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This essay analyzes the infamously strange dialogue of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), in which characters speak English through a modified version of Spanish syntax, false cognates, and peculiar diction. It argues that Hemingway's creation of an Anglo-Spanish literary dialect represents not a political statement on the Spanish Civil War but an attempt to synthesize and recover the moments of interpenetration between English and Spanish since the 1600s. Hemingway's mode of dialogue in the novel is thus a “structural Spanglish” rather than the common code-switching form; it is a mode of interlingual writing that suspends the typical transaction of translation permanently between languages. Hemingway accomplishes this by using Spanish as a laboratory for his overlooked experiments in modernist mistranslation, which I trace through his development of cubist techniques in the novel and his debts to Ezra Pound. As he flattens semantic depth and fuses the syntaxes of two tongues, Hemingway actually invents an aesthetic language that corresponds to neither English nor Spanish, all filtered through a narrator who corrupts the translational process. He thereby creates a critical late modernist novel that looks forward to the depthless anti-epistemology of postmodernist writing. The essay concludes by sketching his place in this genealogy of contemporary writing.
This essay analyzes the infamously strange dialogue of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), in which characters speak English through a modified version of Spanish syntax, false cognates, and peculiar diction. It argues that Hemingway's creation of an Anglo-Spanish literary dialect represents not a political statement on the Spanish Civil War but an attempt to synthesize and recover the moments of interpenetration between English and Spanish since the 1600s. Hemingway's mode of dialogue in the novel is thus a “structural Spanglish” rather than the common code-switching form; it is a mode of interlingual writing that suspends the typical transaction of translation permanently between languages. Hemingway accomplishes this by using Spanish as a laboratory for his overlooked experiments in modernist mistranslation, which I trace through his development of cubist techniques in the novel and his debts to Ezra Pound. As he flattens semantic depth and fuses the syntaxes of two tongues, Hemingway actually invents an aesthetic language that corresponds to neither English nor Spanish, all filtered through a narrator who corrupts the translational process. He thereby creates a critical late modernist novel that looks forward to the depthless anti-epistemology of postmodernist writing. The essay concludes by sketching his place in this genealogy of contemporary writing.
Based on field research conducted in Spain in June 2013, this article investigates some of the historical context for The Spanish Earth . The first section explores the film-related locations of Madrid, Morata de Tajuña, and Fuentidueña de Tajo through site visits and local interviews. The gathered information both expands and corrects what the author presented in Hemingway’s Second War (2011). The second section provides commentary. The article aims to better equip others in drawing more informed conclusions in situating The Spanish Earth within nonfiction theory, the documentary and war film tradition, and Hemingway’s experience of and writings about the war.
Over the course of his career, Ernest Hemingway wrote introductions for a number of writers. These pieces have been largely forgotten, but study and analysis of Hemingway’s introductions offer additional insight into the well-known author. The process of creating and marketing these pieces allowed Hemingway to manipulate and refine his public persona in a space other than his fiction. These introductions enhanced Hemingway’s authority, granted him greater public exposure, and allowed him to enact his defense of writers and writing on several occasions.
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