Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature

As for many years my spirit has been nourished upon the very core of English Literature—evidence of which the reader may discover in the following pages—the translator in putting my Sentimiento Trágico [The Tragic Sense of Life] into English, has merely converted not a few of the thoughts and feelings therein expressed back into their original form of expression. Or retranslated them, perhaps. Whereby they emerge other than they originally were, for an idea does not pass from one language to another without change…. Hence this English translation of my Sentimiento Trágico presents in some ways a more purged and correct text than that of the original Spanish.

Such assumptions were crucial, as we saw in previous chapters, to branches of romantic philology, to the modern origins of comparative literary studies, and to monolingual formations of national literatures. Indeed, literary nativism, though critiqued for decades by academics, still reigns in popular U.S. culture, in undergraduate curricula, and in many global critical traditions. The roots of this thought lie in a brand of nationalism that exhibits a “literary xenophobia” (to use Lawrence Venuti’s term) and “a fear that foreign literatures might contaminate native traditions.” But at the same time, Venuti notes, history shows that “nations do indeed ‘profit’ from translation. Nationalist movements have frequently enlisted translation in the development of national languages and cultures, especially national literatures…. Nationalist translation agendas depend on…circularity: the national status of a language and culture is simultaneously presupposed and created through translation.”² This might occur in many ways: a nation’s scholars might translate the texts of their distant linguistic, religious, or ethnic ancestors; a government might support translation as a project of Westernization that augments its own international standing; an internally dominant literature might enrich itself by gobbling up texts in minor languages produced within the state’s boundaries; a culture might use translation of the texts of one language as a collective form of protest against the domination of their occupier; or even individual translators might alternately domesticate or foreignize texts from abroad in order to affirm the naturalness and superiority of their nation’s primary tradition.

This problem—the simultaneous utility, if not necessity, and putative impossibility of translating foreign literatures—stretches beyond the nativist view of imported texts to its treatment of exported ones. What happens when the authentic national literature leaves its soil and is reformulated in translation, in dialectal shifts by creole or colonial populations, or in its absorption into a pidgin, patois, and hybrid tongues in a contact zone? The presumptive answer—it loses its authenticity—did not fit Miguel de Unamuno’s Spanish nativism, and the philosopher’s controversial and sometimes contradictory theories of how literary expression became more authentic through translation in particular are the starting point for this chapter. At first blush, Unamuno looks like a classic nativist. With a debt to Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, he held a romantic notion of the intimate connection between a pueblo (in Spanish, both a “village” and a “people”) and its tongue. “I am a patriot; to each his own patria,” Unamuno wrote.3 But Unamuno was a heterodox and prolific master of translation between the 1900s and 1930s. He read thirteen languages beyond Spanish and translated everyone from Demosthenes to Walt Whitman, Giacomo Leopardi to Humboldt himself. Most often, he translated figures known for having poeticized their local vernaculars.

As intellectual projects, nativism and a commitment to translation are compatible in an anthropological or ethnographic sense, as if Unamuno were compiling an encyclopedia of distinct cultures (the “United Nations model” of world literature). “In each country,” he wrote, “what interests me the most are those things that are most authentic [castizos] and characteristic, the least translated and the least translatable.”⁴ But as the epigraph above and a number of Unamuno’s writings indicate, he went farther in his claims, asserting that parts of his best-known work were, in his mind, composed in English and translated internally into Spanish. Bringing out this paradox, Unamuno noted that translations had “ultimately influenced me in the formation of my native thought [pensamiento patrio].”⁵ Furthermore, and not unrelated, Unamuno held that José Hernández’s Argentine gaucho epic poem Martín Fierro (1872), which clearly drew on resources disconnected from the Iberian soil, was counterintuitively more Spanish than Argentine. In other words, for reasons opposed to those Dos Passos offered, Unamuno circuitously posited that Castilian Spanish literature actually grew with the end of the Spanish Empire in the New World: the seeds it planted in Spanish America flowered into vivid new variations on a common tongue. In extensions and revisions of this logic, Unamuno claimed that he discovered his own vernacular in Spanish through English—specifically, through translating Thomas Carlyle. In short: translation becomes his original.

To make sense of this, and to understand why it mattered so much after 1898, we must examine Unamuno’s vision of a country whose governments kept him in exile for large parts of his adult life and its relationship with the United States in the new century. Scholars of Hispanophone literature are familiar with his often-critiqued cultural imperialism and Iberian chauvinism. But scant attention has been paid to his theories of literature in English and, in particular, to an Anglophone U.S. tradition that, as it differentiated itself from England, became a key point of contrast to his theories of Spanish American writing. The United States was an intriguing case for a thinker who normally studied national literatures with medieval or classical roots. Against the Spanish example, he held that English in the United States did not expand the linguistic empire of Britain but, rather, became autonomous and authentic in Whitman. American literature, for him, was emergent in Whitman and then only a few decades later was divergent, dangerously splintered as it rose globally in ways that the literatures of Argentina or Uruguay, for example, did not. The United States’ leading authors had divagated from the country’s natural path of development and evolution and turned American English into an Esperanto of commerce after 1898, much as Dos Passos feared, or into an unrooted cosmopolitan hodgepodge, as in Eliot’s and Pound’s poetry.

Unamuno might appear something of an outlier in this book’s structure, except that within this work, he attempted to transfer America’s lost poetic tradition to Spain. He wanted to resuscitate Whitman in translation, then to point to the regional poets, such as Carl Sandburg, Sidney Lanier, and William Vaughn Moody, who might preserve the “authentic” course of U.S. literature in the twentieth century. As he advocated the study of foreign literatures as a means to enhance the autochthonous language and literature of Spain, Unamuno also became a leading figure in founding contemporary American studies in Spain. Most important, the United States became for him a critical meeting point of English and the persisting presence of Spanish, one that he elaborated in his writings for the New Orleans–based Spanish-language periodical Mercurio (1911–1927). Unamuno aimed to revive connections between Spain and the United States after 1898 and to create an intellectual circuit, composed largely of the U.S. Hispanists whom he befriended and who translated his own work into English, of which he would be a crucial part. His publications and his authorial reputation in English would circulate in this network, too, and the latter part of this chapter reconstructs his foreign presence. He saw himself, an exiled icon of dissidence for many writers and cultural critics beyond Spain, as a part of a growing English-Spanish global union—an heir to Whitman—translating across the two languages and even inserting Anglophone U.S. poetry into his own highly personal Cancionero, a poetic diary that he began in his final exile in 1928. In short, Unamuno’s attempts to consolidate Spanish national identity after the empire’s collapse unraveled his own nativist propositions in favor of a new outline of global English and global Spanish within a field of translation governed by the clashes between commerce and “spirit.”6

As he became an apologist for U.S. empire and a critic of Spain’s decline, Unamuno thus imported to Spain a literary tradition with no roots in Iberian soil but one that itself had been enriched by its contact with Spanish cultures, much as Whitman himself believed. Such parts of his career highlight broader issues that, beyond Unamuno’s strange turn as a bilingual pastoral modernist or his international reputation, open up important questions in translational and comparative literary studies: what happens to vernaculars as they become the dominant languages of expanding and contracting empires? And were the booming print landscapes of English and Spanish writing in the New World of the early twentieth century consolidating or fragmenting the languages of the Old World? This chapter traces the ways in which Unamuno’s social theories of language are modified and often undermined—though productively—by his own literary practices, all in order to understand how a translated vernacular became the vehicle for reading one empire and its literary history from the near-vacated shell of another. The renovated configurations of Spanish and American literatures that his theories and his work create through registers of translation become complex models of cultural historiography that challenge still-pervasive approaches to the literary past.

Harnessing the spirit of the celebrations of the Hispanic raza commemorated in 1892, Unamuno relied on what was a common reading in late European imperial settings and reinterpreted empire as spirit rather than as a political project. Especially in his revisions of En torno al casticismo after 1898, Unamuno focused the fraught questions of Spain’s imperial decline on the domestic concept of casticismo, which both signifies untranslatability and is itself difficult to translate. The root word, castizo—from casta—means “pure” (chaste) or “genuine,” and “caste,” as in “pure breeding” or lineage. (The book’s title is, roughly, On Pure Tradition, or On Spanish Authenticity.) While the word castizo can be applied to that which is considered authentic in any culture, it has a long history in Spanish culture of signifying an antiforeign stance in language, bloodlines, knowledge, customs, religion, and more. It was the central term in the centuries-old debates in Spain over whether the solutions to the country’s perceived decline since the 1600s should come from a revival of Spanish traditions alone or by turning to outside sources. Unamuno vacillated and sometimes contradicted himself, but most generally, he favored a version of the nativist solution to the rejuvenation of Spain, but with qualification: there was more to “Spain” than most Spaniards recognized, including the sedimented layers of other cultures (European and African alike). Only “Europeanized” Spaniards could “discover” and “make” Spain, he argued, but they must channel what they learn from foreign sources into a national project.9 In looking to build what he called “la otra España” (“the other Spain”), he argued that “one must make the foreign familiar” and, by doing so, defamiliarize one’s native surroundings at the same time.¹⁰ Instead of becoming rootless cosmopolitans, then, Spaniards should “be what we in ourselves are, seeking our permanent essence and ground, de-Latinizing ourselves, too, until we get back to our Iberian, Moorish, Berber, or whatever, inmost beings.”¹¹

Spaniards should “Spanishify” (españolarse) themselves, that is, and must guard themselves against faddish foreign movements such as modernismo.¹² At once naturalizing and rewriting the history of Spain’s dominant identity, Unamuno writes that he cannot understand either why Spaniards and Spanish Americans are enamored of “Neo-Góngorists, Latinists, Local-colorists, Decadents, Parnassians, Victor-Hugo-ists and other fads from overseas, with their shipments of Quechua, Guaraní, Araucanian, Aztec, Toltec, or Chichimeca monstrosities.”¹³ Only what was buried in Spain’s soil should be excavated and brought to light, and that soil was made of words. Indeed, in his own text Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho (1905) he included a “Vocabulario” as an appendix. He explained that any words in his text not found in the dictionary were “taken from the mouth of the pueblo of the Salmantine region” or from Don Quixote itself, for in order to “enrich the language [idioma], it is better to fish in the tomes of old writers for words that are dead today, or to pull them from the guts of popular speech.”¹⁴ Unamuno’s case, therefore, was not grounded in a theory of racial purity but in biological convivencia; he held that Spaniards themselves were descended from a mixture of Iberians, Celts, Romans, Visigoths, Semitic peoples, Berbers, Arabs, and others. Rather, language was the great universalizing and profoundly historical bond for his holistic, melting-pot nativism—his assimilationist narrative that glorifies Spain’s internal racial mixing over time. (The parallels here to Whitman’s thought in essays such as “Slang in America” [1885] and to Mencken’s effort to catalog the “American language” will resurface momentarily.)

Thus, Unamuno developed his conception of “intrahistory.” He thought that history could best be understood by looking at the discrete, interpersonal histories of anonymous people realized in the products of popular culture—especially linguistic ones—rather than in state structures or political histories. Life, he believed, lay in a vast communitarian sea of which most historians see only the surface. Unamuno argued that “what happens to individuals happens also to the people [pueblos]. Their collective spirit, the Volkgeist of the Germans, has a subconscious base, below the public consciousness that we know and that history shows us.”15 He calls for the properly attuned folklorist to recover “the social protoplasm, the germinative plasma, the eternal Pueblo, the perdurable primary material from which the temporary pueblos arise.”¹⁶ Literatura and pueblo remained connected for him in a Humboldtian manner—especially in its emphasis on the evolutionary, unstable nature of language, tied to environments and human creativity—a connection that was reformed famously in the early twentieth century by figures such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, for whom language was both a conceptual, structural agent and a limit for human thought.¹⁷ Unamuno’s study Vida del romance castellano (The life of the Castilian romance) included a bibliographic essay on the history of the Spanish language for which he chose a line from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound as the epigraph: “He gave man speech, and speech created thought, / Which is the measure of the universe.” Esperanto, having no roots in a defined culture or its authentic soil, was an abomination to him.

In keeping with this thought, Unamuno held that the true casticismo had been appropriated and distorted by a state-created xenophobic, cultish nativism of his moment; it had been turned into naïve patriotism and base jingoism. He wrote that “Spaniards go on repeating time and again the same ineptitudes and the same lies [or ‘fairy tales’: patrañas] about our old tongue and our race [and]…our history.”¹⁸ Casticismo had excluded popular history and daily life, he felt, and had ossified it into a tradition commensurate with the vision of the monarchic state. Nobles, monarchists, and oligarchs, with a top-down portrait of Spain embraced by the nationalist bourgeoisie, had narrowed lo castizo and had stacked the cultural institutions, academies, and universities with ideologues who invented neat lineages to justify their social positions; they had even transformed Don Quixote from a mad knight errant into a rational conquistador. Thus, Ramón Menéndez Pidal could claim that Castilian, “this Hispano-Roman language, continuous in its natural evolution, is the same found as a literary language in the Poema del Cid, the same brought to perfection by Alfonso the Sage, and essentially, the same in which Cervantes wrote.”¹⁹ At their core, Unamuno’s nativism and even his nationalism were a critique of Spanish nationalism as it was conceived and disseminated at the time. (Later, he called the hypernationalist regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera that exiled him in the 1920s “pornocratic” and replete with “rapacious tyranny” that was busily “fool-making” and “bleeding” its people—a regime of “sluts, thieves, and troglodytes.”)²⁰

Unamuno shared plenty of sympathy with Menéndez Pidal and with the reigning imperialists, but his understanding of the Castilian tongue came from other sources and helped compose a distinct political vision that valorized translation as the instrument of evolution and exchange. Through folkloric study, new dictionaries and glossaries, and most important, translations of a wide range of texts that reveal casticismo by way of comparative contrast, the state must become an organic expression of the culture of average Spaniards, he argued. José Luis Venegas adds that Unamuno saw literary creation itself as fundamentally social, making the “process of authorial self-discovery” through inventing fictions a parallel to the “principles of collective identity” that he advocated.21 Academic scholarship—especially philology—froze and finished this process: “What a cemetery a dictionary is!” Unamuno wrote in a poem.²² In another, he asserted his dedication to “Lengua, lengua, no lenguaje”—“Tongue, tongue, not language”; the latter term also signifies style and jargon, removed from the organic embodiedness of the “tongue.”²³

Average Spaniards, Unamuno asserted, had fundamentally anarchic, mystical, and irrational souls that the state had tamed into an artificially rational order. To discover this lost Spain, Unamuno elaborated a new theory of Hispanicity (hispanidad)—not “españolidad”—because he wanted to “attach himself to the old historico-geographic concept of Hispania [the Roman province], which included all of the Iberian Peninsula,” not simply the modern state-formation of Spain (España).24 His romantic sense that races and languages were natural and timeless while states were historical and contingent (“only the human is eternally castizo”) led him to elevate Spain’s unique contributors to intellectual and religious history—the mystics, such as St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and Fray Luis de León.²⁵ In order for Unamuno’s claims to cohere, “Spain” first had to be delimited to a renovated Castilian essence and then had to be expanded to include the imperial and international contacts that had caused the Castilian tongue’s evolution over time. The philosopher therefore railed against regional separatist movements and applauded the historical assimilation of tongues such as Leonese and Aragonese into Castilian during the Reconquista, when Isabella and Ferdinand united both crowns and tongues. (He even urged Castilian Spaniards to learn to read the languages of their provincial neighbors such as the Catalans and Galicians in order to absorb and assimilate their influences in making a single Iberian community that coalesced from the periphery toward the center.) And though he called the “lengua castellana” his “intimate coat [íntimo abrigo],” he believed that the tongue needed to be “Europeanized” and “modernized,” to become “at once lighter and more precise; it needs some disarticulation, because of the present tendency to anchylosis…. Our language tells us things from across the great sea that it never told us here.”²⁶ He believed that the “spirit” of the Castilian language that existed in the blood of Spaniards could be carried abroad and enriched, whether by criollos in Spanish America or by exiles and omnivorous readers such as himself.

With these theories, Unamuno was intervening in the debates over race, language, and nation that had been fermenting in Spain and in Spanish America at least since the 1830s; in the second half of the nineteenth century, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Juan Valera had become leading public voices on these matters.²⁷ Unamuno’s chauvinist, paternalistic assumptions and his cultural imperialism are clear and have been noted by many contemporary scholars. But rather than embracing the material politics of Spanish Empire—he opposed the neocolonial invasion of Morocco too—he translated, as Joan Ramon Resina writes, “the end of political empire [into] the founding of a language empire and the achievement of linguistic supremacy over historical and geographic contingencies.”²⁸ The losses in the Spanish-American War could only be compensated by gains within Spain in order to exercise “spiritual” authority over the cultures of the New World, in what Robin Fiddian calls an “illustration of the metropolitan intelligentsia’s reluctant adjustment to the postcolonial realities of fin de siglo Spain.”²⁹ Unamuno saw a threat: the former colonies were not sites where casticismo was evolving and progressing; in fact, they were fragmenting Castilian and fusing it with indigenous, black diasporic, or other elements that had no roots in Iberian soil or being. Thus, he launched a project of unifying Spanish-speaking peoples around the world, not only in Spain. Unamuno was at pains to praise the fact that the Spanish language had been reconstituted and manifested in so many colorful modes in the New World—rather than confessing that it had variously conquered, absorbed, and wiped out many local tongues. Unamuno desired to see a number of distinct dialects of Spanish all bound together by an “habla común” (common speech), a core of Iberian Castilian. The resulting tongue would be “sobrecastellano” (“Super-Castilian”), which had absorbed and purified elements from abroad and vernacular variations on Iberian Spanish.³⁰

While dismissing writing by German or Italian immigrants to Latin America, Unamuno celebrated the “Americanization” (referring to Spanish America, not the United States) of Spanish and the poetry of Peruvian and Uruguayan Spanish vernacular traditions. In his early, much-debated 1894 article on Martín Fierro, Unamuno called the poem “the flower of gaucho literature, that literature which is so unknown here [in Spain]…the consecration of [Argentina’s] independence, the flower of the criollo spirit.”31 The poem was, for him, at once Argentine and “deeply Spanish…Spanish in its language…Spanish in its soul.”³² Indeed, he even held that gaucho idioms are a “resurrection of our adventurers from the earliest times of the Reconquest.”³³ This work, whose idioms and dialectal terms are ultimately “of the pure Spanish race” (españoles de pura raza), was Homeric for him, and it carried forward a tradition seen in the Poema del Cid and Chanson de Roland. But, he added, for the poem to be “propagated in Spain, it will have to be accompanied by a short glossary and notes for explication.”³⁴ He illustrates this program for how to study the demotic and to make it intelligible abroad by including notes on words like chacras (small farms) and boliche (grocery store), calling them the “breath of the Pampa,” formative parts of the “lengua nacional argentina.”³⁵ (However, he undermines his own celebration of Martín Fierro by claiming that its non-Spanish words derived mostly from indigenous terminology, not from words used by criollos or settlers of Spanish origin.)³⁶ The colonial hegemony of the past was, for Unamuno, now multicultural unity-in-diversity, and he propagated this thought not only in Spain but also in over four hundred publications in Spanish American media in the first quarter of the century.³⁷ Moreover, technological modernity, rationalism, science, and commercial expansion were symptoms of Europe’s disease, for which Spain, after undergoing its own indigenous version of a Reformation, held the cure in its global linguistic empire of irrationality and mystical mythology.

Here we return to a paradox of nativism and, indeed, to many versions of exceptionalism: Unamuno himself claimed that he searched out the “least translatable” in each culture and felt that languages had “commerce between them” yet resisted successful translation, so what ends does translation serve other than affirming the foreignness of the Other, rendered in necessarily inadequate Spanish? Unamuno used his own Spanish existence as an example of how to approach the foreign, claiming that he “felt” the many parts of Spain’s intrahistorical past in himself, including its “Africanism” and “Europeanism” alike. But he could only feel them through an “intimate relationship” formed by “oppositions” and internal dialectics: “When I was a child, my mother, who had studied in France, had me learn French; I read German at twenty, English at twenty-five, and I’ve scarcely read in Spanish. I have lived outside of Spain in spirit—and that is what has made me Spanish.”40 When giving his own literary-philosophical lineage, he wrote that “I can point to Hegel, Spencer, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, Leopardi, Tolstoy, as my main teachers, and along with them the thinkers with religious concern, and the English lyric poets…. As regards Spaniards, I can affirm, for sure: none, nobody. I scarcely have been influenced by any Spanish writer at all. My soul is not very Spanish.”⁴¹ By “discovering” his Hispanicity through foreign-language contacts rather than through the supposition of a mother tongue, he hopes to revive what had become a stale heritage of Spanish literature. Translation and native-language enrichment, in other words, were impossible but nevertheless mutually beneficial projects. When he composed his experimental novel-essay Cómo se hace una novela (How to make a novel) in Spanish, Unamuno had it translated into French in 1926 before it appeared in Spanish, then published it in Spanish in 1927 by retranslating the French version back into Spanish, with annotations on the French. He similarly refused to read works in translation, devoting himself instead to learning the original language and then pairing it with his own work.

Turning back on himself in his own poetry, Unamuno writes, “Translators, traitors! / Fathers of Esperanto, / bricklayers of Babel!” He calls upon translators—framed with an allusion to the Italian play on words traduttore, traditore—to look not only to other languages but also “below ground,” to the “singular tongue, the untranslatable, / eternal, universal.”⁴² His first major collection of his own poetry, Poesías (1907), included translations of Carducci, Leopardi, Coleridge, and his Catalan friend Joan Maragall at the end. In a note to that volume he wrote that he saw no point in trying to render Italian free verse, for example, in Spanish syllabics. He explained, too, that he used in one of his own poems a word, “enlojada,” that “is not found in the Royal Academy’s dictionary, but that I have gathered”—returning to his familiar phrasing—“from the mouth of the pueblo.”⁴³ As in the case of Pound, the line typically drawn between translation and original poetic production was constantly crossed and blurred, and as did Pound, Unamuno valorized discovery and creation by error rather than by mastery in the process of translation.⁴⁴

A voracious reader and autodidact, Unamuno knew French, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Latin, German, English, Swedish, and German well enough to translate from them. His publications for the journal La España Moderna, a review of European thought, brought dozens of new works to Spanish readers.⁴⁵ These included translations of Schopenhauer, Hegel, Leopardi, Herbert Spencer, Carl von Lemcke, Karl Kautsky, and Karl Larsen. He soon began contributing translations to other prestigious magazines such as La Revista Internacional. Briefly under the spell of Hippolyte Taine’s work, he also translated more foreign views of Spain, including the German Ferdinand Wolf’s Studies in the History of Spanish and Portuguese National Literature. In the final years of the 1800s, he translated Shakespeare, Shelley, Spencer, and Carlyle, among many others, and he published versions of English tracts on political economy. All told, he produced more than one thousand pages of translations from English between 1893 and 1900.⁴⁶ Translations of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Whitman would follow soon after.

In the early 1900s, an appreciation of English literature was in vogue among Spanish intellectuals, and Unamuno idealized it. For him, English was “the richest and most complete” language because of its three distinct historical sources (Anglo-Saxon, Franco-Norman, and Latin), making it the “omnivore of languages.” (Castilian, however, had “double” the resources, he held, only they were as yet untapped.)47 He believed that “English literature is, without a doubt, the least monotonous, has better variety of tones and accents to offer us and above all that in which we find more men who have written and fewer professional literatos.” Unlike French and its rootless cosmopolitanism, as he saw it, “English literature has become superior to all other literatures because it has been one of aficionados and not professionals.”⁴⁸ Furthermore, England’s political life was, for him, the “the most translatable,” and it exhibited the best reciprocal expressive relationship with its literature.⁴⁹ But among common Spaniards, a “xenophobic…Anglophobia, an artificial and artificed product” of political cultures, remained in place. This fear was the “product of bad education and a systematic falsification of past history” born of the myth that English literature presented a threat to the “fragile…traditional castizo education.”⁵⁰

He warned, however, that English was potentially suffering by way of its homogenization through commerce—that it was becoming, in effect, an argot of international business. Just months after the War of 1898, Unamuno published “The English-Speaking Folk,” an article in which he claimed, with an eye to Anglophone U.S. writing, that English was becoming “a Volapük of business and Sabir of the uncouth.”⁵¹ Under the “banner of divine conquest through industrialism,” he writes, English is now the “most advanced language [idioma] among the developmental courses of our tongues [lenguas],” removed from any single, knowable pueblo.⁵² English has been “enriched through derivation, through metaphorical translations of meaning, and greatly through the pressure of foreign terms. It is, like the people who speak it, a predatory language; it takes words where it happily finds them and appropriates them simply by saying them in its own way.”⁵³ This market-driven assimilative process will eventually impoverish English to the point of linguistic death, he holds.

English could be recovered through the same internal/external mechanisms that held promise for reviving Spain: indeed, English could be deepened and made more complex by translations by Spaniards. Blake, H. G. Wells, and above all, the lyric poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, and Keats are often cited—influenced him, and he appreciated the challenge their uses of English presented: “writers in Southern [European] countries…ought to immerse ourselves sometimes in Northern fogs…. Our own depths are spread out fully through contact with the foreign [lo extraño]…. Usually what is most untranslatable in foreign literatures is poetry, and within it, the lyric tradition…especially the English lyric,” which he saw as “the purest expression of a national culture.”54 He found “national culture” in lesser-known works, too, such as William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1822–1826), a series of portraits of bucolic and pastoral life in the English Midlands. Drawing a parallel to the Spanish romantic poet and dramatist José Zorrilla, who collected national and folk legends and revived forgotten plays, Unamuno insists that such works are nearly untranslatable because of their reliance on localism, yet they must be translated. (Unamuno’s notes from his readings in foreign literatures are full of marginal comments on words he discovers in them that are local, vernacular terms not found in dictionaries.) Unamuno then continued his own studies of folktales with essays on the Welsh romance legends, and he wrote both on England’s cultural historians who took an interest in Spain, such as George Borrow, and on contemporary Hispanists such as Martin Hume.

In his first major translation, Unamuno published the entirety of Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (1837) from 1900–1902, just as he was revising and reissuing his own En torno al casticismo. Carlyle famously wrote with extensive use of the first person, in the present tense, as an imagined eyewitness to the French Revolution, and with an epic, metaphorical, novelistic, multiperspectival, and rhetorically rich style. This literary combination, Unamuno suggested, was necessary for Spain to digest in this moment, just after the Disaster: Carlyle was an intrahistorian of a foreign culture, a disseminator of foreign (German) thought and literature domestically, and a foreigner (a Scot) within a homogenizing empire. Unamuno praised Carlyle’s prose as a Scots-inflected blend of English’s Germanic and Latinate roots executed with authorial personality, not with the artificial detachment that Unamuno associated with academic historiography. Carlyle also spoke to Spaniards because, Unamuno wrote, “we lack that which Carlyle called the heroism of the pueblo.”55 Unamuno nicknamed him “Maese Pedro,” after the puppet-show director in Don Quixote, for “his way of ‘making’ history”—his pulling the strings of farce, comedy, tragedy, and more at perfect moments.⁵⁶ When Unamuno’s translations were presented to Spanish readers, the editor of the journal Advertencia wrote that “Carlyle, the prince of English writers, is unknown in Castilian. All that has been published is one treason [traícion] of Heroes, incomplete.”⁵⁷ This note was followed by a letter from Unamuno himself, saying that his translation was “crude, because I have proposed to reflect the very peculiar and not always clear style of this eloquent Puritan.”⁵⁸ He wrote that his “great feat in translating The French Revolution into Spanish was simply to take the same liberties with Spanish that [Carlyle] did with English, and where he forged an English word I would forge a Spanish one…[in order to capture] the specific Carlylean rhetoric,” which required “abusing Castilian Spanish.”⁵⁹

Translating Carlyle contributes to the reformation and renovation of Spanish. Carlyle became an ambassador of Anglophone literature for Unamuno, and so it was that, in the same moment in which he was arguing that Spaniards must recover only what was buried in their linguistic soil, he was establishing himself as one of the chief importers of works whose “Anglo-Saxonism” was far removed from anything Spanish. He realized later that he chose “Carlyle, not for his ideas, which strike me as very sparse and not at all original, but for his exposition of them, his impetuous style”; he declared that “it was Carlyle who perhaps contributed most to my finding my own style.”⁶⁰ Carlyle had provided a path for literary English that Unamuno would synthesize with his own Spanish poiesis. But the preservation of a lyric tradition and the literary witness to political change, Unamuno saw, were more active in the United States—a country that, unlike England, was a postcolonial empire that also had a still-visible Hispanophone presence.

What intrigued Unamuno most was not just the monolingual English canon of American literature, which he did not find furthered England’s linguistic empire, but also the growing Hispanophone world of the United States—and the new class of mostly academic Hispanists. Unamuno saw here the grounds for a reciprocal circuit of intellectual exchange between two nations that had just been at war. He befriended a number of Hispanists, translators, and expatriate American Hispanophiles: Warner Fite, Everett Ward Olmsted, Royall Tyler, Rudolph Schevill, Homer Earle, Raymond Weaver, and Archer Milton Huntington. At the same time, Unamuno’s students Federico de Onís and Ángel del Río became leading Hispanists in the United States, and Unamuno himself contemplated leaving Salamanca for a teaching post in the United States as early as 1903.61 Turning away from British Hispanists, he concluded that by 1906, “the United States now is the nation in which Spain is studied better and more extensively. All of its great universities now have Spanish literature and language courses.”⁶² Unamuno believed that the U.S. interest in Spain was a boon for his own casticismo. Addressing a Spanish audience, he acknowledges that politics bear on his own account of U.S. Hispanophilia, and he acknowledges the local fear of an ulterior motive on the part of the “anglosajones” to dominate Spanish America politically and economically. But Unamuno repudiates this by saying that the American Hispanists do not seek material gain or domination; instead, they desire to “penetrate the spirit” of Spanish America by way of Spain—to understand their neighbors to the south by understanding Lope de Vega and Cervantes better.⁶³ Again relying on a nostalgic impression of spirit dubiously separated from the material effects of imperialism, he reads this through the reigning philosophical discourses in the United States—especially positivism and what he sees as its connections to global capitalism—but claims to see an antiutilitarian thrust behind this U.S. intellectual enterprise. Spain and its former republics, on the other hand, are consumed and ripped apart by a brand of positivism that has killed their imaginations.

Shortly after 1898, Unamuno began staging a series of U.S./Spanish juxtapositions:

When Spain was forced in war with the United States, the daily press let loose a flood of ineptitudes when talking about the butchers—other times they would call them, with a little more finesse, “pigs”—the barbarous Yankees who thought of nothing other than amassing millions. A chorus of proud and presumptuous ignorance. One could talk of Emerson or of Longfellow, of James or Channing, but it was useless. And later, when they defeated us, one could hardly recognize the spirit of Emerson, for instance, in the portraits of our conquerors.⁶⁴

Unamuno’s apologetic tone after 1898 would resonate with the U.S. audiences that had begun to read his works in English translation in the early 1900s, when academic, literary, and popular writers—from Havelock Ellis to Ford Madox Ford—frequently discussed him. (He also corresponded with figures ranging from Pound to Frank to Lewis Mumford, and he met Dos Passos, Hemingway, and others personally.) In 1909, Unamuno published a series of essays, entitled “The Spanish Spirit,” in the London weekly Englishwoman, in which he argued that Spanish was becoming, with English, “one of the two great Indo-European languages of the world” but that these two tongues would soon find a unique union.⁶⁸ Unamuno was happy, for instance, to see the signal term “Yankee” absorbed into Spanish as yanquí rather than importing the “exotic” letter k to Spain.⁶⁹ He added contributions to the Independent and the Saturday Review, then wrote several book reviews for the British academic journal Hispania.⁷⁰ These engagements with the Anglophone literary and professional world took place just as Unamuno was composing what would become his most discussed work beyond Spain, The Tragic Sense of Life (Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, 1913)—a text he claimed to have written with a volume of Keats in hand.⁷¹ The English translation of Tragic Sense proved to be the culmination of a broad-ranging English-Spanish synthesis that Unamuno had been theorizing and working to enact across the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The book, a philosophical meditation that Unamuno conveys through interpretations of his own international precursors in thought and literature, is antisystematic and thrives on a resistance to form and rational articulation. Indeed, Unamuno quotes Whitman in the middle of the text in defense of his method: “that tremendous Yankee poet [wrote that]…‘I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me.’ ”72 Rather, the text implies a theory of translation that encapsulates Unamuno’s debts to Carlyle and his approach to native languages. By claiming in his author’s preface to the English edition that his translator, the British Hispanist J. E. Crawford Flitch, had “merely converted not a few of the thoughts and feelings therein expressed back into their original form of expression,” Unamuno binds his own authorial capacities to a non-Spanish language that happens to dominate the globe in the moment.⁷³ He adds that he has revised the translation extensively in collaboration with Flitch, so much so that it is now “a correction, in certain respects, of the original.” Moreover, the necessary changes and cuts “perhaps compensate…for what [they] may lose in the spontaneity of my Spanish thought, which at times, I believe, is scarcely translatable.”⁷⁴ The text includes myriad allusions to, citations from, and discussions of Anglophone figures, from Arnold and Bacon to Oliver Wendell Holmes and William James. Unamuno characterizes Spain, furthermore, through quotations from Huntington.

Unamuno’s claims to have composed through English are difficult to verify with textual evidence. What is certain is that his international career, and particularly his importance in the United States, almost immediately ascended. When The Tragic Sense of Life appeared in English in 1921, it garnered over twenty reviews, and the praise landed Unamuno a “translation package” to bring his complete works into English.⁷⁵ Unamuno found himself treated, as his peer Ortega soon would be, as a global voice representing Spain in the interwar period. Beyond his work he became known as a “spokesman for social justice and intellectual freedom” after he was dismissed from his rectorship in 1914, tried in 1920, and exiled in 1924. The British Athenæum, which commented regularly on his works, cited him as a voice for “intellectual progress” who was being victimized by a “militarist government” and added that “if he has a weakness, it is his passion for Englishmen.”⁷⁶ The Hispanist Aubrey Bell called him a “modern Don Quixote, tilting against the windmills of every rigid and stilted system,” and the Encyclopedia Britannica and London Mercury alike averred that he was the greatest living Spanish writer.⁷⁷ Unamuno’s banishment to the Canary Islands soon became an international cause célèbre for intellectuals and writers, even eliciting condemnation from T. S. Eliot, who typically refrained from making such statements in Criterion.⁷⁸ Unamuno’s own caustic letter that blasted the Primo de Rivera regime circulated in translation across a number of media globally.

Seeking to capitalize on Unamuno’s growing name, Ezra Pound wrote him in 1920 and sent him a copy of his Quia pauper amavi (1919) with an inscription, then followed with several more letters. Pound had just become the foreign editor for the revamped Dial, and he wrote to Scofield Thayer that Unamuno “is accepted as the most important Spanish writer,” so that if the magazine wanted to convey “what the outer world ought to know about Spain” and to gain the “respect of [the] Hispanic world…a monthly Unamuno wd. be a good start.”79 Pound asked Unamuno for some “literary studies or ‘recuerdos’ [memoirs]” for the Dial, hoping that he would “make The Dial your representative organ in the United States.”⁸⁰ An advertisement for the new Dial in the Nation named Unamuno as part of the review’s staff covering “The Continent,” but the Spaniard eventually published only one piece in the Dial, a short, enigmatic parable of literary philosophy called “The Cavern of Silence” (1924).⁸¹ Unamuno also wrote for other Spanish-language media in the United States, such as the New York–based El Gráfico in 1917 (where he urged Spaniards again to “Spanish-ify” themselves), and he dedicated a poem to the first issue of the Revista Hispánica Moderna, founded in 1934 by Onís. He added to this bilingual and translational work by writing prologues and epilogues in the 1920s and 1930s to Spanish translations of English-original works, including W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land (1885), the novel about an Englishman in Uruguay that memorably figures into the plot of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Unamuno’s ties to Onís and other U.S. Hispanists ensured that he was discussed often in Hispania; his works made their ways into classrooms and graduate seminars, and his name was mentioned frequently in the new academic journals of modern languages in the United States in the 1920s. Intellectual and middlebrow media discussed him, too, and by 1924, the imagist poet John Gould Fletcher would even use Unamuno’s work to reread Whitman.82 That same year, the International Book Review (New York) named Tragic Sense one of the ten greatest books of the century (though the century was not even one-quarter finished), and later, Unamuno wrote for journals such as Books Abroad, was reprinted in the Living Age, and, finally, contributed to the New York Times. His exchanges with Waldo Frank then solidified his relationship with the United States. In 1927, Unamuno published in the Argentine Síntesis his touchstone article “Hispanidad,” which was partially a review of Frank’s Virgin Spain (1926)—a text that, in turn, includes a discussion of the “strictly modern…radical mystic” Unamuno.⁸³ Seeing Spain in mystical, organicist terms that converge neatly with Unamuno’s, Frank calls the philosopher “the strongest moralist of our day,” adding that “Wells and Shaw have thin voices beside his well-aimed uproar” (VS 282). Unamuno in turn praises Frank’s portrait of Spain and then translates the final chapter of Virgin Spain, “The Port of Columbus.” The chapter is an imagined dialogue between Cervantes and Columbus in which the writer has the explorer look upon the chaos and Babel of the land he discovered. Columbus confuses it with Spain—“Are you looking at America, or Spain?”—and sees that the New World has been nothing but the “Grave of Europe” (VS 296, 298). And when “Modern Europe flourished,” Spain was busy playing mother to a new world: “She bore America” (VS 299). Columbus finally prophesies that Spain will endow its eternal “spirit” upon “the north: they whose speech is English” and who have ruined the world with global capitalism (VS 300).

The fusion that Frank sees between Spain and the United States appealed to Unamuno: for both of them, Spain could be the spiritual leader of a commercialized, Americanized globe. Unamuno believed that his own career could forge such U.S.-Spanish bonds, much as Jiménez hoped to do poetically. He collaborated robustly with the U.S. journal El Mercurio—a vital and emblematic source of the Spanish language in the English-dominated country, as he saw it. The review listed him on the masthead as its correspondent-editor for sociological issues and, at one point, offered him the editorship. With its simultaneous international focus and dedication to the local growth and dissemination of Hispanophone cultural life in the United States, El Mercurio stands as a vital record of Spanish intellectual debate of the moment.⁸⁴ In an early issue, Unamuno published one of his own seminal essays, “Lengua y patria” (1911), in which he lauds Argentina for having resisted an English invasion and defended its Spanish linguistic traditions.⁸⁵ He sees language as the “currency” in the “commerce of ideas,” for “today, language [lengua] is the principal patrimony of all Hispanic pueblos, it is our fortune, the banner that our merchandise must display.” To conserve the Spanish language, he writes, is to conserve the “individual spiritual independence” that it brings, and without that, political independence is meaningless. Turning to the Anglophone world in which his readers mostly lived, he writes that

English, therefore, has performed the linguistic-racial union that consolidates the United States, yet it has only done so in tension with many other languages. Spanish, meanwhile, is the language of some twenty nations without being the monopoly of any one of them—not even Spain—and he now tells his Hispanophone audience that it “is the language that will one day share with English global dominance.”⁸⁷ The “international tongue [lengua]” of Castilian “will come to be the second, and perhaps the first, tongue in the world,” he prophesies.⁸⁸ This triangulated circuit—the United States, Spanish America, and Spain—maps an evolving “spiritual” world in which Unamuno sees a global future of vernaculars forged by linguistic extensions of English and Spanish.

Unamuno ultimately searched, as he did in all national literary traditions, for the organic, authentic spirit of this country—the United States—in which he himself was now a literary voice in two languages. He read Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, then many works by William James. Soon his library contained books by writers ranging from Franklin to Pound.89 But for Unamuno, the English-language literary production of the United States was summed up in the work of Whitman, who was then being translated more frequently in Spain. He had written several essays on the poet; one of the first was “Adamic Song” (1913), in which he characterizes Whitman as “that American, enormous embryo of a secular poet.”⁹⁰ Whitman was an American master of the lyric poetry that Unamuno appreciated in England’s history. In another article, “Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman” (1918), written during the Great War, Unamuno praised Whitman for having juxtaposed an opium eater, a fishpacker, and a prostitute with the president and his cabinet, all as a means of capturing the entirety of the pueblo. In his poems on Lincoln, “Whitman gave to the world his poems to define America, its athletic democracy…he left us a book that is a man, a mirror of this most overflowing collective life…. He was not a politician in the specific sense of the word…but contributed more to the formation of the civil soul of the Great Democracy of North America than most of the politicians of his day.”⁹¹

Whitman furthermore appealed to him as a Hispanophile who recovered Spain’s presence in the United States. Whitman’s poem “Spain” (1873) recycled a number of persisting tropes for Spanish decay, feudalism, immutability, and syncretism—Spain was the dying mother of the New World, a fallen monument frozen in time and immobile. Yet Spain’s vitality in the history of the United States was key to Whitman: Spain’s death and life in the New World were entwined. Returning to his poetic tropes in an essay-letter “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality” (1883), Whitman writes that, against the overemphasis on the United States’ English and German roots, “no stock shows a grander historic retrospect—grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity and honor” than Spaniards.⁹² Whitman urges Americans to “dismiss utterly the illusion-compound” portraits of Spaniards that he claims are stereotypes invented from The Mysteries of Udolpho, and he even asserts that the “cruelty, tyranny, [and] superstition” found in Spanish history is equivalent in the “corresponding résumé of Anglo-Norman history.”

This romantic melting pot became for Unamuno an ideal figuration of the United States and its Spanish roots: Whitman, who had a prominent name in Hispanophone letters by the turn of the century, was for Unamuno the bard of a shifting, bilingual U.S. tradition. First, Unamuno imitated some of Whitman’s prosody in his own works.⁹³ Then, alongside verses addressed to Melville and Poe, he wrote a short poem to Whitman in 1929:

Whitman’s spiritual populism was, for Unamuno, a version of humanistic socialism rooted in Christianity, and Whitman presented for him a lyrical portrait of heterogeneity contained under the aegis of a single national destiny. His translation from 1930, which is mostly literal and attempts to replicate Whitman’s cadences in Spanish, begins as follows:

More important, Whitman’s poeticized America (“the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”) and Unamuno’s intellectualized, spiritualized Spain converged in the early 1930s. The Spaniard believed that Whitman had founded a line of poetry that was being continued by certain U.S. poets who rejected the commercialized flattening of English internationally. Paralleling Dos Passos’s reading of Spain, Unamuno immersed himself in the works of three regional American poets whom he saw as modern heirs to Whitman—the “Poets to Come” whom Whitman himself addressed in his own imagined future. They were the Chicagoan Carl Sandburg, Sidney Lanier of Georgia, and William Vaughn Moody of Indiana. Unamuno’s readings of them inspired not translations but poeticizations in his own neoromantic, pastoral verse. That is, he composed through English much in the way that he claimed to have thought and articulated Tragic Sense, as he had done since reading Carlyle, and he characterized his own poetry as a mixture of Italian form and English lyric. Even when looking to vernacular poets, he rarely tried to translate dialect; instead, he relied again on glossing and adaptation. He dedicated a poem to the occasion of the baptism of his first grandchild after reading Sandburg’s “Haze,” for instance, and quoted the line, “Why do the cradles of the sky rock new babies?” Unamuno appreciated the ways in which, in the opening section (“Sunrise”) of Lanier’s “Hymns of the Marshes,” the land and language are fully entwined:

He responds with a poem called “Remembering Dante While Reading ‘Sunrise (Hymns of the Marshes)’ by Sidney Lanier.”⁹⁹ Here, as Unamuno fuses his own voice with two foreign ones separated by six centuries, he writes of a “celestial shore on the river of the dead” in which he sees a mythic boat. This vision carries him to a place where “eternity fell / (in a single moment, / and I heard in the darkness / —God lay in its center—) / to the past, the grave / of the whole future [porvenir].” Unamuno appreciated Lanier’s archaic diction and Anglo-Saxon sounds—like Unamuno, Lanier had written scholarly works on Welsh romances and Arthurian legends—finding them a Whitmanian version of a vernacular threatened by modernity. Lanier, however, went too far for Unamuno by writing in the dialectal voice of illiterate Southerners: dialect must remain linked more closely to the “core” language, he believed, as Sandburg’s use of slang did.¹⁰⁰

Unamuno’s closest identification came with Moody. In his notes on Moody, he sees that this poet’s sources are “his pueblo, [which allow] his I’s…[to] come about by con-versation, not dia-logue. All poets are one, one collective poet…. [Even if in] auto-dialogue.”¹⁰¹ After reading Moody’s “Road-Hymn for the Start,” Unamuno wrote a new poem subtitled “Errand-goers who forget?—William Vaughn Moody.” The line he cites comes from the following sequence in Moody:

He concludes his poem inspired by Moody with the same word ending his Lanier poem: porvenir (“future,” but also literally por- + venir [to come, to pass]). This subtle signal of an American future returns us to the legacy of Whitman that Unamuno sees not in the industrial world power that the United States had become but in the recovery of a Volk and their vernacular variations on English. Unamuno desired to foster contact for Spaniards with a certain part of the United States: the bucolic, socially diverse conglomeration of regions, vernaculars, and intrahistories that he saw as authentically American—and in danger of being wiped out by the dominant culture. (He even attempted, briefly, to capture in Spanish the rhythm of Langston Hughes’s poetry: a poem written on Unamuno’s copy of Fine Clothes to the Jew reads: “Ríe, briza, arrulla, llora, / cantando sobre la cuna” [“She laughs, rocks, coos, cries / singing above the cradle”].)¹⁰⁴ English and Spanish, he presumed, would unite and cover the world but would not produce hybrid tongues such as Spanglish. His own work—in English translation, as a translator of English, as a Spanish poeticizer of English, and more—would exemplify this revised Hegelian course of entwined “spirits.” Whitman had no poetic lineage in the Spanish language in the United States that Unamuno had explored; rather, his own writing carried Whitman’s legacy, in translation and poiesis, to Spain.

Thus it was that Unamuno became, across the interwar period, one of the first leading authorities in Spain on Anglophone U.S. literature through both his commentaries and his poetics. By contrast, his position in English-language literary history remains uncertain.105 Even in Spain in 1930, just when his work was being appropriated by the burgeoning fascist and Falangist movements, La Gaceta Literaria devoted a special issue to his internationalism, featuring essays from writers around the world (including Dos Passos) titled “Unamuno and France,” “Unamuno and England,” “Unamuno and Judaism,” and so forth.¹⁰⁶ He was called by the New York Times in 1932 “the greatest living philosopher among the world’s hundred million Spanish-speaking people”; only four years later, when his engagements with U.S. culture were peaking, he died while under house arrest just after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.¹⁰⁷ In an obituary, the Hispanist and translator Walter Starkie dubbed him “the most important Spaniard that has ever lived since Goya,” but he lost favor with other liberal intellectuals for having briefly backed the Nationalists in the war.¹⁰⁸ This disparate legacy—Unamuno as archetypal nationalist and cultural imperialist, Unamuno as cosmopolitan mediator of international exchange—bespeaks the central paradox of nativism’s problem with translation. Unamuno is both Spanish and un-Spanish, a figure who, when seen through translation and as a translator, cannot be resolved or made authentic in the ways modernist historiography seems to demand.