LUIS FUNŃEL ‘San Estebon in Winter’

    The age of innocence is behind us. Writing as entertainment, as timeless art, as unsullied by doctrine, as a harmless leisure activity – all of this is beyond us, lost like a daft dog in the fog of the past. It is now a given that novelists have a hidden agenda. What a dangerous gang of desperadoes these writers are! It is not writing that drives them: it is instead the opportunity to spray about the nascent dregs of their scrambled ideologies like so much farmer’s pesticide. The age of the organic ideology is far away in the future. Writing at present is contaminated by a plethora of mind-bending chemicals: a noxious fusion of confused creeds and damaging dogmas lurking beneath the ripe surface of every sharply printed book.

    Cause for concern, certainly. But fortunately for us careful critics, these alleged ‘hidden agendas’ are very rarely as well hidden as they might at first appear to be. The majority of them, in fact, are about as well hidden as an elephant in an oak tree. Strip away the ornamental leaves and there it is: that great grey hulk, that superciliously long-nosed super-shit producer, held barely aloft by bending branches, quite ready to plummet, like the habitually defeated boxer, to the dusty ground below.

    Can we blame a novelist for failing to conceal his or her agenda in such a way? We cannot. In the end, what is to be gained from a very well hidden agenda? If the vast majority of your readers will miss the point, what point the point? And if, in the case of Luis Funńel, all of your readers will miss the point – well then, why are you writing? You are writing because you are self-indulgent. And you are self-indulgent because you are a writer. You revel in complexity; you roll in it, like a pig rolls in mud. If you sought simplicity you wouldn’t be a novelist. If you really wanted to teach people about things, you would have become a teacher, or a politician, or a journalist. Except that you have an inkling that being a novelist allows you to teach people without people knowing that you are teaching them. So you set about writing your novels, hiding your ‘ideas’ into the nooks and crannies of your well-crafted paragraphs. They’ll never notice, you think. And on the whole they don’t notice. And they don’t learn either. You are not a hypnotist, after all - just a writer. So you bring your ideas to the fore. And this time they do notice. And they stop reading. It’s too obvious. The elephant has fallen out of the oak tree.

    All of which goes to show that the hidden agenda, so long as it is well hidden, is nothing to worry about. If a writer wants to sneak something dangerous deep below the covers, let them. Your toes won’t ever reach that far.

    In light of all thus, what can I say as to the inclusion of Luis Funńel and San Estebon in Winter on Georgy Riecke’s list of the Greatest Novels by Contemporary Writers? It was not I who nominated it, I can tell you that. I find the entire situation bizarre at best: a mathematical puzzle, not a novel. An illuminating experiment, I'll go so far as that, but a great novel? I hesitate to lend my full support to this particular edifice.

    I need hardly tell you that, as it stands, it is a contentious choice. After all, Luis Funńel is not even the author of the work in question – he is merely the translator. By presenting him as the author, however, whosoever made this choice is suggesting we rethink the very notions of authorship. In such way has Funńel found himself thrust from the lowly position of translator to that of creator. Or is ‘thrust’ an inappropriate word? It hints at Funńel’s innocence in the case, whereas in reality he was always very aware of what he was doing. Indeed, he can hardly have ever thought of himself as the ‘lowly translator’. He saw his job as one of recreation: the original text was used, with no real respect, as but a cover for his own devices. And yet, he was not quite so unsubtle not to get away with it. Indeed, as subtlety goes, Luis Funńel really does take the biscuit. If you could be said to grab subtlety, then he grabs it roughly, with both hands. As hidden agendas go, you’d be hard pressed to find one quite as well hidden as his. Thus it is by default that his achievement falls under the heading of ‘great’. But a great what, we ask? A great novel - or a great waste of time?

    As it turns out, the real author of San Estebon in Winter was Guillermo Merentés, a prolific if not especially popular novelist who lived and worked in Salamanca from 1912 to 1978. Merentés wrote roughly fifty works, the majority of which were predictable romances set during the Spanish Civil War and the most admired of which turned out to be San Estebon in Winter, first published in 1956. The book tells the somewhat predictable story of a romance which blossoms over a summer and then dies out in the winter, when the young man in question is forced to leave his sweetheart and go fight for the left in the civil war. The boy fights valiantly at first, but ultimately he cannot bear to be separated from his loved one. One night he leaves the front line and heads back home. On the way back, he is mistakenly shot by someone on his own side. He dies, rather slowly, and the terrible news soon filters back to the young lady. After his death, it is forever winter in San Estebon (according to her anyway: her broken heart seemingly destined to have an adverse – albeit scientifically nonsensical - effect on the climate of her home town).

    All very tragic, one must concede, though the resulting novel may be said to steer through the graveness of the plot about as adeptly as a broken rowboat through a pond of jelly. Woefully inaccurate in historical detail and short on characterisation, the only discernible strong point of this work lies in its lyrical descriptions of the female protagonist’s rear end. Otherwise this is a thoroughly conventional tale, the kind of which has for centuries been used to charm the lower classes into ignorance of anything beyond a wonky conception of the myth of love. It is for this reason that many in the literary world treated the Spanish novelist and translator Luis Funńel’s decision in 1995 to translate the book into English with some suspicion. A peripheral member of a shockingly traditional avant-garde literary movement, Funńel was much more used to translating from English to Spanish, specialising in contemporary political fiction from Cuba. His own fiction is similarly politically charged (if not vaguely engaged) and visibly devoid of anything that we might term ‘romantic’. Having said that, Funńel’s claim that he was taking on the project for ‘financial reasons’ certainly bore the pattern of accuracy. Mediocre as it is, there was never anyone who doubted that a foreign translation of Merentés’ novel might sell well.

    San Estebon in Winter : published by Guillermo Merentés in 1956, translated by Luis Funńel in 1997. In the journey between the two languages, little – if anything – was either lost or gained. The novel remained as tiresome as it always was; Funńel either unable, or unwilling to season his predecessor’s prose with the spice of his own talent. The translation was workmanlike - and easily ignored by all those who knew better than to fall into the soppy broth of quixotic fables.

    That is, until Malcolm Harding popped up. Harding is a translator himself; a somewhat boastful individual with wastefully long arms who claims to have translated a book from every single European language into English.[1] Regardless of whether these claims are in fact true or not, there is no denying that the man has an obsessive streak, tied to a unique ability to find strange things in the most ordinary of places. Who would have thought to have wasted more than a few hours of their lives reading any of lines from Funńel’s translation, let alone spend months reading in-between the lines? It would seem to me to being akin to going to Scotland to look for a rare species of bird that you know full well only lives in New Guinea. What could anyone expect to find in this book?

    What indeed. The significance of Harding’s discovery has yet to be fully understood. If nothing else, he has discovered a curiosity – a phenomenon if you will. To extend the metaphor introduced above, whilst he has been to Scotland, and found an interesting bird, we are not yet sure if it is a rare species, or just a demented version of a common one. Some of us aren’t even sure that he has found a bird at all, merely the ghost of a bird.

    Guillermo Merentés, Luis Funńel, Malcolm Harding. Author, translator, ‘code-breaker’. And at the centre of this eccentric triangle, the text itself: San Estebon in Winter. And from here to the centre of the text: the pivot, the turning point, the spark that caused the fire – a list that occurs to the end of the novel, a list of objects left in the house of the young woman that remind her of her lost lover. I reproduce an excerpt from the second half of this list:

(from p.245 of ‘San Estebon in Winter’, in the version translated by Luis Funńel)

14. His red toothbrush with a wooden handle, onto which he has scratched his name.

15. A postcard from Algiers, reading ‘My Dear Conchita. Algiers is terribly hot, but the harbour is very pretty. A pity the French have got their fingerprints all over it! I miss you more than a cool summer breeze. Your darling Pedro x x x (you know where)’

16. A smooth pebble resembling the profile of Manuel Azaña

17. A Spanish translation of Marx’s ‘Critique of Political Economy’ with his notes in the margin

18. A scrap of paper, on which he wrote the following phone numbers:

- 556437 - 912810 - 108121 - 731911 - 551194 - 167131 - 46218… (last number unintelligible)

    The aforementioned turning point came when Malcolm Harding noticed that these 'phone numbers' reproduced in the translation were completely different to those that had featured in the original. Of course, one doubts that he was the only person in the world who had noticed it, but he was certainly the only one who thought enough of it to track down Funńel and demand an explanation. And though the explanations (note the suspicious plural) were hardly satisfactorily, one is still surprised at Harding’s continued determination to follow the problem all the way to its origin. I can only suspect that Funńel treated the request with such enigmatic guile to have provoked the almost insolently enthusiastic Harding towards a more thorough investigation. After all, one supposes that the change of phone numbers was a deliberate ploy by the translator to attract attention: attention which he happily batted away in the full knowledge that his poor batting technique would in fact act as a lamp with which to attract back this curious moth (by which I mean Harding, though it might as well have been any other metaphorical moth).

    Funńel’s immediate excuse was that he was ‘merely anglicising’ the phone numbers. It is to be presumed that here he was ‘merely’ extracting the urine. Later excuses, however, did not improve upon this standard, most of them flirting with the idea that it was nothing but a ‘simple mistake’. The use of the word ‘simple’ was, of course, an immediate giveaway. If it was a mistake, it was a unique mistake, not a simple one. Changing a whole string of numbers is not something you do by accident. In fact, by repeatedly using the word ‘simple’ Funńel was simply drawing attention to the complexity of his faulty conduct. This is very much how Harding interpreted his comments: having approached the Spanish writer with the intention of sorting out a relatively small problem, he easily slipped into contemplation of a much greater one. And it is towards the complex nature of that great conundrum that we must now turn our roughly weakening attentions.

    Admittedly it does not take a master mathematician to notice a pattern emerging like a figure out of the morning mist from Funńel’s altered phone numbers. The first number sets the tone – ‘556437’ – containing three groups of two numbers which add up to ten. The remaining pair of numbers which could be said to form this alternative group – 2+8 and 9+1 – appear at the beginning of the second number. From then on until the end of the list numbers appear in groups which add up to twenty – 10+10, 8+12, 17+3, 19+1, 15+5, 11+9, 4+16, 7+13, 14+6 and 2+18. The last phone number consists of only five digits, an anomaly resolved by the author’s claim that it is ‘unintelligible’. This is, again, an addition made by Luis Funńel which does not appear in the original text by Guillermo Merentés. The addendum clears up any doubt that might be had regarding the calculated configuration of the numbers, which are otherwise obviously selected for a deliberate, if not obscure purpose.

    The task Malcolm Harding set himself, therefore, was to discover the obscure purpose of these numbers: a task with which he could not rely on the assistance of Funńel, who continued to maintain that there were ‘no monsters lurking beneath the surface of this elementary error’ (a claim which once more invites the antithetical interpretation). Following a series of failed attempts to discover the meaning of these numbers and their relationship to the rest of the text, Harding at last came up with the answer after only five months of close study. His theory was that the numbers represented a code through which Funńel’s translation of San Estebon in Winter could be broken down into a series of ever diminishing narratives, all of which are contained within the original whole (his original, not that of Merentés). Starting with the final pair of digits within the seven phone numbers, words could be gradually removed from the text to reveal another text, and again to reveal another text with the next pair of numbers. The process could be repeated thirteen times, until arriving at what Harding called the ‘ultimate text’: the seed from which the rest of the book grew.

    One of the best ways of understanding this theory is to work backwards from the ‘ultimate text’, using the first two numbers in the list to work your way forwards – thus getting a sense of how one can move from a single enigmatic phrase towards a full-blown novel, or better still a translation of another novel, using the relatively basic template provided by the all-important numbers.

    This, then, is the ‘ultimate text’:

The great green for president.

    Needless to say, we will return to discuss its significance later. Before that happy moment, however, let us move forward (or, as Harding would have originally done it, backwards) to the second text (or ‘penultimate text’):

The litter¹ was² emptied³ into⁴ a⁵ great canvas¹ bag², which³ was⁴ dyed⁵ green – though¹ God² only³ knows⁴ what⁵ for. Blame¹ that² idea³ on⁴ the⁵ president.

    Here we see the importance of the first two digits in the first of Funńel’s re-imagined phone numbers – the two ‘5’s that head ‘556437’. If we compare the ‘penultimate text’ to the ‘ultimate text’ we can see easily enough (with the help of the underlining) that the latter is in fact contained within the former, but interrupted by an influx of new words. In short, the ‘penultimate text’ is merely the ‘ultimate text’ repeated, but with five words added in-between each original word. This pattern repeats itself in the third text, but the interval is now based on the next two digits of the phone numbers: the ‘6’ and the ‘4’. The text expanded upon in this third variation is not the ‘ultimate text’ but the ‘penultimate text’ (within which, as we already know, the ‘ultimate text’ is contained).

The women¹ were² tired³ of⁴ picking⁵ up⁶ litter. Of¹ all² jobs³ this⁴ was the¹ worst². ‘Our³ very⁴ souls⁵ are⁶ emptied by¹ this² demeaning³ task⁴… Into the¹ world² we³ were⁴ born⁵ for⁶ a reason¹, maybe² not³ so⁴ great, but¹ better² than³ this⁴…’ Hoping⁵ to⁶ canvas her¹ opinions², the³ old⁴ bag known¹ as² Madam³ Ortoz⁴ – a⁵ name⁶ which in¹ some² ancient³ language⁴ was derogatory¹ – decided² to³ publish⁴ a⁵ pamphlet⁶. Dyed violent¹ pink², crossed³ with⁴ green stripes¹, the² resulting³ booklet⁴ was⁵ conspicuous⁶, though noone¹ read² it³ except⁴ God and¹ his² dog³ (poor⁴ souls⁵; if⁶ only they¹ existed²). Nobody³ really⁴ knows what¹ she² expected³ to⁴ happen⁵, or⁶ what she¹ was² even³ fighting⁴ for. Most¹ likely² she³ was⁴ simply⁵ spreading⁶ blame, to¹ disguise² the³ fact⁴ that her¹ position² was³ dependant⁴ on⁵ an⁶ idea that¹ her² grandmother³ had⁴ on the¹ occasion² of³ the⁴ meeting⁵ of⁶ the village¹ elders² and³ town⁴ president.

    Within this text we can begin to see examples of the subtle play on words which this technique allows. The two words denoting the object of the ‘canvas bag’ are integrated into the following: ‘hoping to canvas her opinions, the old bag known as...’ In this way, both words have changed their meaning: something they will do countless times more as the progression towards the book we know as San Estebon in Winter continues. This constant carnival of meaning is certainly interesting, though it is also notable that there is rarely any point, let alone consistent narrative sense, to any of these interim variations. The above text makes just enough sense to make sense: otherwise it is but a clumsy jumble of words; no more than the strange means to an uncertain end. The same could be said of the following eleven variations, starting with the fourth, which takes the next two digits – ‘3’ and ‘7’ – as its framework, and which begins like so:

The men¹ and² the³ women who¹ lived² in³ the⁴ valley⁵, though⁶ wellfed⁷, were not¹ very² rich³. Tired⁴ of⁵…(etc)

    The pattern continues (I refer you to Malcolm Harding’s book for the remainder of this third text, and for the ten which follow it).[2] Ingenious, undoubtedly, but as we can see, not without its weaknesses. Is wellfed one word or two? It is in any case one of many examples of the grammatical curiosities that litter these interim texts. It is furthermore a common yet paradoxical feature of the type of literature that operates under self-enforced difficult conditions: that it is prone to take constant liberties. To put it more simply: the process overtakes the results, the means surpass the end and the structure comes ahead of the content. It impresses the audience in theory, but practically speaking it shares many of the same features as purely bad prose.

    Credit, yet, where credit is due. The fifteenth variation from our ‘ultimate text’ forms the translation of the original Spanish text of San Estebon in Winter. And it is a thoroughly workable translation; free from obvious error and by no means baring the mark of the mysterious series of texts that lie within it. This is an achievement which can be contemplated with a wide and satisfied smile. Luis Funńel has created a Russian doll in prose, and he has created it so convincingly that no reader can see the crease across its chest. When at last someone tried to locate this crease (i.e Malcolm Harding) it took him almost a year and he relied not only on his natural intelligence but primarily on the clues given by the altered record of phone numbers. And when he presented his findings, it appeared to all the world that this was some mathematician who had discovered a new number, or an astronomer a new planet, or an archaeologist a hidden tomb – not a translator and literary critic who had discovered…. well, what? What had he discovered? The ‘ultimate text’. All very well, but what was the ‘ultimate text’? Had Harding spent a dozen months pursuing an undomesticated fowl, or was there some significance to this sentence that lay at the heart of Funńel’s translation? On the other hand, did it matter whether or not there was some significance, or was it more a case of the thrill being in the chase (i.e. was the agenda well hidden for the sake of it being well hidden, rather than for the sake of it being an agenda?)

   It is best if we return to look at the purported ‘ultimate text’, in all its five precious words. ‘The great green for president’ is how it reads: a straightforward slogan, peppered with a puzzling resonance. The great green for president. What does it mean? Does it mean anything? There are no watertight theories, for sure. However, most of them do skirt around a general, if not unbelievable concept, in which the phrase is thought to be some sort of political statement. Whilst this would certainly fit in with its hidden status (writers being overly fond of hiding political statements in novels) I cannot think of a statement thought to be so incendiary, so startlingly radical, that it would have to be concealed beneath fifteen mathematically structured layers of text. And even if I could think of such a statement, ‘the great green for president’ would almost definitely not be it. Indeed, if it does refer to the political figure that many believe it does, then the only possible argument for Funńel to have hidden it so well would be that he was embarrassed, not frightened, of his beliefs.

    This figure of which I talk is, of course, the ‘great’ Felipe Elverde, a right-wing Spanish ‘politician’, leader of the humbly dubbed ‘Elverde party’. The reason that I have sprinkled so many inverted commas over this last sentence speaks of the seriousness with which I – and many others besides - do not take Mr Elverde and his political ideas. Were it not for that he is a thug, a liar and a mentally deranged psychopath, the man might be considered to be somewhat of a comedic figure. His policies, such as they are, consist of little more than various programs based on the ancient adage ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, tied to a rigidly racist, homophobic and sexist way of thinking. As none of these attitudes have much currency in Spain, at least not beyond the asylum, you would be excused therefore for thinking of Elverde as a harmless nut. Indeed, at present, this is very much the status which he has been given. In 1997, however, he managed to sneak into parliament on the basis of one of the most horrendous misinterpretations in modern political history. Having run a surprisingly quiet campaign, Elverde gathered a multitude of votes on the understanding that his party was, as his name might have been thought to suggest, somehow concerned with ‘green’ issues. Though he later denied having given this impression, it is to be supposed that he did support this misconception, even despite the existence of a 1996 manifesto in which it is written ‘The Elverde party demands the rapid destruction of all green trees and fluffy squirrels by the year 2000’. Whatever the circumstances, he won his right to become a full-time politician (a right which, thankfully, he has now lost).

    Funńel’s enigmatic sentiment – ‘the great green for president’ – might therefore be interpreted as gesture of support for Mr Elverde, in whose name the Spanish for ‘green’ is contained (the use of ‘green’ in Funńel’s sentence instead of ‘verde’ is most likely a pun, both on the mix-up between his green name and anti-green policies and on the nature of Funńel’s work as a translator from Spanish to English). However, there is no easy explanation for the use of the word ‘president’, since there is no such position in Spain, the term ‘prime-minister’ employed instead (on top of a refreshingly obsolete monarchy). Possibly ‘president’ is used to suggest a desire for Elverde not only to succeed politically, but to forge for himself a new role, maybe one of dictator. Either that or it is meant ironically, as a partner to the earlier use of the word ‘great’ – an adjective rarely found alongside Elverde’s name (unless a reference to his nose). I am personally inclined to see it as irony – and therefore to doubt that Funńel has any sort of respect for Elverde, though this throws into further confusion the already knotty dilemma of what function the ‘ultimate text’ is performing. Why make such an effort to make what is no more than an ironic point? Or is making such an effort to make such an ironic point an ironic point in itself?  Is Funńel leading us to expect a mature and dangerously enlightening political point, only to throw in our faces a sardonic quip?
    Were the ‘ultimate text’ hidden in one of his own novels, this approach might be justified. His inclusion of a hidden message within someone else’s novel is less easy to explain, unless of course it has some kind of precedent in the original (which it doesn’t – attempts to find a code in Merentés’ work have been fruitless). Whichever way you look at it, the ‘ultimate text’ is ultimately ambiguous, with no likely significance. If it ever saves itself, it is through the juxtaposition of its semi-political irony and the rather tame romantic novel within which it is so very carefully concealed.

    All of which leads us to a re-evaluation of the work as a whole, if you should feel that such a thing is required. How does knowledge of the ‘ultimate text’ affect our reading of the book as nothing but a translation of Merentés’ San Estebon in Winter? The answer is that, though it shouldn’t affect us at all, it somehow does, in that it constantly draws our attentions to the intricate way in which Funńel created his translation; to the cross and counter currents flowing beneath the surface of the still water. It reminds us, you could say, that sentences contain other sentences, that novels – those great strings of sentences – can, like blocks of granite, be chipped down to create different works, again and again, till only a single stone of a word or letter is left (in this sense Harding’s ‘ultimate text’ is lacking: it should be smaller, though admittedly he lacked the numbers to break it down any further). It also reminds us – or reminds me, at least - that, for all their concerted digging below the surface, for all their party tricks and hidden agendas, a writer’s work must, in the end, be judged on its surface. This is why I hesitate, nay refuse at this late stage to sign off this review with a stamp of approval for Luis Funńel. His translation of San Estebon in Winter is certainly a conversation piece. And in many ways, it does deserve to be called ‘great’. I have come across few works of such admirable complexity and compelling wit. But is it not needless complexity and hollow wit? As one emerges, like the resurrected dead, from the peaty earth of this intricate text, one allows oneself a view of the ground from which one has broken. One glimpses the surface; the ground on which one can finally stand. And one is forced to confront Luis Funńel on the basis of a single text; that we can all see for ourselves, without the help of the human mole that is Malcolm Harding.
    And that text is San Estebon in Winter.  And one is inclined to think: is it but a translation of a tedious romance – and nothing more.
    The agenda was well hidden: it is best left so.