The Zemganno brothers

Edmond de Goncourt’s Les Frères Zemganno was first published in 1879, in Paris and Madrid simultaneously. It was a Franco-Spanish edition resulting from an agreement between the publishers La España Editorial and Charpentier & Fasquelle.
A few years later, in 1891, La España Editorial published this translation of The Zemganno Brothers, by Emilia Pardo Bazán. The Galician writer translated from the French text, published by the same publisher in 1879, and added a preliminary study. The Galician writer concentrates on those characteristics of Goncourt’s novel that distance her from the most orthodox naturalism and bring her closer to the spiritualism she defended.
The Zemganno brothers is a hymn to fraternal friendship. Here we see the Goncourt brothers behind the figure of the protagonists, Gianni and Nello, two brothers who work as acrobats in a circus. While performing one of his numbers, Nello, the youngest of the Zemganno, suffers an accident and withdraws from the show.
Although acrobatics are everything to him, Gianni, resigned, leaves the circus for love of his brother. It should be borne in mind that in life, the Goncourt brothers jointly signed all their writings. According to his diary, the two worked in perfect union.

In desert, at the foot of the post erected at the crossroads indicated the portazgo, four roads crossed. The first, passing in front of a modern Louis XIII castle, where the first warning bell sounded to eat, climbed describing long eses to the summit of abrupt mountain. The second, bordered by walnut trees, converted at twenty steps into a small neighborhood path, was lost among hills of slopes planted with vines and uncultivated peaks. The fourth skirted some ballast quarries, crowded with iron bands to choose the gravel and wheelbarrows with broken wheels. This road, where the others ended, led, by a very resonant bridge when crossed by carriages, to a small village built, in the form of an amphitheater on lively rocks, isolated by a wide river that, when twisting its course between the plantations, bathed the extremity of a meadow adjacent to the crossroads.
Crossing the sky, still bright, some birds, and flying swiftly and exhaling sharp whistles, they squealed good afternoon. Coldness fell in the shade of the trees, and inks violated in the furrows of the roads. Only the groan of a tired shaft could be heard in the distance. High silence rose from the empty countryside, and, until the next day, deserted of human life. The water of the stream itself, curled only around a submerged branch, was said to have lost its fluid activity, and the current seemed to slide resting.