Gila’s star-making monologue “How I Went to War” (1951) broke a tacit taboo of postwar Spanish society. For twelve years, public discussion of the civil war had limited itself to the Franco regime’s mythos of a Glorious National Uprising, but Gila, with pitch-perfect working-class vernacular, replaced saintly heroes with indignant aunts, petulant commanders, and innocent spies dressed in drag. The diametrical contrast has led critics to hail Gila’s war routines as a comedic takedown of Franco’s official story. And yet the comedian never suffered reprisals—not even when he performed for the Generalissimo himself.
Gila’s comedic monologues present atypical challenges even for translators used to working with humor. Rather than relying on wordplay and culture-specific references, “How I Went to War” creates incongruities through clashes of tone and aspect. The comedian tells his war story in a casual, un-military style. The blue-collar narration and dialogues sometimes morph into exchanges that evoke children playing at soldiers. I’ve attempted to carry over the informal tone of Gila’s oral performances, with his hesitations and false starts, and to choose words and phrasing that would maintain the uncanny juxtapositions of a war narrated as work and play. Part of Gila’s genius is that he crafts a war story in which the words war and killing feel out of place both contextually and grammatically. When he uses matar (kill / killing), he breaks conventions of aspect in the same way that kill does when used instead of work or do (“How you killing?” “Killing good, how about you?”). I’ve tried to surround these words with a consistent baseline of idiomatic speech so that wherever Gila hammers matar into his workaday Spanish, kill fractures U.S. English along similar lines.
–Will Carr, translator
“How I Went to War”[1]
I’m going to tell you the story of how I went to war.[2]
I was working as an errand boy for . . . for some pharmacy warehouses.[3] And one day I accidently broke an aspirin tablet and they fired me.
So I went home and sat down in a chair we had for when we got fired, and my Uncle Cecilio came in with a newspaper with a want ad for the war: “Prominent War Seeks Hardkilling Soldier.” And . . . and my mom said, “You’re quick on the uptake, you should apply.”
And I said, “Me? Why do I have to go to war?”
She said, “Well you have to work somewhere.”
So I said, “But I . . . I don’t kill so good.”
She said, “They . . . they’ll teach you to kill good soon enough.”
Then my aunt said, “But now we’re going to have to buy him a horse.”
And my . . . my mom said, “Nonsense, the army gives you one when you join up.”
My aunt says, “No thank you, God knows who’s been sitting on that thing. He’s better off packing his own horse.”
So we went to buy a horse, but you couldn’t buy them separate. You had to get the cart and the flies with it.
And my mom said, “No, you’re not bringing flies to the war. At least as a foot soldier you’ll keep things clean.”
So I packed myself a hot lunch and went off to war. I showed up Monday at 7:00 AM, and the war was closed because it was too early. And there was this lady outside selling churros and bread and stuff. And I said, “Hey, is this the war of ’14?”
And she said, “This is ’16; ’14’s just down the street.”
So I went to the other war, and when they opened the war at 9:00 I went in. And there was this soldier killing there. I said, “How . . . how you killing?”
He says, “Killing good, how about you?”
I said, “Me, not too good right now, but once I get trained up . . .”[4] READ MORE…
We Stand With Ukraine: “The Ghost of Kyiv” by B. R. Dionysius
Through his phone’s / cracked canopy he plays you a black streak / over Kyiv
In this week’s edition of literary works written in support and solidarity with the citizens of Ukraine, we are proud to present a poem by B. R. Dionysius. “The Ghost of Kyiv” movingly comments on the distancing voyeurism of watching tragedy unfold from afar, and of wide-ranging human affairs condensed into byte-sized consumption. As we continue to navigate the ever-shifting boundaries between the virtual and the real, Dionysius’ poem works between man and machine, its precise lines edging out the bodies caught within them.
The Ghost of Kyiv
Your son shows you a Tik Tok clip;
You both play Russian computer games.
Simulators that glorify World War Two/
mid-century armour & the cold war era
where each new development increased
penetration; rounds that defeated steel’s
stubborn thickness. You watch your son
take to the skies over maps of Ukraine.
1941. Get shot down a lot. The next best
thing to flying solo. Through his phone’s
cracked canopy he plays you a black streak
over Kyiv; a medieval, barbed arrowhead
punching through the sky’s grey cuirass. For
fifty years the fulcrum has been idle; three up
-grades, engines, radar, missiles, but never seen
combat. Seventies bones good enough to mix
it over the capital with its modern successors,
flankers & frogfeet; a retro jet where the ghost
got good purchase from his re-engineered multi-
role fighter. The first ace in a day in fifty years.
Not since Alam’s F-86 sabre rattled in the Indo-
Pakistani war has the aerial world revelled in six
kills in one day. Your son doesn’t bother to fact
check the video, sold on social media’s bravado;
a pilot’s last stand. He tells you the ghost was shot
down, but ejected. His short clip trimmed to fit.
READ MORE…
Contributor:- B. R. Dionysius
; Place: - Ukraine
; Writer: - B. R. Dionysius
; Tags: - machinery
, - Poetry
, - social commentary
, - social media
, - voyeurism
, - War