by Almost 200 years ago, the pioneering British travel clerk Richard Ford offered an observation that were happily ignored by the legions of authors who occurred in his dusty footsteps throughout Spain, Spain, notebooks, the strange violin or Bible and of course their own prejudices.
“Nothing causes the Spaniards more pain,” Ford stated in his 1845 handBook for travelers in Spain“As to see the volume by foreigners in their country written by band.”
In view of some of his Waspish expressions, the pain in Spain was thoroughly justified. Catalonia, to Ford’s spirit, was “no place for the man of pleasure, taste or literature … Here is cotton, reversed, vice versa and dissatisfied, the revolution invented”. He found Valencians “vengeful, grumpy, moody and tricky” and reported that the “better classes” in Murcia “vegetation in a monotonous anti -social existence: their activities are the cigar and the siesta”.
Ford, whose often acidic NIB contradicted a deep love of all things, is one of 20 British authors who are profiled in a new Spanish book. Los Curiosos Impertinentes (“The annoying curious ”), which examines the permanent fascination in Great Britain for Spain and thinks about how two centuries of the travel report have shaped the country’s image abroad.
The book is preceded by Ford’s pain quote and by another by the late Spanish writer Ramón J transmitter: “There is nothing better than a foreigner when it comes to seeing what we look like.”
The authors who were selected by the author of the book, the British journalist and writer William Chislett, include Ford and his contemporary, the Bible seller George Borrow and some of their successors of the 20th century, including Laurie Lee, Gerald Brenan, Norman Lewis, against Pritchett and Robert Graves. Authors from the past few decades are represented by Miranda France and Giles Tremlett and the late Michael Jacobs to whom the book is dedicated.
“I intentionally started Ford in the 19th century and did not go back because I felt like I had to start somewhere,” says Chislett, who has lived in Spain for almost 40 years. “You could consider Ford’s book as the first travel book … then we skip into the 20th and 21st centuries for 18 other people, most of whom are absolutely unknown here, let alone in the UK.”
The book, which was originally designed as an exhibition, is published by Instituto Cervantes, the state organization, which was commissioned to promote the Spanish language and Hispanic culture.
Chislett says that it will not escape that all books he quoted have made “a picture” of the country that has shifted over the centuries.
He points out that the old British idea of Spain was built as a dark, pious place on the anti-Spanish propaganda and was best summarized by the strict majesty of El Escorial, and in the 19th century there was something wild and romantic, in the 19th century. After the war war, the British were seduced by history, architecture and culture of Spain, and El Escorial had placed the distant, Islamic splendor of the Alhambra in Granada.
“It was an unknown area and had all these exotic elements,” added Chislett. “It was avoided that there were all these abandoned castles and flamenco … they have these two contrasts: they have the” black legend “version of Spain and then they have the romantic version of Spain.”
Borrowing and Ford followed Lee, the Spain on the CUSP of the civil war in Verewigte When I went out a midsummer morning and from Lewis, whose Voices of the old sea If a dying lifestyle in Farol, a deep -level village on the Costa Brava, captures because fishing can give way to mass tourism.
The considerations of the authors also show that concerns about what is known today as Uppourism are hardly new. Ford, who may have done more than most to bring Spain onto the tourist map, complained that the “relentless march of the European intellectual is crushed many local wildflowers”, while Pritchett later complained that Spain had “entered tourists”.
As Chislett and others mentioned, Spain’s love hatred is just as familiar with the way it is viewed by foreign eyes. “Perhaps Spaniards are spiky because so much was written about them,” he says. “I didn’t come to a conclusion, but maybe you could say that Spaniards – rightly, but maybe rightly during the Franco Regime – have an inferiority complex that I would like to get rid of completely because they have happened in the past 50 years.
“In many ways, Spain is far ahead of the other European countries.”
While Chislett describes the book as a “work of love” and an attempt to repay Spain for his friendliness and hospitality in the past four decades, he hopes that Spanish readers will also present it in some of the great British travel adjusters. “There are books earlier than Ford and loans that return until the 18th century,” he adds. “It is about emphasizing this tradition that is still going on.”
In his foreword to the book, the Spanish writer and travel clerk Julio Llamazares advises his compatriots to put their “pride and patriotism” aside so that they can look again on the pages.
“It is worth being ready to accept the foreign look or, perhaps more precisely, the foreign looks, since many authors wrote about us after they have traveled to our country and have met it,” he writes.
“Like English -language quixots, they draw our portraits with their words, even if they demonstrate their passion for a country and a culture that, although they are so different, marked them for always and for life.”
