Concha Zardoya y "Cuadernos americanos": la emigración y el exilio como lugares de lectura de la poesía española contemporánea

Abstract

The dialogue between the culture of the Spanish Republican exile and the intellectual emigration from Spain to Latin America in the mid-twentieth century has been little studied in literary criticism and historiography. Given her significant contribution to the study of contemporary Spanish poetry, the case of Concha Zardoya, who settled in the United States in 1948, is particularly illustrative of the coexistence of two reading paradigms marked by the migratory imprint. On the basis of her article ‘El poeta político (en torno a España)’ (1976), published in Cuadernos Americanos, I will show that the cosmopolitan ethic that characterized the Mexican journal and the writer’s contacts with exiles enriched her philological work, which in the 1950s was still strongly influenced by her formative years in a context marked by the predominance of stylistics as a method of literary analysis in Spain. As I will show, the interdisciplinary approach that characterized Cuadernos Americanos helped Zardoya to approach the relationship between the Spanish and the Hispanic, and to develop an interest in the study of the relationship between literature and philosophy which found its raison d’être in a context marked by the European diaspora and its imprint in Latin America.