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Listing Ship
by Anxo Angueira
Translated from the Galician by Kathleen March

Coming Soon...

The Things of Ramón Lamote

by Paco Martín

Illustrated by Xoán Balboa

Translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne

Earthly Secrets!

Guiomar, a schoolgirl from Audierna, with hesitation goes to Mastrina Xaoven's house in the old quarter of Plugufan for Klavia classes, and she is offered that Mastrina will tell her a story in exchange for her dedication to learning the Klavia. In the background we sense that pertaining to historical segregation of Brun/Malluma community and Gwende people, demeanor for Brun people is still undignified. The story follows alternation between Guiomar accounting her visits to Mastrina's house and her personal affairs, and Mastrina telling the story to Guiomar in those visits. ¹

1.       "I want to propose a deal: we'll divide your class time into two parts. If you invest a minimum amount of efforts in learning to play the Klavia, I'll tell you a story – a good one, too. It's about a girl just like you, perhaps a tiny bit older. It begins on the days went to one of those clubs in the nabrallos. I think you'll like it."

The story is about a Gwende girl Attica, nearly of Guiomar's age. In her disguised visit to Bragunde's decrepit quarters to take part in a concert where popular hicupé music is overwhelming she befriends a Malluma boy Fuco, who claims to be a firewalker, after they outwit the SAN agents. Fuco, takes her with him to meet Onga, a witch living in a cemetry, to know the riddle behind the Bragunde being plagued by scorpions on the street. Onga's revelation in her crypt, and a hint from a woman at the bar—from where Attica, caught by rebels, manages to free herself—draw their route to Morvane Tower, which as per the legend, where the entrance to the underworld of Nigrofe is situated. After another revelation by Onga and hearing Cecillio, a blind healer, about the Tartarus and the forthcoming evil in the land of Bragunde and Nigrofe—outcome of the disruption of balance between good and evil, when a sacred tree was uprooted, Attica and Fuco venture into a new journey into the Green Country, the underworld of Nigrofe.² This makes the first part of the novel.

2.       "The subteran cult is based on balance," continued Onga. "The Malluma race professes the faith of its ancestors, which claims equality in the scales between good and evil. The balance is reflected in its two sacrred symbols: Dendria, the peach tree, represented good, while to Tartarus fell the mission of embodying evil, death that lies in wait, conscious of its victory, death. These two symbols lived side by side in Nigrofe, their balance maintained by the priests of Venquita Monastery."

The second part, Nigrofe, largely contains an adventurous tale of Attica and Fuco, who land in the fantastical and magical world full of hunters, thieves, mythical creatures, scorpions, rugged mountains, forests, friends and a powerful being called Birdman rolling the dies. And they must use gold and a peach stone to stop the evil before it is too late, finding their way to the Venquita—where captain Touro, the ruling colonel of Nigrofe has imprisoned all the women—where they are supposed to make brothers Dinis and Vinicius power-up their obelisk before knowing all the secrets for the demonic unraveling of the Tartarus, but what Attica and Fuco are told by Onga and Cecillio isn't enough!

"Newspaper and magazine cuttings, photocopies from encyclopaedias, adverts,…" put as if chapter headings provide a comic-strip dimension to the story uplifting the realm of fiction. The invented names (I suppose), particularly coined for the story, for which a glossary is provided at the end, is a playful approach to create parallel coexisting fictional world: Hicupé feels like the Jazz of the modern world. Mastrina tells the story with "One Thousand and One Nights" kind of cliffhangers that makes all the secrets coming together near the end all the more interesting, as far as that the novel ends in an episode leaving behind a trail for a sequel.

Tartarus is an adventurous tale of clash and harmony between good and evil and an audacious tale of little saviors of the world. 

Author: Antonio Manuel Fraga

Translator: Jonathan Dunne

Publisher: Small Stations Press

Page Count: 227

Price: $ 7.30

Metamorphosis of Earth

One Million Cows puts together eighteen stories by Manuel Rivas, one of the best known and translated author from Spain writing in Galician. These stories, narration ranging from personal accounts to magic like encounters are often short but well crafted.

In the opening story First Love a man meets his former love who wants to go on a foreign trip. My Cousin, The Gigantic Robot is recounted by a small boy who thinks his cousin Dombodan, who rarely speaks, is a robot. The character Dambodan appears in one another story One Of Those Guys Who Come From Far Away when he's offended in a hangout and finally speaks. In Solitary Sailor, after a heavy storm, a humble living dead shipwrecked sailor appears in a bar for a beer. A man is haunted with fish-attack who's on board with five Irishmen in A Match With The Irishman. A suicide is taken far-off for a Christian burial led by an old man in The Lame Horse's Road. In The Englishman a young man after his return from England turns his home into a luxury town with a golf course. Other stories include A father whose love of peace is in danger; A son who receives an unexpected letter from home; An electoral candidate talks about his encounter with a woman who has fish scales; An old woman in conversation with her unlikely driver; A jazz band who's nothing good to play to appease the audience; University teacher who's fond of a country-mill is fooled; A provincial artist who's invited to the capital Madrid where art is unstable; An imaginary friend Tom befriends a little girl; An old woman calls at the telephone exchange for his infantry son to come home; Friends meeting on Sunday talking mundane things, and A girl who has many things to say about her cows. Well, it's clear that there are stories from everywhere, for everyone—places vs places, places vs men and men vs men.

Subtle transformation is one of the key themes to all these stories. Descriptions are prudent that frame the stories, and set the perfect tone, such that we find ourselves merged with the texture of sentences which are organic to storytelling—chunks of merriment. ^1,2

1. With the car going at a man's pace, I realized how much the track revealed its entrails of gravel and mud. In the delayed panorama, the eyes followed the line of electric's fences, drawn from time to time, in the ditch, to the rusty remains of domestic appliances or, on the horizon, to scraggy, discoloured scarecrows and cows that looked as if they'd been waiting for that moment for centuries. 

2. In its reckless convulsion, the sea vomited on the sand a frontier of remains, the sticky enchantment of seaweed, stateless sea urchins, evicted crustaceans and other things, a fairground of strange bodies, vessels with saltpeter and resin calligrams, errant mandibles, logs with wild animals, frayed ropes, machines with rusted teeth, single shoes and skeleton of a watch.

Without being outspoken, the well placed context of modernity in rise, and personal longings in loss, stories successfully place mockery and create casual fun or craft sadness palpable to ordinary beings. The characters confront the world working in anomalous ways and find themselves separated and alone, not necessarily saddened but at odds with being mere observer.³ 

3.    'There is in Spain,' declared the critic Bernabé Candela, 'nature and metaphysics, passion and biology, reflection and outbursts, and it is well known there is no beauty without rebellion, even if that convulsion is contained by the prudent nets of reason. Espinã may be a wonderful symbiosis, that of the monster awaiting the end of the century.'

The stories project, combining all the colours branching from conflicts or settlements, a bright picture of life in Galicia during 1980's.

Author: Manuel Rivas

Translator: Jonathan Dunne

Publisher: Small Stations Press

Page Count: 109

Price: $ 12.99