Death in the afternoon

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Death in the afternoon is an essay by Ernest Hemingway , which appeared on September 26, 1932 under the English title Death in the Afternoon . It thoroughly discusses bullfighting and its history in the Spanish speaking world.

overview

At the beginning, the aficionado Hemingway makes it clear what bullfighting is. Terms are clarified. The author makes it easier to get started with the help of a dialogue partner - the "old lady". The old woman asks the stupid questions, the author answers cleverly. When the lady becomes a nuisance, Hemingway throws her out of the essay on p. 229.

81 black and white photos, bound between pages 240/241, allow the reader to turn back again and again when things get down to business from p. 242. The matter is briefly outlined with one sentence: “There is no great bullfighter who is not impaled sooner or later.” (P. 250) Great matadors , whose lives and deaths Hemingway reproduced partly from his own experience, are shown.

The appendix is ​​provided with an illustrated explanation of words (pp. 353–453), some American voices on Spanish bullfighting (pp. 454–461) and a calendar of the annual bullfights in the Spanish world.

content

Hemingway admits bullfighting is cruel. The author does not want to justify the corrida de toros (bullfight), but just wants to tell about it as accurately as possible. According to Hemingway, bullfighting is not a sport, but a tragedy that ends with the certain death of the wild bull. The closer the unridden bullfighter works on the horns, the more dangerous it becomes for him in the closed arena , in which that tragedy is performed according to historically grown rules. Suerte is the collective term for all maneuvers by the man on the bull in the arena. "The whole bullfight," writes Hemingway, "is based on the bull's bravery, simplicity and lack of experience" (p. 183). Only the man has experience who goes on foot at the fighting bull with the capa (cherry-colored cape) or the muleta (red cloth worn over a stick). The bull only brings strength into the arena and has around 15 minutes to gain experience. Then he is dead. In a corrida, three matadors kill two bulls each. Each bull should be four to five years old. Further “characteristics of the fighting bull are thick and strong skin with shiny fur, a small head but a broad forehead, the strength and shape of its horns, which are bent forward, a short, thick neck with the large muscle hump that swells when the bull is angry is, broad shoulders and the length and thinness of the tail ”(p. 135).

The tragedy is divided into three acts. The first is the "test through the lances". The bull attacks the picadores (lancers) and is irritated by stitches in the neck of those on horseback. At the end of the first act, the dead horses, mostly slashed by the bull, are covered. In the second act, banderilleros place banderillas (sticks with steel harpoon) in the neck of the bull. In the third act, the Faena , the matador defeats the bull in a duel on foot by forcing the bull's head down with the muleta and thus being able to place the sword between the shoulder blades for a fatal blow.

Hemingway describes the fight of famous men in the arena, both from history and from years of spectator experience.

  • The matador Pedro Romero is said to have killed over 5000 bulls between 1771 and 1776 and died normally at home as a 95-year-old.
  • Using Joselito as an example, Hemingway discusses the attractive, captivating effect, the enchanting charisma of bullfighting. Joselito transferred the feeling of his immortality to the audience during the Faena. The great matador was reviled by the audience on May 15, 1920 and received a horn blow in the stomach the next day. He could not hold back his own protruding bowels with two hands. Joselito died on the operating table that same day and was immediately cheered by the journalists.
  • The great Juan Belmonte worked closer to the bull than any other matador. Towards the end of his career, he was increasingly attacked in the newspapers. After a heavy blow of the horn, he withdrew from the arena.
  • Manuel García, called Maëra , grew up with Belmonte in Andalusia . He first worked for Belmonte as a banderillero and then rose to be the proudest matador Hemingway has ever known. Maëra approached the bull with contempt for death and full of verve if the animal refused to attack. Despite significant horn injuries in the armpit and neck, he continued to fight in the arena. “He was way beyond pain” (p. 105), writes Hemingway. The author famously describes Maëra's fight against the cement bull (pp. 104–105). Maëra died miserably of TB in hospital in Seville (p. 107).
  • The Mexican Rodolfo Gaona reached the height of Joselito and Belmonte in 1916 while working in Spain. But a horn wound, his wife and his old age were his undoing. Returning to Mexico, Gaona nonetheless became the teacher and idol of the young Mexican fighters.
  • Rafael el Gallo did not unnecessarily expose himself to the danger of death and invented new figures in which the bull horns just get past the matador (maneuver of the dead).
  • On May 31, 1931, Hemingway watched as a spectator how Francisco Vega de los Reyes, known as Gitanillo de Triana, died in Madrid after the bull hurled the matador twice against the barrier and then, within seconds, the horn through his back Had drifted pelvis. Gitanillo lost half of his body weight within two and a half months after the accident and died in agony.
  • Manuel Vare, known as Varelito , had to take several blows from the bull until he was dealt the deadly blow at the end of April 1930. Varelito lived until mid-May 1930.
  • Manuel Baez, called Litri , careless, was the meat for the bulls . He died of a wound infection from a horn blow in early February 1926 in Malaga .

Mors certa

According to the recognized literary scholar and Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker, the author worked on the manuscript intermittently from mid-1929 to autumn 1932. After Hemingway's interest in bullfighting was piqued in the early 1920s, the plan to write a lengthy book about it had preoccupied him for over seven years before he completed work on the final manuscript of Death in the Afternoon . He was aware from the start that it would take a long time to complete this work.

According to Baker, Hemingway wrote most of the manuscript as early as the fall of 1930; The missing two chapters as well as the appendices and the glossary he completed by mid-January 1932 in Key West. In the spring of that year he made the last selection of the images for his book, which he had acquired between May and July 1931 during another stay in Spain, and finally decided on the title Death in the Afternoon . He then corrected the proofs from April to the end of July 1932 on several boat trips and during his stay in Cuba.

According to Baker, Hemingway was particularly fascinated by the elaborate ritual of stylized professional bullfighting as a significant cathartic expression of the tragedy of life and death. According to Baker, Hemingway saw bullfighting as one of the simplest but most legitimate and fundamental subjects a writer could write about: “About death, of course. Because that is elementary; the only thing that is certain to us. "

Incidentally, Hemingway was well aware of the fact that he could only make a few non-Spaniards friends of bullfighting with his book.

Regardless of this, according to Baker, he was disappointed by the unanimous condemnation of the book in the first reviews, although his friend, the writer John Dos Passos, praised the work as " hellishly good " ("damn good") and is an exemplary model for this book Kind of saw.

It was only with the increasing appreciation of the book by literary criticism from 1935 that Hemingway was finally satisfied.

German-language editions

source

First edition

  • Ernest Hemingway: death in the afternoon . Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 1957. Original linen binding, 312 pages. Authorized transfer from the American by Annemarie Horschitz-Horst , with 81 illustrations and attachment illustration

Secondary literature

  • Carlos Baker: Ernest Hemingway. The writer and his work. Pp. 155-172. Reinbek 1967
  • Hans-Peter Rodenberg: Ernest Hemingway. Reinbek 2002, ISBN 3-499-50626-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Carlos Baker: Hemingway - The Writer as Artist. Charles Scribner's Sons, 4th ed. New York 1973, ISBN 0-691-01305-5 , pp. 145 ff. See also detailed Carlos Baker: Ernest Hemingway - A Life Story . The Literary Guild , London 1969, pp. 257 f., 274-277, 279-283.
  2. ↑ See Carlos Baker: Hemingway - The Writer as Artist. Charles Scribner's Sons, 4th ed. New York 1973, ISBN 0-691-01305-5 , p. 145 f .: " Of all the legitimate 'subjects that a man may write of' death was one of the simplest, apparently, and one of the most fundamental. "In this context, Baker refers to Hemingway's own statements in the first chapter of Death in the Afternoon :" I was trying to learn to write, coming with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death . It has none of the complications of death by disease, or so-called natural death, or the death of a friend or some one you have loved or have hated, but it is death nevertheless, one of the subjects that a man may write of . "
  3. ↑ See Carlos Baker: Ernest Hemingway - A Life Story . The Literary Guild , London 1969, pp. 182, 284, 286, 289, and 294 f. and 296.