Reading the Bogotá 39

Blog resurrection updates

• Ena Lucía Portela's Cien botellas en una pared has been translated by the talented Achy Obejas, and has been published as One Hundred Bottles (via The Constant Conversation).  Given the magnificent job Obejas did in translating Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao into Spanish, I'm sure this will be a wonderful introduction of Portela's work into English.   
• Guadalupe Nettel and Andrés Neuman will participate in the 2011 Hay Festival in Cartagena at the end of January.  Nettel will be part of a panel discussion with Jorge Franco and Pola Oloixarac--they'll be talking about "how they tackle writing new stories, the new novels they have in mind, what obsessions they have as writers and how they knit together new narratives in their imagination".  She will also interview French author and film director Philippe Claudel.  Neuman will take part in the panel discussion with Pola Oloixarac and Agustín Fernández Mallo on "The novel: that useful artefact", which will explore the novel's "open and iconoclastic genre" and how "everything is possible in its vast territory".  He'll also be included in the "Favorite Book Gala"--a popular and fun festival event.  Both were judges of this year's RCN and the Ministry of Education's story competition for students (along with Fernando Gaitán, Beatriz Robledo, Roberto Burgos Cantor, and Juan Gossaín), and will participate in the judges' panel discussion and award ceremony.
• Much has been made of Granta's new "The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists" issue (and deservedly so!), which includes four members of the Bogotá 39.  Three Percent is continuing to showcase all participants--members Andrés Neuman, Santiago Roncagliolo, and Alejandro Zambra have been discussed, and I look forward to the upcoming post on Rodrigo Hasbún.  
• Last month, Antonio Ungar won the 2010 Premio Herralde de Novela for Tres ataúdes blancos.  In an interview with El Espectador, Ungar talked about how his novel could not help but reflect our political reality: 

“Sigue siendo la realidad, pero una más dura, una deformada, y utilizo el humor para abordarla. Porque en Colombia tras una matanza, esa misma tarde ya hay un chiste, reírse de lo trágico es algo muy colombiano, hay algo que conecta la risa y la muerte”.

("It continues to be the reality, but a harder one, deformed, and I use humor to tackle it.  Because when there's a massacre in Colombia, there's already a joke ready that same afternoon.  Laughing at tragedy is very Colombian--there's something that connects laughter and death.")

   "Antes de empezar", the 23-page excerpt Anagrama has posted (as a PDF), fully demonstrates the tendency: Ungar's clever black humor takes off from the very first page. 

Shattered

An entire lyric novel, written about an Argentinian garbage collector.  The beauty Andrés Neuman locates in the fragments tossed out by regular people is humbling.  The dignity and the massive import of the everyday is what gives Bariloche its power...

And we have Demetrio Rota...broken...like the fragments of the flowered saucer he tries to piece together.  Like the pieces of the jigsaw puzzles he faces at his kitchen table, after preparing himself like an artist for his work (black coffee, light, the right time of day).

I took five pages of notes on this one.  I'm haunted by it.

Roncagliolo's vanishing book

The current issue of Arcadia recounts "El affaire Roncagliolo", which is one of the most insane things I've read in a while.  Santiago Roncagliolo, the Peruvian author of Abril rojo (translated by Edith Grossman as Red April) was hired by a certain elderly woman to write her biography several years ago.  She was the member of an old Italian family that had emigrated from Italy to the Dominican Republic in the 1920s, where the patriarch worked for Mussolini and had run-ins with Trujillo, the CIA, and Castro.  Due to all the dirt she was spilling, the family blocked its publication, and so Lobos en el paraíso (Wolves in Paradise) was never published.

Last year, Roncagliolo's last novel was released.  Memorias de una dama follows a young Peruvian woman who is hired by an wealthy eldery woman to write her biography.  The latter was the member of an old Italian family that had emigrated from Italy to the Dominican Republic in the 1920s, where the patriarch worked for Mussolini and had run-ins with Trujillo, the CIA, and Castro...   

Now, the novel is virtually impossible to find.  After releasing it in Spain, the publisher has halted distribution in the Dominican Republic and throughout Latin America, citing "commercial reasons".  While attempting to get to the bottom of things, Arcadia received an anonymous email claiming a secret agreement was reached involving the family, Roncagliolo, and the publisher to halt distribution or face a hefty fine.      

Literary scandal and gossip are one thing.  But what baffles me is why would he do something so risky?  He claims that the novel is his greatest success and "en esencia" (essentially) an original story.  But I wouldn't be surprised if all this turns out to be an experiment of some sort, his attempt to test the boundary between fiction and "reality", or even the public perception of literary scandal (apparently, pirated copies of Memorias de una dama are being widely read in the Dominican Republic).  It's hard to believe he doesn't know exactly what he's doing.

Odds and ends

* In June, Bloomsbury will release Beirut 39: New Writing from the Arab World, an English translation of stories from each of the Beirut 39.  It would be amazing if the Ediciones B anthology, Bogotá 39: Antología de cuento latinoamericano were to be translated as well...  (via Words Without Borders)

* An excerpt from Megan McDowells's translation of Alejandro Zambra's The Private Lives of Trees is up at the PEN American Center. (via Three Percent)

* Hanging out in a museum with Wendy Guerra (subtitled in English):

Waiting in the wings

I've got notes piling up on Pilar Quintana's Conspiración Iguana and Andrés Neuman's Bariloche...  Just have to trudge through the next couple of weeks of work during the day and these nights of staring at a screen for my second job when I get home.  I escape into these books in small cracks of time when I can slip away (although my body never can).

In the former, Lucía's frank recklessness, hatred of hypocrisy, and penchant for gin and tonics makes me grin...even as she skirts around her own destructive tendencies and wanders rooftop jungles on her crusade to topple self-satisfied fakers. 

The latter tips me into a mind where past and future constantly melt into each other: Demetrio's garbage-collecting nights are countered by the fragmented objects he finds to piece back together, while the puzzle he stares at sucks him into reliving things he only wishes he could forget.  But his world still comes alive--window blinds are the eyelids of giants and grey, sodden clouds are trash bags filled to the bursting point over the pines.

So I keep scribbling into my thin, red notebook...  I hope something happens soon.

A novelist's poetry

I've only read one of Ricardo Silva's novels so far--the deceptively innocent En orden de estatura, which is one of the best children's novels I've read in the past few years.  It recounts Leopoldo's quest to retrieve his grandmother's things from his five dentist uncles after she dies, and the family secrets dislodged by his faithfulness to her.  While the story is told in the third person, it closely follows Leopoldo's perspective and thoughts: the grave seriousness of the "niño viejo" who strategically plans the rescue mission with his friend Julia.    

Lately, I've been reading his poetry.  Here are a couple from his collection, El mar:

Silencio

Que, para terminar, haya silencio,
y que el sol y la luna y lo que soy
sean una puerta de salida.

Que la luz cubra mis ojos cerrados,
y mis manos y mis voces
no despierten, sin mí, a medianoche.

Que nazcan, uno a uno,
los infinitos huesos de mi cuerpo 
en el único cuerpo de los hombres.
 
Que el monstruo tenga fe en mi voz,
porque suya es la página en blanco
y los versos de César Vallejo.

Que el libro olvide sus palabras
y espere, en el ocio de las voces,
el silencio que lo ampare.

Índice

La palabra no es la cifra del océano
sino el dedo que apunta a la luna
y duerme y despierta con las olas
que nacen del barco de la historia.

Sí, eso es. Eso repito en el camino.

La palabra no vaticina la muerte,
pero es el gesto de los náufragos
que pisan el silencio de la playa
y encuentran caracoles con secretos. 

Nettel and Echenoz

I just discovered this interview Guadalupe Nettel did with Jean Echenoz back in 2007:

¿Piensa que esta pasión por la música ha influenciado su manera de escribir?

Sí. Estoy seguro de ello. Siento que algunos músicos han tenido sobre mí una influencia literaria, por su manera de construir las melodías y de ritmar las cosas, por su forma de poner síncopes o de introducir los cambios de velocidad. Creo que esto, ya sea de manera consciente o inconsciente, jugó un papel fundamental.

(Do you think this passion for music has influenced the way you write?

Yes.  I'm sure of it.  I feel that certain musicians have had a literary influence on me, for their way of constructing melodies and putting things to rhythm, for their way of adding syncope or introducing time changes.  I think this, whether consciously or unconsciously, has played a fundamental role.)

All of Nettel's articles and reviews for Letras Libres are archived here.

Peruvian pirates

Daniel Alarcón talks to Chicago Public Radio about his recent article in Granta on book piracy in Peru:

In the U.S. it wouldn’t necessarily make sense to pirate a book. But in Peru, a book can cost as much as 20 percent of an average workers weekly salary. It’s resulted in a big market for cheap and illegal books. Underground publishing thrives in Peru...complete with its own version of the book mafia. In downtown Lima there’s a market called Amazonas. There are more than 200 informal book sellers peddling everything from fake copies of Dostoevksy’s Crime and Punishment to pirated copies of the current hits. Writer Daniel Alarcón went through the streets of Lima in search of his own pirated novel while writing the recent article, “Life Among the Pirates." It appears in the latest edition of Granta Magazine.

(via Three Percent)

The situation in Colombia is similar: books are expensive and piracy is everywhere.  Downtown by the cathedral here in Santa Marta, a few pirates have stalls set up just outside one of our two main bookstores. 

One of the most famous recent anecdotes involves García Márquez changing the last chapter of Memoria de mis putas tristes to get the better of them.

Navigating our self-language

In The Believer, Daniel Alarcón conducts a fascinating discussion with Eduardo Halfon and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, where (among many other things) they talk about the glorious complication of what it is to be bilingual and write in a language that isn't your first.  Alarcón asks, 

I’ve had a similar experience with Juan Rulfo. Read him in English and was like, What’s the big deal? Read him in Spanish and couldn’t write for three weeks, you know what I’m saying?

Is there a fundamental difference between the languages? Is beauty itself, the poetry of the language, something that cannot be translated? How does this work for the two of you as stylists, when there is an element of translation already embedded within your work?

Part of Halfon's response:

I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now and can’t really come up with a straight answer, and I think that’s because what you’re asking is much more complex. It’s something like this: Where exactly does beauty lie: in what is being told, or in how it’s being told? Is beauty in the story or in the words that are telling it? If beauty lies solely in the story, then any language, any translation, should achieve this just as well (and we know this isn’t so).

Go no further than Borges, who was translating Oscar Wilde when he was nine years old, and you have yourself a pretty little mess. Borges consistently stated that a translation could exist alongside (as you say, Santiago, when you mention Octavio Paz) or even surpass its original, and that its merits were not in its fidelities and consistencies with the original, but in its infidelities and inconsistencies. After reading Beckford’s Vathek, for example, Borges wrote, “El original es infiel a la traducción” (“The original is not faithful to the translation”). And since his childhood reading of Cervantes was in English, he then wrote in his Essai d’autobiographie: “Cuando más tarde leí Don Quijote (en castellano) me pareció una mala traducción.” (“Later, when I read Don Quixote (in Spanish) it seemed like a bad translation to me.”)

But what happens with someone who appears to be writing in two languages at once, as we are, or as I am? What happens when writing is itself a translation in process? And here, of course, I can only answer from my own experience. With all its treacheries, with all its hardships and apparent contradictions (my mind immediately flashes back to my two sparring mothers), writing in two languages, or writing from two languages, is also like having two distinct treasure chests from where to grab gold and silver and diamonds. If at mid-sentence, for example, I reach for one chest and can’t find in there anything I like or anything that fits, I simply reach for the other one. And for some reason, the constant searching and the relentless tugging of these two languages seems to produce, through that same grammatical and syntactical tugging, a new language, a sort of hybrid or blended language. A self-language, really.

Also in this issue, the first part of Julio Villanueva Chang's amusing "García Márquez Goes to the Dentist" reminded me of one of the greatest (and shortest!) García Márquez stories ever, "Un día de éstos"--a chilling and blackly comic encounter between a dentist and a corrupt mayor.  Its genius lies in its subtext...

A brand new tiger

I've been a fan of Antonio Ungar's luminous writing since trying my hand at translating a scene out of Zanahorias voladoras (Flying Carrots) last year during my literary translation MA.  His images stand out in my mind for their crisp colors and vibrant sensibility.  He is the rare adult who remembers exactly how it was to be a child and to have endless possibilities coursing through his veins.

Las orejas del lobo (The Ears of the Wolf) is a loosely-constructed novel of vignettes divided into two parts: "Dias oscuros" ("Dark Days") and "Dias claros" ("Bright Days").  Each chronological episode is recounted over a span of four or five years by our nameless narrator--a boy who begins as a three-year-old, telling of how he and his mother and sister had to leave their home, and of all the places they went.  His is a wisdom that pierces the mundane and sees past what the adults do and say.  As the entire work is in the present tense, there is a timelessness to his world, making each object and description nearly tangible.  One of my favorite scenes is the delightful form of revenge he and his sister enact against their grandmother and her cruelty--fistfuls of small, green frogs from the pond outside, discreetly placed in her bathroom, her bed, and a glass of water.  

Here is a passage from Katherine Silver's translation of the "Sobrevivientes" ("Survivors") chapter (hopefully the entire translation will be published soon!):

(Before collapsing from exhaustion, before falling asleep on the metal bed of the truck, at Mama's feet, I understand that we can be happy. In spite of everything that has happened. In spite of Papa's ghost roaming the savannah. Happy. The gang's solid core. The survivors. Mama: dark-skinned, vertical, untouchable, singing into the night, laughing but always ready to do anything for us, her children. My sister: whole, again like a cat, like the cat she was before but now a wild cat, a skinny and electric and wet mountain cat, her claws hidden while she watches the students and doesn't stop laughing. Me: lying on the ground, also laughing, my lungs bigger and my hands completely open to the rain. Like a brand new tiger—alive and happy).

A few more things:

• Ungar's interview with Evelio Rosero (and a truncated version in English, translated by Anne McLean) is posted at BOMB's site. 
• His short story, "My Grandfather's Disintigration" (translator not listed), is also in the recent issue of BOMB Magazine (print version only), but "La desintegración de mi abuelo" (the original from 2004) is up at Lateral.
• Two other stories, "Hipotéticamente" ("Hypothetically") and "Un muerto es un muerto" ("A Dead Man is a Dead Man"), are up at the Sociedad Literaria Mesosaurus site.