1939-1980

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1939-1980

  EXILE I (Latin America, 1939-1953)

  EXILE II (Europe, 1953-1980)

EXILE I (Latin America, 1939-1953)
Like so many Spanish Republican intellectuals in 1939, María Zambrano crossed the border into France with her family. Her mother and sister remained in Paris while she left with her husband on a trip to Mexico paid for by the House of Spain. There she met again her close friend, Alfonso Reyes, and re-established contact with Octavio Paz and the Spanish exiles who had arrived thanks to the efforts of the House of Spain: León Felipe, Moreno Villa, Prados, Dieste, Bergamín, Xirau, Gutiérrez Abascal, Blas Cabrera, and Benjamín Jarnés. She delivered her lecture on " Pensamiento y poesía en la vida española” (“Thought and poetry in Spanish life) to that audience in June. She taught History of Philosophy at the University of Morelia and published Filosofía y poesía, Pensamiento y poesía en la vida española, a book that had far-reaching repercussions. She also wrote “Nietzsche o la soledad enamorada,” and “San Juan de la Cruz (De la noche oscura a la más clara mística)”, examples of the enormous influence that those authors exerted on her work.

María exchanged the solitude of Morelia for life in Havana, where she taught at the University and the Instituto de Altos Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (Institute of Higher Studies and Scientific Research), and gave lectures. She reconnected with old friends, such as Manuel Altolaguirre and Concha Méndez and wrote the prologue to Méndez’ play, El solitario. Misterio en un acto. She became close friends with Dr. Pittaluga, also a friend of Ortega y Gasset, and Lezama Lima, who co-directed, along with José Rodríguez Feo, the journal Orígenes (1944-1956). The journal gave its namesake to the group of Cuban intellectuals of which María became a part and to which she was a great source of inspiration.

María often traveled to Puerto Rico where she lectured and published articles. She wrote " La agonía de Europa” and “La violencia europea,” (“The agony of Europe" and "European Violence"), two views on freedom and German idealism. Between 1940 and 1946, she was strongly influenced by Landsberg’s ideas; her concerns became focused on tragedy, hope and transcendence and their relationship to the value of the commitment to personal behavior.

In 1946, her mother died before María could reach Paris after hearing of her serious condition. She remained there for two years afterwards to help her sister Araceli, who had been imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis along with her husband, Manuel Núñez, who was extradited and executed in Madrid in 1944. During this visit, she frequented Picasso, Malraux, Sartre, and Beauvoir, and met Cioran, René Char, Christian Zervos, Luis Fernández, Albert Camus, with whom she established a deep friendship, and Cyril Timothy Osborne, the English painter who became her financial benefactor.

Maria and her husband separated in 1948, after which she returned to Cuba, spent a few months in Mexico, returned again to Havana, and between 1949 and 1951, traveled to Florence, Venice, Rome, and Paris. In 1950 she published Hacia un saber sobre el alma. The sisters left Paris in April of 1951 after being reunited with their friends Luis Ferández, the Lobo married couple, and Salvador de Madariaga. They returned to Havana where they lived precariously through Zambrano’s classes, publications, and lectures.

EXILE II (Europe, 1953-1980)

In 1953, the Zambrano sisters left Cuba and continued their exile in Rome, where they met Elena Croce, Elemire Zolla, and Cristina Campo. María reencountered Diego de Mesa, Nieves de Madariaga and her friend, Juan Soriano, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, and the painters Ramón Gaya and Timothy Osborne. She also met Ángel Alonso, Agustín Andreu, Alfredo Castellón, Carlos Barral, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Tomás Segovia, and Sergio Pitol.

At that time Zambrano published some of her major works:
El hombre y lo divino, (Man and the divine), a favorite of Camus; Persona y democracia (People and democracy), in which she reflected on the essential categories of politics and how they might be the dawn from which real and tragic history would be transformed into an ethical story; and Diótima de Mantinea, a key text in understanding her “poetic
reason“ developed as a critique of Western culture.

Thanks to the Venezuelan poet and singer Reyna Rivas and her husband, Armando Barrios, who were her friends and mentors from 1957 on, Zambrano received a grant from the Fina Gómez Foundation.
In 1961, she met Marius Schneider, whom she admired for his studies on the musicality behind all mythology, and she continued to pursue her studies of religion and the connections between spirituality and physics. María, in her eagerness to meet Massignon, agreed to attend the symposium, to be held at Royaumont Abby in June of 1962, but the great Islamist died some months earlier. Emilio Prados also died that year. He was Zambrano’s old friend with whom she maintained an ongoing correspondence in which she said: "your poetry is something unique for me. I find myself fully in it". She and the poet shared the same ideas about death as creation.

In 1964, the accusations of a fascist neighbor forced the Zambrano sisters to leave Rome and to move with their 13 cats to La Pièce, France, in the Jura Mountains. Thanks to the peace she found there, María’s creativity reached its peak and she developed a large number of works that would appear over the next two decades. In 1965, she published España, sueño y verdad; El sueño creador (Spain, dream and truth; The creative dream), an example of the importance that Zambrano gave to dreams as a form of self-knowledge, and “La palabra y el silencio”, an article that anticipated Claros del bosque.
In 1967, her essay ” La tumba de Antígona” appeared, which is the key to understanding her interpretation of “la generación del toro” (the generation of the bull), and sacrifice as a basis of hope.

In 1972, her sister Araceli died. María traveled through Europe, settled in Rome for a while, and then, with the help of her cousins and José Ángel Valente, she returned to La Pièce, where she remained until 1978. This was a period of overwhelming intellectual production during which time she finished Claros del bosque, her most important philosophical work in which she explored the potential of the logos ruled by the Apollonian metaphor of light and pure insight.

Her friend Lezama Lima died in 1977.  María moved to Ferney Voltaire in 1978 and her work became more secretive.  In 1980, given the precariousness of her health, she moved to Geneva to be cared for by relatives and friends. There she received her friends Orlando Blanco, Emma García (López Molina’s wife), José Ángel Valente, José Miguel Ullán, Américo Ferrari, Chimo Verdú, and the painter Baruj Salinas, who acknowledged the influence of Zambrano’s thought on the luminosity of his paintings at that time.