The Prodigious Physician E-Book

Jorge de Sena

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This astonishingly erotic and ironic novel is set in vaguely medieval times, but the tone is starkly modern. A young gentleman is travelling on horseback, and stops by a river to rest and bathe. As he is lying there naked after bathing, three maidens appear and, trying to avert their gaze from the young man's many charms, they tell him the story of their recently widowed mistress, who is dying of grief. She can only be saved by a man who fulfils three conditions: he must be the son of a king, a great physician, and a virgin. Since he more or less fulfils these conditions, the young man duly goes to the castle where he saves the queen, who immediately falls in love with her saviour. But are the maidens, the queen or the prodigious physician what they seem? In this novel, nothing is certain and nothing is ever entirely over.

Leseprobe

To enter a deliberate contemplative state, all you need is to enter the state of those who meditate, namely, to walk in the grace of God, as long as you do so with no consciousness of mortal sin…

Father Manuel Bernardes

On the Contemplative State

I piss upwards at the brown skies so high and so far away – With the approval of the large heliotropes.

Rimbaud

Evening Prayer

The Author

Jorge de Sena (1919–78) was a Portuguese poet, critic, essayist, novelist, dramatist, translator and university professor. His opposition to the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal led to him going into voluntary exile in Brazil in 1959 and, after the military coup in Brazil in 1964, he moved to the United States. He taught first at the University of Wisconsin and, for the last eight years of his life, at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he was Professor of Comparative Literature. Although he never returned to live in Portugal after the Revolution of 25 April 1974, Sena continued to be a critical observer of Portuguese politics. He died in Santa Barbara in 1978.

The Translator

Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers. She won the Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa in 1992 and for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão in 2012, and her translations of Eça de Queiroz’s novels The Relic (1996) and The City and the Mountains (2009) were shortlisted for the prize; with Javier Marias, she won the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White, and, in 2000, she won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s All the Names. In 2008 she won the Pen Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz.

In 2014 Margaret was awarded an OBE for services to literature.

Introduction

The Prodigious Physician is an astounding book. First published in 1966 in a collection of short stories, it would take a further ten years and a political revolution before the book could come out as a stand-alone novella in 1978. The Prodigious Physician weaves a tale of love, persecution and resistance, mixing traditional prose narrative with poetry and experimental literary techniques. Sena’s style of writing requires our close attention, and his explorations of sexual and political freedom retain the power to challenge readers, even today.

Jorge de Sena was one of the most influential and productive intellectuals to emerge in twentieth-century Portugal. As a scholar, he was firmly committed to exploring Portugal’s literary heritage with painstaking attention to detail, from the Renaissance poet, Luís Vaz de Camões, to the modernist icon Fernando Pessoa. Sena read broadly, and was an avid fan and critic of cinema, and an enormous range of influences and references may be identified in his work – not least in The Prodigious Physician. This novella draws not only on the two stories from the medieval Iberian collection, the Orto do Esposo, to which Sena himself drew our attention; it also alludes to well-known legends (such as Narcissus and Faust), to fairy tales (Sleeping Beauty), to the biblical story of Christ, and makes reference to cinema – a medium of which Sena was particularly fond.

As a politically-engaged intellectual, Sena was well aware of the possibilities of literature as a tool in the resistance against authoritarian regimes such as the highly conservative Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship that governed Portugal from 1933 to 1974. Under the regime, significant restrictions were placed on writers and artists, and self-censorship was encouraged; books deemed inappropriate could be seized after publication and the author and publisher jailed. The isolationist and authoritarian regime headed by António de Oliveira Salazar limited political opposition both in Portugal and in its then colonies through the use of a political police force (known as the PIDE, the International Police for the Defence of the Nation). Sena himself was a known opponent of the Salazar regime, and following his involvement in a failed coup d’état in 1959, he sought exile in Brazil as a means of escaping police scrutiny. When Sena was writing the novella, in 1964, he was still living and working in Araraquara, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, although he would soon move again, this time to the USA, after Brazil also found itself in the grip of a dictatorial regime that lasted from 1964 to 1985. He never returned to live in Portugal and died in California in 1978.

The plot of The Prodigious Physician is misleading in its simplicity: the title character is a young horseman who is endowed with magical powers, his body having been sold to the Devil by his godmother. He cures a ‘damsel in distress’, Dona Urraca. The two fall in love, but their lovers’ idyll is soon brought to an end by the Inquisition, which takes them prisoner on account of the horseman’s alleged witchcraft. The trial of the horseman lasts for many years, during the course of which Dona Urraca dies, with the horseman eventually dying too. The final chapter of the novella sees a popular revolt finally overthrow the Inquisition’s rule of terror. The devil of this story, as it were, is in the detail: The Prodigious Physician is a shifting tale marked by ambiguity in its telling.

In the first instance, the prodigious physician of the title is difficult to pin down. In Portuguese, the word físico, which, after quite some deliberation has been translated here as ‘physician’, is both an old word for doctor or magician, and it refers also to the physical body and to the laws of nature. The importance of the horseman’s physique is repeatedly referred to in the novella – from the opening scene and his subsequent encounter with the maidens in the forest, to his continued physical beauty even when he is severely tortured. His physical relationship with the Devil (who accosts him sexually whenever he is naked and alone), and his curative powers that rely on the use of his blood, are the crux of the story and the reason given for his imprisonment by the Inquisition. Notably, the physician or horseman rejects the possibility of taking a proper name, and the ambiguity around his identity is crucial and continually reverts attention to the physical. In the first half of the novella, the physician is referred to as the young man, the horseman or the physician. In the first six chapters, he is closely associated with his horse, and the two figures repeatedly create a sexual tension. In the opening line of the novella, the two bodies are as one as they penetrate the valley (an image that will be repeated later, when he encounters the ailing Dona Urraca in chapter II). Later in that first chapter, the existing sexual anticipation is heightened by the neighing of the horse as the maidens/goddesses ogle the young man’s naked body. In one grotesque scene in chapter IV, he fantasises/ dreams about Dona Urraca emerging from an orgiastic scene, biting into the horse’s severed penis.

The identity of this character, the physician, is more closely associated with his visual appearance than with any name or background story. For Dona Urraca and the Devil, he is the image of love and all its positive and liberating potential; for the Inquisition, he is the image of evil and opposition. Even while the physician’s image is a central symbol in the narrative, it is not attached to him, as we see from the young man’s fascination with his own image, and then from the superimposition of his face first onto his dead lover’s face, and later onto those of his torturers. Furthermore, just as his image is understood variously by the different characters in the novella (including the physician himself), the way that he is described also changes: he is described first as ‘the young man’ or ‘the horseman’; and by the end of the novella as ‘the body’. For the most part, however, the physician is identified only by the pronoun ‘he’.

The uncertainty surrounding the prodigious physician’s identity is just one of many complex ambiguities that emerge both within the story and from its telling. The translator’s task is made all the more difficult by Sena’s deliberately confusing use of both subject and object pronouns. Margaret Jull Costa’s painstakingly close attention to detail in this respect both clarifies for the Anglophone reader where necessary, and retains Sena’s linguistic play where possible. The parallel narratives present two possibilities at once, while ‘whirlwind’ narratives and a mixing up of narrative positions (such as in chapters I, IV, V and XII) also complicate reading, for it is not always easy to decide whether an event is imagined, or is a magical interlude, or really happens within the narrative – or more than one of these options at once. Furthermore, stylistic quirks such as the parenthetical inclusion of question marks after the word ‘maidens’ after their sexual interaction with the young man serve to question the very vocabulary that we have at our disposal, underlining the loaded nature of certain identifying terms (here). The episodes which take place in the clearing in the forest are particularly tricky in this respect, and again, Margaret Jull Costa has faithfully reproduced the confusion that Sena creates and which adds depth to this story. Between them, the Devil, Dona Urraca and the physician form a kind of unholy trinity that both references and diverges from the biblical story of Christ, with the possibility of the physician’s divinity made explicit at the end of Chapter V. One of the most difficult of all the complicated games of identity and narrative that this story contains is the question of the relationship between the Devil and Dona Urraca. Is Dona Urraca the Devil in another guise? And/or are her maidens yet another incarnation of the Devil? The question is never answered for certain, although many hints are given, and the reader must become a sleuth to find out for sure, noting details that will become increasingly meaningful as the story progresses (watch out for the ‘mocking laugh’ and the ‘acrid smell’ as you read).

The Devil himself is something of an odd character in this novella, for he is not particularly evil. Indeed, the rather likeable, lovesick Devil is used to draw a contrast with the nastiness of the physician’s inquisitors. The plot of the second half of The Prodigious Physician satirises the type of political repression that Sena witnessed in Portugal and Brazil alike. The Inquisition – led by Brother Anthony of Salzburg (whose name recalls the Portuguese dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar) – imprisons the physician, subjecting him and all of his acquaintances to a long and arduous process during which he undergoes severe torture, and his inquisitors are revealed to be reprehensibly corrupt and deeply un-Christian. Sena’s work challenges assumptions about good and evil, revealing the boundary between the two concepts to be as much about perspective as it is about any inherent truth. Equally, a number of other dichotomous pairings are exposed as being much more complex and ambiguous than they may seem at first view, for example: holy/unholy, virginity/promiscuity, witchcraft/ science. Even the boundaries of fictional form are shaken in this novella, as Sena uses a range of techniques, from deploying poetry within the prose narrative to emphasise particular themes (such as the redemptive powers of sexual love), to providing varying perspectives on the same event through parallel columns of text which, although they cannot in fact be read at the same time, serve at least to deconstruct a narrative hierarchy which presents one perspective as being superior to another. Throughout the book, Sena interrogates notions of sexual and political power, weaving the two concepts together and exploring the revolutionary and liberating potential of love in its many forms. The result is a story that is all the more enjoyable for the challenges that arise from its multifaceted ambiguities.

The task of the translator of The Prodigious Physician is decidedly difficult. She must draw on a deep and wide-ranging understanding of Portuguese and European cultures in order to understand and find the best means of conveying Sena’s multiple references to, for example, the troubadour tradition, the chivalric romance, fairy tales and legends from Sleeping Beauty to Faust. She must be able to move, as Sena himself does, between the high register of medieval dialogue to the colloquial tones of contemporary speech. She must find a means of maintaining the laugh-out-loud humour of the Devil’s put-down to Brother Anthony, while at the same time not foregoing the deeply sensitive critique of oppressive regimes. She must make the novella as sexually explicit in English as it is in Portuguese, while retaining Sena’s use of innuendo and his linguistic coyness. And she must keep all the joy and fun in the text – clarifying its linguistic ambiguities where necessary for understanding, but keeping its many delightful quirks and maintaining the readability, ambiguity and literary prowess that make this novella one of the most challenging, and most rewarding, of twentieth-century Portugal’s literary tradition. Margaret Jull Costa’s accomplished new translation can be relied upon to do just that.

Rhian Atkin

Cardiff University