With the cancellation of first-year exams in Oxford earlier this summer, several students took the opportunity to respond creatively through the visual arts and creative writing to some of the literary works they had studied earlier in the year, or works they plan to study next year. Their projects included a Lorca play turned into a short story, a García Márquez short story turned into a play, and an election campaign poster for Coronel Aureliano Buendía.

Here, and in next week’s post, are samples from four projects, all under the direction of Dr Imogen Choi:

 Imogen Lewis (French and Spanish, Exeter College)

“For my final creative piece of the first year I decided to focus on Golden Age poetry (specifically sonnets), and its presentation of the much-idealised Petrarchan Woman. I studied the works of three of the best-known Spanish poets: Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. While the ‘conceptismo’ aspect of these poems is easily captured in a painting (i.e. one can easily picture and reproduce a woman’s ‘pearly white teeth’ or ‘alabaster’ neck), it is the notorious ‘culteranismo’ aspect (the essence of marked opposition and play-on-words) that is much harder to depict.  While Góngora captures the quintessential “cabellos de oro” of the Petrarchan woman, Quevedo ponders the “figura de la hermosura pasada”, and Sor Juana even begins to question identity and the representation of idealised beauty through the figures of painting and “retratos”. On the left two thirds of the piece stands the idealised, beguiling Petrarchan woman, but as the eye naturally moves from left to right we see what is really hidden behind the appearance of these poems – latent decay and and cynicism about age and beauty.”

Costanza Levy (Exeter College)

Eyes of a Blue Dog is a short play in English. It is an adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s short story, Ojos de perro azul, which narrates the relationship between a man and a woman who only meet in their dreams. The ambiguous narrative explores death, desire and the passing of time through the lens of a dreamworld. This theatrical adaptation uses dialogue, a stark set design, blue lighting and the music Charvela Vargas to evoke the central themes of Márquez’s modernist work.

Eyes of a Blue Dog

‘La llorona’ by Charvela Vargas fades in.

A deep blue light fills the stage.

‘He’ is standing to the left of the bed. ‘She’ is sitting on the edge of the bed. She looks at him, perplexed.  He stares back at her for some time.

‘La Llorona’ fades out at 1 minute 24 seconds. 

1

He They’re so bright.

She What?

He  Your eyes. They’re so bright. And blue. Grey-blue. Ash-blue.

She I’ve been told that before.

He  Like a blue dog. The eyes of a blue dog.

The light flickers, then it is dark, except for the candle. ‘He’ lights a cigarette. A harsh white light shines on ‘She’. She is still. There is the sound of fire burning.

[…]

He You’re like a statue. Like some copper statue I’d find in a museum.

He walks around her.

But I recognise you. I’ve seen you before. Who are you?

[…]

She I wish I could remember where I’ve gone looking for you.

He Me too. In some part of the world, ‘eyes of a blue dog’ is scrawled over all the walls, over all the floors, posted through all the letterboxes.

Every night, I tell myself, tomorrow. Tomorrow you’ll remember this, and you’ll know how to find her. Then every morning, I wake up, and it’s all gone.

‘He’ lights a cigarette.

I wish there was something. Something that gave us some sort of idea.

The light flickers. 

A white light shines on ‘She’. She shivers. The shiver becomes a shudder.  There is the sound of fire burning. She crumples to the floor.

It is dark, except for the candle and the cigarette.

Now available online is a series of podcast episodes featuring members of the Spanish sub-Faculty talking about some of the works that we teach at Oxford, produced and presented by one of our own Modern Languages graduates, Christy Callaway-Gale.

The series is aimed at people thinking about applying for Modern Languages at university, their teachers, and also the wider public. We hope to share our fascination with literature in Spanish, to explain why we love teaching it, and why we think you might love it too.

Each episode features a different member of the Spanish sub-Faculty talking about a work of literature from their area of expertise. The format is quite informal, more a relaxed interview than a lecture. As studying Spanish at Oxford involves looking at literary texts in a lot of detail, each podcast episode also includes a segment where tutors perform a close reading of the text (or extract of the text) they’ve been speaking about. We hope this will de-mystify the literature we teach on the course and, if you’re interested in applying for Modern Languages at university, that it will give you a sense of what it might be like to study Spanish at Oxford.

In the first four episodes, we travel from the medieval period to the twentieth-century. Geraldine Hazbun talks about the beautiful and moving poem, Coplas por la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique. Oliver Noble Wood introduces listeners to a classic of early-modern picaresque fiction, Lazarillo de Tormes. Moving to Latin America, María del Pilar Blanco gives an insight into the writing of the Mexican Revolution, with Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho. Finally, Dominic Moran talks about Julio Cortázar’s expertly crafted, highly deceptive short story “Continuidad de los parques.” 

Future episodes, we hope, will feature Spanish-Peninsular literature, as well as more texts from the medieval and early modern (Golden Age) periods.

And you can listen to the trailer here…

Ben Bollig.

Professor of Spanish American Literature,

University of Oxford