I have the beginnings of a post on reading in translation in my drafts, which I hope I will get around to finishing soon, but I have to get ahead of myself a little because I picked up Tristana entirely on the merits of its translator, Margaret Jull Costa. I'd read thousands of pages of Margaret Jull Costa's writing before I ever registered who she was. The moment of clarity occurred when I noticed her name on the José Saramago Wikipedia page. I knew it was a name I recognized, but I didn't think it was from reading Saramago: I'd only read two of his books -- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and The Stone Raft -- neither of which, it turns out, was translated by her. So I clicked through to her page and remembered -- of course! -- that she was Javier Marías' translator. I'd read five of her translations; three of them veritable tomes. I'd seen her name day after day while reading those books, but I'd never investigated who she was. So, I did some investigating... but that's a topic for my as yet unfinished post. In any case, I thought it would be interesting to read other of her translations and when I found Tristana at Books Are Magic, I decided to start with it. I'd never heard of Benito Pérez Galdós, though evidently he's well known in Spain. Tristana was originally published in 1892 (and was adapted by Luis Buñuel for the screen in 1970). I've read a ton of 19th Century books from France and England and Russia, but I wasn't at all familiar with non-contemporary Spanish literature (aside, of course, from Don Quixote, which I've resolved I'll finally get around to reading soon). I had no idea what I was in for. Every time I thought I knew where the story would take me, it went somewhere different. While the overall framework felt familiar: a young woman is orphaned and left in the protection of her father's friend, who seduces her and takes away her "honor," and then becomes jealous when she falls in love with a man more her own age; the execution and turn of events were totally unexpected. Tristana is a brilliant young woman who is trying find freedom of a kind that was unavailable to women in her time. I did something I almost never do while reading Tristana: I got out a pencil and marked the passages I wanted to remember. (What I usually do when I want to return to a passage later is memorize the page number, but in Tristana there were too many to keep in my head!) Tristana is such a compelling character; you sense in her this great potential, and desire that you know is out of her reach. But you also think, if anyone can rise above her circumstance, certainly Tristana would be the one do to so. Of course, things don't end well for her, but they also don't end quite where you think they might.
As a side not, Tristana is the 11th book I've finished in 2019, and the 10th by a male author. However, I've read 5 books translated by women (3 of them by Margaret Jull Costa), so that's something, right? It's something, but it's not enough.
