Two Voices in the Same Sentence

A woman wakes in Madrid with a headache she does not want to explain, and begins, carefully, to account for the previous day. That is how Insolación opens, and almost everything Emilia Pardo Bazán is doing in the novel is already inside it. Asís Taboada is a Galician widow of good family. She has spent the feast of San Isidro at the fair, in the heat, in the crowds, with a man she had no business spending it with. Now she is reconstructing the day for herself, in the tone of a witness who intends to be believed.

Pardo Bazán knew what a reconstruction like that sounds like, because she had spent the decade being asked to account for herself. In 1882 and 1883 she published La cuestión palpitante, the essays that carried Zola’s naturalism into Spanish literary argument and set off a long quarrel about whether such a thing could be reconciled with Catholic Spain. She was a countess, a Galician, a Catholic and a woman, proposing that Spanish novelists look at the body and the social machine with a clinical eye. The novels followed: Los Pazos de Ulloa in 1886, La madre naturaleza in 1887, both set in the Galician country she knew best.

Insolación came in 1889, and it came from Madrid. She was living in the capital by then, inside its dinners and its visiting hours and its new arguments about what women were for. The novel takes the clinical eye she had argued for and turns it on a respectable widow’s desire, which is exactly the sort of specimen the period was happy to examine, provided the specimen stayed quiet. Asís does not stay quiet. She narrates. She is under the lens and holding it at the same time, and she keeps, all the way through, the one thing a case study is not supposed to have: her own intelligence about her own case. Reviewers in 1889 went after the book, and then after her.

That doubleness is the hardest thing in the book to carry into English. Pardo Bazán works in free indirect discourse and mostly declines to mark it. Asís’s social voice, correct and faintly pleased with itself, and the ironic voice underneath it that watches her perform, are not given separate paragraphs or separate quotation marks. They share sentences, and they share them inside company, not only when she is alone. The reader feels the temperature change and cannot always point to the word where it happened.

Inés Bou, who is translating the novel for us, put the principle in her working plan before she had drafted a line of it: the two voices are not two idioms. They are one idiom at two temperatures. An English version that gives Asís an audibly different private register has turned an effect into an explanation. So Bou carries the difference where Pardo Bazán carries it, in word choice, in the length and lean of the sentence, and trusts the reader to hear it.

Diego Pacheco, the Andalusian, speaks with the rhythms and the gallantry of the south, and Pardo Bazán spells that accent straight onto the page, consonants dropped and vowels respelled. The translation does not. English has no way to respell an accent without also making the speaker sound stupid, so the accent is carried instead by what the narrator says about his voice. That is where Pardo Bazán puts it too, whenever she wants us to hear him rather than merely see him. The English has to be warm and physically at ease where Asís is formal, and do it without a costume.

And the fair is not scenery. The route, the food, the particular class geography of who walks where on the feast of San Isidro: Pardo Bazán is precise about all of it, and none of it is there to be admired. It is the pressure Asís is under, made visible.

Ask how many women writing in other languages reach English and you get a number back. A name is more use. Pardo Bazán is a major novelist of nineteenth-century Europe, and for most English readers she is a blank. We are working on that, one book at a time. The one we are working on now is Insolación, which she published in 1889 and subtitled Historia amorosa.

We will have more to say about it when it is ready. If you would like to hear it first, our reader list is at espressopublishing.com/readers.

Idara Crespi
Publisher, Espresso Publishing House