The Hive

Complete and uncensored in English for the very first time, a fragmented, daringly irreverent depiction of decadence and decay in Franco's Spain written by the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The translator Anthony Kerrigan has compared the work of Camilo José Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to that of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Curzio Malaparte. These are, Kerrigan writes, “ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, foul mouthed.” However provocative and disturbing, they are also flat-out dazzling as writers, whose sentences, as rigorous as they are riotous, lodge like knives in the reader’s mind. Cela called himself a proponent of “uglyism,” of “noth- ingism.” But he has the knack, the critic Américo Castro reminds us, of deploying those “nothings and lacks” to construct beauty.

The Hive is set over the course of a few days in the Madrid of 1943, not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the regime of General Francisco Franco was at its most oppressive. The book includes more than three hundred characters whose comings and goings it tracks to hypnotic effect. Scabrous, scandalous, and profane, this virtuosic group portrait of a wounded and sick society was first published in Buenos Aires in 1951 because in Spain it could not be published at all. This new translation by James Womack is the first in English to present Cela’s masterpiece in uncensored form.

Camilo José Cela (1916–2002) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989. Though he wrote prolifically and audaciously in a number of different genres, he is best known for his novel The Hive, which was published in Argentina in 1951 after being banned in Franco's Spain. In addition to his writing, he produced drawings and paintings and also appeared in several films.
 
James Womack is a poet and a translator from Russian and Spanish. His most recent poetry collection, Homunculus, was published by the UK press Carcanet in 2020. His translations include Manuel Vilas's Heaven and a collection of poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky. He is an editor at Calque Press and teaches at Cambridge University.