In the age in which we live, basic terms of reality are undermined, words are subverted, and their meaning changed. We are almost daily assailed by ugly neologisms. In the United States, leftist activists attempted to subvert the grammatical rules of Spanish, historically a gendered Romance language, by pushing the term ‘Latinx’ instead of ‘Latino.’ And even Latino seems to be a left-leaning rival of the more conservative or traditional term ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Hispano.’ The irony here is that even the term “Latin America” (as opposed to Spanish America or hispanoamerica) is in turn also relatively new, first used in Paris in 1856 and favored by French Emperor Napoleon III who was very much interested in the Western Hemisphere and, indeed, invaded Mexico, briefly setting up a puppet empire. Latino activists in the Western hemisphere often identify with the conquered rather than the conquerors, with the indigenous people of the Americas, even though that ethnic connection can be tenuous. Mexico’s newest president, of purely European ethnic origin, has bizarrely called on Spain to apologize for its conquest of the Aztec Empire five centuries ago.
It wasn’t always thus. There was a time when to identify with Latinity or latinidad was to be proud of ancient conquerors and of the shared cultural, religious, linguistic, and civilizational bonds that came into being as a result of conquests. It was to see an imperial project with roots in Rome and the Iberian peninsula that had spread across the globe as something to boast of. An imperial project seen as having been generous, welcoming, fruitful, and enlightening.
One particularly fascinating work of Latinity is Spanish poet and diplomat Ramon de Basterra’s 1921 book, La obra de Trajano (The Work of Trajan). Basterra was not just a Spaniard but a Basque, from Bilbao, who saw no contradiction between a lyric love for the Basque countryside and an admiration for the Spanish imperial project. He was influenced by Italian Futurism—one scholar calls him “the only Spanish futurist”—but also embraced a humanistic vision of Spain as a globe-spanning civilizational project, stretching “from the Pyrenees to the Philippines.” Basterra would coin the term Sobreespaña (“OverSpain”) to describe this project, a term similar to the Hispanidad used by his Spanish Basque colleague Ramiro de Maeztu a few years later. Both were men on Spain’s pre-Civil War political Right.
La obra de Trajano is about Latinity and Hispanidad but it is mostly about Romania, a country where Basterra served as Third Secretary in the Spanish Embassy from 1918 to 1920. Part travelogue and part history, the work is also a meditation on civilization, its survival and existence, not only among the Romanized and Latinized ancient Dacians conquered by the Emperor Trajan, but elsewhere in Europe, the Americas, and beyond. It is a book about the steadfastness and durability of cultures and civilizations, or at least some of them.
The book begins not in Romania but in Rome, in the Forum of Trajan and Trajan’s column, commemorating one of Rome’s greatest soldier emperors, if not the greatest—the empire reached its largest geographical extent under Trajan—but also “an ancient Spaniard.” Marcus Ulpius Traianus was born in 53 AD of native Italian stock in the Roman colony of Italica, near Seville in Southern Spain. Italica had been founded in 206 BC by Scipio Africanus, so Trajan’s family had likely been in Spain for some time. How long they had been there and how Spanish or Italian they really were is a matter of conjecture. For Basterra, Trajan was both a Spaniard and a Roman who was nurtured by the culture and environment of Baetica (Roman Andalusia), while being as polished and as capable as anyone in the city of Old Rome.
Trajan would, in two military campaigns, conquer Dacia, today’s Romania, and incorporate it into the empire where it would remain for less than two centuries until the Romans had to withdraw around 271 AD, during the Imperial Crisis of the Third Century when the empire seemed to be on the verge of complete collapse. Rome ruled Dacia for less time than it controlled Britain and yet a Latinized, Romance language speaking people would survive despite repeated foreign invasion. Basterra notes that the all-conquering Trajan was given three titles by a grateful Senate: Germanicus, Dacicus, and Parthicus. But the only tangible remnant of his titles to survive was Dacicus, his legacy being across the Danube: Roman Dacia-Romania. The author approvingly describes Trajan as the first Hispanic colonizer before the discovery of the New World.
Ancient Dacia would, after the Roman withdrawal, be under the rule of successive conquerors: Sarmatians, Goths, Gepids, Huns, Avars, Cumans, Hungarians, Tartars. This land and its people would later be subject to the heavy influence of neighboring Turks, Poles, Russians, Habsburgs, but would nonetheless survive. Only Dacia, of the Roman Eastern European provinces would resist Slavic submersion. As Basterra notes, “what deep roots the Romanian must have had to survive two thousand years of disaster!” He quotes a national poet, “Românul nu piere” (“the Romanian does not perish”). “The great work of the Romanian race, remnant of the time of Trajan and Hadrian, abandoned in the Eastern region,” says Basterra, “lies in its saving its own existence.”
Basterra’s telling of Romanian history is contrasted with his arrival in Romania itself as a diplomat of a neutral Spain in June 1918. He arrived in a devastated country that had just been defeated by the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. He describes Bucharest as an occupied city filled with German soldiers, like “Merovingian warriors” enjoying themselves in the local beerhalls. The city seems “an isthmus between two seas, one would think of himself in the West or in the Orient.” The Romanian language at times sounds to him like Catalan, other times like Italian. The Romanians have their own deep feeling of melancholy which reminds him of the Portuguese saudade. “Romanian poetic lyricism is surprisingly similar to that of the Lusitanian.” Romanian peasants remind him of afternoons in the Roman Campagna and of the sprightly Spanish garb of the morerias.
Basterra travelled on from Bucharest to the interim capital of Iași (Jassy) where he spent six months. The country would lose the Battle of Romania in December 1917 against the Central Powers, only to be on the winning Allied side of World War I in November 1918. Militarily defeated, it would be diplomatically triumphant. As a result of post-war peace treaties, the country’s size would triple and its population double. The diplomat sees Trajan everywhere—on the currency, the names of children, theaters, hotels, and steamships. He checks into the Gran Hotel Traian.
The young Spanish diplomat enjoyed his time in this larger Romania, visiting remnants of Roman rule at the ruins of Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa, the first Roman capital and that curious Roman monument near the Black Sea, the Tropaeum Traiani. He offers sympathetic portrayals of Romanian Jews (especially the Sephardic ones) and Gypsies (“brothers of those of Sacromonte in Granada”). But most of all, he ponders “the mystery of the survival of the Romanian race on Dacian soil.”
When the Romans left in 271, they reportedly took everyone who wanted to go with them and resettled them south of the Danube in what today is Bulgaria. That population is not identifiable and it is assumed that they were absorbed by the larger Slavic peoples around them. It is those who stayed behind in Dacia, rooted in the soil, that were conquered by the barbarians: “those humble souls who stayed behind are the ones who survived.” For Basterra, the true Romania that endured was to be found among its faithful and rustic peasants.
Seeing how often Romania was invaded and ruled by others over the confusion and mixtures of the centuries, Basterra asks “do races really matter?” He confesses that he doesn’t think they do: “I confess to being somewhat indifferent to blood … but I am quite interested in civilizations.” Although Romanian has Slavic and Turkic loan words, “the heart of the language is Roman (romanico) and it is the brother of other Romance languages.” “Dacia, more alive today than ever,” Basterra writes, “beats with a Latin heart, beneath the arcades of the East.” There is today “a Portugal or Provence in the Carpathians.” And yet he recognizes the unique amalgam that Romania seemed to represent: “By its history faithful to Rome, by religion faithful to Byzantium, by its language tied to the West and by its customs to the East.”
The author’s reveries bring him back to the triumph of Latinity and the heroes of these civilizational enterprises: Scipio in Spain, Caesar in Gaul, Trajan in Dacia. But beyond all that is Spain, “the only province of the old empire that went farthest,” with Cortes, Pizarro, and Almagro, “the Trajans of the New World” having blazed a trail that would lead to a shared, related humanity from the shores of the Pacific to the Black Sea. It would be Spain under the Habsburgs that would in the early 16th century adopt the Burgundian motto of Emperor and King of Spain Charles V, “Plus ultra” (“Further beyond”).
Although the book is a Spaniard’s—and one particularly idiosyncratic Spaniard at that—view of Romania, the idea of a shared ‘latinidad’ would persist. In his journal as a young diplomat in Lisbon, famed Romanian anthropologist (also a man of the Right) Mircea Eliade describes a Romanian diplomatic delegation using the phrase with Portuguese President Carmona in 1941. The old Marshal would dutifully nod every time he heard the word. Eliade published an article in a Portuguese magazine entitled “The Latin Race is Queen” and worked on, but never published a book on “The Romanians, Latins of the East.”
By that time Ramon de Basterra would be long dead. Spanish scholar Mariano Martin Rodriguez describes La obra de Trajano as “one of the best books ever written by a foreigner on this great new Latin nation.” Basterra would have great success as a poet. He would be assigned to the Spanish Embassy in Caracas and there produce yet another great work of reportage and history, Los navíos de la Ilustración. Una empresa del siglo XVIII (“The Ships of the Enlightenment. An Enterprise of the 18th century”) about the work of the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas, a Spanish Basque commercial enterprise founded in 1728.
Basterra had a difficult upbringing and, regardless of his literary brilliance, he seemed to have had longstanding mental health issues. According to his diplomatic file, his mental health worsened during his time in Romania and he finally succumbed to severe mental illness. He died at the age of 40 from a heart attack while in a mental institution.
He has had an interesting afterlife. La obra de Trajano was reissued in 2013 (it has never been translated into English) and his Caracas book was republished several times. His poetry was printed in a collected edition in 2001 in two volumes. He has a monument in Bilbao. But according to the Basque historian Begoña Cava Mesa, Basterra was influenced in life by rightist thinkers such as Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès. As an exponent of Spain’s imperial greatness, he was later well regarded by the Franco regime and indeed had intellectual admirers, influences and friends who were either different types of rightists (Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, De Maeztu) or (like Gerardo Diego or the Catalan Eugenio D’Ors, who called Basterra “the best poet of his time”) enthusiastic members of the Franco regime. In recent years, there has been an effort by left-leaning scholars and intellectuals to minimize this aspect of his personal history.
Writer Jose Ramon Blanco, who wrote a 2012 book about Basterra’s “splendid madness,” in order to distance him from claims that he was too much of a right-winger, described him as “an elegant … monarchist but cosmopolitan writer who was also open-minded,” for example, about the Sephardic Jews of Romania. Of course, Blanco here forgets that among Spaniards who espoused filosefardi sentiments were Falangists Agustin de Foxa, Ernesto Gimenez Caballero, and even Francisco Franco himself, all of them Basterra’s near contemporaries. Others have called him a reactionary or even “a retrograde progressive.” We have no way of knowing what the complicated and contradictory Basterra’s future political views would have been, and it doesn’t even matter. Basterra was fortunate in dying young before he could definitively have been consigned to “the wrong camp” in Spain after 1936 and destined for post-Franco oblivion.
