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In contrast with Spanish speaking countries, it is not customary in the United
States to give someone’s full name, to include his mother’s last name, but in
the case of Diego Catalán, his full name has important connotations for anyone
familiar with Spanish intellectual history.
Diego Catalán not only inherited from his grandfather Ramón Menéndez Pidal his
last name, he inherited from this important member of the so called “Generation
of ’98” his unique knowledge of Spanish history and of its traditional
literature.
When Diego Catalán arrived at UCSD in 1970, he brought with him a very solid
academic trajectory in the fields of Medieval Spanish History and Literature and
the History of the Spanish language, but most of all, he brought with him his
limitless knowledge and love for the Romancero, the ballads that have
lived in the collective memory of Spanish, Portuguese and Judeo-Spanish speaking
peoples in Spain, Portugal, Latin America and in the Sephardic communities of
Northern Morocco, the Balkans, Turkey and the Near East.
Many students in the Literature Department at UCSD had the opportunity to learn
about this fascinating genre of Literature from Diego Catalán, and thanks to his
untiring creation of research and study programs, we were able to participate in
the quest for the preservation of the orally transmitted Romances, a
quest that involved traveling all over Spain’s and Portugal’s countryside in
search of those communities whose members remembered those beautiful and often
tragic tales that have their roots in medieval Spain.
Thousands of ballad texts were collected from the oral tradition by these groups
of UC students, Spanish and Latin American students and Professors, specialists
from other European countries as well as from Japan, organized and led by
Catalán and his core team of Researchers from the Seminario Menéndez Pidal of
the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Diego’s energy and enthusiasm was contagious. We worked long hours to prepare
and administer grants that would allow us to include all those interested in
doing field work and in learning first hand what these literary products sounded
like as they were being “re-created” by the people who remember them as an
integral part of their culture. Needless to say, long hours were then devoted to
the transcription of hundreds of hours of field tapes, to the cataloguing of
these texts, and ultimately, to their publication.
Although our work with the Romancero led several of us to write our
dissertations on that subject, as well as to the writing of numerous articles,
the most remarkable characteristic of the academic work that Diego encouraged
was its collective nature. Just as traditional literature is a collective
product, that is to say, the product of many members of a community who remember
it and transmit it orally from generation to generation, with Diego we worked as
a team. Our teams, like the tradition we were contemplating, evolved throughout
the years, while a “core” group of five of us remained as a research team for
close to twenty years. Most of the books published by the Seminario Menéndez
Pidal has been the work of its members.
Given the longevity of Diego’s grandfather and that of his equally remarkable
mother, Ximena Menéndez Pidal, his friends and students expected him to live to
be a hundred years old, and to continue publishing for many years books on the
Pan-Hispanic Romancero and on Spanish Historiography, his death surprised us
all.
At the time of his death on April 9, 2008 Diego Catalán was correcting galleys
of his new book on La enigmática carta del Embajador, 28 de mayo / 6 de junio de
1562. We are all saddened by his death, but hope to continue learning from him
through his writings.
Descanse en paz.
Beatriz Mariscal Hay
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