The Forging of a Rebel: The Forge, the Track and the Clash - Softcover

Barea, Arturo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782274944 ISBN 13: 9781782274940

Verlag: Pushkin Press IWUK, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

This astonishing autobiographical trilogy—hailed by George Orwell and Gabriel García Márquez—is “the most definitive and personal account of Spain’s history during . . . the 20th century” (Guardian).

The Forging of a Rebel is an unsurpassed account of Spanish history and society from early in the twentieth century through the cataclysmic events of the Spanish Civil War.

Arturo Barea’s masterpiece charts the author's coming-of-age in a bruised and starkly unequal Spain. These three volumes recount in lively detail Barea's daily experience of his country as it pitched toward disaster: we are taken from his youthful play and rebellion on the streets of Madrid, to his apprenticeship in the business world and to the horrors he witnessed as part of the Spanish army in Morocco during the Rif War. The trilogy culminates in an indelible portrait of the Republican fight against Fascist forces in which the Madrid of Barea's childhood becomes a shell and bullet-strewn warzone.

Combining historical sweep and authority with poignant characterization and novelistic detail, The Forging of a Rebel is a towering literary and historical achievement.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Arturo Barea (1897-1957) was born in Badajoz and raised and educated in Madrid. For most of the Spanish Civil War, he acted as head of the Foreign Press and Censorship Bureau of the Republican Government in Madrid and was also the radio broadcaster who spoke as the 'Unknown Voice of Madrid'. Eventually forced out of Spain, he sought temporary asylum in France before crossing to England just before the outbreak of World War II. He and his wife Ilsa settled in Eaton Hastings near Faringdon in Berkshire. From 1940 until 1957 he transmitted a weekly broadcast for Spanish Radio to South America. He published novels and short stories as well as books of criticism, and his great autobiographical trilogy The Forging of a Rebel first appeared in English between 1941 and 1946.

Translator Ilsa Barea (1902-1973) was born and raised in Vienna, where she studied politics at Vienna University. In the 1930s she emigrated to Czechoslovakia for political reasons, before travelling to Spain in support of the Republican side early in the Civil War. She translated more than twenty books into English and lectured and broadcast in several languages. She died in Vienna while working on her autobiography.

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The Forging of a Rebel

The Track, The Clash, The Forge

By Arturo Barea, Ilsa Barea

Pushkin Press

Copyright © 2018 Pushkin Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78227-494-0

Contents

Introduction, 7, 
THE FORGE, 15, 
THE TRACK, 243, 
THE CLASH, 443, 

CHAPTER 1

RIVER AND ATTIC

The wind blew into the two hundred pairs of breeches and filled them. To me they looked like fat men without a head, swinging from the clothes-lines of the drying-yard. We boys ran along the rows of white trousers and slapped their bulging seats. Señora Encarna was furious. She chased us with the wooden beater she used to pound the dirty grease out of her washing. We took refuge in the maze of streets and squares formed by four hundred damp sheets. Sometimes she caught one of us; then the others would begin to throw mud pellets at the breeches. They left stains as though somebody had dirtied his pants, and we imagined the thrashing some people would get for behaving like pigs.

In the evening, when the breeches had dried, we helped to count them in tens. All the children of the washerwomen went with Señora Encarna up to the top story of the washhouse. It was a big loft with a roof like a V turned upside down. Señora Encarna could stand upright in the middle, but her top-knot nearly touched the big beam. We would stand at the sides and bang our heads against the sloping roof.

Señora Encarna had in front of her the heaps of breeches, sheets, pants, and shirts. The pillow-cases were apart. Everything had its number. Señora Encarna sang it out and threw the piece to the boy in charge of the set of ten to which it belonged. Each of us looked after two or three groups, the "twenties," or the "thirties," or the "sixties," and had to drop each piece on the right heap. Last of all we stuffed into each pillow-case, as into a sack, one pair of breeches, two sheets, one pair of pants, and one shirt, all marked with the same number. Every Thursday, a big cart drawn by four horses came down to the river to fetch the two hundred bundles of clean linen and leave another two hundred of dirty washing behind.

It was the linen of the men of the Royal Horse Guards, the only soldiers who had sheets to sleep in.

Every morning, soldiers of the Guards rode over the King's Bridge escorting an open carriage in which the Prince of Asturias used to sit, or sometimes the Queen. But first a rider would come out of the tunnel which led to the Royal Palace, to warn the guards on the bridge. They would chase away the people, and the carriage with its escort would pass when the bridge was empty. As we were children and so could not be anarchists, the police let us stay while they went by. We were not afraid of the Horse Guards, because we knew their breeches too well.

The Prince was a fair-haired boy with blue eyes, who looked at us and laughed like a ninny. People said he was dumb and had to go for a walk in the Casa de Campo every day, between a priest and a general with white mustaches. It would have been better for him to come and play with us by the river. And then we would have seen him with nothing on when we were bathing, and would have known what a prince looks like inside. But apparently they did not want him to come. Once we discussed it with Uncle Granizo, the owner of the washhouse, because he was friends with the head keeper of the Casa de Campo, who sometimes spoke to the Prince. Uncle Granizo promised to see to it, but later he told us that the general would not give his permission.

Those military were all alike. A general who had been in the Philippines often came to visit my Uncle José. He had brought back with him an old Chinese who was very fond of me, a pink wooden walking-stick, which he said had been the spine of a fish called the manatee and was the death of anyone who got a whack with it, and a cross which was not a real cross but a green star with many rays, which he wore everywhere, embroidered on his vest and shirt and as an enamel button in his coat-lapel.

Every time this general came to visit my uncle, he grunted, cleared his throat and asked me whether I was already a little man. He would at once begin to scold me: "Keep quiet, boy, a little man mustn't do that ... Leave that cat alone, boy, you're a little man now." I used to sit down on the floor between my uncle's legs while they talked about politics and the war of the Russians and Japanese. The war had finished long before, but the general liked to speak of it because he had been in China and Japan himself. When they talked about that, I used to listen, and every time I heard how the Japanese had beaten up the Russians I was glad. I could not stand the Russians. They had a very nasty king who was the Tsar and a police chief called Petroff, Captain Petroff, who was a brute and lashed people with his whip. My uncle bought me a new number of the Adventures of Captain Petroff every Sunday. They threw a lot of bombs at him, but he never got killed.

When they stopped speaking of the war they bored me and I went to play on the dining-room carpet.

That other general who was with the Prince must have been just the same. He had to teach the Prince how to make wars when he became king, because all kings must know how to make wars, and the priest taught him how to speak. I didn't understand that. How could he speak if he was dumb? Perhaps he could, because he was a prince; but the dumb people I knew could only talk by signs. And it was not for lack of priests.

It was a nuisance that no ball came floating down, when we needed one to play with that evening.

It was quite easy to fish a ball. There was a small wooden bridge in front of Uncle Granizo's house. It was made of two old rails with planks on top and a railing, all painted green. Underneath flowed a black stream which came out of a tunnel; and that tunnel and that stream were the big sewer of Madrid. All the balls which the children of Madrid dropped into the gutters came floating down there, and we fished for them from our bridge with a net made of a stick and the wire guard of a brazier. Once I caught one made of rubber; it was painted red. Next day at school, Cerdeño took it away from me and I had to keep my mouth shut because he was bigger than I was. But I made him pay for it. In the Corrala, the square in front of the school where we used to play, I threw a stone at his head from the top of the railing, so that he went about with a bandage for two days and they had to sew up his brain with stitches. Of course, he did not know who had done it. But I carried a sharp stone in my pocket after that, just in case, and if he had tried to beat me, they would have had to sew him up a second time.

Antonio, the one who limped, once fell from the bridge and nearly drowned. Señor Manuel, the handyman, pulled him out and squeezed his tummy with both hands until Antonio began to spit up dirty water. Afterwards they gave him tea and brandy to drink. Señor Manuel, who was a tippler, took a good swill out of the bottle because his trousers were all wet and he said he was cold.

Nothing doing, no ball came down. I went to dinner, my mother was calling me. That day we had our meal in the sun, sitting on the grass. I liked it better than the cold days with no sun, when we had to eat at Uncle Granizo's. His house was a tavern with a tin-covered bar and some round tables which were all wobbly. The soup would spill over and the brazier stank. It was not really a brazier, but a big portable stove, with an open fire in the middle...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pushkin Press IWUK
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1782274944
• ISBN 13: 9781782274940
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 768
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland