This chapter studies Pablo Neruda’s stay in Buenos Aires in 1933 through an urban perspective. His network is also considered, including Sara Tornú, Norah Lange, Oliverio Girondo, and Federico García Lorca. In a metropolis as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires was at the beginning of the twentieth century, foreigners could quickly feel at home thanks to the existence of a solid network of sociability that facilitated the integration of the newcomers. For Neruda, who came with the ease that an official position allowed him, it was the possibility of quickly accessing already existing spaces both of expression and recognition, and of sociability (meetings at cafes, private social gatherings, homages). An analysis of Neruda’s urban footprint and his network reveals what a metropolis like Buenos Aires could bring to the intellectuals, especially to Neruda, who was starting then his international career. This urban perspective is thus intended to be a new methodological approach to the study of Pablo Neruda’s works.

The poet who seems to have had the largest role in determining Cohen’s decision to practice that art was the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, whom Cohen first read as teenager. Cohen’s song “Take This Waltz” is a translation of one of Lorca’s poems, and Cohen named his daughter Lorca. Another influence was the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Rumi, whom Cohen called “probably the greatest ascetic religious poet – in the same league as King David.” When Cohen studied briefly at Columbia University, he encountered the Beat movement, which influenced him in a number of ways, though it had little impact on the form of his poems. His writing always had a broad range of reference, from the Bible and ancient mythologies to modernism and postmodernism. His novel Beautiful Losers is reckoned a manifestation of international postmodernism, and, if Cohen’s first literary contexts were Montreal and Canada, his songs and records have had a large international audience. This chapter moves Cohen from a Canadian to a more global context, exploring the cosmopolitan origins of his work.

This chapter explores Langston Hughes’s travels to Spain as a political correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. His journalism, featuring interviews with the Black volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, was just one genre in a significant body of literary production that he completed in Spain. His time in Spain was a culmination of political activities related to labor, antiracist, anticolonial, and antifascist causes. The chapter examines how literary collaborations with the Spanish avant-garde group the Generation of 1927, and specifically his relationships with Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, nurtured his production of original poetry, theater, and translations of Federico García Lorca’s Romancero gitano and Bodas de sangre. In Spain, Hughes experimented with multilingualism and intertextual adaptation across different mediums in order to show antifascist solidarity across linguistic, national, and racial boundaries.