Current Research

Translation and critical edition of La media noche. Visión estelar de un momento de guerra by Ramón del Valle-Inclán

La media noche (Midnight) is based on Valle-Inclán’s experience at the Western Front during WWI. In the chronicle, Valle-Inclán attempts to create out of the devastating fragments that characterize an individual experience of war a synthetic view of the whole, outside of time and space, the product of what he terms “astral vision.” My critical translation provides English-language access to a distinctly Spanish take on central literary problems of the era, including a desire to disengage qualitative experience from its fragmentary expression in language, the expression of discrete temporalities as simultaneous, and the observation of perspectival space from a position of cosmic omniscience.

Book about the aesthetics of Valle-Inclán

Valle-Inclán’s aesthetic treatise, La lámpara maravillosa (1916, The Lamp of Marvels) is the central concern of my book. In the treatise, Valle-Inclán presents a dense synthesis of occult traditions as varied as gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Spanish mysticism, kabbalah, the Hermetic tradition, and alchemy and is clearly situated within the theosophy movement in vogue across Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. The text also presents a remarkably coherent aesthetic system that confronts many of the philosophical problems at the heart of early 20th-century modernism. In the first part, I examine in detail Valle-Inclán’s aesthetic system as presented in La lámpara maravillosa and then in part two its implementation in several of Valle-Inclán’s literary and dramatic texts. In both parts, I am interested in how Valle-Inclán interacts with various strands of modernism, from pre-Raphaelite art to cubism, symbolist aesthetics to narrative techniques that develop out of the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941).