Hola. This is Barbara, your curator of cultural news from the Spanish-speaking world. I have 2.5 topics for you today: a talk by cultural historian Kirsty Hooper about English travellers writing about Madrid, an interesting map of South America, and the poem «Otoño» by Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti, which gives this newsletter its title. So, let’s start before winter is here.
Encountering Spain: How British travellers viewed Madrid
It is one of the better sides of Twitter to serendipitously offer interesting events and exchanges. Through a retweet I found the announcement of an interesting talk by Kirsty Hooper about British views on Madrid from the late 18th to the early 20th century. She thereby covered a time period in which travelling from London to Madrid shrank from six to two days. The talk is part of a series of the Instituto Cervantes in Manchester and Leeds. It got streamed via Zoom.
Hooper is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick, currently on leave because she has a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the project «Hispanic London: Culture, Commerce and Community in the Nineteenth-Century City».
She started her talk by introducing us to the writer Henry Swinburne and his book Travels through Spain in the years 1775 and 1776 in which the author does not hide his contempt for Madrid.
Richard Ford was another English expert on Spain, who published his recollections as A Handbook for Travellers in Spain in 1845. Unlike Swinburne, Ford shows deep affection for the country even though he never misses to demonstrate British superiority. With respect to Madrid, he has a largely negative view of the Spanish capital because it is “a modern town”.
Half a century later, Henry O’Shea aimed to show the better sides of Madrid in his classic travel book A Guide to Spain and Portugal. He also includes more practical information for the readers so that they find it easier to navigate palaces and museums, for example.
Writing maniac Albert Frederick Calvert, in comparison, already discovered a Madrid that was more than ready to welcome and serve travellers from Britain. He admires the extent of infrastructure available to English tourists in Madrid. This infrastructure includes English pubs, Anglican church services and other services for English-speaking travellers - an indication of the visible English influence in the Spanish capital at that time. Calvert published in total 36 books on Africa and Spain. You can find a list of his publicly available books on the site of project Gutenberg.
Sybil Fitzgerald’s book In the tracks of the Moors: Sketches in Spain and Northern Africa shares a common belief with all other authors mentioned before: They all see Madrid as the modern exception to the rest of the country, which becomes orientalised to fit the romantic stereotype of 19th century opera. Spain is something in and from the past.
Hooper rounded up her talk by mentioning Leticia Higgin’s Spanish Life in Town and Country (1904). Higgin developed a different view of Spain because she brings old and new together in one context and thereby reveals the different layers of the country’s history. She does not aim at juxtaposing old and new in order to turn Spain as such into a myth of the past. Thus, she overcomes the above-mentioned romantic view of Spain dominant in the 19th century.
I will post the link to the video as soon as it will be publicly available.
The importance of the national capital
After reading about the importance and difference of Madrid as seen by British travel writers of the past, let’s turn to the importance of national capitals in South America. Today, more than 80 percent of the region’s population lives in cities, making it the world’s most urbanised region. The following map is a clear indication that urbanisation in the geographic region is very concentrated (and Brazil’s exception is easy to explain). It shows how many percent of the population lives in the national capital.
What does this mean in terms of development plans, risk management, and social welfare? Am I overestimating the risk of this ratio since I live in a country whose capital only hosts 1.5 % of the overall population (and, officially, is not even a capital in its traditional sense)? I like federation. I think it is fair when economic, political, and cultural powers are not concentrated in one place, isn’t it?
I found the map on Twitter thanks to geographer and map nerd Simon Kuestenmacher. It is originally from this Subreddit.
»Otoño«, by Mario Benedetti
Let’s finish with an autumn poem, written by beloved Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti. Don’t forget, winter is coming!
Aprovechemos el otoño
antes de que el invierno nos escombre
entremos a codazos en la franja del sol
y admiremos a los pájaros que emigranahora que calienta el corazón
aunque sea de a ratos y de a poco
pensemos y sintamos todavía
con el viejo cariño que nos quedaaprovechemos el otoño
antes de que el futuro se congele
y no haya sitio para la belleza
porque el futuro se nos vuelve escarcha
English translation: Let us make the most of autumn/ before winter sweeps over us/let us elbow our way into that strip of sunlight/and admire the birds as they migrate/now that it warms the heart/if only occasionally and a little/let us think and feel still/with the old affection that remains/let us make the most of autumn/before the future freezes over/and there is no place for beauty/because our future turns to frost
Unfortunately, I couldn’t identify the translator’s name. I found this translation on a facebook page. I am happy to give credits where credit is due, so let me know the name of the translator if you happen to know it.
This is all for this week. By the way, you can now also find me on Mastodon: @nachrichtenlos@troet.cafe. I am grateful to you for reading my newsletter. Happy Thanksgiving weekend!