Daniel Aguirre Oteiza

Academic Degrees: A. B., Universidad de Salamanca; Diploma of Higher Studies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University

Research Interests: Modern Spanish Literature and Culture (18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries); Spanish, Latin American, and U.S. Poetry; Theory of Poetry; Literary Translation; Modernist Studies; Exile, Historical Memory, and Testimony; Nation, Narration, and Literary History; Representations of the Spanish Civil War

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza writes and teaches about literary translation, modern Spanish literature and culture, and Spanish, Latin-American and U.S. poetry. His research focuses on 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century Spanish literature, literary history, poetry translation, and cultural studies, with special emphasis on the tensions between poetics and politics since the emergence of modernity in the late nineteenth century. So far, his work has centered 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. 

Among Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza's translations into Spanish are works by A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Barbara Guest, 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, Edith Nesbit, Andrew O’Hagan, Tim Parks, Annie Proulx, Ruth Rendell, Cathleen Schine, Mark Spragg, and Rafi Zabor.

His last 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.

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza's current 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)Translating describes 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.

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.

In 2023 Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza published an anthology of Miguel Hernández's poetry [Penguin]. He has also published six poetry collections in Spain, O, la ballena (2016) [O, la ballena, entrevista de Felipe Cussen], Si en ajena deriva (2018), and Egrafía (2023) among them.