Beyond Baudelaire’s Views of Poe: Carlos Fernández Cuenca and Josep Farrán i Mayoral, Literary Criticism, and Aesthetic Reception in 1930s and 1940s Spain

Abstract

In 1934, John Eugene Englekirk, in the preface to his Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature, stated that “criticism has been strangely silent as to the far-reaching effects of Poe’s art on the belles lettres of Spain” (Englekirk 1934, ix). As the continuation of the twentieth century would prove, this assessment has been largely corrected, and now Spain is understood as one of the countries in which Poe has had a wide reception in different fields: influencing authors, inspiring artists, offering a vast area of study to scholars, and so on. The decades of the 1930s (even prior to Englekirk’s claim) and 1940s, despite the difficult context the country was going through, were especially fruitful for the reception of Edgar Allan Poe in Spain. Many authors and artists used previous visions of Poe to construct their own views. Since the central decades of the nineteenth century, these versions had been mainly devoted to Charles Baudelaire’s translation and commentaries. However, a group of Spanish critics, over time, tried to accomplish the task of subverting the image of Poe that the French poet had created. Among them, we wish to highlight Carlos Fernández Cuenca (1904–1977) and Josep Farrán i Mayoral (1883–1955), who worked during one of the most convoluted periods of Spain’s recent history. These authors offer different perspectives for understanding Edgar Allan Poe and his works. On the one hand, Fernández Cuenca approached Poe from a more philological and historical point of view, even acknowledging original sources such as letters. On the other hand, Farrán i Mayoral unveiled a more aesthetics-focused opinion, with an evaluation of the artistic implications of Poe. The aim of this chapter will be to analyze these different (and complementary) perspectives and the subsequent details both critics disclose in their editions. Carlos Fernández Cuenca edited a selection of tales under the title La caja oblonga (1930), and Josep Farrán i Mayoral translated and edited the volume Narraciones extraordinarias (1942). Through their particular thoughts on Poe’s works, we will approach the intellectual construction of his identity developed in Spain during the first half of the twentieth century. We aim to show both their dependence on international critics and their autonomy in relation to them. It is also our goal to contrast the reflection about Poe produced in Spain—a milestone within the Hispanic intellectual panorama—and to do so with regard to national and international scholarship. As the title of the chapter announces, both Fernández Cuenca’s and Farrán i Mayoral’s approaches contributed to the expansion of Poe’s reception in Spain. They also contributed to the coinage of a new image, which for the first time since the mid-nineteenth century was free from preconceived ideas or stereotypical views. The critics we have included here demonstrated that coherent research about Edgar Allan Poe could be developed in Spain, even in the middle of one of the most turbulent periods of the country’s recent history.