From a Close Distance: Ralph Cohen's Presence

1969

The first time I heard about a journal named New Literary History was in a building from the late fifteenth century and under quite eccentric circumstances. After two years of cultivated and only seldom intellectually distinguished boredom as a student of German and Romance Literatures at the University of Munich, I had decided to spend my third year at Salamanca, which, I believed, was the university neighborhood (something like a quartier latin) of Madrid. For multiple reasons, that year would turn out to be key to my decision to make teaching and writing about literature my profession, but only one of these reasons had directly to do with what I learnt at the University of Salamanca. Above all, I fell in love with the raunchily charming otherness of a country whose political space was then controlled by an old-style military dictatorship, with all the unpleasant consequences in everyday life that one could imagine. Forty years ago, Spain was much more remote from Germany (where I had grown up) and from France (where I had spent most of my last high school year) than we can possibly imagine in today's globalized present. Spain was the otherness of that neat purple light touching the ground on late summer afternoons, the espresso-perspiring coziness of crowded cafés during a Siberian-cold winter; Spain was harmless books secretly traded at prohibitive prices, and a madman in his long coat, standing at the street corner throughout the year, mumbling "a las cuatro y media"; and Spain also was, not the least, the gaping intellectual emptiness in most of the classes that I took. All of this awakened in me the desire to spend a life far from what was culturally "home."

There was one exception, though, in the academic world: a professor in his late thirties or early forties (a very young age for being catedrático) who, astonishingly, was not interested, like everybody else, in one or another political vision of the world, with a compactly overweight body, a sharp mind, and such an obsession with order in his seminars that he had a janitor lock the door of his classroom in that gorgeous university building from the time of the Catholic monarchs, with the explicit intention of excluding students who came late. Fernando Lázaro Carreter, who would soon leave Salamanca for the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid and later become President of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language, was easily the most impressive teacher I have ever had. Organized, learned, irresistibly funny, vitriolic, complex, daring, he earnestly recommended that we subscribe, as he had already done, to a scholarly journal that was about to be launched under the name of New Literary History. Now, this was a time when, for historical reasons going as far back as the defeat of the Armada, very few Spanish scholars in the humanities would read English, and Ralph Cohen, miraculously, had managed to reach him with his project. Through a bookseller in Germany, I subscribed to New Literary History, and Lázaro found the time to discuss the first issue with me.

1971–1974

It was also thanks to Lázaro that I got my first academic job. He encouraged me to translate into Spanish a number of essays from the then quite lively German discussion about issues in literary theory and to publish them with a short introduction as a paperback with Editorial Anaya. The project earned me contact with, a certain degree of attention from, and finally a position at, the University of Konstanz as an assistant to a senior professor who was one of the protagonists of the emerging school of "Reception Theory." When I met this advisor and academic superior, for the first time on the way back from Salamanca through southern Spain, southern France, Switzerland, and southwestern Germany to my Bavarian hometown, New Literary History and Ralph Cohen once again became part of the conversation. The German scholar, with intimidating determination and a directness that made him sound as if he were giving orders, assigned me to "the project of the new...