Words from Eduardo Galeano

Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers (2021) ends with words from the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano on a black background, translated in the subtitles below:

No hay historia muda. Por mucho que la quemen, por mucho que la rompan, por mucho que la mientan, la historia humana se niega a callarse la boca.

No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.

Elaine and I saw Parallel Mothers not long ago, and I finally tracked down the source of these sentences: Galeano’s Patas arriba: Escuela del mundo al revés (1998), translated by Mark Fried as Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (2000).

What’s really strange: an English version of the Parallel Mothers screenplay is available as a PDF from Sony Classics. The English translation of Galeano’s sentences therein follows Fried. (I’ve added a comma before and, missing from the PDF, to match Fried.)

If you have the opportunity to see Parallel Mothers safely, go. It’s a strange, heartbreaking movie, mixing melodrama and history. It’s the best Almodóvar movie yet, I’d say. Elaine and I went to a weekday matinee with friends who assured us that we would be the only people in the theater. And we were.