Forthcoming: *Göngora et labora*.

Some people ask me why do I write in English. Because I can, and I find it rewarding. I can say in English as many un-English things as I want, in the manner of my dear Santayana. Also, I find it easy, funny, I donʼt know. I think that writing in English allows me to get more distance from my personal, Spanish identity, so that I write better: less centered on myself. For me the question of writing in Spanish or English is decided by the moment. It is what my mind wants to do. I think she (my mind) understands that in English you are allowed to be read by more scientific readers, more the heirs of our present era of the Enlightenment. In Spain or with Spanish readers, Catholicism still makes itself noted. Its power on Spanish speakers and readers is powerful, so that I find that all the essays or literary pieces written in Spanish are less read than those in English. I am more tuned to the English-speaking world around me, and Internet allows me to communicate with that world easily.

   Almost finished with my next work: the compilation of the English translation and edition I did of Göngoraʼs poems, from Poem 1 to Poem 282, a labour of love that took me three years (2015-2017). I love Göngora the more I read him, the more I study his work, the more I visit his lyrical-burlesque style. I appreciate his joie de vivre, his vitalism, his Epicureanism, his tolerance, his wit, his humour, his humanity, his great imagination. Now that I am on it, I recall that dictum by Santayana who said that Imagination is the great unifier of humanity, and the meaning after so many years devoted to art and music, science and philosophy, is clear to me. When you cultivate your imagination you feel more, you live much more, you put yourself in the shoes of other people, you imagine much better what they feel, how they feel, and the respect that that feeling causes in you. Imagine, said Lennon, and that is the beginning of a change in you. C. C. Smith wrote once (“Rich Rhyme in Góngoraʼs Polifemo”, cited in Emilio Orozco, Introducción a Góngora, Editorial Crítica, Barcelona, 1984, p. 240) that for its quality in musicality ʻthis poem must be unique in the world literatureʼ. Indeed. Let me show it to you from the first 40 lines of the fable of el Polifemo (ll. 25-64; skipping the very great three octaves of the Dedication): 

[DESCRIPTION OF THE SICILIAN CAVERN]

25                           Where sparkling the Sicilian sea
                             shines with silver the Lilibeusʼ foot,
                             vault or of the forges of Vulcan
                             or tomb of the bones of Typhoeus,
                             pale signs full of ashes a plain,
30                        when not by the sacrilegous desire,
                             by the hard craft gives. A high rock
                             gag is to a grotto there, of its mouth.

                                Uncouth garrison of this hard block
                             robust trunks are, to whose shock of hair
35                         less light it owes, less pure air it owes,
                             the profound cavern, than to the crag;
                             caliginous bedrock, the ravine obscure
                             to be, of the black night, show it to us
                             infamous mob of nocturnal birds,
40                        moaning sorrowful and flying grave.

                                Of this, then, formidable of the earth
                             yawn the melancholic emptiness
                             to Polyphemus, horror of that range,
                             barbarous hut is, shadowy shelter
45                        and spacious sheepfold where pens
                             those many the rugged peaks goats,
                             of the mounts, do hide: lovely copy
                             that a whistle gathers and seals a crag.

[DESCRIPTION OF POLYPHEMUS]

                                A mount was of limbs eminent
50                        this (who, of Neptune fierce son,
                             with an eye illustrates his browʼs orb,
                             emulous almost of the greatest star)
                             cyclops, to whom the most bold pine
                             cane did obey him, being so swift,
55                         and to the grave pace reed so thin,
                             one day cane was, and crook, another.

                                Black the hair was, imitator billowy
                             of the obscure waters of the Lethe,
                             to the wind that combs it, stormy,
60                        flies with no order, hangs untidy;
                             a torrent it was, his beard, impetuous
                             that, burned son he of these Pyrenees,
                             his breast floods, badly, wrong or in vain
                             crossed, even by the fingers of his hand.

Göngora et labora...