Ferrater Mora, Zambrano, Barea: the exiles ride

If the traveler one winter night decided to write a book about the Spanish exile of 1939… he would let it go the next morning. The tsunami of studies, reissues and monographs of the last twenty or thirty years would be so overwhelming that after the first Google search he would give up due to impotence and saturation. In other words: it has taken a long time, perhaps the slow generational time that cultural studies takes, but the cartography of exile available today is one of the great achievements of recent cultural history in Spain (in its different languages), although it continues there being whiny jingles here and there. The color palette has been radically expanded to incorporate without guilt the inexhaustible diversity of experiences of hundreds of characters – painters, architects, musicians, filmmakers, journalists, teachers, poets, writers – who lived their different exiles with different spirits, fortunes and aptitudes. .

No one would say that we could hear a sparkling, flirtatious, sentimental, sad, depressed and hyper-excited María Zambrano, successively and intermittently, in the 1940s and 1950s in her correspondence with another exile, José Ferrater Mora, but exile led to lives. strange, invented lives, broken lives and fertile lives like almost all lives, whether or not they are the daughters of a bloody and criminal military defeat. But they met in the first days of their exiles in Cuba, and since then they followed each other incessantly (or the letters stopped shortly after the death of Ferrater Mora's wife, in 1962) to find out about each other, announce ideas, share apprehensions. or comment with a joyful complicity on their respective books, shortcomings and joys. She even gave them time to marvel from afar at what was happening in Cuba in 1959…

The first 50 pages of the book, the work of the editor of the epistolary, Miquel Osset, allow us to know in detail the way in which both were resurrected to intellectual and professional life, or even to life without further ado, newcomers and each in their own way. . Zambrano sought shelter in conferences, university courses and some books to finally end up in Rome with her sister and already separated from her husband; Ferrater Mora got into a Philosophy Dictionary and some essays but he immediately found a temporary refuge in the Catalan colony of Chile until he was welcomed by the best Spanish philology (Américo Castro or Pedro Salinas) in American lands. The two found time to talk to each other in long letters with a desire for understanding that is often moving due to the transparency with which they judge, orient, criticize and admire each other: she always a little more sentimental (very little), and he a little more solemn or stiff (very little), but both with frenetic bursts of enthusiasm for learning about the other's books and desires. It is moving to read Ferrater Mora urging her friend to write freely and without surveillance, without fear of herself and her inner thoughts (“I no longer think about the book, I don't know what it will be, I am not concerned about the form or the structure, nor the 'way of expressing it”, “I write to find out myself, to find out what I have inside and that I don't want to continue being like this anymore”). And it is also shocking to hear Zambrano caught up in her old faith as a girl raised in the Catholic religion, just as it is disconcerting that she knows so first-hand that the death of Ortega y Gasset in 1955 is imminent, just a few days before, only to discover that her differences with the teacher neutralizes death: “I had forgotten that I loved him so much.”

Finally reading so many of the major and minor exiles in their direct words, in neatly edited letters and diaries, has achieved something even more: making them part of the immediate and experiential experience of those who today return to them with the genuine impulse of discovery and literary admiration. Arturo Barea and his British exile have become involved in Coradino Vega's sentimental and intellectual life in such an inextricable way that the biographical and reflective essay on the author of The forging of a rebel It turns into an analysis essay on the relations of the Transition with exile and the shortcomings of that rescue. It is not strange that the urgency of demands assails him at every step when he reviews and rereads the pages of that trilogy, its stories and the nearly a thousand collaborations on the BBC for Latin America, all edited with exquisite care in recent years by various experts. Coradino Vega's childhood in a place as unique (and so well told) as Minas de Ríotinto (Huelva) seems to favor a unique approach to reading the extraterritoriality or marginality of Barea. The body has not asked him for a study or a conventional biography but for the two-voice story of his own life intertwined with that of a writer who could only be a writer in the anguish and pressures of exile, near London, and after meeting Ilsa , the woman who would give him the confidence and security to write in “very Spanish Spanish” his poor social origins and his difficult later prosperity. That the story leans somewhat exaggeratedly towards the unleashed praise of the writer is not a defect of the book but rather the necessary condition for this mixed semblance of analytical autobiography to exist. The intuition of “not feeling part of any group” is at its root, and to a large extent that would end up being the experience of the exiles over a long period of time as unpredictable as it was endless.

María Zambrano and José Ferrater Mora
Edition by Miquel Osset
Renaissance, 2023
183 pages. 17 euros

Coradino Vega
Zut Editions, 2023
136 pages. 14 euros

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