The Hive (La colmena, 1950) by Camilo José Cela is a postmodern narrative in fragments by a writer who won both the Nobel prize and the Premio Cervantes. The Spanish journalist Arturo Barea, who advised on the first translation (by J. M. Cohen), described it as a “social document” and a “true work of art”. Though Cela belonged to the “ruling caste” and fought for the Nationalists during the Civil War, Barea still considered him the best writer to emerge in the postwar era.
The action takes place over three days in 1943. War rages in Europe, food is scarce and serenos (night watchmen) are guarding the streets of Madrid. Postwar madrileños are hungry, frustrated and desperate. The novel opens in Doña Rosa’s café, which represents Madrid on a small scale: everyone knows everyone else and their fates are intertwined. The proprietress stands in for the ruling class: greedy and stingy, she cannot be challenged. Like a film director on a dolly gliding from one scene to another, Cela handles his cast of 300 characters with elegant ease.
The Hive remains the most important novel about the “hunger years” after the Civil War. “People have to eat”, says Celestino, who owns a bar and sleeps on a bed made of ten chairs pulled together, “and if they can’t find a job, then they need to do what they can to get by” – selling cigarettes and bread on the black market, or resorting to prostitution. The Hive’s erotic scenes, viewed as an “attack on morality”, earned the book an immediate ban in Spain, so it was first published in Buenos Aires. This new edition from New York Review Books includes parts cut from the original text that have never before appeared in English.
Barea described The Hive as a difficult novel to translate because it contained idioms and “Madrid slang terms” familiar only to native madrileños like himself. James Womack’s new translation employs more modern and neutral language. The famous Spanish proverb “Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos” (Breed crows and they’ll take out your eyes) becomes “You’re nice to someone and then it comes back to bite you”. Womack, a poet who lived in Madrid for ten years, brings a freshness to Cela’s poetic prose and challenging locution. In a scene that demonstrates the challenge a poet in Doña Rosa’s café shuffles words in an attempt to write a poem. Only someone who understands the process and potential frustration of poetry writing could so skilfully find rhyming words in English and reorganize them into semi-complete stanzas, matching the original ones in Spanish. Some readers won’t understand all Cela’s references – the “1903 reforms”, for instance – but many of the novel’s first readers wouldn’t have understood them either. The unfamiliarity doesn’t hinder the reading.
Cela was not the only writer to fall foul of censorship laws that were passed in 1938, supposedly as a temporary measure, and lasted well into the 1960s. Barea, living in exile in England, couldn’t publish his own novel La raíz rota in Spain, although a translation, The Broken Root, came out in the United States in 1951. Luis Martín-Santos’s Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence) appeared in 1962 after the removal of seventeen offending pages.
Unlike his peers, Cela had close ties to the regime. He worked as a civil servant in Franco’s government and even as a censor in 1943, despite having a book of his own (The Family of Pascual Duarte) banned that year. Documents discovered after his death in 2002 show that during the 1960s he informed on other writers who believed him to be a fellow dissident. Whether he took the censor’s post because he thought it might improve his chances of getting published, or for ideological reasons, is still a matter of debate in Spain. Franco’s press director, Juan Aparicio López, apparently hoped that Cela might help to improve the regime’s image, but the writer refused to co-operate, later declaring: “They lie who want to disguise life with the crazy mask of literature”.
Whatever Camilo José Cela’s principles were – assuming he had any, or abided by those he had – his seesawing between sides shows that he wanted neither to be the voice of the right nor the champion of the left. He wanted to write and to be read, and the main character in The Hive – Martín Marco, a writer and an outcast — perhaps reflects that flexible approach. “Write for them, write for their papers”, Marco says. “What I want is something to eat.”
Z. J. Jawad is a graduate student and language instructor. Her particular interest is the literature of twentieth-century Spain
Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS at the TLS Shop
The post The buzz of Madrid appeared first on TLS.
