Trying a new angle

 

Rain and cool weather more typical of October blew me to the Complutense and into the Residencia de Estudiantes today

After heading to the Complutense in the morning for a really fascinating talk by the early modernist Luce López Baralt about the literatura aljamiada of the sixteenth century, I went to the Residencia de Estudiantes to follow up on the Gustavo Durán Martínez character I discovered earlier.

Briefly, so that the topic of Luce López Baralt's talk makes sense, because it was super interesting, aljamiada is the name given to work written by Spanish Muslims in a Romance language -- usually Castilian but also sometimes Portuguese or Valencià -- using Arabic characters.  It comes from an Arabic word meaning "foreign" or "not-Arabic."  There was quite a bit of this written in sixteenth century Spain, and it persisted up until the final expulsion of the moriscos in 1609.  Most of it was lost then, when people walled it up behind false partitions or buried it or similar because (don't I know it!) books are heavy and hard to carry when you're relocating, and there was the hope that you could come back for them soon.  Every so often another cache is found when an old wall falls down.  (I remember seeing an exhibit of books found in walls nearby at the Biblioteca Nacional, I think at the four hundredth anniversary of the expulsion.  Time flies.)  Professor López Baralt explained that the aljamiado texts have been relatively little studied because the first people to look at it recognized the writing as Arabic, and took it to Arabic speakers who read it phonetically and said "this is gibberish."  (Or rather, given a couple of funny 19th C quotes she used, "this must be some kind of North African dialect.  Or maybe Turkish.  Or maybe even from Iran, though it's hard to see how it got all the way to Spain.")  Spanish speakers can read sixteenth century Spanish pretty easily (more easily than English speakers read Shakespeare, even), so they would have recognized it, except that it wasn't transliterated, so they didn't know.  It wasn't until there were Spaniards who studied Arabic and looked at the manuscript that the nickel dropped.




Most of the talk was about the different genres of aljamiado literature, most of it anonymous, since Arabic was a forbidden language, and the Inquisition was rather serious about writings, which were presumed to be religious in nature.  Most of them were for (secret) religious instruction, but there were also novellas, folk tales, and a good deal of history, because -- as my thesis shows -- people are amazingly persistent about hanging on to a usable past.  One of the really interesting things is a book by a chronicler who calls himself "El mancebo de Arévalo" ("the young man from Arévalo") who went around collecting eye-witness accounts of the fall of Granada in 1492, in a "where were you when you heard the news?" kind of way, and also recorded interactions with sympathetic Jewish conversos and a few cristianos viejos.  (One that I found moving was the story of the Carmelite friar who was vehemently opposed to forcible baptism, and tried to shield the people he could by essentially allowing his "congregation" to use his church as a mosque, going through the motions of a Mass to keep them safe but adapting the times so that they lined up with Muslim prayers and fasting.)  There was lots more that was interesting, but as a final cool detail, the aljamiada literature of Spain has a parallel in Turkey slightly later --- when Spanish refugees who escaped or were forcibly expelled tried to cling to their Spanish culture even as they were absorbed into the Arabic-speaking fabric of the society, by writing things down in Arabic but using Roman letters.  As Joan Manuel Serrat allegedly once said, "I sing better in whichever language is prohibited."

Anyway, after class ended at 2:30 I headed virtuously in the direction of the Residencia de Estudiantes, stopping for lunch along the way because the Residencia is closed between 3:00 and 5:00.  I found a lovely, local, not too expensive cafeteria near Nuevos Ministerios (it took some doing to avoid the metastatic Corte Inglés), and took the opportunity to have Spanish food, which I feel silly making for myself, but also feel silly not eating when I'm here.  I don't turn down freshly made gazpacho under almost any circumstances, but as there was a raw, wet, autumn wind blowing soaked leaves on soaked sidewalks, I also jumped at the chance to have my main dish be a cocido madrileño.  (Cocido in general is stew.  This particular stew -- which was almost solid, with little broth and very yummy -- is the Madrileño version of fabada, which has potatoes as well as beans cooked soft with what would be mystery meat anywhere else but this being Spain is -- let's face it -- mystery pork; morcilla, chorizo, tocino, etc.  I didn't eat the tocino, because I can't quite eat straight fat, but the rest was delicious.)  At 5:00 PM I promptly presented myself at the Residencia library, where the people are all as pleasant and helpful and welcoming as I remember from the last time I did research there two years ago, but where it was not possible to do the search for my request in the afternoon.

The Residencia is unusual in that it does not really have an open catalogue, aside from the CSIC general online one.  As I hadn't trolled through that in advance, it was a question of asking the librarian.  Fortunately, as I remembered, one of the librarians is super-nice, and has far more experience with their database than I do.  He asked me to fill out a paper research request with my personal info, and reason for research, and then with the archive I wanted to consult and "a bit of an explanation of what you're looking for, if there are specific authors, or anything like that."  I decided to cast a wide net, so I explained I was looking at the Gustavo Durán Martínez collection because I thought he had known people I was interested in in Madrid in 1937-38, and then later in New York and Cuba during his diplomatic career after the war.  Then I listed absolutely everyone I could think of who might have had contact with him.  I didn't include Richard Wright because Durán was definitely a committed communist, and I don't think he and Wright would have had much to say to each other after Wright left the party.  I did include Dorothy Peterson, because in diplomatic circles even if you have different politics you tend to be - well, diplomatic.  They're going to get back to me in a few days.  I don't have high hopes, but this game requires patience and optimism, and I'm sure I can think of new search terms if I spend a bit more time on it.

After carefully filling out the research request and discussing it a little with the nice librarian (who knows my sponsor at the Complutense, and was perfectly friendly and welcoming to Fulbright people, and generally happy to do a little small talk as well as asking some useful questions to make sure he understood what he was looking for), I headed upstairs from the library (which is in the basement) and stopped to look at the exhibit on "Danza en la edad de plata."  There are a lot of old photos, but there was also a cool set of video clips of old movies with flamenco dancers in them.  I watched them for a while, and then headed home to do shopping and work related emails and similar. 

I close with one of the video clips (or one similar to it) that I found on Youtube, with a sigh of nostalgia for the days when Hollywood hired actual dancers to do dances.  It gets amazing around 2:45.  Enjoy!