Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE) for his post-war diaries that, unpublished until now, will hit bookstores next week.
“Postwar newspaper in Madrid. 1943”, published by the Rafael Cansinos Assens Foundation (Arca), brings together in four hundred pages, which include a name index and a photographic album, the personal impressions of Rafael Cansinos Assens (Seville, 1882-Madrid, 1964) about one of the darkest periods of the recent history of Spain.
The son of the writer and director of Arca, Rafael Cansinos, has told EFE that it is “an intimate diary” and has warned the readers of Cansinos Assens that “it is not ‘The novel of a writer'”. Although this work is also made up of newspapers, but of newspapers that “were rewritten to turn them into a literary work”, while in this post-war newspaper “there is no rewriting”.
“It’s his day to day, and also talking about himself, which rarely happens in ‘The novel of a writer’, where the protagonist is literary life,” said the son of the writer, who is reissuing a good part of His father’s work, Arca already exceeds twenty titles between original works by Cansinos and his translations of classics and classic Hebrew texts.
Cansinos Assens of the moment
In 1943 Cansinos was writing his biography of Goethe, whose complete works he translated, and was willing to undertake the translation and introductory study of “The Thousand and One Nights”, both works, in three volumes each, for the legendary collection of Eternal Works from the Aguilar publishing house, for which he also translated the complete works of Dostoyevsky, among other classics.
Single, Cansinos lived in 1943 in an apartment next to the Madrid Retiro, together with his two sisters, also single, and still suffering the moral hardship of the time -if during the war he was threatened as a suspected Falangist, in the postwar period he was persecuted as suspected of being a republican-, they lived comfortably not so much because of the income from their literary works as because they enjoyed the inheritance of a relative.
In that period Cansinos no longer published in the press nor did he publish original works, for which reason his son has pointed out that “this ‘Post-war newspaper in Madrid. 1943’, due to its nature as a diary narrated from internal exile, is a faithful narration of the socio-cultural situation of those first years of Francoism, which were the hardest and most difficult for those who stayed here”.
The editor has assured that “it is evident that Cansinos’ prose is very topical” and that “current writers have to get used to sharing the table of novelties in bookstores with Cansinos Assens”. “It’s a strange thing because he is a writer from the last century, but many of his works could not be published in his time and they will come out in the next few years.”
Unpublished war diaries
With these words, the writer’s son alludes not only to the post-war diaries, which, all of them unpublished, add up to several thousand pages and extend from 1939 to 1946, inclusive, with an uneven extension, since if the one corresponding to 1944 could occupy two volumes, the one corresponding to the years 1945 and 1946 may be published in a single volume.
It also refers to the equally unpublished war diaries that Cansinos kept in Madrid throughout the war, between 1936 and 1939, but whose editing work is complicated because they require translation, since he wrote them in several languages, not so much to hide what that he consigned as for practicing with these languages that he knew from his work as a literary translator -on one occasion he animated a gathering by writing a Christmas greeting in eleven languages-.
In a single sentence from this post-war newspaper, Cansinos defines himself when, referring to the authors of his generation, he says: “I never really had anything in common with them, except being their contemporary”, and on another page he shows that he continues to literary news when referring to “La familia de Pascual Duarte”, by Camilo José Cela, as “the greatest literary success of all this postwar period” and adding:
“There are those who compare Cela with Dostoyevski in his ‘Karamazov’. All this shows how lacking we are in a great novelist”. EFE
