Italia-España, un entramado de relaciones literarias: la “Escuela de Barcelona”

Abstract

The key objective of the following doctoral thesis is to investigate the ties between post-war Italian literary culture and that of Spain. The thesis focuses, in particular, on the Italian influence in the 1950s on the Catalan group known as the ‘School of Barcelona’. The research deals mainly with the dialogue between the School of Barcelona (José Agustín Goytisolo, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Carlos Barral and Josep Maria Castellet) and the Italian literary sphere, represented at the time by an ensemble of different individual authors, poets, Hispanicists and publishing editors. The reference period of the study covers the decades of the 1950s and the 1960s, because this was the time during which the links between the various representatives of Spanish publishing houses and their foreign counterparts were consolidated. The work proposes to present the School of Barcelona from a new perspective in order to illustrate the way in which the relationship with a foreign literary system could influence the intellectual output (literary, critical, memoirs, editorial) of José Agustín Goytisolo, Josep Maria Castellet, Carlos Barral and, to a lesser extent, of Jaime Gil de Biedma. The thesis seeks to explain the network of contacts between the principal Hispanicists of the time. Carlo Bo, Vittorio Bodini, Dario Puccini, Mario Socrate, Oreste Macrí (all first-class translators as well) would prove themselves indispensable interlocutors with respect to the Barcelona group and true instigators of the bond between post-war Italian culture and the anti-Francoist intellectuals in Spain. Furthermore, the thesis studies the most significant publications that linked the two countries together. It examines the controversies that sprang from some of these publications which contributed to focusing attention on Spain. It is deemed necessary to dedicate a certain amount of space in this work to the figure of Giulio Einaudi, renowned for his constant “dialectic” with members of the School of Barcelona. In order to award him his rightful place in Spanish culture, I sought and then benefited from direct access to the considerable nucleus of still unpublished letters in the care of the ‘State Archives’ of Turin, thanks to the cooperation of Malcolm Einaudi and Pamela Giorgi. The researched material illustrates how relations between the Seix Barral and Einaudi groups developed from their first tentative attempts at communication onwards. Mapping out the exchanged books and the editorial projects in this way permits the reconstruction of the mosaic of the future catalogue of ‘Biblioteca Breve’ of Seix Barral. It also underlines the opening up that occurred vis-à-vis “new” literature on the part of the two publishing houses. Furthermore, I assemble an appendix concerning the Italian translations of the work of the authors of the School of Barcelona up until the present day. This is to increase the available source material in the most complete manner possible. In this way, thanks to an examination of the “Italian” correspondence of these Spanish authors with their translators and main promoters, it was possible to achieve a more precise account of their Italian projection. At the same time, the appendix may serve as a useful consultative instrument for anyone interested in the further pursuit of this complex research route. In the concluding section, I dedicated myself, in particular, to the Italian translation undertaken by José Agustín Goytisolo, whose indispensable work in embracing and circulating contemporary Italian literature can be considered one of the most valuable efforts of the 20th century. Translation can be confirmed then as a valid instrument in studying and in comparing the key elements that characterise the process that drew the two literary systems in question together.

Date of Award	11 Oct 2012
Original language	Spanish
Supervisor	Carme Riera Guilera (Director)