Castalia Library has published the first English translation of “The Battle of Salamanca,” the tenth and final novel in the First Series of Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios Nacionales. Translator Vox Day brought the book to English readers this week, closing out a ten-volume arc that took more than a century and a half to reach an Anglophone audience in full.
“The Battle of Salamanca” carries protagonist Gabriel Araceli from the Béjar sierra to the two bare hills south of Salamanca that the Spanish call Los Arapiles. There, on July 22, 1812, Wellington broke Marshal Marmont’s army in forty minutes and changed the course of the Peninsular War. Gabriel is a major now, attached to the Spanish division serving alongside the allied army, and he arrives at the battle chasing a private matter: Luis de Santorcaz, the freemason and afrancesado who stole Inés seven years earlier, has finally been tracked down. He is not in France after all.
The novel is now available via Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and audiobook. Castalia sent the ebook to paid subscribers ahead of the wider release.
This is not the first time Castalia has closed a translation gap on Galdós. In early August, the press released “Cádiz,” the first English translation of the eighth Episodios Nacionales volume, also translated by Vox Day. That novel follows Gabriel into the besieged port city as French forces close in, working to free a secret daughter held inside a strict Catholic household governed by a matriarch with the authority of a convent superior.
The pattern is important for anyone tracking the state of Spanish literature in English. Galdós wrote the Episodios Nacionales between 1872 and 1912: forty-six novels tracing Spanish history from Trafalgar in 1805 through the political upheavals of the 1870s, divided into five series of ten (with a final series of six). As recently as 1950, few of his works existed in English translation at all, despite a critical reputation that puts him second only to Cervantes among Spanish novelists and earned him five Nobel Prize nominations. Scholars have long compared the scale of the project to Balzac’s Comédie Humaine.
With “The Battle of Salamanca” now in English, Castalia has finished the entire First Series, ten novels covering 1805 to 1812, in translation for the first time. The Second Series, covering 1812 to 1833 under the reign of Ferdinand VII, remains largely untranslated territory.
Galdós spent four decades on this cycle and it stood untranslated in full for most of the twentieth century. What does it say about the state of literary translation that a small independent press is the one finishing the job?
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