This week I met Manolito Gafotas for the first time. Manolito is an 8-year-old boy invented by the writer, Elvira Lindo, for a radio show in Spain in the early 1990s. The first book about Manolito, Manolito Gafotas, was published in 1994 and six more followed. The last of these was published in 2002 and then there was a ten year gap before Mejor Manolo arrived in 2012. In those 20 years Manolito grew from 8 to 12 years old, so he managed to grow considerably faster than William Brown, with whom he shares certain characteristics. William grew not at all in 50 years despite the many birthdays he celebrated.
Both William Brown and Manolito Gafotas have broken out of the world of children's literature to become part of popular culture. Elvira Lindo says in an interview that 'her creation has escaped her control, and even surpassed her. . . . Manolito is popular culture. It's something collective. The readers already know him better than I do.' The same could be said of William, who just like Manolito has been translated into more than 20 languages and made into films, TV series and radio broadcasts, most notably, in William's case, those BBC adaptations performed by Martin Jarvis. William lives on, still 11 years old, long after the death of his creator. Happily, Manolito's creator is still very much alive.
William Brown's character was enhanced by the illustrations of Thomas Henry, just as was Manolito's by the illustrations of Emilio Urberuaga. Both characters are instantly recognisable from these illustrations but I'm sure that in both cases it's the writing that has made them so famous. William and Manolito are both well-intentioned boys who inadvertently end up in trouble and both are essentially comic creations, but the books have a sharp underlying vein of social commentary which is best appreciated by adults, and this cross-generational appeal must be a huge part of their success.
There are, however, just as many differences as similarities between the William stories and those about Manolito. William's world was an invention of its author. Richmal Crompton's niece, Richmal Ashbee, says: 'William's house was not like anywhere Richmal Crompton had ever lived . . . The greenhouse, stable, morning-room and all the rest were conjured up to meet the passing needs of the Brown family . . . The host of servants in the house, too, came from outside her own experience.' It may be that in these books Richmal Crompton caught something of the essence of a certain kind of English village life as it was between the two world wars, but she was never interested in precise details, or accuracy. The sense that the world of these books never really existed, together with the fact that William never grows old, makes the books seem timeless. That, along with the way that Crompton manages to catch something in William's character that adults recognise in their children and children recognise in themselves - a universal quality of childhood.
It is precisely this that readers all over the world recognise in Manolito Gafotas. I say all over the world, but it seems that Manolito hasn't been as successful in English. Four of the books have been translated, with Manolito becoming Manolito Four-eyes, but from the sample I've read I'm not sure that the slang of a poor barrio in Madrid translates that well into (American) English. The William books have been translated into Spanish and are very popular in Spain, but were heavily censored in the Franco era.
Unlike William, Manolito comes from a real place, the barrio of Carabanchel in the south of Madrid. In their depiction of a working-class neighbourhood the books have something in common with Eve Garnett's The Family at One-End Street, though this is a very different world. The scene includes drug-addicts, muggers and fights. The kids do stupid things, they are a little wild, they play on the streets, but when their parents call them in for their sausages every evening they quickly head for home. Some of the reviews of the English-language versions (from the USA) were appalled by the bad example they thought the books set for children. The kids argue with their parents and teachers, they cheat (or try to) on school tests, they fight and play games of chicken. They are in fact real kids. And at the heart of the books is a tender description of family life in a tiny apartment on the third floor. 'We don't have cockroaches in our flat,' says Manolito's mother to a neighbour. 'We'd like some, but there's no room for them.'
Manolito's dad is a truck-driver who arrives home late each night. Manolito has a small brother he calls 'El Imbécil'. His mother doesn't think this is funny, and neither do those US reviewers on Amazon even though 'imbécil' has been softened in translation to 'bozo'. Elvira Lindo has strong views on the rewriting of children's books to conform to modern sensibilities. Of 'El Imbécil' she says: 'What the children tell me is that 'El Imbécil' is 'la bomba.' What for some adults was something inexplicable, for children becomes something absolutely natural; they know how to discern very well. They know that it has nothing to do with the intelligence of the character. They understand that it is an insult that has become something else. They have understood everything very well."
Manolito's mother, Catalina, is sharp-tongued, long-suffering and quick-witted. His grandfather, 79 years old in the first book, has prostate trouble and often gets Manolito out of bother. The words with which Manolito introduces him, 'Mi abuelo mola, mola mucho, mola un pegote.' I suspect would be recognised by most Spaniards. They mean, very roughly, 'My grandfather is cool, very cool, incredibly cool.' All of these characters help to make the books entertaining, but it is the character of Manolito himself that has turned him into a cultural icon.
Manolito is a complex character. He is vulnerable. He gets beaten up but he bounces back. He says that before he got the nickname Manolito Gafotas he used to cry a lot. He'd get bullied in the playground by people calling him 'gafotas' (four-eyes) but once he was Manolito Gafotas insulting him was a waste of time. Manolito talks all the time (luckily for the reader). He talks so much he gets sent to the school psychologist. She tells him he can tell her all his problems. He asks if that means everything, from the day he was born, and she foolishly says yes. He fills three exercise books and is very happy to read what he's written. The psychologist tells his mother he doesn't have any trauma, he just talks a lot. They need to listen to him more at home. 'MORE!!!???' says his mother.
Manolito has some crazy ideas and he is very easily led. When his friends suggest playing chicken with approaching cars on the street Manolito stands in front of a truck and thinks he's making it stop with the force of his mind. One day he suddenly decides it would be a great idea to use some coloured marker pens to draw three parallel lines above the bannisters in his apartment block. I know this boy. Elvira Lindo grew up in this barrio and she knows this place and these kids. I admire the way she understands that it isn't the job of children's literature to provide models of good behaviour in the manner of those books presented as Victorian Sunday School prizes. Anyone who spends time on a primary school playground will soon realise that what children actually do and say is very different from what their teachers and parents might want. It's a kind of parallel world that hasn't changed that much since I was a child myself.
When I was teaching there were several moments when well-meaning teachers attempted to introduce 'playground games' on the grounds that children weren't playing them any more. Children are always playing games, it's just that adults seldom recognise them for what they are. It's the children's world and it's often a private one. In Manolito Gafotas the kids know very well that you don't say 'ni puñetera idea' (no bloody idea) in front of the teachers. They say NPI instead, and there are a million other things that children say and do that are hidden from the adults around them.
The Manolito books are not currently available in English, though you can get second-hand copies and you can read the first book on the Internet Archive if you sign up. But unfortunately the translation is so Americanised that I find it almost impossible to read. Using slang in a children's book is always going to run the risk of making the text sound dated in the future. It seems as if Elvira Lindo avoids this by using a kind of generalised slang rather than the 'slang of the moment' and by adding in very idiosyncratic 'Manolito-isms'. Certainly the books have remained in print in Spain and have been incredibly popular for more than 30 years. The US translation just doesn't really work, and that's a shame. That line about Manolito's grandfather, 'Mi abuelo mola . . .' is translated: 'My grandpa's cool; he's so cool, he's a whole lotta cool.' Manolito often refers to men and women as 'tío' or 'tía', words which, although they really mean 'uncle' and 'aunt' are used extremely commonly in Spain, maybe a bit like we use 'guy', but there is no direct equivalent in English. What certainly doesn't work is to replace them with 'dude' and 'broad'. This all just shows how tricky translation is. But I suspect that the real reason there haven't been further attempts to translate Manolito is just that difficulty of coping with the sensitive issues of the kind that led to the rewriting of Roald Dahl and the Enid Blyton.
Although there is one William story, William and the Nasties, that hasn't been included in collections since 1986, and about which Crompton herself was said to have been uncomfortable, in general the William stories don't seem to have been subject to pressure to rewrite for a modern audience. The censorship of the stories during Franco's rule is interesting though, and I shall find out more about that. Otherwise, publishers here don't seem too bothered about, for instance, William and his mates kidnapping babies and their prams from outside shops. But perhaps that's because babies don't get left outside shops in their prams any more.
The interview with Elvira Lindo is from La Marea 20/11/2024
Richmal Ashbee wrote the introduction to Mary Cadogan's Just William Through the Ages
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