Last year I stopped posting to my personal blog about what I’d been reading because it abruptly became All Research, All the Time for The Sea Beyond, and I couldn’t talk yet about what Alyc and I were working on. Then I could talk about it, but it didn’t make good fodder for the usual “here’s what I’ve been reading” posts, and I didn’t have the time or energy to work through the backlog to do the kinds of individualized book reports I did back in my Onyx Court days.
But this book gets a report, because this is the first time I’ve read an entire book in a language other than English.
Mind you, I wouldn’t give myself full, unadulterated credit. I did rely on Google Lens to check my comprehension of each paragraph after I’d read it, or to assist with sentences I couldn’t quite make sense of. (Some of which I did in fact read correctly the first time, but what they said was so unexpected, I needed verification.) Machine translation also helped a great deal with the quotations of undiluted seventeenth-century Spanish — though after a while I got better at coping with “hazer” and “dexar” and “avía” and “buelta” — and I flat-out needed it for the untranslated Catalan, from which I can pluck out at most fifty percent of the words via cognates.
Still and all, I read this book. On the basis of three years of Spanish classes from ages thirteen to fifteen, a reading comprehension test in graduate school that I passed with an assist from four years of Latin + watching a bunch of familiar movies with their Spanish subtitles running, and a headfirst dive into a Spanish practice app when this series got officially greenlit. I am stupidly proud of myself for doing as well as I did.
And I’m glad I attempted it! In the grand scheme of things, Cisneros is no Liza Picard; he quotes abundantly from the writings of period travelers and Valencian observers, but he doesn’t seem to have gone digging deeply into other kinds of sources or context that might have fleshed out his description in greater detail. It’s all fine and well to tell me what kinds of development was done around the Palacio Real, but I had to look elsewhere to verify my guess that, in the usual absence of the monarch, that was the residence of the viceroy instead. Cisneros is very obviously writing to an audience of fellow Valencians — there’s a constant evocation of “our city” and “our ancestors” — and his goal is mostly to glorify things about the city that date back to the seventeenth century and to describe things that are no longer there. He does acknowledge some of the less-attractive parts, like the rather dingy houses occupied by non-elites or the truly massive amount of interpersonal violence, but he’s not trying to fully explore daily life back then.
Beggars can’t be choosers, though. There’s an astonishing paucity of books in English about daily life in Golden Age Spain — as in, I’ve found a grand total of two, plus one about sailing with the New World treasure fleets — and even in Spanish, it’s hard to find works that focus on Valencia, which is where a significant part of the story will be set. But for every bit where Cisneros goes into stultifying detail on the Baroque renovations of individual churches (almost all of them late enough to be irrelevant to our series), there’s another bit where he tells me exactly which parts of the river embankment will be under construction when our protagonist arrives there, or how Valencians were required to water the streets in the summer to cool off the city and reduce disease, or what now-vanished traditions represent what they did for fun. (At Carneval, they pelted each other with orange skins filled with such delightful stuffings as bran, fat, and the must left over from wine-making. Apparently injuries were not uncommon: he quotes a poem whose title more or less translates to “From a gentleman to the lady who put his eye out with an orange.”)
So this gave me a decent amount of very useful concrete detail that will help Valencia feel like Valencia, not Generic Early Modern European City. It may have taken me weeks to read its 228 pages, because I could only manage about ten pages a day before my brain shorted out and stopped processing any Spanish at all, but in the long run, it was worth it!
