(ENG) Chapter 1: Horacio Kalibang

This is a science fiction story that I am translating from Spanish with help from Ana Lucía Alonso, an artist and animator from Argentina. I am going to post it section by section, and in the end I will make it a PDF and put it next to the Spanish translation on this blog. It has 7 sections, it's really more in the nature of a 15 page short story. If you have any comments on the translation, leave them on this blog posting. -sam smiley

Para los lectores de español:
Si desea leer el texto original "Horacio Kalibang o los autómatas" por Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg  en español, puede descargar el archivo PDF, haga clic en "ciencia ficción" en la página principal.

HORACIO KALIBANG O LOS AUTOMATAS
Horacio Kalibang or the Automatons

by Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg
translated by sam smiley and Ana Lucía Alonso


1.
   "It is completely false" said the burgomeister, raising his lips to the green cup, in which his nephew had just served him a delicate Rhine wine.
   "And you believe this is outside the limits of the conceivable?" asked Hermann with malice.
   "The conceivable! The conceivable! Everything is conceivable, nephew, but not everything is possible."
   "So I have heard it said more than one time; but since I knew that fact  with its terrifying reality, I have come to understand that there exists strange phenomena, that human science cannot explain, and it may never be able to explain"
   "Your opinion is no more than a schoolchild"
  "Uncle!"
“So what? you imagine, by chance that it is possible to be something else?  Only a whippersnapper,  who denies the truths revealed by man (with his concentration and incessant application to the study of nature), and accepts the folly, exactly as you have manifested? You believe, perhaps, that I was born yesterday? Has it occured to you to suspect that you are talking with a religious fanatic who is going to confirm your preoccupations by way of beliefs or faith? No, Hermann, no; you are very wrong. But, why don’t you serve the marshal? And you, Luisa, have you lost the taste for this, after what you have heard? Kaspar, pass me the ham. Captain! Rhine wine?”
    “Thank you, I have been served already.”
    “Marshal, a slice of ham? Excellent, my marshal, it is the best that is made in Pomerania, with goose breast.”
    The burgomeister was right. It was a delicacy, that everyone judged rigorously, without being able to declare any other result that it was exquisite, and therefore it was possible to qualify equally a beautiful woman, and a delicious ham from Pomerania.
    The readers will be right to complain about the strange introduction that I have allowed myself to give them, before introducing them to Horacio Kalibang, with all the solemnity that the character and the readers deserve; but it was not possible to begin in in any other way because to enter the room in which that conversation took place, at that very moment, the burgomeister Hipknock was contradicting his nephew, the lieutenant Hermann Blagerdorff, and as a faithful portrait, I could not do anything but take the recorded words without the past history.


To continue with the story click here.