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Hispania Features

Editorial

Although it is not customary for Editors of scholarly journals to write about deadly diseases afflicting teachers, I think it is important for someone in our profession to bring up the subject of AIDS. Many members of AATSP and readers of Hispania may be unaware of the fact that several distinguished Hispanists have already died of AIDS and others are currently dealing with the final stages of this disease.

It is therefore important that we as colleagues realize that it is in our power to do something for our peers who are dealing with the difficult problem of living and working with AIDS. One such individual, Michael Lynch, Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, has published a moving description of what it is like to be in such a situation (Profession90, MLA 1990, pp. 32-36). He points out, among other important observations on the subject, the stigma and shame that are frequently experienced by people with AIDS and their families. This results in such abberations as the publication of two funeral notices: one published by the family, in which every effort is made to hide the cause of death, and another produced by the deceased ’s friends, in which they celebrate the individual’s life and express their love for her/him.

What we in the teaching profession can do for colleagues who have AIDS is inform students and teachers that AIDS cannot be acquired through casual contact in the classroom or in the homes of people with AIDS. We can demonstrate our compassion for people with AIDS and our solidarity with them. As in the instance of fellow teachers afflicted with other potentially fatal diseases such as cancer or heart disease, we can let our colleagues know that we care about them, we can see that they are not marginalized and isolated, and by demonstrating our love and concern for them, we can perhaps lighten their burdens a little and bring some companionship and joy into their final days.

This is the first number of our journal produced entirely through computerized typesetting in our editorial office. The purchase of the equipment and software and the learning of the techniques of «Desktop Publishing» could not have been accomplished in the short span of three months without the help of Hispania’s new Associate Editor for Electronic Publishing, Professor Joseph A. Feustle, Jr., of the University of Toledo. Dr. Feustle has been an important member of our section on Computers for Professional Applications, and in his new capacity as Associate Editor, he will provide invaluable expertise in the area of Electronic Publishing.

We are happy to welcome several new members of Hispania’s Editorial Board. With the expansion of the Board size permitted in the new Bylaws of AATSP, we will now have two members specializing in Luso-Brazilian Studies instead of one. They are Mary L. Daniel of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ronald M. Harmon of California State University-Fullerton. Also joining us as Associate Editor is David T. Gies of the University of Virginia. The addition of these outstanding colleagues will contribute to our journal’s continuing aspiration towards excellence.

The President’s Corner

Hace poco más de un año me llamó un colega bastante molesto y me dijo: «Ahora que llegarás a ser presidente de la AATSP, quiero que me hagas un favor. Me da pena que la mayor parte de lo que se publica en Hispania esté escrito en inglés. Esto no tiene sentido alguno en una organización como la nuestra. Comunícaselo siquiera a Ted Sackett». En el último ejemplar de Hispania (73.3), otro colega, Guillermo Latorre, se quejó de algo parecido.

Antes de seguir adelante vale la pena decir, y por lo visto confesar, que todos hemos sido culpables en alguna ocasión u otra de lo que se refieren nuestros colegas. Por ejemplo, ¿cuántas veces he publicado en inglés reseñas y entrevistas en Hispania? ¡Es mejor ni acordarme!

Pero el problema va más allá de las publicaciones en Hispania. A través de los años me he venido dando cuenta del hecho de que muchos de nosotros nos negamos a hablar los mismos idiomas con los cuales nos ganamos el pan de cada día. Este fenómeno no es nada nuevo; prevalece desde hace muchísimos años.

Desafortunadamente se oye demasiado inglés en clases de literatura, en charlas entre estudiantes y profesores, en reuniones sociales de la AATSP, así como también en las mismas ponencias o talleres que se presentan.

Me pregunto el por qué. ¡En qué cabeza cabe que nos quejemos de nuestros estudiantes cuando ellos se niegan a usar la lengua o lenguas que les enseñamos si nosotros mismos no cumplimos con nuestro deber! Todo está fuera de enfoque. A fin de cuenta tanto el español como el portugués tienden a sobrevivir a pesar del inglés que les rodea.

Hay una excepción en todo esto. Al escuchar a los estudiantes que nos llegan a la universidad de las escuelas secundarias, los maestros en las escuelas públicas merecen un rotundo aplauso porque, por lo general, parecen insistir mucho más que nosotros en que el estudiante hable, practique, y escriba en la lengua que estudia. Allí, por lo común, el aprendizaje de lenguas parece ser más vivaz, serio, intenso, y con orgullo.

¿Por qué persistimos de una manera descuidada y torpe en usar tanto el inglés en nuestra profesión? Creo que todos sabemos por qué. Por cierto que todos tenemos siquiera una respuesta (o excusa), pero me parece que hay que empezar a cambiar no sólo de actitud sino de práctica y manía, ya sea en el aula o retirados de ella.

El español y el portugués tienen un enemigo, por decirlo así, y somos nosotros, pero lamentablemente no nos hemos fijado en esta realidad o la hemos rechazado de una manera inconsciente como si no tuviera importancia. Ha llegado la hora en que debemos voltear todo al revés para que veamos las cosas más claras. Sólo así podremos evitar que el español y el portugués sigan perdurando bajo las presentes condiciones.

New Mexico Highlands University

Professional News

The Ivory Tower of Babel. The people of Babel expected to reach heaven if they could only build a tower high enough. This tower looked imposing and demanded respect like many venerable universities. Yet even without divine intervention it could never have reached heaven, because it was built on unrealistic expectations. Even if the University of Babel had produced enough interpreters to overcome the confusion of tongues, it would not have worked.

The image of the ivory tower which goes back as far as King Solomon, is often associated with universities. In it we imagine a solitary genius endowed with an overabundance of intellect (but, alas, usually precious little good sense), far removed from the real world outside the walls of his alma mater, thinking up some fabulous hypothesis, e.g. that the real reason why the Tower of Babel would not have reached heaven is that it was planned at the wrong angle of inclination. Of course, he will furnish the needed mathematical and physical equations to prove his point.

When we turn to the schools of languages and linguistics we rarely find curricula based on the realities and demands of the marketplace where students ultimately are supposed to work. In this regard, the United States ranks among the worst academic offenders. Coming from the Department of State, let me try and define what the realities and demands of the diplomatic marketplace are, and which interpreters and translators must be able to cope with if they hope to obtain employment there.

Let me start with interpreting. The interpreting needs of the foreign ministries and by extension the national governments of the world have risen dramatically as a function of the greater frequency of bilateral meetings and the instant communication requirements of the electronic and optical media.

If we look at the history of the language services performed by the Department of State, we notice some startling changes which mirror the experience of other national governments. For the first 165 years of our existence, translating was the dominant activity in Language Services and twice we were known as the «Bureau of Translations». Our mission statements were full of detailed instructions on the translation of written documents and the comparison of multilingual treaties. Interpreting was only mentioned in passing, if at all.

Somewhere around 1955, interpreting caught up with translating. In the sixties and seventies, interpreting requests accelerated sharply, leaving translating far behind. Last year, in 1989, in terms of dollars paid to the language professionals performing the service, interpreters received about 90% of the earnings paid out by the Department of State, translators about 10%. All over the world, the demand for interpreting has risen sharply in the last twenty years or so.

For a large number of reasons, which could be the subject of a separate presentation, consecutive interpreting remains the preferred technique for diplomats and skilled negotiators. At present, about 75% of our interpreting is done in the consecutive mode. Simultaneous, though, is inching up slowly and may account for one-third of our interpreting needs by the year 2000.

Teaching consecutive interpreting, however, demands great skills, interpreting aptitude on the part of the teacher and some professional experience. Teaching simultaneous interpreting is considerably easier. It is amusing to note that the only teachers whom I have ever encountered who dispute this premise are teachers who have never taught consecutive or practiced it at the professional level.

Teaching linguistics is the easiest. That is probably why it is so popular. You don’t even have to know a foreign language. You can engage in perverse acts with your own mother tongue. There are really only two prerequisites to becoming a theoretical linguist. The first is to learn the jargon of this sacred closed society. Once you master it, and you can say things like «the cerebral lateralization for syntactic and semantic components in dyadic polyglot listeners unaffected by dysphasia», you will sound like somebody who really knows something of profound significance about language and -with the passage of time- you will actually believe it. Moreover, the mechanics of cerebral lateralization are totally beside the point if neither hemisphere of the brain contains enough useful information and instruction to analyze with any hope of success what is being heard through either ear.

The first is fairly easy. It is the second prerequisite which requires a tour de force and a streak of imagination of which not everybody is capable. Without it you can never be a good theoretical linguist. You must be able to imagine that language is a rigid, logical

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structure of mathematical precision, something akin to a crystal. You must be able to imagine that language grows like a crystal in predictable patterns. You must be able to believe that pre-existing language resembles the Grand Canyon. Wild and romantic but structured in clearly discernible patterns. You must be able to study morphology, grammar, syntax, prefixes and suffixes as of they were layers of the Canyon wall, giving you orderly clues to its past, present and future.

Unfortunately, language is not structured like a crystal, it never is and never was. Otherwise the Italians would still speak Latin or a linear derivation thereof. Language is not like the Grand Canyon. It has no orderly sequence of layers whose reading yields any results of practical significance.

Language is a jungle that grows unpredictably in all directions at once. New words are created every day. New meanings are attached to old words every day. Formerly fashionable words slide into oblivion every day. One year you could still say «Negro» in the United States. The next year the word was «Black». No a single linguist predicted it. You open a dictionary of the 1950s and it tells you the word for the concept is «underdeveloped country». The dictionary of the 1960s says the word is «developing country». The dictionary of the 1970s claims it is «less developed country». The dictionary of the 1980s says the concept is called «third-world country». The dictionary of the year 2000 may call it «upward mobility country». Who knows? Nobody. Each dictionary is obsolete the day it is printed.

Except for the needs of historians, the only real language is the language of today. If you want to be a competent linguist, you must leave the ivory tower, pickup your machete and venture into the jungle. You take a look at what has grown since yesterday and hack a path to the clearing called communication. And if you can reach it, then you can teach others how to do the same.

It is no accident that there are so few theoretical linguists among the top interpreters and translators of the world. Their training does not prepare them for coping with the rigors of the jungle. And many of them do not really wish to cope with reality. They prefer to build one Tower of Babel after another.

For fifty years some of them have been building a general translation machine. I am sure such a machine will eventually be constructed. But certainly not by theoretical linguists who think that by stuffing words, grammar, and syntax into a computer they will be able to make it create a translation. What an absurd idea.

Words, grammar and syntax are no more to translation than nails, hammer and saw to a carpenter. They are only incidental to the process. What would we think of a carpenter who would throw hammer, saw and nails at a pile of wood, expecting it to arrange itself into a cabinet?

Nobody can make a machine translate before having first correctly analyzed which processes -marvelous, ingenuous and highly complex processes- make a talented human being create a good translation. The hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on some machine translation projects could have built many schools of interpretation and translation with huge libraries and state-of-the-art equipment. And that would have made a useful contribution to international understanding.

Why do I dwell so long on theoretical linguistics? Not only because I have a certain bias against this discipline. I gladly admit that I do. It is because this discipline dominates so many language departments at universities, especially in the United States. The ivory tower mentality prevalent in this discipline is the chief stumbling block to developing useful language teaching programs and programs of interpretation and translation at many colleges and universities. They are the establishment. They have the power. They control the purse. They define what language is supposed to be and what their university does in the field of languages.

Back to diplomacy and its interpreters. What do we require of them? What can the university do to equip them for their profession? Diplomatic interpreters need to master consecutive interpreting. But they also must be able to hold their own in simultaneous interpreting.

The diplomatic interpreter must be a generalist. He may have to handle fifteen different subjects in one week. He will often encounter those subjects at a very high level of sophistication, as prime ministers, presidents, cabinet officers and negotiators usually have top experts at their side who may go into complex technical detail and into highly differentiated arguments. That is why the university is such an ideal place to train diplomatic interpreters. A university usually teaches a wide range of subjects at a high level of sophistication. Many reputable diplomatic interpreters were trained at the Universities of Geneva, Mainz (Germersheim) and Paris, to give just three examples of universities with outstanding schools of interpretation and translation.

Basic courses in law, economics, natural sciences, philosophy, history, even engineering are an ideal preparation for diplomatic interpreting. Foreign languages and interpreting instruction are not enough. The more general education the better. Therefore it is important that interpreters not be locked into an ivory tower of their own while at a university interpreting school but be provided considerable exposure to the other university departments.

The requirements for diplomatic translators overlap those of the interpreters in many areas. They also must be generalists and should be trained with a wide variety of terminology and substantive exposure to various subjects. University translation programs usually include too many texts from international organizations because they are so readily available. While this will benefit those students who will go on to work for such organizations, future diplomatic translators will encounter such texts infrequently when working for national governments.

Here are some of the topics translated in the Department of State last month: tax laws, uranium enrichment, art forgeries, financial reports, extradition requests, a fisheries agreement, African minerals reports, the Statute of the Romanian Republican Party, military technology, permafrost construction, customs procedures, a foreign exchange agreement, aviation safety, drug interdiction, Presidential correspondence, court rulings on bank confidentiality, a broadcasting agreement, satellite technology. These are only half of the translation topics of the month. They readily illustrate why diplomatic translators must be generalists. They also tell us that an educational background in law, economics, finance, natural sciences and engineering is often more helpful than knowledge of political science and the composition and procedures of international organizations. Even less helpful is an extensive background in literary translations with which so many students get overdosed at university translating schools.

That brings us to another interesting chamber of horrors in that particular ivory tower where curricula are designed without undue interference from the real world in which the students will have to make a living. On the wall of that chamber is a framed motto to guide the curriculum writer. It reads, «Teach what you know best!» Whatever benefits are inherent in teaching literary translation, it does not help produce professional translators who can hold their own in the marketplace of the 1990s or in diplomacy, except for those very few who can make a living in this limited field. The reluctance of certain deans and instructors to venture beyond the literary confines into the real professional translation environment is probably not so much born of laziness and insecurity but of the same ignorance of the reality of the situation that made Marie Antoinette exclaim, «Let them eat cake!».

I have tried to show that there is a gap between the translation demands of diplomacy and the skills provided by the interpreting and translating programs of many universities and other institutions of higher learning. If I have shot one dart too many at theoretical linguistics, I apologize. Linguists can blame this on my ignorance of the subject.

Harry Obst
Director of Language Services
U.S. Department of State

Translators Help Sheriff. Criticized for its reliance on Border Patrol agents as translators, the Fallbrook, Calif., sheriff’s substation will begin using this month private citizens to translate for Spanish-speaking victims and witnesses.

Immigrant rights advocates have long argued that using Border Patrol agents creates an intimidating and threatening atmosphere, dissuading many undocumented residents from reporting crimes.

The sheriff’s department denies that Border Patrol agents have ever arrested victims while reporting a crime but is implementing the program in hopes of alleviating the perceived problem.

Hispanic Link
March 5, 1990

Over 62.000 Students from the United States Studied Abroad in 1987-1988. In 1987-88 a total of 62.342 students from the United States received academic credit for study abroad, according to a survey by the Institute of International Education. This figure represents an increase of 13.858 (29%) since the HE conducted its first survey in 1985-86. The report provides support for the widespread impression that study abroad is burgeoning, although the HE points out that a portion of the increase reflects a broader response to the later survey. Europe continued to attract the largest proportion of students -75%. This percentage decreased from the 80% reported in the previous survey, while the percentages increased slightly for students receiving credit for study in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Women greatly outnumbered men among the nation’s study-abroad population: nearly two-thirds were female. Four of the five countries most frequently chosen as destinations by students from the United States are in Western Europe: the United Kingdom (29%), France (12%), Spain (8%), and Italy (8%). The fifth-ranked country was Mexico (5%). Almost half the American students studying abroad were in liberal arts, foreign languages, or social studies, while 11 % were in business and management. Only 5% chose engineering, mathematics and computer sciences, or physical and life sciences. This pattern of specialization was in complete contrast to that of foreign students in the United States, 40% of whom were studying engineering or business and management.

HE president Richard M. Krasno comments in the report that «strong educational relationships with Europe are especially important as 1992 approaches. Europeans are placing a new emphasis on educational exchange, through initiatives such as ERASMUS, which promotes international student movements that bring a new kind of integration to the European community. ERAMUS will fund tens of thousands of university students to learn other European languages and study in EC countries other than their own. It is intended to create a large group of young professionals who can function in the new reality of an integrated Europe.

ADFL Bulletin
21.3 (Spring 1990)

Arizona English Only Law Unconstitutional. On February 6th, United States District Court Judge Paul Rosenblatt struck down an English-Only amendment to the Arizona Constitution which was narrowly approved (580, 830-569, 993) by state voters last fall. Judge Rosenblatt’s ruling, in the case of Yñiguez v. Moffors, was based on the First Amendment of the United States Constitution which guarantees the right

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of free speech.

The English-Only amendment to the Arizona Constitution required state and county governments to conduct business in English, with narrow exceptions for public health and safety, education, and criminal proceedings. Although other states have declared English as their official language, the Arizona law was the most stringent in the nation.

Judge Rosenblatt’s decision was the result of a lawsuit file by María-Kelly Yñiguez of Tempe, a state Department of Administration employee. Ms. Yñiguez, who evaluates and arbitrates medical malpractice claims, charged that the law inhibited her First Amendment right to free speech and prevented her from discharging her responsibilities as an employee of the state. In rendering his decision, Judge Rosenblatt wrote that «a state may not require that its officers and employees relinquish rights guaranteed them by the First Amendment as a condition of public employment».

NABE News

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en la pantalla. Con el título de Yo, la peor de todas, se ha filmado la vida de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Dirigida por María Luisa Bemberg, quien cuenta en su haber con éxitos cinematográficos como Camila y Miss Mary, esta película se estrenó en Buenos Aires el 9 de agosto del año en curso (1990). Ha tenido por asesor nada menos que a Octavio Paz, uno de los biógrafos más destacados de la poeta mexicana. Es más, el guión fílmico se basa en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, de la autoría de Paz, que Seix Barral publicó en 1982.

La película se concentra sobre todo en los últimos ocho años de la vida de Sor Juana, vida nada fácil para una mujer inteligente y erudita en el México colonial del siglo XVII, dominado por la Inquisición y una rígida estructura clerical. María Luisa Bemberg, declarada feminista, presenta a Sor Juana como una mujer valiente, la primera en defender los derechos intelectuales de la mujer en el continente americano. Yo, la peor de todas capta la tragedia de la poeta mexicana, quien se vio obligada a hacerse monja sin vocación religiosa, sólo porque así lo exigían las convenciones de la época a las mujeres solteras que aspiraban a ser respetables y respetadas.

Antonio Martínez
University of Nebraska

Library of Congress Gets New Luso-Brazilian Specialist. Iêda Siqueira Wiarda was recently appointed the Luso-Brazilian specialist in the Hispanic Division. With a doctorate in political science from the University of Florida, she is among the leaders in the field of Luso-Hispanic politics. In addition to teaching at the University of Massachusetts, the Foreign Service Institute and George Washington University, she has also lived and done extensive field work in Brazil, Portugal, Spain and the Dominican Republic, with shorter trips to other Latin American countries. She coauthored The Transition to Democracy in Spain and Portugal (University Press of America) and collaborated on The Democratic Revolution in Latin America (Holmes and Meier). She is working on a manuscript tentatively entitled Brazil: The Politics of Order and Progress. Her work has been supported by the Twentieth Century Fund, the National Institutes of Health, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and the Mershon Center. She has published a number of monographs, articles, book chapters and reviews.

LC Information Bulletin
September 10, 1990

Venezuela Network. Venezuelan Literature Association. Scholars working in the field of Venezuelan literature interested in organizing an informal association for the exchange of information, planning of special sessions at professional meetings, and related activities, are invited to contact Prof. Michael Doudoroff, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 3062 Wescoe, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045.

Tracy D. Terrell Excellence in Teaching Award. McGraw-Hill is pleased to announce the establishment of the Tracy D. Terrell Excellence in Teaching Award, to be presented annually to outstanding foreign language instructors at the college level. Detailed information about the award will be available at professional meetings during the 1990-1991 academic year. Those interested may also contact their local McGraw-Hill College Division representative.

Dr. Thalia Dorwick
Publisher, Foreign Languages

NEH Summer Seminars for School Teachers. The Division of Fellowships and Seminars of the National Endowment for the Humanities is sponsoring fifty-three seminars on a variety of texts in the humanities for four, five, or six weeks during the summer of 1991. Each seminar will provide fifteen teachers with the opportunity to work under the direction of a distinguished teacher and active scholar in the field of the seminar.

Teachers selected to participate in the program will receive a stipend of $2.200, $2.575, or $2.950 depending on the length of the seminar. The stipend is intended to cover travel costs to and from the seminar location, books and other research expenses, and living expenses for the tenure of the seminar.

Although seminars are designed primarily for full-time or regular part-time teachers at public, private, or parochial schools, grades 7 through 12, other school personnel, K-12, are also eligible to apply. Applicants must be U.S. citizens, native residents of a U.S. territorial possession, or foreign nationals who have been residing in the United States for at least three years immediately preceding the application deadline, March 1, 1991.

Participants in Summer Seminars for School

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Teachers in 1989 and 1990 are not eligible to apply to the 1991 seminars.

Applicants must write to the seminar directors for application instructions and forms and for detailed information about the structure, special requirements, site, and housing of seminars.

Applicants may apply only to one seminar. However, applicants may write to more than one seminar director for information. When writing to several directors, please request the NEH application booklet from only one director. Applicants who apply to more than one seminar will not be eligible for a place in any seminar.

The director and a selection committee will decide who will attend the seminar. Therefore, the complete application should be mailed directly to the seminar director and should be postmarked no later than March 1, 1991.

The two seminars will be of interest to readers of Hispania:

Cervantes’s Quixote and Persiles: Novel and Romance

July 1-August 2, 1991 (5 weeks)

Celia E. Weller

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

Whitman College

Walla Walla, Washington 99362

Camilo José Cela’s La Familia de Pascual Duarte, Pabellón de Reposo, La Colmena and the Modern Novel (In Spanish)

July 1-August 2, 1991 (5 weeks)

John R. Rosenberg

Department of Spanish and Portuguese Brigham Young University

Provo, Utah 84602

Information: NEH

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20506

(202) 786-0463.

King Juan Carlos Fellowships. A summer study program for teachers of Spanish was instituted in 1988 by the Sociedad Estatal del Quinto Centenario, the executive branch of the Spanish National Commission of the Quincentennial of Columbus’ Discovery of America (1492-1992), in collaboration with the Ortega y Gasset Foundation and the University of Minnesota.

The main purpose of the Quincentennial program is to familiarize teachers of Spanish in the U.S. with the social and cultural reality of contemporary Spain while at the same time providing them with the opportunity to improve their command of the Spanish language. The program emphasizes the development of curricular materials for secondary classroom use.

An important aspect of the Quincentennial program is a substantial scholarship fund that allows for maximum participation of U.S. teachers of Spanish. This program has been officially endorsed by His Majesty King Juan Carlos of Spain and therefore the fellowships carry his name. A maximum of three hundred fellowships of $1.845 each will be available.

Quincentennial program courses are specifically designed for teachers of Spanish in the U.S. Teachers of grades K-12, foreign language education, ESL, bilingual education, as well as college instructors are eligible and encouraged to participate in the program.

The five-week program will run from July 2 to August 4, 1991. Participants will spend four weeks in Madrid, with scheduled field trips to the cities of Segovia and Toledo. The third week of the program is devoted to a cultural excursion including the cities of Granada, Córdoba, and Sevilla, and other sites in Andalucía.

The Quincentennial program cost is $1.700 to recipients of the King Juan Carlos Fellowship. A maximum of three hundred fellowships of $1.845 each will be awarded. The total program fee, exclusive of fellowship, is $3.545. Tuition, study abroad and registration fees, complete room and board, medical insurance, field trips, and a one week excursion are included. Personal expenditures and air fare are additional.

Participants are encouraged to pursue additional funding from their school districts or other agencies which grant funds for educational purposes. An income tax deduction may be allowed for educational expenses; see your tax advisor or IRS representative for information.

The application deadline date is April 15; early application is strongly encouraged.

Information:

Quincentennial Summer Program

The Global Campus

106 Nicholson Hall

216 Pillsbury Drive S.E.

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, MN 55455

(612) 626-7138.

Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize Established. Beginning in 1991, the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize will be awarded each year for the best book published in English in the field of Latin American or Spanish literatures and cultures. Under the terms of the gift, the prize-selection committee will be especially interested in original, broadly interpretive work that enhances understanding of the interrelations among literature, the other arts, and society. The prize will be awarded for the first time for a 1990 publication; the deadline for nominations is 1 June 1991. Authors of nominated books need not be members of the association.

The Executive Council of MLA voted to accept a

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gift from the family of Katherine Singer Kovacs to establish a prize to honor her memory. Kovacs did her undergraduate work at Tufts University and earned an MA and PhD in French literature at Harvard University. In 1981, her edition of Le rêve et la vie, a Theatrical Experiment by Gustave Flaubert appeared. Ronald Gottesman, a colleague and friend, describes her as an «extraordinary teacher and a scholar whose understanding of the interrelationships among social and aesthetic forms in North American, Latin American and European cultures was breathtaking in its breadth, fine detail, and originality. She was a true comparatist, capable of handling the most complex interpenetrations of economics, politics, sociology, literature, and the fine and performing arts» (Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 [Feb. 1990]: 4).

At the time of her death in May 1989, Kovacs was on the faculty of Whittier College and was a member of the MLA.

To compete for the prize, publishers of eligible books should send six copies to the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, MLA, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003-6981. The winning author will receeve a check for $1.000 and a certificate, which will be pres ented at the 1991 MLA convention.

Independent Scholars. Definition: For distinguished published research in the fields of English and other modern languages and literatures. Eligibility: 1990 publications; author must, at the time of publication of the work submitted, (1) have received a terminal academic degree no fewer than four years earlier, and (2) not hold a tenured, tenure-accruing, or «tenuretrack» position in a postsecondary educational institution. Authors need not be members of the MLA. Requirements: Request an application form by writing to Independent Scholars Prize, MLA; send completed application with six copies of the work. Awarded annually. Deadline: 1 June 1991

Morton N. Cohen Award. Definition: For a distinguished edition of letters. Eligibility: Collections of letters, of which at least one volume was published between January 1989 and June 1991. Editors of important collections of letters are eligible to apply for the award, regardless of the fields the editors and the authors of the letters represent. Eligibility does not depend on membership in the MLA. Requirements: A letter of nomination indicating titles, editors, and dates of publication. Publishers will receive instructions from the MLA concerning the Awarded biennially. Deadline: 1 June 1991.

MLA’s Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize. Definition: For an outstanding research publication (book or article) in the field of teaching foreign languages and literatures. Eligibility: 1990 publications; authors need not be members of the MLA. Requirements: Six copies and a letter of nomination indicating title, author, and date of publication. Awarded annually.

Deadline: 1 June 1991.

Information: MLA Prizes

10 Astor Place

New York, NY 10003

(212) 614-6406.

YFU Receives Major Grant to Encourage U.S.-Mexico Student Exchange. Stereotypes that inhibit U.S.-Mexican understanding will be challenged by a major new teacher and student exchange program and curriculum package developed by Youth For Understanding (YFU) International Exchange through a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The $450.000 Kellogg grant will enable the Washington, D.C.-based YFU, one of the oldest and largest non-profit intercultural exchange organizations for high school students, to establish 50 «partner schools» across the U.S. that will offer a special focus on Mexican culture. Teachers from each of these schools will travel to Mexico where they will live with Mexican families and receive cross-cultural training and classroom materials to bring home with them.

The U.S. schools also will host a Mexican student for a year and will encourage their students to live and study in Mexico as part of the Kellogg grant. The award includes a $50.000 challange grant to elicit matching gifts for scholarships for those students who otherswise cannot participate in an exchange program.

Information: Victoria Street
1-800-424-3691.

Homenaje A Germán Arciniegas. En Bogotá, Colombia, en el mes de febrero de 1990, se realizó un Homenaje Nacional al Maestro Germán Arciniegas, honrándolo con el título de «Hombre de las Américas». Don Germán Arciniegas, nació el 6 de diciembre del año 1900, hoy día sigue activo como presidente de la Comisión Colombiana para la celebración de Quinto Centenario de América, además de presidente de la Academia Colombiana de Historia. El día 28 de febrero, en el Salón Santander del Hotel Bogotá Hilton, la Universidad Externada de Colombia auspició un acto con palabras de Pilar Moreno de Ángel y conferencias de Antonio Cacua Prada («G. Arciniegas y la soledad de su grandeza») y Otto Morales Benítez («El maestro Arciniegas emancipador cultural del continente»). La Universidad Central (con el Instituto Colombiano de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe) publicó un libro titulado Imágenes de América en Alfonso Reyes y en Germán Arciniegas: tres ensayos de J. W. Robb, con la colaboración bibliográfica de J. G. Cobo Borda, Germán Arciniegas: 90 años escribiendo un intento de bibliografía. (Presentación de Jorge Enrique Molina, Rector de la Universidad Central.) La editorial Planeta de Bogotá publicó El Embajador de Germán Arciniegas: su tercer libro enfocado hacia miembros de la familia Vespucci en el ambiente del Renacimiento florentino. (Véase sus biografías Amérigo y el Nuevo Mundo, 1955, y El

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mundo de la bella Simonetta, 1962.) En otro homenaje, el 31 de julio de 1986, en la Biblioteca Nacional de Bogotá, se le había dedicado un busto por el escultor César Gustavo García Paez, presentado por Otto Morales Benítez y el Presidente de Colombia Belisario Betancur.

James W. Robb
George Washinton University

Libro inédito de Vallejo. Claude Couffon, quien ha contribuido enormemente a fomentar el conocimiento de la literatura española y latinoamericana en Francia, se dispone ahora a conmemorar el cincuentenario de la muerte de César Vallejo con una gran noticia para todos los hispanistas: tiene en su poder un libro inédito del poeta peruano que piensa dar a la imprenta lo más pronto posible.

A Couffon, traductor al francés de Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Ángel Asturias y Gabriel García Márquez, el libro de Vallejo le llegó por una de esas raras circunstancias de la vida. Cuando se publicó Escalas por primera vez, Vallejo le regaló un ejemplar dedicado al padre de Couffon, ejemplar que Vallejo recobró cuando Couffon padre murió. Luego, en 1936, estando en París, el poeta revisó todo el texto realizando de su puño y letra más de dos mil correcciones en ese ejemplar encuadernado, lo que para Claude Couffon significa en realidad una nueva versión de un antiguo libro. «Cuando estalló en 1939 la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Vallejo le entregó ese ejemplar a Roland Simon, un comunista, quien, al entrar en la resistencia, guardó el libro en su casa de Tolón, que permaneció abandonada durante muchos años. Simon murió, pero, hace poco tiempo, la hermana del resistente me llamó y me dijo que me tenía ese regalo». Así cuenta Couffon la maravillosa historia y prosigue: «Ahora trabajo en ese libro, que pienso regalar a Perú y España».

La publicación de esta nueva edición de Escalas será un verdadero acontecimiento en las letras latinoamericanas. Amigo de tres generaciones de escritores latinoamericanas, Claude Couffon siempre tiene alguna anécdota que contar y que, como ésta representa un trozo de historia literaria y de vida. A él se debe la publicación parisina de La ciudad y los perros de Vargas Llosa y la traducción al francés de El otoño del patriarca, de García Márquez. Ahora se dedica a los poetas centroamericanos, con especial interés en el hondureño Roberto Sosa.

Antonio Martínez
University of Nebraska

Alfonsine Society of America. The Alfonsine Society of America, organized in July 1990, has the primary purpose of promoting the interdisciplinary study in North America of Iberian cultures (Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, Galaico-Portuguese, Hebrew and Latin) that contributed to the cultural renaissance of the 13th century. Inasmuch as the efforts of Alfonso X supplied the main impetus for this advancement, the society will bear his name.

The ASA will publish annually a scholarly journal, Exemplaria Hispánica, devoted to all aspects and disciplines of Alfonsine culture. Membership in the ASA includes a subscription to this journal. The society will also organize sessions on Alfonsine culture at national and regional conferences.

The officers of the ASA are: President, John E. Keller, Kentucky; Executive Director and Editor, Roberto J. González-Casanovas, Catholic Univ.; Assistant Editors, Matthew Bailey, Holy Cross and José Escobar, College of Charleston, S.C.; Book Review Editor, Diane Wright, Michigan State University; and Corresponding Secretary, Roger Smith, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Membership dues categories are: Individual, $10; Patron, $25; Institution, $20; Founding Member, $50; Individual Lifetime, $200. Membership dues, scholarly articles and inquiries should be directed to: Dr. Roberto J. González-Casanovas, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. 20064.

R. Roger Smith
Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Fondo de Cultura Económica in San Diego. FCE inaugura sucursal en San Diego. El 7 de setiembre de 1990, el Fondo de Cultura Económica inauguró su primera sucursal en los Estados Unidos con la presencia de su director actual, el ex-presidente Miguel de la Madrid. La sucursal servirá de distribuidora para los libros publicados por el Fondo y tal vez de otras casas editoriales de México. Para conseguir los libros para sus cursos a precios más bajos, avisen a sus librerías universitarias que pueden pedir los libros al Dr. Edur Velasco Arregui, Fondo de Cultura Económica USA, Inc., 1407 Second Avenue U/L, San Diego, CA 92101; teléfono: (619) 595-0621; fax (619) 5950622.

Seymour Menton
University of California, Irvine

Alcance. Brazilian Portuguese Development Project announces the availability of Negotiating for Meaning: Papers on Foreign Language Teaching and Testing, edited by Dale A. Koike of the University of Texas at Austin and Antonio R. M. Simões of the University of Kansas at Lawrence. This publication outlines the proceedings of the First Conference on Portuguese Language: Teaching and Testing, held at the University of Texas at Austin on March 3-4, 1989. To order, please send $6,50 (includes postage within the U.S.), payable to the Institute of Latin American Studies, to Elizabeth Ann Jackson ALCANCE- Brazilian Portuguese Development Project, SRH 1.310, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712-1155.

New Theater Journal. Gestos is a journal devoted to critical studies of Spanish, Latin American and Chicano theater. Housed in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Irvine, it contains articles in Spanish and English solicited from scholars

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in Latin America, the United States and Europe. Gestos strives to integrate all studies in Hispanic theater and critical theory. Each issue includes essays, book reviews, reports of theater performances from around the world and features one unpublished play by a prominent dramatist in the Hispanic world. There is a group of well-known scholars from all over the world participating as readers or on the Advisory Committee.

Information: Juan Villegas

Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese

University of California

Irvine, CA 92717.

Camões Center. The Camões Center at Columbia University has recently issued another number of its quarterly. The following topics and articles make up this issue:

«Fernando Pessoa: An Introduction» by José Blanco

«The Portuguese Constitution in Comparative Perspective» by Juan J. Linz

Focus on Brazil: «Whither Goest? The Brazilian Literatura de Cordel in the 1990’s» by Candace Slater

Focus on Spain and Portugal: «The Hidden Legacy of Macau» by Marie-Pierre Astier

Information: Camões Center

Box 19 International Affairs Bldg.

Columbia University

New York, NY 10027.

TESOL Journal Begins. The Executive Board of TESOL has named Elliot L. Judd to be the first editor of the TESOL Journal (originally called the TESOL Teacher).

The TESOL Journal will be refereed and devoted to teaching and classroom research. It is designed to meet the needs of those working directly with EFL and ESL students, including teachers, program supervisors and administrators, curriculum and material writers, teacher educators and those who are engaged in classroom-oriented research. Articles will address these different audiences and instructional levels (from pre-kindergarten to post-secondary education) in a variety of teaching circumstances (academic and nonacademic; bilingual, refugee, special, EFL, ESP, and ESL programs). All of these groups are part of the TESOL organization and should be served by the journal. The journal will also contain a book-review section focusing on classroom materials (texts, computer programs, and videos).

Information: Elliot L. Judd

Editor of the TESOL Journal

Department of Linguistics

(M/C 237)

University of Illinois at Chicago

Box 4348

Chicago, IL 60680, USA.

Texas Foreign Language Association will meet 1-2 March, Corpus Christi at the Marriott Hotel. Info: Cathy A. Champagne, 14135 Barrone, Cypress, TX 77429.

Second/Foreign Language Acquisition by Children, 14-16 Mar., Raleigh, NC. Info: Dr. Rosemarie A. Benya, East Central University, Ada, OK 74820-6899; (405) 332-8000 ext. 290.

Illinois Foreign Language Teachers Association, 14-16 Mar., Schaumburg. Info: IFLTA, P.O. Box 2244, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137.

Southwest Council of Latin American Studies (in conjunction with Texas Tech Literature Symposium), 14-16 Mar., Lubbock. Info: Janet Perez, Texas Tech Univ., Box 4460, Lubbock, TX 79409-1033.

American Association for Applied Linguistics, 21-24 Mar., New York City. Info: AAAL, 1325 18th St. N.W., Suite 211, Washington, D.C. 20036-6501.

Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 21-24 Mar., Indianapolis. Info: J. Thrush, Madison Area Technical College, 3550 Anderson St., Madison, WI 53704; (608) 246-6573.

Satellite Communications for Learning, 22-24 Mar., Durham, NC. Info: Pegge Abrams, If 3 Language Building, Duke Univ., Durham, NC 27706; (919) 684-2857; Fax (919) 684-2753.

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, 24-28 Mar., New York. Info: TESOL, 1600 Cameron, Suite 300, Alexandria, VA 22314; (703) 836-0774; Fax (703) 836-7864.

Georgetown University Roundtable, 1-4 Apr., Washington. Info: James E. Alatis or Carol J. Kreidler, School of Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington 20057; Fax (202) 687-5712.

Computer Assisted Language Learning & Instruction Consortium, 2-6 Apr., Atlanta. Info: CALICO, 3078 JKHB, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602; (801) 378-7079; Fax (801) 3786533; Bitnet CALICO @BYUVAX.

Sixth Annual University of Tulsa Comparative Literature Symposium, April 4-6, Tulsa OK. Info: Jane Nicholson, Foreign Languages and Comparative Literature, Univ. of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK 74104. Topic: Unsettling New Worlds: Interrogating Discovery.

Northeast Modern Language Association, 5-7 Apr., Hartford, CT. Info: Daniel Walden, Dept. of English, Pennyslvania State Univ., University Park, PA 16802.

International Linguistic Association, 6-7 Apr., New York. Info: Johanna J. Woltjer, Columbia University Center for Computing Activities, 612 W. 115th St., New York 10025.

Ohio Foreign Language Association, 7-9 Apr., Columbus. Info: Charles Hancock, Dept. of Educational Studies, 259 Arps Hall, Ohio State Univ., 1945 N. High St., Columbus, OH 43210.

California TESOL, 11-14 Apr. Santa Clara. Info: Kara Rosenberg, 820 Bruce, Palo Alto, CA 94303;

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(415) 856-8296.

College Language Association, 17-20 Apr., Columbia, S.C. Info: Robert P. Smith, Jr., P.O. Box 42885, Philadelphia, PA 19101.

Texas TESOL V, 20 Apr., Eastfield College. Info: Fred Tarpley, Dept. of Language & Literature, East Texas Station, Commerce, TX 75428; (214) 8865253,-5260.

Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 25-28 Apr., New York. Info: Northeast Conference, P.O. Box 623, Middlebury, VT 05753-0623.

Southwest Conference on Language Teaching (in conjunction with California Foreign Language Teachers Association), 26-28 Apr., Anaheim, (CA). Info: Jan Herrera, 10724 Tancred, Northglenn, CO 80234; (303) 452-1038; CompuServe 71261-3606.

Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages, 9-11 May, Spokane, (WA). Info: Ray Verzasconi, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis, 97331-4603; (503) 737-2289 or 2146; CompuServe 75530-727.

Conference on Romance Languages and Literatures, 15-17 May Cincinnati. Info: Carmen Dominguez, Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures, Univ. of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0377.

National Association for Foreign Student Affairs, 24-27 May, Boston. Info: Sherie L. Voland-Koob, NAFSA, 1860 19th St., NW, Washington, D.C. 20009

«Travel and Discovery: Real and Imaginary». 8-10 July, Melbourne, Australia. Info: Conference Organizing Committee, Romance Languages, Monash Univ., Clayton, Victoria 3168, Melbourne, Australia, (Co-sponsored by German Studies Dept.).

Seventeenth World Congress of the FIPLV, Theme: Foreign Language Learning and Lifelong Education, National Center for Foreign Language Teaching of T.I.T., XI., 10-14 Aug., Pecs, Hungary. Info: Basel, Bocskaiat 37, H-1113 Budapest, Hungary.

International Comparative Literature Association, 23-28 Aug., Tokyo. Info: Dept. of Comparative Literature and Culture, Univ. of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-Ku, Tokyo 153, Japan.

Latin American Jewish Studies Sixth International Research Conference, will take place 6-8 October, on the campus of the University of Maryland at College Park. Info: Saúl Sosnowski, Chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 or call him at (301) 454-4305.

Bridging Theory and Practice in the Foreign Language Classroom, 18-20 Oct., Baltimore. Info: Dept. of Foreign Languages, Loyola College in Maryland, 4501 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD21210-2699; (301) 323-1010 ext. 2780; E-mail MORGAN@LOYVAXI.BITNET.

Foreign Language Association of North Carolina (in conjunction with SCOLT), 24-26 Oct., Raleigh-Durham. Info: Wayne Figart, 204 N. 16th St., Wilmington, NC 28401.

Southern Conference on Language Teaching (in conjunction with the Foreign Language Association of North Carolina), 24-26 Oct., Raleigh-Durham. Info: Lee Bradley, Valdosta State College, Valdosta, GA 31698; (912) 333-7358; Fax (912) 333-7408.

Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association, 25-26 Oct. Indianapolis. Info: Harry Reichelt, Indiana University, Dept. of German, Cavanaugh Hall, 425 Agnes St., Indianapolis, IN 46202.

Texas Foreign Language Association will meet 31 October-2 November, Houston at the Adams Mark Hotel. Info: Cathy A. Champagne, 14135 Barrone, Cypress, TX 77429.

The 15th Annual Conference Annual Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will be on 1-2 November, 1991 at Youngstown State Univirsity. The Committee is soliciting proposals for either workshops (2 1/2 hours), or other presentations (50 minutes or 30 minutes), on topics related to the teaching of foreign languages. The deadline for proposals is 15 March. Info: Foreign Language Conference, Department of Foreign Languages, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio 44555.

Japan Association of Language Teachers, 2-4 Nov., Kobe. Info: Japan Assn. of Language Teachers, Lions Mansion Kawaramachi, #111 Kawaramachi Matsubara-Agaru, Shimogyoku, Kyoto 600, Japan.

Rocky Mountain Regional TESOL, 1-3 Nov., Albuquerque. Info: Geraldine Wilds, CITE, Box 3W, New Mexico State Univ., Las Cruces, NM; (505) 646-3629.

Midwest Modern Language Association, 14-16 Nov., Chicago. Info: Maria A. Duarte, 302 English and Philosophy Bldg., Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City 52242-1408.

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 23-25 Nov., Washington, D.C. Info: ACTFL, 6 Executive Plaza, Yonkers, NY 10701-6801; Fax (914) 963-1275.

Modern Language Association, 27-30 Dec., San Francisco. Info: Modern Language Association, 10 Astor PI., New York, NY 10003-6981.

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, 2-8 Mar., Vancouver. Info: (TESOL), 1600 Cameron, Suite 300, Alexandria, VA 22314; (703) 836-0774.

Southwest Conference on Language Teaching (in conjunction with the Foreign Language Association of Nevada), 26-29 Mar., Reno (NV). Info: Jan Herrera, 10724 Tancred, Northglenn, CO 80234; (303) 452-1038; CompuServe 71261-3606.

Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 9-12 Apr., Dearborn, (MI). Info: Jody Thrush, Madison Area Technical College, WI 53704;(608) 246-6573.

Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages, 30 Apr.-2 May, Boise (ID). Info: Ray Verasconi, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Oregon State Univ. Corvallis 97331-4603; (503) 737-2289 or 2146; CompuServe 75530-727.

International Association of Literary Semantics, 31 July-2 Aug., Univ. of Kent, Canterbury. Info: Trevor Eaton, Editor, Journal of Literary Semantics, Honeywood Cottage, 35 Seaton Ave., Hythe, Kent CT21 5HH, England.

Texas Foreign Language Association will meet November 5-7, El Paso at the Westin Paso del Norte. Info: Cathy A. Champagne, 14135 Barrone, Cypress, TX 77429.

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 20-22 Nov., Chicago. Info: ACTFL, 6 Executive Plaza, PO Box 1077, Yonkers, NY 10701-6801; (914) 963-8830; Fax (914) 963-1275.

Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 25-28 Mar., Des Moines (IA). Info: Jody Thrush, Madison Area Technical College, 3350 Anderson Ave., Madison, WI 53704; (609) 2466573.

Francis C. Hayes. Professor Francis C. Hayes, Professor Emeritus of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Florida, died on Sept. 17, 1990, in Gainesville, Florida. He was 85.

Born in Asheville, N.C., Prof. Hayes earned his B.A. and Ph. D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at New York University, Charleston College, Guilford College, and the Universidad de Chuquisaca (Bolivia) before moving to the University of Florida in 1946. Later, he served as Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

During his years in New York, Dr. Hayes developed a life-long friendship with the eminent Hispanist John Crow, and became acquainted with Federico García Lorca. As a result of his pioneering work on gestures, Hayes later traveled to Hollywood to work with Harpo Marx on a number of humorous publications.

Author of numerous scholarly articles and books, including the Twayne World Author Series book on Lope de Vega, Hayes’s true lifelong love was the study of Spanish proverbs. He amassed a collection of over 85.000, which are now housed in the University Library of the University of Florida. Hayes’s dream of publishing this collection was sadly not realized during his lifetime.

Hayes was a longtime member of the Modern Language Association of America, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Phi Beta Kappa and the AATSP.

Dr. Hayes was a kind, compassionate, and gentleman, with a generous sense of humor. He directed several dissertations and was much beloved by his former students as well as by his colleagues.

David Pharies
University of Florida

George H. Wingerter. Dr. George H. Wingerter, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Classics at Austin College, died suddenly in Sherman, Texas, on September 26, 1990, at the age of 37. He is survived by his wife, Rebecca, and his parents, George and Julia Wingerter.

Born in Queens, New York, Professor Wingerter was valedictorian of Massapequa High School and attended Trinity University, where he received many academic honors and graduated summa cum laude with majors in Spanish, Classical Studies, and Latin American Studies. Dr. Wingerter earned a master’s degree in Spanish from Indiana University and then attended Yale University, where he was awarded both a master’s degree and doctorate in Spanish.

Professor Wingerter taught Spanish and Latin at Trinity University in the period 1978-1980, and served as teaching assistant in Spanish at Yale during his graduate study. He joined the faculty of Austin College in 1985, subsequently assuming the presidency of both the Classical Association of the Southwestern United States and the Metroplex Classical Association.

Extremely adept at the acquisition of foreign languages, Dr. Wingerter mastered Russian and Portuguese, in addition to Latin And Spanish. He was a dedicated teacher whose innovative approaches to language instruction were well known and much appreciated by students and colleagues. His professional interests encompassed a wide range of subjects, from Latin poetry to Brazilian fiction.

Professor Wingerter’s outstanding abilities were quite evident during our undergraduate years at Trinity University. «Big George» was well known for his broad knowledge, gentle manner, and subtle humor. He will be greatly missed.

Michael T. Ward
Trinity University

John Kevin Walsh (1939-1990). The Hispanic world suffered an irreparable loss with the death of John Kevin Walsh in San Francisco, on June 23, 1990. He was Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley. Highly praised by his distinguished British colleague Alan Deyermond as «the most important of a brilliant generation of North American medievalists», Professor Walsh made invaluable contributions to the study of Hispanic literature throughout his career. His research revealed the importance of performance in understanding the Poema de mío Cid, the complex layers of irony and parody in the Libro de Buen Amor, the influence of hagiographic narrative on the development of Medieval romance, and the relationship between Federico García Lorca’s life and his poetic and dramatic creations. His scholarship

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achieved clearer readings of Medieval texts by uncovering significant aspects of their literary contexts. He shared his findings with a generosity and an energy of expression remembered by all who knew him or read his published work.

John K. Walsh was born in New York, the second of ten children. He earned his A.B. degree at Notre Dame, spent a formative postbaccalaureate year in Spain, and earned his M.A. at Columbia University and his Ph. D. at the University of Virginia. In 1969, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1979 he attained the rank of full professor. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese made him its first nominee for the campus Distinguished Teaching Award. He is deeply missed by his colleagues and by the generations of students who were inspired and encouraged by his extraordinary generosity and individual attention.

Professor Walsh’s significant work on the structures and composition of the Libro de Buen Amor, drawing on profound and detailed philological research beginning with his doctoral work in Hispano-Arabic, was mindful of the liveliness and the complexities of literary creation in Medieval Spain, owing in part to the cultural interaction of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish communities. His edition of the Libro de los doze sabios (1975) is considered an exemplary publication of its kind. A born teacher, Professor Walsh taught generations of U. C. Berkeley students the basic skills of historical linguistics and Old Spanish, and in his memorable public lectures he guided his colleagues through the most difficult and elusive aspects of Medieval literature. His research on the poetry and theatre of García Lorca clarified the often-misunderstood relationship between the poet’s homosexuality and questions of gender in his writing.

Publication of his work in progress on the Libro de Buen Amor and on García Lorca is currently being carried out by his companion and collaborator, Billy Bussell Thompson and by his colleagues at Berkeley.

As a pioneering editor of La Corónica, Professor Walsh was able to encourage excellent work in Hispanic Medieval studies. He and Professor Thompson began the innovative and effective scholarly practice of free distribution of their «Lorenzo Clemente» imprint at Medieval sessions of the MLA, including their valuable editions of saints’ lives and the Coloquio de la Memoria, la Voluntad, y el Entendimiento (1986). In recent years, they made important contributions to Golden Age scholarship. The Walsh-Thompson collaboration, «The Mercedarian’s Shoes», (MLN 103 [1988]) solves a puzzle that had long confounded readers of Lazarillo de Tormes. With his article, «Tisbea’s’Fire» (1987) Professor Walsh brought his critical insights to comedic criticism.

During the fall of 1989, Professor Walsh taught a brilliant and memorable seminaron hagiography. His death came after a long and courageous struggle with HIV-related infections. He was noted for his genuine modesty, his generosity with colleagues, and his encouragement of younger scholars. To honor his love of teaching, a memorial scholarship fund for undergraduate majors has been established by his department. With his astonishing generosity, his unfailing kindness, his dedication as a teacher and his demanding standards for his own work, Professor Walsh brought out the best in his students and colleagues, and set an example for the profession. In the words of a graduate student who worked closely with him, he taught us that «the most gifted among us can also be the gentlest and most giving».

Emilie L. Bergmann
University of California, Berkeley

The Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian World

A New Critical Biography of Cervantes. The following review of Cervantes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990, 348 pp.), written by French scholar Jean Canavaggio and translated from French to English by J. R. Jones, appeared in The New York Times Review, March 25, 1990. The reviewer is Frederick Luciani.

Cervantes poses a special problem for the biographer. He always presents himself through disguises: counterfeit narrators, the ironic «I» of disingenuous prologues, characters who reproduce, ambiguously, fragments of his lived experience. His fiction is a mask for an identity that remains shifting and equivocal.

Jorge Luis Borges, that other Hispanic master of irony and illusion, offers an additional perspective on the Cervantes enigma. In his story «Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quijote», Borge’s 20th-century protagonist embarks on a very quixotic quest: to write Cervantes’s masterpiece again, in its entirety and word for word. He manages to rewrite a few passages of the novel, passages that, while linguistically indentical to the original, carry different meaning. Menard’s undertaking is subverted by the nature of language itself.

In Cervantes, competently translated from French by J. R. Jones, Jean Canavaggio, who teaches at the University of Caen in France, writes with an acute awareness of the duplicity of Cervantes’s «I». He also seems to bear in mind the Borgesian admonition that to reconstruct textual meaning in writing is to produce new fictions. The biographer must assemble a life from dissembling texts, and the critic must remember that his own meanings, as well as those of the author, lie at the heart of the texts that he deciphers. Mr. Canavaggio’s critical biography is marked by an extreme caution that both defines the limits of his task and proves curiously liberating.

The documentary evidence on Cervantes, while not without its own contradictions and deceptions, can be shaped into a life whose bare outline, at least, seems of unquestionable historicity. We know, for example, that Cervantes (1547-1616) was a combat ant in the Holy League’s great naval battle against the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, a slave of the Moors in Algiers, an itinerant administrator for the Spanish crown whose efforts earned him excommunication and imprisonment, and, late in life, the creator, of an international literary phenomenon -Don Quijote- that brought him considerable fame if little material comfort.

Mr. Canavaggio gives us as much of the man as an exhaustive review of the archival record can furnish. He then fills in the gaps, not with the literary «evidence» that a less circumspect biographer might have exploited, but with historical context. He skillfully combines the story of Hapsburg Spain -Its adventures, triumphs and disappointments- with that of the man who was Spain’s truest emblem and its greatest legacy to world literature.

When freed from the necessary constraints of biography, Mr. Canavaggio’s prose soars, but through spaces bounded by his self-awareness as a critic. His readings of Cervantes’s literary works emphasize their meaning for modernity, a meaning found in the same textual play of reality and fiction that makes literary biography so problematic. A constant in Mr. Canavaggio’s analyses is his notion that the Cervantes hero is self-invented: as he moves through an existentially ambiguous world he fashions a coherent self. Both experience and imagination have a role in this process. Cervantes’s characters evolve as they encounter the trials of «real life», but weave an identity through the fictions that they engage: madness, dreams, magic, literature.

Finally there is Cervantes himself. The book’s critical point of departure is also, it seems, its biographical terminus. Mr. Canavaggio’s painstaking biography suggests that the historical Cervantes is ultimately irrecoverable, the author’s readings of Cervantes’s works confirm that the Spanish master is reinvented in each of his imaginary selves and in each imaginative exploration of his fiction. Mr. Canavaggio’s combination of scholarly reserve and critical discernment provides what will surely be an enduring contribution to our understanding of Cervantes and his work.

George R. McMurray
Colorado State University

The Authentic Cid. A recent book by Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid (New York: Alfred A. Knof, 1990, 218 pp.) is reviewed by Ian Gibson in The New York Timer Review, April 8, 1990.

The doyen of Spanish philologists, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who died in 1968 at the age of 99, devoted a lifetime to the study of Spain’s great medieval epic, The Poem of the Cid. Behind such tenacity lay the desire, perhaps not altogether conscious, to establish that the poem’s portrayal of the famous 11th-century professional soldier is largely accurate historically and that the real life Cid (the word means

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«lord» in Arabic), Rodrigo Díaz, was as much a paragon of Castilian virtue as the epic’s impressive protagonist.

Menéndez Pidal was spurred on, it seems, by the urge to give Spaniards, at the time of national decadence, a hero they thought they needed (in 1898, the loss of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the last vestiges of Spain’s empire in America, had deeply humiliated the country). Little wonder, then, that his monumental compilation The Spain of the Cid became an immediate best seller on its publication in 1929, and hardly surprising that his view of the Cid was later enthusiastically taken up for propaganda purposes by the Franco regime. Film makers, too, were attracted by Menéndez Pidal’s superman -and Charlton Heston cut an appropriate figure in the 1961 film extravaganza, El Cid.

Richard Fletcher, who teaches medieval history at the University of York in England, has sought to put the record straight in his splendidly readable and insightful new book, The Quest for El Cid. While expressing due respect for Menéndez Pidal’s pioneer scholarship, he has no time for the old hero worship and refuses to assume that the great poem (on which Menéndez Pidal was determined to pin an earlier date than is now accepted) is a trustworthy guide to the Cid and his times.

The historical Rodrigo Díaz, if an aristocrat and notable warrior, which no one denies, was far from being a saint. More motivated by lust for booty than by piety (the epic reflects this consistency), he was not averse, when the occasion called, to torturing and killing. There is no evidence that the Cid had any inkling that he was taking part in the so-called reconquest of Spain from the Muslims. Like a true Castilian of the times, he was interested in the Spanish Muslims mainly for their gold.

I particularly enjoyed Mr. Fletcher’s meticulous placing of Rodrigo’s life in its historical context, not only Spanish but European, and the author’s ability to flash a sudden light on the telling everyday detail (he is very good on swords and armor, for example). To have succeeded in illuminating this background for the general reader is a major achievement, given the multilingual complexity (Castillian, Latin, Arabic) of the more or less contemporary sources and the mountains of scholarly commentary in many languages that have accumulated since the 19th century.

Mr. Fletcher’s quest is recounted with great verve and sensitivity -so much so that the book has had the effect of making me reread the epic itself with new pleasure. Those who do not read Spanish and who feel inspired to approach the poem for the first time can do so with profit in the 1985 Penguin Classics parallel text bilingual edition, The Poem of the Cid.

George R. McMurray
Colorado State University

XXVIII Congreso del Instituto International de Literatura Iberoamericana. En Providence, Rhode Island, a pocas calles de la casa donde Edgar Allan Poe cortejó a Helen Whitman un año antes de su muerte, y aún más cerca de la última casa que habitó Howard Philips Lovecraft en el número 66 de la hoy inexistente College Street, en los antiguos e imprácticos edificios de la Universidad de Brown, tuvo lugar la más reciente reunión bienal del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, institución con sede en Pittsburgh que agrupa a la mayoría de las profesiones de la especialidad.

Fundado en México en 1938, con la participación -entre otros- de Pedro Henríquez Ureña y Alfonso Reyes, el instituto celebró su cincuentenario con un congreso en la ciudad de México en 1988 y consagró esta subsiguiente vigésimo octava reunión plenaria -del 18 al 21 de junio-, al examen y balance de las letras del período colonial o virreinal, como sería más preciso.

Cincuenta y ocho sesiones fueron dedicadas a rever los textos del descubrimiento y la conquista, la visión de los cronistas europeos e indígenas, la sociedad colonial, la Ilustración, los orígenes nacionales, el barroco y neo-barroco americanos y la presencia de todo este universo en nuestra literatura moderna y contemporánea.

Unos trescientos participantes de prestigiosos centros universitarios de América, Europa y Asia (incluyendo Rusia y Japón), presentaron los resultados de la revisión y examen que es de práctica en los congresos de este ya venerable Instituto, revisión y examen que algunos han venido efectuando desde siempre y otros en los meses previos al Congreso para preparar sus ponencias. El papel de cada quién debía, por tanto, ser desigual, si bien hay que destacar que junto a la labor de especialistas congresados, contó el esfuerzo de los más jóvenes para contribuir con una visión renovadora y original.

Una presencia notablemente ubicua -que como la divina definición agustina por estar en todas partes no estaba en ninguna- fue eficientemente disimulada de facto por el vicepresidente Dr. José Amor y Vázquez, quien atendió con igual cortesía a directivos, invitados especiales y participantes.

Algunas «celebridades» con todos los gastos pagados no lograron superar las improvisaciones y decepcionaron toda expectativa posible de los asistentes.

Entre lo mejor, sin duda, la presentación de ediciones recientes y algunos textos inéditos como los de la sesión dedicada a dar cuenta de hallazgos y recuperaciones y, desde luego, el merecido homenaje al Prof. Alfredo A. Roggiano, Director Ejecutivo del Instituto y de la Revista Iberoamericana. El homenaje consistió en la entrega de un volumen con contribuciones de importantes críticos y escritores de Europa y América, que refleja el reconocimiento internacional de académicos y críticos al Alma Mater del Instituto, presentado por el Dr. Keith McDuffie, Secretario-Tesorero de la institución durante el acto celebrado en la magnífica biblioteca John Carter Brown, que alberga, conserva y enriquece

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constantemente una rara y excepcional colección del más antiguo acervo colonial de las Américas.

Samuel Gordon
Universidad Autónoma de México
University of Pittsburgh

Los legados de Alberti y Guillén se trasladan a España. El legado de la casa romana del poeta Rafael Alberti llegó el lunes 16 a Cádiz donde el poeta mismo lo entregó a la fundación que lleva su nombre. Durante el acto de entrega el poeta resaltó que entre el material donado se encuentran todos sus manuscritos, grabados y otras obras de amigos suyos como Picasso, Miró, Guttuso, Vedova y Cagli, patrimonio artístico acumulado desde su exilio en Argentina en 1937. El traslado del legado documental de Jorge Guillén (1893-1984), poeta español de la Generación del 27, está previsto para finales de año o principios del próximo. Se trasladará a su ciudad natal de Valladolid. El legado del poeta está formado por un gran número de apuntes, notas de conversaciones, artículos, cartas y manuscritos poéticos. Todo ello se conserva en el que fue el domicilio de Guillén en la ciudad estadounidense de Cambridge, en la universidad de Harvard -donde en 1958 el poeta dictó un curso en la cátedra Charles Eliot Norton- y en el Wellesley College, donde Guillén impartió clases de literatura española entre 1940-1951. El legado del poeta se completa con una importante biblioteca de 10.000 volúmenes que ya se encuentra en Valladolid entre los cuales figura un buen número de primeras ediciones de obras de García Lorca, Dalí, Picasso, Unamuno y Machado [El País, 23 de julio de 1990].

John P. Gabriele
College of Wooster

The «Boom» and the Hispanic American Theater. The well-known «boom» in Latin American literature (mostly fiction) in translation which began c. 1960 gave prominence to writers from Borges to Vargas Llosa in the U.S. and Europe. There was no corresponding «boom», however, in the translated works of contemporary poets and playwrights in Latin America.

Jorge Huerta, who teaches theater at the University of California at San Diego, is heartened therefore by the professional theaters in our country which are beginning «to produce plays about the Hispanic experience». But he is also concerned about the failure of the Hispanic American theater to become better known among students in U.S. colleges and universities. His article in the July 5, 1990, The Chronicle of Higher Education («Colleges Should Expose Their Students to the Tradition of the Hispanic American Theater») proposes that the Hispanic American theater be added to the humanities curriculum and that theater departments study and produce more plays from its repetoire. In support of his argument he cites the rapid growth of our Hispanic minority and the ignorance and lack of respect among many Anglos for Latin nations and their literature and culture. He also stresses the traditional Eurocentric orientation of U.S. culture which colors our view of non-European art and literature.

The tone and intent of Prof. Huerta’s article is well illustrated by the following excerpt:

Robert G. Mead, Jr.
University of Connecticut, Emeritus

Latin American Art Gaining in Prestige. Long relegated to a subordinate role in an art world dominated by New York, Paris, London, Latin American art -in all its complexity- recently has made great strides toward achieving a broader acceptance in U.S. and European art circles. This trend has manifested itself in the United States in a variety of ways: in the growing number of exhibitions and shows featuring Latin American art in museums and galleries throughout the country; in heightened critical and scholarly attention that the art is receiving; and, perhaps most noticeably, in the steadily rising prices offered in the marketplace for works by Latin American artists.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s «Diego y Yo» -depicting Frida’s lonely passion for her famous husband and her fear of loosing him- shattered the million-dollar barrier on its way to selling for $1.430.000 at the Sotheby’s auction on May 2 in New York city, establishing a new world record for Latin American art at auction.

The figure doubled the previous Latin American record set just last November at Christie’s auction, where Colombian Fernando Botero’s «Familia Protestante» sold for $715.000 to entertainer Andy Williams.

The bidding at the semi-annual Sotheby’s and Christie’s Latin American art auctions reflected the continuing surge in interest in Latin American art. Both auction houses bettered their previous sales of Latin American art, with Sotheby’s recording a new record in total sales at $11.594.000. Christie’s total sales were $10,3 million.

Kahlo’s oil-on-masonite painting is a 1949 self-portrait depicting her with black hair swirling around

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her head and tears dropping from her eyes. The painting was executed during a stormy period in her marriage to Diego Rivera -Diego was reportedly having an affair with Mexican movie star Maria Félix. Both artists are now deceased.

Also setting records at Sotheby’s auction were: «The Disasters of Mysticism», by Roberto Matta, a Chilean painter, which brought $1.155.000; Mexican Rufino Tamayo’s «Mujeres Cantando», which sold for $770.000; and Rivera’s «The Grape Pickers» and «Delfina Flores», which brought $605.000, each. At Christie’s, an untitled painting by Matta went for $660.000, while «La Mañana Verde», by Cuban Wilfredo Lam was purchased for $605.000, setting a new record for Lam (The Times of the Americas, Washington D. C., April 18, 1990).

George McMuiray
Colorado State University

Columbus and the Discovery of America on PBS. The Public Broadcasting Service is planning a television series, «Columbus and the Age of Discovery», to mark the Quincentennial anniversary of the discoverer’s first voyage to the Western Hemisphere. Jennifer Lawson, PBS vice-president in charge of programming, wants the series to take a «multicultural perspective» on the discovery and consider such questions as «Was it discovery to be celebrated or was it the beginning of an invasion of lands and the destruction of peoples?».

Hispania readers who are involved in the planning for the Quincentennial observance in 1992 will do well to consider the moral and ethical implications of the conquest and the colonization of the Americas in the light of Ms. Lawson’s question.

Robert G. Mead, Jr.
University of Connecticut, Emeritus

Film At The 1990 Festival Latino. The 1990 edition of Festival Latino was held in New York city in August. This year’s festival showed a major commitment to cinema. Approximately 150 films were exhibited in the following categories: recent feature films in competition, non-competing features, three historical retrospectives, and a competitive selection of shorts and documentaries.

The «Panorama of Cuban Cinema from 1930-1989» was the largest retrospective of Cuban film ever seen in the United States. The retrospective included many well known classics from the revolutionary film institute ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos) such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s famous portrait of a politically uncommitted intellectual Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968). Two little known features directed by men who later left the Revolution were also shown: Alberto Roldán’s La ausencia (1968) is a sensitive exploration of the problem of individual responsibility versus the demands of politics and history. Fausto Canel’s Papeles son papeles (1966) is an uneven comedy-drama about the risks of black marketeering.

The retrospective of Cuban cinema also included three seldom seen features from the pre-revolutionary era. The silent melodrama La Virgen de la Caridad (1930), directed by Ramón Peón, follows the efforts of a rich property owner to swindle land from poor peasants. Peón’s musical-melodrama El romance del palmar (1938) takes up the well worn theme of the country girl who accompanies her seducer to the big city, where she becomes a cabaret singer. The well paced thriller Siete muertes a plazo fijo (1950), produced and directed by Manuel Alonso, is unusual for its successful integration of elements of black humor. Alonso, who resides in the United States, attended the screening of his film.

The retrospective entitled «Argentina Sono Film (1933-/957)» showcased sixteen features produced by the prominent studio Argentina Sono Film. Three of the most significant works in this series were directed by Mario Soffici, who explored in a realistic style historical, socioeconomic, and political themes. His Viento norte (1937) depicts the difficulties of life on the pampas in the nineteenth century, and Kilómetro 111 (1938) explores the social implication of the railroad’s monopoly on the transportation of grain. In Héroes sin firma (1940), Soffici takes up the themes of freedom of the press and political violence and corruption.

There were several other highlights in the Argentina Sono Film retrospective. ¡Tango!, which was directed in 1933 by Luis J. Moglia Barth, is notable for being the first Argentine feature to use optical sound. The musical is a tango extravaganza that shows off the talents of Libertad Lamarque and other fine singers. Ninf Marshall’s exceptional talents as a comedienne are used to advantage in two musical comedies: Madame Sans-Gêne (1945), which is set during the French Revolution, and Carmen (1943), a comic adaptation of the classic opera. La vendedora de fantasías (1950) is an entertaining detective story with many fine comic touches. In La hincha (1951), lead actor and co-screenwriter Enrique Santos Discépolo gives a remarkable performance as an overly zealous soccer fan.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Mexican Cinema lived its so-called Golden Age. Major studios annually produced scores of motion pictures, and a star system held sway. The retrospective «Films from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema» highlighted six well known classics from the era, such as Fernando de Fuente’s adaptation, Doña Bárbara (1943), of the famous novel by Rómulo Gallegos. In addition, the retrospective included Juan Antonio de la Riva’s heartfelt homage to the Golden Age Vidas errantes (1984), which features clips from several of the classic films. Two excellent fiction features were exhibited in the non-competitive category. Director and scriptwriter Fernando E. Solanas’s Sur (1988) combines Astor Piazolla’s original music, superb art direction, and beautiful cinematography to create a poetic masterpiece

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that explores in an entertaining manner the pressing sociopolitical problems of contemporary Argentina. Lo que le pasó a Santiago (1989), the Puerto Rican director and screenwriter Jacobo Morales engagingly tells an intriguing love story involving an older man an a mysterious, beautiful woman.

The Mano de Bronce, the top prize for competing fiction features, was shared by No futuro-Rodrigo D. (1990), directed by the Colombian Víctor Gaviria, Papeles secundarios (1989), an ICAIC-Televisión Española co-production directed by the Cuban Orlando Rojas. Gaviria’s well researched first feature examines in a powerfully realistic style the day -today lives of working- class teenagers in the streets of Medellín; these young people routinely engage in violent crime, and they hold little hope for the future. In his creatively structured and edited Papeles secundarios, Rojas touches on important social and political themes as he explores the personal and the professional relationships in a theatrical troupe based in present-day Havana.

The prize for best director of a fiction feature went to the Spaniard Josefina Molina, for her direction of the historical work Esquilache (1988). The prize for the best «ópera prima» was awarded to Lola (1989), directed and co-scripted by the Mexican María Novaro. Lola is important for its well rounded and sympathetic portrayal of a young single mother who struggles to survive by illegally selling clothes in the streets of post-earthquake Mexico City. The Chilean Pablo Perelman received a special jury prize for Imagen latente (1988), which draws on autobiographical material to explore the topic of the desaparecidos.

Several other strong fiction features competed. In the artistically accomplished Boda secreta (1989), director-writer Alejandro Agresti mixes comedy, social criticism, and drama to tell of a man’s attempt to resume a normal life in a small town after apparently having spent years underground during the recent military dictatorship in Argentina. The Portuguese João César Monteiro wrote, directed, and starred in Recordações da Casa Amarela ( 1989), an unforgettable portrait of a crazed social misfit who in normal attire -or in the guise of a vampire or a military officer- roams the streets, boarding houses, and mental institutions of Lisbon. Baton Rouge (1988) is a sexy murder mystery crisply directed by the Spaniard Rafael Monleón.

The prize for the best documentary was awarded to the Chilean Ignacio Agüero for his 1987 film Cien niños esperando un tren. This outstanding documentary is not stylistically innovative; but it examines a fascinating subject: a workshop on movie making for underprivileged children in Santiago’s shantytowns.

Many other notable documentaries were exhibited. Mónica Vázquez’s well edited Tiempo de mujeres (1987) takes up the seldom treated theme of poor women in the Ecuadorian Andes who must fend for themselves and their children because their menfolk have emigrated to the U.S. Olivia Carresia’s anthropological film Todos Santos: The Survivors (1989) documents the life of the Mam Indian community in the Northwestern highlands of Guatemala in the 1980s, a period of frequently intense violence and repression. ¡Teatro! (1989), directed by Ruth Shapiro, Edward Burke, and Pamela Yates, follows the activities of the grassroots theatrical troupe La Fragua, which was founded ten years ago in Honduras by the Jesuit priest Jack Warner.

The 1990 Festival Latino is to be congratulated for having presented one of the finest and most extensive programs of Latin films ever screened in the U.S. In addition, the festival published a splendid 74-page catalogue that lists the credits and provides other information on all the films. For further information write Paul Lenti, New York Shakespeare Festival, Festival Latino, The Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., N.Y., N.Y., 10003.

Dennis West
University of Idaho

García Márquez Spanish Film Series. More than most writers, Nobel laureate and ex-movie critic Gabriel García Márquez understands how love and death, sex and violence make up the bloodstream of the cinema.

The six movies that compose Dangerous Love, all conceived and co-scripted by García Márquez, deal with extremes of passion, love on the borderline of chaos and the dark. At their gentlest they portray love that tears you apart; at their roughest, love that drives you to the arms of murder.

García Márquez is no dilettante. Film is his great passion; his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, started as a patchwork of prints rejected by producers. The six scripts here are all based on García Márquez stories or novel fragments. It’s a measure of his fecundity that 10 pages or less from Love in the Time of Cholera provide two complete movies: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s exquisite period romance Letters From the Park and Ruy Guerra’s ironic tragedy Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon-Fancier.

Each film has a touch of the fabulous -and one of them, Miracle in Rome, is the sort of fable Luis Buñuel might have liked- yet they’re all relatively simple. García Márquez is an ideal scenarist; he lets the stories reflect the collaborators’ personality as much as his own: Guerra’s opulent sense of fate and doom, Gutiérrez’s mournful romanticism, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s subtle gay psychology, Fernando Birri’s populism and fabulism.

All the films deal with love: difficult rather than dangerous love. In the Brazilian Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon-Fancier, the central character falls madly in love with young pigeon breeder Fulvia, seducing her by carrier pigeon. Hermosillo’s Mexican The Summer of Miss Forbes is the only film with an overtly gay sensibility; it gives us a Prussian governess, two boys who want to kill her, and a dazzlingly beautiful aqualung diver whom she engages in a demented seduction. Miracle in Rome, by Colombian director Lisandro

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Duque, has the series most striking scenario. In this satire on religious zeal, a father crazed with grief after the death of his 7-year-old daughter, tries to have her canonized in Rome, when her body, after 12 years, shows no sign of earthly decay. I’m the One You’re Looking For, perhaps the least impressive of the six, may nevertheless be preferred by audiences who think Pedro Almodóvar is the best living Spanish filmmaker. A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, directed, co-written, and starring Fernando Birri from the Argentine avant-garde, is the rowdiest and most spectacularly alive of the sextet. Here Birri vividly shows us a shanty-town by the ocean, then lets a whole ramshackle carnival community evolve when a miracle transforms the town: An old angel with detachable wings is discovered flopping around near the sea.

But my favorite is Gutiérrez’s Letters From the Park, based on another bit of Love in the Time of Cholera. Here, the professional letter-writer who handles both sides of an epistolary amour is a wonderful invention. And so is the callow Romeo, the witless would be aerialist [By Michael Wilmington, The Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1990].

George R. McMurray
Colorado State University

1990 Noble Laureate Lectures At New York Metropolitan Museum Of Art. Addressing a standing room only audience on Tuesday evening, October 16, Octavio Paz, 1990 Nobel Laureate for Literature, delighted the audience with a forty-five minute exposition on the matter and meaning in pre-Columbian art of Mexico. Octavio Paz briefly touched upon the identity and spirit of his nation and offered several critical differences between America and the Old World that make the former not «Other» but «Another». Paz pointed out that America represented an unknown dimension of reality that was never a part of Western civilization. He shared with his audience his recognition of a special characteristic of the civilizations of the Americas that differentiated them from their Western counterparts: they were original, sui generis, flourishing independently of and not dependent upon Greco-Roman antiquity. Mr. Paz’s point was that this originality was construed as ‘otherness’. He stated that indigenous civilizations were defeated precisely because of their historical isolation from the other European world.

Throughout his lecture, Octavio Paz referred time and time again to Coatlique, the enigmatic snake-skirt divinity that for centuries has simultaneously attracted/repelled, seduced/repulsed. In keeping with his statement-time is movement, movement is change-that alludes to the spiraling cycles of time, Paz offered the suggestion that we are all linked by our differences: not by a bridge but rather an abyss. He concluded his lecture saying that the Coatlique divinity is a rich metaphor that combines the past, present and future of Mexico, and in itself demonstrates the originality, isolation, otherness, spatial and temporal unity that is pre-Columbian Mexico.

Octavio Paz’s lecture was one of three in the 1990 Yaseen Studies Lecture Series that coincides with a major exhibition, Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, organized by the Metropolitan Museum and on exhibit during the Fall and Winter of 1990.

Dianne M. Bono
William Patterson College of New Jersey

Los fondos históricos de la biblioteca de Toledo instalados en el Alcázar. Según un acuerdo firmado el jueves 19 por el ministro de Defensa, Narcís Serra, y el presidente de la Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, José Bono, los fondos históricos de la biblioteca pública de Toledo serán depositados próximamente en el Alcázar de la misma ciudad. La biblioteca pública de Toledo es una de las más importantes de España por sus fondos antiguos, que, centrado en la colección Borbónica-Lorenzana, incluye alrededor de mil manuscritos de los siglos XV y XIX. La sección toledana cuenta con 10.000 volúmenes y 20.000 el legado Malagón. El fondo moderno tiene más de 200.000. En el proyecto de la Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha se precisa que los fondos bibliográficos se instalarán en la primera planta del Alcázar. El Alcázar acoge en la actualidad el museo, oficinas de Gobierno Militar y diversas salas museísticas del Ejército. Con la creación de la biblioteca, y según un proyecto ya elaborado, se contaría en el edificio con salas de lectura con capacidad suficiente para la demanda de la población toledana; depósitos para libros; oficinas y salas de trabajo; una sala de conferencias; un servicio de microfilm y un servicio de restauración de libros antiguos. Otros de los propósitos que contempla el proyecto es el de exponer de forma permanente mobiliario, encuadernaciones y mapas, grabados y pinturas conservadas en la biblioteca. Con esta incorporación se trata de potenciar al máximo el Alcázar como centro cultural histórico militar, proceso de reconversión iniciado en 1986 [El País, 20 de julio de 1990].

John P. Gabriele
The College of Wooster

Bustling Barcelona Is Rich In Culture, History. Barcelona, Spain’s second city, is a star already, but as it prepares forthe 1992 Summer Olympics -which it will host- it is becoming a premiere international tourist attraction.

The Medieval Gothic Quarter, exuberant Art Nouveau buildings and world-class art museums form the core of the city’s sightseeing. Appeals to other senses include many fine restaurants, musical events, chic shops, art galleries and Latin «bonhomie».

This capital city of Catalonia, one of Spain’s oldest and historically richest regions, is on the country’s north-eastern Mediterranean coast.

What adds to Barcelona’s appeal -at least to

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«Norte-Americanos» -is that the residents area unique mixture of industrious, hard-working people who at the same time understand the «Latino» enjoyment of the good things in life-food, wine, music, dance, convivial company. As one Catalán friend put it to me, «We work very hard in order to have a good time».

This explains the hustle and babble along the Ramblas, one of several main shopping and strolling thoroughfares in the city center. It also explains the popularity of cafes where customers sit, sip espresso and people-watch, and the overflowing crowds at the ornate, seven-tiered Gran Teatro del Liceo, one of Europe’s most beautiful (and popular) opera halls.

It also makes the «sardana» more understandable to foreigners. This national Catalan dance is performed with great spirit by friends and strangers alike who form impromptu circles, hands joined, in public parks and in the forecourt of the cathedral on weekend afternoons.

No question about it, the cathedral of Saint Eulalia is the center of attention in this oldest part of the city. Outside, student guitarists may be playing for a few pesetas tossed by passersby. The cathedral itself, built in the 13th and 14th centuries in the exuberant Catalan Gothic style, is a testament of Barcelona’s ancient lineage: it replaced a Romanesque church, which in turn was on the site of a fourth-century Visigoth structure.

According to tradition, the church’s baptistry was used to baptize the first American Indians brought back to Spain by Columbus on his first voyage. Below the stairs is the beautiful alabaster sarcophagus of the saint for whom the cathedral was named.

From the outside, the fretted spires and lacy valentine windows of stained glass look their most mysterious at night, when they are illuminated from inside by an amber light. The illumination usually lasts until 10 p.m. (11 p.m. on Saturdays). A simple door in the cathedral wall leads into the extraordinary Museum of Federico Mares, with its four-star medieval sculpture collection of agonized Christs and Soulful madonnas.

Barcelona’s flavor and history shimmer in the narrow lanes and side streets that lead from the cathedral past the ancient Roman walls and through the 20 tiny blocks known as Barrio Gótico or Gothic quarter. Barrio Gótico has a surprise around every corner: a medieval fountain here, a grimacing stone gargoyle jutting from a roof edge there, a door ajar that reveals a Gothic patio with graceful stone archways.

In the Museum of the History of the City, on Plaza del Rey, you’ll see Roman excavations (reminding you that they were here first) and also the grand Gothic throne room called El Tinell. In this majestic hall, with elongated arches almost forming half-circles, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella received Columbus on hid first return from the New World.

At the edge of the quarter is the Plaza de San Jaime I, where the Ayuntamiento (city hall) sits majestically across a splendid black brick square from the Palacio de la Generalitat or Provincial Council, seat of the regional government. Both are imposing structures, built on land where Roman shoppers once haggled over the price of olives, wine and grain.

The Provincial Council boasts two special delights: A Flamboyant Gothic chapel and a wall festooned with stone gargoyles, latticework and decorations that are considered some of the finest examples of late-Gothic sculpture in Europe.

The City Hall is a beauty -with huge rounded arches, a high ornate coffered wood ceiling and a myriad of wrought iron-and-glass chandeliers. They don’t make buildings like that anymore.

The Picasso Museum. The narrow streets of the Gothic quarter eventually wind toward the Moncada, site of one of the city’s jewels: the Picasso Museum at No. 15. In the elegant 13th-century palace, the Museum is crammed with more than 1.000 works by the famous artist-paintings, graphics, drawings, ceramics.

Though born in Málaga in the south, Picasso studied in Barcelona and identifies with the fiery independent spirit of the Catalonians. The juxtaposition of Picasso’s contemporary art against the sedate Gothic walls and arches gives an extraordinary visual fillip.

Moncada is a short, fascinating street for wandering, lined with art galleries and several intriguing shops full of local handecrafters. Notice how many of the streets in this area are named after medieval guilds, such as Plaza de la Lana (wool), Calle de la Platería (silversmiths), among others.

On the south end of Moncada are Plaza Borne and the church of Santa María del Mar (St. Mary of the Sea), the city’s second most important Gothic church. When it was built in the 14th-century, it was right on the beach.

In fact, money for it was given by stevedores and sailors. A favorite choice for weddings, the church is pure delight with its slender, elongated columns, great elevation and simplicity -one of the city’s many visual treats.

A Sort Of Santa María. Nearby is a replica of Columbus’s wooden caravel, the Santa María. It was built years ago for a movie and now is a favorite for picture-taking by tourists. The harbor is alive with many small, more modern craft-geared for tourists excursions -called «golondrinas» (swallows) and «gaviotas» (seagulls).

Looming above the port is Montjuich, the hill where major Olympic games will be held. Montjuich overlooks the city and harbor and its emerald hillside is studded, plum-pudding fashion, with world class museums, a «theme village» and park.

Most recent of these is the Joan Miró Foundation, where the famous Catalonian artist’s prints, sculpture and paintings are exhibited in a striking modern building designed by a fellow Catalonian, architect Josep-Lluis Sert.

An Ethnological Museum is small but has well displayed exhibits from Asia, Africa and the Americas, and an Archaeological Museum has superb Roman

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floor mosaics and art from the ancient town of Ampurias nearby. The stadium for the Olympic Games crowns the hilltop near the Pueblo Español.

This replica of an entire Spanish village was built for the International Exposition of 1929, then kept as a convenient way for visitors to sample the flavor of various regions of Spain. The Pueblo is a great place to get a sense of the different architectural styles of Spain. Craftsmen work in the various houses, demonstrating and selling their leather-work, baskets, embroideries or woven goods.

Strolling and people-watching are common activities in Barcelona. A favorite place for both is the Ramblas, which in many ways is the soul of the old city, a one-of-a-kind boulevard that cuts through the entire downtown area. What is now a lovely treeshade promenade was once a sandy stream bed down which the southern fork of the Collcerola river flowed. When the river was diverted some 200 years ago, this became an avenue, and the center of fashion in the late 19th-century.

Puerta de la Paz. The Ramblas begins at the harbor on Puerta de la Paz which is dominated by Columbus’s statue on a giant column. The Ramblas today is actually a wide swath of pedestrian boulevard bordered by streets with frenetic traffic, which, in turn, are bordered by narrow sidewalks.

The central boulevard is where the action is -flower sellers with vibrant pots and vases of color; bird, fish, dog, even monkey vendors; perambulating shoeshine men; newspaper hawkers; lottery and gadget touts; sidewalk kiosks and outdoor sidewalk cafes. All these activities are all under the green, leafy «umbrella» of sycamore trees- it’s an ongoing panorama of Barcelona life. Novelist Sommerset Maugham had it right when he described the Ramblas as the most engaging street in the world.

An earlier visitor called Barcelona «a fountain of courtesy, refuge for foreigners... in a unique and beautiful location». This was the appraisal of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quijote, and his words are as apt now -as the city prepares for the Olympics of 1992- as when they were written 400 years ago [The Providence Journal 8-5-90].

Richard A. Picerno
Central Connecticut State University

Prizes and Awards (August-October, 1990). Various literary and artistic prizes and awards have recently been announced. The following, listed by country, are some of the many:

SPAIN:

Premio Camillas to Chilean writer Jorge Edwards.

Premio Planeta 1990 to Antonio Gala.

Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras 1990 to Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri.

MEXICO:

Premio de Poesía Elías Nandino 1990 to Roxana Elvridge.

Premio López Ramón Velarde 1990 to Alberto de la Fuente (poetry), Joaquín Cárdenas Noriega (essay), Francisco José Amperán (short story).

Premio Periodismo Cultural 1990 to David Magaña for his Los adorables locos.

Premio Salvador Gallardo 1990 to Juan Manuel Bonilla Soto (poetry) and Alejandro Paetrana (narrative).

Premio de Narrativa Jorge Ibargüengoitia to Alfredo García Servín for his Los mundos de Orkiris.

Premio Agustín Yáñez 1990 to Cara Sofohovich for her Demasiado amor.

SWEDEN:

Nobel Prize for Literature to Mexican writer Octavio Paz.

GUATEMALA:

Premio Nacional de Literatura «Miguel Ángel Asturias» to Otto-Raúl González.

CHILE:

Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile to José Donoso.

Premio Nacional de Arte to Chilean painter Roberto Matta.

JAPAN:

Internacional Rodin Award to Mexican sculptor Tiburcio Ortiz.

Sam L. Slick
University of Southern Mississippi

Necrology-August-October, 1990. The deaths of the following prominent figures in Hispanic arts and letters are to be noted:

Manuel Puig, 57, Argentine novelist, July 28, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Lorenzo Frechilla, 63, Spanish sculptor, August 15, in Madrid.

Álvaro Fernández Suárez, 83, Spanish essayist, August 21, in Madrid.

Jorge Robledo, 65, Colombian poet, August 22, in Medellín.

Sergio Magaña, 66, Mexican dramatist, August 23, in Mexico.

Félix Duarte, 95, Spanish poet, September 13, in Santa Cruz de la Palma, Spain.

Sam L. Slick
University of Southern Mississippi

Azorín Returns To Monóvar. On Friday, June 8 1990, the 117th anniversary of his birth, the scant

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earthly remains of Azorín were disinterred from the Madrid cemetery in which they had lain since March 1967. As the plastic bag containing the bones was revealed to the small group present, Azorín’s most faithful follower, Santiago Riopérez y Milá, looked at the outline of the skull, and exclaimed, «¡Está clavado!» With that, the remains were rolled up like a rug, and deposited into a fresh casket that also contained the remains of Julia Guinda Urzanqui, Azorín’s wife. A brief ceremony was held in the Ermita de San Isidro, so as to provide the Mayor of Madrid, Agustín Rodriguez Sahagón, with an opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to literature before the television cameras, and the coffin was loaded into a hearse and taken away.

So began one of the more bizarre episodes in recent Spanish cultural history. After various false starts, the Mayor of Monóvar, the town in the province of Alicante in which Azorín was born, and the Mayor of Madrid, both of whom belong to the same political party, succeeded in carrying out their plan to transfer the writer’s remains to a newly prepared mausoleum in Monóvar. Although the event also had the support of the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, which owns the rights to Azorín’s work, the main impulse was the desire of a certain political group to attempt to recuperate Azorín as an intellectual hero of the Right. The interests of scholarship were worthily represented by E. Inman Fox, Laureano Robles and Roberta Johnson, but throughout the spotlight was carefully focussed on the politicians.

A private train was provided by RENFE, to transport the coffin and forty-five guests from Madrid to Monóvar. At 7:30 in the evening, those invited began to collect in the «Salón de Autoridades» in the Chamartín station, where they waited until the Mayor of Madrid reappeared, to be photographed and interviewed by some of the many journalists who were there with their camera-men for the event. Once the Mayor had left for a previous engagement, the guests were free to be led to the platform where the grey hearse was parked by the wood-paneled car that formerly had been reserved for the cabinet ministers and other dignitaries, but now contained the flagdraped coffin. Two sleeping cars were provided for political figures from Monóvar, members of Azorín’s family, a member of the Real Academia española, two representatives from the Academia de Guatemala, and three catedráticos. In addition to the press car, there was also a dinning car in which elaborate meals were prepared by the several chefs who had been provided by RENFE.

During the night, the train was parked on a siding in La Mancha, so as to arrive punctually in Monóvar at 9 a.m. In the midst of the arid countryside, neither Manchegan nor fully Mediterranean, the flag-bedecked station had been freshly painted hot pink, and the blazing sun intensified the colors. There was a small group of people on the platform to watch the coffin being unloaded and placed in the waiting funeral car, which was covered with floral tributes. The visitors were loaded into a bus, and the cortege moved slowly into town. Along the way were only occasional clusters of people, and the impression was that they either did not know what was happening, or did not care. Apparently, discussions of the wisdom of spending such vast sums on this event had been protracted and heated, and the Socialist members of the town council had finally voted to boycott the ceremonies, when they realized how it was to be oriented.

The procession stopped in the Plaza de San Roque, where the band was waiting, and a ceremony took place to effect the official transfer of the notarized remains to the municipality of Monóvar. The hearse proceeded toward the church, and all participants followed on foot. By now the crowd and heat had increased, and the pastel colors of the houses looked like fairy-tale illustrations. The church of San Juan Bautista was full of spectators, who had been joined by Azorín’s friend, Ramón Serrano Suñer, once the second most powerful man in Spain, as well as by representatives of the Generalitat Valenciana, and the military.

The mass was celebrated by the Bishop of Orihuela-Alicante, with musical accompaniment by an organist and a large male choir, from Monóvar. Perhaps the most emotional moment occurred when the coffin was removed, to the choir’s singing of «Va, pensiero», from Verdi’s Nabucco, so often used in nineteenth-century Italy as a hymn to liberty. The saddest part was the omission by the bishop of any mention of Azorín’s wife whose remains were also being subjected to reburial.

The political and military figures who had come to take advantage of the event rode in their air-conditioned official cars, to accompany the buses that took the crowds to the cemetery. The road is winding, and leads past some of the poorest homes in Monóvar, through a double line of pine trees, to the knoll where the walled cemetery is located. Inside among the cypresses are all the signs of the history of Monóvar’s bourgeoisie, to which Azorín’s family belonged. Azorín’s new tomb is located near the entrance, and is made out of five-meter high slabs of white marble. At one end there is a single laurel tree, in bronze, and the other is dominated by a huge bronze bas-relief of Azorín’s face, against a background depicting the outline of Monóvar, all the work of the Valencian sculptor, Vicente Ferrer. It was there that several short speeches by local authorities, a representative of the Cortes Valencianas, a representative of the city of Madrid, and others took place under the unrelenting midday sun. People filled the pathways, and the television cameras captured every detail from a specially-constructed platform.

Afterwards, the curious return to the town to visit the Casa-Museo de Azorín, which had been thrown open to the general public for the day by its director, José Payá Bernabé. The monoveros took full advantage of the opportunity to look over the installations and pick up the complimentary briefcase containing,

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among other items, a programme with essays about Azorín, and a copy of Laureano Robles’s edition of the correspondence between Azorín and Unamuno. The invited guests were also given a facsimile reprint of the first edition of Los Pueblos.

The final event was an opulent luncheon held under the jacaranda trees in the gardens of the casino, for some two hundred people. In addition to sausages, shrimps, seafood mousse, smoked salmon, stewed lamb and fresh fruit, the meal included various local wines, and ended with a special cake made in honor of Azorín, and fondillón, the local dessert wine, from the 1973 vintage commemorating Azorín’s centenary. The luncheon was followed by an emotional reminiscence of surprisingly intimated tails of Azorín’s last years by Santiago Riopérez, and circumstantial comments by the mayor of Monóvar and the members of the academies. The piece de resistance, however, was the rambling speech by Serrano Suñer, who made the political intention plain by a series of revisionist observations designed to demonstrate that Ramiro de Maeztu had been inclined to Fascism all his life, and that his early friendship with Azorín somehow demonstrates that, despite the evidence, at no point in his life was Azorín guilty of any type of transfigurismo político. Whereas the style of rhetoric employed appeared to overlook the fact that fifty years of Spanish history had passed, the remarks were greeted with highly enthusiastic applause from many quarters. The speech came to an end when fourteen of the guests were driven to the station to take the train back to Madrid.

Television and press coverage of the event were wide-spread: ABC and La Verdad published commemorative supplements, and in addition to its regular news broadcasts, Televisión Española offered a special report the next day, summarizing the most colorful aspects. At no point, however, was the understanding of the tortuous complexities of Azorín’s thought enhanced; rather, the failure of scholars’ best efforts to impose a balanced view of Azorín was the most visible result.

Víctor Ouimette
McGill University

Fallece Dalmiro de la Válgama, secretario perpetuo de la Academia de la Historia. Dalmiro de la Válgama y Díaz Varela, secretario perpetuo de la Academia de la Historia desde 1967, murió en Madrid el 9 de mayo. Tenía 86 años. Doctorado en Derecho de la Universidad de Madrid y académico correspondiente de la Historia de Galicia, Paraguay y Ecuador, poseía numerosas condecoraciones, entre otras, la gran Cruz de Alfonso X el Sabio. Estaba casado con la escritora y académica Elena Quiroga. Entre sus obras figuran Los guardias marinas leoneses, Don Zenón de Somo de Villa, primer Marqués de la Ensenada, Estirpe y descendencia de Hernán Cortés, y Línea de Medina-Sidonia. [ABC, 10 de mayo de 1990]

John P. Gabriele
The College of Wooster

Fallece Ramón Piñero. El filósofo Ramón Piñero, figura destacada de la cultura y política gallegas durante la segunda mitad de este siglo, murió el lunes 27 de agosto en Santiago de Compostela a los 75 años de edad. Piñero presidía desde 1983 el Consello da Cultura Galega, un organismo dependiente de la Xunta dedicada a promocionar estudios e investigaciones. Su obra más relevante, Pra unha filosofía da saudade (1953), constituye uno de los principales intentos par a desentrañar la metafísica que subyace a la singular relación del gallego con el mundo. Nacido en 1915 en Láncara, Lugo, militante del partido Galeguista en la Segunda República, y encarcelado durante tres años tras la guerra civil por sus intentos de reorganizar desde París la resistencia al franquismo, Piñero acabó convirtiéndose en un verdadero guía espiritual, tan influyente como convertido. Durante la transición política, la figura de Piñero se tornó particularmente polémica. Fue uno de los promotores del manifiesto Realidade Galega, que propugnaba que el galleguismo no debía enquistarse en una sola forma política, sino intentar impregnar los partidos de ámbito estatal.

John P. Gabriele
College of Wooster

Why on earth am I going back to China again, after forty-five years? The first time was under very different circumstances. It all started when I was sent to study Chinese at Georgetown University in 1943. That was a lucky break for me; otherwise I might well have died on the beaches of Normandy, along with my cousin Franklin Seabrook. He and I had grown up as boys together on James Island, on the coast of South Carolina, fishing and sailing and shooting birds, where our grandfathers had raised Sea Island cotton in the second half of the nineteenth century, until 1911, in fact, when the boll weevil had struck. We both spoke the brand of English that was normal among the few white people living in that corner of the earth, and also Gullah, the (to most city whites and to many city blacks) unintelligible dialect spoken by the black majority living in the country. After seven years of grammar school on the island, Franklin had gone to the Murray Vocational School in Charleston, and I to the college preparatory High School of Charleston, where I took four years of Latin, English and mathematics, three of science, two of French and history. I continued with Latin at the municipal College of Charleston, taking up Greek, while Franklin went to work at the Navy Yard. And there we were on the coast of South Carolina when one Sunday morning in December of 1941 the Japenese struck at Pearl Harbor. We managed to stay out of the Army until 1943 when we turned nineteen. We both did well at marksmanship in basic training; then he was sent to a tank corps, and I was sent to study Chinese at Georgetown University. With twelve months of intensive oral drill in Mandarin, I spoke it fluently; Franklin died in a tank near a beachead in Normandy.

After Signal Corps training, in the spring of 1945 my batallion was finally shipped overseas in a troop ship that left from the port of San Diego and reached Calcutta after thirty-five days at sea, sailing south of Australia to avoid Japanese submarines. It wasn’t an easy trip, crossing the equator twice under steel decks without air-conditioning. And the monsoons in Bengal were not much better. After long delays, we set out for China, first on Indian trains, then in trucks, loaded with barrels of gasoline, which we drove across Burma. On the way we heard the astounding news: something called an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan, and the war was over. Later on we reached the American air base just outside of Kunming.

My job in Kunming was a simple one, with the grandiose title of non-commissioned officer in charge of the reverse-Lend-Lease Chinese laundry on the base. What I actually did was to interpret whenever necessary between the American soldiers who brought in and picked up their laundry and the able Chinese staff who ran everything with no interference from me. I used my spoken Chinese quite a bit, but the only writing I did at my job was two Chinese characters (jia kuai) indicating special fast service for an extra fee. I ate lunch with the Chinese men at the laundry, who were good cooks. They talked to me about lots of different things, from their refugee problems to the plots of traditional operas. One day in town I saw three Chinese priests being ordained, in Latin of course, at the Catholic church. Another day I stopped at a beautiful Buddhist monastery, where a monk served me green tea at a table in the patio.

But my military sojourn in China soon came to an end; I was flown back to India, across the Himalayas, in an unpressurized cabin, a flight that turned a head cold into a sinus infection. After demobilization, assured of tuition and support by the «G. I. Bill of Rights», I applied to Harvard and Yale, where there were programs in Chinese; I had the good luck to be accepted by Yale, as a junior. But after a couple of courses in advanced Chinese, I decided I could do much more with Spanish; I read La vorágine and Don Quijote, studied Spanish classical poetry with visiting professors Dámaso Alonso and Rafael Lapesa, and eventually completed my Ph.D. in 1952. Familiar Chinese phrases and ideograms were slowly forgotten.

And then, almost forty years later, in the spring of 1989, it finally seemed possible for me to revisit China, that is until the bloody termination of the freedom movement on Tiananmen Square in early June. I cancelled my trip. But in the fall of that year I met two senior Chinese professors of Spanish who had come from Beijing to work in Madrid; with their encouragement and help I applied for a visa once more in May of 1990, on the basis of invitations from the National Academy of Social Sciences and from the Beijing Foreign Language Institute. This time my visa was granted almost immediately. And now here I am in China again, at the age not of 21 but of 65.

At the Beijing Airport I am met by Professor Liu Xiaopei, one of my Madrid acquaintances; in fluent Spanish he explains his plans for my month-long tour of China. He has reserved an inexpensive room for me at the Institute of Foreign Languages; the bathroom leaves a bit to be desired, but the big color TV has five or six slick consumer-oriented channels. Next morning I have breakfast at Liu’s home, a two-bedroom apartment on the campus, or rather within the compound; it is a meal of delicious steamed meat dumplings (baozi), a hard-boiled egg, hot milk, Nescafé. With Mrs. Liu I have to try to use my Chinese for the first time; she re-heats the dumplings in a little microwave oven before leaving for work. Later on I eat lunch with a young Spanish teacher from the Autónoma of Madrid, Javier Yagüe, who has just published a translation of The Linguistics of Writing. Liu devotes the next day to showing me some of the main tourist spots of Beijing: the Tiantan temple complex, the great Peking duck restaurant, the Imperial Palace.

I spend a morning with members of the Spanish Department of this Foreign Language Institute. (English is of course the number-one language, with Japanese in second place, then German, Russian, French; Spanish is given less emphasis by the Chinese government). I talk to them informally about my own experiences as a learner and teacher of Spanish. They show me their tiny Spanish library and language lab. Then Chen Chulan, the linguist and language teacher whom I met last fall in Madrid, takes me to her home and shows me her much better international collection of language textbooks. She is working on a future standard program of Spanish instruction at the national level; she may also eventually put together a new Chinese-Spanish dictionary. She has been decorated by the government and is still living on her revolutionary enthusiasm from the 1950’s. She gives me an extremely grim picture of what Beijing student life was like in that difficult decade: watery soup freezing before you could eat it, for example. Earlier, as a refugee child with her family in Vietnam, she had learned French; later she was chosen as one of three first-generation teachers of Spanish in the new China.

Before flying from Beijing to Xi’an I speak with two more groups of specialists in Spanish and in other foreign languages and literatures; one young man gives me a copy of the book that he has published (in Chinese) on García Márquez. In Xi’an, the ancient capital in central China, Spanish is even less widely taught, but the department functions well; Professor Tang speaks good Spanish and is a skilled translator; his Spanish assistant, Víctor Zayas, is devoted to their students and in addition has learned a lot of Chinese in only one year; and two graduating students of Spanish are assigned to me as guides. Because of cancelled flights, I spend more time in Xi’an than was scheduled and get to know it rather well. Moslem culture, though assimilated to Chinese, is surprisingly strong in this city. A visiting company sings traditional opera on campus, to the delight of the older generation. One of my student guides finds a taxi to drive us out to Louguantai, where Laozi

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founded Taoism. It’s only 90 km. away on a major highway, but the trip takes three hours: innumerable slow vehicles, bad pavement, above all local farmers beginning to harvest their wheat, throwing it onto the highway in great quantitites for the traffic to thresh out for them. As a farewell to Xi’an I organize abanquet for six (only $30) at a good local restaurant: Professor Tang, Víctor Zayas and his Belgian girlfriend, the two students, and myself. The food is incredibly good and varied. I’m beginning to come down with a cold; Víctor suplies me with medicine, both Chinese and Western.

The plane from Xi’an to Kunming is small; the woman sitting next to me doesn’t know how to buckle the safety belt, so I help her. It’s a four-hour trip, with a forty-minute stop at Chongquing (Chungking). The Kunming airport is the former American air base, where I was stationed long ago, but I can recognize very little. There is no Spanish taught in Kunming, so Mr. Shi, a representative of the provincial Foreign Affairs Office who speaks excellent English, meets me at the airport and takes me to my first Chinese hotel. Very little of the old city that I had known seems to have survived; everything is modern downtown. My cold is too severe to visit Seone Forest with Mr. Shi the nextday (Sunday). I discover that the Catholic church is only two long blocks away from the hotel, and when I get there, I recognize it clearly: this is the same church where I saw the three Chinese priests being ordained forty-five years ago. The building fills up for mass, mostly women on one side, mostly men on the other, reciting the rosary in Chinese. Suddenly, on the portico, a string of very loud firecrackers goes off, and mass begins, in Latin, largely inaudible; the priest has his back to the congregation, which sings hymns most of the time. Walking back to the hotel I buy a small bottle of local liquor, which turns out to taste like a cheap Spanish aguardiente, just the thing for my cold. The next day I visit the provincial university, which has a beautiful new library and computing center. I speak to an English class and, later on, to a local association of foreign language enthusiasts.

During my flight from Kunming to Guangzhou (Canton) the changes in air pressure leave me virtually deaf in both ears. I am met at the airport by a Chinese teacher of Spanish, who takes me to the nearby Foreign Language Institute. I have a beautiful big apartment there with air-conditioning, which is just as well, given the sweltering heat. Paloma Castro, the visiting professor from Madrid, like Zayas in Xi’an, devotes a great deal of time to her students and has learned to speak good Chinese herself. I meet my host, Professor Chen Guojian, whose third volume of translations into Spanish of Chinese classical poetry has just been published in Barcelona. I visit the two libraries, one for faculty and one for students; the Spanish collection is quite small. I give a talk on Don Quijote and Bakhtin to a handful of graduate students in English, who ask good questions. The next day I meet with the Spanish Department; students and faculty are out in full force and welcome me with loud applause. I talk to them about Spanish studies in the United States. One handsome and outspoken student, who was involved in protests a year ago, asks me a sensitive question about the political relations between China and the United States. I assure him that American popular sympathy, based on TV coverage of the Tiananmen episodes a year ago, is profound and permanent. Later I learn that the administration of this Institute refused to give the government any names of student «agitators» last year. And the next day, alone together, the student explains to me that he has been stripped of his positions as student representative and editor and has been interrogated ferociously, forced to write thousands of words of contrition; but he is firmer than ever in his desire for a change of government. With his record, he will be given a highly undesirable job.

From Canton I finally fly back to Beijing and the United States. I leave with nothing but admiration for the handful of hard-working faculty and students who devote themselves to teaching and learning Spanish in China; their minority status goes hand-in-hand with their high morale. I speculate on the strenuous possibility of spending a year or two there teaching Spanish or English and living in that very different world, so hermetic and at the same time so full of enthusiasm for the study of Western languages and culture.

Elias L. Rivers
State University of New York at Stony Brook

Democracy Comes to Latin America. A recent book by Paul H. Boeker, Lost Illusions (New York: Marcus Wiener Publishing, 1990, 333 pp.), was given the following review by Ronald C. Hellman in The New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1990:

In 1988 Paul H. Boeker, a retired United States career diplomat, traveled throughout Latin America, where he interviewed 26 leaders of the region’s democratic revival. This book is the result.

Mr. Boeker argues that Latin America is producing a new breed of civilian leadership that is realistic and pragmatic in outlook and style. The emergence of these democratic stewards, he says, is a response to widespread disappointment with flamboyant politicians and unfulfilled promises; the Latin American people desire «democracy without illusions». Mr. Boeker’s principal mission here is to make the new leaders and their brand of democratic pragmatism better known to North Americans, and he uses an interview format because he believes the story can best be told directly by the leaders themselves. It is a worthy mission, but one that is only partially accomplished.

Lost Illusions provides some critical insights into the priorities of these individuals. When Raúl Alfonsín, Argentina’s first President (1983-89) after the brutal military dictatorship of the previous decade, emphasizes the urgent need to resolve the debt crisis if democracy is to survive in Latin America, he speaks forall the region’s leaders. When Gen. Ernesto Geisel, the former president of Brasil -a key figure in the transition of Latin America’s largest nation to democracy- points to the weakness of his country’s political parties, observing that «today one changes parties in Brasil as if one were changing shirts», he is addressing a fundamental problem of the democratic role for political parties throughout the region today.

These and the other voices in the book are strongest when they are allowed to be specific about problems. Edgardo Boeninger, the vice president of the Christian Democratic Party in Chile, gives a marvelous chronicle of how the opposition to Gen. Augusto Pinochet skillfully managed to forge, through a «step at a time» approach, a multiparty agreement that culminated in the coalition’s plebiscite victory in October 1988. Unfortunately, Lost Illusions does not offer enough of these insightful moments.

Despite its shortcomings, however, Lost Illusions is well worth reading, because it succeeds, at least partly, in providing Latin American leaders with a chance to tell their story. But we should not be left with any illusions of our own. The region’ s democratic revival is fragile. Mr. Boeker gives a small taste of this problems through the unsettling words of Gen. Hugo Medina, a former minister of defense of Uruguay. When asked how satisfied he is with the course of civilian government so far, he responds: «I am satisfied with the intentions... but not with the results... One wishes that both the attitude of the people and the government would be different». Clearly, skepticism about democracy still runs deep.

George R. McMurray
Colorado State University

Cuba: A Suffocating and Demoralizing Island. The following are excerpts of a review of Jacobo Timerman’s book Cuba: A Journey, which appeared in the October 21, 1990 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Jacobo Timerman is an Argentine writer. The review’s author is David Rieff.

The Castro regime has finally started to get the reputation it deserves. But it has been a long time coming. Perhaps it is the continuing, unremitting hostility of the United States government toward revolutionary Cuba (only during the first two years of the Carter Administration was a genuine dialogue even considered) that causes so many liberal Americans to keep extending the intellectual free pass that the Cuban government has enjoyed since 1959. Even revelations that Cuba set up prison camps in the late 1960’s for homosexuals, and the admission during last year’s show trial of Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez, the former commander of Cuba’s expeditionary forces in Angola, that senior figures in the regime had been involved in drug trafficking, did little to shake the faith of Cuba’s foreign sympathizers.

It is still all too common, in places like Beverly Hills and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to hear criticisms of Cuba either dismissed out of hand or attributed to the distorting effect of the American economic blockade. As the Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman remarks with bitter scorn in his new book on Cuba, «It would take more than a Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalyst to explain why non-Cuban Castroists accept the demythification of the Communist leaders of Eastern Europe and China but remain mesmerized by El Comandante».

Cuba: A Journey, Mr. Timerman’s fierce, intelligent account of his visit to the island in the summer of 1987, should open the eyes of even the most purblind of fellow travelers. He saw the future, all right, and it is a shambles. The Cuba Mr. Timer man visited is a suffocating, demoralizing country, where official boasts about the accomplishments of three decades

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of the revolution sound increasingly desperate and hollow. What surprised him about the ordinary Cubans he met was less the lack of overt opposition to the regime than the way all but the bravest or most delinquent of spirits have retreated into a kind of sullen, infantile quiescence.

Not only does political power rest almost entirely with Mr. Castro, but government propaganda presents him as personally responsible for all the revolution’s achievements, from military strategy and the harvesting of sugar cane to street cleaning. Knowing that their lives depend on the decisions and opinions of a single individual, ordinary Cuban’s wait for the next of Mr. Castro’s interminable speeches in much the way children would attend the most old-fashioned of patriarchs. Demoralized by all this, Mr. Timerman writes of Mr. Castro’s effect on Cuban society: «When you go from city to city, from group to group, from person to person, it becomes clear that his rhetoric has produced a vacuum in the conscience of the Cuban people, substituting as tifling collective paranoia. The rest -acceptance, vacillation, informing- is at the service of repression».

This repression, and the fear and conformity it has induced, was the strongest impression Mr. Timerman carried away from his visit. And if anything, the situation has only gotten worse since he was there. In 1987 Cuba had not yet experienced cuts in aid from the Soviet Union and, more generally, had just begun to face the consequences of the failure of the Castro regime’s economic plans. Were Mr. Timerman to make his trip today, he would find, as I did when I visited the island in July of this year, that discussions of personal freedom now take a back seat to the brute necessities of scrounging for fuel and waiting in endless lines for even the most basic provisions. As I write, the Cuban authorities are warning of further shortages, hinting that food rationing will give way to a system of government run cafeterías and announcing plans to buy 500.000 bicycles to save gasoline.

That said, Mr. Timerman’s account, ably translated by Toby Talbot, is depressing enough. One of the most horrifying moments in his book comes when he reproduces a questionnaire that ordinary Cubans are encouraged to fill out about their neighbors and colleagues. The document is extraordinary. It includes such items as, «Information on the Individual Expressing an Opinion», where the subject of the report is not only categorized by age, occupation and sex, but must be summed up as either «revolutionary» or «disaffected». As Mr. Timerman observes shrewdly, these questionnaires represent not just a way of obtaining information but «a collective state of mind in which the Cuban is, simply, a member or friend, a brother or a son of the Revolution and its Comandante -or else, an enemy of all».

Mr. Timerman has concluded that whatever blame can be laid at the door of the United States for what happened in Cuba, the reality is that any humane outcome will come only after Mr. Castro ceases to rule the island. Mr. Castro, who is a great friend of Gabriel García Márquez, has come to resemble Aureliano Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude or any of the aging tyrants who inhabit the Colombian novelist’s best books.

Whatever the Cuban Revolution was at its beginning, it has now become little more than a murderous and repressive charade. And the sooner honest men and women forget the servile justifications offered by foreign sympathizers such as Mr. García Márquez and start listening to the real news from Cuba, the better it will be for everyone. A good place to start is with Mr. Timerman’s brave and compassionate act of witness.

George R. McMurray
Colorado State University

Political Thought: A View from El Salvador. The absence of a democratic tradition is a serious problem for El Salvador. The roots of this condition are found in the impossibility of popular participation in government. This is not because political discourse or popular energy is lacking, the problem exists because of the narrow control of the country by the military and the oligarchy. With these two anti-democratic elements controlling most official sectors of society, political discourse has been forced underground. This is mainly accomplished through torture, rape, and Nazi-style methods, disappearances, and techniques which lead to a fear of violence. The gangland style assassination of six Jesuit professors at the Central American University (Nov. 16, 1989) was a clear manifestation of the military’s methods. Immediately before the massacre at the University, the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (hereafter referred to as the FMLN) went on the offensive (Nov. 11, 1989), demonstrating considerable support for the popular Revolution. It was most likely this offensive which inspired the official military to assassinate the university professors at the UCA.

The military was so caught off guard by the intensity and magnitude of the FMLN offensive that it took them 36 hours to regroup at which time they started bombing the poverty-stricken neighborhoods which demonstrated support for the FMLN. The military also used white phosphrous, a substance, like napalm, which can burn for days in the wounds it produces. Even though the official military outnumbers the FMLN 6 to 1, the gains of the FMLN demonstrated that they were a military force to be recognized. With military credibility established, the FMLN was able to again state its demand of democracy. On November 13, the FMLN leader Joaquín Villalobos stated that «Since 1981, the FMLN has insisted on the need for apolitical solution to the war». He summarized the dual nature of the FMLN plan over the years, «We have presented dozens of proposals for negotiations, each time being more flexible while our actions demonstrated that we could not be defeated militarily⁷⁶.

The military force of the FMLN has opened two avenues of political dialogue in El Salvador, first the

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general meeting of all political parties and the second, a United Nations sponsored peace initiative. The former took place on the 19th of April when president Alfredo Cristiani met with representatives of other political parties. These parties were the Party of National Reconciliation (PCN), the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), the Authentic Christian Movement (MAC), the National Republican Alliance (ARENA), the Nationalist Democratic Union (UDN), and the popular Social Christian Movement (MPSC). During the meeting the parties agreed that the first item on the agenda should be the democratization which the FMLN has called for. Although Cristiani (a member of the far-right party ARENA which has been linked to the death squads and to the military) stated he would not attend any meeting with the FMLN, he implied that he would in the end sign a final document⁷⁷. Cristiani stated that he would support agreements reached by the parties, even if they included constitutional reform. However, he signaled that the constitution was non-negotiable in the United Nations sponsored peace negotiations with the FMLN.

To sum up some of the commentary at the Meeting of the Political Parties, Rubén Zamora of the MPSC called the meeting positive and stated that the parties had to comply with three mechanisms: I) a relationship with the president, 2) with the FMLN and, 3) direct participation in the meetings between the government and the guerrillas. Unity was the desire expressed by Aristides Alvarenga of the PDC; Raúl Vargas of the UDN stressed the importance of discussion and participation in a process of negotiation through which the various participants may express their opinions. Perhaps the most global political statement of the week of this meeting (16-23 April) was expressed by Gerardo LeChevalier of the PDC who proposed these themes for dialogue: 1) democratization of the country, 2) demobilization of the FMLN, 3) the demilitarization of Salvadoran society and Central America, and 4) economic measures⁷⁸. The importance of this fourth point was accentuated in a statement made one week earlier by Julio César Portillo of the National Unity of Workers (UNTS) who said «There will not be any reconciliation while workers do not have minimum conditions for life»⁷⁹.

Besides this new found political discourse in El Salvador (which still has not been converted from theory to practice), the second level of dialogue, supported by the above mentioned political parties, is taking place between the Military Government (which Cristiani only nominally leads) and the FMLN under the auspices of the United Nations. The United Nations acting as an official mediator is an important gain. UN support lends credibility to the process, making it more difficult to interrupt the dialogue. In a press communique (issued following the Geneva meeting presided over by Secretary Javier Pérez de Cuéllar on April 4), it was stated that «The purpose of the process shall be to end the armed conflict through political means as speedily as possible, promote the democratization of the country, guarantee unrestricted respect for human rights and reunify Salvadoran society». The communique further states that «the process shall lead to the establishment of the necessary guarantees and conditions for reintegrating the members of FMLN, within a framework of full legality, into the civil institutional and political life of the country»⁸⁰.

The dialogue continues in Mexico: UN representative Álvaro de Soto met with representatives of the FMLN (May 1 & 2) and with president Cristiani (May 2). On May 3rd, de Soto met with the Interpartidaria (the eight Salvadoran parties -PDC, ARENA, MNR, MPSC, PCN, UDN and PSD). A further meeting took place on the 5th of May between the FMLN and the Interpartidaria. The FMLN has suggested that the non-ARENA parties also participate in the dialogue. Guillermo Ungo of the MNR supports this view, stating that a joint effort would not inhibit the «right of each party to maintain bilateral relations with the government, the FMLN or the UN». Ungo also reaffirmed support for the Interpartidaria because it is a «factor which de-polarizes»⁸¹. At this point the FDR (the political arm of the FMLN) has been «deactivated» a move which should help the process given the animosity between the Government and the FDR-FMLN.

In the end there is much hope for the negotiations. However there are many possible impediments. The Salvadoran Assembly considered a Sweeping Amnesty for the Military this year, but not for the FMLN. This would be an amnesty for all military people in jail for common crimes or for human rights violations. The second problem is the government of the United States which provides about 1,5 million dollars to the government in El Salvador. According to the New York Times this aid «provides almost 30 percent of the Salvadoran military budget and pays for almost all military expenditures except salaries»⁸². Many sectors in the U.S. government (including Republicans and Democrats) do not understand the importance of de-emphasizing the military to achieve a political solution. The Washington Post reported that on May 1, Secretary of State James Baker agreed that military assistance could be tied to progress in the peace talks between the FMLN and the military government. However, «Democrats who attended the private meeting with Baker argued against any aid restrictions this year and said they should be applied only in the 1991 fiscal year beginning Oct. 1»⁸³. Taking his cue from Baker, Alfredo Cristiani announced on May 3rd that «peace talks with the leftist rebels would begin in about 10 days but warned that a cut in United States military aid would diminish the talks’ chance of success»⁸⁴.

This continuing militarism goes against the talks that Cristiani hosted for the Salvadoran political parties. With 1,5 million U.S. dollars going to a military which suppresses political discourse there can be no «democratization of the country». There will be no «demobilization of the FMLN» because a strong

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military will not negotiate in good faith. This reality has recently been demonstrated in Nicaragua where the Contra Army (now called policía rural) continues to break a series of agreements made with the government, even after the Sandinistas have turned power over to the communist-free market coalition dominated by the Chamorro family inner circle. The Salvadoran military, enjoying a period of prosperity, will inhibit the desired democratic and political goal of the «demilitarization of Salvadoran society» in order to breed and multiply. Finally with most of the aid going to armaments there can be no «economic measures» for the minimal standards of human life. Without money for agrarian reform (Taiwan has pledged some money for this) and for social improvement, the «standard of human life» will not improve. With a powerful military funded by U.S. tax dollars, there will be no good faith negotiating for ARENA. In spite of the successful offensive on the capital last November, the New York Times reports that Cristiani stated on May third that «in the long run, a military victory is [still] possible»⁸⁵. A step in the right direction was the recent Bill in the House of Representatives (HR 5114) which withholds 50 percent of U.S. military aid to El Salvador unless the Government or the FMLN breaks off the negotiations, if the FMLN receives substantial outside arms or if the assassination of the Jesuit university professors is not adequately pursued. A companion bill will be introduced this September by Senators Dodd from Connecticut and Leahy from Vermont. If this cut in military aid is not effected and enlarged, the military stalemate will continue and the FMLN will remain the same, a social movement with widespread popular support, fighting for popular and political dialogue. And sadly the message of the Salvadoran people will continue to fall on deaf ears.

Thomas Butler Ward
Loyola College

Quoted without comment. «What it brought back to me was a sense... of the days at Mansfield Junior High School in Tucson. If I went out on the playground and happened to speak my language, Spanish, with somebody, and a teacher overheard me, I would get swats. Swats are a custom in which you bend down and hold your ankles... And somebody takes a board and hits that part of you that’s up in the air. The crime this punishment fit was speaking Spanish on the playground. This was so I would gain fluency in English, I suppose, and get a good job and fit in and be a competent member of society. I think that I was fairly good at English at that point.

»There are a wealth of experiences of that kind that I think any person of color in this society, who has a kind of double consciousness or biculturalism, would’ve gone through. But there are moments when you remember them more vividly than others». (Renato Rosaldo, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 5, 1990.)

Robert G. Mead Jr.
University of Connecticut, Emeritus

Spanish and Hispanic Studies in Australia and New Zealand⁸⁶. A recent lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand provided an opportunity to discuss and review with Australasian colleagues the status of Spanish and Hispanic studies in that region of the world. Despite the rather isolated geographic position of Australia and New Zealand relative to the Hispanic world, I discovered that Hispanism in these two island nations is firmly established in the university system, and interest in Hispanic studies is on the rise.

Five universities in Australia and New Zealand currently offer academic programs leading to the B.A., M.A., or Ph.D. degrees in Spanish: Flinders University of South Australia (Adelaide), Monash and LaTrobe Universities, both located in suburban Melbourne, The University of New South Wales in Sydney, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Auckland’s Spanish Section, a division of the department of Romance Languages, currently offers the B.A. and M.A. in Spanish, with the possibility of Ph.D. supervision in selected areas. Auckland’s undergraduate program has experienced a dramatic enrollment increase of 80% in the last three years, and now numbers 360 students. The Section’s Spanish Study Abroad Program, established eight years ago, allows students from Auckland and other regional universities to complete their Spanish studies with a four week intensive language and culture program in Madrid. On his recent (July 1990) visit to New Zealand, Philip, Prince of Asturias, the Crown Prince of Spain, announced his official patronage of this program and his support for a Professorship in Spanish at the University. Additionally, Auckland’s Spanish Section currently boasts its first Spanish National Advisor, Professor Ángela Fernández, whose six-month visit has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. Professor Fernández teaches courses at the University, helps to establish Spanish language programs in elementary and secondary schools, and works to promote Spanish civilization and culture across New Zealand.

Australia’s largest Spanish programs are found at the University of New South Wales and LaTrobe University. The School of Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Faculty of Arts at New South Wales has a staff of twelve, and offers courses on the language, literature, film and history of Spain and Latin America. The program offers a B.A. in Spanish or in History, a combined degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies, and the M.A. in Latin American Studies.

Unlike Auckland or New South Wales, LaTrobe University, in Bundoora, Victoria, has a separate Spanish Department that also offers Catalán and Portuguese. LaTrobe’s full-time staff of seven coordinates B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. programs. The department maintains close ties with the university’s substantial Latin American Studies program, which consists of four historians, two sociologists, an economist, and professors of art and film. LaTrobe’s Spanish program was recently enhanced by the appointment of Roy C. Boland (currently at Auckland) to the vacant Professorship of Spanish and as Chair of the Department. Professor Boland, one of the founding editors of Antípodas, the only Australasian journal dedicated exclusively to Hispanic studies, assumes his new duties at LaTrobe in January, 1991.

Although Monash University’s Spanish Section of the Department of Romance Languages is comparatively small, it has been responsible for the supervision of three recent doctoral dissertations (1984, 1985, 1989) by local Autralasian graduates. Interest generated by Monash’s program has contributed to the recent founding of AUSCULTA, The Australian Society of Spanish American Culture, whose aims are the promotion of the Spanish language and Spanish and Latin American culture in Melbourne and throughout the country.

Although I was not able to communicate directly with colleagues at Flinders University, Roy C. Boland and Alun Kenwood’s recent survey of tertiary Hispanic Studies programs («A Survey of Hispanic Studies in Institutions of Higher Learning in Australia and New Zealand», The Ken Garrud Working Papers in Hispanic Studies No. 1, 1989 Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia) notes that this department recently has expanded its instruction of Spanish to Adelaide University, and sites a tradition of Hispanic scholarship at this institution, dating from W.A.R. Richardson’s critical edition of Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo, (London: Harrap, 1973).

Although undergraduate degree programs in Spanish are limited currently to these five institutions in Australia and New Zealand, courses in Spanish language, literature, and civilization increasingly are being introduced to tertiary institutions of the region, including the University of Melbourne, Victoria University in Wellington, and Macarthur College of Advanced Education in Sydney. All university-level institutions in Australia are presently undergoing an «amalgamation» or consolidation under man date from the Australian government. Despite any real or imagined negative effects from such a process, Spanish studies in general stand to gain in overall enrollments due to this move, since it will enable a large number of university students to be exposed to and eventually undertake the study of the language. This fact, coupled with the dedicated and enthusiastic teaching and research efforts of the faculty who staff existing programs, bodes well for the future of Hispanism in the region. In sum, Spanish and Hispanic Studies are alive, well, and growing in the Antipodes.

R. A. Verr
Rollins College

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 74, Number 1, March 1991