ABSTRACT
BORN IN PARIS AND BROUGHT up partly in that city in a bilingual environment (to Spanish and French he soon added English and German), Claudio Guillén (19242007) was the most important Spanish comparatist of the twentieth century (Villanueva 1999). At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he was sent to live with his grandmother in Paris, where he was joined by his mother (Germaine Cahen) in 1937. His cosmopolitan education was punctuated by his father’s (the famous Generation of 1927 poet Jorge Guillén) positions at the universities of Murcia, Seville and Oxford. In 1938 Jorge Guillén left Spain to live in exile in the US. The family joined him in 1939, shortly before the poet began lecturing at Wellesley College. Claudio Guillén obtained a baccalaureate in 1940. He joined Charles de Gaulle’s Free Forces and fought in northern Africa between 1943 and 1946 and on the French eastern front. After graduating from Williams College, in 1953 Guillén received his PhD in comparative literature at Harvard University, where his mentors were Harry Levin and Renato Poggioli. The topic of his dissertation was a comparative study of the origins of picaresque literature, a substantial part of which was written in Cologne, where he had obtained a teaching position. He taught comparative literature at Princeton University, the University of California at San Diego and Harvard University, where in 1983 he became the fi rst Harry Levin Professor of Literature. During the 1980s, Guillén took leaves from Harvard and started teaching in Spain, fi rst as extraordinary chair of comparative literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and later as Emeritus at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
