At the home of Amparo Llanos, from Dover: a temple of books from the place she interprets Jane Austen | Pleasures | S Fashion | EUROtoday

There are glasses within the kitchen, on the couch and on the lounge desk. There are glasses within the bookstore space. There are glasses all over the place. “I see very well from afar but very poorly up close,” says Amparo Llanos (Madrid, 1965), “you know, tired eyesight… It’s not a drama either.” Each pair has its use and prescription and those hanging across the neck are for studying on the road. Because Amparo reads on a regular basis, even when she walks. The house is situated a number of meters from Retiro Park, the place the musician and author goes for a stroll nearly day by day. 22 years in the past he moved from Majadahonda to this home, after his sister Cristina (co-founder of the band Dover) noticed that it was on the market. He just isn’t contemplating shifting: “I have fantasized about going to Miraflores, where I spent the summers of my childhood. But the winters there are harsher and colder and I have my sisters here. What do I know. I’m lazy.”

The room smells particularly good, there are items of Mexican, Romanesque and pre-Romanesque artwork inherited from her mom, images of writers and artists pasted on the perimeters of one of many bookstores and there are, above all, books, many books, most of them in English. In the eating room and lounge, essays, novels and, on the whole, philosophy books by female and male authors are distributed. There are nearly 4 cabinets devoted to the British novelist Jane Austen: to her novels, the books she learn, people who discuss her, people who minimally quote her. “But you have to see my feminist library,” says Amparo with satisfaction and complicity.

In a room adjoining to the lounge, the imposing gynoecium: “Feminist theory, poetry, lesbianism, legal theory, letters and diaries, autobiographies and biographies, novels, suffragism, contemporary authors, what men have said about women…”. And an entire column devoted to Virginia Woolf. In the middle, a coral purple couch and, to the left, a small wood desk with Jane Austen’s letters revealed in English, the María Moliner dictionary and blocks of post-its. “I just bought those three volumes. They are from 1796 and they are the novel Camillaby Frances Burney, an author Austen loved.” Next to it, a small 18th century Swiss ballroom chair. “I bought it in Lucerne (Switzerland) during a tour of Dover. At that time we traveled in a bus with beds. We arrived in the cities in the morning, had breakfast in the room and did the sound check. Lucerne is very small, near the room there was an antique shop and I saw it there, bought it and we put it on the bus as best we could.”

In that Swiss chair and for months, Amparo translated and edited Affectionately yours, Jane Austen, some of the letters that the novelist exchanged, especially with her older sister, Cassandra, and which are now published by the Renacimiento publishing house. “I had to make use of two cushions as a result of I used to be too uncomfortable to put in writing. But what does it matter, if I had began writing once I was youthful, now I must fear about my again, however I by no means apprehensive about these issues.” As an atonement, he spent months writing in that small ballroom chair and, what’s more, he did it by hand. “I do not get concepts with the pc. I am unable to. First I write on free items of paper, on the again. Then I write it down. And possibly I’ll go over it once more. Also as a result of Jane’s letters had that fluidity: she wrote because it occurred to her, altering the topic, returning to a different… And that, for me, with the pc is unattainable, I suppose as a consequence of lack of behavior.”

Llanos says that anything that is “a little bit primitive” works for him. It happened to him with music: he recorded it on a tape, listened to it, recorded it again, listened to it again. When he was in Dover, they never rented a house to isolate themselves and compose. It was always a process anchored to the routine in Madrid, after leaving the store where he worked, owned by his mother. “I’m not saying that it needs to be onerous and tough, but it surely does need to be very concerned in actual life. If you encompass your self with a whole lot of comforts, you soften.”

Amparo’s life appears to maneuver ahead pushed by her stubbornness: “I wrote to Renacimiento and told them: ‘Aren’t you going to do anything for Jane’s anniversary?’ Christina Christina [la editora] He asked me what had been least published and I told him the letters. And I inadvertently thought that I could translate them.” It’s not the first time that he starts something he doesn’t know how to do and ends up learning as he goes along. “It happened to me with music. While we were composing my sister Cristina and I Devil came to me, He said: ‘I want to do this riff and I want to play it well.’ The same thing happened to me with this translation. I really enjoyed the process, but at the same time I sweated a lot.” She wrote and rewrote each letter, especially the first ones, trying to adjust to what Austen might have wanted to say. “There are some very funny moments in the letters, but so biting that they can even be malicious. I think she totally accepted her way of life, she was proud to belong to that social class, but she also had a point of rebellion when she threw those barbs and laughed at things that, in her world and for her, were very sacred.”

The next editorial project floats in the air, but he wants, he says, to take it slow. Think about the possibility of translating feminist theorists from the seventies and eighties like Ti-Grace Atkinson or Andrea Dworkin. “I would also love to translate Josephine Butler, she was a 19th century feminist who achieved the abolition of the contagious disease laws, regulations that allowed the police to arrest any woman suspected of practicing prostitution.” Avoid the opportunity of writing one thing of your individual. “I don’t dare. There are many essays now in which you notice that the person writes very well, but that they also don’t have anything very concrete to say. I consider that I am still learning. I wouldn’t feel able to say: ‘This is what I think’. What I think has been thought by others before.”