Kathleen Riley, ‘Returning to Salamanca: a Telemachan Odyssey’

Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar Series (CCRSS) 

Room G.21, Faculty of Classics
Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge

In his very personal exploration of Homer’s Odyssey, Daniel Mendelsohn points out: ‘As much as it is a tale of husbands and wives, this story is just as much—perhaps even more—about fathers and sons.’ The poem, in fact, begins and ends with a son in search of his father.

Luis Gabriel Portillo (1907-1993) was a poet and left-wing intellectual who arrived in Britain as a refugee at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Sixty years later, his youngest son Michael, fresh from losing his parliamentary seat, made a televised pilgrimage back to the land of his father’s heroes, to the village of his formative years, to the front line of the civil war, and to the ancient university city of Salamanca. It was a moving Telemachan odyssey in which the themes of exile and nostos were potent and many-layered. Salamanca was Luis Portillo’s Ithaca, invaded by barbarian suitors in the form of Franco’s Falangists, its resilient beauty tenderly preserved in his memory and celebrated with flourish and delicacy in his exilic verses, the tristia he composed in suburban north London. His reverence for his alma mater, and his abiding bitterness towards the regime that had robbed him of his true place in the world, fuelled an unappeasable sense of loss and impossible nostos. ‘I had the feeling all my life’, Michael said, ‘that he was nursing a wound, that a terrible hurt had been done to him and he was always thinking about being in another place and another time. There was a tremendous nostalgia for what had been and what might have continued to be’.

Eighty years after Luis Portillo’s flight from Spain, this paper recounts his story through the prism of his son’s railway journey, illustrating along the way its Odyssean strands of displacement, memory, and homecoming.