TransLatin Joyce

Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature

B. Price, C. Salgado, J. Schwartz, B. Price, C. Salgado, J. Schwartz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137407467
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

TransLatin Joyce explores the circulation of James Joyce's work in the Ibero-American literary system. The essays address Joycean literary engagements in Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba, using concepts from postcolonial translation studies, antimodernism, game theory, sound studies, deconstruction, and post-Euclidean physics.

Part I

The Iberian Peninsula

Chapter 1

Re-creating Ulysses across the Pyrenees: Antonio Marichalar’s Spanish-European Critical Project

Gayle Rogers

“Joyce est un peu espagnol—pas?” Antonio Marichalar (1893–1973) asked Sylvia Beach in November 1924, alluding to his efforts to disseminate Joyce’s name and work in his native Spain (Letter to Beach). That month saw the publication of the influential and inventive essay/translation/review “James Joyce en su laberinto” [“James Joyce in His Labyrinth”] in the Revista de Occidente [Review of the West] in Madrid by this young, little-known scholar. Two months later, in January 1925, Jorge Luis Borges would famously yet erroneously proclaim himself “the first Hispanic adventurer [aventurero] to have arrived at Joyce’s [Ulysses]” when he published his celebrated translation of the novel’s final page in the Argentine journal Proa [Prow] (3).¹ Yet unlike Borges’s “complicated, lifelong dialogue” with Joyce’s fiction, as Sergio Waisman rightly characterizes it (157), the lives of Joyce’s works in Spain—where they have shaped literary practices and discourses for generations—have only begun to receive scholarly attention more recently. The “Spanish Joyce” has been the subject of studies and collections including Joyce en España I and II (1994 and 1997, respectively), La recepción de James Joyce en la prensa española [The Reception of James Joyce in the Spanish Press] (1997), James Joyce in Spain: A Critical Bibliography (1972–2002) (2002), Silverpowdered Olivetrees: Reading Joyce in Spain (2003), and several chapters in The Reception of James Joyce in Europe (2004), along with an array of articles and bibliographies, many of which have cited Marichalar’s role in launching the circulation of Joyce’s works in Spain.² But engagements with Marichalar’s seminal piece “James Joyce in His Labyrinth” or with his career as a whole are lacking, leaving a gap in our understanding of exactly how—and for what purposes—Joyce was first made “un peu espagnol.”

“The primary faculty that [the critic] needs,” Marichalar writes of his own style, “is that of re-creation [recreación]; . . . he recreates the artist” (Ensayos Literarios 10; see also Ródenas, xx, xxxvii). By returning to the material contexts in which Joyce’s work was initially translated, critiqued, and disseminated among Spanish-language readers, this chapter aims to account for his “re-creations” of Joyce, of Ulysses, and of Anglo-European modernism—each in multiple iterations across the interwar period. What follows are the intertwined histories of a scholar who moved seamlessly across several cultures, a text (Ulysses) in circulation, contrasting translation practices, and the Europeanizing Spanish cultural politics of a periodical network that brought Joyce’s work to Spain. Marichalar’s critical-creative works, I show, circled out from his initial defense of the “persecuted” fellow Catholic Joyce while he himself writing under a proto-fascist military dictatorship in Spain. By way of his unique translations of fragments of “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” Marichalar also aimed to demonstrate for his compatriots what the Spanish-European aesthetics they were forging at the moment might resemble; in the process, he provided fertile grounds for contemporary critics to understand the challenges encountered in the moment by Joyce’s translators who sought to recreate the innovations of “Penelope.”

My other, necessarily related, aim is to follow Marichalar’s labor in the early 1920s through his expansive body of critical publications that encompassed his analyses of the British novel, his various translations, and his biographies some years later, in order to trace a critical project that was abruptly cut short by Franco’s victory in 1939 and the cultural autarky of his reign. Marichalar’s work was, in short, a project that laid the groundwork for what is now a thriving industry of Joyce studies in Spain. A figure who was in contact with figures ranging from Joyce himself and T. S. Eliot to Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti, from Hart Crane to André Gide and from E. R. Curtius to Victoria Ocampo, Marichalar was fabulously well connected in the interwar republic of letters. He read Ulysses from another marginal European nation through a network of modernist periodical cultures grounded in Paris—a network in which he experienced a sudden rise to prominence in the early 1920s. As a collaborator at both Eliot’s and José Ortega y Gasset’s journals, he undertook a broad-ranging effort to inscribe Spanish writing, which for centuries remained on the sidelines of the continent’s cultural map, into the new European vanguard that Joyce represented. Thus, one of Marichalar’s British peers called his work “trans-Pyrenean,” and those contemporary critics who have begun to recover Marichalar’s work have seen him as a “double-agent between Spain and Europe” (Colhoun 774; Gallego Roca and Serrano Asenjo 71).³ While attending to his work, I will signal some ways in which Joyce was read as an antididactic artist whose novel, imagined in the hands of a seventeenth-century friar, belies arguments for state censorship. And as I argue elsewhere, we might read Joyce’s work differently when taking into account the ways in which themes of persecution, transnational Catholic affinities, and minor Europeanness bear on the embedded and multilayered political narratives of Ulysses (see Rogers, Modernism 65–93).

The Making of the First Spanish Joyce Scholar

One of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 1920s and 1930s, Marichalar has been “unjustly forgotten” in the history of Spanish letters, remains obscure to most Anglo-American Joyceans, and on several occasions has been overlooked as Joyce’s first Spanish translator (Díez de Revenga 79). Born in Logroño, Navarre, into an aristocratic family—he inherited the title Marqués de Montesa—Marichalar moved to Madrid to study law. His passion, however, was for literature—in particular, for French and British fiction. As he began writing literary criticism, his socially connected father, Pedro Marichalar y Monreal, who was a patron of the arts, sent samples of his son’s work to several influential figures across Spain, including the director of Madrid’s Prado Museum and the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (Ródenas xii). Upon receiving one such piece, José Ortega Munilla, the father of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and a prominent publisher of Madrid’s newspaper El Imparcial, was eager to see more. In March 1921, Ortega Munilla responded that the younger Marichalar’s article had “the mark of a fertile and elegant ingenuity” that could successfully promote the new generation of authors in Spain (Letter). He agreed to publish his work, but cautioned at the same time that the precocious scholar should study the Spanish classics and spend more time interpreting Spanish rather than foreign literature.

Marichalar’s interests, however, spanned the pervasive divide between hispanizante and europeizante views of Spanish national culture at the time. In the early 1920s he found success publishing on both Spanish and continental aesthetics in avant-garde journals such as Índice and Horizonte. His burgeoning cosmopolitan sensibilities expanded when he began frequenting Ortega y Gasset’s symposia at the Ateneo salon and the Residencia de Estudiantes, two of the primary venues of the philosopher’s programs of cultural pedagogy. The latter, called “Oxford and Cambridge in Madrid,” was Madrid’s first residential college, founded in 1910 by progressive education reformists who modeled the school directly on their studies of the English Oxbridge system (Trend 33). The Residencia flourished with young Spanish talent until the civil war—Dalí, Lorca, and Buñuel are among the most famous to have attended—and its Anglophilic curriculum featured courses on British literature, society, history, arts, and culture, as well as sports such as rugby and field hockey. It also brought an impressive series of British and European writers, artists, speakers, and Hispanists to its campus, including H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, J. M. Keynes, Walter Starkie, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Leo Frobenius, Henri Bergson, Paul Valéry, Max Jacob, Louis Aragon, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein. During this time, Marichalar also befriended many of his future Generation of ’27 colleagues, notably Lorca, Alberti, and Jorge Guillén.

As he studied with Ortega, who by that point was the leading intellectual voice in Spain, Marichalar became “entirely convinced,” writes Jesús Pabón y Suárez de Urbina, of his mentor’s “modernizing and Europeanizing efforts” to transform Spanish culture, taking especially strong cues from Ortega’s text of cultural philosophy Meditations on Quixote (1914) (424). The ideas that Marichalar developed and the contacts that he made through Ortega indeed shaped the rest of his career. His first consequential literary-journalistic relationship was with Valery Larbaud, who is best known to Joyce scholars for his influential lecture “The Ulysses of James Joyce” (1921) and for his collaboration on the French translation of the novel. Prior to his work with Joyce, however, Larbaud was well respected for having translated into French the Spanish vanguardists Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Gabriel Miró. Marichalar and Larbaud exchanged a wealth of letters, articles, and reviews in the early 1920s. When Larbaud learned in March 1922, just weeks after Ulysses was published, that his lecture on Joyce’s novel would appear in both the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) and a new English review that T. S. Eliot was to debut that fall (The Criterion), he immediately pressed Marichalar to join this international dialogue by writing on Joyce (see Ródenas xiv–xvi).

In the ensuing months, Eliot was busily gathering collaborators for his new periodical and sought a Spanish scholar who could contribute regular letters that would keep British readers abreast of trends in Spain’s literary culture, akin to his own “Lettres d’Angleterre” for the NRF. He sought Larbaud’s help, and the Frenchman sent him the names of Spanish authors and critics whom he might publish in The Criterion, among them Marichalar’s (see Eliot, Letters 1:50, 517; see also Eliot to Marichalar, Letters 2:189–90). Larbaud followed up by sending some of Marichalar’s essays from Índice to Eliot, then putting the two in contact. Eliot was pleased; he wrote right away to Marichalar of his desire to “channel through London the most profound currents of foreign thought . . . and develop a rapport with the most illustrious foreign writers and editors,” a project with which Marichalar sympathized (Letter to Marichalar). When Eliot asked if Marichalar would like to join The Criterion’s international body, Marichalar gladly sent him his first column, which Eliot published in The Criterion’s third issue in April 1923 (see Marichalar, “Contemporary Spanish Literature”). A novice critic who was still in his twenties, Marichalar found himself thrust suddenly into a dynamic world of literary innovation, commentary, and scholarship centered in Paris around Europe’s most celebrated author—only one year after Marichalar’s father had done his bidding. The two shared much in common: with aesthetic sensibilities similar to Eliot’s, “the Catholic Marichalar,” as he became known to editors across Europe, developed into a culturally conservative neoclassicist who was interested in modern fiction but uninterested in the iconoclastic continental avant-garde. In particular, Marichalar came to believe that “[t]he literary thought of Anglo-Saxon modernism and [his] Spanish vanguard shared a network of solutions to the aesthetic and ethical problems of the twenties,” write Miguel Gallego Roca and Enrique Serrano Asenjo (71). This supranational vision of intellectual cooperation fit Eliot’s paradigm for The Criterion, and Marichalar would continue writing regular columns, about once a year, for Eliot’s review over the next fifteen years.

Marichalar relished his new position as a cultural intermediary. In his chronicles for The Criterion, he introduced most every current and salient literary, philosophical, and cultural figure in Spain to an Anglophone reading public that, even while elite and relatively enlightened, knew almost nothing of Spain’s vibrant Silver Age culture (roughly 1898–1939). (“English critics,” lamented the Cambridge Hispanist and musicologist J. B. Trend in The Criterion, “are not very ready to admit that Spain, as a country of the mind, has any real existence” [Review 146].) Marichalar took this obscurity as his opportunity to make known not only the reigning masters of Spain’s Generation of ’14, led by Ortega, but also the burgeoning writers of his own Generation of ’27. This generation—still coming of age in Spain when Marichalar began promoting its work abroad—included Lorca, Alberti, Guillén, Dámaso Alonso, Luis Cernuda, José Bergamín, Pedro Salinas, Manuel Altolaguirre, Rosa Chacel, Emilio Prados, and Gerardo Diego. The writers of ’27 saw as their principal task, generally speaking, synthesizing the literary forms of the Spanish rural and folkloric traditions with the new Anglo-European modernist and vanguard aesthetics. Thus, Eliot and Valéry, Joyce and Proust influenced them as much as—in some cases, more than—their national predecessors like Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado.

By publishing on the aesthetics of the “young literature” [la joven literatura] of Spain in a range of French, German, and Anglo-American reviews, Marichalar became what Domingo Ródenas calls the “European ambassador of the Generation of ’27” (ix). He saw his colleagues and their peers across Europe as a transnational vanguard engaged in a cooperative effort to reshape the continent’s culture after the Great War. To convey “what is talked about in the select circles that an English reader of [The Criterion] would frequent in Spain,” for instance, Marichalar describes his poet-colleagues as innovators of the Spanish lyric tradition who are infusing its styles with those of their European neighbors (“Madrid Chronicle” 357). Likewise, in his Spanish-language journalism, he calls The Criterion “the most purely intellectual journal that exists” and praises Eliot as the model modern poet, an expatriate unafraid to look beyond his national precursors to Dante and Virgil for inspiration (Ensayos Literarios 261). In 1924, he coedited with Larbaud a special double issue of the French review Intentions titled “La jeune littérature espagnole,” for which he wrote an introductory essay on his compatriots. Here, too, he alerts French readers to the “new spectacle” represented by young Spanish poets, of whom he gives short sketches (193). Guillén, he writes in a typical cross-cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   The Iberian Peninsula
• Part II   Argentina
• Part III   Cuba
• Part IV   Mexico
• Contributors
• Index