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AUTHOR (1939 - Present)
By Brenda Padilla
 Internationally renowned biographer and scholar of Spanish history, culture and literature, Ian Gibson is well settled in Spain where he has been based for many years. In possession of a Spanish passport since 1984, Mr Gibson is most certainly more at home in his adopted country than any other.
This eminent expert on Lorca, Dalí, Machado, Buñuel, the Spanish Civil war and so many other aspects of this countries fascinating history and culture, began his Spanish saga in a second hand bookshop in Ireland where he first met with Lorca’s work. He later set about investigating the famous figure’s death at the height of Franco’s dictatorship right smack in Granada, of all places. The result was a book that – hot off the press - was banned by the dictator.
Recently Andalucia.com’s editor had the good fortune to catch up with Mr Ian Gibson to learn about his current projects, his latest book and his greatest Spanish fascinations.
AC: I’d like to start right now in the present – what are you working on right now?
IG: I’m working on a biography of Luis Buñuel, the film director, Spain’s greatest film director, and I’m terribly excited about it because it’s going to take me to Mexico, New York and Paris. And being based in Madrid is tremendous because his archive is here, the National Film Theatre, so most of the papers are in Madrid, but then there’s a lot of stuff in Mexico where he made over 20 films.
AC: How long does it take to carry out a project like this?
 IG: It takes years and years. This book has grown out of my previous work on Lorca and Dalí, so I have a firm basis on which to build this new book. It’s a whole lifetime. I’ve been on this for 40 years, 50 years almost. I’m celebrating my 50 year anniversary as a Hispanist this year actually. I first came to Spain in 1957.
AC: I understand that your first work was banned by Franco.
 IG: That’s true my first book was an investigation into the assassination of Federíco García Lorca at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It was published in Paris. It couldn’t be published here. It was published by… a sort of exile publishing house, and it was banned by the Franco Regime.
AC: That’s quite a thing to have in your credentials.
IG: Yes, I’m rather pleased about that. It was a book that made a tremendous impact. It was perhaps the first monographic on the repression carried out by Franco’s people during the war and it was a very detailed account of the death of (Lorca), after all he’s Spain’s most famous poet, who was assassinated at the age of 38, before he had really done all the things he could have done. It was an absolute tragedy, which still lives with us.
AC: I have a headline from the Guardian in front of me – and article published in August 2007. It says “Anglo-Irish Academic enjoys surprise hit with novel in Spanish” – this is talking about your first novel “Vientos del Sur”. What kind of response did you expect from this book?
IG: (Laughs heartily) That’s a gross exaggeration, actually put out by a friend of mine. I won’t mention any names; a journalist friend of mine in Madrid I think was responsible for that. There was no great hit. It was published in Spanish. The Britts on the Coast aren’t going to read it, are they? And the Spaniards I don’t think are particularly interested in my efforts as a novelist. It hasn’t done badly. It’s really not one of my books that have done best.
AC: You’ve written many scholarly books including the renowned biographies of Lorca and Dali – for example – what has been your favourite project so far? Why?
IG: It all began with Lorca for me. When you’re 18 and you stumble across a poet who speaks to you in a very personal way… I was beginning to learn the language at the time. I was 17 or 18, in a second hand bookshop somewhere in Dublin. I suddenly came across a copy of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballad. I didn’t know the language, but something in those ballads got through to me... Irish literature has never lost its contact with the earth and Lorca is very earthy. His earth was Andalusian, mine was Irish, but the similarity... something enabled me to get into (it). That began and went on and I discovered more about the man, his assassination. And, when I finished, I had to start a doctorate and I decided to embark on a thesis – a doctoral thesis on Lorca and it went on from there.
It’s still with me today. Today I’ve been thinking about Lorca because it’s all inside me and he’s a very, very great poet, one of the greatest European poets, I would say. I’m lucky because I’m the biographer. It all sprang from what you might call a chance encounter with his work, but maybe there was no chance involved. Who knows?
AC: What does a man like Lorca have to offer us today?
IG: Well, you know for a lot of people, he probably doesn’t offer anything. I mean, how many people read poetry? And now that we’re talking about Andalucia, Andalucia is one of the places in Europe that reads least. And it upsets me as a lover of the potential of the Andalucia that might one day flower, come into flowering; people read very little. Who reads poetry here or in Britain or in France? Only a small minority.
IG: Of course, Lorca has the advantage that he’s also a playwright. And I suppose that one of the reasons for his fame is that people have seen the Casa de Bernarda Alba, for example, or Blood Wedding... So he is a very distinguished playwright.
 What do people get from him? I get a tremendous excitement and a sort of shudder down the spine when I read him, feelings of depth and mystery in his work. I suppose I’m a romantic... I think it was Keats who said, you’re reading a poem, when you’re reading a genuine, authentic poem, you can feel the hair rising on your wrists. It’s that kind of electric charge that I get from Lorca. Not just from Lorca, of course... I’ve also written about Antonio Machado, another great Spanish poet. I mean, I get this from – it could be a French poet or British. I get this reaction of the hair rising on the wrist. If I don’t get that, then I’m not particularly turned on.
AC: What most fascinates you about modern Spain?
IG: I’m very fascinated. I have to say I’m very glad to be here and not in a department of Spanish (somewhere), because I’m living it day by day and I’m fascinated by the return to Europe. Spain has been divorced from Europe for so long and is now back there at the centre and doing well. I love that aspect of modern Spain – that we’re back in Europe, that we’ve got this common currency. Frontiers are gone. Children are learning French much more easily than they did before because we’re in Paris learning foreign languages...
I think it’s terribly exciting to be in Europe. Europe is a fascinating space and I think the fact that Spain has returned to the fold – it’s terribly exciting, the fact that after the dictatorship – 40 wasted years, you might say – Spain is now democratic and within Europe. That, for me, is the great news.
AC: What most fascinates you about Spain’s past?
IG: What fascinates me most about the past is the submerged past that’s not recognised by official sort of Catholic historiography, that is to say the mixture of three religions, three cultures, the huge cultural mix that existed in Spain before the fateful day in 1492. I think it’s fateful. A lot of Spaniards think it’s the greatest day in Spanish history. It means the fall of Granada to the Christians, the last Muslim bastion. (It means) the so-called discovery (of America) – I say “so-called” because it was already there and hardly needed the Spaniards to arrive.
I love the Spain previous to 1492 as Lorca did. You know, Granada was a mix of languages. The culture of Spain was a civilised place in the 11th century when Europe was barbaric and all that was lost of course with the so-called re-conquest. That’s what’s got to be rediscovered. That is why Spain today should be a bridge between east and west because it’s got it in its own history. I remember someone from British television saying ‘I couldn’t believe it, on my honeymoon to Marbella I went to Granada and there was this thing that looked like a mosque’. And I said, ‘Well, it was a Mosque, wasn’t it?’ Why is there a Mosque the south of Spain? It’s part of Spanish culture.
And again, there’s richness in that. They don’t teach Arabic in the schools here, but there are 4,000 Arabic words in contemporary Spanish – not to mention the place names. There are thousands, beginning with Madrid. It’s Arabic. It means underground watering system. La Mancha is also Arabic. It means “high plane”. No Spaniard knows that and it’s in the very first sentence of their greatest novel, “Don Quijote”. La Mancha is in the first line of the most famous novel in the world but because Arabic isn’t taught no one (understands it). There’s amnesia on a massive level.
And that is rejected by official, Catholic-inspired history. That the true Spaniard has got to be Catholic and not any Jewish or Moorish blood in their veins – there’s been an obsession here with the blood over the centuries.
AC: And it’s still there, isn’t it?
IG: It’s still there… And yet, there hardly can be a Spaniard without some Jewish and Moorish blood, and why not? They say they’re Christians. Christ was oriental, not an occidental. I say to people, “Jesus was not born in Rome.” (laughs) He went further east, further east. Aramaic is not a romance language. People aren’t using their heads, aren’t thinking. I wouldn’t have the slightest problem about this.
AC: The Spanish Civil War has also been the object of your study. Why the Spanish Civil War?
IG: It all began with Lorca because they killed him and it was very difficult under the Franco regime. Can you imagine a young Irish guy arriving in Granada in 1965, asking questions about what happened there during the war when eight or nine people were executed? So, I got into it that way. When I arrived there I didn’t know anything about the Spanish Civil War. And it fascinated me because of the foreign involvement… the non-intervention pact. It was also an international war. And it’s got everything for the scholar, the destruction of a culture, the destruction of democracy. It’s something that has haunted me ever since I began.
Find links to works by Ian Gibson in the Andalucia.com book store.
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