There are many things that can mark the future of your life and your career. A fruitful conversation, an initiation journey or an interesting lesson in the classroom, as happened to Diego Garrido. The translator was only 22 years old when they screened him at a film school The Dead, John Huston's film based on the last story of Dubliners, by James Joyce. At that time, Garrido was not a person used to reading, but that class made him obsessed with the Irish author. His concern led him to gather for the first time in Spanish all of Joyce's short stories and forms in a volume that he published Páginas de Espuma.
On May 3, by the hand of the same publishing house, he repeats the experience, this time with letters, and brings out the first volume of the largest compilation published to date, with many unpublished texts in Spanish, dating from 1900. to 1920. The second, will see the light next year. “A project never undertaken in our language in an edition that will have more missives than the English one”, advances the editor Juan Casamayor.
Garrido explains to La Vanguardia that “one of my main objectives, beyond gathering the writings, is to demonstrate that Joyce's work is fully valid and accessible to everyone. He is the writer of youth, although people insist on seeing him as someone only suitable for scholars, partly because of how remarkable his best-known work, Ulysses, is. At 25 years old, there is no author with whom I feel more connected.
Of course, he acknowledges, “despite the importance of his works and the intimacy shown in them, as evidenced in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce was not a very pleasant man. To be able to translate someone you have to first take him down from the pedestal he is on. And it's not difficult to do, because you soon realize that he was a complicated guy to deal with and, if he is endearing, it is not because of his actions but because of his work. He did not pay too much attention to the people he had around him and this way of being ended up marking his career, as well as causing a large part of the Dublin literary circle to leave him aside ”. Since he had an answer for everything, although it was not always the most accurate, "he asked his brother Stanislaus to give each of them a poem in which he dedicated all kinds of insults to them."
The author of Finnegans Wake was convinced that he could reach an understanding with a handful of selected dead or with scholars who were not within his reach, such as the playwright Henrik Ibsen, whom he considered a great admirer. “I have roared his name in the dark classrooms of my university, where he was barely known. I have claimed for you the place you deserve in the history of drama”, he came to write to the Norwegian intellectual. Garrido points out that "before those few people, it is curious to see how he put aside his bad temper and became submissive."
In a similar way he acted before Nora, his great love. “The things I said last night may have hurt you, but shouldn't you be able to get my opinion on things?” he apologizes to his wife in a letter. The translator elucidates that, as was the case with Stanislaus, “his relationship with Nora was somewhat stormy. After his mother's death, he struggled to find someone to accompany him. For him, the woman was a being that created life and also destroyed it. For that, Nora was perfect."
But if there is something that marked both his life and his work, beyond his character and love, that was “his terrible vision, increased by a rheumatic fever that he suffered as a young man. A subject that concerned him, as evidenced in his letters, but which also inspired him. In fact, during his convalescence he wrote The Dead, the story that has led me to be where I am today ”, he concludes.
