(1) Exemplary crimes

A new series

Photo by Maria Teneva at Unsplash.

Dear readers, for once in a while I’d like to do something different. So this series is devoted to a famous/unknown Spanish writer and one of his best works, Exemplary Crimes.

Max Aub (1903 – 1972) was a Mexican-Spanish experimentalist novelist, playwright, poet, and literary critic who authored nearly 100 books and plays. While very famous and greatly respected in Spain, he is still criminally little-known in other countries. In English, in particular, the only available work is Field of Honor (1943), the first volume of a six-novel cycle devoted to the Spanish civil War known as The Magic Labyrinth (1943-1968).

I’m lucky enough to own the Italian translation of a small book called Crímenes ejemplares that was first published in 1957. It is a compilation of “confessions” in which a different person describes a crime s/he has committed and tells us why.

I have translated them for you into English (please forgive the mistakes) and I’m going to post them here, little by little. I hope you like black humor. Enjoy.

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“I have not done it on purpose.”

Neither have I. That's all she could say, that idiot, in front of the shattered jug. It was the one my holy mother had left me, God bless her.

I tore her to pieces. I swear I never thought for an instant of the law of retaliation. It was stronger than me.