FOUND IN TRANSLATION

Selected by
Frank Wynne

About Found in Translation

‘Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.’ —George Steiner

It is impossible to overstate the influence world literatures have had in defining each other. No culture exists in isolation; all writers are part of an intertwining braid.

Found in Translation brings together one hundred glittering diamonds of world literature, celebrating not only the original texts themselves but also the art of translation. From Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan, by way of China and Brazil, some of the greatest voices of world literature come together in thunderous chorus. If the authors include prize winners, some of the translators are equally famous – D. H. Lawrence and Edith Wharton translate classic Italian short stories, and Victoria Hislop has taken her first venture into translation with the only short story written by Constantine P. Cavafy.

This exciting, original and brilliantly varied collection of stories takes the reader literally on a journey: it’s the perfect way to travel the globe, and to travel in time.

CONTENTS

In memory of David Miller

INTRODUCTION

I have a memory of the first short story that made an impression on me that is so vivid, so visceral that the hair on the back of my neck still prickles thirty years later. I would have been fourteen, perhaps fifteen, when I read it, sitting in Miss Collins’ French class, in Sligo Grammar School. She had told us to read “En mer” by Guy de Maupassant, a brief story, no more than five pages long, whose sparse, plain language was just within the grasp of our rudimentary French. It is the simple story of an accident aboard a fishing trawler manned by two brothers. On their return to port, the net is almost lost in a heavy squall and the younger brother’s arm is trapped between the ropes and the gunwale. To save the arm would mean cutting the rope and losing the valuable net. The elder brother instead drops anchor and, eventually, the fishermen manage to free the arm, now shattered and horribly mangled. Gangrene quickly sets in. I can still remember sitting at my desk, reading the sentence where the younger brother “… began to cut his own arm. He cut carefully, painstakingly, slicing through the last tendons with a blade as sharp as a razor; soon there was nothing but a stump.” I apologise for this spoiler, but an even greater emotional shock awaits the reader in the final sentences.

This was the story that first offered me a glimpse of the unique power of the short story. Maupassant’s tone is detached and unemotional, something that makes the horror all the more devastating. I began to devour short stories wherever I could find them – I remember the profoundly unsettling feeling of reading Ian McEwan’s stories in First Love, Last Rites, and my first encounters with John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor. Long before I was fortunate enough to stumble into a career as a translator – or had an inkling of what such a peculiar shapeshifter might be – translators introduced me to other masters of the genre: to Chekhov and Pushkin, Borges and Calvino. I discovered that a short story has the matchless ability to capture a mood or a moment, to halt time, to suspend the commonplace and imbue everyday objects with startling power. A short story can conjure a whole world in a handful of pages, it can be poignant, tragic, funny or surreal, it can leave a reader tearful, terrified or inexplicably serene, it can be as fleeting and unfinished as lives glimpsed from a moving train or as forensically precise as an autopsy report. In the words of the great American writer, Walter Mosley: “A good short story asks a question that can’t be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.”

Although every language, as it emerges, develops an oral tradition of storytelling intended to entertain or edify – countless anecdotes, parables and fables that range from the Book of Job to the folk tales told by Scheherazade to Sultan Shahriyar – the short story as we know today is the most recent literary genre. It begins to flourish in the nineteenth century – almost three hundred years after the novel – spurred by the rise of literacy in industrialised countries and the appearance of magazines and periodicals eager to publish shorter fictions. As William Boyd succinctly puts it: “The short story arrived fully fledged in the middle of the 19th century and by its end, in the shape of Anton Chekhov, had reached its apotheosis.”

Even taking this narrow definition of a short story, the task of selecting one hundred from the countless stories translated from any language, from any country is – to say the least – a daunting task. So, when I was asked to edit this anthology I was both preposterously excited and utterly terrified. Obviously, it is impossible to read every story; how then do you decide when you have read enough? Since an introduction is usually the last part of a book to be written, I now know the answer: you will never have read enough.

From the outset, I decided that I wanted to cast my net as widely as possible, to offer a glimpse of as many countries and cultures, as many languages as would fit between these covers and simultaneously to try to chart a course from the seventeenth century to short masterpieces of the twenty-first century. The usual suspects are here – the Russians, the French and the Germans who (with the British and the Americans) dominated the short story form for almost a century – but there are also stories from countries as varied as Guinea and Vietnam, and stories translated from Azerbaijani and Gikuyu. There are a dozen writers in these pages who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature and others who are all but unknown outside their homelands.

These, then, are the writers. But with the exception of those few authors who have translated their own work (Isak Dinesen, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), the words you are reading are those of translators. If, as Susan Sontag says, translation is “the circulatory system of the world’s literatures”, then translators are the beating heart that makes it possible for stories to flow beyond borders and across oceans. Their task is as simple as it may seem impossible: to quote Günter Grass, “Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.” It is not a matter of finding equivalent words (since there is never an exact equivalence), but of weighing the weight and heft of words while striving to preserve the cadence and the rhythm of a sentence, to reinvent a pun, to produce a voice that lives on the page. Like a pianist transforming a written score into a performance of the Goldberg Variations, or an actor taking a play and becoming Hedda Gabler, a translator must interpret and perform, while hewing as closely as possible to the shape of the original. It is a process that is thrilling and frustrating, often challenging and always rewarding. The debt we owe to translators often goes unacknowledged; we talk about having read Tolstoy or Proust when actually we have read Constance Garnett or C.K. Scott Moncrieff. We talk about the style of García Marquez or Murakami, but the style we so admire owes much to Edith Grossman or Jay Rubin. All literature is a continuum, an intertwining of voices and languages, of dialects, and it is impossible to imagine the evolution of the English novel without the availability of translations. As Milan Kundera says: “… it was to Rabelais that Laurence Sterne was reacting, it was Sterne who set off Diderot, it was from Cervantes that Fielding drew constant inspiration, it was against Fielding that Stendhal measured himself, it was Flaubert’s tradition living on in Joyce, it was through his reflection on Joyce that Hermann Broch developed his own poetics of the novel, and it was Kafka who showed García Marquez the possibility of departing from tradition to ‘write another way’.”1

Some years ago, the British novelist David Mitchell co-translated The Reason I Jump with his wife Keiko Yoshida. Interviewed about the experience, he said: “The exercise has confirmed my long-held suspicion that my translators are three times cleverer than me, with a better command of English as well as the ‘into-language,’ plus a knowledge of the mysterious art and science that is translation itself. As a writer I can be bad, but I can’t be wrong. A translator can be good, but can never be right. Translators are jugglers, diplomats, nuance-ticklers, magistrates, word-nerds, self-testing lie detectors, and poets. Translators rock.”

Every anthology, by its nature, is subjective, yet none is truly the work of a single editor. Instead, it is the result of countless conversations and squabbles with friends who champion a particular story or author, with readers who passionately insist that X is the finest short story writer who ever lived and others equally adamant that X is meretricious and wildly overrated. It is impossible to overstate the debt I owe to the editors, readers, writers, and especially to the fellow translators who have guided me. In reading the stories recommended to me, I rediscovered the thrill of finding voices that are new to me, and the ineffable pleasure of rediscovering authors (often in new translations). Editing an anthology, I have discovered, is a microcosm of a reading life; it is a journey filled with startling finds and occasional disappointments. An anthology is a miniature library of stories that one particular editor feels everyone needs to read. But just as space on bookshelves is limited, so too are the pages of any collection. The final choice presented is inescapably personal and, like the lists of 100 Greatest Novels of All Time beloved of Sunday supplements that immediately trigger family feuds, Facebook rants and disbelieving wails, every anthology is bound to frustrate and infuriate by some of its choices.

I have never much liked the word “anthology”; to my ear, it has a textbook ring of authority at odds with the curious cabinet of wonders that make up any collection. But I have always loved the old English term “rattle-bag” (famously a title used by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes); it has the clank and clatter of things found, scavenged, unearthed and retrieved, all jostling between the covers, clamouring for attention. But however modest its intentions, every collection aspires to the ideal described by Robert Graves:

A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.

FRANK WYNNE, 2018

1 From The Curtain translated by Linda Asher

“A short story is the ultimate close-up
magic trick – a couple of thousand words
to take you around the universe or
break your heart.”

—NEIL GAIMAN

THE GLASS GRADUATE

Miguel de Cervantes

Translated from the Spanish by C. A. Jones

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547 (assumed)–1616) is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language, and the greatest novelist of all time. His major work, Don Quixote, is considered the first modern novel, a classic of Western literature, and is regarded among the best works of fiction ever written. His influence on the Spanish language has been so great that the language is often called la lengua de Cervantes (“the language of Cervantes”). Don Quixote has been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible. All the existing portraits of Cervantes were based on a brief description of himself in one of his own novels. A boat on which Cervantes was sailing was captured by Algerian pirates and he was imprisoned in Algiers for five years. After four unsuccessful escape attempts, he was eventually bailed out by his parents, who clubbed together with a religious order to raise a handsome ransom for his return. Cervantes was an inveterate dueller: the first written record of his activities is a warrant for his arrest in 1569 issued after he wounded his opponent. In fact, his third and final stint in prison was occasioned by the death of a man following a duel. Cervantes was shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the arm, with a harquebus – a forerunner of the musket – during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

Two gentlemen students were walking along the banks of the Tormes, when they found, asleep beneath a tree, a lad of some eleven years of age, in peasant dress. They sent a servant to wake him, and when he awoke, they asked him where he came from and what he was doing asleep in that deserted place. The lad replied that he had forgotten the name of his birthplace, and that he was going to the city of Salamanca to look for a master who, in exchange for his services, would give him the opportunity to study. They asked him if he could read, to which he said that he could, and write as well.

‘So that it is not poor memory’, said one of the gentlemen, ‘that has made you forget the name of your country.’

‘Whatever the reason,’ answered the lad, ‘no one shall know the name of my country or my parents until I can bring honour to them both.’

‘And in what way do you propose to honour them?’ asked the other gentleman.

‘By the fame I win through my studies,’ replied the boy, ‘because I have heard that even bishops start off as men.’

This reply made the two gentlemen decide to accept him into their service, and take him along with them, so they did, giving him a chance to study according to the customary way with servants in that university. The lad said he was called Thomas Rodaja, whereby his masters inferred, from his name and dress, that he must be the son of some poor peasant. A few days later they dressed him in black, and after a few weeks Thomas showed signs of such extraordinary talent, serving his masters so faithfully, punctually and diligently that, although he never failed in any way to pursue his studies, he seemed to be solely occupied in serving them; and since a servant who gives good service gets treated well, Thomas Rodaja became his masters’ companion, and no longer their servant. Eventually, in the course of the eight years he was with them, he became so famous in the university by reason of his keen intelligence and remarkable talents, that he won the esteem and affection of people of every kind. His principal study was law, but he was even more outstanding in the humanities; and he possessed such an astoundingly good memory, illuminated with such good judgement, that he became famous alike for both qualities.

The time came at last when his masters completed their studies and went off to their home, which was in one of the finest cities in Andalusia. They took Thomas off with them, and he stayed with them for a few days, but as he was anxious to return to his studies and to Salamanca, whose charms make everyone who has enjoyed the pleasure of living there determine to go back, he asked his masters’ leave to return. They, being kind and generous, gave him leave, setting him up with the means to support himself for three years.

He thanked them, said good-bye, and left Málaga – for this was where his masters lived. As he was coming down the Zambra hill, on the road to Antequera, he met a nobleman on horseback, in splendid travelling clothes, with two servants also on horseback. He joined him and found out that they were going the same way; they shared lodgings, chatted about various things, and Thomas soon gave signs of his unusual talent and the gentleman of his magnificent and courtly bearing. He said that he was an infantry captain in the King’s Guard, and that his ensign was recruiting in the Salamanca area. He praised the soldier’s life, and gave him a vivid picture of the beauty of the city of Naples, the delights of Palermo, the prosperity of Milan, the banquets in Lombardy, and the splendid food in the inns. He gave a delightful and exact account of the way they shouted, ‘Here, landlord’, ‘This way, you rogue’, ‘Let’s have the maccatella, the polastri and the macaroni’. He praised to the skies the soldier’s free life and the easy ways of Italy; but he said nothing to him about the cold of sentry duty, the danger of attacks, the horror of battles, the hunger of sieges, the destruction of mines, and other things of this kind, which some consider to be the extra burdens of a soldier’s life, when in fact they are the main part of it. In short, he told him so many things and in such an attractive way, that our Thomas’s judgement began to waver, and his will to be set on that way of life, where death is always so near at hand.

The captain, whose name was Don Diego de Valdivia, delighted with Thomas’s good bearing, talent and free and easy manner, begged him to go with him to Italy, if he was interested in seeing it. He offered him his table and even a commission as ensign, a post which the present holder was about to give up. Thomas didn’t need much pressing to take up the offer, and quickly persuaded himself that it would be a good thing to see Italy and Flanders and various other lands and countries. After all, travel makes men wise, and at the most he would spend three or four years which, considering his youth, would not be enough to prevent his returning to his studies. And thinking that everything would turn out as he wished, he told the captain that he was happy to go off with him to Italy, but only on condition that he need not take any commission or enlist as a soldier, for he did not want to be obliged to follow the flag. The captain told him that enlisting would not make any difference except that it would have the advantage of enabling him to enjoy the allowances and payments the company might receive, because he would give him leave whenever he requested it. But Thomas replied, ‘That would be going against my conscience and against yours, captain; and so I would rather go as a free agent than be under an obligation.’

‘Such a scrupulous conscience’, said Don Diego, ‘is more becoming to a monk than a soldier; but in any case, we shall go together.’

They got to Antequera that night and, by spending long periods on the road, in a few days they reached the place where the company was duly assembled. It was about to set out again for Cartagena, intending, with four other companies, to put up at such places as they should come across. Thomas took due note of the authority of the commissaries, the bad temper of some of the captains, the importunity of the billeting officers, the keenness of the paymasters, the complaints of the townspeople, the trading of passes, the insolence of the recruits, the quarrels of the tavern-keepers, the vast amount of excess baggage, and finally the way one more or less had to do all those things which he saw and disliked so much.

Thomas was now got up in all the finery of a soldier, having thrown aside his student garb, and was dressed to kill, as they say. He got rid of all his books with the exception of a copy of the Hours of our Lady, and a Garcilaso without commentary, which he carried in his pockets. They got to Cartagena more quickly than he would have wished, because life in lodgings is easy and has plenty of variety, and every day one comes across new and pleasing things. At Cartagena they embarked on four galleys going to Naples, and Thomas Rodaja was struck by the strange life that goes on in those floating houses, where most of the time one is pestered by the bedbugs, robbed by the galley slaves, annoyed by the sailors, gnawed by the mice and worn out by the heavy seas. He was terrified by the great squalls and storms, especially in the Gulf of Lyons, where they had two, one of which drove them as far as Corsica, while the other brought them back to Toulon in France. In short, deprived of sleep, soaked to the skin and hollow-eyed, they reached the beautiful city of Genoa. Disembarking in its sheltered harbour, they visited a church, and then the captain with all his companions came to an inn, where they forgot all about the storms of the past in the merry-making of the present.

There they became acquainted with the smooth Trebbiano, the full-bodied Montefiascone, the strong Asprino, the generous Greek wines Candia and Soma, the great Five Vineyards, the sweet and gentle Vernaccia and the rough Centola, the lowly Roman wines never being allowed a place among these lordly creatures. And when mine host had gone through all these different wines, he volunteered to bring in, without recourse to trickery or sleight of hand, the genuine Madrigal, Coca, Alaejos and Cuidad Real (which deserves to be called Imperial rather than Royal) which is sacred to the god of laughter; he offered Esquivias, Alanis, Cazalla, Guadalcanal and Membrilla, not forgetting Ribadavia and Descargamaría. In short, our host named and offered them more wines than Bacchus himself can have had in his vaults.

Our good Thomas was also fascinated by the fair hair of the girls of Genoa, the elegance and noble bearing of the men and the remarkable beauty of the city, whose houses are set on its hills like diamonds in gold. The next day all the companies which were to go to Piedmont disembarked; but Thomas did not want to go on this journey, but to go overland from there to Rome and Naples, which he did. He resolved to come back via the great city of Venice, through Loretto to Milan and then to Piedmont, where Don Diego de Valdivia said he would meet him, if they hadn’t already been carried off to Flanders, as rumour said they might.

Thomas took his leave of the captain a couple of days later, and within five days reached Florence, having first seen Lucca, a small but very well-appointed city in which Spaniards are better received and entertained than in other parts of Italy. He was delighted with Florence, both because of its splendid situation and its cleanness, magnificent buildings, cool river and quiet streets. He was there for four days, and then set off for Rome, the queen of cities and mistress of the world. He visited its shrines, worshipped its relics and marvelled at its great size; and just as one realizes the greatness and ferocity of the lion by its claws, so he came to realize the greatness of Rome by its marble ruins, its statues, damaged or intact, its broken archways and ruined baths, its magnificent porticos and great amphitheatres, and by its famous and sacred river, which always fills its banks with water and blesses them with the countless relics of the bodies of martyrs which have been buried there; by its bridges, whose arches are like eyes looking at each other, and by its streets whose names alone make them superior to those of every other city in the world: the Via Appia, the Via Flaminia, the Via Julia, and others like them. But he was no less amazed by the way its hills were laid out within the boundaries of the city: the Caelian, the Quirinal and the Vatican, with the other four, whose names testify to the greatness and majesty of Rome. He was also impressed by the pomp of the College of Cardinals, the majesty of the Supreme Pontiff, the mass and variety of peoples and nations. He saw and took careful note of it all. And when he had gone the rounds of the Seven Churches, and made his confession to a penitentiary, and kissed His Holiness’s feet, he decided to go off to Naples, loaded with Agnuses and beads. As it was unsettled weather, which made it dangerous to leave or enter Rome overland, he went off to Naples by sea, where he added to the delight of seeing Rome that of seeing Naples, a city which in his opinion, and in that of everyone who has seen it, is the best in Europe and even in the world.

From there he went off to Sicily, and saw Palermo, and then Messina. He was favourably impressed by the situation and beauty of Palermo, by the port of Messina, and by the abundance of the whole island, which is justly and truthfully called the granary of Italy. He went back to Naples and to Rome, and from there he went to Our Lady of Loretto, in whose holy shrine he did not see any walls at all, because they were all covered with crutches, shrouds, chains, shackles, manacles, switches of hair, wax busts, paintings and altar pieces, which gave testimony to the innumerable favours received by so many from God’s hand through the intercession of His divine mother, to whose holy image He chose to give power and authority by many miracles, as a reward for the reverence which is shown to her by those who have adorned the walls of her house with these signs of devotion. He saw the very room and spot which witnessed the most exalted and important charge ever witnessed, though not comprehended, by the heavens, the angels, and all the dwellers of eternity.

From there, embarking at Ancona, he went to Venice, a city which if Columbus had never lived would be unmatched by any in the world. Thanks be to heaven and to the great Hernando Cortés, who conquered the great city of Mexico, whereby this great city of Venice came to have something of a rival. These two famous cities are alike in that their streets are all water; the European one is the wonder of the old world; the American one, the marvel of the new. Its richness seemed to him to know no limits, and the way it was governed seemed a model of prudence, its situation impregnable, its prosperity vast, its surroundings delightful. In short, the whole and all the parts deserve the reputation they have in every part of the globe, and to which its famous arsenal, which is the place where the galleys, together with countless other craft, are made, adds even further fame.

The delights and pastimes our traveller found in Venice were nearly as dangerous as those of Calypso, for they almost made him forget his original intention. But after he had been there a month, he came back by way of Ferrara, Parma and Piacenza to Milan, that Vulcan’s forge and envy of the kingdom of France; a city of which it is said that they only have to think of something for it to be done. The size of the city and its great church and the marvellous abundance of everything necessary for human life are truly magnificent. From there he went off to Asti, and got there just a day before the regiment was leaving for Flanders. He was very well received by his friend the captain, and in his company went over to Flanders, and to Antwerp, a city no less worthy of admiration than those he had seen in Italy. He saw Ghent and Brussels, and he saw that the whole country was preparing to take up arms to go out on campaign the following summer. Having fulfilled the desire which prompted him to see what he had seen, he decided to go back to Spain and to complete his studies at Salamanca. It was no sooner said than done, to the great sorrow of his comrade, who begged him, as they parted, to let him know how he got on with his journey, how he was and what happened to him. He promised to do as he asked, and returned to Spain through France, without seeing Paris, since there was fighting going on there. He finally reached Salamanca, where he was warmly welcomed by his friends, and with the help they gave him he continued his studies until he finally graduated as a licenciate in Law.

It so happened that at that time there came to the city a certain lively lady who was up to all the tricks. Everybody rushed into the trap and fell for the decoy, and not one of the lads failed to pay her a call. They told Thomas that this lady said she had been in Italy and Flanders, and just to see if he knew her, he went to call on her. The result of this visit was that as soon as she saw Thomas she fell in love with him. He, not realizing it, would not have gone to her house unless he had been marched off to it by someone else. In the end she declared her love for him and offered him all she had. As he was more devoted to his books than to anything else, he did not respond at all to the lady’s fancy, and she, seeing herself scorned, and, as she thought, hated, and realizing that she could not conquer the rock of Thomas’s will by ordinary means, decided to look for other methods which seemed to her more effective and capable of achieving what she wanted. So, taking the advice of a Moorish woman, she gave Thomas one of those things they call love potions, hidden in a Toledo quince, thinking that by this means she would force his will to love her, as if there were herbs, charms or words in the world powerful enough to force free will. Those who give these aphrodisiac drinks or foods are called ‘poisoners’: because all they do is to poison those who take them, as experience has shown on many and varied occasions.

Thomas ate the quince to such ill effect that straight away he began to shake in his feet and hands as if he had epilepsy, and lost consciousness for many hours, after which he came to in a stupefied condition. He declared in a confused and stammering way that a quince he had eaten had done for him, and gave the name of the person who had given it to him. When the Officers of the Law learned of the affair, they went in search of the culprit; but she, seeing what had happened, had made herself scarce and was never seen again.

Thomas was in bed for six months, during which time he became completely dried up, and was nothing but skin and bones, as they say. Moreover, his senses seemed completely at sixes and sevens; and although they gave him all the treatment they could, they only managed to cure his bodily complaints, but not his mind. He got better but remained possessed by the strangest madness anybody had ever seen. The poor wretch imagined that he was all made of glass, and under this delusion, when someone came up to him, he would scream out in the most frightening manner, and using the most convincing arguments would beg them not to come near him, or they would break him; for really and truly he was not like other men, being made of glass from head to foot.

In order to relieve him of this strange delusion, many people, taking no notice of his shouts and pleas, went up to him and embraced him, telling him to look and he would see that in fact he was not getting broken. But all that happened as a result of this was that the poor wretch would throw himself on the ground shouting for all he was worth, and would then fall into a faint, from which he did not recover for several hours; and when he did come to he would start begging people not to come near him again. He told them to speak to him from a distance and ask him what they wanted, because being a man of glass and not of flesh, he would answer them all so much the more intelligently; for glass being a fine and delicate material, the mind could work through it more promptly and effectively than through an ordinary, solid, earthly body. Some wanted to experiment to see if what he said was true, and so they asked him many difficult things, to which he answered straight away, and very astutely too. It amazed the most learned men in the university and the professors of medicine and philosophy to see how in a person afflicted by such an extraordinary madness as to make him think he was made of glass there should be such a fund of knowledge that he could answer every question correctly and intelligently.

Thomas asked them to give him some sort of case in which he could place the fragile vessel of his body, so that if he wore any close-fitting clothes he would not break; and so they gave him a robe made of drab stuff and a very loose-fitting shirt, which he put on very carefully and tied with a cotton cord. He was not at all willing to put shoes on, and the arrangement he had for getting himself fed without people coming near him was to put on the end of a stick a basket, in which they would put whatever fruit was in season. He did not want meat or fish; he drank only from a fountain or a river, and then with his hands; when he went about the streets he went in the middle of them, looking up at the roofs, in fear lest some tile should fall on him and break him; in summer he slept in the country in the open, and in winter he would go into an inn, and bury himself up to the neck in the straw-loft, saying that that was the safest and most suitable bed for a man of glass. When it thundered, he would shake like a leaf and go off into the country, and would never go into the town until the storm was over. His friends kept him shut up for a long time; but seeing that his affliction showed no sign of being cured, they decided to do what he asked, which was to let him go free; and so they left him and he went about the city, arousing amazement and pity in all who knew him.

Then the boys flocked round him, but he would stop them with his staff, and beg them to speak to him from a distance, so that he did not break; for as he was a man of glass, he was very fragile. Boys, being the most mischievous creatures in the world, in spite of his pleas and shouts began to throw rags at him and even stones, to see if he really was made of glass as he said; but he shouted so much and made such a fuss that the men scolded and punished the children to stop them throwing things at him. But one day when they worried him a lot, he turned to them and said,

‘What do you want, you wretched boys, who keep pestering me like flies, who are as dirty as bedbugs and as impudent as fleas? Do you think I’m Mount Testaccio in Rome, to hurl all these pots and tiles at me?’

When they heard him tell them all off they always followed him in crowds, and the boys thought it would be a much better game to listen to him than to throw things at him. On one occasion, when he was going through the old-clothes market in Salamanca, a woman who kept one of the stalls said to him,

‘I’m sorry in my heart for you, Licenciate; but what can I do, for I can’t shed any tears?’

He turned to her and very deliberately said to her,

‘Filiae Hierusalem, plorate super vos et super filios vestros.’

The woman’s husband realized what a subtle answer it was and said to him,

‘Brother Glass,’ for that is what he said he was called, ‘you are more of a rogue than a fool.’

‘I don’t care a bit,’ he answered, ‘as long as I’m not stupid.’

One day when he was going past the brothel he saw at the door several of the inmates, and declared that they were the baggage of Satan’s army, lodging in the inn of hell. Someone asked him what advice or comfort he would give to a friend of his who was very sad because his wife had gone off with someone else. To which he replied,

‘Tell him to thank God for having allowed his enemy to be taken away from his house.’

‘Then shouldn’t he go and look for her?’ said the other.

‘Not on your life,’ replied Glass, ‘because if he found her he would be finding a true and everlasting testimony to his dishonour.’

‘Since that is the case,’ said the same man, ‘what shall I do to live at peace with my wife?’

He replied, ‘Give her what she needs; let her rule over everyone in the house; but don’t allow her to rule over you.’

A boy said to him, ‘Licenciate Glass, I want to leave my father because he’s always beating me.’

To which he replied, ‘Bear in mind, my boy, that the beatings that fathers give their children bring honour to them, and those which the executioner gives are the ones that cause offence.’

As he was standing at a church door, he saw one of those peasants who are always boasting of being old Christians go in, and behind him came another man who did not enjoy as good a reputation as the first. The licenciate shouted to the peasant,

‘Domingo, wait for old Sabbath to pass.’

He used to say that schoolmasters were lucky, because they were always dealing with angels, and that they would be supremely happy if the little angels weren’t so saucy. Someone else asked him what he thought of bawds. He answered that he had never known any who lived in seclusion, but only those who were neighbours.

The news of his madness and of his answers and clever sayings spread all through Castile, and when it came to the ears of a certain prince or gentleman of the court, he wanted to send for him. So he commissioned a nobleman who was a friend of his and who was in Salamanca to send him to him. When the gentlemen bumped into him one day, he said to him,

‘Licenciate Glass, you know there is a great man at Court who wants to see you and has sent for you.’

To which he replied, ‘Please offer my excuses to this gentleman, for I’m no good for palaces, because I’m bashful and don’t know how to flatter.’

All the same, the gentleman sent him to court, and in order to get him there they used the following device: they put him into a wicker basket of the kind they use for carrying glass, filling in the spaces with stones, and putting some pieces of glass in the straw, so that he would get the impression that they were carrying him like a glass vessel. He got to Valladolid at night, and they unpacked him in the house of the gentleman who had sent for him, and who welcomed him with the words,

‘You are very welcome, Licenciate Glass. How was the journey? How are you?’

To which he replied, ‘There’s no road so bad that it does not come to an end, except the one that leads to the gallows. As far as my health is concerned, I’m neither one thing nor the other, for my pulse and my brain are at odds.’

Another day, when he had seen a lot of falcons and hawks and other fowling birds on perches, he said that falconry was a fine thing for princes and great nobles; but that they should bear in mind that in this sport pleasure outweighed profit two-thousand-fold. Hunting hares he said was very pleasant, and especially when one was hunting with borrowed greyhounds.

The nobleman liked his brand of madness, and let him go out in the city, under the protection of a man to take care that the children did not harm him. In a week he was known to them and the whole court, and at every step, in every street and on every corner he would reply to all the questions they put to him. Among them was one from a student who asked whether he was a poet, since there seemed no limit to his gifts.

He replied, ‘Until now, I have been neither so stupid nor so fortunate.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean by stupid and fortunate,’ said the student.

And Glass replied, ‘I haven’t been so stupid as to be a bad poet, nor so fortunate as to be a good one.’

Another student asked him what he thought of poets. He replied that poetry he esteemed highly; but poets not at all. They went on to ask him why he said that. He answered that of the infinite number of poets in existence, the good ones were so few that they hardly counted, and so being unworthy of consideration, he did not hold them in any esteem; but that he admired and revered the art of poetry, because it contained within it all the other sciences put together. It makes use of all of them, and they all adorn it, so that it gives lustre and fame to their wonderful works, and brings great profit, delight and wonder to all the world. He added,

‘I am well aware of the esteem in which a good poet should be held, because I remember those verses of Ovid which say:

Cura deum fuerunt olim regumque poetae.

Praemiaque antiqui magna tulere chori.

Sanctaque majestas, et erat venerabile nomen

Vatibus, et largae saepe dabantur opes.

And I am not unaware either of the great worth of poets, for Plato calls them interpreters of the gods, and Ovid says of them: “Est Deus in nobis, agitanti calescimus illo.” And he also says: “At sacri vates, et divum cura vocamur.” This is what they say of good poets; as for the bad ones, the mere windbags, what is there to say except that they are the most idiotic and arrogant creatures in the world?’

And he went on, ‘What a thing it is to see one of these poets, when he wants to recite a sonnet to those of his circle, wheedling them with such words as, “Pray listen to a little sonnet which I composed last night for a certain occasion. Although it’s of no value, I think it’s quite nice in a way.” And with that, he purses his lips, raises his eyebrows, and hunting about in his pocket, pulls out from the mass of grubby, torn papers, among which there are another thousand or so sonnets, the one he wants to recite, and finally pronounces it in mellifluous and sugary tones. And if by any chance his listeners, out of malice or not knowing any better, don’t praise it, he says, “Either you haven’t understood the sonnet, or I haven’t recited it properly; so I’d better say it again, and you’d better listen to it more carefully, for there’s no doubt at all that the sonnet is worth it.” And then he starts to recite it all over again, with new gestures and new pauses. And have you seen the way they tear each other to pieces? You should see how these modern young puppies bark at the hoary old mastiffs. Not to mention those who snipe at some of those illustrious and worthy persons in whom the true light of poetry shines, and who find it a comfort and recreation among their many serious occupations, who show the divine nature of their genius and the nobility of their thoughts, in spite of those meddlesome ignoramuses who pass judgement on what they do not know, and hate what they cannot understand; and those who only want praise for the stupid folk who sit beneath canopies, and the ignorant who cling to the seats of the mighty.’

On another occasion they asked him why it was that poets in general were poor. He replied that it was because they chose to be, for it was in their power to be rich, if they knew how to take advantage of the opportunity which they had at their disposal all the time; namely their ladies, who were all extremely rich, for their hair was gold, their brow burnished silver, their eyes green emeralds, their teeth ivory, their lips coral and their throats clear crystal, while their tears were liquid pearls. Moreover, where their feet trod, however hard and barren the earth, it would immediately bring forth jasmine and roses; and their breath was of amber, musk and civet; all these things being signs and proof of their great wealth. These and other things he said about bad poets; but he always spoke well of the good ones and praised them to the skies.

One day he saw on the pavement outside San Francisco church some badly painted figures, and this gave rise to the remark that good painters imitated nature, but bad ones vomited it up. One day he went up to a book shop, with the greatest caution lest he should break, and said to the bookseller,

‘I should be very happy about this trade of yours if it were not for one drawback it has.’

The bookseller asked him to tell him what it was.

He replied, ‘The fuss they make when they buy the privilege of a book, and the tricks they play on its author if by any chance he prints it at his own expense. Instead of fifteen hundred, they print three thousand books, and when the author thinks they are selling his, they’re dispatching other people’s.’

It happened that the same day there passed through the square six men who had been flogged, and when the crier said, ‘The first one, for thieving,’ Glass shouted to those who were standing in front of him,

‘Keep out of the way, brothers, lest the list start with the name of one of you.’

And when the crier got to the point where he said, ‘The last …,’ he commented, ‘That must be the one who goes bail for the children.’

A boy said to him, ‘Brother Glass, tomorrow they’re going to whip a bawd.’

He replied, ‘If you told me they were going to whip a pimp, I’d assume they were going to whip a coachman.’

One of those men who carry sedan chairs said to him, ‘Haven’t you anything to say about us, Licenciate?’

‘No,’ answered Glass, ‘except that any one of you knows more sins than a confessor; but with this difference: that when the confessor knows them he keeps them secret, whereas you publish them in every inn.’

A mule-boy heard this (for all sorts of people used to come and listen to him all the time), and said to him,

‘There’s little or nothing to be said about us, Mr Flask, because we are honest folk, needful to the state.’

To which Glass replied,