Abstract
The legend goes something like this: Santayana was in the middle of one of his impeccable lectures on aesthetics—it is said that he spoke the way he wrote—when someone knocked gently on the door of the classroom. He went over and was handed a slip of paper, which contained the news that his mother had just passed away. After a few moments of silence, he turned to his students. “I have a date with April,” he announced. He left the room and never again was he seen in Harvard Yard.
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When we made love, two countries made love.
—Abdelkebir Khatibi
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Notes
George Santayana, The Letters of George Santayana, ed. Daniel Cory (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 319.
Juan Ramón Jiménez, Guerra en España (1936–1953), ed. Ángel Crespo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985), 64.
See also José Maria Naharro Calderón, Entre el exilio y el interior: El “entresiglo” y Juan Ramón Jiménez (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994), 303–306.
José Gaos, “La adaptación de un español a la sociedad hispanoamericana,” Revista de Occidente 38 (May 1966): 168–178.
Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillén, Correspondencia (1923–1951), ed. Andrés Soria Olmedo (Valencia: Tusquets, 1992), 314.
Pedro Salinas, Ensayos completos, ed. Solita Salinas de Marichal (Madrid: Taurus, 1983), 3: 421. This essay was first published in the inaugural issue of Asomante, the Puerto Rican literary journal that Salinas helped to found.
Pedro Salinas, Aprecio y defensa del lenguaje (1944; San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1995). Other page numbers refer to this edition.
On Panhispanism, see Frederick Pike, Hispanismo. 1896–1936: Spanish Conservatives and Liberals and Their Relations with Spanish America (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971); also my The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 2.
Salinas, Cartasde viaje (1912–1951), ed. Enric Bou (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1996), 161.
Claudio Guillén, “Pedro Salinas y las palabras,” La Torre 3, no. 10 (abriljunio 1989): 350.
Juan Marichal, Tres voces de Pedro Salinas (Madrid: Taller de Ediciones, 1976), 75.
Pedro Salinas, El defensor, ed. Juan Marichal (1948; Madrid: Alianza, 1967), 118.
Pedro Salinas, Poesías completas, ed. Soledad Salinas de Marichal, 2d. ed. (Barcelona: Barral, 1975), 720. Page numbers accompanying quotations from Salinas’s poetry refer to this edition.
Letter of July 22, 1939; as quoted in Jean Cross Newman, Pedro Salinas and His Circumstance (San Juan: Inter American University, 1983), 178.
Pedro Salinas, Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, trans. Edith Fishtine Helman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 3.
Pedro Salinas, El Contemplado. Todo más claro y otros poemas, ed. Francisco Javier Díez de Revenga (Madrid: Castalia, 1996), 28.
Gustavo Correa, “El Contemplado,” in Pedro Salinas, ed. Andrew P. Debicki (Madrid: Taurus, 1976), 143.
Robert Havard, “The reality of words in the poetry of Pedro Salinas,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 51 (1974): 44.
The epigraph is taken from Shelley’s Epipsychidion, an allegorical account of Shelley’s adulterous love affair with Emilia Viviani. Many years earlier, Salinas had mentioned this poem (but not this line) several times in letters to Margarita, at the time his fiancée. In Pedro Salinas, Cartas de amor a Margarita (1912–1915), ed. Solita Salinas de Marichal (Madrid: Alianza, 1984), 47, 64.
Leo Spitzer, “El conceptismo interior de Pedro Salinas” (1941), in Lingüística e historia literaria (Madrid: Gredos, 1961), 199.
Pedro Salinas, Reality and Poet in Spanish Poetry, trans. Edith Fishtine Helman (1940; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 4.
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (1996; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 81.
Salinas, Poesías Completas, 664. The poem is part of Todo más claro (1949). In a perceptive analysis of “Verbo,” Vicente Lloréns notes that this poem reflects Salinas’s anxiety about his mother tongue, an anxiety no less real for remaining unexpressed: “De uno u otro modo, el exiliado vive con la preocupación del idioma. Y aunque no la manifieste, se revela en lo que escribe, a veces inesperadamente, casi sin querer” [In one way or another, the exile lives with the worry about his language. And even if he doesn’t admit it, it shows in what he writes, at times unexpectedly, almost unwillingly]. Vicente Lloréns, “El desterrado y su lengua: Sobre un poema de Salinas,” in Literatura, historia, política (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1967), 37.
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© 2003 Gustavo Pérez Firmat
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Firmat, G.P. (2003). Love in a Foreign Language. In: Tongue Ties. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980922_3
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