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.
There is an excerpt available to read on Castalia Library. Tune in to the Darkstream tonight to learn more about this, see the new Byronics video, and hear some exciting news about the Byron AI project.
