{"product_id":"treasure-of-the-spanish-civil-war-isbn-9781939810540","title":"Treasure of the Spanish Civil War","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn intimate portrait of childhood during Spain's violent fascist regime, rendered in a surreal kaleidoscope of linked stories.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSerge Pey's stories are lyrical, vivid vignettes of life during and directly following Spain's violent fascist regime of the thirties and forties. The collection is a defiant ode to the resilience of the human spirit, each story depicting a small act of human resistance: a man plants a fruit tree for each of his assassinated comrades; a professor hides a secret library of banned books in plain sight. Many of the stories are surreal, fable-like impressions from the perspective of children caught in the midst of the political violence. Pey's understated yet unusual prose renders a brutal landscape with childlike wonder. \u003ci\u003eThe Treasure of the Spanish Civil War and Other Tales\u003c\/i\u003e is a strikingly original meditation on courage, survival, and hope in the face of oppression. \"Pey’s haunting, inspired collection captures the lives of refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War...Throughout this remarkable collection, Pey’s startling and memorable images have a poetic logic, building complexity and nuance into the characters’ cries for freedom. This masterful collection stands with the best fiction about war refugees.\" — \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Lyrical, oneiric, wrenching . . . [The collection's] beauty speaks to the collective, if precarious, survival of clandestine, resistant communities who, for all the violence they have suffered, refuse to be defined by it.\" \u003cb\u003e— Carlos Varón González, \u003ci\u003ePublic Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   • \"Donald Nicholson-Smith's translations hold fast to this poetry's unnerving eloquence and simplicity, and its hell-for-leather speed.\" \u003cb\u003e- T.J Clark on \u003ci\u003eIn Praise of Defeat\u003c\/i\u003e (shortlisted for the 2017 Griffen Poetry Prize)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \"Presenting the text \u003ci\u003een face\u003c\/i\u003e, translator Donald Nicholson-Smith navigates the poet's many styles and moods with poise and opens this landmark writer's body of work up to nonfrancophone readers.\" \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e- World Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e on \u003ci\u003eIn Praise of Defeat\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eA   self-described ‘action-poet,’ Pey has now for some fifty years walked the   high tightrope that links the written and the oral, the old shamanic and the   new avant-garde traditions, live performances and printed books. In this   gathering he shows himself a teller of tales of telluric power, inheritor of   the likes of Jean Giono, Kateb Yacine or William Faulkner, as he recounts the   intimately lived adventures of these children caught in the torment of war   and repression . . . There is a truly scheherazadian power in Pey’s voice   that makes each of these stories, be they tragic, pathetic, or even just   every-day dramatic, a true delight to read. This is fast-talking writing at   its best.\u003cbr\u003e — Pierre JorisSerge  Pey is a French writer, poet, and visual and performance artist. A  child of the Spanish Civil War, Pey was born in Toulouse to a working  class immigrant family. Pey's work is inseparable from his political  conscience and focuses on the intersection of poetry and revolution. Pey  received the Grand Prix de Poesié in 2017 for\u003ci\u003e Flamenco\u003c\/i\u003e and the Boccace Prize in 2012 for \u003ci\u003eTreasures of the Spanish Civil War and Other Tales. \u003c\/i\u003eHe is also a laureate of the Robert Ganzo Poetry Prize. Pey now teaches contemporary poetry at the University of Mirai.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDonald Nicholson-Smith's   translations include works by Thierry Jonquet, Guy Debord, Paco Ignacio   Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Paoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean   Laplanche, and J.B. Pontalis. His translation of Apollinaire's \u003ci\u003eLetters to Madeleine\u003c\/i\u003e was   shortlisted for the 2012 French-American Foundation Prize for   Nonfiction and in 2014 he won the Foundation's Fiction Prize for his   translation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's \u003ci\u003eThe Mad and the Bad\u003c\/i\u003e. His translation of \u003ci\u003eIn Praise of Defeat\u003c\/i\u003e by Abdellatif   Laâbi was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. He has  been  named a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres for services to French  literature  in translation.An Execution\u003cbr\u003e THERE WERE FOUR of them at the entrance to the field. Then another one appeared behind the shed. Five now. The boy saw birds scared up from the bushes. Yet another one, rifle in hand. Six. The boy heard a horse whinnying and a bird flapping off behind a boulder. Then he saw the \u003ci\u003eguardia \u003c\/i\u003ecivil corporal pointing them out to the other five with his cord riding-crop. Slowly the mounted guards surrounded the man and the boy.\u003cbr\u003e ”Are you the spitter?”\u003cbr\u003e The man did not reply. He simply spat straight ahead, between the horse’s legs, without lowering his head.\u003cbr\u003e “You have six hours to leave this property and you won’t be warned again.”\u003cbr\u003e The man spat for a second time between the legs of the horse, which sidestepped and reared at its own shadow. The corporal drew his revolver and, trembling, pointed it at the man’s head. The man still did not look down. Then the guard, pulling his horse to the side, took aim at a little black pig that the boy and the man were fattening up for the feast days. The pig’s head exploded from the impact of the shot and its body rolled soundlessly onto its side. Despite the detonation the man’s gaze did not waver and he spat yet again between the horse’s legs. The man had spoken.\u003cbr\u003e “We’ll get you soon, spitter! You’ll end up like that pig and then you can go spit in hell!” said the corporal before disappearing with the other riders in a cloud of dust.\u003cbr\u003e The boy watched an eagle wheeling in the sky. As though harnessed to an invisible noria, the majestic bird drew all the sunshine towards the two of them where they were amidst shadows. The boy would remember this. The man kept silent for a long while, observing the eagle as it turned towards the mountain, perhaps to check its work and draw the sun to another valley. At last the man turned and spoke to the boy.\u003cbr\u003e “Give me your knife.”\u003cbr\u003e The man gutted the piglet and wrapped it in leaves, then dug a hole and lit a fire in it with dry wood. When he had glowing embers he placed the animal’s spread-eagled carcass on them and covered it with soil. The boy and the man had been collecting stones all morning without exchanging a single word when the boy suddenly came upon a snail’s glistening shell under an old tree stump. It was glossy and yellow. A bluish spiral wound around it up to the gaping hole that once contained and protected the creature’s body. The boy picked up the shell and showed it to the man.\u003cbr\u003e “I found a shell.”\u003cbr\u003e “Keep it, kid,” the man replied. “They say that shells bring good luck because they hold the voices of the departed.”\u003cbr\u003e The boy thought to himself that it would soon be midday. \u003cbr\u003e And indeed the man pointed out the shortening shadows as they climbed the mountainside and shrank little by little. By the time the pig was ready the sun was casting no shadows.\u003cbr\u003e The boy was crouched by the spring filling their canteen when he saw a flock of birds rise suddenly from a bush. Further off, the noise of a waterfall had abruptly become the only sound. Then he sensed them, up above, with their horses. He heard a man’s voice yelling words he did not understand. Three shots rang out, followed by a fourth. For a brief moment the silence in the boy’s chest was broken and the roar of the waterfall was deafening.\u003cbr\u003e A horseman had asked, “Where’s the kid?”\u003cbr\u003e A rasping voice answered, “Go and see, and take care of him. He must be by the stream. You, set fire to the hut and the chicken coop.”\u003cbr\u003e The boy dragged himself in among an old oak tree’s roots which, as they wound between rocks, had created a niche he had discovered earlier while trailing a fox. This hideaway was exactly the right size for him. He crawled backwards into the burrow and pulled a branch across the entrance to conceal it. Then he let himself slip down to the point where the narrow passageway made a right-angled turn and continued underneath a boulder.\u003cbr\u003e Sweat trickled into the boy’s eyes and for a moment he stopped breathing. The sound of his heart filled the whole den. He felt as \u003cbr\u003e though he no longer had any heart and that the whole universe was a vast throbbing.\u003cbr\u003e The guard came down to the spring. The boy knew that he was inspecting the canteen that he had left behind and the wine bottle tinkling like a bell under the stream of water. The horse came close, passed above the rocks, then returned and halted by the branches that concealed his hiding place. The guard knew the boy was in there. He sensed the boy’s presence. He was a hunter, honed like a knife, well used to tracking every kind of game, man or beast. The boy pictured him flaring his nostrils and deeply inhaling the scents of the forest as he scanned the trees without turning his head.\u003cbr\u003e “What are you doing?” came the far-off voice of the corporal. “Did you find him?”\u003cbr\u003e The guard guided his horse around the rocks. The boy heard him dismount. The sound of his boots came nearer, then he was pulling aside a few branches just above the hidey-hole. The guard knew that the boy was not far away. Suddenly his voice came, distant: “I know you’re there. You can come out. I won’t kill you.”\u003cbr\u003e The boy knew that the guard had not seen him, because he was speaking from the other side of the rocks. The guard was lying to win his confidence and then shoot him. The boy was behind the guard and very careful not to make the slightest movement for fear of causing stones to topple.\u003cbr\u003e “Come out of your hole. You can’t stay in there all day.”\u003cbr\u003e From the silence that followed the boy realized that the guard had spotted the hole. The guard knew that the boy was down inside, crouched underground. But he could not enter the boy’s hiding-place because the passage was too narrow, so all he could do was fire blindly down the hole in hopes of hitting him. The boy told himself that he had a chance of surviving, for he was at the elbow-bend in the burrow behind another rock. The boy sensed that the guard now had his rifle pointing at the entrance and was about to fire.\u003cbr\u003e “Come on. I’m not going to hurt you.”\u003cbr\u003e A stone tumbled by the boy’s shoulder. It was at that moment that the guard fired wildly into the den. The bullets passed close to the boy without hitting him and grazed the rock against which he was leaning. He remained motionless, burying his face in the earth. Then the voice of the corporal resounded again.\u003cbr\u003e “Come on back. Forget it. You got him. It’s late already.”\u003cbr\u003e The guard waited for a moment. The boy heard him reload his gun and then depart on foot, leading his horse. The boy did not budge.","brand":"Archipelago","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302210916581,"sku":"NP9781939810540","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781939810540.jpg?v=1767742933","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/treasure-of-the-spanish-civil-war-isbn-9781939810540","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}