Ever alert as we are to what is said about us abroad, any article printed in the foreign press causes a stir in Spain. In the same way, books by Hispanists spark special curiosity. So it is surprising that the elegant volume by J.B. Trend, The Civilization of Spain – published in English in 1944 – was not translated before, and in fact, Cambridge’s first Professor of Spanish is an unknown in Spain and forgotten about in his own university. Things have been different for Madrid: A New Biography – by the cultural historian Luke Stegemann, which tells the history of the city from its beginnings as a village to its current state as a metropolis – which has appeared in two languages in 2024.
John Brande Trend (1887-1958) first came to Spain in 1919, sent by Cambridge to report on the country’s cultural scene, and befriended Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca, becoming a privileged witness of that Silver Age through frequent visits in the 1920s and 1930s, until the outbreak of the Civil War. William Chislett, a research fellow at the Elcano Institute, writes the foreword, which recounts Trend’s ties to the Residencia de Estudiantes and his familiarity with Unamuno, Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, or Alberto Jiménez Fraud, in addition to his bond with Falla, with whom he maintained an extensive correspondence, to then write the first monograph on the composer. In the volume being reviewed, the Hispanist and musicologist offers a synthesis of Spanish history from the Phoenicians up to 1936, and the narrative is both entertaining and evocative, written with alluring natural ease and a rare mix of love for our country and undisguised perplexity at some of its more disconcerting traits.
Equally readable, and also characterized by the fusion of a critical eye and a bond of affection, is the new story of Madrid penned by Luke Stegemann, who describes himself as an ‘honorary Madrileño’ and came here for the first time in 1989. Born in the rural heart of New South Wales, the young Australian fell in love with Madrid, and with his huge volume about this ‘beautiful Babylon’ he seeks to save it as much from the coloristic disdain of French, British, and American travelers since the 17th century as from the criticism of Spaniards like Baroja, Azaña, or Cela who have been rather hostile towards it. Divided into four large sections – Village, Empire, City, World – the book starts with the prehistoric settlement and the Muslim stronghold to go on to its flowering as the capital of a vast empire in the 16th century; the city of Cervantes, Quevedo, or Velázquez, as later of Goya, protagonist of Spanish history in 1808 or 1936, and today a financial center and a tourist and cultural mecca that attracts people from all over Europe and the Hispanic world. Praised by Nigel Townson, Michael Reid, or William Chislett as an erudite hymn to a great capital that is not properly known about and less appreciated than it deserves to be, this historical chronicle is a new tile in the mosaic of foreign accounts of us, which with its inextricable fabric of proximity and distance makes us more richly aware of our roots and our identity.
