There are glasses in the kitchen, on the sofa and on the living room table. There are glasses in the library area. There are glasses everywhere. “I see very well from afar but very badly up close”, says Amparo Llanos (Madrid, 1965), “you know, my eyesight is tired… This isn’t a drama either.” Each pair has its use and its prescription and the ones hanging around the neck are to be read on the street. Because Amparo always reads, even when he 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 Dover) saw that it was for sale. He doesn’t think about moving: “I 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 particularly good, there are pieces of Mexican, Romanesque and pre-Romanesque art inherited from his mother, photographs of writers and artists pasted on the walls of one of the bookcases and above all there are books, lots of books, most of them in English. In the dining room and living room, essays, novels and, in general, philosophy books by authors and authors are distributed. There are almost four shelves dedicated to the British writer Jane Austen: to her novels, to the books she read, those that talk about her, those that mention her minimally. “But you have to see my feminist library,” says Amparo with pride and complicity.
In a room adjacent to the living room, the imposing harem: “Feminist theory, poetry, lesbianism, legal theory, letters and diaries, autobiographies and biographies, novels, suffragism, contemporary authors, what men have said about women…”. And an entire column dedicated to Virginia Woolf. In the center, a coral red sofa and, on the left, a wooden table with Jane Austen’s letters published in English, María Moliner’s dictionary and blocks of publish itS. “I just bought those three volumes. They are from 1796 and they are the novel Stretcherby Frances Burney, an author much loved by Austen.” Next to it, a small Swiss ball chair from the 18th century. “I bought it in Lucerne (Switzerland) during a tour in Dover. At that time we were traveling on a bus with beds. We arrived in the cities in the morning, had breakfast in the room and did the soundcheck. Lucerne is very small, near the room there was an antique shop and there I saw it, bought it and we put it on the bus as best we could.”
In that Swiss chair and for months, Amparo translated and edited With love, your Jane Austen, some of the letters that the writer exchanged, especially with her older sister, Cassandra, and which are now published by the Renacimiento publishing house. “I had to use two pillows because I was too uncomfortable to write. But who cares, if I had started writing when I was little, I would have to worry about my back now, but I’ve never worried about these things.” To atone, he spent months writing in that little ballroom chair, and what’s more, he did it by hand. “I don’t get ideas with the computer. I can’t do it. First I write on loose sheets of paper, on the back. Then I write it. And maybe I go back to it. Also because Jane’s letters had that fluidity: she wrote as she thought of, changing the subject, returning to another… And this, for me, is impossible with the computer, I suppose due to lack of habit.”
Llanos says anything that’s “a little 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 and compose. It was always a process anchored to the Madrid routine, after leaving the shop where he worked, owned by his mother. “I’m not saying it has to be hard and difficult, but it has to be very involved in real life. If you surround yourself with a lot of comforts, you soften up.”
Amparo’s life seems to move forward driven by her stubbornness: “I wrote to Renacimiento and said: ‘Aren’t you doing anything for Jane’s anniversary?’. Christina (the publisher) asked me what had been published less and I told her the letters. And without suspecting anything I could have translated them.” It’s not the first time he’s started something he doesn’t know how to do and ended up learning as he went. “It happened to me with music. While we were composing, my sister Cristina and I The 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.” He wrote and rewrote every letter, especially the first few, trying to fit what Austen might have said. “There are some very funny moments in the letters, but so biting that they can even be malicious. I think she was totally accepting of her way of life, she was proud of being of that social class, but she also had a point of rebellion when she would throw those barbs and laugh at things that, in her world and for her, were very sacred.”
The next publishing project is floating in the air, but he wants, he says, to take it slowly. Think about the possibility of translating feminist theorists of the 1970s and 1980s such as Ti-Grace Atkinson or Andrea Dworkin. “I would also like to translate Josephine Butler, she was a 19th century feminist who achieved the abolition of the laws on contagious diseases, rules 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 a lot of essays now where you notice that the person writes very well, but doesn’t even have anything concrete to say. I think I’m still learning. I wouldn’t feel like saying, ‘This is what I think’. What I think has been thought by others before.”
