Spanish · 1891–1951
Salinas taught Spanish at the Sorbonne and Cambridge, held the chair at Seville where Cernuda was his student, ran the summer university at Santander, and translated Proust into Spanish. He is the eldest of the Generation of '27 and the one who behaved most like a professor. In the early 1930s he met an American student, Katherine Whitmore, and wrote her three books of love poems in a stripped, colloquial Spanish of pronouns and questions — you, I, the two of us — that has no scenery and almost no adjectives. His wife found the letters and attempted suicide; the affair ended and the poems remained. He left Spain in 1936 for Wellesley and Johns Hopkins and never came back, dying in Boston and buried in Puerto Rico. He also wrote the best critical book on Rubén Darío and a short essay defending the act of reading against the telephone.