Emilio García Gómez

Emilio García Gómez, 1st Count of Alixares (4 June 1905 – 31 May 1995) was a Spanish Arabist, literary historian and critic, whose talent as a poet enriched his many translations from Arabic.

Emilio García Gómez decided to pursue Arabic as a career after attending Arabic language classes taught by Prof. Miguel Asín Palacios at the Complutense University of Madrid. He had been a student of law. In his Arabic studies he was mentored by the professors Julián Ribera y Tarragó, and by Asín.

Recipient of a scholarship to Cairo he studied there under Prof. Ahmad Zaki Pasha and the Egyptian writer Taha Husayn. His doctoral thesis on the Alexander legend in the Maghrib won the Fastenrath Prize. In 1930 he became Professor of Arabic at the University of Granada, until he returned to Madrid in 1944.

While living in Granada he had become friends with Manuel de Falla the classical music composer and with Federico García Lorca the poet, both aficionados of Flamenco. Inspired by the translations of Gómez, García Lorca wrote his Diván de Tamarit. Here, the poet was not following in imitation of a traditional Arabic verse but rather paying it contemporary homage, García Gómez favorably observed.

He was again in Egypt during 1947. The following year García Gómez spent in Damascus, Syria, where he was appointed to the Arabic Academy [Al-Majma' Al-Ilmi Al-Arabi], a notable distinction for a westerner. He gave lectures at the University of Cairo in 1951 during celebrations on its silver jubilee.

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