Claudio Guillén
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on February 1, 2011, the following Minute was placed upon the records. Claudio Guillén was born in Paris, and was brought up partly in that city. His father, Jorge Guillén, was a major poet of the “generation of 1927” in Spain and also taught poetry at the Sorbonne, the University of Oxford, and the University of Seville; Claudio’s mother, Germaine Cahen, belonged to an assimilated Franco-Jewish family. His sister, Teresa Gilman, recalls that the family shuttled between Spain and France, spending several months each year in Paris. The children grew up bilingual in French and Spanish, and soon added English to their repertoire; thus began Claudio Guillén’s distinguished career as a citizen of the world and tireless promoter of comparative literature. For him, comparative literature was not just an academic field—it was a way of life. As he put it in...