Many Spanish-language poets, from Lorca to Pablo Neruda or Octavio Paz are indebted to the work of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Spanish poet who received the Nobel Prize of Literature en 1956. He is a rare creator of pure, lyrical texts that express the essence of poety. Julio Jensen, Associate Professor in the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen, talks about this outstanding figure in Spanish culture.

Presented by Maria Jenell Nicolas

Books and publications by Juan Ramón Jiménez

Platero and I, translated by Eloïse Roach, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1957.

Selected Writings of Juan Ramón Jiménez, translated by H. R. Hays, New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957.

Three Hundred Poems, translated by Eloïse Roach, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1962.

God Desired and Desiring, translated by Antonio T. de Nicolás, New York, Paragon House, 1987.

Light and Shadows. Selected Poems and Prose, translated by Robert Bly, Dennis Maloney, Antonio T. de Nicolás, James Wright and Clark Zlotchew, New York, White Pine Press, 1987.

Time and Space: A Poetic Autobiography, translated by Antonio T. de Nicolás, New York, Paragon House, 1988.

Diary of a Newlywed Poet, translated by Hugh A. Harter, Selinsgrove, Susquehanna University Press, 2004.

Books and publications about Juan Ramón Jiménez

Cardwell, Richard A., Juan R. Jiménez: The Modernist Apprenticeship, 1895–1900, Berlin, Colloquium Verlag, 1977.

Coke-Enguidanos, Mervyn, Word and Work in the Poetry of Juan Ramon Jiménez, London, Tamesis Books, 1982.

Cole, Leo R., The Religious Instinct in the Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Oxford, Dolphin Book Co., 1967.

Jensen, Julio, The Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez. An Example of Modern Subjectivity, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012.

Olson, Paul R., Circle of Paradox; Time and Essence in the Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.

Wilcox, John C., Self and image in Juan Ramón Jiménez, Modern and Postmodern Readings, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Young, Howard T., The Line in the Margin: Juan Ramón Jiménez and his Readings in Blake, Shelley, and Yeats, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1980.

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Above all a philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset enunciated the seminal idea of his thought in this sentence: “I am myself and my circumstance, and if I don’t save it, I don’t save myself”. In this podcast, Juan Pablo Fusi, Professor Emeritus of Contemporary History at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense, talks about this outstanding figure in Spanish culture that tried to make sense of the most important challenges of 20th century’s humanity.

Presented by Maria Jenell Nicolas

Books and publications by José Ortega y Gasset 

(1914) | Meditations on Quixote, New York, Norton, 1961.

(1921) | Invertebrate Spain, London, Allen and Unwin, 1937.

(1930) | The Revolt of the Masses, London, G. Allen & Unwin, 1932.

(1932) | “In Search of Goethe from Within”, in José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1968.

(1957) | Man and People, London, Allen & Unwin, 1957.

(1958) | The Idea of Principle in Leibnitz and the Evolution of Deductive Theory, New York, Norton, 1971.

(1960) | An Interpretation of Universal History, New York: Norton, 1973.

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Dalí was born in the early years of the twentieth century in a typical bourgeois family from Figueres (Spain). Trained as a classical artist, he soon discovered Surrealism and also became a celebrity in other artistic fields, such as writing, film and design, which cannot be understood without taking into account the creative project he conceived with his wife Gala. In Dali’s Teatre-Museu, in Figueres, his essence is all over the place, just like an old vice or a never negotiated remorse. In fact, this prodigious building is not only Dalí’s museum: it is also his mausoleum. In this podcast, Estrella de Diego, Professor of Art History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, talks about this outstanding figure in Spanish culture.

Dalí’s voiceover by Luis Carlos de la Lombana

Books and publications about Salvador Dalí

Aguer, Montse, Dalí's world, London, Goodman, 2009.

Dalí, Salvador (1942), The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, New York, Dover Fine Art, 1993.

Salvador Dalí: an illustrated life, London / Figueres / Madrid, Tate Publishing / Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí / Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales-Ministerio de Cultura, 2007.

Exhibition catalogues

Salvador Dalí, the early years, London, South Bank Centre, 1994.

Dalí. Mass Culture, Barcelona / Figueres, Fundació La Caixa / Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, 2004.

De Diego, Estrella, Gala Salvador Dalí. A Room of own's own in Púbol, Barcelona, MNAC-Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, 2018.

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No one from Spain’s past is more famed, more hated or more misunderstood than Cristopher Columbus. Misplaced vengeance topples Columbus’ statues. Tweets traduce him. He was mendacious, egotistical, irrational, self-righteous, humourless, and mean. But he had virtues to balance his vices—including dazzling bravery, a kind of ingenuous charm, and a confiding nature. He was, moreover, sympathetic towards cultures other than his own, including Native Americans’. In this podcast, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, talks about this outstanding figure in Spanish culture. 

Books and publications about Christopher Columbus

Bankoff, Greg "Aeolian Empires: The Influence of Winds and Currents on Maritime Expansion in the Age of Sail", Environment and History, 23, 2017.

Colón, Fernando, Historie del S.D. Fernando Colombo: nelle quali s'ha particolare, & vera relatione della vita, & de' fatti dell'Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, suo padre, Venice, appresso Francesco de' Franceschi Sanese, 1571. 

Crosby, Alfred W., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Westport, CT, Praeger, 2003.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Columbus on Himself, London, Folio Society, 1992.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, Columbus, London, Duckworth, 1996.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, "The Stranger-Effect in Early Modern Asia", Itinerario, 24.2, 2000.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, "The Origins of the European Atlantic", Itinerario, 24.1, 2000.

Flint, Valerie I. J., The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992.

Helms, Mary W., Ulysses’ Sail, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1988.

Irving A., Leonard, Books of the Brave, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1949. 

Phillips, William D. and Phillips, Carla Rahn, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Phillips, William D., Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, Philadelphia, Penn Press, 2013.

Wey-Gómez, Nicolás, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2008.

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The general view of Nineteenth Century European narrative is somehow incomplete. The literary critics who set up the canonical banquet table of the XIX century novelists made name tags for only a few: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Zola and Henry James. Meanwhile writers of equal talent, like Benito Pérez Galdós—considered the most important fiction writer in Spain after Miguel de Cervantes—were not even contemplated as possible guests. In this episode, Germán Gullón, literary critic, writer and Professor emeritus of Spanish Literature at the University of Amsterdam, presents the life, work and significance of this outstanding figure in Spanish culture.

With readings of Galdós by Heilet van Ree.

Books and publications about Benito Pérez Galdós

Nobelprize.org: Benito Pérez Galdós at the Nomination Archive

Berkowich, H. C., Pérez Galdós: Spanish Liberal Crusader, Madison, University of Wisconsin, 1948.

Bly, Peter A., ‘Galdós as Traveller and Travel Writer’, The Tenth Annual Pérez Galdós Lecture, Sheffield, The University of Sheffield, 2010.

Dendle. Brian J., The Spanish Novel of Religious Thesis, 1876-1936, Valencia - Princeton, Princeton University - Castalia, 1968.

Dupont, Denise, Realism as Resistance: Romanticism and Authorship in Galdós, Clarín, and Baroja, Bucknell, Bucknell University Press, 2006.

Gilman, Stephen (1981), Galdós and the Art of the European Novel: 1867-1887, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014.

Gullón, Germán, ‘Sentimental Genetics: The Birth of the Human Intimate Sphere (Miau)’, The Third Annual Pérez Galdós Lecture, Sheffield, The University of Sheffield, 1999.

McKinney, Collin, Mapping the Social Body: Urbanization, the Gaze, and the Novels of Galdós, Charlotte, University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Pattison, Walter T., Benito Pérez Galdós, New York, Twayne, 1975.

Percival, Anthony, Galdós and his Critics, Toronto, University of Toronto, 1985.

Ríos-Font, Wadda C., The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain, Bucknell, Bucknell University Press, 2004.

Sackett, Theodore A., Pérez Galdós. An Annotated Bibliography, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1968.

Snow, C. P., The Realists. Eight Portraits, New Yok, Macmillan, 1978.

Tsuchiya, Akiko, Images of the Sign: Semiotic Consciousness in the Novels of Benito Pérez Galdós, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1990.

Walton, L. B., Pérez Galdós, London, Dent, 1927

English editions of Galdós’ works

Trafalgar and The Battle of Salamanca [La batalla de Arapiles], translation by Rick Morgan, Bath, Brown Dog Books, 2019.

Tristana, translation by Margaret Jull Costa, New York, NYRB Classics, 2014.

Our Friend Manso [El amigo Manso], translation by Robert Russell, New York, Columbia University Press, 1987.

Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women, translation by Agnes Moncy, New York, Penguin, 1986.

The Shadow [La sombra], translation by Karen. O. Austin, Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 1980.

The Disinherited [La desheredada], translation by Lester Clark, London, The Folio Society, 1976.

Miau, translation by J.M. Cohen, London, Methuen, 1963.

Torment, translation by J. M. Cohen, New York, Farrar Straus&Young, 1953.

The Spendthrifts [La de Bringas], translation by G. Woolsey, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1951.

Saragossa: A Story of Spanish Valor [Zaragoza], translation by Minna Caroline Smith, Boston, Little and Brown, 1899.

Doña Perfecta, translation by Mary Jane Serrano, with an Introduction by William Dean Howells, New York, Harper&Brothers, 1894-1895.

Lady Perfecta, translation by Mary Wharton, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1894.

Marianela, translation by Mary Wharton, London, Digby, Long, 1893.

Marianela: A Story of Spanish Love, translation by Helen W Lester, Chicago, AC McClurg, 1892.

The Court of Charles IV [La corte de Carlos IV], translation by Clara Bell, New York, William S Gottsberger, 1888.

Leon Roch, A Romance, translation by Clara Bell, London, Trubner / New York, William S. Gottsberger, 1888.

Trafalgar, translation by Clara Bell, London, Trubner, 1884.

Marianela, translation by Clara Bell, New York, William S. Gottsberger, 1883.

Gloria, translation by Clara Bell, New York, William S. Gottesberger / London, Trubner, 1882.

Spain is a country with a lot to offer, and over the history, it has been one of the most creative countries in the world. Its writers, artists, rulers and thinkers have inspired, and continue to inspire, many people throughout the globe. Welcome to 'Major Figures in Spanish Culture', a new podcast that's coming to you on November 18, produced by Fundación Juan March in Madrid. Each month we will invite a renowned expert to sit down with us for half an hour and share a story about one of Spain's most prominent figures. We're bringing you the life and stories of writers, artists, adventurers, writers and more, to expand your knowledge and deepen your appreciation of Spanish culture. You can tune in and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or canal.march.es