SAMPLER El Cid Also available in this series Square Horizon / Horizon carré Arctic Poems / Poemas árticos Equatorial & other poems Skyquake / Temblor de cielo Selected Poems Cagliostro SAMPLER El Cid Mío Cid Campeador Vicente Huidobro SAMPLER translated from Spanish by Warre Bradley Wells Shearsman Books Second Edition. Published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Shearsman Books Ltd 50 Westons Hill Drive Emersons Green BRISTOL BS16 7DF Shearsman Books Ltd Registered Office 30–31 St. James Place, Mangotsfield, Bristol BS16 9JB (this address not for correspondence) ISBN 978-1-84861-628-8 Translation copyright © 1931 by Warre Bradley Wells. Additional material copyright © 2019 by Shearsman Books First published as Portrait of a Paladin by Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, in 1931; first U.S. edition published by H. Liveright, New York, 1932. Originally published in Spanish as Mío Cid Campeador by Compañía Ibero-Americana de Publicaciones, Madrid, 1929. SAMPLER Notice Every effort has been made to trace the representatives of the translator’s estate but we have had no success. We would be pleased to hear from anyone who controls the literary estate of Warre Bradley Wells. Contents Preface 8 Birth 11 Youth 18 Bear, Chief, and Boar 29 Jimena 38 Insult and Vengeance 43 Rodrigo Rides out to War 53 Justice and Injustice 55 Paladin Peerless 63 Fantasia Imperial and Papal 69 Single Combat 79 Doña Urraca 85 The Knighting of The Cid 87 Babieca 98 Love on the Cross 100 Don Sancho 105 Zamora 114 The Oath in Santa Gadea 123 The ightN of Love 129 Two Voices 134 The ateG of ExileSAMPLER 144 Tizona the Sword 157 Triumph and Trophy 159 Zaragoza 167 Interlude 173 The Balance-Sheet of Glory 179 Diary of Aben Ali 189 Lord of Valencia 196 Yusuf 202 Parenthesis 211 Victory After Death 215 Afterword to the Second Edition 222 Glossary of Names 224 SAMPLER 7 DEDICATION TO DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS Dear Mr. Fairbanks, One evening last summer at the Hôtel Crillon in Paris you talked to me about the Cid Campeador, and told me that he was one of the historical personages who most interested you. You asked me to collect some notes about him and send them to you in the United States. You spoke with such enthusiasm that it communicated itself to me, and then I conceived the idea of writing something about the Cid. To you, therefore, I partly owe this Hazaña of Mío Cid Campeador,1 and so I would like your name to stand at the beginning of its pages and there remain as long as this work endures. It was born for me out of all the documents which I started studying for you. If anything in it is of service to you, if any single phrase of mine helps you to feel more deeply for our great hero and understand him better, I shall be content. Your sincere admirer, SAMPLER Vicente Huidobro 1 This may be translated, more or less, as ‘The Exploits of My Cid, the Champion’. A footnote on p.65 goes into greater detail on the definition of ‘Campeador’. 8 AUTHOR’S PREFACE owe it to the truth to say that I had already thought before of writing a I new romance about the Cid Campeador, but I abandoned the idea. This was after having read some pages of A. García Carraffa in his Enciclopedia Heráldica about Don Alfonso X., ‘the Wise,’ who, as everybody knows, was the great-great-grandson of the Cid. I noticed here that Señor García Carraffa, following up the descendants of this King, traced one line which went to Chile and numbered among its latest scions my maternal grandfather, Domingo Fernández Concha. Alfonso X did not attract me, but the Campeador certainly did. I make no concealment of my preference for men of action and adventure. I felt myself a grandson of the Cid. I imagined myself sitting on his knee, stroking that noble great beard of his, which was so imposing that nobody dared touch it. Whether my grandfather was a descendant of Kings or not did not concern me. I may say, however, that I have never met a man with more of the bearing and manners of a King than he. He was the quintessence of Old Spain. What greatness there was even in the humility of this Galician grandfather of mine from Mondoñedo! Someone has said that the Spanish race is a race of princes. So I think myself, and, if I speak here of my ancestors, SAMPLERit is because I cannot hide the pride I take in my Spanish blood. Through my ancestors I am Castilian and Galician, Andalusian and Breton. I am Celt and Spaniard, Spaniard and Celt: an aboriginal Celto-Iberian, impervious and hard-headed. I propose to offer here some explanations regarding the form and content of this Hazaña de Mío Cid Campeador. The reader will find in this book some Gallicisms and (Latin-)Americanisms, both in turn of phrase and in individual words. I make no excuse for these. I employ them simply from caprice. I prefer to write el volantín (the kite) rather than la cometa, because I find this Chilean word more beautiful than the Castilian word cometa, and more natural than the colloquialisms pandorga or birlocha. Similarly in regard to some Gallic turns of phrase, it pleases me to use them, and I use them. Besides, it seems to me a very good thing that languages should invade one another as much as possible—should fly like aeroplanes over frontiers and customs-houses and land in anybody’s territory. Perhaps, thanks to this mutual invasion of languages, we shall arrive some day—a thousand years hence—at one international language, and then the only disadvantage which 9 literature suffers among the other arts will disappear. Moreover, it is not to be denied that the pure Spanish of Castile is a somewhat stiff and stilted language, and that a little nimbleness and flexibility will do it no harm. With regard to the content of this book, I ought to warn the reader that, whether the Hazaña is an epic novel, or a novel set to song, or an expression of the exaltation which a great life produces in the mind of a poet, it has in any case nothing to do with ‘novelised lives’ of that genus which is so fashionable today, and received its first impulse from the famous Life of St. Francis of Assisi by Johannes Jørgensen. Since the Hazaña is essentially a means of poetical expression, it is natural that the author should choose lives out of the ordinary, which best lend themselves to his purpose, and offer him the most fruitful field of poetic imagery. The Hazaña is the novel of a poet, and not the novel of a novelist. There are some poets who write novelists’ novels. Let them go their ways. I will have no share in this bad habit. I am concerned only with poetry, and I am concerned only with the truth as the poet sees it. To avoid possible misunderstandings, I should also warn the reader that, in my data about the Cid, I have sometimes followed the old legendary romances, ballads, and gestes, and at other times history. For example, poetry tells us that the Cid killed Jimena’s father, Count Lozano, and history teaches us that this is false, since Jimena was not the daughter of this Count, but of the Count of Oviedo, Diego Rodríguez. Here I have made a little compromise between historySAMPLER and legend, and Count Lozano is presented as the godfather and guardian of Jimena. Why not? Further on you will see that the daughters of the Cid are not called Doña Elvira and Doña Sol, as legend would have it, but Doña Cristina and Doña María, which were their real names. Nor are they married to Counts of Carrión, in accordance with legend, but to Kings: Cristina to Don Ramiro of Navarre, and María to Ramon Berenguer III of Barcelona, which is the historical fact. Moreover, I have treated the story of the outrage of Corpes as false, in the first place because we know it to be false historically, and in the next place because it is incredible that anyone would have dared to strike the daughters of the Cid, or that the Cid would have tolerated it and not exacted a much weightier vengeance than legend asserts. I do not see my grandfather the Cid suffering my aunts María and Cristina to be whipped without knowing the reason why from their husbands. The thing is false; I swear it is. If it were true we should know it in the family, and you would see how I would have made mincemeat in these pages of such a pair of scoundrels. The fact that I barely mention them will prove to you that this 10 insult is a fantastic lie. I invoke the learned testimony of the noble Don Ramón Menéndez Pidal. At various other points I have corrected both history and legend with that right which the call of the blood gives me, and I have also assembled some episodes unknown even to the learned, which I have encountered in old papers of my ancestors. So do not argue with me about them, but be grateful to me for handing them on to the public. Here you have the true history of Mío Cid Campeador, written by the last of his descendants. V. H. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE2 I have preserved the original form of all Spanish proper and place-names, because (as in the case of other countries) the variety of their English renderings is anomalous; because the originals are more euphonious; and—what good is a translator if he cannot strike the note of his author?— because it pleases me.