Norwegian Influences on Spanish Modernism: Ibsen, Hamsun and Unamuno

Resumen

Scarcely has the influence of Norwegian literature on Spanish letters been

researched. Generally speaking, Norwegian authors have remained largely

unknown to Spanish scholars and readers, to the point that Spanish

translations of, for instance, Bjørnson’s and Hamsun’s works are, still today, a

rarity. Gagen (69) has sustained, some Scandinavian playwrights, particularly

Ibsen and Strindberg, were known in Spanish literary circles already in the

1890s; yet the quantity of critical studies into their reception in Spain is scarce.

This situation has limited our understanding of Spanish Modernism; for

example, Nil Santiáñez (119) has contended that Spain was the first nation

where the term modernism was used to put Spanish literature at the front of

Modernism; however, there had been a Modernist or pre-Modernist literary

trend in Scandinavia known as det moderne Gennembruds Mænd (the men of

the modern breakthrough), as Georg Brandes called it in 1883.