The Joke Is in the Word

Late one night, a miller finds a three-cornered hat and a scarlet cloak left behind at his property. Their owner is the Corregidor, the magistrate who is the law in the town and the country around it, and he has abandoned them after making a fool of himself. The miller puts them on. Every watchman he passes in the dark bows to him. The office is not the man. It is the hat.

That is the engine of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s The Three-Cornered Hat, a short comic novel from 1874 that a great many people know without knowing they know it. In 1919 Diaghilev turned it into a ballet, with sets by Picasso and music by Manuel de Falla, all castanets and stamping and sudden stillness. The ballet is glorious. It is also a little deaf to the book. What Falla kept was the Spanishness. What he could not dance was the argument.

Because underneath the farce, and it is a real farce, full of jealousy and a wrong bed and a Corregidor soaked to the skin, Alarcón is saying something exact about power. Authority, in this story, is a costume. Take it off the right man and put it on the wrong one, and the deference follows the cloth. He wrote that in a Spain that had lived through revolutions, restorations, and the humbling of a dynasty within living memory. The folk tale knew what it was arguing.

A comedy that precise is a hard thing to carry into another language, because its timing lives in its specifics. This is where the older English versions, competent and warm as they are, let the book down. They smoothed the Corregidor into an “official.” They turned the sweets laid out at the mill into “pastries.” They made the whole legible social world of the novel into pleasant local color, and in the smoothing they sanded off the very edges the jokes are cut on.

Inés Bou, who translated our edition, refused the smoothing. Her governing decision was to keep the words that carry weight in Spanish and lose it in English. So the Corregidor stays the Corregidor, not a magistrate or a governor, because the comedy is this pompous title fixed to this bandy-legged, toothless little man. The forms of address stay too: Tío Lucas and Tía Gabriela, the respectful-familiar titles Andalusian villagers gave working adults, and the one that stopped her cold in Chapter IV, la señá Frasquita, the clipped local feminine that no English word holds. Each keeps its italics and earns a short note. You feel where a person stands the moment they are named.

The food stays as well. The pestiños, the mantecados, the puchero on the fire are not generic sweets and stew. They are what the mill offers, the exact texture of this household’s welcome, and a reader told only “pastries” learns nothing about who these people are. The proverbs stay in Spanish for the same reason. When a character announces, archly, that there are moros en la costa, Moors upon the coast, to mean that the Corregidor’s wife is expecting a child, no English proverb is that proverb. Bou lets it stand and lets the note do the quiet work.

This is the whole case for why we translate these books at all. Not to make a foreign story sound as though it happened in English, but to let an English reader stand inside a world that is fully itself, with its own words for its own things. Frasquita is from the north, and her bare arms and her hair worn up in the Madrid fashion read as a bright foreignness among the modest village women. That is a joke, and a social fact, and it is legible only if the grammar around it is kept whole.

The hat, in this edition, still means what Alarcón meant by it.

Idara Crespi
Publisher, Espresso Publishing House