Concha Zardoya: The Intellectual in Exile

Mónica Jato

doi:10.3989/chdj.2019.007

Abstract

The intellectual life of Concha Zardoya (1914-2004) was shaped significantly by its transnational dimension. While Chile was her country of birth, Spain was the place where her university education took place and the United States where her academic and intellectual career developed. The atmosphere of political repression experienced in the 1940s in Spain forced her to look for a new home in the USA. There she obtained her PhD, developing a successful academic career that spanned the next twenty-nine years of her life. Her work as a literary critic was, however, intrinsically linked to her work as a poet, which first began with the publishing of Pájaros del Nuevo Mundo in 1946. This article considers Zardoya’s poetry in light of her experience as a political exile. The fact that her departure from Spain did not coincide with the mass exodus of 1939 has caused many critics to view her residence in the USA as “emigration.” My analysis will focus, instead, on the exilic dimension of her work as an act of affective citizenship, paying particular attention to three books of poetry written in America: Desterrado ensueño, Corral de vivos y muertos and Hondo Sur.

Highlights

The intellectual life of Concha Zardoya (1914-2004) was shaped significantly by its transnational dimension
La falta de sincronía con el éxodo masivo de 1939 ha provocado la consiguiente percepción de su residencia en USA como “emigración” o, a lo sumo, como “expatriación.” Mi análisis se centrará, en cambio, en la presencia de la experiencia del exilio en su poesía como un acto de ciudadanía afectiva, y partirá del estudio de tres poemarios escritos ya en tierras americanas: Desterrado ensueño, Corral de vivos y muertos y Hondo Sur
Three factors seem to have contributed to this lack of recognition or interest in the author: her gender; the fact that she wasn’t born in Spain or, in other words, her contentious nationality; and her move to the United States in 1948 where she lived for almost thirty years, carving out a successful career as a literary critic and as a Professor of Spanish literature