Uncertain Glory
Page 1
JOAN SALES I VALLÈS (1912–1983) was born in Barcelona to a Catalan family. In 1932, he earned a law degree from the University of Barcelona and in 1933 married Maria Núria Folch. Their daughter, Núria, was born the following year. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Sales, who was a member of several regional anarchist and Communist groups, fought for the Republican government on the Madrid and Aragonese fronts before going into exile in France in 1939. He moved to Dominica in 1940, then Mexico in 1942, finally returning to Catalonia in 1948. In 1955 he co-founded the publishing house Club Editor, where he would edit and publish some of the most important authors of twentieth-century Catalan literature, among them Màrius Torres and Mercè Rodoreda, as well as his own work, including a book of poems, Viatge d’un moribund (1952); a collection of letters from his wartime and exile experiences, Cartes a Màrius Torres (1976); and a Catalan translation of The Brothers Karamazov. He died in Barcelona.
PETER BUSH is an award-winning translator who lives in Oxford. Among his recent translations are Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook, which won the 2014 Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, and Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Tyrant Banderas (both for NYRB Classics); Emili Teixidor’s Black Bread, Jorge Carrión’s Bookshops, and Prudenci Beltrana’s Josafat.
JUAN GOYTISOLO (1931–2017) was born in Barcelona and was the author of many novels, including Marks of Identity, Count Julian, Juan the Landless, and The Garden of Secrets, as well as two volumes of autobiography.
UNCERTAIN GLORY
JOAN SALES
Translated from the Catalan by
PETER BUSH
Foreword by
JUAN GOYTISOLO
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1971 by Joan Sales
Translation and translator note copyright © 2014 by Peter Bush
Foreword copyright © by Juan Goytisolo
All rights reserved.
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Institut Ramon Llull
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sales, Joan, author. | Bush, Peter R., 1946– translator. | Goytisolo, Juan, writer of foreword.
Title: Uncertain glory / Joan Sales ; translated by Peter Bush ; foreword by Juan Goytisolo.
Other titles: Incerta glòria. English
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books classics | A reissue of the edition published in London by MacLehose Press, 2014. | Includes bibliographical references. | English translation of the Catalan edition, Incerta glòria.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017034855 (print) | LCCN 2017038427 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681371818 (epub) | ISBN 9781681371801 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Spain—History—Civil War, 1936–1939—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / War & Military. | FICTION / Political. | GSAFD: War stories. | Historical fiction. | Love stories.
Classification: LCC PC3941.S336 (ebook) | LCC PC3941.S336 I513 2017 (print) | DDC 808.83/81—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034855
ISBN 978-1-68137-181-8
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
A Confession by the Author
Foreword by Juan Goytisolo
Translator’s Note
UNCERTAIN GLORY
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
A Confession by the Author
“The uncertain glory of an April day . . . ” Every devotee of Shakespeare knows these words – and if I had to sum up my novel in a single line, I wouldn’t use any other.
A moment comes in life when you feel that you are waking from a dream. Our youth is behind us. Of course, it could never last for all eternity, but what does “to be young” mean, in fact? “Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage,” writes Baudelaire; perhaps youth has never been anything but a gloomy storm streaked by lightning flashes of glory, of uncertain glory, on an April day.
A dark desire drives us on in those difficult, tortured years: we seek out, whether consciously or not, a glory that we can never define. We seek it out in many things, but particularly in love – and in war, if war crosses our path. That was how it was with my generation.
The thirst for glory, at certain moments in life, becomes painfully acute, all the more when the glory thirsted for is uncertain – I mean enigmatic. My novel attempts to capture, in some of its characters, a few of those moments. To what end? Others will be the judge of that.
But I know that he who has much loved will be much forgiven. In other times, there was greater fervour for St Dismas and St Mary Magdalene: there wasn’t so much pedantry around and people didn’t try to hide the passionate intensity we all carry within us under theses, messages and abstract theories.
We are sinners thirsting after glory. Because Thy Glory is our end.
JOAN SALES
Barcelona, December 1956
Truth against the red lie and the black
At the end of 1956, when I finally managed to fulfil my dream and leave the suffocating political, literary and moral atmosphere in Franco’s Spain to find refuge in the freedom of Paris, my individual act of rupture soon took a more ambitious, less selfish turn.
By this I mean that my exile followed in the wake of the great poet Josep Palau i Fabre’s, whose desire I shared to combat the castrating effects of Francoist censorship by trying to publish – as I was to continue to do through Ruedo Ibérico – books that the censors had banned.
Thanks to my companion Monique Lange, I assumed the responsibilities of Spanish reader at Gallimard, a task I carried out for more than ten years. This allowed me to give visibility in France to several writers in the Spanish language who, having been often forced to suffer the preventive surgery practised by the guardians of public morality in their own country, were finally allowed to publish their novels without suffering scissor cuts and amputation. Unsurprisingly, this earned me the hostility of Franco’s regime, as well as a campaign of slander – of which I am duly proud – that lasted until the dictator died.
Reading the manuscript of Incerta Glòria that Joan Sales sent me was one of my most gratifying moments as a publisher’s reader. Despite my as-yet-imperfect grasp of Catalan, I immediately realised it was a great novel, both because of the meticulous and complex way in which it was written and because of its original approach to its subject, the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9.
Written by an eyewitness from the camp of the defeated, it contained no political message and yielded no ground to glib partisan flag-waving. In its pages I found the same grief in the face of irremediable destruction that I had found in Luis Cernuda’s book of poems The Clouds, a grief that avoided the rampant propaganda displayed by both camps – in the mediocre, downright wretched novels and poetry by the poetasters of the Falange, and in the worthier efforts penned by republican and communist authors.
The duty of bearing witness to “the truth against the red lie and the black” – about which he subsequently writes in El vent de la nit (The Wind in the Night), a part added by the author as a sequel to the novel – gives Joan Sales the ethical rigour of someone who does not root his thinking in certainties but rather in lives exposed to the world’s absurdity, its procession of blood, death and injustice.
The heroes of Uncertai
n Glory – volunteers and others fighting on the Aragon front – experience a situation that goes beyond them, making them pawns in a game they cannot control. Their suffering, doubts, heroic deeds and sacrifices embody “the uncertain glory of an April day” which gives the novel its title. Unlike the authors of most war novels, Joan Sales falls neither into the limiting trap of the melodramatic eyewitness account nor into lyrical rhapsodising. That is why the power of Uncertain Glory survives the test of time and why, when reading it today, one experiences the intensity that impelled it during the time of its writing.
The incomplete text I received contained paragraphs and passages that had not appeared in the Catalan edition at the time. Bernard Lesfargues translated them scrupulously into French and the novel received excellent reviews. My tiny struggle against Francoist censorship was thus happily rewarded, as it was again years later when Gallimard published In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda. Both these authors are, in my opinion, the most striking writers of that sombre period of Catalan culture which ran from the end of the civil war to the death of Francoism. The present renaissance of narrative in the language forged by Ramon Llull would have been impossible without them.
JUAN GOYTISOLO
Marrakesh, June 2006
Publisher’s note: The 1962 edition, to which Juan Goytisolo refers, is a much earlier translation than the considerably longer, definitive version published here. It carried the following dedication:
To Juan Goytisolo, who was a child.
Translator’s Note
Joan Sales drew closely on his own experience of fighting in the Spanish Civil War when he began writing Uncertain Glory in 1948 in Barcelona, after nine years of exile in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. The novel was first published in 1956 with the nihil obstat of the Archbishop of Barcelona. This was after Franco’s censors had imposed a total ban on publication because it “expresses heretical ideas often in disgusting, obscene language”. Sales continued to develop the novel and the definitive text – a much longer, more complex novel – became the fourth edition that appeared in 1971.
Joan Sales was a supporter of the Catalan Republican Generalitat and at the beginning of the war trained in its School for Officers; he was then sent to the fronts in Madrid and Aragon. In Madrid he was posted to the anarchist Durruti Column that had just killed all its officers for attempting to turn it into a regular army unit. Sales survived and continued with the Column in Xàtiva, and in Barcelona during the May events of 1937 which pitted anarchists against communists. His second posting was to the 30th Division, formerly the Macià-Companys Column, which was fully militarised and Catalan. It is life in this division that is reflected in the novel.
After the collapse of the Aragonese front in March 1938 Sales was arrested by the republican Servicio de Investigación Militar, the S.I.M. Nùria Folch i Pi, his wife, described the S.I.M. as “the local version of the G.P.U.”. He was arrested for not naming two brothers who had not presented themselves to the army when called up. He awaited trial in the dungeons of Montjuïc and experienced at first hand prison life, the hunger and demoralisation in the city and the corruption of those in government: “And even so we must make a desperate effort to win this war; it’s horrific to think how Catalonia will be treated if we leave,” he wrote on 15 October, 1938. After being cleared, he was sent to an ex-communist column that put up final resistance to the fascists in the Balaguer bridgehead, and then to the army rearguard protecting the retreat of the defeated troops and the exodus of civilians. He would be one of the last to cross the frontier to France at the age of twenty-seven.
Anarchists had been at the forefront of the social revolution in Aragon and Catalonia, sparked off by the military uprising of 18 July, 1936 against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic. Factories were put under workers’ control, peasants collectivised the land and popular militia were set up. At the same time, churches were burned, and priests, bankers and factory owners killed. As the war proceeded and Franco’s crusade against “the liberal-Jewish-bolshevik-atheist-masonic conspiracy” received more support from Mussolini and Hitler, the republic turned to the Soviet Union and Stalin for help. This led to the growth of the Spanish Communist Party, the incorporation of the popular militia into a more formal institutional army, the arrival of the International Brigades and fierce conflict on the republican side between on the one hand anarchists and anti-Stalinists and on the other the supporters of the Communist Party. English readers are used to seeing these struggles through the eyes of Orwell or Hemingway. Joan Sales has created a distinctive tragicomic vision of life in the civil war in Aragon and Barcelona. His novel reminds us that many Catholics fought for the republic against Franco and for Catalan self-government, and that very little was as certain as the certainties of the ideologues.
Spanish anarchism was a mass movement that had its origins in the political and social struggles in the country from the time of the September Revolution of 1868. The struggles had climaxed in the Republican Federal Government of Pi i Margall in 1873. Bakunin’s emissary Giuseppe Farinelli had arrived in Spain in 1868 and Bakunin’s ideas soon found a following among landless workers in Andalusia as well as among workers in the textile factories of Catalonia. Anarchist philosophy was interpreted in various ways. It served as a set of ideas that led to the formation of trade unions such as the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo, which functioned to improve working conditions, shorten working hours and improve wages. There were also anarchists who were more interested in developing enlightened, rational, secular forms of education that might encompass vegetarianism, Esperanto and pacifism. The best known of these is Francesc Ferrer, founder of the Modern School to educate children in lay social ideas; he was arrested during the Setmana Tràgica and executed in Montjuïc on 13 October, 1909. Finally, there were direct-action anarchists like Santiago Salvador who threw a bomb into the stalls in the Liceu, the Barcelona opera house, killing twenty-three people in 1893.
In their early twenties when war breaks out, the novel’s protagonists are all attracted at some stage to anarchism. Lluís, Soleràs and Trini are involved, long before 1936, in student protest circles which heatedly debated varieties of anarchism, Marxism and Freudianism in a tone anticipating the polemics of 1968. Trini’s parents are utopian anarchist teachers. Her father is a pacifist opposed to anarchist involvement in the fighting. Like Sales, Lluís is first posted to take charge of anarchist militiamen; he then finds himself in a militarised battalion in a village on the Aragonese front that has been collectivised by anarchists. The villagers are frightened the new battalion may be like the anarchists; the battalion is frightened the anarchists might still be around. When showing Aragon and Barcelona, Sales re-creates the atmosphere of chaos, confusion and complexity in which people developed ways of life to cope with the devastations of war. Lluís and Soleràs are infatuated with the lady of the castle in Aragon whose husband was a fascist martyr; Trini turns to the Church and attends clandestine communions in city attics. Soldiers banter, play practical jokes and get drunk. The more intellectual protagonists engage in conversations full of savage humour about sex, God, death and war. All interact and coexist as best they can in the daily struggle to survive, whether scouring no-man’s-land in Aragon for bottles of brandy or struggling from the Barceloneta with a sack of maggoty marrowfat peas.
Sales is a key writer in the development of Catalan as a modern literary language. His poetry and his letters to the poet Màrius Torres are unique parallel accounts of his experience of war and exile. He founded a publishing house, Club dels Novel·listes, later Club Editor, and published such writers as Rodoreda and Villalonga. He translated Dostoyevsky, Kazantzakis and Mauriac into Catalan. He was always sensitive to varieties of language as an expression of individuality and opposed to academic purists. I have tried to reflect this in the translation by using a variety of English that is non-standard as well as non-specific for the Aragonese villagers – who speak non-standard Spanish. I
have also maintained the Spanish and Catalan forms when both are used in conversations that in the original are bilingual – hence, “Lluís” (Catalan) and “Luis” as well as the diminutive “Luisico” (Spanish); and “carlà”, “carlan” and “carlana” for the lord and lady of the castle. Some of the women in the village are bilingual because they have worked in service in Barcelona.
I would like to thank Joan Sales’ grand-daughter, Maria Bohigas, for her constant encouragement and her mother, Nùria Sales, for providing valuable clarification of certain references and pointing out distant resonances.
PETER BUSH
Barcelona, June 2014
UNCERTAIN GLORY
Above all, one must adopt a doctor’s precaution and never check a pulse before one is sure it is the patient’s pulse and not one’s own . . .
VIRGILIUS HAUFNIENSIS (Copenhagen 1844)
PART ONE
“What do you see?”
“I see,” said Andrenio, “the same internecine wars two hundred years hence . . .”
GRACIÁN, El Criticón
I
Cito volat, aeterne pungit
CASTEL DE OLIVO, 19 JUNE
I am in excellent health, but as full of grumbles as a sickly child.
I can’t tell you how much I have suffered serving in a division I loathed. I negotiate a different posting, arrive with high hopes . . . and everything collapses on me yet again.
I thought I would find Juli Soleràs here. They told me he was in the field hospital, either wounded or ill; but it turns out he’s been discharged. And I’ve not seen a single familiar face among the thousands the phantasmagoria of war has paraded before my eyes from the day it broke out.