Manuscrit Corbeau (review)

Max Aub. Manuscrit Corbeau. Trans. Robert Marrast. Suivi de Le cimetière de Djelfa. Trans. José María Naharro-Calderón. Postface by J.M. Naharro-Calderón.Narbonne: Editions Mare Nostrum, 1998. 201 pages.

As the century draws to a close here is another testimony of the pain and desolation caused by one of our age's defining moments in the European context: the Spanish Civil War. Max Aub, born French but with a German father, Spanish by adoption, Jewish enough to be a candidate for the gas chambers, spent the last 30 years of his life in Mexico. Aub's family left Paris for Spain in 1914. He was to return there in February 1939 after the fall of Barcelona. But he was no longer welcome in his birthplace and a year later, denounced as a 'dangerous red', he was interned in Vernet, one of the concentration camps set up in southern France to 'process' refugees from the Spanish war. Twice released and twice rearrested, he was then sent in 1941 to another camp in southern Algeria. Released from there and after a few weeks in Casablanca, where he would clearly have been a fitting habitué of Rick's Bar, he finally managed to gain passage to Mexico in 1942. He was lucky. In 1944 the remaining inmates of Vernet were put on a train for Dachau.

Aub had translated the script for André Malraux's film Sierra de Teruel, and had taken part in the filming, narrowly escaping on one occasion from an unwelcome encounter with three messerschmitts. The film's showing was banned in Paris shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. Aub's link with then overtly communist activity undoubtedly contributed to his arrest. His actual political views may be judged from the comment that on the basis of photographic evidence communists were much to be admired since they wear more stars, medals and decorations than anybody. 'Ils brillent', it is concluded. Fascists, on the other hand, are racists who do not permit Jews to wash and eat with Aryans. Antifascists, though, are not racists and do not permit Blacks to wash and eat with Whites. These are the observations of a crow unfortunate enough to have fallen to earth and landed in the concentration camp at Vernet. Originally published in Spanish in Aub's ironically entitled magazine Sala de espera in 1950, the crow's comments on the strange, lesser species of mankind have now been turned into the language of Aub's childhood years.

The model for this satirical bird's-eye view is obviously Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, with Cadalso's adaptation in the Cartas marruecas equally evident as a Spanish forebear. To this model of the foreigner who sees with uncomprehending astonishment the oddities of the strange society in which he finds himself is added that of the talking animal from La Fontaine. There is also a Cervantine dimension as the text has been translated from Crow by the sage Aben Máximo Albarrón. The crow's comments on the primitive tribe of man are intended to edify his corvine readers and help them to avoid human error. Men, clearly linked genetically with worms since they have no wings, place the 'elect' among them inside barbed-wire compounds to prevent the ordinary people gaining access to them. These 'elect' are obsessed with the totemic atavism of identification papers and are watched over by the police who are a subsidiary arm of the banking system. And so on. . . . The feathered visitor to Vernet is obviously one way in which an inmate of the camp being 'processed' after the war was able to process that experience itself and displace the pain, despair and rancour of defeat.

The crow's observations move swiftly through brief paragraphs on topics like money, blasphemy and Pernod, but conclude with a role-call of miniature portraits and biographies of some of the camp's inhabitants. At this point the irony of the text moves much closer to...