As with the works of all great artists, Ribeyro’s body of short stories is visionary because, through its many characters, it illustrates Peru’s paradoxes and contradictions, and lucidly probes Peruvian individual and collective psychology. Consequently, we could talk about a Ribeyrian figure: a subject whose existence lies between dreams and defeat, the most absurd hopes and the crudest disappointments. This figure is certainly a being who is constantly hounded by the temptation of failure, to cite the title of one of Ribeyro’s most memorable books. 

Published in the 1950s, Ribeyro’s first stories emerged at a time when many Peruvian authors were writing neorealist and urban works to represent the new challenges facing Peruvian society. During this period, Lima was going through a difficult transition. While it had been a large town prior, it grew rapidly during this time and became a metropolis, one that needed to renegotiate its identity as a shared space in order to enter a new phase of modernity. Ribeyro’s first stories—memorable works such as “Los gallinazos sin plumas” and “Al pie del acantilado”—tell this story. They are important testimonies of a changing, contradictory urban space, a product of Peruvian internal migration. Subsequently, the city must face a difficult process of mestizaje. 

After publishing Los gallinazos sin plumas (1955), he wrote Cuentos de circunstancias (1958) and Las botellas y los hombres (1964). All these collections portray Lima as a rapidly growing city, but one that nonetheless remains precapitalist and fractured, plagued by significant contrasts and social rifts. For these reasons, it’s fair to say that today, magnified by the size of a metropolis with over ten million inhabitants, the classic Ribeyrian figure wanders about: that subject struggling to carry the weight of frustration and mediocrity, but who fights tirelessly to integrate into a society that marginalizes him over and over again. We must only recall figures such as Roberto López, the protagonist of the story “Alienación,” and his fruitless struggle to “de-lópez” himself in an effort to rid himself of his blackness at any cost and become a white person from the United States. His efforts are so hair-brained and absurd that, despite fulfilling his wish of going to New York, where he ends up living among other marginalized subjects like himself, his American dream turns into an absolute nightmare. I also think of Pablo Saldaña, the chatty protagonist of “Explicaciones a un cabo de servicio,” who, finding himself unemployed and with no prospects, unleashes his pathological lying at a table in a bar in Lima. With a few drinks in him, Saldaña turns into a rich yet temporary businessman, since his lying gets him locked up for the night after he can’t pay his bar tab. Fernando Pasamano, the protagonist of the story “El banquete,” is similar to López and Saldaña. Pasamano is a landowner who has fallen on hard times but who is determined to regain his economic power and social influence. To do so, he burns a hole in his pocket putting together a huge party attended by the president of Peru. When it seems his efforts have paid off and his fortune will be recovered, an unexpected turn of events ruins his plans: there’s a coup d’etat while the party is going on at his house. Strangely, a trusted minister of the president organized the coup, which subsequently forces the president to step down. With Pasamano’s party going on and the president away from his post, this minister ends up taking advantage of the president’s absence to overthrow the government and assume power. All these adventures and misadventures, which abound in Ribeyro’s short stories, are nuanced with a subtle irony that, when it is not a harsh and revealing humor, exemplifies the vicissitudes and frustrations of Peruvian life. Ribeyro gives voice to many characters who are otherwise punished or forced into trivial and mediocre lives. He gives them fleeting moments of hope, until the institutional order, social prejudices, or simple disappointments push them back into the harsh reality of things. 

This view of the human condition in Ribeyro’s work, however, is not limited to the Peruvian context. In Paris, where he arrived at the beginning of the 1950s and would write much of his work, Ribeyro lived firsthand the dilemmas of exile and alienation. Such experiences are clear in a handful of stories in the series titled “Los cautivos,” published for the first time in Lima in 1973 as part of the second volume of La palabra del mudo. In these stories, Ribeyro explores the heartache of the marginalized in Europe and examines the otherness of the Peruvian subject within a new cultural context. This is particularly true of the title story, “Los cautivos,” as well as “Agua ramera” and “Los españoles.” Europe is not a particularly hospitable place for Ribeyro’s characters in these stories; rather, it is the backdrop for subjects who wander through its old cities. While they are drawn by a certain wanderlust, they are also marked by solitude, astonishment vis-à-vis an unknown world, and a sense of existential tedium. His protagonists generally stay in cheap hotels or modest pensions in which they form friendships with other marginalized people within European society. They are characters who, given their anonymity, vaguely identify as “Peruvian,” when not referring to themselves simply as “South Americans.” Another example of European disillusionment is in “La juventud en la otra ribera,” from 1977, a story in which Ribeyro wittily expresses his desire to demystify Paris’s splendor. The protagonist is a very Ribeyrian character: a bureaucrat. In the story, Dr. Plácido Huamán, a “doctor of education,” is sent from Lima to take part in a conference in Geneva. Before getting to his official destination, Huamán plans a visit to the French capital to fulfill a wish he’s had his entire life; that is, to see Paris, and, if he’s lucky, to have a romantic fling there. At first, Dr. Huamán’s wishes seem like they might come true when he meets Solange in a Parisian café. She is a beautiful French woman with whom he has a short-lived, shallow romance. Nonetheless, in the mediocrity of his existence, Huamán classifies his fling with Solange as one of the “golden pages of his life.” The truth is, his luck in love is short-lived and, in a kind of bitter paradox, it’s Paris itself that teaches the aging educator a cruel lesson. In reality, Solange and her group of miscreant friends are only interested in robbing the naïve doctor of the few dollars he has and, after doing so, murdering him. Thus, far from being a city of splendor and romance, in Ribeyro’s stories, Paris becomes a rotten city, a place full of petty thieves where Huamán meets his cruel destiny. 

It could be said that a tone of skepticism and a discrete air that seeks to maintain human dignity in the face of humiliation and adversity consistently accompany Ribeyro’s characters. However, it would be incorrect to reduce his entire body of short stories to the categories described above. We must remember that Ribeyro was prolific in this genre and that, beyond his initial neorealist and urban themes, his short story writing is full of experimentation and offers a range of proposals. That said, it’s no exaggeration to say that Ribeyro’s stories easily dialogue with those of the genre’s best writers. In stories such as “La insignia,” “Ridder y el pisapapeles,” or “Doblaje”, but also in the superb work “Silvio en El Rosedal,” Ribeyro displays his deep familiarity with fantastic literature and establishes important points of contact with works by Poe, Kafka, Borges, and Cortázar. Additionally, his reserved, elegant style calls to mind the best works of other short story masters, such as Chekhov or Ribeyro’s much-admired Maupassant. These are authors who, like Ribeyro, examine the lives of individuals wrapped up in solitary battles and living in a reality that vanquishes them time and time again. In this same vein, the many lost battles Ribeyrian characters face may lead readers to believe that defeat is a constitutive part of the human experience, and even a universal literary theme. This said, it is also true that, despite their repeated failures, Ribeyro’s characters are always dignified in the face of adversity. They possess a quiet heroism, and their greatest virtue is awakening the strongest sense of empathy in readers, while, at the same time, moving them to reflect on their own life adventures. 

With the passage of time, it has become clear that Ribeyro’s work was written in quiet defiance and against the flow of his historical moment. Recent texts on his work by writers who are now beginning to gain recognition in Latin American literature, such as Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez or Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, remind us that in the 1960s, when Latin American literature exploded with novels rich in the verbal experimentation and lofty, totalizing aims of the Boom, Ribeyro remained faithful to his voice and art. He stayed at the margins of the great literary banquet of the time period. In this faithfulness lies our second big lesson about Ribeyro’s work: he personifies the ethics of an artist who, far from the temptations of success, continued working with exemplary tenacity until he forged a body of work that, in its apparent anachronism, is transcendent today. 

A more intimate Ribeyro emerges in the fourth and latest volume of La palabra del mudo, published for the first time in Lima in 1992. In it, we are confronted with a series of texts in which the author encounters the past; these stories revisit moments from a life that begins with the innocent world of a child from Miraflores and ends with the wise skepticism of old age. On the one hand, we encounter an autobiographical tone in stories such as “Sólo para fumadores,” “La casa en la playa,” or “Surf.” On the other hand, a nostalgic air traverses the pages of the “Relatos santacrucinos” series. As the protagonist of “La música, el maestro Berenson y un servidor” indicates, these stories look to recuperate the traces of “happy and unhappy times, finding only the ashes of some, and the call of those still alive.”

A new reading of the stories in La palabra del mudo is likely to remind us that, given their lot in life, Ribeyro’s characters will feel progressively empty inside, or disillusioned, or will be plagued with bad luck. But, as stated in the prologue of the last volume of La palabra del mudo, if “writing is a form of conversing with the reader,” then we, the readers, only stand to thank Ribeyro for the privilege of taking part in this fascinating conversation. Luckily, thirty years after the Peruvian writer’s passing, the dialogue continues, because classics never allow for goodbyes. They only offer opportunities to meet again. 

Translated by Amy Olen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Photo: Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro.

Clarice Lispector, tr. Johnny Lorenz, A Breath of Life (1978)

Popular Verse

“I think it’s very reasonable to see a popular singer as a poet, be it Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, or so many others,” says Argentine journalist and writer Andrea Álvarez Mujica when we discuss the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded in 2016 to the man behind “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Three years after that honor, songwriter Chico Buarque, one of the greatest exponents of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB), received the Camões Prize, considered the highest literary honor in the Portuguese language.

The author of Horas de rock (2017, 2021) and Estelares: detrás de las canciones (2022) maintains, with no hesitation, that it was only right to award this recognition to a lyricist, “first because it takes into account a voice from the streets, outside the ivory tower or the elite. Also because the lyrics of a song can be a form of poetry, though they need not necessarily be; a song can do just fine with lyrics that might not work as verse alone. If we go back to the origins of poetry, probably a great deal of it came from popular singers.”

Rhyme and verse, rhythm and a couple of metaphors, rejoicing in language and taking a chance on cadent phrasing to weave story or song… That’s what the game is all about: “Creating the structure of a work of literature like you structure a piece of music. Using songs to build a correlative and start telling a story. The texts that make up a book create a rhythm, they have a musicality. Words ring out, even when we’re reading in silence,” states Octavio Escobar of Colombia, winner of the 1997 National Literature Prize from his country’s Ministry of Culture for the short story collection De música ligera, whose tales serve as a compass to lead us through the work of artists like Nino Bravo, Guns N’ Roses, Sandro de América, and the Bee Gees.

A Shared Tempo

“To be able to synthesise in the five or six lines of a bolero everything
that a bolero encapsulates is a true literary feat.”

Gabriel García Márquez, tr. Juan Carlos Garvayo, 1985 

“I’ve said myself, more in earnest than in jest, that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a 400-page Vallenato and Love in the Time of Cholera is a 380-page bolero,” Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez told Germán Borda in the “Gabo contesta” section of Cambio magazine in 1990, in response to a question from the composer, writer, and music critic about No One Writes to the Colonel (1961). In said novel, Borda told him, “I find a fixed tempo throughout the work,” and he inquired if this was deliberate or, on the contrary, if this register had come about by coincidence. The Aracatacan pondered his profound relationship with music, and added that not only The Colonel but “even the least significant of my paragraphs is subject to that harmonic rigor.” 

The structure of a work of literature like that of a piece of music. Escobar translated Gabo’s meaning aptly, and in his own way, when the author claimed to have composed a vallenato, a genre declared intangible cultural heritage and marked by lyrics that, according to UNESCO, “interpret the world through stories that mix realism and fantasy.” One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is a fundamental work of magical realism, which revindicated the fanciful, the imagination as a legitimate form of understanding and explaining the world. 

The vallenato, born on Colombia’s northern coast, is an amalgam of cowherd and captive songs, indigenous dances, Spanish poetry, and instruments from all three origins. García Márquez defined magical realism in The Fragrance of Guava (1982) as a mixture of “the overflowing imagination of Black African slaves with that of Pre-Columbian Natives […], the imagination of the Andalucians and the Galicians’ cult of the supernatural”—a principle and precept in the Caribbean. One and the other, with an inescapable vocation for storytelling.

The Everlasting Soundtrack

A way of reinventing the world, says Carolina Bello of Uruguay. Arts that shape time, that try to contain it, to make sense of it and reenact its passage, lending it both logic and catharsis, expresses Colombia’s Ricardo Silva Romero. Primordial stimulus and influence that turns the aesthetic keys of creation, signals Mexico’s Antonio Ortuño. The soundtrack of life and the stage on which the characters transit through a story, states Cuba’s Dainerys Machado. Thus do some Latin American writers, in consonance and perfect rhyme, conceive of the essential, unbreakable, powerful bond between music and literature.

Bello finds three modes of this almost hallucinatory hybridization of music and literature: as theme, motif, or incidental accompaniment. “Since time immemorial, literature and music have been schemes of representation; in this sense, as artistic manifestations based on rhythms and textures, they have always gone hand in hand. Literature has often been subsidiary to sonic arrangements that came before it as a mechanism with which to represent and comprehend the world; at other times, music has operated within literature as a motif—even one of survival—in the characters’ logic,” says the winner of the 2016 Gutenberg Prize, awarded by the European Union and Fin de Siglo press. The best example, she says, is Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) by Manuel Puig of Argentina, “with music inserted into the plot as a mechanism of salvation” (not to mention the tangos. boleros, and foxtrots of Heartbreak Tango). 

Álvarez Mujica concurs with Bello’s conception of music as a sort of frame that becomes foundation and fiber:

It seems, when you put an as-yet nonexistent scene to music, that scene somehow starts coming to life. The music the characters are listening to, or more generally, the music they pick, the music they like, which gives them their identity, obviously gives them life and starts setting them in motion. Music is one of those elements that also adds volume, information, and movement to what’s going on… especially volume!

Likewise, in La Armada Invencible (2022), Antonio Ortuño (winner of the 2018 Nellie Campobello Fine Arts Prize for the Hispano-American Short Story) tells, with heavy metal in the background, the story of a band of aging musicians, “ailing and frustrated,” who plan to get back to their glory years while struggling to survive a life of humdrum adulthood. Ortuño says for himself, “almost every book I’ve published recently has its own soundtrack: for the novel La fila india, Charly García, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Serú Girán, Sui Generis, Pescado Rabioso, cuplés my grandma used to sing, zarzuelas and music from the Spanish Civil War; for Olinka, soul, Curtis Mayfield, Blixa Bargeld, ambiental and experimental music…” And, among so many other sounds, metal and punk as “the music that has given me a literary identity.”

The author of El resto del mundo rima (2021, Mapa de las lenguas) also presents the inverse case, where “music has taken its motifs from literature, or has directly converted literary texts into song, especially from poetry, an inherently musical genre.” Such is the case of Un mundo sin gloria (2023) by Garo Arakelián of Uruguay, in which, Bello tells us, “many songs reelaborate journalistic chronicles published in books or the press, creating a ‘nonfiction album.’ It’s no longer a question of turning a poem or some other preceding text into a song, but rather of reelaborating it into another code that, with all its lyricism, maintains a narrative structure.”

Besides music as a motif, Álvarez Mujica cites albums and songs inspired by books like “La Biblia by Vox Dei, a foundational album of Argentine rock, and foundational from the book it picks up. In Argentine rock, books and authors and literature inspiring music is a common occurrence: for Fito Páez, for Spinetta with Artaud, which is also an iconic record, and one through which many young folks at the time got to know the French author.” “Flaco” himself recognized that he dedicated this album to the author of The Nerve Meter (1927), taking his work not as a starting point, but rather as a response—“an insignificant one, perhaps,” he told Eduardo Berti—to the suffering that came from reading him.

Music As Complicity

For Silva Romero, selected in 2006 by the Hay Festival as one of the thirty-nine most important writers under the age of thirty-nine in Latin America, some popular songs have the vocation of novels, of epic poems, of short stories, and are just as heart-rending as the greatest works of literature. This is so because, as Álvarez Mujica sees it, some artists are “chronicling,” making stories of lyrics “that have meaning for others from the intimate or a more social side, forming that antenna that connects with what happens to others; they receive a little feeling, a little state-of-mind from others, and they put it to verse.”

The author of Cómo perderlo todo (2018) aspires for what he writes “to sound like, and to be, a certain kind of music; that gives you chills, accompanies you, and puts you back together like music does.” For the same reason, he tried—unsuccessfully—to write his degree thesis on Paul Simon, his “favorite writer.” He then wrote it on another Paul, this one surnamed Auster, whose work reminded him of “that vocation as strange as all others,” as he found in it “a oneness that tells the story of a whole world, and, in the process, surpasses the exclusivity of genres and their linguistic codes.”

For her part, Bello notes that, in her own work, music has been present “as an intertextual reference that anchors the text to a given meaning; in characters directly linked to sound; as a matrix of textures to attain sonority in the texts or as an excuse to talk about music and its effects on the characters’ lives and the context in which it appears.” Her book Oktubre, an analysis in novel form of the record of the same name by Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota, is an example of this work. It was written as part of the “Discos” collection from Estuario Editora, an initiative of academic Gustavo Verdesio that sought for different writers to address a Río de la Plata rock album of their choice, on the condition that they speak about all of its songs.

“I think we artists in general are looking for accomplices and inspiration. Sometimes we find them walking down the street, sometimes in a book, sometimes in a song,” says Álvarez Mujica. Thus we have Uruguayan writer Ramiro Sanchiz with the uchronia and dystopia of Un pianista de provincias (2022, Mapa de las lenguas), making us walk alongside a young musician across desolate lands, playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations and contending with an old Michael Jackson imitator, in a novel with “musical methods, techniques, and structures transferred to literature”; or the “literary projects based entirely on musical references, as in the work of Alejo Carpentier, especially his short novel El acoso, whose backdrop and pretext is Beethoven’s Eroica, and you can almost follow the symphony through what befalls the character,” as we are reminded by Dainerys Machado, chosed in 2021 by Granta as one of the twenty-five most outstanding contemporary Spanish-language novelists under the age of thirty-five.

For Chilean writer, journalist, and filmmaker Alberto Fuguet, one of the keys to Ciertos chicos (his return to the novel, after seven years without publishing this genre) was its wager on music: it was advertised in the streets with flyers designed to resemble eighties concert posters, fake cassette tapes were handed out, and playlists were created with its songs (some unknown to the author himself). Almost thirty years have passed since an editor struck down his idea to add music to Por favor, rebobinar, “but now, when someone says a book is like a record, it’s no longer an insult. In fact, that’s how this novel is reaching people.”

No one list will be enough. Music and literature offer us thousands of versions and visions of the world. Millions of symphonies and tempos, lyrics and rhythms from a universal novel, the works that have been dreamed up and written down to the sound of a beloved song, the paragraphs composed to dance or hurt to. Mónica Ojeda offers us a festival of retrofuturist music in Chamanes eléctricos en la fiesta del sol (2024). Julio Cortázar incorporated jazz as essence and path in Hopscotch (1963). Pablo Milanés created sones nourished by the poetry of José Martí and Nicolás Guillén. Rubén Blades inherited a pair of “Ojos de perro azul” and Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys found lively ideas in the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. With his new tango, Astor Piazolla put Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato to music. Juan Villoro dedicated two great pages to the music of the Mexican counterculture and to Caifanes. Willie Colón inherited lines from Clarice Lispector. And, Porque demasiado no es suficiente, Mariana Enriquez reflects regally on Suede, Nick Cave, Manic Street Preachers, Iggy Pop, Radiohead, and Low. Today we repeat, like Andrés Caicedo in 1977: ¡Que viva la música!

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Juan Camilo Rincón is a writer, journalist, and cultural researcher focusing on Hispano-American literature. He earned his Master’s in Literary Studies from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and is a former grantee of FONCA (Mexico). He is the author of Ser colombiano es un acto de fe: Historias de Jorge Luis Borges y Colombia, Viaje al corazón de Cortázar, Nuestra memoria es para siempre, and Colombia y México: entre la sangre y la palabra. He has written on cultural topics for outlets in Latin America and Spain, and has been a guest author at international book fairs in Bogotá, Culiacán, Guadalajara, Guayaquil, Havana, and Pachuca.

Natalia Consuegra is a cultural journalist. She writes on literary topics for outlets in Latin America and Spain. She also works as a proofreader and copy editor (APA style and RAE guidelines).

Photo: Diane Picchiottino, Unsplash.

Portuñol, as a border phenomenon, was both revealing and stimulating to me, to say the least. Also revealing was the train journey I took with a group of Brazilian ladies when I learned that, in Portuguese, viralata was the word for a mongrel dog, a mutt. I identified with this because I myself was a sort of viralata in Buenos Aires. Well, not technically; I had come from Colombia on a grant to do my master’s in Argentina, I couldn’t complain about my living conditions, I lived in a studio apartment in the capital city and my only job was to study and get to know people. But migrating, even within the same continent, felt like a kind of orphanhood across distance. It was rather intimidating, but still, as the months passed by, dwelling in this new space became an illegible brand. Migrant. A sort of mixture, of being in-between, as Anzaldúa would say: in-between countries, families, traditions, ways of saying the same thing and naming other things. That’s when I thought viralata could be a middle name.

Viralata (Estuario Editora, 2018) struck me as a book from the future. A time when, entirely mixed together, we can understand each other at the edges, and nobody tries to define the ways we write as correct, incorrect, or acceptable. In Viralata, I found a border thick with artists with “Brazilianized” singing voices, who write with the structure of Portuñol but with interferences from Spanish. Ten hours by bus from the Retiro station to the Uruguayan city of Rivera, along the dividing line between Uruguay and Brazil, lay the frontier universe that gave us Fabián Severo, the author of the first novel written in Portuñol to receive a national prize for literature.

But what did it contain? What was the novel about? Many members of Montevideo’s literary scene were asking thsemselves the same question, and many people from the border also wanted to know. When the novel reached the border towns, it was harshly criticized by more traditional educators, defenders of linguistic “correctness” who rebuked Severo for, in their view, mocking them in his book, for writing as they spoke, “as if everyone spoke that way,” “as if they wrote that way.” Many border-dwellers who already felt the shame of bearing a “poorly spoken” language on their bodies, their experiences, and their identities felt the book was a joke at their expense. Others, however, did not. On the contrary, they identified with this novel that told of loss, a story woven out of the memories of Fabi and his mother in Artigas (the second largest city on said border), the story of a little boy who grows up and loses his mother due to the neglect of a social system that marginalized them for being from the border, for speaking Portuñol, for apparently being different from all other Uruguayans. 

The border-dwellers were bearers of a language considered “low-quality,” not just in their everyday experience in Uruguay and Brazil, but also in the history of their wandering ancestors who had reached the region as enslaved people, smugglers, and workers of the land.

Portuñol was the mother tongue of many border artists: not a dialect or a case of diglossia, but their language, plain and simple. A language that was being born, and whose speakers were mistreated by the citizens of capital cities, as the formation of the independent states of South America in the early nineteenth century demanded that institutions work together to consolidate new national identities. Portuñol was a language penalized by Uruguay’s dictatorship, which violently condemned all those who spoke Portuguese or anything similar on Uruguayan soil. For artists, writing in Portuñol meant spending years writing in Spanish just to finally declare, “I’m tired. I feel better in my mother tongue.” Musicians suffered the same way, but there was a different kind of freedom in their orality. 

The Portuñol language—or, rather, the Portuñol languages, given the wide variety of dialects that exist in the area—was not only the product of the interaction between populations trapped between two great empires disputing the border as an economic stepping stone from the Brazilian interior to the Río de la Plata. It was also the language of smugglers, of illegals; Portuñol, what’s more, bore the stamp of a trade language. When Portuguese landowners spoke Portuguese to their workers, what language were said workers supposed to answer in if they were on the Uruguayan side of the map? In the language that earned them their daily bread, which was, in this case, Portuguese.

Fabián and other border artists have written in their mother tongue and spoken of the border, of their neighbors, of the stories that their elders didn’t want to remember. They have sought, in the memories of peoples and territories, the footprints of their dead, their suffering, their rootless tree:

Mi historia impieza el día que la maestra nos enseñó el árbol de la familia de unos reye. En el pizarrón, dibujó los rey, despós los padre del rey y de la reina, los avo, y así siguió enllenando el pasado con gajos que se iban tan para atrás, que terminaban cerca de Dios.

Cuando yo pedí para mi madre que me ayudara completar el árbol con el nombre de los familiar, ella me miró raro y me disse que despós. Al rato, yo volví a pedir y ella que ahora no porque istaba haciendo cualquier bobada. Intonce, yo intendí y inventé mi árbol parecido al de los reye. 

Para la maestra que corrigió mis deber, yo venía de un álamo completo y firme, que protegía los hueso de mi casa.

[My story starts the day the teacher showed us the family tree of some kings. On the chalkboard, she drew the kings, then the king and queen’s parents, their grandparents, and so she went on filling in the past with branches that went so far back they ended up close to God.

When I asked my mother to help me make a tree with the names of our family, she looked at me funny and told me later. Later on, I asked her again and she said not now because she was doing some other silly thing. Then I understood and I made up my own tree, like the one with the kings.

To the teacher who graded my homework, I would come from a full, strong poplar, one that protected the bones of my house.]

(Viralata, p. 11)

Thus begins Viralata, with a made-up poplar, a rootless, scattered tree, with a past silenced by the elders. There was something in their border memories they didn’t like to remember, and it was a product of the marginal space they had occupied in history, with the structural violences that affected their domestic and public lives. And there was an imbalance: at home, the border-dwellers spoke Portuñol, but in the plazas and public spaces they had no choice but to use Spanish.

This book, like the work of composers and musicians like Chito de Mello, Ernesto Díaz, and Yoni de Mello, lays bare open wounds and the stitches between languages. It reveals that all these bodies of work represent practices of communality.

In The Restless Dead, translated into English by Robin Myers,  Cristina Rivera Garza refers to an interesting definition of this practice of communality that develops along borders:

The very definition of communality in relation to writing […] requires both exploration and definition. […] Authors engaged in this conversation have rightfully abandoned the notion of the individual and have in turn emphasized various practices of dis-identification as a basis for the production of alternative subjectivities, as Rancière argued. Here, being-in-common is a taut, dynamic, and ultimately unfinished process. (2013)

In his work, Fabián makes evident the practices of communality undertaken with others who speak the language, who are his neighbors, characters who constitute the universe in Portuñol. But he also appeals to the authors of the Uruguayan lettered tradition with whom, in a sort of collaborative imaginative process, he constructs his place, his border, his frontier of dust and earth.

Anzaldúa says of Chicanos, “When other races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture” (2016). Portuñol has lived under the hammer blows of two linguistic histories that vie for authority over the words that belong to the border language: Portuguese and Spanish, the two “correct” languages that fight for ownership of the “correct” words, leaving out the groups that write in the interstices of language.

The border people, as smuggler communities, weave practices of communality not only in their contraband bonds of economic survival, but also in their bonds of artistic and textual solidarity. In the border artist of the north there coexist different languages in perpetual transformation; a contraband culture has formed his language, a culture of wanderers, an age-old tradition on foot:

Así nos hicieron. Una mitad de cada cosa, sin ser cosa intera nunca. Todos viralata como el cusco de los Quevedo. Cada uno trae una mitad mas no incontra nunca la otra metade. Viemo pra se ir, mientras cuchilamos en la vereda, isperando el milagre. 

[That’s how they made us. Half of each, never the whole thing. All us viralatas like the Quevedos’ mutt. Every one of us has one half but never finds the other. We come so we can go, while we doze off on the porch, waiting for a miracle.]

(Viralata, p. 12)

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Alex Teixeira, Unsplash.

“We are a society that has learned to laugh at its misfortunes, be they in soccer, politics, or the economy, and that deserves to be represented in literature. Laughter is not for the dumb, nor is seriousness for the intelligent”

It’s interesting, when we think about Peruvian literature, that what usually comes to mind are novels in which humor is a missing, minimum, or insignificant element. Let’s consider, for example, Redoble por Rancas (Drums for Rancas, trans. Edith Grossman), a book that alludes to indigenous struggles in the Pasco region. Or Conversación en La Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, trans. Gregory Rabassa), in which the history of repression during the Odría dictatorship is narrated. Or En los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers, trans. Frances Horning Barraclough), which tells the story of the injustices faced by a fourteen-year-old Andean boy. Let’s not forget La violencia del tiempo, a work whose monumentality renders it indecipherable for the vast majority of readers, and which has become, as of late, the new “hidden jewel” of Peruvian literature according to some academics, writers, and critics who write with their left hand. The aura of solemnity that has enveloped literature seems strange. It seems that the more stark, harsh, and discomforting (and even political) a work of literature is, the better. It would seem that the poor Peruvian writer is condemned to writing texts as though they were sociological, academic, or journalistic work. The writer is condemned to writing about massacres, coups d’état, struggles, marginalization, or racism. Happiness, according to some, comes off as frivolous in a country like ours.

However, this isn’t so, even though our famished national critics push us to think the contrary. There exists, even though no one speaks about this, a current of humor in our literature. How could this not be so? Our society has had to learn to laugh at its problems (some of them without solution), at itself, at the marvelous blessing and curse of being Peruvian. And it sure is difficult to define what it means to be Peruvian in the time of the Memer’s Republic of Peru. Our jokiness (up to and including our nonsense), which allows us to create memes even about coups d’état, has not been widely explored in our national literature. Therefore, it’s important—rather, it is our duty—to explore and clarify the current of humor in Peruvian literature by pushing aside the fallen branches, the dried-up leaves, and, of course, the cobwebs.

Our luminary Gustavo Rodríguez, winner of the 2023 Alfaguara Prize, merited that award for his novel Cien cuyes, which deals primarily with deterioration and old age. The critic Javier Agreda notes assertively that parts of the novel are written in coded humor. Now then, if we are talking about humor, between Rodríguez and Roncagliolo (winner of the 2006 Alfaguara Prize for Abril rojo, translated as Red April by Edith Grossman), we see an improvement. Although, clearly, this has nothing to do with literary quality. Jaime Bayly, also in 2023, published the novel Los genios, a story about Mario Vargas Llosa punching Gabriel García Márquez: two of the heavyweights of Latin American literature. If we’re talking about humor, Jaimito has had a resounding success (and if we’re talking about sales as well). Because humor, as a literary tool, gives you enough space to allow the characters’ vices and monstrosity to flourish. I doubt that Gabo was as much of a pothead as he is in the novel, and I also doubt that Marito had the vocation for boxing that the author proposes, nor did he drink as many glasses of milk as he does in the novel. Despite this, I do not doubt that there exists a certain truth in the text, and that this allows us to get to know these two iconic personalities. Bayly’s accomplishment is having created an entertaining novel that borders reality and fiction, and that makes the reader laugh out loud. Humor is not a novelty in our fifty-eight-year-old enfant terrible. It is always present in the columns he publishes in different dailies and international platforms, as well as in his short story collection Yo soy una señora.

In 1994, writer Fernando Iwasaki published the novel Inquisiciones peruanas, a book that, in a humorous tone, lays out the peccadilloes and tragicomedy of a society that appears to be sacred, ceremonious, and smelling of sacristy. And, although this book is about the time of the Inquisition and obscurantism, its sins and temptations could well be transplanted to the urban barrios of today’s Lima. Or isn’t it the case that envy, desire, and lust continue to be washed away during Sunday mass? Humor is a lethal weapon that uncloaks any priest, no matter how much of a pater noster he appears to be (please excuse my use of Latin). Julio Ramón Ribeyro, with a cigarette in hand, explored a discreet humor in Dichos de Luder, an aphoristic book in which the main character opines about certain things in a ludic, ironic, and playful manner: “I have never been insulted, or persecuted, or assaulted, or incarcerated, or exiled,” says Luder. “I must therefore be a scoundrel.” Let’s go now to the barracks. Pantaleón Pantoja decides to open a visiting service in order to calm the troops’ lustful impulses in Pantaleón y las visitadoras (Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, trans. Gregory Kolovakos), which is written in a tone different from the one Mario Vargas Llosa has used throughout his successful and brilliant literary career. One must admit, humor is not our most universal novelist’s forte. Indeed, at his conferences, even the laughter seems rehearsed. Our Nobel Prize-winner, who has recently announced his retirement with the publication of his latest novel Le dedico mi silencio, made use of humor in his novel published in 1973 in order to speak nakedly about corruption in the Peruvian army. Between each laugh, between each joke, a monstrous truth begins to form: the army needs to hire prostitutes so as not to rape the local townswomen. It would have been impossible to report on this using a different tone, especially since at that time Peru was living under the military dictatorship of Velasco Alvarado.

“The first modern novel in the history of humanity was a text loaded with humor, irony, and parody. It wasn’t a sociological novel with a ‘serious’ and solemn bent (that’s why nobody has heard of Mateo Alemán)”

Let’s get back to sacred matters… A little nun was in charge of injecting Martín Romaña’s hemorrhoid medicine into his behind, or as the character himself called it, “his rectal via crucis.” It’s clear that Alfredo Bryce Echenique is one of the masters of Peruvian comedy. And none of those academics and critics who condemn humor, no matter how paper-faced they are, can deny the literary quality of our aristocrat who traveled to Paris to learn to be a writer, even though the accusations that he plagiarized his journalistic texts put a damper on his career. It has often been said, especially at his book presentations and in interviews, that Bryce’s style, gin-and-tonic included, is a rara avis (please excuse again), and that before him humor did not exist in Peruvian literature. That’s fine for publicity, but it isn’t true. The author of Un mundo para Julius (A World for Julius, trans. Dick Gerdes) takes his style from two antecedents, which—in my view—are direct.

Please allow me to now descend into literary hell, into the underpinnings of our tradition. Let me sweep away some dead leaves. The first direct antecedent of Bryce Echenique’s style is Duque, the novel by José Diez Canseco published in 1934, considered the second queer novel in Perú after Confesiones de Dorish Dam by writer Delia Colmenares (1929). I won’t go into a discussion of queerness because that’s not the theme of this essay. Duque is written in a humorous tone from the beginning, when the twenty-five-year-old little man, Teddy Crownchield, has the dilemma of choosing a tie among the one hundred fourteen he has in the closet, until the end, when the scandal blows up in the prudish city of Lima. The novel’s characters move among the elegant cafés of the city’s center, including the main brothels and opium dens. This is no coincidence. Bryce must have read this novel because the narrative techniques are, in some cases, the same as his own, especially in the use of the same anglicisms, as is the case with Susan’s famous “darling” in A World for Julius.

The other antecedent, although it might seem strange, comes from Ricardo Palma (yes, Ricardo Palma), who, despite the church-going faces of his children Clemente and Angélica, made a show of his sense of humor in Tradiciones en salsa verde. Our beggar librarian becomes gossipy and even crude, oblivious to his own solemn pose with his combed and immobile mustache. He mocks, with self-confidence, historical and serious characters, in whose image bronze busts have been made (always shat on by some rara avis). Neither Antonio José de Sucre nor Simón Bolívar (with his twenty thousand names) nor Ramón Castilla with his amorous ravings are safe from this acrid pen. Malicious prose and verse, double entendres, and gossipy tone abound: “One day he said to a young man / By the shade of a fig tree / As long as you don’t stick me with a nun / You can stick me with whatever.”

This book was not published until the last third of the twentieth century. It is clear that Palma senior did not publish this book because the bronze medals, the awards, and the title of national hero should be defended; however, it is unclear why the Palma children did not publish the manuscript. Although I can’t imagine Clementito publishing a book like this one, much less Angélica, who was so obsessed with how the ladies of her time should behave themselves. Whatever the case may be, Tradiciones en salsa verde is a book that ends up humanizing our traditionalist, whose canonical work is not lacking in humor either, although it might be more costumbrista and demure. Bryce inherits from Palma the ability to laugh at the patriotic: “Peru advances, Brazil scores a goal!” Besides, both writers also coincide as representatives of Criollismo.

Allow me to descend into the fourth zone of literary hell, to the furthest cave, to demonstrate that laughter is as much a part of our tradition as is crying. During the time of the viceroyalty, when novels were prohibited in the Americas, Juan del Valle y Caviedes wrote Diente del parnaso, his only book. It is full of satirical verses against the doctors of his time, whom he even compares to executioners. Satirical poetry was not the exception at that time. Before Romanticism, satirical poetry was abundant in Spain. However, even if you don’t believe me, it’s enough to see the case of Don Quixote, a novel considered ridiculous during its time and whose main character can be, at the same time, the craziest and the sanest man in the world. The first modern novel in the history of humanity was a text loaded with humor, irony, and parody. It wasn’t a sociological novel, with a “serious” and solemn bent (that’s why nobody has heard of Mateo Alemán). Not to mention the comedies of Lope de Vega, in which graciosos appear as characters; nor the sonnet “To a Nose” by Quevedo, in which he mocks Góngora’s physical appearance: “There was a man stuck to a nose / it was a superlative nose…” No one can challenge, no matter how much of an academic they may be, the fact that these works are the fundamental texts of our tradition. No one could qualify these works as “lacking in seriousness.” The comedy-tragedy, Aristophanes-Sophocles, Lysistrata-Antigone dichotomy, which we have inherited from the Greeks, remains in effect even today.

With all this said, we must begin, at last, to value humor (which does not abound) in our literature. It is striking that not a single Peruvian woman writer can be found who is directly associated with humor. I hope, in the future, there may be more interest in exploring this path, which is a fundamental part of our tradition. This does not mean that we should not appreciate works that are “serious,” sociological, political, and stark. These are fundamental in order to understand a society as bowlegged as our own. However, works that reflect Peruvian humor are also important, especially because it is present in our day-to-day lives, on social media, on television, in the Memer’s Republic of Peru: colorful, outlandish, bizarre. We are a society that has learned to laugh at its misfortunes, be they in soccer, politics, or the economy, and that deserves to be represented in literature. Laughter is not for the dumb, nor is seriousness for the intelligent. Humor is a lethal weapon that disrobes even the most serious academic, no matter how much of an encyclopedic face one may have. Not everything is seriousness, revolution, and massacres. We are also allowed to laugh.

Oklahoma, 2023

Translated by Luis Guzmán Valerio

Photo: July Brenda Gonzales Callapaza, Unsplash.

During Paz’s first stay in India, he hardly made any friends, lived largely within the confines of his hotel, and did not like either New Delhi or the people he met. Later, he reassessed his own responses as partly a projection of his own unhappiness and partly the impact of deep-rooted Western prejudices he unconsciously carried within himself. The first trip thus prepared him mentally for the longer stint of six years, which he often called the happiest years of his life. 

The second stay (1962-1968) marked the most creative and productive years of his entire life. He fully immersed himself in India’s history, philosophy, art, and literature. His house became a meeting point for Indian artists, writers, and thinkers, and much of his poetry and essays emerged out of that joyfulness: Ladera este, Hacia el comienzo, Blanco, El mono gramático, Corriente alterna, Conjunciones y disjunciones. He also found the great love of his life during that period, Marie-José Tramini—an inseparable part of his subsequent poetry. 

Never in history has a major Latin American writer been so deeply engaged in an intercultural dialogue with the Orient. While in India, Paz did not write only about Indian themes. He wrote a book of anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo (1967), and one of the two long essays on painter Marcel Duchamp that became Aparencia desnuda (1973).  He also wrote extensively on world politics and world literature, contributed to various anthologies, and revised earlier editions of his own works. While in India, Paz wrote copious notes for a book that would later develop into La llama doble (“the double flame”), published in 1993, where he contrasted ideas of love in the Western and Indian traditions, often tracing them to the difference in their musical structures.

Paz was well aware that he belonged to a long Latin American tradition of writer-diplomats: Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Rubén Darío and Alejo Carpentier. Since the nineteenth century, some of the most distinguished Latin American writers, though not career diplomats, entered politics and became presidents, such as Rómulo Gallegos of Venezuela, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Bartolomé Mitre of Argentina. José Martí died in 1895 fighting for Cuba’s independence from Spain. Neruda was nominated for the presidency; Vicente Huidobro actually ran for the presidency, albeit unsuccessfully, as did Mario Vargas Llosa. In Mexico alone, the list of writer-diplomats includes distinguished names such as Carlos Fuentes, Alfonso Reyes, José Juan Tablada, Federico Gamboa, José Gorostiza, Jaime Torres Bodet, and Maples Arce, all of whom were colleagues of Octavio Paz. As a public intellectual, the Latin American writer’s political position is one of vital public interest, more than anywhere else in the world. 

Paz’s life stands as a shining example of how the advantages of diplomatic life can be used for maximising literary output. His Paris years fired up his mind by bringing him into close contact with the European avant-garde; his years in the US shaped his poetry through a close contact with Anglo-American literary sensibilities. Paris was also the rallying point for Latin American writers and artists to discover their continental commonalities. Living at a distance gave them a different perspective from that of the regular insider. The close experience of faraway cultures such as India gave the cosmopolitan Paz a non-Western vision of life. He spent a significant part of his time travelling by road across the Indian subcontinent. Paz hosted Julio Cortázar, Severo Sarduy, and Rufino Tamayo at his home, and they experienced India through him. While in Delhi, he also forged deep friendships and collaborations with American composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, and painter Robert Rauschenberg, as well as creative relationships with a wide array of Indian painters, writers, and intellectuals who shaped “modern” Indian culture.  

As part of diplomatic protocol, Paz had to submit his credentials to India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, five days after arriving in India. He was amazed by Nehru’s elegance and sophistication, which managed to shine through in his last years despite the long years of struggle and India’s humiliating defeat in the Sino-Indian War. He had the opportunity to know Nehru “from closer range” when he visited an art exhibition of young Indian artists that he had organised. Paz keenly read his books and listened to his speeches. He was inspired by Nehru’s ability to combine flexibility with energy and intellectual finesse with political realism.

A few days after meeting Nehru, Paz presented his credentials to the president, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a philosopher-politician in the Platonic tradition. Paz noted that “when philosophy is put into action, it becomes pedagogy, which, in its highest form, is politics.” He referred to Dr. Radhakrishnan’s scholarly work, mentioning that there was nothing more satisfying than greeting a Head-of-State who was also a maestro and pursuer of truth. 

Paz had met Indira Gandhi along with her father (Nehru), but after his death in 1964, she became a cabinet minister. It was then that Paz met “Señora Gandhi” quite frequently and they became close, well beyond diplomatic protocol. Since India did not have any specific policy for Latin America, she relied on Paz for drafting a policy for the region. She had travelled to Mexico in 1961 and thus knew of its similarities with India but was relatively lost when it came to the other Latin American countries. Paz sheds interesting light on her by contrasting Indira with Nehru:

Nehru was an intellectual with a political vocation, Indira Gandhi was essentially a political being. Nehru got lost at times in generalities and grandiose-but-vague schemes. Indira was concrete and sober. […] She sought the friendship of writers, poets, and artists, and I was always surprised by her intelligent involvement in ancient as well as contemporary art. (Nehru Memorial Lecture, 1985) 

Paz thus conveyed his assessment of Indira Gandhi as a master of realpolitik.  

When Paz left India abruptly after his resignation, Indira Gandhi organised a party at her residence. Later, she met Paz during her official visit to Mexico in 1981 and invited him to deliver the annual Nehru Memorial Lecture in 1984. Since he was also invited by the Japan Foundation that year, Paz decided to combine the two trips. He was in Kyoto, ready to depart for New Delhi, when he heard of Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31. In his hotel room, he watched on TV the horror of the mindless anti-Sikh riots and massacres that followed her death.

The invitation for the Nehru Memorial Lecture titled “India and Latin America: A Dialogue Between Cultures” was extended to Paz in 1985 by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The text of that lecture formed the core of his memoir of India written in 1995, three years before his death: Vislumbres de la India (In Light of India, 1997). It suggests the humility of his personal vision in the face of “the immense reality of India”: 

…[M]y education in India lasted for years and was not confined to books. Although it is far from complete and will remain forever rudimentary, it has marked me deeply. It has been a sentimental, artistic, and spiritual education. Its influence can be seen in my poems, my prose writings, and in my life itself. (23)

Political Interventions

The declassified diplomatic archives of Octavio Paz reveal several little-known facts of public history. He played an important role in the “Liberation of Goa,” which started in 1961 and was formalised in 1962. The Portuguese considered it an “annexation” by Indian Armed Forces, which put an end to the 451-year-long Portuguese overseas colonies. By the time Octavio Paz arrived in India, the Mexican embassy was already involved in the Portugal-Goa conflict, proposing to use its position in Latin America to establish a dialogue with the Portuguese authorities in both Goa and Lisbon. Nehru suggested that Paz mediate with Portugal. Ironically, the Portuguese embassy too requested that Paz mediate their case with India, as they preferred a third party through “the long and complicated process.”

Though Paz was firmly in favour of Goa’s integration with India, he sought a delicate diplomatic balance in his negotiations with both the governments, emphasising that it would be a terrible mistake “if Goa’s Latin cultural values” and ambience were negated in the name of decolonisation. He made this point emphatically and repeatedly to high-level Indian government officials whom he met. Some of them disagreed with him and argued for the “Indianisation of Goa.”

Paz’s regular diplomatic dispatches to his government about developments in South Asia were meticulously drafted and elaborate. His concerns about the causes behind the Indian student rebellions since 1966 and the Indian government’s way of dealing with them foreshadowed his eventual exit around the student rebellion in his own country.

Political concerns apart, Paz undertook several cultural initiatives that were innovative and unprecedented, carried out with zealous enthusiasm. He tried to disseminate awareness of Mexican culture in India by organising a large-scale travelling exhibition of Mexican handicrafts in India in 1965 and vice versa, drawing attention to their similarities. Titled Portrait of Mexico, the highly successful itinerant exhibition started from Manila and moved eastwards to Calcutta, Madras, and New Delhi, ending in Bombay. 

Octavio Paz also played a key role in the first-ever exhibition of tantric art in Europe, contributing to its catalogue in 1955. In February 1970, the first landmark exhibition of tantric art was held at Le Point Cardinal in Paris, followed by exhibitions in Milan and Rome. At that time, many Western writers and artists became interested in tantric art under the influence of the Theosophical Society. 

Paz also undertook some pioneering commercial initiatives. In 1964, he executed a trade deal for the large-scale Indian export of cinnamon to Mexico. Though cinnamon had been used earlier in Mexican cuisine, its use became increasingly popular, particularly in sweet dishes, salads, baked products, mulled wines, and other drinks. Mexico gradually became the world’s second largest consumer of cinnamon. Though his diplomatic work was not very demanding, he maintained a basic work ethic, keeping his writing life separate from his diplomatic work. He never did any writing during office hours apart from official reports and letters. 

Paz’s earnest concerns for the food and hunger situation in India prompted him to extend a helping hand. He spoke to Señora Gandhi about high-yielding wheat seeds that were developed in Mexico, leading to their Green Revolution in the 1950s. With her encouragement, he imported large quantities of short-strawed, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties developed in the state of Sonora that had given outstanding results and came to be known as “Sonora seeds.” Paz even enabled the transfer of know-how by sending Mexican officials to work with farmers in the fields of Punjab. Despite his pioneering initiatives, the entire narrative of the success of the Green Revolution was usurped by the Rockefeller Foundation and the American agronomist, Norman Borlaug. Diplomatic exchanges show that Octavio Paz tried repeatedly to correct the narrative by demanding credit for Mexican scientists who were eclipsed by the Rockefeller Foundation. 

Resignation

The story of Paz’s dramatic resignation in October 1968 may look a bit more nuanced when we take a closer look at the archival documents. He was planning to resign from the diplomatic services anyway and return to Mexico to start a journal. Political developments only brought it forward and, paradoxically, delayed his return to Mexico by two years due to the hostility of his own government. Octavio Paz carefully drafted his resignation letter in officialese to make it sound not like a resignation, though it was written in “pain and anger.” He had a personal stake in being deprived of his well deserved pension after twenty-three years of diplomatic service.

He characterised his moment of departure as “bittersweet” because of the overwhelmingly warm responses he received in India in favour of his decision. An endless stream of strangers visited his bungalow to congratulate him. When he reached the train station to catch a train to Bombay (where he would board his ship to Europe), he found a crowd had gathered to bid him farewell. Students, writers, and artists waited at railway platforms in all the intermediary train stations with garlands in their hands till late hours of the night, to convey their respect for him.  

Paz never regretted his decision and never yearned for a return to diplomatic services. He was grateful that it provided him the opportunity to travel to faraway countries and cities and meet people of diverse languages, races, and human conditions. Above everything else, he felt grateful because it gave him India and Marie-José, who became the centre of his life and poetry. 

Author’s Note: This brief essay is a very reduced version of a longer (12,000-word) essay on the same topic, which forms part of the book The Tree Within: Octavio Paz and India, which is slated to be published by Penguin in 2025.

“Thénon has to change the language, then, to attend to the perception that throws up new patterns of emotion, unknown and more complex”

Despite mastering the “whorish” language (lenguaje emputecido, according to her own definition), the Argentine poet Susana Thénon never ceases to intellectually demand her reader. We’re talking about the attention to form, the disarmed syntax, the morphological centaurs (that is, in the manner of Oliverio Girondo in En la masmédula); the entire text demands reconstruction. Thénon’s language seems ordinary, but it really isn’t: it’s necessary to first get through the sea of disconnections that evidences a deep concern involving words, communication, and experience, and that implicates language and poetry.

Her poems take us to the spatial and the territorial. Ana María Barrenechea and María Negroni, two of her closest scholars (both personally and literarily), have addressed this characteristic on various occasions, although perhaps in a somewhat indirect way, without directly naming the causes and forms of that phenomenon, but rather replicating it in some way, generating a sensation similar to the original poetry. For example, in the prologue to her complete works reissued by Corregidor in 2019, La morada imposible, María Negroni writes:

[…] in that obsessive arc that goes from Edad sin tregua (1958) to Ova Completa (1987), the “strange places” are repeated as signs that allude to the “tragic and tender caducity of language,” understood as that “minimum distance that exists between us and ourselves, or between us and the other,” to convey the trace of each loneliness, estrangement, or uprooting. There is in this work, it seems, a centrifugal geography that turns towards the outside of itself to plunge into what is not seen, what is ignored or silenced for reasons of good taste or good manners, perhaps in the confidence that only a deformed map can yield the skeleton of certain obsessions.

The quotations picked by Negroni are from the epilogue to distancias written by Barrenechea, in which the critic adds a fragment of a letter sent to her by Thénon. In that same text, Barrenechea adds that these distances testify with intensity and lucidity to this search (“without truce”) for an impossible space. In them, names of spheres are disseminated that are never the sky, the center, fullness, paradise; they are traversed by the eternal wandering through the slums of the world, never to glimpse the place (not even a place).

But, going back to the prologues, and after Negroni’s in that same volume (Corregidor, 2019), Barrenechea’s text proposes this method of analysis that involves spatial metaphors. She maintains that Thénon works “from an extraterritoriality that jumps to the seclusion of the trapped without escape” and that “the poem [for Thénon] is born from the zone of silence that exists in the heart of the words. And it is in this silence surrounded by notions where it acquires its being of freedom, just as a body displaces the air, even if it is submerged in it.”

As we said, the spatial figure is evident in Thénon’s work. Three of her five published books have titles that corroborate this: Habitante de la nada (1959), De lugares extraños (1967), and distancias (1984). In addition, one of the sections of her first book (Edad sin tregua, 1958) is titled “Aledaños” [Outskirts].

But what are, strictly speaking, these “spaces,” “zones,” “places,” “distances,” “geographies,” “maps,” “slums,” and “dwellings” that Barrenechea and Negroni speak of? The answer to this lies in the poetry itself, in the themes that occupy the poetry collections and in the resources the poet uses. It is a spatializing metaphor that transforms a mood into a place, and that refers to a moment of adjustment between experience and language.

Let us take, for instance, De lugares extraños, since it’s not one of her books most analyzed by critics (those are distancias and Ova completa), and also, it offers a window that facilitates our analysis: an epigraph by T.S. Eliot¹. It is a passage from Four Quartets, from 1943. More specifically, they are verses taken from the fifth part of the second poem, “East Coker.” In this passage, the poet estranges himself from the world that is becoming distant to him because it is complicated, and it is an estrangement that increases in parallel with his age. Eliot speaks of experience and of how one goes about interpreting it as one ages, while the old interpretive networks are no longer applicable to create new patterns or to recognize more complicated patterns. Feelings become increasingly distant from expression, and in “The Dry Salvages,” the poem that follows “East Coker” in Eliot’s book, there is another similar passage that says: “It seems, as one becomes older,/ That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be mere/ sequence.”

Eliot resorts to this idea quite a bit. In his essay on Paul Valéry, for example, “A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry” (1924): “A recognition of the truth that not our feelings, but the pattern which we may make of our feelings, is the centre of value.”

In De lugares extraños, Thénon shows a desperate attempt to at least gaze at an unreachable space and time (which function as the same thing in the book). What kind of spaces? Despite speaking about another book by Thénon (the aforementioned epilogue of distancias), Barrenechea speaks of “Outskirts, strange places, spheres that are real, concrete, precise to the point of pain, or that are displaced into sleep, memory, the expected and never-reachable paradise, nothingness.” She then adds some words from Artaud, which are from Le Pèse-nerfs²: “There were some of us at that time who wanted to try things, to create spaces for life within ourselves, spaces that were not nor seemed to have a place in space.”

“That is Thénon’s terrible dissatisfaction, the one she shows throughout her work: the poet is a clumsy howler who tries to knot the impossible”

The space that Thénon glimpses is that of a nucleus that needs to be expressed; an emotion or a feeling, Eliot would say. But it is not possible to create it; that space cannot be made with the language that it has, and therefore, if we continue to apply Artaud, the space is not a space (it is the impossible dwelling that gives title to the posthumous volume) and has no place anywhere. The first poem of De lugares extraños says: “The one who seeks an unforeseen fountain/ finds the fountain of thirst, with its blazons/ and its vigils of sand.” That is to say: whoever seeks water will not be able to find it and will be shipwrecked on a desert island, which is a non-place; she looks for something and finds the opposite. That space is an inaccessible and impossible place, but it is everywhere, in the “eternal wandering through the slums.”

The bull that Thénon takes by the horns is the problem of language and referentiality. She always speaks of that space that remains far from her, as a way of nostalgia; a space where signifier and signified fit in the poet’s mind. Time and space come together as two sides of the same coin, loaded with emotive memory³, a particular memory, an unexpressed, inexpressible, or not-yet-expressed emotion, which is fundamental throughout Thénon’s poetry, because that is the space to which she always refers and around which she revolves like a satellite. Space is the correspondence of expression and experience, always impossible due to the inability of language to apprehend and replicate a fragmented, broken, mysterious, and constantly changing reality. Inhabiting that space is impossible since it implies skipping over the aforementioned limitations that language proposes. Spaces cannot, therefore, be controlled or “governed.” Continuing with the first poem of the book, we read: “Love augurs and beats for no one/ in isolated forts and carriages,/ in windless berths,/ in narrow ungoverned prows.”

Other times, these spaces are recognized a posteriori, in tranquility, after the emotions. During that process the feelings are fixed and verbalized, but the moment remains in the past: “The gaze has memory/ of non-existent spaces and times.” Thénon has to change the language, then, to attend to the perception that throws up new patterns of emotion, unknown and more complex.

There we have the plotted maps, the old networks of language and the new and old patterns. Language always runs behind thought. And it is not about words, but about constructs, about networks. That is why Thénon’s choice of epigraph is not gratuitous, nor is it a passage that changes its meaning out of context⁴.

Every time an attempt is made to apply language, it’s like starting again from scratch, and it always fails; words age; each attempt is an approach to the inarticulate, the formless. Therefore, Thénon seems to oppose the Mallarmean idea that the role of poetry is to interrupt language’s lie of referentiality. For Thénon, the poet suffers that lie and has no choice but to sing that dissatisfaction.

The “places” are not fixed: they flow, they pass, they drag themselves along, they slip, but, before that, they have to navigate and erect themselves inside the poet (“you erected yourself/ in my seabed of shadow and submerged earth”). The beach (again, the image of the beach as in the poem cited above) is not even a place, it is something that passes. And that something is absent, and the years therefore pass “wounded” without the poet being able to name it, although it is attempted with poetic resources, techniques, and under the linguistic prism, all “clumsy ambushes” and “howls.”

That is Thénon’s terrible dissatisfaction, the one she shows throughout her work: the poet is a clumsy howler who tries to knot the impossible. Therefore, it is never possible to inhabit that zone where language and understanding do not remain truncated.

Notes:

1 “Home is where one starts from. As we grow older/ The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated/ Of dead and living.”

2 “Nous sommes quelques-uns a cette époque à avoir voulu attenter aux choses, créer en nous des espaces à a vie, des espaces qui n’etaient pas et ne semblaient pas devoir trouver place dans l’espace.”

3 This refers to the emphasis on the fact that the two dimensions (or the space-time dimension), which are actually very abstract and complicated, come together in Thénon’s poetry as a very concrete object (with two sides) that has value for the poet.

4 The poem from which she takes the epigraph for De lugares extraños begins like this: “Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—/ Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt/ Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure/ Because one has only learnt to get the better of words/ For the one thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which/ One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture/ Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate/ With shabby equipment always deteriorating/ In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,/ Undisciplined squads of emotion.”

Photo: Cintia Matteo, Unsplash.

“Menos Cóndor y más Huemul” (1925) is one of the many prose texts that the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) published in newspapers and other venues during her lifetime. These texts have scarcely been translated to English. A selection of Mistral’s essays was published in English in 2002,¹ but this is the first translation into English of “Menos Cóndor y más Huemul.” Many essays by Mistral remain unavailable for English speakers, and her prose has been much less read and studied than her poetry. Fortunately, new critical studies of her prose have appeared in the past decade.²

In this short essay, Mistral argues for a reconfiguration of the symbolic elements that articulate Chilean national identity. The title of the text refers to the two national animals that decorate the country’s coat of arms, and that popularly represent strength and reason. The country’s motto—por la razón o la fuerza—also refers to these two faculties of the national character. Under Mistral’s interpretation, Chile has paid too much attention to the strength of the condor, and has largely ignored the huemul’s grace and intelligence. Hence, she argues that the national ethos needs to be redirected, in favor of acts of kindness and communal comradery instead of the belligerent and militaristic narrative of national achievements. It is a poetic and political exhortation for a more humane and less aggressive notion of national identity. 

During the military dictatorship (1973-1990) the regime of Augusto Pinochet attempted to impose a conservative version of Mistral, as opposed to the other big name in Chilean poetry: Pablo Neruda. Through this lens, Mistral was seen as the harmless and soft mother of the Nation, who suffered for love, wrote sweet lullabies, and didn’t mess with politics. Needless to say, this image of Mistral strategically ignores key aspects of her work and career, such as her radical commitment to human rights, her role as a transnational public intellectual, her dissident sexuality, and her passionate defense of the dispossessed. Thanks to the feminist scholars of the late eighties and nineties, new critical approaches to the Mistral’s work appeared, and we can now read a richer and more complex Mistral—one that does not fit into conservative frames of interpretation. 

In the context of the massive protests that took place in Chile in 2019-2020, Mistral rapidly became a key political reference point: there were stencils, collages, and graffiti of her figure and texts in the streets of downtown Santiago. References to “Menos Cóndor y más Huemul” were everywhere. Through this gesture, a text that was written almost a hundred years ago reached new audiences and acquired new political implications. Why did Mistral’s proposal ignite the rebel imagination of Chilean protesters? The text envisions a new narrative of national identity, one that is not dominated by masculine war-centric rhetoric and instead pays attention to, as Mistral says, “the acts of kindness… [and] the fraternal actions.” This shift in the way we imagine a national community can guide us towards a future of equality and justice too. Although Latin America is currently filled with tensions and radical inequalities, and hate speech is gaining space in the political arena, we can foresee, as Mistral did, a different trajectory. And that act of imagination is truly revolutionary. By reading Mistral in her role as a public intellectual and activist, we are acquiring new tools with which to rewrite our own futures. 

Gonzalo Montero

1 Selected Prose and Prose-poems. U of Texas P, 2002. Translation by Stephen Tapscott. 

2 I want to highlight, for example, Claudia Cabello Hutt’s Artesana de sí misma. Gabriela Mistral, una intelectual en cuerpo y alma (Purdue UP, 2018). This book focuses exclusively on the intellectual career of Mistral, by analyzing mostly her prose writing. 

Less Condor and More Huemul

We Chileans have in the condor and the huemul of our coat of arms an expressive symbol like no other, which indicates two aspects of the spirit: strength and grace. Due to its duplicity, the rule that it dictates is not easy. It might resemble what the sun and the moon have been in some theogonies, or the earth and the sea: opposed elements equipped with excellence that shape a difficult proposal to the spirit. 

Much has been said, both in schools and in screeching speeches, about the meaning of the condor, and little has been said about its heraldic companion: the humble huemul, scarcely situated in the national geography.

I confess my lack of love for the condor, which is, in the end, only a beautiful vulture. However, I have seen its clean flight above the Cordillera. It crushes my emotion when I recall that its grand trajectory has no other cause than the carrion hidden in a ravine. We females are like this, more realistic than some might think…

The schoolteacher explains to the pupils: “The condor means the dominion of a strong race; it teaches the just pride of the strong. Its flight is among the happiest things on earth.”

So much has heraldry abused the raptors, there are so many eagles, so many ospreys in military insignia, that it does not say much because of repetition, the sharp beak and the metallic talon.

I choose this deer, that, in order to be original, does not even have arboreal antlers; I choose the deer, unexplained by the pedagogues, and about which I would say to the kids more or less the following: “The huemul is a sensitive and petite beast; relative to the gazelle, which is to be related to perfection. Its strength lies in its agility. Refined senses are its defense: the delicate ear, the eye of attentive water, the sharp smell. 

Like the deer, it often defends itself, not with confrontation, but intelligence, which is its unspoken power. Slim and throbbing snout, greenish eyes that capture the surrounding woods; neck of the purest line, flanks of moved breath, hard, silvery hoof. In it the beast is forgotten, since it almost resembles a floral pattern. It inhabits the green light of bushes and has something of light in its arrow’s speed.”

The huemul suggests the sensitivity of a race: refined senses, vigilant intelligence, grace. And all of that is defense, invisible but effective spurs of the Spirit. 

The condor, in order to be beautiful, has to fly high, liberating itself completely from the valley; the huemul is perfect simply arching its neck above the water or raising its neck to spot a sound. 

Between the direct defense of the condor, the peck on the horseback, and the indirect defense of the one that dodges the enemy by smelling it in the distance, I prefer the latter. The attentive eye that observes behind the reeds is better than the bloody eye that dominates from above.

The symbol might be too feminine, if it were limited just to the huemul, and it would not work as the expression of a people. But, in this case, let the huemul be the first face of our spirit, our natural pulse, and let the other be the beat of urgency. Pacifiers of all peace in good days, soft in our faces, our words, our thoughts, and condors only to fly over the cliff of imminent danger.

On the other hand, it is preferable not to exaggerate the symbol of strength. I am reminded, when singing these praises of the deer in heraldry, of the Greek laurel, whose leaf is both soft and firm. This is the leaf chosen as a symbol by those who were masters in symbology. 

Much have we displayed the condor in our acts, and I hope we display other good things that we also possess but have not emphasized. In Chilean history, it is right to cultivate the acts of kindness, which are many; the fraternal actions that fill forgotten pages. Our predilection for the condor over the huemul might have caused us much harm. It will be difficult to superimpose one thing over the other, but this will be achieved little by little. 

Some national heroes belong to what we might call the order of the condor; in parallel, the huemul also has its members, and it is time for us to celebrate them. 

Professors of Zoology always say, only at the end of the class, of the huemul: an extinct species of the deer.

The extinction of this fine beast in a specific geographical area does not matter; what matters is that the order of the gazelle did exist and continues to exist among Chilean people.

Translated by Gonzalo Montero

Originally published in Spanish in El Mercurio, July 11, 1925
Santiago de Chile

La Orden Franciscana de Chile autoriza el uso de la obra de Gabriela Mistral. Lo equivalente a los derechos de autoría son entregados a la Orden Franciscana de Chile, para los niños de Montegrande y de Chile, de conformidad a la voluntad de Gabriela Mistral.

Photo: Gabriela Mistral with students in Brazil, 1945, Archivo Memoria Chilena, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.

“Imperceptible Anatomies,” by Mexican writer and academic Guillermo Jesús Fajardo Sotelo, is an essay that, from the trigger of a genetic condition, elaborates a penetrating discourse on personal health, the dimensions of  an exceedingly rare pathology, and its links to literary creativity. This is an essay that shows extraordinary balance between the confessional, intellectual inquiry, the clinical aspect, and literary reference points. It likewise represents a minor epic on life and the questions surrounding the demands of the human body—a body, as Fajardo Sotelo calls it himself, that is “anatomically disobedient.”

Yes, my heart beats on the right side of my body. I was born with a rare genetic condition called situs inversus totalis, which means all my organs coexist, as if in some motley neighborhood, on the opposite side from where they should be. Among the medical terms that classify me as a rarity, I have—our defects are also ours—dextrocardia and a heart murmur, since one of my valves doesn’t work as it should: the tricuspid, to be precise. I have never demanded an explanation, from nature or from medicine: the former would show me an unsayable concert of inexplicable phenomena, and the second would tell me it was caused by a mutation in the genes “ANKS3, NME7, NODAL, CCDC11, WDR16, MMP21, PKD1L1, and DNAH9,” and both parents contributed to the condition.

Despite this curious pathology, my body functions normally, perhaps by a miracle. A few years ago, though, something happened to me that I now call The Event; something that, to date, none of my cardiologists has been able to explain. One night, I woke up from sleep feeling overheated and intensely dizzy. Confused, I realized my heart was beating furiously, as if it wanted to explode, as if it was reprimanding me—for the first time—for its position in my body, the strangeness of its being displaced to an unnatural, anatomically incorrect geography. As best I could, I made it to the door and alerted Erin, my wife, who managed to calm me down. We didn’t have to call 911: just as it started, it ended. Siri Hustvedt, in her book The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves (Picador, 2010), tells how, while speaking in public on the death of her father, she started shaking uncontrollably. “My knees knocked. I shook as if I were having a seizure. Weirdly, my voice wasn’t affected. It didn’t change at all.” This moment drove Hustvedt to write about her experience, in an effort to understand what happened that day.

I believe this effort of mine, however minimal and superficial it may be, is born of a similar drive.

***

A few years ago, before I decided to go study literature in the United States, I joined an essay-writing workshop in Mexico City. That was when, for the first time, I knew I wanted to write about my anatomically disobedient body, although I did so in the third person. However, after reading Jorge Volpi’s Examen de mi padre (Alfaguara, 2016), I was overcome by the need to confess this apparent oddity that, nonetheless, can be neither seen nor felt. Much like Hustvedt with her shaking fits, I too was unaware—I still am—of what happened to me that night, during The Event. Could my body have reacted to an inexplicable nightmare in my sleep? Could it have been a premonition of what awaits me in the future? Could I have been sleeping in the wrong position? I made an appointment at the Cardiology Division of the University of Minnesota, where I was working on my doctorate. I asked the cardiologist if it had been a heart attack. “No. A heart attack doesn’t just go away,” she told me. They gave me fitness tests, they created a whole map of my body, they prescribed me beta blockers, but the explanation for what had happened to me that night was still wrapped in mystery.

***

This is how Chavoret Jaruboon tells it in The Last Executioner (Maverick House, 2011), his memoirs as an executioner for the government of Thailand. Jaruboon describes how a woman, Ginggaew Lorsoungnern, along with six other people, decided to kidnap the six-year-old son of their former employers. Lorsoungnern herself picked up the child after school and drove him to their hideout, where he would be held until his family handed over the money. After kidnapping him, they decided to murder him, since his parents couldn’t find the exact spot where they were meant to turn in the ransom. Lorsoungnern’s accomplices stabbed him and buried him alive. The Thai authorities soon found them and sentenced three of the conspirators to death, including Lorsoungnern. On the morning of January 13, 1979, Lorsoungnern was placed before a firing squad. She fainted several times, begging for mercy. They tied her up to keep her still and, with a white screen, indicated the exact location of her heart. Ten bullets passed through her body. The attending doctor declared her legally dead. She was transported to the morgue and, while the second death sentence was executed, Lorsoungnern woke up. Desperate screams came from the morgue. Soon, the authorities realized Lorsoungnern was still breathing. This time she begged not for mercy but for death. She was tied, again, before the firing squad. Fifteen shots were fired from an HK MO5 submachine gun. Only then did she perish.

Afterwards, it was discovered that Lorsoungnern did not die the first time because her heart was on the right side.

Like mine.

***

Like Jorge Volpi, I grew up surrounded by doctors. Maybe that’s why I wondered, for much of my youth, if I should study medicine. The answer to the question of this lost calling came one December day during winter break, many years ago, when my uncle invited me to observe a minor operation he was going to perform on my mother, to remove a mole on her face. All I remember is a dizzying trickle of blood running down my mother’s cheek and the rushed, swelling cotton swab that absorbed it. Watching that made me feel terribly faint. At that moment, I was sure of two things: I would never be a doctor, but I would admire them forever. My favorites are internists, who seem to me the closest to the art of literature,  since they formulate a narrative based on symptoms the patient describes to them, creating a story—which is to say, a diagnosis. Back to Volpi: “We live in a ‘heartless’ age. In its obsession with defending business interests from the demon of the state, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate any drive for solidarity among us. As tacky as the slogan may sound, the heart lies to the left. But perhaps I am mistaken.”

The author is mistaken because mine lies to the right—literally—although it leans to the left, if that makes sense. All extremes are horrifying to me. I have left behind the Catholic education that I once took seriously, but that I lost, inevitably, after hoping to have a lively conversation with God—and Him, rudely, not responding.

***

Good essayists share their intuitions. Examen de mi padre and essays like La imaginación y el poder (1998) confirm that Jorge Volpi has the steady hand to unravel the skein and subtly connect diverse threads of imperceptible geometries. Like my organs, Volpi’s writing is not seen, just felt. Nobody could guess what is hidden under my skin without a stethoscope, without auscultating my organs. I have always been fascinated by the sounds that can be transferred from the body to the hand when pediatricians touch children’s bellies to hollow, intrusive rhythms.

Volpi stands out for his ability to write without being seen: an approach to writing reminiscent of the wind that moves the treetops and stirs up the sounds of nature. At one point in the book, Volpi cites Ambroise Paré, the barber surgeon who revolutionized the practice of surgery, especially by introducing the idea—revolutionary in its time—that patients need not feel pain in the process. “Monsters,” Paré writes in the preface to his book, “are things that appear outside the course of Nature (and are usually signs of some forthcoming misfortune), such as a child who is born with one arm, another who will have two heads, and additional members over and above the ordinary.” I have no doubt that Paré would have considered me a monster, given the anatomically strange character of what lies within me. I am an anomaly, but an unnoticeable one. My secrets go unseen, although they are in full view of the whole world.

***

To whom it may concern,

Guillermo was first seen by me in February 1992. He was referred by his Paediatrician because of dextrocardia. No cardiovascular symptomatology was present at the time. 

After examination, chest and abdominal roentgenography and M-mode and Doppler transthoracic echocardiography it was concluded that Guillermo has Congenitally Corrected Transposition of the Great Arteries in Situs Inversus Totalis and mesocardia (Atrial and visceral situs inversus with mesocardia, Atrioventricular discordance, Ventriculoatrial discordance, side-by-side great arteries) without associated lesions.

I read this in a letter my cardiologist wrote on August 27, 2002, which I still keep with me. It is my safe-conduct to interesting conversations.  

***

“Intellectual curiosity about one’s own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery,” Hustvedt writes. I am not clinically ill, I believe, although I’m overrun by various anatomical peculiarities. Some day, my nonoperational valve will have to be replaced with an artificial one or one from a pig. I haven’t yet decided which I will choose—one of the many unknowns surrounding this condition.  The most obvious is the question of why I was born this way. The doctors tell me it’s genetics. My mother, on the other hand, is certain: she says one day, when she was pregnant with me, she was electrocuted.

***

Many writers have suffered a variety of maladies. In Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2014), as he examines the various illnesses that have plagued different writers, physician John J. Ross says William Shakespeare probably suffered some sort of sexually-transmitted illness. Not only are his works rife with references to syphilis, which is believed to have reached Europe in 1493, thanks to Christopher Columbus; his only verifiable medical condition can be found in his handwritten manuscripts: starting at the age of thirty-six, Shakespeare shook while he wrote. His signature seemed to deteriorate over the years. In fact, Ross tells us, many “misreading errors common in the early printed versions of many of the later plays, including Othello, Hamlet, and Lear, are a direct result of a general deterioration in Shakespeare’s writing.” Ross believes the playwright suffered progressive mercury poisoning; the metal was used to treat patients with syphilis. One symptom of this condition is indeed tremors, which could be a “possible cause of Shakespeare’s worsening handwriting.”

Some writers launch their oeuvre to fame despite their misfortunes and illnesses. English poet John Milton composed his Paradise Lost after life dealt him multiple defeats. Blind, bankrupt, with the deaths of his first and second wives and two of his children on his back, and after being imprisoned in the Tower of London, Milton managed to dictate Paradise Lost (1667)—by that time, he had already lost his sight. Ross tells us, referring to Paradise Lost, “Without the humbling experience of sickness, failure, and defeat, Milton never would have felt it necessary to justify the ways of God to men.” Illness draws us closer to death like a pendulum, swinging between two extremes, which forces the writer to see, in death, his last commitment: a memorable oeuvre in exchange for perpetual darkness. Not all human beings are lucky enough to aspire to such a pact. The writer fears not the possibility of death, but that of wasted writing. 

How many masterpieces would never have been written if we shared with the gods the good fortune of eternal life?

***

Why should anyone care if my heart is on the right side and my organs are mirrored, when no one can see them? For physicians, I’m a case study. For the rest of humanity, I’m a case of momentary madness: they don’t believe human beings like myself exist. That is why I hold on to my diagnosis. I have told a lie here, but not deliberately. I just remembered. It says—their words, not mine—that my heart leans instead toward the center. I have also tried to keep my health and my feelings for the world toward the center. You might say this would lead, inevitably, to a boring life. Maybe this is true, but I have had enough; my anatomical peculiarities were not my choice. And I also realize that, little by little, as the years pass, I will have to pay more and more attention to this centric, somewhat deficient heart. Maybe that is why I have been drawn to literature and its silences: to hear my heartbeat more often.

The fact is that my organs will continue being a mystery to medicine. This receptacle that is my body, nonetheless, will escape neither my imagination nor my fictions. The ink I must someday spill into some far-fetched tale—thanks to my organs and their rebellious anatomy—will forever lie in wait for my muscles and my flesh, this permanent revolution within myself, present but hidden, anomalous but operational, as silent as a storm, always mine, now also others’.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: v2osk, Unsplash.

I finished my doctorate a few years ago. I arrived in the United States in 2016 as Trump took office, as my country scrapped its peace treaties, as the Brexit folly unfolded. Watching from the library, a gym, a classroom someplace in the Midwest, I saw it all happening, but I had to carry on—what else could I do? Four years later, my dissertation complete—actually, there were two, but more on that later—all the plans I’d made for a family holiday and celebrations and more fell apart as the Covid lockdown descended. I received my doctorate as an electronic diploma, posted my vote of thanks and triumph on Facebook (as my generation do) and carried on with my craft beer tasting while applying tirelessly—but oh so tired—for academic jobs. Grand Tenure track or a humble Lecturer (an Adjunct, never, they’ll exploit you, so I was told), it couldn’t have mattered less. Because, seriously, what else can you do with a doctorate in Romance Languages and a not-so-aptly named “creative dissertation”? 

I will start, of course, with some background. When I was in the last few years of high school, I had everything very clear: literature and philosophy were my passion. But who studies that? Who would dedicate four or five years to an undergraduate degree in those useless topics? Not long after, in the middle of a module on literature, I had narrowed it down: literary criticism was something people studied, but never creative writing. Writing stories and poems, okay, but a degree? That would be obscure. One thing led to another and finally I woke up to find I was living a double life: by day an aspiring writer with designs on a master’s; by night a translator of self-help books. Time passed and with a novel in my metaphorical pocket and reams of notes and reflections on writing, the day came when I graduated, almost proudly, from that very master’s. “Sweetie,” said my grandma, “What are you going to do now?” I hardly had to think about it. 

After all those years of classes, seminars, and workshops, and with so much writing under my belt, I had to do what any other respected young Latin American writer does nowadays: leave the country. I had to meet other writers and be (mis)educated by them, enter literary competitions, win prizes and, so, get to publish celebrated books—with accolades from celebrated authors on their dustjackets (and, from time to time, return home to make speeches about them). 

Many aeons ago, in the years of the Boom, for whatever reason, the destination was Barcelona. Paris would have done, so they say, but you had to have passed through the Ciutat Comtal to transcend. Today, creative writers from the Spanish-speaking community (as we are known) have another option: New York (not Miami, that’s for Reggaetón). And there, the Mecca: En-Why-You. The University of New York and their Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing in Spanish where the prize-winners of tomorrow hone their skills. But if that doesn’t pan out, if you get rejected (or you don’t get a scholarship, which amounts to the same thing), or if you can’t stand the incessant hubbub of that insomnia-crazed city, there are still two other glowing possibilities: the University of Iowa, the matriarch of Spanish creative writing in the United States—very isolated and very white—and the University of Texas at El Paso, lying in an unbeatable geopolitical location, a frontier-land, its classrooms overlooking the Mexican border. Neither is New York but what can you do?

Admittedly, I am repeating things that nearly everyone knows. And now I come to another: in 2016 the deal with the MFA in creative writing got even more complicated (and for the better, I think). That year, things took a great leap forward when the University of Houston inaugurated the first doctorate in creative writing in Spanish, directed by none other than the magnificent—and feisty—Cristina Rivera Garza. And it’s no accident, as Garza herself confirms, that the programme started in the very year that Trump came to power, when speaking and reading and writing in Spanish in the United States became, more than ever, a political act. Listen up, Donald and chums, the language of the workforce can also make poetry and get funding. Around 2020, before the pandemic hit, there was a rumour of something like Houston’s PhD course happening at the University of Iowa and there was also talk of how certain select Spanish departments were, quietly (almost in secret, shhh), starting to accept “creative work.” Some were even risking all by accepting the controversial “creative doctoral dissertation” just like most English departments (where creative writing has been, for some time now, an unquestioned institution attracting more students than any other “track”). 

Panic over, creative writers are also trained in academe, and we can harmonize literary criticism and fiction—almost as well as Piglia.

But that said, some will ask, what is a “creative dissertation” or “creative work”? (such strange specimens…). They have a point. Isn’t all academic work, indeed, necessarily, in its very essence, creative? And what of doctoral dissertations: aren’t all dissertations required to be creative? It’s difficult to answer that question without entering into interminable discussions about eggs and chickens; thus, to simplify matters, let’s say: in the case of Liberal Arts departments, when we say creative work we mean some form of literary creation by a student or teacher—a novel, a short story, a poem, script, chronicle, memoir, or nonfiction like a creative essay or translation and so on (literature is quite something, a novel, nonfiction, and a long list of etceteras—and no—I’m not going to go there). Take note, it’s not just about fiction and poetic language; but it is a phenomenon inextricably linked to academia: the creative writer is shaped on university programmes dedicated to literary creation, and their “creative work” is work forged by, let’s call it, academic rigour. The irony is that for all the ingenuity and scholarship on display, we insist on giving these authors, and everything they do, the infantile qualifier “creative” (yuck). As if there weren’t already enough confusion in academia. 

What then is this exotic thing called a doctorate in creative writing; who would even consider doing one; and what do you do with it (as my cousin pretty much asked)? Quite honestly, I don’t know. I am not a doctor of creative writing; I learned about the Houston programme very late, and I am sure they wouldn’t have accepted me. I can’t speak with the voice of experience about the creative writing master’s offered (by their majesties) at New York, Iowa, or El Paso, nor do I know much about creative dissertations (eek!), but I have a few suspicions—some even based on reality.

I suspect, for example, that the difference between a master’s and a doctorate is that the student should, must, push beyond the horizons presented by obligatory lectures, with their sights set, always, on producing a brilliant and original debut. I suspect that the MFA can be a good introduction to the trade (as a professional or an amateur?) of reading and writing—or of reading to write—but the PhD should amount to two or three more plot twists. I mean, what can we make of the analysis (Eric Bennett’s) suggesting that, during the long years of the Cold War, financed partly by the CIA, creative writing programmes in the US became another state propaganda weapon (an outrageous conspiracy theory some say)? Or, at the other end of the subversion spectrum, what can we make of their role in Latin America, to cite just one example: “La universidad de las catacumbas,” the so-called “University of the Catacombs” in Videla’s Argentina? I suspect the PhD in question would, without doubt, have some contributions to this discourse, and I suspect the students and teachers involved would have to devote at least some of their time to (re)envisioning the relationship between language and power and all that kinda jazz. I also suspect that such a PhD programme would include some practical tips about the publishing industry—some lessons in how the road to success is never straight and you must learn to navigate it, or how to clear your path—when the reality is far less the poet crafting their verse in splendid solitude and more a case of what Paul Dawson has described as the “public intellectual.”

I spent a good part of my doctorate wrapped in discussions of this sort, trying to find arguments to keep my own creative projects afloat—safe from academics and literary critics (like myself) who would ask (also like myself) if a novel or a short story could properly be considered serious academic work. One of my colleagues once asked, how can anyone today write a novel about love without having read Bauman? (Bateman? said another—it may have been a joke). How do you make an original contribution to learning with a, well, creative dissertation?, asked someone else. From one of my teachers: How are you going to demonstrate what you have researched? And from another: What’s your theoretical framework? All entirely valid questions, of course. So, a great, two-headed beast began to grow; I call it “double dissertation” since this is what my dissertation became. Its first head is a novel (of sorts… let’s call it historical), with whom I did daily, hourly, battle about language, authenticity, commitment, the past and other demons; the other, a “short” essay—or theoretical requirement—which, due to the stuff of (academic) life, grew and grew, sprouting ever more pages and subtitles. Engendered to assuage the worries of my peers—and mine, naturally—it is complete with bibliographic references and an analysis of the narratives and arguments surrounding migration and nationalism (I even read Bauman).

That essay, then, defended and supported my creative dissertation. If anyone in any university job interview ever decides to ask about this business of a novel as a doctoral dissertation, then I have the theoretical foundations—pure and hard—of the aforementioned text. Panic over, creative writers are also trained in academe, and we can harmonize literary criticism and fiction—almost as well as Piglia.

I don’t know if every course with a creative option works, more or less, in the same way. I imagine so. And, to any good soul who reads my dissertation and, like my cousin or my grandma, asks what is the point of doing a doctorate in Latin American literature in the United States and laboring on a creative dissertation only to find it becomes two, I would say they are forgetting one important point. Which is, whether it’s in creative writing or otherwise, any Spanish-speaking doctoral student in the land of the bald eagle is going to wind up teaching Spanish-as-a-second-language and most of the time, at its basic level. SPAN 1001 or 1002, or something like that. Over and over again, all of us will teach the verb “ser,” the numbers, and the colours, we’ll reach direct and indirect object pronouns, and finally, we’ll get to invent and reinvent every variation on the best way to teach the subjunctive. Some more than others, but still, all of us. All of us. From grad students to tenured professors. And that’s fine. 

In time, some of us, no doubt, will escape the cult (of academia) and find another where the skills acquired during a PhD are appreciated and well remunerated. These few will achieve the dream of that other life: one with a fixed schedule and free weekends. Nothing wrong with that… Others of us will remain torn between these two worlds, tied to a visa sponsor, reading among the chaos, up at all hours writing that novel, and, occasionally, an essay about the actions and accidents that brought us here.

Translated by Hebe Powell

Photo: Joshua Hoehne, Unsplash.

Sometimes it feels like all critical approaches to Juan Rulfo are detective work. It’s not apparent what the crime is, but there’s plenty of evidence. The conversation over his two books never runs dry; quite the contrary, they serve as mere pretexts or red herrings. “It happened, not long ago,” says Rulfo in a famous interview on Spanish TV, “that they wanted to prepare an issue of a literary journal dedicated to El llano en llamas. So they wanted to photograph the region, the landscape. They never found it.” And he smiles. In Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué, Cristina Rivera Garza travels to San Juan Luvina like an old cop returning, years later, to an unsolved case. As soon as Rivera Garza mentions Rulfo’s name to a lady from town, the woman smiles. “Of course she knew him. He was that gentleman who told so many lies about the place she lived, isn’t that right?” In 2003, journalist Reina Roffé published Las mañas del zorro, a biography whose title would also be a great fit for a profile of Al Capone. Like all detectives who spend years on one case, Roffé is obsessed with the contradictions, the lies Rulfo told, his secret life. She watches him drink Coca-Cola at a café on the southside of Mexico City; she follows the tracks of a secret lover in Argentina; she documents the writer’s life at a Catholic seminary. More than a critical appraisal, the book is a casefile.

Both El llano en llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955) are often taken in evidence. But evidence of what, exactly? Every prosecutor puts together a different case. Once, at Emmanuel Carballo’s house, Rulfo came face to face with a library with “several bookcases dedicated to his work; out from one shelf poked the slender spines of his books, followed by an impressive number of others that were, in fact, doctoral theses,” as Roffé tells it. Shelves full of books to explain two that would fit in your pocket. Such mammoth attention speaks to the uniqueness of the object studied. Or its supposed uniqueness, at least. There is nothing quite like Juan Rulfo, all these theses tell us, not even the man himself. His silence in print after these two books—and his lack of early work that might allow for contrast or bring to light some creative evolution—lead all spotlights to shine on these two or three hundred pages. You don’t have to read much to find that, when Pedro Páramo comes up, critics persistently ask one question: Was Rulfo a genius or did he get lucky? Both are exceptional conditions. And, in a vicious circle, exceptionality demands scrutiny.

It wasn’t just that his work was sparse—there are other Mexican writers who published a single novel or two stories in a magazine, and they don’t get the same treatment or critical attention—but also that its form and content were cause for astonishment. What Rulfo was doing was different; his books plotted “never-before-seen paths” on the map of Mexican literature, as Rivera Garza contends. No one knew exactly where these campesinos who spoke as if in verse had come from, and no one knew how Rulfo had come up with the fragmentary structure and standstill timeframe of Pedro Páramo. According to Rivera Garza’s reading, Rulfo—like no one else in Mexican literature before him—shows us a woman’s body as lustful, and even includes notions of gender fluidity. Such innovations “aroused suspicion and qualms from even his closest friends,” says Roffé. There, in suspicion, the detective’s work begins.

Rulfo’s Mexicanness did not rely on the real Comala. It was a way of explaining his genius, while also boosting the legitimacy of the Mexican state that had produced him.

There were, in principle, two places these books could have come from, which are the same places all literature comes from: experience or reading. Rulfo’s biography became a well so rich we are drinking from it still. Rulfo was frequently asked in interviews to tell his life story. Orphan at an early age, child in Jalisco countryside landscapes like the ones in his books, lonely young man in an orphanage. Shadowy bureaucrat in Mexico City, migration agent, workers’ foreman at a tire company. Traveling salesman, amateur mountaineer, photographer, frustrated seminarian. His inspiration, his stories had to come from somewhere. Rulfo insisted that his literature had not a single autobiographical element; his critics insisted on the opposite. “The only thing that’s real,” he told Spanish journalist Joaquín Soler Serrano, “is the location.” As we know, Comala is a real town in the Mexican state of Colima, but Comala, the land “in the very mouth of hell,” the “town without noises” but “full of echoes,” does not exist.

Rulfo’s Mexicanness did not rely on the real Comala. It was a way of explaining his genius, while also boosting the legitimacy of the Mexican state that had produced him. A postrevolutionary state, under construction midway through the 1950s, that was also eager to cement its national identity through shared cultural images. Jalisco was rife with such images. With good reason, historian Jean Meyer has said the Jaliso region could be considered “the paradigm of ‘Mexicanness’: charros, bulls, machismo, a soccer team where no foreigner has ever played, religiousness, devotion to marriage, frenchification, etc.” It was only right that Rulfo should be from Jalisco because, through him, this stereotype was not denied but rather subverted, almost broadened. Now western Mexico was also the land of Mexican letters (other canonical writers also hailed from there, such as Juan José Arreola and Agustín Yáñez), where the supposed Mexican fashion of relating to death, poverty, and violence found its most potent lyrical expression.

You need not be an alchemist to know all notions of national purity and authenticity dissolve in the acid of even the kindliest criticism.  Rulfo’s supposedly archetypical Mexicanness is an artifice like any other. Rulfo’s reality is manipulated (like all realities), fabricated (like all realities). A Mexico—the word appears only once in all Rulfo’s work, and symptomatically refers to somewhere else, outside his characters’ world—that “never existed, but that we all believe in,” as Rivera Garza would say.

Firsthand experience of the surrounding country thus showed itself to be insufficient to explain Rulfo. “I have never been able to describe what I see, nor what they tell me, nor what I hear,” the author insisted. “I have never used real things to write.” And, on that note, the detectives turned their eyes to his library. Maybe there they would find the elements with which the author had built his world. Many were curious, for example, to know if he had read William Faulkner before writing Pedro Páramo. Rulfo, in Roffé’s words, “always fearful that his work’s originality might be denied, said no,” although his friends at the time, Juan José Arreola and Antonio Alatorre, told a different story.

Every interview of Rulfo, besides the biographical digression, also included questions about his reading habits: what he read as a boy (when, as he told it, the town priest asked his grandmother to safeguard a library full of books banned by the Vatican, and he read Dumas and Victor Hugo); what he was reading when he wrote Pedro Páramo; what books he would recommend at present. He rewrote the canon every time. Sometimes, the literary production of sixteenth-century New Spain took on capital importance: chronicles, letters, historical accounts. Sometimes he said he had read Faulkner; other times he said he had a great deal in common with José María Arguedas. Rulfo was a heterodox, diverse reader who quoted indigenous legends alongside Von Rezzori, Mujica Láinez, and Bombal. He read “inside and outside the established canons,” Rivera Garza writes: an exercise of peripheral reading that fit in well with his relatively marginal position within the mid-century Mexican literary scene.

Rulfo was, then, someone who shirked fashion. An avant-garde writer who did not choose what to read from the options touted by his Latin American peers—Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Musil—but rather leaned toward peripheral options that, until today, seem atypical for a Mexican writer. “I once had the theory,” Rulfo said, “that literature was born in Scandinavia, in northern Europe, then moved down to central Europe and spread from there to other places.”

Scandinavia? It’s like a movie scene: a police chief assigns an old case to a rookie detective. The rookie flicks through the casefile with little hope. “Who hasn’t tried this already?” he wonders. He holds in his hands a report dated 1982. And he reads: “Juan Rulfo tended toward the literary production of the Nordic outskirts of Europe (Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, but also Finland and Iceland), from two successive periods: the end of the nineteenth century to the start of the twentieth, and the interwar years.” The rookie looks up, wide-eyed. He turns around and sees the rest of his colleagues reading calmly. This changes everything, he thinks. Who had ever heard of this Scandinavian clue? Or rather, who had ever paid it any mind? Even when Rulfo himself had seen fit to repeat it. In a 1959 interview with José Emilio Pacheco, he says, “One of my greatest pleasures as a reader comes from the German and Nordic school of the early 1900s […] There I found the foundations of my literary faith.”

This is a full-fledged confession. The rookie may be a rookie, but he’s done his reading, and he knows people who’ve done their reading, and no one had ever said a word to him about Rulfo and the Scandinavian connection, this Nordic evidence. In the report that blew the lid off, the prosecutor at the time—a Uruguayan, last name Rama—even left a crystal-clear note: “Not enough attention has been paid to this erratic behavior, which is regardless quite significant.”

But there’s more. In 1974, Rulfo told Joseph Sommers he had already run through the few Nordic authors known in Mexico at the time. He had “absorbed” the books of Knut Hamsun of Norway, which took him to “planes hitherto unknown.” Every time he spoke of Scandinavian literature, the same names came up: Hamsun, Lagerlöf, Jacobsen, Laxness. One researcher, last name Martínez Børresen, has already studied the former. The latter inspired great interest in Rulfo but little critical attention. “Halldór Laxness was a true discovery for me,” he told Sommers. “That was long before he received the Nobel Prize.” To Pacheco: “Fernando Benítez and I became interested in him and made his novels available to read in Mexico.” In another interview, Sergio Pitol tells Reina Roffé, “[Rulfo] had also read the Nordic writers, especially one whom almost no one remembers, who is extraordinary, the Icelander Halldór Laxness. And when those names were brought up, Rulfo came back to life.”

Who was this Icelandic miracle worker able to raise the dead? In Roffé’s words, Laxness was “fundamental” to Rulfo. Suspiciously, this assessment does not match the amount of space the biographer dedicates to the Icelander. Laxness takes up barely a paragraph in a book more than 250 pages long. “Laxness’s themes have certain points in common with Rulfo’s,” Roffé writes. “Both authors deal with agricultural crises and the problems that give rise to caciquism and exploitation of rural laborers.” And that’s all she wrote.

If you type the names “Rulfo” and “Laxness” into WorldCat (the vast archive of publications all over the world), you’ll find just one result: Tras los murmullos, a 2010 book published by the University of Copenhagen. The only section of this book that specifically mentions Laxness is just four paragraphs long. Its conclusions are equally laconic: “Like Rulfo in his work, Laxness finds his starting point in the description of an abandoned, isolated place, apparently lacking in any importance. Like in ‘Acuérdate,’ Salka Valka, the novel’s (eponymous) protagonist, the outsider who comes into town anyway, is a young man who falls victim to the community’s humiliations. And, like in ‘Es que somos muy pobres,’ puberty and growing breasts are described with fatal force.” 

C’est tout. In A Companion to Juan Rulfo, Steven Boldy writes, “Rulfo and those close to him have preferred to insist, in an attempt to control the filiation and meaning of his texts, but with scarce stylistic and thematic evidence, on the influence of northern writers such as Knut Hamsun and Halldór Laxness.” Maybe, then, there is not much more to say on the subject. Maybe Rulfo read him, liked him, and recalled him in a couple of interviews. Maybe he exaggerated his importance. Maybe it was another one of those red herrings. Or maybe—but this is all in the mind of the rookie detective, someone who has time and a spark of ambition or ego or who is suddenly overcome by a strange fit of arrogance—no one who has studied the Rulfo case has ever decided, with good reason, to read Laxness’s crowning novel, Independent People, an almost 500-page epic of social realism published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935. What might that novel tell us?

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.