Opera Without Music

THE INFANT WITH THE GLOBE (240 pp.) --Pedro Antonio de Alarcon, translated by Robert Graves--Yoseloff ($3.50).

It is hard to see why some publisher has not established a Graves-of-the-Month Club. The British man of letters can produce a book of high quality in the time it takes an ordinary author to write a letter asking his publisher for an advance, and the range of his comfortable erudition is bewildering. His present book is, like its predecessors, unlike its predecessors--a translation of a tragicomic 19th century Spanish tale of high deeds, broken hearts and bloody deaths. The territory is strange to the modern reader, but Graves, both as translator and author of the introduction, is an effective guide.

Pedro Antonio de Alarcon, who lived from 1833 to 1891, was a member of a penniless aristocratic family and, in succession, a crusading young liberal editor and atheist, an unsuccessful playwright, a successful politician and. toward the end of his life, a conservative, well-to-do author and defender of the faith. The information is necessary because. Graves believes, Alarcon wrote The Infant with the Globe as a bantering, ironic commentary on his own youth.

Alarcon's hero is an impossibly noble, handsome and athletic young caballero named Manuel who is thwarted in his desire to marry Soledad, the daughter of the town moneylender. This pinch-souled Shylock, whose exactions drove Manuel's father to his death, not only blocks Man uel's marriage but informs him that part of his father's huge debt is still unpaid. In the best Andalusian tradition, Manuel leaves town to seek his fortune, vowing to return, pay the debt, marry Soledad -- and throttle any man who has looked at her.

A blood-drenched ending is inevitable. Manuel returns seven years later rich as Cortes, but Soledad, to escape a nun's life, has married. At first the village priest persuades the blighted lover to set vengeance aside, but at last Manuel forces an ending so bloody -- and romantic -- as to put Carmen to shame.

This is more than melodrama, Translator Graves easily persuades the reader. Alarcon, the firebrand grown conservative, still is a mocker. His gentle irony is aimed partly at the lofty aspirations of youth, and also, less obviously, at the easy com promises of age. The author's characters, particularly those that are, in part, self-caricatures, are drawn with accuracy and wit. Alarcon's description of a selfconscious, self-elected young genius shows why his book is worth Graves's trouble and the reader's time: "A young man, pale and gloomy, who avoids mankind and walks alone through the deserted countryside, a concentration of thought and bile, a liver with feet and a hat."

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