Helena Percas de Ponseti, 1921-2011

Abstract

9 Helena Percas de Ponseti, 1921-2011 _______________________________________Michael McGaha H elena Percas de Ponseti died on January 1, 2011, at the age of ninety. She had suffered a stroke on Christmas Day and never regained consciousness. Helena was born in Valencia in January 1921. Her father, Nicolás Percas, was the son of a Greek father and an Italian mother. Her mother , Ana Babenco, was from the Ukraine. Helena was convinced that her mother was Jewish, but she was never able to verify this, because her mother was extremely secretive about her background. Helena’s parents met in Alexandria, Egypt, where her father was born and raised. Nicolás Percas—who spoke Greek, Italian, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Russian—founded the school of languages at the University of Valencia. Helena attended progressive coeducational schools in Valencia. When her high school, the prestigious Instituto Escuela, closed due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, her parents sent her to England. This was a traumatic experience for fifteen-year-old Helena, who hated leaving her home and her friends to go to a strange country. It took her two weeks to get to England by boat. She soon adjusted to her new school, the Polytechnic Institute, and by the summer of 1937, she had become fairly fluent in English. Then her parents sent for her to join them in Paris, where her father had been appointed Commercial Attaché at the Spanish Embassy by the Republican government. She arrived in Paris in time to attend the 1937 World’s Fair. She would always remember what a profound impression Picasso’s mural Guernica— then on display in the Spanish Pavilion—made on her. Her parents en- 10 Cervantes Michael McGaha rolled her in the Institut Maintenon, a boarding school for girls, where she would master yet another foreign language, and complete her high school education. She had just graduated when the Civil War ended with Franco’s defeat of the Republic, and her father lost his job. He soon found a new post teaching literature and philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Caracas, and Helena’s little family was again transplanted. She taught English and tutored high school students in Venezuela while saving up to come to the United States. She was admitted to Barnard College in 1940 and completed her BA there in 1942. She then entered graduate school at Columbia University—at that time the outstanding Spanish Department in the United States— where she specialized in Latin American literature. She completed her MA in 1943 and taught at Russell Sage College and Queens College while working on her PhD, which she finished in 1950, writing a dissertation under the direction of Federico de Onís. In the meantime, her parents had moved to the United States. After brief stints at St. Laurence University and Rockford College, Nicolás Percas was hired to teach Greek and comparative literature at Grinnell College. Helena joined her parents in Iowa in 1948, when Grinnell offered her an entrylevel position in Spanish at the munificent salary of $3,000! Helena loved teaching at a small liberal arts college, particularly enjoying the close personal contact with undergraduate students, and soon acquired a reputation as an inspiring teacher. At the same time, she was earning the respect of professional colleagues as a leading expert on Latin American women poets, especially when her book La poesía femenina argentina, 1810-1850 was published. After that book appeared , she was invited to lecture in Buenos Aires, where she met Jorge Luis Borges. Years later, in 1968, she would invite him to lecture at Grinnell. The administration canceled classes on the day of his visit so that the entire student body could attend his lecture. In 1959 Grinnell wanted to hire a promising young Yale PhD, Andrew Debicki, but he said that he would accept the offer only if he could teach the courses on Spanish and Latin American poetry, which Helena had been teaching until then. With characteristic generosity, she agreed to give up Volume 31.2 (2011) 11 Helena Percas de Ponseti, 1921-2011 the courses in her own area of specialization and teach the classes on Spanish literature...