Several new translations of Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor’s works have appeared in Spain recently. They are not the first translations of her fiction and prose in Castillian, but these efforts aim to bring her work up to date in the Kingdom of Spain.
O’Connor’s work hasn’t changed, of course, but the Spanish language has, so that the evolution of usage, vocabulary and style needs to be incorporated in the translations. Or so the translators tell us.
O’Connor’s work is still on the rise and it is not clear just how high the trajectory will take her legacy. Her work has been translated into over 30 languages and new translations are contemplated, including a translation of several of her short stories into Arabic. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times (Can anything good come out of the Times?), the unsigned editorial argued that if we are to understand the crisis of faith that we now know Mother Teresa of Calcutta underwent, we should turn to Flannery O’Connor whose own experience of the mystery of faith are both inspiring and profound.
So, I was in Madrid on the occasion of the appearance of one of these new translations, having been asked to give a lecture on the topic “Porque leer a Flannery O’Connor en Espana?” (Why read Flannery O’Connor in Spain?). I’ll briefly summarize my points since they are as pertinent in the U.S. as in Europe.
1. Because she is a literary genius. For example, her use of the metaphor was the thing that reached out and grabbed me when I first began to read her seriously some twenty-five years ago. I can’t say that I understood all that I read, but I knew beyond doubt that I was breathing the rarefied air of a master storyteller.
2. Because she is a philosophical and theological genius. Though no more than an “armchair philosopher,” and although she described herself as merely a “Hillbilly Thomist,” O’Connor’s work offers extraordinary and penetrating commentary on the state of the world, and man’s longing for God. Her philosophy and theology are deeply rooted in her fiction, but the reader might gain a clearer appreciation of these doctrinal currents by also reading her prose (Mystery and Manners) and her correspondence (The Habit of Being).
3. Because she will change your life. Many people admit that they came to the Catholic faith because of O’Connor. I can say for my part that I never would have attained an expansive view—and experience—of “grace,” had it not been for the forceful and artistic portrayal of grace in her stories.
I’m often asked where the neophyte should begin reading O’Connor. It’s an important question, because, since she employs the technique of the grotesque, and creates strange cartoonish characters to arrest the reader’s attention, she is to some readers a skandalon—a stumbling block. And so they stumble, misunderstanding the no nonsense technique she uses to underscore the sacramental nature of grace.
O’Connor has two collections of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge; and, two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Probably best to leave the novels for later and to choose a couple of short stories as an entrée. In the first collection, the eponymous “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is the favorite for inclusion in an anthologies of American fiction. It’s not a bad start, but “Good Country People” is O’Connor’s masterful swipe at the pernicious doctrine of nihilism. In the elegant “The Artificial Nigger,” a pathetic Southern negro statuette becomes at once a symbol of the shared sufferings of Christ and a mechanism of grace for a white man and his estranged grandson. Both stories are compelling. Out of the second collection of short stories, the title piece “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is a beautiful tale in which the author argues that individual virtue must precede social change. Another story, “The Lame Shall Enter First” is the one of the most disturbing depictions of evil written anywhere, anytime.
4. Finally, O’Connor once said about a woman who had committed suicide that “her real tragedy was that she didn’t know what to do with her suffering.” O’Connor herself suffered immensely, dying at the untimely age of 39 of lupus and her work is permeated with a rich appreciation of the mystery of suffering. Given that redemptive suffering is such a central concept within the Catholic faith, O’Connor, through her fiction, prose and correspondence, gives us something to do with our suffering. That in itself is worth the price of admission.
Henry T. Edmondson III is Professor of Political Science at Georgia College, Flannery O’Connor’s alma mater, and the author of Return To Good and Evil, Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism (2005). He was the co-director of the “Reason, Faith and Fiction: An International Flannery O’Connor Conference” Rome, Italy, April 2009.
