TRANSLATION: Juan Martín el Empecinado
The ninth in the Episodios Nacionales series by Benito Pérez Galdós
Juan Martín el Empecinado by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It is the ninth of the first series of the Episodios Nacionales and was translated from the original Spanish by Vox Day. The ebooks have already been sent to the paid subscribers.
SPAIN, 1811. THE REGULAR ARMIES HAVE FAILED.
Gabriel Araceli rides into the ruined Alcarria to find a countryside stripped bare — burned villages, empty granaries, women digging the fields with hoes, Frenchmen hanging in the trees. Here the war is fought by bands of irregulars: hungry, improvised, ferociously effective. At their head is Don Juan Martín, called el Empecinado, an illiterate farmer who cannot spell his own dispatches and cannot be beaten in the field.
Beside him rides Mosén Antón Trijueque, a giant of an Aragonese priest in a ruined cassock, a tactician of genius and a man eaten alive by envy of the leader he serves. What begins as resentment becomes conspiracy, and conspiracy becomes an ambush in the snow that leaves Gabriel a prisoner of the French, condemned to be shot, alone in a cell with an orphaned child the guerrilleros have adopted as their own.
What follows is escape, pursuit, a night crossing of the frozen sierra, and a reckoning between two enemies that only Galdós could write.
About the Series
The Episodios Nacionales is a cycle of forty-six historical novels tracing the history of Spain from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 through the Restoration of the 1870s. Written between 1872 and 1912, the cycle is one of the supreme achievements of European fiction, a work that stands with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine as a panoramic portrait of an entire nation across a century of upheaval. This is the first English translation of the ninth volume.
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
The French advance guard appeared on the high road.
“How confidently they come!” said mosén Antón. “Those blockheads never learn. They do not flank their march. Do you see flying columns on the heights?”
“On this side,” said Viriato, “one can see the glint of a few musket barrels.”
“Let us withdraw below,” said Trijueque. “Let them enter the town in peace.”
Shortly after this the partida was moving slowly and in admirable order along a path of gentle slope that led, skirting the hill in repeated turns, to the village of Grajanejos. Mosén Antón ordered a part of the force to conceal itself in the scrub oak, advancing with every precaution so as not to be seen or heard. The rest marched on.
“Complete silence,” said Sardina, “complete silence. Let no shot go off. The man who breathes loudly, I will have him shot.”
As he was saying this, a prolonged and piteous wail was heard. It was the Empecinadillo, demanding the breast.
“If that accursed child does not be quiet,” exclaimed mosén Antón in fury, “throw him into the ravine.”
The Empecinadillo, indifferent to strategy, went on crying.
The chief of staff, who was leading his horse by the bridle, stopped, blind with rage, and repeated:
“Throw him into the ravine! Is there no one who can stop the mouth of that confounded trumpeter?”
Señor Santurrias exerted himself to quiet the poor child, but his arguments failed to convince, and even the threat that mosén Antón would eat him could not reconcile the infant to the obedience which the grave occasion required. In the end I believe they stopped his mouth or smothered his cries by bundling him in his own wrappings, whereby he was spared on that occasion from being cast into the ravine in punishment for his scandalous speeches.
Don Vicente Sardina, in agreement with his second-in-command, ordered that those of us on the left of the path should advance to cut off the exit from the town on the high road in the direction opposite to that by which the French were entering.
“I do not trust these young gentlemen,” said mosén Antón as he watched us depart. “Let el Crudo go with them. Crudo! Crudo!”
There appeared a guerrillero, thick-set and brawny, well armed, and who looked to be the sort of man equally ready for any kind of business in matters of war.
“Crudillo,” ordered the chief, “you and these gentlemen are to cut off the exit below. Take a hundred men of the best. Press hard.”
Reinforced by the men of el Crudo, who were among the finest in the partida, we set off down a gentle slope that brought us to the vicinity of the high road on the southern side of the town. The others, finding themselves close and with the advantage their excellent position on the heights gave them, attacked a small French detachment that had advanced to reconnoitre the hill, while the rest of the enemy force was resting in the town. The French recognised at once that they had been surprised and, thinking to defend themselves, occupied the houses in haste. The men of the partida attacked them not only with spirit but with complete confidence, for the moral force that surprise gave them, and the French defended themselves poorly, owing to the confusion of fatigue and the narrowness of the place in which they had shut themselves.
After a brief engagement the enemy understood that their only salvation lay in flight down the road or back along the same route from Argecilla by which they had come. Many attempted to escape in our direction; but seeing the exit well guarded, and making out on that side uniforms of the regular army and some twenty horses that in their confusion they took for two hundred, they believed that the entire second army under the command of Don Carlos O’Donnell had moved up from Cuenca to take the road of Aragón, and they chose the opposite exit. The tumult and confusion this produced among their panicked troops was such that Don Vicente Sardina with his picked men put to the sword without mercy and without risk a good number of wretches who neither fired their weapons nor had soul or strength for anything but finding among the labyrinth of lanes the best opening that might give them egress from that hell.
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