[In the following essay, Yates reviews a translation of Country Judge, finding the novel "sincere" and "thought-provoking," but "not a great or especially significant novel."]

In Country Judge, a short, episodic novel first published in 1924, Chilean writer Pedro Prado (1886-1952) endowed his title character with several of his own characteristic attitudes: a deep love for Santiago and its environs, a longing for order and justice in the affairs of men, and a quiet resignation to loneliness and melancholy. In the Foreword to this new translation of the work, critic Arturo Torres-Ríoseco, who knew the author in Chile, states that the novel is frankly autobiographical. So it appears to be.

Solaguren, a bored, restless, reflective architect, is the Prado-like protagonist who decides at the story's beginning to accept a judgeship in a suburban district of Santiago. Perhaps foremost among his reasons for taking on the job, for which he has no formal training, is his ambition to put into practice his personal concepts of wisdom and fairness. (His insights into the task of dispensing justice have come to him over the years solely as the fruit of his meditative readings in philosophy.) What Solaguren undertakes to do, in effect, is to project into the questions of conflict arising in his rural jurisdiction a type of ideal and perfect order that he has not been able to impose on his own life. For this reason, and for others easily imagined, the new judge is destined eventually to come face to face with disillusionment and defeat. Country Judge is, quite simply, the brief and poetic account of how all this comes about.

When, after two months of instructive and saddening experience with the humble people and perplexing human problems paraded before him, Solaguren finally feels compelled to submit his letter of resignation, he pens a pair of sentences that contain true wisdom and constitute the only moral one might draw from this tale of frustrated idealism. He writes: "Everything I have done leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth and a contempt for myself. Such is the penalty incurred by one who has not mastered his subject by study, or who does not remain in blissful ignorance by avoiding it altogether."

Pedro Prado began his career in the early years of this century as a poet and only later shifted to prose. However, the rigor of his poetic apprenticeship obviously carried over into his narrative works, and in the best of these he produced memorable cameos of essentially poetic prose. Many sections of Country Judge merit this designation. An example is the chapter entitled "The Cabbie," describing a country outing enjoyed by Solaguren in the company of his grand painter friend Mozarena, which rivals the delicate pastoral charm achieved by the Spanish Nobel Prize-winning poet Juan Ramón Jiménez in his celebrated volume of sketches, Platero and I.

Country Judge is not a great or especially significant novel, but it is a sincere, thought-provoking, and readable one. The sympathetic translation by Lesley Byrd Simpson is intelligently executed and has very few flaws. However, somewhere we should have a word of explanation of how and why the original novel has been "edited."