Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s La media noche: Visión estelar de un momento de guerra (Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War) (1917): Translation and Critical Introduction

FAIN: FEL-288284-23

Elizabeth Drumm
Reed College (Portland, OR 97202-8138)

Preparation of an English-language translation and critical edition of Spanish author Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s chronicle of World War I, La media Noche: Visión Estelar de un Momento de Guerra (Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War) (1917).

I propose to use a NEH fellowship to complete and submit for publication a critical translation of the Spanish author Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s chronicle of World War I, La media noche: Visión estelar de un momento de guerra (1917; Midnight: Astral Vision of a Moment of War). To date, there are no English translations of Valle-Inclán’s fascinating attempt to create out of the devastating fragments that characterize an individual experience of war a synthetic view of the whole, outside time and space. At a time when modernist studies are opening up to texts and traditions outside of the canonical center (England, France, and the United States), my critical translation provides access both to an innovative approach to the genre of war chronicle and to a distinctly Spanish take on central literary problems of the era, including the expression of simultaneity, and the relationship between chronology and a qualitative experience of time.