Introduction

Summary

At 8.30 on the evening of Saturday, 21 June 1919, 32 writers gathered in a private room at the restaurant in the Hotel Gonfarone, in Greenwich Village, New York, for a dinner to celebrate the publication of a book of poems by one of their number. After dinner there were readings by various guests; the party broke up in the early hours. Perhaps the only unusual aspect to the occasion is that it had been advertised as a ‘pan-American’ dinner. This book is an attempt to understand just what resonance the term pan-American had in literary circles in Manhattan at that time. One immediate key is found on the invitation list. The guests were divided more or less equally between US and Hispanic writers: the organiser was clearly making a point. That organiser was a young Nicaraguan poet called Salomon de la Selva, whose life in New York will here remain the touchstone. The pan-American literary project was to a large extent of de la Selva's making: he certainly tried his hardest to sustain it over the five years between 1915 and 1919, the period covered in these pages. That 1919 dinner was the final event in a sequence that began in 1915, book-ending a period that saw dramatic fluctuations in the literary, cultural, social, sexual, and political life of New York, which here forms the backdrop to the less recognised but persistent presence of Hispanic voices interpreting the capital of the twentieth century. Sometimes these Hispanic writers found themselves adrift in the alien yet strangely hypnotic world of New York, but they also often interacted with fellow-writers as they were drawn into de la Selva's ambitious imagining of a trans-American community of poets. During these five years de la Selva worked as a professional translator and spent ten months as a member of the British Army, but mostly he wrote. There survive from this period more than 200 poems, almost all in English, more than 50 translations of poems, from Spanish to English and vice versa, more than ten prose essays and reviews, and nearly 200 letters, some of them more than 20 pages long. The book that follows draws extensively on that material.