Gila’s star-making monologue “How I Went to War” (1951) broke a tacit taboo of postwar Spanish society. For twelve years, public discussion of the civil war had limited itself to the Franco regime’s mythos of a Glorious National Uprising, but Gila, with pitch-perfect working-class vernacular, replaced saintly heroes with indignant aunts, petulant commanders, and innocent spies dressed in drag. The diametrical contrast has led critics to hail Gila’s war routines as a comedic takedown of Franco’s official story. And yet the comedian never suffered reprisals—not even when he performed for the Generalissimo himself.
Gila’s comedic monologues present atypical challenges even for translators used to working with humor. Rather than relying on wordplay and culture-specific references, “How I Went to War” creates incongruities through clashes of tone and aspect. The comedian tells his war story in a casual, un-military style. The blue-collar narration and dialogues sometimes morph into exchanges that evoke children playing at soldiers. I’ve attempted to carry over the informal tone of Gila’s oral performances, with his hesitations and false starts, and to choose words and phrasing that would maintain the uncanny juxtapositions of a war narrated as work and play. Part of Gila’s genius is that he crafts a war story in which the words war and killing feel out of place both contextually and grammatically. When he uses matar (kill / killing), he breaks conventions of aspect in the same way that kill does when used instead of work or do (“How you killing?” “Killing good, how about you?”). I’ve tried to surround these words with a consistent baseline of idiomatic speech so that wherever Gila hammers matar into his workaday Spanish, kill fractures U.S. English along similar lines.
–Will Carr, translator
“How I Went to War”[1]
I’m going to tell you the story of how I went to war.[2]
I was working as an errand boy for . . . for some pharmacy warehouses.[3] And one day I accidently broke an aspirin tablet and they fired me.
So I went home and sat down in a chair we had for when we got fired, and my Uncle Cecilio came in with a newspaper with a want ad for the war: “Prominent War Seeks Hardkilling Soldier.” And . . . and my mom said, “You’re quick on the uptake, you should apply.”
And I said, “Me? Why do I have to go to war?”
She said, “Well you have to work somewhere.”
So I said, “But I . . . I don’t kill so good.”
She said, “They . . . they’ll teach you to kill good soon enough.”
Then my aunt said, “But now we’re going to have to buy him a horse.”
And my . . . my mom said, “Nonsense, the army gives you one when you join up.”
My aunt says, “No thank you, God knows who’s been sitting on that thing. He’s better off packing his own horse.”
So we went to buy a horse, but you couldn’t buy them separate. You had to get the cart and the flies with it.
And my mom said, “No, you’re not bringing flies to the war. At least as a foot soldier you’ll keep things clean.”
So I packed myself a hot lunch and went off to war. I showed up Monday at 7:00 AM, and the war was closed because it was too early. And there was this lady outside selling churros and bread and stuff. And I said, “Hey, is this the war of ’14?”
And she said, “This is ’16; ’14’s just down the street.”
So I went to the other war, and when they opened the war at 9:00 I went in. And there was this soldier killing there. I said, “How . . . how you killing?”
He says, “Killing good, how about you?”
I said, “Me, not too good right now, but once I get trained up . . .”[4]
He said, “Just wait a bit, the captain went out to buy tanks and onions and stuff for the army, but he’ll be right back.”
So I sat down next to a soldier who wasn’t killing that day because he was in mourning, and we waited there a while and when the captain got back, I said, “I’m here about the ad, for killing, and that kind of thing.”
And the captain said, “You bring your own cannon?”
I said, “I thought it was you guys who supplied the equipment.”
He said, “It’s better if everybody uses their own; that way, you break it, you bought it.”
So I said, “I did bring a bullet my neighbor gave me that he had left over from the Spanish-American War.” I said, “It’s used, but if I give it a good wash . . .”
And the captain said, “And once you’ve used up that bullet, then what?”
And I said, “Then I’ll go find it, bring it back, sh . . . and I’ll g . . . I’ll shoot it again.”
He said, “Too much hassle, we can’t be stopping the war every couple of minutes.”
And this soldier who was real short from his dad’s side of the family, he said, “What if . . . what if we tie a string around it, and he shoots it and then grabs the string and pulls it back?”
He said, “And if the string breaks, then what? You lose the bullet and the string too.”
And the sergeant said, he goes, “Besides, that bullet’s too thick for the rifles we use.”
And the lieutenant said, “Maybe if we file it down a little . . . ?”
And the captain called him an idiot.
So he said, “Go on, get killing. In this company we kill hard 9:00 to 1:00 and 4:00 to 7:00.”
They gave me some bullets, and I got into a groove, killing good, and the major said, “We’re sending you off to be a spy, go get your makeover.”
So they put a dressing gown on me and tied ribbons in my hair, and I went over to the enemy and said, “Hi.”
And a. . . a sentry says, “What’s going on?”
I said, “I . . . I’m Maria.”[5]
He said, “So what did you want?”
I said, “Right: hand over the map for your ammo dump.”
He said, “Haven’t been a spy very long, have you?”
I said, “Since 11 o’clock.”
He said, “We thought so, those ribbons are all wrong.” So they said, “No map, no nothing. Go on, get out of here.”
So I went to the captain and said, “They wouldn’t give me the map.”
He said, “Forget it, they’ll get theirs.”
So, bam, I got back to killing, and I was really humming, killing like nobody’s business, and up comes the sergeant again, he says, “Go tell the enemy to give you the plane.” Because, seeing as how us and the enemy got along so good, we all made due with the same plane. Our side bombed Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; and on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday the enemy used it. And on Sundays we rented it to a travel agency to cover costs.[6]
So I went to the enemy and said, “I’m the spy from earlier, here to pick up the plane.”
He said, “We’re putting a Jacuzzi in the back to make it jet-powered.”
I said, “I’ll take it as is.”
So I brought it back and it was broken . . . the propeller. They’d been using it as a fan and they broke it.
So I told the captain, and he said, “We just won’t give it back, that’s all. So now you go bomb them on foot, that’ll teach ‘em.” So I got a bomb under each arm, I walked over, I said, “It’s me again, I’m here to do a bombing run.”
And the enemy captain said, “Real funny, careful you don’t hurt anybody.”
And I said, “Don’t look at me, I’m just a grunt, just following orders.”
He said, “Then drop them somewhere we’re not, go on, quit messing around.”
So I . . . I dropped the bombs in a puddle and they didn’t explode and I didn’t kill anyone.
So I left again and when I got back, the captain said, “You picked a fine time to come back, the war’s over.”
I said, “What happened?”
He said, “There’s . . . they asked to see our weapons permit, and we didn’t have one, so they took our cannons and everything.”
So we divided everything up: the supplies, the meatballs and the parsley and . . . and everything we had, and we all went home. And that’s how the war ended.
Translated from the Spanish by Will Carr
This comedic monologue was first performed in August 1951; performed for Francisco Franco and guests on July 18, 1952; and first recorded on the 45 RPM single “Gila . . . y la guerra” (Hispavox) in 1959.
[1] There is no official title for this monologue. Gila refers to it as “the war monologue” in his 1995 memoir Y entonces nací yo [And Then I Was Born] (Temas de Hoy). Other monikers include “Gila en la guerra” [“Gila in the War”] (1959 single, Hispavox), “Mi guerra” [“My War”] (1968 LP, AMB Discográfica), “La primera vez que fui a la guerra” [“The First Time I Went to War”] (199? TV appearance, viewable on YouTube), “Mi primera guerra” [“My First War”] (2001 anthology Siempre Gila, Aguilar), and “El monólogo del ejército” [“The Army Monologue”] (2019 anthology El libro de Gila, Blackie Books).
I took my title from the first line of the earliest recorded version of this monologue, the 1959 single, just as the title for Gila’s most famous routine comes from its first line, “¿Es el enemigo?” [“Is This the Enemy?”]
[2] Gila’s live performances (as recorded in memoirs and printed anthologies) usually begin with him wandering onto the stage in a soldier’s uniform and saying, “I’m going to explain why I’m here.” The opening line for this translation comes from the 1959 single, which (as an audio recording) could not depend on the uniform’s contextual clue, and thus had to begin by setting the scene more explicitly. I consider that opening line more helpful for the reader unfamiliar with Gila’s soldier routines.
[3] Ellipses reflect stammering or repetition in Gila’s performance. Biographers Juan Carlos Ortega and Marc Lobato speculate that a timid delivery would have heightened the incongruity and thus the hilarity of a soldier wandering onto the stage and recounting a ridiculous war story (Miguel Gila. Vida y obra de un genio, 2015). Gila’s conversational delivery never got rid of these hesitations and repetitions, as evidenced by his performance in the 1990s (YouTube).
[4] The 1959 single is the only version that contains the line Bien, ¿y tú? (which I have rendered (Killing) good, how about you? In subsequent versions (1968 and later) this exchange becomes part of the job interview. It is the commanding officer who asks the question ¿Qué tal matas? which, in that context, would be better rendered How are you at killing? This is a perfectly reasonable question in a job interview for Gila’s army, and Gila’s prospective soldier responds as he does above, lamenting his lack of training.
I’ve chosen to use the 1959 version here because Bien, ¿y tú? is gloriously cliché—literally textbook Spanish (see, for example, the 1989 textbook ¿Y TÚ?). In authentic conversation and in beginning Spanish classrooms around the world, that line follows an equally commonplace question about one’s wellbeing: ¿Cómo estás? or (as above) ¿Qué tal? By forcing killing (matar) into this trite exchange of pleasantries, Gila twists and dislocates everyday language and heightens the already exquisite incongruities of his monologue on war.
[5] In most versions Gila’s spy in drag calls himself Mari Pili, short for María Pilar, and by the late 60s wears a much more thorough disguise with a miniskirt and high heels. Without Gila’s falsetto to mark the name Mari Pili as feminine for an international audience, I opted for the more obvious Maria. (The miniskirt was discarded as part of my attempt to keep the monologue grounded in 1950s Spain.)
[6] This bomber-sharing scheme is remarkably similar to that of Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, in which the enterprising US Army Air Corps lieutenant contracts with the Germans to bomb his own squadron. Given the fact that Gila’s monologue predates Heller’s novel by at least two years (if not ten), the similarities are likely the result of the absurdist zeitgeist of the 1950s.
Miguel Gila Cuesta’s friends argue that the humorist’s life was so hard, it’s no wonder he made up another one. Raised by his working-class grandparents in Madrid, he joined the Republican militias at the outbreak of the Civil War. From there the details are murky. According to his (sometimes imaginative) memoirs, Gila was captured by Franco’s forces in late 1938 and spent several months in various prison camps, but he only survived to become a prisoner because (he said) he was the fortunate victim of a drunken firing squad’s “poor execution” in December of 1938. After the war, Gila began publishing single-panel comics, gaining some notoriety in the late 1940s as a regular contributor to the monumental humor magazine, La Codorniz [The Quail]. He shot to national stardom in 1951 after debuting an absurd, surreal monologue about “How (He) Went to War.” Over the next fifty years, Gila performed for movie, television, theater and radio audiences in Spain and Argentina. Today he is revered as el maestro of Spanish comedy—the master of turning adversity and trauma into laughter.
Will Carr earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish translation from Brigham Young University and spent the next ten years translating for the US government. He eventually returned to school for a master’s in Spanish literature (also at BYU) and a PhD in Spanish with a Translation Studies emphasis (University of California, Irvine). Will “discovered” the work of Miguel Gila while researching popular Spanish humor produced in Franco’s Spain, hoping to find something akin to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Will is now an assistant professor of Spanish translation at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses in translation and researches the exploding sweet spots in the Venn diagram for humor, politics, and translation.
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