Secrets of the museum

This smartly presented story, the first in a dual language series that will feature international authors writing on aspects of El Prado’s collection, is the fruit of Coetzee’s three week residency at Spain’s national museum. Its protagonists are a forty-five-year-old gallery attendant, José, and an enigmatic older woman who keeps returning to the room dedicated to Francisco Goya (1746-1828). Later the woman is revealed to be Coetzee’s alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, a character in several of his novels, but neither we nor José know this at the start. What keeps drawing her back? The woman is particularly interested in Goya’s “Dog” (“El Perro”), one of the artist’s celebrated “black paintings” and among the museum’s most popular works. It shows the small head of a dog depicted against a wash of ochre, about to be engulfed by a brown wave. He could be drowning – indeed the painting is often dubbed “The Drowning Dog”. The woman tells the guard that her husband also drowned, and explains somewhat superfluously that in English you can say that someone “drowned” and also that he “drowned himself”. The guard refrains from delivering a lesson on reflexive verbs in Spanish. Instead he tells her that some people believe Goya’s original painting was bigger and featured a bird in a tree that the dog was looking up at. This may, then, be a painting of canine hope, not canine despair. José is so friendly and kind that it comes as a shock, later on, to learn of Costello’s betrayal – if that is what it is. As with Goya’s painting, the story is ambiguous.

Mariana Dimópulos’s Spanish translation comes first in this volume and arguably reads better than Coetzee’s version. His English can feel stilted, as though it were in fact the translation, not the original. “Retires” is rarely used in English now to describe someone leaving a room (but is standard in Spanish) and “beshat” sounds positively medieval. These odd choices perhaps speak to Coetzee’s interest in the relationship between original text and translation: several of his novels have appeared in Spanish before their English publication, most recently, El polaco (The Pole) (2022). He and Dimópulos have also collaborated on a book about translation, Speaking in Tongues, that will be published in May.

Goya’s drowning (or otherwise) dog also appears in the second book of this series, The Spirit Level (El nivel de aire) by Chloe Aridjis. The third and fourth stories will be by Olga Tokarczuk, and John Banville. Its bilingual format makes Writing The Prado an attractive initiative, offering an invitation to think about how words work, as well as paintings.

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