Thanks to the sterling efforts of colleagues in Collections and Academic Liaison (CAL), a hitherto underutilised section of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) library has recently been catalogued. 2252 titles running to almost 79 metres of shelving under the ‘Foreign colonies’ classification have now been added to iDiscover. Previously these titles were only discoverable through a labyrinthine card catalogue situated in the Rare Books Reading Room at Cambridge University Library; potential users had to know of the existence of this collection and had to physically visit the UL to access the card catalogue.
Continue reading “Cataloguing of the Royal Commonwealth Society Library’s ‘Foreign colonies’ section”Category: Spanish
A deluxe edition of ‘Twenty love poems and A song of despair’ for Cambridge
The University Library has recently received a special limited edition of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. Presented to the University in 1991 by Patricio Aylwin Azócar, former President of Chile, this copy is no. 555 of 250 copies printed from 501 to 750 and features a dedication to the University of Cambridge by the Chilean president.
Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1904-1973) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He is best known for his poetry, most notably this work, which he wrote in 1924 when he was just nineteen years old. Neruda’s works are widely represented in the Cambridge Libraries collections, both in Spanish and in English translation (click here to view our holdings in iDiscover).
This particular edition of Twenty love poems and ‘A song of despair’ was printed by Ismael Espinosa in 1990 in Santiago de Chile.[i] It is presented in elephant folio, with a satin ribbon, illustrated with eight original glazes by Chilean magical realism painter Hernán Valdovinos. The volume is beautifully bound in peacock-feather decorated cloth, with gold paper-title-label insert on the front panel and marbled endpapers.[ii] The calligraphy is by María Angélica Seguel.
Sonia Morcillo
[i] Ismael Espinosa talks about this edition in Revelaciones de un editor de Neruda, El Mercurio, Sept. 25, 1988, p. E16 (available online at: https://www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl/bnd/628/w3-article-297688.html)
[ii] Description details source: The Edmonton Book Store, Canada.
People, poetry, plastic and milk
In this post we will introduce the last addition to our series of posts on Latin American handmade books. We have been developing Cambridge’s cartonera collection since 2013. Ten years, various blog posts and events, a research project collaboration, a book chapter contribution and 271 books later the collection offers a broad panorama of the production of unique books made by hand often in a context of material scarcity and always channelling voices outside of the mainstream.
The bulk of the collection is represented by cartonera books, categorised as items made with hand painted cardboard covers and part of the big publishing movement that originated from Eloisa Cartonera in Argentina in 2003 and which chiefly came to the Library through the AHRC funded project “Cartonera Publishing: Relations, Meaning and Community in Movement project”. It is however important to point out that, of course, cartonera were not the first ever handmade books produced in Latin America and it was always our intention to give context to this collection by also purchasing contextual material that would provide examples of those publishers that came before and after, as a way to depict the wide and rich picture of Latin American independent publishing. It is with that intention in mind that the collection includes examples of Taller Leñateros from Mexico and of Ediciones Vigía from Cuba, which started their activities in the 1970’s and 1980’s, respectively.
Read more: People, poetry, plastic and milkThe last additions to the collection, and the focus of this blogpost, are 11 books published by Ediciones Arroyo, based in Arroyo Leyes, a village in the province of Santa Fe, in the heart of Argentina’s vast and intensively farmed lands. Ediciones Arroyo was funded by Alejandra Bosch in 2016 and she openly recognizes the influence the cartonera movement had in its creation. It does share many characteristics with cartonera books: they are handmade, they re-utilise otherwise wasted material and they publish mainly authors not known outside of the dominant media. However, Ediciones Arroyo follow their very own creative path: their covers are made by using cleaned milk cartons and sachets (inside-out), using a characteristic collage of coloured vinyl letters to add titles or authors’ names in their covers; they publish poetry written exclusively by authors from the provinces and they are all handmade and illustrated by Alejandra and her son, Julian Bosch, in their home in Arroyo Leyes, for zero profit. But to think that the publisher works in distant isolation would be a mistake. As well as publishing, Alejandra and Julian organise a yearly poetry festival in Arroyo Leyes in close and enthusiastic collaboration with local supporters (organisations that offer venues, businesses that cater for food, neighbours that offer free accommodation). The festival gathers poets from around the country, who in turn feed into the publishing selections, by writing poems and often contributing financially to the project and also by sending milk sachets and cartons by post to contribute to the material production of the chapbooks. These are donated by village neighbours too, as a single household milk consumption couldn’t possibly supply such a prolific publisher!
In a country where most of the cultural and political powers reside in the capital city of Buenos Aires, having a very active and creative independent publisher building strong artistic, social and affective networks from an “anonymous” village in a monotonously landscaped region otherwise dominated by the push to produce “high value goods” (Santa Fe province is Argentina’s major OGM soy exporter), is of major significance. In a very interesting article, Alejandra questions the idea of “being at the margins”:
“[…] I am not in a margin; I am at the centre. This is the political decision I have taken when it comes to manage [cultural activities]: to feel that I am at the centre of a territory that irradiates. If we place ourselves and accept that we work, write, publish and manage at the margins, then we are facilitating that conflict […] Arroyo Leyes is the centre of a world that many people have built together and that is being replicated in many other areas of the country.”
Our Library is the only library in the UK holding items by Ediciones Arroyo. We are extremely grateful to their creators and to our local bookseller, García Cambeiro, who facilitated their acquisition. Our selection aims to represent a small but hopefully faithful sample of the world they continue to create; we have chosen poets from different Argentine provinces:
- Fernando Callero (Entre Ríos)
- Francisco Bitar and Larisa Cumin (Santa Fe)
- Aníbal Costilla (Santiago del Estero)
- Micaela Godoy (La Rioja)
- Dafne Pidemunt, Tamara Pradon and Fernando Noy (Río Negro)
- Walter Lezcano and Gustavo Tisocco (Corrientes)
They are available to consult in the Rare Books reading room. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us: hispanic@lib.cam.ac.uk.
Clara Panozzo
Further reading (in Spanish):
Funding opportunity for a PhD on Spanish chapbooks : the culture of their time and modern digital description
Cambridge University Library is delighted to have received an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) and invites applications for PhD studentships, starting in October 2024. The successful PhD candidate will receive funding to work on the Spanish chapbooks collections, as part of the Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) with the University of Oxford.
Continue reading “Funding opportunity for a PhD on Spanish chapbooks : the culture of their time and modern digital description”The Prof. Trevor Dadson donation on early modern literature, history and culture from Spain
The University Library has recently received a donation of several hundred books from the library of the late Professor Trevor Dadson (1947-2020). He was a British Hispanist whose expertise in Golden Age Spanish literature and history gained him worldwide recognition.
Continue reading “The Prof. Trevor Dadson donation on early modern literature, history and culture from Spain”Dame Margaret Anstee Collection: a Newnham alumna in South America
Dame Margaret Joan Anstee (1926-2016) was a remarkable Newnham College graduate who had special ties with Bolivia and who in 1987 was the first ever woman to become Undersecretary-General of the United Nations, the third most senior position at that institution. During her life as a UN official (which we can read about in Never learn to type: a woman at the United Nations), she spent several years working in different parts of the world, including many countries in South America and also Angola (see Orphan of the Cold War: the inside story of the collapse of the Angolan peace process, 1992-93).
It was Bolivia though, where she was the UN representative from 1960 to 1965, that would become a prime focus in her life. In her 1970 work Gate of the sun: a prospect of Bolivia, she recounts her first experiences in a “country to which one cannot remain indifferent”. She not only became special adviser to its government after leaving the UN in 1993 but also chose it as the place to spend part of her retirement (read The house on the sacred lake: and other Bolivian dreams – and nightmares).
Continue reading “Dame Margaret Anstee Collection: a Newnham alumna in South America”
Artists’ books from Cuba
The Latin American and Iberian Collections team has recently acquired a small but utterly compelling collection of books published by Ediciones Vigía. These are beautiful and hugely imaginative hand-made artist books created in Matanzas, Cuba. Although in nature very different to the Cartonera collection we have built over the years, Vigía books also help us ask questions about the possibilities of creating and disseminating art and literature in a context of material scarcity.
A purse… 
…and a book. Las memorias vacías de Solange Bañuelos, by Maité Hernández-Lorenzo (2014). 
Available at CCB.75.20. Full description here: https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/t9gok8/44CAM_ALMA21581461540003606 
The back of the purse-book, with the oil-lamp, the publisher’s symbol, as a zip. 
Canto a Matanzas, by Carilda Oliver Labra (2014). 
The back cover of the portfolio. 
The publication celebrates the 60th anniversary of the poem the prestigious Cuban poet wrote in honour of her hometown, Matanzas. 
The opening of the portfolio… 
… and the unfolding. 
More details here: https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/t9gok8/44CAM_ALMA21581461650003606 
Lydia Cabrera en su laguna sagrada, by Natalia Bolívar Arostegui (2015). A rich collage made of bark chippings, cloth, cardboard, jute cord and hand-coloured paper cut-outs. 
Title page. Book available at CCA.75.4. Lydia Cabrera was a renowned author and anthropologist specialised in Afro-Cuban religions. 
More info here: https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/t9gok8/44CAM_ALMA21581461310003606 
Cristóbal Colón y otros locos, by Pedro R. Monge Rafuls (2016). 
The work is a play that explores the theme of discovery, conquest, and the “encounter of two worlds”. 
Available at CCA.75.3. More details here: https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/t9gok8/44CAM_ALMA21581461380003606 
La flor del cactus, written, illustrated and desgined by Frank David Valdés (2015). Available at CCC.75.211. See https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/permalink/f/t9gok8/44CAM_ALMA21581461440003606
Ediciones Vigía was founded by the poet Alfredo Zaldívar and the artist Rolando Estévez in 1985 but did not originally start as a publisher: it began as a cultural association organizing events for the local community to learn about Cuban and international authors. They would produce invitations for such events held in the then named Casa del Escritor (The Author’s House) in the Plaza de la Vigía square in Matanzas.
Continue reading “Artists’ books from Cuba”Dating Spanish chapbooks: preliminary findings of a Digital Humanities project
The one-year project Spanish chapbooks 1700-1900 in CUDL: dating ephemeral literature, made possible by a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant (CHRG) with the support of Cambridge Digital Humanities, has come to an end (see our earlier blog post on the project here).
Continue reading “Dating Spanish chapbooks: preliminary findings of a Digital Humanities project”Javier Marías: a literary icon
The recent death of writer, translator and columnist Javier Marías (1951-2022) has deeply saddened the literary world. His unique style of writing, his wittiness and his exquisite command of language (in Spanish and in English) won him numerous accolades and many followers both in Spain and abroad. His death on 11 September at the age of 70 came far too early for a writer in his prime who many believed was an obvious candidate for the Nobel prize in Literature.
Javier Marías graduated in Philosophy and Literature from the Complutense University of Madrid. He taught Spanish literature and translation theory at the University of Oxford between 1983 and 1985, at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1984, and at the Complutense University of Madrid between 1986 and 1990.
He made his debut as a writer at the age of nineteen with his novel Los dominios del lobo and had an extensive and prolific career. Translation shaped and influenced his work. Throughout his career, he expertly translated Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Browne, Vladimir Nabokov and Lawrence Sterne, amongst other writers (he won the Fray Luis de León national translation award for his translation of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in 1979).
His works have been translated into more than forty languages and published in over fifty countries. He wrote sixteen novels, eight essays and six short stories, as well as his regular weekly column for the Spanish newspaper El País. In 2006, he was elected to the Real Academia de la Lengua Española (Royal Spanish Academy), the institution responsible for preserving the unity and effective use of the Spanish language in the Spanish speaking world. And, in 2021, he became a member of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature as an International Writer, the first Spanish writer to obtain this distinction.
The University Library has good coverage of his works in Spanish as well as in English translation. His best-known works appear below, listed in order of appearance more or less:
- Los dominios del lobo (9002.d.2638, available here)
- Travesía del horizonte (9001.d.2771, available here)
- El monarca del tiempo (744:39.c.200.371, available here)
- El Siglo (744:39.c.200.317, available here)
- El hombre sentimental (9001.d.2772, available here)
- Todas las almas (9000.d.3879, available here)
- Corazón tan blanco (9006.c.393, available here)
- Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (Library Storage Facility, available here)
- Negra espalda del tiempo (C206.d.6260, available here)
- Tu rostro mañana 1. Fiebre y lanza (744:39.c.200.301, available here)
- Tu rostro mañana 2. Baile y sueño (744:39.c.200.302, available here)
- Tu rostro mañana 3. Veneno y sombra y adiós (744:39.c.200.303, available here)
- Los enamoramientos (C205.c.8016, available here)
- Así empieza lo malo (C209.c.6900, available here)
- Berta Isla (C214.c.5164, available here)
- Tomás Nevinson (C217.c.353, available here)
The Library also has electronic access to his works Lección pasada de moda: letras de lengua (Digitalia Hispánica, available here) and Donde todo ha sucedido: al salir del cine (Digitalia Hispánica, available here). You can see a list of English translations of his works clicking here.
Sonia Morcillo
The visitors’ album of María Luisa Aub : a hidden treasure
The visitors’ album of María Luisa Aub came to the University Library in 2018. María Luisa (1927-2013), affectionally called “Mimín” by family and friends, was the eldest daughter of Mexican-Spanish writer Max Aub. She had close links to Cambridge, having lived in the city for over 25 years, but she also lived in exile in Mexico for many years.
Continue reading “The visitors’ album of María Luisa Aub : a hidden treasure”
Languages across Borders 