NOVELA/NIVOLA
Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Anthony Kerrigan
Princeton: Princeton University Press, Reprint 1987
517pp., $10.50 (paperback)
THREE EXEMPLARY NOVELS
Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Angel Flores
New York: Grove Press, Reprint 1987
228 pp., $7.95 (paperback)
FICCIONES: FOUR STORIES AND A PLAY
Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Anthony Kerrigan
Princeton: Princeton University press, Reprint 1987
310 pp., $8.95 (paperback)
Half a century has elapsed since the death of Don Miguel de Unamuno and still his works are much read and written about. Three volumes of his stories and novellas have been reissued recently in English translation--able translation, by the way. Hundreds of best-selling novelists have risen, and vanished forever from bookshops, during those five decades. Yet Unamuno is everywhere cited and quoted; all of his more important fiction, criticism, and commentary is available in English and other languages; and his fiction's originality has been admired by successive generations of readers and critics. Why this enduring power?
On the face of it, one might not expect Unamuno to retain a great reputation internationally. "Well, I am Spanish!" he wrote in his novela Mist. "Spanish by birth, education, language, profession, and calling. I am Spanish in both body and soul. Spanish before and after, through and through. Spanish is my religion and the heaven in which I want to believe is a celestial, eternal Spain, and my God is a Spanish God, the God of Our Lord Don Quixote, a God who thinks in Spanish and said in Spanish 'Let there be light!' 'Sea la luz!" and his Word was a Spanish word…"
Unamuno frequently is called a philosopher, but it is not because he proposed any novel philosophical system or pattern of political thought. He would be better styled sage--one whose wisdom comes from sources not rational wholly. Contemptuous of metaphysicians in general and Descartes in particular, assailing rationalism and modernity, scourging the disciplines of sociology and pedagogy, Don Miguel, long rector of the University of Salamanca, rejected the dullness of orthodoxy and the complacency of enlightenment.
He called himself an ideoclast--a foe to ideologues; for Unamuno was bent upon undoing the tyranny of abstract ideas. Skeptical after his peculiar fashion, nevertheless Don Miguel wrote devotedly in Spanish, that language which by its very vocabulary affirms faith and rejects blind rationality. "We must sow in men the seeds of doubt, of distrust, of disquiet, and even of despair," said Unamuno. Yet doubt, distrust, disquiet, and despair--of what? Why, of the neoterist or "progressive" modern mentality.
Faithful to his lifelong exemplar Don Quixote de la Mancha, Unamuno maintained the cause of the individual soul against the overweening dominations of our century--and even against
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