An artist returns to the bulls – David Yarrow in Miura II

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BULLISH by David Yarrow (2024)

(Para leer esta publicación en español, haga clic aquí.)

When the great fine art photographer David Yarrow contacted me to help him capture an image of a Spanish fighting bull, I contacted my friend, mentor, colleague and the greatest ambassador el mundo de los toros, ‘the world of the bulls’, could ever ask for, matador Eduardo Dávila Miura. We then took David to the most famous fighting bull-breeding ranch in the world, Zahariche, outside Seville, which is owned run by Eduardo’s uncles, Eduardo and Antonio Miura, and introduced him to the 8-year-old, two thirds of a tonne semental, or breeding sire, bull Pañolito, who has never been fought and never will be.

David Yarrow and Alexander Fiske-Harrison in the ring with the bull Pañolito at Finca Zahariche, Ganadería Miura, outside Seville in 2024 (Photo: David Richard Dunwoody)

No animals were harmed in the taking of this photo, only humans (I am still walking with a stick after breaking my ankle in that ring.) You can read all about it in my earlier post here, with a selection of photos by the rest of our team, including three-time British Champion Jockey and two-time Grand National winner Richard Dunwoody – who took the photo above – and professional polo player and horse-breeder – and semi-finalist in the British Ladies Open Polo at Cowdray Park last year – Klarina Pichler.

EL TORO by David Yarrow (2024)

After the massive success of the release of limited edition, signed and certified prints of that image, El Toro, he has gone on to release another photo, which is my own personal favourite from that day, Bullish. (Click on links in-title to purchase from the Maddox Gallery in UK or US.)

In my own mind, I titled El Toro ‘The Threat’, and Bullish ‘The Hero’. And it is the latter which will soon be hanging on my own wall. That is if they deliver the 5 foot 7 inch wide version. If it is the 7 foot 10 inch print – and that’s not even the largest – it will have hang in the office of City stockbrokers Fiske PLC on loan and I’ll visit it during my monthly board meetings.

It is a suitable venue, given that the bull and the bear are the historical symbolic representations of optimism and pessimism in the stock market. Of course, David knows this all too well, having worked in the markets himself, and is why he named the picture as he did. In his own words:

Three years ago, I took a picture of an imposing mother bear in a rainstorm in Alaska. The image grabbed the eye and held it because the bear was emphatically in a face-off with me and she cut a formidable presence. It looked like my sparring partner would win any battle and therefore I captioned the photograph Bearish.

BEARISH by David Yarrow (2021)

Early in 2024, I travelled to Seville to photograph the famous bulls of the Miura ranch. They are the most dangerous and revered lineage of fighting bulls in the world. It was not an assignment for the timid, as the behind-the-scenes footage shows. Most of my photographs of this bull failed to convey the immediate sense of threat as this emotion is only evoked by a head on charge, which tends to be challenging to photograph. In a full-on encounter, common sense and self-preservation should instinctively take control to the detriment of the filming.

 

But in this split second, I felt secure enough to give the camera half a second more. That’s it – half a second. But that was all I needed. Before I entered the arena, I had no preconception of my lens choice or my shooting position because I had no idea what to expect from these bulls. I certainly didn’t expect to so intensely process the trade-off between risk and reward. It was the purest of iterative processes.

 

The bull has great stature and looks to be a King amongst Kings. He conveys total confidence in himself, as well as an ability to manage the current situation. It was time to marry up the picture Bearish, with a new picture Bullish. ~ David Yarrow

For all enquiries, contact alexander@thelastarena.com

An artist comes to the bulls – David Yarrow in Miura

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Alexander Fiske-Harrison, David Yarrow and the toro bravo Pañoleto at the finca Zahariche of the Spanish fighting bull breeders’ Miura © 2024 Richard Dunwoody – All Rights Reserved

(En español aquí)

When the legendary fine art photographer David Yarrow calls you answer. Not least when he says he wants to extend his photography of wild things to the animal that most closely resembles the undomesticated ancestor of all modern cattle (Bos taurus), the aurochs (Bos primigenius primigenius.)

David’s up close and personal shots of the beasts of the wilderness, reproduced on the internet ad infinitum, but in actuality produced as vast, wall-sized prints of the highest quality, hair-fine resolution, sell for tens – sometimes hundreds – of thousands of pounds, euros and dollars.

CHARGE by David Yarrow (2013)

THE SNOWMAN by David Yarrow (2023)

Sometimes he includes supermodels in his more set-piece works.

CINDY’S SHOTGUN WEDDING by David Yarrow (2019)

Cara Delevingne with lion for Tag Heuer #dontcrackunderpressure campaign by David Yarrow (2018)

The Spanish toro de lidia, aka toro bravo, ‘brave bull’, comes in the top ten genetically for relatedness to the ancestral aurochs, and six of the others in the top ten are its Spanish cousins (including the berrendas who feature later.) However, the toro bravo is the closest in phenotype – anatomy, morphology and behaviour – by far.

The Aurochs from Vig, whose skeleton is in the National Museum of Denmark, weighed almost 1000 kg (2,200 lbs), and its shoulder height was almost 2 metres (6 feet 6 inches.)

You can see the relatedness of the toro de ‘Lidia’ to a British fossil of aurochs, in this summary for Rewilding Europe of the paper ‘Genetic origin, admixture and population history of aurochs (Bos primigenius) and primitive European cattle‘, published in the journal Heredity in 2016.

Having received my brief, I knew exactly where to go: the one breeding ranch, founded in 1847, which famed for its cattle that most closely match the vast size of the aurochs of all the strains of toros bravos and whose extraordinary ‘feral’ (I mean that in the biologist’s sense of the word) aggression most matches the aurochs wild character. It is the name which conjures fear among matadors. As Ernest Hemingway put it in his 1932 classic, Death In The Afternoon:

There are certain strains of bulls in which the ability to learn rapidly in the ring is highly developed. These bulls must be fought and killed as rapidly as possible with the minimum of exposure by the man, for they learn more rapidly than the fight ordinarily progresses and become exaggeratedly difficult to work with and kill. Bulls of this sort are the old caste of fighting bulls raised by the sons of Don Eduardo Miura of Sevilla… which made them the curse of all bullfighters.

A study by the University of Complutense in Madrid, published as ‘Ancestral matrilineages and mitochondrial DNA diversity of the Lidia cattle breed‘ in the journal Animal Genetics in 2008 showed how among the toros bravos which all show “a certain degree of primitivism”, the Miuras are alone as a breed-within-a-breed.

On a less academic level, Miura is the reason why Ferruccio Lamborghini named his first car the Miura in 1967 – he showed it to old Eduardo Miura, father of the present owners, Eduardo and Antonio, and even drove it to their ranch to show them. Several more models from that marque took their name from Miura bulls afterwards: from the Islero in 1968 to the Murciélago in 2001.

Autumn 1968. Finca Zahariche in Lora del Río, Spain. Standing, in a black suit, Ferruccio Lamborghini, next to Eduardo Miura, patriarch of the famous family of fighting bull breeders. The year before, the legendary car began to be sold, the Lamborghini Miura, the first supercar in history.

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Para una versión de este blog en español, La Última Arena: En Busca De La Corrida De Toros, haga clic aquí.

I created this website – as distinct from my online archives of journalism, research and academia at www.fiske-harrison.com – to keep track of my particular work in the world of Spanish bullfighting. 

Above you can find pages on me, the author, an introduction to the structure of the bullfight, a more in-depth piece on the nature of the Spanish fighting bull, and how to contact me.

Two other posts I would mention here are this one on the popularity of bullfighting in Spain and the often quoted ‘Gallup’ polls, and also this one on the 535 famous professional bullfighters killed in the ring in the past three centuries. However, the standalone piece on this blog, and the product of almost 25 years of research is my long essay on bullfighting here.

In the past two and a half decades I have watched well over a thousand bullfights, run the bulls myself in Pamplona for a decade and a half – along with a over dozen other bull-running towns such as Cuéllar and San Sebastián de los Reyes, Tafalla and Falces. I’ve fought alongside matadors in the ring and wrote the first two years of those experiences as a national book award shortlisted memoir, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, available from Amazon (for Amazon UK click here, US here, Canada here, Australia here and India here.)

“Complex and ambitious, compelling and lyrical.”
Mail on Sunday
“An engrossing introduction to Spain’s ‘great feast of art and danger’. Brilliantly capturing a fascinating, intoxicating culture”
Sunday Times
“A compelling read, unusual for its genre, exalting the bullfight as pure theatre.”
Sunday Telegraph
“He did not expect to fall in love with bullfighting, but then he had his eyes opened by the beauty, dignity and art of the sport.”
The Times
“Thrilling. An engrossing introduction to bullfighting.”
Financial Times
“An informed piece of work on a subject about which we are all expected to have a view.”
Daily Mail

…BUT ALSO…

“Although Fiske-Harrison develops a taste for the whole gruesome spectacle, what makes the book work is that he never loses his disgust for it.” (Daily Mail), “It’s to Fiske-Harrison’s credit that he never quite gets over his moral qualms about bullfighting.” (Financial Times), “Uneasy ethical dilemmas abound, not least the recurring question of how much suffering the animals are put through.” (Sunday Telegraph), “Fiske-Harrison admits that with each of his fights he knows more, not less fear. When he kills his first and only bull he feels not triumph but overwhelming sadness for a life taken.” (Mail on Sunday) and “The question of whether a modern society should endorse animal suffering as entertainment is bound to cross the mind of any casual visitor to a bullfight. Alexander Fiske-Harrison first tussled with the issue in his early twenties and, as a student of both philosophy and biology, has perhaps tussled with it more lengthily and cogently than most of us.”(Literary Review)

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Mirror, Mirror: Artificial Intelligence Gives Its Opinion On Bullfighting (Books)

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“Chat GPT 4.0 is a different animal.” I was told this by a friend and client, who made his billions in silicon valley, and whom I taught how to run bulls in Pamplona, and how to bullfight with young bulls alongside my friend and colleague, matador Eduardo Dávila Miura – no animals harmed, only humans – and to whom I was trying to sell an exclusive version of the great work on the sire of the Miura Spanish fighting bulls, who fathered the bulls with which we ran, by the fine art photographer David Yarrow, who photographs animals so famously well…

Copyright David Yarrow – All Rights Reserved

 

…sometimes doubling down on that fame by adorning the beasts…

Copyright David Yarrow – All Rights Reserved

 

…but always taking the finest of images, even if this is the one of which twenty three prints exist and are on sale here, as opposed to the one I am discussing which no one else has.

Copyright David Yarrow – All Rights Reserved

For more on the photo and the taking of it, during which I broke my ankle, click here.

David and I getting the photo – Copyright Richard Dunwoody 2024 – All Rights Reserved

Returning to Artificial Intelligence, the newest edition of Chat GPT is vastly more consistent and apparently intelligent than its precursors, which is what makes its views on my book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, so interesting. Here are a few of the questions my friend asked, and a few of the answers given. (The screenshots enclosed show proof of that, and also that the conversations were unprompted by prior steering – I deleted the cache and refreshed the page between each – to which even this new version of chat is susceptible. (Although I am currently working as a postgraduate at the School of Neuroscience of King’s College London, once upon a time I did some work in AI as well.)

‘Can Computers Converse’, Commentary essay in The Times Literary Supplement, TLS, by Alexander Fiske-Harrison covering his time as one of ten judges at the Loebner Prize 2000, the international Turing Test for Artificial Intelligence held at Darmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, where AI was invented 50 years before.

So, here are the four questions and their answers on Into The Arena that so caught my tech billionaire friend’s interest. I follow with two more complicated questions which may be of more interest, from literary criticism of my writing to an AI attempt at imitation.

 

Question
What is the most important book on bullfighting in English by a living author?

ChatGPT
The most renowned and important book on bullfighting in English by a living author is often considered to be “Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight” by Alexander Fiske-Harrison. Published in 2011, the book offers a profound and immersive insight into the controversial and ancient world of Spanish bullfighting. Fiske-Harrison not only explores the history and culture of bullfighting but also delves into its ethical dimensions by training as a bullfighter himself. This firsthand experience allows him to provide a unique perspective on the subject, blending a personal narrative with a broader cultural and ethical exploration. The book has been recognized for its nuanced and balanced approach to a topic that often divides opinion. Continue reading →

My comments on US National Public Radio on women in bullfighting

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You can read the full interview for free online here.

I was contacted by the National Public Radio Service of the United States originally to give some comments on the reopening of the largest plaza de toros, ‘bull-ring’, in the world, in Mexico City after it was sumararily closed by a judge on what appears to have been a whim. The legal argument proffered, that the citizens of the city had a right to live in an environment free from violence was entirely without merit as it hard to see how boxing tournaments and martial arts contests would surely be banned under those auspices, unless it is the killing of the animal which is the crux, in which case farewell to slaughterhouses.

In the end, I was actually asked to talk about women in bullfighting, which I have always found a fascinating subject. I actually began the post-script of my book, Into The Arena, by saying:

The book is dominated by men. This is because it is representative, but there are women in the world of the bullfight. Like the Venezuelan torera Conchita Cintrón, ‘The Golden Goddess’, who died aged eighty-six in February 2009, warranting obituaries in every major British newspaper as one of the greats of the bullfighting world, although in the write-ups her abilities were overshadowed by her sex. Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín were not so well covered in death. Or Cristina Sánchez, who was by all accounts a great matadora (not just a torera, as, by the time of her ‘moment in the sun’, a woman could officially take that title) but whose career stalled because the great men of the day would not fight by her side. Or the novillera Conchi Ríos, whom I saw turn the men’s sniggers into olés in Casa Matías as we watched her on the television while she fought around the corner in the Maestranza in May 2010. Or another trainee, who partnered me in training … to whom I explained that the bullfighter could be Lady Macbeth too, although what she did with that advice I’ll never know.

I had not revisited those words since I wrote them almost fifteen years ago, but apparently Shakespeare is still foremost in them, as the article version of the interview NPR published – and over 250 other stations republished from Alabama to Wyoming –

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, author of Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, likened female bullfighters to women playing Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Macbeth. “If the setup is such that it is defined by masculinity, you are subverting expectations,” he says.

Necessarily, such interviews always cut out the complexity and nuance of a real viewpoint on such matters: at the time the context I was discussing was how all art is an act of subversion as creativity requires innovation rather than meeting expectation through repetition, but there is always a line about how far one can go before one has departed from the chosen artform all together. I referenced successful examples like Matthew Bourne’s famous all male Swan Lake and my personal favourite, Denzel Washington’s extraordinary performance as a black Macbeth in Joel Cohen’s film of that name.)

I went on to make a more important practical points about the problems of a spectacle where the audience is 2:1 ratio men to women (and most of those women attending with a man), followed by what I have always thought was the greatest difficulty in a career where advancement comes from appearing alongside superior exponents.

Fiske-Harrison says male bullfighters have historically not wanted to mix with women. If a male bullfighter sees a fellow male close to being gored, “you still wouldn’t run in to help until he is literally bouncing on the point of the bull’s horns,” he says. But if a male bullfighter sees a female in distress, they face a conundrum: “If you run into the ring to protect the woman it’s a massive failure of professional courtesy.” On the other hand, he says, male bullfighters break the “chivalric code of being a knight or gentleman” if the woman is, in fact, gored.

“I think the matadors may have taken the line that there is no upside for them,” Fiske-Harrison says.

(Read the full article for free online here. This post formerly contained some words on Chat GPT, Artificial Intelligence, literature, bullfighting, more particularly books on bullfighting, and most particularly my book Into The Arena. That is all now at its own post which can be found by clicking here.)

Meanwhile, as I complete the corrections, edits (less ego, more facts), new forewords, post-scripts and entirely new chapters (including the horrific goring of my friend and teacher Juan José Padilla who was so much in the first edition, to his comeback with one eye – which I covered for Condé Nast’s GQ magazine – his subsequent meteoric rise to number one on the escalofón, to his retirement), I was pleased to see that the latest instantiation of open access artificial intelligence, Chat GPT 4.0, seems to value the first edition of my first book even more highly than I had supposed.

Question:

Who is the greatest living author in English on bullfighting?

Chat GPT 4.0: 

As of my last knowledge update in 2023, determining the “greatest” living author in English on the subject of bullfighting can be somewhat subjective, as it depends on criteria such as depth of knowledge, literary achievement, and personal taste.

However, one name that stands out for his contributions to the English-language literature on bullfighting is Alexander Fiske-Harrison.

Continue reading →

The Last Matador for GQ (unedited)

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Padilla at home (Photo Zed Nelson/GQ/Condé Nast 2012)

It was the last bullfight of the Spanish season, held, as it has been for centuries, in the 250-year-old plaza de toros in Zaragoza in north-eastern Spain.

Juan José Padilla, a 38-year-old matador from Andalusia in the south, was fighting the fourth bull of six (he’d also fought the first.)

The bull, ‘Marqués’, was a 508kg (1,120lb) toro bravo born 5 years and 8 months previously on the ranch of Ana Romero, also in Andalusia. Before entering this ring it had lived wild, ranched from horseback, and had never before seen a man on the ground.

Padilla passing a bull with the magenta and gold two-handed capote, ‘cape’ (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)

Padilla was midway through the second of the three acts of the spectacle. He had already caped the bull with the large, two-handed magenta and gold cape, the capote, then the picador had done his dirty work with the lance from horseback, tiring the bull and damaging its neck muscles to bring its head down.

Now Padilla, rather than delegate to his team as other matadors do, was placing the banderillas himself, the multi-coloured sticks with their barbed steel heads. He had put in two pairs and was on the third. He ran at the bull with a banderilla in either hand, it responded with a charge, Padilla leapt into the air, it reared, he placed his sticks in its shoulders and landed.

Juan José Padilla ‘places’ the banderillas (Credit: WENN US / Alamy Stock Photo)

Running backwards from the charging bull, his eyes were focused on the horns coming at him in an action he had performed tens of thousands of times before. However, this time his right foot came down slightly off centre and in the path of his left, foot hit ankle, and then he was down.

In a breath the bull was on him and its horn took Padilla under his left ear, cracking the skull there, destroying the audial nerve, and then driving into the jaw at its joint. It smashed up through both sets of molars and ripped through muscle and skin before exploding his cheek bone as surely as a rifle bullet, stopping only as it came out through the socket of his left eye – from behind – taking his eyeball out with it, shattering his nose and then ripping clean out of the side of his head.

There is an image I will never lose, much as I wish I could. It is of a man standing with half his face held in his right hand. Cheek, jaw and eyeball, like so much meat, resting in his palm as he walked towards his team uncomprehending, and they, with looks of absolute horror, grabbed his arms and rushed him to the infirmary of the ring.

The second worst image

And yet here, in the amongst the carnage inflicted on a human body by a half ton of enraged animal, is the key to Juan José Padilla. The clue is in the phrase “stood up.”

Soccer players are stretchered off the field from a tap to the ankle. Boxers go down from a padded glove. This was more than half a ton of muscle, focused into a pointed tip that ploughed through his skull like a sword through snow. And the man got up and walked.

Then came coma and intensive care and surgery after surgery. Continue reading →

An Essay On Bullfighting

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José Tomás by Carlos Cazalis from his forthcoming book Sangre de Reyes, 'Blood Of

José Tomás by Carlos Cazalis from his book Sangre de Reyes, ‘Blood Of Kings’

When I first went to my first bullfight almost 25 years ago, I was 23 and was sure I would hate it. I was a passionate animal lover and had been a keen amateur naturalist since childhood, a member of the WWF (which I remain to this day) & Greenpeace, a former zoology undergraduate student at the University of Oxford, and then-current philosophy postgraduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science. (I am currently doing postgraduate work, again at the University of London, this time in neuroscience.)

It should be obvious that this is not an auspicious CV for a future aficionado a los toros.

As expected, what I saw contained many moments of brutality and blood but I was surprised also to find I could see beyond them to feel moments of breathless thrill as well.

What genuinely shocked me, though, was that I could also perceive intermittently, and only with one of the bullfighters present, a type of beauty that was entirely new to me.

In my moral confusion, I decided to research this alien thing, reading what I could in English – Ernest Hemingway, Kenneth Tynan, Barnaby Conrad, A. L. Kennedy etc. – and going when possible to see a corrida, a ‘bullfight’, on my annual visits to Spain. Each time I went with a little more understanding and a little less aversion. Some would argue I became more sensitive to the aesthetics, others that I had become more inured to the ethics (or lack thereof.) I wouldn’t like to say either way.

into-the-arena-cover

Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight was published by Profile Books in 2011 and shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year Award – the oldest and richest sports writing prize in the world – the same year.

Following my controversial essay on the subject for Prospect magazine, ‘A Noble Death‘, in 2008 I was commissioned to write a book and moved to Spain for two years. Among other researches, I trained as a bullfighter to the level of matador de novillos-toros, facing endless cattle from old, heavy and wise to young, light and fast. I ended by killing a single animal in the ring, a novillo, a three-year-old bull weighing around a third of a ton.

As part of the research, I also participated in the encierros, ‘bull-runs’, of Pamplona and ran with fear and ignorance among the masses of drunken foreigners and adrenaline seekers who fill those streets.

Unlike those visitors, I returned, and ended up running in towns across Spain, away from the tourist trail and among those born to this bloodless and less ritualised, more pagan practice. This led to my second book – as editor and co-author, The Bulls Of Pamplona, with chapters by the Mayor of that city, John Hemingway – grandson of Ernest – Beatrice Welles – daughter of Orson – and many others.

The Bulls Of Pamplona, edited by AFH and co-authored with a foreword by the Mayor of Pamplona and co-authored by John Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson, Beatrice Welles, Orson’s daughter and many others.

This makes me singular in my afición in English-speaking countries but in Spain – or Portugal, France, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela – the picture is very different.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison running with the Torrestrella bulls of Álvaro Domecq - striped jacket - in Pamplona (Photo: Joseba Etxaburu - Reuters)

Alexander Fiske-Harrison running with the Torrestrella bulls of Álvaro Domecq – striped jacket – in Pamplona (Photo: Joseba Etxaburu – Reuters)

According to the annual figures on asuntos taurinos, ‘taurine matters’, published by Spain’s Ministry of Culture, the bulls are on the way back for the first time since the world economy collapsed in 2008.

When I first came to Spain to research in 2007 for Prospect magazine there were 3,691 major public bullfights that year, including corridas, of which there were 953, alongside novilladas with novices, and rejoneo with horseback bullfighters.

Following the financial crisis of historic proportions the next year, there was a precipitous drop in numbers, not only for bullfighting but all expensive live spectacles such as theatre and opera. This drop evened out, averaging at a 6% annual fall until I began researching my second book in 2015, when the fall in corridas was 1% per annum.

However, after COVID-19, the number of bullfights of all kinds in total in 2022 was up 8% on 2019 at 1,546 and the number of full corridas up 18% at 412. Continue reading →

Article about me in The Spectator

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An amusing article about me in the oldest – and most successful in current affairs – magazine in the English language, The Spectator, founded in 1828.

Bruce Anderson godfather-patron of the Conservative Party, friend of Prime Ministers (and part of the No.10 Downing Street Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher) and former political editor of ‘The Speccie’. He interviewed me at The Travellers’ Club, the oldest gentleman’s club on Pall Mall in St. James’, London. Our club is the haunt of diplomats and spies, explorers and mercenaries. I once stayed there and dined with the Papal Nuncio, the Archbishop appointed as Ambassador from the Vatican to the UK, and breakfasted the next day with the Colonel of the Special Boat Service (the SBS is what they modelled the Navy Seals on, for my American readers.) AFH

Original article online here

THE SPECTATOR

Bruce Anderson

What wine should you serve to a matador?

26 August 2023

We were talking bulls. A friend of mine, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, is a remarkable character who can claim at least two distinctions. First, he must have been about the worst-behaved boy in the modern history of Eton College. He claims that this is an understatement and that he heads the role of infamy since the days of Henry VI.

He was certainly put ‘on the Bill’ – that is, for a disciplinary interview with the headmaster – on 68 occasions. So he was fortunate that corporal punishment had been abolished before he arrived, though his career of rapscallionry was possibly not the strongest argument for its demise.

He must have come close to expulsion. But there was apparently a feeling that Fiske-Harrison would make his mark in the world. And those who argued in that vein might now feel vindicated, because Alexander became a matador.

He insists that this is a slight overstatement and that he is only partially qualified, not the full Escamillo. But he did kill a bull in a ring: impressive enough for me. He is also the first Etonian ever to hold that honour. If not the full Hemingway, he has written well on bullfighting. He also runs with the bulls at Pamplona and other towns: whence a remarkable story which I have mentioned here before. Continue reading →

Article about me in The Times…

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THE TIMES

Hemingway’s bullfight passion honoured in Pamplona 100 years on

Isambard Wilkinson, Madrid
Wednesday July 06 2023

A century ago Ernest Hemingway first travelled to Spain and attended Pamplona’s festival of San Fermin, which inspired his lifelong passion for bullfighting and transformed the event into an international jamboree.

The festival — which opens on Thursday, lasts a week and dates from the 13th century — became a worldwide phenomenon after Hemingway immortalised it in his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.

To commemorate the centenary John Hemingway, the author’s grandson, and Alexander Fiske-Harrison, an amateur British matador and bullfighting expert, will rise before the first bull run on Thursday… (read on in the image below or follow this link to The Times website.)

The Hemingway Prize 2022

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I have just arrived back in Nîmes for the French literary award, Le Prix Hemingway 2022, for which I am shortlisted (once again.)

I thought I would put up the composite draft of the original English, the excellent translation by Monique Allier-Chay, and my edit of that translated back into English. It may, as a result, have a clumsiness at the beginning in English, but has all of the power I intended at the finish.

It was published by Les Avocats du Diable in French (Amazon UK here, US here, France here, Spain here, Germany here) my English version is below.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

THE FLIGHT OF THE CONDOR

 

AT first the blood had poured between his fingers like dark water seen swirling around rocks. The pain had been almost unbearable, but he had known pain enough in life to know it was nothing more than a mist one moved through. Think about something else. Where were they? They should be here by now.

Finally, he could hear voices and he knew that was good, for although the bleeding had slowed to a trickle, he knew his thoughts were drifting as his will diminished.

“¡Espera, torero! Estaremos ahí. Es peligroso, quédate quieto.”

He noticed one of his hands had fallen away from the wound, and he looked at the limb. It felt cold, and he knew that was bad. He tried to move it back into place, but it merely rolled on the ground. The sand felt different, colder than the hand, although all sensation was going now. As was vision. He could hear, just.

A voice said something indistinguishable in German. Which was strange, he thought. Continue reading →