Of Saints and Miracles by Manuel Astur (tr. Claire Wadie)
Review by Eleanor Updegraff
Each year, the Peirene Stevns Translation Prize awards an emerging literary translator the chance to translate a short work of contemporary fiction that will be published in the UK and US by independents Peirene Press and New Vessel Press. The winner of 2021’s Spanish-focused prize was Claire Wadie, whose melodic translation of Manuel Astur’s Of Saints and Miracles is now available for the delectation of English-speaking readers. An astonishing novel that blends crime, fable and social commentary against the backdrop of a wild mountainous landscape, it lives from its singular narrative voice and an enthralling sense of freedom that marks Astur out as a novelist of unique brilliance, and Wadie as an equally talented wordsmith.
From the opening pages, with their first-person-plural narrator and overtones of mysticism, Of Saints and Miracles is determined to be different. This determination is sustained throughout the course of almost two hundred pages, but, to his great credit, Astur rarely seems to be trying too hard. (Only occasionally does the build-up of arresting similes threaten to become overwhelming, catastrophe always mercifully averted by the deployment of some well-placed irony.) And so the reader finds themselves transported to what could be the set of a film or elaborate theatre production, a one-horse town in the mountains of Asturias, on the edge of which lives Marcelino, ‘small, insignificant, and pig-headed’, yet, for all that, our undisputed hero.
The intense beauty of Marcelino’s rural home is juxtaposed with both fearsome poverty and extreme violence, as the title of the first section (or ‘song’), ‘The Killing’, makes abundantly clear. The (accidental) victim is Marcelino’s brother, whom he adored as a boy, and in the disorientating aftermath of the crime he disappears into the countryside, embarking on a journey through the wilderness that will take him far from civilization but back towards his roots. As he walks, Marcelino is pursued by the authorities, loses precious possessions – axe, dog – and mentally unspools a traumatic childhood branded by his father’s drunken rages and an abusive priest. Unbeknown to him, he has become a national cult hero, with young liberals and anarchists descending on his village to make a stand for social reform and keep a kind of vigil until he is caught.
It is a strange, haunting story — Marcelino’s journey and the life that came before it –- but it is made all the stranger by Astur’s decision to insert vignettes throughout the narrative describing the ordinary, moving or downright absurd lives of various village characters (Benjamina, whose pyrotechnic death is as colourful as her life, being a particularly memorable cameo). These are joined by shifts in tense, a repetitive thread that seems lifted straight from a nursery rhyme, and philosophical, often anger-laced interjections on the part of our unnamed, omniscient narrator. Then there is the dreamy refrain from the opening passage — ‘We have the voice and we have the time. We have all time’ — which returns often and echoes the cyclical dimension of the story, in which the slow turning of the seasons reflects the pattern of human life. It is a perspective of crushing inevitability, yet it offers, too, a sense of liberation. In the end, there is no escaping past or future — neither for Marcelino nor anyone else — yet what matters is not so much what happens here as that it should be happening at all. As the narrator makes sure to tell us: ‘in this story everything is of equal importance.’
A book that operates on this imaginative level can succeed only if it manages to engage the reader, which Claire Wadie’s translation does commendably. Not only does her English move with a subtle, hard-to-define rhythm that presumably echoes the Spanish (there isn’t a rhyme scheme, though one senses it lurking just around the corner), she has also captured the dry, world-weary tone of the narrator, their impassioned outbursts, and a sharp realism shot through with nostalgia for the ‘Old World’. The resulting text is vibrant, lyrical and effortlessly flowing, making it easy for the reader to be swept along on the story.
This is the great gift we are offered by Astur: the chance to engage with the everyday and find magical elements hidden within it. Of Saints and Miracles gives us the chance to look at the world anew, guiding us sometimes gently, sometimes with ill-concealed impatience: ‘It is absurd to think yourself superior simply because you are alive.’ Marcelino and the characters within these pages are fictional figures, it’s true. But isn’t it refreshing to think that, in reading, we can suspend reality for just a moment, put our own small, insignificant lives on a par with Marcelino’s, and accept that, for better or worse, ‘everything, in the end, is a story’.
Of Saints and Miracles is published by Peirene Press, 6 July 2022