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Iberian Interfaces Literary and Cultural Relations between Spain and Portugal, 1870–1930 a n t on io s á e z de l g a d o s a n t i ag o pé r e z i s a si
Iberian Interfaces
Funding Acknowledgement The translation of this work has been funded with Portuguese national funds by FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, I.P., through project IUDB/00509/2020.
Antonio Sáez Delgado Santiago Pérez Isasi
Iberian Interfaces Literary and Cultural Relations between Spain and Portugal, 1870–1930
Translated by Eleanor Staniforth
Antonio Sáez Delgado Lingüística e Literaturas Universidade de Évora Évora, Portugal
Santiago Pérez Isasi Centro de Estudos Comparatistas Universidade de Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal
Translated by Eleanor Staniforth
Pontevedra, Spain
ISBN 978-3-030-91751-7 ISBN 978-3-030-91752-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91752-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
About the Book
Research on the historical, cultural and literary relations between Spain and Portugal has often imposed the cliché of neighbours who turn their back on each other. However, if we study in depth the history of cultural relations between the two countries, we find that there have been countless exchanges and contacts (translations, friendships, joint events, influences, etc.). This volume focuses on one of the historical moments in which these literary and cultural relations were most intense and fruitful: the period between 1870 and 1930—that is, from the generation of Antero de Quental, Clarín, Eça de Queirós or Emilia Pardo Bazán to the Iberian modernist and avant-garde movements (Fernando Pessoa, Ramón Gómez de la Serna ou José de Almada Negreiros). An analysis of the contacts between Portuguese and Spanish writers and artists of this period shows that, at least among the cultural elites, there were intense and fruitful dialogues across political and linguistic borders. The focus of this volume is in line with the most recent developments in the field of Iberian Studies, identified primarily as an area of Comparative Literature. This book conceives the Iberian Peninsula as a complex and multilingual cultural polysystem, polycentric and heterogeneous, in which diverse literary systems coexist and establish relations of mutual interdependence. It is this network of relations and interferences that justifies a comparative consideration of Iberian literatures and cultures, such as the one we propose in this study.
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Contents
1 Introduction 1 2 The Age of Cultural Iberisms (1870–1890) 21 3 The Age of Symbolism and Modernismo 57 4 The First Portuguese Modernism and the First Avant-Garde119 5 The Second Portuguese Modernism and the Generation of 1927: Some Open-Ended Reflections167 Index177
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About the Authors
Antonio Sáez Delgado is an associate professor at University of Évora, an integrated researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center of History, Cultures and Societies, and a collaborator researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Lisbon. He is a specialist in early-twentieth-century literary relations between Portugal and Spain, subject to which he has devoted several books, the most recent of which are Pessoa y España (Pre-Textos, 2015); Almada Negreiros en Madrid (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2017, with Filipa Soares); De espaldas abiertas. Relaciones literárias y culturales ibéricas (1870–1930) (Comares, 2018, with Santiago Pérez Isasi); and Literaturas entrelazadas. Portugal y España, del modernismo y la vanguardia al tiempo de las dictaduras (Peter Lang, 2021); and numerous articles and chapters in collective works. He has also published in Spain and Spanish American countries translations of works by Portuguese writers such as Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago and António Lobo Antunes, among others. He commissioned the exhibitions Suroeste. Relações Literárias e Artísticas entre Portugal e Espanha 1890–1936 (MEIAC, 2010, which catalogue was published in both Spain and Portugal) and, with Jerónimo Pizarro, Fernando Pessoa em Espanha (National Library of Portugal, 2013; National Library of Spain, 2014). As a literary critic, he is a frequent contributor to Babelia, the cultural supplement of El País newspaper. He is the director of Suroeste, Journal of Iberian Literatures. In 2008 he received the Giovanni Pontiero Translation Award and in 2014 the Eduardo ix
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Lourenço Prize for Iberian Studies. He is the head of the Chair of Iberian Studies at the University of Évora. Santiago Pérez Isasi is Assistant Lecturer (Professor Auxiliar) at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. His main research interests include Iberian Studies, Literary History and Digital Humanities. He has published extensively on those subjects, with publications that include De espaldas abiertas. Relaciones literarias y culturales ibéricas (1870–1930) (Comares, 2018, with Antonio Sáez Delgado), Perspetivas críticas sobre os estudos ibéricos (co-edited with Cristina Martínez Tejero, Ca’ Foscari, 2019), Los límites del Hispanismo (Peter Lang, 2017) or Looking at Iberia (co-edited with Ângela Fernandes, 2013). He developed the project Digital Map of Iberian Literary Relations (1870–1930) and is co-director of project IStReS—Iberian Studies Reference Site, with Esther Gimeno Ugalde. He is also co-editor of the International Journal of Iberian Studies. For Editorial La Umbría y la Solana, he has translated José Luis Peixoto’s O caminho imperfeito (El camino imperfecto, 2020) and Hélia Correia’s Adoecer (Dolencia, 2021).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1.1 Iberian Studies and Comparative Literature As we delve into the bibliography on literary and cultural relations between Spain and Portugal, a recurring cliché quickly becomes apparent: two neighbours with their backs to one another engage in reciprocal aggression when they are not displaying mutual indifference. Historic tensions, unresolved conflicts and years of isolation and reciprocal incomprehension appear to have erected an invisible, unbreachable wall between the two countries. Yet, when we examine the true history of economic, political and cultural interaction between Spain and Portugal, this cliché proves inaccurate: rather than a wall, they are separated by an interface allowing the flow of contacts, dialogues, confluences and influences from one country to another. These flows have been particularly intense at certain times in history. The systematic study of these relations is a relatively recent phenomenon1 and research has focused not only on the relationship between Portugal and Spain, but also on relations with linguistic and cultural areas such as Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country. Historic events including the fall of the autocratic dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, the rapid disintegration of Portugal’s colonial empire following the Carnation 1 Of course, earlier examples can also be found: one of the best-known is Pyrene by Fidelino de Figueiredo (1935).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sáez Delgado, S. Pérez Isasi, Iberian Interfaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91752-4_1
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Revolution and the accession of both countries to the European Union in 1986 have given rise to a wider debate about their place in Europe and the world (masterfully analysed, in the case of Portugal, by Eduardo Lourenço in O labirinto da saudade [1978/2000]), as well as increasing mutual interest and engagement between these Iberian neighbours. The heightened solidarity between southern European countries following the 2008 economic crisis and Lisbon’s transformation into a leading tourist destination also helped to speed up and democratise what had until then been a largely intellectual and artistic movement. From a strictly academic perspective, a specific field seeking to explore these interrelations within the geocultural space of the peninsula—Iberian Studies—emerged in the 1980s. The discipline has a far-reaching genealogy: it is simultaneously a critical expansion of Hispanic Studies, as it has been framed in the English-speaking world, especially the United States (Faber 2008; Resina 2009; Gimeno Ugalde 2017),2 a sub-field of Comparative Literature (Magalhães 2007a, b; Marcos de Dios 2007, among others) and a renewed form of Area Studies (Pinheiro 2013). Although these academic traditions have different theoretical and methodological foundations, such as poststructuralist criticism and Cultural Studies in the case of the United States, and Dionýz Ď urišin’s interliterary theory (1988), Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory (1990) and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field (1992) in the Iberian case,3 they share a common focus and objective: to rethink the Iberian peninsula, with its rich linguistic, cultural and artistic variety, as a complex system of historic interrelations that are worthy of study beyond traditional linguistic and literary divisions. 2 A critique of this approach can be found in Gabilondo 2013–2014. These publications should also be viewed in the context of the movement to review Hispanic Studies in the English-speaking world and beyond, advocated by works such as Ideologies of Hispanism (Moraña 2005), Spain Beyond Spain (Epps and Cifuentes 2005), New Spain, New Literatures (Martín-Estudillo and Spadaccini 2010), Un Hispanismo para el siglo xxi (Cornejo and Villamandos 2011), Nuevos hispanismos. Para una crítica del lenguaje dominante (Ortega 2012) and Los límites del Hispanismo (Pérez Isasi et al. 2017). It is important to note that not all of these publications focus on peninsular Hispanic Studies, nor do they include non- Castilian Iberian literatures and cultures in their analyses; for example, Un Hispanismo para el siglo xxi takes an alternative approach to hegemonic Hispanism—(Trans)Atlantic Studies— whereas New Spain, New Literatures aims to extend the Hispanic Studies canon to the other official languages in Spain and to Portugal. 3 For a discussion of the possibilities and problems involved in applying these theories to the Iberian Peninsula, see Harrington 2000, Casas 2003 and Domínguez 2007.
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Both of these academic traditions are linked to the re-emergence of Area Studies, which seeks to study geopolitical and geocultural units that are “bigger than the nation, smaller than the world” (Bush 2014), and which have been greatly reconfigured since the Cold War (by adopting, for instance, the postcolonial perspective advanced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 2005). However, in order to overcome the arbitrary nature of national divisions in Literary Studies, it is not enough to merely replace traditional national borders with a new supranational geographic entity or one that is not connected to any specific nation state. César Domínguez has warned of “the danger of transforming spaces into natural entities, that is, of de-ideologising them” (2007: 78). What is needed, therefore, is a reconfiguration of the Iberian space4 that maintains its status as an ideological, ideologised object while simultaneously rejecting any new form of Iberian essentialism, even for strategic purposes. One of the central aims of Iberian Studies is to produce a prismatic or rhizomatic conceptualisation of the Iberian Peninsula allowing multiple connections between different points without needing to pass radially through centres of power (as in the approach proposed by Santana 2013). In recent decades, the body of literature in Iberian Studies has grown exponentially and the field is now well-established on the international scientific and academic scene. This growing bibliography ranges from foundational texts like RELIPES I y II (Magalhães 2007a, b), Reading Iberia (Buffery et al. 2007) and Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos (Resina 2009) to ambitious compilations such as the Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula (Cabo Aseguinolaza et al. 2010; Domínguez et al. 2016) or the Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies (Munoz-Basols et al. 2017), which represent something of an apogee for this relatively recent field in terms of academic prestige and visibility.5 4 As suggested by Enric Bou (2010, 2012), for example, who applies the theories of Lefebvre and Deleuze and Guattari to the study of Iberian literatures and cultures. 5 It would be impossible to list every contribution made to the field of Iberian Literary Studies here; in addition to those already mentioned, the methodological proposals made by Abuín González and Tarrío Varela (2004), Resina (2013), Delgado (2013), Santana (2013), Pérez Isasi (2013, 2017) and Pérez (2016), and the individual or collective works by Fernandes (1986), Carrasco González and Viudas Camarasa (1996), Álvarez Sellers (1999), Sáez Delgado (2000, 2008, 2012, 2015), Carrasco González et al. (2000), Lourenço (2005a, b), Marcos de Dios (2007, 2008, 2012), Ribera Llopis and Arroyo Almaraz (2008), Besse (2010), Fernandes et al. (2010), Sáez Delgado and Gaspar (2010), Martínez-Gil (2010), Lafarga et al. (2010), Gavagnin and Martínez-Gil (2011), Núñez Sabarís (2011), Fernández García and Leal (2012), Pérez Isasi and Fernandes (2013), Harrington (2014),
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Meanwhile, the existence of associations such as the British Association for Contemporary Iberian Studies (ACIS), which publishes the International Journal of Iberian Studies, working groups such as the Iberian Studies Group at the Ohio State University and the Comparative Iberian Studies network at the University of California, and recent conferences such as those held in Lisbon (Estudos Ibéricos: Novos Espaços, May 2016; Os estudos ibéricos a partir da periferia, March 2018), in Chemnitz (II Jornadas de Estudios Culturales Ibéricos, November 2017) or in Siena (Iberismo: strumenti teorici e studi critici, November 2019) provides further evidence of the relevance of this field of study on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit with different theoretical principles, methodologies and practices (Pérez Isasi 2017). This reconsideration of the Iberian geocultural space is inevitably underpinned by politics, as Joan Ramon Resina notes: “Lo que propongo es evidentemente un programa político o, más bien, un proyecto epistemológico sin pretensiones de imparcialidad política” [“What I am proposing is, of course, a political programme, or rather an epistemological project that makes no claims to political impartiality”] (2009: 92). It involves a reconfiguration of linguistic and cultural relations in the Iberian space that, in general terms, rejects national(ist) compartmentalisations of humanistic knowledge. More specifically, it challenges and subverts the almost exclusive focus on Spanish literature in Iberian literary studies (especially in the US context), seeking to deconstruct a nationalist or even imperialist Hispanism that denies or downplays other Iberian cultural contexts (Gabilondo 2013–2014). For a long time, the combination of scientific isolationism and cultural expansionism in ‘Castilianist’ literary studies hindered the development of a broader epistemological, geographical approach, thwarting any possibility of establishing fruitful dialogues and comparisons within the wider geographical context (including Portugal’s rich literature and more purposeful, open interaction with Catalan, Galician and Basque literatures, among others).
Ribera Llopis (2015), Newcomb and Gordon (2017), Bermúdez and Johnson (2018) and Newcomb (2018) are of particular note. An ambitious, albeit non-exhaustive, catalogue of Iberian Studies literature can be found in the IStReS project (Iberian Studies Reference Site, http://istres.letras.ulisboa.pt; Gimeno Ugalde and Pérez Isasi 2017), which now includes more than 1600 references.
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Joan Ramon Resina explores the problems caused by academic and cultural isolationism, as well as by the centralism and nationalism underpinning at least part of Spanish literary studies: el interés de las literaturas vasca, catalana y gallega no es un asunto de corrección política. Su incorporación al currículo del hispanismo es ante todo un asunto de coherencia epistemológica. La historia (política, social, literaria) de la península ibérica no puede estudiarse adecuadamente sin atender a la dialéctica entre las naciones peninsulares. (2009: 91) [the interest in Basque, Catalan and Galician literatures has nothing to do with political correctness. Their incorporation into the Hispanic Studies curriculum is primarily a matter of epistemological coherence. The (political, social and literary) history of the Iberian Peninsula cannot be adequately studied without exploring the dialectic between Iberian nations.]
Yet he is neither the first nor the last to raise these concerns. Ramón Menéndez Pidal already warned of this danger in the prologue to Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas (1949) by Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, stating that “lo que aún más hace perder el interés al estudio de la literatura española en el concierto de las demás es el historizarla sin relacionarla debidamente con los hechos de las literaturas extranjeras” [“what exacerbates this decline in interest in studying Spanish literature among other literatures is the way in which it is historicised without being appropriately compared to foreign literatures”] (Menéndez Pidal 1949: XLIII). Similarly, there has been abundant criticism of the concept of ‘national literature’ itself, especially in the field of Comparative Literature. Claudio Guillén, for example, warns that “como objeto de la historia literaria, la literatura nacional es, en la mayoría de los casos, desde una perspectiva histórico-literaria, una institución no solo insuficiente, sino también espuria y fraudulenta” [“as an object of literary history, national literature is in most cases an institution that is not only inadequate but is also spurious and fraudulent from a historical and literary perspective”] (Guillén 1969: 235) and that “los componentes fundamentales de la historiografía literaria, es decir, de las unidades extensas, como los periodos, las corrientes, las escuelas o los movimientos […] no suelen reducirse a ámbitos nacionales” [“the key components of literary historiography, that is, of large units such as periods, currents, schools and movements […] do not tend to be limited to national borders”] (Guillén 2005: 333).
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The aim here is not to replace one essentialism with another of a higher order by focusing on Iberian rather than Spanish, Portuguese or Catalan literature: perceptions of the Iberian Peninsula as a single unit are a historical construction with an underlying genealogy and ideology. Indeed, Iberia as a metageography linked to other concepts such as south or east6 is an idea that was constructed both externally (especially in Central Europe) and internally, once certain aspects of that romantic heterovision had been accepted and others rejected or challenged (such as Orientalism or exoticism, which jarred with the Spanish and Portuguese people’s understanding of themselves as Latin, Christian populations). At the same time, in promoting a comparative or systemic approach to the interaction and evolution of Iberian literatures, we must not forget the power relations that exist between them. Iberian cultural relations are shaped by dialogue, fruitful interaction, confluence and mutual translation, as well as by a desire for domination, conflict and the silencing of the ‘peripheral Other’ by the hegemonic centres. Therefore, the approach to Iberian Studies taken in this volume encompasses perspectives from Comparative Literature, which have contributed to a rethinking of literary history in recent years. Our aim is to explore the various elements in the literary (poly)system: production and reception, institutions and shared literary repertoires, effective exchanges (gatherings, personal relations, translations, etc.) and systemic synchronicities between the different literatures and cultures present on the peninsula. We also propose a polycentric vision (which could also be described as ‘rhizomatic’ or ‘prismatic’, to borrow a term from Helena Buescu [2013: 16]) of the Iberian Peninsula, rejecting the monopoly of bidirectional relations between Portugal and Spain or Lisbon and Madrid, to incorporate ‘peripheral’ or ‘minoritised’ spaces and systems (all of which are of course controversial terms): Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country. These cultural spaces should, on the other hand, be viewed as complex and heterogeneous in themselves. This plural, complementary approach to the geocultural spaces that make up the Iberian Peninsula reveals the functioning of a dynamic Iberian polysystem that is constantly evolving, with multiple, variable structures that are regularly built and rebuilt on the basis of an exercise in internal opposition and tension between the centre(s) and periphery(ies). In the period covered by this book, this approach also offers fertile ground for 6
See Domínguez (2006) or Vecchi (2013).
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active coexistence or open confrontation between ‘modernists’, ‘anti- modernists’—defined rather insightfully by Antoine Compagnon in the following terms: “los modernos en dificultades con los tiempos modernos, el modernismo o la modernidad, o los modernos que lo fueron a regañadientes, modernos desarraigados, o incluso modernos intempestivos” [“modernists who struggle with modern times, modernism or modernity; reluctant modernists, uprooted modernists, or even premature modernists”] (2007: 11) and recently used by José Carlos Mainer (2010) to cast light on Spanish literature—and traditionalist conservatives, staunch opponents of modernity. Using this methodology, we are able to study writers who appear on the top level of their national canon, but which operate alongside other writers from a secondary level, but who are nonetheless fundamental in terms of reception and interaction between systems due to their role as cultural mediators. This also provides us with a space in which to examine trends or poetics traditionally viewed as irreconcilable due to their aesthetic divergence, acknowledging the fact that they emerged in parallel and shared a determination to overcome these tensions. The Iberian focus of this study ensures that some of these literary trends assume far greater prominence in comparative terms than they had when explored from a strictly national perspective. In this way, certain movements that have been more widely overlooked in traditional literary histories (the first Spanish avant-garde and ultraism, in particular) are accorded greater conceptual space based on their importance for reception and not necessarily on their productive capacity. This volume can therefore be situated within the field of Iberian Studies, understood as a branch of Comparative Literature, for three main reasons: firstly, it seeks to systematise and compile the ample academic literature focusing on this period in Iberian literary and cultural relations; secondly, it aims to provide an overview to inform subsequent research on specific authors, texts or periods overlooked by literary criticism; finally, it offers an innovative methodology for studying and conceptualising Iberian literary relations that may be applied to other periods, movements or phenomena. It is intended as an initial chapter in a far broader endeavour: to explore the history of literary and cultural interrelations within the Iberian polysystem.
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1.2 From Iberism to the Avant-Gardes: 1870–1930 It would, perhaps, be relevant here to explain the choice of this particular historical and cultural period as the focus of this study. As we hope to demonstrate throughout this volume, it is a period that bore witness to intense relations between the different geocultural contexts that make up the Iberian Peninsula: Portugal, Spain, Catalonia and Galicia. A large group of intellectuals, including Antero de Quental, Valera, Unamuno, Teixeira de Pascoaes or Joan Maragall, embraced a certain idea of Iberism, which was not so much political and economic as cultural and spiritual. This gave rise to joint publications, cross-border initiatives and reflections on the ‘Iberian soul’ and its artistic manifestations. The vision of an Iberian Peninsula that was historically, politically and spiritually united—or at least closely linked by language, culture and art—can be detected in the works of these authors and in the personal relations and abundant correspondence documented between them. One of the key aims of Iberian Studies from a literary studies perspective is (or should be) to reconstruct the historical evolution of these systemic relations between the peninsula’s literatures and cultures, and it is no coincidence that the essays produced on the subject tend to focus primarily on the times when contact and interference were at their height: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (before, during and after the ‘Iberian union’, when Spain and Portugal were united under the power of the Habsburg dynasty), the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and the contemporary democratic period, primarily. There can be no doubt that these are the historical periods with the greatest proximity and dialogue between Iberian cultures, due to the union of Spain and Portugal under a single dynasty from 1580 to 1640 in the first case; the alignment prompted by cultural Iberism in the second; and the opening of the borders brought about by the fall of the dictatorships and the two countries’ integration into the European Union, allowing political, commercial, cultural and artistic flows between them, in the third. In this volume, however, we aim to go beyond a mere positivist compilation of gatherings, exchanges and publications. By focusing on the parallel, interlinked nature of the spread of literary, cultural and artistic movements in different geographical and linguistic areas of the peninsula, we seek a more systemic overview of Iberian cultural relations. In our analysis of Iberian literatures, we apply the ‘entangled history’ methodology (Bauck and Maier 2015), which promotes a transnational
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reconsideration of historiographic paradigms by exploring dependencies, interferences and transfers and which draws on postcolonial theories and Wallerstein’s world-system theory (2004). This book will delve into Iberian manifestations of literary realism, naturalism, symbolism, modernism (as an aesthetic category in the Spanish or Latin American sense), saudosism, the Generation of 1898, the first modernism (in the Portuguese sense of the term) and the historical avant- garde through its various -isms, extending as far as the final stage in the modernisation process with the Generation of 1927 in Spain and the second modernism in Portugal. Based on these fundamental principles, we will lay the foundations for a comparative study of Iberian literatures underpinned by a conceptual framework that seeks to overcome the monolithic approaches that have impeded the study of national literary histories. This issue has been particularly present in Spain, where wide-ranging concepts such as ‘modernism’—understood from an international perspective that relates it to symbolism as a broad movement linked to a periodological category, as hinted at by Juan Ramón Jiménez—have been resisted due to the presence of a category with the same name in the Spanish tradition that refers to the aesthetic current introduced by Rubén Darío. As a result of this reluctance, a traditional historical approach to Spanish literature predominated in the first half of the twentieth century, based on excessively small segments that were isolated from one another (among the most obvious cases are modernism and the Generation of 1898, or the first avant-garde and the Generation of 1927) to the extent that they were often irreconcilable, impeding the adoption of a perspective shaped by continuity, integration and inclusion. This focus on chronologically and culturally extensive movements also explains the volume’s organisation into three (or four) main sections. The first explores cultural Iberisms, Iberian realism and naturalism and the cultural and literary ‘revival’ that blossomed on the Iberian Peninsula throughout the nineteenth century. The second is centred around Portuguese symbolism and Spanish modernism, while the third studies the first Portuguese modernism and the Iberian avant-gardes, which split and continued in a new movement (the second Portuguese modernism and the Spanish Generation of 1927) that is briefly reflected upon at the end of this book. Although the 1870s, the 1890s and 1915 may be viewed as a symbolic frontier between one section and the next, it is not our intention to suggest any kind of rupture or discontinuity between
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generations, movements or groups of authors, but rather to enhance readers’ understanding of the heterogeneous continuum produced by the complexities of the modern age. In this way, as Nil Santiáñez (2002: 65) recommends, we reject the urge to establish rigid chronological boundaries—so often used for pedagogical reasons—and produce a ‘cross section of the moment’ of modernity, providing an overview of a multifaceted mosaic of constantly evolving trends and aesthetics. The chronological parallels (and, to a large extent, aesthetic alignment) between Iberian literatures that are identified here are in no way intended to imply that every movement is of equal relevance in every area, whether it is in terms of production or reception. From the perspective of literary production, the movements described here form part of an Iberian canon that shifts from one geocultural space to another. For example, the most crucial time for Portuguese poetry (led by Pessoa and the early modernists) corresponds to the least memorable period in Spanish literature: the first avant-garde and ultraism, which are included alongside prominent figures from the Generations of 1898, 1914 and 1927 in more traditional literary histories. It is therefore possible to identify a dynamic Iberian canon that flows between the different cultural spaces in the Iberian Peninsula and is supplemented by elements deriving from the influence of other European literatures on these national literatures. In order to present this analysis, the volume will be organised into three main chronological and thematic sections (and an epilogue), in which we will explore the authors and texts that represent each period. These sections, whose temporal bounds are deliberately porous, allow us to demonstrate the complex shifts occurring in Iberian literary systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1.2.1 The Age of Cultural Iberisms The chosen start limit of 1870 shares the same “relative conventionality” (Reis 2010: 95) as any other date used to delimit a literary history study. In Portuguese historiography, this date immediately evokes the Generation of 1870, made up of key figures in Iberian cultural relations such as Antero de Quental, Eça de Queirós and Oliveira Martins, among others. In the years immediately preceding and following 1870, Antero de Quental published two of the central texts in cultural Iberism: Portugal perante a revolução de Hespanha: considerações sobre o futuro da politica portugueza no ponto de vista da democracia iberica (1868) and Causas da decadência dos
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povos peninsulares (1871). Meanwhile, in Spain, the Revolution of 1868 and the failed First Republic gave rise to a period of political stability combined with a profound sense of stagnation and decay, which is reflected in the works of the main authors in Spanish realism and naturalism. The authors from the Generation of 1870 in Portugal and the Generation of 1868 in Spain serve as an anchor for our reflections on this period: we refer in particular to Antero de Quental and Oliveira Martins in Portugal, and to Juan Valera and Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’ in Spain. Our analysis of the concepts of realism and naturalism (with the pivotal figure of Emilia Pardo Bazán as a benchmark) has a clear Iberian dimension, even if we cannot assert the existence of an ‘Iberian naturalism’, as we will see in the relevant section. It was also around 1870 (some years before or after, depending on the cultural area in question) that literary revival movements emerged in Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country. Although the dates are again imprecise, the publication of Rosalía de Castro’s Cantares gallegos (1863) and the poem ‘L’Atlantida’ by Jacinto Verdaguer (1877) or the organisation of the Floral Games in Catalonia (1859) and the Basque Country (1853) marked the start of a trend towards national and literary regeneration, which were inevitably intertwined. In these movements, nationalism and cultural criticism are inseparable. Alongside Spanish disaster and nineteenth-century Iberism, they aimed to drive artistic creation as well as political, social and economic progress. They are, therefore, a pan-Iberian phenomenon (which should, of course, be situated within a wider European movement). 1.2.2 Symbolism and Spanish Modernism A second, equally subjective temporal landmark is 1890. In the international context, M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane’s classic study Modernism (1991) identifies 1890 as the date when the process of modernisation began in Europe, culminating in the historical avant-garde. From the Portuguese perspective, 1890, the year of the famous British Ultimatum, also marks the dawn of poetic symbolism in Portugal and across the Iberian Peninsula with the publication of Oaristos by Eugénio de Castro. Just two years earlier, Azul…, with which Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío revolutionised Spanish lyric poetry, had been released. This second period is dominated by the emergence and expansion of Portuguese symbolism and Spanish modernism, alongside Portuguese
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saudosism and the Spanish Generation of 1898. Symbolists and modernists shared a cosmopolitan intent and a passion for models imported from French symbolist poetry and the work of Rubén Darío, while saudosists and ’98ists sought answers to the challenges of the time by venturing deeper into their own cultures, with a clear nationalistic component. During this phase, which spans the period from approximately 1890 to 1915, an extremely interesting debate emerged between defenders and detractors of the importation and imitation of hegemonic poetics in Europe and America as a first step towards acceptance of an aesthetic model looking outwards without inhibitions. The complexity and plurality of this period are embodied by several authors in particular: the Portuguese writer Eugénio de Castro, whose impact on the Spanish literary scene was more significant than it ever was in his own country; Miguel de Unamuno, perhaps the best-known intellectual of his time on both sides of the border; Teixeira de Pascoaes, whose saudosist poetry reached almost every cultural corner on the Iberian Peninsula; and figures such as Catalan poet Joan Maragall, Ramón María de Valle-Inclán from Galicia and the writers of Grupo Nós, who will allow us to extend our focus from Spanish and Portuguese cultures to a broader Iberian context. 1.2.3 The First Portuguese Modernism and the First Avant-Garde The third section of this volume centres around the first Portuguese modernism and the first Spanish avant-garde, examining the reception, assimilation and production on the Iberian Peninsula of the avant-garde -isms that emerged in Europe around the time of World War I. Alongside these -isms, we must take the following movements into consideration, which are listed in chronological order: the first Portuguese modernism, traditionally linked to the publication of Orpheu magazine in 1915, Portuguese futurism and the aesthetic vision of Fernando Pessoa, with sensationism taking particular prominence; the creationism introduced in Spain by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro from 1916, and the ultraism that emerged in 1918 through magazines such as Grecia and Ultra, the standard bearers for the movement in Madrid. Participants in the aesthetic adventure of the first Portuguese modernism and the first Spanish avant-garde, which may be situated between
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1915 and 1927, shared a desire to bring their respective literary systems into line with European aesthetic trends, albeit with different premises and results. They also emerged in a similar way, articulated through magazines that revealed an active and somewhat peaceful coexistence with symbolist, decadentist and, in the case of Spain, modernist poets. The period encompassing the first Portuguese modernism and the first Spanish avant-garde is represented in this volume by Fernando Pessoa, whose proximity to Spain has not yet been sufficiently explored; Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who lived in Portugal and continued to write his greguerías, or witty one-line poems, in Lisbon; and José de Almada Negreiros, who lived in Madrid from 1927 to 1932 and was an active participant in the cultural life of the Spanish capital. This section will also analyse early-twentieth-century Basque literature: in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, the Basque literary system underwent a period of modernisation through the work of writers who belatedly adapted symbolism and post-romanticism based on European and Iberian models. 1.2.4 The Second Portuguese Modernism and the Generation of 1927 The volume ends with some open-ended reflections on the second Portuguese modernism and the Generation of 1927, whose evolution takes us beyond the chronological limits established for this study. As well as being founded almost simultaneously during the symbolic year of 1927, the two movements shared an active interest in literary criticism, a radical admiration for certain writers from the previous generation (such as Pessoa and Gómez de la Serna) and an insightful approach to their respective national literary traditions, which was apparent in their passion for Camões and Góngora in an interesting conceptual chiasm viewing tradition as avant-garde and avant-garde as tradition. The authors considered in these final reflections also clustered around established magazines—Presença in Coimbra and La Gaceta Literaria in Madrid—whose close links resulted in collaborations that were only interrupted by the ideological shift taken by La Gaceta Literaria. As we have noted, it would be beyond the chronological scope of this study to dedicate the same depth and breadth of analysis to these authors as we do in previous sections. The end point selected for this book—1930— represents the start of a series of drastic, and, in many ways, tragic changes
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that rocked Spain and Portugal for many years. The introduction of the Estado Novo in Portugal in 1933, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the immediate establishment of Francoism represent a historical, political and cultural turning point, suggesting that the 1930s should be considered the start of a new chapter in Iberian cultural relations. This new chapter offers fertile ground for future research by us or by other, more authoritative figures.
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Cabo Aseguinolaza, Fernando, Anxo Abuín González, and César Domínguez, eds. 2010. A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. Vol. 1. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Carrasco González, Juan, and Antonio Viudas Camarasa, eds. 1996. Actas del Congreso internacional luso-español de lengua y cultura en la frontera. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura. Carrasco González, Juan, María Jesús Fernández García, and Maria Luísa Leal, eds. 2000. Actas del congreso internacional de historia y cultura en la frontera / 1.° Encuentro de lusitanistas españoles. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura. Casas, Arturo. 2003. Sistema interliterario y planificación historiográfica a propósito del espacio geocultural ibérico. Interlitteraria 8: 68–96. Compagnon, Antoine. 2007. Los antimodernos. Barcelona: Acantilado. Cornejo Parriego, Rosalía, and Alberto Villamandos Ferreira. 2011. Un Hispanismo para el siglo XXI. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Delgado, Luisa Elena. 2013. ‘If We Build It, Will They Come?’ Iberian Studies as a Field of Dreams. In Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula, ed. Joan Ramon Resina, 37–53. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Díaz-Plaja, Guillermo. 1949. Historia general de las literaturas hispanoamericanas. Barcelona: Barna. Domínguez, César. 2006. The South European Orient: A Comparative Reflection on Space in Literary History. Modern Language Quarterly 67: 419–449. ———. 2007. The Horizons of Interliterary Theory in the Iberian Peninsula: Reception and Testing Ground. In The Horizons of Contemporary Slavic Comparative Literature Studies, ed. Halina Janaszek-Ivaničková, 70–83. Warsaw: Elipsa. Domínguez, César, Anxo Abuín González, and Ellen Sapega, eds. 2016. A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. Vol. 2. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ď urišin, Dionýz. 1988. Theory of Interliterary Process. Bratislava: Veda/Publishing House of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Epps, Brad, and Luis Fernández Cifuentes. 2005. Spain beyond Spain. Modernity, Literary History and National Identity. Bucknell University Press. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. Polysystem Studies. Poetics Today 11 (1). Faber, Sebastiaan. 2008. Economies of Prestige: The Place of Iberian Studies in the American University. Hispanic Research Journal 9 (1): 7–32. Fernandes, Manuel Correia. 1986. Literatura Portuguesa em Espanha. Ensaio de uma Bibliografía (1890–1985). Porto: Livraria Telos Editora. Fernandes, Ângela, et al., eds. 2010. Diálogos Ibéricos e Iberoamericanos: actas del VI congreso internacional de ALEPH. Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Comparatistas/ Editorial Academia del Hispanismo.
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Fernández García, María Jesús, and Maria Luísa Leal, eds. 2012. Imagologías ibéricas: construyendo la imagen del otro peninsular. Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura. de Figueiredo, Fidelino. 1935. Pyrene. Ponto de vista para uma Introdução à História Comparada das Literaturas Portuguesa e Española. Lisbon: Empresa Nacional de Publicidade. Gabilondo, Joseba. 2013–2014. Spanish Nationalist Excess: A Decolonial and Postnational Critique of Iberian Studies. Prosopopeya 8: 23–60. Gavagnin, Gabriella, and Víctor Martínez-Gil, eds. 2011. Entre literatures. Hegemonies i perifèries en els processos de mediació literaria. Lleida: Punctum. Gimeno Ugalde, Esther. 2017. The Iberian Turn: An Overview on Iberian Studies in the United States. Informes del Observatorio / Observatorio Reports 036-12/2017. https://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/ files/estudios_ibericos_en.pdf. Accessed 25 September 2021. Gimeno Ugalde, Esther, and Santiago Pérez Isasi. 2017. IStReS—Iberian Studies Reference Site. Lisbon: Universidade de Lisboa. http://istres.letras.ulisboa.pt. Accessed 4 August 2018. Guillén, Claudio. 1969. Teorías de la historia literaria. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. ———. 2005. Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Introducción a la literatura comparada (ayer y hoy). Barcelona: Tusquets. Harrington, Thomas S. 2000. La generación del 98 y sus correlatos intrapeninsulares: una propuesta para un acercamiento panibérico al estudio de la producción cultural del primer cuarto del siglo xx. Anuari de filologia. Secció F, Estudios de lengua y literatura españolas 10: 49–64. ———. 2014. Public Intellectuals and Nation Building in the Iberian Peninsula 1900–1925: The Alchemy of Identity. Bucknell University Press. Lafarga, Francisco, Luis Pegenaute, and Enric Gallén, eds. 2010. Interacciones entre las literaturas ibéricas. Bern: Peter Lang. Lourenço, Eduardo. 1978/2000. O labirinto da Saudade. Psicanálise mítica do destino portugués. Lisbon: Gradiva. Lourenço, António Apolinário. 2005a. Eça de Queirós e o Naturalismo na Península Ibérica. Coimbra: Mar da Palavra. ———. 2005b. Estudos de Literatura Comparada Luso-Espanhola. Coimbra: Centro de Literatura Portuguesa. Magalhães, Gabriel, ed. 2007a. Actas do Congresso RELIPES III. Covilhã / Salamanca: Universidade da Beira Interior/Celya. ———, ed. 2007b. RELIPES. Relações Linguísticas e Literárias entre Portugal e Espanha desde os inícios do Século XIX até à actualidade. Covilhã/Salamanca: Universidade da Beira Interior/Celya. Mainer, José Carlos. 2010. Historia de la literatura española. Modernidad y nacionalismo (1900–1939). Barcelona: Crítica.
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Marcos de Dios, Ángel. 2007. Aula ibérica. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. ———. 2008. Aula bilingüe, vol. 1: Investigación y archivo del castellano como lengua literaria en Portugal. Salamanca: Luso-Española de Ediciones. ———. 2012. Aula bilingüe, vol. 2: Usos del castellano y competencias plurilingues en el sistema interliterario peninsular. Salamanca: Luso-Española de Ediciones. Martín-Estudillo, Luis, and Nicholas Spadaccini, eds. 2010. New Spain, New Literatures. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press. Martínez-Gil, Víctor. 2010. Uns apartats germans: Portugal i Catalunya = Irmãos afastados: Portugal e a Catalunha. Palma de Mallorca/Lisbon: Lleonard Muntaner/Instituto Camões. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1949. Caracteres primordiales de la literatura española con referencias a las otras literaturas hispánicas, latina, portuguesa y catalana. In Prologue to Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas, ed. Guillermo Díaz- Plaja, XIV–LIX. Barcelona: Barna. Moraña, Mabel, ed. 2005. Ideologies of Hispanism. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press. Muñoz-Basols, Javier, Manuel Delgado Morales, and Laura Lonsdale. 2017. The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies. London; New York: Routledge. Newcomb, Robert Patrick. 2018. Iberianism and Crisis. Spain and Portugal at the End of the Twentieth Century. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Newcomb, Robert Patrick, and Richard Gordon, eds. 2017. Beyond Tordesillas. New Approaches to Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press. Núñez Sabarís, Xaquín. 2011. Diálogos ibéricos sobre a modernidade. Vila Nova de Famalicão: Húmus/Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho. Ortega, Julio, ed. 2012. Nuevos hispanismos. Para una crítica del lenguaje dominante. Madrid/ Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. Pérez, Jorge. 2016. ¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de estudios ibéricos? Sobre los beneficios de un archivo cultural más amplio. Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 41: 263–279. Pérez Isasi, Santiago. 2013. Iberian Studies: A State of the Art and Future Perspectives. In Looking at Iberia. A Comparative European Perspective, ed. Santiago Pérez Isasi and Ângela Fernandes, 11–25. Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2017. Los Estudios Ibéricos como estudios literarios: algunas consideraciones teóricas y metodológicas. In Procesos de nacionalización e identidades en la Península Ibérica, ed. César Rina, 347–361. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura. Pérez Isasi, Santiago, and Ângela Fernandes, eds. 2013. Looking at Iberia. A Comparative European Perspective. Oxford: Peter Lang. Pérez Isasi, Santiago, Raquel Baltazar, Isabel Araújo Branco, Rita Bueno Maia, Ana Bela Morais, and Sara Rodrigues de Sousa. 2017. Los límites del Hispanismo. Nuevos métodos, nuevas fronteras, nuevos géneros. Oxford: Peter Lang.
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Pinheiro, Teresa. 2013. Iberian and European Studies: Archaeology of a New Epistemological Field. In Looking at Iberia: A Comparative European Perspective, ed. Santiago Pérez Isasi and Ângela Fernandes, 27–42. Oxford: Peter Lang. de Quental, Antero. 1868/1982. Portugal perante a revolução de Hespanha. Considerações sobre o futuro da política portugueza no ponto de vista da democracia ibérica. In Prosas sócio-políticas, ed. Joel Serrão, 211–241. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. ———. 1871. Causas da decadência dos povos peninsulares. In Prosas sócio- políticas, ed. Joel Serrão, 255–296. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. Reis, Carlos. 2010. A falência da palavra realista: antes do modernismo. In Suroeste. Relaciones literarias y artísticas entre Portugal y España (1890–1936), ed. Antonio Sáez Delgado and Luís Manuel Gaspar, 95–105. Badajoz/Lisbon: Ministry of Culture/MEIAC/Assírio&Alvim. Resina, Joan Ramon. 2009. Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. ———. 2013. Iberian Modalities. A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Ribera Llopis, Juan Miguel. 2015. Revista de Filología Románica. Anejo IX: Literaturas ibéricas. Teoría, historia y crítica comparativas. Madrid: Universidad Complutense. Ribera Llopis, Juan Miguel, and Antonio Arroyo Almaraz, eds. 2008. Literaturas peninsulares en contacto: castellana, catalana, gallega y vasca. Madrid: Universidad Complutense. Sáez Delgado, Antonio. 2000. Órficos y Ultraístas. Portugal y España en el diálogo de las primeras vanguardias literarias (1915–1925). Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura. ———. 2008. Espíritus contemporáneos. Relaciones literarias luso-españolas entre el modernismo y la vanguardia. Seville: Renacimiento. ———. 2012. Nuevos espíritus contemporáneos. Diálogos literarios luso-españolas entre el modernismo y la vanguardia. Seville: Renacimiento. ———. 2015. Pessoa y España. Valencia: Pre-Textos. Sáez Delgado, Antonio, and Luís Manuel Gaspar, eds. 2010. Suroeste. Relaciones literarias y artísticas entre Portugal y España (1890–1936). Badajoz; Lisbon: Ministry of Culture/MEIAC/Assírio&Alvim. Santana, Mario. 2013. Implementing Iberian Studies: Some Paradigmatic and Curricular Changes. In Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula, ed. Joan Ramon Resina, 54–61. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Santiáñez, Nil. 2002. Investigaciones literarias. Modernidad, historia de la literatura y modernismos. Barcelona: Crítica.
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Spivak, Gayatri. 2005. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Vecchi, Roberto. 2013. Thinking from Europe of an Iberian ‘South’: Portugal as a Case Study. In Looking at Iberia. A Comparative European Perspective, ed. Santiago Pérez Isasi and Ângela Fernandes, 69–86. Oxford: Peter Lang. Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke University Press.
CHAPTER 2
The Age of Cultural Iberisms (1870–1890)
2.1 Iberism or Iberisms? The period covered by this study begins around 1870, even if, as we have noted before, dates in cultural history tend to serve a symbolic purpose rather than a strictly delimiting one. Nonetheless, there are various reasons for selecting 1870 as the starting point for our research that make it far from arbitrary: the most obvious of these is the link to the Generation of 1870, some of whose members (Antero de Quental, Oliveira Martins, Eça de Queirós or Teófilo Braga, among others) figure prominently in this history of Iberian cultural relations. Another reason is that the last 30 years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century saw the greatest influence of Iberism, understood as a complex and somewhat incoherent set of initiatives aiming to bring Portugal and Spain closer together (encompassing privileged dialogues with some of the peninsula’s minoritised cultures, such as Galicia and Catalonia), rather than as a political project for unity. However, this study could equally have begun in 1868, when the so-called Glorious Revolution took place in Spain, prompting Antero de Quental to write Portugal perante a revolução de Espanha, which marks the (symbolic) beginning of the period of cultural or civilisational Iberism that replaced the strictly political Iberism of previous years. Before we proceed, it is in fact important to clarify the concept of Iberism, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways and has been used indiscriminately over the last 200 years to refer to very different approaches © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sáez Delgado, S. Pérez Isasi, Iberian Interfaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91752-4_2
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and stances, ranging from innocent Lusophilia or Hispanophilia to expansionist annexation projects prepared to draw on military means, which arose on various occasions on the Spanish side of the border. It is for this reason that some researchers, such as Rina (2016) and Lima García (2007), use the term in the plural: ‘Iberisms’. In line with Sardica (2013: 24–26) and Matos (2007: 170), the following conceptualisations or models of Iberism may be identified: • A purely economic Iberism proposing the removal of customs checks within the peninsula and the creation of an Iberian Zollverein, as suggested by Sinibald de Mas in La Iberia in 1851 (although this foundational text advocates a political union as well as an economic one). • A political Iberism (commonly known as Iberism tout court), which calls for Spain and Portugal to be integrated into a single political unit.1 Several variants of this Iberism emerged over time, the most significant of which were monarchic, unionist or dynastic (the merging of the two nations under a single crown), and federalist or republican Iberism, which was predominant in Portugal throughout much of the nineteenth century (Pereira 2010a: 261). In Spain, meanwhile, calls by annexationists for Portugal to be absorbed into Spain as a province (as in the controversial La Fusión Ibérica by Pío Gullón 1861) were more common, whereas others argued for a political union that would not entail the disappearance of either individual nation (as in the Iberist stances emerging from early-twentieth-century Catalanism). • A cultural Iberism promoting greater proximity between Spain and Portugal based on the historical ties between the countries that did not advocate any kind of political unification. História da civilização ibérica (1879) by Oliveira Martins may be viewed as the central text in this third type of Iberism due to its influence on later authors. This political Iberism was also referred to as “Iberian nationalism” by Rocamora (1994), as “los argumentos esgrimidos para defender la unión ibérica son asimilables a los utilizados por los nacionalismos europeos, especialmente los encaminados hacia unificaciones, como germanismo, italianismo, escandinavismo o paneslavismo” [“the arguments put forward in favour of an Iberian union are similar to those used in European nationalisms, especially those advocating unification, such as Germanism, Italianism, Scandinavism or Pan-Slavism”] (19). However, this statement is debatable, as it is rare to find affirmations of the existence of a single Iberian nation in Iberist documents; arguments for a political union of two (or more) nations without the dissolution of nationalities, either under the same monarchy or based on a federal model, are far more common. Numerous scholars also argue that Iberism played a role in boosting Portuguese nationalism during the nineteenth century, contrary to its objectives (Matos 2006: 352). 1
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This book focuses primarily on cultural Iberism and its literary manifestations in particular. However, a number of clarifications must be made regarding the relationship between Iberism and other nationalist movements that emerged throughout the nineteenth century, which we will return to in greater detail in the fourth section of this chapter. The emergence and evolution of Iberism (especially its more political variant) is not an isolated phenomenon, nor one that is detached from the political or philosophical trends of the era. Indeed, this movement can only be understood in the context of European nationalisms and their development during the period extending from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. From the French Revolution to approximately 1870, an early variant of nationalist ideology spread across Europe, linked to liberal ideas of progress. This variant largely manifested itself in the form of unifying nationalisms, in line with what Hobsbawm (1991) termed the “threshold principle”. The principle holds that small nations lack resources and opportunities to guarantee happiness and security for their citizens and should group together (or be absorbed) into larger states. Economic and political Iberism emerged in this context and was characterised by a strong liberal sentiment: this first wave of Iberism, which supported a monarchic model rather than an absolutist one, called for unification (to differing degrees and based on different formulas) of the Spanish and Portuguese states as a way to overcome the decline of both nations as they gradually lost their colonial territories and international status. This early Iberism, developed by figures such as Henriques Nogueira and Sinibald de Mas, had a clear impact on certain intellectual circles, especially in Portugal, although there are reasonable doubts as to the extent of its influence over society beyond this intellectual elite. In any case, Iberism as a call for genuine political union began to decline in the 1870s, becoming less and less fashionable from 1890 onwards. Some nationalist groups went as far as to reject any proposal for Iberian union, especially in Portugal, where the idea came to be perceived as a rather furtive attempt by Spain to dominate the country. In 1879, Pinheiro Chagas defined Iberism as a movement “que só tem adeptos em Espanha e que desejaria que os dois povos da península hispânica se fundissem numa só nação com este nome de Ibéria” [“that is only supported in Spain and that wishes to see the two populations of the Iberian Peninsula merge into a single nation called Iberia”] (Pinheiro Chagas, quoted in Matos, 2007: 172).
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This rapid loss of ideological relevance owes to several reasons, which were both domestic and external. According to Rocamora (1994: 111), echoing E. Hobsbawm, from approximately 1870, European nationalist movements maintained their influence but their political ideologies were reversed. They ceased to be (largely) liberal and unifying, becoming increasingly conservative and secessionist (as in the case of Basque, Galician and Catalan nationalism, which gained prominence in the last few decades of the nineteenth century). In this new phase of nationalism, linguistic and ethnic factors began to predominate over the civic, economic or realpolitik considerations present during the previous phase. In this way, political Iberism—a unifying nationalism that inherited liberal utopian ideas— faded into the background from 1870 and was overshadowed by colonialist trends and the advance of state-endorsed and peripheral nationalisms,2 although it reared its head again at times of crisis, such as the 1890 British Ultimatum or the Disaster of 1898.3 However, from 1868, two significant phenomena occurred that counteracted this weakness in Portuguese Iberism. On the one hand, in a cultural, rather than a political, context, Iberism was given new momentum by writers from the Generation of 1870, with the publication of works such as Portugal perante a revolução de Espanha and Causas da decadência dos povos peninsulares by Antero de Quental, or Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira Martins’s História da civilização ibérica.4 These publications varied in the degree of political Iberism that they espoused, but they took the close historic connections between Spain and Portugal for granted and had a strong influence on authors such as Menéndez Pelayo and Miguel de Unamuno in subsequent decades.5 2 “Como dice Jover Zamora, el iberismo aparece en 1874 derrotado, siendo una idea perteneciente al pasado o al futuro, pero no al presente, siendo superado como proyecto por el africanismo al igual que ocurría en Portugal” [“as Jover Zamora says, in 1874, Iberism appears to have been defeated, an idea belonging to the past or future but not to the present, overtaken as a project by Africanism as occurred in Portugal”] (Rocamora, 1994: 112). 3 Of course, Iberism did not disappear from the political and cultural landscape, but it took on a markedly cultural or spiritual character. For a description of the subsequent evolution of different approaches to Iberism, see Molina (1990), Urrutia (2011), Reis (2014) or Pérez Isasi (2014). 4 For an in-depth reading of these texts and their connections with their historical and political context, see Newcomb (2018). 5 It is worth pointing out that Iberism, like nineteenth-century nationalisms, had a certain influence on literary historiography, although its potential was never realised and no ‘history of Iberian literature’ was ever produced as such. Nevertheless, attempts were made to pro-
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On the other hand, Iberism also found an ally in Catalanism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the latter viewing a potential federation between Spain and Portugal as a means of countering Castile’s centralising power (Rocamora 1994: 135; Harrington 2010; Martínez-Gil 2013). Politicians such as Prat de la Riba and intellectuals like Ribera i Rovira and Joan Maragall backed a political or cultural reconfiguration of the peninsula, whereby the different Iberian nationalities (Galicia-Portugal, Castile and Catalonia and, in some cases, the Basque Country too) would maintain their individuality. A ‘tripartite Iberism’ that would surpass the Spain-Portugal binary and create three peninsular ‘nations’—the Atlantic Galician/Portuguese nation, the central Castilian nation and the Mediterranean/Catalan nation—thus emerged. There is no doubt, therefore, that in order to fully understand Iberism, it must be studied in conjunction with European nationalisms, as well as with peripheral nationalisms on the Iberian Peninsula. Iberism was the peninsula’s response to the European unifying movements (in Italy and Germany in particular) at a time when the viability of small nations was being challenged, but it was also a viable solution to a situation in which two states—Spain and Portugal—found themselves stagnating, all too conscious of their decline and of the need to regenerate. But Iberism is also linked to the centrifugal nationalisms that emerged in Spain in the late nineteenth century, and to Catalanism in particular, with which it shared an overt anti-centralist stance. Naturally, by focusing on these Iberist discourses and projects, we run the risk of overstating them or according them greater significance than they merit within the context. It is important to note that the political movements that supported an Iberian union led to a resurgence of nationalist, Hispanophobic positions, especially in Portugal (Matos 2003, 2014). It should also be borne in mind that no matter how frequent and intense duce works along these lines by influential critics such as Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo: “Españoles fueron en la Edad Media los tres romances peninsulares: los tres recorrieron un ciclo literario completo, conservando unidad de espíritu y parentesco de formas en medio de las variedades locales. […] Dios ha querido además que un misterioso sincronismo presida al desarrollo de las letras peninsulares. No hay transformación literaria en Castilla a que no responda otra igual en Lusitania.” [“The three romance languages on the peninsula in the Middle Ages were Spanish: all three completed a full literary cycle, preserving a unity of spirit and similarity of forms despite local variations. […] God has willed it that a mysterious synchronism reigns over peninsular literature. No literary transformation occurs in Castile without an equivalent transformation in Lusitania.”] (Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo 1878).
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the literary and cultural contact between the different Iberian cultural spaces (including cross-border relations between Galicia and Portugal), nation states continued to be the predominant benchmarks in literary creation, reception and canonisation, encouraged by the implementation of liberal education systems. Nonetheless, despite never being effectively implemented in politics nor influencing society beyond both countries’ intellectual elites, the influence that Iberism had on the imaginaries and activities of some of the most relevant writers in Spain and Portugal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Antero de Quental to Joan Maragall, Emilia Pardo Bazán to Teixeira de Pascoaes, ‘Clarín’ to Almada or Valle-Inclán to Pessoa, makes it clear that it was a cross-cutting phenomenon lasting for decades, which must not be overlooked in the peninsula’s literary and cultural history.
2.2 Antero de Quental, Oliveira Martins and Cultural Iberism In order to explore the history of literary and cultural relations between Spain and Portugal in the last third of the nineteenth century, we must first understand the positions on Iberism held by the authors from the Generation of 1870, especially Antero de Quental and Oliveira Martins. Gabriel Magalhães (Magalhães 2007) studied the different stances taken by the authors from this generation, identifying a diverse range of opinions within a shared sense of awareness of a common Iberian culture. Whereas Antero de Quental and Oliveira Martins reconsidered their position on the possibility of an Iberian union or on the racial, spiritual and cultural commonalities between Iberian populations, other writers from this generation maintained a more distant relationship with Iberism in their work. In some cases, they rejected the concept out of hand: according to Eça de Queirós, for example, the idea of unifying with Spain was little more than a ploy to awaken regenerationist patriotism among the Portuguese (Medina 1980). Teófilo Braga, on the other hand, opposed an Iberian union in the monarchic, unitarist sense, but was open to the idea of an Iberian federation, provided that Spain was first divided into smaller, autonomous units (Lourenço 2005b: 346). One of the central, foundational texts in this new phase of Iberism was Portugal perante a revolução da Espanha, a pamphlet by Antero de Quental
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that was published in 1868. Iberism(s) is a common thread running through Quental’s essays, as research by Robert Newcomb (2008, 2018) has shown. Although it was present throughout his career, his thinking on the subject was most clearly refined in the aforementioned pamphlet and in Causas da decadência dos povos peninsulares (the second of the ‘Casino Conferences’ held in 1871, with other participants including Augusto Soromenho, Eça de Queirós and Adolfo Coelho). As its title indicates, Portugal perante a revolução de Espanha was inspired by the 1868 Spanish Revolution known as ‘La Gloriosa’, which Quental observed rather enviously in the knowledge of the benefits that a similar revolution would bring to Portugal. The political solution proposed by Quental was based on a key concept: the “democratic federation”. In his words, “conciliação para todos os intereses, garantia para todas as liberdades, campo aberto para todas as actividades, equilibrio para todas as forças, templo para todos os cultos, a federação é a única fórma de governo digna de homens verdadeiramente iguaes” [“conciliation for all interests, guarantees for all freedoms, free rein for all activities, balance for all forces, churches for all beliefs, federation is the only form of government worthy of truly equal men”] (Quental 1868/1982: 226).6 In Quental’s discourse, democratic federation is presented as a political solution for the new Spain that was emerging after the revolution. However, he immediately goes on to propose an “Iberian federation” comprising Spain and Portugal and abandoning the existing nation states as a failed model: Para toda a Península não há hoje senão uma única política possível: a da federação-republicana-democrática. […] o irresistível movimento democrático da nossa sociedade vai tornar inevitável a queda da nacionalidade, nas opiniões, a principio, e mais tarde nos factos, no grande dia do abraço fraternal das populações da Península Ibérica. […] não há outra saída aberta senão esta: a democracia ibérica; nem outra política, política capaz de ideias, de futuro e de grandeza, possível em Portugal, senão esta: a política do iberismo. [Only one politics is possible for the peninsula as a whole: a republican, democratic federation. […] The irresistible democratic trend in our society will make the decline of nationality inevitable in our thought and later in our actions, on that great day when the populations of the Iberian Peninsula fall 6
On the relationship between Iberism and federalism, see Pereira 2010a, b.
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into a fraternal embrace. […] There is no possible path besides Iberian democracy, nor any other politics in Portugal capable of supplying ideas, future prospects or greatness besides Iberism.] (Quental 1868/1982: 238–240)
The basic premise for Causas da decadência dos povos peninsulares nos últimos três séculos, the title of the talk given by Antero de Quental at the Casino in Lisbon on 27 May 1871, was rather different. Although Quental had merely pointed to Iberian federation as a solution to the decline of the Portuguese nation in Portugal perante a revolução de Espanha, this was the main topic of his subsequent talk. He sought to analyse how and why Portugal and Spain had lost their central role on the European political stage in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, identifying three reasons of different kinds (moral, political and economic): “O primeiro é a transformação do Catolicismo, pelo concílio de trento. O segundo, o estabelecimento do Absolutismo, pela ruína das liberdades locais. O terceiro, o desenvolvimento das Conquistas longínquas” [“The first is the transformation of Catholicism following the Council of Trent. The second is the introduction of absolutism, destroying local freedoms. The third is the pursuit of conquests in distant lands”] (Quental 1871: 269).7 In contrast with the pamphlet, Quental did not offer solutions or explicitly advocate Iberism in his talk. Nevertheless, his entire discourse was implicitly based on a racial or civilisational form of Iberism. The reasons that he suggests for Portugal’s decline are also true for Spain, since the peninsular populations share “caracteres essenciais da raça peninsular” [“traits inherent to the peninsular race”] (Quental 1871: 258), a single “genius” (259) or “spirit” (260). These terms were used indiscriminately during the nineteenth century to translate the concept of Herder’s Volksgeist. It appears, then, that Quental viewed the decline of Spain and Portugal as a decline of their nationhood. In Portugal perante a revolução da Espanha, he offers the controversial solution of “renegar a nacionalidade” [“denying nationhood”] (1868/1982: 241). There are clear points of convergence between the positions held by Antero de Quental and Oliveira Martins. The latter expressed his thoughts 7 The causes noted by Oliveira Martins in his História da Civilização Ibérica are very similar: in a chapter that shares the same title as Quental’s speech and explicitly cites a lengthy passage from it, Oliveira Martins identifies three elements whose degeneration led to decline: individualism, Jesuitism and the Conquests.
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in the talk “Do princípio federativo e sua aplicação à península Hispânica” and the book História da civilização ibérica, where he explained and detailed the history of the concept of “race”8 or “civilisation”, which differentiates the Spanish (used here to refer to the inhabitants of Spain and Portugal) from other European populations. In his introduction focusing on the peninsula, he states: Se a geographia é a nosso vêr uma causa das graves differenças que, segundo as regiões, distinguiram os hespanhoes na historia, e os distinguem ainda hoje, mantendo visiveis os caracteres ethnologicos, nem sempre fáceis de determinar nas suas affinidades: essa causa não basta para que, acima de taes differenças, a historia nos não mostre a existencia de um pensamento ou genio peninsular, caracter fundamental da raça, phisionomia moral comum a todas as populações da Hespanha; pensamento ou génio principalmente affirmado, de um lado no enthusiasmo religioso que pomos nas cousas da vida, do outro no heroísmo pessoal com que as realisamos. D’aqui provém o facto de uma civilisação particular, original e nobre. [While we view geography as a cause of the drastic differences that, depending on the region, have marked the Spanish throughout history and continue to do so today, keeping ethnological dimensions visible although their affinities are not always easy to determine, that cause is not sufficient to counter the presence of a peninsular philosophy or genius that surpasses these differences, a fundamental character of the race, a moral physiognomy common to all populations in Spain; this philosophy or genius is primarily expressed through the religious enthusiasm that we dedicate to life on the one hand and through the personal heroism with which we go about life on the other.] (Martins 1880: XIX)
The first chapter of the fourth part of the book, which is significantly entitled “O génio peninsular” [The peninsular spirit], echoes similar ideas 8 “[S]omos uma mesma raça, gira em nossas veias um sangue irmão: celta, fenício, cartaginés, depois romano, depois godo, depois árabe. Por certo as condições geográficas, económicas e políticas deram até certo ponto feição diversa aos diversos estados da Península, da mesma forma que detro deste cada provincia tem o seu carácter e nestas ainda cada lugar o seu distintivo”. [“we are a single race, joined as siblings by the blood that flows through our veins: Celtic, Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Gothic, then Arabic. Of course, geographical, economic and political conditions have given rise to different features in the different states on the peninsula to some extent, just as each province within the state has its own character and each place within the province has distinct characteristics.”] (Martins 1869/1960: 34).
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and contains one of the clearest applications of biologistic principles to the national context: As nações sào, com effeito, seres collectivos, e o seu desenvolvimento é em tudo análogo ao dos seres individuaes. […] Quando as nações, depois de uma lenta e longa elaboração, attingem esse momento culminante em que todas as forças do organismo collectivo se acham equilibradas, e todos os homens compenetrados por um pensa- mento, a que se pode e deve chamar alma nacional, — porque o mesmo caracter tem, nos indivíduos, aquillo a que chamamos alma, — é entào que, por um mysterioso génesis, se dá um phenomeno a que também chamaremos synthese da energia collectiva. A naçào apparece como um ser, nào já apenas mecânico, quaes sào as primeiras aggregações; nào somente biológico, como nas epochas de mais complexa e adiantada organisaçâo; mas sim humano, —isto é, além de vivo, animado por uma idéa. [Indeed, nations are collective beings and their evolution is similar in every way to that of individual beings. […] When, following a long, slow process, nations reach that climax when all forces in the collective organism are balanced and all men are attuned with one another through a single way of thinking, which could and should be referred to as the national soul— because it is similar in nature to what we call soul in individuals—then, through some mysterious genesis, a phenomenon emerges that we will refer to as the synthesis of collective energy. The nation is akin to a being, no longer purely mechanical, regardless of its initial aggregations; not only biological, as in eras of more complex, advanced organisation; but human—not only alive, but animated by an idea.] (Martins 1880: 174–175)
Nevertheless, Oliveira Martins makes a clear distinction between aspects of an Iberian character that were shared by all “Spaniards” and were shaped throughout ancient and medieval times, on the one hand, and the Spanish and Portuguese nationalities on the other, which emerged as a result of a process of historic decantation of those aspects and whose independence and difference are never questioned. Indeed, it is significant that História da civilização ibérica ends at the point when the two nations acquired their own independent personalities (at the start of the modern age). Therefore, whereas Antero de Quental suggests renouncing Portugal’s nationhood (perhaps with a view to stirring controversy and provoking readers) in the conclusion to Portugal perante a revolução da Espanha, this is not the case of more moderate Iberists such as Teófilo
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Braga or Oliveira Martins himself, who advocate a “união de pensamento e acção, [e] independência de governo” [“union of thought and action, [and] independent government”] (Martins 1889/1960) throughout their work. Sérgio Campos Matos explains this approach in the following terms: Entusiasmado com a revolução espanhola de 1868, em nome de um ideal democrático e republicano-federalista, [Antero] proclamou até que se devia renegar a nacionalidade (esta não passaria dum instrumento dos poderosos, um ‘obstáculo desgraçado, resto das hostilidades fatais de séculos bárbaros’). […] Ao invés do que frequentemente se escreve, embora sustentando a necessidade de uma aproximação diplomática e cultural com a Espanha, Oliveira Martins sempre defendeu a autonomia política de Portugal, distanciando-se inequivocamente do unitarismo iberista. [Enthused by the 1868 Spanish Revolution, in the name of a democratic, republican, federalist ideal, [Quental] went as far as to proclaim that nationhood should be abandoned (it was no more than a tool for the powerful, an “unfortunate obstacle left over from the deadly hostilities of the barbaric centuries”). […] Contrary to what is often stated, Oliveira Martins always defended Portugal’s political autonomy while nevertheless arguing for the need for diplomatic and cultural proximity to Spain, distancing himself unequivocally from Iberist unitarianism.] (Matos 2007: 173–174)
In the work of Antero de Quental and Oliveira Martins (as well as Teófilo Braga), albeit more so in the case of Martins, the only political model capable of reconfiguring the Iberian Peninsula without dissolving or absorbing Portugal into Spain was a federation, a concept which was closely linked in their thinking to ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’. Oliveira Martins expressed this belief in Do principio federativo e a sua aplicação à Península Hispánica (1869/1960): A liberdade é incompatível com a monarquia, que é uma das formas do governo da autoridade, como o é com a panarquia ou comunismo; a liberdade só é compatível com a democracia e com o self-government, isto é com o pacto social acordado entre individuos. Semelhante facto encontra a realização única na federação. [Freedom is incompatible with monarchy, which is one type of governing authority, as are panarchy and communism; freedom is only compatible with democracy or with self-government, that is, with a social pact agreed between
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individuals. This can only be put into practice through federation.] (Martins 1869/1960: 12; italics in the original)
The influence of Oliveira Martins on Spanish and Portuguese authors is key to understanding the evolution of cultural Iberism from the late nineteenth century onwards (detached from any unionist pretensions), which was advocated in Portugal by Moniz Barreto, António Sardinha and Almada Negreiros, among others (Martínez-Gil 2002: 39), albeit with very different approaches. In Spain, Menéndez Pelayo was one of the most relevant intellectuals to follow Oliveira Martins’s stance, viewing Castilian, Catalan and even Portuguese authors as equally Spanish. Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’, Miguel de Unamuno and Joan Maragall, who will be mentioned in later sections, may also be considered heirs of Oliveira Martins’s particular branch of cultural Iberism.
2.3 Eça de Queirós, Clarín and Pardo Bazán: Iberian Naturalisms The Generation of 1870 has frequently been linked to the Spanish Generation of 1898 due to their shared concern for the future of the nation, their regenerationist spirit and their direct involvement in the national political debate. However, it may be more fitting to relate this generation to a group of Spanish writers who, although not commonly referred to as a ‘generation’ (the term ‘Generation of 1868’ is much less prevalent and defined than its Portuguese equivalent), are chronologically closer. They include Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’, Emilia Pardo Bazán, the Giner de los Ríos brothers and Menéndez Pelayo, all of whom were renowned Lusophiles although whether or not they may be accurately described as ‘Iberists’ is debatable. A good example of this complex, shifting Lusophilia is Juan Valera, who lived in Lisbon several times throughout his life and to whom Oliveira Martins dedicated his História da civilização ibérica. According to Romero Tobar (2013), Valera’s Iberism, expressed mostly through texts for periodicals, shifted from optimism to realist scepticism.9 This is apparent in 9 In any case, Valera’s Iberism was always more cultural than political and was based on recognition and appreciation of the three (sic) literary languages on the peninsula. “Yo me alegro de que haya, no una, sino tres lenguas literarias en la Península; pero creo que un genio o espíritu solo, exclusivo para otra casta y común a tres familias ibéricas debe ser supe-
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texts published in Revista Peninsular, which was founded by Valera himself, and particularly in the series of seven articles that he published from 1861 to 1863 in Revista Ibérica with the overarching title “Spain and Portugal”. This series was completed by another two articles published in El Contemporáneo (cfr. Romero Tobar 2013: 192). The ideas set out in these articles, which the author used to express his position on Iberian relations at that time, were a response to the controversial pamphlet espousing annexationist ideas by Pío Gullón: La fusión ibérica (1861). In this section, however, we will focus on a different kind of literary or cultural relation based on aesthetic synchrony rather than the premise of an Iberian identity or continuity: the expansion of naturalism in Spain and Portugal. While the last third of the nineteenth century may be viewed as the age of cultural Iberisms from a geopolitical perspective, in strictly literary terms these years correspond to the expansion and consolidation of naturalism in Iberian literatures. In the words of António Apolinário Lourenço, “existe um razoável consenso quanto ao facto de a internacionalização da corrente naturalista se ter verificado apenas por volta de 1880, na sequência do êxito de vendas alcançado por L’assommoir e da grande polémica suscitada por esse romance zoliano” [“there is reasonable consensus that the naturalist current only spread internationally around 1880, following the commercial success of L’Assommoir and the great controversy surrounding Zola’s novel”] (2009: 291). However, in Lourenço’s opinion, Portugal diverges from the rest of Europe as a result of the rapid assimilation of naturalist aesthetics and principles by Eça de Queirós. His novel O crime do Padre Amaro, considered the first example of naturalism in Portuguese narrative literature, was originally published in 1875 and
rior y estrecho lazo de amistad. […] En resolución, yo miro como riqueza envidiable, que no debemos perder, ni confundir, ni mezclar, el que tengamos tres y no una sola lengua literaria; pero me inclino a creer que todo español culto debe entender y estudiar las tres, seguro de que con ello completará y hermoseará la que él hable y escriba, sin desnaturalizarla por eso” [“I am glad that there are not one but three literary languages on the Peninsula; but I believe that, above all, there must be a single genius or spirit, a bond of friendship that excludes any other group and is common to the three Iberian families. […] In conclusion, I consider the fact that we have three literary languages and not just one as an enviable asset that we must neither lose nor confuse nor combine; but I am inclined to think that all educated Spaniards should understand and study the three languages in the certainty that this would supplement and embellish the language that they speak and write without distorting it”] (letter from Valera to Narcís Oller, quoted in Oller 1962: 42).
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translated into Spanish that same year by an unknown translator.10 With his work quickly translated and disseminated among Spanish writers and critics, Eça de Queirós became the central node in a series of personal, intellectual and textual relationships that shaped the expansion of naturalism on the Iberian Peninsula.11 Among his most prominent admirers was Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’, the great Spanish critic who, along with Emilia Pardo Bazán, was responsible for introducing naturalism in Spain.12 He reflected upon the subject in talks such as ‘Naturalismo en el arte’, held at the Ateneo de Madrid in 1882, in a series of articles entitled “Del Naturalismo” published in La Diana magazine from 1 February to 16 June that same year (Martinon 2016: 101), and in the prologue to Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La cuestión palpitante, to which we will return later. It is relevant to note that Clarín was also the main instigator of the (unsuccessful) Hispano-Portuguese Literary League (Utt, 1988: 203–226), with help from Portuguese poet Joaquim de Araújo and promises to join from Campoamor, Pérez Galdós, Giner de los Ríos, Núñez de Arce and Palacio Valdés, among many others. Naturally, Clarín’s efforts to promote Portuguese literature in Spain were not limited to this failed project: his status as a critic and creator gave him the opportunity to review the work of renowned writers such as Joaquim de Araújo, Guerra Junqueiro and Antero de Quental. Nevertheless, the key figure in Clarín’s relationship with Portuguese literature and with naturalism as a movement was Eça de Queirós.13 Clarín refers to Eça’s work and his form of naturalism on several occasions in letters, articles and essays. For example, in an article published in 1883 in Revista Ibérica and quoted by António Apolinário Lourenço, Leopoldo Alas states:
10 On the reception and contemporary translations of the work of Eça de Queirós in Spain, see Losada-Soler (2001, 2010). 11 See Rios (2007, Master’s thesis), who compiles positive and negative reactions to the Portuguese novelist’s work from Spanish critics. 12 Apart from the works which deal with the direct or indirect influence of Eça de Queirós on Clarín, there is also a tradition of comparative readings between both authors, such as García Álvarez (1979), Fedorchek (1979–1980) or Reis (1999). More recently, Vieira (2012) has analysed the spatial poetics of both authors, altogether with Machado de Assis’s. 13 It is possible that Clarín was responsible for a mysterious Spanish translation of El primo Basílio that was published in 1884 in ‘El Cosmos Editorial’, or at least this is the theory put forward by Lourenço (2005a: 364–365).
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El naturalismo, esa tendencia literaria que con haber nacido en Francia no parece francesa, que se va abriendo paso y va siendo convicción arraigada de muchos escritores en muy diferentes países, tiene en Portugal también dignos representantes en la novela, en la poesía y en la crítica. Uno de los más notables es Eça de Queirós. […] El primo Basilio está francamente inspirado, si vale hablar así, en las novelas de Balzac, Flaubert y Zola, pero especialmente en la inmortal Madame Bovary. [Naturalism, that literary trend that does not appear French despite emerging in France, which is gradually gaining prominence and becoming a deep- rooted conviction among many writers in many different countries, also has worthy representatives in novels, poetry and criticism in Portugal. One of the most noteworthy is Eça de Queirós. […] El primo Basilio is clearly inspired, if we can speak in those terms, by the novels of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, and by the immortal Madame Bovary in particular.] (Lourenço 2009: 295)14
The third point on the Iberian naturalist triangle (which could be supplemented by other figures, including Simões Dias, Benito Pérez Galdós, Narcís Oller and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez) is writer and critic Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose Lusophilia has been affirmed by some experts (Vázquez Cuesta 1969; Lourenço 2010) and questioned by others (Herrero Figueroa 2007), although there is ample evidence of her interest in the neighbouring country and its culture. Her writing describes several of her trips to Portugal (in 1872, 1883 and 1888, although she is likely to have travelled there on additional occasions; vid Pardo Bazán 1884, 1889a), as well as her meetings with Teófilo Braga, Guiomar Torrezão and Oliveira Martins. There is also a written record of her frequent correspondence with Portuguese intellectuals and writers. In several of her texts, Pardo Bazán discusses Portugal and its literature, especially the relationship between Portugal and Galicia: examples include “Vecinos que no se tratan” (1884) (written in the form of a letter to Guiomar Torrezão, her
14 The possibility that Eça’s O primo Basílio is directly echoed in Clarín’s La Regenta is not strictly within the scope of our approach to comparative studies in this book and will not be explored in greater depth here for this reason. Critics such as García Álvarez (1979) or Núñez Rey (1987), among others, have studied the similarities between the characters, storylines and narrative resources used in the two novels, although it would be wise to approach these similarities with caution as they may not reflect a direct relationship but rather interference from other European naturalist authors, especially from France.
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closest Portuguese colleague; vid. Freire López 2011), “La Eloísa portuguesa” (1889a) and “Erudición Portuguesa” (1891). In these three texts (as well as at other points in her work), she repeats a stereotype that would persist for centuries, lamenting the mutual ignorance between the two countries: “en Portugal no saben Vdes. palabra de lo que en España se escribe y piensa. Es más: experimentan Vdes., y al decir ustedes claro está que aludo al público en general, instintiva antipatía por la cultura hispana y cierta voluntaria pereza que les impide leer libros españoles” [“in Portugal, you do not know a word of what is written and thought in Spain. What’s more, you experience, and by ‘you’ I am of course referring to the general public, an instinctive dislike for Spanish culture and a certain wilful laziness that prevents you from reading Spanish books”] (1884: 522). She goes on to say that “nosotros […] vivimos sepultados en la más crasa ignorancia respecto a Portugal, y no solo manifestamos indiferencia, sino a veces ridículo menosprecio” [“we […] are immersed in the gravest ignorance with regard to Portugal, displaying not only indifference, but sometimes also a ridiculous scorn”] (523). Yet Pardo Bazán’s most important meeting of all was with the writer Eça de Queirós at the time when he was working as a diplomat in Paris. The author wrote a lengthy account of this encounter in “Un novelista ibérico (Eça de Queirós)” (1889b), in which she succinctly reviews the Portuguese novelist’s work (O Primo Basílio, A Relíquia, Os Maias, etc.), as well as lamenting the distance between Portugal and Spain once again. Pardo Bazán also makes a criticism that could be applied to most writers of the era: Este gran artista portugués sería mucho más grande, casi perfecto, si hubiera brotado de la misma entraña de su nación; si fuese castizo, neto, lusitano o peninsular hasta las cachas, hijo y continuador de la tradición literaria de su país. […] Así el flaco de la coraza, el talón de Aquiles de Queiroz es el afrancesamiento. [This great Portuguese artist would be far greater, almost perfect, if he had emerged from the same womb as his nation; if he were authentic, pure, Lusitanian or peninsular to the very core, the son and heir of his country’s literary tradition. […] But the chink in Queiroz’s armour, his Achilles heel, is his Frenchification.] (Pardo Bazán 1889b: 1)
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In her essay La cuestión palpitante, originally published as a series of articles in 1882 and as a book in 1883 (with a prologue by Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’), Pardo Bazán mentions Eça de Queirós in one of the concluding sections, which is significantly entitled “De la moral” [“On Ethics”]. The Portuguese novelist is again described as being ‘Frenchified’, although this time the source of his inspiration is deemed to be Zola rather than Flaubert: “El portugués Eça de Queiroz, en su novela O primo Basilio —donde imita a Zola hasta beberle el alma— traza un cuadro horrible bajo su aparente vulgaridad, el del suplicio de la esposa esclava de su culpa” [“The Portuguese Eça de Queiroz, in his novel O primo Basilio—in which he imitates Zola to the extent of drinking from his very soul—paints a picture of the torment of a wife enslaved by her guilt that is horrible in its apparent vulgarity”] (1883: 153).15 This criticism of Eça de Queirós is closely linked to Pardo Bazán’s overall assessment of French (or Frenchified) naturalism, which she compares to a more nuanced Spanish version that is, in her opinion, more palatable from an ideological and artistic perspective. Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Lusophilia leads neatly into the next section of this chapter, as the Galician author’s vision of Portugal and Portuguese literature should be understood in the context of the emergence and consolidation of political regionalism and the literary Rexurdimiento in Galicia. Pardo Bazán had an ambivalent relationship with this context, not only because she opted to use Spanish in her writing (consciously positioning herself within the Spanish literary system, while remaining close to and active in the Galician system),16 but also because of her distrust of regionalism as a political movement and as an aesthetic trend (see Hermida Gulías 1989; González-Millán 2004). In a statement that she wrote upon the death of Rosalía de Castro, entitled “La poesía regional gallega”, 15 Lino de Macedo, author of “Revista Portuguesa”, which was inserted into the Revista de Galicia edited by Emilia Pardo Bazán, refers to the work of Eça de Queirós in very similar terms: “Eça de Gueiros (sic) es el Zola portugués; sus novelas tienen el inconveniente de no poderse leer con la nariz destapada. tienen todas un tufo nauseabundo, deletéreo, repugnante: parecen escritas en un cuartel, después del toque de queda.” [“Eça de Gueiros (sic) is the Portuguese Zola; his novels have the drawback of being unreadable without holding your nose. They are sickening, toxic, repugnant: it is as if they had been written in a barracks after curfew.”] (Lino de Macedo 1880: 208–210). Identifying naturalism with dirtiness, vulgarity and immorality was a recurring cliché in the literary criticism and history of the time, to the extent that Clarín dedicated the bulk of his prologue to La Cuestión Palpitante to refuting these accusations. 16 On Emilia Pardo Bazán’s role in the intersection between the Galician and Spanish literary systems, see Gabilondo (2009).
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Pardo Bazán made a series of assertions that were later echoed and amplified by the writers of Grupo Nós and the Irmandades da Fala: Mejor que regiones análogas podemos considerar a Portugal y Galicia un país mismo. […] Después de la amputación de Portugal quédase Galicia como miembro destroncado, sin vida propia. Cuando Portugal se alza y señorea del Océano —lo mismo que si al negar con voluntad la nacionalidad española, quisiese afirmarla con sus hazañas—, Galicia se anula. […] No es posible dudar que la literatura gallega, a no ahogarla en su adolescencia acontecimientos y vicisitudes políticas, hubiera sido lo que fue la de Portugal, en la cual hay que ver el cumplido desarrollo de un germen galaico. Fueron el idioma portugués y el gallego, según todas las probabilidades, una misma cosa hasta el siglo xv; y por lo tanto, el desarrollo actual de aquel revela lo que pudo este dar de sí. [Rather than similar regions, we might consider Portugal and Galicia a single country. […] After Portugal’s amputation, Galicia finds itself like a severed limb, without a life of its own. When Portugal rises up and rules the Ocean—as if upon wilfully denying Spanish nationality, it wished to reaffirm its words with deeds—Galicia is redundant. […] There can be no doubt that Galician literature, had it not been repressed in its adolescence by political occurrences and vicissitudes, would have followed in the footsteps of Portuguese literature, which may be viewed as a Galician seed brought to fruition. The Portuguese and Galician languages were most likely one and the same until the fifteenth century; the current development of one thus casts light on what the other could have been.] (Pardo Bazán 1888: 21–22)
Narcís Oller is another figure of particular interest who helps to cast light on the broad functioning of the Iberian literary system during the time of naturalism. A Catalan writer who wrote in Catalan, Narcís Oller maintained friendly correspondence with many of the naturalist authors of his era, including Pérez Galdós, Pereda, Clarín and Pardo Bazán. However, his position within the naturalist movement was somewhat precarious as he resisted the centripetal forces that sought to oblige him to relinquish writing in Catalan and integrate fully into the Spanish system, and into the European and international literary systems by extension. In a well-known article in La Prensa in Buenos Aires, Benito Pérez Galdós wrote the following: Oller escribe sus novelas en catalán, privando así a la mayor parte de los españoles del placer de leerlas. El catalán es más difícil de lo que parece a
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primera vista, seduce poco y no es de esas lenguas que se pegan. Cuando la necesidad nos obliga a leerlo, rara vez permanecen en nuestra memoria sus giros y su vocabulario, y si cuesta algún trabajo aprenderlo, no cuesta ninguno olvidarlo. Que Oller, uno de los más insignes catalanes y uno de los primeros novelistas españoles, escriba sus admirables obras en catalán, es verdadera desdicha. [Oller writes his novels in Catalan, depriving most Spaniards of the pleasure of reading them. Catalan is more different than it appears at first glance, has little charm and is not one of those languages that stay with you. When we are obliged to read it out of necessity, we rarely remember its phrases and vocabulary, and while it is rather difficult to learn, it is very easily forgotten. The fact that Oller, one of the most distinguished Catalans and one of the first Spanish novelists, writes his admirable works in Catalan is a crying shame.] (Pérez Galdós 1886, cited by Martínez-Gil 2015: 34)
These lines reflect the same kind of limitations as many of Pardo Bazán’s texts on Galician ‘regionalist’ literature: the idea appears to be that Catalan or Galician may be used to write traditional, bucolic, lyrical or even ruralising poetry but not narrative literature, and certainly not the modern naturalist novel. As we have seen, a network of contacts and relationships linked some of the most prominent representatives of the naturalist school on the Iberian Peninsula. In some cases, these contacts manifested themselves through more or less obvious direct appearances (like Eça de Queirós in Clarín’s narrative); in others, they reflected aesthetic affinities and intellectual admirations, such as Pardo Bazán’s appreciation for Eça or Clarín’s for Pardo Bazán, expressed in his prologue to La Cuestión Palpitante. These intellectual exchanges also gave rise to meetings in person: Eça de Queirós and Emilia Pardo Bazán met in Madrid, while Narcís Oller and José María de Pereda gathered in Barcelona in 1884 (Bonet 2009: 29). Equally, these literary contacts sometimes served as a vehicle for Iberist-inspired projects (such as the ‘Literary League’ created by Clarín or the Revista Peninsular founded by Valera), whereas other figures had no particular intention of pursuing cultural or political rapprochement, such as Eça himself. Is it possible, then, to speak of an Iberian naturalism? According to António Apolinário Lourenço, whose view we share, the concept is rather problematic:
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Não falamos nunca, é evidente, de um Naturalismo ibérico, porque como é amplamente sabido, desde o início do século xviii que a literatura portuguesa e a literatura espanhola se haviam irremediavelmente separado, abandonando uma longa tradição de complementariedade. […] Deste modo, as evidentes relações de parentesco que podemos establecer entre as obras de todos os autores a que nos referimos nas páginas anteriores devem-se, sobretudo, ao facto de tanto os escritores portugueses como os espanhóis terem por Mestres os mesmos autores franceses, ainda que não possamos ignorar o contributo queirosiano para a formação do cânone naturalista espanhol. [Of course, we never speak of an Iberian naturalism because, as is widely known, Portuguese and Spanish literature were hopelessly separated from the early eighteenth century, abandoning a long tradition of complementarity. […] Therefore, the clear kinship between the works of all the authors mentioned on previous pages owes above all to the fact that both Portuguese and Spanish writers were taught by the same French authors, although we cannot overlook Queirós’s contribution to the formation of the Spanish naturalist canon.] (Lourenço 2005a: 643)
It is obvious (and it would be absurd to assert otherwise) that both Spanish and Portuguese realist and naturalist writers were indebted to the French role models that they shared: Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. However, it is equally true that the writers from this school (especially Eça de Queirós, Clarín and Pardo Bazán, although there were many others) established a network of exchanges, admirations and references that allows us to state that, while there is no Iberian naturalism as such (as Lourenço argues), there is (as he later admits) an Iberian appropriation and adaptation of naturalism. These processes did not occur at exactly the same time but they were characterised by similar constraints and mutual contamination, making it possible for the phenomena to be studied in conjunction with one another.
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2.4 The Catalan, Galician and Basque Literary Revivals: An Iberian Vision Two key concepts in our analysis, which we have already mentioned in this chapter without going into greater detail, are decline and regeneration.17 These concepts were ubiquitous in the literary, cultural and political debate in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the definition of modernity itself (Calinescu 1987). As we have already begun to observe, they had a direct influence on the Iberian and Iberist discourse. Few texts could be more representative of these ideas than Antero de Quental’s Causas da decadência dos povos peninsulares. In Spain, meanwhile, almost identical debates on the causes of and possible solutions to the country’s long-standing political and cultural decline took place from the mid- nineteenth century. This led to the emergence of Joaquín Costa’s regenerationism and, several years later, the so-called Disaster of ’98 prompted a substantial body of texts exploring this idea, which was expanded in the first third of the twentieth century with contributions from Miguel de Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, among many other writers. In this section, we will focus on the literary and political movements that emerged in Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country, which aimed to salvage their respective literatures after a lengthy period of decline and stagnation and restore them to life, modernising them and contextualising them within world literature. We are referring here to the Catalan Renaixença, the Galician Rexurdimento and, to a lesser extent, the Euskal Pizkundea; we also consider the Portuguese Renascença, which occurred a little later. These movements were not exclusively literary but were closely linked to the appearance of what was known at the time as regionalism and is now referred to as Catalan, Galician and Basque nationalism. On this matter, it is important to recall the dual retroactive and proactive nature of nationalism: the scholars who analysed the national, literary decline did so in an attempt to change the situation through national, literary regeneration.18 The ‘resurgence’ or ‘revival’ movements that sprung 17 Thomas Harrington (2000) elaborates a conceptual approach to the literary, cultural and historical phenomena surrounding the Generation of 1898, which is highly relevant here. A rather similar methodology is used in this book, albeit applied to a slightly different phenomenon. 18 Anthony Smith described the regenerative nature of nineteenth-century nationalism: “We see this particularly clearly in the third activity of the nationalist: that of collective regeneration. Regeneration involves a summons to the people, mobilising the members of the
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up across Europe (Italy and Ireland are two prime examples) sought to awaken national populations from a long sleep and lead them to independence, unification or the revival of past splendours, depending on the country. In the literary context more specifically, the dual nature of nationalism is also apparent from the beginning of the nineteenth century: the retroactive aspect prompted the recovery of medieval and Golden Age texts in particular, as well as historiographical work, while the proactive aspect was apparent in the use of these materials as ‘good models’ for future national writers, as well as in the active promotion of literary creation in the national language. In any case, it is worth pointing out that this attempt to reproduce past literary glories in the present and future was not only an end in itself, but, above all, a tool for national resurgence in other social, cultural and even political areas. This can be seen very clearly in the work of Teixeira de Pascoaes, as we will later explore. One of the first manifestations of this interest in reviving national literatures, especially in areas where the vernacular literary tradition had been interrupted (as it had in Galicia or Catalonia) or had never been fully developed (as in the Basque Country), were the ‘Floral Games’. These yearly literary contests were intended to reward the best compositions, which were usually written on a theme issued in advance. The first Floral Games in an Iberian language were held in 1853, although they took place outside the peninsula, in the French Basque Country or Iparralde, most likely due to the influence of the French Floral Games. It was not until 1879 that they were organised in the Spanish Basque Country or Hegoalde. Meanwhile, similar contests were held from 1859 in Catalonia, with prizes for the best romantic, religious and patriotic poetry, and from 1861 in Galicia. As well as standalone initiatives, some of which were organised by particularly energetic individuals (as in the case of Antoine d’Abbadie and the Floral Games in the French Basque Country), this proliferation of literary contests was underpinned by a series of literary movements that proclaimed themselves to be ‘literary revivals’ (or were subsequently labelled as such by critics). They were more or less directly linked to nationalist movements with a centralising or decentralising agenda, depending on the community, tapping their collective emotions, inspiring them with moral fervour, activating their energies for national goals, so as to reform and renew the community” (Smith 1995: 16).
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case, which began to appear from the second half of the nineteenth century and multiplied in the final third of that century. Some of these movements had a relatively clear scope, with a common agenda, a fairly compact corpus of authors and texts and an explicit regenerative purpose, expressed in manifestos and articles published in sympathetic periodicals. The most obvious example is the Portuguese Renascença (or Lusitanian Renascença), which we will discuss further in the third chapter of this book: it is generally considered to span the same period as the magazine A Águia (1910–1932) and, despite being more cohesive than other movements, it cannot be described as homogeneous or free from internal dissent.19 In most cases, however, these literary movements tended to be broad and heterogeneous, made up of a diverse group of writers who shared the aim of recovering and regenerating national literature. It is impossible to establish a clear start or end date for the movements beyond symbolic events (literary or otherwise). This is the case of the Catalan Renaixença, which is believed by some scholars to have begun in 1833 when El Vapor newspaper was first published, while others situate its arrival in 1877 when Verdaguer wrote the poem “L’Atlantida”. The movement’s members included Aribau, Àngel Guimerá, Narcís Oller and Jacint Verdaguer. The Galician Rexurdimento is another example of a more heterogeneous movement, which began with the publication of Rosalía de Castro’s Cantares Gallegos in 1863, albeit with some immediate antecedents. It reached maturity in 1880 with the publication of Rosalía’s Follas novas, Aires da miña terra by Curros Enríquez, and Espiñas, follas e frores by Valentín Lamas Carvajal. Other well-known figures linked to the movement include Eduardo Pondal and Manuel Murguía. In the case of the Basque Country, it is unclear when exactly the term ‘revival’ and its Basque translation ‘Pizkundea’ began to be used: puede resultar que este [el término «Renacimiento»] no termine de convencer, no solo porque intenta reproducir en el caso vasco el proceso cultural catalán de la Renaixença y el gallego del Rexurdimento, sino porque también es un término que aparece en la época, pero la palabra vasca que lo traduce, Pizkundea, no se documenta hasta los primeros años del siglo xx. además, pronto el término se convierte en equívoco, puesto que tras la llegada de la dictadura del general Primo de Rivera y la prohibición de actividad política al Partido Nacionalista Vasco, el renacimiento cae en un estado 19 See the documents compiled by Paulo Samuel (1990), which reveal the controversies present within the Portuguese Renascença.
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de debilidad, y la vuelta a la actividad política, y en consecuencia a la producción cultural que se produce en la II República se denomina Renacimiento, Pizkundea. [it may be true that the latter [the term “revival”] fails to convince, not only because it attempts to reproduce the Catalan cultural process of the Renaixença and the Galician Rexurdimento in the Basque Country, but also because it is a term that appears during that era, whereas its Basque translation, Pizkundea, is not documented until the early twentieth century. Moreover, the term quickly becomes ambiguous: the revival was weakened by the arrival of the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera and the prohibition on the Basque Nationalist Party’s political activity, and the return to political activity and cultural production that occurred during the Second Republic was referred to as the Renacimiento or Pizkundea.] (Kortazar 2008: 213)
In the case of Spain and Portugal, the literary tradition had not been interrupted in the same way as it had in Galicia and Catalonia. Rather, critics and historians observed a decline that called for a simultaneous reformulation of the countries’ national identity and literary production. This decline was due at least in part to the atrophying of their respective liberal political systems, as well as to historical events (the independence of the overseas colonies in the case of Spain and the British Ultimatum in the case of Portugal), which revealed the extent to which they had lost power and assumed a peripheral position on the international stage. Yet these ideological simultaneities or affinities are not the only aspects that make it possible (or indeed advisable) to consider the nationalisms that were emerging on the peninsula in the late nineteenth century in conjunction with the reflections on the very existence of the Spanish and Portuguese states that were taking place at that time. A cluster of literary figures served as intermediaries, linking one Iberian geocultural space to another as literary emissaries or ambassadors. This was the case of Menéndez Pelayo, for example, who gave the closing speech at the controversial 1888 Jocs Florals, which were also attended by Benito Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán and demonstrated the divisions within the Catalanist movement (Pinyol i Torrents 2012; Balcells 2011: 100). The regionalist and nationalist movements, especially in Galicia and Catalonia, also had a mutual influence on one another, with the Catalan Renaixença serving to a certain degree as a model for the Galician Rexurdimento (Beramendi 2012).
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Meanwhile, the abundant manifestos published by the aforementioned literary movements contain extremely useful information allowing us to identify the main instigators of these regenerative movements. For example, the first issue of Catalonia’s Renaixença magazine contained the following words: Entenem, en fi, anar, no pel camí del provincialisme exclusivista, sino del esperit provincial, no pel camí del partidarisme polítich, sinó del esperit patri, no pel fraccionament, sinó per la atracció, per la unió, per la germanó de criteris, de afeccions y de voluntats á la reconstitució del element nacional que es la mes alta potencia civilizadora dels pobles. [Our intention is not to take the path of exclusionary provincialism but that of provincial spirit, not to take the path of political partisanship but that of patriotic spirit, not to opt for division but for attraction, for union, for the twinning of ideas, affections and desires to rebuild that national element that offers the greatest civilising potential to the people.] (Renaixensa magazine, 1881, cited by Figueres 1995: 206)
Sometime later, the founding document for Eusko Ikaskuntza (Basque Studies Society) stated its aim in the following terms: “reunir a todos los amantes del País Vasco que, ansiando la restauración de la personalidad del mismo, se proponen promover, por los medios adecuados, la intensificación de la cultura como condición indispensable para tal fin” [“to unite all lovers of the Basque Country who, eager for its personality to be restored, aim to promote reinforcement of its culture via the appropriate means as an essential condition for that purpose”] (Founding document for Eusko Ikaskuntza—Basque Studies Society, 1918, cited by Estornés Zubizarreta 1983: 20). The ‘mission statement’ included in the first issue of Revista de Galicia, edited by Emilia Pardo Bazán, was more modest and rather more cautious with regard to the possibilities of regionalism: A fin de conseguir el resultado apetecido, entendemos que conviene mucho reanimar el espíritu provincial, pero sin aislarse del movimiento de la nación á que pertenecemos, pues la prensa es justamente gran medio de comunicación, y por ella deben relacionarse entre sí las provincias y el centro. Importa pues que las Revistas informen a la nación de cuanto sea digno de nota en la cultura provincial, y enteren á la provincia de lo que la nación piensa, trabaja y escribe.
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[In order to achieve the desired result, we believe that it is very important to revive the provincial spirit without isolating ourselves from the trajectory of the nation to which we belong, as the press is a great vehicle for communication and must be used to link the provinces to the centre. The Revistas should inform the nation of anything that is worthy of note in provincial culture and report what the nation thinks, writes and produces to the province.] (Pardo Bazán 1880: 1)
These texts draw on three basic elements: the idea of recovering an element lost in the past, the idea that this lost element is an essential part of nationhood and, finally, the conviction that recovering this element will give rise to a new era of national glory. It is no coincidence that the logo for the newspaper La Renaixensa (1881–1905) showed a phoenix, nor that the most iconic magazine in the Portuguese Renascença was titled A Águia [The Eagle]. Indeed, the Portuguese Renascença movement, even if it appeared some decades later than the others, is the one most closely embodies the ideals of recovering a forgotten past and national essence. The texts stating the movement’s agenda (almost all of which were penned by Teixeira de Pascoaes) report a dual motivation: to recover the past and build the future. O fim da Renascença Lusitana é combater as influências contrárias ao nosso carácter étnico, inimigas da nossa autonomia espiritual e provocar, por todos os meios de que se serve a inteligência humana, o aparecimento de novas forças morais orientadoras e educadoras do povo, que sejam essencialmente lusitanas, para que a alma desta bela Raça ressurja com as qualidades que lhe pertencem por nascimento. [The purpose of the Lusitanian Renascença is to fight influences that run contrary to our ethnic character and are inimical to our spiritual autonomy, prompting the emergence of new moral forces, by any means available to the human imagination, to guide and educate the people to be Lusitanian in essence, so that the soul of this beautiful race resurges with the qualities that are inherent to it.] (Samuel 1990: 13–14)
Another aspect of particular relevance here are the interrelations between these regeneration and revival movements and the Iberism or Iberisms that emerged in the final third of the nineteenth century, or the way in which Catalan and Galician nationalisms (and, to a lesser extent, Basque nationalism) conceptualised Portugal as a real or symbolic
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interlocutor in their processes of identity construction (Núñez Seixas 2013). In the words of Víctor Martínez-Gil, “en realidad, el iberismo y el regionalismo son en España, después de la Restauración borbónica, dos realidades inseparables” [“in truth, Iberism and regionalism have been inseparable in Spain since the Bourbon Restoration”] (2015: 35). Studied in particular depth by Martínez-Gil, the closest, most explored relationship is between Catalanism (and the literary Renaixença) and Portuguese Iberism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although they exceed the chronological scope of this chapter, some of the key milestones in this relationship (Martínez-Gil 2013) are the influential Iberisme (1907) by Ignasi Ribera i Rovira, À Catalunha (1914) by Portuguese writer Augusto Casimiro and Teixeira de Pascoaes’s visit to Barcelona, where he delivered a series of talks that formed the basis for his book Os Poetas Lusiadas (1919). It is clear from the dates that most of these milestones occurred in the first third of the twentieth century (especially after the establishment of the Portuguese Republic) rather than in the late nineteenth century. At the end of the century (and beyond), Galician nationalism also had a Lusitanian or even a ‘reintegrationist’ component, but, unlike the case of Catalonia, this unifying aim was not reciprocated by Portugal (Molina, 1990: 33).20 We have already mentioned Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “La poesía regional gallega”, emphasising the author’s ambivalent relationship with the Rexurdimento. With regard to the relationship between the Galician literary movement and Portugal, a more illustrative text is El regionalismo gallego (1889), written by Manuel Murguía in response to an aggressive, derogatory speech by Antonio Sánchez Moguel at the Royal Academy of History. In his book, in which he ardently defends Galicia and its historical 20 One of the authors to state this fact is Vázquez Cuesta: “O interese que, desde o noso Rexurdimento cultural da segunda metade do século pasado ata o día de hoxe, tiveron por Portugal os intelectuais galegos non se corresponde, de ningún xeito, co que os seus colegas lusitanos —agás honrosas excepcións, unha delas os fundadores e mantedores desta revista, que, a partir dos seus comezos (cando englobaba indistintamente as artes e as letras), deu acollida nas súas páxinas a estudios e noticias referentes á nosa terra— sentiron e senten pola súa veciña do Noroeste peninsular”. [The interest that Galician intellectuals have had in Portugal from our cultural Rexurdimento in the second half of the last century to the present day does not in any way correspond to the interest that their Lusitanian colleagues—with certain honourable exceptions, one of whom founded and maintains this magazine, which, from the very beginning (when it covered literature and the arts indiscriminately), welcomed studies and news relating to our land on its pages—felt and feel for their neighbours in the north west of the peninsula.] (Vázquez Cuesta 1995: 5).
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nationalism, focusing particularly on its Celtic origins, Murguía issues a clear warning to Spain: Galicia could, if circumstances dictated, join Portugal. El peligro que por esto corre el Estado español, de que se ahonden las diferencias que nos separan, y conviertan en marcada hostilidad las relaciones que al presente unen a las diversas nacionalidades de que se componen, es tanto más serio, cuanto que Galicia se halla constantemente solicitada por Portugal, y que puede en un momento dado venir en su auxilio y tomarla para sí, sin que nos duela ni mucho menos. [The danger that this poses to the Spanish state, that the differences separating us will become entrenched and convert the relations that currently bind the different nations within it into marked hostility, is all the more serious given that Galicia is being constantly sought out by Portugal, which may come to its aid at any time and take it for itself without it hurting us in the least.] (Murguía 1889: 11)
The potential for political integration with Portugal is deeply rooted in Galicia’s history and culture: Confieso que tanto en las provincias fronterizas, como en la misma Beira, considerada como el corazón de Portugal, siempre creí hallarme en mi país y entre los míos. Todo era para mí igual, la tierra, las producciones, el hombre. La misma lengua, las mismas costumbres, la misma bondad de carácter que solo se pierde cuando, abandonando Portugal, entramos en España por Cáceres o Badajoz. […] Es un hecho, pues, que por el origen, por el territorio y el lenguaje, de igual manera que por su historia y la comunidad de sentimientos y deseos, estos pueblos del noroeste forman una nación con caracteres propios, distinta de gran parte de las que constituyen el Estado español. [I confess that in both the border provinces and in the Beira itself, considered the heart of Portugal, I have always found myself at home and among family. Everything was the same for me, the land, the crops, the people. The same language, the same customs, the same good nature that is only lost when one leaves Portugal and enters Spain through Cáceres or Badajoz. […] It is a fact, then, that these populations of the North West, due to their origin, landscape and language, as well as to their history and common feelings and desires, differ from many of those who make up the Spanish state.] (Murguía 1889: 46–48)
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This understanding of relations between Portugal and Galicia as a historical, cultural continuum also found advocates on the Portuguese side of the border (Torres-Feijó 2009: 378–383), whose words were reappropriated as authoritative arguments by Galician nationalists and the authors of the Rexurdimento. Oliveira Martins and Teófilo Braga are the most prominent of these advocates. For example, Teófilo Braga states: Effectivamente a Galliza deve ser considerada como um fragmento de Portugal, que ficou fóra do progresso de nacionalidade. Apesar de todos os esforços da desmembração politica, a Galliza não deixou de influir nas formas da sociedade e da litteratura portugueza. [Galicia should indeed be viewed as a fragment of Portugal that was left out of the progress on nationhood. Despite all the attempts at political dismembering that have taken place, Galicia has never ceased to influence Portuguese forms of society and literature.] (Braga 1877: XXXVI)
There is a clear interrelationship between Galician regionalism and nationalism and Portugal or the idea of Portugal; this idea has been analysed in several diachronic studies (Salinas Portugal 2007; Torres-Feijó 2008, 2009; Dotras Bravo 2012). The contribution of literature to this interrelationship is also clear, stretching back to the Galician-Portuguese lyric. From a contemporary perspective, focusing strictly on the Rexurdimento period, one particularly relevant figure is the poet Eduardo Pondal, whose poem Os Eoas (which went unpublished until 2005, despite being considered one of the key works of the Galician poetic Rexurdimento) is inspired by Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas. However, this is far from the only explicit reference to Portugal in Pondal’s work: Dejando a un lado Os Eoas, […] hemos llegado a contabilizar, a lo largo y ancho de la obra entera del poeta, alrededor de una treintena de poemas distintos que hacen referencia a Portugal […]. Por lo que hemos podido ver, el cantor de Breogán preconizaba una Unión Ibérica, en que todos los pueblos de la Península y de allende los mares deberían reunirse. Para ello, es precisa la vuelta de Portugal a esa misma unidad; pero esta reunión conlleva algo más: la fusión de Portugal con Galicia, creando una unidad indisoluble dentro de esa pronosticada Unión Hispánica. [With the exception of Os Eoas, […] we have counted around thirty different poems mentioning Portugal in the poet’s complete works […]. From
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what we can see, the singer of Breogán advocated an Iberian Union, where all peoples from the Peninsula and across the seas would come together. For that to happen, Portugal would need to return to that union; but this reunion has another effect: Portugal would merge with Galicia, creating an indissoluble unit within the Hispanic Union envisaged.] (Pociña López 2007: 227)
Naturally, this ancient cross-border relationship reappeared in later periods, when it became more important still. We are referring here to the contact between Grupo Nós and the Irmandades da Fala and Portugal, and the relationship between Vicente Risco and Teixeira de Pascoaes in particular (Villares 2003). The political and literary movements analysed in this section are relevant to the study of Iberian literary relations for several reasons. Firstly, our analysis reveals the extent to which the emergence of these movements in Catalonia and Galicia, as well as in Spain and Portugal, was not only parallel but also interconnected. However, the fact that we have adopted an Iberian perspective in this book and that cultural Iberism is one of the subjects that we explore is not intended to suggest that relations between Iberian literary systems or between the various regenerationist movements that emerged simultaneously on the peninsula were symmetrical or entirely peaceful. This is true with regard to not only the opposition between centre and periphery (between Madrid and Barcelona, Bilbao or Santiago de Compostela, so to speak), but also the relationship between different centres (Madrid-Lisbon) and different peripheries (e.g. Barcelona-Bilbao-Santiago de Compostela), as Ribera Llopis has shown in several studies (2013, 2014). Secondly, these political and literary movements are relevant to the study of Iberian literary and cultural relations due to their links with Iberist movements, seeking a genuine partner and symbolic model in Portugal to help them to counterbalance the centralising power of Castile. This was the case, as we have seen, of Galician regionalism and Catalanism in the final third of the nineteenth century, and, to a far lesser extent, of Basque nationalism, which barely had any practical or discursive relationship with Portugal. These movements are fundamental in allowing us to understand the constitution and evolution of the complex Iberian literary and cultural polysystem, which was often structured as a network of centrifugal resistances in opposition to the centripetal force of the central or Castilian literary system (Ribera Llopis 2014). Therefore, the Catalan, Galician and
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Basque literary revivals should be understood not as an exclusively local or regional occurrence but as contemporaneous, interconnected manifestations of a single phenomenon: the reconfiguration of the Iberian cultural space in response to a context of ‘literary diglossia’ with cultural, historical and political roots.
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García Álvarez, María Teresa Cristina. 1979. Eça de Queirós y Clarín. In Estudios ofrecidos a Emilio Alarcos Llorach, 419–428. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo. González-Millán, Xoán. 2004. Emilia Pardo Bazán y su imagen del ‘Rexurdimento’ cultural gallego en la Revista de Galicia. La Tribuna: cadernos de estudios da Casa Museo Emilia Pardo Bazán 2: 35–64. Gullón, Pío. 1861. La fusión ibérica. Madrid: Gabriel Alhambra. Harrington, Thomas S. 2000. La generación del 98 y sus correlatos intrapeninsulares: una propuesta para un acercamiento panibérico al estudio de la producción cultural del primer cuarto del siglo xx. Anuari de filologia. Secció F, Estudios de lengua y literatura españolas 10: 49–64. ———. 2010. The Hidden History of Tripartite Iberianism. In A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, ed. Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Anxo Abuín González & César Domínguez, 1: 138–162. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hermida Gulías, Carme. 1989. Emilia Pardo Bazán e o Rexurdimento. Festa da palabra silenciada 6: 17–23. Herrero Figueroa, M. Araceli. 2007. Sobre a discutíbel lusofilia de Pardo Bazán ou de como Da Emilia non é propiamente María Guavaira. In Actas del VII Congreso Internacional de Estudos Galegos: mulleres en Galicia; Galicia e os outros pobos da península, ed. Helena González Fernández and María Xesús Lama López, vol. 2, 143–154. La Coruña: Ediciós do Castro/Asociación Internacional de Estudios Galegos/ Universitat de Barcelona. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1991. Naciones y Nacionalismo desde 1780. Barcelona: Crítica. Kortazar, Jon. 2008. La literatura vasca y la creación de la nación. Las ideas de José Aristimuño, Aitzol (1896–1936). In Literatura y nación. La emergencia de las literaturas nacionales, ed. Leonardo Romero Tobar, 207–222. Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. Lima García, José Luis. 2007. Ibéria, iberismos e iberografias. In Aula Ibérica— Actas de los congresos de Évora y Salamanca (2006–2007), ed. Ángel Marcos de Dios, 571–581. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Losada-Soler, Elena. 2001. La (mala) fortuna de Eça de Queiroz en España: Las traducciones de Valle-Inclán. In La traducción en la Edad de Plata, ed. Luis Pegenaute, 171–186. Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias. ———. 2010. Una historia intermitente: Eça de Queirós en España. In Suroeste. Relaciones literarias y artísticas entre Portugal y España (1890–1936), ed. Antonio Sáez Delgado and Luís Manuel Gaspar, 83–93. Badajoz/Lisbon: Ministry of Culture/MEIAC/Assírio&Alvim. Lourenço, António Apolinário. 2005a. Eça de Queirós e o Naturalismo na Península Ibérica. Coimbra: Mar da Palavra. ———. 2005b. Estudos de Literatura Comparada Luso-Espanhola. Coimbra: Centro de Literatura Portuguesa.
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———. 2009. Leopoldo Alas ‘Clarín’ e Eça de Queirós: um encontro decisivo. In Anais do V Congresso Brasileiro de Hispanistas / I Congresso Internacional da Associação Brasileira de Hispanistas, 291–298. Belo Horizonte: Faculty of Literature, UFMG. ———. 2010. Emilia Pardo Bazán e a literatura portuguesa. In Interacciones entre las literaturas ibéricas, ed. Francisco Lafarga, Luis Pegenaute, and Enric Gallén, 47–58. Bern: Peter Lang. de Macedo, Lino. 1880. Revista literaria portuguesa. Revista de Galicia 14: 208–210. Magalhães, Gabriel. 2007. A atitude ibérica da Geração de 70: variações na unidade. Península—Revista de Estudos Ibéricos 4: 157–175. Martínez-Gil, Víctor. 2002. La Ilustración Ibérica i la creació d’un mercat: literari peninsular. Els marges 71: 37–55. ———. 2013. La visió lusocatalana d’Ibèria / A visão luso-catalã da Ibéria. In ACT 25. Catalunya, Catalunha, ed. Esther Gimeno Ugalde, Fátima Fernandes da Silva, and Francisco Serra Lopes, 21–54. Vila Nova de Famalicão: Húmus. ———. 2015. Modernidad, política e ibericidad en las relaciones literarias intrapeninsulares. Revista de Filología Románica Annex IX (Literaturas ibéricas. Teoría, historia y crítica comparativas): 31–44. Martinon, Miguel. 2016. Era obra de su tiempo. Texto y contexto de ‘La Regenta’. Madrid: Verbum. Martins, Joaquim Pedro de Oliveira. 1869/1960. Do principio federativo e a sua aplicação à península Hispánica. In Jornal, 9–42. Lisbon: Guimarães Editores. ———. 1880. Historia da civilização ibérica. Lisbon: Bertrand. ———. 1889/1960. Iberismo. In Jornal, 219–228. Lisbon: Guimarães Editores. Matos, Sérgio Campos. 2003. Nacionalismo e anti-iberismo. A pedagogia nacionalista da comissão 1° de Dezembro (1890–1933). Eixo Atlântico 4: 2–13. ———. 2006. Iberismo e identidade nacional (1851–1910). CLIO. Revista do Centro de História da Universidade de Lisboa 14: 349–400. ———. 2007. Conceitos de Iberismo em Portugal. Revista de História das Ideias 28: 169–193. ———. 2014. Hispanofobia e nacionalismo: a Comissão 1o de Dezembro e a memória de 1640. En António Pedro Vicente. Estudos em Homenagem, 645–58. Lisboa: Caleidoscópio. Medina, João. 1980. Eça de Queirós e o Iberismo. Reflexos da questão ibérica na obra de Eça de Queirós, de 1867 a 1888. In Eça de Queirós e a Geração de 70, 21–72. Lisbon: Moraes. Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. 1878. Programa de literatura española. In Estudios y discursos de crítica histórica y literaria, vol. I: Menéndez Pelayo Digital. Santander: Digibis. Molina, César Antonio. 1990. Sobre el iberismo y otros escritos de literatura portuguesa. Madrid: Akal.
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Murguía, Manuel. 1889. El regionalismo gallego. Havana: La Universal. Newcomb, Robert Patrick. 2008. Antero de Quental, ‘Iberista’: iberianism as organizing principle and evolving intellectual commitment. Iberoamericana. América Latina—España—Portugal 8: 45–60. ———. 2018. Iberianism and Crisis. Spain and Portugal at the End of the Twentieth Century. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Núñez Rey, Concepción. 1987. La Regenta y O Primo Basilio. In Clarín y La Regenta en su tiempo: actas del Simposio Internacional, 731–750. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo. Núñez Seixas, Xosé Manoel. 2013. Iberia Reborn: Portugal through the Lens of Catalan and Galician Nationalism (1850–1950). In Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula, ed. Joan Ramon Resina, 83–98. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Oller, Narcís. 1962. Memories literaries. Barcelona: Aedos. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 1880. Programa. Revista de Galicia 1 (1): 1. ———. 1883. La cuestión palpitante. Madrid: Imprenta Central. ———. 1884. Vecinos que no se tratan. La Ilustración Ibérica 85: 522–523. ———. 1888. La poesía regional gallega. In De mi tierra, 3–41. La Coruña: Tipografía de la Casa de la Misericordia. ———. 1889a. La Eloísa Portuguesa. La España Moderna, June 1. ———. 1889b. Un novelista ibérico (Eça de Queirós). Los lunes del Imparcial, November 25. ———. 1891. Erudición portuguesa. Nuevo Teatro Crítico I (3): 83–88. Pereira, Maria da Conceição Meireles. 2010a. Concepções e avatares do iberismo no Portugal finissecular: do federalismo republicano ao ecletismo dos republicanos. In Uns apartats germans: Portugal i Catalunya = Irmãos afastados: Portugal e a Catalunha, ed. Víctor Martínez-Gil, 85–110. Palma de Mallorca; Lisbon: Lleonard Muntaner/Instituto Camões. ———. 2010b. Iberismo e nacionalismo em Portugal da regeneração à República. Entre Utopia e Distopia. Revista de História das Ideias 31: 257–284. Pérez Isasi, Santiago. 2014. Literatura, iberismo(s), nacionalismo(s): apuntes para una historia del iberismo literario (1868–1936). 452 °F Revista de teoría de la literatura y literatura comparada 11: 64–79. Pinyol i Torrents, Ramon. 2012. Els dos Jocs Florals de Barcelona de 1888. In Joc literari i estratègies de representació: 150 anys dels Jocs Florals de Barcelona, ed. Josep M. Domingo, 327–352. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Societat Catalana de Llengua i Literatura. Pociña López, Andrés José. 2007. Portugal en la obra de Eduardo Pondal. In Aula Ibérica—Actas de los congresos de Évora y Salamanca (2006–2007), ed. Ángel Marcos de Dios, 219–230. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. de Quental, Antero. 1868/1982. Portugal perante a revolução de Hespanha. Considerações sobre o futuro da política portugueza no ponto de vista da
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democracia ibérica. In Prosas sócio-políticas, ed. Joel Serrão, 211–241. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. ———. 1871. Causas da decadência dos povos peninsulares. In Prosas sócio- políticas, ed. Joel Serrão, 255–296. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. Reis, Carlos. 1999. Eça de Queiroz y Clarín o la novela como discurso ideológico. In Sin fronteras: ensayos de literatura comparada en homenaje a Claudio Guillén, ed. Antonio Monegal, Enric Bou, and Dario Villanueva Prieto, 141–152. Madrid: Castalia. ———. 2014. Portugal ante la revolución de España: de Antero de Quental a Fernando Pessoa. Semiosfera 2: 10–31. Ribera Llopis, Juan Miguel. 2013. Centre-Peninsular Considerations on Catalan Literary Regeneration: An Everlasting Code? In Looking at Iberia: A Comparative European Perspective, ed. Santiago Pérez Isasi and Ângela Fernandes, 165–180. Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2014. Las letras catalanas y el entramado peninsular contemporáneo: modos y tópicos interliterariamente conectores. 1616: Anuario de Literatura Comparada 4 (monographic issue ‘Relaciones culturales ibéricas’): 59–76. Rina, César. 2016. Iberismos. Expectativas peninsulares en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Funcas. Rios, Vera Monteiro de Souza. 2007. A obra de Eça de Queirós: Leituras espanholas. Master’s thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo. Rocamora, José Antonio. 1994. El nacionalismo ibérico. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. Romero Tobar, Leonardo. 2013. Valera’s Iberism. In Looking at Iberia. A Comparative European Perspective, ed. Santiago Pérez Isasi and Ângela Fernandes, 181–200. Oxford: Peter Lang. Salinas Portugal, Francisco. 2007. A língua e a literatura portuguesas na configuração do campo literário galego. In Aula Ibérica: Actas de los congresos de Évora y Salamanca (2006–2007), ed. Ángel Marcos de Dios, 411–420. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Samuel, Paulo. 1990. A Renascença Portuguesa: Un perfil documental. Porto: Fundação Eng. António de Almeida. Sardica, José Miguel. 2013. Ibéria. A Relação entre Portugal e Espanha no século XX. Lisbon: Aletheia. Smith, Anthony. 1995. Gastronomy or geology? The role of nationalism in the reconstruction of nations. Nations and Nationalism: Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism 1 (1): 3–23. Torres-Feijó, Elias. 2008. A mais poderosa ponte identitária: Portugal e a Saudade no nacionalismo galego. In Actas do III Colóquio Luso-Galaico sobre a Saudade, em homenagem a Dalila Pereira da Costa, ed. Maria Celeste Natário, António Braz Teixeira, Afonso Rocha, and Renato Epifânio, 149–166. Sintra: Zéfiro.
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———. 2009. Portugal nas velas do galeguismo contemporâneo: de Teófilo Braga a Manuel Rodrigues Lapa. In Actas do I Congresso Internacional ‘O Pensamento Luso-Galaico-Brasileiro entre 1850 e 2000’, 371–402. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda. Urrutia, Jorge. 2011. El despertar del iberismo en torno a la revolución española de 1868. Boletín de la Academia Argentina de Letras LXXVI. Utt, Roger L. 1988. Textos y con-textos de Clarín: Los artículos de Leopoldo Alas en ‘El Porvenir’ (Madrid, 1882). Madrid: Istmo. Vázquez Cuesta, Pilar. 1969. La lusofilia de D.ª Emilia Pardo Bazán. In Homenaje Universitario a Dámaso Alonso. Madrid: Gredos. ———. 1995. Portugal-Galicia, Galicia-Portugal: un diálogo asimétrico. Colóquio. Letras 137–138: 5–21. Vieira, Estela. 2012. Interiors and Narrative: The Spatial Poetics of Machado de Assis, Eça de Queirós, and Leopoldo Alas. Bucknell University Press. Villares, Ramón. 2003. Portugal, Galicia e o Iberismo. In Galiza e Portugal: Identidades e Fronteiras: Actas Do IV Simposio Internacional Luso-Galaico de Filosofía, Santiago, ed. María Xosé Agra Romero and Nel Rodríguez Rial, 13–28. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela.
CHAPTER 3
The Age of Symbolism and Modernismo
With the publication of Eugénio de Castro’s poetry collection Oaristos, the year 1890 marks the formal arrival of symbolism in Portugal (just two years after Rubén Darío published Azul…) and the Iberian Peninsula as a whole. The period extending from 1890 to the mid-1910s represented a high point for the peninsular literatures in terms of their international vocation and the proliferation of dialogue within the peninsula. During this time, there was intense debate between two sometimes opposing visions of the best way to move beyond realism and its positivist principles. Some authors were fascinated by the possibility of taking Iberian literature in the same direction as the foreign literatures that were hegemonic at the time, French and Latin American literature in particular.1 Others were more sceptical about the value of these imports and preferred to build an ideological and aesthetic discourse around the foundational, structural elements of each national culture. This debate gave rise to aesthetic tensions between fervent defenders of internationalisation and those who preferred to search for the authentic 1 The profound impact of Spanish American literature in the genesis of Spanish modernism has been widely addressed by critics. A recent and novel approach to this topic, in a postcolonial key, is due to Alejandro Mejías-López (2009). In the case of the relations between Portuguese and Brazilian literatures in the period under study, there does not seem to be such a deep and evident debt in the process of formation of the aesthetic movements of modernity. There do exist, however, interesting relationships and confluences between the poets of the first modernism of both countries, as Arnaldo Saraiva (2015) has shown.
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essence of each culture. The process of deep reflection that took place in movements such as symbolism and saudosism in Portugal and modernism and the Generation of 18982 in Spain is shaped by these tensions. These movements have traditionally been viewed in isolation by many critics, despite their unquestionable complexity and interwoven nature, especially in the case of Spain (Torrecilla 1996a, b, 2004, 2006). Through this opposition between aesthetics and ideology, a fertile exploration of the concept of modernity began. The assimilation of the cosmopolitan symbolist and modernist movements attracted endorsement and feedback within national literatures, generating a wave of action and reaction with groups of authors challenging many aspects of the symbolist/modernist trend, including the saudosists in Portugal and the Generation of 1898 in Spain. Within this complex landscape, new projects and trends emerged that spanned national borders to become fully Iberian, offering an opportunity to study specific examples of mutual understanding between writers from the different Iberian literatures that help to counter strictly national conceptualisations. Indeed, there is no shortage of texts and testimonies to illustrate the parallels between Portuguese symbolism and the modernism brought to Spain by Rubén Darío, on the one hand, and between the saudosism linked to the Porto-based association Renascença Portuguesa and the Generation of 1898, on the other, in terms of their role in assimilating foreign literatures. This is not only true for Portuguese and Spanish literature; other peninsular literatures, such as Catalan and Galician literature, also displayed an interest in forming part of the mosaic, proposing new dialogues that must be contextualised to allow us to understand the plural reality underpinning the development of literary modernism in the Iberian Peninsula. This chapter focuses on the work of a group of authors who were particularly active in this peninsular dialogue. The complex process of importing and assimilating movements and trends was strongly influenced by Eugénio de Castro’s symbolism (essential for understanding modernism in Spain) and Pascoaes’s saudosism (followed and admired in Catalonia, Galicia and Spain more generally), while Miguel de Unamuno was an
2 Núñez Sabarís (2011) produced a well-documented analysis of the relationship between the term ‘modernism’ and the concept of the Generation of 1898, as well as the different meanings of the term in Spanish and Portuguese literary history.
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intellectual icon in the Iberian context, who was equally well respected on both sides of the border and regularly sought after as a cultural mediator. It is important to note that the peninsular impact of the three authors in this elite triangle hinged upon the personal relationships between them and with many other writers, translators and cultural mediators spread across almost the entire peninsula, with greater reception of Portuguese literature in Spain than of Spanish literature in Portugal (Torres Feijó 2007). These authors and movements also interacted extensively with Catalan and Galician literatures and cultures, constituting a ‘tripartite Iberism’ that comprised an Atlantic Galician-Portuguese nation, a Mediterranean nation and a central nation. Within this complex network of affinities and intersections, the relationships between Portugal and Catalonia and Portugal and Galicia were fundamental. Among the figures used in this chapter to illustrate some of these interrelations, albeit superficially, are Catalan poet Joan Maragall, Galician polygraph Ramón María del Valle- Inclán and the most representative writers from Grupo Nós.
3.1 Portuguese Symbolism and Eugénio de Castro’s Presence in Hispanic Modernismo By studying the reception of Eugénio de Castro’s work by many Spanish modernist authors, we are able to gain a greater understanding of the spread of symbolist principles across the peninsula. This poet from Coimbra played a particularly significant role in several ways: as a nexus of contact between Portuguese symbolism and Spanish modernismo, demonstrating the permeability between these two Iberian literatures; as a paradigm of the continuum of modernity, with writers from several different movements and generations following and admiring his work (modernists, the Generation of 1898, the ultraist avant-garde and the Generation of 1927); and as a clear example of the need for a more nuanced analysis of Iberian literatures that moves beyond national units, as Castro’s work made a far greater mark on the Iberian context than on his own national literary system. Indeed, Eugénio de Castro was the most published, popular and admired Portuguese poet on the Iberian Peninsula throughout the first half of the twentieth century and his influence was equalled only by that of Fernando Pessoa during the second half of the century. He is unquestionably the most prominent Portuguese lyrical poet in Spain, achieving a
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similar level of recognition as Eça de Queirós with his narrative literature. Castro and Eça received the most attention from publishing houses, and the poet was also one of the main figures involved in developing modernism on the international scene after it was introduced by Rubén Darío. Castro was also a leading interlocutor, establishing direct relationships with authors writing in Spanish (from Spain and Latin America), Galician and Catalan, as his letters in Spanish (Álvarez and Sáez Delgado 2006) and Galician (Álvarez and Estraviz 2008) demonstrate.3 He acquired unprecedented prestige in the Iberian context, while his work currently occupies a more modest position in the Portuguese literary canon. As we have mentioned, the birth of symbolism on the Iberian Peninsula may be traced back to 1890 and the publication of Castro’s Oaristos, which represented a milestone in the movement’s expansion on the peninsula. A year earlier, in 1889, the magazines Bohemia Nova and Os Insubmisos were launched, providing fertile ground for Castro to publish his poetry collection. In the preface, the poet invokes Baudelaire and Gautier and proclaims himself to be open to other literatures (particularly French literature) on the basis that “Com duas ou três luminosas excepções, a Poesia portuguesa contemporânea assenta sobre algumas dezenas de coçados e esmaiados lugares comuns” [“With two or three dazzling exceptions, contemporary Portuguese poetry is based on several dozen worn-out, faded platitudes”] (Castro 1927: 19). He proceeds to give a long list of literary clichés to be avoided, including metaphors, rhymes and vocabulary, extols the virtues of João de Deus as “our first Poet” and points to his own personal battle against “vulgarity”, emphasising that “Este livro é o primeiro que em Portugal aparece defendendo a liberdade do ritmo contra os dogmáticos e estultos decretos dos velhos prosodistas” [“This book is the first in Portugal to defend freedom of rhythm against the dogmatic, foolish edicts of the old prosodists”] (Castro 1927: 22).
3 Eugénio de Castro’s Spanish correspondence reveals the breadth and variety of his extraordinary international network of contacts, containing letters from 113 different senders. It covers almost every cultural space on the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America, with names including Miguel de Unamuno, Francisco Villaespesa, Rubén Darío, Luis Berisso, Eugeni d’Ors, Ignasi Ribera i Rovira, Manuel Curros Enríquez and Emilia Pardo Bazán. Meanwhile, the compilation of Castro’s correspondence in Galician contains letters from 16 different senders and a set of documents that provide evidence of his presence in Galicia (Álvarez and Estraviz 2008: 65–158).
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Oaristos revolutionised the formal conception of the poem, adopting a rhythm and prosody that were far removed from strict classical moulds. Just a year later, in 1891, the poet used similar techniques in Horas. In the preface to this new collection, Castro emphasises the importance of the ‘symbol’ in his project in a fascinating passage: “Silva esotérica para os raros apenas: […] terraço ladrilhado de cipolino e ágata, por onde o símbolo passeia, arquiepiscopal, arrastando flamante simarra bordada de Sugestões, que se alastra, oleosa e policroma, nas lisonjas” [“Esoteric forest for only a few […] terrace paved with cipolin and agate, where the symbol promenades, archiepiscopal, trailing a splendid cassock embroidered with Suggestions, which spreads, oily and multi-coloured, across the lozenges”] (Castro 1927: 93). With these volumes, Eugénio de Castro brought Portuguese poetry into line with the latest developments coming out of Latin America, which were driven by Rubén Darío (Mochila 2014), born just two years before Castro in 1867, as well as José Martí from Cuba, José Asunción Silva from Colombia, José Santos Chocano from Peru and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera from Mexico. In 1892, Darío arrived in Spain. Making contact with numerous authors, he began to forge a legacy that would shape Spanish literature throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Four years later, the author of Azul… gave a talk on Castro in Buenos Aires after being captivated by the Portuguese poet’s work, which was reproduced in Los raros. This text is fundamental in understanding the privileged position granted by the Nicaraguan author to his select group of favourites, enhancing their influence across the entire Ibero-American space.4 In one passage of the speech, Darío compares Portugal and Spain from across the Atlantic, insisting on the considerable differences between the two cultures as a result of Spain’s aesthetic isolation and Portugal’s “sudden energy”: Señores: Mientras nuestra amada y desgraciada madre patria, España, parece sufrir la hostilidad de una suerte enemiga, encerrada en la muralla de su tradición, aislada por su propio carácter, sin que penetre hasta ella la oleada de la evolución mental de estos últimos tiempos, el vecino reino fraternal manifiesta una súbita energía; el alma portuguesa llama la atención del mundo, la patria portuguesa encuentra en el extranjero lenguas que la 4 The reproduction of this text highlights its importance in the Spanish context, predating Francisco Villaespesa’s translation of Castro’s Salomé y Otros Poemas in 1914.
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c elebran y la levantan, la sangre de Lusitania florece en armoniosas flores de arte y de vida: nosotros, latinos, hispanoamericanos, debemos mirar con orgullo las manifestaciones vitales de ese pueblo y sentir como propias las victorias que consigue en honor de nuestra raza. [Gentlemen: While our beloved, ill-fated motherland, Spain, appears to be suffering the hostilities of misfortune, enclosed by the walls of its traditions, isolated by its own nature, untouched by the wave of mental progress that has emerged in recent times, its kindred kingdom and neighbour is displaying a sudden energy; the Portuguese soul is drawing the world’s attention, the Portuguese nation is finding languages overseas that celebrate it and raise it up, the blood of Lusitania is blossoming into harmonious flowers of art and life: we, Latinos, Latin Americans, should look with pride upon this population’s expression and experience the victories they achieve in honour of our race as our own.] (Darío (1896) 1999: 275)
In his statements on the relevance of Portuguese culture abroad, Darío is likely to have been influenced by the fact that he discovered Castro’s work through critics such as Remy de Gourmont in France and Vittorio Pica in Italy, creating an air of cosmopolitanism around his oeuvre that the Nicaraguan writer could not overlook. In Darío’s work, as Enrique Díez- Canedo explained a number of years later, “Eugénio de Castro’s technique predominated over that of the French” (Díez-Canedo 1921: 234). This opinion appears to be confirmed by Darío’s declarations in Los raros, in which he described Castro as “el admirable lírico que había de representar, el primero, a la raza ibérica, en el movimiento inte- lectual contemporáneo” [“the admirable lyrical poet who was to represent the Iberian race in the contemporary intellectual movement”] (Darío (1896) 1999: 272) and “uno de los más exquisitos con que hoy cuenta la moderna literatura europea, o mejor dicho, la moderna literatura cosmopolita” [“one of the most exquisite writers in modern European literature, or rather, in modern cosmopolitan literature”] (Darío (1896) 1999: 284). His admiration for the Portuguese poet was so great that he considered him and Gabriele d’Annunzio as the “primeros ‘músicos’, en el sentido pitagórico y en el sentido wagneriano, del arte de la palabra hoy” [“first ‘musicians’, in the Pythagorean and Wagnerian sense, of the art of words today”] (Darío (1896) 1999: 297). As a result, Castro’s work quickly became known in several Latin American countries, where it was translated and published, enhancing the author’s prestige. In 1896, Luis Berisso translated Belkiss in Buenos Aires,
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where it was so successful that a second edition was printed in Argentina in 1899. It was also published in Spain by Editorial América in 1919 at the peak of the avant-garde movement. The edition was prefaced by a lengthy ‘Introductory Statement’ by Leopoldo Lugones, which mentions the author’s “incomparable prestige” (Lugones 1919: 16) and his key role in European symbolism. In Colombia, meanwhile, Samuel López translated El anillo de Policrates in 1908, helping to make the book available in Spanish-speaking literary contexts. The author himself was well aware of his influence and acknowledged his role in the history of symbolism in Portugal in the second edition of Oaristos in 1899, recognising the pioneering nature of his work without excessive triumphalism: “A verdade é esta: literariamente, bem pode ser que os Oaristos nada valham, mas, historicamente, ninguém se atreverá a negar-lhes um importante e duradouro lugar na literatura portuguesa do século que finda” [“The truth is this: in literary terms, Oaristos may be of very little value, but in historical terms, nobody would dare to deny it an important, lasting place in Portuguese literature at the close of this century”] (Castro 1927: 13). The way was laid for Eugénio de Castro’s work to be published internationally and all that was left to do was wait for the most attentive mediators on the peninsula to fix their eyes upon his poems, as critical studies by Fein (1958), García Morejón (1971), Henríquez Ureña (1978) and Lourenço (2005) have shown. It did not take long for Eugénio de Castro to attract significant attention in three main areas: in newspapers and magazines, which published the poet’s poems and news, as well as critical notes on his books; in anthologies and collections of Portuguese poetry; and in Spanish translations of a number of his works, increasing their influence on the Spanish literary scene. Castro’s poems were also featured in many of the most important publications in the Spanish modernist movement, such as Renacimiento Latino, La Vida Literaria, Vida Intelectual, Revista Latina and Prometeo, as well as in those that led the transition to the ultraist avant-garde, such as Los Quijotes, Cervantes and Grecia. Reviews and commentary on his works can also be found in magazines and periodicals like Helios, El Liberal, La Vanguardia, El Adelanto, ABC, El Sol, Raza Española, España, Residencia and La Nación in Buenos Aires.5 Meanwhile, his work was also included in the main anthologies and collections of Portuguese poetry 5 One valuable source of information about the dissemination of the poet’s work beyond Portugal is the catalogue accompanying the bibliographical exhibition dedicated to the poet
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published in the Spanish and Catalan linguistic spheres, such as Del dercado ajeno (1907) and Pequeña antología de poetas portugueses (1926?) by Enrique Díez-Canedo, Atlàntiques (1913) by Ribera i Rovira6 (who also translated several of Castro’s poems into Catalan in Solitaris, published in 1918) and Las cien mejores poesías líricas de la lengua portuguesa (1918) by Fernando Maristany. However, it was the poet’s individual works, translated into Spanish, that brought him the greatest recognition: Constanza, 1913, translated by Francisco Maldonado, with a prologue by Miguel de Unamuno; El rey Galaor, 1913, edited by Juan González Olmedilla; Salomé y otros poemas, 1914, translated by Francisco Villaespesa; El hijo pródigo, 1914, translated by González Olmedilla, who also translated La sombra del cuadrante in 1916 and the first volume of Obras de Eugénio de Castro in 1922. This recognition brought him the favour and mediation of Miguel de Unamuno, who, after reading Constança, became a fervent advocate and admirer of Castro’s work, as we will see later on. Another author to follow in Darío’s footsteps was the Andalusian poet Francisco Villaespesa, who was one of the most loyal supporters of modernism in Spain and one of the most enthusiastic admirers of Eugénio de Castro’s poetry, which he translated along with other titles by Fialho de Almeida, Júlio Dantas and Eça de Queirós. Villaespesa was a true Lusophile (Fernández Sánchez-Alarcos 2004), who produced the magazine Renacimiento Latino in 1905 with Abel Botelho and played a prominent role in founding one of the key magazines in the shift from modernism to the avant-garde in Spain, Cervantes, which featured poems by Castro in its first four issues. Villaespesa even went as far as to express his passion for Portugal in parts of his own poetry, with themes and scenes drawn from the country appearing in Viaje sentimental (1909) and Saudades (1910). He even caused controversy when he translated and dramatised Castro’s O rei Galaor: after signing it with his own name, he was accused of plagiarism and the play was withdrawn from Madrid’s theatres, although it was eventually performed on two occasions, in 1917 (Madrid, La Novela Teatral) and in 1930 (Madrid, Prensa Moderna). at the University of Coimbra: Eugénio de Castro. Consagração da Universidade de Coimbra (1947). 6 A facsimile reedition of Atlàntiques, with a lengthy prologue by Víctor Martínez-Gil (2017a), has recently been published: “Atlàntiques: una antología de la modernitat lusocatalana”.
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This episode provides some indication of the degree of admiration for Castro’s poetry expressed by the Almerian poet over the decades. In 1902 (a crucial year that saw the publication of Unamuno’s Amor y pedagogía; Camino de perfección by Pío Baroja; La voluntad by Azorín; and Sonata de otoño by Valle-Inclán), he wrote a letter to Castro in which he described him as “el primero de todos los poetas peninsulares” [“the best of all the peninsular poets”] (Álvarez and Sáez Delgado 2006: 149) and asked for his assistance in promoting modernismo in Spain, based on Castro’s work in Portugal a decade earlier: Su personalidad me es sumamente simpática por coincidir con ella mi temperamento. Vd. hizo en Portugal hace diez años lo que Rubén Darío y yo estamos ahora operando en las letras castellanas. Gracias a su genio, la poesía portuguesa tiene hoy cierto perfume de delicadeza, de suavidad, de algo alado y sutil, que nosotros intentamos darle hoy al idioma de Cervantes. […] Es preciso que Vd. nos ayude con todas sus fuerzas en esta cruzada de arte, en este llamamiento a la juventud de ambos países, hoy extraviada por atajos sociológicos y caminos pedregosos. Es preciso que Vd. vuelva a la lucha, que se apiade de la juventud de su país, que hoy, como rebaño suelto, se pierde miserablemente seducida por cuatro palabras huecas y sonoras que, aunque tengan significación en la materialidad de la vida, no la tienen en el Arte. [Your personality greatly appeals to me as it echoes my own temperament. Ten years ago in Portugal, you did what Rubén Darío and I are trying to do now with Spanish literature. Thanks to your genius, Portuguese poetry now has a delicate, soft scent, subtle and airborne, that we are attempting to replicate in the language of Cervantes today. […] We need you to lend us all your strength in this artistic crusade, in this appeal to the youth of both countries, who have lost their way along sociological shortcuts and bumpy roads. We need you to resume the struggle, to take pity on the youth in your country, who, like loose sheep, are being pathetically seduced by a few hollow yet sonorous words, which, although significant to the materiality of life, hold no meaning in Art.] (Villaespesa, cited by Álvarez and Sáez Delgado 2006: 149–50)
However, Eugénio de Castro’s main contact and advocate in Spain was Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote extensively about the poet (in Por tierras de Portugal y de España, 1911, in particular) and cultivated a long-lasting friendship with him over the years. Unamuno, who played a significant part in bringing Portugal and its culture to Spain, was a personal friend of
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both Eugénio de Castro and Teixeira de Pascoaes, acting as the apex of a triangle of authors whose works transcended their national literatures. Unamuno’s opinion of Castro’s poetry shifted over time as their relationship developed, moving from an initial disdain for Belkiss to a keen interest in Constança. Unamuno’s appreciation was influenced by a matter close to his heart: a persistent quest to identify the spirit of an author’s national culture in their literary works, which took precedent over the formal flights of fancy that so often adorned the creations of symbolist and modernist poets at that time. When he found that spirit in Constança, Unamuno’s opinion of Castro changed dramatically and he began to consider his role in Portuguese lyric poetry as pivotal. In this context, Castro visited Madrid in 1922 to give a talk at the Residencia de Estudiantes and perform a poetry recital at the Ateneo, where he was introduced by the critic, translator and poet Andrés González-Blanco. To this day, González-Blanco remains one of the most relevant figures in the cultural rapprochement between Portugal and Spain during this period, although his role is often overlooked. He was also among the Spanish writers who established a relationship with Castro, albeit in a less intense manner than Unamuno, exemplifying the extent to which the Coimbran poet’s work permeated Spanish literature during the first 30 years of the century. Alongside Enrique Díez-Canedo and the omnipresent Unamuno, González-Blanco was one of the most prolific Spanish writers on Portuguese literature and his words were generally well-informed and displayed good critical judgement. He wrote a lengthy text about Castro in French, which was published in the third issue of the Parisian magazine Hispania (July–September 1922). Castro’s decision to reproduce this text in the third volume of his Obras poéticas, published in Lisbon in 1928, provides clear evidence of the importance he accorded to the Spanish writer’s words. González-Blanco also published a slightly different version of his text in Revue de l’Amérique Latine, and it was reproduced in Spanish, most likely in 1922, in the volume dedicated to Castro in the collection Las mejores poesías (líricas) de los mejores poetas, which was coordinated by the Catalan translator and poet Fernando Maristany for Editorial Cervantes. In the text, González-Blanco commented on the period when Oaristos was published: “¿Quién hacía entonces Modernismo en la península? Nadie, absolutamente nadie” [“Who was working in modernism on the peninsula at that time? Nobody, absolutely nobody”] (GonzálezBlanco 1922: 12). This was not the first time that González-Blanco had
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been in contact with Portugal and its literature: in 1920, he translated Fialho de Almeida’s La ciudad del vicio, with a prologue signed in Café Martinho in Lisbon, and he continued to do the same with texts by Eça de Queirós, Antero de Quental and even Camões himself. He had such a strong interest in Portugal that he chose the country as the setting for two short naturalist novels: El fado del Paço d’Arcos, published in 1922, and Españolitas de Lisboa, published in 1923 (Sáez Delgado 2008: 85–94). In 1922, during his time in Madrid, Eugénio de Castro was invited to a banquet in his honour at the Hotel Palace, which was attended by many of the writers who would later join Acción Española. Some of their names are mentioned in the dedications in Castro’s book about Spain, A mantilha de medronhos (1923), confirming his close ties to this circle of authors. Curiously, one of the dedications was to the writer Juan Ramón Jiménez; the relationship between Castro and the Andalusian author has gone completely unstudied and provides fertile ground for future research, as Castro and Guerra Junqueiro are the only Portuguese lyrical poets to be mentioned by Juan Ramón Jiménez in his seminal El Modernismo, Apuntes de Curso (1953). A letter written to Castro by Villaespesa in September 1902 tells us that Ramón Jiménez, the author of Platero y Yo, sent Castro at least one of his books (by that time, he had published Almas de violeta, 1900; Ninfeas, 1900; and Rimas, 1902) as part of an exchange requiring more extensive research. Against this backdrop, Eugénio de Castro became a common presence in Spain, whose influence began to filter through into the heart of the peninsular literary fabric. He even appeared as a character in several books by Spanish authors, demonstrating the significance of his relationship with the country’s literature: Lusitania. Viaje por un país romántico (1920) by Rogelio Buendía; Un español en Portugal (1928) by César González- Ruano; and Los terribles amores de Agliberto y Celedonia (1931) by Mauricio Bacarisse. The three books could not have been more different from one another (the first was a travel book, the second was a collection of interviews and the third a novel), but their authors, all of whom were born approximately a quarter of a century after Castro, in the 1890s, perfectly illustrate the interest that his work aroused in the generation of Spanish authors that straddled modernism and the avant-garde. In this context, it is important to mention the role of Rogelio Buendía, an Andalusian poet who participated actively in the ultraist movement and who became the first translator of Fernando Pessoa’s work in Spain in 1923, as we will see in our exploration of Pessoa’s influence. Buendía is
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likely to have been introduced to Eugénio de Castro’s work by Unamuno, with whom he had established a friendship based on his admiration for the master from Bilbao. In 1920, when ultraism was beginning to shake up the modernist aesthetic with new techniques, he published Lusitania. Viaje por un país romántico, in which he recounts a train journey from the border at Ayamonte to the final stop, Coimbra. It was one of the few books dedicated entirely to Portugal in Spanish literature at that time and contained one of the most impassioned arguments for fraternity between Spain and Portugal. In his book, Buendía (who published an interesting ‘Canción de España a Portugal’ echoing the theme of Iberian rapprochement two years later in the third issue of the Lisbon magazine Contemporânea) describes meeting Castro in Coimbra: Esta mansión, con ventanas de hierro pintadas de verde, no puede ser sino la de algún poeta de Andalucía que quisiera recordar su tierra. Y, sin embargo, es la casa de un poeta enardecido de paganismo clásico, que ama las flores, el sol y el silencio. Ya estamos frente a nuestro antiguo amigo. […] Hablamos del comienzo de nuestra amistad, que hoy se afianza al estrecharnos la mano por primera vez. Fue un amigo nuestro, que ama a Portugal, quien nos hizo conocer al poeta más lírico de todos los actuales líricos lusitanos. Aquel amigo nos dio a leer Constança. Eugénio de Castro ama a España como nosotros a Portugal. Todos los años visita unas cuantas ciudades españolas. Fue a Sevilla y a Granada, representando a la Universidad de Coimbra, cuando el centenario del padre Francisco Suárez. Admira nuestro Arte y es un amigo leal de nuestra patria. Es autor de bellísimos libros de los que conocemos A fonte do satyro, O filho pródigo, Constança, O rey Galaor, Silva, Belkiss y O cavaleiro das mãos irresistiveis. […] Hablamos de Portugal y España. Hojeamos revistas. El nombre de Moréas, el gran amigo de Eugénio de Castro, trae a nosotros el recuerdo doliente del griego de parís.
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Leemos el programa de literatura castellana que explicó nuestro amigo… tenemos una gran alegría al descubrir nombres gloriosos tan venerados: Berceo, Santillana, Juan de la Cruz, Herrera, Lope de Vega. [This mansion, with green-painted iron windows, could belong to none other than an Andalusian poet seeking to recall his homeland. And yet, it is the house of a poet fired up by classical paganism, who loves flowers, sunshine and silence. Now we’re face to face with our old friend. […] We talk about the beginning of our friendship, sealed today as we shake hands for the first time. It was a friend of ours, who loves Portugal, who introduced us to the most lyrical poet of all contemporary Portuguese lyrical poets. He gave us Constança to read. Eugénio de Castro loves Spain, just as we love Portugal. Every year, he visits several Spanish cities. He has been to Seville and to Granada, representing the University of Coimbra at the centenary of Father Francisco Suárez. He admires our Art and is a loyal friend of our country. He is the author of beautiful books, including A Fonte do Satyro, O Filho Pródigo, Constança, O rey Galaor, Silva, Belkiss and O Cavaleiro das Mãos Irresistiveis. […] We talk about Portugal and Spain. We flick through magazines. The name of Moréas, a great friend of Eugénio de Castro, brings back the painful memory of the Greek man in Paris. We read the plan for Spanish literature set out by our friend … We are very happy to see such revered, glorious names: Berceo, Santillana, Juan de la Cruz, Herrera, Lope de Vega.] (Buendía 1920: 76–8)
Buendía’s admiration for Castro and his translations of some of his poems for the magazine Grecia (“De Toledo para el mar”, issue 20, 30 June 1919), one of the cornerstones of ultraism, reveal the Portuguese poet’s underlying influence on the Spanish avant-garde. Meanwhile, the use of symbolist and post-symbolist elements in the Lisbon magazine Orpheu and in the work of several of the poets involved in the magazine continued. While Rogelio Buendía expressed his devotion to Castro in Lusitania at the start of the 1920s (when the avant-garde and the Generation of 1927 took root in Spain), another poet linked to the ultraist movement, journalist César González-Ruano (author of one of the most popular poetry collections in this avant-garde, Viaducto, published in 1925),
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displayed his admiration for Castro’s work in 1928 in his book of interviews Un español en Portugal (Sáez Delgado 2012: 99–116). Ruano dedicates a chapter of his volume to the poet, who he visited in his hometown. The interview is filled with expressions of admiration and references to the poet’s Iberian relations. It cites Villaespesa and González- Blanco, as well as listing Castro’s favourite Spanish authors. The names listed (with Unamuno nowhere to be seen) offer a fascinating insight into Castro’s knowledge of Spanish literature, as they include two great poets who were little known in Portugal at that time, Antonio Machado7 and Juan Ramón Jiménez, as well as other key authors such as Pérez de Ayala, Pedro Salinas, Catalan writer Eugeni d’Ors and Galician author Valle- Inclán. The list reveals the breadth of Castro’s reading as a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Coimbra; he did not limit his explorations to the authors with whom he corresponded, as only one of the names mentioned by the poet as one of his favourite Spanish writers features among his correspondents: Eugeni d’Ors. Another relevant author, broadly linked to the Generation of 1927 (although he died at a young age in 1931), is Mauricio Bacarisse, who appeared in the group’s founding photograph, the famous image of the ultraists taken at La Parisiana in 1921 and the well-known portrait by José Gutiérrez Solana depicting a gathering at Café Pombo led by Ramón Gómez de la Serna in 1920. In the year of his death, poet and novelist Bacarisse published one of the most interesting novels in Spanish avant- garde experimentalism, Los terribles amores de Agliberto y Celedonia, which echoed the work produced by authors such as Ernesto Giménez Caballero and Pedro Salinas. Exploring a couple’s ongoing reflections on their own identity and on the limits between reality and fiction, the novel is largely set in Portugal. Although neither the country nor the cities visited by the characters are ever mentioned by name, Lisbon, Coimbra and Porto are unmistakeable from the author’s descriptions (Sáez Delgado 2012: 117–36). In the passage that interests us here, Agliberto and Celedonia travel to an “antigua y escolástica” [“ancient, scholastic”] city, with a university and botanical gardens, to visit “un gran poeta, hombre de mucho prestigio y resonancia” [“a great poet, a man of great prestige and resonance”] (Bacarisse 1931: 217), who is none other than Eugénio de Castro. The meeting takes place in the writer’s home and allows Bacarisse to make the 7
On Antonio Machado’s presence in Portugal, see Cuadrado (1990).
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only explicit reference to a Spanish poet in the novel, when the Castro character says: “En España tienen ustedes un poeta muy interesante: Juan Ramón Jiménez” [“In Spain, you have a very interesting poet: Juan Ramón Jiménez”] (Bacarisse 1931: 226). While it is unclear whether or not the episode is based on real events (i.e. whether or not Bacarisse and Castro actually met), this excerpt is particularly interesting as it once again mentions Juan Ramón as the Spanish poet most admired by Castro. During the 1930s and 1940s, Castro continued to act as a role model for writers across the peninsula. Despite falling outside the temporal scope of this study, one of the most important events to occur in relation to Castro during this period involved another of his Iberian contacts, Eugeni d’Ors, who dedicated several interesting pages to the poet in Nuevo glosario and Novísimo glosario. D’Ors, who abandoned much of his Catalanism to enter the Falange and Spanish fascism, led a procession to pay tribute to Castro at the University of Coimbra (where the Spaniard was later awarded an honorary doctorate) in 1938, at which José María Pemán read his poem “Salutación y homenaje a Eugénio de Castro”. At that time, the cultural context was highly politicised8 and Castro’s name began to acquire partisan connotations in Spain, where his ideology was associated with the Acción Española group and figures such as Ramiro de Maeztu, who wrote the prologue to the first Spanish edition of La alianza peninsular by António Sardinha in 1930 and to whom Castro had dedicated one of the poems in A mantilha de medronhos, and d’Ors himself, who produced the prologue to the Spanish edition of the biography of the Portuguese dictator written by António Ferro in 1935: Oliveira Salazar. El hombre y su obra. These developments had a profound influence on the critical reception of Castro’s work, overshadowing his pioneering role in introducing symbolism to the Iberian Peninsula or eclipsing it entirely.
8 The proximity of the official cultures of the Salazar and Franco regimes was particularly apparent in the 1940s, when the modernist writer António Ferro, a friend of Fernando Pessoa and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, played a key role in the dialogue between the two cultures. The symbolic climax of this process was the decision by the University of Coimbra to award Francisco Franco an honorary doctorate on 25 October 1949. This academic ceremony is one of the central motifs in Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s Amor a Portugal (1949). The eloquent speeches paying tribute to the General were quickly compiled and published in Franco en Portugal. Actos y discursos (1949). An extensive graphic report of the event can be found in Mundo Hispánico, special supplement, November 1949, accompanying the chronicles written by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, Eugenio Montes and Giménez Caballero.
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It is clear, then, that Eugénio de Castro is central to understanding Iberian dialogue in the first half of the twentieth century. Although his presence gradually began to fade from the 1940s, his legacy provides important insight into the true extent and significance of the relationships, contact and permeability present within the different peninsular literatures, involving some of the most prominent authors of the time.
3.2 Miguel de Unamuno, the Great Iberian Literary Icon The writer who drew the most unanimous respect and admiration from both sides of the border between Spain and Portugal during the first 30 years of the twentieth century was Miguel de Unamuno. His work was revered in Spain and Portugal alike, and he was a role model and icon for writers ranging from the Generation of 1898 to the Portuguese saudosists who had assembled around Teixeira de Pascoaes and the magazine A Águia. Unamuno had a strong personality and never concealed his thoughts on matters in either country, no matter how controversial they might have been. This was the key to his appeal among advocates of different aesthetic currents, such as the Spanish modernists and the Portuguese symbolists, who disagreed with many of his opinions but always found fertile ground for reflection, discussion or debate in his words. His perspectives on different topics were even picked up by later generations of writers, including some ultraist poets and Portuguese modernists such as Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, who believed him to be the ultimate Iberian authority when it came to aesthetic standards. Unamuno’s friendship, opinions and advice were sought after by writers concerned with peninsular dialogue, who viewed him as a leading figure in this area. Many authors made contact with Unamuno, revealing the impact of his words on his peers. Meanwhile, he came to play a key role in the reception of modernism in Spain after it was introduced and disseminated by Rubén Darío and his followers (as well as Eugénio de Castro, as we have seen). His activities also cast light on the evolution of aesthetic ideas (and the related ideological baggage) over time, which he influenced significantly. Unamuno maintained intense, frequent direct contact with key names in Portuguese lyrical poetry, as studies by Julio García Morejón (1971)
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and Ángel Marcos de Dios (1978, 1985) have shown. His relationships with Guerra Junqueiro, Eugénio de Castro and Teixeira de Pascoaes are particularly noteworthy. Through these interactions, he became a privileged observer of the literary situation on the peninsula and the most prestigious mediator of the cultural rapprochement between several of its literary systems. No other Spanish writer owned as many books by Portuguese authors, engaged in such broad, intensive correspondence with the main representatives of Portuguese literature or was as familiar with the country’s literature and society at that time. Unamuno was at the centre of the vast majority of the connections established between Spanish and Portuguese writers, and he made a reputation for himself as an important cultural mediator and arbiter of currents and trends, harnessing his abundant literary knowledge and his prominent role as a respected creator, critic and debater. From the time of his arrival in Salamanca in 1891 (Marcos de Dios 2010), Unamuno forged close ties with Portugal through books, trips and friendships, as his extensive correspondence in Portuguese demonstrates (Marcos de Dios 1978). Although he admitted to reading Eça de Queirós before settling in the university city, there is no doubt that his passion for Portugal had a great deal to do with his place of residence and its proximity to Spain’s neighbour. Indeed, Unamuno spent time at the beach in Portugal during the summers and travelled frequently to Porto to attend meetings in his role as administrator of the railway company that covered the line between the city and Salamanca. The writer’s visits to Portugal, readings of Portuguese authors and correspondence with many of them fuelled his Lusophilia, and he crossed the border on at least 16 occasions from 1894 to 1935 (Barros Dias 2000: 33). It is no surprise, then, that Unamuno wrote extensively about Portugal and its authors. The shelves of his library were home to more than 300 books by Portuguese authors, many of which were sent to Unamuno by their authors with effusive dedications, while he played his own role in this Iberian dialogue by writing around 50 articles and more than a dozen poems about Portugal (Marcos de Dios 1985). Among the Spanish writers active at that time, Unamuno’s body of work contained the most sizeable, varied series of texts about the neighbouring country, which was at the heart of his international interests. One of Unamuno’s most important relationships was with Guerra Junqueiro, who he made contact with in the nineteenth century and met on several occasions. The two authors shared one of Unamuno’s main
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concerns: the concept of ‘patria’ or ‘homeland’ (Junqueiro wrote a book with this title in 1896) and the ongoing quest for autochthonous elements from each country’s culture. In his 1900 article “Turrieburnismo”, Unamuno mentioned his admiration for the Portuguese poet, who was widely translated in Spain at the end of the first decade of the century. This was largely thanks to the work carried out for Editorial Atlante by the modernist poet Eduardo Marquina, with whom Unamuno maintained regular contact and who made Junqueiro a well-known, respected figure on the literary scene.9 Meanwhile, Junqueiro was included in the prestigious collection Las mejores poesías (líricas) de los mejores poetas published by Editorial Cervantes, with Eugenio Carballo and Fernando Maristany translating a selection of his poetry for the collection. Unamuno and Junqueiro frequently exchanged ideas, sending books to one another in Salamanca and Porto. Unamuno’s personal library, preserved as part of the house-museum dedicated to him in Salamanca, contains titles such as Os simples and Oração à luz, while Junqueiro’s personal archive features dedicated copies of Paisajes, Vida de don Quijote y Sancho, Paz en la guerra, Amor y pedagogía and Rosario de sonetos líricos, demonstrating the intensity of the correspondence between the two men and the Spanish author’s deep admiration for Junqueiro, who he believed to be a truly Iberian intellectual, as he wrote in 1907: “Y el mismo Guerra Junqueiro […], ¿no es un ingenio ibérico más bien que portugués? A mí me resulta muchas veces hondamente español, siendo hondamente portugués.” [“And Guerra Junqueiro […], is he not an Iberian wit rather than a Portuguese one? I often find him deeply Spanish, despite him being deeply Portuguese.”] (Unamuno (1911) 1964: 18–9). This focus on the authentic, genuine aspects of national culture that appealed to Unamuno in Junqueiro’s poetry was also closely linked to his enthusiasm for the works of Eugénio de Castro and Pascoaes. He wrote an article about Castro in 1907, which appeared at the beginning of Por tierras de Portugal y de España in 1911, likening him to Junqueiro in terms of the “culto al dolor” [“worship of pain”] present in Portuguese poetry at that time. As we have seen, Unamuno’s admiration for Castro blossomed after he read Constança (1900), as the Portuguese poet’s more markedly 9 Marquina translated Patria. Finis patriae. El cazador Simón. A Inglaterra (1909?), Los simples (1909?), La vejez del padre eterno (1910?), La muerte de Don Juan (1910) and La musa en ocios (idilios y sátiras). La lágrima. Victoria de Francia (1910?) as part of the project to publish the author’s Complete Works by Editorial Atlante.
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symbolist poetry, which earned him prestige among the Spanish modernists, was not to his liking. Unamuno described Castro’s earlier work in the following terms: “ese insoportable Belkiss, de Eugénio de Castro, libro que huele a polvillo de biblioteca amasado en aceite de lámpara, y a orientalismo de enésima mano” [“that unbearable Belkiss by Eugénio de Castro, a book that smells of library dust kneaded into lamp oil and of hand-me- down Orientalism”] (Unamuno, cited by García Morejón 1971: 393). His opinion changed completely, however, when he met the poet in person in 1904 and read Constança, finding within it “toda el alma dolorosa y soñadora de Portugal” [“every bit of Portugal’s sorrowful, dreamy soul”] (Unamuno (1911) 1964: 12) and experiencing it as something akin to a hymn to pain and ‘patria’, with profound echoes of the Portuguese cultural tradition. Centring his commentary around Constança, for which he had written the prologue to the Spanish version, Unamuno reflected on the superficial nature of some analyses of Castro’s symbolist poems (with veiled self-criticism), which he viewed as failing to grasp their true essence. Unamuno’s article reveals his ideological, aesthetic position, which, although undoubtedly influenced by the friendship he had established with Castro by that time, remains faithful to his statements not long before in En Torno al Casticismo: En su primera época apareció Castro a muchos de sus compatriotas, enamorados ciegamente de lo que llaman vernacular, como un poeta exótico, imitador de la poesía francesa novísima. A esto se atribuía el que hubiese sido tan pronto acogido y amparado en el Mercure de France, y a haber sido acogido y amparado por esta publicación debe, sin duda, su boga entre los jóvenes literatos sudamericanos. Pero no supieron ver eso sus compatriotas, que le encontraban poco castizo, cómo por debajo de las galas de la literatura, que llamaré internacional, palpita el espíritu más arraigadamente portugués. […] para los portugueses casticistas, atenidos a una tradición literaria más raquítica y más estrecha aún que puede ser la de nuestros casticistas españoles, Eugénio de Castro era un nefelibata—uno que anda por las nubes—, mote con que en Portugal se conoce a los que aquí llaman modernistas, a falta de otro nombre, o decadentes, o cualquier otro término que no quiera decir nada. [During his early career, Castro appeared to many of his compatriots, blindly enamoured with what they call vernacular, as an exotic poet, an imitator of the latest in French poetry. This led him to be quickly accepted and supported by the Mercure de France, and the magazine’s acceptance and sup-
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port are undoubtedly behind his popularity among young South American literati. But his compatriots, who found him rather inauthentic, were unable to see the most deeply rooted Portuguese spirit pulsating beneath the finery of what I will refer to as international literature. […] for Portuguese people seeking authenticity, who have accepted a more meagre, scant literary tradition than even Spanish authenticity-seekers, Eugénio de Castro was a daydreamer—someone with their head in the clouds—, a name given to all those known as modernists in Portugal, for want of a better name, or decadents, or any other meaningless term.] (Unamuno (1911) 1964: 13–4)
For the purposes of our study, it is interesting to observe how Unamuno’s reflections on the poetry of Eugénio de Castro, Junqueiro and Teixeira de Pascoaes allow him to adopt an Iberian approach to their work and make cross-border comparisons. He rarely analyses these authors in the context of their national literatures alone, examining them instead within the Iberian context with a clear focus on the relationship between Portugal and Spain. His multiple, often controversial, opinions should be understood in this context. Whereas Unamuno admired Guerra Junqueiro’s militant ethical commitment and concept of ‘patria’ and Eugénio de Castro’s expression of the essence of Portuguese culture in Constança, his third great friend, Teixeira de Pascoaes, gave him a new perspective on spirituality in Portugal through the lens of nostalgia. Pascoaes appears to have been Unamuno’s greatest role model, and it was with him that he maintained the most regular, intimate contact over the years. Unamuno and Pascoaes met several times after their first meeting in Salamanca in 1905, when they were accompanied by Castro. In the wake of that first encounter, the two writers exchanged books such as Jesus e Pã, Para a luz and Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, paving the way for an intense written dialogue that continued, albeit with some gaps, until shortly before the Spanish writer’s death on the last day of 1936. Unamuno met Teixeira de Pascoaes in person on numerous occasions, especially during 1906, 1907 and 1908, and the two men built a solid, lasting friendship based on mutual admiration and harmonious coexistence with their respective families (Barros Dias 2000). Whereas Pascoaes, who was 27 years old when he met the Spanish writer, admired his brilliant critical judgement, dedication and analytical skills, Unamuno, aged 40, found something of an Iberian kindred spirit in Pascoaes. At that time, Pascoaes had published several poetry collections (Sempre, 1898; Terra
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prohibida, 1900; and Para a luz, 1904), but Unamuno’s first book, Poesías, was not released until 1907. At the same time, Unamuno and Pascoaes shared a desire to change the course of poetry, moving away from the styles that predominated in their countries in the early twentieth century: symbolist poetry in Portugal and modernist poetry in Spain. In their work, they distanced themselves from the affected writing style adopted by the epigones of both schools, who they considered to prioritise formal aspects over content in their poetry. The letters exchanged by the two writers represent an inexhaustible source of information (Unamuno and Pascoaes 1986) and are fundamental in analysing their relationship. The compilation contains 31 letters written by Pascoaes and 19 by Unamuno, covering the period extending from 1905 to 1934, with several lengthy periods in which no documents are available, between 1920 and 1934 in particular. Pascoaes’s admiration for Unamuno is clear from the forms of address that he uses in his letters, which include “Meu querido Mestre” [“My dear Master”] in his second letter and “Queridíssimo Mestre” [“Dearest Master”] in his last, as well as “venerado Mestre” [“revered Master”] and “inolvidável Mestre” [“unforgettable Master”]. He expressed his passion for the Spanish writer’s work in his second letter in 1905: “D. Miguel de Unamuno é o Cervantes moderno!” [“Mr Miguel de Unamuno is the modern Cervantes!”] (Unamuno and Pascoaes 1986: 24), while another letter dated February 1914 that recounted his reading of Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida contained the words: “Na verdade, não vi ainda obra de arte ou literária que traduzisse o génio hespanhol com mais vigor e sublimidade” [“In truth, I have not yet seen an artistic or literary work that conveys the Spanish spirit with greater excellence and vigour”] (Unamuno and Pascoaes 1986: 42). Pascoaes was not alone in his opinion of Unamuno in Portugal, where he was respected and admired among intellectual circles around the country. The publication of Por tierras de Portugal y de España, which was originally to be entitled Almas y cosas de Portugal, played a key role at a time when Unamuno’s enthusiasm for Portugal was at a peak. Instead of producing a book solely about the land of Camões, Unamuno decided to include texts about Spain in the volume to convey his vision of the Iberian context as exemplified by the relationship between Portugal and Spain, combining themes and reflections relating to both cultural contexts. The book contains 12 texts about Portugal and 14 about Spain, drawing on the articles published in the Argentine newspaper La Nación. Its warm
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reception in Portugal is echoed in the correspondence between the two poets: a letter from Pascoaes (who published a lengthy review of the book in issue 8 of A Águia, 1 April 1911) informs Unamuno that several Lisbon bookshops are interested in making it available to their customers. Another article in the volume is “Las sombras, de Teixeira de Pascoaes”, which Unamuno dedicated to the Portuguese poet’s fifth collection, published in 1907. In this important text, he emphasises the book’s pantheism and the concepts found in the poems, such as “sleep” and “ambiguity”. He establishes a curious parallel between Pascoaes’s poetry and his own approach to poetic creation before highlighting an interesting difference: La filosofía poética de Teixeira de Pascoaes es una filosofía sombrosa—no sombría. Las realidades se diluyen y disuelven en sombra en ellas, y las sombras se cuajan y consolidan en realidades. El sueño y la vela pierden sus linderos, derritiéndose uno en otro: la vida se convierte en sueño y el sueño en vida. Y así resulta una filosofía infantil y antigua, de la infancia del hombre y de la infancia de la Humanidad, de cuando el poeta era algo sagrado y espontáneo. Para Teixeira de Pascoaes, la obra del hombre tiene más realidad que el hombre mismo. Juan Valjean sobrevive a Victor Hugo, y Ofelia a Shakespeare. Doctrina esta expuesta varias veces—yo mismo la he desarrollado en mi Vida de don Quijote y Sancho—, pero que aquí el poeta la convierte en sustancia poética. Y esto da a la poesía de Teixeira de Pascoaes la vaguedad que tanto la caracteriza, y con ella cierta difusión que es su defecto capital. Defecto sin el cual no sería lo que es ni valdría lo que vale. No hallaréis en sus composiciones esas estrofas densas, compactas, de espesísimo cristal, esculpidas, diamantinas, tales como se encuentran en Carducci y como yo me he esforzado por hacer en mis propias poesías; las de Teixeira de Pascoaes se alargan y desvanecen como sombras de crepúsculo. Pero ¡qué hermosamente!
[Teixeira de Pascoaes’s poetic philosophy is a shadowy philosophy—not a sombre one. In it, realities are diluted and dissolved into shadow, while shadows come together and are cemented into realities. The boundary between sleep and wakefulness is lost and they merge into one another: life is transformed into sleep and sleep into life. A primitive, ancient philosophy emerges, from the infancy of man and the infancy of Humankind, from when poetry was something sacred and spontaneous.
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For Teixeira de Pascoaes, a man’s work is more real than the man himself. Juan Valjean survives Victor Hugo, and Ophelia outlives Shakespeare. This doctrine is expounded several times—I myself elaborated upon it in my Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho—, but here the poet transforms it into poetic substance. And this lends Teixeira de Pascoaes’s poetry the ambiguity that characterises it so, and with it a certain scattering that is its principal defect. Yet without this defect, it would not be what it is, nor would it be of such great value. In his compositions, you will not find those dense, compact verses of thick glass, sculpted and diamond-white, like you find in Carducci and like I myself have strived to create in my own poems; Teixeira de Pascoaes’s poems stretch out and fade away like shadows at dusk. But how beautifully they do so!] (Unamuno (1911) 1964: 23)
Between the publication of this article in 1908 and that of the book containing it in 1911, Pascoaes invited Unamuno to submit a piece for the magazine A Águia, the official periodical of the Renascença Portuguesa movement, in December 1910. In a letter sent in March 1909, the Spanish writer declared that “desde hace algún tiempo las cosas de Portugal son de las que más me interesan” [“for some time, developments in Portugal have been of the utmost interest to me”] (Unamuno and Pascoaes 1986: 72), adding not long after in January 1910: “Cada día me siento menos europeo y más ibérico” [“Every day I feel less European and more Iberian”] (Unamuno and Pascoaes 1986: 76). Unamuno agreed to collaborate with A Águia without hesitation and submitted two sonnets belonging to the Rosario de sonetos líricos collection (1911) in December 1910. One of them, which begins with the words “Cuando, Señor, nos besas con tu beso” [“Lord, when you bless us with your kiss”], cites a verse from Antero de Quental and enters into dialogue with it: “Na mão de Deus, na sua mão direita” [“In God’s hand, in his right hand”]. The second, which appeared alongside an illustration by António Carneiro in issue 5 of the magazine during the same year, 1911, is entitled “Portugal” and is one of the most iconic Spanish poems dedicated to the country’s neighbour: Portugal Del atlántico mar en las orillas desgreñada y descalza una matrona se sienta al pie de sierra que corona triste pinar. Apoya en las rodillas
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los codos y en las manos las mejillas y clava ansiosos ojos de leona en la puesta del sol. El mar entona su trágico cantar de maravillas. Dice de luengas tierras y de azares mientras ella sus pies en las espumas bañando sueña en el fatal imperio que se le hundió en los tenebrosos mares, y mira cómo entre agoreras brumas se alza Don Sebastián rey del misterio. [At the farthest edge of the Atlantic shore, a barefoot and dishevelled lady peers into the waves, at the foot of the mountains, and hears the distant, weeping pines. She sits before the swirling sea, propping her head in her hands, and like a lioness, fixes her gazing eyes on the gateway of the sun, while the ocean cries its tragic songs of wonders and distant lands. It sings of tragedies and fate, while she, with her feet in the foaming surf, dreams of history – dreams of that once-great empire doomed to be, so suddenly, lost and drowned in the gloomy sea – then stares, through the mist, as the King of mystery, Dom Sebastian, rises from the sea.] (Unamuno, cited by Marcos de Dios 1985: 83, translation by William Baer)
The publication of this sonnet only enhanced Unamuno’s prestige in Portugal, making him the Spanish literary icon par excellence for Portuguese writers from the generations of Eugénio de Castro and Pascoaes, as well as for younger authors such as Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Fernando Pessoa himself,10 who wrote to the Basque writer to seek his opinion on several of their books (A confissão de Lúcio and Dispersão, between 1913 and 1914, in the case of Sá-Carneiro; about Orpheu magazine in 1915 in the case of Pessoa). These interactions will be explored in greater depth in Chap. 4. Pascoaes stressed Unamuno’s influence on new generations of Portuguese writers in a letter dated February 1918, three years after 10 Some critics, such as António Apolinário Lourenço, view Unamuno’s sonnet “Portugal” as a possible precursor to the poem “O dos Castellos”, which opens Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem (Lourenço 2008: 76).
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Orpheu was published, in which he stated: “Toda a gente nova de valor tem pela sua Obra a maior admiração. É o Escriptor Hespanhol mais lido e amado—o que é de toda a justiça, em Portugal.” [“All worthy newcomers hold his oeuvre in the greatest admiration. He is the most read and most loved Spanish writer—and rightly so, in Portugal.”] (Unamuno and Pascoaes 1986: 49). However, his popularity did not prompt Unamuno to take an interest in the work of the Portuguese modernists or the Spanish avant-gardists, and he does not appear to have replied to any of the young Lisbon writers who contacted him (with the exception of a polite note to Sá-Carneiro thanking him for sending his books), causing them lasting disappointment. The case of Pessoa is a prime example. Despite reading Unamuno’s work and sharing some of his most deeply rooted obsessions (his nationalist philosophy and its implications for identity), causing him to mention the Spanish writer in several of his texts, Unamuno never cited Pessoa. He remained loyal to his famous maxim in Contra esto y aquello: “Eternidad y no Modernismo es lo que quiero” [“Eternity, not modernism, is what I want”] (a phrase which, incidentally, Pessoa himself would most likely have endorsed), after interpreting the letter accompanying the copy of Orpheu magazine as little more than an avant-gardist uprising, as we will see later on. However, Unamuno’s interest in Portuguese literature was not limited to the three authors we have mentioned: he read widely and maintained a diverse range of contacts. Nevertheless, he preferred modern Portuguese literature to classic literature and stated this fact openly: “sin negar el valor de algunos de los clásicos portugueses, debo decir que, a mi entender, la literatura portuguesa, en cuanto merece leerse, data del siglo pasado, del periodo romántico, de la época de Almeida Garrett y de Herculano. Y creo que su verdadera edad de oro es la actual” [“without denying the value of some of the Portuguese classics, I must say that, in my view, the Portuguese literature worth reading dates back to the last century, to the romantic period, to the time of Almeida Garrett and Herculano. And I believe that its true Golden Age is happening now.”] (Unamuno (1911) 1964: 16). In “La literatura portuguesa contemporánea” (which was initially published in 1907 before being reproduced in Por tierras de Portugal y España), Unamuno listed the names of the authors who aroused his interest. These included João de Deus, “el más grande lírico portugués entre los muertos” [“the greatest Portuguese lyrical poet among the deceased”]; Antero de Quental, who he compared to Leopardi or Kierkegaard; António Nobre, who represented “desesperanza patriótica” [“patriotic despair”];
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Eça de Queirós and his “espíritu supercrítico” [“extremely critical spirit”]; Camilo Castelo Branco, whose Amor de perdição is “uno de los pocos libros representativos de nuestra común alma ibérica” [“one of the few books to represent our shared Iberian soul”]; and Oliveira Martins, the historian who was “más artista y más penetrante” [“most artistic and most insightful”] (Unamuno (1911) 1964: 17–9). Another figure who should no doubt be added to this list is doctor and writer Manuel Laranjeira, who Unamuno met in 1908 and imagined to be the physical embodiment of Portugal’s tragic, suicidal spirit. “La literatura portuguesa contemporánea” also contains excerpts that relate to the final aspect of Unamuno’s Iberian philosophy that we wish to broach here: the harsh criticism that abounded in his reflections on Portugal, its landscape and its culture. Unamuno never took an indulgent view of Portugal (or of Spain or the Iberian ideal), nor were his opinions sweetened by his friendships with many of the country’s most prominent writers. On the contrary, he took advantage of his knowledge and contacts to search for Portugal’s quintessential essence in its nationalism and spirituality, adopting exactly the same behaviour and displaying the same motivation and drive as he had in his explorations of his own country. In 1908, when he was writing the articles for La Nación that would later be published in Por tierras de Portugal y de España, Unamuno wrote to Pascoaes: “el libro será un conjunto doloroso y me temo que no ha de agradar a muchos portugueses. Pero yo que he dicho tristes y duras verdades a mis compatriotas creo poder decirlas a los otros” [“the book will be a sorrowful compilation and I fear that it will displease many Portuguese people. But given that I have told my own compatriots sad, difficult truths, I think I am within my rights to do so to others”] (Unamuno and Pascoaes 1986: 68). This anecdote serves to emphasise Unamuno’s Iberian spirit, based on the crucial relationship between Portugal and Spain, with the Spanish context playing a leading role. It also demonstrates the extent of his concern for Portugal and for the way in which the two countries often appeared to be talking at cross-purposes, which he consistently sought to combat by avoiding empty pretexts: Y siendo así, ¿a qué se debe este alejamiento espiritual y esta tan escasa comunicación de cultura? Creo que puede responderse: a la petulante soberbia española, de una parte, y a la quisquillosa suspicacia portuguesa, de la otra parte. El español, el castellano sobre todo, es desdeñoso y arrogante y el portugués, lo mismo que el gallego, es receloso y susceptible. Aquí se da
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en desdeñar a Portugal y en tomarlo como blanco de chacotas y burlas, sin conocerlo, y en Portugal hasta hay quienes se imaginan que aquí se sueña en conquistarlos. Y, sin embargo, Portugal merece ser estudiado y conocido por lo españoles. [And given that, what is the cause of this spiritual distance and this scant cultural dialogue? I think I know the answer: petulant Spanish pride, on the one hand, and fastidious Portuguese suspicion on the other. Spaniards, especially Castilians, are disdainful and arrogant and the Portuguese, like the Galicians, are wary and thin-skinned. Here, people scorn Portugal and view it as a target for jokes and mockeries, without really knowing it, and in Portugal, there are people who imagine that Spain dreams of conquering them. Yet Portugal deserves to be studied and discovered by the Spanish.] (Unamuno (1911) 1964: 16)
Unamuno did not hesitate to write that “Portugal es hoy un purgatorio poblado de ánimas” [“Portugal today is a purgatory peopled by spirits”] (Unamuno (1911) 1964: 49) in 1908, nor to refer to the country in a letter to the poet and translator Eduardo Marquina as “aquel desdichado país de mendigos y de pedantes que ha vendido su personalidad étnica por una sombra de independencia nominal” [“that miserable country of beggars and pedants who have sold their ethnic personality for a semblance of nominal independence”] (Unamuno, cited by Robles 1991: 248). Compounded by his criticism of the English alliance, this attitude underpins many of Unamuno’s more extreme (and desperate) statements on the possibility of Castile annexing Portugal, as well as his ideas about the preeminence of Spanish over Portuguese, on the premise that the language of Cervantes was used by far more people in far more countries than that of Camões. Unamuno’s obsession persisted for decades and his occasional support for the subordination of Portugal by Spanish cultural expansion displeased Fernando Pessoa, who debated the matter with Unamuno in writing in around 1931, as we will see in the next chapter. Unamuno expressed considerable concern for the present and future relationship between Spain and Portugal and was generally well-informed, prompting him to reflect at length on the links between quixotism, which he so ardently espoused, and Teixeira de Pascoaes’s saudosism. Although his famous sonnet (LXVII in Rosario de sonetos líricos), which read “La sangre de mi espíritu es mi lengua / y mi patria es allí donde resuene / soberano su verbo” [“My language is the blood of my spirit / and my
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country is where / its verbs ring out, sovereign”], provoked widespread controversy and heated debate, and although it is important to bear in mind the writer and philosopher’s strong personality, Unamuno nonetheless occupies a very important position in the catalogue of relationships between twentieth-century writers on the Iberian Peninsula that very few authors can equal. The rector of Salamanca, with his eccentricities and his sharp pen rarely disposed to euphemism, became the most visible face of the Spanish rapprochement with Portugal among his generation of authors, driven by the conviction that: “Es una obra de amor y de cultura hacer que Portugal y España se conozcan mutuamente. Porque el conocerse es amarse. El conocimiento engendra amor y el amor conocimiento.” [“Enabling Portugal and Spain to get to know one another is a labour of love and culture. Because to know one another is to love one another. Familiarity engenders love and love engenders familiarity.”] (Unamuno and Pascoaes 1986: 69).
3.3 Teixeira de Pascoaes and the Iberian Dimension of Saudosism From the early 1920s in particular, Teixeira de Pascoaes began to acquire a considerable reputation on the Iberian Peninsula, taking his place alongside Eugénio de Castro as the most prominent Portuguese lyrical poet in Castile, Catalonia and Galicia. The reception of Eugénio de Castro and Teixeira de Pascoaes’s work was shaped by a significant degree of aesthetic confrontation, as, with important exceptions such as that of Unamuno, it filtered into Iberian literatures (albeit with obvious differences between the two poets) as a result of its genealogical relationship with the two currents that were predominant in international literature at that time: the Latin American current inspired by French literature, introduced by Darío, in the case of Eugénio de Castro, and the vernacular current of transcendental orientation in the case of Teixeira de Pascoaes. The work of Pascoaes circulated widely across the Iberian Peninsula from the 1920s, becoming especially popular in three specific linguistic and cultural areas: Castile, Catalonia and Galicia. Although Eugénio de Castro had already made contact with writers in these three areas, Pascoaes was even more active and built up an enthusiastic group of mediators and admirers in each area, who belonged to groups or currents that were autochthonous to these cultural contexts. As a result, Pascoaes’s work was
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received in different ways in Catalonia, Galicia and the rest of the Spanish state (although this reception did not occur hermetically in each of these regions), depending on the national and Iberian outlooks of the authors who served as mediators of his work in the different literary systems. This multiple reception allowed the poet to enter into dialogue with each of the three literary areas, which he got to know in person through his trips and close relationships with many of the most important writers in each area, as his correspondence in Galician (Álvarez and Estraviz 1999) and Spanish (Cameirão 2010a) reveals. Pascoaes acquired a plural vision of the Iberian Peninsula (Franco 2010), which came to form part of his thinking and literary production: he adopted an Iberist approach in several of his texts, associating himself with this particular philosophy. In other words, Pascoaes interacted regularly with the different literary systems on the Iberian Peninsula and adopted a multifaceted perspective, responding to the reception of his work and his influence on many Catalan, Castilian and Galician authors at that time with his own vision, based on saudosism, which took on an increasingly Iberian dimension as the years went on. Miguel de Unamuno played a key role once again, acting as Pascoaes’s most prominent mediator. In 1905, Pascoaes visited him with Eugénio de Castro, forging a friendship that lasted until Unamuno’s death in 1936. In 1905, when Unamuno published his seminal Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, he and Pascoaes began to exchange books and letters.11 Not long after, Unamuno published his first major review of Pascoaes’s poetry in La Nación in Buenos Aires, entitled “Las sombras, de Teixeira de Pascoaes”, which was reproduced in Por tierras de Portugal y de España. In it, he mentioned two encounters with the poet in Portugal: one in Porto and another in Pascoaes’s manor house on the outskirts of Amarante, where they spent several days together. The pivotal nature of Unamuno’s book for the reception of Pascoaes’s work in Spain is evidenced by the inclusion of three of his poems in Pequeña antología de poetas portugueses12 by Díez-Canedo, who is believed to have been one of his first Spanish translators. Earlier international collections of translations by Díez-Canedo, including Del cercado ajeno (1907) and Imágenes (1910), overlooked Pascoaes but included poems by 11 For more on Pascoaes’s relationship with Spain and his correspondence with Spanish authors, see Lurdes Cameirão (2010a, b). 12 A facsimile edition of Pequeña Antología de Poetas Portugueses by Díez-Canedo ((1926?) 2010) is available, accompanied by an introductory study (Sáez Delgado 2010).
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other Portuguese authors such as Eugénio de Castro, Antero de Quental and Gomes Leal. The publication of Por tierras de Portugal y de España marked a significant turning point in Pascoaes’s relationship with Unamuno, and, more broadly, with Spain and its writers. The spiritual affinity between the two men is clear from the lengthy review of Unamuno’s book by Pascoaes in A Águia, published on 1 April 1911. In the text, which warns readers that Unamuno is “not at all Portuguese” but rather “organically Spanish”, the author of As Sombras traces a clear line from Unamuno’s idea of “Lusitanian sadness” as an unmistakeable element of the Portuguese soul to the concept of saudade or nostalgic longing in a transcendental, spiritual sense that was of interest to Unamuno. From this central premise, Pascoaes sets out the differences between the Spanish (“mármore criado” [“created marble”]) and Portuguese temperaments (“névoa criadora” [“creative mist”]) and echoes Unamuno’s stance in En torno al casticismo, raising doubts as to the relevance of many of the traces of French influence found in the literature in vogue at the time in Portugal. He also mentions the damage caused by a particular strain of Roman Catholicism in the development of Portuguese culture, suggesting the idea of “inward” progress in search of that Lusitanian sadness that lies at the heart of saudade: A literatura de Portugal, quasi sempre influenciada por livros e ideias vindas de França, assim como as nossas classes superiores, e a alma do povo adulterada pelo catolicismo romano, não permitiram que o grande escritor hespanhol visse o fundo virgem e inédito da alma lusitana, e portanto, da sua tristeza. […] o velo profundo e vivo d’essa alma está sepultado, há séculos, debaixo d’um enorme entulho feito de ideias, sentimentos, costumes, modas, etc, etc, importados de roma para uso do coração, e de paris para serviço do espírito. e não é fácil trabalho destruir esta espessa e já petrificada camada de cinza, para que surja à luz do dia, esperta e viva, essa divina faúla de lume que nos deverá alumiar no caminho de progresso e perfeição. […] Não me canso de afirmar que Portugal deve progredir dentro, absolutamente dentro da sua tristeza. […] o cinco de Outubro foi já um facto de grande alcance, porque nos livrou da influência de Roma, apagou as lâmpadas de Roma. Agora só resta (e será o mais curioso) apagar os fachos de Paris, e guiarmo-nos pela nossa própria candeia, alimentada com azeite das nossas oliveiras … é preciso educar este povo dentro da sua personalidade: um vestuário estrangeiro não lhe fica bem: não foi feito para o seu corpo.
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[Portugal’s literature, almost always influenced by books and ideas from France, just like our upper classes, and the soul of the people, adulterated by Roman Catholicism, prevented the great Spanish writer from seeing the untouched, unseen heart of the Lusitanian soul, and, therefore, its sadness. […] the deep, living fleece of that soul has been buried for centuries beneath an immense clutter of ideas, feelings, customs, fashions, etc. imported from Rome for the use of the heart and from Paris for the use of the spirit. It is no easy task to destroy that thick, petrified layer of ash to allow the light of day to emerge, bright and alive, that divine spark of light that should illuminate the path of progress and perfection. […] I cannot repeat it enough: Portugal must progress from within, from deep within its sadness. […] The 5th October was already a great leap, as it freed us from the influence of Rome, it put out the lights of Rome. Now all that remains (and this will be the most curious thing) is to dim the beams of Paris and follow the light of our own candle, fuelled with oil from our olive groves … We need to educate the people with respect for their own personality: a stranger’s clothes never fit well: they were made for a different body.] (Pascoaes 1988: 24–6)
Some of these concepts echo Unamuno’s ideas, which, in turn, can be found in much of the philosophy espoused by the Generation of 1898. The quest for autochthonous elements of national and Iberian culture shaped the philosophy and literary output of both Unamuno and Pascoaes, who shared similar concerns despite their opinions and solutions often diverging, particularly when it came to the organic characterisation of the Iberist ideal. However, the philosophy and works of Teixeira de Pascoaes were not only important to Unamuno; they also made a significant mark on Catalonia, as we will see in the section focusing on Joan Maragall. Another Catalan writer whose enthusiastic admiration for Pascoaes may have been influenced by Unamuno’s book and by a shared interest in A Águia was Ignasi Ribera i Rovira, who lived in Portugal from a relatively young age and was one of the country’s main standard-bearers on the other side of the Iberian Peninsula. Between 1913 and 1925, he wrote 12 letters and a postcard to Pascoaes (Cameirão 2010a: 438–50). He was among the Catalan intellectuals with the deepest passion for Portugal (Mayone Dias 1975), and, more specifically, for the work of Pascoaes, who he greatly admired. Sharing his devotion was the Catalan poet (who wrote in Spanish) and translator Fernando Maristany, who belonged to a circle of creators who actively sought out Portugal as a mirror allowing them to reflect the
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Iberian reality, as studies by Thomas Harrington (2000a, 2001, 2002) and Víctor Martínez-Gil (2010a, b, 2013a, 2017b) have shown. Ribera i Rovira published a considerable number of books on Portuguese topics, including Portugal artístic (1905), Iberisme (1907), Portugal y Galicia: Nación (1911) and Portugal literari (1912), which summarised a series of talks on Portuguese literature held at the Ateneo de Barcelona. Although he did not dedicate as much space in his book to the work of Pascoaes as to Junqueiro or Castro, Ribera i Rovira identifies several key aspects that link the concept of saudade in Pascoaes’s poems to the Catalan anyorament, which is fundamental in explaining the reception of the poet’s work in Catalonia: La saudade lusitana sols en l’anyorament català té digna i expressiva semblança psíquica. L’ànima de la raça portuguesa es la saudade: així com l’ànima de la raça catalana es l’anyorament, l’anyorança. La saudade, o l’anyorament, en la seva ultima i fonda analisi, es l’amor carnal espiritualitzat pel dolor o l’amor espiritual materialitzat pel desig; es les noces del bès amb la llagrima; es Venus i la Verge Maria en una sola dòna. Es la sintesi del cel i la terra; el punt on s’encreuen totes les forces cosmiques; el centre de l’univers: l’ànima de la naturalesa dintre l’ànima umana. La saudade, o l’anyorament, es la personalitat eterna de la raça; la fisionomia caracteristica, el còs original amb el qual ella ha d’apareixer entre ·ls altres pobles. [Portuguese saudade bears a fitting, expressive psychic resemblance to Catalan anyorament. Saudade is the soul of the Portuguese race, just as the soul of the Catalan race is anyorament or longing. Ultimately, saudade or anyorament is carnal love spiritualised by pain or spiritual love materialised by desire; it is a marriage of kisses and tears; it is Venus and the Virgin Mary in one woman. It is the combination of heaven and earth; the point at which all cosmic forces come together; the centre of the universe: nature’s soul within the human soul. Saudade, or anyorament, is the eternal character of the race; the inherent physiognomy, the original body in which it must walk among the other peoples.] (Ribera i Rovira 1912: 77–8)
In the prologue to the Portuguese poetry anthology in Catalan Atlàntiques (1913), Ribera i Rovira goes as far as to say that “L’Anyorament es una nova Religió” [“Anyorament is a new religion”] (1913: 29), linking the concept and its saudosist ties to the poetry of Ausias March, as Martínez-Gil (2017b) has shown. The association between these concepts, analysed by Cerdà Subirachs (2000a), is central to understanding
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the role that Pascoaes’s saudosist poetry played in the Catalan cultural context, and, more specifically, in the generation of authors born in the early 1880s, shortly after the Portuguese poet, such as Ribera i Rovira and Maristany. Ribera i Rovira’s anthology is of great cultural value and compiles the work of authors ranging from Almeida Garrett to Vasconcellos e Sá, including several poets unknown in Catalonia and across Spain at that time. It pays particular attention to Eugénio de Castro (who has twice as many poems in the volume than any other author), although it also features three poems by Pascoaes, translated for the first time into Catalan. The enthusiastic response to the anthology is likely to have been the trigger for Andrés González-Blanco’s article about Pascoaes—“Teixeira de Pascoaes y el Saudosismo”—published in the Barcelona magazine Estvdio13 (González-Blanco 1917), as well as for the invitation that Pascoaes received from Eugeni d’Ors in 1918 to travel to Barcelona to give a series of talks on the history of Portuguese poetry at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. A year later, these talks were published in Os poetas lusíadas, alongside a short preface in which Pascoaes recounted his time in Catalonia and listed the names of the writers who had accompanied him. Among these writers was Maristany (Sáez Delgado 2008: 51–76), a modernist (or even late modernist) poet who worked as a translator for many years, almost always for the prestigious Editorial Cervantes, which published his important anthology Las cien mejores poesías líricas de la lengua portuguesa in 1918. In the book, whose contents list writers ranging from Dom Dinis to Alfredo Brochado, Teixeira de Pascoaes occupies far more pages than even Camões himself, evidencing Maristany’s passion for his poetry. The anthology became a valuable tool for introducing the Catalan and Spanish public to Pascoaes’s work, while the prologue served to publicise Ribera i Rovira’s theory on the kinship between saudosism and Enyorantisme, which mirrored the Portuguese movement by applying the concept to Catalan culture. From this perspective, the collection functioned not so much as an overview of Portuguese lyrical poetry throughout history, but as a way of introducing readers to the new literary currents practised in Portugal, with saudosism occupying a central position. Indeed, the anthology broke with
13 The relationship between the Barcelona magazine Estvdio and Portuguese and Galician literature has been explored by Navas (2010) and by Navas and Ribera Llopis (2013) respectively.
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tradition by selecting living authors, adopting a similar practice to Maristany’s volumes of other foreign literatures for Editorial Cervantes.14 These circumstances suggest that Maristany and Ribera i Rovira found a perfect companion in Pascoaes’s saudosism. The prologue for Maristany’s anthology by Ribera i Rovira clearly states that “La saudade portuguesa es la añoranza catalana, que el alma española se ha incorporado bellamente” [“Portuguese saudade is Catalan añoranza, beautifully embraced by the Spanish soul”] (Ribera i Rovira 1918: 11), emphasising the need for a literature that echoes the authenticity of each culture, eschewing the excess of exoticism found in the work of modernist epigones of the “cisne moribundo” [“dying swan”]: En el fondo es el mismo sentimiento elegíaco, idílico, amoroso, que baña suavemente toda la poesía portuguesa: así como una fuente eterna de las emociones que hacen sentir el alma poética lusitana, o bien como el retorno a la genuinidad excelsa que ha producido los reales valores estéticos que honran magníficamente a la literatura de Portugal; retorno a la genuinidad que ha desarraigado toda casta de exotismos y extravagancias, guiando por la mano a seguro puerto el espíritu desorientado de los verdaderos poetas. La generación nueva ha crismado con el espiritualísimo nombre de saudosismo […] Los poetas de la nueva generación que quieren descubrir el perdido camino de la genuinidad estética nacional, se cobijan bajo la saudade, porque esta los dirige dulcemente hacia la senda elegíaca, amorosa, idílica, de la cual se habían desviado las pasadas generaciones literarias, empujadas por las más locas corrientes de extranjerismo. […] He ahí la alta orientación del nuevo espíritu poético lusitano. Y es muy cierto que, nunca como ahora, tan señalada y numerosa pléyade de poetas cantó al son de la lira apolínea en esa bendita tierra embebida de luz, y ese canto no es el del cisne moribundo, sino la melodía primaveral, el oculto y misterioso prenuncio de renovación de la raza portuguesa. [At heart, it is the same elegiac, idyllic, loving sentiment that softly envelops all Portuguese poetry: like an eternal source of the emotions provoked by the Portuguese poetic soul, or a return to the wonderful authenticity that has produced the genuine aesthetic values that grace Portugal’s literature; a return to the authenticity that has uprooted all kinds of exoticisms and 14 Fernando Maristany compiled his anthologies of the best Greek, Italian, Portuguese, French, English and German lyrical poetry in Florilegio, published by Editorial Cervantes in 1920.
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extravagances, guiding the lost spirits of true poets to safety. The new generation has been baptised with the very spiritual name of saudosism. […] Poets from the new generation who wish to discover the lost way of national aesthetic authenticity shelter behind saudade, which leads them gently towards the elegiac, loving, idyllic path from which earlier literary generations diverged, driven by the wildest currents of foreign influence. […] What I have here is the ultimate direction of the new Lusitanian poetic spirit. It is very true that, now more than ever, a visible, multitudinous group of poets sings to the sound of the Apollonian lyre in that blessed land bathed in light, not to the song of the dying swan but to a springtime melody, the hidden, mysterious portent of the renewal of the Portuguese race.] (Ribera i Rovira 1918: 12–4)
However, the notion of saudade as a basis for kinship with Portugal backed by Fernando Maristany was not only present in the Catalan context. The article published by González-Blanco (an author whose poetry reflected the sentimental prosaism that is so frequent in late modernist Spanish lyrical poetry, including the work of José del Río Sáinz, Juan Sierra, Galician writer Luis Pimentel and Díez-Canedo himself, and occasionally echoes some of the ‘shadier’ tenets of the saudosists) in 1917 questions the extent to which saudade is exclusive to Portugal, considering the possibility that its influence is visible throughout the Iberian context: El Saudosismo originario de la fusión de los elementos arios y de los elementos semitas, no es exclusivo de Portugal y conviene a todos los pueblos ibéricos. La saudade es de hecho, como palabra, una creación lusitana; mas el sentimiento que informa esa palabra es patrimonio de todos los pueblos de iberia donde han encarnado las dos fuertes razas arias y semíticas. […] ¿No podría aplicarse esta fórmula de psicología colectiva al sur de España, por lo menos, a la Andalucía donde aparecen tan fusionados los elementos semita y ario? […] Entre España y Portugal no hay disentimiento fundamental, no hay diferencia substancial, no hay línea divisoria de raza; y, sin embargo, debiendo estar indisolublemente unidos, permanecemos separados. [Saudosism, which originated from the fusion of Aryan and Semitic elements, is not exclusive to Portugal and suits all Iberian peoples. In fact, the term saudade is a Lusitanian creation; but the sentiment behind the word belongs to all the peoples of Iberia where the two strong Aryan and Semitic
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races are present. […] Could this formula of collective psychology not be applied to the south of Spain, or at least to Andalusia, where the Semitic and Aryan elements are so intertwined? […] There is no fundamental dissent between Spain and Portugal, no substantial difference, no racial dividing line; and yet, although we should be inextricably bound, we remain separate.] (González-Blanco 1917: 397)
It is clear that the climate on the Iberian Peninsula was ripe for Pascoaes and his school of saudosism. Many other writers sought to follow this trend, demonstrating the extent to which poetry from one nation was able to penetrate other Iberian literatures. In response to this situation, Maristany asked Pascoaes to write a preface (in which he cites Antonio Machado) for his poetry collection En el azul (1919). He also agreed to translate several of Pascoaes’s books, starting with the compilation of the poet’s work included in the collection published by Editorial Cervantes in 1920, Las mejores poesías (líricas) de los mejores poetas, which featured the work of other Portuguese modernists such as Eugénio de Castro, Guerra Junqueiro, Antero de Quental and Gomes Leal. The year 1920 played a central role in the reception of Pascoaes’s work in Spain and brought such important events as the publication of the translation of Tierra prohibida by Spanish-Argentine writer Valentín de Pedro (who wrote the article entitled “El moderno pensamiento lusitano. Teixeira de Pascoaes”, which was published in the Madrid magazine Cosmópolis a year later) and the start of Pascoaes’s collaboration with the newspaper La Vanguardia, confirming his command over the Catalan cultural milieu. The poet’s interesting article “Saudade y quijotismo” was published on 13 July 1920 and set out the basis for his Iberist philosophy, providing the material for a talk that he gave at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid—where he met Federico García Lorca, who sent him a dedicated copy of his Libro de poemas and several short letters (Nogueras 1985: 7)—in 1923, the same year in which Maristany published his translation of Regreso al Paraíso with a prologue by Leonardo Coimbra. In “Saudade y quijotismo”, Pascoaes explored the transnational potential of his saudosist theory, which had already taken on a profoundly Iberian dimension: La saudade ciñe casi toda la Iberia en un abrazo, como las brumas del mar … Es una aureola que la cerca, un resplandor divino … En el centro está don Quijote deslumbrado, porque la saudade es Dulcinea, el amor dolorido y
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doloroso (o lo que es lo mismo, saudoso y quijotesco) por inalcanzable e infinito … […] La saudade es portuguesa como es gallega y catalana. […] Nuestro sueño está creado en la saudade y en Don Quijote. Basta solo revelarlo, darle cuerpo y forma, para que sea una persona, un ser, una Divinidad. Y habrán llegado entonces los nuevos tiempos de Iberia. [Saudade embraces almost every part of Iberia, like the sea mist … A halo surrounds it, a divine glow … In the middle is a dazzled Don Quixote, because saudade is Dulcinea, painful, sorrowful love (or in other words, nostalgic and quixotic love) that is infinite yet out of reach … […] Saudade is Galician and Catalan as well as Portuguese. […] Our dream is embodied by saudade and Don Quixote. All we must do is expose it, giving it form and substance, for it to be a person, a being, a divinity. And at that point, the new age of Iberia will have arrived.] (Pascoaes 1988: 190–1)
Eugeni d’Ors is another central figure in relation to Pascoaes’s presence in Barcelona and a key architect of this Iberian alignment. As we have noted, he gave a speech at a banquet in the poet’s honour and wrote extensive commentary on Portugal and its culture (Cerdà Subirachs 2000b). Until he met Pascoaes, d’Ors believed in the Mediterranean and Atlantic duality of the two countries, Catalonia and Portugal, and the Portuguese poet played an important part in shaping his Lusophilia. The presence of Pascoaes and his ideas on the relationship between saudade and quixotism as the backbone of the Iberian Peninsula had a strong influence on d’Ors, which can be seen in his texts on Portuguese literature and the history of Portuguese art. In these texts, d’Ors draws on the talks given by Pascoaes and compiled in Os Poetas Lusíadas as an inexhaustible source of information, as well as on the work of Leonardo Coimbra, who he met in Lisbon in 1919 when he travelled to the city to deliver a series of lectures at the Academia das Ciências. The Iberist ideal advocated by Pascoaes is also clearly apparent in his relationship with Galicia (Torres Feijó 2010: 172–82), where the group of writers that had crystallised around the magazine Nós, including prominent figures such as Vicente Risco, Alfonso Castelao and Álvaro Cebreiro, quickly understood his work as a mirror of their own particular way of perceiving poetry and viewed him as an aesthetic and ideological brother. In the first issue of Nós in 1920, Pascoaes was mentioned alongside Rosalía de Castro and Eduardo Pondal as the pinnacle of the editors’ poetic aspirations. As a result of this enthusiastic reception, Pascoaes’s work was included in many of the main Galician magazines of the era, such as Ronsel,
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Alfar and A Nosa Terra. The poet viewed Galicia as an inseparable part of his being and as an additional component in the Iberian cultural mosaic. In Os Poetas Lusíadas, Pascoaes speaks of the existence of a “divina constelación: Rosalía, Galán y Maragall” [“divine constellation: Rosalía, Galán and Maragall”] ((1919) 1987: 35), creating a triangle that broadly corresponds to the different dimensions of his vision of a tripartite Iberism described in Chap. 2. Pascoaes felt such a deep sense of kinship with the land of Rosalía that in 1920, he dedicated the second edition of his book Marânus to Galicia, expressing his gratitude and dedication in a dozen verses that were condensed into the following octave in the final version of the poetry collection: Galiza, terra irmã de Portugal, Que a divina saudade transfigura, A tua alma é rosa matinal, Onde uma lágrima de Deus fulgura. Terra da nossa infância virginal, Altar de Rosália e da Ternura, Dedico-te estes versos, que, uma vez, Compus, em alto cerro montanhês. [Galicia, sister land of Portugal, Transformed by divine saudade, Your soul a morning rose, Upon which God’s tear gleams. Land of our virginal childhood, Altar to Rosália and Tenderness, To you I dedicate these verses that I once Composed atop the mountains.] (Pascoaes (1920) 1990: 3)
It is apparent, therefore, that Galicia is the third literary system in which Pascoaes’s poetry achieved considerable prominence. Further evidence of this fact can be found in “Alma ibérica”, which was intended as a prologue to the poet’s Epistolario Ibérico—Cartas de Pascoaes e Unamuno but was absent from the final version. Among Pascoaes’s most explicit declarations on the subject, this interesting text returns to the idea of the ties between Don Quixote and saudade and extends the scope of Iberian influence to the south to build a spiritual and cultural bridge between the very
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different worlds of (southern) Europe and Africa, providing one of the most accurate pictures of the poet’s plural approach to the Iberian Peninsula found in his work: A Ibéria é um fantasma feito de todas as sombras que divagam na margem do Estígio, à espera do barqueiro. Algumas adoram o esperar, isso a que se chama vida, outras gritam desesperadas: Ó da barca! Ó da barca! E as lívidas margens repercutem aqueles gritos, que entoam fantasticamente no Outro mundo. A Eco, essa ninfa cantada por Ovídio, também divaga naqueles outeiros, onde a terra parece perder o peso e a densidade e alongar-se em ondas extáticas de fumo. A Ibéria é um espectro, mas encarnado num verdadeiro corpo humano. Castela é o osso; o núcleo galaico-minhoto, a carne; e o músculo é o núcleo catalão-asturiano. O Sul é já Moirama. Já ou ainda? Será o norte de África a continuação da Ibéria, que mergulha nas trevas até deitar a cabeça de fora, no Cabo das Tormentas? Essa cabeça é a mesma do Adamastor, o titã lusíada. [Iberia is a phantom made of all the shadows that wander the banks of the Styx, waiting for the boatman. Some love waiting, that thing we call life, while others shout desperately: Oh boatman! Oh boatman! And the livid shores echo their cries, humming terrifically in the Otherworld. The Echo, that nymph sung by Ovid, also wanders those hills, where the earth seems to lose its weight and density and stretch out into rapturous waves of smoke. Iberia is a ghost in the form of a real human body. The bones are Castilian; the flesh is Galician and Minhoto; and the muscle is Catalan and Asturian. The South is already Moorish. Already or still? Is the north of Africa a continuation of Iberia, diving in the darkness until its head emerges at the Cape of Storms? That head belongs to Adamastor, the Lusiad titan.] (Pascoaes 1988: 250)
Teixeira de Pascoaes thus emerges as the core of a galaxy of contacts and aesthetic flows that reached almost every corner of the different Iberian literary spaces. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Pascoaes’s oeuvre and saudosism were among the very few works and schools that, despite emerging in an entirely national context, cultivated an Iberian seed that would transform and amplify their essence to create a common spirit, shared by writers in Castilian, Catalan and Galician literatures alike.
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3.4 Joan Maragall and Catalanist Iberism The history of Catalanist Iberism or Luso-Catalanism (Martínez-Gil 1997, 2010a, b, 2013a), a term employed to differentiate Catalanism with a Portuguese focus from Iberism itself, is complex and filled with nuances and divergences. Even the terms used to describe the different approaches to Iberism adopted by Catalanist authors, movements and groups (which vary greatly from one another) have been widely debated and challenged: as well as ‘Iberism’ and ‘Luso-Catalanism’, Martínez-Gil speaks of “peninsularism”, while Cerdà Subirachs prefers the term “ideal ibèric—i no pas d’iberisme –” [“Iberian ideal—and not Iberism –”] (2012a: 28). In essence, this is the same type of polysemy that can be found in nineteenth- century Iberism, especially in Portugal, which revolves around the difference between federalist and liberal movements and other, more conservative currents, as well as between politically motivated movements (calling for the union of Iberian peoples or nations) and those that advocate exclusively cultural or ‘spiritual’ alignment. In El nacionalismo catalán, published in around 1916, Antonio Rovira explains: Dentro de esta solución [la ibèrica], contiénense en realidad soluciones diversas y aún opuestas. Hay el iberismo de los unitarios castellanos que sueñan en conquistar Portugal y reintegrarlo a la unidad española, por considerar que la tierra portuguesa no es sino un pedazo de la patria hispana; este es un pseudo-iberismo, que no es sino castellanismo violento. Hay el iberismo de los que quisieran llegar a la unión federativa de España y Portugal (Salmerón). Hay el iberismo de los que defienden la federación regional peninsular, siendo Portugal uno de los estados regionales (Pi y Margall, Almirall). Hay el iberismo de los que parten del reconocimiento de tres nacionalidades ibéricas—Portugal, Castilla y Cataluña—, o de cuatro contando a Vasconia, para formar con ellas un Imperio federal (Prat de la Riba). Hay un iberismo de los que creen que, por debajo de las diferencias nacionales peninsulares, existe una raíz ibérica que exige la hermandad de los pueblos de la península dentro de un régimen de libertad (Oliveira Martins, Maragall). [This solution [the Iberian solution] actually contains different and even opposing solutions. There is the Iberism of the Castilian unitarists, who dream of conquering Portugal and reincorporating it into Spain, in the belief that Portuguese land is no more than a chunk of Spain; that is pseudo- Iberism, which is merely violent Castilianism. There is the Iberism of those who wish to create a federative union of Spain and Portugal (Salmerón).
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There is the Iberism of those who advocate regional federation on the peninsula, with Portugal as one of the regional states (Pi & Margall, Almirall). There is the Iberism of those who wish to form a federal Empire from three recognised Iberian nationalities—Portugal, Castile and Catalonia –, or four counting Vasconia (Prat de la Riba). There is an Iberism of those who believe that Iberian roots underpin national differences, calling for a brotherhood between the peoples of the peninsula that is based on freedom (Oliveira Martins, Maragall).] (Rovira y Virgili 1916?: 285–6)
The most popular model in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Catalanism was tripartite Iberism (to adopt Thomas Harrington’s term), or a reorganisation of the Iberian Peninsula around three main cultural and national entities: Atlantic (Galicia and Portugal), Mediterranean (Catalonia, in broad terms) and central (Castile), with very occasional references to the Basque Country, which was largely overlooked in most Iberist proposals and discussions. This type of Iberism attracted numerous Catalan intellectuals (Antoni Ribera, Fèlix Cucurull, Manuel de Seabra, Cambó, Pla, Gaziel, etc. (Revelles Esquirol 2010; Sala-Sanahuja 2010)) belonging to the Catalan Renaixença and Noucentisme movements in Catalonia and beyond. Joan Estelrich from Majorca, for example, led the Oficina d’Expansió Catalana, which organised initiatives such as the Exposició d’Art Catalá in Lisbon in 1921 (Revelles Esquirol 2015). However, in the context of early-twentieth-century Catalanism, there can be no doubt as to the fundamental role of Ignasi Ribera i Rovira, who was already mentioned in the previous section. As well as producing the lengthiest, most coherent articulation of the concept of Catalanist tripartite Iberism, he did much to promote it in the rest of the peninsula, and especially in Portugal, through contact and collaboration with a variety of intellectuals and writers, including Teixeira de Pascoaes, as we have seen.15 Yet it is the poet Joan Maragall who came to symbolically embody Iberian cultural contact in his own era and in subsequent literature. There are several reasons for this: the relevance of his poetry and essays, the contacts he established with other writers, and the symbolic value he acquired following his untimely demise. “Maragall no va ser pas l’unic formulador d’aquest iberisme catalanista, però sí que en va ser el més influent per la 15 There is some disagreement as to who was the first to adopt and develop tripartite Iberism: Martínez-Gil (2013a: 51–2) argues that Ribera i Rovira began to explore Iberism due to the influence of Joan Maragall, while Harrington (2010: 143–6) believes that his explorations began earlier and were not influenced by the poet.
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capacitat que tenia de generar imatges poètiques que funcinavem com a correlats d’intencions politiques” [“Maragall was not the only person to articulate this Catalanist Iberism, but he was the most influential due to his ability to produce poetic images to accompany political motivations”], explains Martínez-Gil (2013b: 14). Joan Maragall’s oeuvre contains several works, both poems and essays, that are particularly relevant to his relationship with Iberism and appear to contradict the “Occitanism” that also underpins his work, as some critics have noted. Perhaps one of his most important works in this regard, as well as the most analysed,16 is “Himne ibéric”.17 In it, Maragall introduces several of the historical regions of the Iberian Peninsula (Cantabria, Lusitania, Andalusia, Catalonia, all coastal areas in contrast with inland Castile) and ends with a declaration of his love for Iberia: Terra entre mars, Ibèria, mare aimada, tots els teus fills te fem la gran cançó. En cada platja fa son cant l’onada, mes terra endins se sent un sol ressò, que de l’un cap a l’altre a amor convida i es va tornant un cant de germanor; Ibèria! Ibèria! et ve dels mars la vida, Ibèria! Ibèria! dóna als mars l’amor. [A land between seas, Iberia, beloved mother, your sons sing the great song to you. The waves sing on every shore, but only the echo is heard inland, inviting love from one shore to another in a song of brotherhood; Iberia! Iberia! Your life comes from the sea, Iberia! Iberia! Love the seas in return.] (Maragall (1906) 1981: i: 173–5) 16 A commentary is provided by Dámaso Alonso in his Cuatro Poetas Españoles (1962: 108–14), for example. According to Víctor Martínez-Gil, this poem is Iberian in another respect: “L’Himne ibèric era una recreació del cant X de L’Atlántida […] Un cant que era, al seu torn, la recreació d’un passatge d’Os Lusíadas, llibre que Maragall va llegir atentament i que fins i tot va subratllar” [“The Himne Ibèric was a recreation of Book X of L’Atlántida […] This book was, in turn, a recreation of a passage from Os Lusíadas, which Maragall read closely and even underlined”] (2013b: 19). 17 It was published in 1906 with the title “Cantar dels hispans”, although the year in which it was written is still subject to debate. A detailed commentary on the poem was produced by Cerdà Subirachs (2012b).
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A similar exaltation of Iberian lands, and, above all, languages, which does not necessarily exhort political action and calls instead for aesthetic, cultural or spiritual alignment in an imagined Iberian community based on a reconfiguration of the different Iberian identities, as Ayo (2003: 12) explains, can be found in other well-known poems by Maragall, such as “A València en festa” (“si per llei d’amor l’Espanya és una / per la llei del parlar és una i trina” [“if the law of love holds that Spain is but one / by the law of language it is one and three”]) and “Or de llei” (“Vegé que Espanya era una en tres, / perquè tres parles hi sentia, / i essent tres feien harmonia, / pro fent-ne una no eren res” [“He saw that Spain was one and three / because three languages were heard / and by being three, they created harmony/ but one alone was nothing”]). Maragall also set out his ideas for a tripartite reconfiguration of the Iberian Peninsula in several prose texts, including the article “El ideal ibérico” (1906) and the prologue to Poesía i Prosa edited by Ribera i Rovira (1905), in which he states: Quan Castella assumí la integració política de tota la península espanyola, degué atendre a que en ella hi havia una Espanya atlàntica, una Espanya central o interior, i una Espanya mediterrania; i quan per no haver-hi atès prou, per no haver sigut capaç de fondre en un els tres elements, la descomposició ha vingut, Castella ha hagut de reconèixer en un sol concepte diferencial de sí meteixa a Portugal i Catalunya. I encare que la diferenciació hagi arribat a totes les seves conseqüencies polítiques en l’un, i en l’altra a no tantes o no tant resoltament en la apariencia, el fet espiritual era idèntic, i aquest es la essencia que una hora o altra determina el fet exterior. [When Castile embarked upon the political integration of the entire Spanish Peninsula [sic], it had to acknowledge the fact that it contained an Atlantic Spain, a central or inner Spain, and a Mediterranean Spain; and when, because it failed to dedicate enough attention to them and to combine the three elements into one, the disintegration took place, Castile had to recognise Portugal and Catalonia as a single concept differing from itself. And although this differentiation had multiple political consequences in the former, and in the latter these consequences were lesser or not as resolutely apparent, the spiritual fact was identical, and this is the essence that at one point or another determines the external fact.] (Ribera i Rovira 1905: 14)
Joan Maragall’s interaction with other writers and intellectuals also played a significant part in the relevance he acquired on the Iberian cultural scene. His most important relationship in this regard was with Miguel
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de Unamuno,18 who also served as a link between Maragall and Portuguese and Galician culture, of which he had no first-hand experience. In a letter on 6 June 1900, Unamuno wrote to Maragall: “No sabe usted bien cuánto me regocija el haber entablado relación con usted, el poeta español de mi generación que más me satisface (los del pasado me gustan poco). Verdaguer, Guerra Junqueiro el portugués (en Os Simples) y usted son los únicos que releo. A Junqueiro le he hablado mucho de sus Poesies y se las he dado a conocer, así como a otros varios” [“You have no idea how happy I am to have made contact with you, the Spanish poet of my generation whose work I most enjoy (I am not particularly fond of the poets of the past). Verdaguer, the Portuguese poet Guerra Junqueiro (in Os Simples) and you are the only poets that I re-read. I have discussed Junqueiro’s Poesies a lot with him and I have promoted them, as well as several other writers”] (cited by Cerdà Subirachs 2012a: 29). The correspondence between Maragall and Unamuno19 continued until the Catalan poet’s untimely death (“few writers corresponded as frequently as Miguel de Unamuno and Joan Maragall did between 1900 and 1911”, says Sotelo Vázquez 2012: 2), revealing an intellectual exchange based on mutual admiration, in which a shared vision of the Iberian Peninsula and its various cultures played an important role. It is well known that Maragall and Unamuno planned to launch a multilingual magazine together, Iberia. This did not ultimately come to pass due to the poet’s death and the writers’ uncertainty as to how to organise and where to publish the magazine (see Sotelo Vázquez 1989). The magazine, or one with the same name, was released later during World War I, with an explanatory note from Unamuno in the first issue: No hace muchos años el inolvidable Maragall, mi amigo del alma, y yo proyectábamos haber fundado una revista, que habría de haberse llamado Iberia y estar escrita en las lenguas literarias de la península: castellano, 18 “La recepció maragalliana en l’àmbit lusòfon no es pot mesurar sense la mediació castellana. Per aquest motiu és difícil poder descompartir la recepció de Maragall en l’àmbit hispànic (i ibèric) de la d’Unamuno” [“The reception of Maragall’s work in Portugal cannot be assessed without taking into account Spanish mediation. For this reason, it is difficult to separate Maragall’s reception in the Spanish (and Iberian) context from that of Unamuno”] (Cerdà Subirachs 2012a: 43). 19 The correspondence between the two writers was published in the 1950s (Unamuno and Maragall 1951) and has been widely studied. Works on their correspondence include Jiménez Millán (2015) and Lladonosa i Vall-Llebrera (2000).
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c atalán y portugués. Algún día publicaré noticias circunstanciadas de aquel proyecto, con lo que al respecto me escribía Maragall. El cual llegó a proponerme que la revista se editase aquí, en Salamanca, como ciudad española la más próxima al centro de Portugal. […] Iberia. Un órgano en que los distintos pueblos que la integran nos comuniquemos en nuestras sendas lenguas. Y téngase en cuenta que no abjuro de mis deseos y mis esperanzas respecto al porvenir de esas lenguas y a su fusión un día. ¡Mas nunca por la fuerza! [It was not so many years ago that my close friend, the unforgettable Maragall, and I planned to create a magazine, which would have been entitled Iberia and written in the literary languages of the peninsula: Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese. One day, I will publish a detailed report of that project, which Maragall used to write to me about. He suggested to me that we should publish the magazine here, in Salamanca, as the Spanish city closest to the centre of Portugal. […] Iberia. An entity made up of different peoples, who speak their own languages. And let it be known that I do not retract my desires and hopes for the future of these languages and their eventual fusion. But never by force!] (Unamuno 1915: 3)
However, it is also important to take into consideration the differences between the two authors’ visions of Iberia: although both are based on a broadly similar tripartite cultural Iberism, they are differentiated by certain nuances that may have caused them to diverge over time. One key difference lies in the writers’ approaches to the various Iberian languages. Whereas Maragall viewed these languages as a fundamental vehicle for understanding between the Iberian peoples, as we have seen in the excerpts from “A València en festa” and “Or de llei”, Unamuno never concealed his desire for the other Iberian languages (including Portuguese and Basque, which he fails to even mention) to be replaced by Spanish as a common language of communication. This discrepancy is evident in an indirect disagreement recounted by Cerdà Subirachs (2012a: 44). Unamuno criticised a multilingual edition of classic literature in translation, saying: Hay una edición de las Vidas, de Cornelio Nepote, con tres traducciones: en catalán, en portugués y castellano, y esto sí que es el colmo de la pedantería y de una pedantería ridículamente infantil. ¿A qué conduce poner una traducción portuguesa junto a una de castellana y esta junto a una catalana? Como no sea a querer mostrar que se pone al catalán al igual de las dos lenguas oficiales de la península, no veo bien a qué más.
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[There is an edition of Cornelio Nepote’s Vidas with three translations in Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish, and this truly is the height of pedantry, and a ridiculously childish pedantry at that. What is the point of placing a Portuguese translation next to a Spanish one, and next to that a Catalan translation? I cannot see any reason for it other than a desire to show that Catalan is valued on a par with the two official languages of the peninsula.]
According to Cerdà Subirachs, Unamuno must have been aware that the idea for this collection of classics in multilingual translation had come from Joan Maragall, who had become friendly with Bosch i Gimpera due to their shared interest in multilingual translations of Greek and Latin classics in the Iberian languages. Although their differences went beyond the mere choice of language used in a critical edition, they did not prevent Maragall from becoming a Catalan symbol, representative or token in Iberian literature and culture following his death. Unamuno made constant reference to his friend in articles such as “En la muerte de Maragall” (La Publicidad, 23 December 1911), “Leyendo a Maragall” (La Nación, 7 and 22 March 1915) and “Prólogo” in Volume XVII of the Obres Completes in 1934 (Sotelo Vázquez 2012: 2). Yet he was not the only writer to keep Maragall’s memory alive: Ribera i Rovira also mentioned the poet as a key representative of anyorament, or the Catalan, Catalanised saudade: “Aquell genial vident i profeta, producte excels de la nostra raça, en Maragall, sentia aquesta frisança fraternal de catalans i portuguesos quan deia que, al retrobar-se novament en el cami de la vida umana, ‘Portugal i Catalunya s’avien de dir moltes coses’” [“That brilliant visionary and prophet, an excellent product of our race, Maragall, felt this brotherly angst between Catalonia and Portugal when he said that, finding himself once again on the path of human life, ‘Portugal and Catalonia had a lot to say to one another’”] (Ribera i Rovira 1913: 21–2). He goes on to insist: “producte genuí i genial de la raça, el poeta de l’anyorament, en Joan Maragall, del qual, el trascendent sentit d’espiritualitzada pagania, floreix com una flor eterna, umana, viva, optimista, emergint gemada del·cor mateix del poble de Catalunya” [“a genuine, brilliant product of the race, the poet of anyorament, Joan Maragall, whose historic sense of spiritualised paganism blossoms like an eternal, human, living, optimistic flower, emerging exuberantly from the heart of the Catalan people itself”] (Ribera i Rovira 1913: 24; vid. Martínez-Gil 2017a).
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Meanwhile, in his Os Poetas Lusiadas (which, as we have seen, was based on a series of talks held in Barcelona), Teixeira de Pascoaes describes Maragall as the epitome of saudade in Catalonia, placing him on a similar level to Camões, Rosalía de Castro and Cervantes in the case of the other Iberian populations: Entre a Saudade e D. Quixote, como se vê, há um parentesco estreito. E neste parentesco existe a unidade espiritual que liga superiormente as raças nítidas da Ibéria: Castela, Catalunha e Portugal que se revê na Galiza, encantado, como num espelho maravilhoso que ao seu velho perfil restituísse o frescor, a graça, a luz da infância. O Portugal de Camões, a Galiza de Rosalia, a Catalunha de Maragall são os reinos da saudade, como a fidalga Castela é o reino de D. Quixote. [There is a close relationship, as we can see, between Saudade and Don Quixote. And this relationship is shaped by the spiritual unity that links the distinct races of Iberia: Castile, Catalonia and Portugal, which is reflected in Galicia, enchanted, as if in a wonderful mirror that restores the freshness, the grace, the light of childhood to its ageing profile. The Portugal of Camões, the Galicia of Rosalia, the Catalonia of Maragall are the kingdoms of saudade, just as the noble Castile is the domain of Don Quixote.] (Pascoaes (1919) 1987: 166)
The idea of Maragall as an Iberian or even Iberist poet was already deeply entrenched, but it was maintained and reiterated over the years. In 1921, for example, Joan Estelrich gave a talk at the Exposició d’Art Català entitled “O poeta Maragall e o iberismo”. Josep Pla, who wrote several articles on his journey to Portugal to visit the exhibition, summarised Estelrich’s talk in the following words: Maragall, como Oliveira Martins, como Unamuno, creía en una conciencia ibérica, en un espíritu peninsular. […] Se ha de descartar, por utópico, el iberismo mítico, abstracto, cultural, y se ha de ir a una ‘entente cordiale’ con Portugal, fundada en la comunidad de intereses económicos ya existentes. [Like Oliveira Martins, like Unamuno, Maragall believed in an Iberian consciousness, in a peninsular spirit. […] We must reject mythical, abstract, cultural Iberism as a utopia, aiming instead for an “entente cordiale” with Portugal that is based on existing common economic interests.] (Pla 1921, cited by Revelles Esquirol 2015: 82)
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The figure of Maragall was not only (re)used to promote Iberian union: the Franco dictatorship also tried to take advantage of the centenary of his birth to present Maragall as a “Spanish poet”, a Catalan member of the Generation of 1898 who was religious and concerned with the essence of Spain and Catalan “popular” culture (Presas Sobrado 2015). This appropriation was neither peaceful nor unanimous, reflecting a policy of propaganda and struggles between different currents within the regime; indeed, a musical version of Maragall’s poem “Cant de la Senyera” performed at the Palau de la Música resulted in the song being censored and part of the audience being detained. It is evident, therefore, that many Catalan writers and intellectuals kept Maragall’s idea of Iberism alive long after the poet’s death. In the words of Jesús Revelles, “evidentement, podem considerar que l’iberism de Maragall ès massa ingenu, però tambè hauren de convenir que és clarivident. […] hi hatot un seguir d’intellectuals i homes polítics d’acció que, d’una manera gens ingènua, varen partir de l’iberisme formulat per Joan Maragall” [“of course, we could view Maragall’s Iberism as excessively naive, but we must also agree that he is prescient. […] there are a whole series of intellectuals and political men of action who, in a way that is far from naive, drew on the Iberism formulated by Joan Maragall”] (Revelles Esquirol 2011: 215).
3.5 Portugal and Galician Identity in the Early Twentieth Century: From Valle-Inclán to Vicente Risco and Grupo Nós As observed in previous sections, Portugal was a key symbolic reference point for the creation of a Galician identity throughout the nineteenth century. The linguistic, historical and ideological ties between the two communities continued to have a significant influence on Galician writers and intellectuals of the first third of the twentieth century, who believed it necessary to restore the shared history between Galicia and Portugal and to promote the importance of an Atlantic axis for Galicia’s political and cultural future, linking to the “Celtic nations” (Brittany, Ireland, etc.) in the north and to a Lusitania that was similarly oriented towards the ocean in the south.20 On the relationship between Atlantism and Celtism, see Bello Vázquez (2000: 92–4).
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Among the writers who shared this vision of an Atlantic Galicia with close connections to Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the most relevant in the Iberian or even the European literary system at the time was Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, who maintained very close contact with the Portuguese literary and intellectual spheres. Rather than his well-known, rather mediocre, translations of Eça de Queirós’s novels A reliquia, O primo Basílio and O crime do Padre Amaro, considered spurious by a number of experts (Losada Soler 2001; Núñez Sabarís 2011), we are referring here to the network of correspondence, mutual admiration and book exchanges that he built with Portuguese authors (Leal da Câmara, Guerra Junqueiro, Leonardo Coimbra, Ferreira de Castro, António Ferro, etc.). These relationships have been studied by Relvas (2007) and Mascato Rey (2010, 2011, 2012a, b) in particular, the latter of whom also explored the presence of Portuguese authors in Valle-Inclán’s personal library. In an interview about the imminent establishment of the Republic in Spain by António Ferro, Valle-Inclán made his most explicit reference to “Atlantism” (Mascato Rey 2016), a concept which had already begun to emerge previously and would become a key variant of nineteenth-century political Iberism. The idea of Atlantism was to divide the Iberian Peninsula into four entities with (Roman) historical origins: a Cantábria, a Lusitânia, a Tarraconense e a Bética. A Cantabria, toda a zona de ferro compreendida entre o cabo Finisterra e os limites das Vascongadas. Capital: Bilbau, única cidade viva da cabeça de Espanha. A Tarraconense, toda a região mediterrânea. Capital: Barcelona … A Betica, a região africana de espanha, com a sua fisionomia própria, inconfundível. Capital: Sevilla. Lusitânia seria todo o Portugal e quasi toda a Galiza: Vigo, Pontevedra, Orense (sic), até Lugo, todo esse caminho dos rios suaves e líricos da Península, dos rios-poetas … Capital: Lisboa, a cidade atlântica da Península, o grande vôo! [Cantabria, Lusitania, Tarraconensis and Baetica. Cantabria, the iron- producing region extending from Cape Finisterre to the edge of the Basque-speaking provinces. Capital: Bilbao, the only living city at the top of Spain. Tarraconensis, the entire Mediterranean region. Capital: Barcelona … Baetica, the African region of Spain, with its own, unmistakeable physiognomy. Capital: Seville. Lusitania would be the whole of Portugal and almost all of Galicia: Vigo, Pontevedra, Orense (sic), up to Lugo, the full course of the Peninsula’s gentle, lyrical rivers, the poetic rivers … Capital: Lisbon, the
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Peninsula’s Atlantic city, the great flight!] (Valle Inclán in Ferro 1930, cited by Relvas 2007: 143–4)
In this and in similar texts, “frente al celtismo, Valle contrapone por lo tanto un atlantismo que […] debe ser interpretado en la clave latina dominante en Europa a partir de la Gran Guerra y, para el caso de la Península Ibérica, el escritor gallego propone la Lusitania y la lengua portuguesa o ‘latín galaico’” [“Valle counters Celtism with an Atlantism that […] should be understood in the context of the Latin culture that predominated in Europe following the Great War, and, for the Iberian Peninsula, the Galician writer proposes Lusitania and the Portuguese language or ‘Galician Latin’”] (Mascato Rey 2016: 596). This particular form of Iberism revolved around identity rather than politics, arousing enthusiasm among some intellectual elites in Spain and Portugal and scepticism or suspicion among many others. Valle-Inclán played an active role in promoting Atlantism: as well as supporting the creation of a Galician and Portuguese literature professorship at the Central University in Madrid, he was a member of the executive board of the (relatively unsuccessful) Society of Friends of Portugal that was founded at the Ateneo de Madrid on 23 April 1922, alongside other prominent figures in intellectual, artistic and political circles. Valle’s relationship with Galicianism is too complex to analyse fully here; to summarise it briefly, he wrote a single poem in Galician, which was initially well received, and established friendships based on mutual admiration with many advocates of Galicianism. However, from 1920 especially, Valle-Inclán began to receive attacks from critics for his “cultural appropriation” of the Galician universe in his works written in Spanish (Mascato Rey 2012b: 56). However, throughout the 1910s in particular, certain aspects of Valle-Inclán’s Iberist or Atlantist philosophy resembled the thinking of many other Galician intellectuals. They included Vicente Risco, Otero Pedrayo and Castelao, among other writers from Grupo Nós, who left a lasting, almost permanent, mark on the Galicianist movement (referred to by its members as “Galician nationalism”) in the early twentieth century. Indeed, the work of several of the authors linked to Nós magazine (1920–1935) hints at a philosophy quite close to that espoused by Valle- Inclán in terms of its stance on the proximity between Galicia and Portugal and the relationship with Atlantism, which they too link to the Celtic world. Atlantism operates as an alternative to Castilian centralism or a defence mechanism against it, performing a similar role to Iberism in the
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Catalan nationalist movement at that time. Whereas Mediterraneanism prompted Spain to look inwards and to close in on itself, Atlantism opened it up to the ocean and to progress. Vicente Risco explains this idea in his Teoria do nacionalismo galego: Ora isto dá unha significación universal ao galeguismo, isto dá unha meirande realidade histórica á nosa existencia nacional. A misión histórica de Galiza e Portugal é de opoñer ao mediterraneísmo, o atlantismo: fórmula da era futura. Tras de nós, España enteira ata agora infestada de mediterraneísmo, co seu século de ouro, co seu conceptismo especioso, coa súa faramallosa retórica, coa súa énfase grandilocuente, incorpórase toda ela á civilización atlántica. [This lends a universal significance to Galicianism, a greater historical reality to our national existence. The historic mission of Galicia and Portugal is to counter Mediterraneanism with Atlantism: the formula for the future. In our wake, Spain, infested until now with Mediterraneanism, with its Golden Age, its specious conceptism, its pretentious rhetoric, its grandiloquent emphasis, is absorbed entirely into Atlantic civilisation.] (Risco 1994: 45)
Vicente Risco also played an important part in renewing the main influences on the relationship between Galicia and Portugal in the first few decades of the twentieth century. As Torres Feijó has shown in several studies (2008, 2009), Risco positioned Teixeira de Pascoaes at the centre of Galicianist ideology and discourse in his role as editor of Nós magazine and in his own texts (including the aforementioned Teoria do nacionalismo galego). Thanks to Risco, “Pascoaes, a saudade, o saudosismo ficárom rapidamente incorporados às velas galeguistas” [“Pascoaes, saudade, saudosism were quickly incorporated into Galicianism”] (Torres Feijó 2009: 385), to the detriment of earlier influences, including Oliveira Martins and his História da Civilização Ibérica and Teófilo Braga. It can surely be no coincidence that Issue 1 of Nós magazine featured a poem by Pascoaes himself, “Fala do sol”, dedicated “Aos jovens poetas galegos” [“To young Galician poets”]. The issue also contained a section entitled “Os homes, os feitos, as verbas” with an essay on “Teixeira de Pascoaes e Nós”, which referred to Teixeira de Pascoaes as “Mestre” [“Master”] and “Revelador da Saudade” [“Revealer of saudade”], and stated: “Temos a Teixeira de Pascoaes como cousa nósa, e nas nósas internas devociós témol-o moi perto da santa Rosalía e de Pondal, o verbo da lembranza” [“We have Teixeira de Pascoaes as one of our own, and in our
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inner devotions, he is very close to Saint Rosalía and Pondal, the word of memory”] (Risco 1920: 18). The article also cites an excerpt from a letter that Risco received from Teixeira de Pascoaes, in which the Portuguese poet states: “A Galiza é irmã e mãe de Portugal. Portugal saiu dos seios da Galiza; depois abandonou a Mãe e foi esses mares fora; fuguiu como o fillo prodigo. Más é chegado o tempo do seu regresso ao lar materno. Temos de voltar a viver espiritualmente em comum” [“Galicia is Portugal’s sister and mother. Portugal emerged from the bosom of Galicia; it then abandoned its mother and took to the seas, fleeing like the prodigal son. But it is time for it to return to its mother’s side. We must live spiritually together again”] (Risco 1920: 18).21 Harrington (2000b) has shown that Risco’s contacts with Portuguese intellectuals, Teixeira de Pascoaes and the Renascença predated 1920 and provides evidence of a change in stance over time: in his early contacts (e.g. in the letters he sent to Teixeira de Pascoaes in 1920), Galicianist thought is positioned as subordinate to Portuguese saudosismo, whereas in later texts, Risco appears to place himself on an equal footing with his Portuguese correspondents. As Harrington observes, the idea that Galicia would complete Portugal and not vice versa can be gleaned from later texts by Risco, and the quote from Teixeira de Pascoaes that he selected for Issue 1 of Nós magazine, in which he proclaims Galicia to be the “mother” of Portugal, had precisely this intention (Harrington 2000b: 249).22 Although Risco was the main proponent of the link between Galicianism and saudosism, the idea was quickly adopted by the other members of Grupo Nós. According to Torres Feijó, “saudade e saudosismo atingírom categoria importante, como mostram obras de Ramón Cabanillas (1920) e Otero Pedrayo (1931), os escritores centrais da poesia e da narrativa na altura” [“saudade and saudosism attained substantial prominence, as shown by works by Ramón Cabanillas (1920) and Otero Pedrayo (1931), the main poetry and fiction authors at that time”] (2009: 388). Even if 21 Of course, this is not the only Portuguese reference in Nós magazine: Valiente Fernández (2007) carried out an extensive study of the Galician magazine and identified contributions from 13 Portuguese intellectuals; references to 98 Portuguese figures (including writers, historians, politicians, scientists, etc.) in articles specifically focusing on Portugal; and another 40 references in articles about other topics. 22 In the dedicatory poem that opens the second edition of his book Marânus, cited in Sect. 3.3 of this chapter, Teixeira de Pascoaes calls Galicia “sister” rather than “mother”, insisting on the proximity of the two populations on the basis of saudade.
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Otero Pedrayo’s main point of reference appears to be De Valera’s Ireland (Patterson 2002: 160–8), he also displays an awareness of the linguistic, historical, cultural and perhaps even political unity between Galicia and Portugal. In a 1933 article, Otero Pedrayo presents an imagined dialogue between a father and son: —Meu pai, ¿e os Portugueses porque falan coma nos? —Porque somos da mesma xente e vimos da mesma troncalidade. [—Father, why do the Portuguese speak like us? —Because we are the same people and we come from the same family line.] (Otero Pedrayo 1933, cited by Patterson 2002: 174)
For Otero Pedrayo, the essence of Galicia’s soul did not lie solely in the Galician language; it was also present in saudade, although the concept was less ingrained in Teixeira de Pascoaes’s thinking than in Risco’s. Therefore, “a reinvindicación da Saudade como trazo definidor dos galegos e dos celtas, tamén permite a Otero o estreitamento de relación con Portugal, que, igual que Irlanda, era unha presenza fundamental no galeguismo” [“asserting saudade as the defining trait of the Galicians and Celts also allows Otero to establish a closer relationship with Portugal, which, like Ireland, was a fundamental presence in Galicianism”] (Bello Vázquez 2000: 101). By way of example, Otero Pedrayo’s book recounting his journey from Galicia to Buenos Aires (via Portugal) is significantly entitled Polos vieiros da saudade [On the Path of Saudade] (1952). Years later, in a book that would become a key landmark in Galician nationalism, Castelao dedicated a chapter to saudade, “o sentimento que abrangue a Portugal e a Galiza nunha sola eternidade” [“the sentiment that envelops Portugal and Galicia in a single eternity”] (Castelao (1944) 2012: 293). In his book, Castelao cites saudade as a characteristic that links Galicia not only to Portugal but also to the Celtic peoples: Dado que a Saudade é un sentimento inesplicable, que vén das nosas orixes, haberá que buscá-la no corpo revelado da poesía celta […] Así, ficamos convencidos de que a Saudade é un sentimento proprio dos Fisterres, onde se mantén unha indeclinable fidelidade á fremosura da espranza, onde se persiste na rebeldia contra o despotismo dos feitos, onde se sigue no empeño de facer o mundo mais complexo, mais maravilhoso, mais habitable.
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[Given that saudade is an inexplicable sentiment that comes from our origins, we must look for it in the open corpus of Celtic poetry […] We are thus convinced that saudade is a sentiment inherent to the Finisterres, where an unshakeable loyalty to the beauty of hope remains, where rebellion against the despotism of the facts persists, where people remain committed to making the world more complex, more wonderful, more habitable.] (Castelao (1944) 2012: 295)
Through the publication and dissemination of the literature and philosophy of Risco, Otero Pedrayo and Castelao, the link between Galician nationalism and Atlantism became entrenched, encompassing a Celtism oriented especially towards Ireland and a Lusism with linguistic and cultural rather than political implications. This Atlantism took on different nuances and variations following the end of the period covered by this study. In the words of Torres Feijó: Saudade e Saudosismo som, pois, um activo, e, embora antigo, com algum sucesso, da fabricaçom e está depositado como bem cultural no povo galego, no seu repositório; nom parece provável que passe, mais umha vez, a ser ferramenta intelectual nem popular de galeguidade, entendida como construçom para actuar no mundo, mas constitui um activo importante, particularmente em algumhas elites, para manter determinados vínculos galego-portugueses, ratificando os objectivos nacionalistas com que desde a Galiza se impulsionou. [Saudade and saudosism are, therefore, an asset, one that despite being old is rather successful, and which is deposited in the Galician people, in their repository, as a cultural good; it does not appear likely that it will resume its position as an intellectual or popular tool of Galicianness, understood as a construction for operating in the world, but it constitutes an important asset, especially among some elites, for preserving certain links between Galicia and Portugal, ratifying the nationalist objectives causing it to be promoted in Galicia.] (2008: 165)
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Unamuno, Miguel de. 1915. Iberia. Iberia 1: 3. ———. (1911) 1964. Por tierras de Portugal y de España. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Unamuno, Miguel de, and Joan Maragall. 1951. Epistolario y escritos complementarios. Madrid: Seminarios y Ediciones. Unamuno, Miguel de, and Teixeira de Pascoaes. 1986. Epistolario ibérico. Cartas de Unamuno e Pascoaes. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim. Valiente Fernández, Alicia. 2007. La recepción de la cultura portuguesa en la revista Nós. Revista de Filología Románica 24: 251–262.
CHAPTER 4
The First Portuguese Modernism and the First Avant-Garde
With the publication of the Lisbon-based magazine Orpheu, the year 1915 unquestionably marks the beginning of the first modernism in Portugal, driven by the trio of authors responsible for the magazine’s success: Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and José de Almada Negreiros. Meanwhile, in Spain, the first avant-garde is considered to have emerged towards the end of 1918, when ultraism, the primary manifestation of the country’s avant-garde revolution, began to become active in the public sphere. One hundred years later, both modernism and ultraism continue to be the subject of analysis and critical evaluation in Spain and Portugal, as recent studies on Portuguese modernism by Reis and Lourenço (2015) and on Spanish ultraism by Anderson (2017) indicate.1 During this period, the Iberian Peninsula adopted and assimilated the -isms that sprung up in Europe in the years before and after World War I, which ranged from cubism and futurism to Dadaism and expressionism. Iberian literatures embraced European trends and new aesthetic currents were introduced through the work of literary magazines, which played a central role in disseminating these new movements in a context in which the embers of symbolism and Rubenian modernism still smouldered. Nevertheless, the genesis of the Iberian avant-garde movements also obeyed peninsular dynamics that largely depended on the specific 1 The most extensive compilation of ultraist poetry to date, most of which was originally published in literary magazines, was produced by Bonet (2012).
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circumstances of each region. The case of futurism is particularly significant because of its international relevance; in Portugal, the seeds for the futurist movement were sown in the newspaper O Heraldo in Faro in 1916 (Júdice 1993: 8–9), before it manifested itself openly in the magazine Portugal Futurista (from 1917, which was seized by the police) and appeared in works by Almada Negreiros and Álvaro de Campos. Meanwhile, Fernando Pessoa forged a personal relationship with avant- garde through his own -isms: Paulism, intersectionism and sensationism. In Spain, however, following the pioneering work by Ramón Gómez de la Serna (who presented and translated Marinetti’s futurist innovations in Prometeo magazine in 1909) and Gabriel Alomar’s unique ‘Futurismo’, Italian futurism failed to be accepted by a defined group of authors. Strictly speaking, no other European -ism achieved acceptance in this context either, as young Spanish poets preferred to cluster around the ultraist movement in the belief that it offered a way forward from realism and modernism, although it provided no clear aesthetic programme to guide them in the wake of futurism and Dadaism. In both Spain and Portugal, literary magazines2 set the pulse for aesthetic developments (via titles such as Orpheu, Portugal Futurista, Contemporânea and Athena in Portugal and Los Quijotes, Cervantes, Grecia, Cosmópolis, Alfar and Ultra in Spain), featuring the most modern material from many European literatures alongside the aesthetic proposals emerging from each of the national literatures. From this perspective, the first Portuguese modernism and the first Spanish avant-garde are vastly different in terms of their reception and assimilation of European -isms, but they coincide and complement one another in one key area: the pages of their magazines and the individual works of their authors combine voices and echoes from the avant-garde with others from Portuguese symbolism and Spanish modernism, creating an initial stage in the Iberian avant-garde that is characterised by this intertwining of elements from different movements. This merely confirms the presence of the heterogeneous continuity that we have identified, which is again apparent in the contributions made to Orpheu or Grecia, perhaps the two most important publications in terms of the development of the avant-garde in the two countries.
2 On literary magazines in Spain and Portugal, Rocha (1985) and Molina (1990b) continue to be highly illustrative.
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It is important to take into consideration the profoundly different roles of the poets of the first Portuguese modernism and those of the first Spanish avant-garde (especially the ultraists) in their respective national literary histories: whereas the Portuguese poets, alongside Fernando Pessoa, occupied a central position and experienced one of the most significant, celebrated periods in twentieth-century Portuguese literature, the historical impact of the Spanish poets has often been viewed as secondary, serving more as a precursor to the Generation of 1927 than as an important link in the chain of modernity. The literary relations established on the Iberian Peninsula during this period may thus be divided into several different models. On the one hand, there are profoundly asymmetric examples in which a major writer in a national literature (such as Pessoa) encounters mediators who are no longer part of the national canon today. On the other, we have the opportunity to study the presence and legacy of an avant-garde aesthetic that emerged in one country and took root in another, as is the case of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and the greguería in Portugal. Finally, we can analyse the example of an author who played a major part in the progression of the Iberian avant-garde, Almada Negreiros, who is one of the most illustrative figures in the dialogue between different artistic languages and whose literary, visual and personal development were fundamentally shaped by his complete integration into Spain’s cultural milieu, where he lived alongside Spanish artists and intellectuals. Therefore, this chapter has four sections. The first three focus on the aforementioned authors—Fernando Pessoa, Ramón Gómez de la Serna and José de Almada Negreiros—while the fourth section explores late Basque symbolism, which represents an important period of alignment between Iberian and European aesthetics and literary production in the Basque language, especially poetry. This allows us to present an overview of the time of the first avant-garde and to identify the points of contact between the different Iberian literatures. It is important to note that Portuguese literature was at a peak in the modernity cycle during this period, while across the border, Spanish literature would have to await the arrival of the Generation of 1927 to reach the pinnacle of avant-gardism. Yet both the poets of the first Portuguese modernism and those of the first Spanish avant-garde helped to transmit modernity and set an aesthetic precedent for the next generation of authors—those of the second Portuguese modernism and the Generation of 1927—who, despite their obvious differences, were direct heirs of the forward-thinking approach adopted by the avant-garde.
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4.1 Fernando Pessoa, the Idea of Iberia and the Ultraist Poets The life of Fernando Pessoa runs almost exactly parallel to the period extending from the arrival of symbolism on the Iberian Peninsula to the start of the Spanish Civil War: he was born in 1888, two years before Eugénio de Castro’s Oaristos was published, and he died in November 1935, just a few months before the war broke out. However, his international literary reputation was consolidated only after his death, and particularly during the latter half of the twentieth century. Today, his forward-looking oeuvre continues to offer new opportunities for study and analysis. It is safe to say that Fernando Pessoa’s cultural preferences did not lie with the Iberian Peninsula or its writers. Despite this, his life was marked by frequent, brief contacts with the peninsula through reading, translation, direct relationships with certain authors and even his own literary works on the idea of Iberia. It is important, therefore, to explore this lesser known dimension of Pessoa’s life, which has recently come to the attention of researchers. For some time, studies researching the Iberian dimension of Pessoa’s work either directly or indirectly focused on tracing the temporal coordinates involved by linking the author to the Generation of 1927 (Crespo 1979, 1985; Extremera Tapia and Trías Folch 1984, 1985; Vázquez Cuesta 1988; Bessa-Luís 1988). These early studies justified this link by noting that both Pessoa and the poets of the Generation of 1927 were at the pinnacle of their respective national literary canons and that the Portuguese poet published his first text in Spain in 1928 (this date has been taken as fact in more recent studies, including Ruiz Casanova 2011) in an editorial environment that was closely linked to Lorca’s generation, as we will see later. A direct link was thus established between the first Portuguese modernism and the Generation of 1927, which may be understood as the second phase of the Spanish historical avant-garde, although some critics have highlighted the possibility of drawing a direct line between Pessoa and the ultraists, who were the true protagonists of the first phase of the avant-garde (Molina 1987, 1990a). Subsequent research (Sáez Delgado 1999, 2000) has confirmed the existence of an initial set of translations of Pessoa’s poems that were produced by Rogelio Buendía in Huelva in 1923, in the midst of ultraism, suggesting a link between Pessoa and the poets of the first Spanish avant-garde and situating his historical
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reception in the context of ultraism, emphasising the degree of continuity between the avant-garde poets and those of the Generation of 1927. The case of Pessoa constitutes a paradigm that allows us to observe the serious difficulties experienced by some of the most important writers in the history of Iberian literature in finding appropriate mediators in other literary systems on the peninsula. As we will see, Pessoa did not receive the support that he requested from Unamuno to promote the work of the poets published in Orpheu and he had to make to do with the mediation of a small group of ultraist poets, who occupied a secondary position in the Spanish literary canon. This situation highlights the importance in Iberian dialogue of many writers who ranked lower in terms of literary production, but performed a key systemic function in reception. Until 20 years ago, as we have observed, research on the Iberian dimensions of Pessoa’s work emphasised its parallels with the Generation of 1927, which, surprisingly, paid little attention to Portugal. From the middle of the century, exceptions began to emerge in the form of sporadic translations of individual poems by Antero de Quental, Fernando Pessoa, Eugénio de Castro, Carlos Queiroz and Virgínia Victorino by Jorge Guillén and Gerardo Diego (Díez de Revenga 2007). These parallels were drawn for two reasons: on the one hand, the publication of Pessoa’s poem “Pierrot bêbado” (without a Spanish translation) in the 1928 Almanaque de las Artes y las Letras, edited by Gabriel García Maroto, which contained texts by many of the Generation of 1927 and the most significant authors from the first Portuguese modernism; on the other, as a result, the temptation to position the most prominent poets in Spain and Portugal alongside one another (indeed, the Almanaque is the only historical publication to feature texts by both Pessoa and Lorca). However, an alternative, complementary approach is also possible, exploring Pessoa’s relationship with Spain through the continuum linking Spanish ultraist poets to the members of the Generation of 1927, with a particular focus on the former. This perspective is grounded in Pessoa’s relationships with Spanish writers from the first avant-garde, with whom he completed several joint projects: among these, the most significant was the publication of his first poems in Spanish in 1923 (not in 1928) thanks to the mediation of two ultraist poets, Rogelio Buendía and Adriano del Valle. Far from positioning Pessoa as a typical avant-gardist, this approach allows for a more plural analysis of his literary career, the Iberian dimension of which was shaped by his thwarted contact with Unamuno and his relationships with the ultraist
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poets, whose links to the output of the Generation of 1927 are well known (Bernal Salgado 1995). Pessoa’s life was peppered with Iberian relationships and many of these were the product of his experiences as a literary translator. His first active contact with Spanish literature is believed to have taken place in 1908, when he translated José de Espronceda’s El estudiante de Salamanca under the heteronym Alexander Search (Barbosa López 2016; Wiesse- Rebagliati 2016). In 1912, when he launched his career as a writer, Pessoa translated poems by Garcilaso de la Vega, Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora for a Biblioteca internacional de obras célebres (Saraiva 1996: 67–94), continuing his brief, yet interesting, incursion into Spanish literature, in which Poema de Mio Cid also played a part. Pessoa also took an interest in the work of José María de Pereda, Benito Pérez Galdós, Pío Baroja, Felipe Trigo and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, whose names appeared on several lists of projects according to Jerónimo Pizarro (2010: 242–3). However, the presence of these names among the poet’s papers does not appear to demonstrate a deeper knowledge of Iberian literature on his part. Among the books in his personal library, there are only 21 titles by Iberian authors, covering the Castilian, Catalan and Galician cultural areas (Pizarro 2010: 243–4). These titles include Por tierras de Portugal y de España by Unamuno; Humoradas y cantares and Poesías y fábulas by Campoamor; Obras poéticas de Don José de Espronceda; La dorada mediocridad and La rueda de color by the ultraist writer Rogelio Buendía; La sombrilla japonesa by fellow ultraist Isaac del Vando-Villar; Vieja y nueva política by José Ortega y Gasset; La integridad de la Patria: Cataluña ante el espíritu de Castilla by Ribera i Rovira; and Follas novas by Rosalía de Castro. Given the extent of Fernando Pessoa’s reading, this was a relatively small number of titles, although not a negligible number for someone who never left Portugal. With regard to his personal relationships, Pessoa met at least two Spanish poets in the years that marked the peak of his direct interest in the neighbouring country: 1915 and 1923. In his diary for November 1915, as the Orpheu project gathered momentum, he briefly mentions an encounter with Iván de Nogales, a largely forgotten Spanish bohemian poet who shared Pessoa’s theosophical interests and was included in a list written in 1917 as the possible author of an article about sensationism (Pérez López 2011). Meanwhile, in Lisbon in 1923, as we will see in greater detail later, Pessoa met Adriano del Valle, who was the only Iberian writer with whom he would share literary projects and meet on a more
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regular basis. The two writers maintained an interesting correspondence until 1924. In 1915, the publication of Orpheu magazine triggered Pessoa’s interest in the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, where he sought to ensure that the magazine reached as many readers as possible. Indeed, the two lists (Pessoa 2009: 451, 454) that he wrote at that time contain an extensive set of names to whom the magazine was to be sent, indicating the media outlets for which they worked in many cases. The first of these lists features many prominent names, with a solid presence of writers from Catalonia (such as Eugeni d’Ors and José María Jordá) and Galicia (Jesús Cano and Ramón María del Valle-Inclán) as well as Castile, with names such as Unamuno, Pío Baroja and Jacinto Benavente. The second list is longer still and is made up of potential subscribers or promoters, including Unamuno, Ribera i Rovira, Joaquín Dicenta and Felipe Trigo. The fact that the first Iberian references to Pessoa outside Portugal came from Catalonia and Galicia is highly significant. In Catalonia, the first indirect mention of Pessoa’s work appears in Ribera i Rovira’s Atlàntiques (1913), when he discusses the context that allowed saudosism to emerge: “I aquest ressorgiment ve a ser l’albada d’un nou esclat de la civilització atlántica, la promesa de l’adveniment d’un supra-Camões, l’esperança que Portugal aportarà alguna cosa nova a l’humana civilització” [“And this resurgence will be the dawn of a new era in Atlantic civilisation, the promise of the advent of a supra-Camões, the hope that Portugal will contribute something new to human civilisation”] (Ribera i Rovira 1913: 19). Ribera i Rovira was certainly attentive to the fortunes of the magazine A Águia, edited by the Portuguese Renascença, in which Pessoa had published “A Nova Poesia Portuguesa Sociologicamente Considerada” in 1912, publicising his visionary prophesy of the dawn of a supra-Camões. Pessoa had also mentioned Catalan authors Eugeni d’Ors and Diego Ruiz in several of his texts (Cerdà Subirachs 2010). In Galicia, meanwhile, Orpheu magazine began to draw attention from the press, including El Eco de Santiago and La Concordia in Vigo (Quiroga 2018: 143 et seq.). In the former, Juan Barcia Caballero signed a note dated April 1915, in which he emphasised the value of Pessoa’s “O Marinheiro” in the context of the magazine. In the latter, Jesús Cano (whose name appears on one of the aforementioned lists) highlighted the avant-garde nature of the magazine, underscoring the name of Alfredo Pedro Guisado rather than Pessoa. This poet and his relationship with Galicia in particular (where his ancestors originated) have been studied by
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Pazos Justo (2010, 2015), who also documents an early mention of the Orpheu group in Galicia in December 1914 (in a text by Alejo Carrera Muñoz in Issue 65 of Vida Gallega) and a third review of the magazine by the same author in El Tea (Pazos Justo 2011: 43–55). Both lists of authors also feature the name of Miguel de Unamuno, who was sent a copy of Orpheu in 1915 and remained Pessoa’s most direct reference point for Spanish culture throughout much of his life (Eminescu 2007: 918–9). In a text that casts significant light on the aims of our study, Pessoa reflects on the difference between Spanish and Portuguese culture and mentions Unamuno directly: Diferença de cultura que há hoje em Espanha e Portugal. Em Espanha há um intenso desenvolvimento da cultura secundária, da cultura cujo máximo representante é um homem de muito talento; em Portugal, essa cultura não existe. Há porém a superior cultura individual que produz os homens de génio. E, assim, não há em Espanha uma figura de real destaque genial: o mais que há é figuras de grande talento—um Diego Ruiz, um Eugenio d’Ors, um Miguel de Unamuno, um Azorín. Em Portugal há figuras que começam na centelha genial e acabam no génio absoluto. Há individualidades vincadas. Há mais: há um fundo carácter europeu no fundo. [Cultural differences exist today between Spain and Portugal. In Spain, there is intense development of secondary culture, of culture revolving around a man of great talent; in Portugal, that culture does not exist. There is, however, a superior individual culture that produces men of genius. And indeed, there are no real geniuses in Spain: at best, there are figures with great talent—Diego Ruiz, Eugenio d’Ors, Miguel de Unamuno, Azorín. In Portugal, there are figures that start out with a spark of genius and end up with absolute genius. There are pronounced individualities. What’s more, this is underpinned by a European character.] (Pessoa 1994: 355)
As we saw in the section dedicated to him, Unamuno received several books from Mário de Sá-Carneiro with a request to express an opinion on them, demonstrating the interest of some of the most visible members of Orpheu in working with the Spanish writer as a mediator. In an attempt to obtain a response from Unamuno, Pessoa wrote a provocative letter on behalf of the magazine but received only silence in return. It is easy to imagine the clash in aesthetic visions provoked by this letter, the tone of which must have appeared rather offensive to Unamuno, whose literary
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interests differed significantly from those of the young poets involved in the Lisbon magazine: Por este correio enviamos a V. Ex.ª o primeiro número da nossa revista Orpheu. Como depreenderá de uma, ainda que rápida, leitura, esta revista representa a conjugação dos esforços da nova geração portuguesa para a formação duma corrente literária definida, contendo e transcendendo as correntes que têm prevalecido nos grandes meios cultos da Europa. Tomamos a liberdade de chamar para isto a sua atenção, e de lhe pedir que examine de perto a atitude essencial da nossa arte literária; estamos certos que n’ella terá a surpresa de encontrar qualquer coisa que não se lhe terá deparado no seu percurso através das literaturas conhecidas. Como temos a consciência absoluta da nossa originalidade e da nossa elevação, não temos escrúpulo algum em dizer isto. [With this missive, we send Your Excellency the first issue of our magazine Orpheu. As even a superficial reading will demonstrate, the magazine is the product of the combined efforts of the new Portuguese generation to create a well-defined literary current, encompassing and transcending the currents that have prevailed in Europe’s major cultural circles. We take the liberty of bringing this to your attention and of asking that you examine the essence of our literary art closely; we are certain that you will be pleasantly surprised to find within it things that you have not been exposed to in your journey through the established literatures. As we are absolutely certain of our originality and our significance, we have no scruples in saying this.] (Pessoa, cited by Marcos de Dios 1978)
This letter brought two entirely different worlds together. Pessoa’s youthful, ground-breaking and, to a certain extent, avant-garde vision, characterised by the loftiness typical of the promoters of -isms, clashes with Unamuno’s deeper, more serene and more sceptical perspective. Never very keen on avant-gardism or on participating actively in young writers’ magazines, with the exception of unavoidable commitments, Unamuno always maintained his distance from the aesthetic endeavours of advocates of new trends and is likely to have viewed the letter and the magazine as merely another folly of the modernity that also gave him pause for thought in Spanish poetry at that time. It is rather curious, then, that Sá-Carneiro and Pessoa should attempt to obtain his support as a mediator, unless they were seeking to provoke a public confrontation (which never came) or were unaware of the extent of the distance between
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the existentialist stance held by Unamuno and the spirit of the Orpheu poets. Pessoa was in fact familiar with the texts that Unamuno submitted to A Águia and those that Teixeira de Pascoaes had dedicated to the Spanish writer in the magazine, leaving a public record of a common aesthetic and ideological orientation from which Pessoa diverged from 1912. Unfortunately, no correspondence between Unamuno and Pascoaes has been found for 1915 and evidence suggests that Unamuno never mentioned Fernando Pessoa in any of his texts about Portugal, displaying a degree of disinterest in the poets of the first Portuguese modernism that was consistent with his approach to literary creation. With the exception of the brief mentions that we have cited, Pessoa appears to have been completely unknown throughout the rest of the Iberian Peninsula during this period. The only mention of his name in a literary magazine is in Andrés González-Blanco’s article “Teixeira de Pascoaes y el saudosismo” in a 1917 issue of Estvdio, in which he links Pessoa, as a literary critic, to the movement led by Pascoaes and Leonardo Coimbra. Unamuno’s silence seems to have embittered Pessoa, who made negative remarks about him later in his career. In around 1931, he wrote a text in response to several controversial opinions voiced by Unamuno a year earlier in an interview with António Ferro that was published in Diário de Notícias, in which he discussed a topic relating to nationalism that was of interest to both Unamuno and Pessoa: the language to be used by Iberian writers and the potential for the federalisation of the peninsula. The opinion expressed by Unamuno,3 who vehemently defended the role of Castilian as the most important language in the Spanish state with the largest number of readers and encouraged all writers on the peninsula to 3 In the aforementioned interview, Unamuno said: “Eu tenho, porém, as minhas ideias, de que não abdico, sobre a língua. Penso que vale mais escrever numa só língua, em benefício da própria cultura, do que ficar encerrado numa língua inacessível, pouco divulgada. Que ganham os catalães escrevendo em catalão? Que ganham os bascos escrevendo em sua língua? A cultura catalã, afinal, é conhecida através dos seus escritores que escrevem em castelhano. […] Penso, no entanto, que a Catalunha, as Vascongadas, a Galiza, só podem ganhar, na sua própria expressão regional, se adoptarem, francamente, o castelhano.” [“However, I have my own ideas about language and I will not renounce them. I think that it is more valuable to write in a single language, for the benefit of one’s own culture, than to limit oneself to an inaccessible, rarely disseminated language. What do Catalans achieve by writing in Catalan? What do Basques gain from writing in their language? In the end, Catalan culture is discovered through authors writing in Castilian. […] I think, therefore, that Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, can only progress in their own regional expression if they adopt Castilian.”] (Ferro 1930: 1)
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use it, aroused Pessoa’s suspicions, prompting him to respond to the Spaniard in carefully chosen English: The problem of language does not matter, for if a Catalan likes to write Castilian, he will do so then as he does now, in the same manner as a Catalan can write in French and get a wider public still. Unamuno put the case: why not write in Castilian? If it comes to that, I prefer to write in English, which will give me a wider public than Castilian; and I am as much Castilian as I am English in blood and much more English than Castilian since my education is English. Unamuno’s argument is really an argument for writing in English, since that is the most widespread language in the world. If I am to abstain from writing in Portuguese, because my public is limited thereby, I may just as well write in the most widespread language of all. Why should I write in Castilian? That U. may understand me? It is asking too much for too little. (Pessoa 2012: 104–5)
A concern with the idea of ‘patria’ and nationalism is a constant in the work of both authors (García Martín 1990: 7–35), who were influenced by Guerra Junqueiro; whereas Unamuno dedicated his heart and soul to building the Castilianist myth, Pessoa spent significant time envisaging the future position of Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula in world literature. Indeed, he dedicated an extensive body of texts (Pessoa 2012) to his reflections on the idea of Iberia, which are fundamental in understanding the true weight of the subject among his obsessions. In these texts, Pessoa combines linguistic, political, historical, sociological and cultural musings, creating a mosaic that situates him in the lineage of writers concerned with cultural Iberism and connects him to almost every author discussed in this book.4 The interplay between a Spanish nationalism based on the idea of 4 For example, see the following excerpts: “O que supremamente convém é criar, desde já, a ibericidade. Fazer tender todas as energias das nossas almas para um fim, por detrás de todos os fins imediatos que tenham. Esse fim é a Ibéria, a Ibéria como dona espiritual das Américas Ibéricas (e não latinas), a Ibéria como senhora da África Setentrional, a Ibéria como destruidora do prestígio e predomínio francês. Vinguemos a derrota que os do Norte infligiram aos árabes nossos maiores. Expiemos o crime que cometemos, expulsando da península os árabes que a civilizaram.” [“What it is most important to do now is to create Ibericity. We must turn all the energies of our souls to a single goal, behind all the immediate goals that they have. This goal is Iberia, Iberia as the spiritual mistress of the Iberian (not Latin) Americas, Iberia as the lady of Northern Africa, Iberia as the destroyer of French prestige and domination. Let us avenge the defeat that the Northerners inflicted on our elders, the Arabs. Let us atone for the crime that we committed by expelling the Arabs who civilised the peninsula.”] (Pessoa 2012: 74)
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Castile and Pessoa’s vision of a plural Iberia, open to participation from Catalonia as a key player on the peninsula (Martínez-Gil 2007), shaped the heterogeneous reality present in the poet’s perception of the Iberian Peninsula, as shown in his poem dedicated to “mother Iberia”, which features several variants on a bipartite or tripartite Iberia: De leste a oeste commandámos, Onde o sol vae, pisamos nós. Ao luar de ignotos fins buscamos A gloria, inéditos e sós. Hoje a derrota é a nossa vida Doença o nosso sonno brando. Para quando é a nova lida, “Criar uma nova literatura, uma nova filosofia—esse é o primeiro passo. Foi dado em Portugal, em filosofia sobretudo, por Leonardo Coimbra, um dos três grandes filósofos da Europa contemporânea (os outros dois são Bergson e Eucken). […] Cultura e arte sintéticas das de europa—não há civilização de outro modo—mas orientadas ibericamente, isto é, subordinadas ao conceito fundamental que das coisas faz a alma ibérica. Tal conceito difere do das outras nações da Europa neste ponto—em que toda a política e a arte desses outros países se apoia em princípios nacionais, enquanto que nós-outros só obtemos princípios nacionais a través de sínteses e amal- gamas de princípios importados, cosmopolitas. Especialmente é isto verdade no que diz respeito a Portugal, onde a atitude cosmopolita é máxima.” [“Creating a new literature, a new philosophy—that is the first step. In Portugal, in philosophy especially, this step was taken by Leonardo Coimbra, one of the three great philosophers in contemporary Europe (the other two are Bergson and Eucken). […] A culture and art that condense European art and culture—there can be no civilisation otherwise—but oriented to Iberia, that is, dependent on the fundamental essence that makes up the Iberian soul. This essence differs from that of the other European nations in this respect— in that the politics and art of these other countries are based on national principles, whereas we only obtain national principles by synthesising and amalgamating imported, cosmopolitan principles. This is particularly true with regard to Portugal, where the cosmopolitan attitude is at its peak.”] (Pessoa 2012: 38–9) “De há tempos para cá se vem fazendo, por um processo de combinação espontânea que vale muito mais, e significa muito mais, que qualquer táctica de política amistosa, uma aproximação mental entre Portugal e Espanha. Dir-se-ia que os dois países repararam por fim no facto aparentemente evidente que uma fronteira, se separa, também une; e que, se duas nações vizinhas são duas por serem duas, podem moralmente ser quase uma por serem vizinhas.” [“For some time now, through a process of spontaneous merging that is worth far more, and means far more, than any friendly political tactic, Portugal and Spain have experienced an intellectual alignment. It would seem that the two countries have finally realised the apparently obvious fact that a border unites as well as separates; and that, if two neighbouring nations are two because they are two, they can morally be almost one because they are neighbours.”] (Pessoa 2012: 98)
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Ó mãe Ibéria, para quando? Dois[trez] povos vem da mesma raça Da mãe comum dois[trez] filhos nados, Hispanha, gloria, orgulho e graça, Portugal, a saudade e a espada, [a catalunha, o novo] Mas hoje … clama no ermo insulso Quem fomos por quem somos, chamando. Para quando é o novo impulso Ó mãe Ibéria, para quando? [From east to west we command, Where the sun goes, we tread. In unknown ends we search For glory, unheard and alone. Today, defeat is our life Sickness our gentle sleep. When is the next endeavour, Mother Iberia, when? Two [three] peoples from the same race From one mother two [three] sons born, Spain, glory, pride and grace, Portugal, saudade and sword, [Catalonia, the young one] But today … who we were calls out for who we are in the insipid wilderness. When is the next push, Mother Iberia, when?] (Pessoa 2012: 25)
In the midst of this concern, which was particularly present between 1915 and 1918 during the (pre)construction of the first avant-garde on the Iberian Peninsula, Pessoa established his first direct contacts with the Spanish writers of his era. In 1918, as we have already noted, the most important autochthonous movement of the Spanish avant-garde emerged: ultraism. Captained by Rafael Cansinos Assens, who was described by António Ferro as “o apóstolo da nova literatura española” [“the apostle of new Spanish literature”] (Ferro 1923: 41), and controversially led by the young Guillermo de Torre (who spent several days in Lisbon in May 1924, according to the Diário de Lisboa on 29/5/1924),5 the ultraists planned to set Spain’s literary clock to the same time as the rest of Europe. Despite 5 Carlos García and Martín Greco have compiled the letters exchanged by Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Guillermo de Torre at that time, including several letters describing the lat-
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this, the magazines linked to the group included contributions from Portuguese poets such as Eugénio de Castro and Teixeira de Pascoaes, whose aesthetic styles showed little evidence of adherence to ultraist tenets.6 Three Andalusian poets with a largely modernist background who were nonetheless linked to the ultraist movement established relationships with Pessoa between 1923 and 1924: Adriano del Valle, Rogelio Buendía and Isaac del Vando-Villar. In 1923, Del Valle spent his honeymoon in Lisbon after collaborating (like Rogelio Buendía) several months earlier with Contemporânea magazine, which became a standard-bearer for the cultural alignment between the two countries in the early 1920s (Sáez Delgado 2017). During the summer of that year, Pessoa and Adriano forged a friendship that grew to encompass Buendía and Vando-Villar, who was the editor of Grecia magazine. By the end of 1924, Adriano had exchanged 14 letters with Fernando Pessoa and the two poets had come up with several joint projects, including the publication of Pessoa’s first poems translated into Spanish, which were released in the Huelva newspaper La Provincia on 11 September 1923 thanks to translator Rogelio Buendía and mediator Adriano. In the same newspaper at around the same time, the two ultraist poets also published translations of poems and short stories by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, António Botto—another of Adriano’s correspondents—Judith Teixeira and symbolist Camilo Pessanha, marking the real arrival of the first Portuguese modernism in Spain (Sáez Delgado 2015: 181–4). In most cases, these collaborations produced the first Spanish translations of the work of the authors involved, although they reached a very small audience. The excerpt of a letter from Pessoa published by Adriano del Valle in the Seville newspaper La Unión on 18 September 1923 met a similar fate: Con ocasión de mi reciente viaje a Portugal, hube de conocer en Lisboa a uno de los más puros y selectos hombres de letras de aquel bello país ibérico: Fernando Pessoa. A su virtud de gran poeta, de ciudadano avecindado en Lunalópolis, une la depuradísima cualidad de ser uno de los más sagaces críticos literarios de su país y de poseer un espíritu tan amplio y tan abierto ter’s time in Lisbon, where he was accompanied by Jorge Luis Borges and António Ferro for part of his stay (García and Greco 2007: 64–83). 6 The Madrid-based magazine Cosmópolis was an exception, publishing a dozen articles on Portuguese topics by Carmen de Burgos ‘Colombine’ between 1920 and 1921, including “El futurista Mário de Sá-Carneiro” (1921: 13).
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a todas las fuerzas ciegas de la naturaleza—“súbdito del mar y del cielo”, se llama él—que toda su obra crítica está llena de una gran prodigalidad de comprensión, de una fina sonrisa de simpatía, para todas las más audaces manifestaciones del arte contemporáneo. [During my recent trip to Portugal, I met one of the purest, most refined men of letters in that beautiful Iberian country in Lisbon: Fernando Pessoa. As well as his merit as a great poet and a citizen of Lunalópolis, he holds the sophisticated qualities of being one of the wisest literary critics in his country and of possessing such a generous spirit that is so open to all the blind forces of nature—“a subject of sea and sky”, as he calls himself—that his entire critical work is filled with profuse understanding, a pleasant smile directed at the most daring expressions of contemporary art.] (Valle 1923)
Adriano del Valle’s admiration for Fernando Pessoa’s work was sincere, although evidence suggests that the aesthetic and ideological relationship between the two men was rather shallow. This evidence includes Pessoa’s impressionistic appraisals of the books written by his Spanish correspondents and several of the letters that he exchanged with them. In the last letter sent between the writers in November 1924, for example, Adriano del Valle discusses ultraism as if he had never mentioned it before in his conversations with Pessoa, while stating his opinion on the central magazine Athena without making any comment on the heteronyms present in it, suggesting that he was unaware of their existence: Admirado amigo: El 1.° número de Athena, recibido ayer, me llena de grata sorpresa, y mueve mi pluma a felicitarle por el acierto que su buen gusto estético ha sabido imprimir a la revista. Ella me parece un magnífico intento digno de vida longeva. Veo en sus páginas una escrupulosa selección de originales literarios, en lo que adivino la orientación del fino espíritu critico—difícilmente igualado por nadie en Portugal—que hay en usted. Maravillosa y fidelísima me parece su traducción de El Cuervo, de Poe. Muy interesantes también sus palabras liminares, tan elegantes—valga la frase—, y tan llenas de ponderación y justeza en su fondo, y en la pura filosofía de sus ideas. Las páginas sobre arte pictórico portugués parécenme atinadísimas, dada la índole que informa la Revista, e interesantes en grado sumo para cuando esta llega a manos, como las mías, extranjeras, en una persona que, como yo, tanto se interesa por toda manifestación del arte portugués. Yo hubiera preferido encontrar la firma de Almada Negreiros al pie de uno de sus originales dibujos a la línea. Dentro de la orientación que inicia Athena— muy antigua y muy moderna—¿por qué no se inclinan un poco a la estética
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de la avant-guerra y de la post-guerra, que culminó—y culmina—en los nombres de Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Reverdy, Cendrars, Paul Morand, Giraudoux y tantos otros nombres sugestivos? Temo que para ello sea una remora el mismo título de la Revista—Athena—pero nosotros, los jóvenes, hicimos una revista en Sevilla que se tituló Grecia, en la que creamos la moderna y audaz escuela literaria que ha dado la vuelta al mundo con este nombre que no sé si habrá llegado a sus oídos: ultraísmo. Muy interesantes me parecen las reproducciones de las pinturas de Lino Antonio, y dignas también de estudio las reproducciones del Visconde de Menezes. Mi enhorabuena a todos y a ese magnífico Ruy Vaz, que tiene nombre de Rey de Castilla y de Aragón, que veo pasear con usted por ese Jardín de Akademos que se abre en la primera página de la Revista. Mil gracias a todos, y usted reciba la devoción literaria y el puro afecto de amistad fraternal que, con un fuerte abrazo, le envía su camarada de España, Adriano. [Admired friend: Issue 1 of Athena, received yesterday, is a source of pleasant surprise and prompts my pen to congratulate you on the role of your good aesthetic taste in the magazine’s success. It seems to me a wonderful endeavour worthy of a long life. I see in its pages a scrupulous selection of literary originals, indicative of guidance from the sophisticated critical spirit—unrivalled in Portugal—that you possess. Your translation of Poe’s The Raven is brilliant and very faithful. Your preambular words are also very interesting, so elegant—it is worth mentioning—and so full of consideration and exactitude in their substance and in the pure philosophy of the ideas expressed. The pages on Portuguese pictorial art seem to me to be hugely apt, given the nature of the magazine, and are of great interest to foreign readers such as myself who are keen to find out more about Portuguese art in all its forms. I would have preferred to find the signature of Almada Negreiros at the foot of one of his original line drawings. Within the scope of Athena—very old yet very modern—why not focus a little more on the pre-war and post-war aesthetic, which culminated—and is culminating—in the names of Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Reverdy, Cendrars, Paul Morand, Giraudoux and so many other evocative names? I fear that the title itself echoes this—Athena—but we young people put together a magazine in Seville called Grecia, with which we created the modern, daring literary school that has spread around the world with a name that I am not sure you will have heard: ultraism. The reproductions of paintings by Lino Antonio are very interesting and those of the Viscount of Menezes are also worthy of study. My congratulations to all of them and to the wonderful Rui Vaz, a name worthy of the King of Castile and Aragon, who I see strolling with you around the Garden of Akademos that opens up on the first page of the magazine. Thanks to you all. Please accept the literary devotion and pure
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fraternal friendship and affection that your Spanish comrade, Adriano, sends you with a warm embrace.] (Valle, cited by Sáez Delgado 2015: 144–7)
Despite the interest displayed by the young ultraists, it is evident that the relationship that developed between them was not particularly close or deep and Fernando Pessoa had to wait until after the Civil War—the 1940s, to be precise—for his work to begin to be more widely received in Spain. With the shadow of Miguel de Unamuno’s silence pursuing him for much of his life, Pessoa lacked an adequate mediator. In this context, the Andalusian ultraists became genuine interlocutors for the Portuguese poet, playing a far more important historical role in the reception of his work than traditional histories of Spanish literature focusing largely on production acknowledge. By revisiting Pessoa’s work from an Iberian perspective, we have opened up new areas of analysis and lines of research, situating his oeuvre within a genealogy that did not appear relevant to his life until now. In this way, we have been able to identify ideas of Iberia in Pessoa’s work, as well as to redefine that work within the Iberian context of his time.
4.2 Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Carmen de Burgos ‘Colombine’ and the Greguería in Portugal Ramón Gómez de la Serna is the Spanish avant-garde writer with the closest ties to Portugal. He travelled to the country on a regular basis, meeting some of its most significant authors and collaborating in Portuguese magazines, including Contemporânea (Rivas 1995; Sáez Delgado 2000: 187–96). He even built a house in Estoril, where he wrote several books, and some of his works are set in Lisbon and the surrounding area. Gómez de la Serna welcomed key names in Portuguese literature and art at his famous gatherings at Café Pombo in Madrid. There can be no doubt that his relationships with Portugal are far closer and more fruitful than those of any other Spanish writer in his generation, and they have already been the subject of a large number of studies (Matos 1984; Llardent 1990; Molina 1990a: 58–67; Sáez Delgado 2007; Navarro Domínguez 2007, 2010; Fernández Sánchez-Alarcos 2010; Fernandes 2010, 2014). These relationships manifested themselves in two main ways: on the one hand, Gómez de la Serna’s greguería genre became widespread in Portugal and influenced several Portuguese writers of the era, including modernist author António Ferro, a friend of Pessoa, who adopted it in
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works such as Teoria da indiferença (1920) and Leviana (1921); on the other, the Spanish author developed such a palpable interest in Portugal in his fictional works as a result of his experiences living on the coast near Lisbon that he set several of his books—including La Quinta de Palmyra (1923)—in the country. In this way, Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s relationship with Portugal operates in both directions: his greguerías permeated the Portuguese literary system while his own work was influenced by Portuguese settings and locations. It is widely known that Gómez de la Serna was, in many ways, a forerunner of literary innovation in Spain in the early twentieth century. From 1908 to 1912, he published Marinetti’s first futuristic texts in Prometeo magazine, before doing the same in April 1909 with a manifesto that would shape the course of modern Spanish literature: “El concepto de la nueva literatura”. These activities quickly placed him in the vanguard of Spanish literature and his prominent position was accepted and acknowledged throughout society despite distancing himself from the main movements of the Spanish historical avant-garde and adopting a rather individualistic stance. In 1909, Ramón began a romantic relationship with the writer Carmen de Burgos (‘Colombine’), which lasted for 20 years and was directly linked to his proximity to Portugal. The couple viewed the country as the perfect place to live out their love and boost their creative activity, with Colombine also setting several of her books there (Núñez Rey 2005: 493–7). As well as their personal circumstances, two historic events fuelled the couple’s interest in Portugal, which they shared with many Spanish intellectuals of the era: in 1910, the Portuguese Republic was declared, and in 1916, the country joined World War I. In many people’s eyes, the land of Camões became a role model for modernity, casting off its image as a socially “backward” country among many Spaniards (Navarro Domínguez 2010: 257–8). In 1915, in the midst of the conflict that was raging across Europe, the couple chose Portugal as the destination for one of their international trips and their fascination for all things Portuguese grew. A year later, in 1916, Colombine published Peregrinaciones, in which she recounted her journeys to Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, England and Portugal, with an epilogue by Gómez de la Serna that emphasised the pleasant surprise he experienced when visiting the latter for the first time. In his epilogue, the inventor of the greguería dreamily invokes Portugal’s literary scene and the buzz of its cafés:
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Portugal es el verdadero descubrimiento de este viaje de Carmen y más que del viaje, de sus confidencias íntimas. Después de las palabras de Carmen sobre Portugal tenemos que visitarle urgentemente […] Iremos a Portugal. […] ¡Qué cafés debe tener Lisboa! ¡Qué «Pombos» con aire transatlántico, con olor a buen café, con cierta presencia de marinos modestos, de habla afable, de ojos grandes y mulatos varoniles y serenos! ¡Qué «Pombos» en los que habrá colgado un cuadrito con un barco y con un mar de cola de pescado! Tanto insiste en nosotros esta idea de un «Pombo» acrecentado, que nos parece Lisboa como una ciudad creada salida de un «Pombo» cordial, ubérrimo, sensato, incubado de todo con proporción, bondad y cariño. [Portugal is the true discovery of Carmen’s trip, or rather, of her intimate confidences. After hearing Carmen speak about Portugal, we must visit it urgently. […] We will go to Portugal. […] Lisbon must have such wonderful cafés! All those “Pombos” with their transatlantic air, the scent of excellent coffee, friendly, unassuming sailors with their big eyes and poised, manly mulattos! Those “Pombos” with their paintings of boats and seas full of fish tails! This idea of an enhanced “Pombo” is so present within us that Lisbon seems to us to be a city made from a cordial, luxuriant, wise “Pombo”, incubated with balance, kindness and affection.] (Ramón Gómez de la Serna, in Colombine 1916: 454–8)
Between 1916 and 1926, Ramón Gómez de la Serna established a close relationship with Portugal, its writers and its culture (Fernandes 2010), almost always in the company of Carmen de Burgos. The couple were entertained by Colombine’s friend Ana de Castro Osório7 and by Teófilo Braga. Shortly after, in 1918, Ramón published Pombo, which includes the chapters “Cartas desde Portugal” [Letters from Portugal] and “Segundo viaje a Portugal” [Second trip to Portugal]. In them, he admits to being rather disappointed by one of his obsessions: Lisbon’s cafés. Nevertheless, he talks at length about Portuguese cultural life, with which he had begun to familiarise himself:
7 The relationship between Carmen de Burgos and Ana de Castro Osório has been documented by different scholars, for instance, Núñez Rey (2014) or more recently by del Moral Vargas (2021). However, despite the publication of groundbreaking volumes such as Bermúdez and Johnson’s New History of Iberian Feminisms (2018), the connections between Iberian feminist activists and movements, and in general the place of female writers and intellectuals as mediators in the Iberian cultural network still needs further exploration and research, as proposed by Harkema (2019).
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La juventud aquí es admirable. Podría compartir nuestras noches de Pombo. Yo me he sentido su hermano, realmente su hermano en medio de ellos. Declaman los versos como si llorasen. Están en el momento en que es solo de iniciados su dignidad espiritual. […] Los editores son muy contados, pero el movimiento intelectual es amplio y podrá con el burgués y su indiferencia. Existe en Oporto una sociedad editora llamada «Renascença Portuguesa» que edita muchas obras y una bella revista mensual Aguia, de la que es director el gran poeta Teixeira de Pascoaes, fundador del movimiento «saudosista», y donde han colaborado algunos de los más brillantes poetas nuevos, como Jaime Cortesão y Augusto Casimiro, que combate en las trincheras de Francia. Otro gran poeta, Joao de Barros, dirige en Lisboa la gran revista Atlántida. Perdidos, pero frenéticos de inspiración, hay muchos jóvenes de corazón hijo del sol naciente, como Veiga Simões, como Joaquim Correia da Costa, como Mário Beirão, Afonso Duarte, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, suicida del que otro gran poeta que fue su amigo, António Ferro, ha dicho «que fue el último suicida de su obra», Fernando de Pessoa, Augusto de Santa Rita, Luís de Montalvor, Silva Tavares, Pedro Menezes, Luis J. Pinto, Augusto Cunha. (Quiero repetir todos los nombres. Déjenme. Reténganlos y apúntenlos en nuestro Álbum de Pombo tan lleno de firmas.) [The youth here are admirable. I was able to share our Pombo nights. I felt like a brother, truly like their brother, when I was among them. They recite their verses as if they were weeping. They are at the very beginning. They are at the point where their spiritual gravitas is only for insiders. […] There are very few publishers, but the intellectual movement is broad and will overcome bourgeois indifference. In Porto, there is a publishing company called “Renascença Portuguesa”, which publishes many works and a wonderful monthly magazine Aguia, edited by the great poet and founder of the “saudosist” movement Teixeira de Pascoaes, with collaboration from some of the most brilliant new poets, including Jaime Cortesão and Augusto Casimiro, who is fighting in the trenches in France. Another great poet, Joao de Barros, is the editor of the wonderful Lisbon magazine Atlántida. Wandering lost, yet filled with frenetic inspiration, there are many young people who are sons of the rising sun at heart, such as Veiga Simões, Joaquim Correia da Costa, Mário Beirão, Afonso Duarte, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, whose suicide prompted another great poet, his friend António Ferro, to say “it was the final suicide of his work”, Fernando de Pessoa, Augusto de Santa Rita, Luís de Montalvor, Silva Tavares, Pedro Menezes, Luis J. Pinto, Augusto Cunha.
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(I want to repeat all the names. Allow me to do so. Remember them and note them down in our Pombo Album that is so full of signatures.)] (Gómez de la Serna (1918) 1999: 417–8)
It is interesting to observe the way in which Gómez de la Serna gradually worked his way into the inner sanctum of Lisbon’s literary scene and briefly met Fernando “de” Pessoa, who he regrettably never mentions again in his texts despite sharing a friendship with António Ferro and frequenting groups that were closely linked to Pessoa in the early 1920s, such as the group that produced Contemporânea magazine to which both writers contributed. Ramón began to publish in the magazine in July 1922, submitting three texts (“Nuevo muestrario—verano 1922”, no. 3, July 1922; “Discurso no banquete da Contemporânea”, no. 7, January 1923; and “El ente plástico”, no. 8, February 1923), which appear to have earned him a good number of contacts in the circles gravitating around the magazine. Among these three texts, the speech given by Gómez de la Serna at a banquet in honour of the magazine’s editor, José Pacheko, is particularly significant. It contains further details about his stay in Portugal and about how privileged he felt to contribute to a magazine capable of combining modern and rustic literature, closely reflecting his own aesthetic interests. His passion for Portugal was so great that he went as far as to build himself a house (called ‘El Ventanal’) in Estoril, where he lived with Carmen de Burgos from 1924 to 1926. Unable to repay the debt he had incurred in building the house, he was obliged to sell it soon after (Utrera 1998: 395–408; Pires Rodrigues 2000; Núñez Rey 2005: 512–36). He wrote about this experience in La sagrada cripta de Pombo (1924), which contains numerous Portuguese references: the Leão d’Ouro café, a photograph showing António Ferro at the Martinho, an excerpt dedicated to the painter Guilherme Filipe, photographs by José de Almada Negreiros and Rogerio Garcia Perez (who translated Ramón’s novel A ruiva—La roja—in 1923, with a prologue by Ferro) taken during their visits to literary gatherings in Madrid, and, of course, a short chapter about ‘El Ventanal’ describing his voluntary exile and his excitement at this new stage in his life, in which he would dedicate his time exclusively to literature. This chapter may be usefully compared with a chapter written on the same subject in the 1940s in Automoribundia, which recounts the end of his Portuguese adventure and the events leading up to the traumatic sale of the villa in quite some detail.
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Gómez de la Serna experienced his trips to Portugal as a form of time travel transporting him back to the Romantic era, which he saw reflected in Portuguese culture and society, in contrast to his vision of Spain as a pitiable place during the wartime years. In Peregrinaciones, Gómez de la Serna outlines his vision of Portugal; rather than adopting a traditional stance focusing on the deep nostalgia aroused among many Spanish intellectuals upon contemplating the country, he situated this romanticism as a last bastion of the revolutionary liberalism that he had always found so appealing: Portugal se me hace que vive aquella época por la que pasó España y en la que pudo hacer la revolución, que por no haberse hecho entonces no sabemos hasta qué punto se habrá malogrado, ya que pasó estérilmente aquel límite de bondad por el que ha pasado todo el mundo una sola vez no hace mucho y parece que hace demasiado. Aquella edad—esta que vive Portugal abiertamente, victoriosamente—fue la edad propicia de la que nosotros no supimos deducir las consecuencias permanentes y autónomas, fue la edad de una adolescencia que quizás no vuelva. Portugal parece vivir en un tiempo anterior y mejor, no porque no se haya desarrollado su modernidad, su valentía y su clarividencia, sino porque esa impasibilidad y esa acérrima falsedad que se ha apoderado de Europa no se ha desarrollado en él, siendo por eso, porque le falta ese síntoma de una edad más avanzada en el tiempo por lo que parece vivir en una hora más atrasada, aunque solo sea que es mejor. [Portugal seems to me to be living through the same era that Spain went through when a revolution was possible, the extent of whose failure we cannot now judge as it did not occur at that time, sterilely crossing the threshold of goodness that everyone crossed on one occasion not so long ago yet which seems so far behind us. That era—which Portugal is experiencing openly, victoriously—was the optimal age whose lasting, independent consequences we were unable to deduce, the age of an adolescence that may never return. Portugal appears to live in an earlier, better time, not because its modernity, courage and foresight have gone undeveloped, but because the impassivity and resolute mendacity that has taken hold of Europe has yet to emerge in the country, because it lacks these symptoms of a more advanced age, making it appear to live in an earlier time, although it may simply be better.] (Gómez de la Serna, in Colombine 1916: 456)
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Indeed, Portugal came to play such a central part in Gómez de la Serna’s view of the world that it found its way into his own literature and he set three books in the country: La Quinta de Palmyra (1923), El inencontrable (part of the 1925 volume El Novelista) and El cólera azul (1937), the first two of which were written at El Ventanal (Fernandes 2014). Among the three, the novel of greatest interest to our study is La Quinta de Palmyra, a genuine “sinfonía portuguesa” [“Portuguese symphony”] as it was described by Larbaud, in which Gómez de la Serna pays tribute to the country that he loved so much against the subtle backdrop of the El Ventanal episode (Richmond 1982). This deeply lyrical novel tells the tale of Palmyra’s romantic relationships, with a bold, homoerotic ending. It echoes the debate between cosmopolitanism and provincialism, between past and future, creating an era beyond time in a physical setting (the Quinta referred to in the title) near Estoril, which is represented by the village of Ardantes. Here, a deep, organic relationship emerges between the characters and their surroundings as a symbol of that “utopian” country where Ramón, always unique and individualistic, felt at home despite expressing occasional criticism. Describing the author’s literary production linked to Portugal as a whole, Ângela Fernandes concludes: “os retratos portugueses de Gómez de la Serna se apresentam acima de tudo como retratos, ou seja, como imagens compostas e retocadas, eventualmente excessivas, que assim desvelam a margem de elaboração ficcional inerente a todos os discursos da identidade” [“Gómez de la Serna’s Portuguese portraits are presented above all as portraits, that is, as composed, retouched, even excessive images, which reveal the margin of fictional creation inherent to all identity discourses”] (Fernandes 2014: 48). His close ties to Portugal allowed Gómez de la Serna to build up a network of friends and regular collaborators. Two of these are particularly interesting: writer and painter José de Almada Negreiros—the subject of the next section of this chapter—and António Ferro, the Portuguese author who followed Ramón’s work most loyally from the early 1920s and whose own literary works were influenced by the greguería. Ferro is the most cited Portuguese author in Ramón’s works on Portugal; alongside Almada, he is also the writer with whom he had the greatest number of joint projects. Whereas the relationship between Gómez de la Serna and Almada was based on mutual collaboration and dialogue between literature and the visual arts, as we will see in the next section, the relationship with Ferro was more didactic and he was strongly influenced by the Spanish author’s greguerías. Nevertheless, this admiration went both ways,
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and Ferro is mentioned in Pombo as a “great poet” and in La sagrada cripta de Pombo as the “great António Ferro”. The depth of these relationships is unsurprising given that Ramón Gómez de la Serna was discovered and commended by the Portuguese modernists at the same time or even earlier than he began to draw the admiration of the Spanish avant-garde, as Augusto d’Esaguy ([1925] 2004: n.p.) explains in the magazine Contemporânea: “ao contrario de quase todos os escritores espanhóis, Ramon Gómez de la Serna, triunfou primeiro em Lisboa e depois em Madrid” [“unlike almost all Spanish writers, Ramón Gómez de la Serna triumphed first in Lisbon and then in Madrid”]. Indeed, from the mid-1910s, Gómez de la Serna began to gain prominence in Lisbon’s literary circles, which revolved around António Ferro, the former editor of Orpheu magazine. It did not take long for him to start to collaborate with Portuguese authors. In 1923, Ferro wrote the preface to the Portuguese translation of La roja, emphasising Gómez de la Serna’s pioneering role in modern art and his aversion to schools and movements: Ramón Gómez de la Serna, acróbata de frases e de ideias, é o grande escritor da Espanha moderna. A sua obra forte, a sua obra que é um circo de palhaços e de jongleurs, é o triunfo barulhento e definitivo da nova literatura espanhola. Ramón, artista menino, que ainda não se cansou de pôr brinquedos na árvore de natal da sua arte, é um dos escritores mais originais do momento, dos mais imprevistos e dos mais raros. […] Ramón Gómez de la Serna que nunca foi um discípulo é hoje um mestre. A Espanha, que levou muito tempo a tomá-lo a sério, tem hoje por ele o respeito e a ternura que todos os inovadores devem merecer. É preciso que Portugal também o conheça. [Ramón Gómez de la Serna, an acrobat of phrases and ideas, is the great writer of modern Spain. His vibrant work, a circus of clowns and jongleurs, is the noisy, ultimate triumph of new Spanish literature. Ramón, a young artist who has not yet tired of hanging toys on the Christmas tree that is his Art, is one of the most original, unpredictable and unusual writers of our time. […] Ramón Gómez de la Serna was never a pupil yet today he is a teacher. Spain, which took a long time to start taking him seriously, now has the
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respect and affection for him that all pioneers deserve. It is important that Portugal discovers him too.] (Ferro (1923) 2004: 13)
The didactic role that Ferro mentions is apparent if we analyse the presence of Gómez de la Serna’s greguerías in books like Teoria da indiferença and Leviana (the final version of which, published in 1929, contains a prologue by Gómez de la Serna). In the preface to La roja, he describes Ramón’s invention: A «greguería» é a confidencia das coisas, dos gestos e das atitudes. A «greguería» é um sorriso ou um queixume, uma gargalhada ou uma lágrima. A «greguería» é uma frase curta a dizer as longas sensações. A «greguería» é a voz de tudo quanto é silêncio … A «greguería» é o ritmo daquele beijo que o bico dum seio pode dar numa blusa de seda, a frase de sofrimento e de tragédia pronunciada por certo chapeu mole em repouso numa cadeira, é o ramalhar das árvores, a fala dos retratos e das flores. Ramón é o inventor da «greguería». Mas Ramón, o grande Ramón de cuja amizade me orgulho, tem outros títulos de glória. [The “greguería” is the secret of things, gestures and attitudes. The “greguería” is a smile or a lament, a guffaw or a tear. The “greguería” is a short phrase expressing long sensations. The “greguería” is the voice of all that is silence … The “greguería” is the rhythm of the kiss bestowed on a silk blouse by the nipple of a breast, the statement of suffering and tragedy pronounced by a floppy hat resting on a chair, it is the rustling of the trees, the speech of the portraits and the flowers. Ramón is the inventor of the “greguería”. But Ramón, the great Ramón who I am proud to call a friend, has other grounds for glory.] (Ferro (1923) 2004: 14)
Both the book of aphorisms Teoria da indiferença and the novel Leviana contain traces of Gómez de la Serna’s greguerías. In the short critical study at the start of his novel, Ferro refers to the Spanish author as one of his direct influences alongside such prominent names as Proust and Joyce. The similarity between the two authors’ poems, which sought to capture the fleeting nature of the instant using this new genre, thus comes as little surprise. The parallels between their work are particularly apparent in Teoria da indiferença, many of whose aphorisms, such as “Os burgueses são os etcéteras da vida” [“The bourgeoisie are the etcetera of life”] or “Os vestidos são os cartazes do corpo” [“Dresses are the body’s posters”],
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are very similar in spirit to the greguería. This can also be seen in Leviana, which contains maxims that openly echo greguerías interspersed among the narrative and spoken by some of the characters. An analysis of these two works by Ferro reveals the extent to which the Spanish author’s influence extended beyond the borders of his own country and was embraced and disseminated across Portugal, where he enjoyed a degree of prestige that is incomparable to any other author from the Spanish avant-garde.
4.3 José de Almada Negreiros or the Total Dialogue of Iberian Modernity Alongside Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, José de Almada Negreiros was one of the three most important authors to be involved with Orpheu magazine and with the first Portuguese modernism as a result. A writer, painter, draughtsman, stage designer, dancer and cultural agitator, he lived the longest of the three authors mentioned (until 1970) and became something of a total artist in Portuguese modernity, playing a frontline role in twentieth-century culture in his country. Almada participated actively in several historic periods and their corresponding aesthetic trends, with the Salazar dictatorship dominating his adult life, and advocated the spirit of the Orpheu group at all times. He was keenly aware of the importance of the role played by this small group of creators in Portuguese culture during that era. In addition, among the authors of the first Portuguese modernism, he had the closest and most prolonged contact with Spain, living in Madrid for five years from 1927 to 1932 at a time when his artistic output was particularly prolific; this period of his life has been the subject of a number of studies (Sousa 1983; Acciaiuoli 1983; Areán 1984; Barco 1989; Fernandes 1998; Vieira 1998; Bonet 2004; Cabral Martins 2004; Gaspar 2004; García 2004; Ferreira 2010; Sáez Delgado 2014; Sáez Delgado and Soares 2017). Almada is a perfect example of the dialogue between literature and the visual arts that underpinned many of the basic tenets of the international historical avant-garde, both from the perspective of his own individual work as a poet, painter and essayist, and so on, and from that of the cross- disciplinary work he produced with other authors. In this context, his extended collaboration with Ramón Gómez de la Serna during his time in Madrid is particularly noteworthy: Almada produced numerous illustrations for Gómez de la Serna’s texts and the two men shared an immense
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artistic affinity that was hugely important in the context of cultural relations between Spain and Portugal. However, the foundations for Almada’s close relationship with Spain were laid several years before 1927, when he arrived in Madrid. During the early 1920s, he developed strong ties to several of the Spanish writers who contributed to Contemporânea, a markedly Iberist publication that sparked a multitude of contacts that later grew into relationships between authors from the two countries, as we have seen in previous chapters. In the case of Almada, he met several Spanish writers through Contemporânea magazine and collaborated with them in subsequent years. His most significant relationship was with Gómez de la Serna, one of his main chaperones upon his arrival in Madrid, with whom he attended gatherings at Café Pombo and shared numerous joint projects. As noted in the previous section, Almada’s photograph appears in La Sagrada Cripta de Pombo (1924) alongside another snapshot of journalist Rogerio Garcia Perez under the caption “Los que han pasado por Pombo” [“Those who have passed through Pombo”], confirming that his links to the literary gatherings at the café predated his move to the Spanish capital. However, Almada collaborated with other authors besides Ramón Gómez de la Serna. The Andalusian ultraist poets who appeared in Contemporânea and are linked to Pessoa—Rogelio Buendía, Adriano del Valle and Isaac del Vando-Villar—are illustrative examples that can help us to decipher a network of relationships between Spain and Portugal that developed around the concept of the avant-garde. A letter from Vando- Villar to Adriano del Valle, dated 17 October 1924, reveals that Del Valle supported the project to publish a selection of poems from the book La Sombrilla Japonesa by Vando-Villar, with illustrations by Almada (Sáez Delgado 2002: 100). This confirms that Adriano del Valle was familiar with much of the Portuguese writer’s work and became another of his Spanish allies; he kept A Invenção do Dia Claro in his personal library (as he indicates in the letters he sent to Pessoa on 3 October 1923 and 20 April 1924) and Almada wrote a curious dedication to him in 1946 in another copy of the same book, enthusiastically expressing his gratitude.8 8 Carlos Paulo Martínez Pereiro, basing his argument on information from his book A Pintura nas Palavras. ‘A Engomadeira’ de Almada Negreiros. Uma Novela em Chave Plástica (Martínez Pereiro 1996), has established a clear link between this dedication (and the expression “atisbos de génio” [“glimmers of genius”] and the review by Juan Barcia Caballero published in Orpheu on 6 April 1915, in which the critic uses exactly the same expression to
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A / Adriano del Valle / el / primero / que ha dicho (1912) / sobre / mi / primero / escrito / que / se / intitulaba / «el eco» / en / «frizos» (orfeu, n.° 1) / y / cuya / frase / fue justamente: «tiene atisbos de genio» / y / por / esto / antes de todo / yo / soy / el / más / reconocido / de / los amigos / de / Adriano del Valle. [For / Adriano del Valle / the / first / to say (1912) / of / my / first / text / which / was / entitled / “el eco” / in / “frizos” (orfeu, no. 1) / and / whose / phrase / was: “it has glimmers of genius” / and / for / this reason / above all / I / am / the / most / grateful / of / Adriano del Valle’s / friends.] (Cited by Sáez Delgado 2014: 57)
Contact with Spanish writers thus formed an integral part of the young Almada’s life. He also established relationships with representatives of other artistic disciplines, becoming friends with the painter Daniel Vázquez Díaz, who also contributed to Contemporânea and who painted his portrait in 1923 and in 1927 (Berruguete 2010); the musician Tomás Terán, who spent lengthy periods in Lisbon from 1923 to 1925; the famous flamenco dancer ‘La Argentinita’, about whom Almada wrote an article in 1925 after drawing her in pencil a year earlier; and writer Tomás Borrás and singer La Goya, who visited Lisbon several times during that period (Ferreira 2010: 284–8). This network of relationships provided the perfect backdrop for Almada’s move to Madrid in 1927; indeed, he may have made these prior contacts with the intention of relocating to Spain. Almada appears to have found the Spanish cultural milieu an auspicious environment for his work, feeling more comfortable there than in his previous stay in Paris or even in his own country, which he complained about bitterly on many occasions. Despite these complaints, his time in Madrid served to accentuate and deepen his understanding of his ‘Portuguese being’, and his work always reflected the spirit of Orpheu and his concern with nationalism and identity, which only grew after his stay in Madrid. It is clear, then, that Almada was no stranger when he arrived in the Spanish capital in March 1927. A month earlier, the recently launched magazine La Gaceta Literaria included an interesting text by Ramón Gómez de la Serna entitled “El alma de Almada” [“Almada’s soul”], in which he demonstrated his knowledge of the artist’s work with a particular focus on his paintings and drawings: describe Pessoa’s ‘O Marinheiro’. This may have prompted Almada to mistakenly write the year 1912, as there is no suggestion that the two men knew one another at this time.
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Almada Negreiros es el ser impar en medio de la pintura y de la literatura portuguesa, sobre las que salta de trapecio en trapecio. Hay que conocer el espíritu de Lisboa para darse perfecta cuenta de este ser hecho de nostalgias y de ilusiones locas que se cartea con la luna. […] Almada Negreiros es el artista que resume la delicadeza, la inquietud y el diletantismo de Lisboa. Es ese artista sin salida que lo que le importa es vivir la gracia de su ciudad y andar en zancos por las calles que dan a la luna y subirse a una verja para alcanzar una flor. […] Almada, en una palabra, refleja con sus dibujos o con sus escritos lo más fino de esa melancólica y feliz Lisboa, dando noble aire de blasón a cada cosa y soplándolas hacia el ideal como si fuesen carabelas. [Almada Negreiros is the odd one out in the world of Portuguese painting and literature, jumping from one to another as if from trapeze to trapeze. One must be familiar with the spirit of Lisbon to fully comprehend this individual, made up of nostalgia and mad illusions, who fires off letters to the moon. […] Almada Negreiros is an artist who encapsulates Lisbon’s delicateness, restlessness and dilettantism. He is a dead-end artist who is most concerned with enjoying his city and walking on stilts along the streets that lead to the moon and climbing a fence to reach a flower. […] Almada, in a word, reflects the most delicate elements of that melancholic, joyful Lisbon in his drawings and texts, lending them a noble air and wafting them towards the ideal like caravels.] (Gómez de la Serna [1927], in Gómez de la Serna and Almada Negreiros 2004: 21)
The magazine, which we will discuss further in the final chapter of this book, quickly came to feature contributions by Almada and an exhibition of his work was organised in June 1927 at the Ibero-American Union of Madrid (Areán 1984), where Almada gave a talk in Spanish entitled El Dibujo (Cabral Martins 2017). This was, without a doubt, his first great affirmation on Madrid’s cultural scene. Over the years, Almada participated in several collective exhibitions as a draughtsman and collaborated with numerous magazines, newspapers and book collections in Madrid, including Revista de Occidente, ABC, La Farsa. Novela de hoy, El Sol, Nuevo Mundo and La Esfera. Alongside these projects, Almada’s Iberian alignment intensified as he published illustrations for texts by Pío Baroja and Clarín in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Portuguese magazines such as Magazine Bertrand and Ilustração. Among Almada’s friendship circle in Madrid was Federico García Lorca,
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with whom he attended Café Zahara, as Almada notes in Gigantismo (Ferreira 2010: 290–2), as well as the group of architects who gathered at Café Granja El Henar. His active public presence also led him to produce several billboards for San Carlos cinema, contribute to the decoration of Muñoz Seca theatre and Barceló cinema (Sousa 1983; Vieira 1998) and design a magic lantern for the musical La Tragedia de Doña Ajada in 1929, with music by Salvador Bacarisse and poems by Manuel Abril (Santos 2017). During that same year, the journalist Novais Teixeira, a friend of Almada during his time in Madrid (Marina 2014; Rosa 2016; Novaes Ledieu 2017), published an article in Ilustração about Almada’s success in Spain, in which he recounts an interesting anecdote from the artist about the reception of his work in the capital: Saí de Portugal arreliado […]; saí desgostoso apenas com o panorama artístico. De resto, o nome de Portugal esteve sempre no primeiro plano das minhas preocupações. Apesar da minha vinda para Madrid ter coincidido com os eventos de aproximação que então sopravam e ainda sopram, quero fazer constar que vim individualmente. […] O tempo que passei foi admirável, não só pelo que aproveitei como por aquilo que tive de desprezar; aprendi, enfim. Aconselho aos meus compatriotas uma visita a Espanha […] onde há efectivamente que aprender quando se é peninsular. Considero a Espanha o país mais leal de todos para que nós entendamos a humanidade e a civilização. [I was angry when I left Portugal […]; I was displeased only with the art scene. Otherwise, Portugal was always among my most pressing concerns. Despite my arrival in Madrid coinciding with the events that were and continue to be held to bring people together, I would like to state publicly that I came of my own accord. […] My time there was wonderful, not only because of what I was able to enjoy but also because of what I had to disregard; I learned, in short. I advise my compatriots to visit Spain […] where there are things to be learned by others from the peninsula. I consider Spain to be the most faithful country of all for us to understand humanity and civilisation.] (Almada Negreiros, in Novais Teixeira 1929: 42)
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Almada’s time in Madrid influenced both his literary and artistic work, which contained multiple references to Spain and its culture. He even wrote texts in Spanish and allusions to Spain can be found in his poetry, essays and talks from early on in his artistic career. The famous poem “A cena do ódio”, published in 1915, briefly mentions Cervantes, who shares a verse with key figures in European literature such as Hugo, Zola and Camões. With this text, Almada set a precedent that continued throughout much of his life, particularly during his stay in Madrid. He wrote several poems while he was living in the Spanish city (including “Luís o poeta salva a nado o poema”, with two different versions from March and December 1931), as well as practising his Spanish by writing poetry in the language, such as the lengthy “El cazador”. As recent research by Martínez Pereiro (2017) and Costa (2017) has shown, Almada also wrote fairly extensively for the theatre in Spanish: his most prominent work was El uno. Tragedia de la unidad, which includes the plays Deseja-se mulher and S.O.S. He also wrote several essays and lectures reflecting his interest in Spanish culture. In these essays, he frequently mentions painters in the Spanish tradition, especially Goya—“o mais perfeito génio da pintura de todos os tempos” [“the most perfect painting genius of all time”] (Almada Negreiros 2006: 201)—and Picasso, who is cited in Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguesas do século XX, Arte e artistas and Cuidado com a pintura! However, he also refers to literary figures. In Pierrot e Arlequim, Almada mentions Don Quijote, comparing him to Arlequim, while in Modernismo, he reflects on the Iberian context and the difference between Spanish and Portuguese art. These texts confirm that Almada regularly pondered on life in Spain, the country’s relationship with Portugal and the role of his own work in the peninsular context. Upon his return to Lisbon and the publication of Direcção única (1932), Almada Negreiros remained loyal to his quest to find an organic discourse about the Iberian Peninsula, in which Portugal, his true artistic and intellectual home, would play a key role during the 1930s (Fernandes 1998). This is apparent in the texts that he wrote and published in 1935 (which are beyond the temporal scope of this study, but must be mentioned as a logical extension of his personal assimilation into the Iberian cultural context) in his own magazine, Sudoeste. In the first issue, he reflected at length on the theme in an important collection of texts that, echoing the spirit of Orpheu, dialogue with the Iberian passages written by
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Fernando Pessoa, who died several months after the first issue was published. In these pages, Almada explored Portugal’s role in European literature in depth—indeed, the text that opens the magazine is entitled “Portugal no mapa da Europa” [“Portugal on the map of Europe”]—paying close attention to the Iberian context (Pizarro 2017). Along similar lines, the second text in the first issue of Sudoeste is entitled “As 5 unidades de Portugal” [“The 5 unities of Portugal”], which the author defines as follows: individual Portuguese unity, collective Portuguese unity, Iberian peninsular unity, European unity and universal unity. Among them, occupying a central position, peninsular unity is highlighted in a text entitled “A civilização peninsular ibérica” [“Iberian peninsular civilisation”], which offers some interesting reflections on Almada’s vision of the Portugal/ Spain duality within the Peninsula. In a tone similar to that used by Pessoa in several of his texts on the topic of Iberia yet distancing himself from the idea of a tripartite peninsula, Almada sets out his personal view of the problem: Civilização ibérica, sim. Sempre. União ibérica, não. Nunca. Aljubarrota mais Toro igual a zero. Península ibérica igual a Espanha mais Portugal. A península ibérica já foi a cabeça do mundo com forte Espanha e o heróico Portugal. A península ibérica fez a América Latina. A península ibérica espalhou por toda a terra o sangue de Espanha e os padrões de Portugal. Ficaram eternos no mundo Portugal e Espanha. Pela primeira vez na História, dois povos independentes realizam uma mesma e única civilização: Portugal e Espanha criaram a Civilização Ibérica. […] A dualidade Portugal e Espanha é afinal o segredo da vitalidade da península ibérica e da sua civilização. Portugal e Espanha são dois opostos e não dois rivais. Os opostos são complementos iguais de um todo. Este todo está representado geograficamente pela península ibérica e em espírito pela civilização ibérica. […] A segunda parte da missão da civilização ibérica começa em nossos dias: criar a cultura do entendimento português e a do entendimento espanhol, não só para os actuais peninsulares como também para todos os originários da nossa civilização comum e dual. […]
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Cada português terá que ser mais português do que nunca em face do espanhol mais espanhol do que nunca e sobretudo, portugueses e espanhóis teremos que ser mais portugueses e espanhóis do que nunca, em face do alemão mais alemão do que nunca, do inglês mais inglês do que nunca, do francês mais francês do que nunca, do italiano mais italiano do que nunca, do russo mais russo do que nunca, enfim, de todo e qualquer povo mais nacional hoje do que ontem, mais ele mesmo hoje do que nunca. [Iberian civilisation, yes. Always. Iberian union, no. Never. Aljubarrota plus Toro equals zero. Iberian peninsula equals Spain plus Portugal. The Iberian peninsula already led the world with strong Spain and heroic Portugal. The Iberian peninsula made Latin America. The Iberian peninsula spread Spanish blood and Portuguese principles all across the land. Portugal and Spain became eternal in the world. For the first time in history, two independent peoples created a single civilisation: Portugal and Spain created Iberian Civilisation. […] The duality between Portugal and Spain is the secret of the Iberian peninsula’s vitality and civilisation. Portugal and Spain are two opposites and not two rivals. Opposites are equal complements of a whole. This whole is represented by the Iberian peninsula in geographical terms and by the Iberian civilisation in spirit. […] The second part of the Iberian civilisation mission begins today: creating a culture of Portuguese appreciation and of Spanish appreciation, not only for those who currently live on the peninsula but also for everyone who originates from our common, dual civilisation. […] The Portuguese will have to be more Portuguese than ever in the face of Spaniards who are more Spanish than ever, and, above all, we Portuguese and Spanish will have to be more Portuguese and Spanish than ever in the face of the German who is more German than ever, the English who are more English than ever, the French who are more French than ever, the Italian who is more Italian than ever, the Russian who is more Russian than ever, in short, any population that is more national today than yesterday, more itself today than ever before.] (Almada Negreiros 1935: 5)
There can be no doubt that Almada’s stay in Madrid was a central part of his training and left a lasting mark on his perception of Spain and its relationships within the peninsular context. Rather than a formula for political unity between the two peninsular states, Almada’s Iberism called for active coexistence and cultural collaboration at a time when the
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borders between European nations and identities were being defined, and advocated respect for the idiosyncrasies and unique identities of Portugal and Spain alike. While the presence of this Iberian component played a key role in shaping Almada’s career, prompting him to take a richer, more dynamic, approach to his relationship with Portugal following his stay in Madrid, his impact on the Spanish culture of the era is equally significant and he became an ambassador of modern Portuguese art and literature. In this regard, Almada was accepted unconditionally and his influence on the Spanish literary and art scene remained all-pervasive for many years: in 1938, Eugeni d’Ors invited him to participate in the Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale, confirming his status as an Iberian artist (although Almada did not support the centralist slant of the initiative and rejected the invitation). In short, no other Portuguese writer linked to the first modernism enjoyed such a close relationship with Spanish culture as Almada Negreiros, who was also an extremely active participant in the dialogue between different artistic languages. Only by acknowledging the diverse, multi-faceted nature of José de Almada Negreiros’s career can we accord him his rightful place among the authors who prioritised Iberian dialogue in their work as creators.
4.4 (Post)symbolism in Basque Literature: Esteban Urkiaga ‘Lauaxeta’ and José María Agirre ‘Lizardi’ Readers may be surprised by the limited number of references to the Basque language and literature made in this overview of Iberian literary and cultural relations, and the scarcity of connections between Basque literatures and other Iberian cultures (in contrast with the multiplicity of links and connections shown in other chapters).9 Of course, as anyone who is familiar with his poetry, fiction or essays will be aware, Miguel de Unamuno, one of the main cultural agents in the Iberian literary and cultural space, was from Bilbao in the Basque Country. However, his complex, contradictory and controversial relationship (like almost all his 9 In this sense, this brief section could be considered but an invitation or a stimulus for future research, given that, be it for linguistic, cultural or historical reasons, Basque literature has been the one that has attracted the least attention within the field of Iberian Studies (see Gimeno Ugalde and Pérez Isasi 2019).
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relationships) with the Basque language and with movements to revive Basque literature and culture10 deterred him from promoting and mediating between the Basque space and the rest of the Iberian Peninsula. There are two main reasons for this isolation of Basque culture in the Iberian context, one of which is strictly literary while the other is more political. Indeed, as noted previously, the Basque region was practically absent from Iberist discourses. The concept of ‘tripartite Iberism’ split the Iberian Peninsula into three broad linguistic and cultural areas (Atlantic, central, Mediterranean), which did not include the Basque culture and language. Due perhaps to its ethnicist nature, Basque nationalism “en líneas generales estuvo más inclinado a prescindir de unas relaciones estrechas con los demás pueblos de la Península” [“was, generally speaking, more inclined to eschew close ties with the other peoples of the Peninsula”] than Galician and Catalan nationalism (Rocamora 2000: 117).11 With regard to the purely literary reasons for the invisibility of Basque literature on the Iberian cultural scene, it is important to remember that the historiography of Basque literature is based on a methodology and periodisation that until very recently did not coincide with those used in the study of other Iberian and European literatures for a variety of historical, social, political, sociolinguistic and other reasons. Histories of Basque literature have emphasised its exceptional nature, describing it as scarce, belated, peculiar and even low quality.12 The introduction to Koldo Mitxelena’s Historia de la literatura vasca (the first ‘history of Basque
10 In 1888, the young Unamuno applied for a Basque language professorship at the Instituto Vizcaíno, but his application was rejected in favour of Resurrección María de Azkue. However, over the years and from 1900 in particular, his stance towards the Basque language and literature hardened. This is reflected in his famous speech at the 1901 Floral Games, where he expressed his conviction (a combination of forecast and wish) that Basque was worthy of study but unable to adapt to modern times, and was therefore destined to disappear (Aulestia 1989; Longhurst 2008–2009: 343–5). This opinion on the Basque language is consistent with Unamuno’s dream of a monolingual Iberia, as we have seen in the interview with António Ferro that aroused controversy with Pessoa. 11 The fact that Oliveira Martins’s História da Civilização Ibérica begins with a reference to the Basque race as the seed of the Iberian race (reflecting Basque-Iberist tenets) is merely anecdotal, as is the fact that Alexandre Herculano set his drama A Dama Pé de Cabra in the Basque Country (Juaristi Linacero 1998: 107). 12 According to Cabo Aseguinolaza, “Basque’s own historiography has in large part incorporated this feeling of differentiation as well as a clear desire for standardisation into its own discourse” (2010: 47).
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literature’ as such, which was not published until 1960) is paradigmatic in this regard: La literatura popular vasca, esencialmente oral, es probablemente tan rica y tan variada como la de cualquier otro pueblo. La literatura culta es por el contrario tardía, escasa y en conjunto de no muy alta calidad. Se salva, con todo, en ella un puñado de obras que no desmerecen junto a producciones análogas en las literaturas vecinas. [Basque popular literature, which is primarily oral, is probably as rich and varied as any other literature. However, the erudite literature is belated, scarce and, overall, not particularly high quality. Nevertheless, a handful of works that can hold their own against similar productions in neighbouring literatures may be salvaged.] (Mitxelena 1960: 13)
Drawing on these ideas, works such as Historia de la literatura vasca by Urquizu (2000) and the volume by Aldekoa (2004) dedicate chapters of varying lengths to oral literature and include genres that tend to be absent from modern literary historiography such as religious texts,13 manuals and Basque dictionaries or translations, often of a religious nature, in the classical period. As a result, terms such as ‘Renaissance’, ‘Baroque’ and ‘Neoclassicism’ are practically absent (as structuring concepts, at least) from histories of Basque literature, with the exception of Euskal literaturaren historia txikia (Kortazar 1997), which is organised around this periodisation despite being adapted to reflect the Basque literary context. This mismatch between Basque literature and other peninsular literatures should be approached with some caution, as it is largely the product of stereotyping rather than detailed analysis; Jon Kortazar observed that there are periods in Basque literary history when the distance from European cultural movements varies and that this may owe to a weakness in the system itself rather than to a chronological discrepancy: the Renaissance is therefore “quizás … el momento en que la diferencia sea menor” [“perhaps … the period in which the difference is smallest”] (2004: 337).14 In any case, it is undeniable that during the first few decades of the twentieth century, Basque literature, especially poetry, was synchronised with the main modernist 13 In a frequently cited, yet rather outdated, survey, Sarasola (1982: 183) counted a total of 12 non-religious works written in Basque before 1879, among which only four may be considered as literary works in the strict sense. 14 The discovery of the Lazarraga manuscript in 2004, which contains a selection of poetry and a pastoral novel written in c. 1564–1567, helps to confirm this suggestion.
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literary movements emerging in other cultural areas both in the Iberian Peninsula and in Europe and Latin America. Two of the most prominent drivers of this renewal and modernisation of Basque poetry were Jose Maria Agirre ‘Xabier Lizardi’ and Esteban Urkiaga ‘Lauaxeta’, who adopted contemporary techniques, movements and influences and adapted them to suit the Basque poetic tradition, thus opening it to European (and, in this context, also, Iberian) influences and connections. According to Jon Kortazar: Lizardik eta Lauaxetak, […] euskal postsinbolismoaren gunerik garbiena agertu dute. Metaforaren erabileran, musikari eskainitako garrantzian, heriotzari izandako beldurrean haien lanean utzitako arrastoengatik sinbolismoa ezagutu zutela, bakoitza bere joerarekin, garbi esan dezakegu. [Lizardi and Lauaxeta […] occupy the most prominent position in Basque post-symbolism. The traces that it has left on their work, in aspects such as the use of metaphor, the importance of musicality or the fear of death, allow us to state categorically that both writers were familiar with symbolism in their own way.] (Kortazar 2000: 198)
Indeed, the two writers differ significantly in the way in which they assimilated and transformed their sources in their poetry. Jose Maria Agirre, ‘Xabier Lizardi’, is almost unanimously viewed as the apex of pre- war Basque poetry. Koldo Mitxelena’s seminal Historia de la literatura vasca made it clear that “sus mejores poesías [son] la más alta cima de la lírica vasca” [“his best poetry [is] the pinnacle of Basque lyric”] and that “su poesía [es] personal hasta el punto de que resulte difícil señalar influencias en su obra” [“his poetry [is] personal to the extent that it is difficult to identify influences on his work”] (Mitxelena 1960: 140). Despite the father of Basque literary historiography’s opinion, and, as Kortazar notes, “Orain arte ia alferrikakoa izan da esal- dirik esaldi ibiltzea lizardiren lanean, bere testu bat eta kanpoko beste bat konparatuz” [“it has until now been almost futile to go sentence by sentence through Lizardi’s texts, comparing a text of his with another by another author”] (Kortazar 2000: 211–2), a number of authors have since been able to establish links between Lizardi’s work and some of the main literary trends and movements of the first third of the twentieth century, especially modernism and the Generation of 1898, and Antonio Machado and his Campos de Castilla in particular, although these are perhaps less obvious than direct intertextuality.
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For example, after describing Lizardi as an “emblema de la lírica vasca” [“emblem of Basque lyric”] and stating that “elevó la lírica vasca hasta su cumbre” [“he took Basque lyric to its peak”], Mikel Zarate analyses the poem “Bultzi-leihotik” [“Through the Train Window”] and compares it to other poems about trains by Verlaine, Machado and Juan Ramón (whose poem “Guipuzcoa” it resembles in some respects), stating that: Frantziako sinbolisten eraginez, nikaraguako rubén Darío-ren modernismo giroan eta Espainiako «27.eko belaunaldiarekin» batean, Aitzol, Lauaxeta, Lizardi, Orixe, Loramendi ta gainerako olerkarien gogoak bizkortu ta erdiminetan jarri ziren. lizardirena, batez ere. [As a result of the influence of French symbolism, in the context of Rubén Darío’s modernism and the Spanish Generation of 1927, the spirits of Aitzol, Lauaxeta, Lizardi, Orixe, Loramendi and the other poets were strengthened and bore fruit. Lizardi’s, especially.] (Zarate 1978)
Lizardi’s relationship with Rubén Darío and modernism, as described by Zarate, should be understood not as one of dependency or imitation but rather as an aesthetic affinity demonstrating the assimilation by both parties of a varied set of sources, both classic and modern, European and American. A particularly interesting example is Lizardi’s barroquism or Gongorism, identified by Otaegi Imaz (1993: 150) and discussed by Kortazar (2000: 213), although it is important to note that this barroquism also had roots in Basque literature itself, recovered and championed by Orixe: Espainiako barroko garaiko kontzeptisten estetika hartu zuen lizardik bere kanona osatzeko irizpidetzat, Gongorak korronte horren barruan errepresentatzen duen estetizismoaren bidetik. […] Lizardik atsegin duen estetika kontzeptista logikoa da hogeitazazpiko olerkariek hartu zuten bide beretik hartu zuela pentsatzea, eta ez zuzenean, bere gisa, idazle barrokoaren dizdirak erakarrita. [Lizardi adopted the conceptist aesthetic of the Spanish baroque era as a benchmark to complete his canon, through the aestheticism that Góngora represented within that trend. […] It is logical to conclude that Lizardi adopted the conceptist aesthetic that he liked by following a similar path to the poets of 1927, and not because he was directly attracted to the baroque poet’s brilliance on his own account.] (Otaegi Imaz 1993: 150)
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It is clear, therefore, that Mitxelena’s affirmation of the unique nature of Lizardi’s poetry and the impossibility of establishing relationships or identifying influences within it must be qualified by situating the Basque poet’s work in the context of Iberian, European and American modernity. This, of course, in no way undermines the originality of his aesthetic or his work. Esteban Urkiaga, ‘Lauaxeta’, is another of the most relevant figures in the Basque literary revival movement in the first half of the twentieth century. The winner of the First Basque Poetry Day, held in Rentería in 1930, with his poem “Maitale Kutuna” [“The Favoured Sweetheart”], produced a small body of poetry, which, like Lizardi’s career, was interrupted by his untimely death in the Civil War.15 His work is compiled in Bide barrijak [New Directions], published in 1931, and Arrats beran [At Dusk], published in 1935. Urkiaga was an avid reader of symbolist and Parnassian poets such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Rimbaud (some of whose work he also translated), as well as modernist poets including Manuel Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez (Kortazar 1994), and his reading also reflected important contacts with other Iberian literatures. As Kortazar has demonstrated, “la impronta de la Generación del 98, de la del 27 y, posiblemente, de la Revista de Occidente es bien palpable” [“the mark of the Generation of 1898, the Generation of 1927 and, possibly, the Revista de Occidente is very apparent”] (1994: 287). He also read in Catalan, a language with which the Basque writers felt great affinity. This prompted him to translate texts by Maragall (in 1928) and Verdaguer (in 1930) for Euzkadi magazine; his admiration for Maragall is also evident in many of his texts, some of which refer to works such as “Pirinenques” and “Visions” that had not yet been translated at that time. Another example of Lauaxeta’s appreciation of Catalan literature can be found in his 1935 journey to Barcelona to attend the Floral Games. However, there are no apparent references to the poet reading or translating Galician or Portuguese literature (Kortazar 1994: 289). In any case, the most obvious and most widely studied influence on Lauaxeta’s work is that of Federico García Lorca, who he does not appear to have met in person despite the poet from Granada travelling to Bilbao 15 Esteban Urkiaga was captured by Nationalist troops while accompanying French journalist George Berniard on a visit to Guernica, which had been bombed by the Condor Legion. He was executed by firing squad on 26 June 1937.
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in 1936 for the premiere of Bodas de Sangre in the city. Besides this possible missed encounter, the most relevant example of the influence of Lorca’s work (especially Romancero Gitano, although not exclusively) is on Lauaxeta’s Arrats beran; it is no coincidence that Lauaxeta became “un temprano traductor de García Lorca al vasco” [“an early translator of García Lorca into Basque”] (Juaristi Linacero and Kortazar 1995). The two works contain similarities with regard to rhythm, rhyme, topics, metaphors and symbols. Lorca’s work thus emerges as a key factor in Lauaxeta’s gradual realignment with popular forms, alongside the debates that were taking place within the Basque literary system itself, especially between Aitzol and Lauaxeta. This adaptation of Lorca’s model to Basque poetry is exemplified by the 1931 poem “Langille eraildu bati” [“To a Murdered Labourer”], in which the gypsies’ suffering is substituted by that of the miners on the left bank of the Nervión river: Opor-otsa dok txaide zabalan, —ukabil sendo, soñanzki urdin—. Jaubiak, barriz, nasai etzunda, laguntzat auke, i, urrutizkin. Aurpegi balzdun miatzarijoi ari bittartez deyak yabiltzak. Bideskan zelan dirdir-yagijek txapel-okerren kapela baltzak! Orreik yaukoen gaizkin-itxura sispa luziak lepo-ganian! […] Mendiz bera lau txapel-okerrez aurpegi balzdun miatzarija. Begi baltz orreik sastakai dozak baña zatittu ezin esija. [Murmur of strikers in the wide street, – clenched fists, blue overalls –. The bosses, meanwhile, nonchalant, have help from you, oh telephone. Tanned-faced miner, calls flow through the wires. How the black cloaks of the Civil Guard shine all along the path! Like criminals, their long rifles
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at their shoulders! […] Heading downhill between four civil guards, the tanned-faced miner. His black eyes like daggers, yet unable to break free.] (Lauaxeta 1935: 79)
The Basque poetry revival was put on hold by the Civil War and Francoism and the lives of some of its most prominent advocates were tragically cut. It was not until 30 years later, with the linguistic, political and literary movements of the 1960s and the very important work by Gabriel Aresti in particular, that the history of Basque poetry would resume its course.
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———. 1990b. Medio siglo de prensa literaria española (1900–1950). Madrid: Endimión. Navarro Domínguez, Eloy. 2007. Regreso al futuro: la República portuguesa en la obra de Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Carmen de Burgos (con Larra al fondo). In Aula Ibérica, ed. Ángel Marcos de Dios, 87–111. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. ———. 2010. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Carmen de Burgos y el ‘descubrimiento’ de Portugal. In Suroeste. Relaciones literarias y artísticas entre Portugal y España (1890–1936), ed. Antonio sáez Delgado and Luís Manuel Gaspar, vol. I, 257–281. Badajoz and Lisbon: SECC-Ministry of Culture, MEIAC and Assírio & Alvim. Novaes Ledieu, David. 2017. Novais-Teixeira, el cicerone de Almada Negreiros en Madrid. In Almada Negreiros en Madrid, coord. Antonio Sáez Delgado and Filipa Soares, 133–151. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Novais Teixeira, Joaquim. 1929. Artistas portugueses no estrangeiro / José de Almada Negreiros triunfa em Espanha / Suas colaborações, projectos e ideias / Uma publicação que honra Portugal / Os seus panneaux no Cine San Carlos, de Madrid, consagram-no definitivamente. Ilustração, December 16. Núñez Rey, Concepción. 2005. Carmen de Burgos ‘Colombine’ en la Edad de Plata de la literatura española. Seville: Fundación José Manuel Lara. ———. 2014. Un puente entre España y Portugal: Carmen de Burgos y su amistad con Ana de Castro Osório. Arbor 190 (766): 115. Otaegi Imaz, Lourdes. 1993. Lizardiren poetika pizkundearen ingurumariaren argitan. PhD thesis. Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto. Pazos Justo, Carlos. 2010. Trajectória de Alfredo Guisado e a sua relação com a Galiza (1910–1921). Santiago de Compostela: Edicións Laiovento. ———. 2011. O primeiro Modernismo português e a/na Galiza (1915): um camino (im)possível. In Diálogos ibéricos sobre a Modernidade, coord. Xaquín Núñez Sabarís, 41–61. Vila Nova de Famalicão: Húmus. ———. 2015. Relações culturais intersistémicas no espaço ibérico. O caso da trajetória de Alfredo Guisado (1910–1930). Vila Nova de Famalicão: Húmus. Pérez López, Pablo Javier. 2011. Fernando Pessoa e Iván de Nogales: claves simbólicas, literarias e ibéricas de un encuentro. Suroeste. Revista de literaturas ibéricas 1: 135–152. Pessoa, Fernando. 1994. In Páginas de estética e de teoria e critica literárias, ed. Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho. Lisbon: Ática. ———. 2009. Sensacionismo e outros ismos. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. ———. 2012. Ibéria. Introdução a um imperialismo futuro. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Pablo Javier Pérez López. Lisbon: Ática. Pires Rodrigues, Maria Antónia. 2000. Portugal a través de ‘El Ventanal’. In Congreso Internacional de historia y cultura en la frontera, ed. Juan M. Carrasco
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González, María Jesús Fernández García, and Maria Luísa Leal, vol. I, 473–483. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura. Pizarro, Jerónimo. 2010. Otros vestigios. In Suroeste. Relaciones literarias y artísticas entre Portugal y España (1890–1936), ed. Antonio Sáez Delgado and Luís Manuel Gaspar, 240–246. Badajoz and Lisbon: Ministry of Culture, MEIAC and Assírio and Alvim. ———. 2017. Sudoeste e Iberia; Arte y Política. In Almada Negreiros en Madrid, coord. Antonio Sáez Delgado and Filipa Soares, 153–163. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Quiroga, Carlos. 2018. Raízes de Pessoa na Galiza. Santiago de Compostela: Através. Reis, Carlos, and António Apolinário Lourenço. 2015. História crítica da literatura portuguesa. Vol. VIII: O Modernismo. Lisbon: Verbo. Ribera i Rovira, Ignasi. 1913. Atlantiques. Antologia de poetes portuguesos. Barcelona: Biblioteca Popular de L’Avenç. Richmond, Carolyn. 1982. Una sinfonía portuguesa—Estudio crítico a La Quinta de Palmyra. In La Quinta de Palmyra, by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, 11–151. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Rivas, Pierre. 1995. A revista Contemporânea e Ramón Gómez de la Serna: dois aspectos da modernidade. In Encontro entre literaturas. França-Portugal- Brasil, 113–121. São Paulo: Hucitec. Rocamora, José Antonio. 2000. El iberismo en el contexto de la expansión del nacionalismo en la Península Ibérica. In Relações Portugal-Espanha: Cooperação e Identidade, ed. Fernando de Sousa, 113–121. Porto: CEPE-SE/FRAH. Rocha, Clara. 1985. Revistas literárias do século XX em Portugal. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. Rosa, Vasco. 2016. Joaquim Novais Teixeira, um europeu do século xx. Suroeste. revista de literaturas ibéricas 6: 183–189. Ruiz Casanova, José Francisco. 2011. Las atípicas recepción e influencia de Fernando Pessoa en España. In Dos cuestiones de literatura comparada: traducción y poesía. Exilio y traducción, 178–194. Madrid: Cátedra. Sáez Delgado, Antonio. 1999. Inscriptions. Rogelio Buendía, primer traductor español de Fernando Pessoa. Ínsula 635: 2–3. ———. 2000. Órficos y Ultraístas. Portugal y España en el diálogo de las primeras vanguardias literarias (1915–1925). Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura. ———. 2002. Adriano del Valle y Fernando Pessoa (apuntes de una amistad). Gijón: Llibros del Pexe. ———. 2007. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, António Ferro y la greguería. Península. Revista de Estudos Ibéricos 4: 195–202. ———. 2014. A recepção de Almada Negreiros em Espanha. Revista de História da Arte Series W 02: 52–61. ———. 2015. Pessoa y España. Valencia: Pre-Textos.
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———. 2017. Sobre la encrucijada ideológico-estética del modernismo y la vanguardia en la Península Ibérica: el caso de la revista Contemporânea. In Procesos de nacionalización e identidades en la Península Ibérica, ed. César Rina, 363–372. Cáceres: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura. Sáez Delgado, Antonio, and Filipa Soares, coord. 2017. Almada Negreiros en Madrid. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Santos, Mariana Pinto dos. 2017. Lanterna Mágica em Madrid. In Almada Negreiros en Madrid, coord. Antonio Sáez Delgado and Filipa Soares, 179–192. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Saraiva, Arnaldo. 1996. Fernando Pessoa, poeta-tradutor de poetas. Porto: Lello Editores. Sarasola, Ibon. 1982. Historia social de la literatura vasca. Madrid: Akal. Sousa, Ernesto de. 1983. Re Começar. Almada em Madrid. Porto: IMNC. Urquizu, Patricio. 2000. Historia de la literatura vasca. Madrid: UNED Ediciones. Utrera, Federico. 1998. Memorias de Colombine, la primera periodista. Madrid: Hijos de Muley-Rubio. Valle, Adriano del. 1923. En torno a La rueda de color. Opinión de un poeta portugués sobre un libro de Rogelio Buendía. La Unión, September 18. Vázquez Cuesta, Pilar. 1988. Pessoa y la generación del 27. República de las letras 21: 105–116. Vieira, Yara Frateschi. 1998. Almada em Espanha. In Almada Negreiros. A descoberta como necessidade, coord. Celina Silva, 417–428. Porto: Fundação Eng. António de Almeida. Wiesse-Rebagliati, Jorge. 2016. On Pessoa’s The Student of Salamanca. Pessoa Plural 10: 193–218. Zarate, Mikel. 1978. Euskal literature II—Azterbideak, azterketak, Aztergaiak. Durango: Leopoldo Zugaza. https://armiarma.eus/zarate/azt2.htm. Accessed 4 August 2018.
CHAPTER 5
The Second Portuguese Modernism and the Generation of 1927: Some Open-Ended Reflections
This final chapter focuses on the relationships between the authors of the Generation of 1927 and those of the second Portuguese modernism, bringing us to the end of the historical period covered by this volume (1870–1930), which has taken us from the era of Iberisms through to the introduction of modernist literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, exploring a multitude of intersecting relationships. These movements occurred at the very end of the period covered in this study, beginning in 1927 but continuing to develop beyond 1930. Nevertheless, we considered it relevant to include them in this section of ‘open-ended reflections’ as a starting point for future research. In Portugal and Spain alike, 1927 marked the appearance of what may be referred to as the ‘second avant-garde’, with the emergence of the group that made up the second Portuguese modernism—linked to the launch of Presença magazine in Coimbra in March—and of the Spanish Generation of 1927, which was formed at the tribute to Góngora held in December that same year at the Ateneo de Sevilla. The authors of the second modernism and the Generation of 1927 played an important role as successors of modernity and the avant-garde as they worked to modernise their national literary traditions and continue the legacy of their immediate precursors. The writers in both groups embody what is probably the point of greatest aesthetic synchronisation between Portuguese and Spanish literatures © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sáez Delgado, S. Pérez Isasi, Iberian Interfaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91752-4_5
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in the time frame covered by this book. On the one hand, they formed part of the chain of modernity, accepting their avant-garde role without eschewing the literary traditions of their own countries; on the other, alongside poetry and fiction, both groups prioritised literary criticism as a strategy for constructing their own generational discourse by defending certain immediate precursors (such as Pessoa, in the case of the presencists) and establishing a poetry canon for the era by publishing anthologies such as Poesía Española Contemporánea by Gerardo Diego. Literary magazines were also central to this process in both contexts; the two groups were linked to different publications, which shared a number of principles and ideals: Presença, in the case of the Portuguese authors, and La Gaceta Literaria, in the case of the Spanish authors. Both titles aimed to encourage knowledge and dialogue between the two literatures. There is a clear continuity, then, between these two groups and their immediate precursors, the first Portuguese modernism and the first Spanish avant-garde, despite the undeniable differences between them: after the revolutionary activities of the first -isms, the trend shifted towards a less radical aesthetic and a certain “restoration of order”.1 In both countries, this “restoration of order” aimed to pursue avant-gardism, not from an ex nihilo perspective but by revisiting and updating the inherent characteristics of each literary tradition to adapt them to the modern day and bring them into dialogue with the international context. However, despite the exceptional conditions for establishing closer relations and mutual collaborations enjoyed by the presencists and the members of the Generation of 1927, the project fell by the wayside quite early on. The reason for this lies in the increasing politicisation of Spanish literature in the 1930s and the growing attention paid to the country’s international interests, which caused the dialogue between the two groups of writers to break down and resulted in the loss of an excellent opportunity for greater alignment. The most significant critical works on the influence of the presencists and the Generation of 1927 poets on peninsular dialogue (Cuadrado 1988a, b; Molina 1990; Lourenço 2005: 123–138; 2010) emphasise the importance of the two magazines, which became the visible face of the new authors on both sides of the border and provided them with a vehicle by which to express themselves. La Gaceta Literaria was launched in 1 In relation to this concept, see the article by José Régio that was published in the second issue of Presença magazine: “Classicismo e Modernismo” (Régio 1927a).
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Madrid in January 1927 and edited by Ernesto Giménez Caballero. It continued to be published until 1932, coinciding with Almada Negreiros’s stay in the capital (as we have seen, Almada collaborated with the magazine and drew a portrait of the editor in Julepe de Menta in 1929). From the very first issue, the magazine described itself as “Iberian, American and international” and it was intended to act as a catalyst for relations between different areas of Hispanism; as we will see, the definition of this term shifted over time from a broad, open approach to a manipulative vision with imperialist connotations, revealing the editor’s ideological and intellectual evolution. Unlike Presença, La Gaceta Literaria was not an official vehicle for the Generation of 1927, nor was it a literary magazine as such; it was intended as a kind of “literary newspaper”—according to Ortega y Gasset (1927) in the ‘Salutation’ opening the first issue—that was open to different generations and aesthetics. However, this did not prevent the Generation of 1927 from taking pride of place in the magazine’s pages and it is viewed today as one of the main channels for the poetry group’s affirmation. Among the authors who formed part of the Madrid-based magazine as collaborators or subjects of articles and reviews were Eugénio de Castro, Almada Negreiros, João de Castro Osório, Oliveira Martins, Aquilino Ribeiro, Raúl Brandão, Antero de Quental, Guerra Junqueiro, António Sérgio and Fidelino de Figueiredo (Cuadrado 1988b). The editors were so keen to open up La Gaceta Literaria to Portugal that they began to publish a Gaceta Portuguesa in 1929, with Presença as a direct reference. Paradoxically, the Portuguese magazine would go on to play a role in the rift between Giménez Caballero and his Portuguese colleagues. The desire for dialogue with Portugal is clear in the very first issue of the magazine, which contains a text by João de Castro Osório with the highly significant title: “A esperança lusíada e a fraternidade ibérica” [“Portuguese hope and Iberian fraternity”]. The second issue of the Gaceta features the omnipresent Eugénio de Castro, while the third offers readers an important manifestation of the Iberian dialogue driven by the authors of the first avant-garde, with a poem by Almada and Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s famous text “El alma de Almada” [“Almada’s soul”], which paved the way for the exhibition of the Portuguese artist’s work that was held by the magazine. The magazine’s pages were filled with Portuguese authors and Issue 45 was dedicated entirely to the ‘Exhibition of Portuguese Books’ that the Gaceta organised at the Spanish National Library. Not long after, the
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magazine celebrated the beginning of its third year in Issue 49 (1 January 1929) by introducing three new supplements, influenced by editor in chief César M. Arconada: the Gaceta Americana (edited by Guillermo de Torre and Benjamín Jarnés), the Gaceta Catalana (by Tomás Garcés and Juan Chabás) and the aforementioned Gaceta Portuguesa (by António Ferro and Ferreira de Castro). These supplements were dedicated to the “peninsular cultures” that coexisted alongside the “central, Castilian” culture, revealing a Spanish supremacy over the other Iberian cultures that began to cloud relations with Presença, which had been friendly towards the magazine until then. The Gaceta Portuguesa was published as a supplement on a regular basis until Issue 53 (March 1929) by editors Ferro and Ferreira de Castro; however, their names ceased to appear as editors two issues later, pre- empting the dispersal of the Portuguese content throughout the pages of La Gaceta Literaria, which continued until the final issue, no. 101–102, published in March 1931. During this time, the publication was fed largely by texts that had already been published in Presença, encouraging collaboration from key names from the second Portuguese modernism, such as José Régio, João Gaspar Simões, Miguel Torga and Branquinho da Fonseca. Meanwhile, Presença (1927–1940) also paid attention to Spanish literature, although its original objective differed greatly from that of La Gaceta Literaria as it was explicitly intended to serve as a vehicle for the group’s affirmation. This is made clear in the programmatic article “Literatura viva” (1927b) by José Régio that opens the magazine. In the first issue, which broadly sets out the magazine’s editorial line, there is an interesting article—continued in the following two issues—by João Gaspar Simões entitled “Contemporâneos espanhóis: Pío Baroja” [“Spanish contemporaries: Pío Baroja”], which describes the author of El árbol de la ciencia as a key influence on the magazine’s aesthetic intentions. In this regard, Lourenço (2010: 348) observes that Gaspar Simões’s interpretation of Baroja may have been influenced by the frequent ambiguity of the meaning of the term ‘modernism’ in Portugal and Spain, as the Spanish novelist belonged to an earlier literary generation. In any case, he may be viewed as an immediate reference for the presencists, just as he was for the authors involved in La Gaceta Literaria, the first three issues of which (published in the two months leading up to the launch of the Coimbra-based magazine) also featured texts about Pío Baroja, which appears to have influenced his appearance in Presença.
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A rather similar situation, albeit less obvious, occurred with José Ortega y Gasset,2 whose work was discussed in the magazine in November 1928. That year, he had published the second edition of the influential La deshumanización del arte, providing the ideal pretext for João Gaspar Simões to write about him and identify the differences between the philosopher’s approach to Spanish lyric poetry at that time (which was shaped by a clear process of intellectualisation and dehumanisation) and the aesthetic direction that the article’s author advocated for Presença. It is relevant to note that Issue 6 (July 1927) of the Portuguese magazine reported on the anniversary celebrations held to commemorate Góngora, which led to the creation of the Spanish literary group, given that La Gaceta Literaria had dedicated an issue to the great baroque poet just a month earlier; this demonstrates the attention paid by Presença to the Gaceta at that time, which was reciprocated by Giménez Caballero’s magazine. Interestingly, the text (which is anonymous and can be quickly attributed to the magazine’s editors) cites the names of Ramón Jiménez (sic), Gerardo Diego, Rafael Alberti, García Lorca and Prados as reformers of the Góngora tradition, as well as Valle-Inclán and Gabriel Miró in relation to prose. Explicit mention was also made of Giménez Caballero, who is described as an author from the same tradition due to his euphemistic style and the ‘culteranismo’ present in his essays. This anonymous note represents the first example of direct aesthetic synchrony between Presença and the Generation of 1927, mediated by Giménez Caballero and La Gaceta Literaria. However, it was not until late 1929, when relations between the two publications had cooled, that Presença dedicated its first long article to an author from the Generation of 1927: a text about Benjamín Jarnés, one of La Gaceta’s most frequent collaborators, written by Casais Monteiro in Issue 22. In the article, which likens Jarnés to the widely admired Ramón Gómez de la Serna, the author acknowledges his limited knowledge of the Spanish literary tradition and attributes it to his greater preoccupation with France. This does not prevent him from producing an interesting summary of Spanish and Portuguese literature:
2 Margarida Amoedo (2017) produced a recent study on Ortega y Gasset’s Portuguese years, focusing in particular on the course that he taught in Lisbon in 1944, La Razón Histórica.
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Benjamin Jarnés não escapa ao vício-característico da literatura espanhola: a retórica. O espanhol é eloquente, metafórico, excessivo. Mas isto é tão fundamental, que não é vício que se censure; a literatura espanhola sem retórica não seria espanhola; não é um vício, é uma característica; e como todas as características, natural. Se porventura aparece como um defeito, é ao contacto da nossa sensibilidade diferente, e da educação diferente do nosso espírito. […] Não podemos, hoje, basear os nossos juízos sobre a simples adesão instintiva: não podemos criticar por comparação com o que somos, e com o que é a literatura do nosso país. A interpenetração das culturas existe hoje, de facto; se ontem se apreciava uma obra estrangeira pelas analogias que oferecia com as obras nacionais, hoje isso seria ridículo, porque a cultura já não se faz em relação às simples inclinações do terroir. [Benjamin Jarnés has not escaped the vice inherent to Spanish literature: rhetoric. Spanish is eloquent, metaphorical, excessive. But it is so fundamental that this vice is not censored; Spanish literature without rhetoric would not be Spanish; it is not a vice, it is a characteristic; and like all characteristics, it is natural. Should it appear to be a defect, it is upon contact with our different sensibilities and the different education our spirits have received. […] We cannot, these days, base our judgements on mere instinctive affinity: we cannot criticise by comparing with what we are, and with what our country’s literature is. Indeed, today, cultures are intertwined; whereas a foreign book was once appreciated for its similarities to our national works, that would be ridiculous today, because culture is no longer based merely on the preferences of the terroir.] (Casais Monteiro [1929] 1933: 159–160)
The year 1929 marked the peak of tensions between the two magazines, and, as a result, between the authors associated with them. The main source of controversy, as we have noted, was the magazines’ differing approaches to the relations between the different Iberian cultural areas that La Gaceta Literaria aimed to bring into dialogue with one another. Whereas Giménez Caballero, on the one hand, aspired to establish a system of relations between the Iberian Peninsula and the Ibero-American space in which Castilian culture and literature, based in Madrid, would be the epicentre, the presencists rightly objected to Portuguese literature being relegated to the sidelines and subordinated to Spanish literature, placed on a par with Catalan literature. Since Giménez Caballero persisted in his zeal to transform Spain into Portugal’s cultural role model, leaving France behind, Presença was obliged to distance itself from these literary policies with an editorial published in January 1930 that leaves no doubt as to the ideological chasm separating the two magazines:
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Há entre La Gaceta Literaria e Presença um mal-entendido—patente no artigo que Giménez Caballero publica no número de 1 de Janeiro do ano presente. Agradecemos a Giménez Caballero a oportunidade que nos oferece de o desfazer. Trata-se do seguinte: Certas ambições nacionalistas de Caballero, e porventura de outros espanhóis,—parece haverem-se alargado a Portugal. E o sonho dum império cultural cuja capital fosse Madrid re- espanholizado, e ao qual Portugal pertenceria,—parece ter aquecido a imaginação de nuestros hermanos. [There has been a misunderstanding between La Gaceta Literaria and Presença—apparent in the article by Giménez Caballero that was published in Issue 1 this January. We are grateful to Giménez Caballero for the opportunity that he offers us to clear it up. It is as follows: certain nationalist ambitions held by Caballero, and perhaps by other Spaniards,—appear to have reached Portugal. It is the dream of a cultural empire whose capital is a re- Spanishified Madrid to which Portugal would belong,—appear to have fired up our brothers’ imaginations.] (Anonymous 1927)
Once relations ceased between Presença and La Gaceta Literaria, news of Spanish literature in the Portuguese magazine became less and less common and tended to be of little significance. The ideological paths of the two publications continued to diverge; the fact that Presença published obituaries for Unamuno and García Lorca is telling in this regard. In this way, a historic opportunity for Iberian dialogue and cooperation with a series of prominent figures who appeared particularly well-suited to this task was lost. Fifty years later, João Gaspar Simões (1977) blamed La Gaceta’s excessive Castilianism for this collective failure. That same year, David Mourão-Ferreira lamented the fact that the two magazines and their respective generations had lost “há cinquenta anos, mais uma oportunidade de confronto, convívio ou dialogo entre duas grandes literaturas da Península” [“yet another opportunity for comparison, interaction or dialogue between two great literatures on the Peninsula fifty years previously”] (Mourão-Ferreira 1977: 59). This opportunity was ultimately thwarted by the misunderstandings and differences that emerged between the two publications, affecting the Generation of 1927 in particular: their subsequent contact with Portuguese literature was very limited, with just a handful of translations by Jorge Guillén and Gerardo Diego of individual poems by Antero, Pessoa, Eugénio de Castro, Carlos Queiroz and Virgínia Victorino in the middle of the century. Even the reception of the work of Lorca, the legend of his
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generation, took some years longer to gain momentum in Portugal (Simões 1999). However, the writers linked to the second Portuguese modernism took a greater interest in Spanish literature. Some of the most relevant examples among Presença’s collaborators, once the Spanish Civil War was over and beyond the temporal scope of this book,3 include Miguel Torga, who published Alguns poemas ibéricos in 1952 and Poemas ibéricos in 1965, paying tribute to mythical figures in Spanish culture such as Cervantes, San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Ávila. Meanwhile, Adolfo Casais Monteiro4 republished his article on Benjamín Jarnés for Presença in the book Considerações pessoais (1933), before publishing A palavra essencial (1965) three decades later in Brazil. This volume—and the title in particular—was heavily influenced by Antonio Machado and eloquently describes the poet in the following words: Poucos poetas têm lugar tão grande no meu coração como António Machado, o entre nós tão pouco conhecido poeta espanhol. Ele é sem dúvida o primeiro grande poeta moderno da Espanha, moderno embora sem nenhuma revolução literária, e tendo entrado na literatura da mesma forma mansa, discreta, como soube morrer, no exílio– pior: num campo de refugiados, na França– quando a vitória de Franco o arrastou para fora das fronteiras, nas agonias da fuga precipitada. Ele inovou, purificando; renovou, não por novas formas, mas por uma voz nova: a primeira que, na poesia espanhola, estrangulou realmente o gasganete da retórica. [Few poets are as close to my heart as António Machado, that Spanish poet who is so little known among us. He is, without a doubt, the first great modern poet from Spain, modern without literary revolution, entering the literature in the same gentle, discreet way as he died, in exile—worse still, in a refugee camp in France—when Franco’s victory took him beyond our borders in the torment of hasty flight. He innovated, purifying; he refreshed, not with new forms but with a new voice: the first to truly throttle rhetoric in Spanish poetry.] (Casais Monteiro 1965: 72)
3 For more on the relationships established between Spanish and Portuguese literature during the Spanish post-war period (1939–1950), see Chapter III of the PhD thesis by Antonio Rivero Machina (2016). 4 An anthology of Adolfo Casais Monteiro’s work with a Spanish translation and prologue by Rafael Morales was published in 1954.
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Another interesting example is Alberto de Serpa, who published the book Vê se vês terras de Espanha in 1952, followed by Mais uns versos de Castela in 1957. The dedications in the former mention an extensive list of Spanish contacts, with particular prominence given to Unamuno. De Serpa’s poems, which are yet to be studied in greater depth, include the names of writers such as Camilo José Cela, José Luis Cano, Leopoldo de Luis and several poets from the Generation of 1927, including Gerardo Diego, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Rosales and Federico García Lorca himself. Finally, the book Histórias castellanas (1955) by Domingos Monteiro, who did not collaborate in Presença but belonged to the same generation of writers, is dedicated to Unamuno and Machado. Monteiro also translated Valle-Inclán’s Sonatas in 1948, demonstrating an undeniable passion for Spanish culture. To summarise, the second Portuguese modernism and the Spanish Generation of 1927 had a historic opportunity for dialogue that was frustrated by the circumstances arising from the new political discourses taking hold across the Iberian Peninsula. After the Civil War, and despite the members of the Generation of 1927 continuing their work from different locations in the diaspora, Spanish and Portuguese literature took a very different direction. The image of the thwarted dialogue between writers on either side of the border against the ideological backdrop analysed here constitutes a possible metaphor for the persistent stereotype of Spain and Portugal as countries with their backs to one another. It is clear that the reality is far more nuanced if we explore the different cultural spaces of the Iberian Peninsula in their entirety, as we have sought to do in this volume. It is only by exploring and according equal importance to relationships of different characteristics and intensities that visibly interact in every corner of the Iberian polysystem that it is possible to outline and reconstruct an image of the peninsula as an interface with a key role in the adventure of literary modernity, shaped by the fertile sociocultural tensions that underpin the history of Iberia.
References Amoedo, Margarida I. 2017. Ortega y Gasset em Lisboa. Coimbra: Coimbra University Press. Anonymous. 1927. Comentário. Presença 24: 14–15.
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Index1
A A Águia (magazine), 43, 46, 72, 78, 79, 86, 87, 125, 128 Abbadie, Antoine d’, 42 Abril, Manuel, 148 Acción Española, 67, 71 ‘Aitzol’, José de Ariztimuño Olaso, 156, 158 Alberti, Rafael, 171 Aleixandre, Vicente, 175 Almada Negreiros, José de, 13, 26, 32, 119–121, 133, 134, 139, 141, 144–152, 145–146n8, 169 Almeida Garrett, José Baptista, 81, 89 Alomar, Gabriel, 120 Alonso, Dámaso, 98n16 Anyorament, 88, 90, 102 Araújo, Joaquim de, 34 Arconada, César M., 170 Area Studies, 2, 3 Aresti, Gabriel, 159
Aribau Farriols, Buenaventura Carlos, 43 Athena (magazine), 120, 133, 134 Atlantism, 104n20, 105–107, 110 Avant-garde, 7–14, 59, 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 119–159, 167–169 Azkue, Resurrección María de, 153n10 ‘Azorín’, José Martínez Ruiz, 65, 126 B Bacarisse, Mauricio, 67, 70, 71 Bacarisse, Salvador, 148 Balzac, Honoré de, 35, 40 Barcia Caballero, Juan, 125 Baroja, Pío, 65, 124, 125, 147, 170 Baudelaire, Charles, 60, 157 Beirão, Mário, 138 Benavente, Jacinto, 125 Berisso, Luis, 60n3, 62
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.
1
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sáez Delgado, S. Pérez Isasi, Iberian Interfaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91752-4
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INDEX
Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente, 35, 124 Borrás, Tomás, 146 Bosch i Gimpera, Pere, 102 Botelho, Abel, 64 Botto, António, 132 Braga, Teófilo, 21, 26, 30–31, 35, 49, 107, 137 Brandão, Raúl, 169 Branquinho da Fonseca, António José, 170 Brochado, Alfredo, 89 Buendía, Rogelio, 67–69, 122–124, 132, 145 C Cabanillas, Ramón, 108 Cambó, Francisco, 97 Camões, Luís Vaz de, 13, 49, 67, 89, 103, 125, 149 Campoamor, Ramón de, 34, 124 Campos, Álvaro de (Fernando Pessoa), 120 Cano, Jesús, 125 Cano, José Luis, 175 Cansinos Assens, Rafael, 131 Carballo, Eugenio, 74 Carneiro, António, 79 Carrera Muñoz, Alejo, 126 Casais Monteiro, Adolfo, 171, 174, 174n4 Casimiro, Augusto, 47, 138 Castelao, Alfonso, 64n5, 93, 106, 109, 110 Castelo Branco, Camilo, 82 Castro, Eugénio de, 11, 12, 57–76, 60n3, 61n4, 64n5, 80, 84–86, 88, 89, 92, 122, 123, 132, 169, 173 Castro Osório, Ana de, 137, 137n7 Castro Osório, João de, 169
Castro, Rosalía de, 11, 37, 43, 93, 94, 103, 107, 108, 124 Cebreiro, Álvaro, 93 Cela, Camilo José, 175 Cervantes, Miguel de, 77, 103, 149, 174 Cervantes (magazine), 63, 64 Chabás, Juan, 170 ‘Clarín’, Leopoldo Alas, 11, 26, 32–40, 34n12, 34n13, 35n14, 37n15, 147 Coelho, Adolfo, 27 Coimbra, Leonardo, 92, 93, 105, 128, 130n4 ‘Colombine’, Carmen de Burgos, 132n6, 135–144, 137n7 Comparative Literature, 1–7 Contemporânea (magazine), 68, 120, 132, 135, 139, 142, 145, 146 Correia da Costa, Joaquim, 138 Cortesão, Jaime, 138 Costa, Joaquín, 41 Creationism, 12 Cucurull, Fèlix, 97 Cultural mediation, 59, 63, 73, 84, 85, 121, 123, 126, 127, 132, 135 Cunha, Augusto, 138 Curros Enríquez, Manuel, 43, 60n3 D Dadaism, 119, 120 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 62 Dantas, Júlio, 64 Darío, Rubén, 9, 11, 12, 57, 58, 60–62, 60n3, 64, 65, 72, 84, 156 de Quental, Antero, 8, 10, 11, 21, 24, 26–32, 28n7, 34, 41, 67, 79, 81, 86, 92, 123, 169, 173
INDEX
D’Esaguy, Augusto, 142 Deus, João de, 60, 81 Dicenta, Joaquín, 125 Diego, Gerardo, 123, 168, 171, 173, 175 Díez-Canedo, Enrique, 62, 64, 66, 85, 85n12, 91 Dinis, Dom, 89 Don Quixote, 92–94, 103, 149 D’Ors, Eugeni, 60n3, 70, 71, 89, 93, 125, 126, 152 Duarte, Afonso, 138 E Eça de Queirós, José Maria, 10, 21, 26, 27, 32–40, 34n10, 34n12, 35n14, 37n15, 60, 64, 67, 73, 82, 105 1890 British Ultimatum, 11, 24, 44 Entangled history, 8 Espronceda, José de, 124 Estado Novo, 14 Estelrich, Joan, 97, 103 Euskal Pizkundea, 41, 43, 44 Expressionism, 119 F Falange, 71 Fascism, 71 Federalism, 25–28, 31, 32, 96, 97 Fernández Flórez, Wenceslao, 71n8 Ferreira de Castro, José Maria, 105, 170 Ferro, António, 71, 71n8, 105, 128, 131, 132n5, 135, 138, 139, 141–144, 153n10, 170 Fialho de Almeida, José Valentim, 64, 67 Figueiredo, Fidelino de, 1n1, 169
179
Filipe, Guilherme, 139 Flaubert, Gustave, 35, 37, 40 Franco, Francisco, 71n8, 104 Francoism, 14, 159 Futurism, 12, 119, 120 G Gabriel y Galán, José María, 94 Garcés, Tomás, 170 García Lorca, Federico, 92, 122, 123, 147, 157, 158, 171, 173, 175 García Maroto, Gabriel, 123 Garcia Perez, Rogerio, 139, 145 Garcilaso de la Vega, 124 Gaspar Simões, João, 170, 171, 173 Gautier, Théophile, 60 ‘Gaziel’, Agustí Calvet Pascual, 97 Generation of ‘14, 10 Generation of ‘27, 9, 10, 13–14, 59, 69, 70, 121–124, 156, 157, 167–175 Generation of ‘98, 9, 10, 12, 32, 41n17, 58, 59, 72, 87, 104, 155, 157 Generation of 1868, 11, 32 Generation of 1870, 10, 11, 21, 24, 26, 32 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto, 70, 71n8, 169, 171–173 Giner de los Ríos, Francisco, 32 Giner de los Ríos, Hermenegildo, 32, 34 Gomes Leal, António, 86, 92 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón, 13, 70, 71n8, 120, 121, 131n5, 135–147, 169, 171 Góngora, Luis de, 13, 124, 156, 167, 171 González-Blanco, Andrés, 66, 70, 89, 91, 92, 128
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INDEX
González Olmedilla, Juan, 64 González-Ruano, César, 67, 69, 70 Gourmont, Remy de, 62 Goya, Francisco de, 149 Grecia (magazine), 12, 63, 69, 120, 132, 134 Greguería, 13, 121, 135–144 Grupo Nós, 12, 38, 50, 59, 104–110 Guerra Junqueiro, Abílio Manuel, 34, 67, 73, 74, 76, 88, 92, 100, 105, 129, 169 Guillén, Jorge, 123, 173 Guimerá, Ángel, 43 Guisado, Alfredo Pedro, 125 Gullón, Pío, 22, 33 Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel, 61 Gutiérrez Solana, José, 70 H Henriques Nogueira, José Félix, 23 Herculano, Alexandre, 81, 153n11 Hispanism, 2, 2n2, 4, 5, 169 Hugo, Victor, 149 Huidobro, Vicente, 12 I Iberian Studies, 1–8, 4n5, 152n9 Iberism, 8–14, 21–51, 22n1, 24n2, 24n3, 24n5, 27n6, 32n9, 59, 93, 94, 96–106, 97n15, 129, 151, 153, 167 Interliterary theory, 2 Intersectionism, 120 Irmandades da Fala, 38, 50 J Jarnés, Benjamín, 170–172, 174 Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 9, 67, 70, 71, 156, 157, 171
Jordá, José María, 125 Joyce, James, 143 K Kierkegaard, Soren, 81 L ‘La Argentinita’, Antonia Mercé y Luque, 146 La Gaceta Literaria (magazine), 13, 146, 168–173 ‘La Goya’, Aurora Purificación Mañanós Jauffret, 146 Lamas Carvajal, Valentín, 43 Laranjeira, Manuel, 82 Larbaud, Valery, 141 La Renaixensa (magazine), 46 ‘Lauaxeta’, Esteban Urkiaga, 152–159 Leal da Câmara, Tomás, 105 Leopardi, Giacomo, 81 ‘Lizardi’, José María Agirre, 152–159 López, Samuel, 63 ‘Loramendi’, Juan Arana Ezpeleta, 156 Lourenço, Eduardo, 2 Lugones, Leopoldo, 63 Luis, Leopoldo de, 175 M Macedo, Lino de, 37n15 Machado, Antonio, 70, 70n7, 92, 155, 156, 174, 175 Machado, Manuel, 157 Maeztu, Ramiro de, 71 Maldonado, Francisco, 64 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 157 Maragall, Joan, 8, 12, 25, 26, 32, 59, 87, 94, 96–104, 97n15, 98n16, 100n18, 157
INDEX
March, Ausiàs, 88 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 120, 136 Maristany, Fernando, 64, 66, 74, 87, 89–92, 90n14 Marquina, Eduardo, 74, 74n9, 83 Martí, José, 61 Mas, Sinibald de, 22, 23 Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino, 24, 25n5, 32, 44 Menezes, Pedro, 138 Miró, Gabriel, 171 Modernism, 7, 9–14, 57–110, 57n1, 58n2, 119–159, 167–175 Moniz Barreto, Guilherme Joaquim de, 32 Montalvor, Luís de, 138 Monteiro, Domingos, 175 Montes, Eugenio, 71n8 Mourão-Ferreira, David, 173 Murguía, Manuel, 43, 47, 48 N Nationalism, 5, 11, 22n1, 23–25, 24n5, 41, 41n18, 42, 44, 82, 110, 128, 129, 146 Basque nationalism, 46, 50, 153 Catalan nationalism, 22, 24, 25, 44, 46, 47, 50, 71, 96–104, 153 Galician nationalism, 46–49, 106, 107, 109, 153 Spanish nationalism, 129 Naturalism, 9, 11, 32–40, 35n14, 37n15, 67 Nobre, António, 81 Nogales, Iván de, 124 Nós (magazine), 93, 106–108, 108n21 Noucentisme, 97 Novais Teixeira, Joaquim, 148 Núñez de Arce, Gaspar, 34
181
O Oliveira Martins, Joaquim Pedro de, 10, 11, 21, 22, 24, 26–32, 28n7, 35, 49, 82, 96, 97, 103, 107, 153n11, 169 Oller y Moragas, Narcís, 33n9, 35, 38, 39, 43 ‘Orixe’, Nicolás Ormaechea, 156 Orpheu (magazine), 12, 69, 80, 81, 119, 120, 123–128, 142, 144, 145n8, 146, 149 Ortega y Gasset, José, 41, 124, 169, 171, 171n2 Otero Pedrayo, Ramón, 106, 108–110 P Pacheko, José, 139 Palacio Valdés, Armando, 34 Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 11, 26, 32–40, 37n15, 37n16, 44–47, 60n3 Parnassianism, 157 Pascoaes, Teixeira de, 8, 12, 26, 42, 46, 47, 50, 58, 66, 72–74, 76–95, 85n11, 97, 103, 107–109, 108n22, 128, 132, 138 Paulism, 120 Pedro, Valentín de, 92 Pemán, José María, 71 Pereda, José María de, 38, 39, 124 Pérez de Ayala, Ramón, 70 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 34, 35, 38, 39, 44, 124 Pessanha, Camilo, 132 Pessoa, Fernando, 10, 12, 13, 26, 59, 67, 71n8, 72, 80, 80n10, 81, 83, 119–135, 139, 144, 150, 168, 173 Pica, Vittorio, 62 Picasso, Pablo, 149
182
INDEX
Pimentel, Luis, 91 Pinheiro Chagas, Manuel, 23 Pinto, Luís, 138 Pla, Josep, 97, 103 Poe, Edgar Allan, 133 Polysystem theory, 2, 6, 7, 50, 175 Pondal, Eduardo, 43, 49, 93 Prados, Emilio, 171 Prat de la Riba, Enric, 25, 96, 97 Presença (magazizne), 13, 167–175, 168n1 Prometeo (magazine), 63, 120, 136 Proust, Marcel, 143 Q Queiroz, Carlos, 123, 173 Quevedo, Francisco de, 124 R Realism, 9, 11, 57, 120 Regenerationism, 41 Régio, José, 168n1, 170 Regionalism, 37, 39, 41, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50 Renaixença, 41, 43–45, 47, 97 Renascença Portuguesa, 41, 43, 43n19, 46, 58, 79, 108, 125, 138 Revista de Occidente (magazine), 147, 157 Rexurdimento, 37, 41, 43, 44, 47, 47n20, 49 Ribeiro, Aquilino, 169 Ribera, Antoni, 97 Ribera i Rovira, Ignasi, 25, 47, 60n3, 64, 87–91, 97, 97n15, 99, 102, 124, 125 Rimbaud, Arthur, 157 Río Sáinz, José del (‘Pick’), 91 Risco, Vicente, 50, 93, 104–110
Romanticism, 13, 140 Rosales, Luis, 175 Rovira, Antonio, 96 Ruiz, Diego, 125, 126 S Sá-Carneiro, Mário, 72, 80, 81, 119, 126, 127, 132, 132n6, 138, 144 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 71, 71n8, 144 Salinas, Pedro, 70 ‘San Juan de la Cruz’, Juan de Yepes, 174 Sánchez Moguel, Antonio, 47 Santa Rita, Augusto de, 138 ‘Santa Teresa de Ávila’, Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda, 174 Santos Chocano, José, 61 Sardinha, António, 32, 71 Saudade, 2, 86, 88, 90–94, 102, 103, 107–110, 108n22, 131 Saudosism, 9, 12, 58, 83–95, 107, 108, 110, 125, 128 Seabra, Manuel de, 97 Search, Alexander (Fernando Pessoa), 124 Sensationism, 12, 120, 124 Sérgio, António, 169 Serpa, Alberto de, 175 Sierra, Juan, 91 Silva, José Asunción, 61 Silva Tavares, João, 138 Simões Dias, José, 35 Soromenho, Augusto, 27 Spanish Civil War, 13, 14, 122, 135, 157, 159, 174, 175 Sudoeste (magazine), 149 Symbolism, 9, 11–13, 57–110, 119–122, 132, 152–159
INDEX
T Teixeira, Judith, 132 Terán, Tomás, 146 ‘Torga, Miguel’, Adolfo Correia da Rocha, 170, 174 Torre, Guillermo de, 131, 131n5, 170 Torrezão, Guiomar, 35 Translation, 6, 34n10, 34n13, 61n4, 63, 69, 80, 85, 92, 101, 102, 105, 122, 123, 132, 134, 142, 154, 173, 174n4 Trigo, Felipe, 124, 125 U Ultra (magazine), 120 Ultraism, 7, 10, 12, 68, 69, 119, 122, 123, 131, 133, 134 Unamuno, Miguel de, 8, 12, 24, 32, 41, 58, 60n3, 64–66, 68, 70, 72–87, 80n10, 94, 99–103, 100n18, 123–129, 128n3, 135, 152, 153n10, 173, 175
183
V Valera, Juan, 8, 11, 32, 32–33n9, 33, 39, 109 Valle, Adriano del, 123, 124, 132, 133, 145, 146 Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del, 12, 26, 59, 65, 70, 104–110, 125, 171, 175 Vando-Villar, Isaac del, 124, 132, 145 Vasconcellos e Sá, Alexandre José Botelho, 89 Vázquez Díaz, Daniel, 146 Veiga Simões, Alberto da, 138 Verdaguer, Jacinto, 11, 43, 100, 157 Verlaine, Paul, 156, 157 Victorino, Virgínia, 123, 173 Villaespesa, Francisco, 60n3, 61n4, 64, 65, 67, 70 Z Zola, Émile, 33, 35, 37, 37n15, 40, 149