Halfway through this fascinating novel – a fictionalized biography of the (real-life) Spanish librarian María Moliner (1900–81) – the fifty-year-old protagonist has a flash of inspiration. Reading alone at home, Moliner stands up to consult her copy of the “official” dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy and check the definition of a word. Unconvinced by what she finds, she pencils in corrections before returning to her chair. Moments later, unable to concentrate, she jumps to her feet, laughs abruptly, then gazes out of the window in the grip of a wild surmise.
The first half of Hasta que empieza a brillar (Until It Begins To Shine – the title comes from Emily Dickinson) supplies a biographical run-up to this pivotal moment. The second half covers the rest of Moliner’s extraordinary story, with an emphasis on the sixteen years in which she wrote her dictionary. Andrés Neuman tells the tale with skill and humanity. It isn’t action-packed: she sat at the dining-room table with pencils and filing cards, painstakingly compiling what Gabriel García Márquez would later call “the most complete, useful and amusing dictionary of the Spanish language”. But by the time she’d finished it, she had produced something that prioritized everyday usage over historical origins or political bias, and had clearer coverage of many more terms than the prescriptive, and often sexist, volumes of the Royal Spanish Academy.
Moliner’s achievement is hard to grasp unless one knows something of her life. Neuman presents her first as a precocious young girl who grapples with adversity. She is in her teens when her father, a doctor, abandons his wife and three children. The impoverished family is forced to move from Madrid to Zaragoza. There, she takes on part-time office work to finance her studies at school and university, and to support her mother and two siblings. After finishing her history degree in double-quick time, she passes the civil service exams and begins a career as a librarian and archivist. In 1925, she marries a physics professor at the University of Murcia (where she was the first female professor) and overcomes the death of her first-born to have four more children. A key figure in the adult literacy programme launched during the Second Republic (1931–9), she becomes a director of libraries, including that of the University of Valencia, during the Civil War.
Her collaboration with Republican governments stymied her professional progress following the war. She escaped imprisonment, but was vilified for her association with the “Reds” and demoted eighteen rungs on the civil service ladder. (Her husband was stripped of his university post, but later reinstated.) For the rest of her career, Moliner languished in undemanding posts at minor archives – a form of punishment that, ironically, allowed her to conserve the energy she needed to bring her private lexicographical project to fruition.
The 100 or so pages of this book covering the years 1950–72 constitute an impressive display of authorial empathy, as well as an extension of the range of the modern novel. Neuman presents a series of capsule analyses of entries from Moliner’s dictionary, in which he maps her words onto the contours of her life and thinking. The author’s examinations of Moliner’s definitions cohere into a convincing case for treating the dictionary as both a veiled autobiography and an act of political resistance. Entries for words such as exile, free, republic or yoke are subjected to meticulous, aphoristic inspection to show how Moliner challenged the politics of the all-male Royal Spanish Academy. Some words are striking by dint of their inclusion. Foreign “barbarisms” such as control, test or récord were frowned on by the Academy, but they made it into Moliner’s dictionary along with bikini, at a time when such garments were banned in most parts of Spain. Other entries made subtle, quietly amusing points about life under a military dictatorship, as when Moliner provided a meaning not given by the Academy for the verb bloquear (“to block”), which read: “To detain or intercept something so that it does not reach the place towards which it is aimed, for example a ball or a radio transmission” (my translation).
The tasks of compilation and revision took their toll on Moliner, whose health was affected in more ways than one. The author of Hasta que empieza a brillar has described her as “devoured by the dictionary”, but perhaps it is truer to say that she was concealed by it, since she lent her surname to the book, then vanished into the background. Andrés Neuman has righted this wrong by fashioning a brilliant double tribute to both La Moliner and el Moliner.
Martin Beagles teaches at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid
The post Official definitions appeared first on TLS.