For Whom the Bell Tolls

Supposedly uncensored Estonian edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", but...

You'll probably wonder why an English speaker would read Ernest Hemingway in an Estonian translation. Aside from the simple answer of "because I can", the main answer is that "For Whom the Bell Tolls” has always been a problematic and awkward read in the original for me.

The reason for that is because Hemingway takes an affected stance as if he was writing in Spanish and the text was being simultaneously translated into English, which results in:

a. Awkward passages of broken English e.g.
"Do you come for us to do another train?" - Chapter 2
"Is the same to me. Better four good than much bad." - Chapter 11
b. Seemingly anachronistic Elizabethan English full of show more thous, thees and thys in an attempt to approximate the familiar form of address in Spanish e.g.
“... when thou wert wiping thy mother’s milk off thy chin.” - Chapter 11
“But did thee feel the earth move?” - Chapter 13
c. Hemingway’s self censorship with the use of the words “obscenity” & “unprintable” in place of rough language, resulting in passages such as
“Care well for thy unprintable explosive.” - Chapter 3
“I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness.” - Chapter 9
d. The paradoxical use of those same curse words in the original Spanish, but left untranslated.
“But me cago en la leche, but I will be content when it starts.” - Chapter 39

All of those problems disappear in this supposedly uncensored 2014 edition of Enn Soosaar’s Estonian translation which was first published in 1970. (Unfortunately, I don’t own a copy of that original so I have to guess that the censorship was in the areas of both curse words and politics.) The speaking is translated normally, the Estonian familiar form is not anachronistic, logical choices of relatively minor curse words are used instead of “rõvedus” (obscenity) and the Spanish is translated in footnotes (with one exception that I noticed).

So the only catch is that they may have now printed all of Soosaar’s translation, but they don’t seem to have gone back to check whether he actually translated the entire thing in the first place. i.e. based on at least one example, I suspect Soosaar left untranslated some passages that he felt wouldn’t make it past the then Soviet censor in any case.
In chapter 27 aka "Sordo’s Last Stand" there is a paragraph:
"That they should aid us now," another man said. "That all the cruts* of Russian sucking swindlers should aid us now." He fired and said, “Me cago en tal, I missed.”
In the Estonian translation this reads as:
“Et nad aitaksid meid praegu,” ütles üks meestest. Ta tulistas ja ütles “Me cago en tal. Jälle lasksin mööda.”
You can probably tell that the middle sentence which curses the Russians has been left out in the Estonian. It would have read something like "Et kõik need sittad Vene imejad petturid peaksid aitama meid nüüd.”

Otherwise, this is a terrific translation which now made this work completely readable for me. It would be interesting to know how other international translators solve these sorts of issues.

*Hemingwayspeak for “shits” show less

I greatly enjoyed my first Hemingway, not least because of my circumstances (on an eight-hour train from Marrakech to Fez). I found Robert Jordan less easy to understand fully than some of the other characters in the story. Hemingway develops each of the characters with a depth and a detail that thrusts the reader within the group’s constantly changing power dynamic and also within each person’s mind, each person’s reactions to the unspoken likelihood that the bridge bombing wouldn’t end well. Without very many directly spoken details from anyone except Robert Jordan, the reader still manages to understand each character’s internal anguish with clues from their outward behavior, especially through their interactions among the show more other characters. Further clues stem from the gossip – these people sure do talk about each other a lot, and perhaps Hemingway’s point lies in the need for accountability and transparency in times of life-threatening duress. The reader only hears Robert Jordan express all of these thoughts, accusing himself of madness and weakness in the face of a routine job, which he optimistically tries to convince himself will ultimately succeed. His relationship with Maria provides further opportunity for his mind to swirl with thoughts of the future and the questions about how long his future will be. Hemingway’s strange self-censorship ultimately adds an air of lightness to this heavy story. Rather than using the proper English swear words that this rough and tumble crew of guerilla soldiers uses quite often, Hemingway inserts terms like “unprintable” and “milk.” Moreover, the Spanish cursing occasionally appears perfectly normally. This bizarre little trick distracted me, I think, from the story. show less

The earth moved, and the bell tolled for him.

I first picked up this book because of the title. I knew the famous line from John Donne- "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"; but I did not know, then, that Hemingway had built an entire novel around those fifteen words. I expected a war story. I got a war story, yes. But I also got a love story compressed into seventy hours, a meditation on duty and death, and the most haunting final paragraph I have ever read.

What it is:

The year is 1937. The Spanish Civil War rages. Robert Jordan, a young American demolition expert fighting for the Loyalist (Republican) cause, is given a mission: blow up a strategic bridge behind enemy lines at a precise time, to coincide with show more a broader offensive. He links up with a small band of anti-fascist guerrillas hiding in a mountain cave: the gypsy woman Pilar, who dominates the group with her ferocity and earthy wisdom; Pablo, her husband, once a fierce fighter, now a broken, drunken coward; the old man Anselmo, who has never fired a shot but will die for the cause; and Maria, a young woman whose family was murdered by fascists, whose head was shaved, and who is slowly learning to trust again. The novel spans exactly three days and three nights. Robert Jordan falls in love with Maria. He waits. He plans the demolition. He argues with Pablo. He listens to Pilar's stories of the massacre at El Sordo's hill. And on the third day, the bridge is blown.

Why it stayed with me:

1. The prose is deceptive. Hemingway's style is often called simple, but it is not simple. It is pared. Short sentences, yes. But in this novel, he also uses long, looping, repetitive run-ons that mimic the rhythm of a man thinking in the dark, waiting to die. The effect is hypnotic. You are inside Robert Jordan's head for four hundred pages, and by the end, you do not want to leave.

2. The love story is not a distraction. It is the point. Maria and Robert meet, love, and promise a future they both know will not come. The famous scene where Maria tells Robert that "the earth moved" during their lovemaking is not sentimental. It is tragic. Because Hemingway refuses to let you forget that love, in a war zone, is a luxury. And luxuries get people killed.

3. Pilar is the heart of the book. She is stocky, fierce, brutally honest, and one of the greatest characters Hemingway ever wrote. She has seen too much death. She can predict the future by reading the palm of a hand. She bullies Pablo, mothers Robert, and keeps the guerrilla band together through sheer force of will. Her story about the massacre of the fascists in her home town: the lines of prisoners being thrown off a cliff at night, the singing, the waiting, is the most terrifying passage Hemingway ever wrote. It is also the most honest. Pilar does not regret the killing. She regrets that the killing did not bring back the dead.

4. The theme of duty versus survival. Robert Jordan could walk away. The bridge is not his war. But his sense of duty: to the Republic, to his dead comrades, to the mission prevents him from fleeing. The novel asks: is it noble to die for a cause that is already lost? Hemingway does not answer. He simply shows you a man, lying on a pine needle bed with a broken leg, waiting to kill an enemy officer, knowing he will die immediately after. And he makes you respect that man.

5. The ending is perfect. Robert Jordan is wounded. His leg is shattered. He cannot walk. He sends Maria away with Pilar. He lies alone in the forest, his submachine gun trained on the road, waiting for the fascist cavalry to arrive. The final paragraph repeats the word "numb" and "cold" and "not at all." He has crossed into a place beyond fear. And then, Hemingway does something remarkable: he leaves Robert Jordan alive, waiting, the gun aimed. He does not show you the killing. He shows you the preparation. And that is worse. Because your mind finishes the scene. And your mind is crueler than Hemingway could ever be.

Where readers might stumble (and that's okay):

1. The Spanish dialogue is rendered in a pseudo-archaic English. Hemingway made the stylistic choice to translate the Spanish spoken by his characters into a kind of literal, old-fashioned English ("thee," "thou," "hast"). Some readers find this distracting. I found it charming. But it is a choice you should know about before you start.

2. The pacing is slow. The action is compressed into three days, but Hemingway spends much of that time inside Robert Jordan's head: his memories, his fears, his calculations, his imagined arguments with his dead father. If you need constant plot momentum, this will test you.

3. The violence is not gratuitous, but it is present. A fascist is executed by being thrown off a cliff. The corpses of El Sordo's men are decapitated and their heads kicked down the mountain. The novel does not linger on these images, but it does not turn away.

4. The politics are dated. Robert Jordan is fighting for a Republic that lost. He believes in something that did not survive. For some readers, that makes his sacrifice feel futile. For me, that is exactly the point.

Who should read this:

Anyone who has ever wondered what it feels like to face death with your eyes open.
Readers who love Hemingway's spare prose and moral complexity.
Those who want to understand why the Spanish Civil War mattered to a generation of writers.
People who are not afraid of an ambiguous, haunting ending.

Who might struggle:

If you need a fast-paced war thriller (look elsewhere).
If you dislike long internal monologues and slow philosophical reflection.
If you find Hemingway's machismo exhausting (there is plenty of it here, though it is tempered by Pilar).

Final verdict:

For Whom the Bell Tolls is not Hemingway's most accessible novel. It is his longest, his most political, and his most interior. But it is also his greatest. He wrote it in 1939, after covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, after seeing the bombing of Madrid, after watching his friends die. He poured everything into this book: his despair, his hope, his conviction that a man must do his duty even when he knows the cause is lost. The novel ends with Robert Jordan waiting to die. But it is not a bleak ending. It is a defiant one. Because he did not run. He stayed. And he will kill one last fascist before they kill him.

I finished this book on a quiet evening, closed the cover. Then I opened it again to the title page, where Hemingway quotes John Donne: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." And I understood, finally, what the title meant. The bell is not tolling for Robert Jordan alone. It is tolling for all of us.

Five stars. For the bridge. For the pine needle bed. For the earth that moved. And for the man who kept his eyes open until the very last paragraph. show less

This is sort of a tragic tale, and it can be very repetitive and sometimes go on and on just about conflicting views in someone's head, or off on a tangent that hardly seems to be related. And boiled down it seems sort of a simplistic story. But, somehow despite all that, the story really mattered quite a bit to me, and I'll carry it with me for many years. I think it delivers its meaning subtly, weaving it into the book almost while you're distracted by all the other stories and events. But there's quite a bit there if you care to notice. I don't think it could have been written if Hemingway hadn't spent so much time covering the war and if he hadn't cared so deeply about its outcome. Like in WW2, Spain's Civil War had a strong feeling show more of the anti-facists 'fighting the good fight' and 'being on the right side of history', but this book does a good job of showing that always wars are complicated. There are good and bad people on each side, sometimes your position is based on strong ideals, and sometimes it is determined for you and you could have just as easily been fighting *with* the people you're fighting against. The book was written knowing that the Fascists ended up winning that war, but it still held to the kernel of hope and the ideals that ultimately helped restore democracy several decades later. I think it's a special book, and, though it was emotionally taxing at times, I'm very glad I read it. show less

Maria was very hard on his bigotry. So far she had not affected his resolution but he would much prefer not to die. He would abandon a hero's or a martyr's end gladly. He did not want to make a Thermopylae, nor be Horatius at any bridge, nor be the Dutch boy with his finger in that dyke. No. He would like to spend some time with Maria. That was the simplest expression of it. He would like to spend a long, long time with her." (pp171-2).

There are a great many books that have a great reputation but fail to live up to them. Classic literature in particular can often have a reputation that those who slug through their weighty prose and dull characters find hard to fathom. In what must seem like heresy to many book lovers, I often personally show more prefer the notion of having read a book, rather than enjoying the act of reading it and immersing oneself in it. I anticipated a similar response from myself when I sat down to read my first Hemingway novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Thankfully, and somewhat to my surprise, it did not elicit such a response and touched something deeper and more joyful.

Set over three days, this nearly-500-page novel (in my paperback Arrow edition) is set in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, with Robert Jordan, an American volunteer for the Republican side, being ordered to meet up with a band of guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines and blow up a bridge for military reasons that one does not need to go into here (nor does one need to have a particular interest in history to enjoy the story). But it is more than just a war novel, as it is upon linking up with the guerrilla band that he meets Maria, and the story begins a romantic arc. Both the war and romance angles are well-developed and executed; indeed, so perfect is the balance between the two that, if pushed, one could not firmly place Hemingway's novel in either the war or the romance genre if it meant its unjust exclusion from the other.

It is a beautiful story expertly told; this is often called Hemingway's masterpiece and though, as I mentioned earlier, I have not (yet) read any of his other work, For Whom the Bell Tolls seems to show an author at the peak of his craft. The pacing is superb; one might reasonably assume that, given it stretches a three-day period over nearly 500 pages, it might stumble or digress or indulge on occasion - but it does not. Though it may seem strange to label it so for a book of this type, it is something of a page-turner from page one right through to its powerful ending. The strength of that ending is largely due to the impressive characterisation. With 500 pages to work with, Hemingway adds a depth and camaraderie to all the members of Jordan's diverse guerrilla band so that when the attack on the bridge does come, one is invested in each and every one of them.

True to its title, Hemingway lends a sense of inevitable doom to the novel. The spectre of the bridge looms large throughout the guerrilla camp for the three days that precede the battle, but it is not the only episode of tension. The story of the start of the 'movement' - the civil war - as told by Pilar to Robert Jordan and Maria in Chapter 10 is of a brooding, operatic brutality that, to my mind, would not be out of place as the opening set-piece of a Sergio Leone western. And the echoes of battle which torture Primitivo's ears in Chapter 25 also wear heavily on the reader as we share his anguish. As a journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway is also able to provide perceptive and wry commentary on the contemptuous nature of war, mostly from Robert Jordan's inner monologue but also from others. ('I hate these pistol brandishers,' one minor character states of his superior officer. 'They cannot give an order without jerking a gun out. They probably pull out their pistols when they go to the toilet and order the move they will make.' (pg. 329)).

It may seem churlish to propose any criticisms of the novel given my admiration for it, but some of the language of the novel seemed bizarre, to say the least, and these irregularities I found somewhat difficult to shake. All the characters speak with 'thou' and 'thee' (Understandest thou?' one character asks), which seems far too much of a formality for a mostly-peasant band of guerrillas ('Eatest thou always onions for breakfast?' goes another casual conversation). I understand Hemingway did this as a sort of transliteration from the Spanish 'tú', and employed other archaisms to suggest to the English-speaking reader that the characters are speaking a foreign language, but it does hinder one's immersion in the dialogue. It nagged at me persistently throughout the novel, and I found it hard to shake that I was not reading the Gospel According to Ernest ('guard well thy explosive' must be one of the lost commandments!). Furthermore, there is a lot of censoring of obscenities which borders on the absurd at times. Hemingway has a bit of fun with it ('go muck yourself' and 'we are mucked', for example) but it reaches such levels of unwieldy absurdity that at one point a character is asked, 'What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable unmarried gypsy obscenity?' (pg. 32). Another guerrilla bemoans how they must 'blow up an obscene bridge and then have to obscenely well obscenity ourselves off out of these mountains', before instructing Jordan to 'go to the unprintable... and unprint thyself' (pg. 48). However, one does begin to become accustomed to these and some of the peculiar phrases I found rather enjoyable ('thou art rare' for when someone is acting strangely, or 'how art thou called?' instead of 'what is your name?', as two examples). Indeed, one might even have a bit of fun by replacing their own choice obscenities in place of the 'unspeakables' and 'unnameables'. But I still wouldn't drink the milk...

Overall, For Whom the Bell Tolls is a fantastic novel executed perfectly by a writer at his peak. Both the war and romance arcs of the story coalesce into a single ending that satisfies both arcs. Hemingway convincingly shows how a man and woman can meet and fall in love in just a few days ('What we do not have is time. Tomorrow we must fight. To me that is nothing. But for the Maria and me it means that we must live all of our life in this time.' (pg. 302)). Maria may seem rather timid and perhaps a bit of a doormat to modern readers (though she has suffered much from the war and can be excused her timidity and dutiful deference), but she is a nice tender foil for Robert Jordan's resoluteness. Similarly, the reader is never beaten over the head with an anti-war message; there are no glaringly obvious monologues about man's inhumanity to man, or clichéd political messages like 'why are we here?' shoehorned into the dialogue. Rather, Hemingway's impressive characterisation compels us to invest in the men and women of Jordan's guerrilla band as human beings, so that their loss is felt keenly, and the reader angrily condemns the war and violence that caused such losses. By painting such a rich tapestry of a civil war and allowing us to experience the loss it engenders ourselves, Hemingway creates a more powerful anti-war message than any novel that beats the reader over the head with a crude 'war is bad' cudgel ever could. When Hemingway does finally raise said cudgel ('War is a bitchery,' one character cries on pg. 484) it is brought down with grace and is well-placed in the context of an emotionally powerful ending. The ending of For Whom the Bell Tolls is perfect, satisfying both the war and romance arcs told within the novel. As Jordan says in something of an epiphany, 'If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.' (pg. 485). This revelation captures the three main aspects of the story; in essence, it summarises the theme of the novel in two succinct sentences. In Maria, Robert Jordan found the perfect expression of all the finery and beauty the world had to offer. He believed this world, with all its finery, was why he was fighting the civil war there on that damnable bridge. And finally, as he is leaving it, when the bell tolls, he hates that he could not experience more of it with her. But he won anyway because he experienced the fullness of life in those three days. It is a truly breathtaking message well-articulated and a perfect end to a perfect novel." show less

This is sort of a tragic tale, and it can be very repetitive and sometimes go on and on just about conflicting views in someone's head, or off on a tangent that hardly seems to be related. And boiled down it seems sort of a simplistic story. But, somehow despite all that, the story really mattered quite a bit to me, and I'll carry it with me for many years. I think it delivers its meaning subtly, weaving it into the book almost while you're distracted by all the other stories and events. But there's quite a bit there if you care to notice. I don't think it could have been written if Hemingway hadn't spent so much time covering the war and if he hadn't cared so deeply about its outcome. Like in WW2, Spain's Civil War had a strong feeling show more of the anti-facists 'fighting the good fight' and 'being on the right side of history', but this book does a good job of showing that always wars are complicated. There are good and bad people on each side, sometimes your position is based on strong ideals, and sometimes it is determined for you and you could have just as easily been fighting *with* the people you're fighting against. The book was written knowing that the Fascists ended up winning that war, but it still held to the kernel of hope and the ideals that ultimately helped restore democracy several decades later. I think it's a special book, and, though it was emotionally taxing at times, I'm very glad I read it. show less

How do you review a classic?

I could start by saying that if you have not this book, and are reading this review to figure out if you should or not, by all means READ IT! Hemingway was a master of language and story, and he is in top form with both in this novel. I became very interested in the main characters, but not attached to them, which, given the world they live in, is a good thing. There is a world of hurt found in love, and lust is just so much easier, especially if you are short-termer on this earth.

The is, of course, about Death. "Ask not for whom the bell tolls," wrote Donne, "it tolls for thee." Donne was telling us there is a meaning found in death, a meaning created by a community that helps us sustain life. Hemingway is show more pushing us to the brink on that concept. IS THERE really a meaning found in death? When people die, do we notice? Do we care? Those questions hit you hard as you work your way through the book, especially if you know enough history to know that the characters are fighting out a lost cause, for the wrong side. Does it matter? Does it really matter whose side we are on, if find, in the middle of the existence of ours, real life, and real love? If we can feel the earth move when we make love, even once, is that enough?

I hope I have enticed enough to open this book and start reading.....It will be well worth your time. show less