Spanish Stories of the Romantic Era Read online

  Spanish Stories

  of the Romantic Era

  Cuentos españoles

  del Romanticismo

  A Dual-Language Book

  Edited and Translated by

  STANLEY APPELBAUM

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  Mineola, New York

  Copyright

  English translations, Introduction, and footnotes copyright © 2006 by Dover Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition, first published in 2006, contains the complete Spanish texts of twelve stories, reprinted from standard editions (see the Introduction for details on the first publications, etc.), together with new English translations by Stanley Appelbaum, who also made the selection and wrote the Introduction and footnotes.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Spanish stories of the Romantic era = Cuentos españoles del romanticismo : dual-language book / edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum.

  p. cm.

  Contents: The souls in purgatory ; Lady Luck and Mr. Money ; Soldier John / Fernán Caballero—The inn, or, Spain in Madrid / Ramón de Mesonero Romanos—A story of two slaps / Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch—Marrying in haste ; The old Castilian ; Christmas Eve, 1836 / Mariano José de Larra—Nightful in San Antonio de la Florida / Enrique Gil y Carrasco—The green eyes ; Master Pérez, the organist ; Three calendar dates / Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.

  eISBN 13: 978-0-486-12088-1

  1. Short stories, Spanish—Translations into English. 2. Short stories, Spanish. 3. Spanish fiction—19th century—Translations into English. 4. Spanish fiction—19th century. I. Title: Cuentos españoles del romanticismo. II. Appelbaum, Stanley.

  PQ6267.E8S73 2006

  863 ’.010805—dc22

  2005054789

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

  INTRODUCTION

  The Romantic Era in Spain

  Spanish Romantic literature shared many basic features with that of other European countries: an emotional exaltation of the self; a preference for instinct over reason, and inspiration over rules; idealism and mysticism; a love of the wilder aspects of nature, the eccentric, the exotic, and the morbid; a partiality for the (imperfectly understood) Middle Ages as an era of heroism and pageantry; and a renewed appreciation of national folkways, including legends and other lore, as well as naïve piety, and entailing a greater emphasis on regionalism. A writer’s approach might be somber and self-important, but there was also much humor, either hearty or sarcastic.

  Political conservatives celebrated the elements that they saw as being particularly grandiose in Spain’s past, especially the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Liberals worshipped freedom and dreamed of utopias which were then more closely defined, with preciser goals, by the militant socialists toward the end of the nineteenth century.

  Naturally, not every writer of the time was a Romantic, nor could any one Romantic subscribe to each and every Romantic tenet. Indeed, certain writers who are thoroughly identified with Romanticism lampooned elements of the movement which they found excessive, their barbs being aimed chiefly at hangers-on and overeager followers of trends; there are a few examples of such criticism in the stories anthologized here.

  Romanticism began to flourish in Spain much later than in England, Germany, or even France. Its inception is usually dated to 1814, when the German Hispanist Johann Niklaus Böhl von Faber (1770–1836), by then resident in Cádiz, introduced to Spain the great German Romantics’ revaluation of Spanish Golden Age literature and rehabilitated the romancero (the corpus of Spanish medieval and Renaissance narrative ballads) and such dramatists as Lope de Vega and Calderón. In the following years, Romanticism spread, but still under great duress.

  The pan-European post-Napoleonic reaction was championed in Spain by King Fernando VII, who for most of his reign (except for a brief period, 1820–1823, when he had some degree of liberalism imposed upon him, and for his last couple of years, when he partially gave up the struggle) enforced a rigid censorship and drove many of the most eminent writers into exile. By 1832 there was much greater freedom of the press, and the exiles, who had profited greatly by their experiences and contacts in France and England, began to return home. (When Fernando died in 1833, the evil he had done lived after him: without secure constitutional underpinnings, he left his throne to his baby daughter, later Isabel II, under a regency, passing over his already disaffected brother Carlos, who plunged the nation into what would be some forty years of intermittent civil war; the first Carlist War lasted from 1833 to 1839.)

  The 1830s and 1840s were the glory years of Romanticism in Spain. By 1850 the consolidation of the middle class led to a decline in idealism and the beginnings of Realism in fiction, which developed in mixed proportions until its victory in the 1870s. Nevertheless, between 1850 and 1875 there were enough major writers, primarily Bécquer, to constitute an important Postromantic period; Bécquer is well represented in this Dover volume. (To some literary historians, Romanticism was so revolutionary and pervasive a breakthrough that it has never really ended.)

  In the heyday of Spanish Romanticism, 1830–1850, poetry and drama were more significant than prose fiction; many historians even speak of a huge qualitative hiatus in the Spanish novel and shorter fiction between the seventeenth century and the 1870s. This view may well be in need of revision; at any rate, the writers included here have always been highly regarded, and the reputation of some is actually on the upswing.

  A special feature of Spanish Romantic prose is costumbrismo, a celebration, sometimes patronizing, of regional folkways or of everyday life, largely that of the lower classes. Visibly inspired, in the Romantic period, by such older predecessors as Addison and Steele, and by much more recent French practitioners, costumbrismo was also following in an unbroken native Spanish tradition of genial, witty depiction of the ways of common people, from at least Cervantes onward. Costumbrismo, in turn, became a major influence on the important regional novelists and story writers of the later nineteenth century and beyond. The short pieces most characteristic of costumbrista writing, which vary greatly in the extent of their narrative element, are usually divided (not too strictly) into artículos (articles) de costumbres, which tend to be more didactic, satirical, and critical, and cuadros (pictures) de costumbres, which are more cheerful displays of local color. A galaxy of costumbristas, including three authors represented in this volume (Mesonero Romanos, Hartzenbusch, and Gil y Carrasco), contributed to the omnibus work that is considered the crowning achievement of the genre, Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (The People of Spain Painted by Themselves), 1843–1844.

  “Fernán Caballero” (1796–1877)

  “Fernán Caballero” was the masculine pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl von (in Spain: de) Faber, daughter of the above-mentioned scholar who was so influential in bringing Romanticism to Spain. She has been called the initiator in Spain of not only the regional novel (very important in the late nineteenth century), but also the thesis novel of ideological conflict.

  Cecilia was born in Morges (on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva) in 1796; her Spanish mother was also a writer. She went to Germany in 1805 with her father alone, and was educated at a French-language school in Hamburg from 1810 to 1813, when the whole family was reunited in Cádiz, where her father was the German consul. She married young, in 1816; accompanying her husband to Puerto Rico, she began writing there; this first of three husbands died the next year. When she remarried in 1822, it was to a marquess; they lived in a
nd around Seville, which was to be her main gravitational point ever afterward; a street in that city is named for her. Her new social status was too lofty for her to publish her writings with decorum; thus, a few of her major novels remained unpublished for up to two decades after she had written them. Because of this gap in time, she deserves even more credit as a literary pioneer than she generally receives, and the question of whether she was primarily a Romantic or a proto-Realist merits a closer look.

  The author’s second husband died in 1835. Between then and her third marriage, in 1837, Cecilia enjoyed the one great love of her life, for an Englishman. Her third husband underwent severe economic setbacks and killed himself in 1859. Earlier, in 1857, Queen Isabel II had made a gift to Cecilia of a home in the Seville Alcázar, but this was lost when Isabel was driven from the throne in 1868, and the author spent her final Seville years in some need.

  “Fernán Caballero” had already published a few items outside Spain in the early 1840s, but her breakthrough year in Spain was 1849, when she published (in periodical installments; book publications came years later) her novels La gaviota (The Seagull), La familia de Alvareda (The Alvareda Family), and Elia. Some critics have spoken of these novels as series of cuadros de costumbres strung on a makeshift plot. Some of her earliest works were written in French or German, which she then knew much better than Spanish, and were translated into Spanish with, or by, her parents or friends.

  She later wrote more novels, as well as books of Spanish folklore, containing tales, jokes, rhymes, and sayings. The folklore volumes cannot conceivably have been written in any language but Spanish, because they are flavorful and idiomatic, and their language itself is “the message.” Cecilia’s work, gentle and witty, is also didactic and conservative in tone, eschewing ardent sex and inculcating Christian values. It shows a deep affection for Andalusia and its humble, everyday life, striving to detect and record vanishing rural traditions. Her style is simple and clear. In most literary handbooks she is classified along with Alarcón as a pioneer of literary Realism in Spain.

  “Fernán Caballero’s” retellings of Andalusian folktales (which share plots and motifs with those of many other lands) have been singled out for especial praise. One eminent Spanish critic has written: “Her folktales are first-class; nothing better has been done in that line in our country.”

  All three stories in this Dover volume (appearing in the same sequence as in their source) are from Cuentos y poesías populares andaluces (Andalusian Folktales and Popular Poetry; some references add Colección de to the beginning of the title), originally published in Seville in 1859 by the press of the magazine Revista Mercantil (Mercantile Review). The volume comprises sixteen sections, several in the form of dialogues between “Fernán” (the author and folklore investigator) and Uncle Romance (the native informant; tío and tía are affectionate rural terms of address for mature or elderly people, with no reference to family relationships). In the preface to the volume, the author complains (as her contemporary, the great novelist Juan Valera, also did) that no one was collecting folktales in Spain the way that the Grimms and others had done in Germany and elsewhere.

  “Las ánimas” and “Juan Soldado” contain elements that will be very familiar to readers of the Grimms, Andersen, and other folklorists; while the strife between the two title characters in “Doña Fortuna y don Dinero” immediately recalls the Aesopic contest between the wind and the sun, trying to make a wayfarer remove his cloak. “Juan Soldado” strings together a number of different folktale motifs: the footloose discharged soldier, the fearless man in a haunted house that contains hidden treasure, the magic sack, the confounding of the Devil, and the sneaking into heaven.

  The Spanish text is full of all kinds of verbal color: idioms, rhyming proverbs, sayings, and unusual vocabulary, regional, obsolete, or both. Because of this difficulty of vocabulary, a total of ten words or brief phrases in the three stories have been translated conjecturally.

  Ramón de Mesonero Romanos (1803–1882)

  Mesonero Romanos was the foremost author (and, according to some, the initiator) of lighthearted, jocular cuadros de costumbres. Born in Madrid in 1803, he remained all his life an affectionate chronicler of the city, where a street is named after him. He had to take over his father’s successful business at the age of sixteen, and was self-educated, though he never ceased delving into archives and libraries for background material. He began writing during the liberal interlude (1820–1823) in the reign of Fernando VII: in 1822 he began submitting articles to periodicals, and published the volume Mis ratos perdidos (My Spare Time), on Madrid customs, which has been considered the first important example of costumbrismo.

  In 1831, Mesonero Romanos published his Manual de Madrid, a very thorough handbook of the city. The following year, with the pseudonym “El Curioso Parlante” (The Inquisitive Chatterbox), he began the long series of articles that would eventually be known as the first series of Escenas matritenses (Scenes of Madrid). In 1833–1835 he traveled in Spain, France, and England. Back in Madrid in 1835, he became a cofounder of the great literary club (still in existence) the Ateneo (Athenaeum); he served the club as chief librarian from 1837 to 1840. Between 1835 and 1838 there appeared the three volumes of articles called Panorama matritense.

  In 1836 Mesonero Romanos founded his own journal, to which numerous important writers would contribute over the years: the Semanario Pintoresco Español (Spanish Picturesque Weekly). The magazine ran from April 3, 1836, to December 20, 1857, though its founder didn’t manage it for its entire run. It was for that periodical of his own that, between 1836 and 1842, he wrote the second series of Escenas matritenses. In 1842 all the Escenas were published in four volumes, with the Panorama included as the first part. Between 1843 and 1862, Mesonero Romanos continued to write, his pieces being collected in such volumes as Tipos y caracteres (Types and Characters) and Bocetos de cuadros de costumbres (Sketches for Pictures of Folkways).

  Travel books, literary essays, and topographical studies with influential proposals for urban renewal continued to flow from his pen. In 1880 he published an invaluable sourcebook on the Romantic era, Memorias de un setentón (Memories of a Septuagenarian). In his later years he was a literary “elder statesman,” encouraging and advising the up-and-coming writers of Realist and Naturalist fiction, particularly Benito Pérez Galdós.

  Mesonero Romanos, in his cuadros de costumbres, was consciously preserving for posterity disappearing folkways that he considered typically and traditionally Spanish, and threatened by increasing cosmopolitanism. His standpoint is that of a practical-minded, contented (at times even smug) bourgeois; he may sympathize with the destitute, but he never considers them as downtrodden victims of society. His criticism, always mild and benevolent, is sometimes directed at the more extravagant public displays of the Romantic spirit.

  The article, or story, selected here, “La posada o España en Madrid” (in some editions, posada is replaced by parada, which in that case would probably denote a relay station), first appeared in the Semanario Pintoresco Español during July of 1839. In the 1842 publication of the Escenas matritenses (Imprenta de Yenes, Madrid) it was included in Series II. The story contains an immense amount of observation of occupations, costumes, and other folkways from various parts of Spain.

  The character Juan Cochura had already appeared in the author’s cuadro “El recién venido” (The Newcomer), published in his Semanario during August of 1838. There Juan is described as a naïve 25-year-old from the province of Ávila, who cuts short his first trip to Madrid after he is taken in by confidence men and jailed though he has committed no crime.

  What with its rare vocabulary and idioms, its allusions to bygone current events, and its use of various languages (Galician, Catalan, etc.) and pseudodialects in unregulated spelling, the story is a daunting challenge to any translator; this Dover translator readily confesses that about a dozen words or brief phrases have been rendered conjecturally. (The next four authors in
the anthology do not present these problems!)

  Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch (1806–1880)

  Hartzenbusch has won a permanent niche in the history of Spanish letters as the author of Los Amantes de Teruel (The Lovers of Teruel; first performed, 1837), one of the three pinnacles of that nation’s Romantic drama, but his contribution to literature was much more extensive.

  Born in Madrid to a German cabinetmaker, Hartzenbusch was compelled to leave his prestigious Jesuit-run school at age fifteen to take up his father’s trade, but his love for learning never diminished. As a young man he wrote for periodicals, worked as a government shorthand secretary, and clerked at the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library), where he was to become director in 1862! In 1841 he co-founded the Academia Hispano-Alemana, which disseminated German Romantic thought. In 1847 he was elected to the Spanish Academy.

  Hartzenbusch was a prolific playwright (his dramatic work beginning at least as early as 1831); some of his plays were written in collaboration with others, a not unusual custom at the time (in Paris, it was virtually standard practice). He was a significant poet, best remembered today for the 120 verse fábulas he wrote between 1848 and 1861, under the inspiration of Lessing and other German writers of fables. In prose he wrote several short novels, various stories and artículos de costumbres, and a great deal of criticism. He was an important philologist and translator, and a major anthologist and editor of older Spanish classics, contributing learned introductions that are still considered valuable. His prose style is considered meticulous and correct even by those literary historians who deem the general run of Romantic prose to be slovenly.

  The story included here, “Historia de dos bofetones” (in some editions, the last word appears as bofetadas), first appeared sometime in 1839 in a Madrid periodical to which Hartzenbusch contributed repeatedly, El Panorama (full run: March 1838 to September 1841). The earliest volume in which I have found the story included is Obras escogidas de don J. E. Hartzenbusch, published in Baudry’s Librería Europea, Paris, 1850, as Volume XLIX of the “Colección de los mejores autores españoles” (this extremely distinguished series was published between 1838 and 1853).