Joseph Conrad was already well-known in Spanish intellectual circles before the translation of several of his works into Spanish in the mid-1920s, following a commemoration of the Polish émigré author in the Madrid literary review Revista de Occidente in 1924. Inspired by Conrad’s writing, the Basque author Pío Baroja collected a substantial number of his volumes in the library at his house ‘Itzea’ (in Vera de Bidasoa, Navarra), with several in French translation. Among them was the French edition of The Secret Agent (1907), published as L’Agent secret (1912). This article seeks to update the long-established critical framing of the influence of anglophone literature on Baroja. It provides a comparative approach to striking parallels between literary representations of revolutionary activity in London and Madrid in Conrad’s The Secret Agent and two closely contemporaneous novels by Pío Baroja: La dama errante (The Wandering Lady) (1908) and La ciudad de la niebla (The City of Fog) (1909). Through a focus on sceptical engagements by each author with theories of criminal and racial anthropology, this analysis explores parallels between the two writers’ literary works beyond existing hierarchies of appropriation and direct influence.
This essay seeks to establish how Joseph Conrad's Gaspar Ruiz (1906), a novella written in English but set entirely in Spanish-speaking South America, systematically affirms and reiterates its Hispanic character in such a way as to counter any predisposition on an anglophone reader's part to, as it were, read the world exclusively in English. Narration works to relativize or de-universalize English through constant reminders of the Hispanic character of the tale's counterfactual background – reminders that had the fictional events actually taken place, they would have ‘happened in Spanish’. To this end, the essay considers how Gaspar Ruiz's Hispanic-ness problematizes its affiliation to the anglophone literary system that has assimilated Conrad's work, before turning to the concept of translanguaging, originating in foreign-language pedagogical theory but to which comparative literature has also had recourse, to confront the monolingual dimension of the so-called national paradigm and explore this dimension's operation in English studies’ orthodoxy. The essay concludes by advocating a convergence of translanguaging's drive for linguistic decolonization and comparative literature's mission to disarticulate counterproductive geo-cultural circumscription of literary systems, thereby ushering into critical practice a multilingual mindset eminently suited not only to the understanding of evidently culturally hybrid writing like Conrad's but indeed all literature.
This essay traces the development of the two principal forms of literary bilingualism currently practiced by Scottish poets and notes that parallel production in English is a more recent phenomenon among Gaelic poets than those writing in Scots. The nature of poetic bilingualism is explored, with particular attention paid to the role of poetic form in the different parts of a poet's output. The essay argues that bilingualism in Scottish poetry is less widespread than is often supposed and suggest that the current practice of self-translation by Gaelic poets might have an inhibiting effect on the development of certain kinds of verse. It then looks in detail at the work of two truly bilingual Scottish poets - Iain Crichton Smith and W. N. Herbert - and in particular at their 'double' collections: Na h-Eilthirich / The Exiles (1983-4) and Omnesia (2013). These works are presented as striking examples of literary bilingualism in which the relationship between a poet's languages is mutually beneficial. The author revises his previous criticism of Crichton Smith's publishing strategies in favour of a more sympathetic view, taking into account the history of his poetic output in both Gaelic and English, and considers the alternatives it might offer to Gaelic poets in the twenty-first century.
