Around the World in 32 Countries: Spain

It has been surprisingly difficult to gather a list of Spanish books that I would like to read that feel representative of the country and its history.

Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes requires no further introduction. This tale of adventure and knighthood is not nearly as tough to read for an Anglo-German speaker like me as, for example, some 19th century Spanish-language literature. It is also reassuring to have a massive yellow-covered Langenscheidt dictionary at hand. That said, I am still reading all of the prologues and state censors' notes and dedications, so I haven't yet reached even the opening phrase:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda.

[Loosely translated: In a village in the Mancha, whose name I cannot be bothered to remember, not so long ago there lived a knight of somewhere, who had a lance put away, an old shield, a thin workhorse and a coursing greyhound. A pan of something more inexpensive beef than mutton, cold cuts most nights, eggs with bacon or sausage on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, scrapings in addition on Sundays, consumed three-fourths of his pension.]

15 pages down, perhaps 1300 to go.

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Reading a sound biography of Federico García Lorca — a German one, by Karen Genschow — and a translation of The House of Bernarda Alba has also been good as an 'encapsulation' of Spain. I did this a few years ago, however.

García Lorca's life ended prematurely in the 1930s, the era of Spain's Civil War. Leftist intellectuals and workers fought General Franco and the Church; Pablo Picasso was inspired to paint the gruesome violence of a Guernica that had been wasted by the aerial bombing of his countrymen; and the fascist brutality of World War II was foreshadowed. But his biography also spans a traditional upbringing in the late 19th century, the leftist stirrings of the early 1900s, as well as his generation's endeavours to explore and uphold Spanish regions' cultural identities. (Much like the Andalusian, Sevillan, etc. dances that Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados were composing during García Lorca's lifetime, to speak of music instead of literature.)

In terms of media, García Lorca delved not just into traditional/modern poetry, theatre, etc. but also into the fledgling art of film.

Mujer 1: Los pobres sienten también sus penas.
Bernarda: Pero las olvidan delante de un plato de garbanzos.
Muchacha 1: (Con timidez) Comer es necesario para vivir.
Bernarda: A tu edad no se habla delante de las personas mayores.

(First woman: The poor also have their sufferings.
Bernarda: But they forget them as soon as they see a plate of chickpeas.
First girl: (timidly) Eating is necessary to live.
Bernarda. At your age one does not speak in front of older persons.)

"Parroquia Nª Sª de la Granada, Moguer. (Huelva, España)."
Church in the village of Moguer, where Juan Ramón Jiménez was born.
© Miguel Angel, via Wikimedia Commons

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At the recommendation of a colleague from Spain, I have also read but not yet finished two 19th-century literary classics. The first is Fortunata y Jacinta, by Benito Pérez Galdós. In the beginning it describes the milieu of wealthy cloth merchants in upper-middle-class, educated urban Spain during the turbulent 1860s, when Queen Isabella II's reign was wobbling but religion was strong.

The set of characters at the beginning seems to focus on two children, a boy and a girl, who are both being educated thanks to the wealth of their merchant parents, and are both the targets of marital plans by said parents.

I think the book's problem is, although this is based only on reading the first chapters, that it leaves out a great quantity of detail about human psychology and society outside of the immediate families who are portrayed. It's more in the wit and sarcasm, not the depth of the characterization or social analysis, I think, where its attraction lies.

Image: 'Fragment of a silk cloth from China: the outer border with flowers, vines and ribbons.' Silk. In the Cooper Hewitt collection of the Smithsonian Design Museum. via Wikimedia Commons.

In Fortunata y Jacinta, the cloths that the merchants sell are often inspired by Chinese art and design.

The author's contemporaries would have liked the sketches of the uncertain times — these are portrayed with nostalgia, as the book was written after the 1860s — and likely the none-too-adulatory depiction of the bourgeoisie.

To exemplify Galdós's wit, although I probably haven't taken the best example:

He describes a low-rent apartment in the city: "las habitaciones parecían destinadas a la premeditación de algún crimen." (To translate roughly: The rooms seemed destined for the premeditation of some sort of crime.)

That said, I am wading through the Spanish text. So the reading experience will be different than if I were reading it in a more familiar language. Also, my finding the book none too deep and not more impressive than other novels clashes with the characterizations in Benito Pérez Galdós's biographical article in Wikipedia, written by people who would know better — so it might be best to take my words skeptically.

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I think that the better book is Reeds and Mud, or Cañas y Barro, by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. It is a beautifully written, less abstract (perhaps) 'landscape painting' of a real lake bordered by swamps, near Valencia. Still set in royal Spain, of the late 19th century, the settlers are fishermen who catch eels amongst the wilds of palmetto, sedge, and murky water, but also a growing contingent of rice farmers who are changing the landscape by making it arable. Beset by guards whenever they attempt to eke out a more nourishing addition to their poor subsistence by shooting birds or rabbits, there are also minor resentments between the groups. Ibañez sketches the scene so well that when I looked it up in Wikipedia, the photographs of the marshes were barely necessary.

At the heart of the book are Tío Paloma, the fisherman and huntsman; his son Tío Tòni, who enrages his father by preferring agriculture; and the grandson Tonet, whose ambitions are greater but whose inclination to physical labour is lesser. But these figures are also set in a broader character cast of other labourers and townsmen: the vicar, 'town drunk,' inn-keeper, etc. From a feminist perspective I've cringed a few times at the way women are presented. But I couldn't quarrel with portraits of a reality where women were married when people felt like having offspring or conversation/cooking at home, and then 'kept in their place'; to recognize a reality is not to endorse it.— I just disliked the theorization about 'feminine wiles' in connection with Neleta, the childhood love of Tonet.

"Regata de vela latina en la Albufera de Valencia"
Attributed to Dorieo, Wikimedia Commons (License CC-BY-SA 4.0), c. 2018

In its water-side location, the inter-generational plot, the relationship of men with the environment, the absorbing experience of reading the book, and the sense that the author is keeping himself out of the narrative (although not to the extent that impressed me so much when I read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart), I was reminded of Gabriel García Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude. 

But I think Blasco Ibáñez, a palpably 19th-century author in many respects, has a different, 'less is more' approach at times, too. It's more fin-de-siècle than Galdos's mindset. (His adherence to monarchical Spain also seems faint at best, although not antagonistic; this is another sign of modern influence.) For example, in one paragraph he does what a whole war novel might do when he describes Spanish men returning from fighting Americans in Cuba and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere:

They were famished specters, feverish phantoms, as yellow as candles seen in funeral ceremonies, their will-to-live sparkling in their eyes, which were as deep as a star at the bottom of a well. They all marched off to their homes, incapable of ever working again, and destined to die off within a year, in the bosom of their families, who had given a man and received in return a shadow.

Isaac Goldberg translated the work from Spanish into English, in the edition that I am reading online. I appreciate that he drops in the original Spanish terms whenever there is special vocabulary related to local Valencian tradition or language, without ruining the flow of the work pedantically or speckling the book with footnotes. I hesitate to state unequivocally that he does a fine job merely because I haven't compared the Spanish original to catch divergences in nuances, but from an English literary perspective I like his style. It also captures the directness, the absence of distracting frills or muddy syntax, that I feel often characterizes Spanish literary styles.

Here Goldberg is, translating one of many vignettes of the circum-Valencian scenery:

The bushes, under the caress of a sun that was as warm as in summer, were full of flowers, and above them insects shone bright as gold, flitting about with a subdued buzzing. The twisted, ageless pines stirred with a stately murmur, and under the vaults formed by their wide tops a soft shade prevailed, like the shadows in the naves of an immense cathedral. From time to time a sunbeam fell between two tree-trunks, as if coming in through a window.

And since his translation was published in the 1920s, I wonder what weird resonance Goldberg would have felt with the paragraph about the soldiers. It was written before World War I, first printed 1902, and yet would have been a poignant insight into the world the translator inhabited.

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Don Quijote de la Mancha
Miguel de Cervantes
Edición, notas y anexos de Francisco Rico
punto de lectura, 2013
(quotation from p. 27)
[Also available at Wikisource here]

Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
Translated by John Ormsby
Wikisource, originally 1885: here

Federico García Lorca
Karen Genschow
Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011

La casa de Bernarda Alba
Federico García Lorca
(Wikisource: quotation from Act One, here)

Fortunata y Jacinta

Benito Pérez Galdós

[Excerpts of the book can be found at Google Books here]

Reeds and Mud (Cañas y Barro)

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, transl. Isaac Goldberg

E.P. Dutton, 1928

[Available at Archive.org here]

The House of Bernarda Alba [Wikipedia]
Federico García Lorca [Wikipedia]

Benito Pérez Galdós [Wikipedia]

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez [Wikipedia]