Carpathian Jew who became a leading Hispanist by chance

NEW YORK (El País / Eduardo Lago) Thomas Mermall, a professor of Spanish language and literature who taught at New York University, died last Thursday of a pancreatic cancer in Manhattan. Mermall, a specialist in the history of Spanish contemporary thought, was the author of a collection of books, articles and essays that comprise a bright journey across Spain's intellectual life after the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.Two of his leading works were The Rhetoric of Humanism and The Allegories of Power in Francisco Ayala, besides a superb critical edition of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, which includes an analysis of the impact this book had in American culture. Miguel de Unamuno, Octavio Paz, Jiménez Lozano and Laín Entralgo are some of the leading men of letters whom the prestigious Hispanist dissected with great clarity.>>>

Hemingway haunts Madrid - 50 years after his death

Outside Chicote

MADRID (El País) It's not really Hemingway visiting from his grave, only a little word missing from our headline: 'in', between 'haunts' and 'Madrid'. El País reporter María Hervás writes an excellent tour of Ernest Hemingway's Madrid, a place he visited frequently. "Yet when you get to know it [Madrid], it is the most Spanish of all cities, the best to live in, the finest people, month in and month out the finest climate," wrote Ernest Hemingway in Death In The Afternoon . The Nobel Literature Prize winner visited Spain on several occasions, and in the 1920s he was here nine times with his family. During the Civil War, in 1937 and 1938, he returned to Madrid as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, and was back again in the 1950s, attracted mostly by the bullfights, especially those featuring his friends Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez at Las Ventas.>>>

Leonard Cohen, 2011 Príncipe de Asturias for Literature

SPAIN (Agencies) The Prince of Asturias Prize is the highest civilian award Spain is able to give. This year's for Literature goes to songwriter, poet and novelist Leonard Cohen, 78, for "literary work that has influenced three generations," according to a statement from the jury. There were 32 candidates in this section; the finalists, aside from Leonard Cohen, were another Canadian, Alice Munro, and British novelist Ian McEwan. Cohen was also a candidate in the Arts section for his musical career, but this year's went to music director Riccardo Muti. Several prizes are yet to be decided but another one interesting to our readers is that awarded to Britain's Royal Society.