Abstract
Ernesto Giménez Caballero's Trabalenguas sobre España (1931) has been relatively neglected by criticism, yet it is a fascinating text. It stands at the very end of his avant-garde production, and is also transitional to the sequence of more openly political and tendentious works that began with Genio de España (1932). Trabalenguas sobre España sports no fewer than three subtitles: 'Itinerario de Touring-Car. Guía de Touring-Club. Baedeker espiritual de España', and contains texts written in Castilian, English, French, Italian, and German. While it might appear to belong to the tour- or travel-book genre, it rapidly becomes clear that Giménez Caballero is simply using this framework to enable him to talk about a number of things besides geography, such as history, literature, and culture. The avant-garde is represented in a number of ways, from a parodic guide to San Sebastián, to a strange, prose poem-like 'Malagan Song', to a well-documented essay on '1918 Spanish Literature 1930'. At the same time, distinctive political views can be discerned in the meditations on Castile, the chapter on Catalonia, and the surveys of recent intellectual history, where the advent of the Second Republic is hailed as the first step towards superseding the legacy of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism.
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