Eca de Queiroz

Here is some prose for your spare time. The Eça de Queiroz excerpt I talked
about.
Note that I would describe Eça as a slightly arrogant very very refined aristocrat.
Nevertheless a very inteligent and humorous one.
For background I add that: he was someone very influenced by the british
culture as opposed for the majority of french influence in those days; he is the
author of a translation of "King Solomon's Mines" which was translated back
to english and became more widely known than the original work at least
before Holywood; he is not, definitely not, a supporter of the critical work
of Mr. Karl Marx, I'm pretty sure not even a reader of it; he was the author,
among a huge literary work of a newspaper column were he criticized
politicians, education, justice and always the clergy.

This was translated by me (an engineer and a musician) with great effort,
correct it if you will.

--------------------

"Two Campaigns in Afghanistan Copied from One Another"

Eça de Queiroz - 1880 in "Letters from England"

The english are experimenting, in their attribulated empire of India, the truth of that humorous commonplace of the eighteenth century: "History is an old human who repeats herself endlessly".
 
Fate or Providence, or whatever Entity up there directs the episodes of the Afghanistan campaign in 1847, is merely doing a servile copy, revealing thus an exausted imagination.

In 1847 the english, "by a Reason of State, a necessity of scientific borders, the safety of the empire, a barrier to the russian domain of Asia..." and other vague things that Indian politicians growl tenebrously wriggling their moustaches - invade the Afghanistan, and there they go annihilating secular tribes, dismantling vilages, devastating tilled fields and vineyards: seize, finally, the holy city of Kabul; shake off the seraglio an old terrified emir, place another of more submissive race, that they bring prepared in their luggage, with slaves, concubines and carpets; and as soon as the newspaper correspondents have the victory telegraphed, the army, camping by the riverside and in the orchards of Kabul, loosens the belts, and smokes the peace pipe... Thus is exactly in 1880.

At that time, precisely as in 1847, energic chiefs, indigenous Messias, go across the territory, and with the great names of Patriotism, of Religion, preach the holy war: the tribes gather together, the feudal families run with their suites of cavalry, rival princes unite in the hereditary hate against foreigners, the infidels, and shortly it is a whole shinning of camping fires on the tops of the highlands, dominating the canyons that are the path, the entrance to India... And when appears, at last, the bulk of the english army, arround Kabul, filled with artilery, draining itself thickly through the gorges of the mountain ranges, in the dry beds of the torrents, with its long caravans of camels, that barbarous mass rolls over it and annihilates it.

Thus was in 1847, thus is in 1880. Then the disperse rests of the army take refuge at some of the cities at the border, sometimes Gasnat sometimes Kandahar: the Afghans rush, besiege, slow siege, full of oriental leisure: the sieged general, who in those asiatic wars can always comunicate, telegraphs the viceroy of India, claiming reinforcements and tea and sugar! (This is textual; it was general Roberts who freed days ago this shout of british greediness; the English, without tea, fight slackly.) Then the government of India, spending millions of pounds, as who spends water, sends in rushing hideous bundles of restoring tea, white hills of sugar, and ten or fifteen thousand men. From England depart those black and monstruous convoys, vapour powered Noah's arks, taking campings, herds of horses, parks of artilery, a whole fearful invasion... Thus was in 47, thus is in 1880.

This host disembarks from Hindustan, joins other columns of Indian troops, and is directed day and night over the border in express trains at fourty miles per hour; hence begins a devastating march, with fifty thousand camels of luggage, telegraph, hydraulic machines, and an eloquent riding of newspaper correspondents. One morning the convoy catches sight of Kandahar or Gasnat - and in a moment, is annihilated, dispersed in the dust of the plain, the poor afghan army with its cimitars of melodrama and its venerable cannons [no word for colubrinas] of the same model of the ones that once fired in Diu.

Gasnat is free! Kandahar is free! Hurray! - Immediatly patriotic songs are made out of this; and the deed is popularized throughout England in a poster, in which appears the liberating general and the sieged general shaking hands with vehemence, in the foreground, among rearing horses and grenadiers beautiful like Apollo, that breathe out in noble attitude! Thus was in 1847; Thus will be in 1880.

Nevertheless, in canyon and moutain, thousands of men which either defended their homeland or died for the scientific border stay there, food for ravens - which is not, in Afghanistan, a respectable image of rhetoric: there, it is the ravens who in the cities do the cleaning of the streets, eating the filth, and in the battle fields purify the air, devouring the remains of the defeats.

And of so much blood, so much agony, so much mourning, what remains in the end? A patriotic song, an idiot poster, in the dinning rooms, latter one line of prose in a page of chronic...

Consolating philosophy of wars!

Nevertheless England enjoys for some time the "great victory of Afghanistan" - with the certainty of having to start again, in ten years or fifteen years; because it cannot conquer and annex a vast kingdom, which is large as France, neither can it consent, glued on its side, a few million fanatic men, warrior and hostile. "Policy" therefore is to weaken them periodically, with a ruinating invasion. Those are the strong necessities of a great empire. Rather possess a back garden, with a cow for the milk and two feet of lettuce for the Summer snack...

Eça de Queiroz

--------------------

I must now add that the last few phrases of the first period of the last paragraph sound a bit racist to me.

But take off the tea joke and see how many resemblances...
He even mentions bin Laden and the taliban....

I'm not too worried about the past though...
If someone who has spanish or portuguese as his native tongue is
reading this, please tell me, and I will send you the original.

Miguel