Jacobé & Fineta – Joaquim Ruyra (tr. Alan Yates)

Nature is complaining as it goes into decline.

“AUTUMN”, the opening word of Joaquim Ruyra’s short story ‘Jacobé’, a period of shedding, dying back before hibernation and then (later) rejuvenation. Immediately you are transported to the season where the natural world is shedding its vibrancy.

…it is something death-like which moves through the land in accordance with an annual rhythm.

As the author biography tells us:

Joaquim Ruyra was a short story writer, poet and translator, considered a key figure in modern Catalan literature and one of the great narrators of the 20^th century. He was in the vanguard of the Catalan Modernist generation as they constructed a new literary model after 1860, when the Catalan language became the vehicle of cultural nationalism. Although he did not produce a large body of work, his short stories set a stylistic benchmark for Catalan literature, including the shaping of a ‘landscape canon’.

‘Jacobé’ is deeply set in the natural world, yes it opens with “autumn”, however it is littered with natural images of rejuvenation, springtime, beauty. Here are a few examples:

Broom flowers…I can see her now through the blue aloe flowers…everything about her was like a delicate winter flower…skin the warm colour of a peach tree…that attractive young lily who graced the seafront, the very image of wholesomeness, is now like a delicate plant that has been trampled on the roadside.

However, this isn’t a short story about the natural world, it is a mediative piece about a man, Minguet, who returns to the seaside village of his youth and crosses paths with Jacobé, a girl from the village who looked after Minguet when he was a youngster. She has now contracted an inherited illness, most likely from her father and grandfather who were both alcoholics, and she is now in decay.

Jacobé’s decline is couched in natural terms,

Thins purple veins show on her eyelids like the slenderest reddish lines which adorn a mallow flower.

…she’s withering away like a dead vine shoot…

Even Minguet’s memories of her are related in natural terms:

Everything here still reminds me of her, especially that group of scattered rocks standing out just offshore in the cover, adorned with clusters of plants that shine like antique gold. The rocks themselves look to me now like a pedestal without its statue: the right setting for the figure of that long-legged girl with her angular features, her clothing and hair flapping in the wind.

This is a tragic short story, capturing Jacobé’s mental and physical decline, as the story moves to its conclusion the plants become harsher:

…sitting on a rock by a large cactus.

A strong gust of wind carries away her headscarf, which ends up snagged on some brambles close to where I stand.

The scrub around us is being flattened like ripe corn under a great downpour. Clumps of broom are forced against rocks, their sharp twigs waving tremulously.

I never worried at the time about where I grasped with my hands for security, whether on a thorn bush or on a spiky aloe branch.

[SPOILER ALERT]

And as the story draws to its tragic conclusion:

She crashes though some pine saplings, which quickly wave goodbye to her with their pliant thin branches, and she plunges through emptiness, down and down. Like a flower in the wind… He skirt and petticoat spread and spin in a large whorl, against whose colours the faint pinkness of her thin legs, like lily stamens, is displayed.

A beautifully engaging and vivid short story, light and heartbreaking, one that is a wonderful example from a “landscape canon”.

The second short story in this collection, ‘Fineta’, uses similar imagery, however this time it is the sea:

The sea is calm. The waves are rolling in gently and, on the sloping beach, they stretch themselves languidly upon the sand, leaving behind as they recede a surface as smooth as burnished copper. Some dark pebble banks basking here and there in the cover are briefly covered and then revealed again by the lapping movement of the shallow water, with drips running from every strand of the green moss that clothes them and smooths their shapes. It is just as though they are indulging in some gentle bathing. The cove is empty, concealed between lofty cliffs where patches of bright sunlight and purplish shadows form patterns.

Although a very slight book (a mere 53 pages including an introduction by Julià Guillamon) it is a beautifully presented book, slight and charming, the innocence of nature sitting uncomfortably alongside dark tales of suffering. Well worth seeking out.

My copy was provided as part of my Fum d’estampa subscription.

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‘The Silent Letter’ – Jaume Subirana (tr. Christopher Whyte)

In my last post about Antonio Gamoneda’s ‘Book of the Cold’ (tr. Katherine M. Hedden & Victor Rodríguez Núñez) I quoted one of the translators, who wrote: “Spanish American poets who refuse to follow the conventions of how U.S Americans want them to write as a way to disrupt the neocolonialist unidirectional circulation of ideas”, let’s extend that idea to Catalan poets.

Fum d’Etampa Press, a recent arrival on the independent publishing scene, specialises in Catalonian literature. In the introduction to the novel ‘Wild Horses’ by Jordi Cussà (tr. Tiago Miller) there is a short explanation of the history of Catalan writing in the last century:

When Franco and his fellow rebels won the Civil War, they did everything they could to outlaw the Catalan language, which was made illegal in books, schools, the cinema, the theatre, as well as on transport tickets, remembrance cards, advertisements, road signs, tombstones and so forth. These strict prohibitions were partially lifted in the 1960’s and a new generation of writers began to emerge, although one of them (Joan Sales) wrote to another (Mercè Rodoreda), the fact that not a single news item or review could be published about any Catalan language book meant that there were all, so to speak, sent to Coventry, unable to re-enter the mainstream they had been happily swimming in before Franco’s victory.

Although poet Jaume Subirana was born in 1963 (in Barcelona) the impact of the language restrictions bleeds through into his collection of poems ‘The Silent Letter (tr. Christopher Whyte). As the “Acknowledgements” section advises these poems were written in places far from Catalonia such as Connecticut, Venice, and Wales. This feeling of being in “exile” from Barcelona was something I noted very early on in my reading of this collection. An exile from a culture that’s been restricted.

This book is presented in both Catalan and English and is made up of forty-two short poems, only one (‘Jonah by the Garonne’) is longer than one page.

FONDAMENTA

Escaping from the island
trains whistle through the night:
carrying to the mainland
tiny lights, on the causeway
their voices alternating
at regular intervals
with the water taxis.
At night I think of trains
full up at the platform
waiting to depart
until I fall asleep,
dreamladen fondamenta,
little lights of meaning.
When they return they’re empty,
a long rope in the darkness
clattering in the silence,
clattering towards me.

As journalist Jordi Galves points out in a short essay at the end of the collection, titled “Viva Nova”;

I don’t think I’m wrong when I say that Subirana’s poetry dares to search out common sense and meaning in the midst of the experience, in the intimate biography steadily shedding itself of all unnecessary things until blossoming into an unexpected collection of visual, revolutionary Joan Brossa-esque poems. Visual because they cry out to be interpreted beyond the immediate obvious. A poetry as experimental as any other, as doubting as any other, but that sketches out a specific drawing, a slice of meaning, provisional comprehension, a harvest from within the fog.

As the above poem shows, there’s an “immediate obvious”, a recollection of packed trains, departing lights and them returning empty, however there’s also the silence, the escape and then the alienation.

Many of the poems capture this pensive regret:

SNOW (SAY GOODBYE)

Catching cold, night’s tyre slows down at the crossroads.

The breathing of the small hours gradually weakens, they congeal
progressively in this mineral silence of the trees, assuming the
disguise of snow, like a present delivered, left in offering to the
folds of dawn.

So much snow. Give thanks. You’ll have had the privilege of
spending a wakeful night with it, and when your eyes open, to-
morrow, months later, even the memory of it will have melted.

Now, today, all around you, a white sheet covered in frost.

And there are poems about poetry:

SAN ANTOLÍN DE BEÓN
(FREE VERSION AFTER BERTA PIÑÁN)

What strange, absurd matter you are, poetry:
revealing in detail the darkness of the soul
unable to tell the colour of the sea’s patina
growing solid in her eyes when afternoon comes.

As in the ‘Book of the Cold’, this collection is full of dark and unsettling images, nothing that you can anchor to, strange visions coming as you turn each page and read the few lines, the natural world meeting the imagined, the dreamlike landscapes of something slipping away.

The shipwreck is our greatest teacher, advising us to retire voluntarily from any lengthening of life before it’s too late, to definitively unlearn the certainty of death. In the intensity of ignorance, the oblivion of the moment, we feel eternal and pure, a little like animals not knowing they are to die. (Jordi Galves ‘Vita Nova’ – end word).

There is also a play on numbers and the number of letters in each word, as in the poem ‘Five Letters (Aubade)’:

Your finger on my lips,
the palm of your hand
wasting time on my back,
the pain, this pain with which
the night exhales itself
not wanting tomorrow’s
letters to reach an end.

My lips say “index”
the hand goes its way
explores impenitent
the river bank of now:
we’re this, we are a moment.
All I want to breathe
five letters and one night.

A love poem, the hand on the back, the exploring hand, and “night”, “index”, “night” five letters. Leads us back to “crying out to be interpreted beyond the immediate obvious”.

A collection that feels as though it’s playing on the edges, one where you read and then re-read the poem and have two different meanings, a focus on the here and now with this dark shadow of a foreboding future somewhere in your peripheral vision.

My copy is courtesy of my subscription to Fum d”estampa Press.

Recounting: Antagony Book I – Luis Goytisolo (translated by Brendan Riley)

The Catalan “Ulysses”?

In recent months I have come across a plethora of references to James Joyce’s novel, with comparisons to numerous world literature works, must be the circles I mix in on social media! As frequent visitors here would know, I have recently reviewed part of Oğuz Atay’s “Tutunamayanlar” (“The Disconnecte d”), referred to as the Turkish “Ulysses” and today I look at Luis Goytisolo’s “Antagony”, more precisely “Recounting: Book 1”.

Here’s a few snippets of other reviewer’s thoughts, one taken from the publisher’s foreign rights page, the other from a site I visit often to explore world literature.

In whatever way, like Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In search of lost time, like many others—or few others—you shouldn’t die without having read it (Antonio Martínez Asensio, blog Tiempo de silencio, Antena3.com)

In Spain, it is considered as one of the great works of 20th century literature, compared both to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; Remembrance of Things Past). The comparison are certainly valid. Like the Joyce it is a Bildungsroman while, like the Proust, it is a long exploration of the artistic development of a young man. From the site “The Modern Novel” (although a great review it should come with a spoiler warning)

And then we have Mario Vargas Llosa (thanks to The Untranslated for this snippet ):

Besides being an ambitious and complex book, difficult to read due to the protoplasmic configuration of the narrative matter, it is also an experiment intended to renew the content and the form of the traditional novel, following the example of those paradigms which revolutionalised the genre of the novel or at least tried to do so — above all Proust and Joyce, but, also James, Broch and Pavese –, without renouncing a certain moral and civic commitment to historical reality which, although very diluted, is always present, sometimes on the front stage, sometimes as the novel’s backdrop.

Structurally this book does have a Proustian bent, following the life of Raúl Ferrer Gamide, a middle class Catalan, from childhood through army service, law studies, romantic interludes but more importantly his desire to be a writer. All against the political backdrop of Barcelona. I won’t be putting any spoilers in my thoughts here, rest assured if you decide to tackle this massive book I’ll allow you to discover the narrative yourself.

However, it is not the plot that is the main attraction here, it is the novel’s structure, grand sweeping exploration of Catalan society after the Spanish Civil War and the political luminosity that drags you along, through 648 pages.

A difficult book to read, we have ten page paragraphs, generally consisting of a single sentence, dialogue that forms part of the main text, so it is a challenge to understand who is speaking, a cast of hundreds, all with nicknames, some with code names and then broad philosophical debates, including political manifestos.

For example there are three page explanations as to why a door was locked at 3pm precisely, another three pages observing the eating of a ham sandwich, but it is the microscopic examination of Barcelona and the middle class that brings the richness to this novel.

A wonderful example of the craft is the beginning of Chapter IV, where the paragraph opens with “Coming down to Las Ramblas…”, an area of Barcelona, and ends with “their fitful procession heading up Las Ramblas.” In between there are descriptions of all the alleys, the crowds, the flowers, “confusing alleys and side streets with their little dives which stank of hashish, alleys where, as it grew dark, the shining lights isolated the ground floor businesses, the red doorways, the worn, narrow pavement, the filthy paving stones, high-heeled shoes, bulging hips, necklines, long manes of hair, painted eyes, a succession of bars, of turf marked off and intensified by cigarette smoke.”

Each of the players circle in and out of focus, and as we move through Raúl’s maturation from childhood to schooling, to army service, to his involvement with the socialist/communist party, his distribution of clandestine pamphlets, his legal work and dreams of being a writer, we learn more and more about Catalan society.

Classic references to things such as the “caganer”, the defecating figurine in Catalan nativity scenes, blend with discussions on Catalan poetry, literature, its demise and subsequent rise, and further discussions on Spanish speaking Catalonians, this is a detailed expose of cultural life.

In one section we have many pages describing the Sagrada Familia, Raúl simply walking in there to hide from the police, when suddenly the text lapses into descriptive explanations of the iconic Church:

And to the right, the Portico of Faith, enraptured altarpiece centred on the presentation of Jesus in the temple, with an outline of images now solemn and impassive, now violent, like the one of John the Baptist preaching in the desert, foretelling the coming of the Messiah, all that upon an embroidered background of wretchedness and suffering, of an interwoven framework of thorns and flowers, buds, corollas, thalamus, sepals, petals. Stigmata, honeybees drawn to pollen, and superimposed on the bramble-crag crenellations, the lantern, a three-peaked oil lamp, eternal triangle, base of Immaculate Conception, dogmatic effigy rising in ecstasy, like an ejaculatory prayer from within a large cascade of sprigs and grape clusters, all those details one can spot carefully from any one of the points of the belfry towers, as you climb the airy spiral staircases, from the doorways, from the enclosed balconies sinuously integrated on the projections of architraves and cornices of the frontispiece, balconies with bulbous wrought iron railings, small contoured galleries, catwalks, small steps, intestinal cavities, twisted corridors of irregular relief, passages conjoined in a coming and going from the belfries to the façade, four intercommunicating bell towers, harmonically erect. Which, if near their bases appear rather strangely compounded with the parameters of the porticoes, as the separate, each acquiring its own shape, they becomes curving parabolic cones, the two outer pairs equal in height, the two center towers taller.

The more you read of this complex work, the more you realise it is an homage to Barcelona.

Richly packed with snippets of historical data, with references to cultural icons and other books, there are also brilliantly referenced cultural scraps, for example when one character’s father suspiciously dies and the subsequent legal action over his business interests hots up, there is a reference to Goya’s “Trágala, perro”, “depicting some raving monks with a giant syringe about to forcibly administer an enema to a trembling man in the presence of his veiled wife.”

 

 

Suddenly an obscure etching has made itself into my sphere, and now my consciousness.

We also have a number of references to Marcel Proust, one of my favourite sections talking about a literary endeavour:

…we have a good example of that in Manolo Maragas, with his remembrances and reflections, with the magnified profiles of his memory, when he talks about Alicia and Sunche, when he talks about Magdalena’s grandmother as if she were the Duchess of Guermantes and as if Grandpa Augusto were the duke, and Doña America were Madame Verduin, and that crazy Tito Coll a sort of Charlus, while he, Manolo Moragas, the narrative I, an apathetic Marcel, too sceptical to take the trouble to write anything, the only reason for him not already having withdrawn into his cork-lined cell, becomes a chronicler of Barcelonan society, the literary transcription of whose avatars, for any reader not directly implicated in that world, would awaken the same interest, probably, as the prose of one of those stylists in the Sunday edition of a provincial newspaper who’ve achieved a certain notoriety by the agreeable character of the collaborations, stylists who philosophize like a sheep chewing its cud before the ruins of the Parthenon, not in service of the validity of the ideas developed, but rather, to please his readers’ palates, of the originality of the focus and the graceful exposition, as well as this stylist’s prose, the interest of the specific problems of that world, of the characters capable of inhabiting it, grazing and watering among the ruins of the culture, with the grace and subtlety and elegance of a bull’s head that, like Narcissus, gazes at itself in a puddle.

In a few lines, the depth of characters take on a new meaning, readers of Proust suddenly having another layer to the already complex players. But we are not restricted to Proust, the is a whole section questioning scholars and them not giving enough time to Dante’s Canto 34 in Inferno. Through drunken debates, scholarly discussions, a whole playing field of the author’s views can be spread on this massive canvas.

I must admit, there were many political sections where I tired of the proletariat debate, the roles of the bourgeois, the eternal struggle of the worker, however these political rants were more than adequately balanced with crystal clear observations of daily life, of the existentialist struggle. A Menippean satire? Possibly. A Catalan “Ulysses”, less likely, for a start it isn’t a single day…

A massively complex but thoroughly engaging work, unfortunately we have to wait until August 2018 for Book II to be released in English, and by that time it may mean a re-reading of “Recounting” is required, a novel that would reveal so much more upon every re-read, and so little time!!!

I am hoping to get to a few other world literature “Ulysses” over the coming months, I may tire of that journey but a few books I do have set aside are:

“Leg Over Leg” by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (all four volumes)

“Three Trapped Tigers” by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

“Adam Buenosayres: A Critical Edition” by Leopoldo Marechal

“All About H. Hatterr” by G.V. Desani

“Berlin Alexanderplatz” by Alfred Döblin

And of course I need to post my thoughts on the remaining section of Oğuz Atay’s “The Disconnecte d”

I am sure there are many many more books that fall into the “Ulysses” category, hopefully I get to discover their riches over the coming years.

War, So Much War – Mercè Rodoreda (translated by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent) – Best Translated Book Award 2016

I have spent the last couple of months getting through the United Kingdom based Man Booker International prize longlist, but at the same time I had one eye looking sideways at the emerging titles on the United States based Best Translated Book Award. The Man Booker International Prize announced a longlist of thirteen titles on 10 March, and trimmed the list to six on 14 April, giving avid readers five weeks to get through their list. Meanwhile the Best Translated Book Award announces a fiction longlist of twenty-five titles, they did so this year on 29 March and their shortlist consists of ten books which they announced 21 days after the longlist!!! Three weeks to get through twenty-five books, methinks not. I think a longer period between the two announcements would elicit more discussion, more reading, more sales (for example there are eight works on the longlist that I haven’t read and which did not make the shortlist, with a longer timeframe there is a very good chance I would have read those books, with piles of unread books stacking up around me there is a very much reduced chance that I will go out of my way and hunt these eight books down).

A couple of the books shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award were already on my “to be read” pile, “The Physics of Sorrow” by Georgi Gospodinov (translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel) and “War, So Much War” by Mercè Rodoreda (translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent), as a result of my subscription to Open Letter books. Congratulations to them for publishing two titles that are deemed representative enough to make such a prestigious shortlist.

Mercè Rodoreda’s “War, So Much War” is set during the Spanish Civil War, however if you are after a traditional “war” story, or revelations from a Catalan point of view about the events of the Spanish Civil War, then I suggest you look elsewhere.

This book has forty-three chapters, each a small poignant, matter of fact vignette, written in the first person, with our narrator/protagonist being Adrià Guinart, a young boy “born at midnight, in the autumn of the year, with a birthmark on” his “forehead no bigger than a lentil.”

The house was ancient, the sink had a terrible stench, the faucet leaked. On windy days the cold crept in through the cracks, but in good weather the smell of flowers permeated every corner. On the Sundays when my father wasn’t of a mind to visit his cousins, he would take me for a walk. We spent hours sitting by the side of the road, and sometimes the air winnowed threads from the hearts of stunted flowers, and some would catch in my clothes. It seemed to me that people were all the same: with legs, with thighs, with eyes, mouths, teeth. I walked along, straight as a ninepin, holding the hand of my father who was tall and very good. I don’t know why I resented girls; if I ever got my hands on one, I would wring her neck like you would a bird’s. They exhaust motherly love.

As the announcement of the breakout of war reaches Adrià, he decides to run away from his family home, a carnation growing farm on the outskirts of Barcelona, half committing to joining the war, half simply joining other boys, his “coming of age” search from individuality, freedom. He spends the rest of our novel escaping, or running from, the war, and wandering from one fantastical adventure to the next.

With elements of dark fairy tales and a feeling that there is a parallel to Homer’s “Odyssey” (more on that later) each vignette reveals a little more of Adrià’s fears, hopes, dreams.

The novel is a blend of numerous influences. We have Biblical references, “They know not what they do”, and stigmata makes an appearance.  Mystical references, for example Chapter IV is titled “The Hanged Man, is this a reference to the Tarot Card? Martyrdom? Suspension in time? A sacrifice for the greater good? Or is our narrator, by running away from home, breaking old patterns of behaviour and restrictive bad habits? Or is it simply a tale about a man who is hanging from a tree branch?

There are also messages of hope, a bright future;

Soon, even more shell-hued than the previous night’s moon, the new day awoke to eyes that have never tired of seeing the tenderness it brings.

There is a never ending cast of characters who enter Adrià’s circle and then simply disappear as he moves on to another adventure. We have Narcisa, the female form of Narcissus, derived from ναρκη (narke) meaning “sleep, numbness”, appearing as the wife of a man who cannot help but fall asleep all the time, he is a “cyclops” of sorts, a one eyed man:

A man came and stretched out beside me. He was portly and his skin glistened as if it had been smeared with lard. He folded his hands over his bellow. I could only see one of this eyes, beneath an eyebrow with hairs thicker than esparto. The eye studied me, then quickly closed, only to open again slowly.

Wonderfully rich characters who all have influences on Adrià’s development. The novel is broken into three parts and at the end of Part One Adrià is living/hiding with Pere Ardèvol, a man who contemplates the sea and spends many hours looking into a mirrow, “each person is the mirror of the entire universe.” When Pere dies he leaves his full estate to Adrià on the condition that he shred and burn all of his documents. Adrià reads them and this leads us to Part Two of the novel.

Part Two includes dream sequences, a repetition of events that Adrià himself has recently experienced when he came to Pere’s farm but events that Pere himself experienced when he was younger. “Under what conditions can one become another?” As is my usual want here I won’t reveal any more of the plot…

This is a novel packed with riddles, parables, dark tales and a cast of characters too numerous to mention. We have a wanderer who walks with his back to the moon and sun so he can keep his shadow company, a moon-shaped man, and naked nymphs in the reeds with pitchforks, young girls on the beach tossing an orange, girls who are afraid of the waves. All presented in a rich, descriptive language:

The henhouse was at the back of the vegetable garden. I crept toward it, life a wolf stealing through the artichokes. A hen was clucking like made, I would eat her egg. The frightened fowl stood over her nest, legs deep in the straw, staring at me. The egg tasted like hazelnuts. Three more hens, still as death, craned their necks forward as they perched on their nests. Their wattles dropped, their combs drooped, they were old hens, has laid many eggs, marched little chicks around. I heard the sound of a slamming door coming from the direction of the house, followed by the squeak of a pulley. The egg had made me hungry. I left the vegetable garden. There wasn’t a village in sight. I was surrounded by fields. I was suddenly struck by a flash of sadness, and I shook it off in a hurry. Somehow, I would find what I needed. I continued on my way, slit-eyed, blinded by a sun that had a deeper yolk color than the egg I had just swallowed. I was walking in the bright sunlight, my mind on other things, when I tripped and fell, bloodying my knee. The blood was red, redder than a red carnation, redder than the drooping combs of those golden hens.

Multi layered and with a depth that demands re-reading and exploring in detail, this is a complex, but at the same time thoroughly readable, work. Drawing on myth, Christian icons, medieval, and classical characters, Mercè Rodoreda’s final novel was so enjoyable, I will be hunting down further translated works from her bibliography. In fact I have already committed to reading two via my “Classics Club” list of fifty classic translated books.

Another wonderful Catalan work that was published last year was “Life Embitters” by Josep Pla (translated by Peter Roland Bush) published by Archipelago Books, a very large collection of short stories, over 600 pages worth, which is written in a more “straight forward” narrative style if you would like to explore Catalan Literature outside of this dark and frolicking work.

A worthy entrant on the Best Translated Book Award shortlist, one I thoroughly enjoyed, a tale of a wandering young boy, observing the war around him, meeting so many characters he simply has to become a man:

I enjoyed nothing more than wandering throughout the world lost. Doing as I please no matter how things turned out, with no one giving me any advice. Seeing the sky, the forests, experiencing fear, contemplating the night and it having a roof.

Stone In A Landslide – Maria Barbal (Translated by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell)

This week I am going to look at three books published by Peirene Press, of course all by female authors, given we are still participating in Women In Translation Month. Peirene Press specializes in contemporary European novellas in English translation. Part of their “charter” is to only publish books of less than 200 pages, which are best-sellers and/or award winners in their own countries. They publish three titles per annum in a “theme” and today I’m going to look at a novella from their first series “Female Voice: Inner Realities”, their second book actually published, “Stone in a Landslide”, by Maria Barbal, translated from the Catalan by Laura McGloughlin and Paul Mitchell.

Maria Barbal was born in 1949 in the region of Pallars Jussà, and moved to Barcelona in the 1960’s graduating with an Arts degree from the University of Barcelona. In 1984 this work, (“Pedra de tartera”), won the Joaquim Ruyra prize and this was simply the start of a string of literary awards including the National Catalan Literature Prize in 1993 for “Càmfora”. For an article by Maria Barbal, “Who I am and why I write?” go to Catalan Literature Online here. http://www.lletra.net/en/author/maria-barbal

“Stone in a Landslide” covers a lifetime in only 126 pages. Our story opens with our first person narrator, Conxa, explaining the realities of being female and the fifth of six children in a small village. At age thirteen this unsure young girl takes her first ever trip away from her village to a neighbouring village to go and live with her mother’s sister, Aunt Tia, who is childless. Conxa is an extra pair of hands to help on the land.

I closed my eyes and those first days of my new life seemed very far away: the nights I cried myself to sleep remembering each and every person from home, the times I would wake with a start, and the anxiety that didn’t leave me all day. How quickly I got used to such a great change! But if I counted it up, I’d already been away for half a year. And now I felt, not fully, but almost as if I’d been born in Tia’s house.

When you knew Tia well, you came to love her, because she didn’t begrudge what she gave you as long as you followed her orders to the letter. Decide, then act, that was her, and she didn’t likfe to be contradicted. Like my mother, she was not demonstrative, but in her own way she showed affection. A glass of fresh milk, still warm from the cow, beside my plate, without a word. I knew they saved it for the calves, or if there was more than enough, they took a few litres to the Augusts’ to earn a peseta or two.

Oncle kept quiet, like that first day on top of the mule, but he wasn’t bad-tempered. I wore myself out helping him. He worked and worked. I learnt to do everything, outside the house as well as in. Exactly as they had shown me, without any touches of my own which they might think showed a lack of respect.

The passage of time is handled in an interesting way with this work, what may seem like minor events (having a glass of milk six months after arriving) show the development of the character over great stretches of time. Conxa marries, and has a child, a girl, both events themselves not appearing in the story itself but happening in between the chapters. We learn of Conxa expecting a second child

A boy will be a man. And a man has the strength to deal with the land, the animals, to build. But I didn’t see it so clearly. When I thought about the families I knew well, I saw the woman as the foundation stone. If I thought about my home, it was my mother who did all the work or organized others to do it. Not to mention Tia. The woman has the children, raised them, harvested, took care of the pigsty, the chicken coop, the rabbits. She did the housework and so many other things: the vegetable garden, the jams, the sausages…What did the man do? Spent the day doing things outside. When a cow had to be sold. When someone had to be hired for the harvest. It wasn’t obvious that the man did more or was more, but everyone said, What is a farm without a man? And I thought, What is a house without a woman? But what everyone had always said weighed on me. I only knew that I wanted a boy.

The development of our narrator is smooth however the innocence of only living in two small villages is retained throughout. This is a personal tale, of one woman living in a small secluded region, and that naivety shines through as the Spanish Civil War breaks out, events happen to Conxa without her having an iota of understanding why. As a beautiful counterpoint to numerous Spanish and Catalan works highlighting the Civil War where the politics are played out throughout, this is a fresh voice of the personal impact of those events. Quite simply a story of a woman with three young children who had never moved beyond two villages being impacted by the War.

As mentioned earlier, the passage of time here is very smooth and years disappear with the turning of a page, however this doesn’t leave you at all confused or grasping for an event that may have been significant. Our narrator Conxa has a simple life and therefore the simplicity is repeated whilst we turn the page.

Not a complex tale, nor a political tale, this is a personal rural tale, one which captures the lives of so many people who would have been in similar situations in Spain in the 1930’s.