Francisco Ayala
Francisco Ayala García-Duarte (Granada, March 16, 1906-Madrid, November 3, 2009) was a Spanish writer. Among his works of invention, the novels Muertes de perro (1958) and The bottom of the glass (1962) and his collections of stories Los usurpadores stand out. (1949) and The Lamb's Head (1949). With legal training, he went into exile in 1939 and developed his professional career as a professor of Sociology in Argentina and Puerto Rico and, later, as a professor of Literature at various universities in the United States. He was also a columnist, translator and editor. After his return to Spain with democracy, Ayala was recognized, among others, with the Cervantes Award, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and the National Narrative Award. He occupied the Z chair of the Royal Spanish Academy.
Biography
Childhood and adolescence
Francisco Ayala was born in Granada on March 16, 1906. His father, Francisco Ayala Arroyo, a native of Campillos (Málaga), came from a wealthy family; his mother, the Granada-born painter Luz García-Duarte González, was the daughter of of the doctor Eduardo García Duarte, who became rector of the University of Granada. Baptized Francisco de Paula Eduardo Vicente Julián de la Santísima Trinidad, Ayala was the eldest son of an educated bourgeois family conditioned by economic ups and downs. After spending his early years in a rented apartment on San Agustín street, the family moved to the Granada neighborhood of Albaicín, to a house located in Carmen de la Cruz Blanca; This is where Ayala's first childhood memories are framed:
... it was a very spacious house, with marble columns in the bass and, on the upper floor, precisely in the chamber that my parents used as a bedroom, Arab craftsmen that from when the tourists, then not so numerous, English almost always, asked permission to admire. The carmen had a beautiful garden, extended to the walls of a convent that closed it to the bottom...
Subsequently, the family moved to a house located at number 18 of Calle San Miguel Baja. Francisco went with his little brother José Luis to the kindergarten of the Colegio de Niñas Nobles; Later he was a student at the Calderón School and the School of the Piarist Fathers. In 1918 he enrolled in the General and Technical Institute of Granada to attend the Baccalaureate.
Madrid years
Financial difficulties pushed Ayala's father to accept a position with a British shipping company based in Madrid. The entire family moved there: the parents, Francisco and his brothers José Luis, Eduardo, Vicente, Rafael and Enrique; They settled in a flat on Lope de Rueda street, where soon after their little sister, María de la Luz, was born. In 1923, Ayala finished high school and enrolled in the preparatory course for Law at the Central University. Soon the National Library became one of the favorite places of the young Ayala:
... in that reading room, I devoured – with pleasure, with enormous enthusiasm – all the works of Baroja, Azorín, Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, Pérez de Ayala, Gabriel Miró, and even some of the popular novelists of that time, such as those already appointed, or Zamacois, or Felipe Trigo.
Ayala came into contact with Madrid's literary circles, in which the avant-garde was beginning to make its way. On February 28, 1923, he published his first collaboration in the Madrid press, and shortly after his novels Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu (1925) and Historia de un amanecer saw the light of day. /i> (1926). In those years he frequented the gatherings of the Revista de Occidente and La Gaceta Literaria , publications in which his stories, articles and reviews will appear. In 1929 he obtained a scholarship from the Faculty of Law of the University of Madrid, of which he was already an assistant professor, to further his training in Berlin. There he met Etelvina Silva, a Chilean student with whom he married in 1931. Back in Madrid, after the proclamation of the Second Republic, he worked as an editor for the newspapers Crisol and Light . In 1932 he won the opposition to Court Lawyer and in 1935 he obtained a chair of Political Law. A few months earlier, on November 4, 1934, Nina Ayala Silva, his only daughter, had been born. In the spring of 1936 Ayala traveled to South America with his family to give a series of lectures. There he learned of the military uprising of July 18 and decided to return to Spain to rejoin his position as his official.
During the civil war, Ayala performed various tasks for the government of the Republic, first in Madrid and later in Valencia. In 1937 he was assigned to the legation in Prague as secretary of Luis Jiménez de Asúa. Upon his return, he continued working for the Republican government in Barcelona, until January 23, 1939, when he went into exile. The war had terrible consequences for Ayala's family, as he himself recounted in his memoirs:
... Taken to Burgos's presiding with two of his sons (my brothers José Luis, who, married already, lived with him, and Vincent, who was on his way to visit him), my father had touched him to enter a certain day in one of the daily prisoners and had been killed along with the other unhappy ones. My brother Rafael, recruited by the army at the age of seventeen, had been shot as a deserter.
Exile
Argentina
After a journey that took him through France, Cuba and Chile, Ayala settled with his family in Buenos Aires, and very soon began to publish articles in the newspaper La Nación. In 1940 he was hired by the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Santa Fe) to teach Sociology courses, but his main role during this period in Argentina was as an editor and translator. In this new life stage, Ayala resumed writing fiction: in 1939 he published in the magazine Sur «Dialogue of the Dead», which ten years later would form part of the volume Los usurpadores. In 1945 he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he spent the entire year teaching a Sociology course. There he related to writers and intellectuals such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira or the Chilean Gabriela Mistral, who served as her country's consul in Rio; and he wrote much of his Treatise on Sociology. On his return to Argentina, he launched a new project with Lorenzo Luzuriaga and Francisco Romero: the creation and edition of Reality (Revista de Ideas), which in its 18 issues (published between 1947 and 1949) He had collaborators such as Arnold J. Toynbee, Martin Heidegger, T. S. Eliot, Pedro Salinas, Juan Ramón Jiménez or Jean Paul Sartre. In 1949, the last year of Ayala's stay in Argentina, two of his main works appeared: Los usurpadores and La cabeza del cordero .
Puerto Rico
Francisco Ayala arrived in Puerto Rico in January 1950. The island was experiencing a crucial historical moment, immersed in the constituent process that would lead to its declaration as a Commonwealth. After teaching a semester course as a visiting professor, the rector of the University of Puerto Rico, Jaime Benítez, entrusted Ayala with the organization of social science studies, and entrusted him with the direction of the university publishing house. His most notable projects were the creation of the magazine La Torre and the launch of the Basic Culture Library collection. As in Argentina, the writer from Granada related to the Spanish exiles who had landed in Puerto Rico, such as José Medina Echavarría, Federico de Onís, Aurora de Albornoz, Ricardo Gullón or Juan Ramón Jiménez. This is how Ayala records the arrival on the island of the Nobel Prize winner in his memoirs:
Great expectation! After laborious negotiations and long delays, the arrival of Juan Ramón Jiménez in Puerto Rico was finally announced. The University had succeeded – precious prize! – that the great poet would accept his hospitality as a guest of honor. But alas, the great poet was sick, very sick. He arrived on a sea trip, and the island's most distinguished doctors had come to wait for him in the port.
In 1955, Ayala was invited by Vicente Llorens to teach for a semester at Princeton University, after which he returned to his post at the University of Puerto Rico. At the beginning of 1957, during a trip to the East, Ayala received a new proposal from Llorens to replace him during the fall semester of that year; It was during this second stay at Princeton that he finished writing Dog Deaths, his first novel in thirty years.
United States
From the fall of 1958, and until his retirement in 1976, Francisco Ayala was a professor of literature at various North American universities, always having New York City as his main residence. He taught at Rutgers University (1958-1966), Bryn Mawr College (1959-1964), New York University (1964-1966), University of Chicago (1966-1973), and the City University of New York (1973-1976). At this stage, Ayala enjoyed economic and job stability that allowed him to continue his literary career. In 1962 he published the novel The Bottom of the Glass while the English translation of Dog Deaths was being prepared.
In the summer of 1960, the author returned to Spain for the first time since the end of the civil war. His intention, as he confessed in a letter to Guillermo de Torre shortly before starting the trip, was «to have the “experience” of Spain after more than 20 years and a lifetime of absence, and that experience is what, primarily, I am going to searching". The trip also meant a return to his native Granada, to which he had not returned for almost forty years:
I came back, and everything remained the same; everything answered and adjusted immediately to the image of my memory. It was not so much that I recognized what I found; it was that I sought what I wanted to find, recognize. [...] Granada had hardly changed during that half century of my absence; it was still, still, the Granada of my childhood.
Since then, summer trips to Spain were common, until, after his retirement, and the dictator having died and the process of transition to democracy begun, Ayala returned to his country of origin definitively.
Back home
Installed in Madrid, Ayala easily reintegrated into Spanish civic and cultural life. From the platform offered by newspapers such as Informaciones or El País, he contributed his vision of an intellectual committed to the most relevant aspects of politics and society at the time. In this At that time, their participation in cultural forums and university courses was common. During the eighties he published the three volumes that make up his main memorial work: Recuerdos y olvidos , whose definitive edition would appear in 2006.
In 1983 he was awarded the National Narrative Award for the second volume of the aforementioned memoirs. A year later, he entered the Royal Spanish Academy, where he held the capital Z chair until his death. In 1988 he was awarded the National Prize for Spanish Letters, in 1991 he received the Cervantes Prize and in 1998 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias de las Letras. These recognitions were added to the doctorates honoris causa from the Complutense universities of Madrid, Seville, Granada, Toulouse-Le Mirail, UNED and Carlos III, and other distinctions such as the Medal of Gold from the City of Granada, the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 1997 or the Medal of Merit for Work in 2004.
In 2006, Ayala attended the events and tributes that were held on the occasion of his centenary. In his later years, he continued to receive samples of the world of culture's admiration for his figure. On February 15, 2007, he became the first depositary of the Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute and on March 19 of the same year he participated in the inauguration of the headquarters of the Foundation that bears his name in Granada. Francisco Ayala He died on November 3, 2009 at his home in Madrid as a result of generalized physical weakness. On December 1 his widow, Carolyn Richmond, deposited his ashes under a lemon tree transplanted that same day in the orange tree patio of the Francisco Foundation Ayala.
Work
Narrative
Before he turned twenty, Ayala had already published two realistic novels: Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu (1925) and Historia de un amanecer (1926). Both works clearly show his deep knowledge of the Spanish literary tradition, from Cervantes and the picaresque to Galdosian realism. While Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu tells the story of a man –Miguel Durán – victim of the wickedness of his peers, Historia de un amanecer narrates the fight of some revolutionaries against an oppressive regime. In these novels the author deploys the narrative techniques inherited from the traditional Spanish novel. Although they suffer from the typical errors of a budding writer, both works offer indications of the paths that the Ayalian narrative of the future will follow.
After writing these novels, Ayala was looking for new expressive paths and came into contact with avant-garde movements, which would give rise to a series of stories that he would compile in his two avant-garde books: The boxer and an angel (1929) and Cazador en el alba (1930), which, in the opinion of critic Juan Manuel Bonet, form "one of the most coherent sets of texts in Spanish avant-garde prose". The boxer and an angel is made up of five fictions in which anecdotal issues related to cinema (“Polar, star”) and boxing (“The boxer and an angel”) coexist with pieces of inspiration mythological (“Susana leaving the bathroom”) or biblical (“The Passion Rooster”). In line with the dehumanized literature defended by Ortega, the plot is the least of these stories, in which the important thing is style and originality. This playful attitude lives on in the two texts that make up Hunter at Dawn, previously published in Revista de Occidente (“Hunter at Dawn” and “Erika in the Winter”), although in these there is a conscious attempt to achieve greater internal coherence beyond simple avant-garde experimentation.
Overall, Ayala's avant-garde prose stands out for its careful style dotted with metaphors, images, and comparisons. The influence of cinema is also important, both in the themes and in the author's interest in transferring cinematographic technique to literature. The city is the great protagonist of these narratives, a setting that reflects the advances of contemporary society.
The same year he arrived in Buenos Aires, Francisco Ayala wrote his first fictional text after a decade of narrative silence: it is “Dialogue of the Dead”, published in the magazine Sur. However, we had to wait until 1949 for the appearance of Los usurpadores, a book of short stories with which the mature phase of Ayaliana's literary production began. These narratives, set in events in the history of Spain, have as their central theme the idea that all power exercised by human beings over their fellow men is always a usurpation. The book, which has such memorable texts as "San Juan de God" or "The Bewitched", closes precisely with the aforementioned "Dialogue of the dead".
Also in 1949 he gave The Lamb's Head to the printer, a set of narratives that focus on the civil war. To face such a recent and traumatic matter, the writer adopts a moral point of view to approach the conflict and its effects. Beyond the anecdotal, stories such as "El Tajo" or "El regreso" investigate the human behavior of the characters and the ethical aspect of the situations reported.
The following collection of stories is Historia de macacos (1955), Ayala's first book published in Spain since he went into exile. The narratives in this volume represent an ironic inflection in his production; this change in tone is also seen in the use of tragicomic humor.
Coinciding with his first years as a teacher in the United States, Ayala returned to the novel with Muertes de perro (1958). Set in an imaginary country in the American tropics, the work recreates the climate of political and moral oppression of a dictatorship whose epicenter – General Antón Bocanegra – barely appears in the plot. The leading role falls on the witness narrator, Luis Pinedo, a subject who has decided to write the chronicle of the turbulent times in which he has had to live, for which he compiles different testimonies, written and oral, among which the memories of another of the protagonists, Tadeo Requena, personal secretary of the dictator. Other important characters in the plot are Mrs. Concha (Bocanegra's wife), the minister Luis Rosales and Dr. Olóriz. Technically Muertes de perro stands out for the plurality of points of view and narrative discourses on which the plot unfolds, as well as for the richness of the different linguistic registers. In the words of José María Merino, beyond being a novel about a dictator, Muertes de perro "offers a far from complacent parable about certain aspects of the social experience of human beings." Francisco himself Ayala pointed in that direction when he indicated in his essay "The sociological background in my novels" (1968):
... the political element in Dog deaths It constitutes only the framework – one of the possible frames – within which the main object of the novel is framed: presentation of human life from certain angles in search of its ultimate meaning. Calling her "political novel" is to err her goal.
The moral approach and the disenchanted vision of the human condition will continue to be present in The Bottom of the Glass (1962), a novel considered to some extent a continuation of Muertes de perro. Although it is true that it takes place in the same country once democracy was restored, and that its protagonist already appeared, albeit anecdotally, in the same country, in The Bottom of the Glass the political situation changes and the tone also changes, closer to humorous satire than to social denunciation. José Lino Ruiz, the protagonist, is a narrator very much liked by Ayaliano, "a poor man whose vileness we will discover throughout his own story."
After publishing a new fiction book in the Argentine publishing house Sur –El as de Bastos (1963)– Ayala began to compose what, in the opinion of many critics, is his most personal work: The Garden of Earthly Delights, whose first edition saw the light of day in the Barcelona publishing house Seix Barral in 1971. We are facing a work that would undergo additions and modifications until its final edition in 2006. Articulated around two sections –“Diablo mundo” and “Días feliz”– this polyhedral book has as its main themes, according to the Hispanist Carolyn Richmond, time and the self of the creator Ayala. Emilio Orozco, the first critic who dedicated a study to this work, warned that in the process of creating El jardín lies Ayala's concern for the narrative structure and for the unitary sense that he wants to give the whole: “It doesn't matter that each one corresponds to a different date, if responds to a similar vein and tone. He is interested in seeing the essentials of the human condition, surprised from different perspectives and circumstances. That is why he is interested in the isolated vision and the fragmentary”.
Although of a memorialistic nature, Recuerdos y olvidos can be considered another literary work by Ayala, since as the author himself recognized regarding the publication of the first volume of his memoirs in 1982, “ in them I collect real events, of course, but transformed literary. It is a fictional book whose material is real experience, without any transformation in terms of facts, but elaborated in terms of form." The second volume, "El exilio", appeared in 1983 (National Literature Award in of narrative) and the third, “Retornos”, in 1988. Coinciding with his centenary, Ayala published in 2006 a fourth volume, of a compilation nature, entitled “De vuelta en casa”.
Sociological Writings
In Ayala's sociological training, the teaching of Political Law Professor Adolfo G. Posada was decisive; The thought of Ortega y Gasset, whom Ayala had frequented in the gathering of the Revista de Occidente since the mid-1920s, also had an influence. Before his trip to Germany in 1929 to continue complementing his studies on the subject, the writer had printed Indagación del cinema, the first book published in Spain on cinema. Influenced by the avant-garde currents of the At that time, the volume compiled his criticisms and reflections on the new art, presenting itself as a first attempt to sociologically analyze the relationships between cinema and modern society. Back in Berlin, Ayala came into contact with Hermann Heller and the main representatives of German historicist sociology: Freyer, Mannheim, Alfred and Max Weber, Oppenheimer... Back in Spain he began preparing his doctoral thesis, directed by Posada and defended in 1931: Political Parties as Government Organs in the Modern State (in press), clearly influenced by Heller's work. In the texts and newspaper articles of this period, what the researcher Alberto J. Ribes has called the Ayalian “sociological approach” can be seen, a first stage in which the young Ayala understood sociology as an instrument to understand society and overcome the crisis of modernity.
The second stage of the sociologist Ayala goes from 1939 to 1952. During this period, known as that of “systematic sociology” (Ribes, 123 ff.), he published his most important sociological works. According to Salvador Giner, the texts from these years represent a sociological inquiry into human freedom from the positions of the historicist school. freedom (1943), Reason for the World (1944), Politicians (1944) and his two great sociological monographs, the Treatise on Sociology (1947) and the Introduction to the Social Sciences (1952). The Treatise, originally published in three volumes by the Losada publishing house, quickly became a reference manual in the Hispanic world, as it was the first systematic exposition of the sociological discipline in our language. For its part, Introduction to the social sciences is an informative work, without losing its academic character, in which the author advocates the need to achieve knowledge of the world in which we live through discussion of their problems.
In 1957, Ayala changed his country –from Puerto Rico to the United States– and his academic discipline –from teaching Sociology to teaching Literature–. After the publication of the Introduction , his sociology became more diffuse, less systematic (Ribes, 227). Ayala did not return to write academic sociological works; now in his intellectual production he tends more and more to the forms of the essay and the article, as shown by books such as Tecnología y libertad (1959), Razón del mundo: La preocupación de España (1962) or Spain, to date (1965). The question of Spain and its problems had already been dealt with by the author in the 40s (Razón del mundo: An examination of intellectual conscience, 1944). Ayala had never set aside the Spanish reality; Since his first visit in 1960, he tried to take the pulse of Spanish society in the first person, parallel to his reflections on the most recent history of the country. As early as 1965, a work such as España, a la fecha ventures to presage the possible paths that the country will have to take to leave Franco's dictatorship behind and join the train of western democracies.
Since the 1970s, Ayala's intellectual production tended towards a fusion of genres –'dedifferentiation' in the words of Ribes– and to fragmentation:
The genres are over, the distinction between fiction and reality is over (the game between reality and fiction is accentuated), the rigid separation between sociology (either diffuse) and literature (also more than difuminated). [...] the option adopted by Ayala is to delve into the fragmentation [...], and its way of doing so is through the production of texts. Texts that are at the same time of several genres and that do not belong orthodox to any, but in which the “ sociological approach” and many of the fundamental ideas that Ayala had exhibited from other forms throughout her many and varied works.
These texts will occasionally appear in the press and will form part of compilations such as The image of Spain (1986), The writer in his century (1990) or Against power and other essays (1992).
Literary Studies
In the same way that the Ayala narrator is inseparable from the Ayala sociologist, the Ayala theoretician and literary critic would not be understood without his sociological approach or his literary production. The author himself explained this natural tendency as follows:
The cultivation of imaginary stories has sought me the greatest satisfaction, and in this genre I think I have produced works with some perennity. No one may miss, however, that, apart from the creation of such fictions, I have also been concerned about the problems that such creation arouses, and that, supported by my own experience, I have tried to investigate and draw up on the peculiarities, resources, difficulties and happiness of the novelist exercise; said in other words, that I have also applied, even marginally, to the study of literary theory and the practice of critical analysis.
Reflection on his own literary creation and that of others is a constant in the intellectual production of Francisco Ayala since his first writings. In his early 20s, he published his first critical contributions in Revista de Occidente and La Gaceta Literaria . In these magazines, he reviewed novels by foreign authors such as André Gide, John Dos Passos and Alfred Döblin, and some of the main works of avant-garde Spanish fiction such as The Useless Professor by Benjamín Jarnés or Pájaro Pinto by Antonio Espina.
Starting in the 1940s, literary reviews gave way to longer texts of various types (prologues, magazine articles, essays...) on aspects of literary theory. These new investigations include reflections on the work of fiction itself, as occurs in the “Proem” to La cabeza del cordero (1949) or in the essay “The sociological background in my novels” (1968), texts in which the author speculates on his own process of literary creation. As Professor Estelle Irizarry indicates, in his literary studies Ayala shows a constant interest in questions of style, technique and form, and although he does not disdain genres such as theater or poetry in his theoretical production, his main area of work will be the novel. Most of these studies on literary theory were compiled in the volume The writer in his century. Ayala dedicated his critical essays to Cervantes, El Lazarillo, Quevedo, Unamuno, Galdos and Machado. There is no doubt that Don Quixote was his most studied work, and that Cervantes was his favorite author and to which he dedicated the most pages.
Collaborations in the press
Since his first writing in the press appeared when the author was 16 years old –an article on the painting of Julio Romero de Torres published in the weekly Vida aristocrática–, Ayala has not stopped collaborating in newspapers and magazines throughout his life. During the second half of the twenties his texts were published in publications such as La Época , El Globo , Revista de Occidente or La Gaceta Literaria dealt mainly with cultural issues; Thus, literary reviews or the occasional theater and film criticism signed by Ayala were common. With the proclamation of the Second Republic and his career in public affairs, his texts will focus on social and political issues, as shown by his writings that appeared in Crisol, Luz and The Sun. After the gap of the civil war, collaborations in the press will be one of the occupations with which the exiled Ayala earns a living in Buenos Aires, mainly reviews of literary works and essays in the newspapers La Nación and South. Other periodicals would include the sociological texts of the author, such as the magazines La Ley, Argentina Libre, Pensamiento español or Cuadernos Americanos. Although he never stopped collaborating with the press, Ayala's intellectual production during his years in Puerto Rico and the United States focused on his academic work, preferably on literary studies.
Returned from exile at the age of seventy, Francisco Ayala began his collaborations in newspapers and magazines in the Spanish capital. His signature will be frequent on the pages of the newspapers Informaciones , El País and ABC , or in magazines such as Saber leer . Most of these writings were published in compilations in the following books:
- Words and letters (1983).
- The rhetoric of journalism and other rhetoric (1985).
- My room with swords (1988).
- Against power (1992).
- In which world we live (1996).
In the words of Santos Juliá, with his collaborations in the press, Ayala assumes the task of the intellectual, of the public writer.
With realism and without nostalgia, evoking the moments of his life without ever feeling crushed by the weight of the past; always attentive to the social changes and the new literary currents; realizing again the events that now, definitively installed in Madrid, it was his turn to live, of the new ways that opened up to Spanish society from the process of transition of the dictatorship the democracy; participating in the debates that were openly appealed by the different avatar
Translations
A little-known facet of Francisco Ayala is his work as a translator. At the time of his stay in Berlin, in 1929, Ayala made the first translation of it, in collaboration with Beate Hermann: a German story that would end up being published in the Argentine magazine Síntesis . The first book he translated was a novel, Lorenzo y Ana , by Arnold Zweig, which would appear published in 1930 in Ediciones Hoy, in Madrid. Ayala did not stop translating until the start of the war in 1936, mainly German books on legal subjects.
Shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires, after the war, he worked as a translator for the Losada publishing house. His first commission was to produce a Spanish version of The notes of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke, which appeared in 1941. In the following years, Ayala would carry out numerous translations for Losada and also for other Argentine publishers, such as Sudamericana, Argos or Schapire. He devoted himself above all to literary texts, mainly from German, such as Thomas Mann's Charlotte in Weimar, or Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, but he also translated from Portuguese the Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant by Almeida, from the French Selected Pages by Léon Bloy, and from the Italian La Romana by Alberto Moravia.
This professional performance, moreover, had its theoretical reflection in a series of texts that were published in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación between December 1946 and February 1947, and that make up the essay “Brief theory of translation", collected by Ayala in several of his books dedicated to literary studies.
List of published books
Narrative and autobiographical work
- Tragic means of a spiritless man (1925).
- History of a dawn (1926).
- The boxer and an angel (1929).
- Hunter at dawn (1930).
- The usurpers (1949).
- The head of the lamb (1949).
- History of macacos (1955).
- Dog deaths (1958).
- The bottom of the glass (1962).
- The ace of Bastos (1963).
- The garden of delights (1971).
- Memories and forgetfulness. 1. From paradise to banishment (1982).
- Memories and oblivion. 2. Exile (1983).
- Memories and oblivion. 3. Returns (1988).
- Time and me, or the world behind (1992).
- From my steps on earth (1998).
- «The Girl of Gold» and other stories (2001).
- The garden of delights [definite edition] (2006).
- Memories and oblivion (1906–2006) [definite edition] (2006).
Essay and articles
- Inquire of the cinema (1929).
- The problem of liberalism (1941).
- Oppenheimer (1942).
- History of freedom (1943).
- Politics (1944).
- The reason for the world. An intellectual awareness examination (1944).
- Histrionism and representation (1944).
- Trial on freedom (1944).
- Sociology Treaty (1947).
- Political Sociology Tests (1952).
- Introduction to Social Sciences (1952).
- Individual rights for a mass society (1957).
- The writer in mass society (1958).
- The current crisis of education (1958).
- Social integration in the Americas (1958).
- Technology and freedom (1959).
- Experience and invention (1960).
- The reason for the world. The concern of Spain (1962).
- From this world and the other (1963).
- Reality and dream (1963).
- Spain to date (1965).
- Translation problems (1965).
- The Lazarillo: re-examined. Further review of some aspects (1971).
- Confrontations (1972).
- It's yesterday. (1972).
- Cervantes and Quevedo (1974).
- The novel: Galdós and Unamuno (1974).
- The writer and his image (1975).
- Words and letters (1983).
- The narrative structure and other literary experiences (1984).
- The rhetoric of journalism and other rhetoric (1985).
- The image of Spain (1986).
- My room with swords (1988).
- The Pens of the Phoenix (1989).
- The writer in his century (1990).
- In which world we live (1996).
- The writer and the cinema (1996).
- The invention of Quixote (2005).
Works translated by Francisco Ayala
From German
- Arnold Zweig, Lorenzo and Ana (1930).
- Godehard J. Ebers, Church law of the State (1931).
- Karl Kautsky, The Erfurt program (1933).
- Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Constitution (1934).
- Ernst Manheim, Public opinion (1936).
- Karl Mannheim, Man and society at the time of crisis (1936).
- Emil Ludwig, Three dictators... and one fourth. (1939).
- Arnold Zweig, The Living Thought of Spinoza (1939)
- Hermann Rauschning, The revolution of nihilism (1940).
- Thomas Mann, Carlota in Weimar (1941).
- Thomas Mann, Trocada heads (1941).
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1941).
- Hans Freyer, Sociology, science of reality (1944).
- Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1944).
- Emil Ludwig, Beethoven (1944).
- Hans Kelsen, The idea of Natural Law and other essays (1946).
- Maximilian Beck, Psychology: Essence and Reality of the Soul (1947).
- Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe (1956).
From English
- Jeremy Bentham, Political Sophism Treaty (1944).
- Alex Comfort, The novel and our time (1949).
From French
- Juana Duprat, The social functions of the State according to Mr. Posada (1931).
- François Mauriac, The Living Thought of Pascal (1941).
- Georges Gurvitch, The forms of sociability (1941).
- Léon Bloy, Selected pages (1884-1905) (1946).
- Leonardo da Vinci, Breviaries (1952).
From Italian
- Alberto Moravia, The Roman (1950).
From Portuguese
- Manuel Antônio de Almeida, Reports of a militia sergeant (1947).