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Lloyd A. Kasten (1905–1999)

IAN MACPHERSON

Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London

The figure of Lloyd Kasten—Lusitanist, lexicographer and Alphonsinescholar—and the institution of the University of Wisconsin at Madison areinextricably linked. In the 1930s Kasten completed his doctorate as aninstructor in the Spanish Department at Madison; the forties brought hispromotion first to an associate professorship (1942) and then to a fullprofessorship (1947); in 1968 he was appointed to the Antonio G. SolalindeDistinguished Professorship of Spanish and Portuguese. But none of theseevents could persuade him to be known to generations of undergraduatesand the sixty-six doctoral candidates whose successful theses he supervisedas other than plain Mr Kasten. In 1937, following the untimely death ofAntonio Solalinde, who had founded the Seminary of Medieval SpanishStudies at Madison, a youthful and relatively inexperienced Lloyd Kastenwas asked to take over its directorship. He fulfilled that post withdistinction and commitment until his retirement, determinedly retained hisoffice and his books in Van Hise thereafter, and continued to come in towork regularly until his ninety-fifth year. Full circle was appropriatelyachieved when Kasten’s first full-length piece of scholarship, the edition ofJuan Fernández de Heredia’s Aragonese version of the SecretumSecretorum which gained him his doctorate in Madison in 1931 under thedirection of Solalinde, was published as his last, in a reworked version, bythe Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies in Madison just three monthsbefore his death on 13 December 1999.

Kasten’s early background was not the most obvious for a futurehispanist. He was born in Watertown, Wisconsin, where he spoke Germanas his first language, spent his youth and received his early schooling; hegraduated with the degree of Bachelor of Arts from the University ofWisconsin in 1926, having majored in Economics, and a promising businesscareer seemed in store for him. Nevertheless, some undergraduateacquaintance with foreign languages, including Latin, French and Spanish(the last on the grounds that it might help him to get a job in business),prompted him to complete an MA in Spanish at Madison the followingyear. An instructorship at Florida (1927–28) gave him some teachingexperience, and his first trip to Spain in the summer of 1928 consolidated

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the change of direction. In 1929 he was appointed as a full-time instructorin Spanish at Madison. The beginnings of his interest in Portuguese, whichwas to exert a considerable influence in his later professional career, can bedated to 1932–33, spent researching in Spain and Portugal. Kasten’ssubsequent rise through the ranks at Madison allowed him both thefreedom and the facilities to indulge all of these early concerns, and todevelop new ones.

At the outbreak of the second World War, Kasten’s early initiatives inthe development of Portuguese courses at Madison were fully recognized bythe federal government: Wisconsin was selected to provide intensiveinstruction in the Portuguese language for American military personnel. Bythe late fifties, Kasten had established the first NDEA Luso-BrazilianCenter in Wisconsin, which became a major centre for the training ofdoctoral candidates in Portuguese and which he served twice as Director(1958–60 and 1964–66). In this period he oversaw the founding of theprestigious Luso-Brazilian Review, published by the University ofWisconsin Press.

It is, however, almost certainly for his work within the Seminary(reputed to be a mis-translation of seminario by its founder, and a name towhich subsequent directors have remained loyal), that Kasten will be bestremembered. Kasten inherited from Solalinde a fair proportion of the textof Alfonso el Sabio’s General Estoria, partly edited, along with somecommentary. The huge Segunda Parte was furthest advanced, and at presswhen civil war broke out in Spain in 1936. The edition was totallydestroyed. After further vicissitudes, Kasten eventually brought out, withthe collaboration of Victor Oelschläger, the two-volume edition of thesecond part (Madrid: CSIC, 1957–61). The remaining parts of the GeneralEstoria did not appear during Kasten’s lifetime, but 1957 did see thepublication in Madrid of Kasten’s edition of the Pseudo-Aristotle Poridat delas poridades, and four years later he completed, in collaboration withLawrence Kiddle, the edition of Alfonso’s Libro de las cruzes (Madrid:CSIC). His interest in Alfonso and in the Western texts of the Secretumsecretorum is further illustrated by journal articles published throughouthis career: few in number, but characterized by their precision, theirmeticulousness and their scholarly attention to detail. The WisconsinSeminary, in the years of his directorship, was also a centre forlexicographical research, its premises a focus and its publications an outletfor much graduate work in the United States. Along with HaywardKeniston, R. S. Boggs and H. B. Richardson, Kasten revived and expandedan earlier project to bring out, in 1946, a Tentative Dictionary of OldSpanish. A much-expanded second edition is promised for 2001. And workon the Wisconsin Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language continues, animmensely ambitious project for a citation dictionary of Old Spanish

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initiated eighty years ago by Solalinde, inherited by Kasten, and nowdirected by John Nitti. Bedevilled over the years by changes in personnel,editorial criteria, funding problems, and never-ending developments incomputer technology, the end of the first phase may now be in sight: athree-thousand-page volume defining some six million words of AlphonsineSpanish.

Honours accorded to Kasten over his long lifetime include aGuggenheim Fellowship, membership of the Hispanic Society of America,installation as an Académico de número of the Academia Norteamericanade la Lengua Española, and an homenaje—Studies in Honour of Lloyd AKasten—presented to him by friends and colleagues on the occasion of hisretirement in 1975. Kasten never married, and it is true that theWisconsin Seminary, over the years, provided the major focus and purposefor his energies. Those who met him only in an academic context, however,would have missed much of the whole man. He was comfortable on thefarm, and spectacularly well informed on the subject of pigs. Dogs andchildren were at home in his company. He took pride in his large garden,and for as long as he was physically able to do so nursed it lovingly throughthe hard Wisconsin winters. He played violin and piano, and dancedpolkas. Those fortunate enough to have spent Thanksgiving or Halloweenat home with him testify with enthusiasm to his sly sense of humour and tothe quality and abundance of his cooking. Generations of students,colleagues and friends, saddened by his death, will nevertheless derivepleasure from his multiple achievements over a long and rewarding life.Lloyd Kasten belonged to a generation which had no problems over thewisdom of sacrificing short-term glory for the long-term goal.