"Eliminate the Gómez": Ramón de la Serna y Espina and his collaboration in editorial Cruz del Sur. History of a mistake within the framework of a great republican exile project in Chile

Abstract

The article intends to contribute to the knowledge of one of the most renowned publishers of the republican exile in Chile: Cruz del Sur, founded in 1941 by Arturo Soria, and which received collaborations, among others, from Spaniard José Ferrater Mora and José Ricardo Morales and from Chileans Manuel Rojas and José Santos González Vera. This article is interested in studying the collection Itineraries, by the Spanish-Chilean writer, translator and cultural critic Ramón de la Serna y Espina. With this, the widespread error in specialized criticism will be corrected, which insists on confusing this figure with that of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, in addition to denying the publication of any volume of the collection. The investigation carried out has allowed us to verify that De la Serna y Espina presented the collection in 1943 with a clear editorial outline, with travel as a literary geography. In this relieving transit as a fundamental cultural condition, in 1949, with a prologue by Ramón de la Serna, El correo de Bagdad. Del Irak a Siria por la ruta clásica de los mercaderes, by Adolfo Rivadeneyra, also a Spanish-Chilean, was published. Despite being the only volume in the Itineraries collection, it allows us to visualize the importance attached to transatlantic exchange and flow by Spanish and Chilean intellectuals after the editorial project of Cruz del Sur, especially by those who, like Ramón de la Serna and Espina, will see themselves as "misguided pilgrims" without fixed itineraries.