WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
Yale Margellos
The Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters series identifies works of cultural and artistic significance previously overlooked by translators and publishers, as well as important contemporary authors whose work has not yet been translated into English.
New Releases
Serhiy Zhadan; Translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
Antonio Lobo Antunes; Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Cees Nooteboom; Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson; With Photographs by Simone Sassen
Web Exclusives
The Holy Innocents by Miguel Delibes is a shattering tale of oppression and resistance during Franco’s dictatorship, by a beloved Spanish novelist. Below, translator Peter Bush discusses the work’s themes, the author’s history, and the process of translation.
The Holy Innocents is a Spanish classic that had been translated into twelve languages before 2025, but not yet into English. What makes this work a classic, and what led you to translate it?
PB: The originality of the style and subject matter. Six chapters that are six sentences stripped of formal punctuation and standard capitalization allow readers to focus on the language and the starkness of the social conflict and class prejudices at the heart of the narrative. Delibes employs the experimental to voice tensions in a way that straightforward social realism rarely achieves, and he chooses Azarías, a sixty-year-old man with severe mental handicaps, as his hero—and that, I think, explains the novel’s status as a classic. I leapt at the opportunity to translate it. Delibes has been one of my favorite authors ever since I read a book of his short stories in Madrid in 1966.
In the foreword to the book, Colm Tóibín writes, “there are moments when the novel could be set in medieval Europe.” Could you elaborate on this while explaining why this observation is important to understanding the novel?
PB: It appears to be almost medieval in the way that landowners are pitted against cowering peasants, whose lives they determine on a whim and whom they treat as animals with the support of an all-powerful church. However, it is indeed only an appearance. From the end of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the civil war in 1936, peasants in Andalusia and Extremadura organized to fight against living conditions that did verge on the medieval. When Francisco Franco began his insurrection against the democratically elected Spanish Republic, his military forces swept through the south, killing huge numbers of people, including four thousand male prisoners massacred in the bullring in the Extremaduran city of Badajoz. The Holy Innocents is set in Extremadura, and the situation on the landed estate reflects attitudes held during the post-civil war dictatorship.
Delibes wrote a short story, The Kite, in 1963, and developed it into a novel later in the decade. It was a time when those defeated in the civil war were beginning to regain confidence, as seen in the novel when members of the younger generation openly defy their masters, who in turn blame such rebelliousness on the Second Vatican Council’s progressive edicts. The writer said he didn’t publish the novel earlier because the characters were based on people he knew and who were still alive. He may very well have also concluded that the novel would have aroused the ire of the censors. Instead, he published it in 1981—six years after Franco’s death and a few months after the attempted military coup led by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero. Readers in the English-speaking world shouldn’t forget that while Bob Dylan and the Beatles were in full swing in the 1960s and ’70s, Franco was still garrotting opponents in a one-party state that lacked any press or political freedoms.
How does the theme of revolt figure in The Holy Innocents?
PB: At the level of daring to have aspirations above her “station,” Régula, Azarías’s sister, wants her daughter and sons to have access to schooling. When forced to accompany their master hunting, her son Quirce does his duty but refuses the hundred-peseta note that Iván offers him, which was a considerable amount of money. When preening, well-heeled young men arrive from the city to give language and grammar lessons to the illiterate farmhands, the latter quietly mock their absurd pedantry. Régula and her husband, Shorty Paco, care for their family in the most distressing conditions, in contrast to their “betters” on the estate, who are consistently foulmouthed and disrespectful of each other, as well as of their “inferiors.” The major revolt is staged by Azarías, who shows his humanity in the depth of love he displays toward his pet birds and his young, paralyzed sister, Tiny Charo, and the sheer delight he finds in giving chase to tawny owls across the mountainside. His final act expresses an almost instinctive hatred of injustice.
What was Miguel Delibes’s relationship with the Spanish state from the Civil War to Franco’s dictatorship to the democratic period? How did that affect his writing?
PB: As a young man Delibes was shocked by the burning of churches and killing of priests carried out by some anarchists. He supported the nationalist insurrection, and at the age of seventeen he enlisted in the Francoist navy in the hope of avoiding infantry combat. In the years of hunger that followed Franco’s victory he became increasingly critical of the fascist government’s policy of economic autarchy and repression.
In the 1940s he wrote articles for the newspaper El Norte de Castilla that highlighted the suffering in the countryside. He eventually became the paper’s editor but was forced to resign in 1963 because of his willingness to publish unflattering descriptions of what was happening in Castile—descriptions that contradicted the rosy pastoral idyll of the regime’s propaganda. From the 1950s, many of his novels portrayed the miserable, poverty-stricken lives of young people in rural communities and the cruelty the state encouraged. His fiction was never overtly political, but the worlds he created were always an implicit critique of the society the Francoists had created.
In the 1960s he wrote regularly for the Barcelona magazine Destino, which was constantly censored for publishing opinions, however subdued, that were antagonistic to the regime. Again, one must bear in mind that there was no freedom of the press, and all newspapers printed daily encomiums of the dictator and the wonderful state of the country. During the transition to democracy Delibes continued to write in a critical vein, and he was particularly outspoken in his defense of the natural world. He dedicated The Holy Innocents to the pioneering Spanish naturalist Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, an avid campaigner on behalf of endangered species.
Were parts of The Holy Innocents difficult to translate?
PB: Any work that is stylistically original is a challenge to the translator. I decided to respect the lack of standard punctuation and capitalization and to re-create the colloquial rhythms within the dialogues and narrative and the lexical precision in the descriptions of the rural setting, the birds, the flowers, and the hunting. I’m quite familiar with the rural. My grandfather was a shepherd, and I grew up in the countryside and had an uncle who went on shoots and would bring us the occasional pheasant. As a youngster I heard lots of the spare conversations between bulb pickers, pigmen, and dykers. We even had a huge sow—my first pet—in our backyard, as people still did in the era of postwar rationing. Repetition, humorous banter, and physical contact with animals and humans are key in the novel, as they are in small rural communities. As an example of repetition, there is Azarías’s favorite saying “milana bonita,” which literally means “pretty kite”; for Azarías, every bird is a “milana,” whether it’s an eagle owl or a jackdaw. However, “milana bonita” has a musicality that “pretty kite” doesn’t, hence I decided on “pretty kitey” and “kitey” throughout. It seems a mere detail, but it was quite a leap for me; every word is carefully chosen by Delibes, and his translator must be equally careful—and bold.
Miguel Delibes (1920–2010) was one of Spain’s most popular twentieth-century writers. He is the author of Five Hours with Mario and The Heretic, among other works. Peter Bush is an award-winning literary translator from Catalan, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Colm Tóibín is an award-winning novelist and critic.
The post Miguel Delibes’s The Holy Innocents: A Conversation with Translator Peter Bush appeared first on Yale University Press.
Featured Authors
Featured Translators
Contact Us
For any questions regarding the Yale Margellos, please use the button below to contact us.