Ricardo Blanco's Blog

Q&A with Gary Raymond

Last month I was interviewed by the excellent Gary Raymond for his BBC Radio Wales Arts Show (listen here) and last week we did a Q&A in anticipation of our chat at the Abergavenny Writing Festival tomorrow. For more on Gary’s writing, please check out his Substack publication, Blue, Red and Grey.

Richard Gwyn’s latest book is a book about the writing of a book, or rather a book about the research for that book, the award-winning The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America (which incidentally, was my Welsh book of the year in 2016). Ambassador of Nowhere is a wild and searching ride through several Latin American countries, an in-depth look at cultures and literary movements, as well as political backdrops, full of drinking, poets, and death. What more could you ask for?

I had Richard on the Radio Wales Arts Show a few weeks back to talk about the book, but fortunately, the ever-truncated opportunities for discussion natural to the radio format will be widened on April 19th, as I get to talk to Richard at greater length at the Abergavenny Writing Festival. Details can be found here.

In the meantime, Richard has agreed to engage with my writers’ QnA.

Where are you from and how does it influence your work?

I grew up in Crickhowell and the landscape of the Black Mountains still holds an almost mystical fascination for me. That is my Cynefin, to which I belong and will always return. It’s also near the border, and borders have been a zone of interest to me throughout my life (I once swam across the Evros, the river that forms the border between Turkey and Greece, because my friend and travelling companion, an ‘illegal’ north African migrant, didn’t have papers). On the other hand (and there is always another hand) I am a committed European and internationalist and while I support Welsh independence, I detest provincial or parochial thinking.

Where are you while you answer these questions, and what can you see when you look up from the page/screen?

I am in my attic in Grangetown, Cardiff, with a vista from the loft window of three gigantic tower blocks emerging on the other side of the Taff that will soon dwarf all around them, and block the morning sun from view. Right now my attic space is covered with boxes of books, pots and pans, camping gear, kids’ clothes, a menagerie of cuddly toys, the debris of 30 years living and raising a family in this house. My wife and I are in the process of selling up and moving home, closer to my place of origin (see Q. 1)

What motivates you to create?

No idea, but I can’t imagine not doing it. I like the way that Lydia Davis puts it, when she says that travel, writing and translation are all inextricably linked. That works for me.

What are you currently working on?

I have recently finished a book about the Welsh landscape artist James Dickson Innes (1887-1914) and am now working on a book of perambulations around the Black Mountains (see Q.1)

Writers are always a couple of years ahead of their readers, so a book like Ambassador of Nowhere, which has just been published, was actually finished in 2022. Sometimes it is an effort to remember who you were (or who you thought you were) when you wrote the book that for everyone else is your latest thing.

When do you work?

Very early morning, and for as long as I feel like it — usually no more than three or four hours. It’s a habit I got into when I had a full time job and it works for me.

How important is collaboration to you?

Since I also work as a translator (from Spanish) collaboration is a constant. When I am working on my own stuff, I am accompanied always by my double, or doppelgänger.

Who has had the biggest impact on your work?

As a teenager I was a fanatical reader of the Russian classics (in translation) but probably the turning point came when I discovered the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges as an 18 year old, followed closely by the Italian fabulist Italo Calvino. I have always read widely in other literatures, and having lived in both Greece and Spain for long periods I was influenced in turn by the modern Greek poets, Cavafy, Seferis and Ritsos — and later by a raft of Spanish-language novelists and poets, many of them Latin Americans. I would count Montaigne as an abiding influence, and also perhaps Joan Didion and John Berger. I like to think that the books we haven’t read are always there for us, like an invisible thread leading to places we might one day visit. Reading remains one of life’s great pleasures. But it needs to remain a pleasure, rather than a duty.

How would you describe your oeuvre?

No doubt living in other countries for much of my twenties and thirties set me at a distance from many Welsh authors. I think that has definitely left a mark on the way I regard both my writing and my native country. Since I seem to be writing more about Wales these days, I am curious to see how this will pan out. Ever since reading Raymond Williams’ uncompleted Black Mountains trilogy, I always wanted to complete one of my own. Just to make things difficult for myself, I now envisage my 2019 novel, The Blue Tent, set in the Ewyas valley, as the middle part of that trilogy, rather than the first, as I originally thought, so I now have to write a prequel and a sequel. But I have a pretty good idea of what they are about.

What was the first book you remember reading?

In its entirety? Five go off to Camp, by Enid Blyton. I was maybe six years old.

What was the last book you read?

Wish I was here, a memoir by M. John Harrison.  I’m still reading it, and am yet to make up my mind about it. It’s the kind of book that needs time to settle.

Is there a painting/sculpture you struggle to turn away from?

The one on our living room wall. It’s by the Catalan artist Lluis Peñaranda, a dear friend, who died in 2010, far too early. It shows four figures carrying a huge fish.

Who is the musical artist you know you can always return to?

JS Bach and Leonard Cohen.

During the working process of your last work, in those quiet moments, who was closest to your thoughts?

James Dickson Innes. Who is the book’s subject, fortunately.

Do you believe in God?

After a fashion.

Do you believe in the power of art to change society?

No. Or rather, I believe in the power of art to shape ideas, and therefore, to a limited degree, influence trends within society. But fascistic, retrogressive thinking is far more likely to prevail, because most people seem to prefer the certainties of bigotry and prejudice that attach to such a mindset: hence Brexit, hence Trump. I don’t believe in the idea of progress, certainly not in terms of humankind’s capacity for ignorance and cruelty.

Which artist working in your area, alive and working today, do you most admire and why?

If you had asked me this a couple of years ago I would have said the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, but he died in 2022, following complications from Covid. Apart from being an extraordinarily incisive writer (who saw the novelist’s craft as akin to that of the spy) he was also a dedicated enemy of hypocrisy and bullshit. He spent a lifetime pissing people off, which is almost always admirable.

But since Marías doesn’t count, I will go for the Mexican writer Juan Villoro. He is not widely read over here but is considered a major figure in Latin America. I’d especially recommend his novel The Reef, and his astonishing book about Mexico City, Horizontal Vertigo. He has spoken out bravely against the persecution of journalists in a country ravaged by criminal cartels and political and police corruption. His scope and vision are extraordinary and he has also played a significant but discreet role in movements for social justice (his father, Luis Villoro, was an influential figure behind the Zapatista movement of the 1990s).

What is your relationship with social media?

One of dread. I find it useful, up to a point, but am terrified of my own potential for time-wasting.

What has been/is your greatest challenge as an artist?                                                  

 Getting and staying sober (see next question)

Do you have any words of advice for your younger self?

For much of my earlier life I had serious addiction issues, and although I was constantly filling out notebooks, I wrote nothing of any consequence, so the first thing I’d advise myself would be not to drink quite so much. Since that advice would obviously go unheeded, I’d suggest meditation and a long stretch of solitude on a remote island, preferably uninhabited.

What does the future hold for you?

I am no longer young (or anything near it) so will most likely miss the full consequences of climate catastrophe. But each of us will, necessarily, find our own ways of coming to terms with that, and in the meantime, I have a few more things I’d like to write, and a few long walks to do, alone and in company.

Ambassador of Nowhere is out now.

Blue, Red and Grey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Gary Raymond is a novelist, author, playwright, critic, and broadcaster. In 2012, he co-founded Wales Arts Review, was its editor for ten years. His latest book, Abandon All Hope: A Personal Journey Through the History of Welsh Literature is available for pre-order and is out in May 2024 with Calon Books.

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 Posted on April 18, 2024 by

 Literature

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Ambassador of Nowhere

Thursday March 28th saw the launch of Ambassador of Nowhere. I was interviewed by the astute and genial Jon Gower – who has helped launch three of my books to date – and there were a few questions from the audience. The gist of our chat was reported by Martin Shipton and published in Nation Cymru here.

The book describes many journeys, and was a journey in itself, several years in the making, and I am happy (and relieved) that it is finally out there. A Spanish version is due to be published later this year, by Lom in Chile and Bajolaluna in Argentina, translated by Jorge Fondebrider.

Here is the article I submitted to Nation Cymru on the topic ‘On Being a Writer in Wales’.

The American writer Lydia Davis once wrote that “to translate is also to read, and to translate is to write, as to write is to translate and to read is to translate. So that we may say: To translate is to travel and to travel is to translate.”  These words resonate powerfully with me, having recently completed a book about travel and translation. So how does this fit with ‘being a writer in Wales’?

As a Welsh writer, I have written relatively little about my native land. The publisher’s blurb on my first poetry collection, more than thirty years ago, put it this way: ’Some Welsh authors write solely about Wales. Richard Gwyn stands apart from these . . .’ A review of my most recent book of poems, Stowaway: A Levantine Adventure, continues in the same vein: ‘For a book written by a Welshman, published by a Welsh press, supported by the Welsh Books Council and reviewed in Wales Arts Review, it is remarkably reticent about Wales – with, I think, only a single mention of Gwalia to nod to its native land.’

It is strange for me to read this, because even though my books have often been set far from Wales — my first novel was set in Barcelona, the second in Crete, both places in which I lived for long stretches during my twenties — I feel deeply attached to the red loam of my native patch, have lived for the past 33 years in Cardiff and yet, at the same time, I don’t really think of myself as belonging anywhere. A paradox, I know, but one that I share with the Scottish poet and translator (from Spanish, like myself) Alastair Reid, who claimed that the ideal state for a writer might be that of a ‘foreigner’, someone who has no proper home, no secret landscape claiming them, no roots tugging at them. Such a person is, if you like, properly lost, and so in a position to rediscover the world, from outside in. Reid believes that if they are lucky, such adventurers might “smuggle back occasional undaunted notes, like messages in a bottle, or glimmers from the other side of the mirror.” Sometimes I feel as though I have always been a foreigner.

Only in my third novel, The Blue Tent, did I ‘come home’. I always suspected I would, but it just took time. And The Blue Tent will almost certainly not be the last of my books to engage with Wales, or rather, the small portion of it that I recognise as unmistakably my own, the Bannau Brycheiniog, or more specifically the Mynyddoedd du, or Black Mountains, that mysterious massif in the shape of a hand, which forms a landscape, or a dreamscape, that for me bears all the characteristics of a recurring obsession.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way to my latest book, Ambassador of Nowhere: A Latin American Pilgrimage. This is a story that deals with travel to distant places — Nicaragua, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Colombia — and is deeply in thrall to the notion of ‘being a foreigner’, although I do end up back in Wales towards the end of the book, chasing memories of my father, who was, for most of his working life a GP in rural Powys. I had not intended him to figure in the book, but he died as I was nearing its end, and I couldn’t keep him out.

I have always loved maps, and in my late teens I stuck a map of South America on my bedroom wall. Convinced that I had a special affinity with that continent, the map proved strangely prophetic, but it took me three decades to put my travel plans into action. The ‘Ambassador’ of the title is flagrantly deceptive. In 2014, I spent a year as a ‘Creative Wales Ambassador’ (a term chosen by the Arts Council of Wales, not me) and since I had been commissioned to complete an anthology of Latin American poetry in translation, published as The Other Tiger in 2016, it seemed like a good idea to chronicle my journeys across that continent in search of its poets and poetry.

It was unfortunate, to say the least, that I ended up in conversation with a small town police sergeant in Colombia, who on being told I was from Wales, informed me that no such place existed, and that I must therefore be the Ambassador of Nowhere. Ironically, that town on the Magdalena River, which has the unlikely name of Mompox, is itself remembered in words uttered by General Bolivar, the Liberator, who (according to Gabriel García Márquez) claimed that “Mompox does not exist. At times we dream of her, but she does not exist.” In this way I was caught in a web of illusion, or of dreams: a policeman from a town that may not exist accusing me of coming from a non-existent country. Eduardo the police sergeant and his brother-in-law Washington then took me to the saddest discoteca in the word, where we downed two bottles of fiery aguardiente, while a handful of dancers, all of them middle-aged and half-drunk, circled aimlessly in a moribund chug around the dance floor to the lachrymose accompaniment of a pot-bellied Latin crooner.  The policeman never guessed that he had gifted me the title of my book.

Returning to my opening quote from Lydia Davis, I happen to believe that whether or not we write or travel, translation forms a fundamental aspect of who we are, since we are all translators. While early childhood is the acute phase of translation, a period marked by insatiable curiosity and of translating and being translated by others, it seems to me that any writer worth their salt remains curious and continues to translate, because all writing is a form of translation — from silence, or from life itself.

For those who were unable to attend the launch, I will be in conversation with the excellent Gary Raymond at Abergavenny Writing Festival, on April 19th at 15.00. In case you missed it, I was interviewed about the book by Gary for his Radio Wales Arts Show, which can be found on BBC Sounds.

I will also be at Book-ish, Crickhowell, on 7th May at 19.30, in conversation with the super-talented author Nicola Rayner.

Ambassador of Nowhere is published by Seren and can be found at good bookshops. It is the companion piece, or secret double, of my anthology The Other Tiger, also published by Seren.

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 Posted on April 8, 2024 by

 Literature

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This is not a border

The Coll de Banyuls, on the edge of the French department of Pyrenées Orientales, offers a convenient path across the border between France and Spain, an alternative to the major highway crossing, fifteen kilometres to the west as the crow flies — but far longer by road — at La Jonquera.

There is no customs post at the Coll de Banyuls, and there was no covered road here until about ten years ago, but the locals knew about it all too well: historically it played an important role in the frontier traffic, especially during the Spanish Civil War, when tens of thousands of refugees crossed over, to be herded into camps along the beaches at Argèles-sur-mer and Saint-Cyprien. Shortly afterwards, in the years that followed the Civil War, many other refugees crossed, in the opposite direction, fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.  They were assisted at every stage by the local Maquis and guides who risked their lives to take small groups of migrants across the mountains, many of them already exhausted by their flight and terrified of capture. The most famous of these refugees was the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who crossed a short distance to the east of here, at Portbou. In the valley below, a few kilometres inland from Banyuls, stands a memorial to the brave villagers who guided their charges across the mountains.

Shortly after the Coronavirus pandemic broke out, the border was closed to traffic. The French police set up a barricade consisting of four huge boulders, preventing vehicles carrying Covid-infected passengers from one country to the other. Curiously, this narrative changed the following year, and the closure of the road was justified as an attempt to prevent the passage, as a local French newspaper claimed, of ‘illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.’ Why such felons should pass this way, rather than via the main crossing at La Jonquera, where there is no passport control, or by any of the other minor crossings for that matter, remains a mystery. 

In the nearby villages on the Spanish side, fuelled by the autocratic decision of the French police to close the border, the rumour started circulating that ‘terrorists’ had been using the pass, a weird skewing of the truth that managed to convolute two variations on the notion of the ‘other’, blending fear of Coronavirus with fear of the masked bomber. In these paranoid times, however, such confabulations should come as no surprise.  Walking near the pass in the late spring of 2022, I noticed a couple of camouflaged SUV’s, hidden behind a clutch of bushes and quite invisible from the road on the Spanish side. The foremost of the vehicles sported a banner above the windscreen that read ‘FORCE VIGIPIRATE’. A quartet of heavily-armed soldiers stood at their ease, chatting. One of them greeted me with a cheery ‘Bonjour’ as though his presence there were a routine matter, and he and his colleagues were here simply to enjoy the view. I continued on my way, and onto French terrain, along a trail that hugged the flank of the mountain I had just descended.

I was therefore very please to discover, this summer, that local people have commandeered a JCB and removed, or kidnapped the boulder that blocked the middle of the road, and plonked it on the roundabout outside the nearest village on the Spanish side, Espolla, with a sign that reads, in Catalan, ‘The Alberas are not a border’. Thus far there has been no response from the French authorities. The gendarmes — or the Force Vigipirate — are unable to retrieve their boulder as it now resides on the territory of another sovereign state. The boulder has been daubed with the senyera estelada, the flag of Catalan independence, since many Catalans do not recognise the state border between Spain and France as signifying anything more than an artifical divide between Spanish Cataluña and the French Catalogne. No one I have spoken to has pointed out the delicious irony that Independentistas are taking advantage of a national border that they disagree with in order to escape prosecution from police action.

Nevertheless, I applaud their removal of the boulder. That is what we need more of: civic action for the common good. It brings a cheer to the heart that people take matters into their own hands in this way.

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 Posted on November 25, 2023 by

 Literature

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The last of the grapes

Garnatxa, Guardian of the Vineyard

There is something deeply nostalgic about the last day of the grape harvest. It symbolises the coming of autumn as poignantly as the emptying of the beaches or the departure of the swallows. In a year such as this, however, it inevitably gives rise to other, more perplexing thoughts: the searing heat we endured over July and August, the parched soil, and the ever present danger of wild fires burning up the land, here in Spain as well as elsewhere across the continent and the planet.

I was in reflective mood when I joined my friends in the fields below the village. It is many years since I worked on the grape harvest. For one thing, it seems such an obvious homage to the God Dionysus, whom I respect but no longer serve. For another, I spent so many days working on the vendange and other fruit picking jobs during my misspent youth, here in Spain as well as in France and Greece, that it doesn’t hold the romantic appeal it might for some. But yesterday was an exception, and I made my way along the rows of vines, secateurs a-snipping, with no motive other than joining in this annual ritual, an integral part of village life hereabouts, where the grape is the bedrock of the economy.

There had been a very welcome downpour the night before. Lying in bed and hearing the heavy patter of rain on the terrace outside was strangely reassuring, even comforting. It was music to so many listening ears, as well as a relief to the wilting plants in our small garden. 

But the long awaited rain was only a partial solution. Along the vines, many of the bunches resembled sun-dried raisins more than plump grapes, evidence of the long drought, and elsewhere the harvests promise similar results. Olives most especially, with prices rising accordingly, by as much as 40 per cent. 

All of this is part of a much wider pattern, and as traditional livelihoods are affected here, in southern Europe, how much more so must they be in Africa, to which the swallows will shortly be returning, and where entire swathes of the population are heading north, to find relief from drought and famine, hoping to find a life in fortress Europe. 

And how, we must ask ourselves, do we treat such migrants? The election of a neo-fascist government in Italy, the rise of hard-right parties everywhere — back in the ‘UK’ this simply means the Tories, whose shift to the right has neutralised competitors — means that a clear policy of exclusion is taking shape. With it will be decided the fate of millions.

Thinking about the future poses many imponderables. I’m not sure how I got here, picking grapes.

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 Posted on September 17, 2023 by

 Catalunya

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Notes on (mis)translation (1)

It has been said that the most interesting aspect of translation is mistranslation — or, to put it another way, translation only gets noticed when it goes wrong. Everyone has their mistranslation stories, and there are now new ways in which AI-assisted translations can generate a laugh.

I thought I would collect a few favourites, and do a little series. Since I am currently in Spain, I’ll offer a couple from last week’s trip across the north of that country.

The first comes from a packet of potato crisps (called ‘chips’, with a long ‘ee’ sound in Spanish).

The packet informs us in Spanish that they were ‘fritas en sarten’ — which suggests that the crisps (or chips) were fried in a pan (‘sartén’ is a frying pan or skillet). This is unlikely to be true, since hand-cooking millions of potato slices in an individual frying pan could not be a cost-effective way of producing hundreds of thousands of packets of crisps. Surely they would have been cooked in a single, industrial-sized container?

But the translation is ‘chips in frying pan’ which suggests not so much that the things were cooked in a particular way, but that they are to be purchased along with the item in which they were allegedly fried. Confusing.

The second of today’s examples of mistranslation was taped to the window of a service station diner on the motorway between Bilbao and San Sebastian. ‘Local’ in this context might be translated as ‘the premises’, i.e. the shop or restaurant outside of which Mrs Blanco and I were seated. It might have read read, ‘Food not purchased from these premises should not be consumed here’ or some such, but certainly not the following, which suggests the promotion of locally-produced foodstuffs:

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 Posted on September 11, 2023 by

 Literature, Translation

     

The Lakes of Covadonga

The road snakes up the mountainside above Covadonga towards the lakes of Enol and Ercina. A pair of eagles glide in slow synchrony against the infinite expanse of blue framed by the window of the bus. Access to the lakes is limited during much of the year, and private cars are not permitted during those times, which, given the precariousness of the road, might not be such a bad idea. A coach toppled off the road on 31 July this year causing serious injury to several of those on board (fortunately, no one died) when the vehicle made way for a passing car.

There is no way to avoid being a tourist on days like this: you buy your ticket and join the queue. There is no jostling for position. Most of the tourists are Spanish, as Covadonga is a site of national importance (see my last post) and as a rule, the Spaniards are respectful queuers. On the bus there is muted conversation as we climb and climb; some take photos of the scenery on their phones, others selfies with a scenic background; astonishing how, one way or another, almost all of us are in thrall to our phones until the signal dies, and beyond . . .

But once you have disembarked, and chosen a route to follow, the numbers thin out and there is plenty of space for everyone. Mrs Blanco and I decide on a modest five mile circumnavigation of the lakes that we find on the Wikiloc app, a walk that offers spectacular views without great exertion. 

Everything falls into place. Up here, even the cattle are chilled. There is a majesty to the setting that puts a temporary halt to the racing of my monkey mind, and that is something. Although I try to curb the internal dialogue when I walk, it is still almost always there, babbling on like a tinkling brook. But up here, it quells itself and ebbs away for a couple of hours, and a kind of peace descends on us.

And in the confluence of sky and mountain it becomes apparent, if only for a while, that the world is an act of the imagination. Perhaps, for some of us, that is what meant by God.

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 Posted on September 10, 2023 by

 Travel

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Covadonga: a separate reality

Before visiting Asturias, I knew nothing of Covadonga, or the special place it holds in the religious, political and cultural mythology of Spain. But the friends we consulted ahead of our journey all mentioned it as a site of extraordinary beauty, so we booked into the Hotel Gran Pelayo — which had excellent reviews on booking.com — thinking it would be nice to end our trip somewhere a bit special. It was only when we got here that we realised we had stepped into a kind of parallel universe, based in large part on a myth.

For Covadonga is a place of pilgrimage, and the first week of September happens to be the time that the faithful gather in great numbers to celebrate La Santina, the ‘Mother of Spain’, and to remember the warlike deeds of King Pelayo, who led the resistance to the Muslim invasion of the country that would one day be called Spain, regarded by some as the first step towards the reconquest and christianisation of the peninsular, which was completed over seven hundred years later, in 1492.

Monument to Pelayo, slayer of Moors

In the first week of September, visitors to Covadonga can witness the build-up to the celebration of  La Santina — and by implication, Pelayo’s victory over the ‘Moors’ — by attending daily mass and taking part in a variety of celebrations around a shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and in the Basilica. The celebrations culminate on 8th September with Asturias Day, and a procession of dignitaries — the great and the good — from the Basilica to the Holy Cave, accompanied by bagpipes.

The shrine of the Virgin Mary – La Santina – at Covadonga

So, we turned up, unwittingly, for the last two days of these festivities before Asturias Day, which provided a glimpse into aspects of Spanish cultural life with which neither Mrs Blanco nor I were particularly familiar. Growing up as a Catholic, with an Andalusian mother, my spouse has a better grasp of what all this means than I do, but even she admits to feeling a dense pall of gloom descend around her when confronted by the more baroque manifestations of the faith. At the same time, neither of us are immune to the fallout from the collective religious experience — something like bewilderment, something like joy — being shared by the hundreds of believers we witness on Thursday night as they carry an effigy of the Virgin from the church to the shrine, a ritual that will be repeated with some variations, and greater pomp, tonight.

So who was Pelayo? According to legend, he was an Asturian warlord who led a successful counter-offensive against the Muslim invaders, around 722 AD. Immediately before his unexpected victory at the Battle of Monte Auseba, he experienced some kind of religious communion with the Virgin, in her shrine at Covadonga, and this — accord to believers — ensured him of victory against the ‘Enemies of the Cross’.

However, the entry in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica puts it more sceptically:

The stories and relics of Pelayo associated with the nearby shrine of Covadonga, the preserved site of the first major victory against the Moors (722), belong to legend rather than to fact; it was, however, in this legendary guise that he became an important symbol of Christian resistance in medieval Spanish history and literature.

As outsiders it is hard to penetrate to the essence of a myth that holds such a powerful response for so many. But there are aspects of this story that are perplexing.

Consider this, for example, taken from an article in the online review ctxt:

‘When Santiago Abascal [the leader of the extreme right party, Vox] studied for his High School Baccalaureate, in the early nineties, he learned in his history class that the Battle of Covadonga – the supposed origin of Christian Spain – was a myth with little factual basis: an ideological construction put at the service of political interests. Almost 30 years later, in April 2019, he stood under the statue of Don Pelayo (and in front of the cameras) to recite the hymn of the Virgin of Covadonga, celebrate El Cid and “the great work of Hispanidad” in America, vilify the “silent and shameful politicians” in the face of affronts to national prestige, and warn that his party would never ask for “forgiveness for the works of our forebears across the centuries” and to offer “a guide to resistance and normal values, based on common sense.”

Did Abascal forget what they taught him at school? It is more likely that he remembered the practical part of the lesson: there are few weapons more powerful than national history turned into myth. And even more so in a country like Spain, where an element within public opinion believes that there are powerful enemies determined to make Spaniards ashamed of being Spaniards.’

This is pretty scary stuff when one considers the role that Vox has in several regional constituencies; but the topic cannot to be avoided, when we remember what Covadonga stands for in the patriotic mind. The faithful, following the plaster and paint image of the Virgin on Thursday evening from the Basilica to the holy cave might not have been Vox supporters, but the idea of the homeland proclaimed in various spots around the place has a special resonance in a nationalist ideology. Which is not to say, of course, that all, or even most Spaniards feel this way — that would be absurd — but as so often, a myth can skew perceptions.

For example, on the way into the sacred cave, a marble plaque reminds us that the Holy Virgin is like a mother to the nation, and that this place is the cradle of Christian Spain. Below the cave, on a huge engraved block of granite, we find the words celebrating ‘the great victory of Pelayo and his Faithful over the Enemies of the Cross’. And who, we might ask, are the ‘Enemies of the Cross’ today? No doubt, Santiago Abascal and Vox provide an answer to that, pursuing, as they do, Islamophobic policies, and more specifically, of halting immigration, most especially of Muslims from the Maghreb.

“Europe is what it is thanks to Spain—thanks to our contribution, ever since the Middle Ages, of stopping the spread and the expansion of Islam,” claims Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, until very recently Vox’s spokesman on international relations.

In a statement issued yesterday, in advance of Asturias Day, Vox announced that its deputies would not attend the presentation of the Medals of Asturias at the Oviedo Auditorium at 6:30 p.m. “due to the politicisation that has affected the awards that should be the pride of our region and that now only serve for Adrián Barbón (President of the Asturian regional government) to reward his own kind.” 

However, the deputies affirm that they will attend all the Asturias Day events “that go hand in hand with Asturian and Spanish traditions, such as the Mass in the Basilica of Covadonga, followed by the procession to the Holy Cave accompanied by a band of pipers.”

By which time, as chance will have it, we will have moved on. Covadonga has been an education, and one which will no doubt furnish pleasant memories — which I will describe in another post — but it is also a place that resonates with a deeply troubling mythology, holding many Spaniards in its thrall.

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 Posted on September 8, 2023 by

 Travel, Spain

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Gaudí’s Folly

Comillas, on the Cantabrian coast, was for centuries a small fishing port of no great importance — whaling was the main industry — until in the mid nineteenth century, Antonio López y López, born into an upper class family fallen on hard times, decided to reverse the family fortunes and become a millionaire. Like so many before him, he set off to the Americas — in his case to Cuba — and returned a very rich man, while still relatively young. He made important friends, among them the king of Spain, Alfonso XII, who bestowed on him the title of Marquis of Comillas, and he built a palace on the hill in his home town. Because of his many shady dealings, he wanted his trusted lawyer near to hand, so on a vacant plot near to his palace, he installed Máximo Díaz de Quijano; and the young Antoni Gaudí — whom the Marquis had met through his Catalan connections (he was married to a Catalan) was commissioned to design the house. Máximo’s passions were nature and music, and these twin themes formed the basis for Gaudí’s architectural plan. As such, the house contains fastidious detail with regard to these two interests, including musical weights attached to the sash windows and representations of flora and fauna throughout the building — from sunflower tiles to butterflies and birds on the stained glass. Unfortunately the house was never completed. Máximo died a week after moving in, from cirrhosis — contracted, no doubt, by a love of rum acquired over long tropical nights in Cuba.

We visited the house, known as El Capricho de Gaudí — or Gaudí’s Folly — on a sunny afternoon, and were shown around by our excellent guide, Andrea, whose explanations of the social and political background, as well as the exquisite detail of Gaudí’s design, were filled with insight and humour.

The next morning we set off into Asturias, along a winding mountain road. In search of a picnic spot midway, we happened upon a medieval bridge called Puente La Vidre, which spans the diaphanous waters of the Río Cares. There was no one around and I took an icy swim. Next stop: the Picos de Europa and Covadonga.

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 Posted on September 7, 2023 by

 Literature, Travel

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Cave art in Cantabria

Over the past year or two we have visited various caves in Spain and France and wondered at the pictures made in them by Palaeolithic artists. It all began in March last year with a visit to Lascaux, which uncovered memories I had of visiting the cave as a six year old, the year before the cave was closed to the public for good, in 1963. 

Revisiting the excellent reconstruction (Lascaux IV) six decades later aroused deeply submerged memories. In November last year Mrs Blanco and I visited La Pileta cave, an astonishing network of caves not far from Ronda, in southern Spain. In January we made a trip to Ardales, also near Ronda, and wondered at the designs left there by its occupants. It has only recently been acknowledged that the earliest artists of Ardales were, in fact, Neanderthals. You can read about them here.

I am trying to piece together parts of a puzzle: it is not only what I seem to recall from my visit to the Lascaux caves as a young boy, but also the answer to a question posed by the writer Helen Macdonald in her memoir The Hawk, when her childhood schoolteacher came out with the curious remark that ‘no one knew why prehistoric people drew animals.’

Macdonald’s schoolteacher’s statement led me to write, on this blog:

Of course we knew why people painted on the walls of their caves! Children, perhaps, more than anyone else: we know it in the very fibre of our being. We need to draw the animals, and to sing the songs of the animals and dance their dances in our rituals, for a very simple reason: we recognise them as both ourselves and as other, a simultaneous perception of identification and of othering; the elemental you and I, perceiver and perceived; the subject and object of all encounters. The essential paradox of being.

Our ancestors were not only fascinated by these creatures who lived their lives in parallel with their own, and with whom they had a pact of sorts. They also loved them. This love is visible in the paintings so tenderly crafted, which in a modern-day observer stirs a sense of a forgotten intimacy, of profound loss.

So cave art has been on our minds for a while now, and this is what brought us to Cantabria this week. Specifically, we wanted to visit Altamira, which, along with Lascaux, holds the most complete collection of palaeolithic painting yet discovered. The cave was made famous by local landowner Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, whose eight year old daughter Maria first spotted the images of bison on the ceiling of the cave in 1879. The story of Sautola’s attempts to celebrate the discovery, and his rejection by the (mainly French) archaeological authorities of the day, who ridiculed his findings and even accused him of forgery, form the storyline of the 2016 Hugh Hudson movie Finding Altamira (starring Antonio Banderas). Although the film is spoiled by a ridiculous subplot involving Sautola’s wife and a vicious local priest (played by Rupert Everett), it has its moments, and gives a good idea of the local landscape — including scenes shot in Santillana del Mar (see yesterday’s post).

Sautuola died before his hypothesis of Altamira’s cave artists became accepted, and celebrated by the likes of Picasso, who, after visiting the cave, is supposed to have declared (somewhat self-defeatingly) ‘Después de Altamira, todo es decadencia’ — which might be loosely translated as ‘After Altamira, it’s all been downhill’. However, as Paul Bahn has pointed out in his article ‘A Lot of Bull? Pablo Picasso and Ice Age cave art’, there is no evidence that Picasso actually said this, any more than he said ‘We have invented nothing’ after a visit to Lascaux. But the fact that the quotes exist, however fallacious they might be, is revealing in itself. We have a gut reaction to this art; it touches deep emotions and feeds the imagination in ways that are hard to pin down. It reflects, perhaps, a sense of belonging within a natural landscape which we have lost forever, and for which we can only long, overcome by some elemental nostalgia.

We set out in bright midday sunshine, the storms of last night blown away by the clean Atlantic breeze, and after visiting the museum complex, waited our turn to join the guided tour. Compared with the layout of the Lascaux replica — which copies the descent through the cave in every detail — the Altamira version was spoiled somewhat by the modern gangways and the crowding of one group upon another of visitors. But once we reached them, after a short descent, the effect of the paintings themselves was exhilarating. The ceiling of the reproduction cave is quite low and, of course, we were free to photograph them. I caught a selection of images.

A plaque in the entrance hall of the museum that holds the replica cave quotes lines from the Spanish poet Rafael Albertí, who visited the cave in 1928, and later wrote in his memoir La arboleda perdida (The Lost Grove):

Parecía que las rocas bramaban. Allí, en rojo y negro, amontonados, lustrosos por las filtraciones de agua, estaban los bisontes, enfurecidos o en reposo. Un temblor milenario estremecía la sala. Era como el primer chiquero español, abarrotado de reses bravas pugnando por salir. Ni vaqueros ni mayorales se veían por los muros. Mugían solas, barbadas y terribles bajo aquella oscuridad de siglos.  Abandoné la cueva cargado de ángeles, que solté ya en la luz, viéndolos remontarse entre la lluvia, rabiosas las pupilas

It seemed as if the rocks were roaring. There, in red and black, huddled together, lustrous from leaking water, were the bison, enraged or at rest. An ancient tremor shook the room. It was like the first Spanish cowshed, packed with wild cattle struggling to get out. No cowboys or herders could be seen on the walls. The animals roared alone, bearded and terrible under that darkness of centuries. I left the cave laden down with angels, which I released into the light, watching them ascend through the rain, their eyes wild. 

But if one image stays with me from the visit, it is perhaps the single modest hand print that I photographed in the shadows of the cave. I remembered from my visits to other caves, in the south of Spain, how powerfully that image had shaken me. Neanderthals, as well as our human forebears, are known to have made the images of a hand on the walls of their dwelling places, either by placing their palms, sticky with red ochre, on the wall itself, or else spraying the paint over the outline of the hand, as a kind of stencil. It is the image of that hand planted against the rock that haunts me, the earliest creative gesture of a human being that we have on record. A statement of creative intent: here I am.

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 Posted on September 6, 2023 by

 Cave Art, Travel

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Driving to Cantabria

We take a trip, ostensibly to visit rock art in Cantabria and Asturias. But to get there we need to cross the great plain of Aragon, and the territory that comprises southern Navarra, northern Leon and Rioja. Much of the way is dotted with strange, irregular mountain ranges; while still in Catalunya, near Lleida, these consist of jagged formations that resemble stalactites, but deeper into Aragon there are flat-topped pyramidical shapes, below which stand enormous livestock factories for the production of pig-meat (‘farming’ is too kind a term to apply to this harvesting of the pig on a vast, industrial scale). In 2017, Aragon overtook Catalunya as the biggest producer of pork in Spain. Currently over 15% of the region’s workforce is employed in the industry, accounting for 11,000 jobs. The conditions under which these animals are kept are unimaginably bleak, as this article by an animal rights group explains. These sinister death camps litter the countryside for miles on end, and make me seriously re-evaluate the merits of a bacon sandwich.

Photo by Animal Equality, uploaded August 20, 2023.

Into Rioja, as one might expect, porcine production is replaced by cultivation of the grape, and the road sweeps through endless vineyards. As we drive into the greener landscape of Cantabria, and leave the dreary motorway to climb through the sierras of this green land, it all begins to look a bit like home, assuming that ‘home’ is anything more than an illusion, a fleeting vision cast down in childhood and sustained for lack of any better word. The weather changes, too, and grey clouds begin to gather, promising a storm that will arrive later in the day, once we arrive at our destination, near the shores of the Atlantic.

Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik

We stop off for a picnic, in the car, because it doesn’t look too inviting out there. ‘Out there’ is the Embalse del Ebro, a natural reservoir formed by the river Ebro a few miles downstream from its source, and a place where it gathers its resources for a 900 kilometre journey to the sea, slicing through northern Spain, before forming a spidery delta in the province of Tarragona, and eventually discharging into the Mediterranean. The river gives its name, via Greek and Latin to the Iberi, or Iberians — the name by which the people of the peninsular were once known. Its name has also gone down in history as providing the setting for the deciding battle of the Spanish Civil War.

Arriving at Santillana del Mar, a small medieval town, turned into an extended tourist walkway, the long awaited deluge finally arrives. We hide out in our ancient hotel and wait for the storm to pass before setting out into the village, which features in the 2016 movie, Finding Altamira — in which Antonio Banderas stars as Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who found the Altamira cave in 1879, but whose discovery was rejected by the leading archaeologists of the day as a fake. 

The town of Santillana del Mar is supposedly nicknamed ‘The Town of Three Lies’ because it is neither sainted (Sant), nor flat (llana) nor is it by the sea (del Mar).

The light of early evening, following the storm, casts the sandstone building of the Colegiata in resplendent light. In La Nausée (Nausea) Jean-Paul Sartre refers to Santillana as ‘le plus joli village d’Espagne’ (the prettiest village in Spain) which seems at the very least an exaggeration, if not actually a lie.

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 Posted on September 5, 2023 by

 Travel

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Extreme weather in the Pyrenees

Photo: El Periódico

The photo reminds me of a painting by one of the old masters. The scene is Biblical. A shepherd hauls a bale of hay for his flock of terrified goats. Plumes of smoke drift across the land. There is a bush fire close by, and it is getting closer.

The situation was described by the man himself, Antonio Rodríguez, who has been grazing a herd of 150 goats in the high ground between the small towns of Portbou and Colera for more than 20 years. The mountains hereabouts — called L’Albera in Catalan, Les Albères in French — are the easternmost arm of the Pyrenees, as they descend towards the Mediterranean above the Bay of Roses. 

‘I’ve had a really bad time of it, but it’s what I had to do . . . save my goats. I was alone in all the danger’ he told the Diari de Girona.

When in the mountains with his flock, Antonio stays in a cabin that stands a mere 400 metres from ground zero of the forest fire that tore through almost 600 hectares of woodland during the fires here earlier this month. To save his flock, Antonio had to spend the night encircled by the advancing flames, high on the mountain. 

The Tramuntana, the Empordà wind, began to blow with gusts that exceeded 120 kilometres per hour. ‘There were people who told me to stay, others to leave . . . I thought I’d better stay here with my goats because if I didn’t they would die and I’d feel guilty all night thinking that I let them die. Only a shepherd understands this,’ he said.

I read Antonio’s story and consider its impact within the context of the hundreds of other stories doing the rounds right now, about climate change and our apparent inability or unwillingness to act in the face of impending catastrophe.

A week later, I was caught in a storm from the other end of the weather spectrum: a torrential downpour, hailstones the size of haricot beans, thunder and lighting directly overhead. 

I was not careless: it could have happened to anyone. I had set out early, and started my climb from the small town of Queralbs, inland from the Alberas, in the high Pyrenees, around 7.00 a.m. The forecast — which I always check before setting out — suggested there might be ‘light showers’ in the afternoon, but otherwise it would be a warm, clear day. The first four hours of my ascent went calmly enough. At the Coma de Vaca, where there is a mountain refuge, I took up another trail, the so-called Camí del enginyers, which runs along in peaks and troughs at over 2,000 metres, towards the Vall de Nùria. 

But people die up here. Near to Nùria stands a monument to nine monks who died in a storm way back in the 13th century — and every year someone gets caught out, someone dies on the mountain. I was lucky.  At the outbreak, when the heavens opened, and the temperature plummeted by about 25 degrees, and my hands turned blue and the hailstones started pinging onto my bare legs, I found some basic shelter beneath a large rock. A trickle of a stream behind me, from which I had struggled to fill my water bottle a few minutes before, had become, within seconds, a furious torrential flood. Thunder crashed and lightning scorched the air directly overhead. I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt, but fortunately I had a rain jacket with hood in my daypack, which I hastened to pull on. 

Storm clouds gather

I sat out the worst of the storm by my rock, during which time I felt strangely protected by a power beyond myself — I have no idea why, but the words of an Irish traveller friend from years gone by, Anto Walker, kept running through my head: May the Lord keep you in the palm of his ridiculous hand — and for some reason that helped. When the worst had passed I set off and walked the remaining two hours to Nùria rather quicker than I might otherwise have managed. It continued to rain and hail, by turn and intermittently, all the way there. At Nùria I caught the little train that descends the mountain to Queralbs, where I had left my car. I was soaked through, and cold to the bone. I switched on the car heating full blast and dried out. Driving down the mountain road from Queralbs to Ribes, the next village, I was met by scenes of devastation: trees uprooted by the storm straddled the road; rockfall lay scattered about. The next day the newspapers reported on the ‘freak storm’, and I knew how lucky I had been. But I had left details of my hike with a friend in the village and he had been following the storm’s progress. He sent me a WhatsApp message as I waited it out beneath my rock, which miraculously I received and replied to. He told me later that if I hadn’t messaged him from Nùria he would have sent out for help. But that wasn’t necessary, fortunately. I was lucky. 

But people die up there. People die because of fire, and because of storms. They always have done, but these days it all seems to be getting worse, a lot worse.

After the storm: a very amateur video

Aftermath of the storm at Queralbs, Redacción NIUS/Europa Press, Girona
12/08/2023  20:59h.

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 Posted on August 26, 2023 by

 Pyrenees

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The hill of wild horses and the nature of risk

Sometimes things fall into place in a way that suggests an omniscient narrator is writing the script, and you are merely a pawn in the plot. On a hill named Pen Gwyllt Meirch — the hill of wild horses (or stallions) — you stop beside a string of them as they graze, just as this pair — who have been nuzzling at each other’s necks as you approach, embark on a silent dance, with only the wind as accompaniment. After their exuberant pas de deux, they return to the group, as the others look on.

You have to find a way toward the ridge, but the path has petered out, and the ridge is an ever-receding goal. This is common enough, in life as well as hill-walking. Here, the soft contours are deceptive, and each rise conceals the next, offering a continuous retreat from view, a problem you give little thought to nowadays. 

As a child, walking in these hills, you often felt as though the longed-for ridge would never arrive, and you would nurture a deepening sense that however many times the hillside flattened out to reveal yet another ascent — even as you scurried over gorse and heather — there would always be another rise ahead, and you would never reach the top.

You might say this was an elementary lesson in philosophy. False horizons are always going to mislead you; there will always be another peak and another plateau, just as, in any kind of excavation —downwards, into the heart of the matter, whatever the matter might be — another layer always seems to accrue in the process of discovery, even as you dig. The problems of descent are no less fraught than those of ascent.

But on this mid-May day of uninterrupted sunshine, after months of overcast and wet weather — which nonetheless leaves our reservoirs depleted, because the spring downpours have not compensated for the lack of rain over the past twelve months — there is a spring to your step.  You are climbing towards the ridge, and those horses have you thinking of something the French philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle wrote, in her essay, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living. 

‘What the animal disarms in advance, even in its cruelty (outside the range of human barbarity), is our duplicity. The human subject is divided, exilic. If the animal’s gentleness affects us this way, it is undoubtedly because it comes to us from a being that coincides with itself almost entirely.’

And what does it mean, to coincide with oneself almost entirely?

Anne Dufourmantelle might herself provide the answer. She dedicated much of her working life to an examination of risk, of the importance of taking risks, and the need to accept that exposure to any number of possible threats is a part of everyday life, from which we cannot be protected by the false and pernicious security manias of the powers that be. She wrote, regarding risk, that ‘being completely alive is a task, it’s not at all a given thing. It’s not just about being present to the world, it’s being present to yourself, reaching an intensity that is in itself a way of being reborn.’ Her best known work, In Praise of Risk, extols the virtues of risk-taking in words that leave little doubt as to her intention:

‘“To risk one’s life” is among the most beautiful expressions in our language. Does it necessarily mean to confront death — and to survive? Or rather, is there, in life itself, a secret mechanism, a music that is uniquely capable of displacing existence onto the front line we called desire.’

Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 in the Mediterranean after attempting to save two children, unknown to her, at a beach on the French Riviera, but she did not survive. She swam after them when they got into difficulty in strong winds at Pampelonne beach, near St Tropez, but was herself carried away by the strong current. The children were later rescued by lifeguards and were unharmed, but attempts to resuscitate her were unsuccessful.

Of all the risks we might take, she believed that risking belief was perhaps the most crucial:

‘To risk believing is to surrender to the incredible . . . to surrender oneself not to reason but to the part of the night that lives in us . . . and obliges us to look towards the top.’

Looking towards the top and believing in the summit, even though it is invisible and receding, always on the retreat, is much like staring down into a fathomless pit in which the accretion of nothingness appears impenetrable: is this what you needed to learn as a child? And did you learn your lesson? 

 2 Comments

 Posted on May 21, 2023 by

 Literature, The Black Mountains

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