I’m briefly in Prague for a valuable symposium on “Democracy in the 21st Century: Challenges for an Open Society” organized by the Czech political research and reform group called Institute H21. I will share substantive ideas from the conversation when I’m home. In lieu of new comments about this beautiful city, I’ll share a link to an introduction I wrote during a longer visit here in 2008. Sometimes, I find my own writing from that long ago cringe-worthy, but I think this mini-essay about how to “read” the city of Prague holds up OK and may have some value for other visitors.
Four sabbatical months in Europe are coming to a close this week. We spent three of those months in Granada, Spain, until our Schengen tourist visas ran out. Since then, we have mostly stayed in Penzance, Cornwall.
It’s a study in contrasts. To name one: Andalusia is famous for fervent Catholic spirituality, although I’ve written a bit about how that reputation is exaggerated.* Meanwhile, Cornwall may be the most Methodist region on earth, with Methodists representing an outright majority of Cornish churchgoers since the 1800s. Few expressions of Christianity could be as different as a stark, sober Nonconformist chapel versus a whole city that pulsates with baroque, syncretic Catholicism during Holy Week.
But I want to mention water.
Andalusia has always been semi-arid, and its classic landscape is dry earth studded with olive trees between stony mesas. Right now, the region is suffering a catastrophic draught that is probably related to climate change. However, the Nasrid (medieval Arabized Muslim) rulers of Granada built a remarkable irrigation system for the city. Snow melts on the Sierra Nevada mountains, fills Nasrid aqueducts, flows through high-pressure pipes under the Alhambra to the Plaza Nueva, and then up to the area around today’s Church of San Nicolás, where a mosque covered a large public cistern. From that reservoir, pipes still fill more than a dozen other Nasrid cisterns, from which water irrigates backyard gardens and squares filled with flowering trees and other plants that attract an exuberant array of birds. The whole city is an artificial oasis, more than eight centuries old, which is surviving the ecological crisis so far. You can clearly see the distant snow that waters the trees around you.
When we arrived in Cornwall, it stopped raining here, as if we had brought the Andalusian draught with us. The skies have been almost as blue as they were in Spain. But this is a watery place. Everywhere, burbling streams rush down to the nearby sea. Most streams are overgrown, almost concealed in foliage, as is nearly everything. The entire county has been covered by a thick mat “Of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown”–not inert, but luxuriantly growing as you watch; and flowers have been generously sprinkled over all that deep green.
We’re leaving Granada tomorrow after living here for three months. My limited Spanish and a certain shyness have prevented me from learning a lot about contemporary life here. I feel better informed about the distant past than the present. Nevertheless, I’ll venture a few observations and hypotheses.
For those who have not seen it, the most salient feature of Granada is its beauty. The castle-palace of the Alhambra caps one hill, but around that romantic building are bigger summits, and the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas form the backdrop. Whitewashed houses with flowering gardens and little squares cascade down the hill of the Albaizin, where we lived. On the plain below are fine boulevards, marble-paved squares, and baroque domes.
Granada is not a big city. The population of the municipality is only 230,000. Although some legally protected green space has been lost, farmland and wooded hills remain in view. The university enrolls about 60,000 students, not concentrated on one campus but distributed through several neighborhoods. Numerous foreign students either visit the university or study Spanish in private schools. As a result, the population is quite youthful and informal. Hardly a business suit is seen.
Since three million people visit the Alhambra each year, the city is full of tourists. A substantial portion are Spanish, but Granada also draws people from the rest of the world, ranging from backpackers to bourgeois families to big tour groups. And there are many expats and some refugees. No particular foreign language dominates.
Andalusia is still fairly poor and dominated by agriculture. The region’s per capita GDP is $18,500, similar to Sicily’s and much lower than $42,000 for the EU as a whole. Many rural people moved to Granada in the postwar period and settled in neighborhoods like El Zaidin, where, apparently, conditions were at first pretty rough. I have walked through every part of the city proper and found all the streets pleasant: bustling, clean, safe, and well served by public transportation (including a brand-new subway line) and other facilities. Perhaps some of the apartments are small.
Rural life usually feels far away, but not always. We could regularly hear a burro bray from our house, and once we watched a man herd his goats up a nearby street.
Granada retains a small-town feel under the surface. On the bus that I often used to take home, the older clientele would frequently greet each other by name. People walk their dogs off-leash and leave them to wait outside of stores. Many enjoy a paseo in the late afternoon.
For me, a rough indicator of globalization is the variety of food. In Granada’s supermarkets, virtually all of the ingredients are meant for Andalusian dishes or Italian-style pizza and pasta. Except in the biggest “Ipermercado” and one little shop owned by a South Asian man, stores typically offer a single shelf with a few bottles of soy sauce and some “Old El Paso”-brand seasoning as their only foreign ingredients. Likewise, 98 percent of the city’s many restaurants offer Andalusian menus with very similar dishes. The situation is completely different in Madrid, where one can buy ingredients or cooked meals from anywhere in the world.
The previous paragraph is not a complaint. For one thing, Spanish food is good! Besides, we enjoyed being immersed in a place with a distinct culture. I do think Granada might be behind the curve (for better and worse) on globalization. That doesn’t mean it is unsophisticated, although some Castilians and Catalans may think so. For instance, the city boasts at least 14 independent bookstores, presumably serving the university community. It seems characteristic of Granada that these stores stock many new books for serious readers, yet almost every volume is in Spanish, and most are by Spanish authors. The same was true at the extensive annual book fair. One gets a sense of mild insularity–and pride.
There is a long and rich literary tradition of describing Granada as melancholy. As I wrote recently, Richard Wright observed Granada and all of Andalusia as fanatically Catholic, haunted by history, and static. I am reminded of how writers use the Turkish word hüzün (meaning something like “communal sadness”) to describe Istanbul. In both cases, outsiders are inspired by the tragic remains of past grandeur. In both cases, some local people adopt the visitors’ melancholy as their own. And both descriptions mislead.
In fact, Granada can give an impression of frivolity and subversiveness. Spanish people from other regions like to visit the city for pre-wedding parties. They dress in crazy matching costumes and tease the blindfolded fiancés. Although they are generally segregated into “hen” and “stag” groups, you see individuals expressing various gender identities. For every nun in a habit, there must be a hundred young people with tattoos and piercings. The graffiti art by El Niño de las Pinturas and others is well-known.
The first thing that Castilians say about Granada is that the Arab-Islamic heritage is strong there. They are not wrong. In our neighborhood, the layout, the surrounding walls, and the water system all date to the Emirate of Granada; and at the bottom of our hill, the Guadalquivir is simply the Wadi al-Kabir: the Big River.* More subtly, the streets are still repaved with black and white stones, a continuous practice since the Arab period; and even modern doors often have rows of iron studs that, in medieval times, would have been painted to indicate that the owner had accomplished the Hajj. Under our living room is a cistern, an aljibe, that is part of the irrigation system of Arab origin.
But I want to complicate this impression. First, the influence of Arab Islamic culture is far deeper in other places than many people realize. In English, there are about 900 words of Arabic origin, including “sugar” and “alcohol,” and there are about 4,000 in Spanish. Not only in Granada, but also in Chile and Texas, people use a lot of Arabic words. Americans eat meals in courses, wear lighter colors during the summer, and do many other things as a result of the customs of Arab al-Andalus.
Also, some of the explicitly Arabic influences in Andalusia are probably “invented traditions,” in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase.
For instance, it’s worth experiencing an “Andalusian hammam” or Arab bath. That tradition dates all the way back to 1988. The Alcaicería is the city’s “bazaar” neighborhood, a warren of quaint shops. It burned to the ground in 1843, and the architecture you see there today is a Victorian fantasy of the Middle East. The Alhambra is one of the world’s greatest expressions of classical Arab culture, yet it probably consists of a selection of medieval buildings that had various owners and functions. Ferdinand and Isabella seized, heavily renovated and modified, and connected these buildings to form one renaissance-style palace, and then the rest of the neighborhood gradually vanished. The Alhambra has never stopped being transformed by ambitious architects who are responsible for things like the incongruous Victorian roofs and everything about its lovely gardens.
Arab and Romani/Gitano influences were as important for Granada’s modernists, Lorca and Manuel de Falla, as they have been for its folk arts, like flamenco. But this is not simply a case of the past influencing the present. For one thing, Arabs and Romani constitute living communities in Granada. In 2003, the Moroccan immigrant community of almost 5,000 people opened a beautiful new mosque across from the Alhambra, and Romani still dominate the Sacromonte district.
When audiences cry ¡Olé! to appreciate a flamenco dancer, they may be saying wa Ilâh (“by God”) in Arabic. Or that may be a false etymology that persisted as a myth because it sounded so romantic. In short, there is a long and complex history here of assimilation, appropriation, “othering,” ambivalence, celebration, nostalgia, and sheer invention. Andalusians have been hybrid and have been choosing to present themselves as hybrid ever since the Emirate.
Sad to leave Granada, I think of the last sultan, “Boabdil” (actually, Muhammad XII), and his famous “Moor’s Sigh” as he turned to face the Alhambra for the last time. Or of Carlos Cano’s lyrics:
Deep in the cistern, what should appear But the sadness that killed Boabdil the emir. And I left it under the shadow of an almond tree On my way to the mountains of Guajar-Faragüit.
To see whether, during the time of honey, There was a flowering of the light of thought, And whether the town will recover its color, That old-time Berber green-and-white.
Oh, country children, Tender spikelets, Go and run to tell the earth
That the poor wait for her at dawn. At dawn, old earth, at dawn…
[my translation]
En el fondo de un aljibe me encontré la tristeza que matara al rey Boabdil. Y a la sombra de un almendro la dejé por los montes de Guajar-Faragüit.
Por ver si cuando el tiempo de la miel la luz del pensamiento diera flor y el pueblo recobrara su color verdiblanco de origen bereber.
Ay niños del campo, espiguitas tiernas, echad a correr.
Decidle a la tierra que el pobre la espera al amanecer.
Al amanecer la tierra, al amanecer…
Then again, maybe nothing could be more typical of Granada than an American tourist (think: Washington Irving) recalling a mythologized medieval Andalusian Arab to taste some melancholic sublime on a cheerful day in a thriving city of tourists and students.
Translating (or even privately reading) modern free verse in a language that has many cognates and grammatical similarities to English is partly a matter of choosing an English match for each word in the original and stringing those words together. You must accept the inevitable distortions, because the sounds and senses of the two languages cannot match perfectly. The original may also present larger choices.
This is an early Lorca poem about the city where we’re living for three months. The Darro River is 800 meters from the house that we’ve rented and is about one meter wide.
“The Guadalquivir River”
A little ballad of three rivers for Salvator Quintero
By Federico Garcia Lorca
The Guadalquivir River
goes between oranges and olives.
The two rivers of Granada
Come down from snow to wheat.
Ah, love,
gone and not come back!
The Guadalquivir River
Has garnet stubble.
The two rivers of Granada
one weeping and the other blood
Ah, love
off in the air!
For sailing ships,
Seville has a road;
In the water of Granada
Sighs alone could paddle.
Ah, love,
Gone and not come back!
Guadalquivir, high tower
And wind in the orange groves.
Dauro and Genil, little towers
dead over the ponds
Ah, love
Off in the air!
Who will say that the water carries
A will-of-the wisp of cries!
Ah, love,
Gone and not come back!
Carry orange blossom, carry olives,
Andalusia, to your seas.
Ah, love
Off in the air!
The Spanish text is here. For the refrains, Lorca uses relative clauses that begin with “que,” starting with: “Ay, amor / que se fue y no vino …” That could mean a love who or a love that. Spanish permits this ambiguity, which might have been especially attractive for Lorca, for whom a “who” would have been a man. Like Rolfe Humphries, who translated this poem for Poetry, I opted for a past participle, to retain the ambiguity.
I chose “sighs alone could paddle” for “sólo reman los suspiros,” partly because I liked the echo of paddle and stubble, and partly because the English monosyllable “row” is too easily misread as a noun.
Humphries must have found the literal meaning of the following verse confusing or unconvincing:
Guadalquivir, alta torre
y viento en los naranjales.
Dauro y Genil, torrecillas
muertas sobre los estanques
How can small rivers be “little towers” or “turrets,” and what does it mean for turrets to be dead over ponds? Humphries loosely offers:
Guadalquivir, high tower,
Wind among orange blossoms,
Darro and Genil, lowly
And dead among the marshes.
I like Humphries’ verse better than my translation, but I am not sure his conveys Lorca.
By the way, I love that the Guadalquivir is just the Wadi al-Kabir, the Big River, transliterated into Spanish.
I’m in Granada, Spain, for three months, as part of a sabbatical. We’re living in a “carmen,” which is a “a type of urban housing” typical of two specific neighborhoods in this city, “with an attached green space, both garden and orchard, that constitutes an extension of the dwelling, according to the classic definition of Seco de Lucena. A Carmen is a space closed to the outside, surrounded by walls about two meters high, usually whitewashed, with lush vegetation” (per Wikipedia).
That describes our rented house quite well. We’re located near the summit of the Albaicin, the neighborhood of which the young Lorca wrote, “[El] tiene sonidos vagos y apasionados y esta’ envuelto en oropeles suaves de luz oscura” (“It harbors vague and passionate sounds and is wrapped in soft tinsels of dark light”). I see what he meant, but the views are usually crisp and vivid–with the snow-capped Sierra Nevada rising behind the sharp angles of the Alhambra–and the birds that provide most of the soundscape seem raucously cheerful rather than wistful for the lost world of al-Andalus.
I’m busy with several research projects that will benefit from concentration, including an interesting collaborative study that involves trying to diagram the logic of open-ended responses to a political survey. I appreciate the quiet hours when Americans are asleep, although I’m glad to hear from people once dawn breaks in the USA.
Although I’m certainly learning about Granada and Spain, I feel too much of a novice to post much about those topics yet. I presume I will blog normally about civic engagement and related matters.
(Montreal) I’ve had opportunities to visit several cities since July and have enjoyed watching migrants in those spaces.
In Cordoba, Spain, the cathedral was once one of the world’s great mosques. I watched many Muslim visitors, especially young Francophone Arabs. I wondered how they interpreted this space, with its Islamic heritage and its boldly Catholic symbolism. (In a terrible act of vandalism, Charles V dropped a cathedral right in the middle of its coolly harmonious aisles.) Meanwhile, Grenada now has a mosque for the first time since the renaissance, serving its substantial and growing Moroccan population.
Forty-five percent of Augsburg’s population consists of migrants. I heard second-hand about an African migrant’s strong critique of structural racism, which reinforces what I have learned on other recent visits to Germany. (I was in Weimar last November.) However, superficially, Augsburg appears to be a lively and diverse city in which people from many part of the world–including, now, thousands of displaced Ukrainians–interact quite productively. It’s also nice that Augsburg doesn’t seem to draw many tourists, despite being very attractive and interesting. That means that the diverse population seems committed to the place. For instance, they are rapidly learning German.
Iceland’s national citizen population is about 366,000, and each year before the pandemic it was receiving about 2.3 million visitors (counting the ones who stayed at least one night). Meanwhile, citizens of the Schengen zone can easily get Icelandic work permits. As a result, Reykjavik has turned into one of those global transit zones, where a sample of the world’s wealthier countries–plus a few refugees–parades through public spaces, being greeted and served by people who are almost as diverse as the visitors. Although Dubai is Iceland’s opposite in many other respects (from climate to politics), it is another example of this category.
Now I’m in Montreal, which I always enjoy as a bilingual city that is also a magnet for migrants from the whole world. I love the “bonjour hi” greeting, which invites one to respond in French or English. (As someone whose French is not bad, but is generally much worse than the locals’ , I’m not sure what is expected of me.) I also enjoy watching the trilingualism of many recent immigrants. The men who served me my “shawarma poutine magique mix” communicated amongst themselves in Arabic, and with their customers in rapid-fire English and French. The actual dish combined tater tots, shawarma meat, hot sauce, cheese, and fresh parsley in an apt melange.
I’m sure others have made this point or are typing it this minute, but I will pile on …
Notre-Dame de Paris is a stunning building but not a well-preserved medieval one. It has been through a lot, including the 18th-century removal of the original stained glass in the nave, the smashing of statuary and most of the remaining glass during the French Revolution, and a profound reconstruction that began in 1844. Some of the most famous features of the cathedral are the work of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, a Romantic-era restorer who was comfortable redesigning medieval buildings in ways that are now obvious to us. The gargoyles, the spire that collapsed yesterday, portions of the interior architecture, and much of the stained glass is by Viollet-le-Duc, not by anonymous craftsmen of the 12th and 13th centuries. Many other Gothic buildings are much better preserved.
John Ruskin wrote in 1849 (not specifically about Notre-Dame but about the general approach to restoration in his time):
Neither the public, nor those who are responsible for the maintenance of public monuments, understand the true meaning of ‘restoration’. It signifies the most complete destruction that an edifice can suffer; a destruction from which not a single vestige can be recovered; a destruction that comes from the false description of the thing destroyed. It is impossible, as impossible as it is to bring the dead back to life, to restore whatever might have been grand or beautiful in architecture….the enterprise is a lie from the beginning to the end.
Notre-Dame is not a “lie,” but it is to a large degree a legacy of the French Romantic period, as much a creation of Victor Hugo and Viollet-le-Duc as of the first builders in 1160-1260. It is part of the city that we know today, which was profoundly influenced by Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891), the flattener of ancient neighborhoods and planner of boulevards:
Old Paris is gone (no human heart
changes half so fast as a city’s face) … There used to be a poultry market here, and one cold morning … I saw
a swan that had broken out of its cage, webbed feet clumsy on the cobblestones, white feathers dragging through uneven ruts, and obstinately pecking at the drains …
Paris changes … but in sadness like mine nothing stirs—new buildings, old neighbourhoods turn to allegory,
and memories weigh more than stone
From Richard Howard’s translation of Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
It is not a criticism to place Notre-Dame in the 19th century. The years from 1848-1870 mark the apogee of a certain Parisian culture that is admirable and attractive. It was the age of boulevards and cafes, Seine embankments, and Impressionist cityscapes, all of which shape our view of Notre-Dame. The reason the history matters is that we can reconstruct late-19th-century buildings when they are well documented, as every stone of Notre-Dame is. In contrast, we would have neither the materials nor the craftsmanship to reconstruct the stained glass of the nearby Sainte-Chapelle if that were lost.
The fire is a tragedy; the crown jewel of 19th-century Paris will be badly damaged for some time. But in the long run, this will be a footnote.
(Syracuse, NY) I’m in the city where I was born and raised but haven’t resided in 33 years.
One result of this kind of visit is to make the intervening years fold away like a picture book put back on its shelf. When we travel to foreign places, I find that all the vivid new experiences stretch time. The journey feels long; regular life feels distant. But as soon as we’re in the airport on the way back home, the days of travel shrink to a finite memory, as if we’d had a few moments away.
The same can happen to decades. A third of a century seems rich and complex while you live it, but returning to where you began shrinks those years back to size.
Another result is a reminder of how little detail we retain. I once knew all kinds of information: What would you see if you turned that corner? Who lives in that house? What minor joy or sorrow once accompanied that building for me? It’s all flattened by the slow passage of years.
At a meeting at a community organization in Boston, we were using various terms to describe local issues and observing that those phrases would not be clear to the people we were talking about–especially new immigrants. That made me wonder about the history of our vocabulary, so I used Google’s Ngram tool to see the frequency of “urban poverty,” “inner city,” “gentrification,” “deindustrialization,” and “urban redevelopment” in published books. This graph shows trends since 1900.
In rough order of when these phrases became popular…
“Urban redevelopment” starts very soon after WWII but declines after 1970. It is a keyword of high-modernist urban planning from the era of big housing projects and highways blasted through downtowns. It has been notably less popular (at least in books) since ca. 1980.
“Urban poverty” rises in the 1960s and the 1990s, but has–interestingly–fallen in the 2000s.
“Inner city” seems to have become rapidly popular during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, plateaued at a high level until about 2000, and then fallen off.
“Gentrification” enters the lexicon in 1975. It plateaus in the 1990s and then rises rapidly in our century.
“Deindustrialization” is a new term ca. 1980, describing a phenomenon that started in the 1970s. It peaks in the 1990s.
These changes seem to reflect objective circumstances–cities lose their industrial base but then sometimes attract yuppies who push up housing values–as well as shifts in intellectual fashions, such as the rise, and then fall, of high-modernist design.
At a meeting at a community organization in Boston, we were using various terms to describe local issues and observing that those phrases would not be clear to the people we were talking about–especially new immigrants. That made me wonder about the history of our vocabulary, so I used Google’s Ngram tool to see the frequency of “urban poverty,” “inner city,” “gentrification,” “deindustrialization,” and “urban redevelopment” in published books. This graph shows trends since 1900.
In rough order of when these phrases became popular…
“Urban redevelopment” starts very soon after WWII but declines after 1970. It is a keyword of high-modernist urban planning from the era of big housing projects and highways blasted through downtowns. It has been notably less popular (at least in books) since ca. 1980.
“Urban poverty” rises in the 1960s and the 1990s, but has–interestingly–fallen in the 2000s.
“Inner city” seems to have become rapidly popular during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, plateaued at a high level until about 2000, and then fallen off.
“Gentrification” enters the lexicon in 1975. It plateaus in the 1990s and then rises rapidly in our century.
“Deindustrialization” is a new term ca. 1980, describing a phenomenon that started in the 1970s. It peaks in the 1990s.
These changes seem to reflect objective circumstances–cities lose their industrial base but then sometimes attract yuppies who push up housing values–as well as shifts in intellectual fashions, such as the rise, and then fall, of high-modernist design.
