La cicatriz de Ulises

Erich Auerbach was not only a Romance scholar and literary critic, but also a committed intellectual who, during the tumultuous years of Europe, championed literature as a privileged means of understanding the world and quelling hatred in the "age of extremes." The essays and letters collected here, written between 1922 and 1952, allow us to appreciate the voice of this brilliant writer and profound Europeanist, as familiar with Homer, the Bible, Dante, and Montaigne as he was with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. A friend of Walter Benjamin, he fled Germany in 1936 for Istanbul, where he taught for a decade, achieving great recognition as a philologist in the United States after the war. Through his writings on suffering and the meaning of existence, even in periods of darkness, Auerbach examines the construction of the West from a perspective that, as in his letters, reveals a luminous personality even for contemporary readers.