Instituto Cervantes and UST to present translated edition of Gabriel Miró's masterpiece
MANILA, Philippines - Instituto Cervantes de Manila and the University of Santo Tomas (UST) launch the English translation of distinguished Spanish writer Gabriel Miró’s masterpiece “Nuestro Padre San Daniel (Our Father San Daniel)” on Jan. 24, 6 p.m., at the Miguel de Benavides Library in UST.
The first volume of a two-book series titled “Oleza,” Nuestro Padre San Daniel takes us to a fictitious place patterned after Orihuela, a city where he grew up and masterfully describes the tension between tradition and modernity. The second part of the collection, “El Obispo Leproso” (The Leprous Bishop), will be launched by UST Publishing House within the year.
A masterpiece of Spanish literature originally published as two separate novels in the 1920s, the publication of the Oleza is being printed by the UST Publishing House as part of the university’s “400 years, 400 books” program. It is the first time that this two-volume novel is translated in English.
Born in Alicante, Spain (1879- 1930), Miró worked as an intern at the College of the Jesuits of Orihuela. His literary career gained public relevance with the publication of his narrative “Nomad” in El Cuento Semanal, a publishing company from the beginning of the century in Spain.
In 1910, he published “Las Cerezas del Cementerio (The Cherries of the Cemetery), a title in which Miró introduced a theme that runs through his later work and which is central in the Oleza novels: the conflict between the quest for happiness and a fundamentalist religion marked by guilt and intolerance.
Considered to be his masterpiece and a great contribution to the cultural heritage of Hispanic culture, the Oleza novels are being published as was the wish of the author, who always wanted to publish them together.
With translations into English by Filipino scholar Marlon James Sales, who received a grant in the Translation School of Toledo of the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo, Spain, this piece of literature also discusses themes that remain relevant to Philippine society at present.
“The real challenge in translating Gabriel Miró consisted in rendering his words into structures that can be grasped by a modern-day reader, but without watering down as much as possible the precision and complexity of his prose,” Sales said.
The edition, designed by Filipino artist Félix Mago Miguel, is the result of a project coordinated by the Instituto Cervantes in Manila with the assistance of the Ministry of Culture of Spain, AECID and the Embassy of Spain in the Philippines. In addition, the Orihuela Library and Alicante’s Gabriel Miró Library have also collaborated in this venture.
This translated edition gives the English-speaking market an opportunity to read one of the great writers of the Spanish literature of the 20th century —an author distinguished for the finely wrought but difficult style for his works that he has been deprived of wider dissemination among readers.
