Abstract
In the afternoon of November 8, 1951, the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén paid a visit to George Santayana at the clinic of the Blue Nuns in Rome, where the old philosopher had lived for ten years. At the time, one year before his death, Santayana’s reputation in the Hispanic world was broad but shallow. Although some of his principal books had been translated into Spanish, he remained an enigma, a philosopher less known for his philosophy than for his nationality. Even after his death, Santayana’s compatriots remained primarily interested in his españolidad, whether or to what extent his work reflected a “Spanish” or “Latin” outlook on the world. According to some, even though Santayana wrote in English and resided abroad for most of his life, he had never stopped listening to “the voice of his Spanish blood.”1 As Ramón Sender pointed out, had Santayana stayed in Spain he would have been a member of the Generation of 1898 (he was one year older than Miguel de Unamuno), and even in English his work was similar enough to that of his peers to make him the “evasivo fantasma del 98”2 [the evasive ghost of 1898]. Others took the position that, his parentage and his place of birth notwithstanding, Santayana was no more Spanish than he was American, or anything else, for his was a philosophy of desasimiento, Stoic detachment.
George, digo Jorge Santayana, ese español ajeno y perdido en su patria y otras patrias.
[George, I mean, Jorge Santayana, that alien Spaniard, lost in his and other homelands]
—Juan Ramón Jiménez
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Notes
Concha Zardoya, “Poesía y estilo de George Santayana,” Cuadernos Americanos 49 (January–February 1950): 131.
See also: Concha Zardoya, “Santayana y España,” Insula 83 (November 1952): 1, 4, 8
Ramón Sender, “Santayana y los castellanos interiores,” in Unamuno, Valle Inclán, Baroja y Santayana (Mexico City: Ediciones de Andrea, 1955), 137–170
Carlos M. Fernández Shaw, “El españolismo de George Santayana,” Revista de Estudios Políticos 140 (March–April 1965): 541–59
Carlos Clavería, “España en la obra de Santayana,” Filología moderna 4, no. 13 (October 1963): 1–28
Guillermo de Torre, “Santayana, el desasido,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 34, no. 1–2 (January–April 1968): 446–452
Enrique Zuleta Álvarez, “Santayana en Hispanoamérica,” Revista de Occidente 79 (Diciembre 1987): 9–25); and Santayana Abroad: The Reception of Santayana’s Philosophy in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, ed. David Wapinsky and Zechariah Switzky (New York: Publications Philanthropica for Public Libraries, 1993).
Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillén, Correspondencia (1923–1951), ed. Andrés Soria Olmedo (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992), 586–587. A few years later, Guillén would commemorate the occasion with a poem describing the philosopher as “español de raíz, inglés de idioma.” In “Al margen de Santayana,” in Aire nuestro (Milan: Pesce D’Oro, 1968), 1179.
George Santayana, Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 282. Other page references to this edition (PP) will be included in the text. Santayana’s autobiography was originally published in three separate volumes: Persons and Places (1944), The Middle Span (1945), and My Host the World (1953). It had been his intention to gather the three volumes under the title of the first, as in the MIT edition.
The phrase is Baker Bromwell’s, in “Santayana, the Man and the Philosopher,” in The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (1940; New York: Tudor, 1951), 49. On this point see also Michael Hodges and John Lachs, Thinking in the Ruins: Wittgenstein and Santayana on Contingency (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 63, 87–89.
Timothy Sprigge, Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), 220.
The Letters of George Santayana, ed. Daniel Cory (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 430.
George Santayana, “Apologia pro mente sua,” in The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (1940; New York: Tudor, 1951), 599.
George Santayana, Reason in Art, vol. 4 of The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 85. Other references to this edition (RA) will be included in the text.
I take the term “xenity” from John Taylor, “On the Ledge: Joseph Brodsky in English,” Michigan Quarterly Review 40, no. 3 (summer 2001): 594–603.
George Santayana, The Last Puritan, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (1935; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 6. Other page references to this edition (LP) will be included in the text.
Daniel Cory, Santayana: The Later Years (New York: George Braziller, 1963), 210.
Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Seabury, 1979), 70.
Reproduced in J. M. Alonso Gamo, Un español en el mundo: Santayana (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1966). In his superb biography, John McCormick states that Santayana’s “command of Spanish was such that he would meticulously correct accent marks, diction, and style in the Spanish works he often read” (George Santayana [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987], 4); but to judge by this writing sample, as well as by the mistakes in the Spanish words that Santayana occasionally put into his books, his command of Spanish was not very good. In Persons and Places, speaking of his difficulties in communicating with his father, Santayana states that his “powers of expression in Spanish were limited, for I had read, and even now have read, hardly any Spanish books” (199). He makes similar statements elsewhere. Santayana’s comments about Spanish literature are limited to a few references to Don Quijote, which he read as a child but never re-read, and to other classics such as Calderón’s La vida es sueño and Zorilla’s Don Juan Tenorio.
George Santayana, The Philosophy of George Santayana: Selections, ed. Irwin Edman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 4–5. This essay originally appeared in Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, ed. George P. Adams and William Montague, (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 2: 239–257.
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896; New York: Dover, 1955), 104. In “The Task of the Translator” (1923), Walter Benjamin makes the same point with the same example: “The words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same. It is owing to these modes that the word Brot means something different to a German than the word pain to a Frenchman, that these words are not interchangeable for them, that, in fact, they strive to exclude each other.” In Theories of Translation, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 75.
In George Santayana, Dominations and Powers (1950; New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1995), 142.
George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 256. Ortega, who had read Santayana, used a similar image to describe the “intranscendence” of vanguard art, which makes the reader focus on the window pane rather than on the garden beyond it; see La deshumanización del arte (1925), in Obras completas (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957), 3: 357–58. I discuss the significance of this passage in my Idle Fictions: The Hispanic Vanguard Novel, 1926–1934 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), chap. 3.
George Santayana, Realms of Being, vol. 14 of The Works of George Santayana, Triton Edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 109–110.
George Santayana, “Apologia pro mente sua,” in The Philosophy of George Santayana, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (1940; New York: Tudor, 1951), 598.
George Santayana, The Idler and His Works, ed. Daniel Cory (New York: George Braziller, 1957), 4.
Late in his life, talking about A. E. Housman, Santayana said: “I suppose Housman was really what people nowadays call ‘homosexual.’ […] I think I must have been that way in my Harvard days—although I was unconscious of it at the time” (Daniel Cory, Santayana: The Later Years: A Portrait with Letters [New York: Braziller, 1963], 40). On Santayana’s homosexuality see McCormick, George Santayana, 49–52; Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979)
Ross Posnock, “Genteel Androgyny: Santayana, Henry James, Howard Sturgis,” Raritan 10, no. 3 (winter 1991): 58–78
Irving Singer, George Santayana, Literary Philosopher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 57–63.
George Santayana, Soliloquies in England (1922; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 4.
Cioran, De l’inconvénient d’être né (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 49. On the autobiographical basis of The Last Puritan, see McCormick, George Santayana, and H. T. Kirby-Smith, A Philosophical Novelist: George Santayana and “The Last Puritan” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997). In the preface to The LastPuritan, Santayana describes Oliver as “a stage-presentation of myself” (3).
George Santayana, Platonism and the Spiritual Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 36.
Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997).
Santayana, The Complete Poems of George Santayana, ed. William G. Holzberger (Lewiston: Bucknell University Press, 1979), 127.
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© 2003 Gustavo Pérez Firmat
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Firmat, G.P. (2003). Saying Un-English Things in English. In: Tongue Ties. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980922_2
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