I realized last week that I never posted this piece, though I
wrote it nearly a year ago…
Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature, a contemporary
novel translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, tells the story of Nicolás
Bautista Monardes, a sixteenth-century Spanish physician who advocates the use
of tobacco for medicinal purposes. The novel is a picaresque—generally an
entertaining one—narrated by Monardes’s assistant, the hapless, unreliable, and
Portuguese Guimarães da Silva.
The reader witnesses all sorts of cures and odd episodes in
chapters with titles like “For Long Life,” “Intestinal Worms, Enemas,” and “For
Protection Against the Plague and All Manner of Contagions,” and Monardes holds
forth on matters of religion, nature (the human is “a pipe, through which
nature passes”), and politics.
I especially enjoyed a scene based in England, in which King
James I holds a debate called “Whether the frequent use of tobacco is good for
healthy men?” Says da Silva, “The question mark here is pure hypocrisy and is
intended solely to satisfy the formal requirements of debate.” da Silva’s
comments about his seatmates at the debate are, like many other passages in the
book, funny in a slapstick way. As da Silva takes notes and draws a Star of
David, one of his neighbors “stared bug-eyed at the star on my sheet. I quickly
crossed it out and grabbed my quill such that I—ostensibly accidentally—showed
him my middle finger.”
Of course part of the fun of all this for me, a twenty
first-century reader who used to write quite a bit about drug discovery and
development, was reading about political debate around a substance used as a
medical treatment. And of course our modern-day vilification of tobacco puts loads
of irony into watching Monardes and da Silva advocate its use to cure just
about everything, puffing away on cigarillas as a preventive measure. da Silva,
however, records this:
“I’ve been sustaining myself with tobacco for twenty years longer than you have,” replied the doctor. “There seems to be something in tobacco which causes such a cough. After many, many years.
Today is a bad day for tobacco, I thought to myself.
Perhaps even more interesting: Monardes
was a real person and, according to the Special Collections Department of
the library at the University of Glasgow, “Monardes made tobacco a household
remedy throughout Western Europe and his gospel was accepted by the majority of
European physicians for more than two centuries.” I don’t know if Ruskov smokes
but Bulgaria is apparently a big tobacco-using country: according to data
on Wikipedia, Bulgaria ranks fourth in the world in number of cigarettes
per adult per year, 2,437.
I would be remiss if I didn’t add that I thought Rodel’s translation read nicely, conveying humor and a stylized voice.
Disclosures: I
received a copy of Thrown into Nature
from Open Letter Books, a publisher with which I always enjoy discussing
literature in translation, including a specific piece I’m translating.
Up Next: The Canvas, by Benjamin Stein, an Open
Letter Book that I’m enjoying very much… fitting since I’ll be going to Rochester, NY, home of Open Letter,
for the American Literary Translators Association conference next week. I loved
last year’s conference in Kansas City so can’t wait!
Image: Portrait
of Monardes, from user Valérie75, via Wikipedia.
