Translation Rights TQE / Twenty Years and a Day

Veinte años y un día (Twenty Years and a Day) is the first novel that Jorge Semprún writes directly in Spanish. The reader will immediately understand that it must be so, since both the characters and the historic setting of this story of the post-war era and the clandestine opposition to Franco seem to demand it.

Toledo, July 18^th 1956.  In their estate La Maestranza, twenty years after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the Avendaño family has decided to celebrate one last time the expiatory ceremony in which, every year and as part of a ritual, they re-enact the execution of the youngest brother by local farmers. Among the guests are an American academic intrigued by such a strange tradition, and an officer of Franco’s secret police determined to find the man under the name Federico Sánchez, a communist agent.  For different reasons, they both share the same interest in researching the family’s recent history, and especially the secret relationships held by the beautiful and mysterious widow, Mercedes Pombo. In the fragmented sequence of encounters and moments, different versions overlap and complement each other as they reconstruct the fateful events that gave origin to the ceremony, and new revelations about secret passions emerge in the thick and violent atmosphere of the post-war period. 

Jorge Semprún was born in Madrid in 1923 into a large Spanish family. His father was a lawyer who taught philosophy of law at Madrid University, and one of the short-lived Spanish Republic's representatives in The Hague. After Franco's victory he went into exile and settled in France. Upon the outbreak of war, Jorge joined the Resistance. Arrested in 1943, he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in January 1944, where he was an active member of the clandestine communist organization. After his liberation in April 1945, more than 15 years were to elapse before he was able to begin writing about his deportation experiences. During that time he was a leading member of the underground communist party in Franco’s Spain, until he became disillusioned and was expelled from the party as a dissenter. He turned to literature with an immediate impact: his first book, The Long Voyage, was published in French in 1963, was quickly translated into several other languages and obtained the first edition of the prestigious Formentor Prize. It marked the beginning of an extraordinary career.

            Since then he is among the most important and widely read memoir-writers and novelists, and has also worked as scriptwriter with directors such as Alan Resnais and Costa Gavras. Among other books he is the author of The Long Voyage, Literature or Life, What a Beautiful Sunday, The Second Death of Ramón Mercader, Netchaiev is Back, Federico Sánchez Says Farewell, Goodbye, Light of Summers…, and I will Live with His Name, He will Die with Mine.  Jorge Semprún is a member of the Académie Goncourt which awards the prestigious annual prize of the same name and was the Spanish Minister of Culture between 1988 and 1991. His writing has received a very wide recognition: the Formentor Prize (1964), the Femina Prize in France (1995), the Peace Prize of the German booksellers (1994) and the Jerusalem Prize (1996). He is without a doubt one of the prominent European intellectuals of our time.