Roger Moore, St. Thomas University, Fredericton
Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is considered by many to be the greatest Spanish novelist after Miguel de Cervantes. His extensive, truly prolific, repertoire includes approximately seventy-seven novels and twenty-two plays. In the opinion of many, several of these novels are outstanding, for example, El Amigo Manso (1882), La de Bringas (1884), Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87), Miau (1888), the Torquemada novels (1889–95), Angel Guerra (1890–91), and Misericordia (1897). Balzac, Cervantes, and Tolstoy, amongst others, seem to have provided Galdós with clear literary models. The enigmatic realism of the Spanish author’s work in which characters reappear in book after book and the vast canvas upon which he sketched the society in which these characters move necessitate a ritual comparison with Balzac’s extensive life series: the Comédie Humaine.
Nazarín, finished in 1895, is in many ways an excellent novel to translate more than a century after its initial publication, for it presents a series of scenes that will not be unfamiliar to the traveler in Latin America and the developing world.[1] One of the delights of the Aguilar edition[2] is the series of ancient sepia photographs illustrating the text; for example, a patio “mal empedrado y peor barrido” (Saínz, facing p. 160), “una galería que se inclinaba como un barco varado” (Saínz, facing p. 161), “la primera casa era grande, como de labor (Saínz, facing p. 352), “la gran villa de Móstoles (Saínz, facing p. 353). The illustrations bear witness to the poverty and shabbiness of city and countryside as Nazarín would have seen them. Indeed, Nazarín (both novel title and protagonist) may be considered by some to be a model for the liberation theologian and worker-priest who leaves the main body of the Catholic Church to live an exemplary life among society’s poorest citizens. Needless to say, while deeply appreciated by some of the people whose poverty and ill-treatment he shares, Nazarín, like the Nazarene Christ-figure on whom he is in part modeled,[3] is mocked, scorned, and despised by others. In addition, the authoritarian hierarchs of church, state, and society who fail to understand a life mission so alienated from their own entrenched power positions in the pyramid of society hate the man and all that he represents. For, in Nazarín, the grand pyramid of society is turned upside down and the sad chronicle of life at the bottom, the very rocky and muddy bottom of society, is paraded before the reader’s eyes, page after page, with all its enigmas and injustices.
In reply to the question “What do you think about today’s current affairs, the problems our society is facing?”[4] Nazarín’s answer, written in 1895, could have been made yesterday, or the day before, in front of the television cameras or the radio microphone, by any thoughtful and concerned observer of a working-class city or a developing country. One does not have to travel to the Dominican Republic or to Chiapas in Mexico for insight, because these same words can be heard on the streets of Saint John, New Brunswick, or Halifax, Nova Scotia. They are the words of people’s parties with their socialist agendas, so often categorized and subverted by those in power as left wing, Marxist, and communist views. Yet here, in the mouth of Nazarín, long before the rise of the Communist Party and the Russian and Mexican popular revolutions, the words are modeled on those of Jesus Christ, that subversive pre-Marxist thinker. “The only thing I know is that while what you call culture is advancing, and there’s this so-called progress, and more machinery is being built and some people are getting richer, there are more poor people than ever, and the kind of poverty they live in is blacker, uglier, more desperate” (R/A 20). This particular conversation between the narrator, a journalist friend, and Nazarín ends with a discussion on the nature and extent of justice, a debate that might be heard on a daily basis in rural Canada, amongst the poor of the big cities, and on the lips of America’s blacks or of Canada’s often disregarded indigenous people: “‘And if they brought false charges against you?’ ‘I wouldn’t defend myself. As long as my conscience is clear, false accusations won’t bother me.’ ‘But there are laws and the courts to defend you against criminals, you know.’ ‘I doubt there are things like that. I doubt that they really protect the weak from the strong’” (R/A 21).
The extent of the dialogue and the attribution of radically opposing points of views to speakers who cannot agree on the exact nature of the reality surrounding them come directly from Cervantes’s perspectivismo, a narrative in which each character is given his or her own perfectly justifiable perspective. Furthermore, the reliance upon dialogue together with the enigmatic commentaries of the narrator underline Galdós’s understanding of the captivating power of discourse in its conversational form. With no power structure and with narrator and characters all in a similar quandary as to where reality and truth are to be found, each speaker is entitled to his or her own point of view, and readers must choose for themselves what they consider to be true from a shifting screen of opinions offered as sometimes contradictory facts and often opposing arguments.[5] Within this framework, Nazarín lays hands on a dying child and prays for the child’s recovery. When the child recovers, is it a miracle or not? The mother thinks so, and so do the two prostitutes who act as Nazarín’s companions. But does one miracle make a savior? And does Nazarín’s act of curing really represent a true miracle? And should a so-called “religious” man be encouraged to wander the countryside with harlots as companions? These questions are posed by characters within the text. Galdós presents us with all the available evidence; and we, as readers, must come forward with our own answers.
It is legitimate to ask why Galdós’s novels have not been translated more often from Spanish into English, and the answer can be found with a brief study of the English translation of the first, excruciatingly long sentence in the Spanish original. First, the Spanish: “A un periodista de los de nuevo cuño, de estos que designamos con el exótico nombre de reporter, de estos que corren tras la información, como el galgo a los alcances de la liebre, y persiguen el incendio, la bronca, el suicidio, el crimen cómico o trágico, el hundimiento de un edificio y cuantos sucesos afectan al orden público y a la Justicia en tiempos comunes, o a la higiene en días de epidemia, debo el descubrimiento de la casa de huéspedes de la tía Chanfaina (en la fe de bautismo Estefanía), situada en una calle cuya mezquinidad y pobreza contrastan del modo más irónico con su altisonante y coruscante nombre: calle de las Amazonas” (Saínz 23–24).
Now let us read the first sentence in the English translation: “It’s to a journalist of the new wave that I owe the discovery of Aunt Chanfaina’s (or Stephanie, as she was baptized) boarding house” (R/A 3). Here, in a nutshell, is the problem: Galdós opens the story of Nazarín with a long, beautifully balanced, and mock high-sounding (cómicamente altisonante) single Spanish sentence; the translation, of necessity, is forced to fragment this one sentence into a series of smaller, bite-size chunks. There are four of them in the present translation. In this way the translation achieves sentences of manageable proportions in a more conservative English prose. The English translation now continues: “The journalist was one of those to whom we give the exotic title of reporter. The sort who runs after news like a hound in hot pursuit of a hare, who chases down fires, brawls, suicides, comic or tragic crimes, a collapsing building, in short, everything that affects the law and order of our daily lives or our health in the case of an epidemic. The boarding house was located on a street where indigence and poverty stand out in the most ironic contrast to its lofty, blazing name: Street of the Amazons” (R/A 3).
All vital pieces of information are, of course, included in the translation. Yet somehow the spirit of Galdós’s words is missing. For example, reporter is italicized in both texts; yet “el exótico nombre de reporter” with its use of the English term in italics (and remember that Galdós was writing in 1895 when reporter actually was an exotic and debatable neologism in Spanish) will always be more exotic than the translation “the exotic title of reporter”—translated, after all, in 1997, when reporters are no longer exotic in any language, for we are all accustomed to them in their thousands, on the television, on the radio, in the newspapers. This only illustrates two more obstacles: neologisms and the placing of foreign words in italics. In addition, one must always question how the translators translate what is after all a period piece from one chronotopos (the outskirts of Madrid in 1895) to another more distant one (the USA in 1997). Let us look at the italicized words a little more.
Galdós, like his model Miguel de Cervantes, often permitted his characters to mumble and mash their words, thereby creating humorous and innovative terms that often appear in the text in italics. Thus, the manicómelo (Saínz 51) which becomes a “lunatic insylum” (R/A 11). Clearly, insylum is a mispronunciation of asylum and is curiously comic in its own way. But what is a manicómelo in Spanish? At its most basic level, it is a corruption of manicomio, the lunatic asylum or the madhouse. Beyond that, however, Chanfa is complaining about Nazarín’s inability to feed himself and the consequent necessity that she must feed him: “¡So criatura, más inocente que los que todavía maman!” (Saínz 50) / “Why you’re more innocent even than a baby still sucking on its nipple!” (R/A 11). “¡Y ahora quiere que yo le llene el buche!” (Saínz 50) / “And now you want me to fill up your little beak!” (R/A 11). “Si es Ud. pájaro, váyase al campo a comer lo que encuentre, o pósese en la rama de un árbol, piando, hasta que le entren moscas.” (Saínz 50) / “If you’re a bird, go on out to the fields and eat whatever you can find out there, or go sit on the branch of some tree and chirp until you catch a bunch of flies” (R/A 11). I will underline briefly the curious translation of the very passive “hasta que le entren moscas” (literally, “until flies enter you[r mouth]”) by the much more active “until you catch a bunch of flies” with the comment that such an activity as catching flies would clearly be abhorrent to the extremely non-aggressive personality of Nazarín as established by the narrator.
Now I would like to concentrate on the associative fields of eating and feeding, for the comic neologism manicómeselo fits ever so neatly into these fields. In the first place, maní can be used for peanut in place of the more usual (in Spain) cacahuete. Then, cómeselo is quite possibly a further corruption of cómetelo, meaning almost literally “Eat it!”, and can be associated directly with the well-known phrase con su pan, se lo coma (literally, “let him eat it with his bread”), which is similar to the English proverb “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it!” with its overtones of “Get on with it; it’s your own fault!” In addition, the manicómeselo now takes on the meaning of something that will devour the inmate (literally, “se lo come” / “it eats him up”). This gives the term an extended afterlife, which obviously far exceeds the potential of the translation’s substitution of insylum for asylum. Clearly, based on this example, Galdós’s italicized neologisms are extremely difficult to understand and virtually impossible to translate; but they do add an incredible richness, depth, humor, and vitality to the lower-class dialects present in parts of the original text. An extended analysis of the italicized words in original and translation would be an excellent project for further study.
In the same way that literary creators are bound by the language, time, and place in which they write (Bakhtin’s chronotopos), so translators and readers are bound by similar conditions. By extension, the unilingual readers of Nazarín, be they English speaking or Spanish speaking, will undergo a vastly different experience from a bilingual reader who sees original mirrored in translation and vice versa. This translation of Galdós’s Nazarín, with all its flaws and all its glories (some hits, some misses, in modern parlance), deserves more attention than I can give it here.[6] I would emphasize, however, that it is an important translation, for it introduces the non-Spanish-speaking reader to major themes and issues which are still causing tremendous controversy today: liberation theology, the meaning of sainthood, the nature of justice, the tragedy of poverty, the extreme differences between rich and poor, the trap of technology, and the nature of society’s power structures. Many of these themes (liberation theology is, of course, a more recent phenomenon) were vibrant in Madrid society a full century ago. It is no small criticism of the nature of our own society to say that, in spite of all our apparent progress, poverty, suffering, and cosmic misunderstandings are still with us.
NOTES
[1]
As Peter Bly points out in his excellent analysis of the difficulties inherent
in interpreting the text of Nazarín,
Buñuel’s 1959 black and white film of Nazarín
was set in the Mexico of Porfirio Díaz. See Peter Bly, Pérez Galdós: Nazarín, Critical Guides to Spanish
Texts (London: Grant and Cutler, 1991) 105.
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[2]
All references to the Spanish text are to Benito Pérez Galdós, Nazarín, Prólogo de Federico C. Saínz de
Robles (Madrid: Aguilar, 1960). Henceforth, they will be included in the text
following the editor’s name.
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[3]
See, for example, Alexander A. Parker, “Nazarín,
or the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to Galdós,” Anales Galdosianos 2 (1967): 83–101. As Bly adroitly points out, while
Galdós would have expected practically all readers to detect “the New Testament
and Don Quijote echoes” in Nazarín,
“only those of wider reading could perhaps extend their source hunting to such
works as Brand, or The Life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola”
(96–97).
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[4]
All references to the English translation are to Benito Pérez Galdós, Nazarín, trans. Robert S. Rudder and
Gloria Arjona (Pittsburgh: Latin American Review Press, 1997) 20. Henceforth
all references appear in the text following the abbreviation R/A.
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[5]
Bly presents a very clear analysis of the enigmas presented by the narrator in
the opening chapter entitled “Galdós’s Prologue: Part I as Lesson in Reading
Strategies” (9–24).
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[6]
For example, the phantom service performed by Nazarín when he has been banned
from saying mass by the Church has remarkable parallels with the mass said by
Monsignor Quixote, in similar circumstances, at the end of Graham Greene’s
novel Monsignor Quixote.
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