Meet El Novio de la Muerte/Death’s Groom, back from the tomb (he wasn’t human anyway), and his angel-wolf Canute:

Hear him sing “Agua de los ríos”:

More here, including ¡how Canuto saved Death’s Groom from serpents! ¡the treasure and the skeleton’s ring! and ¡El Novio’s unfortunate relationship with the head of the bað̞a’xoθ paddleboat fleet! Extremadura has […]

Ulysses: “I suppose the people gave him that nickname going about with his tube from one woman to another.” Junius Henri Browne wrote in 1873 that he “gained a much worse reputation [in the US] for licentious stories than he deserved, from the spurious and prurient rubbish that used to be put off on the […]

The monument is a quality marble tomb round about where the sea gate was, on which Habsburg general Josep Moragues’ head hung in a cage for 12 years from 1715-1727, his body having previously been quartered on the Ramblas. This for surrendering on a Bourbon pardon at the end of the War of the Spanish […]

Just before he died, says Cecil Parrott in The bad Bohemian, the author of The good soldier Švejk (that’s Shvake: “No one pronounces it Shvike–not even in Germany”) drafted a letter to the district police:
I, the undersigned, ask respectfully to be kindly given the necessary passport for a stay in Spain (Barcelona, Calle Rosellos [sic: […]

Ferran Mascarell said a couple of months back that
Frankfurt perseguia tres objectius: millorar la presència de la literatura catalana en el món, entendre el paper fonamental de l’edició catalana amb els seus cinc segles d’història al darrere i ensenyar al món l’existència d’una cultura forta, plena i integral. El primer objectiu suposo que ha funcionat, […]

Sez Damià Pons. (Thanks JD)

A short story “El lobo de las sierras” published in The new monthly magazine in 1851 evokes a typical day in the life of a British railway engineer on the Catalan coast (the Mataro-Barcelona line opened in 1848):
It was enough to have disquieted a man of stouter nerves than Tom, who, torn, stupid and intoxicated […]

“En plena disputa per les obres de l’AVE, que amenacen amb danyar l’estructura de la Sagrada Família, Manuel Otaño, un sacerdot jesuïta que treballa al Vaticà, torna a Barcelona per a supervisar les obres del projecte més ambiciós d’Antoni Gaudí. Aviat es veurà embolicat en una intriga que girarà entorn d’un manuscrit oposat que podria […]

This is a crucial element in what remains of French realist writing in the 1920s and 30s, which, for this reason and others, was more popular than praised. Based on some reading and no maths, I would venture that in a book of (x + y) pages (not counting the open letter of support from […]

In 1927 the Catalan literary researcher and writer, Ramon Miquel i Planas (1874-1950; henceforth MiP) wrote a little book, published in a bibliophile edition, called La llegenda del llibreter assassí. In it he reflects on the origins and recycling of “Le bibliomane ou le nouveau Cardillac”, an anonymous tale published as if true in 1836 […]

Someone’s passed me the English edition, with the usual gibberish-infested flap. The Scotsman describes it as having “a dramatic tension that so many contemporary novels today seem to lack,” while Scotland on Sunday says, “The translation by Lucia Graves is excellent, mixing formality with poetry, so the rambling prose occasionally sparkles with lovely phrases … […]

I’ve always wondered where Spanish judges, particularly local ones, find justification for their habit of ignoring judicial precedent and ruling whatever the hell they feel like. Having read Azorín’s Los pueblos (1904) yesterday evening, I think I’m getting closer.
It contains the story of Don Alonso, a rural judge in Ciudad Real, who is presented […]

Apparently the four corners of a square reel used in this Huesca village in hemp yarn production represent four horses bound for France. I wonder which horses these were: those that awaited the Duke of Calabria, when he sought with three others to flee the court of King Ferdinand of Aragon, or others? (If folksy […]

Ramón J Sender’s La tesis de Nancy is the account of an affair between strawman and strawwoman, in which Curro, Work, a part-gypsy ingénu-cynic from the Seville town of Alcalá de Guadaira “who devotes himself to the resale of bullfight tickets in the summer and to wine-tasting for the rest of the year” leaves Dutch […]

Some great location- and Catalan actor-spotting fun at Méliès last night, where we saw Tom Tykwer’s version of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (buy the novel in the USA or the UK). Easy enough: the torture-turned-orgy scene in El Pueblo Español; the various use of Girona’s Pujada Sant Domènec, with the palace arch and the view up […]

Mr B may be between jobs, but there’s no end to the man’s industry. Here he is in action up at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
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“The world is inhabited by two categories of people,” anticipated officer Fumero to himself as he slunk after the couple through the Plaza Real and into the Calle de […]

Nick Lloyd enters 2007 a feedless and no doubt unrepentant Luddite, but he’s got an excellent story over at Iberianature (13/12/2006) about José Sideburns and his lynx waistcoat, re which:
Francesc Candel’s Han matado un hombre, han roto el paisaje (Antonio Rabinad recently sold me a copy at Sant Antoni) derives its dramatic strength in part […]

I continue to think “mystifications” is a better translation than “hoaxes” of mixtificaciones. Gerald Howson in The flamencos of Cadiz Bay writes of a 1950s carnaval pregonero preaching against the use of “mixtifications, modernisms and orfeonic banalities” in carnival songs. He wouldn’t have liked Silvester Paradox either.

Abdou Diouf, “Secretary-General of la Francophonie and former President of Senegal”, responding to Chirac in the former organisation’s first meeting outside France, in a Ceausescu palace in Bucharest:
the notion of culture from a US standpoint is understood to mean entertainment rather than the expression of peoples’ souls and identities.
I’ve read quite a lot of twentieth […]

I’ve been translating quite a lot of elderly Flemish over the past few months. Here’s an excerpt from some manuscript memoirs found in the municipal archives of Ditverstaanzetochniet:
An ivory trader on the Congo River has been suffering severe depression as a result of harrassment by an inquisitive steamboat captain speaking defective French. He decides that […]

For residents of Barcelona’s old town an affair way up in Sarrià or Sant Gervasi is probably the best way of surviving the summer. Ensure beforehand that your new friend’s flat is high in a modern block overlooking gardens, and you can enjoy coffee and parrots (barbecued, if you’re lucky) on the balcony before drifting […]

This fragment from Pío Baroja’s memoir, Desde la última vuelta del camino, reminded me of much contemporary Barcelona graffiti:
As we approach Reinosa the fog begins to clear and we see the lights of the village shining.
I awake in the morning and lean over the hotel balcony. A gray day; foggy and cold, in the mountain […]

This is the promised translation of the chapter in Pío Baroja’s serialised novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) in which Silvester takes up with an English conman, quack, amateur pugilist and exponent of inventions such as the translatoscope called Macbeth. The source is […]

Arturo Pérez-Reverte sez (via Órdago):
As I type this I still don’t know whether the ultranationalists will succeed in making Catalan the only official and obligatory language in the new statute of autonomy. I should add that I neither know nor care, and that everyone should speak how he facking wants. But the problem is […]

Nightfall in Madrid, which was apparently notorious (Pérez Galdós, Rosalía, ca 1872):
In the house a sepulchral silence reigned, but outside the noise was unbearable: carriages came and went without cease; a girl cried the lottery every five minutes, informing the public, “Tomorrow’s the last day to get your tickets. 10 reals for a décimo [tenth […]

MJ suggests that “adventures, devices and hoaxes” is a better translation of “aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones” than “adventures, inventions and mystifications.” I think that’s a bit hard on C19th Spain’s greatest scientist ;o)

Re shepherds, Pío Baroja says that in the Navarre village inhabited by Silvester Paradox, hero of The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox (Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox, 1901) that the local guardians of public order were called ministers (ministros). (Silvestre Paradox is very strange and very funny. It’s a disgrace that […]

Were Zapatero to read the Bible as thoroughly as we Carpathian Independents, he’d be in a better position to understand the significance of the first photo-album of his glorious Alliance of Civilisations: the crowds sent to die in a desert in connivance with a brutal regime, the bloody stigmata on the hands of those who […]

Unlike Carlos, I’m actually rather fond of Albacete, and not just because its ugliness is on a smaller scale than Birmingham’s. Although generally more energy tends to be devoted to damnation than to praise, I found out the other night, flicking through a book called Historia de la provincia de Albacete, that I’m not the […]

Thanks for the concerned mails. The cooperative gave us the day off, so I’m able to report that, far from being drunk or dead, I am in fact drownded, and that neither in the Jesus Sea, nor in the Odys-sea, but in the rippling Manchegan earthsea, where gypsies wear latex and smell of Eau de […]

In Amor se escribe sin hache (Amor is written without H, 1929), “an almost cosmopolitan novel,” Enrique Jardiel Poncela describe Birmingham as “the Albacete of the United Kingdom.” Not to be outdone, José Martínez Azorín (who also gave the Generation of 98 its name) baptised Albacete “the New York of La Mancha.” That all […]

Seeing hordes of plump Barcelonans engaged in public Tai-chi–imagine Jackie Chan on lard–and reading of the dreadful internal purges inflicted by Johannes Itten–who seems to have believed himself a Tibetan monk–on Bauhaus students before the parties started, I remembered that I was going to translate a bit more Aub’s Campo cerrado. So here, at top […]

“The Parallel has tree faces,” writes Max Aub in Campo cerrado, “day, night, and Sunday morning.” The Parallel–crammed with artistes and whores–was a key location in the rise of the anarchist gangsters for whom Orwell fought, yet the Church of England’s favourite anarchist seems to have missed it and various other crucial locations on the […]

Brits tend to see Trafalgar (search) as the stage on which British naval hegemony was established. The French official view, on the other hand, is that it is just another anniversary. For some Spaniards, meanwhile, apart from being a reminder of the perils of entrusting project management to the French, it recalls imperial glory (we’re […]

One of the surprises of Sergio Vila-Sanjuán and Sergi Doria’s Passejades per la Barcelona literària (“Walks in literary Barcelona”) is that it ignores Max Aub, whose Campo cerrado, the first part of a six-volume account of the war, is probably the best fictionalised version of the period leading to the events of July 1936 in […]

I did a little customised walk for some people this morning, taking in planned and unplanned (ie gypsy shanty and troglodyte) housing developments at the point where Barcelona crests and breaks on the Collserola ridge, and ending with drinks at my favourite spouse-swapping club. We started amid the tower blocks of airy, light Nou Barris. […]

I recently referred to Un deliri de mar, an abysmal novel–it’s about a dreamy descent into the chasms and crevices of a drained Med–by Josep M Miquel i Vergés. Un deliri was considered unpublishable by the author’s book-trade friends 50 years ago but, in the current rush of publicly funded patriotism, has been brought out, […]

Re chav, here From a lexicon of flamenco song terms derived from Caló and thieves’ dialects (germanías):

Mark Liberman is being nasty to our beloved intellectuals, most of whom we manage to ignore most of the time. His frustration may arise from a misunderstanding of the role of the intellectual in European society, which is something like that of a Catholic bishop in the States. I think I recall somewhere in Campo […]

Check out and contribute to Joan Ducròs’ compilation of literary extracts based in Barcelona (via Carles Mirò). It includes inexplicable exclusions from a similarly themed book I read recently (eg Max Aub), and I’m sure it will shortly add great stuff like self-confessed con-artist Jan Cremer’s encounter with the Guardia Civil and the prostitutes of […]