The butterflies were going mad after flying all day. There seemed to be more and more of them, as if the sun and axe blows were encouraging them to be born and grow faster. Fear returned. Fear caused a drop of salt water to trickle down my back. I had the impression that behind me, where the bee had sucked the flower for so long, a hidden child was watching what I was doing, and the child would run away to alert the villagers, starting with the blacksmith. He would tell them that a man was hollowing out a tree with a pitchfork in the forest of the dead.
I strode over to the shrub. When I had taken four steps, I tripped. One of my feet had caught in the handle of a root, and I hurt my knee. Nothing was behind the shrub. A stream of warm blood ran down my leg. As I turned round to finish opening up the tree, I heard a little laugh, like a memory. On my left cheek, above my heart, I felt a caress mixed with wet hair, as if the air that wasn’t air were brushing my cheek with green cane leaves. With a sudden movement, I covered my eyes with my arm, burying the raw flesh from the blister in a fold in my scarred forehead, and I did what I could to keep the caress on my cheek from dying. I took hold of my cheek so the caress would not flee. A ray of sun burnt my chest and dried the blood from my knee. The branches moved. Time was fleeing, and I had to bring Time to a close. Branches swayed, leaves swayed, blades of grass swayed, as if everything that lacked a voice wished to speak to me.
The seedcase rolled out of the tree. I picked up the awl and pointed it at my heart. I was giving them only a corpse. Death without the Festa. I walked back and put away the pitchfork and axe, then returned slowly because my knee ached and the blood that had become a scab pulled with the movement. I gave the seedcase a prod, rolled it to another tree, and covered it with leaves. I hope it will be a long time before they realize. If they drag me from the tree, they will drag me out dead. I removed the four nails from the bark, letting them drop one by one. I pierced my heart with the awl and my life closed. I can begin the story of my life wherever I wish; I can tell it differently, I can begin with the death of my child, with the morning the blacksmith’s son jumped in front of me in the forest of the dead, with my visit to Senyor. It matters not what I do, my life is closing. Like a soap bubble that has turned to glass, I cannot remove anything or add anything. I can change nothing in my life. Death escaped through my heart, and when I no longer held death within me, I died.
Author Bio
Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983) is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Rodoreda began writing short stories as an escape from an unhappy early marriage, and in the early 1930s she began publishing political articles and wrote four early novels. Exiled in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began writing the novels and short stories—Twenty-two Short Stories, The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, Garden by the Sea—that would eventually make her internationally famous, while at the same time earning a living as a seamstress. In the mid-1960s she returned to Catalonia, where she continued to write. Death in Spring was published posthumously, and is translated into English for the first time here.
Translator Bio
Martha Tennent was born in the United States, but has lived most of her life in Barcelona, receiving her B.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Barcelona, and serving as the founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She has regularly translated between Spanish, Catalan, and English, and recently edited Training for the New Millennium: Pedagogies for Translating and Interpreting. Her translations have appeared in Two Lines, Words Without Borders, eXchanges, and Review of Contemporary Fiction.
About Open Letter
Open Letter — the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press — is one of only a handful of publishing houses dedicated to increasing access to world literature for English readers. Publishing twelve titles in translation each year, Open Letter searches for works that are extraordinary and influential, works that we hope will become the classics of tomorrow.
Making world literature available in English is crucial to opening our cultural borders, and its availability plays a vital role in maintaining a healthy and vibrant book culture. Open Letter strives to cultivate an audience for these works by helping readers discover imaginative, stunning works of fiction and by creating a constellation of international writing that is engaging, stimulating, and enduring.
Current and forthcoming titles from Open Letter include works from France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Russia, and numerous other countries.
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