The Genealogy of Late Modernism in Spain: Unamuno, Lorca, Zambrano, and Valente

Abstract

A paradoxically belated ‘late modernist’ poetics took shape in Spanish poetry during the final decades of the twentieth century. Its bestknown representative was Jose Angel Valente (1929–2000), a poet who late in life cultivated the mystique of a para-mystic and cryptic writer, modelling himself explicitly on poets like Paul Celan, whom he translated into Spanish.1 At times it may have seemed to readers of Valente as if he were in competition with the Romanian poet of German expression to make himself deserving of the appellation ‘last European poet’, one whose voice would embody the unspeakable catastrophes of Europe in the twentieth century.2 Spain’s late modernism has also been called ‘essentialism’ [esencialismo] because it favours hermetic knowledge over transparent communication and regression to womblike origins over teleologies of linear progress. This late modernism is not, primarily, a revival of the historical modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. It is, rather, a largely reconfigured movement that arises almost exclusively from a single strain of Spanish modernism: the cultural exceptionalism and poetic phenomenology developed in the writing of irrationalist philosopher Maria Zambrano (1904–91) and like-minded authors in the generation of 1927. Zambrano, of course, is not the only significant influence shaping late modernism. A full genealogy of this movement would also have to