Tristana

BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS (1843–1920) was born into a middle-class family in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. When he was nineteen, he was sent to Madrid to study law. Once there, however, he neglected his studies and plunged into the ordinary life of the capital, an experience that both developed his social and political conscience and confirmed him in his vocation as a writer. He became an assiduous theater- and concert-goer and a visitor to galleries and museums, and began publishing articles on literature, art, music, and politics. Galdós was the first to translate The Pickwick Papers into Spanish, and on a visit to Paris, discovered the works of Balzac. His first novel, La fontana de oro, was published privately and initially met with little interest. It wasn’t long, though, before critics were hailing it as a new beginning for the Spanish novel. In a career that spanned more than forty years, Galdós wrote nearly eighty novels and some twenty plays. He also managed to find time to travel widely, in Spain and abroad, and to conduct a series of discreet affairs—one of them with fellow novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán. Perhaps his most ambitious literary project, entitled Episodios nacionales, comprised forty-six books, each chronicling a different episode in Spanish history from the Battle of Trafalgar onward. He continued to write until his death at the age of seventy-six, dictating his novels to an amanuensis when blindness overtook him. Galdós provides his readers with an extraordinarily vivid picture of life in nineteenth-century Spain; his novels teem with fascinating characters from all social classes. His masterpiece is generally considered to be the vast and wonderful Fortunata and Jacinta, but equally impressive are such works as Doña Perfecta, Misericordia, La de Bringas, and Miau. Luis Buñuel based three of his movies—Viridiana, Nazarín, and Tristana—on three Galdós novels, perhaps recognizing in Galdós a fellow subversive.

MARGARET JULL COSTA has been a translator of Spanish and Portuguese literature for nearly thirty years. Among the authors she has translated are José Saramago, Javier Marías, and Eça de Queiroz. She has won many prizes, including the PEN Translation Prize. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2014 she was awarded an OBE for her services to literature. She lives in the United Kingdom.

JEREMY TREGLOWN is a writer and literary critic known most recently for his work on Spanish culture, film, and literature. His books include several biographies, including V. S. Pritchett, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Award for Biography, and most recently Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936. He was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement for almost a decade and is currently the Donald C. Gallup Fellow in American Literature at the Beinecke Library at Yale. He lives in the United Kingdom.

TRISTANA

BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS

Translated from the Spanish by

MARGARET JULL COSTA

Introduction by

JEREMY TREGLOWN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Translation copyright © 2014 by Margaret Jull Costa

Introduction copyright © 2014 by Jeremy Treglown

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Darío de Regoyos y Valdés, Portrait of Miss Jeanning, 1885; Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts, © Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa / Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao.

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pérez Galdós, Benito, 1843–1920.

[Tristana. English]

Tristana / by Benito Pérez Galdós ; translated by Margaret Jull Costa ; introduction by Jeremy Treglown.

1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-59017-792-1 — ISBN 978-1-59017-765-5 (alk. paper)

I. Costa, Margaret Jull, translator. II. Title.

PQ6555

863'.5—dc23

2014025387

ISBN 978-1-59017-792-1
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

CONTENTS

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

TRISTANA

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Translator’s Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

WITHIN a few pages, two people have taken over our imaginations. In some ways their predicaments are formulaic: an aging, self-mythologizing, predatory yet generous man lives with an attractive, passionate, much younger woman who is beginning to sense her separate potential.