Research Interests: Modern Spanish Peninsular Literature; Spanish Civil War, Exile, Historical Memory; Modern Peninsular and Latin American Poetry; Translation 

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza is a scholar of modern Spanish Peninsular literature and culture with broad interests in Spanish, Latin-American and U.S. poetry. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature, literary history, literary translation, and cultural studies, with special emphasis on the tensions between poetics and politics since the emergence of modernity in the late nineteenth century. Thus far, his work has concentrated mainly on the value and function of poetry as cultural memory with regard to discourses of political commitment and nation-building, situating poetry in Spanish in comparative frames of legibility marked by a translational, transnational, and cross-temporal understanding of textuality. This comparative perspective has led to a particular focus on poetry as a prevalent cultural discourse in times of socio-cultural upheaval and disruption like the 1930s and 1940s.

His new book This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets (Toronto UP, 2020) explores the fraught relationship between poetry and literary history in the context of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). The Spanish Civil War was idealized as a poet’s war. The thousands of poems written about the conflict are memorable evidence of poetry’s high cultural and political value in those historical conditions. After Franco’s victory and the repression that followed, numerous Republican exiles relied on the symbolic agency of poetry to uphold a sense of national identity. Exilic poems are often read as claim-making narratives that fit national literary history. This Ghostly Poetry critiques this conventional understanding of literary history by arguing that exilic poems invite readers to seek continuity with a traumatic past just as they prevent their narrative articulation. The book uses the figure of the ghost to address temporal challenges to historical continuity brought about by memory, tracing the discordant, disruptive ways in which memory is interwoven with history in poems written in exile. Taking a novel approach to cultural memory, This Ghostly Poetry engages with literature, history, and politics while exploring issues of voice, time, representation, and disciplinarity [https://utorontopress.com/ca/this-ghostly-poetry-3#].

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza's new book project, (In)Translating: Poetry and Politics of Identity in 21st-Century Spain, asks how poetry translation can resist exclusionary identity-building discourses in 21st-century Spain. It does so by primarily examining the textual challenges that non-standard translations from or into languages and language variants spoken in the Iberian Peninsula pose to discourses of identity today—particularly those of political and national identity. These discourses have gained renewed traction in Spain since the 2008 global financial crisis. The project specifically asks: what are the sociopolitical, cultural, and ethical implications of non-standard translations when normative notions of language shape discourses of identity in today’s multilingual Spain? (In)Translatingdescribes not only an unusually creative or purposely obscure translation, but an occasional, sometimes barely noticeable, use of, or reference to, translation in a text that may bring about a disruption of reading. (In)Translatingthus also indicates a general strategy for reading significant translational operations that readers often fail to heed.

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza's first scholarly book was El salto a lo desconocido: yo lírico y negatividad dialéctica en la poesía de la modernidad [The Leap into the Unknown: Lyrical I and Dialectical Negativity in the Poetry of Modernity] (2013). His second book, El canto de la desaparición: Memoria, historia y testimonio en la poesía de Antonio Gamoneda [The Song of Disappearance: Memory, History, and Testimony in the Poetry of Antonio Gamoneda] (2015), investigated recent debates about collective memory in Spanish and European contexts through the lens of the Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda, who as a child was an eyewitness to the disappearance of prisoners in a military prison during the Spanish Civil War.

Among Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza's translations into Spanish are works by A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Shel Silverstein, Wallace Stevens, and W. B. Yeats. He has translated fiction and memoir writers such as Lawrence Block, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Douglas Coupland, Tibor Fischer, Peggy Guggenheim, Elmore Leonard, Jay McInerney, Robert McLiam Wilson, Andrew O’Hagan, Tim Parks, Annie Proulx, Ruth Rendell, Cathleen Schine, Mark Spragg, and Rafi Zabor. He has also published five poetry collections in Spain, Si en ajena deriva(2018) [Epílogo de Eduardo Milán] and O, la ballena (2016) among them [O, la ballena, entrevista de Felipe Cussen] [https://www.varasekediciones.es/oleaje-de-palabras-sobre-o-la-ballena/].