Posted by Margaret Jull Costa on September 17th, 2021

An anthology, etymologically speaking, is a gathering or collection of flowers, and in this anthology my aim has been to gather together a collection of really fine flowers, stories dating from the nineteenth century to the present days, including writers across all of Spain's four languages - Basque (euskara), Castilian Spanish (castellano), Catalan (catala) and Galician (galego). Choosing what to include was both a delight and a torment; a delight because it involved reading so many wonderful stories, most of which were entirely new to me, and a torment because choosing meaant having to pick only some and not others. There are, inevitably, omissions (Juan Goytisolo, Dulce Chacon, Camilo Jose Cela, Antoniio Munoz Molina, Laura Freixas, to name but a few), but I also wanted, where possible, to choose and translate stories that hadn't previously been translated into English or which, in my entirely biased opinion, would benefit from a fresh translation.

A confession: while I can read Spanish and Galician (which is very like Portuguese), I do not read Basque or Catalan. In the case of Basque, I have based my translations on the Castilian versions made by the authors themselves. In the case of Catalan, I turned to my colleague Peter Bush for his translations of Joseph Pla, Quim Monzo and Teresa Solana. However, I could not resist doing my own translations of the stories by Catalan writers Carme Riera and Merce Rodoreda, basing my translation of the former on the author's self-translation and of the latter on the excellent translation by Clara Janes. I learned later that in Riera's Spanish version of her own story, she made radical changes, including cutting the first two pages of the original. She even changed the title: in the Catalan version it is Retorn a casa (Homecoming), in the Castilian version it is simply Volver (Return). A translation in more than one sense!

For me, the short story is not a truncated novel, but is more akin, perhaps, to poetry. The best stories create a world in just a few pages, just as the best poetry (in my view) encapsulates a moment in a few words or lines. It is never wise to read poem after poem, and it seems to me a mistake to read any collection of stories one after the other. Think of this rather as a box of chocolates; savour and ponder each story one, or, at most, two at a time.

People have, it seems, always told stories, and in Spain, the custom of the cuento can perhaps be traced back to the Arab tradition of story-telling, given that the Moors were a potent presence in Spain for more than seven hundred years. Those spoken stories from India, Arabia and Persia were, of course, later set down in such books as The Arabian Nights, but in Spain the story in its written form is usually deemed to have begun with the anonymous picaresque 'novel' Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), which wove together a series of stories all featuring a young lad and his many masters. This form was developed further by Cervantes in his Exemplary Novels (1613), which comprises twelve unconnected and very diverse stories. Cervantes was using the word 'novel' to distinguish his written fiction from the oral story, or cuento; over time, novela came to mean 'novel' and cuento 'short story'. As in the rest of Europe, the written cuento really came into its own with the growth of literacy, the advent of the steam printing press, and the subsequent popularity of newspapers and magazines. In the early 1800s, Mariano Jose de Larra wrote what were called 'cuadros de costumbres', descriptions of contemporary life, often with a sharp, satirical edge. The short story as we know it really took off in Spain in the late nineteenth century, with novelists like Galdos, Pardo Baza and Leopoldo. Alas, and, aas elsewhere in the world, it has to this day remained an essential genre for most writers.

In choosing the stories, I didn't think in thematic terms at all, but themes have emerged of their own accord. Perhaps inevitably, many of the stories deal directly or obliquely with the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, and had a devastating effect on society both during and long afterwards. The stories included here cover both the brutality and absurdity of war (Sender and Calders), the terrible divisions caused by any civil war (Rivas), the lingering grief and loss (Merino and Rodriguez), and the grim aftermath of poverty, repression and even mental illness (Delibes, Marse and Laforet). Realism and social comment are, of course, bound up in that first theme, both other stories reveal other lives from the various social classes: the impoverished working class (Ignacio Aldecoa and Pombo), the wealthy middle class (Tusquets, Ayesta and Monzo) and the sunken middle class who don't quite fit in anywhere (Alas and Pla). Women also feature strongly (both as authors and characters), from put-upon, frightened or bored-rigid wives (Rodoreda, Maatute and Baroja), to the woes or otherwise of the independent woman (Josefina Aldecoa and Millas), to the hormonal confusion of an adolescent girl (Puertolas).

As I read and reread the collection, I was also very struck by how much fantasy there was in these stories. This may, of course, have to do with my own tastes, but while the fantastic and the ghostly have long been a strong thread in British and American fiction (thanks, perhaps, to Poe), I have always tended to think of Spanish literature as staunchly realist. Yet here, from the nineteenth century (Galdos and Pardo Bazan) up to the present day (Aixa de la Cruz), we have that same fascination with the inexplicable, and with the wilder side of our imaginations (Chacel, Rodoreda, Benet, Vila-Matas and Cubas). There is also, thank heavens, a great deal of humour, sometimes black (Marias and Solana), sometimes absurd (Galdos and Cunqueiro), sometimes just very acutely observed (Molina Foix, Fraile and Cercas), and sometimes just joyfully playful (Azorin). I have also included three pieces (Carrasco, Diaz-Mas and Cercas) which are, strictly speaking, memoir, but I was encouraged by biographer Claire Tomalin's comment that while the (auto)biographer cannot invent, he or she does still need imagination. And given our human tendency to lie or misremember or elaborate on the facts, any memoir is always tinged with fiction.

The stories are arranged chronologically according to the author's date of birth but, as with any anthology, there is a delightful randomness about subject matter and style and time, shifting from an absurd tram journey with a man who cannot tell fact from fiction to the jittery owner of what might be a magical talisman to two lonely hotel guests finding solace of sorts to a simpleton finding friendship for the first time, and those are just the first four stories. Feel free to read the stories in any order that takes your fancy, but remember, only one or two at a time.