ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: What was the Ultraist literary movement (“ultraísmo” in Spanish)?

Dr. Ruth Fine is Salomon and Victoria Cohen Professor in Iberian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Director of the Institute of Western Cultures. She acts as the President of the Israeli Association of Hispanists and Vice-President of the International Association of Hispanists. In 2012 she was awarded the Orden del Mérito Civil, or Order of Civil Merit, by the King of Spain for her contribution to Spanish culture. In 2016 she was elected corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy.

Her main areas of research are Spanish Golden Age Literature (of the 16th–17th centuries); The Literature of the Conversos after 1492; The Work of Miguel de Cervantes; The Presence of the Bible and of Jewish Elements in the Work of Cervantes; Contemporary Ibero-American literature; and the work of Jorge Luis Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinian short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature in the 20th century. Dr. Fine wrote her doctoral thesis about his work The Aleph, and recently participated in a program about the writer for the International Spanish State Radio station. She spoke with us about Borges’s life and work.