The City and the Mountains
CONTENTS
Title
The Author
The Translator
Translator’s Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Copyright
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz was born on 25th November 1845 in the small town of Povoa de Varzim in the north of Portugal. His mother was nineteen and unmarried. Only the name of his father – a magistrate – appears on the birth certificate. Following the birth, his mother returned immediately to her respectable family in Viana do Castelo, and Eça was left with his wetnurse, who looked after him for six years until her death. Although his parents married later – when Eça was four – and had six more children, Eça did not live with them until he was twenty-one, living instead either with his grandparents or at boarding school in Oporto, where he spent the holidays with an aunt. His father only officially acknowledged Eça as his son when the latter was forty. He did, however, pay for his son’s studies at boarding school and at Coimbra University, where Eça studied Law, and was always supportive of his writing ambitions. After working as the editor and sole contributor on a provincial newspaper in Évora, Eça made a trip to the Middle East. Then, in order to launch himself on a diplomatic career, he worked for six months in Leiria, a provincial town north of Lisbon, as a municipal administrator, before being appointed consul in Havana (1872–74), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1874–79) and Bristol (1879–88). In 1886, he married Emília de Castro with whom he had four children. His last consular posting was to Paris in 1888. He served there until his death in 1900 at the age of only 54.
He began writing stories and essays as a young man and became involved with a group of intellectuals known as the Generation of ’70, who were committed to reforms in society and in the arts. He published four novels and one novella during his lifetime: The Crime of Father Amaro (3 versions: 1875, 1876, 1880),Cousin Bazilio (1878),The Mandarin (1880), The Relic (1887) and The Maias (1888). His other novels were published posthumously: The City and the Mountains, The Illustrious House of Ramires, To the Capital, Alves & Co., The Letters of Fradique Mendes, The Count of Abranhos and The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers.
Margaret Jull Costa has translated the work of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, amongst them Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, José Régio and Mário de Sá-Carneiro. She was awarded the 1992 Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. With Javier Marías, she won the translator’s portion of the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White. In 2000, she won the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s All the Names and, in 2006, the Premio Valle-Inclán for Your Face Tomorrow: I Fever and Spear by Javier Marías. Her translation of Eça’s The Maias brought her the 2008 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the 2008 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
I would like to thank the Arts Council England for the award of a writer’s grant under their Grants for the Arts scheme, and to thank, as always, Maria Manuel Lisboa, Tânia Ganho and Ben Sherriff for all their help, advice and support.
Eça wrote this novel in 1895, when he was living and working in Paris. In 1892, he had visited the house and estate his wife had recently inherited in the Douro valley, in the north of Portugal. His responses to these two very different places seem to hold the key to the origin of The City and the Mountains. Eça had long wanted the post of consul in Paris, but once there, took little part in Parisian society and wrote to a friend: ‘[the city] has grown very coarse as regards manners and ideas, and it’s completely black!’ Writing to his wife from their Portuguese estate, Quinta da Vila Nova, he praised the wild beauty of the countryside, but commented:
One of the drawbacks is the terrible squalor in which the local people live. There is genuine poverty here, which is the reverse side of all this beauty. The houses in the village and the tenants’ houses are out-and-out hovels, not even fit for cattle – and this is entirely the fault of the landlords. Now that I have had a chance to observe it more closely, I am truly appalled.
Out of this twin ambivalence toward city and country comes this spry and strangely modern satire split neatly into two halves. In the first half, set in Paris, Eça describes a society obsessed with technology and money, a society divided into those who have too much and those who have almost nothing. In the second half of the book – which is, in many ways, a paean of praise to the natural beauty of the mountains and to the simple country life – a similar division exists.
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