Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer - Leyendas
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| The striking portrait of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer painted by his brother, Valeriano Domínguez Bécquer. An iconic image formerly used on 100-peseta notes. |
This was my 2014 holiday reading, found at a beachside bookstall on the Playa del Cura in Torrevieja (Alicante). My purchase contained only seven of the legends; I imagine from the attractively minimal apparatus that it was a booklet supplied free with some newspaper or other. Anyway ten years later I bought myself a full edition (from Santos Ochoa in Zenia Boulevard, for completeness!), so here's a run-through of all the stories.
Leyendas is a well-known book in Spain, and a regular on the school curriculum; Bécquer's stories have also been adapted for children. It is a collection of romantic tales in the tradition of Hoffmann and Heine. Most of the stories feature the supernatural. Another implication of the title is that the author doesn't consider any of the stories to be true. This creates a fertile arena for literary artistry; in effect, these are early exercise in the use of an unreliable narrator, because the author's commitment to the material is always uncertain. The artistry co-exists happily with a healthy simplicity for the most part, but sometimes the ironies become more restive. Bécquer is also, of course, an important poet, his poems speaking with a kind of direct freshness that was then new in Spanish literature.
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| Bécquer adapted for children |
El caudillo de las manos rojas (The chieftain of the red hands)
One of the two "Indian" legends. Pulo kills his brother and is tormented by remorse and by the bloody hands that cannot be washed clean. To achieve redemption he is sent on a long pilgrimage to Tibet, accompanied by his beloved Siannah, with the proviso that they remain chaste throughout the pilgrimage, but when it's nearly done they rest under a tree and give way to their desires. Siannah instantly vanishes, and the devastated Pulo is now instructed to spend many years building a magnificent temple to Vishnu and finally to admit a mysterious stranger for the consecration of the idol, but with strict instructions that he must not pry on the stranger's work. On the cusp of success Pulo is once again too eager, and he takes a peak. The idol assumes the terrifying form of Shiva, and Pulo dies, glimpsing Siannah in his last moments; she commits Sati.
[Image source: https://www.todocoleccion.net/libros-antiguos/el-caudillo-manos-rojas-gustavo-adolfo-becquer-novela-semanal-n-198-ano-1925~x476001942 .]
More about this story:
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| Jacket of El caudillo de las manos rojas when it appeared in the series La novela semanal in 1925. |
[Image source: https://www.todocoleccion.net/libros-antiguos/el-caudillo-manos-rojas-gustavo-adolfo-becquer-novela-semanal-n-198-ano-1925~x476001942 .]
La Cruz del diablo (The devil's cross)
High in the Pyrenees the narrator offers a prayer to a sinister-looking wayside cross, but is interrupted by a horrified local, who tells him its story.
A wicked overlord once marauded and devastated the region. Finally the local inhabitants take up arms and succeed in killing him. However they continue to be harried; his armour comes to life, possessed by a devil, and becomes the cruel leader of an even worse band of villains. After this happens repeatedly, the inhabitants finally melt down the accursed armour and re-cast it in the form of a cross, which successfully imprisons the devil. However all prayers to the cross are fulfilled by contraries.
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| Illustration for La cruz del diablo by Ángel García Nieto, from a webcomic of Leyendas. |
[Image source: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/AgZGX .]
La creación (The creation)
La ajorca de oro (The gold bracelet)
El monte de las Ánimas (The mount of souls)
Los ojos verdes (The green eyes)
Maese Pérez el organista (Maestro Pérez the organist)
El rayo de luna (The moonbeam)
The noble youth Manrique is a passionate solitary, too much a poet to ever write poetry, preferring the dream of love to real women. Late one evening, when he's crossed over the Duero to linger in the deserted convent of the Templars, he seems to see the white dress of a woman moving under the trees. He feels sure that this beautiful woman, in this unlikely spot, is the true love he's been waiting for. He tries to follow her but gets only uncertain glimpses. Eventually he decides she has rowed across the river, and he searches the narrow streets of Soria in vain. His hopes come to rest on a lighted window, but in the morning he finds it belongs to a wounded royal huntsman who has no female connections. Finally he returns to the place where he first saw his beloved. He sees the same flickering white dress again... then he realizes that it's just a moonbeam piercing through the moving canopy of leaves. Subsequently he is reduced to utter lethargy, and is reckoned to be mad. If anyone attempts to stir him into action he asserts that love is just a moonbeam... glory is just a moonbeam...
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| Illustration for El rayo de luna |
[Image source: https://ketzalitorres.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/1625/ .]
Creed en Dios (Believe in God)
Teobaldo of Montagut (in the eastern Pyrenees) is the ultimate wicked baron. He and his followers lead a life that's debased in every way, and he has no belief in God. One day he and his band, out hunting, take shelter from the rain in a church. He is admonished by the priest, becomes enraged and is about to kill him when news comes that a boar has been sighted, and he rides off in pursuit, outstripping his retinue. When he has ridden his own horse to death and is cursing his ill fortune, an unknown page brings him a black horse. Teobaldo jumps on, and this tireless horse leads him on a frantic journey across deserts and snows and eventually into the heavens where he sees a vision of the paradise of the just, followed by the hell of the atheists. When he returns to consciousness he is back beside his own dead horse. He returns to Montagut to discover that 120 years have passed, no-one knows him, and his abandoned castle has been given to a religious order to use as a monastery. He begs, as a miserable sinner, to make confession and to become a monk.
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| Illustration for Creed en Dios |
[Image source: https://todostuscomplementos.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/becquer-por-tercera-vez/ .]
El Miserere (The Miserere)
A pilgrim comes to the Abbey of Fitero. He is a musician who wants to redeem the sins of his youth by writing the ultimate musical setting of the Miserere. A local shepherd tells him the story of a Miserere that seems to emanate from the ruins of a nearby mountain monastery every Holy Thursday. Today happens to be Holy Thursday, and the pilgrim excitedly sets off in the awful weather to witness it. (The lay brothers think he's mad.) He arrives and at midnight he's terrified by the sight of the ancient monks (skeletons in tattered habits) intoning their Miserere. The overwhelming music is at first despairing and finally heavenly. Returning to the Abbey the next day, he begs for board and lodging for a few months in return for making the abbey famous by delivering the greatest of Misereres. But despite hundreds of drafts he's unable to capture in musical notes what he heard, and he goes mad and dies.
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| El Miserere, from a 1971 comic book by Carlos Giménez. |
[Image source: https://mannysbookofshadows.wordpress.com/2020/10/08/el-miserere-by-gustavo-adolfo-becquer/ .]
El Cristo de la calavera (The Christ of the skull)
In the streets of Toledo at midnight, two fierce rivals for a beautiful woman search for a place to settle their differences, and eventually find a Christ on a wall that is illuminated by a torch. But every time they cross swords the torch goes out, plunging them in darkness. Eventually they get the message and make friends, and they decide to go together to seek out their lady and ask her to choose between them; but when they get to her lodgings they are disgusted to find another, unsuspected, lover just leaving.
El gnomo (The Gnome)
An old shepherd describes finding a subterranean cache of incredible treasures guarded by the gnomes. Most of his audience dismiss the story as nonsense but it affects two sisters, Marta and Magdalena. The two sisters are very different from each other. They encounter the gnomes themselves and (after a protracted choral set of temptations), the idealistic Magdalena escapes the lure of the treasure while Marta is drawn in and disappears underground for ever.
La cueva de la Mora (The cave of the Moorish lady)
The Christians attack a Moorish stronghold. The Christian leader is captured but after some days ransomed. However he remains melancholic, having met a beautiful Moorish lady while in captivity. He gets together another force and re-attacks the fortress and is seriously wounded. The Moorish lady manages to get him into a cave, but he is dying from thirst. She goes to get him water, and is accidentally shot by Moorish soldiers. Before they both die, the hero baptises her in the Christian faith. The ghost of the lady continues to haunt the river-bank outside the cave.
La promesa (The promise)
A noble leaves his reluctant beloved to go to the wars, making a promise to return and save her honour. He returns successful but haunted by a mysterious hand that rescues him from dangers and is always visible to him. Eventually a mysterious troubadour explains to him that his beloved has died but will not allow her hand to be buried until he has come back to redeem his promise.
La corza blanca (The white roe-deer)
A nobleman, out hunting with his daughter and retinue, meets a half-crazed shepherd who tells them of his meetings with deer - including a white one - who talk in human voices. While most dismiss this as gibberish, one person does not. This is the daughter's servant, Garcia, who is in love with his young mistress (a pale girl with dark eyes and a somewhat mysterious history). He determines to hunt the white deer for his mistress's honour. She mocks him and tries to dissuade him, but he persists. He finds that the shepherd's story is true, he sees the deer, hears them talk, sees them swim and transform into beautiful women, one of whom looks a lot like his mistress. Time and again he decides not to shoot, but each time he draws back he hears the sound of jeering. Eventually the hunting instinct overcomes him and he looses his arrow at the white deer as it disappears into the shadows. Following up, he finds to his horror that he has slain his mistress.
El beso (The kiss)
The French army are occupying Toledo during the Peninsular War. Avoiding a resentful populace, they are compelled to bunk down in churches. Our hero, a French officer, finds himself in these strange surroundings. Wakeful, he finds himself falling for a marble statue of a beautiful woman on a tomb (accompanied by a statue of her husband). He invites his officer pals to a drunken party, and during the increasingly outrageous evening, mockingly addresses the husband and finally attempts to kiss the lady. At this moment, he is felled by a blow from the husband's stony fist.
Luis Buñuel used the climax of the story in the opening scene of The Phantom of Liberty (1974).
La rosa de Pasión (The Rose of the Passion)
In old Toledo there is a Jewish metalworker (Daniel) with an inveterate hatred of Christians. He has a beautiful daughter, Sarah, who constantly rejects her Jewish suitors. One of them hints to Daniel that his daughter has a Christian lover. Daniel and his allies plan to secretly and gruesomely murder the Christian, and gather together instruments reminiscent of Christ's passion, but Sarah foils their plans and boasts to her father of her own conversion. Daniel kills her instead, and some time later a new kind of flower containing symbols of the Passion appears in the ruins of the old church where they carried out their evil deed. (Evidently this is the New World plant known to us as the Blue Passion Flower (Passiflora caerulea), now a common alien species in Spain.)
Obviously an example of a "blood libel" story (like Chaucer's Prioress's Tale), and it's uncomfortable that Bécquer should choose to tell this story in 1862, even though he frames the tale in ironies. The pious girl who, he says, told him the story, is both very good and very pretty; that is, naive and uneducated. And the story abundantly underlines the persecution of the detested Jews by a Christian populace addicted to just such anti-Jewish stories as this one seems to be.
The bald summaries I've supplied fail to represent the concise artistry of the author's presentation, and this story is particularly rich in that respect, but it doesn't make me feel much more comfortable. Can the story be re-focussed as one in which the father is only "said" to be a wicked bogeyman, and in which his sad sacrifice in honour of his religion balances his daughter's fervent martyrdom? (Hang on a minute, can I really be proposing this?)
In the streets of Toledo at midnight, two fierce rivals for a beautiful woman search for a place to settle their differences, and eventually find a Christ on a wall that is illuminated by a torch. But every time they cross swords the torch goes out, plunging them in darkness. Eventually they get the message and make friends, and they decide to go together to seek out their lady and ask her to choose between them; but when they get to her lodgings they are disgusted to find another, unsuspected, lover just leaving.
El gnomo (The Gnome)
An old shepherd describes finding a subterranean cache of incredible treasures guarded by the gnomes. Most of his audience dismiss the story as nonsense but it affects two sisters, Marta and Magdalena. The two sisters are very different from each other. They encounter the gnomes themselves and (after a protracted choral set of temptations), the idealistic Magdalena escapes the lure of the treasure while Marta is drawn in and disappears underground for ever.
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| Illustration by David Vela for "El Gnomo" - http://davidblogcartoon.blogspot.co.uk/ |
La cueva de la Mora (The cave of the Moorish lady)
The Christians attack a Moorish stronghold. The Christian leader is captured but after some days ransomed. However he remains melancholic, having met a beautiful Moorish lady while in captivity. He gets together another force and re-attacks the fortress and is seriously wounded. The Moorish lady manages to get him into a cave, but he is dying from thirst. She goes to get him water, and is accidentally shot by Moorish soldiers. Before they both die, the hero baptises her in the Christian faith. The ghost of the lady continues to haunt the river-bank outside the cave.
La promesa (The promise)
A noble leaves his reluctant beloved to go to the wars, making a promise to return and save her honour. He returns successful but haunted by a mysterious hand that rescues him from dangers and is always visible to him. Eventually a mysterious troubadour explains to him that his beloved has died but will not allow her hand to be buried until he has come back to redeem his promise.
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| Sketch by Santiago Caruso for "La promesa" [http://santiagocaruso.tumblr.com/] |
La corza blanca (The white roe-deer)
A nobleman, out hunting with his daughter and retinue, meets a half-crazed shepherd who tells them of his meetings with deer - including a white one - who talk in human voices. While most dismiss this as gibberish, one person does not. This is the daughter's servant, Garcia, who is in love with his young mistress (a pale girl with dark eyes and a somewhat mysterious history). He determines to hunt the white deer for his mistress's honour. She mocks him and tries to dissuade him, but he persists. He finds that the shepherd's story is true, he sees the deer, hears them talk, sees them swim and transform into beautiful women, one of whom looks a lot like his mistress. Time and again he decides not to shoot, but each time he draws back he hears the sound of jeering. Eventually the hunting instinct overcomes him and he looses his arrow at the white deer as it disappears into the shadows. Following up, he finds to his horror that he has slain his mistress.
El beso (The kiss)
The French army are occupying Toledo during the Peninsular War. Avoiding a resentful populace, they are compelled to bunk down in churches. Our hero, a French officer, finds himself in these strange surroundings. Wakeful, he finds himself falling for a marble statue of a beautiful woman on a tomb (accompanied by a statue of her husband). He invites his officer pals to a drunken party, and during the increasingly outrageous evening, mockingly addresses the husband and finally attempts to kiss the lady. At this moment, he is felled by a blow from the husband's stony fist.
Luis Buñuel used the climax of the story in the opening scene of The Phantom of Liberty (1974).
Statues who do things to libertines are a common trope in European literature. In Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) a statue of the Commendatore (slain by the anti-hero) comes to dinner. In Zampa, the popular opera by Hérold (1833), the statue of Zampa's abandoned lover Alice closes her fingers round his ring, intervenes in his schemes in other ways and eventually carries him down to hell.
La rosa de Pasión (The Rose of the Passion)
In old Toledo there is a Jewish metalworker (Daniel) with an inveterate hatred of Christians. He has a beautiful daughter, Sarah, who constantly rejects her Jewish suitors. One of them hints to Daniel that his daughter has a Christian lover. Daniel and his allies plan to secretly and gruesomely murder the Christian, and gather together instruments reminiscent of Christ's passion, but Sarah foils their plans and boasts to her father of her own conversion. Daniel kills her instead, and some time later a new kind of flower containing symbols of the Passion appears in the ruins of the old church where they carried out their evil deed. (Evidently this is the New World plant known to us as the Blue Passion Flower (Passiflora caerulea), now a common alien species in Spain.)
Obviously an example of a "blood libel" story (like Chaucer's Prioress's Tale), and it's uncomfortable that Bécquer should choose to tell this story in 1862, even though he frames the tale in ironies. The pious girl who, he says, told him the story, is both very good and very pretty; that is, naive and uneducated. And the story abundantly underlines the persecution of the detested Jews by a Christian populace addicted to just such anti-Jewish stories as this one seems to be.
The bald summaries I've supplied fail to represent the concise artistry of the author's presentation, and this story is particularly rich in that respect, but it doesn't make me feel much more comfortable. Can the story be re-focussed as one in which the father is only "said" to be a wicked bogeyman, and in which his sad sacrifice in honour of his religion balances his daughter's fervent martyrdom? (Hang on a minute, can I really be proposing this?)
*
The Leyendas, often combined with Bécquer's poems as Rimas y leyendas, were only put together after his early death in 1870. Every edition seems to have a slightly different selection of stories, and in a different order.
But these seventeen completed stories are the heart of the Leyendas, listed above in roughly the order they were written (between 1858 and 1865). This is the sequence given in Enrique Rull's 2016 edition of Rimas y leyendas.
All the above Leyendas (and more) in Spanish:
English translation from 1909, by Cornelia Frances Bates and her daughter Katharine Lee Bates (but sadly it doesn't include the two Indian legends):
Labels: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Specimens of the literature of Spain
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