1616, Bilingual Modernism, and Anglo-Spanish Literary History

[There is no] point in studying the “History of English Literature” as taught. Curiously enough, the histories of Spanish and Italian literature always take count of translators. Histories of English literature always slide over translation [, but in fact . . .] English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of translations.

—Ezra Pound, “How to Read” (1928)

A bilingual English-Spanish literary journal was a modernist vision, in some form, on several continents in the interwar era. In 1916 William Carlos Williams arranged a “Spanish-American number” for the little magazine Others, which was printed fully in English.¹ Two years later, Ezra Pound planned a bilingual “Spanish number” of the Little Review with the help of his friend Tomás Morales, a poet from the Canary Islands.² This project, however, was never realized.³ Over a decade later, in 1930, the Argentine writer, editor, and publisher Victoria Ocampo planned to launch a new review with the help of her North American colleague Waldo Frank. Frank pushed her to make the publication, which he thought should be called Nuestra América (Our America), an English-Spanish periodical primarily of New World literature. Instead, Ocampo founded Sur (South) in Buenos Aires in 1931. The magazine was completely in Spanish, but it included numerous translations of works by Anglo-American and European modernist writers from both the Old and New Worlds—Frank, Pound, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, and Virginia Woolf among them. This bilingual ideal was fulfilled, however, by a related project—and one that is unique in the interwar era for its linguistic and national specificity—initiated by the Spanish poet Manuel Altolaguirre with the help of his wife, Concha Méndez.

While living in London between 1934 and 1935, Altolaguirre and Méndez founded, edited, translated for, wrote for, and printed 1616: English and Spanish Poetry. The interrupted and incomplete project that Altolaguirre began was an attempt to integrate centuries of intertwined English and Spanish literary history. It culminated in the assertion, for instance, that the Englishness of Eliot (however cultivated) and the Spanishness of Federico García Lorca are mutually implicated with one another, and that—indirectly redressing the history Pound cites in the epigraph above—their works belong in one another’s national and linguistic literary traditions. Specifically, Altolaguirre works “bi-nationally” in 1616, resurrecting from various points the forgotten interpenetration in the literary pasts of England and Spain, when the two were in much fertile contact both with one another and with other European literatures. With his own sustained engagement with English literature, Altolaguirre hoped to re-create this bilingual intermingling in 1930s London, where interest in Spanish letters was relatively small, then to circulate it abroad as an exemplary type of venture. His work, furthermore, was a leading effort of a new pro-European liberal democracy in Spain that sought to inscribe itself into the modern continent’s republic of letters. The record of 1616 encompasses a moment of periodical history that provides some overlooked or surprising inroads—whether internationalist forms such as the sonnet or transnational sympathies as expressed by the British Romantic—into the archive of the making of innovative modernist poetic traditions. This brief overview of the journal and its relevance to contemporary literary studies uses 1616 as a model for continuing the scholarly inquiry into modernism beyond nationally and linguistically based categories in literary history, while still drawing on the heuristic and historical potential of those categories. That is, 1616 belongs neither to “Spanish” nor “English” modernism purely, nor to the dominant language of either one. Rather, it is both a “Spanish-English modernist” text and a sketch of the history of a bi-national literary tradition and the bilingual modernist ideals it implied.

Manuel Altolaguirre, who grew up in Andalusia in southern Spain, was a leading poet of the country’s Generation of 1927, and the context of his career in the twenties explains much about his periodical ambitions. The loose collection of writers known as...