Dark Vales
Page 1
Acknowledgements
Our thanks are due first of all to the Institut Ramon Llull for a grant from their programme of support for translation of Catalan literary works, and to Eric Lane and the Dedalus team for undertaking to publish Dark Vales. We are also grateful to Kim Eyre, for reading the English text and suggesting sensitive amendments; to Mike Mitchell and John Devlin for their encouragement, and for discussing various nuances of meaning and expression, pointing us towards improvements. The frontispiece map was kindly supplied by Josep Maria Mussachs of Editorial Alpina, Barcelona.
The builder, Josep Vilardebò i Puig, like Eva a native of Figueró-Montmany, was born in the Rovira house, a major landmark in the narrative. In the summer of 2011 he accompanied her and Jordi Castellanos on a tour of the whole district, sharing with them his memories and insights, pointing out hidden corners and identifying virtually all the buildings (most now in ruins) mentioned in the text.
Jordi, himself a son of the sots feréstecs, and the leading authority on the work of Raimon Casellas, tragically did not live to see this publication of Dark Vales, which would have given him such pride and satisfaction. The first English translation of the novel is dedicated to the memory of a special friend and generous mentor:
Jordi Castellanos i Vila
(Tagamanent, 11/9/1946 – Barcelona, 19/10/2012)
Cover of the first edition of Els sots feréstecs, 1901.
(Biblioteca de Catalunya)
Cover of the first edition of Les multituds, 1906.
(Biblioteca de Catalunya)
The Translator
Alan Yates, born in Northampton in 1944, is Emeritus Professor of Catalan at Sheffield University where he worked for 30 years, after graduation (1966) and then a doctorate (1971) from Cambridge. His teaching and research covered the language and the modern literature of the Catalan-speaking lands. He has published several books and numerous articles in these fields, now keeping a foot in both by exercising his enthusiasm for literary translation. The rest of his time (when not spent with grandchildren or being out and about on his local patch) is devoted to mountain walking and nostalgic fell-running.
The Editor
Eva Bosch is a painter, writer and video maker. She writes on prehistoric art, and has lectured on Picasso and Miró at the National Gallery, Tate Modern and the Instituto Cervantes. Born in Barcelona, she grew up in Figueró-Montmany, the village where Dark Vales takes place. In 1973, she fled the upheavals of Franco’s regime to settle in the UK, where she studied at the Royal College of Art and later at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. She now lives and works in London with regular sojourns in her home village, combining her creative work with lecturing in the History of Art.
Portrait of Raimon Casellas, c. 1898, by Ramon Casas Carbó.
(Charcoal on paper. © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.)
Contents
Title
Acknowledgements
The Translator
The Editor
Introduction
Editor’s Note
I
Aleix the Truffle Man
II
The Derelict Church
III
The New Priest
IV
Death’s Dominion
V
Nightmare
VI
Dwellers in Limbo
VII
The Local Entertainer
VIII
The Church Refurbished
IX
The Bells Ring Out
X
Bad Stock!
XI
The Story of the Old Couple
XII
Footloose
XIII
God and the Devil
XIV
White Mass and Black Mass
XV
Dark Days
XVI
Howls in the Night
XVII
The Road to Calvary
XVIII
Sacrilege
XIX
Death Throes
XX
Absolution
Copyright
The Figueró-Montmany district of Catalonia.
(Fragment reproduced from the map “Cingles de Bertí”, courtesy of Editorial Alpina, Barcelona, 2013.)
Main street with donkey – Figueró around 1910.
(Courtesy of the Municipal Archive, Figueró-Montmany)
Introduction
The novelist and the novel in context
Raimon Casellas i Dou (b. Barcelona 1855) died, almost certainly by suicide, in 1910. The reasons for his premature death can be read between the lines of his novel Els sots feréstecs. The first edition appeared in Barcelona in 1901, although all of its chapters had previously been published between 1899 and 1900 in a Catalan newspaper. Els sots feréstecs is considered to be the first truly modern novel in Catalan.
Casellas was an extremely influential figure in Catalan Modernisme. This movement corresponded in broad terms to Art Nouveau and the European fin de siècle, and it left a major legacy on all artistic fronts. The architect Antoni Gaudí and contemporaries like Domènech i Muntaner and Puig i Cadafalch exemplified a revolution in style which also reverberated locally in every branch of the decorative arts. The young Picasso was formed in that setting, absorbing trends which were distinctive in outstanding Catalan painters like Ramon Casas, Santiago Rusiñol and Isidre Nonell. It is important to understand Els sots feréstecs as a manifestation of the same ‘cultural revolution’.
Casellas was primarily an art historian and critic, but his novel Els sots feréstecs, and his two collections of short stories (Les multituds: 1906; Llibre d’històries: 1909) demonstrated a talent for giving literary form to his intellectual and artistic concerns.
Modernisme was superseded by the more sober cultural model of Noucentisme which prevailed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Casellas was torn between his own initial artistic idealism and the demands of a more disciplined programme. Class conflict and social turbulence, however, were exacerbated during the same period, and this undoubtedly contributed to the author’s final disillusionment, perhaps anticipated already (intuitively and poetically) in his novel.
With input from Modernisme and then Noucentisme, the basis of twentieth-century Catalan politics and culture were established. These can be concisely defined as: organised demands for autonomy within the Spanish state, affirmation of cultural distinctiveness and consolidation of the status of the Catalan language. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) followed by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco led to a period of social and cultural repression with the suppression of the Catalan language and culture. After the death of Franco in 1975 things changed during Spain’s difficult transition to democracy. The Spanish Constitution of 1978 gave the Catalan language special ‘respect’ and specific protection in the respective autonomy statutes of Catalonia (1979), Valencia (1982) and the Balearic Islands (1983). The new political context enable Catalan literature to recover its twentieth-century momentum and flourish again. A good illustration of this is the fact that the first edition of Els sots feréstecs with a scholarly introduction appeared in 1980, at a time when many other key writers from the pre-war period were being ‘rediscovered’.
Els sots feréstecs/Dark Vales
Els sots feréstecs artistically converts an actual place into a ‘landscape of the mind’ (while the real location is endowed with a mythical aura derived from the fictional recreation).The novel is set in a rural region of Catalonia, centred on the parish of Montmany, some 40 kilometres north from Barcelona. The author’s personal links with the area and with the parish priest there at the end of the nineteenth century are explained in the Editor’s note. Nowadays Montma
ny is a more accessible place than it was in the late nineteenth century, but it retains much of its ruggedness, especially as most of the traditional subsistence agricultural activity has now disappeared. At the time when the novel was written this was a remote and forbidding ‘back of beyond’, the reason for the priest’s exile, is the sin of heterodoxy. The ex-seminarian Casellas’s feel for the territory is reflected in his novel to the extent that the words on the page can virtually be used as a guide for finding one’s way around the whole district.
The author put a lot of himself into the novel and its central character. ‘Intensity of feeling and of technique’ had been highlighted by him as the main requirement for Catalan fiction in order to put the literature of his own country in line with the European fin de siècle. As a prominent historian and critic, Casellas was fully abreast of the currents which were transforming Western culture. One main agent in the intellectual ferment within which he was working was a preoccupation with the idea of a ‘Godless universe’ (derived from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche). Thus the Decadent morbidity which pervades Dark Vales is an effort to explore the bounds of human reason, which ran up against the inadequacy of language to communicate ultimate truths and the mysteries of the human condition. The frequent use of punctuation dots for pregnant pauses (a favourite Symbolist device) is intended to show moments of crisis where reason and words begin to fail and where silence itself is supremely expressive. In a similar way the constant reiteration throughout of key phrases and motifs is a literary application of Wagner’s musical Leitmotiven. The notion of ‘landscape of the mind’ surfaces prominently here, and is complemented by Casellas’s use of an earthy and rough-edged diction (at the time a notable innovation in literary Catalan) in presenting description, action and the characters’ speech.
The translation aspires to be faithful to the principal stylistic features of the original: to render the subtle interplay between a landscape and the two minds which are central in Dark Vales: that of the narrator, merging with that of the main character. Casellas was writing at a time when the conventions of nineteenth-century realism, objectivity and the ‘authority’ of the omniscient, impersonal narrator, were being seriously questioned. Like many contemporary authors Casellas replaced the discredited omniscient narrator of conventional realism by inserting another consciousness in the narrative as a presence operating close to the level of a character’s mind. This is particularly evident in the treatment of the priest-protagonist’s dreams, visions and hallucinations, leading up to and then after his breakdown, from chapter XIV onwards. Especially innovative and challenging is the exploration of his ‘locked in’ catatonic condition in the final chapters, creating an ‘atmosphere of the mind’. There are points in Dark Vales where the relationship between the two ‘minds’ comes close to breaking point and where fragmentation of traditional narrative structures and syntax seems imminent.
Characterisation is highly stylised. The figure of Father Llàtzer, has to bear a lot of weight, perhaps too much. This, however, is an inevitable consequence of how the story is told.The presentation of the atavistic rustics as an amorphous, subhuman mass reworks Zola’s concept of la bête humaine in the light of contemporary trends in the new sciences of psychology, sociology and criminology. Monotony here is obviated by the presence of few minor characters: Aleix the truffle man, picked out of the anonymous peasant crowd in chapter I; pumpkin-faced Carbassot, feebler as a presence than Aleix, who figures in the interlude provided in chapter VI. This pairing is complemented by another one, the old couple who serve Father Llàtzer, and the local whore. The priest’s household companions, Josep and Mariagna act as a double-act Sancho Panza to Father Llàtzer’s Don Quixote. The inseparable pair supply an authentically human, and humane, dimension to a novel which, given the insistence of its symbolism and its prevailing bleakness of outlook, would be much the poorer and the more monotonous without them.
The striking and colourful figure of Footloose enlivens the action in her role as a caricature of the Decadent femme fatale: the embodiment of the forces of Evil, and ultimately of cosmic despair. Her name in Catalan, La Roda-soques, denotes both ‘vagabond’ and a woodland bird (treecreeper/nuthatch). It being impossible to convey in a single English word ‘footloose (and fancy free)’ was chosen.
The landscape of Montmany is the virtual protagonist in the novel, a feature enshrined in the Catalan title. For rendering sots feréstecs (‘wild ravines/gorges’) Dark Vales was chosen as it reflects the dominant emotional/psychological atmosphere of the narrative.
While it is difficult to dissociate the themes and the mood of Dark Vales from Raimon Casellas’s suicide in 1910, the novel has a much wider and more complex relevance than that or than the work’s religious trappings. Father Llàtzer can be seen as an archetype of the modern intellectual who aspires to improve, enlighten and dignify the society in which he lives. This grim parable about a parish priest who tries and fails to bring salvation to a benighted flock does not negate altogether a kind of nobility which inheres in the undertaking and in the efforts made to achieve it.
AY
Villagers from Can Mas and Ca l’Antic – around 1910.
(Courtesy of Mercè Pareras i Puig)
Editor’s Note
The writings of Raimon Casellas were familiar to me from my childhood in the village of Figueró-Montmany in spite of Francoist censorship and the dictatorship’s proscription of the Catalan language. Set at the very end of the nineteenth century, the events narrated in this highly original novel take place in the dark vales of the parish of Sant Pau, in the rugged foothills of the Pyrenees. With forbidding crags, thick woods and magical ponds, the bitter winters there deny it the prosperity, based on hot springs, of the neighbouring village. The dilapidated partly Romanesque church of Sant Pau still stands in the wild empty ravines, having borne witness since Casellas’s day to poverty, revolts, and a bitter civil war. After the innumerable clumsy restorations it has suffered down the centuries, it is in danger now of succumbing finally to the fate so feared by Father Llàtzer.
In his youth, Raimon Casellas made several visits in those obscure yet enchanting valleys. He wrote later of going in 1870 to the Uià farm, fleeing from Barcelona with his mother during an outbreak of yellow fever in the city. With its ‘cultivated terraces lining the hillside like steps rising up towards the clouds’, the house there is a consistent point of geographical reference in the narrative. His intimate knowledge of the region is reflected in the geographical accuracy and emotional engagement of his descriptions.
The parish priest at the end of the nineteenth century was Father Lladó, who was on friendly terms with the young Casellas (himself a seminary student). Local archives record Lladó’s tussles to uphold in the district the authority of his own church. Conflicts between the clerical authorities and the villagers were to persist into my own childhood during the 1950s. It is likely that Lladó was the model for the central character in the book: the coincidence Lladó/Llàtzer is surely not accidental. The former was involved in ecclesiastical power struggles, whereas the fictional priest’s personal drama contains a higher ambition: to break ‘the umbilical cord that unites man to matter, thus freeing him from slavery’, in the words of Jordi Castellanos. Làtzer, however, fatally underestimates the power of the flesh or the dark allure of the rocky slopes with natural forces haunting the deep ravines and the dim paths in the Black Wood.
The densely poetic language of the original poses a daunting task for the translator. For years I had harboured the dream of bringing this extraordinary work to a wider public. After persuading Alan that Els sots feréstecs was not ‘untranslatable’, the idea was transformed into an up-and-running project which acquired definitive momentum when Dedalus accepted the work for publication.
My specialism as a painter and a lecturer in art emphasises my own sensitivity to the geographical and atmospheric characteristics of the countryside where I grew up and where Casellas had chosen to set his novel. Co-operatio
n in the translation process has enabled me moreover to revisit in a creative way the moods, local legends and traditions of the place. The whole operation has been a laborious one as we were constantly confronted with issues which stemmed from different, but complementary, perspectives on the text. My personal reading of it involves a painter’s vision which inevitably suffuses my subjective responses to words on the page. I cannot but pursue a particular intimate suggestion emerging from a word or sentence, nor escape the idea that any translation can only be like a new layer painted on to a unique and precious fresco. Alan, on the other hand, had got involved in the project from within the disciplines of teaching and researching on modern Catalan language and literature, as well as having considerable experience of translating modern texts from that language into English. Our different backgrounds and cultural perspectives and our not completely coincident individual interpretations of the novel made for some intense, and ultimately productive, disputation.
Some general and two central problems concerning the translation are commented on in Alan’s presentation above. ‘Footloose’ remains still a bone of contention between us. My own preference was for keeping the original Catalan nickname La Roda-soques, in the hope that the reader would overcome its foreignness. Alan, on the other hand insisted that it was necessary to seek some equivalence in English, along the lines he expounds above. Other thematic and stylistic issues presented by the challenging character of the original text were efficiently resolved by dint of exchanging and re-working numerous annotated drafts as the translation process evolved. The co-operation just described has given both of us much private and ‘professional’ fulfilment. The result, we think, is a worthy version of a unique and captivating novel.