The Scholarship Base

Kenneth Koch had the concept of the "happiness base" and the "poetry base." The happiness base, for example, consists of all the elements supportive of happiness, like good health and relationships, a good attitude toward life, enough material comforts, etc...

Today, I'd like to consider the "scholarship base." This consists of things like your "cultural capital," the excellence of your training and education, your knowledge base, your access to a good library (plus the quality of your personal scholarly library), your ongoing activities and participation in networks of other scholars, and the momentum from previous scholarly projects: unused ideas and knowledge, logical next steps in your scholarly trajectory. A lot of the "work" we do serves simply to maintain the scholarly base, and thus is work that doesn't lead directly to publication. Nevertheless, an excellent base makes everything else far easier. I think of the base as about 75%, with the actual writing being the remaining quarter. Some refer to this as the iceberg theory. We are judged by what is above the surface of the water, but the iceberg itself is mostly submerged.

For example, suppose a teacher at a liberal arts college who doesn't get any research done during the academic year has the summer off. Probably the whole summer could be devoted simply to restoring the base to decent shape, without any articles being written. At the end of the summer, it is time to go back to teaching again. You wouldn't expect more than one article to be written every three summers on such a schedule. An active researcher at a Research One university with an excellent scholarship base might write one to two articles, on average, in a summer, finishing up one begun during the Academic Year and writing another from scratch. If you are already doing research it is easy to keep doing it.

That some researchers in very good institutions do not produce very much shows how difficult it really is to sustain a research program over the long stretch.

Getting it wrong

 I'm interested in how things are misunderstood, or how mistakes get made.  I think the first thing to consider would be that not understanding reality is the base line.  We really don't know very much in the first place, and are prone to cognitive biases.  

The second thing would be to look at language. We think that language gets us somewhere, but, epistemologically speaking, language is inert. It is only as good as the base line of knowledge. We believe we advance through terminology, but our terms cannot be better than our knowledge.  That's why theological debates seem like pointless semantic exercises that lead us no closer to the truth.  A lot of magical thinking depends on putting a linguistic spin on things. (Language is very good at keeping track of what we do know, though. Definitions are important.)

So we have base line ignorance, and a misguided reliance on language.  

What especially intriguing is error among experts, in the exact area of their expertise, as in the replication crisis in the social sciences.  Error is normal, but there ought to be some gold standard, places in which error becomes exceedingly rare.  

***

In the humanities, our research is almost defined by confirmation bias.  We have an intuition taken from reading a literary text. The intuition is a valid piece of information about our own response to the text. Our next step is to bolster the intuition with confirmation from the same text.  We are in the famed hermeneutic circle.  Contrary to what Gadamer argues, most readers won't allow the text to correct them.  They will instead dig in to their reading. The literary text is made of language, so we create a metalanguage to explain it. The rhetorical strength of our writing then convinces other people of the validity of our interpretation.  All of this is fine.  Some intuitions really are better than others, or at least better argued. 

When a certain Lorca scholar sees the 4 palomas in a poem by Lorca as the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with no apparent evidence.  I want to call that a false form of "knowledge." I want to reject a lot of ways of reading and interpreting, as silly as a podcast claiming that autistic children can do telepathy.  But the only real answer is a kind of epistemic humility: I too am wrong (not always, but ignorance is still the baseline assumption.). 

Consumatory

This guy has come up with a concept similar to my "scholarly base." In my opinion, this article is on the right track in some ways but flawed in others.

1. The word "consumatory" itself is unfortunate, in my view. It comes from "consume" but also suggests a kinship with "consummate," a word from a different Latin root. (You can see the commentators spell it as "consummatory.") A scholarly base is not, primarily, consuming things, using them up. If this is to be a defense of what professors do, then you don't want to emphasize the passive, consumer-like consumption of knowledge.

2. My concept of the scholarly base is much broader. It does not consist, only or even primarily, of reading other scholarship. For me, it involves reading primary texts of literature and philosophy, or listening to music and looking at art. Only a small part is reading journal articles in my own field. If that's all it is, then it wouldn't take too much time.

3. He emphasizes that scholars in non-research institutions spend a lot of time working on their scholarly base. That is true, but the best way of developing the base is to use it to produce more scholarship. You can't just "consume." If you are keeping up the scholarly base in a serious way, you will get ideas of your own you will want to publish.

Research Got You Where You Are

There ought be a kind of researcher's bill of rights.

Research got you where you are.

(You competed with many other people to get your job. Your expertise and research was a factor in getting you the job you have.)

You are paid to do research or at the very least to maintain your scholarly base.

(If you are teaching at the college level you got there because you are good at what you are teaching. You developed the skills and knowledge that you are imparting to the students. You need to keep developing your own knowledge base, because nothing is worse than a teacher gone stale. If you actually are in a research position then doing that research is part of what you are paid to do, not some ancillary thing you do on your own time, even if the department and the university act like that sometimes.)

Anyone who says you are writing too much, or discourages you from your work, should be your sworn enemy.

(The motivations of people who tell you this are never good. They can envious of you; they might think you are better than them [you are]; they might just want to sabotage your career out of pure spite. Even if their motives were good, so what?)

You should feel proud of your accomplishments.

(Stop being embarrassed about devoting too much time to your work, or publishing too much. )

Agenda (5) and Scholarly Base

It strikes me that the scholarly agenda (overarching sense of the purpose of one's work) helps in the elaboration of the scholarly base: all the things necessary but not sufficient that support scholarship. The base is not just knowledge, but also access to materials, to other scholars; abilities, like writing prose or analyzing texts. The relation between the agenda and the base should go without saying, but a lot of things that go without saying need to be said over and over again.

Questions for JM:3, 4. 5

Is this bridge a secret?

Do some people know this secret?

Did Lorca know?

I have to answer these three questions as a group. I'm assuming Thomas knows my book has the the What Lorca Knew, so the last question, did Lorca know, I would conceptualize as "what did he know?" How do we categorize for this as knowledge. The main word in Spanish we use for this is conocimiento.

Is the bridge a secret? Is poetic knowledge, in general, secret knowledge or shared knowledge? Because I am using Gadamer as my theoretical base, I am assuming that poetry is sharable. In other words, it can't ever be a question of only one poet incommunicado to the world, or of only one reader who truly understands.

There are arcane or recondite dimensions to poetics. It is also assumed that not everyone will understand. So some "know," some do not.

I am assuming there is value to poetics, that it is not there just to be explained away as a symptom of something else, so my work would differ from conventional "cultural studies" which reduces culture to a kind of political barometer of some other, more significant thing. Yet I don't believe in naive versions of poetics, a kind of romantic attitude that stands in awe before the duende, or whatever. I realize either of those two positions would be easier, in a sense.

Work Smart Not Hard

But smart work is hard work. Not tedious, but work of great intensity. I studied poetry as a young kid--from about 11 years old to the present, virtually every day, in order to see what made it work from the inside out. Nobody told me to do this; it wasn't for any class. Anything I learnt related to the subject I incorporated into my knowledge base. For example, in French class in high school we learned versification. I still know French versification. In college I would do enough to get good grades but spend more time with my own study, and so on.

There is a difference in mentality between people who study a subject to know superficial things about it, or to acquire a lot of trivial facts, and those who really want to know how things work. How does a poem work? What makes a great poem so great? Those are the questions I'm still asking.

This makes me a great researcher but not a great teacher. Why? Because the average student is not interested in how things work from the inside out. Even the graduate student doesn't seem to realize that there are these great unsolved problems. The music student loves music, but the Spanish literature student doesn't love literature. Not to complain, because that's a caviar problem as problems go.

The Basics

If you are new to this blog let me review some basics:

(1) The blog is about how to get your scholarly writing done. The key here is to write on a regular schedule, three or four times a week for 1-3 hours, writing from 300-700 words each day. I set weekly goals, using the private writing group, along with short term goals (the particular article or chapter I'm working on), and long term goals: the particular book-length project I'm working on.

(2) The larger concept is the development of the scholarly base, the large percentage of the work that is not visible in the writing. (Hemingway's "iceberg" theory.) A scholar needs to develop a long-term agenda, a sense of what he or she wants to accomplish. The agenda goes beyond any one article or book.

(3) No particular intelligence is required to have good writing habits. It is more important to work smart than to be smart. The scholarly base, by the same token, is an infinitely expandable reservoir of knowledge and expertise. Once you are smart enough to actually be in the field (the "threshold theory"), then you only have to worry about managing your resources.

(4) While I often go off on metaphorical tangents, I like to return, again and again, to basic principles. The same things that make good coherent writing for a freshman in college (or in high school) are the things you need to know as a scholar. Failure often occurs at the bottom, not at the top. In other words, the writer is failing to apply concepts he or she should have known even before college.

Baseball IQ

"I didn't know you knew so much about baseball." I don't, but I was at someone's house with people who talked about scoring "points." It wasn't hard to seem like I knew something about it. I view it as "territorial" knowledge. Growing up as male in the 1970s I simply know the minimum that anybody in my situation would have to know. Like someone living in a town would know where the major streets in the town are.

You would know that if the catcher drops the third strike, he must throw to first.

That if the home team is ahead toward the end of the game, they can skip the bottom of the ninth. If they are behind in the bottom of the ninth, the minute the score, the game is over.

I knew that RISP is runners in scoring position (2nd or 3rd base). I know what era and rbi stand for.

***

I underestimated my baseball IQ because I am do not follow baseball very much, or watch it much except for when the local team is in the world series. I am not a baseball expert or serious fanatic at all. Yet I know that baseball has umps, not refs, the meaning of some basic terminology. I know you score runs, not "points."

We probably underestimate or overestimate our knowledge of many things. A speaker we had yesterday said that I new more about American poetry than most people in English departments would know. That is true.

What do you compare?

This question is inevitable if one's major or PhD area is Comparative Literature. It sounds stupid to me when I hear it, but every person I've ever met who isn't an academic studying literature has asked me that question. What I compare are modernist poetics. Even though only one of my four books is a Comp Lit book, I still am a Comparatist, in my self definition.

To be that, you have to actually master a particular field. In my case, I am a Hispanist, and have only worked in Spanish depts, though my dream job, of course, is professor of comparative poetics and percussion. If I weren't a legit Hispanist I wouldn't be a good comparatist either. I hate comparatists who don't master any of their fields well enough.

You also have to master at least one other field. In my case, that is the literature of my own nation. So I could be an Americanist teaching courses in modern American poetry tomorrow, without having to retrain myself. I know Donne and Blake too, and some Shakespeare. I despise comparatists who can't hold their own in second field. I don't mean just knowing it at the wikipedia level, but being able to have actual ideas based on a specialist knowledge.

Thirdly, you have to have reading knowledge of some other traditions. I know French pretty well and can read novels and poetry and criticism in that language. A lot of Hispanists have really good French, but the reverse is more rare. I couldn't be French professor, though. I can read novels in Italian and Portuguese too. So maybe I am a romance philologist, though not a particularly erudite one. I might be as close at it comes for 2013.

Fourthly, you have to know something about literatures you don't read in the original. I know about Cavafy and Basho, or the history of translation of Chinese poetry into English. Y un largo etcétera...

The scholarly base for a comparatist should also include some intellectual history and philosophy. You should be able to teach Western Civilization, or comparative religion at a basic level, with a few weeks of prep time. You need some literary theory too.

So now on a chapter about Lorca's poetics of cultural exceptionalism, all this comes into view. It is handy, in the Heideggerian sense. I can talk about Cavafy and Barthes and Pessoa intelligently enough to make some comparisons. There's a depth there, one would hope, in that I'm not just looking up a Greek poet I just heard about the day before yesterday and doing some lame-assed "comparison."

Ironically, I might seem less qualified for comp lit type jobs than someone who "compares" more but doesn't have quite the depth of reading.

consensus

 I used to think that every article I wrote had to challenge a critical consensus. I thought I had to be paradoxical or counterintuitive always.  But that doesn't really make sense. 80% of scholarship should build a consensus, and 20% should work at being paradoxical. The reason is that the paradoxical mode of criticism only works if there is some kind of established base of knowledge. 

Generalities About Specialization

Here's my idea about specialization and the mistaken notion of being a "generalist." Even if you are very specialized, you will still need a scholarly base of general knowledge. You will still have had a general education in college, and will have pursued other minor interests.

On the other hand, if you set out to be a generalist, you will have no focus. You can't set out to be an expert in everything, because the task is defined too diffusely. At best, you will know more about a few more things than the specialist does.

Inventory of Strengths

I am going to inventory my strengths in this post, for two or three reasons. I want to put myself up for a distinguished professorship, so I better have some idea of what my selling points are. I also find it helpful to figure out how to exploit the things that I already know how to do well. (A separate post will outline my weaknesses.) Thirdly, I want to continue writing in these 25 minute "boxes" in order to develop those particular muscles for "speed writing." I might run out of strong points before the time has elapsed. That is always a risk.

First, modesty. (That is a joke.)

More seriously, I see nothing immodest about taking inventory of strengths as well as weaknesses. One strength I have is the ability for honest and realistic self-assessment. That is a very significant talent to have. It is easy to puff oneself up or to tear oneself down in a sort of useless way. Real self-assessment is a little more difficult.

I think I am a good writer of prose. I am fairly erudite in my own field, with a very solid scholarly base, and adept at finding questions of significance to tackle. I am intellectually curious and have developed several areas of research that interlock with one another in interesting ways. I am also very independent of trends. I am more likely to influence the debate than to let myself be influenced by others. My perspectives, as a consequence, are independent. I have some ability to think critically and some theoretical "chops."

I am adept at time management and seeing research projects through to their completion, as well as generating new ideas. I can work with speed and efficiency, with no sacrifice of quality. I have no problem concentrating for a few hours and getting something significant done. I am tenacious and not easily discouraged.

Aside from Spanish, I can read a novel in just about any other Romance language (except Romanian). I have a decent knowledge of literature in the English language.

In my teaching I am good at coming up with new ideas for courses and at presenting very complex ideas. I am good at helping students develop their own research ideas. I am a compelling and engaging public speaker. I wouldn't think of using powerpoint in a public lecture.

I have a particular area of strength in mentoring and evaluation. I am good at helping others improve their writing and fulfill their professional ambitions. Some have said that I am "generous" in this area. I enjoy intellectual dialogue, and am a good listener.

I can write a poem better than some so-called professional poets. I am not a bad translator either.

I know how to combine these strengths to produce scholarly work that is compelling, intellectually demanding, thought-provoking, and imaginative. My time is up for this post, and I may have left something out, but it is a good start.

Starting off narrow

Specialization gets a bad rap. But think of someone whose opinion you really respect on a particular subject.  That person is likely to be a specialist. That person's "general" knowledge is also likely to be pretty good, as good as that of the so-caled "generalist," maybe. Let's say the foremost expert on Mahler knows as much about Mozart as the person who knows a little about everything in music but is not the foremost expert on anything in particular. My girlfriend is the foremost tourist guide-book writer on Japan, and she also knows a lot about places that aren't Japan, more than the casual traveller who doesn't even know one place well.  

It is normal to start out narrowly.  I was a specialist on one genre, in one country and one period of time, and knew about one poet more than any other. That is what I have seen in Assistant Professors in my department over the years too. Then I branched out to other poets, went back in time to the modernist period from the postwar, still doing one genre and one nation. I knew about other things, but I was only authoritative about that. Then I decided to do the 1st Lorca book, and drew on previously untapped parts of the scholarly base. Still highly specialized, but now it doesn't look so bad, does it? A full professor is still a specialist, just broader and deeper. By developing depth on any topic, you also develop breadth, branching out to learn the other things you need in order to understand your topic. Personally, I see the breadth as a normal part of intellectual curiosity about things that aren't your speciality, and the depth as your mastery of your domain.    

Jumping over the pond (iii)

If you are considering moving (partially) into a new field, as I am, you'll have to think systematically about what this would entail. As I took inventory of my scholarly base in Latin American poetry, I found some strengths and quite a few gaps. I came up with a list of questions that looked kind of like this:

Who are the major scholars in this field? What journals publish the most (or the best) articles in this field? What are the dominant modes of writing about poetry? What are the main narratives that these scholars put forward and share as a group? How do their ideas relate to larger debates within Latin American Studies? To what extent is the field divided into national sub-fields (Peruvian poetry, Chilean poetry, Mexican poetry) or into critical industries devoted to major authors (Neruda, Vallejo, Paz)? Is it a field that doesn't know itself, in that scholars working on one part might not know poets from other national traditions? Is it valid to see Spanish American poetry and Spanish poetry as parts of a single, transatlantic tradition, as some have argued? Who would be in a position to make this kind of judgment? Are the Spanish American poets best known in Spain also those are best known in their own countries or across the continent as a whole?

How does the success of the Latin American novel beginning in the 60s effect the status of poetry? How about the dominance of cultural studies generally? What kind of dissertations have been written over the past 10 years in this field?

And so on. Even to be able to formulate a list of questions involves a certain amount of knowledge, or at the very least an approach to finding out more about the field.

Now suppose you aren't moving into a new field, but simply trying to stay abreast of your own. Now, instead of just a similar list of questions, you would have some answers too.

Research and Writing

Though I talk here a lot about writing, I don't go much into the process of research. In other words, I'm dealing with the process of turning ideas and claims into finished prose and then publishing it. But where does my knowledge come from? How do I know what I know?

You might see me in café in Lawrence Kansas. I'll have a pen and a notebook, but no books or other materials. I will just be writing things down from my head, working out problems. Obviously this only gets me so far. Here's the thing, though. I cannot gather all my information before I begin the writing process. Until I start writing, I literally do not know what else I need to find out. So I'm working with an idea I know something about, enough to start writing about, but I always have to do more research as I go along. Writing in the humanities is a heuristic process: you can't just find out some results and later write them up, because the writing always causes other issues to surface.

So my research is mostly reading other things and trying to make them fit together. A second component of my research is knowing people I can ask things I don't know. So if I'm writing about Valente, say, I would email Claudio Rodríguez Fer in Galicia, the head of the Cátedra José Ángel Valente, and ask him a few pertinent questions. If I'm writing about Gamoneda, I would ask Miguel Casado, who is the foremost expert on this poet. I have Lorquistas I can ask Lorca questions to. I never abuse the privilege by asking things I could easily look up myself. Scholarly contacts are part of my scholarly base. Aside from specialized information, they can provide a "check" on my ideas by saying, "you're right, that's a fruitful approach" or "you're barking up the wrong tree."

Other researchers are very good at looking at archives, specialized collections of materials. Some people I know have a great archive at their disposal but aren't as good at interpreting what they find. They unearth things, but these things are of interest to people like me, the hermeneuts. Scholarship really requires both types of people.

Career Narrative

Like many bookish kids with literary aspirations, I originally planned to be an English major. Since it was the 1970s, I also got caught up in the prevalent enthusiasm surrounding Spanish-language poetry the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and other novelists of the Latin American “Boom.” After spending my junior year studying in Madrid, I completed a major in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Spanish. Graduating from the University of California at Davis, I enrolled in the PhD Program at Stanford, with the idea of being a specialist in modernist poetry. I ended up devoting my dissertation—and my entire career—to twentieth-century Spanish poetry, but I never abandoned my interest in English. 

            As an assistant professor I was able to publish in the most prestigious journals in my field. I also published my dissertation, on the contemporary Spanish poet Claudio Rodríguez, as a book, with minimal revisions. Before tenure I wrote a second book, The Poetics of Self-Consciousness: Twentieth Century Spanish Poetry, with the aid of my first NEH Fellowship. One of the secrets of my early success was that I had somewhat of a head start: I went into the field because of my interest in poetry, and began to study it in earnest during that year in Madrid. My single-minded focus on a relatively narrow field of study made me an expert at a relatively early stage in my career. I found extra time to write by teaching short summer sessions at Ohio State in exchange for quarters off during the regular academic year.

            My agenda during this first phase of my career was to use the insights of poststructuralist literary theory to elucidate the implicit theories of language in modern Spanish poetry. My particular generation of Hispanists was the first to see theoretical sophistication as the gold standard by which to judge scholarship. I found myself in an ideal position to take advantage of this development, since I had a rigorous training in theory through the Comparative Literature Program at Stanford. My particular contribution was unique, I felt, in that I saw the literary text itself as theoretical in its own right, rather than “applying” a theory to the text in a mechanical or arbitrary way. While my scholarship has changed in several ways over the decades, I continue in my attempts to understand poetry from the “inside,” as it were, rather than subjecting it to agendas imposed from the outside.    

   

            After being awarded tenure at the Ohio State University in 1994, I was offered a job at one of the premier Spanish and Portuguese departments in the US, at the University of Kansas, where I continue to work. It was not immediately clear what my next project would be, so I worked on articles on a variety of topics until I decided to focus on recent developments in Spanish poetry. In my third book, The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000(Liverpool, 2009), my focus shifted to the question of the cultural legitimation of poetry. The critical problem I was addressing was why the paradigm that had governed poetry from romanticism through modernism had fallen in disfavor among a younger generation of Spanish poets, who disdained the intellectual seriousness and ambition that had characterized Spanish poetry for most of the twentieth century.   

            The articles that I wrote leading up to The Twilight of the Avant-Gardemade me well known among poets in Spain, inserting me in a polemic between those who remained faithful to the avant-garde agenda and those that had broken with it. The result was that I was invited frequently to Spain to lecture about contemporary Spanish poetry, becoming friends with many of the most prominent poets in the avant-garde camp. Although I was not averse to polemics, at some point I began to feel that didn’t want to be known mostly for my position in this particular debate. I turned my attention to one of the figures who had first inspired me to go into the field: Federico García Lorca.         

            My fourth book, Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch(Chicago, 2009) had a transformative effect on my career, while also obliging me to look at the period in which I first developed my interest in Spanish literature. My own decision to enter the field was the result of the interest in Spanish-language poetry in the US, but this episode in literary history had not received a rigorous scholarly treatment. Coincidentally enough, my first published poem, written thirty years earlier when I was an undergraduate, addressed the issue of “apocryphal translation” that I address in my book: It was a response to Kenneth Koch’s parody of translations from the Spanish, “Some South American Poets.” It began like this: “There is no need to invent imaginary / Latin American poets! Real poets exist, / Waiting to be translated!” I was interested in the multiple ways that Lorca had been translated into an American cultural context, but I was particularly interested in poems, like those of Koch, Robert Creeley, and Jack Spicer, that purport to be translations but are really not. This is a well-known trope in literary history: think of Cervantes’s conceit that Don Quijotehas been translated from the Arabic, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. A large number of American poets translated Lorca, but I was especially fascinated by the idea of creating new Lorca translations that had no original texts behind them. This seemed to be a way of accessing the cultural image of Spain in its purest form, without the interference of actual works of Spanish literature.                   

            Being known as a specialist on a very well-known writer brings certain advantages. Apocryphal Lorcawas published by a more prestigious press and was much more widely reviewed than any of my previous work. Because Twilight of the Avant-Gardetook a long time to write and suffered delays on the part of my publisher, both books appeared the same year, and I was promoted to the rank of professor that year. Once again, I searched for a new project. I didn’t intend to write another book on Lorca, and began working instead on a sequel to Twilight of the Avant-Garde. At some point, however, I decided I had many more things to say about Lorca. In 2018 I published a second book on Federico García Lorca: Lorca’s Legacy: Essays in Interpretation, in which I extended my insights of Apocryphal Lorcainto other areas and solidified my knowledge of Lorca himself.           

            In 2015, I began to teach myself jazz piano and to write songs, without any thought of connecting these interests with my scholarship. I have played drums for many years, and had always been an avid listener of music. I discovered that I had also, over the years, learned enough harmony to compose music, despite my lack of proficiency on the keyboard. A few years later, this avocation led to the birth of a third projected book on Lorca, focusing on musical adaptations of his work. The title will be Lorca: The Musical Imagination. I am not a musicologist and the focus of his book is not the technical analysis of music. My musical literacy, however, has given me the confidence to look at scores, to read the secondary literature on the composers I will be studying, and to write cogently about music for the general public. When I realized how much music Lorca had inspired, in both classical and vernacular genres, I realized that there was a book here and that I was the one to write it. I began to explore the field of “word and music studies” and found that there was a genre of books devoted to musical settings of poets like Baudelaire, Whitman, or Celan. A book about Lorca could be groundbreaking in this field, since his poetry has inspired both classical composers and performers in vernacular genres like folk, rock, and flamenco. (Almost all previous work in word and music studies, in contrast, has been restricted to the world of classical music.) 

            The intellectual interest of this material, for me, is analogous to the texts I considered in Apocryphal Lorca. Instead of using translations, adaptations, and parodies to study Lorca’s cultural influence, I am now looking at musical settings and homages from Spain, other European countries, and the Americas. A musical setting, ultimately, is a kind of translationthat provides a window on the cultural imagination. What turns out to be most compelling about this music is the way in which both classical and vernacular musicians use Lorca to convey their vision of the persistent cultural archetypes associated with Spanish culture.    

   

            When I reflect back on my career I can see that my agenda has remained constant in one fundamental respect: I have always attempted to understand the mystery of poetry itself. What has changed over the course of the years is an inevitable broadening and deepening of perspective. Like most young scholars, I had a relatively narrow range of expertise at the beginning of my career: I was a specialist on Claudio Rodríguez, a poet who was not particularly well known at the time, even in departments of Spanish. My work on Lorca has given me a far broader scholarly base, making my knowledgeable about translation theory and word and music studies. I am still, essentially, a specialist on a single author, but to be a competent Lorca scholar requires a vast amount of expertise. In fact, I did not consider myself a true specialist on Lorca until I finished my second book on him.   

            At the current stage of my career, I want my work to reflect four major values: depth of engagement, intellectual curiosity, humor, and accessibility. Depth is the product of sustained, focused attention over the course of several decades. Curiosity is the willingness to grow intellectually through exploring new ways of looking at familiar materials. Humor involves a sense of humility about the ultimate limits of understanding something as mysterious as poetry. As Kenneth Koch wrote, “The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?” Finally, I now place higher premium on accessibility than I did at the beginning of my career. Whenever I have gone back to read something I wrote twenty-five years ago, I have concluded that I was not particularly focused on communicating my ideas to the reader. For the most part my prose was not unclear, but I can see now that I was more interested in mounting a display of my own intelligence. The audience for the kind of scholarly books I am interested in writing is inherently modest in size, but precisely for this reason no reader should be turned away by an off-putting style. Writing for a few hundred interested readers now seems preferable than addressing myself to a dozen scholars in my own field. To this end, I have devoted a lot effort into defining and putting into practice my ideas about accessible scholarly prose.