Cartas desde mi celda by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

At the end of 1863, ill, Bécquer settles with his brother, the painter Valeriano, in the Cistercian monastery of Veruela, abandoned by its monks since the confiscation of church lands. From his cell he writes to his colleagues at El Contemporáneo: “Queridos amigos” (“Dear friends”). He describes the journey by train to Tudela, by coach to Tarazona and by mule to the valley, and the kitchen where, by the fire, he reads Shakespeare and Byron while hoping to recover his health.

Every afternoon, at the foot of the Black Cross in the poplar avenue, he waits for the post rider who brings his newspaper, and feels the politics and bustle of the capital fade with the evening bell. In a village graveyard he thinks about death and recalls his boyhood dreams in Seville, when he wanted to be buried on the banks of the Guadalquivir; in another letter he proposes that painters, architects and writers travel the provinces to save the memory of a vanishing Spain, and in another he portrays the women of Añón, who carry firewood to Tarazona singing.

The most famous letters are about witches. A shepherd tells him how the village youths hunted down and killed Aunt Casca, whom they accused of witchcraft; the girl who serves him, oil lamp in hand, explains how to guard against spells; and Bécquer retells in his own way the legend of the castle of Trasmoz, raised in a single night by an old sorcerer, and that of Dorotea, the priest’s niece, from whom the local witches descend. The last letter, addressed to a young lady, tells of the apparition of the Virgin that gave rise to the monastery.

Bécquer spent the winter and part of the spring of 1864 at Veruela, and the letters appeared in El Contemporáneo between May and October under the general title Desde mi celda; they were collected in a book in 1871, after his death. This is post-Romantic prose: the melancholy of ruins, a love of the Middle Ages and of popular tradition, a fascination with the supernatural and, at the same time, the ironic eye of a journalist who knows the life of the capital well.

Many pages foreshadow his Leyendas (Legends), and the letters about the witches of Trasmoz are the most widely read. Today they are also read as a portrait of rural nineteenth-century Aragon and as the self-portrait of a poet who, at twenty-eight, already wrote: “Ser un comparsa en la inmensa comedia de la humanidad; y concluido mi papel de hacer bulto, meterme entre bastidores, sin que me silben ni me aplaudan” (“To be an extra in the vast comedy of mankind, and, my walk-on part done, to slip into the wings without being hissed or applauded”).

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was born in Seville on 17 February 1836 and died in Madrid on 22 December 1870, probably of tuberculosis. A poet, storyteller and journalist, he made his literary life in Madrid; his brother Valeriano, a painter, was with him at Veruela.

He won some fame in his lifetime, but his reputation came after his death, when his friends collected his writings. His Rimas (Rhymes) and Leyendas (Legends) together make one of the most popular books in Spanish literature.