The Professor of Spanish Literature Adolfo Sotelo, from the University of Barcelona, has located the first manuscript of Camilo José Cela. It is the collection of poems Pisando la dubious luz del día, written shortly after the death of his girlfriend, a victim of the bombings of the first great siege of the Francoist troops in Madrid, to which he would paradoxically end up enlisting some time later.
The collection of poems, whose title refers to a verse from the fable of Polifemo and Galatea, was written between November 1 and 11, 1936 and Cela himself defined it as "a book of phenomenal, monstrous verses, the verses that only they can be written when one feels death in one's hands”.
The notebook was in the hands of María Isabel Maristany, daughter of the director and owner of Ediciones del Zodíaco, the publisher with which it would be published in 1945. Sotelo, for his part, would take a philological edition of the book to Ediciones Línteo years later. Until now, however, the manuscript of the book remained missing. Finally, after fourteen years of intense searching, Sotelo has found the original, which will soon see the light of day in the form of a facsimile.
This finding, in addition to appreciating the author's calligraphy, allows us to glimpse some unknown data, such as the subtitle: Poems of a cruel adolescence or the decision to eliminate the poem Announcement of a declaration of love. On the other hand, a preliminary note is added and, in Sotelo's words, "variants are established and Cela's calculated strategy is revealed in the dedications of the poems to open horizons in his growth as a professional writer."
With this notebook, the knowledge of all the manuscripts of Cela's main works is completed, from La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942) to Madera de boj (1999), all of them kept in the Camilo José Cela de Iria Flavia Galician Public Foundation. , in A Coruna.
