The current of the Mississippi brings us novelties. Comanegra has published, with editing and translation by Jaume Creus, Extravagant Tales by Mark Twain, an inventory of human foolishness described with the unmistakable humor of a man who played all the roles of the auca and saw all colors in his seventy-four years of life: Confederate militiaman in the American Civil War, he was also a miner, printer, journalist and even a steamboat pilot. From this profession comes his pseudonym Mark Twain, an exclamation made by sailors to indicate to their companions that the river has sufficient depth to navigate. The fluvial landscape of the Mississippi is inseparable from his great novels, but it was also raw material for his memoirs, like Life on the Mississippi (Edicions de 1984), a work translated into Catalan by Marc Donat, in which Twain, halfway between social and historical chronicle and travel book, immerses us in two periods of his life: the years of apprenticeship to become a pilot of the steamboats that filled the Mississippi River before the outbreak of the Secession War, and the nostalgic return to the same scenes, thirty years later —converted into a renowned writer, now indeed with the pseudonym that has made him famous throughout the world—, when the steamboats, defeated by the aforementioned war and by the irruption of the railway, are already a nuisance of the past.
Twain there describes the world that serves him as a landscape to write Huckleberry Finn, which now at last we can read with a good translation by Xavier Pàmies, published by Proa. Here is the story of an adolescent boy, motherless and with a drunk father, without trade or profit and without direction, who sails downriver on a raft, adventurously, with Jim, a fugitive black man who if he were arrested would run the risk of being resold as a slave. As Enric Casasses says in the prologue, «the friendship with Jim makes Huck overcome the racist and classist prejudices that permeate his world». Both of them «suffer this racism, live it, have to believe it, but deeply, humanly, they have freed themselves from it». In this sense the novel can be read as «a great manifesto against racism», although Twain warns in the initial epigraph that whoever tries to find a moral in this book will be banished.
At the end of the novel, Huck resists letting himself be civilized by Aunt Sally and takes off for the Indian territory. Robert Coover (1932-2004) pulled this thread to write a postmodern sequel to Huckleberry Finn in the West (Quaderns Crema), a novel very well translated by Marta Marfany that places us in Huck's adult life in California, where he has adventures with Jim, who falls back into slavery after being sold to some Cherokees by none other than Tom Sawyer, who here does not come off well.
Coover gives Huck a destiny consistent with the free wanderer's character that Twain had imprinted on his character. Here Huck contracts with Eeteh, an Indian of the Lakota tribe, a relationship similar to the one he had with Jim, that of two men who prefer to wander in freedom before bending to work. That lack of ambition of the adolescent has transformed into an adult skepticism before social conventions. Huck grasps the reigning hypocrisy but remains free of malice or resentment. Coover does not address so much the racial stigma of blacks but he does expose the shames of white supremacism that justified the extermination of the Native Americans during the conquest of the Far West.
The African-American author Percival Everett has made a brilliant re-writing of Huckleberry Finn with James (Angle), in which he tells the same story through the mouth of Jim, a Jim who, being a self-taught reader, knows how to explain to us, throughout the same river journey down the Mississippi, the racist crust of the southern states. This novel, translated by Jordi Martín Lloret, has obtained both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and has been instantly hailed as a classic for the skill with which it overturns and subverts the narrator's original point of view. With a delirious humor, Everett makes Jim speak with his family in standard English but maintain the patois proper to blacks in front of whites, with whom he shows himself ignorant and superstitious so as not to raise suspicions. As in Twain's original adventure, Jim and Huck meet on Jackson's Island and will make a journey down the Mississippi, one fleeing from Miss Watson, who wants to sell him as a slave, and the other pretending he has died to escape an abusive father. Now, the "adventures" can mean, for Jim, to earn his freedom, recover his dignity, and gain respect as his ancestors had not been able to do.
