Unfortunately standards of translation do not exist in this country. Many believe that there is no such thing as translation, that the essence of a book cannot be conveyed. The professor seizes his dictionary, the lady tourist her pen; the ingenious publisher knows that none is so low that he will not translate—the less the experience, the more the translator, a maxim in the application of which Blasco Ibáñez has suffered appalling casualties. When Sangre y arena ("Blood and Sand") comes from the press as The Blood of the Arena, the judicious pause—this is to thunder on the title page, not in the index—but when we meet the eunuch of Sónnica transformed into an "old crone," error passes the bounds of decency and deserves punishment which is callipygian. Nor are these translations worse than their fellows.
Blunders of this sort ought no longer to be possible. If American scholarship is not a sham, this reform, which is imperative, must be immediate.
Blasco Ibáñez was born in Valencia, that most typical of the cities of the eastern littoral along the Mediterranean, known as the Spanish Levant. The Valencian dialect is directly affiliated with the neighboring Catalan, and through it with the Provençal rather than with the Castilian of the interior plateau. In the character of the people there is a facility which suggests the French, while an oriental element is distinctly evident, persisting not only from the days of the Moorish kingdoms, but eloquent of the shipping of the East and the lingua franca of the inland sea. Blasco Ibáñez is a Levantine touched with a suggestion of Cyprus, of Alexandria, with an adaptability and mobility of temperament which have endowed him with a faculty of literary improvisation which is extraordinary. He has been a novelist, a controversialist, a politician, a member of the Cortes, a republican, an orator, a traveller, an expatriate, a ranchman, a duellist, a journalist. "He writes," says the Argentine Manuel Ugarte, "as freely as other men talk. This is the secret of the freshness and charm of the unforgettable pages of The Cabin, of the sense of fraternity and camaraderie which springs up immediately, uniting the author and his readers. He seems to be telling us a story between cigarettes at the café table. In these times when mankind is shaking itself free from stupid snobbery to return to nature and to simple sincerity, this gift of free and lucid expression is the highest of merits."
Ibáñez's first stories dealt with the life of the Valencian plain, whose marvellous fertility has become proverbial:
| "Valencia is paradise; |
| Wheat today, tomorrow rice." |
Swift with the movement of the born story-teller and the vitality of a mind which is always at white heat, these tales are remarkable for vivid descriptive power in which each successive picture conveys an impression of the subject so intense that it seems plastic. He is a painter of sunshine, not as it idly falls on the slumberous streets of the Andalusian cities, but turbulent with the surging of the spirit, welling up and pressing on.
In the novel of a more intellectual, introspective feature, he has also met with rare success, as Mr. Howells has well shown in one of the few articles upon this author in English which are of value. The vein is more complex but not less copious, remaining instinct with power. It is indeed less national, an excursion into the processes of the northern mind. Ibáñez, however, was never an æsthete; no phase of art could detain him long. He sailed for Argentina to deliver a series of lectures on national themes at a time when Anatole France was upholding the Gallic tradition in that country. Argentine life attracted him and he became a ranchman on the Pampas, bought an American motor tractor, and settled down to create the Argentine novel. South America, it must be confessed, for some reason has been incontinently unproductive of great novels, nor was Ibáñez to find its atmosphere more propitious than it had proved to its native sons. Besides, the Spaniards, who are a religious people, were praying for his return. He took ship as suddenly as he had arrived and has since resided chiefly at Paris, a city which has been to him from early youth a second home.
In the cosmopolitan vortex of the great war capital, he has interpreted the spirit of the vast world conflict in terms of the imagination with a breadth and force of appeal such as has been given, perhaps, to no other man. While Spain has remained neutral, under compulsion of material conditions which those who best understand her will appreciate at their true weight, in a single volume Ibáñez has been able to abrogate this neutrality of the land, and to marshal his people publically where their heart has always been secretly, in line with the progressive opinion of the world.
If in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse he has rendered his greatest service to humanity, in The Cabin he has made his chief contribution to art. It is the most nicely rounded of his stories, the most perfect. Spanish and Latin-American opinion is here unanimous. Nevertheless, primarily it is a human document. Rubén Darío, than whom, certainly, none is better qualified to speak, emphasizes this crusading bias: "The soul of a gladiator, a robust teller of tales à la Zola is externalized in The Cabin. The creative flood proceeds without faltering with a rapidity of invention which proclaims the riches of the source. Books such as this are not written purely for love of art, they embody profound human aspirations. They are beautiful pages not only, but generous deeds and apostolic exploits as well." The ambient blends admirably with the action and the characters to present a picture which is satisfying and which appeals to the eye as complete. The Cabin is a rarely visual story, and directly so, affording in this respect an interesting contrast to the imaginative suggestion of the present-day Castilian realists. In no other work has the author combined so effectively the broad swish of his valiant style with the homely, even crass detail which lends it significance. "A book like this," to quote Iglesias Hermida, "is written only once in a life-time, and one book like this is sufficient."
A favorite anecdote of Blasco Ibáñez is so illuminative that it deserves to be told in his own words: