There are glasses in the kitchen, on the sofa and on the living room table. There are glasses in the bookstore area. There are glasses everywhere. “I see very well from a distance but very bad up close,” he says (Madrid, 1965), “you know, tired eyesight… It’s not a drama either.” Each pair has its use and prescription and the ones hanging around the neck are for reading on the street. Because Amparo reads all the time, even when she walks. The apartment is located a few meters from Retiro Park, where the musician and writer goes for a walk almost every day. 22 years ago he moved from Majadahonda to this house, after his sister Cristina (co-founder of the band) saw that it was for sale. He is not considering moving: “I have fantasized about going to Miraflores, where I spent the summers of my childhood. But the winters there are harsher and colder and I have my sisters here. What do I know. I’m lazy.”
The room smells especially good, there are pieces of Mexican, Romanesque and pre-Romanesque art inherited from her mother, photographs of writers and artists pasted on the sides of one of the bookstores and there are, above all, books, many books, most of them in English. In the dining room and living room, essays, novels and, in general, philosophy books by male and female authors are distributed. There are almost four shelves dedicated to the British novelist: to her novels, the books she read, those that talk about her, those that minimally quote her. “But you have to see my feminist library,” says Amparo with pride and complicity.
In a room adjacent to the living room, the imposing gynoecium: “Feminist theory, poetry, lesbianism, legal theory, letters and diaries, autobiographies and biographies, novels, suffragism, contemporary authors, what men have said about women…”. And a whole column dedicated to . In the center, a coral red sofa and, to the left, a small wooden table with Jane Austen’s letters published in English, the dictionary and blocks of post-its. “I just bought those three volumes. They are from 1796 and they are the novel Camillaby Frances Burney, an author Austen loved.” Next to it, a small 18th century Swiss ballroom chair. “I bought it in Lucerne (Switzerland) during a tour of Dover. At that time we traveled in a bus with beds. We arrived in the cities in the morning, had breakfast in the room and did the sound check. Lucerne is very small, near the room there was an antique shop and I saw it there, bought it and we put it on the bus as best we could.”
In that Swiss chair and for months, Amparo translated and edited some of the letters that the novelist exchanged, especially with her older sister, Cassandra, and which are now published by the Renacimiento publishing house. “I had to use two cushions because I was too uncomfortable to write. But what does it matter, if I had started writing when I was younger, now I would have to worry about my back, but I never worried about those things.” As an atonement, he spent months writing in that small ballroom chair and, what’s more, he did it by hand. “I don’t get ideas with the computer. I can’t. First I write on loose pieces of paper, on the back. Then I write it down. And maybe I’ll go over it again. Also because Jane’s letters had that fluidity: she wrote as it occurred to her, changing the subject, returning to another… And that, for me, with the computer is impossible, I suppose due to lack of habit.”
Llanos says that anything that is “a little bit primitive” works for him. It happened to him with music: he recorded it on a tape, listened to it, recorded it again, listened to it again. When he was in Dover, they never rented a house to isolate themselves and compose. It was always a process anchored to the routine in Madrid, after leaving the store where he worked, owned by his mother. “I’m not saying that it has to be hard and difficult, but it does have to be very involved in real life. If you surround yourself with a lot of comforts, you soften.”
Amparo’s life seems to move forward driven by her stubbornness: “I wrote to Renacimiento and told them: ‘Aren’t you going to do anything for Jane’s anniversary?’ Christina Christina [la editora] He asked me what had been least published and I told him the letters. And I inadvertently thought that I could translate them.” It’s not the first time that he starts something he doesn’t know how to do and ends up learning as he goes along. “It happened to me with music. While we were composing my sister Cristina and I Devil came to me, He said: ‘I want to do this riff and I want to play it well.’ The same thing happened to me with this translation. I really enjoyed the process, but at the same time I sweated a lot.” She wrote and rewrote each letter, especially the first ones, trying to adjust to what Austen might have wanted to say. “There are some very funny moments in the letters, but so biting that they can even be malicious. I think she totally accepted her way of life, she was proud to belong to that social class, but she also had a point of rebellion when she threw those barbs and laughed at things that, in her world and for her, were very sacred.”
The next editorial project floats in the air, but he wants, he says, to take it slow. Think about the possibility of translating feminist theorists from the seventies and eighties like Ti-Grace Atkinson or Andrea Dworkin. “I would also love to translate Josephine Butler, she was a 19th century feminist who achieved the abolition of the contagious disease laws, regulations that allowed the police to arrest any woman suspected of practicing prostitution.” Avoid the possibility of writing something of your own. “I don’t dare. There are many essays now in which you notice that the person writes very well, but that they also don’t have anything very concrete to say. I consider that I am still learning. I wouldn’t feel able to say: ‘This is what I think’. What I think has been thought by others before.”
