The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui (Dedalus Europe) - Softcover

Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, the son of a Spanish father and an Italian mother, was born in Rome in 1927. He is one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, and yet his reputation is based largely on two novels: his first book, The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui, (1951) and The Jarama (1956), which won the Spanish National Critics' Prize. One is a children's fantasy for adults, the other a minute dissection of one tiny chunk of reality. Since thei rpublicatiuon thery have acquired classic status.

Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers. She won the Portuguese Translation Prize twice, the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Weidenfeld Translation Prize 3 times, the Pen Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize, the Marsh Children’s Fiction in Translation Award & the Best Translated Book Award. In 2013, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in 2014, was awarded an OBE for services to literature. In 2018, she was awarded the Ordem Infante D. Henrique by the Portuguese government.

One rainy night, a distant wind blew into the garden. Alfanhuí had his window open, and the wind made the flame of his lamp flicker. The shadows of the birds trembled on the walls. They moved only slightly and hesitantly at first, as if they had been woken unexpectedly. From his bed, Alfanhuí saw the shadows trembling on the walls and the ceiling, and saw how they fragmented and overlapped in the corners of the room. It seemed to him that his little room was getting larger and larger until it had become a vast salon. As the little flame in the oil lamp flickered, the shadows of the birds were growing larger too and more numerous. The wind was blowing more forcefully in through the window and brought with it something like the music of rivers and forgotten forests.

The flame made the shadows dance to that music. Like ghosts or puppet birds they began dancing the arcane dances, the primitive dances of their species, tracing on the high ceiling of the salon a great ring of wings and beaks, a constantly changing ring, light and luminous, that turned and turned, restoring to the dead shadows the birds' former colours. In the middle danced the heron with the Chinese eyes, moving its beak to a haughty rhythm, keeping time for all the other birds, and the wind seemed to be hurling gusts of rain into its eyes. The stuffed birds had vanished from their pedestals, as if the rain had brought them back to life, and they had flown off to join their shadows dancing on the ceiling of the salon.

The fog of silence and solitude vanished, and forgotten visions awoke as the music of the wind and the rain met the dead colours of the birds. In the middle of the ring of birds on the ceiling, a circle seemed to open up to which all the primitive colours were returning. The thousand greens of the jungles, the white of waterfalls and, from the land of wading birds, the pink and grey of the wetlands, with a red sun trembling on the muddy, bloodshot surface. At the foot of the purples and yellows of the reedbed gleamed the black silt of the banks, carpeted with tiny roots that snaked about amongst the myriad tracks left by different birds. The salty whites of the estuaries returned, along with the saltmarsh birds who probe the mudflats with their long beaks. And the marine sun of the seagulls and the albatrosses beating down on a desert of sand and conch shells.