Carmen Martín Gaite translating Brontë. Two novelists.

A novelist translating a novelist is usually a warning sign and here it's the opposite. Martín Gaite's Spanish has a first-person voice which sounds like a person actually speaking and not like a nineteenth-century governess being ventriloquised, and since the whole book is Jane talking directly at you, that's the only thing which matters.

Reader, I married him. Lector, me casé con él. English does the address with an unadorned noun and it lands like a hand on your arm. Spanish has to choose the register and Martín Gaite keeps it simple, and it works, though I've heard people argue the Spanish sounds more formal than Brontë intended. Why is that the famous line, and not the far stranger sentences standing all around it? Somebody will explain me one day.

What I'd forgotten: how angry the first quarter is. Gateshead, the red room, Lowood, the cold and the burnt porridge and Helen Burns. That is the strongest stretch of the entire novel and it's over before the plot even begins.

What I'd conveniently deleted from memory: St John Rivers. Unbearable! And not unbearable in the interesting way Rochester is. He's a cold man performing a vocation and he takes up an enormous amount of the ending, and every time Jane nearly agrees to go to India with him I want to put the book in a drawer.

Eight. Bertha is a problem I've read too much about to have my own opinion on any more, which is its own kind of loss.