(3) Exemplary crimes

By Max Aub

Dear readers, this is the second installation of my translation of Max Aub’s 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, more or less one a day (or more than one in case they are very short). I hope you like black humor. Enjoy.

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He choked until doomsday. I'm not afraid to look him in the face. Filth spurs courage.