“Exiles at home, neither in exile nor at home”. New Insights in Pearse Hutchinson’s Image of Spanish Regionalism in the 1950s-1970s

Abstract

After his journeys around a continent that was still licking the wounds of WWII, the Irish poet Pearse Hutchinson (1927-2012) chose Barcelona as his residence in different periods in the 1950s and the 1960s.There is considerable agreement in the notion that Hutchinson reflected the parallels between Spain and Ireland and both countries’ cultural and language oppression in his poetry (Veiga 2011; Keatinge 2011; Mittermaier 2017). Yet, the understanding of his involvement with Spain and its regions/nations is still limited. While existing literature on this issue relies heavily on the poetic production of the author, little attention has been paid to Hutchinson’s uncatalogued papers held at UCC and Maynooth U., which include unpublished poems, personal letters and postcards, annotations and his collection of books. The purpose of this paper is to increase the existing knowledge about the poet’s representation of Spain and, in particular, of the regions of Galicia and Catalonia.