At the crossroads of cultures
It is said that Charles de Montalembert, a 19th century historian, gave Isidore of Seville the nickname of "the last master of the Old World". One thing is certain: when the man who was proclaimed the patron saint of computer scientists by the Vatican in the 20th century was born, the lands that would one day become Spain had already known many occupants of different origins. Thus, the Iberians, who gave their name to the peninsula, and the Celtiberians, of Celtic descent, were among the first to arrive. Each of these peoples had their own language, but in the second century B.C., the Roman conquest - which was divided into two provinces, Hispania Cittadora in the north and Hispania Posterior in the south - imposed the Latin language, from which the languages now spoken throughout the territory were derived, from Castilian to Catalan, including Galician and Portuguese. To return to Isidore of Seville, he was born around 560 in Cartagena and became bishop of Hispalis, the ancient Latin name of the city that gave it its name and which was then under the domination of the Visigoths, a Germanic people who had settled after the fall of the Roman Empire in thefifth century. Seville, like Barcelona, Cordoba, Merida and Zaragoza, was a cultural center where intellectual life was developing, of which our bishop was the most illustrious representative. In addition to his decisive influence on the clergy and the political world of the time, the importance of his writings is commensurate with his erudition: considerable. If he kept the reputation of having been able to reintroduce the thought of Aristotle to his fellow citizens and thus to make the thought of the Ancients last at a time when Christianity rather encouraged to make a clean sweep of the past, he is also the author of a fundamental work which will not cease to inspire and to be copied during all the Middle Ages: the Etymologiae. This encyclopedia, composed of 20 books and 448 chapters, is a compilation of all the knowledge, scholarly or popular, to which he had access during an existence that ended in 636.
After a slight temporal leap and a new conquest - the one that gave birth to Al-Andalus: a generic term designating the territories occupied by the Arabs, at one time or another, between 711 and 1492 - a poetic form was invented, commonly referred to as khardja. This word - jarcha in Spanish - is quite fascinating because it refers only to the final verses of a longer poem: the mouachah, whose composition was established at the same time by a blind poet from Cabra, Muqaddam ibn Muafá (847-912). Now, if the mouachah is written in Arabic, Hebrew or Aramaic, the khardja, on the other hand, is written in one of the Spanish dialects... but retranscribed in non-Latin characters. This mixture of languages remained a mystery for a long time, and it was not until the twentieth century that some khardjas were finally translated, and that they revealed their specificity: embodying the voice of women in these poems which, of course, spoke of love. However, the second universal theme from which literature often derives was not forgotten: the troubadours - juglares - told the story of wars in long chansons de geste, the most famous of which is The Poem of the Cid(El Cantar de Moi Cid), dated from the middle of the twelfth century in oral form and fixed in writing in 1207 by a certain Per Abad. This manuscript, miraculously almost untouched by time, is kept in the Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid). Written in medieval Castilian, it evokes the Reconquista through the exploits of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar
In Catalan literature, Raymond Lulle, born in Palma de Mallorca around 1232, is considered the first to standardize the language in writing. Endowed with all the talents, he showed himself to be as curious about science and philosophy as he was a skilled poet. His work is the same: dithyrambic! In the form of poems, novels, encyclopedias, it touches all the fields, from theology to mysticism, from botany to politics, through physics or anthropology. We could thus quote Le Livre de la Contemplation or Le Livre du gentil et des trois sages (editions du Cerf), but also Félix ou le livre des merveilles du monde or Blaquerne (editions du Rocher). Raymond Lulle pursued only one goal: unity, whether of faith and reason, or of the three cultures - Arab, Jewish and Christian - that permeated his native region. His near-contemporary, Alfonso X (1221-1284), earned his nickname Alfonso the Scholar by inviting intellectuals from these same three cultures to produce manuscripts in all fields, whether legal, scientific or historical. His scribes were gathered in the School of Translators of Toledo, and they too contributed to the evolution of Castilian into a more literary language, and one that was resolutely linked to the Court
The Golden Age
We should also mention El Triunfo de las donas, an ode to women composed by Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara (1390-1450), or the Stanzas on the death of his father (unfortunately out of print in its French translation) by Jorge Manrique (ca. 1440-1479), and a much-performed play: La Celestine, a tragi-comedy of Calixte and Melibeia, attributed post-mortem to Fernando de Rojas (ca. 1465-1541) and to be discovered by Fayard. In a completely different genre, The Book of Life (Gallimard) by Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), canonized in 1622, has become a classic, more so than the poetry of her contemporary and colleague Fernando de Herrera (1534-1597), who evoked a platonic love in elegies inspired by Petrarch. A third man of faith is better known on our side of the Pyrenees: John of the Cross, born in Fontiveros in 1542, whose enlightenment made him so lyrical that he is now published in Gallimard's poetry collection (Nuit obscure, Cantique spirituel
). All these talents prefigured the Spanish 17th century, nicknamed the Golden Age, not only because of the importance of literature - and more generally of the arts - but because the country was at the height of its power, both European and colonial.The most emblematic author of this literary splendor is of course Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) who with El Ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, revolutionized the novelistic genre. Embodying chivalric values, anticipating the absurd, his hero will be perceived in turn as comic or tragic, an infinite reading that explains the importance of this masterpiece worldwide. It is worth noting that Cervantes was not the man of only one book, he also wrote poetry and theater, including The Siege of Numance, which inspired an imitation to one of the three great playwrights of the time, Lope de Vega (1562-1635). Lope's life is so full of adventures - both amorous and adventurous - that it seems incredible that he had time to write the thousands of texts (including at least 1,500 plays) attributed to him! Yet he is considered nothing less than the father of the Comedia nueva, a new style that he theorized in El arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609) and which gives pride of place to action while displaying a certain irony. With regard to the past centuries, the pleasure of reading him in all his diversity remains the same, whether it be with La Dorotea (GF Flammarion), La Guerre des chats (Circé) or the Soliloque amoureux d'une âme à Dieu (Allia). Among the other renowned playwrights of the time, Tirso de Molina (1579-1648) was the first to stage a Don Juan more than 20 years before Molière in El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (1630), and Pedro de Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) presented the disturbing and moving play La Vida es sueño (Life is a Dream
) in 1635. On the poetry side, we must not fail to mention Luis de Góngora (1561-1627), a pure representative of cultism, who plays with very baroque ornaments, especially in his Solitudes. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, the sense of conciseness and the art of ellipsis are the prerogative of Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, a true champion of conceptualism, and also the author of a (unique) picaresque novel (albeit somewhat disillusioned and sarcastic): El Buscón (which became The Life of the Rogue Don Pablos de Segovia: Exemplary Vagrant and Model of the Rogues , published by Fayard).Decline, wars and renewal
The eighteenth century opened with a devastating War of Succession that augured the complexity of the centuries to come and the national unity imposed at the expense of autonomous identities. Nevertheless, the "Ilustración" - as the Enlightenment is called in Spain - includes the Teatro critico universal by Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, who, although a Benedictine, was not lacking in bite, the rhetorical essays by Gregorio Mayans, or the sainetes (farces) by Ramón de la Cruz. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, author of a comedy(El delincuente honrado), a tragedy(Pelayo o La Muerte de Munuza), and also a translator of Milton, as well as the fabulist Félix María Samaniego, who did not hide his admiration for La Fontaine, show that the game of influences had been reversed: Spain was now following the European currents. Nevertheless, the opposition to Bonaparte at the beginning of the 19th century rhymes with the awakening of national sentiment, even if this tendency, linked to Costumbrismo (from costumbre: custom, tradition), is still dispensed with in a broader movement, Romanticism, which does not hesitate to be critical of the ruling power. The two main poets of these turbulent times - José de Espronceda (1808-1842) and Mariano José de Larra (1809-1837) - confirm this ambivalence, which was only reinforced by the Generation of '98. This generation was opposed to the Restoration, interested in the rural world and, above all, initiated new aesthetic approaches, far from the classical standards. Originally, three authors represented it - Pío Baroja, Azorin and Ramiro de Maeztu - but we could add to them, among others, Antonio Machado(Fields of Castile, Gallimard) or Jacinto Benavente, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922
Then came the Generation of '14, whose leader was undoubtedly the sociologist José Ortga y Gasset, some of whose work was published in French by Allia(La Mission du bibliothécaire, L'Histoire comme système..) but whose main work - The Revolt of the Masses - is offered by Belles Lettres, then the fertile Generation of 27, to which many writers are associated, the most famous of which are undoubtedly the playwright and poet Rafael Alberti(Le Repoussoir published by L'Arche or Marin à terre published by Gallimard), and above all Frederico García Lorca, born in 1898 and executed in 1936. He left a work abundantly translated, especially by Gallimard: My Village, Romancero gypsy, Noces de sang, Yerma, etc. The next generation is given a tragic year, that of the entry into the civil war, 1936. These authors - Blas de Otero, Gabriel Celaya, José María Fonollosa... - were those who suffered the full force of Franco's rule, its restrictions, its censorship
Since then, Spanish writers have been able to speak freely again, and many of them can be found on the shelves of our French bookstores. Without trying to be exhaustive, we could list Eduardo Mendoza(The Last Journey of Horatio II, The King Receives), Jaume Cabré(Confiteor), Enrique Vila-Matas(The Evil of Montano, Bartleby and Company), Rosa Montero(Tears in the Rain, Good Luck), Antonio Muñoz Molina(Full Moon, A Lonely Walker in the Crowd), Javier Cercas(The Imposter, Independence), Lucia Etxebarría(God Doesn't Have That Much To Do), Víctor del Árbol(The Weight of the Dead, Before the Terrible Years)..
