Speak the Culture: Spain: Be Fluent in Spanish Life and Culture

Antonio Machado. Less politically charged than

Unamuno but greatly influenced by the elder writer’s

descriptions of landscape, Machado, the most

important poet of the 98ers, looked on the bright side

of Spanish life. By examining the beauty of the land but

also the flaws of its people, particularly in theCampos

de Castilla(1912) collection of verse, he hoped the

Spanish would draw inner strength. He fled Catalonia

when Franco’s troops arrived, dying in France soon after.

Pío Baroja. Usually deemed the most significant

Spanish novelist of the Generation of 98, Baroja wrote

brilliantly of the dispossessed, of social injustice,

destitution and moral corruption. At the end of a

word-packed career he came up with an eight-volume

autobiography but his best form came early on, notably

in the trilogyLa vida fantástica(1901-06), a satirical story

of Madrid folk.La lucha por la vida(1922-24), set in

Madrid’s slums, is also well regarded.

José Ortega y Gasset. Among the Generation’s second

wave, Gasset was known primarily as a philosopher and

essayist. InEspaña invertebrada(1921), he traced what

he called Spain’s ‘spinelessness’ all the way back to the

Visigoths, whileLa rebelión de las masas(1930) hinted

at a way forward. In 1923 he founded the literary

magazineRevista de Occidente, introducing radical new

European ideas to Spain’s literati. Later he was a

member of the Cortes that helped bring about the

Second Republic in the early 1930s. (See section 2.2.1.

for Ortega’s philosophy)

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1. Identity: the
   building blocks of
   2. Literature
   and philosophy
   3. Art and
   architecture
   4. Performing
   arts
   5. Cinema
   and fashion
   6. Media and
   communications
   7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
   the details of

Have you heard the one
about the poet and the
group of nuns?
Juan Ramón Jiménez was
made Nobel laureate for
his moving, pure poetry
about existence and
spirituality. Alas, it wasn’t
for a series of erotic
poems about an order
of nuns with whom he
stayed as a young man.
The risqué verse
concerned three nuns in
particular from the Sisters
of the Holy Rosary in
Madrid. Jiménez was
there for two years at the
turn of the 20thcentury,
convalescing from an
illness. The verse was
only published for the first
time in 2007, much to the
chagrin of the order of
nuns, still in existence.