 and 1792 there
were a total of only twenty-eight operatic productions (including small works), as opposed to
sixty-four productions for the sixteen-year period between 1761 and 1776. (M.C. Brito 1989, 57)
It seems that the investment made by Joseph I was hardly sustainable any longer and, even
though it did not eliminate musical-theatrical spectacles from the court’s pastimes, the Queen
re-oriented them in a slightly diferent, and cheaper, direction. Operas were substituted by
serenades and oratorios: “they were much cheaper to put on, requiring no scenery, costumes,
dancers, or extras, and only few rehearsals” (M.C. Brito 1989, 58).
Regarding the second way of entrance of Italian repertoire elements in Portugal, we must
go back to 1733, when the daughters of Alessandro Paghetti, the Royal Chapel violinist, started
singing for audiences in private homes. he Paghettis performed Farnace, the irst opera ever
produced for a public audience, at the Academia da Trindade in 1735 (M. C. de Brito 1989, 15).
In October 1737, another Italian company was authorized to rent the theater Pátio das Comédias,
with the only restriction that it perform operas.
As mentioned above, from 1742 until the early 1750s, theater did not exist in Portugal in
any of its variants. According to the testimony of Manuel de Figueiredo as quoted by his brother
Miguel Coelho de Figueiredo in the complete edition of his works on theater, ater the prohibi-
tion more Italian companies had settled in the Bairro Alto:
Sixty-three years ago, when there were no good actors, my brother remembered seeing some of
the most famous ones in Spain as diferent characters; but what impressed him the most, which
I heard him tell his whole life, were some comedies he had seen, I think in Italian, in the Bairro
Alto from 1754 to 1755, performed by the children of musicians and actors who had come from
Italy ater 1750 for the irst theater the glorious King Joseph I had ordered built at the Torreão
da Casa da India. (M. de Figueiredo 1804–10, 14:555, quoted in Castelo Branco 1986, 193)
he fortiied tower mentioned was one of the several theaters (in diferent places and with dif-
ferent uses) whose construction was ordered by Joseph ater his coronation. he others were
Ópera do Tejo, Salvaterra (royal theater inaugurated in 1753 for the royal family’s amusement
at their summer residence), and that of do Forte or Torreão da Casa da Índia (at the Palácio da
Ribeira, inaugurated in 1752).
During the decade of the 70s, by the end of Joseph I’s reign, yet another Italian company
was registered in Portugal, which was the talk of Portuguese society of the moment because of
the afair between one of Sebastião de Carvalho, Marquês de Pombal’s sons and its main actress,
the famous Zamperini. In 1770 she settled at the recently opened heater of Rua dos Condes.
During the last years of the 80s the company’s locale was changed to the Teatro do Salitre,
where Beckford remembered having attended a performance with King Peter (Queen Mary I’s
husband), and aterwards to the Teatro de S. Carlos. Another testimony that insists on the idea
of the Italian model’s dominance in Portuguese theater is that of Link, another of the several
foreign travelers who visited Portugal in the second half of the century (Carreira 1988, 409)
who declared that Portuguese originals were performed on few occasions, being almost always
substituted by Italian translations.
We have seen the successful route of this model that we can refer to as popular through
the establishment of Italian companies in Lisbon. It is important to clarify that the diference
between the two models does not mean that elements from the upper social classes, or even the
royal family, did not attend these theaters. Quoted testimonies have indicated otherwise and
popular here means that they were public places, with free access and low-price tickets. his
made a considerable diference compared to court theaters, whose access was restricted only to
guests, for tickets were not sold to an audience.
It is important to remember that the main diference between both models (aulic and
popular) is the not the playwright (although a detailed study could show preferences) but the
kind of text performed. Sometimes language indicates the diference (mostly Portuguese as
time progresses), at other times it is the kind of edition of the librettos, and at yet other times
the genre chosen, as comical adaptations of original tragedies show.
Other processes were underway that were parallel to those that set diferent Italian rep-
ertoire models at the center of the scene. Two decades ater Molière’s irst translation into Por-
tuguese, the French repertoire model started being introduced in Portugal with a certain hold,
irstly by Molière and aterwards by Voltaire. Marie-Noëlle Ciccia, who has studied Molière’s
theater in Portugal, sets 1768 as the date for its solid establishment. Among the several factors
that she identiies for this introduction, we reproduce three:
he people were used to moralist works and had a taste for French fashion and most of all for
French theater.
Bourgeois audiences were favored by Pombal’s reforms and, in consequence, ready to
add to his political dynamics. Besides, translations and imitations of Molière were mostly pub-
lished in folhetos of reasonable taste, allowing them to reach a moderate part of the population.
In addition, the enlightened spirit of estrangeirados spread the ideals of moral order and
maintenance of social order so dear to Molière. (Ciccia 2003, 37)
We must highlight that it seems clear that the French repertoire model (through translations/
adaptations of French productions or through original Portuguese productions, particularly
those elaborated by the members of the Arcádia Lusitana) sought its audience in the emerging
middle class, fundamentally conigured by non-aristocratic court employees and merchants.
he topics Molière dealt with and his theater’s pedagogical function were intended for this
group, for the elite had its own theatrical model which probably corresponded to the existence
of several ethical models according to social class (it was usual in doctrinal productions of the
time to specify the social background of diferent social functions).
he existence of the two mentioned entryways and, consequently, of two repertorial mod-
els and two kinds of diferentiated audiences caused an expected attempt to keep distinction
limits deined. hus, from its creation in 1768, the Real Mesa Censória (Royal Censorship
Board) made eforts to impede the spread of a certain kind of adaptation made from Italian
originals (though not exclusively), which tells of the central position this repertorial model
occupied inside the Portuguese theatrical sub-system of the time, and also of the importance
given by the crown to the model and to the subsystem itself. In a general sense, we can consider
that the limit between one model and another lay essentially in the fact that the highest social
groups (particularly the nobility) consumed Italian theater in its original language, while trans-
lations were destined to a popular audience. his can be veriied through the diferent attitudes
of the censors towards translations from Italian and those from French.
Laureano Carreira (1988), in his study on theatrical censorship, collects the opinions of the
members of the Real Mesa Censória (1768–87) and of Mesa da Comissão Geral sobre o Exame
e Censura dos Livros (General Censorship Commission; from 1787 onwards), who agreed that
one of their main objectives (besides avoiding the circulation of texts considered ofensive to
the monarchy or the clergy) was the elimination from the Portuguese stage of those elements
considered in bad taste, that is, those identiied with the taste of the lowest social groups (this
critical function of censorship was also remarked by J. da Miranda 1978). However, we will see
that the criteria applied are diferent depending on the audience expected for each play.
he privileged model was, as previously indicated, the Italian one, for the privileged groups
did not need translations and they had access to the originals. hat is why censors assumed that
adaptations in the Portuguese style were unavoidable in products addressed to the middle and
lower class, and the same occurred with Portuguese original productions.
he case of the censorship of Pietro Metastasio’s Semiramide is the perfect example of the
separation of audiences in the Italian theater. In 1776, a version of this text – which had already
been performed ive years before at the Teatro de Salvaterra (heater of Salvatur) – that was
adapted in a restrained way to be performed at the Teatro da Vila de Chaves (heater of Village
of Chaves) under the title Entre aggravos a constância (Perseverance for afronts), was presented
to the censorship committee. Two facts are noteworthy: irst, the relocation from the Teatro de
Salvaterra (heater of Salvatur) to the theater of a small village in the north of Portugal; second,
directly linked to the previous one, the remodeling of Metastasio’s text from a sung tragedy into
an adapted comedy with a title which had evident concomitances with the eighteenth-century
Spanish model. he pragmatic reaction of the censor was: “the author introduces some need-
less scenes, with strange episodes of the story, perhaps to adapt it to the abuses common people
usually like in theater. Anyway, it does not have anything ofensive for religion or the state, so
my opinion is it should be given the license it demands” (Carreira 1988, 141). In other words,
the modiications and possible deviations from the standing theatrical canon (also defended by
the Arcádia Lusitana, as we have seen) are understandable because this kind of adaptation was
exclusively addressed to the common people.
Regarding this duplicity, Carreira himself contributed with some information about Semir-
amide that is essential in order to understand not just the way censorship worked, but also the
market of theatrical translation in Portugal at the time:
Opera in 1755, comedy in 1776 and 1785, and by the end of the century, Metastasio’s Semiramide
appeared as a drama. In the midst of all of this, just one translation was worthwhile, the one
enclosed with the Italian text in 1765, for an essential reason: because it was sung by an Italian
company in its original version. (quoted in Carreira 1988, 144)
his means that translations only make sense when enclosed (perhaps as decoration) with the
original text in the framework of an opera performance for the elite (the 1765 performance
referred to took place at the Teatro Real de Salvaterra (Royal heater of Salvaterra). he rest
of the adaptations were not just linguistic, but also social, modifying the elitist elements of the
original work (especially remarkable in the case of Metastasio) for an audience with very dif-
ferent education and interests, as well as to meet the expectations the crown had for one group
and the other.
At the same time, a more demanding attitude is detected with regard to French texts (al-
though at the moment no systematic study has been done on this subject). his can be seen with
the translation of Le Medécin malgré lui (he Doctor in spite of himself), by Molière, which was
censored and rejected with this argument: “this comedy, in its translation, is absolutely disig-
ured, lacks good taste, and it seems to me more an entremezada than a comedy that intends to
teach. I judge it not apt to be published” (Carreira 1988, 227). Notice the adjective entremezada,
which refers to the entremês (interlude), a genre associated in Portugal with seventeenth-cen-
tury Spanish theater.
Something similar occurred with the adaptation of the tragedy Atrée et hyeste, by Crébil-
lon. Ater much praise of the author and his original production (“well known for his customs
and genius, for his fortune and tragedy, and for his compositions; they have given him the
reputation of the third best tragic poet of France” and “this work intended for translation is the
main work by Crébillon, in which he has shown all his talent, so that, just as Crébillon exceeds
all poets in that part called the terrible, he has now also equaled them in that part called the
pathetic”), the censors state:
Its translation is neither accurate nor good. In many parts the translator did not understand the
original meaning; in some others he translated the natural and simple language of the author
that is so characteristic into a style which is not only belittling, but despicable; and it would
be better if the irst tragedy of such a well-known author was printed in Portugal in a proper
translation. (quoted in Carreira 1988, 236–37)
Another very interesting detail that will possibly throw light on the special care taken by the
censors of French works can be found in this passage:
As to its performance, it seems to me typical of a country where a strong democracy prevails in-
stead of a regulated monarchy. I judge it risky to be performed in front of common people who
are oten unable to distinguish a monarch from a tyrant. It was performed in Paris seventeen
times, but the author was not right to consider this a success, for most common people judged
his heart to be as bad as Atreo’s. his is the reason why, even if a good translation of Crebillon’s
were printed – for some readers use –, it should not be performed in theaters, where anything
that may cause scandal, even to the fainthearted, should be avoided.
(quoted in Carreira 1988, 236–37)
What is to be deduced from these words is that, on the one hand, some content is not appropri-
ate for the lower class because of its political complexity (in fact, this was usual in censorship,
which oten allowed nobles to have banned books). On the other hand, the development of a
democratic (using the censor’s own word) Enlightenment in France forced a more vigilant at-
titude. In the end, Metastasio’s works or other Italian texts were scarcely censored because of
ideological content. On the contrary, they were used by more than one European monarchy for
its own pleasure.
It seems clear that the censorship of theatrical texts (those for publication or those meant
to be performed) was especially calculated to prevent speciic content from reaching the masses,
either because of the danger of some ideas proceeding from France, or because of the cultiva-
tion of a typically Spanish aesthetics still successful in Portuguese theaters. In this sense, Span-
ish theater was the object of direct and explicit attacks, like the following regarding the comedy
Selva de Diana that censors declare to be:
[O]ne of those bad productions that the Castilian genius corrupted its theaters with, nowadays
rejected in all Europe. It starts with a praise, or account, according to the name they give to
it, in which there are only a few enchained hyperboles; it continues with a recognizable plot
mixed with nonsense and dishonesty of a chocarrao, or fool, and ends up with badly arranged
marriages, with no action, no morals, and no other aim but to pervert those youngsters watch-
ing it performed.
[…] hat is why nowadays it is well said that the model of theater has to be searched for in
Greek originals or in non-Castilian works. (quoted in Carreira 1988, 245)
An especially revealing censorial proceeding was Fr. Inácio de S. Caetano’s refusal to publish
the comedy Contra amor não há engano (here is no trick against love), adducing that “neither
verse nor concepts are valuable, it is written in the style of those Spanish works which provoke
laughter in the erudite and are no good for customs [...]. If there is any Portuguese wit who
wants to try a hand at comical writing, he must search for other models, and not those of Span-
ish comedies” (Carreira 1988, 275).
Nevertheless, the attack on a certain kind of adaptation of originally elitist texts did not
stop there and, besides the opinions expressed by the members of the Arcádia Lusitana in doc-
trinal texts, we must also record criticism spread by other sources. herefore, we consider Éclo-
ga. Elpino e Tirse (Eclogue. Elpino and Tirse), a text by António Diniz da Cruz e Silva (1731–99),
very interesting. It was recited in a lecture at the Arcadia on July 31, 1758, according to the editor
Francisco Manoel Trigozo de Aragão Morato (Silva 1811). Silva (whose literary pseudonym was
Elpino Duriense), intended to advertise the repertorial model promoted by the Arcadia before
an assembly protected by the crown and personally supported by King Joseph I and by his min-
ister the Marquês de Pombal through the recreation of the personality of his friend heotonio
Gomes de Carvalho (whose pseudonym was Tirse) and the success of the performance of his
tragedy O César.
he eclogues became a criticism of the Portuguese intellectual ield of the time, ranging
from the situation of the educational system ater the arrival of Jesuits to the quality of theatri-
cal adaptations:
Just like a sound, the memory brings back old cases, and unfortunately, now they are either
produced in low rough verses or presented in a foreign language so misshapen in barbaric
diction that the Wise Singer himself, who composed them in diferent ields, would not believe
them to be his if he heard them.
In a footnote, the author clariies any existing doubt about the identity of the Cantor sabio
(Learned singer), specifying that “he alludes to the well-known Abbade Metastasio, whose mis-
erably translated works lood Portuguese theaters” (Silva 1811, 129). Silva, in support of the of-
icial policy – the political position of the Arcádia Lusitana was ratiied by the allusion to the
Jesuits and their role in educational reform (126) – condemned Metastasio’s adaptations into
Portuguese for a diferent social class than that for which they were originally intended.
hus, the end of the century saw the Spanish repertorial model clearly discredited in the
theatrical subsystem and by people of inluence. On the other hand, beginning in the 30s, the
French repertorial model became an object for enlightened groups, in particular those French
playwrights with a clearly pedagogical function, like Molière, or those who had imitated the
Greek tragedy model, like Racine and Voltaire. At the same time, the consolidation of Italian
repertorial models was unstoppable, both those that reached the intellectual and political elite
(the Metastasian sung tragedy), and those which, adopting some elements from the censored
Spanish model, were the favorite of the low and middle class.
he success of the more elite Italian model depended on the existence of a court that sus-
tained the huge expenses originated by the hiring of musicians, scenographers, composers, de-
signers (all Italian), and other production expenses. he economical crisis led Queen Maria I,
as we have seen, to redirect these costs, which meant that opera, which had been the favorite
genre of the elite for decades, ended up without a space for performances, and members of the
upper class were forced to reduce their taste for opera to the performance, at private parties, of
arias written by Metastasio and other prestigious European composers such as Gluck.
he so-called serious opera (the sung tragedy) ended up without a space in the Portuguese
theatrical subsystem, being replaced in the court for cheaper genres, and in theaters because of
audience demand. herefore, when a new royal theater, promoted by elements of the merchant
middle class, was built in 1793, its programming was essentially made up of Italian comical op-
eras. However, not only the aristocratic elite’s repertorial model was set aside, but also the social
group itself was displaced. he main boxes were booked by those who had paid for the theater’s
construction, symbolically excluding the aristocracy that until that moment had tried not just
to direct the crown’s intervention, but also to guide the court’s spectacles.
If we attend to the description of the new theater by David Cranmer, we will see that it was
very diferent from the sumptuousness characteristic of the Teatro da Ópera during its short
life:
he stalls were laid out on a slight incline, descending from back to front, divided into four by
means of three parallel gangways, and had a seating capacity of 800. hey consisted of rows
of benches with banks, one section of which, the plateia dos nobres (noblemen’s stalls), was
upholstered. No women were allowed in the stalls. he 122 boxes were divided into ive levels,
twenty-four on each except the last with twenty-six […]. In the midst of the boxes, rising above
the entrance at the back of the stalls was the Royal Box. (Cranmer 1997, 17)
He adds that “the audience probably consisted chiely of members of the merchant classes, in-
cluding the capitalists who funded the building of the theater, rather than the nobility. Joaquim
Pedro Quintela is almost certain to have been present in his especially large box” (20). It is
noteworthy that the fragment quoted above indicates that aristocrats were not seated in boxes,
but in the plateia, and that the only diference between their places and those of the common
people was that the plateia dos nobres (seats for nobility) was padded. On the other hand, capi-
talist patrons such as Quintela had a box of their own.
Evidently, this theater has little to do with the Portuguese concept of royal theater of 1755,
when the Teatro da Ópera was built for the prestige of Joseph I. By 1793, the one paid tribute
to was not a king, but the social class supporting that king (John VI), which was to play the
leading role when the system changed from monarchical absolutism to liberalism. his is the
reason why it was no longer royalty who decided who was to attend the theater or to condition
the programming:
Although the T. de São Carlos was a public theater at which royalty had a permanent invita-
tion and place (the royal box), not a court theater to which the monarch invited whoever he or
she chose, royal birthdays and name-days were regularly celebrated, usually with a lavish new
production and/or a specially composed ode (elogio) or cantata. (Cranmer 1997, 22)
Another fundamental diference from the Teatro da Ópera was the programming. If in 1755 only
serious operas were represented, in São Carlos “all the operas performed at the new theater
were comic works and all those that originally had three acts […], given in two-act version”
(20). Although the Italian inluence continued in Portuguese theater, the prevailing repertoire
was comedy, which represented the interests of the emerging middle class who did not recog-
nize themselves in the Metastasian tragedies of remarkable absolutist ainity.
As we have seen up to this point, in the theatrical subsystem of this period there was
a struggle between diferent repertorial models to occupy the center of the Portuguese stage.
However, we cannot forget that this struggle was not just limited to aesthetic proposals but that
it was, above all, a conlict of ideological purposes. Even in its variants (aulic, popular, etc.), we
can see that theatrical producers and promoters intended to further a certain kind of ethical
and/or political agenda, perfectly identiied by theoreticians and censors who strained to war-
rant their eicacy.
Regarding the matter of territorial origin of each of these repertorial models, the funda-
mental issue was their symbolic connotation. At a certain moment the Spanish model not only
lost its prestige because of being identiied as antiquated (or gothic) but also for being associ-
ated with a period of Spanish dominion over Portugal. hat is what occurred with the French
theatrical model, which was severely watched by censors to avoid iltering to the Portuguese
audience pro-bourgeois ideas alive in France decades before the 1789 Revolution. On the other
hand, there is the hypothesis that the origin of certain repertorial models coming from Catholic
and absolutist Italy were eased into Portugal through their assimilation by the elite.
he Spanish literary system in the nineteenth century
Leonardo Romero Tobar
he construction of a historical-literary space
At the turn of the eighteenth century, the West underwent the great upheaval caused by the
French Revolution and market industrialization; two factors that afected cultural activities and
the construction of a new vision of the literary system. But the autonomous process that made
up a previously unknown experience of what was present day art as an assumption of the art of
the past began to be shown in the work of Romantic and post-Romantic writers such as Heine,
Chateaubriand, and Baudelaire when they made use of the word modernity. Heine, in the third
section of his work Reisebilder (1826), coined the expression unerfreuliche Modernität (tire-
some modernity) to refer to how the novels of Walter Scott showed the loss of old forms and
beliefs. Some years later, Chateaubriand used the word modernité to refer to the contemporary
vulgarity “of customs and passports.” he negative associations implied by this term explained
for some critics the contradictory dialectic between the Enlightenment and Romanticism: “Ro-
manticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment and was therefore determined by the En-
lightenment itself […]. Romanticism is the other side of modernity: its remorse, its delusions,
its nostalgia for the embodied word” (Paz 1987, 121).
However, in his key essay on Constantin Guys, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” Baudelaire
uses the term modernité with a diferent sense that gives the word a new semantic energy. As
Hans Robert Jauss has analyzed (1970, 70), the French poet uses a bold comparison to seal the
contraposition between the ephemeral fashion of the modern and the frozen eternity of the
old: “You have no right to despise this transitory leeting element, the metamorphoses of which
are so frequent, nor to dispense with it. If you do, you inevitably fall into the emptiness of an
abstract and indeinable beauty, like that of the one and only woman of the time before the
Fall.” (Baudelaire 1972, 403).1 In Spanish we do not ind the word modernidad until the very
end of the nineteenth century but, in the sense in which Heine, Chateaubriand, and Baudelaire
related time past and time present when using it, we can ind an equivalent in this eloquent text
by Larra, written in 1836, in which he refers to the concept of civilization, a concept related to
contemporary fulillment by illustrious igures of the Enlightenment:
his idea (civilization) would lead to an extremely long article […]; but what can be said is that
if it were possible for a people to have not only the knowledge of their political rights, freedom,
material interests, in a word, the arithmetical advantages of civilization, but also the charm
and hope, the poetry of a primitive people, and an appreciation and protection of the arts, this
would be, for us, the beautiful ideal of society.2
1. “Cet élément transitoire, fugitif, dont les les métamorphoses sont si fréquents, vous n’avez pas le droit de
le mépriser ou de vous en passer. En le supprimant, vous tombez forcément dans le vide d’une beauté
abstraite et indéinissable, comme celle de l’unique femme avant le premier peché.” (Baudelaire 1976, 695)
2. Esta idea nos llevaría a un artículo demasiadamente largo […]; pero lo que sí diremos es que si fuera
posible que se diese un pueblo que reuniese al conocimiento de sus derechos políticos, a su libertad, a sus
intereses materiales, en una palabra, a las ventajas aritméticas de la civilización, el encanto y las ilusiones,
Understanding modernity in a broad sense, as Larra understands civilization in the piece above,
allows us to insert the literary systems of the nineteenth century into a lexible scenario which
both directs itself towards past times – from the nostalgia of original spaces to the sweet cul-
ture of the Enlightenment – and foresees future experiences in artistic experiments or in the
explanation of the end of the twentieth century as the time of post-modernity. When using the
historical-literary concept of modernity, we are using it as an umbrella term for the literary
processes of the nineteenth century, including such controversial notions as Romanticism, Real-
ism, Naturalism, and Modernism or Turn of the Century. A more synthesized idea of modernity
overcomes the simpliied view of those notions, understanding literary history as a series of
movements which successively deny the previous ones and, as this dynamic is neutralized in
favor of a more comprehensive perception, it makes possible a clearer vision of the speciic con-
tributions of each of the moments in the literary history of the nineteenth century with both its
breaks and its continuities (Romero Tobar 1998, xxxv-xlii).
he concept of organic nature, the idea of the imagination as creative power, and the un-
derstanding of poetic language as a network of myths and transcendental symbols are the three
underlying principles of Romanticism, a great international movement which revived old pla-
tonic values, adapting them to the experience of the Enlightenment (Romero Tobar 1994, 84).
he aim of Realism was to intensify the imitation of everyday life from the perspective of every
social class, emphasizing even the proiles of proletarian and marginal groups which had been
ignored up to the time. Using the same suppositions, the aim of the Naturalist School (Lis-
sorgues 1998) was to give a natural-scientiic explanation for the conlicts common to human
coexistence. Naturalism’s most relevant creations during the two last decades of the nineteenth
century ran parallel to the revival of the romantic impulse which emphasized the symbolic-
subjective dimensions of an obscure spiritualistic yearning, as is seen in many literary texts of
the turn of the century or, in its particular Spanish meaning, in Modernism.
he awareness, in the end, that the artistic text creates its own autonomous code since the
writer – the artist when thinking of every ine art – is a lighthouse that illuminates with its cre-
ative capacity, is the Copernicus-like change of direction that western literary systems under-
went during the nineteenth century. And Spanish literature was no exception in this profound
change in aesthetic principles.
Context and circumstances
he oscillating process of establishment of the modern State in nineteenth-century Spain, to-

gether with the inluence of the use of nationalist ideology in the spheres of literary creation
(Álvarez Junco 2001), generated a dependency system in which artistic writing could be subor-
dinated to political agendas or the interests of social class. Especially from this second perspec-
tive, Spanish literature – as happened in other contemporary literatures – became a privileged
mirror of bourgeois groups that took the lead in initiatives for historic transformation. From
la poesía de un pueblo primitivo, y su aprecio y protección a las artes, éste sería a nuestro entender el bello
ideal de la sociedad. (Larra 1997, 686)
632 Leonardo Romero Tobar
the patriotic proclamation of the doceañistas (moderate liberals of the beginning of the nine-
teenth century) to the analysis of critics at the end of the same century, an extensive compila-
tion of texts document this phenomenon of interrelation between literature and society. As an
example, just one testimony suices, written in 1881 by an incisive critic, Leopoldo García Alas
“Clarín”, from an eminent point of observation:
he Revolution of 1868, prepared with stronger elements than any other previous political
movement, was not only transcendental because of the radical political transformation it
brought about, but also because it reached every sphere of social life, penetrated every spirit,
and for the irst time in Spain, it raised all the arduous problems caused by the freedom of con-
science in every free and cultured country in Europe” (García Alas 2003, 156).
he Spanish Constitution of Cádiz (1812), founding text for the Spanish modern State, estab-
lished in its irst section that the Spanish nation was “the meeting point of every Spanish person
from both hemispheres,” but the internal contradictions of liberalism together with the political
and military happenings of the Hispanic Empire caused by the war (1808–14) resulted in the
emancipation of the colonies during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century.
he emerging republics underwent a peculiar tension with the old metropolis. A speciic battle-
ield for this tension was the literary relations between both sides of the ocean. Writers from
America searched for diferent routes to circulate their work while writers from the Peninsula
tended to forget that Spain and Latin America shared the same language and had a common
cultural background.
However, in spite of personal disagreements and institutional reticence regarding the role
that the Royal Academy of Spanish Language should play, the use of a common language and
the individual interest of many authors and businessmen kept channels of communication
open. hese increased at the turn of the century because of the attention paid to South America
by inluential critics such as Juan Valera and Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (Fogelquist 1967). he
attitude of writers from both sides of the Atlantic regarding the Spanish language was unsettled
and manifested itself in diferent ways. he role the Academies – especially the Spanish one –
had to play as regulatory boards of linguistic rules, for instance, was discussed, and gloomy
predictions were also made about the future of the language. Clarín, for example, maintained
an exclusive linguistic position in favor of writers from the Peninsula, a position far removed
from that held by eminent grammarians from Latin America. Lectures given in the Literary
Hispano-American Congress, held in November 1892, highlight many of these clashes regard-
ing linguistic criteria (Frago 2005).
But the Spanish language was also a vehicle for literary expression for authors educated
in other languages – Cecilia Böhl von Faber, Salvatore Constanzo, Ernesto Bark, etc. (Romero
Tobar 2005) – and it was, of course, another means for the artistic realization of bilingual writ-
ers in Spain, who both restored the Catalan, Galician, and Basque languages to literature and
simultaneously used the common tongue. A special but not infrequent case is that of authors
who stopped using Spanish in order to write in a diferent language as did Sánchez Barbero in
Latin, Juan María Maury in French, Princess Paz de Borbón in German, José María Blanco and
Jorge Santaya in English, and many others.
To the above mentioned political, social, and linguistic issues, we must add the develop-
ment in thinking which, as had happened before in spiritual Hispanic history, showed a limited
autonomy, since its originality came to a great extent from philosophical and scientiic trends
that had prevailed in the intellectual circles of Europe: Hegelian idealism in its ethical-legal ver-
sion of Krausism, Positivism in its evolutionist version, and even a consolatory Neotomism in
terms of archaeological recovery. Few Spanish writers of the nineteenth century ofer a proile
with a solid intellectual basis, even though these theories lowed through their writings, some-
times creating much talked about debates, for instance, the discussion on “Naturalism in art
and literature” which caused much debate in the eighties (Lissorgues and Sobejano 1998).
In the same way, technological changes which brought the experience of material prog-
ress into the daily life of people in the nineteenth century also had an important impact upon
literary activity. Even in some of the manifestations of scientiic and industrial development,
a close correspondence in the relation between literature and society is clearly visible. In the
performing arts, for instance, a machine called phantasmagoria was the clear forerunner of the
cinematographer and, in theaters, the advent of gas light as well as at the turn of the century,
electric light were determining factors for the staging of shows and for the concept of stage
space. Electricity as a poetic element, along with the uses of mechanical innovations in daily life,
was a recurring motif in the literature of the century (Bernal Salgado and Schmitz 2003). Opti-
cal artiices, locomotives, the hot-air balloon, telegraphs, and telephones all helped communi-
cation between people and stimulated the imagination of writers who discovered new emotions
such as speed, two-point perspective in drawing, and long distance voice transmission, with the
corresponding coinage of new artistic motifs.
Technological progress stimulated the rethinking of age-old issues: the realism of the pho-
tograph invited renewed meditation upon the “mimesis” of nature; the growth of big cities took
up the old motif of Babylonian confusion; printing techniques allowed the juxtaposition of
engravings and text, taking texts back to the old ut pictura poesis. In short, technical applica-
tions of science and the changes that these provoked in daily life not only opened a wide range
of novel matters and motifs in literary circles, but also generated a new way of imagining the
future in terms of what the next step in scientiic knowledge and its applications might be. his
is the ield of science iction, a variety of fantastic literature which, although not predominant,
was already present in Spanish literature of the nineteenth century. Some usual elements were
journeys to remote places as a reworking of the classic journey to the moon, or the devising of
a time machine capable of traveling back and forth in time (see the anthology of texts selected
by Santiáñez-Tió 1995).
he organization of society into social classes with a conlict of interests, as was the case of
collective urban and industrial life in the nineteenth century, once again poses the unfairness of
exhausting and alienating jobs, the denunciation of which was to be the seed of revolutionary
movements, as is told in the novels and drama of proletarian focus. he insuicient industrial
development of Spain in the nineteenth century explains the absence of memorable texts de-
scribing the strong social unrest experienced in other European countries at that time. In spite
of this, naturalistic and melodramatic narratives, from Marianela (1878) by Galdós to a whole
range of accusatory texts (Delmiro Cotos 2003), do contain moving documents about the pov-
erty of the dispossessed classes and the extremely hard working conditions encountered in
mining. he combination of the old Arcadian myth and the increase in social demands resulted
in an anti-industrial literature that found its best expression in creations from the irst years of
the twentieth century (Litvak 1975).
In the end, the tendency of similar social groups to join together was translated in literary
terms into a greater number of monographic periodicals, that catered to workers, professionals,
children, and women, and it also afected some of the social customs of the time, a customs in
which both women and poets played a key role. Poets played this role in the ostentatious jocs
lorals (loral games) that, beginning in 1859 in Barcelona, recovered what had once been old
Provençal gaya scienza (gay science), and aterwards spread to many other Spanish cities (Soria
Andreu 1998). Women played a key role in the peculiar cultivation of the lyric instrument that
marked the poetic style of a lyric sisterhood (Kirkpatrick 1989), which was the preamble to the
professionalization and public recognition of women as writers.
Tradition and change in established models
It should be pointed out that in nineteenth-century Spanish literature there was an enormous
diference between the hierarchy of genres established by the post-Aristotelian poetic tradi-
tion (irst epic, then drama, lyric, and inally the didactic genres) and the social esteem they
enjoyed. he development of the epic had become a shelter for writers devoted to the teaching
of literature. his was the case of Alberto Lista who, circa 1825, recommended that Espronceda,
one of his pupils, write an epic poem on “Don Pelayo.” he reason for his recommendation is
made clear by a question Lista wrote shortly thereater: “does any other nation have such an
epic history as Spain?” In practice, lyric poetry was a form for the manifestation of bourgeois
sociability. Except for oratory that was used in politics, the practice of didactic genres such
as classical fable was reduced to school exercises and the period saw a near disappearance of
humanistic dialogue and the essay. For authors who knew how to satisfy the new demands of
a bourgeois public, theater was, in fact, the formula to obtain fame and fortune (as it had been
in the old regime).
At the other end of the gradus ad Parnasum, still in force in the nineteenth century, was
literature for “popular consumption.” his kind of literature had been oicially produced since
the origins of printing and responded to the needs of an illiterate or semi-literate public, who
even in the nineteenth century listened to oral texts in diferent forms: the genuine form of the
Hispanic ballad, traditional songs, or any other narrative oral form, which generated a liter-
ary low of interest to anthropologists and folklorists. An illustration of how this means of
communication worked is found in the pliegos de cordel (chapbooks) sold by the Hermandad
de Ciegos de Madrid (Blind Brotherhood), an organization which established a monopoly in
the edition of these sheets which was maintained until the implementation of free trade rules
brought about by the liberal state (Botrel 1993, 15–175). However, printed versions on sheets
or in notebooks containing texts from the oral tradition or rewritten modern texts were af-
terwards relected in cultured literature. his is the case of much of the folklore or the prodi-
gies and crimes recounted in chapbooks which appeared in speciic literary texts such as tales,
novels, narrative poems, and drama (Amores 1997) that were read by a literate audience from
the higher social classes.
New publishing and distribution systems brought about by the increase in the reading
audience – even though in 1900 only one-third of the Spanish population was literate – along
with improvements in printing, which had developed from typesetting to linotype and other
mass production systems, resulted in a massive reading market, especially noticeable in the
popularity of periodical press, press from ideological or political groups, and press by proit-
making companies.
he critical and informative functions of the press in the eighteenth century remained as
two of the aims of the periodical press in the following century, but changes in the historical
context and the dynamics of publishing companies conditioned the journalistic system as well
as its impact on methods and rules for writing (C. Alonso 2003). Unipersonal journalism, for
instance, persisted up to the turn of the century with Folletos Literarios (Literary pamphlets)
by Leopoldo Alas and Nuevo Teatro Crítico (New critical theater) by Emilia Pardo Bazán, al-
though mercantile market conditioning was introduced. his lead to the prestige of certain
writers’ signatures, such as Larra’s Fígaro and Alas’s Clarín, which were imposed as trademarks
for collective writings. In modern journalism, the importance of the latest information gave an
important role to the journalist as opposed to the role of the creative writer, and the increasing
development of graphic illustration reduced linguistic discourse to brief structures that were
eye-catching and markedly rhetorical.
Journalism did of course recount daily life events and, through them, the range of linguis-
tic features of common speech and the rhetoric of politicians and lawyers. here is a noticeable
interrelation between the rhetorical features of spoken speech and journalistic texts, as the
pages in periodicals became a new means of transmitting poems, aphorisms, and puns. In this
respect, journals and magazines functioned merely as a textual medium for literary texts that
already had their own consolidated and traditional media. But, together with the reiteration of
accredited functions in the literary tradition, journalism in the nineteenth century modulated
existing genres into new categories such as the artistic tale, the newspaper serial, and the article
about customs. Other genres speciically generated by journalistic writing were the chronicle,
the report, and the interview; genres capable of maintaining traces of what had been notices, ac-
counts, and dialogues in the literature of the Spanish Golden Age (Romero Tobar 2006, 277–94).
Impressions and sensations were the direct experiences that writers of newspapers tried to
transmit at the turn of the century. Novels of the time also took on these characteristics of style
and professional practice, for example Nazarín (1895) by Galdós and Pachín González (1896) by
Pereda. Rafael Mainar explained it in didactic terms in a textbook entitled El arte del periodista
(he art of the journalist, 1906): “It has been said that we are in a time of neurosis; I think this
is true and precisely for this reason I believe that journalistic language has to be nervous, alive,
vibrant, and, as a logical consequence, given that it’s impossible to maintain some states of high
tension, that all journalistic work should be brief ” (Mainar 1906, 88–89).
Metamorphosis in literary genres
Not everything changed in the literature of the nineteenth century. Plays, for instance, were a
faithful replica of the dramatic guidelines established in the popular tradition of the Golden
Age and of the bourgeois models of Enlightenment drama. Something similar occurred with the
persistence of modes of social behavior within which the writing and performances took place.
During the old regime, theater and public shows had been a privileged way of entertain-
ing and indoctrinating the masses, considering the educational role they had had during the
Enlightenment. hey retained this characteristic, but now within a conlict which lasted nearly
the rest of the century. Public institutions – government, councils, welfare organizations – and
performing artists were in favor of maintaining organizational structures and established tastes.
On the opposing side were some theatrical professionals and writers in favor of legal reforms
capable of guaranteeing non-protected stage activity that was only dependent on market forces.
he long debate began in the eighteenth century and in it, singers and actors, foreign and na-
tional companies, old aesthetic principles and new artistic suggestions, were in conlict. As a
result, the abundant production of drama was conservative and no radical changes took place
in the conception of old and new sub-genres.
Musical drama depended to a great extent on Italian and French productions; only the
nationalist movement gave importance to the national musical tradition of popular songs (to-
nadillas), traditional pieces, Spanish operetta (zarzuela), and melólogos, in order to create a
group of texts which were highly successful with audiences. hese texts imposed themselves
on publicity boards from the Revolution of 1868 onwards, either interlaced with a score – the
successful género chico (nineteenth-century light, oten musical, theatrical works) also called
teatro por horas (drama per hours) (Espín Templado 1995) – or within non-musical texts that
reiterated the structure of brief pieces of golden-secular drama. Ricardo Vega, author of famous
librettos for the género chico such as the one for La verbena de la paloma (Fair of the dove),
wrote an epistle in verse in which he stressed the patriotic constituent these texts had: “Señor
don Armando Palacio Valdés: / I ask for your consent, señor don Armando, / if I favor the
sainete in my writing, / rather than the French bufo genre.”3
he diiculty of writing classical tragedy, which was a historical trait of Spanish writers, re-
mained in the nineteenth century. Authors continued their work in drama and comedy. Drama
was characterized by the pathetic and histrionic traits of European Romanticism, and was es-
pecially inluenced by Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. Comedy was based on the human
conlicts of the bourgeois class, inding expression in economic terms: property, business, and
faithful love. Matters of deeper emotions, such as freedom of conscience, the unfair class strati-
ication of society, and the marginal status of artists, were only developed in speciic works in
which there was a moral drive towards denunciation and revolutionary claims.
Historical drama, most of it in verse, searched for a synthesis between the Spanish theater
of the Golden Age and the rhetorical and theatrical resources of contemporary European the-
ater, so that acting techniques and the construction of scenes with shocking dialogue efects
3. “Señor don Armando Palacio Valdés: / Os pido dispensa, señor don Armando, / si en pro del sainete la
pluma tomando, / preiérolo al género bufo francés.” (quoted in Valera 1902, 4:288)
were recurrent formulae of authors such as Ángel de Saavedra (Duke of Rivas), García Gutiér-
rez, Zorrilla, Echegaray, etc. hese resources became attractive stimuli for later operatic ver-
sions of historical dramas such as Saavedra’s Don Álvaro, and García Gutiérrez’s El trovador
(he troubadour) and Simón Bocanegra (for staging aspects see Ribao Pereira 1999 and Catalán
Marín 2003). Bourgeois comedy experimented only with elemental artiices such as prose texts,
emotionally charged rhetorical styles, and satisfactory resolutions for the traditionally conser-
vative audience, to the point that in the last years of the nineteenth century, it was very hard
for dramatic proposals that moved even slightly away from established models to be successful.
In a similar way, the plentiful amount of lyrical poetry written in the nineteenth century
was mostly conined to the circulation of manuscripts or to social acts with public readings, and
kept itself deeply rooted in the poetic traditions of the Golden Age and the Enlightenment. his
was certainly evident among poets educated in the principles of post-Aristotelian poetics, in
which the imitation of models was an unavoidable imperative: Lista and Reinoso in Andalusia,
Cienfuegos and Quintana in Salamanca, Arriaza and Larra in Madrid, Boggiero and Mor de
Fuentes in Aragon, and Cabanyes and Aribau in Catalonia. Meter and verse in classical forms
– the anacreontic ode, the epistle in triplets, verse variations upon the sapphic-adonian – were
applied to wide-ranging poetic motifs, such as love, friendship, science vs. the ine arts, moral
satire, and to the exaltation of patriotic feelings brought about by military and political events.
he new Romantic school was trapped between the inluence of these techniques and the
strength communicated by the liberating speeches in the Byronic hero style, along with Orien-
tal fantasies that were once again discovered in Spain. To sing of the unfulilled yearning that
united Eros and hanatos was the aim of young poets who, following Espronceda’s tradition,
tried to form a new lyric expression. he search to ind in unknown Arabic, Persian, and He-
brew poetry an exotic and original vision of the world was an efect of the poetic orientalism
which spread among poets in the second third of the century. he fact that verse was written
in traditional models such as ballads, sonnets, and eight-syllable songs underscores the deep-
rooted nature of poetic measure, even though it sometimes showed itself open to experiments
like the metric scale or the Elizabethan sonnet.
he poetic expression of the self, typical of European Romanticism, was only in its initial
stage in Spain, since Spanish poets had to learn how to popularize the popular songs and ver-
sions of German Romanticism in order to achieve a real Romantic expression. Gustavo Adolfo
Bécquer’s rhymes accomplished the mission of transmuting the vague tendencies of Hispanic
poetry into a wonderful illumination, because “what was really important was his achievement
in sentimentalism, the degree of cultivated elaboration; how he materialized it in writing, how
he related it to a modern linguistic conscience, that is to say, with deep thought on the modern
subject and his longings, his limitations, and his pacts” (García Montero 2001, 65). his door-
way opened by the irst modern poet in Spain led the way to the development of romantic Man-
nerism, including that of Becquerianism itself, while at the same time the search for new paths
towards the expression of the lyrical experience was initiated.
he inal renewal was brought about by several channels: the reading of Becquer, the
spread of French Symbolist and British pre-Raphaelite poetry, and the creative energy of young
authors from former South American colonies. he presence in the Peninsula of some Hispa-
no-American writers re-launched the tentative relations between Spain and its ex-colonies, but
fundamentally it stimulated a shared feeling of belonging to a living community which was

capable of opposing the materialistic values of the North, which at the turn of the century mo-
nopolized power and prestige. he ever-problematic dialogue of Clarín and Emilio Bobadilla,
Enrique Gómez-Carrillo, and José Enrique Rodó (García Alas 2006) is an extraordinary ex-
ample of how the energy of Latin communities served as a counterpoint to the siege of invasive
Anglo-Saxon capitalism. “Be careful. Spanish America is alive! / A thousand cubs of the Span-
ish lion are loose” prophesized Rubén Darío in his ode “To Roosevelt” (1904),4 the very Ruben
Darío who inally achieved the modernization of the Spanish lyric.
A poetic image of German origin – the blue lower from Heinrich von Oterdingen (1802)
by Novalis – serves as a metaphoric version of the course of Spanish poetry in the nineteenth
century. he color blue (“art, it is blue” stated Hugo) symbolizes the original purity that tends
to the unlimited in the poetic language of romantics and post-romantics in Europe. Gustavo
Adolfo Bécquer seems to be the irst Spanish poet to use this color in his prose writings in this
sense and, from his legends, the transcendental blue spread out in poems, stories, paintings,
and in the title of the poetic book key to the lyrical presence of Rubén Darío, Azul (Blue; 1888).
Bécquer’s prose also occupies a decisive position within the system of nineteenth-century
narrative. Previous to the his Leyendas (Legends), written and published between 1855 and 1871,
long and short stories by many authors of periodicals (Gutiérrez Díaz-Bernardo 2003; Trancón
Lagunas 2000) had been published, and there were also well-informed editors who published
novels referred to as historical or of contemporary customs. Bécquer knew how to apply the
mannerist touch given to paintings and scenes by romantic journalists, but, extraordinarily,
also sensed the way to give his iction a halo of non-reality that leaves the reader in the worrying
uncertainty provided by modern fantastic literature.
his vein of non-reality ran through Spanish nineteenth-century narrative, which can be
seen in the archaic tribute paid to fantastic literature in Zorrilla’s poem Leyendas, in the prolif-
eration of fantastic literature of the grotesque (Roas 2002a), and in narrative’s tendency towards
scientiic guesswork (Santiánez-Tió 1995) and its skill for producing fears and doubts (Roas
2002b). his bent cannot be forgotten when it comes to outlining the history of the contempo-
rary novel and the short stories written at the time, although the dominant model was that of
the realistic story based on the models of the picaresque tradition and Cervantes. Nevertheless,
the most immediate stimulus was fundamentally contemporary French, English, and Russian
literature.
It is not coincidental that the authors making up the canon of the Spanish realistic novel
(Romero Tobar 2006, 167–90) were at the same time authors of short, fantastic stories: Juan
Valera, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Leopoldo
Alas “Clarín.” To these we can add writers who speciically emphasized regionalist realism such
as “Fernán Caballero,” José María de Pereda, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.
he representation of human conlicts that were true-to-life for readers in the nineteenth
century, either set in contemporary times or in the immediate past (as was the case of Galdós’s
Episodios nacionales [National episodes]) caused a series of narrative techniques and resourc-
es to unfold which lent Spanish nineteenth-century realism a singular originality among the
4. Tened cuidado. ¡Vive la América española! / Hay mil cachorros sueltos del león español.
artistic realisms of other literatures (Stenzel and Wolfzettel 2003). Although Alarcón, Valera,
and Galdós himself had published novelistic masterpieces before 1881, it was in this year that
Galdós published La desheredada (he disinherited) and it was then that the Spanish modern
novel truly came into being. his chronological delay has a series of explanations, not least
among them the inluence of classical models such as Don Quixote and the picaresque novel.
he touch of modernity in La desheredada is given by the swing in perspective from the third-
person narrator (Cervantes’s model) to the text centered solely on the irst person (picaresque
model). he novel inally opts for the irst model and thus, Isidora Rufete, its protagonist, be-
comes the new Quixote dressed in a skirt, with all the narrative implications this choice implies.
Émile Zola’s project of a direct commitment to the scientiic experimentalism of modern
medicine and biology added to this theoretical program of deep signiicance. At the level of
theoretical discourse, his work found a great response in Spain from 1876 onwards, at least
in the ierce debates in which essays such as Clarín’s “El Naturalismo” (Naturalism; 1882) and
Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “La cuestión palpitante” (he pulsing question) of the same year were
determining factors. However, the greatest achievements, that is to say, the novels which are
still intensely alive today, were those that used the scalpel of realism with creative imagination.
hus, public and private conlicts and the social and psychological tensions of people belonging
to the extended middle class occupied the most noteworthy pages of naturalistic and realistic
narrative. Pérez Galdós put it pragmatically in a 1870 article:
he modern novel of manners (the realistic novel) has to be the expression of whatever good
and bad exists deep in this social class, the expression of the incessant agitation it produces, of
the will to ind certain ideals and solve certain problems which worry them all, and to know
the origin and remedy of certain ills disturbing families. he great aspiration of literary art in
our time is to shape it all. (Pérez Galdós 2004, 17)
hus, the value of the Spanish nineteenth-century novel lies both in the appropriate choice of
narrative programs in which old techniques of the mimesis mode were updated, and in the
invention of ictional characters full of individual energy and symbolic capacity. he lives of
the middle and working classes, the aristocracy and the wealthy, marginal groups, the difer-
ent social scenarios of Madrid found in Fortunata y Jacinta (Fortunada and Jacinta; 1885–86)
by Galdós, or of a remote provincial town founf in La Regenta (1884–85) by Clarín, Galician
landscapes dominated by a rural oligarchy such as those in Los pazos de Ulloa (he son of a
bondwoman) and La madre naturaleza (Mother Nature; 1886–88) by Pardo Bazán as well as
the southern lands in idyllic rural poetic texts such as Juanita la Larga (1895) by Valera, all help
complete the stack of thick novels which served as models for many other Spanish writers in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Critical prose in the nineteenth century had as a main resource for its development, the
periodicals that, from the romantic years onwards, provided a space for the most important
anxieties of restless Spanish citizens and for linguistic coinages better itted to colloquial prox-
imity and to the expression of the writer’s individuality. he essay, as literature of the I (the same
as autobiographical and epistolary texts, more abundant than oten thought) started to direct
intellectual discourse towards a modern, agile, and suggestive prose such as that ofered by
Mariano José Larra, between 1828 and 1836, and by Leopoldo Alas “Clarín” between 1875 and
1901. A diferent type of critical prose with a more academic style was written by learned writers
and scholars whose discussions and essays were essential for the study of literary works of the
past and their re-reading in the light of modern culture.
he large number of bibliophiles that helped construct the image of national literature of
the Golden Age, the mixture of knowledge and guessing resulting from the interpretation of
Don Quixote by classicists and romantics (Romero Tobar 2006, 241–60), the Krausistic recovery
of an aesthetic system rooted in the philosophy of the ideal and rationalism (López-Morillas
1973), and the great visionary work of a learned man (Menéndez Pelayo), constitute many other
chapters in the Spanish literary prose of the nineteenth century. his is prose with stimulating
efects that were felt during the twentieth century and will possibly be felt in the twenty-irst
century as well when it comes to bringing texts’ pasts are brought to present times, in short,
when the experience of modernity is cultivated in the sense that Larra and Baudelaire under-
stood it.
he dialogue of Iberian literary nationalisms (1900–50)
José-Carlos Mainer
he conscience of asymmetry
Any comparatist approach to literatures in the Iberian Peninsula must begin by acknowledging
the clearly asymmetric situation of these literatures. It must also bear in mind that this asymme-
try increased throughout the twentieth century due to the rise of nationalist sentiments in dif-
ferent autonomous communities. hese nationalisms were occasionally convergent, but more
oten they stressed elements of separation rather than conjunction. he harmonizing Iberismo
(Iberianism) of nineteenth-century romanticism continued to exist, but only as a vague per-
sonal ideology that was unrelated to associations or movements and had more to do with spe-
ciic individual biographies. Iberianism was an important component in the intellectual lives of
Miguel de Unamuno, Joan Maragall, Alfonso Castelao, Salvador Espriu, and Miguel Torga, but
it did not prevail as an organized ideology within the general atmosphere of mistrust and doubt
between diferent cultures.
he case of the Iberian Peninsula was not unique, of course, in the century of nationalisms.
When discussing the languages of the Iberian Peninsula, it is important to bear in mind that the
asymmetry can be attributed to genuine causes. he Peninsula had two active literary languages,
Spanish and Portuguese, which throughout the twentieth century hoped to stimulate new rela-
tionships with the American countries that shared their language. he other Iberian languages,
the literary varieties of Catalan, Galician, and Basque, had to confront a strong and ambitious
national language. hey each reached very diferent positions in their establishment as national
languages, positions which were always considered insuicient by nationalist demands.
Although we will deal with this topic in more detail below, it is important to explain the
situation of these languages in the early twentieth century. In the social customs of Catalo-
nia, Catalan functioned as a national language. It completed the main part of its institutional
expansion in the 1920s, favoring a structured intellectual group which was closely tied to re-
gional political power. Galician never reached these proportions, despite the notable efort by
an important intellectual group that was distanced from politics. Instead, it faced dissociation
between popular vitality in the countryside and institutional fragility. Basque sufered the same
dichotomy, which was exacerbated by its strong dialectal fragmentation and the dependence of
its weak institutional life on the patronage of the Catholic Church and nationalist political par-
ties. he history of the Balearic variant of Catalan can almost be confused with that of Catalan.
he Valencian variant, which produced much less literature, was divided between an isolating
Valencian nationalism (which is still alive today and has recently denied Valencian’s status as a
dialect) and a recognition of Catalanism which reached a milestone with the publication of the
reasonable Castellón grammar rules during the period of the Republic.
642 José-Carlos Mainer
he legacy of disaster
he presence of several opposing nationalisms was the backdrop during the historical period I
am considering. What is interesting is that this nationalist crisis had a common origin which
began at the turn of the century when it became obvious that the organization of Iberian soci-
eties had failed and that these were extremely isolated from the modern world represented by
imperialist Europe (Sociedad Estatal “Lisboa 98” 1998). his crisis was related to the failure of
Spain and Portugal as heads of an empire, and two episodes were crucial in demonstrating this
collapse. In the case of Portugal, this was the British Ultimatum of 1890, which stopped Portu-
guese expansion in South Africa. he efects of this predicament became obvious in 1898, when
an economic slump forced the Portuguese state to consider selling its African colonies. As for
Spain, the Spanish-American war of 1898 was the culminating disaster, producing the collapse
of its overseas empire, which was already facing a crisis due to colonial insurrection and an
excessive dependence on foreign capital. In any case, it is important not to limit the etiology or
reach of both these crises. Spain and Portugal experienced what positivist sociology would later
refer to as the weakness of Latin countries, an experience also shared by France and Italy. he na-
tionalist backlash by Iberian intellectuals should not be isolated from those of other European
nationalisms that also surged from the readjustments at the end of the century nor from those
that followed the 1918 armistice. he growth of these nationalisms (and of their fascist variants
and revolutionary escape valves) has many common elements in all of Southern Europe, which
was characterized by strong traditional rural ties and by a diiculty to adapt to modern life
(Costa Dias 1969; Pan-Montojo 1998).
he disastrous events at the turn of the century were reconverted into a philosophy of pa-
triotic efort and national reorganization which let a strong legacy. In Spain this was evident to
those who considered themselves primarily Spanish, but the political coniguration of Catalan
and Basque nationalisms was also in large part a reaction to the national disaster. he Catalan
middle class saw itself as a healthy part of a sick state, hastening the change from a difuse
form of Catalan nationalism to a political organization which was much more conscious and
vindicative. his movement was lead by the industrial middle class, although a vague federalist
popular Catalanism persisted, along with a more conservative branch inluenced by the Catho-
lic Church (Marfany 1995). In the Basque country a similar type of nationalism arose which
was strongly ethnic and close to traditional Catholicism, afraid of losing its religious and racial
identity. Galician nationalism began later, but it shared with the others a view of Spain as the
enemy. In Catalonia and especially in the Basque country, many caricatures of Spaniards identi-
ied them with lamenco, laziness, and ugliness (oten associated with immigrant workers). In
Galicia, Spaniards were associated with uneducated, insensitive, and haughty politicians and
civil servants who were scornful of Galicia (J.A. Durán 1981).
he result was the same in the three regions: political dissatisfaction was progressively
associated with the linguistic problem. he nineteenth-century state of benevolent tolerance
– which was validated by the vernacular Juegos forales (Floral Games) – satisied no one, and
each linguistic region aspired for its language to become the natural expression of a program
of historical emancipation. here were campaigns to extend the use and difusion of these lan-
guages, the most important of these being the Galician Irmandades da Fala (Brotherhoods of
he dialogue of Iberian literary nationalisms (1900–50) 643
Language), which were founded in 1916. here was also an evident efort to modernize these
languages in order to facilitate their use as an instrument of nationality: the First Conference
of the Catalan Language was held in 1906, followed by a long-needed and successful reform of
Catalan spelling and grammar, and in 1918 the First Conference of the Basque Language was
held. However, Portugal and Spanish-speaking Spain also experienced an important vindica-
tion of their literary and linguistic heritage. he tercentennial of the publication of the irst
part of Don Quixote in 1905, Azorín’s persuasive articles on the literature of the past (which
commenced in 1912 with Castilla [Castile] and Lecturas españolas [Spanish readings]), and the
historiographic history of Spanish literature and language written by Ramón Menéndez Pidal
and his collaborators at the Centro de Estudios Históricos in 1910 prove the fundamental role
of culture in the development of Spanish nationalism. he same occurred with the construction
of Portuguese national philology. In Portugal, the veteran scholar Teóilo Braga represented
the positivist and accumulative period, which was embodied in Spain by Marcelino Menéndez
Pelayo (although these two men were political enemies: Braga was a progressive who became
President of the Republic, while Menéndez Pelayo was a neo-Catholic conservative in favor of
the Restoration). In contrast, Ramón Menéndez Pidal represented positivist science tempered
by linguistic idealism and a popularizing view of history, which was relected in his Portuguese
counterparts José Leite de Vasconcelos and Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos (whose edition
of Cancionero de Ajuda [Ajuda songbook] was published suspiciously close in time to Menén-
dez Pidal’s grand edition of Poema de Mio Cid [Poem of my Cid]).
he Iberianism of Unamuno
he dialogue between nationalisms is always very diicult, but not impossible. he igure of
Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish nationalist of Basque origin, was exemplary in this respect. In
his early years Unamuno wrote local customs literature in Spanish. He considered there to be
no future in the use of Basque, which he referred to as the great fossil. His attitude to Catalan
was quite diferent and he considered his friend Joan Maragall (with whom he maintained a fas-
cinating correspondence) to be the greatest poet of his time, although he thought that Catalan
nationalism was a sentimental Mediterranean exaggeration (Maragall 1961, 930–44). Maragall
had felt the Disaster of 1898 as a personal one and he believed the moment to be ideal for a new
relationship between the Iberian nations, as he portrayed in “Els tres cants de la Guerra” (he
three war songs) in his book Visions i cants (Visions and songs; 1900). Unamuno was open to
this proposal for a new Iberianism, as can be seen in the Barcelona edition of his work En torno
al casticismo (About purism; 1902), an outline of a renewed Spanish nationalism. hese com-
mon beliefs came together in the poem “Himne ibèric” (Iberian ode) which Maragall wrote in
1906. In its verses he described how Cantabria, which for him represented all of Northern Spain,
Andalusia, of which he evoked “el teu gran esllanguiment” (your great idleness), and Catalo-
nia, which had “el gran esdevenir” (great prospects), must reveal to their sister Castile that sea
which she had never known, because the new Iberia would receive everything from its seas and
for this it must learn to love them (Maragall 1960, 173–74; Hina 1986).
Unamuno’s attitude toward Portugal was diferent, since he fully recognized Portugal’s
right to have its own nationality. He irst traveled there in 1904 and soon started spending
his family summer holidays in Figueira da Foz (García Morejón 1971). he correspondence
between Unamuno and his Portuguese friends relects a system of elective ainities and an
enduring exchange of Iberianist enthusiasm, although this never went beyond good intentions
(Marcos de Dios 1978). Eugénio de Castro, the Portuguese symbolist poet, was host to Una-
muno while he was preparing his poem Terras de’Hespanha (Lands of Spain), which was never
published. In 1913 Unamuno wrote the prologue to the translation of Constanza, by his friend
Francisco Maldonado. In 1908 he had the opportunity to discuss the assassination of the Por-
tuguese king with Abílio Guerra Junqueiro, the great republican poet, who said, “[t]here is
no doubt: we are close relatives, almost brothers” (quoted in Marcos de Dios 1978, 166). But
Unamuno’s closest friendship of this period was with Joaquim Pereira Teixeira de Vasoncelos.
He wrote his irst letter to Unamuno in 1905 ater reading Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (he
Life of Don Quixote and Sancho), which he greatly admired: just as Tolstoy had resuscitated
the igure of Jesus Christ, Unamuno had done the same with Don Quixote. herefore, he said
that “Don Quixote is our God and Don Miguel de Unamuno is his prophet.” Later, the radical
young doctor Manuel Laranjeira spoke to Unamuno about the Portuguese tradition of suicide
of its best writers: “In Portugal we have reached this principle of desperate philosophy – suicide
is a noble resort, it is a type of moral redemption. In this forsaken country, those who are noble
commit suicide, while those who are rogues triumph” (Letter of 28 October, quoted in Marcos
de Dios 1978, 180).
All of these experiences were collected in the book Por tierras de Portugal y España (In the
lands of Portugal and Spain; 1911), which was read by all of the implicated Portuguese authors.
he work begins with an article dedicated to Eugénio de Castro, followed by a review of “La
literatura portuguesa contemporánea” (Contemporary Portuguese literature; 1907) in which he
praised João de Deus, Camilo Castelo Branco, and Oliveira Martins, whose História da Civili-
zação Ibérica (History of Iberian civilization) “should be read by every educated Spanish and
Portuguese citizen.” Ater this there is a short biography of Teixeira de Pascoaes and a series of
profound relections on his travels: “La pesca en Espinho” (Fishing in Espinho), “Braga,” “O
Bom Jesús do Monte,” etc. Also in 1911, Rosario de sonetos líricos (Rosary of lyric sonnets) repro-
duced one of Unamuno’s poems, “Portugal,” written in September 1910, in which he portrayed
the country as “an unkempt and barefoot woman” who, observing the sea, “ixes her anxious
lion eyes / on the sunset,” while the ocean sings the memories of “the fatal empire / which sank
in its dark seas / and watches how, in the gloomy mist / Don Sebastian rises, king of mystery”
(Unamuno 1987, 286). his same metaphor also appeared in Unamuno’s article “Eugenia de
Castro” in Por tierras de Portugal y España, although in this case the unkempt woman was a
beautiful young girl. In 1915 Fernando Pessoa asked for Unamuno’s opinion about his projected
magazine Orpheu, because “nothing is as dear to us as the shakeup of ideas” (Letter of 26 March,
1915, quoted in Marcos de Dios 1978, 303). Other new authors also admired Unamuno, such as
Vitorino Nemesio, who on October 15, 1919 wrote to him to express his devotion to Por tierras
de Portugal y España and Recuerdos de niñez y mocedad (Memories of childhood and adoles-
cence), which he had read many times. He recommended that Unamuno read Raul Brandão
and the intellectuals exiled in Paris, like Aquilino Ribeiro, Antonio Sérgio, Raúl Proença, and
Jaime Cortesão. He also asked him to accept “the small confession of a young Portuguese man
in times of the Dictatorship,” who “shares some of the spiritual anguish of the great Miguel de
Unamuno” (quoted in Marcos de Dios 1978, 241–43). During the same period, another exiled
author, Fidelino de Figueiredo, contacted Unamuno to express his interest in translating into
Portuguese La agonía de cristianismo (he agony of Christianity) and to thank him for his fa-
vorable reference to his book As duas Espanhas (he two Spains). In addition, Teixeira Pascoaes,
whose book on St. Paul was praised by Unamuno (he wrote the prologue to the Spanish transla-
tion), was also pleased by his recognition: “To read those words written by the greatest spirit of
Iberia and among the greatest in the world! What an honor! What intimate consolation! I kiss
his sacred hands!” (quoted in Marcos de Dios 1978, 298).
Unamuno’s last visit to Portugal took place in 1935 to witness the celebrations of the Sala-
zarist dictatorship, and he wrote three important articles regarding it in the newspaper Ahora
(Now) which were very critical of Portugal’s political situation. He did not wish to be received
by Salazar “because I am also a professor and I do not wish to examine him or be examined by
him.” In any case, he believed that “the core dictatorship that Oliveira Salazar represents is an
academic-military dictatorship, or if you prefer, a wartime-scholastic one. It is a dictatorship of
generals or colonels and professors, with a touch or two of the clergyman.” Nevertheless, under-
neath it all lay the true Portuguese people, oppressed by the control of inances and the colonial
obsession (“Portugal is not small,” stated the nationalist propaganda that Unamuno had seen
in his travels): “Unfortunate pharaonic nations in which the state gets richer by impoverishing
and enslaving the people, who sufer from hunger and weariness while being entertained with
pyramids of glory! And by pyramids I mean factories, stadiums, shipyards, barracks” (Una-
muno 1958, 1119).
National periods
he nationalizing mission that Iberian literatures undertook from the beginning of the twen-
tieth century possibly favored the division of periods based on successive generations. hese
generations were understood to be a series of articulated projects which formed part of one col-
lective goal: to give literary form to a nation. Portuguese usage unanimously associates the birth
of modern Portugal to the Generation of 1870. his term is equivalent to the supposed Spanish
Generation of 1868, though this formulation was never very successful. On the other hand, the
term Generation of 98, which is so common in Spanish literature (although it has been harshly
criticized since 1960), does not have a corresponding Portuguese equivalent. he Portuguese
crisis of 1890 is associated in any case with the provincial saudosismo incarnated in Antonio
Nobre’s volume of poetry Só (Alone) and with the decadent and symbolist aesthetics of Eugénio
de Castro. In other words, according to the common, although discredited, Spanish diferentia-
tion between the Generation of 98 and Modernism, it is associated to this last concept. he other
Spanish nationalities created similarly deliberate terms to refer to the start of their own ascen-
sion: Renaixença (Renaissance) in the case of Catalan and Rexurdimento in that of Galician,
terms which implicitly referred to forgotten spiritual resources that were again activated. Later
in time, the general acceptance of the term modernisme in Catalonia for the period from 1890
to 1905 came to refer to a will for international renovation and a deepening of intrinsic values,
both of which formed a double motto for the country at the turn of the century. It is notewor-
thy that in Latin America and Catalonia, which both had a desire to acquire a strong cultural
identity, the term needed no speciications or complementary or opposing classiications, as
occurred in the case of Spain (Valentí Fiol 1973).
he term Generation of 1910 or Generation of the Republic emerged in Portugal to associ-
ate the end of the monarchy to the modernization of the country and to the inevitable decline
of the rationalist and international Generation of 1870. In a Spanish context, the equivalent
concept would not be the Generation of 98, but rather the Generation of 1914, although the
referent actually has a mix of both. One part of the Portuguese generation identiied itself with
a telluric and mystic point of view, represented by Teixeira de Pascoaes and saudosismo through
the magazine Águia (Eagle). In Spain, this corresponded with the irrationalist, ruralizing, and
nationalist position of Unamuno and the early writings of Valle-Inclán. Yet, if anything, the
Generation of 1914 in reality signiied the triumph of philosophical idealism, the reduction of
the Spanish problem to a question of aesthetics and to a historical optimism which was linked
to intellectual specialization and to a desire for political reform and a rejection of sterile radical-
ism (Mainer 2000, 295–330). With this state of afairs, the most meaningful equivalent to the
Spanish Generation of 1914 was the Catalan movement which was named noucentisme by its
member Eugeni d’Ors, probably borrowed from the Italian expression for the twentieth century
(Bilbeny 1988). his movement believed in the cultural premises of the new century, classicism
over romanticism, an urban spirit over a rural spirit, and order and rationality over revolution.
In the hands of Eugeni d’Ors and Josep Pijoan, noucentisme was able to organize, almost until
1936, Catalan cultural life. In Spain, its efects were limited to politics, which were no less im-
portant in the intellectual sphere.
he transfer of the term noucentisme to the Spanish context with the word novecentismo
never took root, despite the eforts of the Catalan critic Guillermo Díaz-Plaja (1975). In 1907,
a gloss by d’Ors gave a list of Castilian noucentistes, almost all of whom were related to the
Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Education). In 1932, Josep Pijoan published a
biography of this Institute’s founder with the title Mi don Francisco Giner (My don Francisco
Giner), echo of another text, El meu don Joan Maragall (My don Joan Maragall; 1927), proving
the compatibility between the two spiritual loyalties, although they were present in a man who
lived in the United States.
he Generation of 1914 involved a critical rereading of the spirit of 1898 and a crucial con-
tribution to the elaboration of a new canon. Azorín’s conformism, Baroja’s individualistic ar-
bitrariness, Unamuno’s anti-European spiritualism, and Valle-Inclán’s decadence were rejected,
while there was admiration for Unamuno’s spiritual nationalism, Azorín’s evocative precision,
Baroja’s independence, and Valle-Inclán’s new aesthetic. What is more, these veteran authors
shaped their personal literary program to the new interpretation that their successors proposed.
he period between 1910 and 1925 was characterized by its artistic signiicance and its de-
ined ideological programs throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Accordingly, cultural magazines
oten ofer the best means of understanding it and of comparing the parallel remodeling of
the national literatures’ objects of study. In Madrid, the ambitious magazine España. Semanar-
io de la vida nacional (Spain. Journal of national life; 1915), originally inspired by Ortega but
aterwards more let-leaning, is an important example. Its pages included the more combative
side of the end-of-the century age group – Valle-Inclán published in it his play Luces de bohemia
(Bohemian lights), and Antonio Machado his poems “Una España joven” (A young Spain) and
“España en paz” (Spain in peace) – along with the more reined spirits of the new generation –
such as Ramón Pérez de Ayala and Manuel Azaña –, and even younger writers. In Catalonia in
the same year, La Revista (he journal) was founded by Josep Maria López-Picó. his magazine
brought about the recognition of the noucentiste ideals of Europeanism, the vision of Catalonia-
City, and the commemoration of the hundred-year anniversary of the Renaixença in 1930. Soon
ater, the Portuguese magazine Seara Nova (New Harvest; 1921) undermined the saudosista
aesthetic in favor of a more realistic and critical stance. his was ratiied by the important peri-
odical Presença (Presence; 1927), in which José Régio published his article “Literatura viva e lit-
eratura livresca” (Live literature and bookish literature) which represented the innovative ideals
just before the Salazar dictatorship. In Galicia, the magazine Nós (Us; 1919) was presented as a
relection of a generation that considered itself European and Galician, modern and traditional,
intellectual and spiritual (Vilavedra 1999; Real Academia Gallega 1972).
he resolution of these contradictions was not easy and in many cases fascism became
a temptation, almost trapping Vicente Risco, founder of Nós, and the Basque poet Ramón de
Basterra, creator of the Escuela Romana del Pirineo (Roman School of the Pyrenees). his
school was an efort to extricate the ethnic obsession from Basque nationalism and instead
relate it with the Latin tradition and a neo-Hispanism which included America and which
Basterra conceived of as Sobrespaña. Basterra’s proposal was unsuccessful, but part of its spirit
lingered in a singular magazine, Hermes (1917), published in Bilbao, euphoric at the time from
the economic advantages of being an industrial and port city in a neutral country during World
War I. With very few exceptions, Hermes was written entirely in Spanish, but it identiied with
an open Basque nationalism which was very similar to the Catalan nationalism represented by
the noucentistes and to minor sectors of the Basque Nationalist Party. However, the economic
crash at the end of the war and the closure of the magazine brought this project to a halt (Agir-
reazkuenaga 2000).
he frailty of the Portuguese republic and the monarchy of Alfonso XIII resulted in simul-
taneous dictatorships in the Peninsula (General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s coup occurred in
September of 1923; General António Carmona’s took place in Lisbon in November 1926). hese
dictatorships marked very diferent paths for the diferent nationalist projects. he triumph
of totalitarianism over liberalism was a universal epidemic. In 1927, António Ferro, the Portu-
guese journalist and writer who had been an early companion of Pessoa and became the irst
interpreter of Salazar, published a brilliant and cynical essay titled Viagem à volta das Ditaduras
(A travel to dictatorships) in which he described his experiences of the fascism of Mussolini,
Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, and Primo de Rivera in Spain.
he period from 1910 to 1925 registered a large amount of activity in the ield of mutual
translations, resulting in an escalation of the publishing industry. he writing of Eça de Queirós
reached Spain belatedly, but it counted with translations by writers as important as the Galicians
Wenceslao Fernández Flórez – who translated Alves & Cia, Una campaña alegre (he darts), La
capital (he capital city), El conde de Abraños (he count of Abraños) – and Ramón del Valle-
Inclán – El crimen del padre Amaro (he sin of Father Amaro), El primo Basilio (Cousin Bazilio),
La reliquia (he relic) –, and Eduardo Marquina. his Catalan author who wrote in Spanish
translated La ciudad y las sierras (he city and the mountains), and also the most well-known
works of the poet Abílio Manuel Guerra Junqueiro: La muerte de don Juan (he death of Don
Juan), Patria, Finis patriae, Los simples (he simpletons), and La vejez del Padre Eterno (he old
age of the eternal father) (Correia Fernandes 1986, 234–43).
During this period there was also a reinterpretation of Iberianism in more conservative
terms that desired a strong spiritual union between the two nationalisms, but the exclusion of
any type of political unity. his was the conviction of Portuguese integralismo, a movement
initiated in 1916 with an inluential conference on A Questão Ibérica (he Iberian problem).
Its promoter, António Sardinha, and his followers Hipólito Raposo and Pequito Rebelo be-
came popular in reactionary and Spanish monarchic circles both during the dictatorship, the
republican period (in which the magazine Acción Española cultivated neo-Iberianism), and
the period immediately following the Civil War. In 1940, the already extinct Acción Española
presented one of António Sardinha’s books, La alianza peninsular (he Peninsular alliance),
with a signiicant prologue by the Marquis of Quintanar. Ramiro de Maeztu included some
elements of this movement in his 1926 work Don Quijote, don Juan y la Celestina, in which he
compared the pessimism of Cervantes with the dreamy enthusiasm of Camoens. However, like
many other educated Spaniards, he mistakenly used the term Lusíadas in the feminine instead
of in the masculine.
In 1914, the Portuguese Fidelino de Figueiredo, who was critical of Teóilo Braga’s positiv-
ism, published the article “Características da literatura portuguesa” (Characteristics of Portu-
guese literature) in Revista de História, which was translated by Ramón María Tenreiro in 1916.
His following essay, “Do critério de nacionalidade em literatura” (he criteria of nationality in
literature; 1917), included in Estudos de literatura (Studies on literaure), was the irst emotional
characterization of Portuguese literature. It coincided with another important work by Ramón
Menéndez Pidal, “Quelques caractères de la littérature espagnole” (Some essential character-
istics of Spanish literature; 1916), published in Spanish in 1918 by the Bulletin Hispanique and
reproduced by the Boletín de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza in 1919. For Figueiredo, national
literature was “the artistic expression of a national spirit in a national language. he nationality
of literature has, thus, two basic principles, country and language, and a dominant concept, the
emotion of art. he country of matter, with its moral unity, its internal problems and relation-
ships, its restlessness; the language of form, the instrument of expression” (F. de Figueiredo 1971,
20). hese ideas were further developed in an essay, Pyrene. Ponto de vista para uma introdução
à História comparada das literaturas portuguesa e española (Pirene. An outlook for a compara-
tive history of Portuguese and Spanish literatures; 1935), which collected “Do critério de nacio-
nalidade em literatura” and the notes he dictated in a course at Columbia University in 1931. he
text is an open and friendly dialogue with the theses of Menéndez Pidal, with which it mainly
agreed. Figueiredo considered that Spanish literature, which lacked a strong lyric tradition, ex-
celled in genres that involved the struggle of the individual against his environment (medieval
epic, picaresque, mystic literature, etc.). From this he concluded that “if Spanish literature is
strength, then Portuguese literature is love, erotic intrigue, lyricism, subjectivity, contempla-
tion, idle pursuit, nostalgia, and when it expresses strength, it is with an attenuating alliance
with lyricism” (46).
he diferent receptions of modernity
he avant-garde tendencies in the diferent Peninsular literary areas did not try to approach
each other but instead magniied their independence. However, there were a few exceptions.
I have already mentioned that Pessoa asked for Unamuno’s opinion on his project for Orpheu,
one of whose founders, the writer and painter José de Almada Negreiros, spent a brief period in
Spain in which he collaborated with Ramón Gómez de la Serna (2004). Gómez de la Serna also
lived for a short time in Estoril, and his experiences there inspired his Portuguese-themed novel
La quinta de Palmyra (Palmyra’s estate; 1923), unfortunately full of clichés. Federico García Lor-
ca wrote in Galician Seis poemas galegos (Six Galician poems; 1935) with the help of his friend
and admirer Eduardo Blanco Amor. Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s journal, La Gaceta Literaria
(he literary journal; 1927–32), was initially conceived of as Iberian-Hispanic-International, but
it became a powerful instrument of Spanish literary nationalism. he journal barely dealt with
Basque and Galician culture, and its inclusion of Portuguese literature was mainly rhetorical. Its
most signiicant links were with Catalan culture, in a notable efort for mutual understanding,
and with Latin American culture, although in this case the attempts for hegemony of Hispanic
literary life were not well received.
his interlude also lacked homogeneity in the description of periods. he term modernism
referring to Portugal designated the era of modernity, associated with historical avant-garde
movements. But the work of its two main proponents, Fernando Pessoa and Mario de Sá Car-
neiro, was mainly scattered in magazines. Carneiro was only republished in 1937–39 and Fer-
nando Pessoa published just one book in his lifetime, Messagem (Message), which was strongly
nationalistic and for which his friend António Ferro won the National Book Award in 1934.
Knowledge of Pessoa’s heteronyms was not complete until the systematic edition of his work
from 1943 to 1946. Another characteristic of this time was the open battle between oicial and
independent aesthetic trends. In 1930, Salazar’s regime created the Secretariado de Propaganda
Nacional (Secretariat of national propaganda), which attempted to construct a Portuguese cul-
ture based on folklore, cultural autism with respect to Europe, and the memory of past military
and maritime glories. In Catalonia, noucentisme dominated a large part of Catalan modernity
(in the cases of Carles Riba, a symbolist poet, and J. V. Foix), while a more avant-garde faction
presented a fascinating and unorthodox trajectory. he anti-noucentisme tone of the Manifest
Groc (Catalonian antiartistic manifest) of 1928, which was penned by Salvador Dalí, Sebastià
Gasch, and Lluís Montanyà, is evidence of this split.
he use of the term Generation of 27 in Spain has received much criticism. his use was a
result of the desire for recognition of this generation. Ater the Civil War it became entrenched
as a type of collective nostalgia for a remarkable creative period. Although the soundness of this
taxonomy is questionable (A. Anderson 2005), this is not the case of its inluence on neighbor-
ing cultures. Just as Lorca had approached Galician culture, the reading of his works (and those
of Juan Ramón Jiménez) had an inluence on the writing of the most highly esteemed poet in
Basque of the 1930s, Esteban de Urkiaga, also known as Lauaxeta. Nevertheless, the tone of
Lauaxeta’s works, like that of Xabier Lizardi’s, still owed much to the forms of traditional poetry
and to rural and familiar themes inherited from Romanticism. His writing was closely tied to
the archaic ideals of the Basque Nationalist Party and used an artiicial language inherited from
the precepts of its founder, Sabino Arana (Kortázar 1986).
he trajectory of Basque literature in the 1930s had little to do with that of other Peninsular
languages. he society Euskaltzaleak (Friends of Basque) was founded in 1927 and beginning
in 1930 it was lead by the priest José de Ariztimuño, “Aitzol.” his society did an excellent job
promoting the language in its more lexible and popular version, but its patriotic-literary aim
was the creation of a national epic which captured the heritage of the rural tradition, in the way
that Kalevala, compiled by Elias Lönnrot, did for Finnish. Another priest, Nicolás Ormaetxea,
“Oritxe,” undertook this feat by writing Euskaldunak (he Basque), which was not completed
until 1950 (Aldekoa 2004).
he consequences of the Spanish Civil War
he impact of the Spanish Civil War signiicantly altered the conditions of dialogue, as it signi-
ied a long hiatus in the development of vernacular languages in Spain. Not until the late 1940s
and early 1950s was there a gradual increase in literary writing and publishing, although this
activity faced mistrust, especially in the case of Catalan. Given this state of afairs, exile was the
only option for continuity. From exile, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez conceived of (and par-
tially completed) an interpretation of Hispanic poetry that gave prominence to the renovation
that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century in the hands of vernacular poets like Rosalía
de Castro and Jacinto Verdaguer and which embraced all Hispanic literatures of the modernist
century, including that of Latin America. Ignoring his country’s oicial hostility towards Spain,
the Portuguese writer Miguel Torga (Adolfo Rocha) inspired his pseudonym on Miguel de
Unamuno and considered the 1936 Civil War as the main event of his life. His autobiographical
novel El cuarto día (he fourth day; 1939) begins with his memory of Spain during the war and
is full of slogans and wall paintings that had impressed him (“Franco, national sea of all the riv-
ers of Spain,” “Danger,” “Torquemada,” “Long live Franco,” “Don Ramón y Cajal Street”). When
one of the characters reaches the French border, he proclaims: “hank goodness, damn it! Half
and hour more in this hell and I’d burst! Yes, hell… I repeated ater a few seconds in a soliloquy
out loud. But I wonder if this is any better than what we have there” (Torga 1986, 281). In “Ibéria,”
one of the Poemas ibéricos (Iberian poems; 1952–65) that make up his Diario (Diary), he speaks
of Spain as a “Land-tumor-of-anguish of knowledge / […] An antenna of Europe that receives
/ the voice from afar that wishes to speak to it.” Another poem is dedicated to Unamuno, and
another evokes García Lorca. Both are clichéd; he refers to Lorca as brother and, with notorious
impropriety, as indomitable gypsy. Of Unamuno he remembers that “Don Miguel […] / made
white paper pigeons / that lew from Iberia to the end of the world / Unamuno the third! / Cid
was irst, / Don Quixote was second” (Torga 1985, 122–23; Novo Palacio 1999).
At this time the forms of Iberianism, isolated from any kind of oicial initiative, were
transformed into personal nostalgia for a liberalism that was deinitively lost and that would
have allowed freedom and also spiritual brotherhood. he repressed Catalan journalist Agustí
Calvet, “Gaziel,” published an interesting trilogy in the 1950s of “Viatges i somnis” (Travels and
dreams), made up of Castella endins (Inside Castile), Portugal enfora (Portugal from outside),
and La península inacabada (he uninished peninsula). In the second book he relates his visit
to the convent of Mafra in March and April of 1953 and dwells on the parallel destinies of the
Catalan rebellion of 1640 and the Portuguese emancipation of 1668, the second perhaps a con-
sequence of the irst:
Catalonia is quite inferior in every aspect, except in laboriousness and ingenium, to her At-
lantic sister. Spirit it has plenty of, and will probably always have, but it will always have one
handicap. It does not know how to build itself, not even when its kings were sovereigns, be-
cause Catalonia has no political force, no organic cohesion, and no will for power in spiritual
matters. his has always made me think – and I have said it many times – that the best deini-
tion of Catalonia is this: it is a lost soul.5
From 1950 to 1955 there was a short-lived climate of Castilian-Catalan dialogue which favored
the Poetry Conferences of Segovia, Salamanca, and Santiago and the publication of Revista
(Journal), an attractive Barcelona magazine inspired by the ex-Falangist Dionisio Ridruejo.
his magazine was a more explicit and active version of another weekly publication, Destino
(Destiny), founded in 1940 and also of Falangist origin. During these years the Castilian col-
laborations of Josep Pla in Destino had a contagiously friendly tone and his work let a mark on
Iberian literature: his Viaje en autobús (Voyage by bus; 1942) was the forerunner of many other
itineraries, starting with Viaje a la Alcarria (Voyage to Alcarria; 1947), by Camilo José Cela. he
historian Jaume Vicens Vives was another usual collaborator in both magazines. His impor-
tance lies with two of his works which marked an about-face in the understanding of intra-His-
panic relations: Aproximación a la historia de España (Approach to the history of Spain; 1952)
and Notícia de Catalunya (News of Catalonia; 1954). Between 1957 and 1958, in Lavínia (Bar-
celona) and Sinera (Arenys de Mar), Salvador Espriu wrote the poetry of La pell de brau (he
bull hide; 1960), a metaphor of all of Spain, ater having written “Assaig de càntic en el temple”
(Essay of song in the temple, from El caminant i el mur [he traveler and the wall]), perhaps his
most famous poem, in which he spoke of “pobra / bruta, trista, dissortada pàtria” (poor, dirty,
sad, and unfortunate country), which referred to a Catalonia humiliated by the winners of the
war. La pell de brau was a late reply to Ortega y Gasset, who had remarked on the periphery’s
inability to understand the Spanish essence. Furthermore, it was probably an implicit continu-
ation of the tone of Joan Maragall in 1900. In poem 30 Espriu demands “l’alta i senzilla veritat”
(the noble and simple truth) of recognizing that “diverses són els homes y diverses les parles,
/ i han convingut molts noms a un sol amor” (there are many men and many languages / and
they have given many names to just one love; Espriu 1977, 44), while poem 25 formulates the
“desig / de cel piadós i gran, nou cel de Sepharad” (the wish / of a great and merciful heaven, the
new heaven of Sepharad; 50). More explicitly, poem 46 expresses a dilemma which is obviously
political, although it would take iteen years for it to be resolved in a favorable way: whether
5. “Catalunya és molt inferior, en tots aspectes, menys en el treball i l’enginy, a la seva germana atlántica.
D’ànima, Catalunya en té de sobres, i probablement en tindrà sempre, Però sempre també li ha mancat
un cos adient. Mai no sabé forjar-se’l, ni quan els seus reis eren sobirans, perqué Catalunya no té pesada
política, ni cohesió orgánica, ni voluntat de potencia en les coses espirituals. Això m’ha fet pensar sempre
– i ho he dit molts cops – que la millor deinición de Catalunya em sembla aquesta: és una ànima en pena.”
(A. Calvet 1960, 197)
“de vegades és necessari i forçós / que un home mori per un poble, / però mai no ha de morir tot
un poble / per un home sol” (it is necessary and essential / for a man to die for his people, / but
a whole people ought not to die / for just one man; 66).
he shiting systems for literary creation in the novel during the transition
and democracy (1975–82)
Randolph D. Pope
Belief
Franco’s death on November 20, 1975, was a media event which held the attention of Spain and
is today a cultural shorthand reference for the complex transformation of Spain from dictator-
ship to democracy. It was not the cause of change, of course, but a tipping point, an event that
precipitated into action and coalesced numerous trends that were struggling for a democratic
society and a free cultural environment, aided by the efect of the 1959 Stabilization Plan which
created a modern economy which required a more open society. Eugenio Bregolat observes, as
many others have, that “Spain’s political system thus became inconsistent with its new econom-
ic and social reality,” concluding, in my opinion wrongly, that therefore “the political transition
was not diicult” (1999, 149 and 150). Rosa Montero (1995a, 315), instead, gives what I consider
a more appropriate description:
I should like to start with a bold statement: the changes that have taken place in Spain in the last
twenty years are staggering. We have moved successfully, without bloodshed, from dictator-
ship to democracy. With four oicial languages and a variety of regional cultures, we have man-
aged to free ourselves from totalitarian rule without breaking up the nation state. […] Spain
has successfully extricated itself from centuries of isolation and boarded the train of history.
But irst the old train conductor needed to depart. Since the team of doctors treating Franco in
his agony could not cure him, one of the several hundred mantles belonging to the Virgin of
Pilar was brought from Zaragoza for a miraculous intervention, joining the holy relic of the arm
of Saint Teresa. his mummiied arm had been stolen from the Carmelite Convent at Ronda
during the Civil War and was recovered in 1937 by Franco’s troops in Málaga. Sent to Franco, he
kept it the rest of his life (Preston 1994, 219). he mantle had been made especially by a group
of nuns, who worked on their knees while preparing it, to celebrate the entry of the Nationals
into Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War (Morán 2005). he connection of the Virgin
of Pilar, military glory, “hispanidad”, and Spanish unity was strategically highlighted ater the
war (J. Casanova 2005, 322–23). hese hand and mantle were religious national treasures for
some, but for others one more symbolic expression of an imploding rhetoric of power based
on irrational faith.
here is no doubt that Franco’s prolonged agony and death is a crucial narrative of the late
twentieth century, since it opened wide gates that had been already tested and weakened, but
which still held retaining power. he publication in Mexico instead of Spain of novels by Juan
Goytisolo – Señas de identidad (Marks of identity; 1966), and Reivindicación del conde don Ju-
lián (Count Julian; 1970) – and Juan Marsé – Si te dicen que caí (If they tell you I fell; 1973) – are
signiicant examples of the limitations imposed to culture even late in the Franco regime, while
the executions Franco ordered a few days before his death bespeak the remaining political
harshness. It would take several years to end censorship, dismantle the monopoly of state radio
and television, and write a new constitution. he power of the Church would decline gradually,
654 Randolph D. Pope
to the extent that in 2005 only 49% of Spanish youth between iteenn and twenty four years
of age consider themselves Catholic, and only 10% practicing, numbers which had plunged
from 68% and 19% respectively in a similar survey a decade earlier (García-Soler 2006). he
numbers in 1965 were quite diferent for the whole population: 83% identiied themselves as
practicing Catholics. he irst big drop is seen in 1976, when the practicing percentage falls to
56% (Laboa et al. 1986, 89). he mantle and the mummiied hand, therefore, epitomize a basic
diiculty for understanding the recent past of Spain, since they are objects that test our belief.
Some will ind in them a connection to transcendence and consider them ideal objects to have
at a deathbed. Others will see relics not of religion, but of superstition. he former can still walk
into a cathedral and pray, where the latter will only visit a vast and relatively empty museum.
We may be looking at a diferent past. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht begins the section dedicated to
Spanish post-Civil War literature, in his excellent general history since 1100 to the present, by
quoting an exchange of telegrams between Pope Pius XII and Franco on April 1, 1939, the day
in which the war was declared ended. Gumbrecht wonders, at the start of a brilliant analysis of
the compressed rhetoric of the messages, about the fact that the telegrams were written not that
long ago, and yet produce for him in the late 1980s a comical impression. here must have been
in 1939, he ponders, people who believed in the truth of those texts and took them seriously
(1990, 937–38).
he death performance, which utilized to the hilt the culture of the spectacle analyzed
by Guy Debord, brought the country together in a common interest to hear the end of the
story. Preston writes that “as the news of his death was lashed to every corner of Spain, many
mourned and many rejoiced” (1994, 779). hen over 300,000 people paid their respects or satis-
ied their curiosity, iling by the body which lay in state for ity hours in the Sala de Columnas
of the Palacio de Oriente (Preston 1994, 779). As they dispersed through the city they would be
moving into a prevalent cultural system that soon would ofer many more diverse opportunities
than existed before. he common story was coming to an end. here was never, as the decades
ater 1975 have widely shown, a positively welcomed common history within the Iberian penin-
sula, but the oicial story which claimed it existed had managed to be the dominant – the one to
support or attack – for over thirty years. It would reemerge powerfully in 1981, in a date that has
become an icon, the 23 of February, 23-F, when there was an attempted coup d’état, but it was
only a brief reenactment of the power struggle of the past, albeit the fact that the images of doz-
ens of armed Civil Guards irrupting into Congress were lashed again to every corner of Spain.
he period which preceded and followed 1975 was one of tentative possibilities, in a whirl
of openness to Europe, airmation of national and regional agency, sexual exploration, drug
and rock ’n’ roll, renovation in the ilm industry and the media, and the birth of important
new periodical publications. he unfortunate word of destape (uncovering) has been used to
describe this period, stressing what was unveiled – bodies, censored books, banned ilms, punk
music – but neglecting to stress the creative efort of a new society. What was “uncovered” ac-
tually in most cases was not previously there in a quiescent latent state, but created. Hopes,
though, were oten too high, and the disappointment of inding that democracy is not a pana-
cea came under the moniker of “desencanto,” which gives a negative retrospective vision of a
period of diicult but successful accommodation that required extraordinary talent and his-
torical good luck. What is clear is that there was not only a systemic change, but a collapse of
he shiting systems for literary creation in the novel during the transition and democracy 655
the old paradigm which was not replaced by a new one, but by a proliferation of new generative
systems that oten coexisted with the still established. herefore, we should even hesitate about
using the word transition which assumes a continuity, something being transferred. In the case
we have irst presented, about the miraculous quality of certain objects, there is no discussion as
that which occupied Feijoo in the eighteenth century. Simply, most people have moved to other
issues that interest them more, and couldn’t care less about St. Teresa of Ávila’s arm. In many
cases, nothing has been passed on, except for a free space to ill at pleasure.
Feeling
When Víctor Pérez-Díaz (1993, 2) expresses the frame of mind of many people before 1975, he
reveals the central and shared concern of most active participants in the culture of the time:
In short, those of us who were members of the generation belonging to the late 1950’s and early
1960’s considered ourselves to be, on the one hand, dissenting from the predominant culture
and institutions of Francoist Spain and, on the other, hopeful of the possibility of anchoring
our dissent in the European experience of that time.
If our irst diiculty was one of reading with belief or disbelief, now we confront the usurpation
of the whole and the arrogation of the privilege to speak for a whole generation. Pérez-Díaz
considers himself part of a generation, only deined by a couple of dates, a generation that dis-
sents and needs to sail into a European port to lower the anchor there. Were there at that time
no people of a similar age to Pérez-Díaz who did actually participate in the predominant culture
and institutions of Francoist Spain? How could culture and institution be dominant without the
support of a large sector of the population, a sector that drops from view? he operative mode
here is to choose a position, declare it superior, and then assign oneself a term that excludes
others from participation. Most of us, I would wager, believe that the change to democracy was
excellent, but a comparative approach needs to resist what I have called here the usurpation of
the whole. One would have to deal, for example, with the fact that one of the most sold Spanish
books of the twentieth century is José María Escrivá de Balaguer’s Camino (he way). his spiri-
tual text in my opinion lacks depth and is poorly written, but obviously many do not share my
opinion, and it spoke to the desire many readers felt to take control over their lives. A new edi-
tion of 10,000 irst-edition copies has been published in 2006 in the United States by Doubleday,
also the publisher of Dan Brown’s he Da Vinci Code. As Robert Escarpit determined decades
ago – but there is no reason to doubt his igures do not apply today – the literature read in any
period is around 50% contemporary, which means that as the calendar changes it leaves behind
much of what was actually read in the past: it disengages. It also means that in the period we are
considering around half of the books were survivors of the relentless shedding brought about
by the constant slide into the contemporary, either continuing their presence in the changing
canon or rescued and brought into new prominence because of a change of values.
José-Carlos Mainer (1994, 110) gives a masterful description of how he and many other
Spaniards felt as they awaited Franco’s death:
Without November 20, 1975, nothing – that’s for sure – could have happened as it did. [Yet]
just because of that date alone nothing could have been diferent ater that obituary which in
the heart of hearts all of us desired with the dark fury of a biological need, with the underlying
disbelief with which we expect the end of the world, with the disquiet one has when having a
glimpse of the unknown.
Mainer continues by stating that a historian would consider the death of Carrero Blanco two
years earlier as a more signiicant catalyst for change, an economist would point to the crisis of
1972, and sociologists would ofer diferent frustrations or hopes where transformation was tak-
ing root. Mainer concludes quite correctly that a slow process of transformation in the prefer-
ences of the middle class was changing the country (1994, 111). What I wish to stress, though, is
his brilliant description of the anxiety with which he awaited Franco’s death, not quite believing
it would ever happen and fearing an unmapped future. In this recollection, he is not alone, in
fact, he is with “all of us,” erasing therefore all who may have felt diferently. Just a few pages lat-
er, when speaking about the protests against Carlos Saura’s 1973 ilm La prima Angélica (Cousin
Angelica), Mainer refers to “the extreme right which then was so active” (1994, 115). I do share
Mainer’s feelings, but we must relect on the disturbing fact that the extreme right cannot have
suddenly disappeared. I believe and hope that it has become obsolete in its old way, as also has
happened to the extreme let. he great contribution of this transformative period is not to have
had the let win over the right, but the collapse of this opposition as the top priority for esthetic
evaluation. Mainer calls it the “generalized shipwreck of the letist tradition” (1994, 129, italics
in the original; see also Mainer 1992, 56–57).
Evolution allows looking back with understanding and even gratitude – we come from
there, we recognize our roots – but a paradigm collapse, more akin to a metamorphosis than
to growth, leaves great sectors of the past unable to be taken seriously, and recoverable only as
irony or satire, a symptom of a crucial divide between framing systems. When, ater the Civil
War, successive novels which had popular and critical acclaim presented dire social conditions
(attracting also negative reviews, but deinitely impossible to ignore), there was a profound
similarity between them: Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte (he family of Pascual
Duarte) and La Colmena (he hive) with Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Nothingness) epitomize an
existential belief in the harshness of life and the intermittent happiness available to individu-
als. While the Church reviled existentialist thought, there is no doubt that it crossed the border
from France and connected with local thought to tinge a great number of novels written ater
the war, as Óscar Barrero Pérez (1987) has amply demonstrated. Most of the literature of the
ities and sixties inherited the pain of living, but responded to the lone individual by presenting
them as part of social groups and looking for a cause for their conditions of lack and oppression.
he encompassing book of Gil Casado, La novela social española (he Spanish social novel),
published in 1968, with a second and much expanded edition in 1973, both editions signiicantly
published by Seix Barral, lists hundreds of novels which were generated at the time with the fol-
lowing implicit guidelines: the main character is part of a social class or a representative of some
form of labor: ishing, mining, transportation, and so on. he intention was clearly combative
and the prevalent belief was the importance of literature as a form of political action. Juan
Goytisolo in a lecture of 1970 airmed that “a whole sector of Spanish literature of the period
we examine [1950–1965], is notable for its intent to transform words into acts, to compete with
life, to become ‘performative’” (1977, 159). Attempted objectivity prevailed because what was
shared appeared as better than what was eccentric or unique. Language became unusually lat
to reach the great public. he belief was that novels mattered, a belief reinforced by censorship,
yet in spite of the frequent airmations among literary critics that some novels undermined the
Franco dictatorship, there cannot be any proof ofered for such a drastic efect.
Darío Villanueva (1987 and 1992), in an admirable overview of the novels written between
1975 and 1985 – he believes there are around one thousand which merit attention – observes that
realism is less favored in this period due to its identiication with the Francoist period and to
the social concerns of novels such as La piqueta (he pickax), La mina (he mine), and Central
eléctrica (Electric power station). Nevertheless, he also airms, rightly, that there were numer-
ous novels dealing with the war and recent history, most notably texts by Cela, Benet, and Julio
Llamazares. Yet what caught the eye of the public was the arrival of the Latin American novel’s
Boom writers who came to shatter the literary vocabulary, muted and gray, by presenting a rich,
transgressive, and colloquial range of what could it in the novel once imagination was let loose.
But it also came to conirm that the novel had to be connected with journalism, politics, and the
ight for justice. In the meantime some of the most respected writers among the critics, such as
Juan Benet, Juan Goytisolo, Luis Goytisolo, and Juan Marsé produced extremely complex and
important novels. he cultural capital of these texts consisted in their moral alignment with
progressive ideologies and in their sophisticated crat.
Freedom
Once the political urgency was removed from literature, the moral calling lost its shared ap-
peal. his happened abruptly and disrupted retroactively the literary tradition, which became
a kaleidoscope into which diferent people looked ater each one gave it a shake. It was not the
fragmentation of the past, since this would mean that the constituting elements were the same,
even if divided into smaller pieces, but the discarding of vast regions of the past, as we will see,
and the generalization of new cultural matrixes in many cases unrelated to each other. We had
gone from an arboreal situation, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s expression, to a rizomatic one.
his came on the wake of what Germán Gullón (2004, 2) has perceived as evidence that “the
Era of Literature” is over. We are not, therefore, dealing with the same product as in the earlier
periods, because the context has changed so radically, he claims, that we now live “a culture of
the masses, with its demands which include the mass production of what is ofered so it can be
available to all regardless of income, and the normalization of taste.”
he year 1975 saw the publication of a decisive book for the study of the Spanish novel,
the irst edition of Gonzalo Sobejano’s Novela española de nuestro tiempo (Spanish novel of our
time; 1975), which had the subtitle En busca del pueblo perdido (In search of the lost people),
in which he provided a comprehensive and reassuringly neatly classiied overview of the past.
In a complementary efort, under the title “Los marcos de la literatura española (1975–1990):
Esbozo de un sistema” (he parameters of Spanish literature [1975–1990]: A drat of a system),
Darío Villanueva (1992, 4) provided a masterful overview of a period in which he describes
the development of a new Spain which at the time he writes, 1991, is “dynamic to the point of
an upheaval” and which had developed from what was already latent, repressed or outlined in
1975. He examines the producers of literary works, the mediators who take their work to the
public, the readers, and the recreators (critics and such), insisting on the continuity with the
past and the coexistence of ive generations of writers for which the diversity of literary trends
before 1975 would help reduce the usual sharp conlicts which occur when younger generations
attempt to create some space for themselves by destroying the previous generation. Yet, the fact
that a radical change has happened is outlined in a revealing paragraph:
But we are let with the reasonable doubt if this [lack of conlicts] instead of being a sign of har-
monic coexistence between the citizens and factions that make up our contemporary Republic
of Letters, may not instead be certain weakness or lack of intellectual interest in establishing
esthetic or ideological positions […]. Seen thus, this situation would it perfectly with that gen-
eral tendency to be light, that “weak thought” of which the postmodern cultures sufer, lacking
a stern criticism based on a very precise theoretical foundation. (Villanueva 1992, 12)
What is notable here is that the author sees irst a harmonic community of writers of all ages and
tendencies who have become sophisticated enough not to exchange sharp barbs with each other
ater 1975, but then, as the superb critic he is, he takes a second look, mistrusting the happy im-
age he has painted and suggesting that perhaps these new writers do not really care about taking
a position in matters of literary quality or politics. One perceives the pang of sadness in one of
the deans of Spanish criticism when he reproaches the younger writers for their weakness. We
have to remember here a word frequently used ater 1975, pasota, which refers to someone who
just could not care less about very precise theoretical foundations: he may be speaking to them.
Villanueva rescues the situation by diagnosing this lightness of which postmodern cultures suf-
fer with Gianni Vattimo’s term, weak thought, thereby safely incorporating the disinterest which
worries him within the stern boundaries of theory.
We encounter a similar assessment by Jesús María Lasagabaster when he examines Basque
literature from 1976 to 1986. he change in the status of Basque language which could at last
develop openly, did not bring a vast number of books (95 in 1976), but made the novel more vis-
ible in an Iberian context and shares the general shit away from a central concern with politics,
as Lasagabaster (1987, 286) describes it:
Literature has ceased to be, fortunately, a covert form, or better said, a metaphor at the service
of extraliterary and transcendental causes. he writer, the poet, the novelist, faced with the
blank page appears now liberated of that bleak and dramatic sensation of working for the lib-
eration of Euskadi, or of recuperating in agony the national identity.
He adds that “the most characteristic trait of this trend among young Basque writers is their
aggressive vindication of literature for literature itself and not for its reference to the linguistic,
ideological or political” (289). More importantly, he detects, as Mainer, a resistance among the
writers to classiication and pigeonholing:
herefore it is diicult to identify this period as having one aesthetic, one ideology, or a mini-
mally common and uniform concept of literature. And this is not due only to the coexistence of
several generations, chronological and literary, but because the last generation, the one called
to deine, and it is already doing so, the orientation of Basque literature, is in itself hard to
reduce to a common denominator. his lack is paradoxically its most salient characteristic,
next to an approach suiciently shared by all to understand literary work in a less rigorous and
transcendental manner, more disinterested and more playful. (290)
A similar situation but with a negative spin is reported from Galicia by Basilio Losada (1987,
277): “he narrative panorama, confusing and at times disconcerting, starts to show some de-
ining characteristics. he concern for technique, in the irst place,” which Losada inds tiring
and useless to solve the real problems of Galicia. He had perceived well the gap between his
approach, anchored still in social realism, and many of the new narrators who felt at last the
freedom to experiment, explore their own personal world, and were not cowed by the authority
of critics. A writer then in mid-career, such as Xosé Luis Méndez Ferrín (b. 1938), published in
this period novels which would eventually all be translated into Spanish, Antón e os inocentes
(Antón and the innocents; 1976), Crónica de nós (Chronicles of us; 1980), and Amor de Artur
(he love of Artur; 1982), while also Alfredo Conde was starting his successful narrative career
with three novels which would be followed by the one which gave him an important break into
the Spanish market with the translation of his Xa vai o grifón no vento (he grifon; 1985). At
the time Suso de Toro (b. 1956) was starting his career which would eventually lead him to win
the Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2003 with his novel Trece badaladas (hirteen strokes).
he concern for technique which worried Losada seems to have had good results.
Barcelona has had a predominant position in the editorial industry of the Iberian Pen-
insula. It also had a profusion of Catalan writers and a much larger reading public than their
Galician or Basque counterparts. Even so, it must be remembered that Catalan sufered severe
repression under Franco. Ater the war and until 1946, no books could be published in Catalan,
and until the early 1960s translations into Catalan were forbidden. It was a slow recovery, justii-
ably resentful. As Josep-Anton Fernández (1995, 343) notes in his essay about becoming normal,
it was only in 1976 that the same numbers of books were published in Catalan per year, around
800, as before the war, and the number climbed to 4,500 in 1990, and to around 5,500 in 1996.
Around 500 publishers produce books in Catalan, compared to around 100 for Basque and 100
for Galician. To put these igures into perspective, there are around 3,300 active publishing
houses in Spain, even if only around 700 publish more than ten books a year (for these and
other igures see Couartou 1998).
One of the greatest novels of the long postwar period was written in Catalan by Mercè Ro-
doreda (1908–83), La Plaça del Diamant (he Time of the Doves; 1962). As Christine R. Arkin-
stall (2004, 13) writes in Gender, Class and Nation, Rodoreda’s works “take on almost mythical
proportions,” precisely because they respond to and contest the Catalan cultural struggle, from
the Renaixença, to modernisme and noucentisme, to conigure a nation that sees itself as practi-
cal, relatively rich, sophisticated, and masculine. La Plaça del Diamant presents a diferent point
of view, of a young, poorly educated, and disoriented young woman, sufocating in a patriarchal
society and a confusing city. Rodoreda participated actively in politics during the Republic and
spent many years in exile, returning to Spain only in the mid-seventies. She represented, then,
diferent elements which were attractive to many people in the Barcelona of the sixties and
seventies: a reconnection with what had been lost to the Republican defeat and exile; a concern
with the toils of people of modest means thrown into an accelerating whirl of capitalism, now
more international in nature; and the great contribution made by women to culture.
It may not be out of place to remember here that another mythical igure of the sixties
and seventies was Carmen Balcells, who single handedly brought Catalan editors into the con-
temporary world and gave them in addition the glory of publishing the Latin American Boom
authors. Vargas Llosa tells the story of how she visited him in London, where he was teaching
at King’s College in the early sixties, and told him to abandon his job and come to Barcelona to
dedicate himself only to writing. When Vargas Llosa observed that he had a family and needed
a salary, she ofered to pay him a similar salary every month, and thus we all gained great
novels, plus an astounding concentration of Latin American talent in the Condal City, engag-
ingly described by José Donoso in Historia personal del Boom (he boom in Spanish American
literature: a personal history). (Herrero-Olaizola 2000 does a rigorous analysis of the relation
between Seix Barral and Latin American authors, but in my opinion he sees it too much as
exclusively a business, while I would add the pleasure of great literature, which Barral was able
to recognize.) he mention of Donoso in Barcelona should remind us that literature at any
given time in any city is a mix of local authors and authors and books from abroad, written in
the same language of the reader or translated. Mario Santana (2000) has shown to what extent
books by Latin American authors were present during this time in Spain.
As Rosa Montero (1995b, 381) indicates in her brief article, “he Silent Revolution: he
Social and Cultural Advances of Women in Democratic Spain,” “the cliché of Spanish machismo
is clearly outdated.” Sexism, she assures us, is no worse than in other EC countries and the
discrimination against women has only recently diminished. Montero puts in a nutshell the
situation up to 1975:
Until 1975, the date of Franco’s death, a married woman in Spain could not open a bank ac-
count, buy a car, apply for a passport, or even work without her husband’s permission. And if
she did work with her husband’s approval, he had the right to claim her salary. On top of that,
for the whole of the forty-year period contraception, divorce, and abortion were illegal. In ad-
dition, adultery was a crime for which a woman could be sent to prison, while concubinage
(male adultery), though a criminal ofence, was treated more leniently. (1995b, 381–82)
Since that time women have made signiicant gains in independence, being a large sector of
the working force, studying at university, instituting numerous organizations to defend their
rights and celebrate their accomplishments, and producing an amazing number of great writers.
While in the older generation one would have highlighted Rodoreda and Carmen Martín Gaite
as the best known and more studied, the list of possible names in the younger generation is
extensive. Just to name a few, Carme Riera, Esther Tusquets, Soledad Puértolas, and Rosa Mon-
tero have produced popular novels which also garnered critical acclaim. he MLA Bibliography
in June of 2006 listed 87 scholarly studies on the work of Carme Riera, 107 for Tusquets, 26
for Puértolas, and 92 for Montero. In comparison one inds 136 for Muñoz Molina, 35 for Julio
Llamazares, 46 for Juan José Millás, and 15 for Manuel Rivas. For further comparison, there are
154 dedicated to Rodoreda, 29 to Josep Pla, and 307 to Martín Gaite.
Another important contribution of this era was the rapidly shiting situation of homo-
sexuality from repressed to relatively accepted. Terenci Moix, for example, published in 1976
two books, the novel Sadístic, esperpèntic i àdhuc metafísic (Sadistic, grotesque, and even
though metaphysical) and the collection of short stories La caiguda de l’imperi sodomita i altres
històries herétiques (he fall of the sodomitic empire and other heretical stories). It is hard to
overestimate how the audacity of a writer such as Moix pushed the envelope and helped modify
the range of the acceptable within the system. It is true that the world was changing and Moix,
an inveterate traveler, who had been dazzled by his visits in the sixties to Paris and London,
knew that homosexuality was more acceptable outside of Spain and that life could be more
glamorous and exotic. While large social forces were at work, still one must grant that there is
some agency in literature, and that a book such as Moix’s earlier El día que va morir Marilyn
(he day Marilyn died; 1969, published in a revised edition in 1998), gave a very diferent view
from the traditional of how it was to grow up during the postwar years. He has been compared
justly with Gide, and Moix’s memoirs, El peso de la paja (he weight of straw), published in
three volumes in 1990, 1993, and 1998, were immensely popular.
In 1982 Luis Antonio de Villena published Ante el espejo: Memorias de una adolescencia
(Before the mirror: memories of an adolescence), which Robert R. Ellis (1995, 322) celebrates
as “a ‘camp eye’ that destabilizes dominant, bourgeois conigurations of gender and social class
and turns homosexual and aristocratic posturing into acts of deiance,” but that also shows the
confusion and pain of becoming oneself as gay in the moralistic and homophobic atmosphere
prevailing during the Franco years. Villena was born in 1943 (and died in 2003 – Moix had been
born in 1942), so the road to self-airmation was even harder for Juan Goytisolo, born in 1931,
who would tell his story openly in his memoirs, Coto vedado (Forbidden territory) and En los
reinos de taifa (Realms of strife), published in 1985 and 1986 respectively. He tells there about
how he was molested at an early age by his maternal grandfather – a revelation that estranged
him from his brother Luis, also a novelist – and how only meeting Jean Genet in Paris chal-
lenged him to come (slowly) out of the closet. Towards the end of the century, the pioneers of
open gay life would have hardly recognized Spain, with a neighborhood in Madrid, Chueca,
which has become in the last decade a gay quarter and even a tourist attraction, as described by
Gabriel Giorgi (2002, 58):
Spain, traditionally a hot spot for tourists, represents quite an exceptional example of the re-
positioning of a nation on the map of modernity. In the last three decades it has experienced
radical social and political changes that transformed a country generally regarded as backward
and conservative into a modern democratic nation and a metropolitan power. It was also, as
the guidebooks for gay and lesbian travel promise, transformed into a society highly tolerant
of homosexual life. Spain is said to have made a “historical leapfrog” ater the death of Franco,
in view of the unexpected extent of the country’s modernizing impulse. he trope condenses
the doubts it fosters in some critics, who regard Spain’s bright modernity as illusory or weak.
Doubts there may well be, and there is always the danger of a backlash, but for now the archive
of the possible has changed immensely for gay literature, immersed in a drastically diferent,
much more positive, local and international environment than in 1975. (One can also wonder,
of course, if the normalization and gentriication of gay life will not take also away some of its
edge and creativity.)
his return of narrative was reairmed in the decades that followed by the progressively
more centralized distribution to massive outlets, which required books that would move as
rapidly and in such high numbers as other products in their stores. In the year 2005 over half
of the books that were sold in Spain were bought at great chain stores – such as El Corte Inglés,
Fnac, and Casa del Libro – and in large supermarkets – such as Carrefour, Alcampo, and so on.
In Catalonia, a large cooperative, Abacus, with half a million members, selects books and
distributes them at prices that undercut independent bookstores. Authors and editors who wish
to sell, therefore, must generate a story that will attract a large number of buyers from the
massive means of distribution, a situation that does not encourage the profound, diicult, or
otherwise demanding. he changes had begun decades earlier, but the cultural consumer has
acquired an importance he did not have in the seventies, when authors in general were still seen
more as intellectual heroes than entertainers, and it was frequent to speak of popular literature
as low and of more reined literature as high. Writers such as Arturo Pérez Reverte, whose irst
big success came with El maestro de esgrima (he fencing master) in 1988, command among the
highest sales and has been of interest to scholars. he MLA International Bibliography showed
in June of 2006 a relatively high number of 63 entries for studies devoted to Pérez Reverte,
among them two doctoral dissertations. Being popular does not mean the author limits his
aspirations, as Pérez Reverte explains to an interviewer in 1999: “I am speaking to the present,
about the Spaniard of today, about what it is to be Spanish. I speak about how we are what we
are, about how we were who we were, and about how we were made as they did. Corrupt secre-
taries of state, fanatical priests and incompetent kings brought us to be the wreck we are today”
(G. Contreras 1999). Yet when the interviewer compares him with best sellers in the United
States, he reacts sharply:
I am not attacking the North American bestseller. I read them, and there are even narrative
techniques which I take from them without any scruples. What I am not pleased with is when
no diferences are made. I do not want people to think that because we sell many books, Ken
Follet and I are the same… Together, but not of one feather… I want to make the diferences
clear. I am a European writer, with a three-thousand-year old memory, so don’t compare me
with… Well, with Ken Follet.
What is at issue here is more complex than geographical location or memory capacity and it was
played out in the late seventies and eighties, when the book market took of big time in Spain.
he system grew to favor adventure, narrative, suspense, and friendliness towards the reader,
precisely categories in which Pérez Reverte excels. In contrast, Juan Benet published El aire de
un crimen (Scent of a crime) in 1980, in a clear if failed attempt to produce a bestseller backed
by Planeta, a far cry from his masterful and enigmatic novels such as Volverás a Región (Return
to Región, 1967). More fortunate, Juan Goytisolo produced a lively bestseller with his memoirs,
Coto vedado (1985) and En los reinos de taifa (1986), again a departure from his challenging
novels such as Makbara (1980). While in the case of Goytisolo the switch to a diferent genre,
the memoir, allowed him to ind the proper tone; in the case of Benet there was a mistake in
register. It takes a special talent to ind the middle ground between the large readership and the
sophisticated reader. Paul Julian Smith (1998, 324), for example, has made an excellent case for
Francisco Umbral, stating that his newspaper column “has ambitions far beyond those of gossip
writers in other countries or his rivals in Spain itself. For his aims are at once total and partial:
to give a general account of the glittering social life of a Dior-issimo Madrid and a speciic so-
cial critique of that same elite’s decadence and arrogance as the ironically named ‘Red Decade’
advances.” A similar case is Carmen Martín Gaite’s shit from the meditative and slow-going
Retahílas (Strings) of 1974 to her very successful, and more entertaining, as well as profound,
El cuarto de atrás (Back room) of 1978, which merited her the Premio Nacional de Literatura.
A few years later, in 1987, she published another popular hit, Usos amorosos de la posguerra
española (Amorous customs of the Spanish postwar period), which received the Premio Ana-
grama for Essay and the Libro de Oro from the association of Spanish booksellers. In a conver-
sation with her, she told me that Usos amorosos had changed her relation to her public, since
they felt she was speaking directly about their lives and providing them some wisdom. Usos
amorosos does indeed show once and again how popular culture does have a fundamental role
to provide models, which Martín Gaite sees as liberating and inspiring for many women of the
dreary decade ater the war. From here she went on to produce two other lively and very suc-
cessful novels, Lo raro es vivir (he strange thing is to live; 1997) and Irse de casa (Leaving home;
1998). By then she had tuned in perfectly to her readership and audience, had become a favorite
of US Hispanists, and was received in her talks with the fervor usually reserved for rock stars.
Germán Gullón (2004) indicates in a retrospective article in which he considers the previous
decade, “he novel returns […] to the human being, to life, to the world.” But it is doubtful that
the novel had ever let that territory. What is true is that novels that do attract human beings as
buyers have been doing much better in Spain ater 1975.
Barcelona ofers also the best example of a peculiar situation caused by a bilingual city in
which only one of the languages, Catalan, is considered the national one. In Canada, if a writer
uses French or English for his novels, she is a Canadian writer. Similarly, in the United States,
which with over forty million Hispanics has become de facto bilingual in many large cities,
writers writing in Spanish or even in a daring mix of the two – the border language described
by Gloria Anzaldúa – are considered American. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, wrote
his famous Meditations in Greek, without losing his place in Roman literature. (Of course, Latin
had the advantage of using two diferent words, Latin literature for the one written in Latin,
and Roman literature for the one written by Roman citizens.) Nevertheless, the choice has been
made in Catalonia to use language as the essential element to determine who belongs to Cata-
lan literature. (Something similar happens, even if with less rigor, with Galician, which leaves
someone like Valle-Inclán, whose work is mostly about rural Galicia, in a national limbo, since
it would be a stretch to call him a Castilian writer.) he language litmus test afects other Euro-
pean writers, so it is not unusual: Kaka, whose life is closely bound to Prague but wrote in Ger-
man, is not part of most accounts of Czech literature, or appears only parenthetically; Conrad,
who was born in the Ukraine, is clearly considered a British writer, but he has also been claimed
by Polish literature, as when the novelist Stefan Zeromski wrote a glowing preface to the Polish
edition of Lord Jim, and declared him a Polish writer. While this classiicatory system is justi-
ied by a reasonable national pride in the accomplishments of writers using Catalan language,
it has a couple of important odd results. On the one hand, it cannot handle well some writers
who have written part of their work in Catalan and part in Spanish. Examples of this bilingual
creativity are Eugenio d’Ors and Moix. On the other hand, some writers who have been born
in Barcelona and have devoted most of their work to the city, but write exclusively in Spanish,
such as Juan Marsé and Luis Goytisolo, are excluded in most accounts or simply incorporated
into Spanish literature. It is true that the literary system for publication, distribution, and recep-
tion was extremely diferent for writers who in the past chose one or the other language. As
the new political reality of a much more autonomous Catalonia gains ground, it will probably
become possible to see all the literary activity which takes place in Catalonia as uniied and the
relation between literature written in Catalan and in Spanish as mutually energizing. A com-
paratist view shows that classiications along national lines hardly relect the cultural hybridity
we patently see in Spain today, but are an important part of a profound sense of belonging and
exclusion which ultimately relects the fragility of all cultural accomplishments. (For a long-
range view of the issue of nationalism in Spain, see the essay by José Álvarez Junco [2002] “he
formation of Spanish identity and its adaptation to the Age of Nations,” which so completely
misses the point about what constitutes a national identity today that it makes evident why
holding on to the language can be crucial. For an insightful examination of this issue in Latin
America, see Sommer 1999.)
It is precisely the rich complexity of life in Barcelona that animates some of the best novels
of this period. Just before the end of Franco’s regime, Juan Marsé published Si te dicen que caí,
describing in a technically complex and reined form the life of young people growing up in
Barcelona surrounded by the misery and the still open wounds let by the war. Marsé has stated
that he did not expect his text would pass censorship, so he wrote assuming from the begin-
ning that he would have to publish it outside Spain, as he did, in Mexico, which gave him the
freedom to write one of his best novels. Luis Goytisolo published in 1973 Recuento (Recounting),
a rambling but dazzling novel which is an ode to the city of Barcelona, as well as a novelized
memoir of his early years. But the breakthrough novel that had the good fortune of coming ex-
actly at the right time was Eduardo Mendoza’s La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (he truth about
the Savolta case; 1975). he history of Catalan industry in the early part of the twentieth century
is in itself fascinating and had been treated before, for example in the novels of Ignacio Agustí
published between 1944 and 1972 under the general title of La ceniza fue árbol (he ashes were
a tree). But La verdad sobre el caso Savolta has reached more readers and it has been translated
into over ten languages, receiving in 2005 the beneit of an exemplary edition by Nuria Plaza
Carrero in which one can see the vast bibliography the novel has generated, with at least eight
books dedicated to Mendoza’s work and fourteen doctoral dissertations, which proves it has
made a solid and perhaps permanent inroad into the academic system which takes careful note
of the continued attention of readers to a novel and its commentaries. he novel is an imagi-
nary recreation of the Barcelona from 1917 to 1919, which uses in part historical documents
and throws into the mix a profusion of voices and resources borrowed from the detective novel
and newspaper serials to create a whirl of false leads, misguided interpretations, and suspense.
While the topic is most serious – the violence of capitalism – there is a playful side to the novel
which ultimately leaves many readers with the sense that truth is hardly attainable.
La verdad sobre el caso Savolta became a ilm in 1979, directed by Antonio Drove, a clear
case in which the novel by far surpasses the movie. his is a happy instance, because it is clear
that during the period which we have considered here ilm, television and video became the
primary sources for common narratives. To explore the extraordinary creativity in the movies
produced in Spain during this period would require another essay, but we can note here that
Almodóvar is better known outside Spain than any of her novelists. His ilm Todo sobre mi
madre (All about my mother) was seen by over 2.5 million spectators in Spain in 1999, but we
must consider ruefully that the previous year Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley (Torrente, the
stupid arm of the law) reached close to 3 million. he time of the novel may not have ended, but
it deinitely has changed since Franco’s death.
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Index
A al-Andalus 7, 86–88, 93–102, 329, 333, Almagro, Manuel 193

Aarne, Antti 476, 554–556 334, 337, 338, 351–365, 366–385 Almeida, Estêvão de 417
Abadín 253 Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de 195, 197, Almeida, Francisco António de 622
Abraham [Patriarch] 264, 372–374, 199, 202, 638, 639 Almeida, Isabel 597
377–381, 385 Álava 105, 106, 460 Almirall, Valentí 139–142
Abravanel, Isaac 377 Albaicín 210 Almodóvar, Pedro 130, 665
Abū Muḥammad al-A‘rābi al-‘Āmirī Albania 106 Alomar, Gabriel 141, 150, 240,
359 Albert, Salvador xi, 56, 155, 157, 158, 242–244
Abū Nuwās [Abū Nuwās Al-ḥasan 160, 288, 436 Alonso Cortés, Narciso 486
Ibn Hāni’ Al-ḥakamī] 367 Alborg, Juan Luis 77, 127 Alonso Girgado, Luis 264
Abuín, Anxo xiv Albuquerque, Luís de 313 Alonso Hernández, José Luis 492
Abulaia, Todros 384 Alcalá de Henares 605 Alonso Montero, Xesús 468
Achadinha 322 Alcántara, Pedro de 418 Alonso Romo, Eduardo Javier 419,
Achebe, Chinua 270 Alcazarquivir 296, 427, 505 420
Adang, Camilla 381 Alcover 150, 157, 240–243, 443, 555 Alonso, Cecilio 635
Adler, Max K. 112 Alcover, Antoni Maria 443, 555 Alonso, Dámaso 503, 508, 510, 512
Adonis [‘Alī Aḥmad Sa‘īd] 116 Alcover, Joan 150, 157, 240–243 Álora 136, 278, 280
Adorno, heodor 315 Aldana, Cosme de 458 Alps 36, 37
Aeetes 290 Aldana, Francisco de 458 Alpujarra, La 199
Aegean Sea 290 Aldekoa, Iñaki 47, 48, 106, 107, 110, Altube, Severo 452
Afonso [Prince of Portugal] 415, 416 454, 650 Alvar, Manuel 479
Afonso I of Portugal [Afonso Alemany, Luis 301, 305 Álvares, Manuel 395, 413
Henriques] 165, 409, 410, 424 Alemão, Valentim Fernãdez [or V. Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando [Duke
Afonso II of Portugal 346, 407 Fernandes de Morávia] 425 of Alba] 598
Afonso III of Portugal 408 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’ 189 Álvarez de Villasandino, Alfonso
Afonso IV of Portugal 422 Alencar, José de 174, 177, 272 420, 608
Afonso V of Portugal 415 Alfonso III of Leon 389 Álvarez del Vayo, Julio 205
Africa 10, 55–59, 62, 68, 79, 81, 91, Alfonso V of Aragon [he Álvarez Emparanza, José Luís
97, 106, 115, 125, 126, 135–137, 163, Magnanimous] 384, 602, 604, [Txillardegi] 113, 453, 454
165, 169, 170, 172, 175, 194, 195, 607, 608 Álvarez Gato, Juan 610
206, 209, 217, 268, 269, 271, 280, Alfonso VIII of Castile 343, 579, 580 Álvarez Junco, José 457, 459,
291, 293, 297, 301, 302, 308, 318, Alfonso X of Castile [he Learned], 464–466, 468, 469, 471, 631, 664
347, 352, 356, 480, 505, 507, 511, VII 25, 29, 36, 343, 345, 348–350, Álvarez Quintero, Joaquín 439
587, 612 380, 384, 397–399, 403–410, 431, Álvarez Quintero, Serafín 439
Agirreazkuenaga, Joseba 647 456, 461, 577, 579, 580, 582–594, Álvaro of Córdoba 389
Agostinho da Cruz [Fr.] [Agostinho 602 Alvernha, Peire d’ 398
Pimenta] 414 Alfonso XI of Castile 589 Alves, Hélio J. S. 125, 126
Aguilar, Ildefonso 304 Alfonso XIII of Spain 147, 647 Alves, José Augusto dos Santos 615
Aguiló, Marian 199, 612 Algarve 95, 347, 396, 517, 534 Amades, Joan 555
Aguirre Sorondo, Juan 111 Algeria 96, 216, 488, 505 Amado Carballo, Luís 265
Aguirre, Domingo 452 Alghero 504 Amado, Jorge 178, 179, 265, 395
Aguirre, Tomás de 452 Alhama de Granada 280 Amador de los Ríos y Padilla, José
Agúndez, José Luis 555 Alhambra 184, 186, 190, 200–202, 20, 27, 28, 30–33, 35, 37, 43, 75–77,
Agustini, Delmira 160 207, 208, 210, 286, 288, 289 90, 100
Ahmed, Akbar S. 87 Alicante 281, 283, 439 Amengual, Bartomeu 150
Aira da Pedra 546 Aljubarrota 423, 577, 594 America 24, 44, 45, 56, 58, 59, 79, 81,
Alagno, Lucrezia d’ 604, 608, 611 Allariz 582 102, 125, 130, 135, 151, 156, 157, 163,
728 Index
165, 172, 184, 188, 194, 205, 209, Appiah, Kwame Anthony 169, 277 Astarloa, Pablo Pedro 223, 224, 229,
212, 214, 215, 217–220, 256, 261, Aquinas, homas [St.] 218, 254, 375, 450, 451
299–301, 303, 483, 491, 497, 499, 391, 425, 426, 502, 531, 645, 655 Astarte 290
504, 505, 612, 632, 638, 647 Aracil, Lluís 244 Astorga 258, 417
Amézaga, Elías 110 Aragon 7, 13, 44, 50, 65, 73, 102, 393, Asturias 8, 25, 32, 65, 99, 102, 192,
Amicis, Edmondo de 195, 200, 201, 411, 431, 456, 461, 465, 577, 580, 208, 280, 349, 389, 461, 469, 476,
208 592, 602–604, 607, 608, 611, 637 499, 511, 517, 537, 540, 542–544,
Amigo, Anabel 517, 544 Aramon i Serra, Ramon 611, 612 549, 552, 558, 590
Amillategui, Pascuala 102 Arana Goiri, Sabino 108, 109, Ataíde, Bernardo de 417
Amo, Joaquim 443 111, 138, 225–227, 229, 230, 232, Ataíde, Luís de 424
Amor Ruibal, Ángel 266 451–453, 470, 650 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 647
Amorebieta 236 Arana, Vicente de 225 Atero, Virtudes 498
Ampère, Jean-Jacques 74, 82–84, 122 Aranaz Castellanos, Manuel 231 Athens 241, 245, 247
Anahory-Librowicz, Oro 505, 668 Arato, Franco 15 Atxaga, Bernardo [Joseba Irazu]
Anastácio, Vanda 122, 123, 125, 621 Araújo, João Salgado de 417, 599 103–105, 107, 108, 111, 113, 236,
Anaya, Ángel 10 Arbelbide, Xipri 111 454, 472
Ança, Martí d’ 610 Arcediano, Antonio de 419 Aub, Max 51
Anchieta, José de 419, 420 Arcila 505 Augustine of Hippo [St.] 218, 254,
Andalusia 7, 44, 65, 81, 84–86, 102, Arcos de la Frontera 284 425, 426, 502, 531
192, 201, 278, 283, 285, 288, 347, Arendt, Hannah 134 Augusto Casimiro [A. C. dos
469, 479, 490, 544, 582, 637, 643 Ares Montes, José 423 Santos] 154
Andersen, Hans Christian 201, 202 Aresti, Gabriel 104, 234, 235, 453, 471 Aulestia, Gorka 107
Anderson, Andrew A. 649 Arfet, Ana d’ 318, 319, 323 Aulete, Francisco Júlio Caldas 164
Anderson, Benedict 165, 211, 217, Argentina 216, 217, 256, 488, 530 Aullón de Haro, Pedro 15
220, 326 Argote de Molina, Gonzalo 576, 577 Aulnoy, Madame d’ [Marie-
Andorra 114 Arias Montano, Benito 184, 373, 392 Catherine Le Jumel de
Andrade, Mário de 5, 42, 45, 176 Aribau, Bonaventura Carles 239, Barneville] 135, 187
Andrés, Juan 15–17, 25, 26, 90, 91, 93, 440, 637 Australia 346, 523
113, 120, 121, 154, 158, 217, 246, 251, Aristotle 376, 391, 586 Averroes [Abū al-Walīd
258, 260, 437, 449, 471 Ariztimuño, José de 650 Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn
Andrés-Suárez, Irene 471 Arlt, Roberto 210 Muḥammad ibn Rushd] 373
Anglada, Ruth 307, 308 Armada Teixeiro, Ramón 256 Avicenna [Abū ’Alī al-Ḥ usayn ibn
Angola 42, 137, 164, 171–173, 269, Armas Marcelo, Juan Jesús 300, 301 ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā] 374, 376
272, 537 Armistead, Samuel G. 476, 487, 496, Ávila 337, 417, 655
Angra do Heroísmo 312 499, 502, 504–506, 508, 509, 539 Avinyó [Mossèn] 603. 607
Añibarro, Pedro Antonio 223, 227, Arnau i Segarra, Pilar 472 Avondano, António Pedro 622
229 Arniches, Carlos 439 Axular, Pedro de [Pedro de
Anseüne, Garin d’ 505, 508, 509 Arnold, A. James xi, 56, 57 Aguerre] 104, 448
Antequera 280, 577, 603 Arozarena, Rafael 301 Ayerbe Echevarria, Enrique 111
Antonio Agustín 394 Arriaga, Emiliano de 225, 226, 228, Azaña, Manuel 647
António I of Portugal [Prior of 231 Azaola, José Miguel 233
Crato] 595, 598 Arriaza, Juan Bautista 637 Azevedo, Ângela de 423
Antonio, Francisco de 416 Arroyo, Mario 114 Azevedo, Luísa de 423
António, Juliana Maria de 423 Arteixo 258 Azkue, Resurrección María de 108,
Antunes, António Lobo 170, 171, Artés, Jeroni d’ 603 109, 229, 230, 234, 451, 555
179, 417 Arthur [King] 303, 304, 407, 408 Aznar Vallejo, Eduardo 294
Antwerp 394, 424, 449, 481 Asados 254 Aznar, José María 221, 294
Anyés, Joan Baptista 395 Asensio, Eugenio 510, 513, 517, 524 Azores 137, 291, 294, 295, 298, 310,
Apalategui, Ur 104 Ashcrot, Bill 115 312, 318, 482, 541
Aparicio, Juan Pedro 205 Asia 17, 45, 56, 61, 69, 78, 79, 83, 91, Azorín [see Martínez Ruiz, José]
Apolinário, António 123 93, 106, 121, 125, 135, 163, 165, 173, Azpilcueta, Martín de [Doctor
Appadurai, Arjun 134 194, 302, 320, 505, 612 Navarro] 417, 425
Index 729
Azpilikueta, Luis María 113 Barenboim, Daniel 86 Benedict XIV [Pope] 8

Azúa, Félix de 472 Baret, Eugène 4, 23, 42 Benet, Juan 657, 662
Bark, Ernesto 633 Bénichou, Paul 488, 489, 493, 495,
B Baroja, Pío 63, 205, 213, 217, 231, 505, 506
Baasner, Frank 12, 24, 27 467, 646 Benjamín de Tudela 183, 184
Bach y Rita, Pedro 609 Barradas, Rafael 263 Benloew, Louis 83, 84, 86
Bachelard, Gaston 67, 68, 84, 309, 312 Barral, Carlos 245, 656, 660 Benson, Eugene 115
Bacon, Francis [Sir] 17, 18, 85, 246, Barrero Pérez, Óscar 656 Bentham, Jeremy 86
550 Barrès, Maurice 202, 208 Berceo, Gonzalo de 345, 348, 384,
Badia Margarit, Antoni M. 434 Barreto, João Franco 7 385, 406, 548
Badía y Leblich, Domingo [Ali Barría, La 484, 496 Bergantiños 136, 253
Bey] 194 Barrios, Eduardo 160 Bergondo 258
Badiola Rentería, Mª Prudencia 106 Barros, João de 118–120, 128, 414, Berguedà, Guillem [or Guillerm]
Baells 556 417, 597 de 431, 608
Baena, Juan Alfonso de 412, 413, Barrutia, Pedro Ignacio de 450 Berlin 10, 18, 66, 167, 255
420, 422, 461, 601–603 Barry, Jeanne du 189 Bermeo 223
Baeza 280 Barthes, Roland 111, 555 Bermúdez, Diego 419
Baghdad 184, 378 Bartolomé [Fr.] 451 Bermúdez, Jerónimo 427
Baião, Lopo de 169 Bartolomé de Santa Teresa [Fr.] 223 Bernal Salgado, José Luis 633
Bailey, Matthew 503 Barul, Miguel 420 Bernat i Baldoví, Josep 439
Baker, Edward 11 Baselga y Ramírez, Mariano 611 Bertens, Hans 61
Bakhtin, Mikhail 456, 467 Basozabal, Eleuterio 225 Bertolucci Pizzorusso, Valeria 406
Bal y Gay, Xesús [or Jesús] 264, 543 Basque Country 3, 65, 102, 105, 106, Bertrana, Aurora 195, 196
Balaguer, Víctor 36–38, 40 108, 135, 214, 222, 224, 226, 227, Betanzos 253, 257
Balbuena, Cristóbal 418 229, 230, 236, 257, 446, 447, 471, Betencourt, J. Barbosa de 51, 125
Balcells, Carmen 660 472, 536–538 Béthencourt, Jean de 293, 294
Baldensperger, Fernand 18, 59 Bastardas Parera, Joan 388, 389 Béthencourt, Maciot de 294
Balearic Islands 38, 65, 136, 536 Basterra, Ramón de 231–234, 647 Betjeman, John [Sir] 85, 240, 550
Balkans 339, 488, 507 Batllori, Miguel 395 Bettinelli, Saverio 89
Balmont, Konstantin 155, 160 Baudelaire, Charles 240, 323, 454, Betz, Louis-Paul 59
Balzac, Honoré de [Honoré Balssa] 578, 630, 640 Bevilacqua, Rubén [Sergeant] 307,
81 Bautista Prieto, Diego 115 308
Bandeira, Manuel 177, 272 Bayo, Ciro 200, 203, 204, 206, 207 Beyrie, Jacques 18, 673
Banderas, Antonio 130 Beaucaire 589 Bhabha, Homi 313–315
Bañez de Artazubiaga, Martín 445 Beauvais, Vincent de 292 Bidador, Joxemiel 113
Banhos, Alexandre 540 Beck, Martin 305 Bierzo, El 387, 542, 545, 546, 548
Banniard, Michel 350 Beck, Ulrich 566 Bilac, Olavo 160
Bar Hiyya, Abraham 378, 379, 385 Becker, Dan 372 Bilbao 108, 135, 136, 222–226, 228,
Barahona de Soto, Luis 427 Beckford, John 624 230–236, 449, 450, 453, 468, 648,
Barata, José Oliveira 617, 622 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo [G. A. 666, 667, 671, 672, 680, 685, 687,
Barberino, Andrea da [Andrea Domínguez Bastida] 637, 638 693, 696–698, 701, 709, 716, 723,
de’Mangiabotti] 416 Bedon, Robert 292 726, 727
Barbosa, Aires 416, 417 Behaim, Martin 294 Bilbao Arístegui, Pablo 233
Barbosa, Joseph 618 Beirão, Caetano 621 Bilbeny, Norbert 646
Barcelona 33, 36, 38, 104, 140, 142, Belgium 118, 141, 153 Bin Laden, Osama 568
147, 148, 150, 153, 155, 156, 158–161, Bell, Aubrey F. G. 42, 63–66, 68, 121 Biscay [or Bizkaia] 105, 106, 225,
190, 192, 199, 209, 235, 240–242, Bello Vázquez, Raquel 614 230, 450, 457, 460
244–247, 249, 250, 255, 301, 304, Belo, Ruy 24, 323 Blacasset 609
307, 341, 381, 382, 408, 414, 416, Beltran, Vicenç 542, 550, 604 Black Sea 290
432–434, 437, 440, 442–444, 450, Bembo, Pietro 458 Blackwell, homas 79
451, 463, 465, 468, 471, 472, 481, Ben-Amos, Dan 564 Blair, Hugh 79
603, 606, 634, 643, 651, 663, 664 Benavente 63 Blakemore, Harold 58
730 Index
Blanche of Castile [Queen] 408 Borrow, George 202, 204, 208 Brito, Bernardo Gomes de 119
Blanche of France 579 Bory de Saint-Vincent, Jean- Brito, Manuel Carlos de 119,
Blanchot, Maurice 133 Baptiste 297, 298 616–619, 622, 623
Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos 77, 129 Boscán, Juan 186, 416, 427, 433, 458, Brocar, Arnao Guillén de 605
Blanco Amor, Eduardo 254, 649 463, 597, 603 Broch, Àlex 471
Blanco de Herrera, Francisca 299 Bosch Vilá, Jacinto 361 Brochado, Alfredo 154
Blanco García, Francisco 34, 40 Bosnia 61, 482, 504 Brown, Dan 655
Blanco Torres, Roberto 265 Bosphorus 91 Browning, Robert 160
Blanco, José María 632, 649 Bourbon, Mariana Vitória de Brunel, Antoine de 187
Blanes 444 [Queen of Portugal 620, 621 Brunetière, Ferdinand 48, 126
Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente 63, 205, 230, Bourgoing, Paul de [Baron of Brunot, Louis 505
245, 467, 638 Bourgoanne] 191 Brunvand, Jan Harold 570
Blau, Joshua 355 Bourguet, Marie-Noëlle 187, 674 Brussels 118, 119, 128, 393
Bloom, Harold 164 Bouterwek, Frederick 2, 5, 10, Buarque de Holanda, Aurélio 164,
Bobadilla, Emilio 638 18–20, 22–24, 28, 35, 36, 42, 69, 173
Bobadilla, Francisco de 418 73, 74, 80–82, 84, 120–122, 124, Buddha [Siddhartha Gautama] 410
Bocángel, Gabriel 458 125 Budé, Guillaume 392, 393
Boccaccio, Giovanni 293, 421, 458, Bouza Álvarez, Fernando 595, 599 Buenos Aires 59, 159, 216, 254, 256,
476, 557, 610 Bóveda, Alexandre 265 261, 265, 488, 492
Boill Mates, Jaume [Guerau de Braga 1, 2, 5, 6, 29, 42–44, 46, Buescu, Ana Isabel 597
Liost] 241, 242 122–124, 126, 143, 145–147, 154, Buescu, Helena Carvalhão 52, 122,
Boggs, Ralph S. 556 155, 388, 417, 419, 556, 616, 644, 125, 310
Böhl von Faber, Cecilia [Fernán 645, 649 Buescu, Maria Leonor Carvalhão 51
Caballero] 282, 289, 549, 632 Braga, Teóilo 1, 2, 5, 6, 29, 42–44, Bulgaria 504, 508
Böhl von Faber, Johann Niklaus [or 46, 122–124, 126, 143, 145–147, 154, Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich 155
Juan Nicolás] 282 155, 388, 417, 419, 556, 616, 644, Buñuel, Luis 203, 205, 304
Boileau, Nicolas 619 645, 649 Burckhardt, Jacob 390
Bolívar, Simón 299 Bragança 414, 419, 534, 551, 552, Burgos 105, 204, 209, 420, 425, 454,
Bologna 416 596, 619 476, 517, 555, 558, 559
Bolseiro, Juião 521 Bragança, Teotónio de 419 Burjassot 248, 249
Bolte, Johannes 554 Brah, Avtar 310 Burke, Peter 12, 562
Bombardillo 496 Brañas, Alfredo 260 Burns, Robert 155
Bonafed, Solomon 383, 384 Brandão, Raul 159, 644 Burns, Robert I. 356
Bonaparte, Louis-Lucien 223 Brandenberger, Tobias 577, 595, 596 Burton, John 373
Bonaval, Bernardo de 402 Brann, Ross 97 Burton, Richard 194, 206
Bonet, Blai 443 Braudel, Fernand 56, 58 Bush, George W. 221
Bonilla y San Martín, Adolfo 159 Braulius of Zaragoza 387 Bustinza, Evaristo de [Kirikiño]
Bonnemaison, Joël 63, 78, 116 Brazil 2, 75, 125, 126, 164, 167, 173, 230, 451
Bontier, Pierre 294 175, 180, 181, 269, 413, 417, 419, Bustos Tovar, José Jesús 386
Bopp, Franz 325 420, 478, 482, 504, 555, 567, 612 Buttimer, Anne 78
Boqueixón 254 Brecht, Bertolt 453 Byron, George Gordon [Lord] 66,
Borbón y Dos Sicilias, María Bregolat, Eugenio 653 157, 218, 286, 325, 440, 448, 592,
Cristina de [María Cristina Bremond, Claude 554 663
of Naples] [Queen Regent of Brenan, Gerald 75 Byzantium 386
Spain] 253 Brendon, Piers 200
Borbón, Juan de [Count of Brennan, Timothy 69 C
Barcelona] 132 Breton, André 43, 44, 48, 136, 304, Caballero, Fernán [see Böhl von
Borbón, Luis María de [Cardinal 307, 349, 452, 537 Faber, Cecilia]
and Archbishop of Toledo] 225 Briolanja [Doña] 414, 422, 505, 579, Cabana, Darío Xohán 253
Borbón, Paz de [Princess] 632 580, 582, 584, 585, 612 Cabanillas, Ramón 265, 266
Bordeaux 3, 49, 86, 448 British Isles 79, 136, 237–239 Cabano Vázquez, José Ignacio 256,
Borja, Francisco de 27–29, 33, 34, 419 Brito, António Ferreira de 616 257, 260, 262
Index 731
Cabanyes, Manuel de 637 Cândido, António 117, 170, 619 Carvalho, João de Sousa 621
Cabo Aseguinolaza, Fernando xi, Cangas, João de 253 Carvalho, Joaquim de 128, 129
xii, 1, 53, 55, 68, 577 Cano, Harkaitz 110 Carvalho, Mário Vieira de 621
Cabral, Amílcar 271 Canonica de Rochemonteix, Elvezio Carvalho, Ruy Duarte de 181
Cabral, Pedro Álvares 413 458, 461–464, 472 Carvalho, heotónio Gomes de
Cabrera, Benito 205, 303, 467 Cansinos Assens, Rafael 264 [Tirse] 627
Cabrerizo, Mariano de 440 Cantabria 280, 517, 643 Casal, Julio José 262–264, 267
Cacheiras 257, 262 Cantel, Raymond 599 Casanova, Julián 3, 196, 653
Cacho Blecua, Juan Manuel 409 Capdevila, Josep Maria 156 Casanova, Pascale 3
Cacho Viu, Vicente 149 Cape Verde 137, 173, 269, 272, 294, Casanova, Sofía 196
Cádiz 114, 257, 280, 281, 291, 632 297, 310, 312, 313, 317–319, 323, 536 Casares, Carlos 254
Caiado, Enrique 395 Capmany y Montpalau, Antonio Casas, Arturo 265
Caimo, Norberto 190, 191 de 466 Casas, Ramon 141, 196
Caldeira, Bento [or Benito Caldera] Carabias Torres, Ana María 595 Casas-Carbó, Joaquim 135, 141, 142,
426 Caracas 299 145–148, 152, 154
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 532, Caramés Martínez, Xesús 461 Cascales, Francisco 427
615, 617 Caratão, Paulo 555 Casenave, Jon 131
Calders, Pere 245 Carballiño, O 263 Casiri, Miguel [Michel Garcieh Al-
Caldwell, Christopher 87 Carballo 260, 265 Ghaziri] 8, 88
Calin, William 114 Carballo Calero, Ricardo 41 Castanheiro, José 169
Calvet, Agustí [Gaziel] 139, 153, 158, Cardaberaz, Agustín de 450 Castelar, Emilio 37, 198, 468, 469
161, 162, 650, 651 Cardenal, Peire 609 Castellbell 142
Calvet, Jean 271 Cardigos, Isabel 554 Castellón 443, 641
Calvo Carilla, José Luis 76 Cardoso, Boaventura 180 Castells, Manuel 211
Câmara, Maria Alexandra T. Gago Cardoso, Jerónimo 417 Castellví, Francí de 603
da 621 Carducci, Giosuè 155 Castellví, Joan de 608
Camarena, Julio 554, 555 Carel, Elias 398 Castelo Branco, Camilo 45, 46, 121,
Camba, Julio 205 Caribbean, he xi, 56, 57, 59, 61 623, 644
Cambó, Francesc 140, 147, 148, 150, Carita, Rui 313 Castile 36, 44, 45, 50, 65, 73, 75, 84,
151, 158 Carli, Giovanni Rinaldo 296 85, 87, 102, 121, 135, 138, 139, 142,
Cambouliu, François-Romain 3, 5, Carmona 280 145, 152, 154, 158, 161, 165, 166,
29, 35–37, 39 Carner, Josep 241, 242, 444 203–205, 208, 211–215, 218–220,
Cameron, Deborah 431 Carnicer, Ramón 205 278, 283, 285, 333, 342–348, 380,
Camino, Marta 304, 398, 419 Caro Baroja, Julio 449, 536 396–398, 404, 414, 415, 417, 424,
Camões, Luís Vaz de 7, 44, 45, 71, Carpio, Bernardo del 493, 505, 506 456, 457, 461, 470, 493, 505, 511,
119–121, 154, 155, 165–169, 176, 177, Carral 257 529, 532, 537, 551, 578, 580, 583,
271, 273, 322, 415, 420–422, 426, Carranza, Bartolomé de 394 584, 590, 591, 593–595, 602–604,
427, 462, 599 Carrasquilla-Mallarino, Eduardo 608–612, 644, 651
Campbell, Mary 194 157, 159 Castillejo, Cristóbal de 427
Campión, Arturo 451 Carré Aldao, Uxío [or Eugenio] 124, Castillo Solórzano, Alonso de 463
Campos F. Fígares, Mar 101 131, 258, 259 Castillo, Hernando del 422, 433
Campos, Germão de 422 Carreira, Laureano 615, 624–627 Castro de Rei 253
Canada 212, 480, 504, 531, 532, 539, Carrero Blanco, Luis 656 Castro, Américo 75, 90, 283
663 Carrillo, Diogo Vaz 210, 425, 638 Castro, Eugénio de 155, 644, 645
Cañadas, Las 304 Carrión, Francisco de 420 Castro, Fernando 304
Canalejas, Francisco de Paula 468 Cartagena 50, 192, 417, 425 Castro, Fidel 299
Canals, Antoni 395 Cartagena, Diego de 50, 192, 417, Castro, Guillén de 491, 580, 603
Canary Islands 136, 137, 188, 425 Castro, Inês de 422, 427, 599
290–308, 420, 445, 478, 482, Carter, Michael G. 371, 678 Castro, Ivo 407, 408, 597
484, 612 Carvalho, Alberto 310, 313, 314 Castro, Rosalía de 154, 157, 254, 258,
Canavaggio, Jean 51 Carvalho, Francisco Freire de 1, 9, 260, 266, 397, 468, 650
Cándano Fierro, Graciela 500, 677 42, 120 Castro, Xavier 263
732 Index
Català, Víctor [Caterina Albert] Charlemagne 17, 386, 389, 411, 481, Coelho, Joam Soarez 524
140, 147, 148, 158, 442, 444 505, 506, 509 Coelho, Jorge 395, 524
Catalán Marín, Mª Soledad 637 Charles I of Spain [see Charles V] Coello, Antonio 463
Catalán, Diego 491, 493–495, 497, 349, 596 Cohen, Mordechai 372
504 Charles III of Spain 13 Coimbra 51, 409, 416–419, 424, 425
Catalán, Pascual 420 Charles of Austria [Archduke] 9 Coimbra, Leonardo 154, 159
Catalonia 25, 35–37, 65, 77, 85, 102, Charles of Aragon [Prince of Viana] Coinci, Gautier de 406
135, 136, 138–146, 148, 149, 151, 607 Coles 254
152, 155–157, 161, 190, 199, 214, Charles V [Holy Roman Emperor] Collier, Simon 58
219, 238, 240, 243–245, 252, 258, 77, 415, 416 Colmeiro, José F. 85
328, 339, 346, 349, 383, 389, 397, Charnon-Deutsch, Lou 81 Colocci, Angelo 399
430, 436, 438, 439, 441–443, 462, Chartier, Alain 536, 608, 609 Colón, Germà 438
463, 465, 471, 472, 482, 490, 499, Chartier, Roger 5369 Columbus, Christopher 184, 294,
504, 511, 536, 537, 539, 540, 566, Chasles, Philarète Ephémon 30, 100 456
571, 576, 602, 605, 606, 608, 611, Chateaubriand, François-René de Columna, Guido de 423
613, 614, 638, 642–644, 646–648, 81, 85, 125, 630 Comalada, Miquel 606
650, 652, 663, 664 Chaunu, Pierre 12 Compañel, Juan 258
Catarella, Teresa 495, 497 Cheney, Richard 220 Conde, Alfredo 103, 659
Cather, Willa 212 Chernobyl 572 Conde, José Antonio 87–89, 100
Catherine of Austria [Queen of Chevalier, Maxime 555, 556 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 189
Portugal] 416, 596 Chicago xiv, 339, 346 Conolly, Leonard W. 115
Catullus, Gaius Valerius 248 Chile 212 Conrad, Joseph [Józef Teodor
Caufriez, Anne 560 China 67, 78, 185, 329, 419, 523 Konrad Korzeniowski] 55, 206,
Cavacas, Fernanda 277 Chipulina, Eric 114 663
Cavanilles, Antonio Josef 190 Chirbes, Rafael 206 Constantinople 184, 336, 488, 611
Cebreiro, Álvaro 264 Chiziane, Paulina 180 Constanzo, Salvatore 632
Cebrián, José 7 Chueca 209, 661 Contreras, Alonso de 185
Cejador y Frauca, Julio 77 Ciccia, Marie-Noëlle 617, 624 Contreras, Gabriel 662
Cela, Camilo José 204–206, 254, Cicero, Marcus Tullius 335, 391, Cooper, James Fenimore 85, 212
471, 603, 651, 656, 657 395, 425 Corachán, Juan Bautista 395
Celanova 254 Cid [El] [see Díaz de Vivar, Corbella, Dolores 297, 298
Celaya, Gabriel 472 Rodrigo] Córdoba 30, 87, 95, 102, 278, 280,
Celinos [Prince] 482, 509, 542, 543 Cid, Jesús Antonio 47, 105 281, 283, 338, 339, 357, 363, 366,
Centelles, Jordi 603 Cidade, Hernâni 119, 595 371, 372, 378, 584
Centeno, Antonio 427 Circe 290, 305 Corella, Joan Roís de 431, 432, 603,
Cerdá y Rico, Francisco 395 Cirujano Marín, Paloma 27 605, 606, 611
Cerdá, Clotilde 196, 395 Ciudad Real 555 Corneille, Pierre 619, 620
Cerne [island] 291, 292 Claramonte, João Sucarelo 417 Cornejo Polar, Antonio 166, 175,
Cervaens y Rodríguez, José 5 Claret, Antonio María [St.] 218, 254, 179
Cervantes, Miguel de 24, 63, 71, 121, 425, 426, 470, 502, 531, 645, 655 Cornis-Pope, Marcel xi, 55–57, 60,
156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 187, 204, Clarín [see García Alas, Leopoldo] 61, 63
207, 209, 383, 385, 408, 421, 426, Clavel, Vicente 156, 158 Coronado, Carolina 196
459, 460, 462, 463, 567, 599, 638, Cléves, Ynés de 607 Coronel, Marco Antonio 437
639, 648 Cliford, Charles 281, 288, 289 Correa Calderón, Evaristo 264
Céu, Maria do [Sóror] 423 Cliford, Jane 281 Correa, Isabel 423
Céu, Violante do [Sóror] 423 Coci, Jorge 481, 487 Correas, Gonzalo 513
Ceuta 165, 195, 293, 419, 505 Cocteau, Jean 234 Correia Fernandes, Manuel 648
Ceylon 537 Codax, Martín 253, 519 Corriente, Federico 354, 355, 358
Chagas, Manuel Joaquim Pinheiro Codoñer, Carmen 387, 395 Cortada, Alexandre 141, 146
272 Coelho, Adolpho 555 Cortés Vázquez, Luis 550
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 5 Coelho, Eduardo 117 Cortes, Adriano de las 185, 186
Chandler, Richard E. 75 Coelho, Jacinto do Prado 117 Cortés, Hernán 184
Index 733
Cortesão, Jaime 154, 645 Cummins, John G. 511, 513, 524, 528 Derrida, Jacques 26, 329
Coruña, A 136, 253, 254, 256–264, Cunha, Carlos Manuel Ferreira da Desierto 223
267, 545 3, 6, 43 Despeñaperros 201
Cospeito 253 Cunha, Simão da 417 Despuig, Cristòfol 434
Costa Cabral, António Bernardo Cunqueiro, Álvaro 253, 264 Deus, João de 154, 157, 321, 519–521,
da 167 Curell, Clara 298 526, 529, 531, 644
Costa da Morte 254 Curros Enríquez, Manuel 157, 254, Devoto, Daniel 491, 492
Costa e Silva, Alberto da 5, 42, 122, 259 Deyermond, Alan 124, 502, 524, 525
170 Curthoys, Ann 131 Di Stefano, Giuseppe 493, 500, 537
Costa i Llobera, Miquel 239, 241, Curtius, Ernst Robert 59 Dias, Aida Fernanda 124, 642
444 Cyprian, hascius Caecilius 387 Díaz de Montalvo, Alfonso 589
Costa Ruibal, Òscar 150, 151 Díaz de Vivar, Jimena 505, 580
Costa, Cristóvão da 424 D Díaz de Vivar, Rodrigo [El Cid] 63,
Costa, Francisco de França da 417 Dacier, Anne 621 92, 102, 132, 505, 509, 580
Costa, João da 423 Dainotto, Roberto M. 5, 17, 89, 91, Díaz del Castillo, Bernal 184
Costa, Manuel da [Doctor Sutil] 93 Díaz G. Viana, Luis 477*, 562
417 Dalí, Salvador 263 Díaz Roig, Mercedes 496
Costa, Pedro da 417 Damasceno Nunes, J. 122 Díaz y Díaz, Manuel 386, 387
Costilla, Jorge 604 Dámaso, Pepe 304, 508 Díaz-Mas, Paloma xiii, 475, 476,
Couartou, Alain 659 Damião de Góis 166, 425 478, 480, 500, 503, 539
Couceiro Freijomil, Antonio 7 Damrosch, David 311, 316 Díaz-Plaja, Guillermo 38, 47, 50, 646
Coutinho, Eduardo F. 59 Danckert, Werner 528 Didier, Béatrice 69
Couto, Diogo do 166 Daniel, Arnaut 86, 138, 254, 263, Diego, Gerardo 253
Couto, Mia [António Emílio Leite 491, 608, 617 Dieste, Rafael 254, 265
Couto] 180, 268, 269, 273, 276 Dante Alighieri 458 Díez Borque, José María 50, 102, 112
Covarrubias, Juan de Horozco Danvila, Alfonso 595 Díez-Canedo, Enrique 154, 158
y 458 Darío, Rubén [Félix Rubén García Dieze, Johann Andreas 10, 73
Covarrubias, Sebastián de 458, 460 Sarmiento] xi, 159, 209, 253, Díez-Echarri, Emiliano 50
Cranmer, David John 628, 629 638, 657 DiFranco, Ralph A. 503
Craveirinha, José 179 Davillier, Jean Charles [Baron of] Dinis of Portugal [King] 399–401,
Crébillon, Prosper Jolyot de 626 201 404, 405, 409–411, 503, 513, 525,
Crecente Vega, Xosé Andrés 253 Davis, David Byron 218 526, 529, 593, 602
Crescas, Hasdai 377 De la Campa, Mariano 542, 546, Djerba [island] 505
Cresques, Abraham 380 547, 549 Dollfus, Olivier 60
Cresques, Jafudà 380 De la Cruz, Juan [St.] 218, 254, 425, Domench, José Maria 113
Crexells, Joan 156 426, 502, 531, 645, 655 Domènech i Montaner, Lluis 141
Cristóvão, Fernando 269, 424 De Vega, Isaac 302 Domínguez, César xii, 1, 21, 53, 72,
Cruz Seruya, Trino 114 Débax, Michelle 500 79, 91, 577
Cruz, Agostinho da [Fr.] 414 Defoe, Daniel 202 Donoso, José 660
Cruz, Bernardo da [Fr.] 417 Delclaux, Jaime 233 Doré, Gustave 201
Cruz, Duarte Ivo 615 Deleuze, Gilles 64, 108, 109, 131, Doron, Aviva 383, 384
Cruz, Elio 114 134, 657 Dorson, Richard M. 564
Cruz, Viriato da 177 Delgado Rodríguez, Secundino 299 Dorst, John 567
Cuba 217, 231, 235, 256, 299, 300, Delgado, Alonso 299, 419 Dos Passos, John 207, 208
305, 307, 478, 505, 555 Delibes, Miguel 205, 206 Dozy, Reinhart P. 88, 90
Cuba, Xoán R. 217, 231, 235, 256, Delmiro Cotos, Benigno 633 Drove, Antonio 664
299, 300, 305, 307, 478, 505, 555 Demangeon, Albert 53 Duardos [Don or Dom] 421, 540
Cubero Sebastián, Pedro 186 Denina, Carlo 18, 19, 75 Duarte, Pascual 167, 181, 408, 656
Cubillo, Antonio 302 Denis, Ferdinand 2, 3, 5, 22, 23, 42, Dueñas, Juan de 608
Cucurull, Felix 143, 147, 162 45, 112, 121 Duggan, Joseph J. 502–504
Cuéllar, Jerónimo de 427 Dennis, Philip 115 Dumas, Alexandre 195, 196, 201,
Cuenca, Jerónimo de 419, 420 Denny, Frederick Matthewson 87 202, 636
734 Index
Dundes, Alan 564 Escrivá de Balaguer, José María 655 Ezkerra, Iñaki 235
Duns Scotus, John 377 Escrivà, Joan 603
Durán, Agustín 28, 30, 31, 494 Espagne, Michel 3, 4, 8, 30, 81–84, F
Durán, José Antonio 642 86 Fabian, Johannes 17, 85
Durand, Gilbert 67, 313, 554 Espartero, Baldomero 27 Fadrique [Infante of Castile] 585
Durango 228, 450 Espín Templado, María del Pilar Faial 312
Dutton, Brian 601 636 Faílde García, Domingo F. 115
Espinosa, Agustín 303, 304 Fanjul, Serafín 90
E Espinosa, Aurelio M., Jr. 555 Fārābī, al- [Muḥammad ibn
Earle, homas F. 425 Espinosa, Aurelio M., Sr. 555 Muḥammad ibn Ṭarkhān ibn
East Asia 67 Espírito Santo, Alda do 180 Uzalagh al-Fārābī] 374, 376
Ebro River 53 Espriu, Salvador 245, 247, 249, 251, Faral, Edmond 503
Echave, Baltasar de 449 443, 641, 651 Faraldo, Antolín 257, 258
Echegaray, José 637 Esteban de Vega, Mariano 94, 113 Faria, Baltasar de 123, 321, 417, 426
Echenique Elizondo, Mª Teresa 460 Estébanez Calderón, Serafín 494 Farinelli, Arturo 184
Eco, Umberto 216, 298 Estellés González, José María 325, Febrer, Andreu 384, 608
Egeria 336 329, 386, 394, 395 Feijoo, Benito Jerónimo 465, 655
Eguilaz y Yanguas, Leopoldo 90 Estellés, Vicent Andrés 246–251, Fenollar, Bernat 603
Egypt 62, 81, 91, 92, 94, 115, 297, 374 437, 443 Ferdinand I of Aragon [Ferdinand
Eiras Roel, Antonio 256 Esteva, Jordi 186 of Antequera] 577, 602–604,
Elche 202 Estienne, Henri 298 608
Eleanor of Austria [Queen of Estoril 649 Ferdinand II of Aragon [he
Portugal] 596 Etcheberri, Joanes d’ 449 Catholic] 186, 433, 456, 457, 577,
Eleanor of England [Queen of Eteocles 320 603, 604
Castile] 579 Ethiopia 420, 453 Ferdinand III of Castile 282, 344,
Eliot, T.[homas] S.[tearns] 136, Etxeita, José Manuel 230 582–584, 586, 587, 592
237–239, 241, 242, 248, 252, 453 Etxepare, Bernat [or Bernard Ferdinand IV of Castile 588
Elis 407 Dechepare] 113 Ferdinand II of Leon 361
Ellis, Havelock 207, 208, 661 Eugenius of Toledo 387 Ferdinand VII of Spain 94
Ellis, Robert Richmond 207, 208, Eulogio de Córdoba 338 Ferguson, Charles A. 329, 352, 439,
661 Europe xi, xiii, 2, 4–6, 8, 10–13, 16, 446
Elsner, Jas 183, 184, 200, 684 17, 19–24, 29, 35, 37, 44–46, 48, 52, Fernández Alemán, Alonso 416
Emiliano, António 225, 226, 228, 55, 56, 58–61, 64–66, 69–72, 74, Fernández Almagro, Melchor 286
231, 350 75, 78–84, 86, 88, 91, 93–95, 99, Fernández Álvarez, Manuel 186, 187
Encina, Juan del [Juan de 100, 107, 108, 118–123, 125, 126, Fernández Cerviño, María Xosé
Fermoselle] 576, 577, 605, 612 130, 133, 135, 139, 148, 153–157, 161, 266
Engels, Friedrich 316 164, 167, 200, 205, 209, 212, 216, Fernández Cifuentes, Luis 135, 183
England 3, 10, 20, 48, 71, 72, 76, 79, 218, 219, 225, 237, 240, 255, 256, Fernández de Gerena, Garci 602
81, 82, 90, 130, 225, 232, 237–239, 264, 266, 301, 303, 313, 318, 323, Fernández de Heredia, Juan 395
280, 295, 393, 487, 488, 504 342, 350, 351, 378, 379, 390, 393, Fernández de la Sota, José 235, 23
Enguita, José María 50 394, 398, 406–408, 410, 412, 414, Fernández de Moratín, Leandro
Entwistle, William J. 487–489, 494, 415, 422, 424, 447, 458, 503, 505, 196, 197
507, 538 506, 523, 537, 538, 554, 555, 563, Fernández del Riego, Francisco 40
Epaltza, Aingeru 131 592, 607, 622, 628, 633, 634, 639, Fernández Flórez, Wenceslao 647
Erasmus, Desiderius 392–394 643, 650, 651, 655 Fernández Latorre, Juan 260
Erkiaga, Eusebio 234 Euskadi 105, 138, 219, 221, 235, 328, Fernández Moreno, Baldomero 160
Escalante, Amós de 197, 198 446, 447, 454, 659 Fernández Naval, Francisco Xosé
Escalante, Eduard 439 Euskal Herria 76, 104–107, 110, 113 [Chisco] 254
Escalante, Pedro 231, 232 Even-Zohar, Itamar 11, 12, 617 Fernández Sánchez, María Manuela
Escarpit, Robert 656 Évora, Andrés de 395, 417–419, 426 425
Esclasans, Agustí 160 Extremadura 44, 50, 102, 483 Fernández y González, Francisco
Escorial, El 8, 88, 208, 373, 405 Ezechiel [Prophet] 364, 381, 591 88–90, 94
Index 735
Fernández, James D. 24, 605 Fogelquist, Donald 632 Frazer, James George 554
Fernández, Josep-Anton 659 Foito, Martim Afonso 417 Frederick II of Prussia 18
Fernández, Lucas 421, 605 Foix, Germana de [Vicereine of Freire, Francisco José de 1, 5, 9, 42,
Fernández, Tristán 492 Valence] 245, 247, 249, 433, 437, 120, 257, 619, 620
Ferrà, Miquel 240, 242 443, 649 Freitas, Ascêncio de 273
Ferrando, Antoni 433, 438, 442 Foix, Josep V. 245, 247, 249, 433, 437, Frémont, Armand 131
Ferrater, Gabriel 245, 249 443, 649 Frenk, Margit 476, 479, 489, 490,
Ferreira da Cunha, Carlos Manuel Fokkema, Douwe 61 510–512, 514, 515, 517, 519, 524,
3 Fole, Ánxel 253, 264 525, 528, 536
Ferreira, António 121, 123, 414, 420, Foley, John Miles 506 Freud, Sigmund 492
421, 427, 597, 616, 617, 620 Fontán, Antonio [or Antoni] 388, Friggieri, Oliver 112
Ferreira, Diogo Fernandes 423 394, 395 Froissart, Jean 421
Ferreira, José Maria d’Andrade 42 Fontanella, Francesc 434, 603 Fructuosus [Bishop of Braga] 387
Ferreira, Manuel Pedro 400 Fontanella, Lee 136, 278, 281, 285, Fuentes, Carlos 301
Ferreiro, Celso Emilio 254 288 Fuertes Acevedo, Máximo 6, 8, 32
Ferrer Chivite, Manuel 460 Fontenla Leal, Xosé 259 Fuerteventura 291, 293
Ferrer, Bonifaci 605, 606 Fontes, Manuel da Costa 499, 508, Funchal 312
Ferrer, Francesc 608, 610 537, 539–541, 551 Funes, Leonardo 504
Ferrer, Pablo 419 Forcadela, Manuel [Manuel Furió Ceriol, Fadrique 393, 395
Ferrer, Vicent [St.] 433, 605 Santiago Fernández Álvarez] Fuster, Joan 239–242, 245–248, 251,
Ferrés, Antonio 205 254 252, 430, 432, 436, 444
Ferro, António 291, 293, 298, 647, Ford, Richard 200–202, 206, 286,
649 687 G
Ferrol 253, 256–259, 261, 262 Forneiro, José Luis 462, 476, 500, Gabilondo, Joseba 105, 130, 131
Fez 93, 505 501, 536, 541, 542, 544, 545, 551 Gabrieli, Francesco 93
Fidalgo, Elvira 405 Forner, Juan Pablo 11, 18 Gaiferos 505, 506, 509, 613
Fierro Cubiella, Eduardo 114, 115 Fortunate Isles 291–296, 298, 299, Gaines, Steven D. 70
Figueira da Foz 644 304 Gala, Antonio 580
Figueiredo, A. Cardoso Borges Fortuny Marsal, Mariano 289 Galba, Joan de 579
de 42 Foucault, Michel 68, 86 Galí, Francesc d’Assis 156
Figueiredo, António Pereira de Foulché-Delbosc, Raymond 192 Galiana [Saracen Princess] 505, 509
[Padre] 117 Fox, Inman 31, 76, 111 Galiana, Lluís 435, 436
Figueiredo, Fidelino de 7, 41, 45, 46, Fradejas Lebrero, José 555 Galicia [Galiza] xiv, 6, 16, 25, 33,
50, 51, 123–128, 154, 645, 648 Frago, Juan Antonio 457, 461, 462, 38–40, 45, 65, 68, 77, 101, 102, 125,
Figueiredo, Manuel de 615, 617, 464–466, 632 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 152, 157, 203,
620, 623 France 1, 3, 4, 10, 12, 16, 18–20, 22, 214, 219, 253–266, 280, 328, 336,
Figueiredo, Miguel Coelho de 620, 23, 30, 36, 48, 50*, 53, 59, 68, 71, 338, 339, 346, 347, 349, 396–398,
623 72, 74, 78–84, 86, 89, 90, 106, 107, 407, 409, 411, 412, 441, 461, 462,
Filgueira Valverde, Xosé Fernando 114, 120, 124, 125, 141, 155, 158, 159, 468–472, 482, 483, 499, 501, 511,
266 188, 202, 206, 266, 281, 306, 341, 532, 533, 536, 537, 540, 542, 544,
Filipe, Bartolomeu 417 342, 345, 393, 398, 417, 424, 437, 545, 551, 552, 603, 604, 613, 643,
Fine, Gary Alan 566 438, 440, 441, 446, 447, 465, 466, 648, 660, 664
Finestres, Josep 395 469, 487, 488, 496, 502, 504, 506, Gallego, María Ángeles 259, 265,
Finland 201, 286 529, 538, 576, 580, 608, 615, 617, 325, 329, 351, 359–361, 364, 602
Fiore, Silvestro 505 618, 620, 627, 628, 630, 643 Gallois, Lucien 57
Fishman, Joshua A. 329, 356, 357, France, Anatole [A. François Galmés de Fuentes, Álvaro 26
445, 447 hibault] 160 Gama, António da 417
Fitzmaurice-Kelly, James 30, 51 France, Miranda 209 Gama, Leonarda Gil da [Glória
Flanders 188 Francis I of Austria 19 Magdalena Eufemia] 423
Floovant 505, 508, 509 Frank, Daniel H. 376 Gama, Vasco de 45, 166, 173, 174,
Flores, Juan de 483, 499, 546, 580, Frank, Waldo 208 293
586, 599 Franklin, Benjamin 189, 219 Gámir Sandoval, Alfonso 286
736 Index
Gândavo, Pêro de Magalhães 597 Gener, Pompeyo 142 Goldoni, Carlo 439, 615–617, 622
Ganim, John M. 79 Genet, Jean 661 Goldstein, David 369
Ganivet, Ángel 76, 77, 144, 201, 286 Genette, Gérard 103 Golpe, Salvador 258
Garcái, Martí 608 Geneva 23 Gombrich, Ernst 280
Garção, Pedro António Correia Genoa 414 Gomera, La 294, 304, 307, 308
619, 620 Geofrey of Monmouth 591 Gómez Cabia, Fernando 565
Garcés, Enrique 426 Gérard, Albert S. xi, 56, 103, 488 Gómez Carrillo, Enrique 209, 210,
García Alas, Leopoldo [Clarín] 632, Gerber, Jane S. 371 638
635, 638, 639 Germany 4, 12, 20, 22, 23, 48, 53, 59, Gomez Chariño, Paio 254
García Bodaño, Salvador 253, 254 71, 72, 78, 79, 86, 120, 206, 238, Gómez de Castro, Álvar 394
García Cabrera, Pedro 304 266, 393, 487, 488, 571, 594 Gómez de la Cortina, José 28
García Cárcel, Ricardo 90, 393 Getto, Giovanni 13, 18 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 264,
García de Nora, Eugenio 469 Ghazālī, al- [Abū Ḥ āmid 649
García de Santa María, Gonzalo Muḥammad Ibn Muḥammad Gómez de Tapia, Luis 426, 427
456, 457 Aṭ-ṭūsī al-Ghazālī] 375 Gómez Manrique, Diego 609
García Felguera, Mari-Santos 288 Giacometti, Michel 559 Gómez Martínez 157
García Gómez, Emilio 96 Giardini, Cesare 159, 160 Gómez Moreno, Ángel 31, 390,
García Gutiérrez, Antonio 637 Gibraltar 76, 91, 114–116, 280, 281, 394, 691
García Isasti, Prudencia 93 301, 505 Gómez Redondo, Fernando xiii,
García Lorca, Federico 204, 263, Gide, André 160, 662 575, 577, 582
267, 469, 476, 558, 559, 649, 650 Gies, David T. 51, 691 Gómez, Gonzalo 593
García Márquez, Gabriel 301 Gil Casado, Pablo 656 Gómez-Aranda, Mariano 366, 373,
García Martín, Ana María 423 Gil de Biedma, Jaime 245 378, 380
García Matamoros, Alfonso 7, 394 Gil de Zárate, Antonio 1–3, 27, 33, 35 Gonçalves, Luiz A. Oliveira 274,
García Montero, Luis 637 Gil Fernández, Luis 395 317, 318
García Morejón, Julio 644 Gil Polo, Gaspar 603 Góngora y Argote, Luis de 278
Garcia Peres, Domingo 413, 423, Gil Varela, Álvaro 264 Gonzaga, Silvio Valenti [Cardinal]
424, 597 Gil y Carrasco, Enrique 198, 199*, 8
García Rivas, María José 115 203, 205 González Besada, Augusto 39, 40
García, Diego 343 Gil, Fernando 166 González Blanco, Andrés 159
Garcia, Francesc Vicent 411–413, Gil, Juan 131 González Cuenca, Joaquín 601
422–424, 434, 597 Gilroy, Paul 131 González de Clavijo, Ruy 183
García-Romeral Pérez, Carlos 184 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto 50, González de Langarika, Pablo 236
García-Soler, Jordi 654 649 González de Posada, Carlos 8
Garea, Mario 159, 160 Gimferrer, Pere 245, 471 González Díaz, Manuel N. 302
Garibay, Esteban de 116, 449 Ginebra, Jordi 441 González Martínez, Enrique 160
Garnier, Xavier 133 Ginger, Andrew 286, 287 González Palencia, Ángel 51, 98, 350
Garolera, Narcís 199 Giorgi, Gabriel 661 González, Estebanillo 461
Garrett, Almeida [João B. da Silva Giraldo [Mestre] 273, 395, 411, 413 González, Fernán [count of Castile]
L. de Almeida, Viscount of] 2, 5, Girón Alconchel, José Luis 459 502, 505
11, 42, 44, 120–122, 167, 410, 615 Girona [or Gerona] 444, 608 González, Francisco Javier 302
Gárrulo, Teresa 96 Girona, Cerverí de [Guillem de González-Blanco, Andrés 154
Gasch, Sebastià 649 Cervera] 347, 516 González-Blanco, Edmundo 154
Gassama, Makhily 271, 276 Gironella, José María 206 González-Millán, Xoán 32, 40, 46
Gassull, Jaime 603 Glaser, Edward 599 Gorani, Giuseppe 622
Gaudí, Antoni 141 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 628 Gordimer, Nadine 180
Gauger, Hans-Martin 464 Gnisci, Armando 87, 116 Göttingen 10, 22–24, 29
Gautier, héophile 85, 191, 195, 200, Goa 173, 419, 504, 537 Gouveia, António de 170, 395
201, 206, 208, 406 Godinho, Vitorino Magalhães 595 Goyens, Michèle 350
Gavilanes, José Luis 123 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 157, Goytisolo, Juan 102, 194, 205, 217,
Gayangos, Pascual de 27, 89, 99, 100 196, 316 472, 653, 657, 661, 662
Gaziel [see Calvet, Agustí] Goldberg, Harriet 555 Goytisolo, Luis 657, 663, 664
Index 737
Gracián, Baltasar 426, 427 Gutiérrez, Jesús 18, 19 Hijari, al- Abū Muhammad cAbd
Graell, Guillem [or Guillermo] 140, Gutiérrez, Juana 298 Allāh Ibrāhīm 95, 96
150–153 Guys, Constantin 630 Hilário da Lourinhã [Fr.] 410, 414,
Gramsci, Antonio 493, 562–564 425, 627
Gran Canaria 292, 296, 297, 301, H Hina, Horst 101, 643
304, 305 Habermas, Jürgen 131, 134 Hjelmslev, Louis 316
Granada 90, 95, 199–202, 204, 257, Habib Arkin, Alexander 373 Hofman, Eva 81, 315
280, 281, 283, 285, 286, 288, 289, Haes, Carlos de 286, 287, 289 Hofmann, Léon-François 80, 85,
347, 349, 364, 369, 418, 425, 456, Haggard, Henry Rider 169 286, 287
484, 549, 686, 689, 710 Hall, Stuart 165 Hollier, Denis 112
Granara, William 97 Halliday, Michael A. K. 431 Hombrías 496
Granda, Germán 539 Halperín, Jorge 571 Hones, Sheila 67
Grandson, Oton de 608 Hamburg 104 Hoot Comajuncosas, Andreu van
Granjel, Luis S. 262 Hampâté Bâ, Amadou 180 54, 110, 131
Great Britain 3, 81, 115, 219 Harizi, Judah ben Solomon al- 382, Hooper, Kirsty 50, 103, 131
Greece 64, 123, 286, 290, 291, 352, 383 Horace [Quintus Horatius Flaccus]
374, 487, 504, 508 Harney, Michael 504 157, 248, 387
Greene, Roland 313 Harpe, La 189 Horrent, Jules 491
Greenwich 298 Harrington, homas 135, 138 Horta 248, 312, 421
Gregory the Great [Pope] 387 Hart, homas R., Jr. 10, 22, 24 Houaiss, Antônio 164, 165, 173, 271
Gregory X [Pope] 589 Harvey, David 211, 212, 400, 503 Houellebecq, Michel 136, 305–307
Gregory, Derek 55, 69, 74, 387, 589 Haushofer, Karl 78 Huesca 505, 556
Greimas, Algirdas Julius 554 Havana 39, 254, 256, 259, 260, 300 Hugalde y Mollinedo, Nicolás 28
Griith, Gareth 115 Hayyuj, Judah 372 Hugo, Victor 81, 117, 240, 440, 636,
Grimm [Brothers] [Jakob & Heath, Meter 96 638
Wilhelm Grimm] 554 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Huidobro, Vicente 263
Grimm, Jakob 325 20, 79, 86 Humboldt, Alexander von 295
Gröber, Gustav 36, 40 Hegoalde 76, 113 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 107, 222
Guattari, Félix 64, 108, 109, 131, Heine, Heinrich 630 Hungary 496
134, 657 Helios 290 Hurdes, Las 203, 205
Güell, Eusebi 140 Helman, Edith 189 Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego 517
Guerra Junqueiro, Abílio Manuel Henriques, Henrique Jorge 417, 424 Hurtado de Mendoza, Juan 418
154, 155, 157, 644, 648 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro 512 Hurtado, Andrés 217
Guevara, Ernesto [Che] 299, 610 Henry I of Portugal [Cardinal- Hurtado, Juan 98, 418
Guicciardini, Francisco 186 Prince] 418, 595 Hurus, Pablo 580
Guillén, Claudio 54, 103, 445, 491, Henry II of Castile [de las
580, 603, 605 Mercedes] 602 I
Guimarães, Ana Paula 273, 559 Henry III of Castile 293, 576 Ibarbourou, Juana de [Juanita
Guimerà, Àngel 140, 239, 442 Henry IV of Castile 601, 607 Fernández Morales] 157, 160
Guinart, Roque 463 Henry of Burgundy 165 Ibias 543
Guinea-Bissau 137, 173, 269, 536 Hercules 127, 291, 293, 297 Ibn Adret, Solomon 381
Guinevere 303, 304 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 19 Ibn al-Mir‘izī 364
Guipuzcoa 450, 460 Heredero Salinero, Fermín 565 Ibn Bajja [Abū-Bakr Muhammad
Gullón, Germán 657, 663 Herman, Jószef 218, 350 ibn Yahya ibn al-Sāyigh] 375, 376
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 654 Hermes 231, 232, 290, 647 Ibn Balaam, Judah 372
Gumiel, Diego de 579 Hermisende 549 Ibn Bassam [Abū l- Ḥ asan ‘Alī Ibn
Gusmão, Alexandre de 614, 618, Hernández García, Julio del Pino Bassām al-Shantarīnī] 95, 96,
619, 622 299, 301 360
Gutiérrez Díaz-Bernardo, Esteban Herrera, Fernando de 7, 426, 427, Ibn Ezra, Abraham 372, 373,
638 458, 465 377–380, 385
Gutiérrez García, Santiago 577 Herrero-Olaizola, Alejandro 660 Ibn Ezra, Moses 7, 97, 98, 366, 369,
Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel 157 Hierro, El 291 372
738 Index
Ibn Gabirol, Solomon 370, 371, 373 Isabella I of Castile 456, 589, 601, John II of Castile 415, 576, 601, 602
Ibn Gharsiyya, Abū ‘Āmir 358, 359 603, 605, 606, 608 John I of Portugal 423
Ibn Hassan, Yequtiel 370 Isabella of Portugal [Holy Roman John III of Portugal 414, 416, 418,
Ibn Hayyan, Abū Marwān 95 Empress] 415, 596 419, 595 596
Ibn Hazm [Abū Muḥammad ‘Alī Isabella II of Spain 27, 31, 288, 470 John IV of Portugal 414, 423
ibn Aḥmad ibn Sa‘īd Ibn Ḥ azm] Isidore of Seville 292, 336, 341, 386, John VI of Portugal 629
96, 97, 381 387, 583 John of Capua 580
Ibn Janah, Yonah 372 Isla del Meridiano, La 298 John of Cyprus 575
Ibn Khaldūn, Abū Zayd Abd Israel 97, 218, 371, 372, 374, 375, 504, Jolles, André 277
al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad 507, 508 Jomelli, Noccolò 618, 622
353–355 Itálica 280 Jorba, Manuel 33
Ibn Paquda, Bahya ben Joseph 373, Italy 11–13, 20, 37, 48, 53, 71, 72, 74, Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de 189,
375 78, 79, 82, 114, 120, 123, 156, 159, 190, 465, 466
Ibn Quzman 367 191, 196–198, 206, 238, 281, 290, Jover, José María 10
Ibn Shabbetai, Judah 383 293, 339, 349, 389, 390, 393, 394, Juan Manuel [Don] 348, 383, 576
Ibn Shaprut, Hashday 378 399, 416, 424, 456–458, 486, 488, Juan, Jorge 188
Ibn Shem Tov, Joseph ben Shem 538, 539, 604, 607, 614, 616, 617, Juana La Beltraneja 419
Tov 374 623, 629, 642 Juárez Medina, Antonio 465
Ibn Ṭufayl [Muḥammad Ibn ‘abd Ithaca 481 Juaristi, Jon 108, 109, 223–226,
Al-malik Ibn Muḥammad Ibn Iulianus of Toledo 387 228, 231, 235, 236, 445, 449, 450,
Muḥammad Ibn Ṭufayl Al- Izagirre, Koldo 108, 112, 454 452–454, 536
qaysī] 374 Judas 294
Ibn Zabara, Joseph 383 J Junquillo de la Mar 496
Ibsen, Henrik 150, 155, 262 Jabés, Edmond 116 Jupiter 379, 591
Iceland 115 Jacinto, António 117, 177, 650 Juretschke, Hans 28
Ifriqiya 95, 96 Jaén 280, 533, 534, 583, 585 Juvenal [Decimus Junius Juvenalis]
Iglesia Alvariño, Aquilino 253 James I of Aragon 382, 582 75
Iglesias Vilarelle, Antonio 266 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 314
Iglesias, Amalia 235 Japan 78, 419, 523, 570 K
Iglesias, Bieito 254 Jardine, Alexander 191, 192 Kadir, Djelal xi, 56
Iglesias, Ignacio 146 Jason 290, 297 Kaka, Franz 108, 109, 133, 663
Iglesias, Narcís 438 Jaubert de Passà, Francesc 35 Kagan, Richard L. 280
Ildefonsus of Toledo 387 Jauss, Hans Robert 631 Kapanaga, Martín 223
Imperial, Francisco 171, 588–590, Jeanne III of Navarre [Juana de Kassis, Hanna 364
602 Albret] 448 Katz, Israel J. 502, 506–509
Inácio de S. Caetano [Fr.] 627 Jeremiah [Prophet] 323, 364, 381 Kazakhstan 62
India 45, 78, 115, 121, 126, 219, 293, Jerez de la Frontera 280 Kazantzakis, Nikos 207
294, 377, 380, 419, 424, 504, 523, Jerome [St.] 218, 254, 364, 387, 425, Keller, John Esten 555
623 426, 502, 531, 645, 655 Kempis, homas À [homas
Indonesia 523 Jerusalem 98, 186, 188, 296, 427 Hemerken] 425, 606
Iohannes of Víclaro 387 Jesus Christ 448, 644 Keown, Dominic 136, 237
Iparralde 76, 111, 113 Jiménez de Cisneros, Francisco 605 Khosa, Ungulani Ba Ka [Francisco
Iradier Bulfy, Manuel 194, 195 Jiménez de la Espada, Marcos 193 Essaú Cossa] 180
Iraq 95, 96, 220, 221, 374, 567, 569 Jiménez, Juan Ramón 160, 231, 233, Khwārizmi, al- [Muḥammad ibn
Iria Flavia 254 234, 649, 650 Mūsā al-Khwārizmi] 377, 378
Iriarte, Tomás de 189 Joan i Tous, Pere 472 Kiberd, Declan 256
Irigoien, Alfontso 234 Joanna I of Castile and Aragon Kierkegaard, Søren 307
Irlos [Count] 481 [Doña Juana] 579 King, Edmund L. 285
Irving, Washington 201, 202, 208, John [Prince of Castile and Aragon] Kircher, Athanasius 296
220, 286, 289 [Don Juan] 576, 579 Kirkpatrick, Susan 634
Isabella of Aragon and Castile John II of Aragon and Navarre 607, Klaniczay, Tibor 61
[Queen of Portugal] 415, 416, 596 608, 610 Knysh, Alexander 95
Index 739
Kofman, Cristobal 604 Larra, Mariano José de 630, 631, 635, Liciniano of Cartagena 387
Kogan, Barry S. 375 637, 639, 640 Licudi, Héctor 115, 698
Koji, Kawamoto 56 Larramendi, Manuel de 445, Lipset, Seymore Martin 212
Koningsveld, Pieter Sjoerd van 364 449–451, 453 Lisbon 1, 8, 142, 146, 152, 165, 170,
Korea 78 Lasa, Mikel 454 172, 208, 292, 296, 316, 399, 400,
Kortazar, Jon 47, 48, 108, 111, 135, Lasagabaster, Jesús María [Txuma] 404, 408, 409, 414–416, 418, 419,
136, 222, 454, 455 3, 47, 48, 104, 106–108, 110, 111, 422, 423, 425, 426, 435, 552, 615,
Kosovo 61 658 616, 621, 623, 625, 648
Kraemer, Joel L. 374 Lasso de la Vega, Gabriel 427 Lissorgues, Yvan 631, 633
Kristeller, Paul 390–392 Latin America 34, 50, 56, 58, 59, 65, Lista, Alberto 28, 30, 634, 637
Kristol, Irving 220 75, 77, 130, 136, 157, 159, 160, 175, Litvak, Lily 255, 634
Kristol, William 220 193, 209, 219, 299–301, 478, 480, Liverpool 339, 346, 726
Krutwig, Federico 234 489, 556, 562, 633, 647, 650, 651, Lizardi, Xavier [José María de
Kruz, Luís 410 658, 661 Aguirre] 452, 649
Kundera, Milan 111 Lauaxeta [see Urkiaga, Esteban de] Llamazares, Julio 205, 657, 660
Kurtz, Gerardo 281, 288 Laurent, Juan 289 Lleal, Coloma 350
Kushner, Eva 61, 697 Lavínia 652 Llompart, Josep Maria 241
Laxalt Urza, Monique 131 Llorente, Teodor 239, 244, 442
L Laxalt, Robert 111 Lluhí i Rissech, Joaquim 147
Laban, Michel 179, 268, 272–276 Lázaro Carreter, Fernando 466 Llull, Ramon 431
Labat, Jean Baptiste 191 Lazarus-Yafeh, Hava 381 Llull, Romeu 603
Laboa, Juan María 654 Le Verrier, Jean 294 Loaysa, Jofré de 582
Laborde, Alexandre de 201 Leal, António Gomes 157 Lobato, José Bento Monteiro 160
Lacarra, María Jesús 555, 585 Leander of Seville 387 Lobeira, João de 409
Lacerda, Bernarda Ferreira de 423 Lebanon 504 Lobito 170
Laetus, Julius Pomponius 392 Ledesma, Martín de 417–419 Lodge, David 305–308
Laforet, Carmen 136, 304, 656 Lefebvre, Henri 211 Löfstedt, Einar 388
Lafuente, Modesto 94, 685 Lehmann, Paul 388 Lombardy 496
Lagerlof, Selma 159 Leiras Pulpeiro, Manuel 253 Lombroso, Paula 492
Laguna, Sandra 566 Leiro 259 London 11, 23, 372, 432, 504
Laín Entralgo, Pedro 212, 215 Leizarraga, Joanes 448 Lönnrot, Elias 651
Lalande, Jérôme 197 Lekeitio 102 Lopes, Fernão 165, 167, 514
Lamas Carvajal, Valentín 254 Lemos, Antero Vieira de 413, 417, Lopes, Graça Videira 330, 396
Lamba, Jacqueline 304 597 Lopes, Óscar 46, 51, 124
Lambert, José 53 Lemos, Luis de 413, 417, 597 López Cuevillas, Florentino 263
Lambra [Doña] 414, 505, 579, 580, León 25, 50, 87, 99, 102, 205, 208, López de Ayala, Pero 423
582, 584, 585, 612 307, 339, 342, 343, 345–347, 373, López de Haro, Diego 586
Lampillas, Francisco Javier 16, 17 417, 476, 483, 495, 498, 500, 542, López de Mendoza, Íñigo [Marquis
Lancelot 303, 407, 408, 422 544, 546, 547, 553, 556, 578, 581, of Santillana] 7, 425, 458, 575,
Lang, Henry R. 602 583, 585, 591, 594 577, 602, 608, 609
Langer, Marie 492 León Barreto, Luis 307 López de Pisuerga, Martín 343
Lanz, Juan José 232 León, María Teresa 580 López de Zúñiga, Diego 394
Lanzarote 291, 293, 301–307 Leopardi, Giacomo 155, 157 López García, Ángel xiii, 325, 332,
Lapa, Manuel Rodrigues 510 Lérida 471 456, 459
Lapesa, Rafael 461, 465, 602 Lertxundi, Anjel 454 López García, Bernabé 87
Lapiedra Gutiérrez, Eva 360 Lesson, René-Primavère 298, 699 López Gaseni, José Manuel 47
Lapurdi 106 Lestringant, Frank 309, 312, 313, 699 López Martín, Sara 569
Larache 505 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 555 López Morales, Humberto 465
Laranjeira, Manuel 644 Lewis, Martin W. 58, 60, 66–68, 72, López Ontiveros, Antonio 192
Lardizabal, Francisco Ignacio de 78, 91, 130 López Pinciano, Alonso 394
451 Lewis, Norman 208 López Piñero, José María 393
Larios, Jordi 136, 237 Ley, David 60 López Prudencio, José 420
740 Index
López Sainz, Joseina 106 Machado, Antonio 215, 647 Malaspina, Alessandro 188
López Salinas, Armando 205 Machado, Diogo Barbosa de 7 Malaysia 504
López Velarde, Ramón 160 Machado, Manuel 234 Maldonado, Francisco 644
López, Alfonso 420 Machado, Simão 414, 421 Malinowski, Bronislaw 492
López, Bartolomé 419 Machaut, Guillaume de 421, 608 Malka, Elie 505
López-Morillas, Juan 641 Machim, Roberto 318, 323 Mallarmé, Stéphane 133
López-Picó, Josep Maria 156, 241, Macías [he Enamored] 121, 412, Mallet, Henri 79
647 602, 608 Malmontet 10
Lorenzo Figueroa, José 27 Mackay, David 240 Malocello, Lancelotto 293
Lorraine, Claude 207 Macpherson, James 79 Malta 115, 116
Losada Diéguez, Antón 263, 265, Madariaga, María Rosa de 87, 88 Maman, Aharon 372
266 Madariaga, Salvador de 75 Mancha, La 189, 203
Losada, Basilio 263, 265, 266, 660, Madeira 137, 170, 173, 291, 292, 294, Manent, Marià 156
675 310, 312, 316, 318, 319, 322, 541 Manila 185
Louis of Spain [Luis de España y Madeira, Ana Isabel 173 Mankell, Henning 305
Lacerda] 293 Madrazo y Kuntz, Federico de 289 Manrique de Lara, Manuel 497
Louisiana 504 Madrazo, Cecilia 289 Manrique, César 207, 304
Lourenço, Eduardo 163–166, 269, Madrazo, Pedro de 287 Manrique, Jorge 207, 422, 425, 427,
270 Madrid 27, 31, 32, 39, 58, 92, 497
Lousada, Maria Alexandre 615, 616 100–102, 105, 140, 149, 154, 158, Manrique, Tomás 418
Low Navarre 106 159, 184, 191, 193, 196, 197, 199, Mansedumbre, La 496
Lozano, Rafael 160 205, 209, 210, 217, 220, 235, 242, Manuel Antonio [M. A. Pérez
Luanda 170, 273 243, 245, 246, 253, 254, 257, 260, Sánchez] 254, 264, 265
Lucan [Marcus Annaeus Lucanus] 264, 265, 281, 295, 301, 307, 316, Manuel María [M. M. Fernández
76, 89, 98, 387, 591 339, 399, 405, 417, 419, 420, 423, Teixeiro] 253
Lucas of Tuy 585 426, 439, 461, 463, 467–469, 472, Manzanares de Cirre, Manuela 88
Lucas Velázquez, Eugenio 286, 287 494, 496, 497, 569, 570, 594, 635, Manzano Moreno, Eduardo 90
Lucía Megías, José Manuel 596 638, 640, 647, 654, 662, 663 Maragall, Joan 143–146, 148–150,
Ludolph of Saxe 606 Maestre Maestre, José María 395 154, 155, 157, 160, 161, 240, 241,
Lugo 136, 253, 257, 259–262, 264, Maestro González, Pilar 89, 94 469, 641, 643, 646, 651
484, 541–543, 545, 687, 689, 709, Maeterlinck, Maurice 155, 160, 240, Maravall, José Antonio 395
710, 715 262 Marcabru 398
Lugones, Leopoldo 160 Maeztu, Gustavo de 233 Marçais, William 352
Lugrís Freire, Manuel 256, 259, 677 Maeztu, Ramiro de 213, 215–217, 231, March, Ausìas 7, 146–148, 151, 156,
Luis de Granada [Fr.] 418, 425 232, 648 157, 220, 343, 431, 432, 436, 437,
Luis de León [Fr.] 63, 373, 427 Magalhães, Jaime de 128, 597 568, 569, 587, 603, 604, 607, 608,
Luján de Sayavedra, Mateo 460 Magocsi, Paul Robert 60 622, 644, 651
Luna, Álvaro de 610, 611 Magret, Guilhem 398 Marcos de Dios, Ángel 413, 417,
Lusitano, Amado 395, 417 Maia, Clarinda de Azevedo 396 644, 645
Lusitano, Cândido 117, 619 Maimonides, Moses [Moses Ben Marcus Aurelius 663
Lusitano, Zacuto 417 Maimon] 364, 372, 373, 375–377, Marfany, Joan Lluís 241, 242, 244,
Lynch, Benito 160 380, 385 440, 642
Lyotard, Jean-François 62 Mainar, Rafael 635 Margalho, Pedro 417
Mainer, José-Carlos 9, 14, 50, 578, Margaret of Austria [Regent of the
M 641, 646, 655, 656, 658 Netherlands] 579
Macao 185, 419, 537 Maizkurrena, Mari Feli 235, 236 Margarido, Alfredo 175, 269
Macaronesia 136, 290–294, 297, 300, Majorca 97, 149, 150, 239, 242–245, Margarit, Joan 395
313, 314, 317, 319–321 431, 439, 443, 465, 483, 613 Margolin, Jean-Claude 390
Macedo, António de Sousa 599 Majumdar, Swapan 78 Margolis, Max L. 98
Macedo, Helder 170, 171, 510, 511 Malacca 504 Maria Manuela [Princess of
Macedonia 61, 504, 508 Málaga 192, 278, 281, 654, 705, 709, Portugal] 596
Machado, Álvaro Manuel 122 725 Mariana, Juan de 15, 116
Index 741
Marías, Fernando 235 Masera, Mariana 524 Mendonça, Maria 169, 171
Marín Padilla, Encarnación 503 Maseras, Alfons 154, 155, 158–160 Mendoza 489, 494, 575, 604–606,
Mariner, Vicent 437 Maside, Carlos 265 609, 610
Marino, Adrián 13 Massey, Doreen 62, 64, 66, 122, 132 Mendoza, Eduardo 664
Maristany, Fernando 156–160, 162 Massó i Torrents, Jaume 147 Mendoza, Íñigo de [Fr.] 604–606,
Marlot d’Irlanda 407 Massó Ventós, Josep 146 609, 610
Marqués, Josep-Vicent 244, 611 Masson, Louis Leon 11, 12, 18, 75, Mendoza, Mencía de [Duchess of
Márquez Montes, Carmen 188, 288, 289 Calabria] 393
Márquez Villanueva, Francisco 350 Massot i Muntaner, Josep 33, 539 Mendoza, Vicente T. 489, 494, 703
Marquina, Eduardo 224, 648 Mata, Inocência 136, 137, 176, 205, Menéndez [y] Pelayo, Marcelino 30,
Marquis of Mirabel 288 268, 271, 546 32, 33, 36, 38, 50, 98, 100, 101, 486,
Marsé, Juan 471, 653, 657, 663, 664 Mateo Gambarte, Eduardo 129 632, 640, 643
Marseille 83, 414 Maufsaise, Charles 289 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 15, 20,
Martelo Paumán, Evaristo 258, 259 Mauléon, Savarie de 398 26, 31, 48, 91–94, 101, 102, 127,
Martí Monterde, Antoni 129 Maury, Juan María 632 132, 159, 278, 339, 342, 343, 350,
Martí, José 299 Maximilian I of Habsburg [Holy 479, 484, 486, 488–491, 493, 494,
Martí, Josep 564 Roman Emperor] 579 497, 499, 502–508, 510, 537–539,
Martí-López, Elisa 34 Mayans i Siscar, Gregori [or 643, 648
Martín Gaite, Carmen 660, 662, 663 Gregorio] 391, 436 Meneses, Aleixo de 419
Martin of Braga 339 Mayor Arias [Doña] 414, 505, 579, Meneses, Baltasar Fernandes de 417
Martinelli, Gaetano 617 580, 582, 584, 585, 612 Meneses, Francisco Xavier de
Martínez Almoyna, Julio 413 Mazas, Ocharan 231, 232 [Count of Ericeira] 618, 622
Martínez Ruiz, José [Azorín] 63, Mazzeo, Guido Ettore 15, 16 Menino, Pero 422, 423
190, 200, 203, 205, 213, 217, McClintock, F. Leopold 55 Menocal, María Rosa 90, 93, 96
283–288, 469, 643, 646 Medea 290, 617 Meregalli, Franco 10, 24, 50, 51
Martínez Salazar, Andrés 258, 260 Medina del Campo 203, 607 Mérimée, Henri 506
Martínez Torner, Eduardo 489, Mediterranean Sea 590 Mérimée, Prosper 85, 195, 201, 286
494, 544 Medulio [mount] 258 Merino, José María 205
Martínez Torrejón, José Miguel Medusa 297 Merlin 407, 408
595, 598 Meier-Graefe, Julius 207 Mesa, Cristóbal de 427, 625
Martínez, Marcos 291, 293–295 Meillet, Antoine 451 Mèscua, Francesc de 608
Martínez-Gil, Víctor 143, 146–149, Meistersheim, Anne 309, 310, 312, Meseguer, Lluís 467
162 323 Mesquita, Roberto de 309
Martins, Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Melilla 505 Mestre, Antonio 273, 395, 411, 413
6, 43, 45, 125, 145, 170, 618, 644 Melo, Francisco Manuel de 427 Metastasio, Pietro 616, 617, 621, 622,
Mártires, Bartolomé dos 395 Melo, João de 137, 170, 309, 316–318, 625–628
Martorell, Joanot 579 321–323 Metge, Bernat 395
Marx, Alexander 98, 316, 457 Melo, Sebastião José de Carvalho Metternich, Klemens von 19
Marx, Karl 98, 316, 457 e [Marquis of Pombal] 137, 170, Mexía, Pedro 394
Mary Anne of Austria [Queen of 309, 316–318, 321–323, 427 Mexico 59, 129, 184, 478, 494, 653,
Portugal] 622 Melville, Herman 218, 219 664
Mary I of England [Mary Tudor] Mena, Juan de 422, 432, 602, 607, Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm 451
280 608, 611 Michel, Francisque [François-
Mary of Aragon and Castile [Queen Mendes, António 417 Xavier Michel] 3, 7, 8, 47, 68,
of Portugal] 596 Mendes, Margarida Vieira 7 86, 136, 179, 268, 274, 275, 305,
Mary of Austria [Holy Roman Méndez Ferrín, Xosé Luís 2, 524, 350, 559
Empress] 416 659 Michelangelo [Michelangelo
Mascarenhas, Jerónimo 417 Méndez Nieto, Juan 424 Buonarroti] 196
Masdeu, Juan Francisco de 12, 13, Mendiburu, Sebastián 450 Michelena, Luis [or Koldo
16, 17, 90 Mendiño 253 Mitxelena] 47–49, 106, 108, 222,
Masdovelles, Joan Berenguer de Mendonça, Henrique Lopes de 227, 454
603, 611 169, 171 Michener, James 208
742 Index
Micoleta, Rafael de 223, 449 Montemor [or Montemayor], Jorge Muniategi, Sabin 234
Mignolo, Walter D. 81, 163 de 421, 426 Munibe, Xabier María de [Count of
Mikesell, Marvin 73 Montero, Rosa 653, 660 Peñalorida] 224
Milà i Fontanals, Manuel 38, 612, Monterrei 256 Muñoz Molina, Antonio 661
613 Montesino, Ambrosio [Fr.] Münzer, Hieronymus 184, 186, 207
Millás, Juan José 660 604–606 Muqqadam de Cabra [Muqaddam
Mindelo 312, 319 Montesquieu [Baron of] [Charles- ibn Mu‘āfa al-Qabrī or
Minho 125, 396, 397, 411, 412 Louis de Secondat] 17, 79, 160 Muhammad Mahmūd al-Qabrī]
Minorca 434, 435, 613 Montevideo 339 89
Mintegi, Laura 113 Montgomery, homas 504 Murcia 102, 283, 288, 289, 490, 582,
Minyana, José Manuel 395 Montiano y Luyando, Agustín de 9 584
Mir, Gregori 241, 243 Montoliu, Manuel de 154, 158 Muret, Marc Antoine 89, 341
Mirabent, Francisco 158 Montoro, Antón de 610 Murgades, Josep 441, 444
Miralles, Joan 439 Montoya, Luis de 419 Murguía, Manuel 6, 39, 40, 258, 260
Miranda do Douro 424, 531, 540 Montsoriu, Aldonça de 606 Murphy, Gretchen 219, 220
Miranda, José da Costa 209, 424, Monvel, María 160 Mussolini, Benito 647
531, 540, 618, 625 Móogo, Pero 525, 528, 529 Myrine 297
Miranda, Xosé 555 Moore, Michael 221, 392
Mirande, Jon 453 Mor de Fuentes, José [J. Mor y N
Miró, Gabriel 280, 285, 287, 288 Pano] 637 Nadal, Josep M. 235, 430, 432, 438,
Mistral, Frédéric 155, 234 Moraes, Wenceslau de 128 443
Mistral, Gabriela 157, 160 Morais, Angelo de 159 Nahmanides, Moses 382
Mitchell, William J. homas 137 Morales Blouin, Egla 524 Naíta, Izidine 276
Mitxelena, Salbatore 229, 454 Morales Moya, Antonio 190 Naples 89, 197, 602, 604, 607–609,
Moçâmedes 170 Morales, Juan Bautista de 190, 423, 613
Mocoroa, Justo [Ibar] 452 458, 524 Napoleon I [Napoléon Bonaparte]
Mogrovejo, Juan de 417 Morán, Javier 653 4, 254
Moguel, Juan Antonio 224, 450 Moratalla, Sebastián 571 Napoleon III [Charles-Louis-
Moguel, Juan José 225 Morato, Francisco Manoel Trigozo Napoléon Bonaparte] 58
Moguel, Vicenta 224, 225 de Aragão 627 Narváez, Ramón María [General]
Mohrmann, Christine 388 Moreda Leirado, Marisa 264 257
Moix, Terenci 660, 661, 663 Morel-Fatio, Alfred 36 Nasarre, Blas 9
Molas, Joaquim 33, 35 Morell, Antoni 114 Nascentes, Antenor 164
Moles, Abraham A. 314 Morin, Edgar 309 Nascimento, João Cabral do [Mário
Molière [Jean-Baptiste Poquelin] Morlà, Pere Jacint 434 Gonçalves] 137, 309, 316–319,
325, 615–618, 620, 624, 626, 628 Morley, S. Griswold 507 322, 323
Molina López, Emilio 361 Morocco 93, 96, 116, 195, 216, 296, Nash Smith, Henry 218
Molina, César Antonio 263 300, 301, 341, 483, 484, 486, 497, Navagero, Andrea 186
Molina, Luis de 419 505, 508, 514, 555 Navarre 50, 105, 113, 183, 184, 372,
Molina, Tirso de [Fr. Gabriel Téllez] Morris, James 208 446–448, 451, 457, 536, 592, 607,
325, 461, 462, 599 Moses [Prophet] 7, 97, 364, 366, 369, 608
Moncada, Jesús 444 372–375, 380–382, 591 Navarría 496
Mondoñedo 253, 603 Motril 53, 289 Navarro Pastor, Santiago 28
Moner, Francesc 603 Moure Casas, Ana 388 Navarro Villoslada, Francisco 451
Monforte 257 Mourlane Michelena, Pedro 232 Nazariantz, Hrand 156, 157, 159, 160
Monmany, Mercedes 103 Mozambique 42, 137, 164, 173, 174, Nebrija, Elio Antonio de 392–395,
Monroe, James T. 88, 100, 219, 220, 269, 537 414, 416, 433, 456, 457, 465
358 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 325 Negreiros, José de Almada 649
Montaner, Alberto 147, 504 Mubarrad, al- [Abū Al-’abbas Neira de Xusá 264
Montanyà, Lluís 649 Muḥammad Ibn Yazīd] 372 Nerval, Gérard de 488
Montauban, Renaud de 505 Muḥammad 92, 95, 96, 98, 353, 361, Neto, Agostinho 177, 275
Monteagudo, Henrique 441 364, 373, 378, 381, 585, 612 Neubauer, John xi, 55–57, 60, 61, 63
Index 743
New York 58, 105, 221, 255 Oliveira, F. Xavier d’Athaide 555 Oviedo 339, 340, 348
Nicholson, Reynold A. 99 Oliveira, Fernão de 414 Oviedo, Alfonso de 418
Nicolás Antonio 7 Oliveira, José Osório de 128 Oxford 416, 425
Nicolàs, Miquel 429, 438, 442 Oliver, Miquel dels Sants 141, 149,
Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel 150, 152 P
391 Oller, Narcís 239, 442 Padilha, Laura Cavalcante 135, 163
Nietzsche, Friedrich 240, 427 Olmedo 611, 612 Padilla, Jerónimo 418, 503
Ninyoles, Rafael 244 Onaindía, Mario 14 Padrón 254
Nobre, António Pereira 645 Onaindia, Santiago 234 Paes, Diogo Denis Faria de 321
Nóbrega, Manuel da 420 Ong, Walter J. 280, 536 Páez, Pedro 420
Nodier, Charles 85 Oran 488, 505 Pageaux, Daniel-Henri 12, 22, 617
Nogueira, Carlos 617 Orbe, Timoteo 231 Paghetti, Alessandro 620, 623
Noguerol, Arturo 263 Ordóñez de Ceballos [or Cevallos], Pagis, Dan 382, 383
Noia Campos, Camiño 555, 558 Pedro Pais Valencià 328
Nooteboom, Cees 208 Ordóñez de Montalvo, Garci 422 Pais, Amélia Pinto 126, 328
Noriega Varela, Antonio 253 Oribe, Emilio 160 Paiva, João Soares de 398
Norway 48, 78, 141, 153 Origen [Oregenes Adamantius] 387 Pakistan 346
Novalis [Friedrich Freiherr von Oriol, Carme 555, 687, 708 Palacio Valdés, Armando 63, 636
Hardenberg] 157, 638 Orleans, Antonio de [Duke of Palacios, César Javier 555
Novo Palacio, Eduardo 651 Montpensier] 288 Palencia 51, 98, 344, 345
Novoneyra, Uxío [Eugenio Novo Ormaetxea, Nicolás 47, 233, 234, Palencia, Alfonso de 425
Neira] 253 452, 650 Palma-Ferreira, João 3, 15, 22, 42
Nucio, Martín 481 Ormandía 496 Palmas, Las 203, 300, 301, 304, 305
Nunes, A. J. Damasceno 122 Oroncio [Don] 299 Palmireno, Juan Lorenzo 392, 395
Nunes, Ambrósio 417, 424 Orosius, Paulus 336 Palomo, María del Pilar 599
Nunes, João Arriscado 175 Orotava, La [valley] 105, 299 Palou, Josep 472
Nunes, José Joaquim 520, 521, Orringer, Nelson R. 76 Pamplona 106, 223
524–526, 529 Ors, Enric-Josep 142 Pan-Montojo, Juan 642
Nunes, Pedro 424 Ors, Eugeni d’ 7, 142, 151, 154, 156, Pannonia 339
Núñez de Arce, Gaspar 209, 468 158, 232, 233, 240, 646, 663 Parada de Moreda 253
Núñez Ruiz, Gabriel 1, 708 Orta, Garcia de 424 Paraguay 333, 539
Núñez Seixas, Xosé M. 41, 42, 119 Ortafà, Pons d’ 608 Paraíso, El 496
Núñez, Hernán 394, 530 Ortega Gallarzagoitia, Elene 709 Pardo Bazán, Emilia 196, 209, 254,
Nunyes, Pere Joan 395 Ortega Munilla, José 195 259, 468, 469, 635, 638, 639
Ortega y Gasset, José 112, 185, 186, Pardo Gómez, María Virtudes 260
O 207, 220, 651 Pares, Miquel 606
Oarabeitia, Martín de 224 Ortí, Antonio 568, 570, 571 Paris 23, 58, 81, 85, 155, 159, 160, 186,
Ocampo, Florián de 88 Ortiz de Villegas, Diego 419 188, 196, 202, 205, 210, 233, 255,
Oceania 135, 163, 165, 173 Ortiz, Lourdes 307, 419 257, 298, 306, 393, 409, 416, 417,
Odysseus [see Ulysses] 291 Ortoño 266 488, 623, 627, 645, 662
Oedipus 320, 323, 618 Osório de Oliveira, José 128 Parma 15, 668
Ogier le Danois 505 Osório, Jerónimo 395, 417 Pascasius [Deacon of Braga] 388
Oïhenart, Arnaut 449 Osoro, Jasone 131 Pascoaes, Teixeira de [Joaquim
Ojeda, Mateo de 418 Otero Pedrayo, Ramón 254, 263, Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos]
Ojén 280 264, 266 152, 154–161, 264, 644–646
Olaciregui, María José 104, 110, 112 Otero, Aníbal 549, 550 Pascual Tirado, Josep 443
Olesa, Jaume [or Jaime] d’ 603, 612 Otero, Blas de 233–235, 472 Passmore, Lawrence [Tubby] 306
Olinger, Paula 524 Ourense 136, 253, 254, 256, 257, Pastor Fuster, Justo 7
Oliva [Abbot] 389 260–264, 542–544, 550, 551 Pastor, Simón 7, 603
Olivar, Pere Joan 395 Outeiro de Rei 253 Pastoriza, A 254
Oliveira, António de 5957 Ovid [Publius Ovidius Naso] 248, Patron, Joseph 114
Oliveira, António Resende de 398 249, 387 Pausa, La 496
744 Index
Paz, Octavio 630, 632 Pérez-Prendes Muñoz-Arraco, José Pinto, António Costa 41, 42, 118, 119,
Peche Andrade, Lola 115 Manuel 596 124, 126
Pedraita 543 Perle, Richard 220 Pintos, Xoan Manuel 260
Pedro Afonso [D. Pedro] [Count of Pers i Ramona, Magí 3, 34, 35 Pirandello, Luigi 383
Barcelos] 399, 410, 411, 502, 580, Perse 290 Pires, António M. B. Machado 313,
593, 594 Perseus 297 3951
Pedro, Valentín de 159, 160 Perugia 389 Pisan, Christine de 421
Pedrosa, José Manuel 476, 514, 515, Pessanha, Camilo 128 Pita, María 254
517, 553, 555, 570, 571 Pessoa, Fernando 117, 119, 138, 167, Pitta, Maria Josefa Caetana Guerra
Peiró Martín, Ignacio 88, 89 170, 268, 271, 644, 647, 649 423
Peking 206 Peter I of Castile 602 Pius II [Pope] 421
Pelayo, Álvaro 389 Peter I of Portugal 420, 427 Pius XII [Pope] 653
Pelegrín, Ana 499 Peter IV of Aragon [he Pizzarello, Alberto 114
Pellat, Charles 97, 354 Ceremonious] 380, 430 Pla, Josep 206, 207, 245, 438, 444,
Pellistrandi, Benoît 13, 27, 31 Peter V of Aragon [Constable of 651, 660
Pemán, José María 471 Portugal] 415, 422, 575 Playa de las Americas 306
Pena, Xosé Ramón 398, 405–407, Peters, Francis E. 373, 374 Plaza Carrero, Nuria 664
412 Petersen, Suzanne 493, 496, 505 Plencia 223
Penelope 481 Petöi, Sándor 155 Pobra de Trives 264
Penny, Ralph 350 Petrarch [Francesco Petrarca] 16, Polín, Ricardo 412, 681, 712
Pensado, José Luis 408 37, 293, 294, 392, 395, 410, 458, Politian [Angelo Poliziano] 392, 395
Pepetela [A. C. M. Pestana dos 575, 602 Polívka, Georg 555
Santos] 180 Philip [Infante of Castile] 589 Polo, Marco 184, 525
Pepper, Stephen C. 78 Philip I of Portugal [see Philip II of Polono, Estanislao 605
Peralta, Victoria 59 Spain] 595 Polynices 320
Peraza, Guillén 445 Philip I of Spain [he Handsome] Pompeii 197
Percy, homas 19 579 Pomponius [Julius Pomponius
Pereda, José María de 63, 466, 467, Philip II of Spain 10, 45, 280, 415, Laetus] 392
635, 638 419, 577, 595, 596, 598 Poncelas, Bárbara 549
Pereira, Aureliano J. 259, 261, 264 Philip III of Spain 580, 595 Pondal, Eduardo 253, 258
Pereira, Duarte Pacheco 167 Philip IV of Spain 45, 595 Pons i Gallarza, Josep Lluís 243
Pereira, Edimilson de Almeida Philip V of Spain 281, 436, 465 Ponta Delgada 312
180, 181 Philip of Tripoli 586 Pontano, Giovanni 607
Pereira, Maria Helena da Rocha Philippines 217, 305, 504, 537 Ponteareas 550
117, 123 Philo of Alexandria 374 Ponteceso 253, 258
Pérès, Henri 95, 96, 98 Pi i Margall, Francisco 139, 140, Pontesampaio 254
Péret, Benjamin 304 142, 147 Pontevedra 136, 253, 257, 260–263,
Pérez Ballesteros, Xosé 258 Picard, Christophe 95, 705 265, 266, 550, 557
Pérez Bayer, Francisco 395 Picasso, Pablo 263 Ponz, Antonio 187, 189, 190, 197
Pérez de Ayala, Ramón 470, 647 Picaud, Aymeric 183, 253 Pope, Randolph 578, 653
Pérez de Betolaza, Joan 223 Pickthall, Marmaduke Portalegre, António de 420
Pérez de Lazárraga, Joan 224 Pico, Berta 297, 298 Portnoy, Sarah 505
Pérez Galdós, Benito 196, 467, 468, Pidal, Pedro José 27, 30 Porto Santo 292
470, 638, 639 Pijoan, Josep 647 Portugal e Castro, Francisco de
Pérez Pascual, José Ignacio 132 Pimentel, Juan 188, 264 [Marquis of Valença] 614, 618,
Pérez Reverte, Arturo 662 Pimentel, Luís 188, 264 619
Pérez Villaamil, Jenaro 287 Pimpão, Álvaro Júlio da Costa 44, Portugal, Domingos Antunes 417
Pérez y Durá, Francisco Jorge 325, 123 Portugal, Marcos 621
329 Piñar Samos, Javier 289 Pound, Ezra 160, 231, 232
Pérez, David 622 Pinheiro, Gonçalo 417 Pouvreau, Sylvain 449
Pérez, Fernando 419 Pinheiro, Teresa 597 Poza, Andrés de 449
Pérez-Petit, Víctor 150, 151 Pinhel, Aires 417 Pozuelo Yvancos, José María 31, 51
Index 745
Prada Allo, Alfonso 256 Quinet, Edgar 81, 201, 202 Rey Ballesteros, Ánxel Adolfo 254
Prague 108, 109, 663 Quintana, Manuel José 638 Rey de Artieda, Andrés 603
Prampolini, Santiago 6, 40, 50 Quintanilla, Xaime 262 Reyes, Alfonso 160, 344
Prat de la Riba, Enric 138, 140–142, Quintela, Joaquim Pedro 628, 629 Reymont, Wladyslaw 159
149, 153, 156, 161 Quintilian [Marcus Fabius Ría de Vigo 253
Prata, Francisco Fernandes 417 Quintilianus] 98 Rianxo 254
Prats, Modest 432 Quiroga, Horacio 160 Riba, Carles 142, 245, 247, 249, 437,
Pratt, Mary Louise 187, 194 444, 649
Praz, Mario 208, 604 R Ribeira Grande 312
Preston, Paul 653, 654 Rábade Paredes, Xesús 253 Ribeiro, Aquilino 644
Primo de Rivera, Miguel 160, 215, Racine, Jean 437, 617, 620, 628 Ribeiro, Bernardim 421
264, 647 Rafanell, August 438, 440 Ribeiro, José Silvestre 42
Proença, Raúl 644 Ràfols, Josep Francesc 240 Ribeiro, Margarida Calafate 167
Propp, Vladimir 554 Rahola i Trèmols, Federico 140 Riber, Llorenç 242
Provence 25, 83, 124, 341, 347, 377, Ramalho, Américo da Costa 416 Ribera i Rovira, Ignasi 142–156,
383 Ramires, Gonçalo Mendes 167–170 158–161
Prussia 19 Ramírez, Álvaro 70 Ribera Llopis, Juan 468, 469
Ptolemy [Claudius Ptolemaeus] Ramírez, Diego 418 Ribera y Tarragó, Julián
292, 298, 380 Ramírez, Víctor 301 Ribera, Suero de 609
Puerto de la Cruz 305 Ramis, Joan 434, 435, 437, 692 Richard of Haldingham 294
Puerto de Santa María 280, 407 Ramón Berenguer IV [Count of Richelieu [Cardinal] [Armand-Jean
Puerto Lápice 192 Barcelona] 24 du Plessis] 298
Puerto Rico 217, 478 Ramos Corrada, Miguel 1, 8, 29, 713 Rico, Francisco 52, 124, 390, 391, 513
Puértolas, Soledad 660 Ramos, Luís A. de Oliveira 1, 8, 29, Ridao, José María 204, 205
Puga, Amalia 160 417, 418 Ridruejo, Dionisio 651
Puibusque, Adolphe 3, 30, 83, 84, Raña Lama, Román 254 Riera, Carme 103, 443, 472, 660
86, 100 Raposo, António 417 Riga 286
Puig i Cadafalch, Josep 140, 141 Raposo, Hipólito 648 Rimbaud, Arthur 234, 240
Pujol, Josep Maria 554, 565, 567, Ras, Aureli 153–155 Rio de Janeiro 59
570, 572 Ratzel, Friedrich 78 Rio de Onor 552
Pujols, Francesc 154 Razi, Muhammad b. Umar, al- 373, Río de Oro 291
Pyrenees 37, 65, 75, 76, 91, 123, 127, 385 Río, Ángel del 51, 291, 498
200, 232, 233, 280, 288, 335, 338, Rebelo, José Adriano Pequito 648 Rioja, La 105, 345, 517
339, 347, 446, 448, 471, 503, 647 Reccesvinthus [Visigoth King] 388 Ríos, Amador 20, 23, 27, 28, 30–33,
Recco, Nicoloso da 293 37, 43, 75–77, 90, 100
Q Reckert, Stephen 510–512, 518, 522, Ríos-Font, Wadda C. 23, 714
Quadrio, Francesco Saverio 12, 13 524, 525, 527 Ripoll 389
Quadrio, Miguel 7 Régio, José 647 Riquer, Martí [or Martín] de 27–29,
Quart, Pere [Joan Oliver i Sellarès] Reid, homas 79 33, 34, 38, 463, 503, 603, 608–613
245, 247 Reig, Carola 502 Risco, Vicente 6, 108, 254, 261,
Québec 58 Reigosa, Antonio 555 263–266, 647
Queirós, José Maria Eça de 154, 159, Reigosa, Carlos G. 254 Risério, Antônio 180, 181, 714
167, 168, 170, 647 Reis, Carlos 52, 123–125 Rivas, Manuel 254, 472, 637, 660
Queneau, Raymond 6 Remak, Henry H. H. 62 Rivière Gómez, Aurora 89, 90, 100
Quental, Antero de 43, 145, 154, 157 Remédios, Joaquim Mendes dos Roas, David 639
Querol, Vicent [or Vicente] 46, 51, 124 Robe, Stanley L. 556
Wenceslau 157, 239, 244 Rentería, José Agustín de 224 Robert of Naples 576
Quesada, Alonso [Rafael Romero Requeixo, Armando 549, 550 Roberts, David 201, 287, 288
Quesada] 305 Resende, Andrés de 395, 398, 427 Roca Franquesa, José María 50
Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco de Resende, García de 411, 412, 422 Rocha-Trindade, Maria Beatriz
279 Resina, Joan Ramon 130, 131, 469 310, 311
Quilis Merín, Mercedes 350 Reverte, Javier 206, 662 Rochelt, Oscar 231
746 Index
Roderick [Don Rodrigo] [Visigoth Roth, Norman 374 Salazar, Francisco de 417
King] 584 Rouanet, Maria Helena 3, 23 Salinas, Galo 259
Rodó, José Enrique 160, 638 Rousillon 38 Salinas, Juan de 418
Rodoreda, Mercè 245, 251, 471, 659, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 79, 189, 450 Sallust [Gaius Sallustius Crispus]
660 Rovira, José Carlos 143–146, 158, 604 387
Rodrígues, Heitor 417 Rubiera Mata, María Jesús 95, 97, Salomon [archipelago] 60, 116, 136,
Rodrigues Lapa, Manuel 409, 510 99 291, 292, 294–296, 298–303, 306,
Rodrigues Lobo, Francisco 422, 427 Rubiés, Joan-Pau 183, 184, 200 308, 312, 318–321, 323, 537
Rodrigues, Ana Margarida Rubió i Balaguer, Jordi 430 Salvà, Maria Antònia 240, 242
Salgueiro 137, 309 Rubió i Ors, Joaquim 239 Salvador de Bahia 539
Rodríguez Castelao, Alfonso Daniel Rubio, Elías 33, 38, 556 Salvador Plans, Antonio 459
138, 254, 263 Rudavsky, Tamar M. 377 Salvador, Vicent 75, 155, 157, 158, 245,
Rodríguez del Padrón, Juan 421, Rudin, Ernst 472 253, 254, 258, 325, 331, 429, 435,
581, 612 Rueda, García de 605 437, 440, 443, 459, 539, 567, 641,
Rodríguez Elías, Avelino 265 Rufete, Isidora 639 649, 651
Rodríguez Figueroa, Luis [Guillón Rufus, Jordanus 411 Salvaterra 623, 624, 626, 627
Barrús] 299–301 Ruiz i Calonja, Joan 38 Salvi, Sergio 112
Rodríguez González, Eladio 259 Rumsfeld, Donald 220 Samaniego, Félix María de 224
Rodríguez González, Olivia 468, Rusiñol, Santiago 141, 196 Sampaio, Albino Forjaz de 617
469 Ruskin, John 240 Sampere, Josep 567, 570
Rodríguez Mohedano, Pedro 9, 13, Russia 8, 33, 48, 61, 62, 64, 72, 91, Samson of Córdoba 338
14, 76 192, 205, 439, 487, 488, 507 San Borondón [isle] 290, 294–296,
Rodríguez Mohedano, Rafael 9, 13, Ruyra, Joaquim 444 300
14, 76 San Feliu de Guíxols 161
Rodríguez Puértolas, Julio 77, 215 S San Fernando 257, 282
Rodríguez, José Cervaens y 5, 112 Sá de Miranda, Francisco 121, 416, San Millán [de la Cogolla] 340,
Rodríguez-Luis, Julio 57 417, 420, 421, 597 345, 503
Rodríguez-Moñino, Antonio 481, Sá, Mem de 121, 416, 417, 420, 421, San Pedro de Oza 258
484, 495 597, 649 San Pedro, Diego de 258, 422, 454,
Rohmer, Elisabeth 314 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego 7, 427 580, 604, 605, 612
Roig, Jaume 262, 605 Saavedra, Ángel de [Duke of Rivas] San Sebastián [or Donostia] 222,
Rojas Zorrilla, Francisco de 463 7, 288, 427, 637 228, 236, 453
Rojo, Guillermo 542 Sabio Pinilla, José Antonio 425 Sanches, António Ribeiro 417
Roland 111, 313, 325, 502, 505, 509 Sacy, Silvestre de 88, 89 Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio 90
Romania 78, 130, 504 Sada 256, 259 Sánchez Barbero, Francisco 632
Rome 188, 197, 198, 232, 233, 248, Sáenz-Badillos, Ángel 364 Sánchez de Badajoz, Garci 610
249, 292, 386, 591, 593, 621 Sagarin, Raphael D. 70 Sánchez de las Brozas, Francisco [El
Romero Muñoz, Carlos 3, 35 Sagastizabal, Joxean 131 Brocense] 427
Romero Tobar, Leonardo 15, 27, 32, Said Armesto, Víctor 542 Sánchez Mazas, Rafael 232, 233
33, 101, 578, 630–632, 635, 638, 640 Said, Edward W. 41, 52, 80, 81, 85, Sánchez Moguel, Antonio 39
Romo Feito, Fernando 456, 469 86, 117, 124, 131, 180, 219, 315, Sánchez, Ángel 301
Roncevaux 505 380, 542 Sánchez, Diego 420
Roosevelt, heodore [Teddy] 220, Saint Brendan [isle] 290, 294–296, Sánchez, Florencio 160
638 303 Sánchez, Pedro 416
Rosa, João Guimarães 273, 653, 660 Saint Circ, Uc de 398 Sanctis, Francesco de 68
Rosales Martínez, Eduardo 289 Saizarbitoria, Ramon 113, 454 Sanguinetti, Leopold 114, 115
Roscoe, homas 201 Salamanca 12, 206, 208, 228, 229, 253, Sanlúcar de Barrameda 280
Rosen, Tova 89 337, 415–419, 424–426, 449, 450, Sant Jordi, Jordi de 431, 603, 608
Rosenblat, Ángel 464 453, 476, 504, 505, 558, 637, 651 Santa Cruz 409, 419
Rossich, Albert 435–437 Salaverri, Vicente 160 Santa Fe, Pedro de 608
Rotaetxe, Karmele 325, 331, 445–447, Salazar, António de Oliveira 51, 172, Santa Marta de Ortigueira 256
453 645, 647, 649 Santana, Mario 478, 660
Index 747
Santander 253, 467, 483 Schmitz, Sabine 633 Silveira, Miguel de 427
Santarém 95, 96, 167, 168 Schopenhauer, Arthur 427 Silverman, Joseph H. 487, 505–508
Santaya, Jorge 632 Schuchardt, Hugo 451 Simón Abril, Pedro 395
Santiago de Compostela xi, 136, 183, Schwartz, Kessel 75 Simon, Uriel 372
188, 208, 223, 224, 253, 254, 256, Scott, Walter [Sir] 85, 225, 239, 440, Simonet, Francisco Javier 90
257, 258, 260, 261–263, 265–267, 551, 630 Sindalias, Las 496
349, 398, 538, 593, 651 Sebastian I of Portugal [King] 165, Sinera 251, 651
Santiáñez-Tió, Nil 633 296, 418, 419, 427, 577, 595, 598, Sinopoli, Franca 15, 18, 67
Santo Agostinho, Francisco de [Fr.] 644 Sirat, Colette 97, 375
410, 414, 425, 627 Segovia 186, 417, 609, 652 Sismondi, Jean-Charles Leonard
Santos Zas, Margarita 203 Segura Bueno, Juan Manuel 289 Simonde de 2, 5, 10, 18, 20,
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 167, Seidel, Michael 315 22–24, 27, 28, 30, 35, 36, 42, 69,
175 Seivane 253 74, 75, 79, 80, 82, 84, 91, 93,
Santos, José Joaquim dos 622 Seixo, Maria Alzira 172, 312, 314 120–122
Sanz del Río, Julián 287 Sela, Shlomo 378, 379 Sisterna 543
São Miguel [isle] 290, 294–296, 312, Semedo, Odete da Costa 176 Sjöwall, Maj 305
316, 322 Sempere, Andreu 395 Skidmore, homas E. 58
São Paulo 176, 177 Sena, Jorge de 117, 119 Slaby, Rudolf 159
São Tomé and Principe 269 Senabre, Ricardo 1 Smith, Adam 79
São Vicente [isle] 290, 294–296, Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 76, 89, 98 Smith, Colin 503
312, 316 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 394, 506 Smith, Jonathan 69
Saraiva, António José 46, 47, 51, 124, Sepúlveda, Lorenzo de 394, 506 Smith, Paul Julian 662
401, 409, 410, 428 Serai, Pere 603 Smock, Ann 133
Saralegui y Medina, Leandro de 40 Sérgio, António 644 Soares, Bernardo [see Pessoa,
Saramago, José 165, 166, 170, 172 Serrà Campins 438, 439 Fernando] 117, 119, 123, 398
Sarasola, Ibon 47, 49, 104–106, 108, Serra do Courel 136, 253 Soares, Pero Roiz 599
110, 225, 446, 448, 450, 451, 454 Serrão, Joaquim Veríssimo 595 Sobejano, Gonzalo 633, 657
Sardinha, António 648 Sestao 223 Sobh, Mahmud 94, 99
Sardinha, Pedro Fernandes 417 Seville 86, 95, 185, 190, 204, 208, Soja, Edward 211, 212
Sardinia 504 280–283, 288, 293, 296, 364, Soldevila, Carles 156
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 202, 396, 414, 426, 463, 489, 496, 555, Soler Pascual, Emilio 188, 189
209 582–585, 589, 593 Soler, Frederic [Serafí Pitarra] 439
Sarmiento, Martín 8, 13, 16, 25, 26, Shakespeare, William 157, 262, 432 Solinus, Gaius Julius 292, 294
30, 39 Sharrer, Harvey L. 400, 503 Solís y Cuetos, Miguel 257
Sarría, Jesús de 231, 232 Shaver-Crandell, Ann 183 Soltura, Regina 233
Sarrionandia, Joseba 236 Shelley, Percy B. 160 Sommer, Doris 664
Saura, Carlos 657 Sibawayhi [Abū Bishr ‘amr Ibn Soravia, Bruna 95
Saussure, Ferdinand de 111, 456 ‘uthmān] 372 Soria 102, 517
Savage Islands 291, 294 Sicily 92, 93, 96, 97 Soria Andreu, Francisca 634
Scandinavian Peninsula 56, 59, 61, Sienkiewicz, Henryk 155 Soriano, Rodrigo 195
71, 79 Sila, Abdulai 180 Soromenho, Alda da Silva 555
Scarlatti, Domenico 621 Silius Italicus, Tiberius Catius Soto Freire, Manuel 257
Schack, Adolf Friedrich von 93, 94 Asconius 75 Sousa, Diogo de 417
Schafer, Martha E. 510 Silos 340 Sousa, Manuel de 417, 426
Schaub, Jean-Frédéric 595 Silva, Alberto da Costa e 170, 719 Sousa, Manuel de Faria e 123
Scheindlin, Raymond P. 366–368, Silva, António Diniz da Cruz e Sousa, Noémia de 179
370 [Elpino Duriense] 627 South Africa 346, 642
Schippers, Arie 364, 367–371 Silva, António José da [O Judeu] South Asia 67, 130
Schlegel, August 3, 22–24, 31, 43, 616, 620, 622 South East Asia 67
80, 325 Silva, José Maria da Costa e 5, 42, Southey, Robert 3, 19, 24, 42
Schlegel, Friedrich 3, 4, 19–24, 27, 122 Southworth, John 503
28, 36, 42, 43, 69–73, 79, 120–122 Silva, Lorenzo 307 Soyinka, Wole 180
748 Index
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti 35 Tenerife 291, 292, 296, 297, 299–304, Torrente Ballester, Gonzalo 51, 253
Staël, Madame de [Anne-Louise 306, 307 Torres Amat, Félix 7, 25
Germaine Necker] 20, 22, 23, Tennenbaum, Felipe 504 Torres Bodet, Jaime 160
79, 80, 82 Tennyson, Alfred [Lord] 66, 225, Torres Feijó, Elias 40, 722
Staford, Fiona 85 440, 448, 592, 663 Torres Naharro, Bartolomé 421, 458,
Stagl, Justin 184, 194 Tenreiro, Ramón María 648 460, 464
Stegagno Picchio, Luciana 123, 125 Teodorico de Bolonha 411 Torres Rioseco, Arturo 160
Stegmann, André 61 Terceira [isle] 290, 294–296, 312, 318 Torres Villarroel, Diego de 435
Stein, Gertrude 208 Terés, Elías 95, 97 Torres, Juan de 608
Stendhal [Henri Beyle] 81, 85 Teresa of Ávila [St.] 218, 254, 425, Torriani, Leonardo 294
Stenzel, Hartmut 640 426, 502, 531, 645, 655 Tortosa 382, 434
Stern, Samuel M. 400, 512, 518, 519 Terra Cha 136, 253 Tosca, Tomás Vicente 395
Storni, Alfonsina 160 Terry, Arthur 239, 240, 245, 249 Toscanelli, Paolo 294
Strabo 75 Tertullian [Quintus Septimus Toscano, Sebastião [Fr.] 410, 414,
Strauss, Leo 220 Florens Tertullianus] 387 425, 627
Strecker, Karl 388 Tettamancy y Gascón, Francisco Tovar, Antonio 110, 453
Strindberg, August 262 259 Townsend, Joseph 191, 192
Stúñiga, Lope de 422, 608 Tetuán 195, 505 Tracy, Honor 208
Stussi, Alfredo 439 Teyssier, Paul 125, 416, 421 Trancón Lagunas, Montserrat 639
Suárez López, Jesús 499, 555 héry, Hervé 58 Trapero, Maximiniano 478, 505,
Suárez-Galbán Guerra, Eugenio hevet, André 298 669
105 hiesse, Anne-Marie 50, 79 Trás-os-Montes 551
Subirats, Eduardo 220 hompson, Stith 476, 481, 554, 556 Traube, Ludwig 388
Suez Channel 312 Tibi, Amin 95, 96 Triana 280
Switzerland 22, 70, 79, 155, 281, 282 Ticknor, George 10, 22, 24–31, 33, Trigo, Felipe 255
Syracuse 320 35, 36, 100 Trigueiros, Luís Forjaz 128
Syria 94, 95, 358, 504 Tierras Brillantes 496 Tristan 407, 408, 422, 613
Tietz, Manfred 472 Troy 423, 591
T Tiin, Helen 115 Trueba, Antonio de 225, 231
Tabucchi, Antonio 295 Timoneda, Joan 433, 604 Tuan, Yi-Fu 67
Tafur, Pedro 183, 185 Timor 173, 537 Tudela 184, 372
Talavera 419 Tiraboschi, Girolamo 12, 13, 17, 89 Tui 253, 257
Tamen, Miguel 5, 26, 52, 125 Tito Rojo, José 289, 711 Tunisia 95, 504, 505
Tangier 195, 490, 505 Tocqueville, Alexis de 135, 212 Turkey 62, 69, 78, 91, 464, 504, 508,
Tarifa 280 Todorova, Maria 61, 722 647
Tarouca, Carlos da Silva Toledo 88, 92, 202, 208, 327, 333, 337, Turmeda, Anselm [Fr.] 153, 410, 414,
Tarragona 465 338, 341, 343, 344, 346, 349, 350, 425, 627
Tarrío Varela, Anxo 136, 253, 602 380, 386, 396, 405, 459, 583–585, Turner, Frank M. 219, 506, 674, 681
Tarszevsky, Luis [Count de Lipa] 590, 606, 680, 693, 698 Turner, Frederick Jackson 219, 506,
289 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 644 674, 681
Tartas, Jean de 449 Tomar 142, 596, 674 Turull, Paul 154, 155, 157, 159
Tasso, Torquato 296 Tomás, Manuel 275, 323, 395, 418, Tusquets, Esther 660
Tavani, Giuseppe 399, 402 419, 452, 467 Tutuola, Amós 180
Tavares, Ana Paula 176, 691 Tomiño 254 Twain, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens]
Taylor, Anne 115, 669, 682 Torbado, Jesús 205, 722 212
Teide [mount] 292, 298, 304, 306 Torga, Miguel [Adolfo Correia da Txillardegi [see Álvarez Emparanza,
Teive, Diogo [or Diego] de 395, 417 Rocha] 641, 650 José Luis]
Teixeira, António 152, 154, 156–158, Toro, Suso de 509, 659
264, 622, 644–646 Torre, Guillermo de 263, 264 U
Tejeira 547 Torrellas, Pedro [or Pere Torroella] Úbeda 280, 585
Tejera Gaspar, Antonio 295 577, 607–611 Ugarte, Manuel 160, 209
Tellería, José Luis 70 Torrendell, Joan 141, 149–153, 162 Ugarte, Michael 135, 211
Index 749
Ugarte, Pedro 235 Valla, Lorenzo 392 Verlaine, Paul 157, 160, 234
Ukraine 664 Valladares, Rafael 596 Vernet, Juan 99, 724
Ulacia, Francisco de 231 Valladolid 50, 288, 343, 344, 419, 567, Verney, Luís António de 46, 619
Ulíbarri, Pablo 225 580, 600, 612 Versteegh, Kees 352, 355, 364
Ulloa, Antonio 188, 193, 640 Valle-Inclán, Ramón del [Ramón J. Viana, Antonio de 296, 477, 562,
Ulysses 290, 292, 293, 481, 488 S. Valle Peña] 63, 213, 254, 470, 607, 613
Unamuno, Miguel de 63, 93, 112, 154, 647, 648, 664 Viar, Nicolás 109
159, 203, 206, 207, 209, 212–215, Vallvé, Joaquín 360 Viardot, Louis 30
217, 219, 221, 225, 227–231, 383, Vallverdú, Josep 38 Vic 420, 571
469, 641, 643–646, 649, 650 Vaqueyras, Raimbaut de 346 Vicens Vives, Jaume 651
United States 81, 111, 117, 130, 212, Varela Jácome, Benito 40 Vicente, Gil 66, 68, 349, 412, 414,
217, 221, 447, 468, 480, 497, 504, Varela, João Manuel [Timotéo Tio 416, 421, 464, 518, 534, 539–541,
613, 647, 656, 663, 664 Tiofe, G. T. Didial, João Vário] 579, 597, 615, 616, 620
Unzueta, Sorne 234 137, 309, 316–318, 322, 323 Vicetto, Benito 258
Urals 60, 91 Vargas Llosa, Mario 301, 661 Vidal Martínez, Xoán 265
Uriarte, Cristina G. de 223, 298 Varvaro, Alberto 350 Vidal, Peire 265, 608
Uriarte, José Antonio 223, 298 Vasconcelos, Carolina Michaëlis de Vieira, José Luandino 178, 180,
Urkiaga [or Urquiaga], Esteban de 396, 408, 409, 643 271–276, 413
[Lauaxeta] 233, 234, 452, 649 Vasconcelos, Francisco de Paula Vienna 10, 23, 408
Urkizu [or Urquizu] Sarasua, Medina e 323 Viera y Clavijo, José de 188, 189,
Patricio 106, 107, 454 Vasconcelos, Jorge Ferreira de 421 296, 297, 301, 302
Urrea, Pedro de 610 Vasconcelos, José Leite de 643 Vigo 208, 253, 254, 257, 258,
Urretabizkaia, Arantza 454 Vásquez, Juan 489, 490 260–262, 264, 265, 519, 535
Urrutia, Andrés 113 Vasto, Excelêncio 276 Vilanova de Arousa 254
Uruguay 149, 150 Vázquez Cuesta, Pilar 551, 595, 597 Vilanova, Johan 265
Urzainqui, Inmaculada 16 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel 472 Vilariño Pintos, Daría 260
Uther, Hans-Jörg 476, 554, 556 Vázquez Souza, Ernesto 262 Vilariño Suárez, María 264
Utrecht 10 Vedia, Enrique 27 Vilarrasa, Luís de 608
Utrillo, Antoni 196 Vega, Félix Lope de 31, 121, 296, 421, Vilas, José 260
426, 427, 435, 461, 463, 464, 479, Vilas, Primitivo 260
V 491, 525, 580, 599, 619 Vilavedra, Dolores 40, 647
Vaamonde Lores, Florencio 6, 40, Vega, María José, xiii Villafranca del Bierzo 547
258 Vega, Ricardo 636 Villalonga, Llorenç 243–245, 443, 471
Valbuena Prat, Ángel 15, 51 Veiga de Forcas 543 Villanueva, Darío xi, 203, 657, 658
Valcárcel Rivera, Carmen 28 Veiga, Tomé Pinheiro da 543, 599 Villar Palasí, José Luis 453
Valcárcel, Antonio de [Count of Velázquez Soriano, Isabel 350 Villar Ponte, Antón 261, 266
Lumiares] 28, 395 Velázquez, Luis José 9, 10, 13, 14, 73 Villar Ponte, Ramón 261, 266
Valdés, Alfonso 394 Velázquez, Ruy 505 Villasandino 412, 602, 608
Valdés, Juan de 457, 460, 465 Vélez de Guevara, Luis 427, 463, 599 Villasante, Luis 47, 48, 105, 106, 108,
Valdés, Mario J. xi, 54, 56, 58, 63, 581 Venezuela 299, 300, 478 109, 448–450, 454
Valencia 25, 38, 65, 102, 136, 156, 190, Venice 196, 606 Villaurrutia, Xavier 160
239, 241–246, 248, 250, 251, 347, Ventadorm, Bernat de 608 Villemain, Abel-François 1, 4, 23, 30,
348, 393, 414, 431, 433, 434, 436, Venturino, Alicia 160 42, 74, 82, 84, 93, 119
439–444, 463, 465, 493, 496, 505, Verbeke, Werner 350, 692 Villena, Enrique de 575, 577, 605
509, 539, 541, 550, 604–607, 612 Verdaguer, Jacint [or Jacinto] 157, Villena, Isabel de 605, 606
Valenciano, Ana 499, 540, 541, 550, 199, 203, 206, 239, 296, 442, 650 Villena, Luis Antonio de 394, 661
551 Verdaguer, Màrius 154, 160 Vinyoles, Narcís 603
Valentí Fiol, Eduardo 647, 724 Verde, Cesário 167, 312, 323, 498 Viqueira, José María 599
Valera, Juan 40, 192, 209, 468, 632, Vergara, Francisco 394 Viqueira, Xohán Vicente 154
638, 639 Vergara, Juan 394 Virgil [Publius Vergilius Maro] 204,
Valerius of Bierzo 387 Verhaeren, Emile 155, 157, 160 249, 387, 458
Valero, José Antonio 9, 14, 17 Verín 551, 712 Viseu 417, 419
750 Index
Viso, Marquis of 188, 280 Wilde, Oscar 160 Z

Vitoria 108 Williams, Stanley 24 Zabala, Juan Mateo 223
Vitoria, Baltasar de 427 Wilson, George Washington xiv, Zacuto, Abraham 381
Vivaldi, Ugolino 293 155, 289 Zahara de los Atunes 280
Vivaldi, Vadino 293 Woestijne, Paul van de 388 Zajjaji, al- 372
Vivas, João [Fr.] 408, 410, 414, 425 Wolf, Ferdinand Joseph 42, 125, 486 Zamacois, Eduardo 262
Viveiro 253, 261 Wolfowitz, Paul 220 Zamakhshari, Abu’l-Qasim
Vives, Juan Luis 392–395 Wolfzettel, Friedrich 639 Mahmud b. ‘Umar, al- 373
Vizcarra, Zacarías de 217 Wray, Allison 332 Zamora 190, 199, 206, 476, 482,
Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet] Wright, Richard 208, 209, 326, 331 502, 505, 509, 542, 549, 550, 552,
189, 246, 427, 616, 617, 620, 624, Wright, Roger 333, 350, 430 599
628 Wulf, Fernando 88, 90, 108 Zamora Vicente, Alonso 599
Vossler, Karl 388 Wyngaerde, Anton van den Zamora, Francisco de 190, 199
[Antonio de las Viñas] 280, 281 Zaragoza 208, 336, 375, 422, 481,
W 603, 610, 653
Wagner, Richard 240 X Zarauz 223
Wahlöö, Per 305 Xauen 505 Zarco, João Gonçalves 318, 319
Walsh, John K. 726 Ximenez Aritza, Iñigo 106 Zavala, Antonio 561
Webber, Ruth H. 493, 502, 503 Ximénez de Rada, Rodrigo Zavala, Iris M. 77
Weinrich, Harald 458 [Archbishop] 343–345, 417, 419, Zaya, Antonio 301
Wellek, René 19 503, 584, 592, 605 Zea, Leopoldo 8
Werbner, Pnina 134 Xitu, Uanhenga 273–276 Zeno, Apostolo 617
Werfell, Esteban 106 Zeromski, Stefan 663
Werner, Michael 3, 57 Y Zoberman, Pierre 133
Westphalia 10 Yates, Alan 140 Zola, Émile 240, 639
White, Hayden 66 Ybarra, Ramón de 233 Zorita, C. Ángel 503
White, Linda 104, 109, 113, 114 Yborra Aznar, José Juan 115 Zorrilla de San Martín, Juan 160
White, Steven F. 180 Yeats, William Butler 262 Zorrilla, José 288, 463, 637, 638
Whitehead, Alfred North 237 Ynduráin, Domingo 458, 460 Zuberoa 106
Whitman, Walt 212, 218, 219 Ynduráin, Francisco 458, 460 Zumthor, Paul 479, 569
Wiebe, Karl 572 Yoshihiro, Ohsawa 56 Zurara, Gomes Eanes de 165
Wieviork, Michel 274 Youssef, Saadi 116 Zuria, Jaun 226
Wigen, Kären E. 58, 60, 66–68, 72, Ysern i Lagarda, Josep-Antoni 112 Zurita, Jerónimo 461
78, 130 Yuan, Heh-Hsiang 56 Zwartjes, Otto 95, 356
In the series Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages the following titles have been
published thus far or are scheduled for publication:
XXIV Cabo aseguinolaza, Fernando, anxo abuín gonzalez and César Domínguez (eds.): A
Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. Volume I. 2010. xiv, 750 pp.
XXIII gillesPie, gerald, manfred engel and bernard DieTeRle (eds.): Romantic Prose Fiction. 2008.
xxi, 733 pp.
XXII CoRnis-PoPe, marcel and John neubaueR (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.
Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume III: he making and remaking of literary
institutions. 2007. xiv, 522 pp. [subseries on literary Cultures 3]
XXI eYsTeinsson, astradur and Vivian lisKa (eds.): Modernism. With the assistance of Anke Brouwers,
Vanessa Joosen, Nathan Van Camp, Dirk Van Hulle, Katrien Vloeberghs and Björn hor Vilhjálmsson. 2007.
xii, 1043 pp. (2 vols.).
XX CoRnis-PoPe, marcel and John neubaueR (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.
Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume II. 2006. xiv, 512 pp. [subseries on literary
Cultures 2]
XIX CoRnis-PoPe, marcel and John neubaueR (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe.
Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume I. 2004. xx, 648 pp. [subseries on literary
Cultures 1]
XVIII sonDRuP, steven P. and Virgil nemoianu (eds.): Nonictional Romantic Prose. Expanding borders. In
collaboration with Gerald Gillespie. 2004. viii, 477 pp.
XVII esTeRHammeR, angela (ed.): Romantic Poetry. 2002. xii, 537 pp.
XVI Knabe, Peter-eckhard, Roland moRTieR et François mouReau (dir.): L'Aube de la Modernité 1680-1760.
2002. viii, 554 pp.
XV aRnolD, a. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 2: English- and Dutch-speaking
regions. 2001. x, 672 pp.
XIV glaseR, Horst albert und györgy m. VaJDa † (Hrsg.): Die Wende von der Auklärung zur Romantik
1760–1820. Epoche im Überblick. 2001. x, 760 pp.
XIII KlaniCzaY, Tibor, eva KusHneR et Paul CHaVY (dir.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). Tome IV:
Crises et essors nouveaux (1560–1610). 2000. xiv, 817 pp.
XII aRnolD, a. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. 1997.
xviii, 398 pp.
XI beRTens, Hans and Douwe W. FoKKema (eds.): International Postmodernism. heory and literary practice.
1997. xvi, 581 pp.
X aRnolD, a. James, Julio RoDRiguez-luis and J. michael DasH (eds.): A History of Literature in the
Caribbean. Volume 1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions. 1994. xviii, 579 pp.
IX gillesPie, gerald (ed.): Romantic Drama. 1993. xvi, 516 pp.
VIII gaRbeR, Frederick (ed.): Romantic Irony. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1988. 395 pp.
VII KlaniCzaY, Tibor, eva KusHneR et andré sTegmann (dir.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600).
Tome I: L'avènement de l'esprit nouveau (1400–1480). (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1988. 594 pp.
VI:2 european-language Writing in sub-saharan africa. Volume 2. 1986.
VI:1 european-language Writing in sub-saharan africa. Volume 1. 1986.
V WeisgeRbeR, Jean (dir.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume II: héorie. (Akadémiai Kiadó)
Budapest, 1986. 704 pp.
IV WeisgeRbeR, Jean (dir.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume I: Histoire. (Akadémiai Kiadó)
III VaJDa, györgy m. † (dir.): Le Tournant du siècle des Lumières 1760–1820. Les genres en vers des Lumières au
romantisme. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1982. 684 pp.
II balaKian, anna (ed.): he Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages. (Akadémiai Kiadó)
I WeissTein, ulrich (ed.): Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest,
1982.
he series incorporates a subseries on Literary Cultures
I. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and
20th centuries.
Volume I (Vol. XIX in the main series)
Volume II (Vol. XX in the main series)
Volume III (Vol. XXII in the main series)
Volume IV n.y.p.
(Eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer)
II. Comparative Histories of Nordic Literary Cultures n.y.p.
III. Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula n.y.p.

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A CompArAtive History of LiterAtures

in tHe iberiAn peninsuLA

Coordinating Committee for

fernAnDo CAbo AseGuinoLAZA

JoHn benJAmins pubLisHinG CompAny

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages ix

Section I. Discourses on Iberian literary history

Section II. he Iberian peninsula as a literary space

Identitarian projections: Between isolationism and reintegrationism

Cities, cultural centers and enclaves

Bilbao and the literary system in the Basque Country 222

Section III. Multilingualism and literature in the Iberian Peninsula

Literary language and diatopic variation: Catalan literary cultures 429

Section IV. Dimensions of orality

Section V. Temporal frames and literary (inter-)systems

he court of the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1504), or the break in the equilibrium

Note on Documentation and Translation

Coordinators: Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza and César Domínguez

he European horizon of Peninsular literary historiographical discourses

National history, foreign literature

he European literary ield and national literatures

Revisio and literary history

Literary memoir and heritage

Antiaustracismo and Chronopolitics

As for the geopolitical background of these historiographical processes, it is pertinent to

History as apology: Literary nationalism

he language of the nation

he second observation pointed to the European horizon of historiographical nationalism of

he apologetic direction of eighteenth-century Spanish literary history led to a proto-

In summary, eighteenth-century historiography introduced essential aspects that explained the

In reality, these observations it the evolution of Denina towards a historical-critical concept

Friedrich Schlegel’s History of ancient and modern literature

he inluence of the chrono-literary interpretation of Iberian literature can be clearly seen in

he institutionalization of Spanish literature

In the ield of literary historiography, this process can be understood as an appropriation by

Pidal, historian and member of the Spanish government

he irst national historian

Pers i Ramona et alii

Suebi and Celts

However, the primary reference of Galician historiography continues to be Historia de la

he literature of the Portuguese nation

Euskal literaturaren historia

he historiography of Basque literature faced a diferent situation (Lasagabaster 2002). Prece-

he purpose of the HALEL [History of African Literature in European Languages] project

arrived at a satisfactory answer regarding the appropriateness of geographical delimitation. By

An example of Iberian meta-geography: “he charm of a perpetual enigma”

he igure of English Hispanist Aubrey F. G. Bell (1882–1950) ofers an interesting example of

When geography matters: Why a meta-geography of (Iberian) literary historiography?

meta-geographical categories, especially those received through literary histories. Tradition-

Paene-insula: For a pathogenia of the “peninsula efect”

he mythologization of al-Andalus/Spain/Ishbaniya as an earthly paradise (on the etymology

Literary chronicles from Liliput: “One knows what it means to be small”

Both directions demonstrate the intense double consciousness of knowing “what it is to be

“El-Rey de Portugale / Barcas mandou lavrare” (Johan Zorro): A tragical-nautical history

From the disputed Peninsula to the postnational Peninsula

As I stated at the beginning, the documentation is abundant and my focus infrequent. he

Coordinator: Sharon Feldman

Introduction: he Iberian Peninsula as a literary space

of Calvalcante, ofers a postcolonial, transnational perspective that underlines the dilemmas

he hidden history of tripartite Iberianism

his “religiously-enabled” and monistically-deined model of national mobilization would