TRANSLATION: Gerona
The seventh in the Episodios Nacionales series by Benito Pérez Galdós
GERONA by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It is the seventh of the first series of the Episodios Nacionales and was translated from the original Spanish by Vox Day. The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.
A DESPERATE AND GLORIOUS DEFIANCE
In May of 1809 the French army arrived before Gerona: a Catalan city of narrow streets and stacked houses, held by a garrison far too small to hold it, under a governor who did not regard that as a reason to give it up. Seven months later, after eleven thousand nine hundred bombs were exploded, eighty thousand rounds were shot, and twenty thousand men lost in the assaults, the French were still outside the walls.
Andrés Marijuán was inside. An Aragonese private billeted with a locksmith’s family, he watched the city eat its horses, then its cats, then its rats, and at last nothing whatever. He watched the children of the house go out hunting through the rubble for anything with meat on it. He watched a physician, unhinged by grief, forge newspapers full of relief columns that were never coming, so that his daughter should not learn what had become of the world. And he watched Mariano Álvarez de Castro, dying on his feet, return the same answer to every summons to surrender that the greatest generals of the age sent him.
The way Galdós describes the siege of Gerona is the bleakest book in the first series of the Episodios Nacionales, and the most unsparing: an account of civilian endurance carried well past the point where endurance means anything, told by a survivor who cannot understand how he survived.
About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.
Excerpt
Our commander at Santa Lucía was one of the bravest men of this war, an Irishman by the name of Don Rodulfo Marshall, who had come to Spain without anyone bringing him and solely from a desire to defend our sacred cause. Adventurer or not, Marshall for his valour deserved to have been Spanish. He was ruddy, corpulent, of a festive countenance and a fiery eye, somewhat resembling that of Don Juan Coupigny whom we saw at Bailén. He spoke our language badly; but although some of his blunders made us laugh, he uttered them with sufficient clarity to be understood, and it mattered nothing that he mangled the Castilian provided he mangled the French as well, which he did on several occasions.
You should have seen the fury of those columns of swine, gentlemen. They seemed nothing less than hungry wolves whose object was not to defeat us but to devour us. They flung themselves blindly upon the breach, and there it fell to us to stop it. Twice they entered through it, prepared to drive us from the curtain; but God willed that we should drive them out instead. Why? How? This is what I could not tell you if you asked me. I only know that we cared nothing at all for dying, and perhaps that says everything. Don Mariano appeared there, and you must not think he harangued us with talk of glory and the national cause, of the king and religion. Nothing of the sort. He placed himself in the front line, dealing sabre-blows against those who tried to climb, and at the same time said to us: “The troops behind have orders to fire upon those in front if they fall back a single step.” His forbidding countenance inspired in us more terror than the entire enemy army. When some officer told him not to expose himself so close to the danger, he replied: “Attend to your own duty and do not trouble yourself so much about me. I shall be where it may be advisable.”
He went off afterwards to another point where he thought himself needed, and without him we were bewildered again. That man carried with him a miraculous light that let us see more clearly where we stood and measure our movements and those of the French, so that they could not throw themselves upon us. The enemy soldiers died like flies at the foot of the breach; but of ours, too, they fell by the dozen. I remember that a comrade of mine whom I loved dearly was struck in the chest and fell beside me at one of the moments of greatest peril, of most furious fire, of true anguish, when a slight effort more or less on one side or the other would have decided whether the wall remained France’s or Spain’s. The poor fellow tried to rise, but in vain. Two nuns came forward, scorning the fire, and bore him away.
But the most grievous loss was that of our commander, Don Rodulfo Marshall. I have the honour of having gathered him in my arms at the very mouth of the breach, and I shall never forget what he said shortly afterwards, lying in the street at the moment of his death: “I die content for so just a cause and so brave a nation.”
By the time this happened, the French were already showing signs of having given up entering the city on that side. And well they might, for we were more and more resolved not to let them in. If we could not contain them with fire we cut them down without mercy; and when even that was not enough, we still had the very stones of the wall to hurl upon their heads. This was a weapon the women wielded with great spirit, and from the surrounding area stones of half a quintal rained down upon the besiegers. When the action at the wall of Santa Lucía ended, we could not see one another, for the dust and smoke formed a dense atmosphere over the whole city and its surroundings, and the noise produced by the two hundred French pieces vomiting fire from every direction was comparable to no sound of earthly machines or heavenly storms. The wall was thick with dead whom we trod upon without ceremony as we moved from one place to another, and among them some heroic women lay expiring, mingled with the soldiers and patriots. The señora Sumta was hoarse from so much shouting, and Don Pablo Nomdedeu, who had thrown many stones, had his fingers crushed and bruised; but he did not for that cease to tend the wounded, assisted by many ladies, some nuns, and two or three friars who were not fit to load a weapon.
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