The holy fools

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The holy fools (original title: Los santos inocentes ) is a novel by the Spanish writer Miguel Delibes , which was published in 1981 and was first available in a German translation in 1987.

action

Miguel Delibes describes the story of the feeble-minded servant Azarias, who ekes out a meager life on a feudal estate in Extremadura , one of the poorest and most backward areas of the country, during the Francoist regime in Spain . The author creates a very straightforward portrait of the self-sacrificing life of dependent farm workers in a dark and archaic world in which only mutual solidarity ensures the survival of the individual subjugated . After the landlord has ignored the plight of his farm workers and house staff for a long time, a violent backlash on the part of Azarías ensues, which could be seen as an almost inevitable result of the cynical power structures.

style

The most striking stylistic device of the novel, which is divided into six chapters, is that each chapter consists of a single sentence, so the storyline is told in just six sentences.

interpretation

Obituaries for the author's death always highlighted The Holy Fools from Delibe's extensive oeuvre and described the book as “a clear accounting for the southern Spanish landowners and their mistreatment of the farm workers”.

expenditure

reception

The literary motif of the "holy fool" was often used in Spanish literature to open a discourse on "dealing with authority and power, rebellion and guilt".

The way in which Los Santos Inocentes was translated into German by Curt Meyer-Clason was the subject of a linguistic diploma thesis. The Austrian translator Erich Hackl gave Meyer-Clason's translation a positive assessment, which “cleverly enriches the sober reporting tone of the author with a nuance of baroque verbosity”.

The book was made into a film by Mario Camus in 1984 ; At the Cannes International Film Festival , the actors Francisco Rabal and Alfredo Landa received the Actor Award for their performance in the same year.

In the year the German translation was published, Die Zeit published the volume's sales figure of just 2,000 copies as quoted by Piper in a series of interviews with several literary publishers. According to a statement by the publisher Ernst Reinhard Pipers , "it was not easy to bring an author back into conversation who had not been present on the German-speaking book market for over twenty years".

Reviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walter Haubrich . On the death of Miguel Delibes. Castile pride and dignity . In: faz.net, March 12, 2010.
  2. ↑ Nadine Stern: The motif of the "holy fool" using the example of the figure of Azarías in the novel "Los Santos Inocentes" by Miguel Delibes . Grin-Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-638-88662-8 , p. 6.
  3. ^ Claudia Mariareiber: Colloquial language in literary translation. Considerations on this topic based on the work “Los Santos Inocentes” by Miguel Delibes in Curt Meyer-Clason's translation “The holy fools” ( diploma thesis ). University of Graz, 1994; proven by Stefan Kutzenberger: Europa in Grande Sertão: Veredas - Grande Sertão: Veredas in Europa (= International Research on General and Comparative Literature, Volume 85). Rodopi, Amsterdam / New York 2005, ISBN 90-420-1605-1 , p. 58, note 182.
  4. ↑ Spanish writer Miguel Delibes died. ( Memento from September 13, 2012 in the archive.today web archive ) at: tagesanzeiger.ch , March 12, 2010.
  5. ↑ Ulrich Greiner : A thoroughly dubious business . In: Die Zeit (25/1987), July 17, 1987.
  6. ↑ Proof in the reviewer's list of publications , accessed in July 2018.