Hola. This is Barbara, your curator of cultural news from the Spanish-speaking world. This week I have three cultural snippets for you: a book announcement, statistics on the use of several terms to name the half-continent South of the United States of America, and a concert with Spanish Christmas songs from the Renaissance.
Marcos Ricardo Barnatán: El príncipe de Alepo (2022, The prince of Aleppo)
Like many other former students of Spanish-American literature, I got to know Marcos Ricardo Barnatán as the author of the book Jorge Luis Borges. Biografía total (1990). When I studied, it was one of the most recent biographies about the Argentinian writer. OMG, we were all afraid of Jorge Luis Borges back then. Our professors sometimes used his wisdom and knowledge to show us that we were an unread generation. Barnatán’s biography of Borges seemed to echo the dry and aloof character of the person and his writings. It took me many years to get the hang of Borges’s wit and humour.
Well, I came across the name Barnatán again many years later, when I started to learn Ladino and listened to this weekly radio show in Ladino on Spanish public radio. Marcos Ricardo Barnatán is not only a literary critic, but also a poet himself. Besides, he writes a lot about the history of art. The author, born in Argentina but residing in Spain since 1965, is also an active member of Spain’s Sephardic community.
This summer he published the first part of his memories under the title El príncipe de Alepo (The prince of Aleppo). Unsurprisingly perhaps, I found out that Barnatán, much like Borges, is not only an erudite biographer but also a humourous, cosmopolitan human. In the following conversation with Esther Bendahan, Director of Culture at Centro Sefarad-Israel, he talks about his new book and reflects on the importance of the past in the process of literary creation.
Barnatán is a very active Twitter user and you may learn more about his network and even become part of it if you follow and interact with him. Expect tweets about Cuban cigars, too.
What’s in a name?
Which name do you use when you research information about the region South of the US border? The dilemma is to choose between different possible terms: in English, you can choose between Latin America, Hispanic America or Iberoamerica. The words are not identical since they have variations in terms of the countries they include. I’d say I prefer Hispanic America when I do research for literary stuff, but prefer Latin America when my interest is instead an economic or political one. Here’s a statistic which shows the preferences of Google users (for the terms in Spanish).
Which one do you regularly use?
Preparing for Christmas
Like many others, I have been busy consuming my December DALL·E 2 credits to see how state-of-the-art AI is changing our ways to create. DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. I wanted to surprise you with a lovely Christmas image from Medellín. However, I found out that DALL·E 2 does not yet have enough information about Fernando Botero whose style I wanted to imitate for my generated painting (even though his style is easily recognizable imho). It is perhaps an indication that the AI’s training model is still eurocentric. I was not happy with the result. Therefore, I changed my setting and artist and described my painting as follows: “Spanish Christmas scene in Madrid as Francisco Goya would have painted it.” Here you go:
How do you like this random idea of mine put into a generated painting? I have my doubts. Goya surely influenced impressionism but would he have painted like an impressionist?
To finish today’s newsletter, I leave you with the concert «Un niño nos es naçido» (Unto us a child is born) with traditional Spanish Christmas carols, «villancicos» from the 16th century, streamed on November 28th, 2021. The concert took place at the Barfüsser Kirche in Basel. Following is the outline of the concert program (description from the YouTube entry, translated from German): During the Renaissance, the «villancico» developed into one of the most popular genres of polyphonic music on the Iberian peninsula. Towards the end of the era, in the late 16th century, as in the Latin American colonies, sacred «villancicos» became increasingly popular alongside secular ones. The programme starts with Christmas «villancicos» from the Cancionero de Upsala (1556) and sacred «villanescas» (old country songs) by Francisco Guerrero (1589). Secular «villancicos» in Spanish and Portuguese by Juan del Encina, Luis Milan, Mateo Flecha el Viejo, Cristóbal de Morales and others complete the programme and show how diverse this genre was and is. A program in English is available.
This is all for today. May you find some quiet minutes to enjoy this newsletter. Let me know what you think about it. Talk to you soon. 👋