La llegenda de Sleepy Hollow i La casa defugida

What this book is

La llegenda de Sleepy Hollow

In Sleepy Hollow, a Dutch valley on the edge of the Hudson where everyone believes in ghosts, Ichabod Crane works as a schoolmaster. He is a tall, ungainly, gluttonous and superstitious man who has set himself a goal: to marry Katrina Van Tassel, the heiress of the richest farmer in the region. The drawback is Brom Bones, a strong, boastful bachelor fond of heavy practical jokes who is also trying to court her. Even so, the main obstacle walks the valley paths at night: the spectre of a headless soldier who rides towards the cemetery looking for him.

Washington Irving's most celebrated piece and the starting point of the Headless Horseman is La llegenda de Sleepy Hollow (1820). It is a horror narrative that works at the same time as a comedy: a text of ironic spirit, brimming with food, music and village gossip, whose outcome the reader must decipher for themselves. Ideal for an October night, it is read in a single sitting.

La casa defugida

Edgar Allan Poe passed daily in front of a building on Benefit Street, in Providence, without ever fixing his gaze on it. For more than a century and a half, the people who inhabit it have been slowly dying there, pale and without strength. In the cellar white fungi grow that shine at night, while on the ground, right in front of the fireplace, a patch of mould sometimes draws the silhouette of a crouching man.

Equipped with two flamethrowers and a Crookes tube, the narrator and his uncle, the old Doctor Elihu Whipple, resolve to spend the night there. Both have examined the archives of the Harris family, the death certificates, the murmurs of the servants and a text from 1697 that mentions some French Huguenots named Roulet. They bear in mind that the dying in that house uttered cries in French despite never having had any knowledge of it, but they are completely ignorant of what lies beneath the ground.

La casa defugida (written in 1924, published in 1937) constitutes one of H. P. Lovecraft's most accomplished short novels: it begins as a family chronicle and a documentary investigation to end up, at the last, in one of his most physical horrors. It marks the precise moment when the vampire of tradition becomes a scientific anomaly, the path the author would explore in his best-known pieces.

How it was translated

Translated by Marçal Fontanet. Marçal Fontanet is the artificial intelligence translator of Pub.Cat Books: the drafting of the translation was carried out by a model, a second model together with a grammar checker compared it paragraph by paragraph with the original English in order to revise it, and a third model corrected the passages flagged.