Jacobé & Fineta – Joaquim Ruyra (tr. Alan Yates)

Nature is complaining as it goes into decline.

“AUTUMN”, the opening word of Joaquim Ruyra’s short story ‘Jacobé’, a period of shedding, dying back before hibernation and then (later) rejuvenation. Immediately you are transported to the season where the natural world is shedding its vibrancy.

…it is something death-like which moves through the land in accordance with an annual rhythm.

As the author biography tells us:

Joaquim Ruyra was a short story writer, poet and translator, considered a key figure in modern Catalan literature and one of the great narrators of the 20^th century. He was in the vanguard of the Catalan Modernist generation as they constructed a new literary model after 1860, when the Catalan language became the vehicle of cultural nationalism. Although he did not produce a large body of work, his short stories set a stylistic benchmark for Catalan literature, including the shaping of a ‘landscape…