The poem—that strange mirror that reflects the self, the other, and the mystery of both—is not foreign to us. So, for this cover feature, we have chosen Mexican poet Coral Bracho, winner in 2023 of the thirty-third edition of the Premio FIL de Literatura en Lenguas Romances. Bracho has been publishing since 1977, and is an essayist as well. Her long career was fittingly recognized with this prestigious honor late last year. This dossier, assembled by our editor Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza, contains writing by Blanca Luz Pulido, Javier Alvarado y Verónica Murguía. The brief bilingual selection of poems by Coral Bracho that accompanies their essays was translated by U.S. poet and translator Forrest Gander. In 2003, when Coral Bracho received the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, she said, “For poetry, to enter into the territories of language means to recover the parts of language that have worn out or overshadowed its everyday use.” And this is precisely what drew the Premio FIL’s judges to her work: Coral Bracho’s tremendous ability to make of the act of naming an exercise as much of beauty as of precision. 

This issue’s second dossier was put together by Argentine writer and editor Vera Land, and centers on something our Argentine friends do very well: Spanish-language rock music. But that’s not all: writing about music, and about rock bands in particular, is a long-held tradition on both sides of the Andes. So, at LALT, we wanted to take note of this phenomenon, which has always brought together great Argentine writers and journalists. We have titled the dossier “Literature and Rock,” unrhetorically and unhaltingly, like a naked blade on a dark street. We are happy to walk down this route through music, literature, and journalism. Besides Vera Land, the dossier features writing by Walter Lezcano and Humphrey Inzillo on Suárez and Rosario Bléfari, Patricio Rey y los Redonditos de Ricota, and Chilean band Los Tres. “The dream can’t leave us behind; we are the dream,” the legendary Enrique Symns wrote more than two decades ago in the equally legendary Argentine magazine Cerdos & Peces. And it’s true: those of us who were born listening to rock—and who, like myself, bore witness in the eighties to how Argentine bands crossed the Andes to bring us this unthinkable music, written in our own language—will never forget how, at the same time, we were reading poetry books purchased on the street. There was a time when literature and rock made us travel and trip, unstoppable, as if it were all a dream: our dream.

As I’ve said before, we conceived of our annual essay contest as a sort of bulwark, a line of resistance against the mechanized writing styles of the academy. We favor the essay that is exploratory, friendlier to doubt and critique than to the forced ideological certainties that now pollute even the freest academic spaces. In this regard, we are happy to publish in this issue the first finalist essay from this year’s contest, written by Lina Gabriela Cortés of Colombia. The essay is titled “Being Viralata.” And this new issue brings much more besides. In our section on classic authors, we include a brief selection from the letters of Rosario Castellanos to Ricardo Guerra, written between 1952 and 1953—a true gem from the history of Mexican literature, translated by Nancy Jean Ross. In the interview section, we feature Juan Camilo Rincón’s conversation with Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo and Fernando Valcheff-García’s with Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica, author of the disturbing novel Tender Is the Flesh. And, finally, Eduardo Suárez talks with Mexican writer Brenda Navarro, who reminds us that literature need not necessarily have a message. We can only agree. 

On her end, our translation editor, Denise Kripper, has organized two remarkable dossiers. The first, a full selection of works “Seeking Publisher,” is an open window onto the publishing world for literature in translation. This dossier features excerpts from as-yet unpublished works in translation by Mexican poet Víctor Cabrera, Cuban writer and journalist Jorge Olivera Castillo, and Mexican novelist Emiliano Monge. The other dossier, as always, consists of Translation Previews. In this issue, we feature the essay collection Planes Flying over a Monster by Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París, translated by Christina MacSweeney and Philip K. Zimmerman; The Trees by Bolivian writer Claudia Peña Claros, translated by a friend of the magazine, Robin Myers; and, finally, Fog at Noon by Colombian writer Tomás González, in translation by Andrea Rosenberg.

We never tire of building bridges. In this issue, our readers will find our permanent sections on poetry, fiction, Indigenous literature, and Brazilian literature, plus other essays and the odd surprise hidden in the electronic pages of Latin American Literature Today. 

I’ll conclude this note recalling what Chilean poet Jorge Teillier told us so many times: “Poetry must be as commonplace as the sky that spills over us.” Coral Bracho’s poetry lives up to this dictate with which we judge certain works that may be within arm’s reach, but are no less complex for it. And I’m happy for it, as all her readers should be. 

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Marcelo Rioseco, editor-in-chief of LALT, by Romina García.

This dossier on Aira was curated by guest editor María Belén Riveiro. Our initial idea was to publish the translation of the prologue to Aira’s translation of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. María Belén undertook this work alongside Philippa Page, a researcher at the University of Newcastle, along with an enthusiastic group of students and professors from the United Kingdom. But that’s not all: María Belén also invited translator and literature professor Aixa Zlatar to contribute an article. María Belén herself compiled an illuminating collection of quotes from César Aira in which he writes and reflects on translation. In these quotes, Aira sometimes seems to contradict himself, but don’t let that fool you: Aira has thought long and hard about translation, but he has not always thought the same thing. Of course, in this dossier we include Aira’s prologue to his translation of Cymbeline. These texts are accompanied by a detailed translators’ note by María Belén and Philippa. And, in an interview with Colombian journalist and cultural critic Juan Camilo Rincón, Daniel Mecca discusses Aira as the author of an oeuvre that is simultaneously disproportionate and rigorous. We are confident that, with this dossier, we offer a new reading of one of the least-known facets of this great Argentine writer.

The other dossier we feature in this new issue of LALT focuses on Latin American young adult literature. This genre, so well-established in the English-speaking world, does not share the same conditions of translation, publication, and distribution in our countries. We wanted to know what’s going on with this literature, and this dossier is the result of that question. This initiative was led by British translator Claire Storey, who assembled a set of texts that offer a comprehensive look at different angles of literature for young readers. In this dossier, Daniela Ottolenghi reflects on the relationship between literature and virtual spaces; David Jacobson writes on the translation of Latin American young adult literature and the tremendous challenges this endeavor implies; Claire Storey and Federico Ivanier also respond to questions on their respective practices. What can we say of these “people who write about young people” in this age of algorithms and artificial intelligence? I’ll quote Federico Ivanier: “In reality, with or without the internet, teenagers today face the same challenges as always: understanding who they are, what they desire, how to achieve it, how to coexist, how to transition into adulthood, what love consists of, or how to be yourself, and this is not an exhaustive list.” That’s what young adult literature is all about: making connections; discovering yourself and discovering in general; talking to those young readers who, while reading themselves, start to read others and understand how different we all are from each other. The dossier closes with an excerpt from Never Tell Anyone Your Name by Federico Ivanier, translated by Claire Storey.

A great many names grace this issue of LALT. Indranil Chakravarty writes from India on Octavio Paz’s experience as a diplomat in his country; Juan Camilo Rincón and Natalia Consuegra interview Mexican writer Jazmina Barrera. In our Brazilian Literature section, Sheyla Smanioto and Cristiane Sobral write on the Black experience in Brazil. Our translation previews, as usual, aren’t to be missed: Katie Brown, Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn, and Jordan Landsman share their respective translations of Alejandra Blanca, Daniela Tarazona, and Ángel Bonomini. This issue also includes the second installmen of our collaboration with Hablemos, escritoras, where LALT’s readers can find three interviews, all by Adriana Pacheco, with Ecuatorian writer Mónica Ojeda, Argentine writer Clara Obligado, and Puerto Rican writer Esmeralda Santiago.

What’s more, our lead translator and Managing Editor, Arthur Malcolm Dixon, interviews Brazilian writer and translator Bruna Dantas Lobato, winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her translation of Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain. In our section of texts from World Literature Today, we highlight Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, winner—among many other honors—of the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, awarded by WLT from the University of Oklahoma. It is fitting to quote his nominating juror’s justification for endorsing Kadare for the Neustadt: “Kadare is the successor of Franz Kafka. No one since Kafka has delved into the infernal mechanism of totalitarian power and its impact on the human soul in as much hypnotic depth as Kadare.” The three articles we share in this section, available for the first time in Spanish, were first published in WLT Vol. 95 No. 1 in 2021. In his acceptance speech, Kadare refers to the relationship between literature and totalitarianism. No surprises here. His reflections arise from his lived experience in Albania, and are more pertinent today than ever. Kadare recalls that, “In totalitarian regimes, literature and the arts were tested cruelly, in a manner unknown in world history until then. We know about the punishment of writers even before: the censors, the prisons, and the camps were well known.” What astonishes us is not the cruelty of the past, but the dangers of the future. And not just for literature and writers.

It would be impossible to summarize everything contained in our June issue. Here, readers will once again find poems, stories, and reflections on the practice of translation. New names. In our Indigenous Literature section we present three trilingual poems by Macuxi poet Trudruá Dorrico. A final curiosity in this issue is a brief text by Gabriela Mistral, “Less Condor and More Huemul,” first published in Santiago de Chile in 1925 and translated here by Gonzalo Montero. The huemul is a species of deer native to the Andes that appears on the coat of arms of Chile alongside the condor. In this text, Mistral revindicates the spiritual, feminine figure of this peaceful animal, wishing, “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…” It is clear that Mistral is referring here to something more. As in Kadare’s case, this meditation is both a revindication and a warning. In these polarized times, there is much to be said—in Mistral’s own words—for belonging to “the order of the gazelle.” In 2024, totalitarianisms lie just around the bend. And who knows if there also hangs a condor in the air, awaiting our arrival, circling over a potential wasteland.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Marcelo Rioseco, editor-in-chief of LALT.

I had read Alejandro Zambra before. Ways of Going Home in particular struck me as a very well realized book. I thought, somehow, I had come to understand his literary world just by reading it. But I was wrong. Reading his last three books, one after another, gave me a new idea of Zambra’s literature—something I had sensed before, but couldn’t quite put my finger on. Now I know: it’s the strength of his prose’s tone. An encompassing tone that wipes away all dissonance, that stacks up differing stories and moods almost unnoticed. It is not a sad tone, as some have said. Or perhaps it is, but there is something more to it. It is also, I think, a way of capturing the world. Or feeling it. If I had to think of Alejandro Zambra as a poet, I would turn to this tone of his, so personal and unique. In the end—sometimes, for some people—prose is one of the hardest forms of poetry.

Marcelo Rioseco: Let’s imagine a fictional scenario in which we could talk to Gonzalo, the character from your novel Chilean Poet, and ask him, years after his separation from Carla, if being a stepfather was worth it. What do you think he’d say? The question might lead us to think about the rather strange circumstance of being a father with a sort of expiration date if things go wrong. Where do you think it goes, all that love that then seems impossible to get back? I ask because I think the ending of the novel points in that direction: two men, walking along, trying to get something back, although even they themselves aren’t quite sure what that something is.

Alejandro Zambra: Your question is more beautiful than any answer I could give, but anyway, I’d better answer it. I’d say it took me a few months to realize Chilean Poet was a rewriting—or maybe a rereading—of The Private Lives of Trees. Stepfatherhood was there from the start, of course, connecting the two books, since Chilean Poet was always more a novel about stepfatherhood than a novel about poetry. But shortly after that scene fell into place, in the first third of the novel, when Gonzalo grapples with the word stepfather, I started back down that tennish-year-long bridge between the two books. Maybe the fundamental difference between The Private Lives of Trees and Chilean Poet lies in the intensity of that struggle with the word stepfather. And in the magnitude of the resulting defeat.

I think, especially since Bonsai, I’ve tried to talk about the crisis of legitimacy and authority that we suffer and feel for ourselves, but that we also celebrate and feel thankful for on a daily basis. From certain points of view, all arguments are about legitimacy and authority. I was interested—and I still am—in depicting that delegitimized space of the stepfather in relation to masculinity. Stepfathers are the bad guys: that’s made clear in literature and the press and even in language itself, in both denotation and connotation. It’s hard to identify with that figure. So a stepfather like Gonzalo doesn’t necessarily get together with other stepfathers, because perhaps they all share this prejudice. The same goes for masculinity; it’s not easy to identify with other men, and yet building yourself up or putting yourself forward as an exception is absurd and somehow deceitful. Plus, exception is solitude. An exceptional story is a story of solitude. It’s hard for us to build camaraderie or reformulate what we have traditionally understood as camaraderie. And our relationships continue to be brutally competitive.

I think, from early on, Gonzalo knows his experience as a stepfather has been essential, or rather he distrusts other experiences. Then there’s the guilt of love’s classic spell; the guilt of clinging to the hypothesis of love-for-life when the only thing we know from the start, when it comes to love, is that separation is a permanent possibility. And also the guilt of having made assurances, of having consciously and sometimes consistently raised a child. You don’t get close to a child just to abandon that child. And, even though Gonzalo has a long and even solid line of reasoning that allows him to conclude he did not abandon Vicente, he knows he did in fact abandon him.

Vicente is the real protagonist. He’s the one who was abandoned, but he’s forced to suppose and accept that he wasn’t, that the story’s protagonists were his mother and his stepfather; there is a grief that he cannot officially, legitimately experience. That’s where the prefix “step-” starts acting against the stepson. There’s one apparently minor scene that was really hard for me to write, because it was especially painful for me, in which Vicente asks Gonzalo, almost completing his sentence, casually, if he’s ever going to abandon them. And Gonzalo has to say no, he’s never going to abandon them. When he gives this answer, of course he hopes it’s true. And, at the same time, he knows it’s not true. Or it might not be true.

M.R.: I was totally on board with the title Chilean Poet until I got to the party scene, with what seems to be the conclave of every poet in Santiago, and I joked to myself, “This book should be called Chilean Poets.” It’s a very funny scene, by the way, almost a parodic homage. What were you trying to say about Chilean poets in this novel? Is it a way of putting yourself, and other Chilean poets too, under a microscope? Who really is the Chilean poet in this story?

A.Z.: That’s exactly why I like the title being singular—you can read the novel through your question, almost as a riddle. Who is the Chilean poet? At any rate, I could only ever enter into the mystery of nationality from the place of Chilean poetry, because that’s the only element of my nationality, my Chileanness, that I’ve ever accepted as tradition. Everything else I questioned, or disputed, or ignored, or cast aside, but I’ve never been immune to Chilean poetry. Very quickly, very naturally, I found my playmates in Chilean poetry.

I aspired to poetry. I was always better at telling stories than writing poems, but I aspired to poetry. At the age of twenty, I was a bad poet, maybe because I took advantage of poetry’s “illegibility”—I wanted to talk without talking, to make it seem like I was saying something, like someone moving their lips and their hands, confident they’re being watched from afar, with no sound. Or like someone who swears they can play guitar when really they have no idea, they just want to be invited to join the band… And, well, they invited me to join and I got up onstage to make a fool of myself, and some people said nice things or understanding things and some people said things that seemed awful, but weren’t that awful in the end, or were awful, but much less awful than being alone. 

M.R.: I really enjoyed the appearance of Sergio Parra as himself, a sort of literary cameo. I’m not sure if he’s the only character who appears under his real name, but it’s a very amusing nod to the inner history of Santiago’s literary scene. Are your characters based on real people, or are they 100% literary fiction?

A.Z.: I always work with real-life models: someone’s eyes, someone else’s hands… Someone’s way of thinking, mediated by an exogenous sense of humor. But there are rare cases when the person you’re imagining as you write coincides entirely with the person you mean to depict. This happened with a lot of characters in Chilean Poet—Rosabetty Muñoz, Armando Uribe, Nicanor Parra, and Sergio Parra, of course. I mean, I didn’t want to write a “documentary” novel about Chilean poetry, I was going the other way; I wanted to come up with a literature that could serve as a playing field for the studies and adventures of Gonzalo and Carla and Pru and Vicente. And it felt good to mix apples with oranges, but along the way, like I said, I came across character-people whom I decided I would rather keep intact.

M.R.: What’s the place of children’s literature in your own world? I ask because you say in your book Literatura infantil, “The idea that I make and read real literature, while the books we read together are a sort of substitute or imitation or preparation for real literature, strikes me as unfair as it is false.” I think there’s a lot to be said here about “real literature” and “necessary literature”—necessary in order to live, to be with a son or daughter, for instance. What would you say on that subject?

A.Z.: Literature is company, above all. There are times when we want to seem more intellectual, but the social drive always comes first. That will to play has always been there—it may be bashfully disguised, but it’s there. Reading and writing are activities we tend to carry out in solitude, but always, in the back of our minds, with an eye to company. In childhood, or towards the end of childhood, literature shone out like some kind of obscure band that nobody else had heard of, so it became imperative to leave your neighborhood and seek out other fans of this band. You wouldn’t have to go too far, either, because in every community, on every block there were one or two weirdos you could sit down and talk with. This brought about a different way of moving through the city and understanding human relationships. And through these bonds—often desperate, fervent, passionate, and loquacious—we managed to preserve the intensity and willfulness of childhood. We’re still doing it. I am, anyway. For me, the fluctuation between naivety and the desire for naivety is still very important. The impossible pursuit of naivety, we might call it, mediated by a genuine, involuntary naivety. Man, it’s hard to talk about these things; I don’t really understand them myself, they work better when we skim over a story and spot details in which we recognize ourselves. But I’m thinking about the desire to understand everything all over again, starting fresh. For example, at the moment, due to my fatherhood, I’m very interested in adanism, which obviously gets a lot of bad press. Every day you discover something that’s new to you but old to the world. But there is something important in that breakdown, that malfunction: there’s a party we sometimes don’t let ourselves into. 

Anyway, I think that’s my doorway into the “children’s” world. Although, especially since the birth of my son, I can sense a sort of “pre-literary” space—that’s what I like to call it, but those aren’t exactly the right words. An initial moment, I mean, when literature, music, and humor are all blended together in one big delightful mess. I’m talking about intuitions here, because I don’t know if I ever really experienced that phase, if I truly lived through it. Nobody read me stories when I was a kid. On the contrary, there I was, like so many of us, in a constant struggle to leave childish things behind, to stop feeling ridiculous—that’s how I remember it. But still, I feel I’ve retrieved that phase I never had, that phase I may have partially made up, through poetry. Certain things I stumbled upon by chance, things that even contradicted what I was looking for, ended up being very important to me.

M.R.: How does it feel writing in the second person, writing to someone who hasn’t yet arrived? Whom are you speaking to in that moment? Is it actually a kind of monologue, a way of waiting for that child to whom you’re writing poems on your phone?

A.Z.: I don’t know how old I was when I first read “Monólogo del padre con su hijo de meses,” the poem by Enrique Lihn. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. That’s the implicit model for Literatura infantil, and maybe for all writing on fatherhood in the Chilean tradition. I was really impressed by that vision of a tragic, tender, and celebratory time (the “new joyous and painful game”), a form of realism I practiced daily as soon as I had my son in my arms. Because when a father, enraptured and tearful, holds his newborn child, he’s also thinking, “I’m going to drop him.” So the practice of speaking to someone who can’t answer ceases to be precisely that, or only that. The bond also formed, for me, in the surrealistic version of that famous semi-sleeplessness: Literatura infantil is pure recliner writing, my son and I half-asleep. He’s six years old now, and he talks a lot, and it’s hard for me to remember the time before he was talking because really, and in part thanks to Lihn’s poem, my son and myself were in communication from the first second; I never felt that classically masculine sensation of uselessness in the first few months. Later on we’ll become the main characters in the classic comedies of errors that take place between fathers and sons, I suppose.

M.R.: In Chilean Poet and in Un cuento de navidad, there’s a sensation of settling scores—but not in personal terms, nor in the penalty box. I’m not talking about revenge, but rather, instead, an author who’s settling scores with his past, with himself. Do you think, in literature (and especially in the act of writing itself), there’s an effort to do this, to settle scores, as if the book you’re writing could illusorily “improve upon or make up for” an unchangeable past?

A.Z.: I subscribe to that idea. Sometimes I even have a visceral feeling that literature does change the past. In any case, the past comes to us most commonly in the form of a question, that’s its everyday form, and literature allows for that kind of conversation. Writing is a habit, first and foremost. There’s the whole question of “becoming a writer,” of course… At some point you make some kind of decision, but it’s also the case that habit and play coincide. And other goals didn’t go your way. I’m not interested in any evangelical position on writing. I lean that direction, sometimes, but really we’re all locked in a struggle against chronological time, against the dictatorship of chronological time, and each of us fights that fight differently, in our own way. I was lucky enough to have literature around me. And it was around me in a way that was casual, with no obligations, not untethered from play. In its pure, pre-bibliographical state, we might say. If not for writing I would understand less, I would have understood less; writing has been my crutch. The imagery may seem alarmist, but I like that aphorism of Canetti’s that says, quite simply, “The pencil, my crutch.”

M.R.: There’s a scene in Un cuento de navidad where the writer and the editor argue over a copy of Bolaño’s 2666. When I read it, I realized there’s a certain correlation between Bolaño and yourself, in the way you both relate to Chilean poetry. Of course, Bolaño had a more epic, even hyperbolic view of poets than the one we read in your writing, but the two of you both have that connection to the world of Chilean poetry that I feel somehow characterizes all Chilean poets. Maybe it’s like when Gonzalo says somewhere that, if you’ve published a book, “you’re screwed, you’re a Chilean poet now.”

A.Z.: Of course, but I was already older when I read Bolaño. I was twenty-one or twenty-two when I came across Nazi Literature in the Americas. Perhaps for that reason Bolaño wasn’t like a father to me, he was more like that older brother who gets home late at night and climbs into your room through the window and starts telling you all about his adventures… Bolaño was partial to the same poets I admired, but discovering him also meant envisioning a contemporary Chilean prose, because even though I had grown up reading Chilean novelists, I used to see Chilean prose as a part of literary history, not a part of the future. I think that moment was healthy for us, when we “de-exagerrated” the differences between poetry and prose. And between traditional and avant-garde, and between poetry and antipoetry. Nowadays the Nerudian paradigm, demythicized and then immediately remythicized by Nicanor Parra, seems so old-school to me. I’m more interested in the poet once removed from the hero-antihero axis. I’m interested in seeing the poet fulfill a role in his community or cook up a plate of rice one Sunday afternoon.

M.R.: I’ve noticed, as have many others, that against all odds there are still a great deal of Chilenisms in your prose, even though you’ve lived out of the country for some time. How is your literary relationship with these expressions and turns of phrase? Do they help you write?

A.Z.: I believe literature is the second language of the monolingual. That second language includes one’s own language and the variants of Spanish. We were always willing not to understand. That’s what I’m most thankful to literature for. And to music. Unfamiliar idioms, foreign words, they weren’t problems—quite the contrary, they increased the attraction. We were willing not to understand slightly, momentarily; not understanding was the step that led to a possible future understanding, which sometimes simply never came. And who cares if it came or not? I know that’s not exactly what you asked, but it’s still true. Your own country’s literature always matters more to you, causes you more pain. I’m tremendously interested in these issues, I find them entertaining. And I feel no attraction to the blind, furious defense of any one single identity or state of things; any mechanism that seeks to freeze conversation, any form of paralysis, of certainty… Plus, when you live outside your own country, every loss is really a gain, a discovery. Every time you miss your own way of speaking, you discover nuances you didn’t know you needed. 

I also love to savor the hodgepodge of accents, I’ve always liked that. My way of speaking changes, and so my way of writing changes too. Because, even though my idea of style is hazy and protean, it feeds on speech; there is some part of my prose that demands a certain musical dimension, that aspires to it. I’m not generalizing. As a reader, I like lots of books in which orality works in other ways, but in my case I need every single word to go up against the sound test. And I’m more influenced every day by the way my son speaks—he has a strong, chronic case of Mexico City Spanish. But I like to lose my confidence in words, and to find myself having to construct an illusory, provisional new confidence. I love it, Marcelo, having these sorts of issues at the age of 48. Every day I think about nuances, details. And I’m impressed by the persistence of Chilean ways, too. We’ve put together a fun community here, with some Chilean musicians in particular; that helps a lot to generate a sort of fertile confusion, which makes life a little easier to bear. 

M.R.: One question we always ask here at LALT has to do with the very nature of this magazine: being Latin American. I’d like to ask you how your perspective on Chile and Chilean literature has changed since you’ve been living in Mexico, a country with great cultural heft. Do you feel like you’re more in Latin America, or just in Mexico, or perhaps just that you’re not in Chile? Does the place you’re writing from matter to you?

A.Z.: Of course. I’d say I feel like I’m in transit—not just between Chile and Mexico—and I enjoy it. I turn to images, of course, because comparing countries is a game (or vice) as absurd as it is inevitable and necessary. Just the same, on every trip home my country strikes me as more thoroughly Latin American. But at the same time, perhaps contradictorily, that pathological Chilean pessimism is vying—ever more acutely, in my case—with that senseless and inexplicable Mexican optimism. I don’t see it as a rivalry, but as a passage, I think, heading towards the future much more than the past. I really want my son to appropriate more of my country, to feel it’s his own. It’s a simple, dumb feeling. I love it when we come back from Chile and I can hear his accent has changed a little bit. 

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, by Agence Opale / Alamy Stock Photo.

Alejandro Zambra is the author of ten books, including Chilean Poet, Multiple Choice, Bonsai, The Private Lives of Trees, and Ways of Going Home. A recipient of a Cullman Center fellowship from the New York Public Library, he has won the English PEN Award and the PEN/O. Henry Award and was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, and Harper’s Magazine, among other publications. He lives in Mexico City.

]]> https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/2024/03/entrevista-alejandro-zambra/feed/ 0 https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/2024/03/editors-note-march-2024/ https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/2024/03/editors-note-march-2024/#respond Sun, 24 Mar 2024 02:28:47 +0000 https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/?p=31728 Quarrels between poets are a familiar story. Any reader interested in such things will know them well. They pop up throughout the literary history of the West, but are not exclusive to it. The dispute between Homer and Hesiod, Martial’s epigrams, the glorious Spanish Golden Age with rivalries as notorious as the one between Quevedo and Góngora. In France, during that same century, poets took sides in the classic debate between the old-school and the modern. The list grows long. In Latin America, Chile was perhaps the most disciplined disciple of the Spanish Baroque writers. Neruda, Huidobro, and De Rokha all rode into long-lasting pitched battles. They were not without their followers. Their struggles were bitter, but also intense and amusing. When it comes to literature, Chile has always been a ring defined by its own geography. Insularity and intensity, animosity and blind defense. Chilean society has only begrudgingly gotten along with its poets, and vice versa. Nevertheless, these quarrels serve to shed light on literary history, paradoxically revealing that poetry is always a subversive act, going against the grain: a practice for a select few.  

That brings us to the author on this issue’s cover: Alejandro Zambra, who is himself the author of a novel titled Poeta chileno, translated by Megan McDowell as Chilean Poet. No one could remain indifferent to that title. A Chilean writer—a writer who is himself a poet—writes about one or many Chilean poets. Doubly unique. The title is somewhat deceitful, as it shies away from placing the novel on the battleground of Chilean literature. It is, in this sense, an exception to what I mentioned earlier. An upper-case exception, I must say. If the book does set foot on the battlefield, it does so parodically, with humor and freedom. Chilean Poet goes a different direction and, by shunning the obvious, asks a deeper question: “Who is the Chilean poet?” Or, in other words: “Who is really the poet in this story?” We spoke to Zambra about this novel and other books: Literatura infantil and Un cuento de Navidad. There is a great deal to say about this feature. First, we thank Megan McDowell, a longtime friend of LALT, who helped us put it together. Here we present her translator’s note from the forthcoming new edition of My Documents as well as a never-before-seen translation from the same book. The feature also includes the epilogue by Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo from the recent new edition of La vida privada de los árboles (Anagrama, 2022). Make no mistake: while we talk about Chilean poets in this feature, we also talk about children’s literature, the risks and wagers of fatherhood, personal relationships, loves unraveled and rebuilt, sentiments between friends, and a love rarely mentioned in literature: the love of stepparents. Allow me to correct myself: a love rarely mentioned. Period. 

This issue’s second dossier is dedicated to Elisa Lerner of Venezuela, a multifaceted writer who has cultivated, as Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza points out in his interview with her, “crónicas, drama, essays, short stories, novels, and aphoristic writing.” Lerner is one of those hard-to-find writers who take poetry seriously while not being a poet. It’s no surprise, then, that their conversation touches on the value of prose and language. Meanwhile, Néstor Mendoza’s essay, “Notes on De muerte lenta by Elisa Lerner,” puts forth an approach to “the first of two novels published by Lerner,” which “possesses the Carpentian ‘severity of a courthouse.’” You need a lot of silence to write this kind of novel, and a lot of silence to read it. In her article, “The Metaphorical Concept of the Mirror in Elisa Lerner,” María Josefina Barajas reflects on the mirror as a metaphor in Lerner’s crónicas, the mirror as “object-subject of writing.” The dossier closes with the short story “Papa’s Friends,” originally published in 1991 and translated by Amy Prince. 

The fiction section of this issue leans toward the Southern Cone, with Luisa Valenzuela, Tali Goldman, and Martín Kohan from Argentina, along with María José Navia from Chile. In our indigenous literature section, we present four poems in Nahuatl by Baruc Martínez and four poems in Tutunakú by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez. In our window onto literatures written in other parts of the world—provided thanks to the generous support of World Literature Today—we feature an article on Korean literature by researcher Eun-Gwi Chung titled “‘Tough as Ox Tendons’: Korean Literature and Returning Catastrophe,” along with a story by US writer Philip Metres, “Lost in the Underground Cathedral,” about a trip on Moscow’s subway system in 1992. This section ends with an interview of Japanese poet Shizue Ogawa by US historian Alice-Catherine Carls.  

In other news, we’re happy to announce the start of a literary friendship. From this issue on, through an exclusive agreement with literary podcast platform Hablemos, escritoras, LALT will publish excerpts from their interviews with outstanding Latin American women writers. In this issue, we start with interviews with Argentine writer Selva Almada, Mexican writer Brenda Navarro, and Peruvian writer and journalist Gabriela Wiener. We are grateful to Adriana Pacheco for granting us access to this monumental project, which has already carried out over five hundred interviews. We are lucky to share their work in our digital pages. This agreement would not have come to pass without the initiative of our translation editor, Denise Kripper, whose translation of Salt by Argentine writer Adriana Riva we also highlight in this issue. Salt was published by Veliz Books in February of this year. Our readers can find an excerpt from Denise’s translation into English in the “Previews” section of this issue.

In 2023, we launched two contests: one for literary essays and another for book reviews. Our goal with these contests was to promote literary writing. Academic articles have come to saturate the world of critical reflection, and their objective is to feed an academic machinery from which the everyday reader is conspicuously absent. We, in contrast, hope to vindicate the literary essay written with the reader in mind, whose logic rests on exploration, closeness, and ultimately an invitation to read. With this goal in mind, we present in this issue the last three finalist texts from our first-ever Literary Essay Contest (2023), by Luis Madrigal, Daniela Suárez, and Rodrigo Mariño, respectively. Likewise, we present the three winners of our first-ever Book Review Contest (2023). Congratulations to Irina Ruth Garbatzky for her review of Ilusiones de botánica by Cuban writer Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Ronny de Jesús Ramírez for his review of Después de tanto arder by Dominican poet Soledad Álvarez, and Maikel Alexander Ramírez for his review of Maniac by Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut. Here we also feature Rodrigo Figueroa’s interview of Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue, plus interviews of poet Ana Negri and Paula Vásquez, author and founder of the Lata Peinada bookstore in Spain. The issue comes complete with poems by five Latin American poets and much more besides.

And so LALT carries on, with faith in the obvious: literature is irrepressible. It refuses to be either an atlas of our Latin American ills or a documentation of barbarism. One need be no prophet in order to see how literature is now disappearing from the university classroom at an ever more alarming pace. Some call this phenomenon “the crisis of the humanities.” We hear tell of the market, of budget cuts, of the student body’s lack of interest. But this is a condescending, even deceitful description. What’s in crisis is not literature—just reading this journal should be enough to corroborate the good health literature still enjoys in this age plagued by algorithms and social networks. Literature has simply refused to be anything else, to be distorted, to be exhibited as an illustration of the social sciences. There are already professors who speak of “a university outside the university.” And that’s a good thing; the idea is tempting. This nonexistent university might still offer what in certain neoliberal countries is called “a public, free, and high-quality education.” Delusion or utopia? Maybe both. It would not be so outlandish, at this time of crisis in the humanities, to start reading Latin American Literature Today as the first textbook of a university whose only aim is to give away poetry to any and all takers.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Marcelo Rioseco, editor-in-chief of LALT.

Marcelo Rioseco: When I first saw the cover of Páez (2023), I noticed the press behind the book is now Cerdos & Peces, which transported me immediately to the first edition from 1995, published when Fito was just 32 years old. Let’s take a quick look back at the past: how and why did the idea of making a book about such a young musician come about? Why did you choose to publish a new edition now with Cerdos & Peces?

Vera Land: The urge to do projects together, that’s what motivated us in that moment. Fito had been close to our magazines, he had supported our independent journalistic endeavors; he came to our offices, sometimes before the sun came up. He told us what he thought about our cover stories, it was an informal thing, friendly. Then we made plans for three books. The first was Invitación al abismo (Espasa Calpe, 1994), a compilation of texts by Enrique Symns, where Fito took part in the selection and wrote the prologue. The next book was the biography, and, lastly, a book that never came together. I’ve forgotten what that one was about. Fito was young, but his work was already realized to a great extent. I think that was clear. 

As far as the new edition with Cerdos & Peces, I did the relaunch for old times’ sake. I have an ambivalent and unresolved relationship with Cerdos & Peces: I take a critical eye to much of the magazine’s content. It was that way in the moment, but much more so now. At the same time, I’m the person who was there for the longest time and who contributed the most, sometimes trying to act as a counterweight to postures or premises I didn’t share, but always generating the conditions for the magazine to exist and get to the presses because I loved the fact that we were making a magazine. There were periods of time when every issue felt like pushing a boat through sand and others when it floated through the city in airy ecstasy. I constantly miss how artists would mill around my desk at Cerdos & Peces. Writing a tagline or coming up with a title surrounded by people and interruptions was really formative. I don’t need a favorable environment to concentrate. 

In 2018, when I started writing the biography of Estelares, an Argentine rock band, I connected with two previous biographies I had coauthored with Symns: Los Tres, la última canción (Aguilar, 2002) and Páez (Espasa Calpe, 1995). Both books were out of print, and I thought, “after publishing the Estelares book, I have to put out new editions.” I wasn’t in touch with Symns over the past ten years. A few months after the release of Estelares, detrás de las canciones (Hormigas Negras, 2022), I sent him a message through a mutual friend, asking if he was on board with the new edition of Páez. He responded with a concise “yes.” I finally got up the nerve to go visit him. He was convalescent and, his having been a person with extraordinary physical strength, it wasn’t easy for me to see him bedridden. On my second visit, I realized that bringing him the new edition was going to give him a little bit of joy in the midst of that dull everyday existence, which he wasn’t going to escape. I pushed up the schedule so I could walk into his sickroom with the book. The morning I finished writing the prologue, I added the date: San Telmo, March 16, 2023. I went out to buy oranges and, not long after, I got the news of his passing. 

M.R.: You’re credited in the book as Vera Land, not Andrea Álvarez Mujica. What’s it like being two literary persons in 2023? Does the Vera who wrote with Enrique Symns in the nineties still exist?

V.L.: I’m handling the issue of being two literary persons well, at the moment. A few years ago it was very complicated for me. I wanted to get away and have a new life, without a past. That lasted for a while, and it was interesting. That Vera Land from the mid-nineties to the early two-thousands still exists, she’s within me. But the Vera Land character from 1986 to 1991 evaporated. Readers miss that phase in my writing, when I was 20 to 25 years old, but since I have nothing more to give along those lines, in terms of writing and in terms of the character, to be honest and so as not to create false expectations, I’m very careful with how I use my pseudonym. I save it for new texts connected to materials from the past. I’ve been thinking about a compilation of my earliest articles to satisfy the relative expectation for that brief period of my career as a young writer. What came before, the poetry I wrote between the ages of 13 and 20, was never published and is now lost. I have somehow managed to get my new music books, my current novels, and my new poems to coexist with my pieces that have almost faded away entirely. 

M.R.: A very powerful part of the book are the narrative and journalistic techniques with which you wrote Fito’s biography. It’s a book that even seems to preempt what we now call the “Latin American chronicle.” There are reports, interviews, informal conversations captured on hidden tape recorders, personal testimonies (from main and supporting characters), opinions from friends, and even drawings, among many other narrative and journalistic resources and strategies. Where did that idea come from? Was that something that was already being done in Argentina at that time?

V.L.: The idea of the narrative techniques came from Symns. When we wrote the biography of Fito Páez, very few rock books were being published in Argentina. But still, there was the tradition of the multivocal rock book that arranged and compiled fragments of testimonies, touching on different subjects with no intervention from the author or authors. We used that model for some sections. But the determining factor as far as the form and structure of Páez was Symns’ initial idea: applying the subgenres of journalism to biography. “A book that reads like a magazine, with sections,” he said at our first meeting. Of course, that wasn’t being done at that time. I think that’s the source of the novelty that still feels fresh thirty years later. I learned how to be a journalist in the second half of the eighties in the editorial offices of print magazines and the nearby bars that were extensions of the workplace, for meetings and arguments. At the time when we were working on Fito’s biography, I was so saturated with journalistic work that playing with subgenres was more important than the subject matter itself. And, at the same time, I was fascinated by Fito’s dizzying life. I was born in ‘66. Fito is a point of reference for my generation. 

M.R.: What do you make of Argentine rock today? In Páez there is a motif that’s repeated with a certain insistence: the musicians who did well, the ones who made it to the other side. Now that Fito has made it all the way down the path to success (which is fantastic), do you have any thoughts coming out of this book on the relationship between rock and power, success, money, and those spaces of freedom and true rebellion that seemed so proper to Argentina’s underground rock scene?

V.L.: The rock from the end of the dictatorship that I grew up with, the rock we listened to bringing albums from one house to another while the plainclothes or uniformed police were stopping us and interrogating us under suspicion of belonging to a terrorist cell, is a great national anthem today. Banned songs and the new, festive songs that boomed with the coming of democracy form part of our popular identity. These songs didn’t change the world, but they did change our country. Many of our rock forefathers have died or are now convalescent and inactive—one exception, among others, is Fito Páez. It’s not clear who their heirs are, but we can glimpse an overwhelming feminine presence. In 1995, when we wrote the biography, Fito was touring behind Circo Beat (1994) and had just been filling stadiums with El amor después del amor (1993). He was one of the musical focal points of the era. He had been questioned for abandoning the bohemian lifestyle, years had already passed since his famous statement at Prix D’Ami: “Be brave, quit cocaine.” He had attained financial wellbeing and massive success. That’s why the subjects of power, money, and convictions appear in the book. 

We were halfway through Menemism and every time he was near a microphone, Fito tossed out a statement against the Riojan. This generated tension because in Argentina there is a relative consensus that all artists who attain financial success through their work lose the right to speak up in favor of the people or the impoverished masses. To be able to make such statements cleanly, the artist has to renounce the privileges of money. This is obviously a dogmatic position that serves to delegitimize or neutralize voices that hold sway over the crowds that might rise up against the powers that be. This controversial role that Fito embodied in the nineties was taken over by Indio Solari in the two thousands. 

M.R.: I’m interested in the topic of friendship. In Páez there are good things and bad things about life, Fito’s friends, and some of his partners. But the book always treats him with great fondness, without ever being condescending. It’s very natural. How did you deal with the subject of friendship in this book? Your own friendship with Fito? Fito’s friendship with his people and vice versa?

V.L.: Fito has the sensitivity to bring his friends together for artistic projects, and the determination to make them sign contracts with clear rules. He moves in that somewhat oxymoronic space of giving freedom while setting the limits of that freedom. I see it as a happy pendulum between chaos and control, for him and his surroundings. That’s the special thing about him—that comfortable movement between order and disorder sets him apart. Friends, partners, and exes have worked and still work with him on albums, movies, and tours. I think he conceived of a oneness between daily life and art, and that’s why his friends go with him, they form part of his troupe, his “Circo Beat.” We work with a lot of freedom and a lot of support from Fito. He opened all the doors to his world for us, without restrictions and with absolute trust. 

M.R.: A number of times, Fito is mentioned as a poet. We understand this is in the context of the music he makes. What do you make of his relationship with literature and art in general? He is clearly very well read and has seen a great many films. Is Fito, more than a musician, an artist?

V.L.: He’s an artist who takes risks. Who explores the places that aren’t conducive to him, as well as developing in his safe spots. He’s persistent, and if something doesn’t work out for him he waits and then tries again. He’s all-encompassing. He’s an urban artist who feeds on city scenes. Sometimes he spits out words like a torrent, other times he captures the spirit of the age in four lines. For him, literature is a source of inspiration and dialogue between disciplines. His discography between the ages of twenty and thirty touched the hearts of three generations—his own, the one before his, and the one after—and that’s very unusual. The eight albums he released between 1984 and 1994 are the ones people love. From Del 63 to Circo Beat. His work over that decade sets itself apart album by album, along with the renown of certain favorite songs. They’re albums you listen to all the way through. I’m not saying they’re better than the ones that came after—that would have to be studied over time, but these releases marked the arrival of something unique for his fans. They became something like soundtracks to his listeners’ lives. Of course, changes in technology and communication also gradually modified the way people listen to music. 

M.R.: Today we see Fito as a successful musician, a master of rock music, of popular music, but the book shows us a much more underground, sometimes countercultural world. Readers will appreciate those moments when we “see” all these musicians blazing a trail, hand in hand—that combination of youth, friendship, and the will to make things happen. How do you evaluate those moments in an artist’s life? Is it something specific to youth, to their beginnings, or is it rather something that’s lost over time when things get stuck in “the old scripts of the world,” in the institutionality of attained wellbeing?

V.L.: When you write a rock biography, you know the story is richest between anonymity and visibility. From the margins to the center, or the subsoil to the surface. That’s where you find the gems, the treasures, the epic. In Fito’s case, his work started to develop early, when he was 14, in the midst of the dictatorship, and he was recognized almost immediately. But he joined the ranks of the canon with El amor después del amor. His success story has to be told and is welcome, but a biographer knows the best part of the book will be found in those pages where the artist is fighting back against adversity. 

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Argentine writer and journalist Vera Land.

Arthur Malcolm Dixon is co-founder, lead translator, and Managing Editor of Latin American Literature Today. He has translated the novels Immigration: The Contest by Carlos Gámez Pérez and There Are Not So Many Stars by Isaí Moreno (Katakana Editores), as well as the verse collection Intensive Care by Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza (Alliteratïon). He also works as a community interpreter in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a Tulsa Artist Fellow.

To dare, to listen to that other voice, to reach the other shore. In other words, to break free.

And if anyone dares and transgresses, it is Ecuadorian writer María Fernanda Ampuero, our featured author is this issue of LALT. Her vision of reality is anchored to extremes. She doesn’t hide it. Ampuero has mastered a literature that digs through the most despicable aspects of life, those we prefer not to see. Both a writer and a journalist, she currently lives in Spain, but Ecuador is ever-present in her writing. Her books are rich with horror; it is a personal interest of hers, an obsession. Horror, in her writing, is more than a literary genre. Mistreated women (and little girls, in particular), immigrants, and many other characters typically ignored by the world appear in her stories as victims of an everyday, sometimes unbearable violence; her voice narrates the unutterable. María Fernanda made herself known internationally in 2018 with her book of short stories Pelea de gallos (translated to English by Frances Riddle as Cockfight). Although it was not her first book, its brutal stylings did not go unnoticed by Latin American critics. The results are visible today. This feature’s guest editor is Ecuadorian writer and journalist Issa Aguilar Jara, and it includes writing by Natalia Andrea Mera and Rosalía Vázquez Moreno. We owe this issue’s cover feature to this trio of young writers.

This issue’s second dossier highlights the work of writer Giannina Braschi, Puerto Rican by birth and a New Yorker by adoption. Without the drive of our friend Tess O’Dwyer, this project would never have come to fruition. Tess compiled these materials and brought together this dossier’s contributors. As Manuel Broncano rightly tells us, Giannina Braschi can be seen as “a Nuyorican poet, a Latinx philosopher, a postmodern novelist, a social satirist, a magical realist, a feminist, a post-dramatic playwright…” and many other things besides. Braschi, like all those who master an unclassifiable style of writing, is all these things and none of them at once. We will let our readers decide if these varied titles fit or not when it comes to understanding her writing. In this dossier, our readers will find writing by Broncano along with Nuria Morgado and Sarah Ahmad, as well as an excerpt from Putinoika by Braschi herself.

Our interview section is chock full of top-shelf new releases. Pablo Concha interviews Spanish writer and translator Javier Calvo, who just published a remarkable translation of the letters of legendary U.S. writer and master of horror, H.P. Lovecraft, titled Cartas I, de H. P. Lovecraft (Editorial Aristas Martínez, 2023). Colombian writer and journalist Juan Camilo Rincón interviews Argentine writer Eduardo Sacheri on his latest novel, Nosotros dos en la tormenta (Alfaguara, Argentina). The last interview is my own, and it’s something special: a conversation on the new edition of the biography of Fito Páez, titled simply Páez, republished this year by Cerdos & Peces. I spoke with Vera Land about the past and present of Argentine rock and everything else we find in this book first published in 1995 by Vera Land and legendary cultural journalist Enrique Symns. Páez, Fito’s biography, is now in bookstores for fans of rock en español and handmade cultural journalism.

In this issue, our collaboration with World Literature Today is twofold. First, because our section on literature from other parts of the world includes several pieces from our sister magazine. The first is by Veronica Esposito, who studies three Latin American women writers: Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, and Mónica Ojeda. Three unique cases, for sure. If these writers “find resonance and meaning in the realms of horror, the political, and bodies,” as Esposito writes, “it is perhaps because they are in touch with something basic about being a woman in the early twenty-first century.” It is up to us to delve into these new literary endeavors and discover what they have to offer. Another article in this section is by friend of the magazine Michelle Mirabella, who writes, almost as a war correspondent, about Gato Caulle, a community-minded bookstore at the far south of the American continent in the Chilean city of Valdivia. Finally, Kevin M. F. Platt and Mark Lipovetsky talk with poet and prose writer Maria Stepanova, renowned author of In Memory of Memory. In these times of war and desperation, Russia and its writers have a great deal to say. WLT is also present in our Indigenous Literature section. WLT’s ninety-seventh issue (No. 5, September 2023) was dedicated to the indigenous literatures of the American continent. Our selection in this issue of LALT includes Quechua poet Fredy Chikangana from the Yanakuna Mitmak nation of southeastern Cauca, Colombia, along with Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez of Tuxtla, Zapotitlán, who writes her poems in Tutunakú and Spanish, and Miriam Esperanza Hernández Vázquez of Masojá Shucjá, Tila, Chiapas, a poet, translator and Ch’ol language activist. This issue of WLT naturally resonates with the digital pages of LALT, where we have promoted the varied indigenous literatures of our continent since the magazine’s inception. One important note on a new collaboration: these texts from WLT were translated by students of the Residency in Literary Translation directed by professor Daniela Bentancur as part of the English-language translation-training program of the Instituto de Enseñanza Superior en Lenguas Vivas “Juan Ramón Fernández” in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Speaking of poets, this year U.S. publishing house Seven Stories Press released a new edition of Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton. Here, LALT, presents a preview of nine poems from this new volume. Dalton’s currency, we are happy to note, has not decreased by even a millimeter. Just read his poem “Poeticus Eficacciae,” cited below. It still retains all its freshness and its troubling truthfulness; it is still a perfect lesson in understanding the function of political literature in these times when our polarized Latin America struggles to lift its weary head:

You can judge
the moral fiber of a political regime,
a political institution
or a political man,
by the degree of danger they consent to
by way of being observed
through the eyes of a satirical poet.

As ever, watch out for the poets. Every republic has its Plato.

Where translation is concerned, don’t miss this issue’s brief essay by Australian translator Lilit Žekulin Thwaites in memory of one of the world’s best-known translators of Latin American literature: Edith Grossman, who passed away this September in New York City. Her list of translation credits includes Gabriel García Márquez (who, as is well known, described her as his voice in English), Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Ariel Dorfman, Sor Juana Inés de Cruz, and Carlos Rojas, among others. We hope this note serves as recognition of and testament to her legacy. 

With this edition of LALT we close out the year, having published twenty-eight issues with no interruptions. Thus, with this entirely free and almost impossible gesture, we affirm that literature still exists (we hope to prove this), but we must not deceive ourselves. Literature could also cease to exist. We know this to be true; Kafka put it well when he claimed we would still be happy if we didn’t have books. The fact is, Kafka knew some books are dangerous, whispering into our ear the master plan with which to escape from the scripts of prefabricated life, to overcome the lies with which children are forced to put on the long trousers of defeat. That blow that awakens you to life, from the pages of a book, is well worth it. All of which reminds me that literature, in the end, is for those who break free, those magical travelers of the human imagination, those who know there is a street that is not two-way: that the only path forward is getting lost, taking pause, awaiting a miracle.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

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Photo: LALT editor-in-chief Marcelo Rioseco.

The future of poetry lies at the heart of this new issue of LALT. It had been some time since a poet graced the cover of our journal. This time, it is dedicated to perhaps the greatest living poet of the Spanish language in Latin America: Carlos Germán Belli of Peru. This cover feature is, all at once, a reunion, a recovery, and a just reevaluation of Belli’s literary work. It was completed by some of the world’s major experts on his oeuvre. Inmaculada Lergo presents a concise synthesis of Belli’s work, book by book. This essay is complemented by an interview with the poet, titled “Concern for Form.” Chilean poets Pedro Lastra and Enrique Lihn are also present with articles evaluating different eras and aspects of Belli’s production. The feature is accompanied by a selection of poems by Belli himself. All anthologies are incomplete, but not unfairly so. Here, we hope to present a complex, necessary author. Mario Vargas Llosa understood him as such when he stated, “In the poetry of the Spanish language of our times there is no poet who has constructed his oeuvre with greater rigor and coherence than Carlos Germán Belli, or with lesser ease.” This is a lesson for young poets, and a guiding light for us all.

But the poetry does not end there. This issue’s second dossier is dedicated to Guatemalan K’iche’ Maya poet Humberto Ak’abal, who passed away in 2019. This dossier includes writing by poets Francisco José Cruz and Martín Tonalmeyotl. The former tells us, “Ak’abal’s poetry, through the oral expressions of his people and healthy doses of repetition, sinks its roots into song as well as story, binding them together as if with a magic spell.” He was a bilingual poet of remarkable resourcefulness. For his part, Martín Tonalmeyotl, based on his own reading, places Ak’abal as “the finest poet of the indigenous peoples of America. We might go so far as to say that, up to the present, he has been the finest poet of all our peoples.” This claim, of course, does not leave out poets yet to come. Tonalmeyotl’s statement is a celebration, and a heartfelt one at that. Ak’abal’s poetry is alive, as is its original language. The poet reminds us of such with these words: “The shadow of a house, / of a tree, / of a wall / or of a rock…, / is called, in our language, mu’j.” We are his readers, but we also read to learn of an entire world that comes to us through his poetry.

In the section “World Literature from WLT,” we pay homage to Yugoslav-Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić, who passed away this year in Amsterdam, where she had lived since 1996. Ugrešić was invited to the University of Oklahoma in 2016 to receive the Neustadt Prize, awarded by World Literature Today. In her keynote address at the Neustadt Festival, Ugrešić declared, “we should invest all our energies in supporting people who are prepared to invest in literature, not in literature as a way to sustain literacy but as a vital, essential creative activity.” These words resonate even more powerfully today as we witness a decline in the study of humanities at universities around the world, as social media and fragmentary messages saturate our minds with insignificance and quick humor. This homage features writing by our colleague from the University of Oklahoma, Russianist Emily D. Johnson, and by novelist and translator Alison Anderson, who describes how Ugrešić’s literature overcomes national borders. Hers is a literature that finds its readers among those “who are not afraid of the other, the foreigner.” 

The authors we publish in this issue’s other sections are many and diverse. In fiction, we have Teresa Icaza, Yael Weiss, and Josefina Plá. In poetry, Alonso Rabí, Mónica Ojeda, Santiago Acosta, Teresa Korondi, and María Paulina Briones. In Brazilian literature—that great unrecognized country—we publish work by writers Manoel Carlos Karam and José J. Veiga. In Indigenous literature, we have something new. This issue features texts by writers Alba Eiragi Duarte, Natalia Toledo, and Rosa Chávez from the book Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women, recently published by prestigious U.S. press HarperCollins. We are indebted to this book’s editor, Sandra Guzmán, who graciously allowed us to publish these excerpts from this essential collection dedicated to Latin America’s women writers of yesterday and today.

We are also happy to present some important previews from the English-language publishing world. First, the poetry of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (Secret Poetics, translated by Rebecca Kosick), which will come out this November from Winter Editions. Another preview comes from our friends at Deep Vellum: Heather Cleary’s translation of Recital of the Dark Verses, by Mexican writer Luis Feliz Fabre, a novel in translation that recently reached bookshelves. Reflection on translation, of course, is also accounted for. Renowned U.S. translator Robin Myers writes in this issue on her process of translating Like the Night Inside the Eyes by Argentine poet Daniel Lipara. We also feature two texts in our “Seeking Publisher” section. The first is George Henson and Michelle Mirabella’s translation of a novella by Colombian writer John Templanza Better, Limbo: A Story of Horror in the Caribbean. The second is Bruna Dantas Lobato’s translation of D’s Cryogenics or a Manifesto for Lost Pleasures by Brazilian writer Leonardo Valente. We hope publishers of books in translation will take heed of these samples we display in our digital shop window with every new issue.

With nothing more to add, we welcome you to this new issue of LALT, full of novelty and safeguarded by the poetic word, hoping to reach another dawn.

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: LALT editor-in-chief Marcelo Rioseco.

I pause over Professor Weinstein’s reflections to introduce a cover feature that has a great deal to do with the above: with reading, writing, citing, giving, exciting, and, of course, imagining. The cover of this issue is dedicated to Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán. The feature itself was organized by Chilean writer María José Navia and includes writing by Ramiro Sanchiz, Nicolás Campisi, and Rodrigo Bastidas Pérez. Fresán’s work is fundamental to Spanish-language letters, as María José makes clear: “A body of work that keeps reading as it is written and that, when you read it, makes you want to write.” What more can you ask of a book? In her introduction, she warns us that this is an “impossible dossier.” It’s true—as with all great bodies of literary work, something will always escape us. “With Fresán, when we read, we remember,” María José writes, before adding, “and remembering always brings you back to the imagination,” that unique and wondrous time machine with which the world’s readers travel. The feature concludes—as it should—with a text on translation, titled “Translators’ Triptych,” in which Isabelle Gugnon, Will Vanderhyden, and Giulia Zavagna (translators into French, English, and Italian, respectively) reflect on their translations of a single sentence by Fresán: a playful and imaginative exercise that speaks to the multiple echoes of Fresán’s prose in other languages. 

This issue’s second dossier is dedicated to Nicaragua. For some time now, it has been impossible to avert our gaze from what is taking place in this small Central American country. Human rights violations are an everyday occurrence, decried again and again in international fora. Nothing changes. Things keep getting worse. This February, the Ortega-Murillo regime deprived ninety-four Nicaraguans of their nationality, including writers Sergio Ramírez (winner of the 2017 Cervantes Prize and featured author of LALT’s eighth issue in 2018) and Gioconda Belli (winner of the 2023 Reina Sofia Poetry Prize and a Chilean citizen as of February 19 of this year). Dumbfounding the world, Nicaragua’s dictatorial regime not only committed the implausible act of stripping away its opponents’ nationality; it also confiscated their property. For this reason, we invited three Nicaraguan writers—Jorge Adiak Montoya, Fátima Villalba, and Mario Martz—to join Sergio Ramírez in telling the stories of their experiences after being forced to leave Nicaragua behind. Their testimonies serve as proof of how, since 2018, the country’s political situation has deteriorated. Nevertheless, Nicaraguan writers continue to resist this wave of repression with weapons of their own making. Sergio Ramírez puts it perfectly, writing: “Mine is a tongue without borders. The tongue no one can take from me and from which I cannot be banished. The tongue that is my homeland.”

As you’ll know if you follow us on social media, this year we organized our first-ever literary essay contest, which was a great success. The winner was Mexican writer Olivia Teroba, with her essay “Money and Writing.” As we announced, we are happy to share Teroba’s essay in this issue. On its decision, the prize jury stated: “This essay stands out for its discursive clarity, its incisive nature and its opportune quotations, the unique way it confronts difficulties with the resources of literary creativity.” Teroba’s essay “is also a stone-cold confession; an urgent reminder, a long meditation on the writer’s vocation, fragments of a literary diary written in secret.” Six other essays were also declared finalists, and in this issue we publish the first of them: “The Behind-the-Scenes of C.E. Feiling’s El agua electrizada: Disputed Biographical and Political Landscapes” by Argentine writer Mariano Vespa. In early 2024 we will announce the second call for contest submissions. We hope for the best. Not only a contest, this effort is also a revindication of the essay as a form of critical exploration, a type of text we believe is immune to preconceived formats whose freedom is plagued with doubts and intuitions as well as the bulky baggage of specialized knowledge. In any case, this is also a revindication of a long tradition in Latin American literature and thought. 

Another novelty fills us with joy. Starting with this issue, Latin American Literature Today (LALT) will include a special section in which we feature texts previously published in World Literature Today (WLT), both in English and in translation into Spanish. This marks the fulfillment of a long-held editorial dream: the dream of becoming a small showcase for world literature in the eyes of the Spanish-speaking world. For some time now, we have published Latin American authors whose concerns go beyond their own region. And we are convinced of this: Latin America is more than itself. Our authors also care about the world. This new step will bring Hispano-American readers even closer to the literatures of other parts of the world. The remarkable legacy of WLT rests on the foundation of almost a century of tireless effort; it is therefore a true honor for all of us at LALT to publish material that could not reach Latin America by any other path. In this first edition of the new section, we chose to highlight award-winning German writer Jenny Erpenbeck (the 2018 Puterbaugh Fellow) with an article by our University of Oklahoma colleague Robert Lemon, “Vectors, Vanishing Points, and Vicissitudes in the Works of Jenny Erpenbeck.” In Latin America, science fiction is a hybrid and emerging genre that is earning an ever-larger space for itself in the academic world; so we decided to share an article by David Fowler, “Mathematics in Science Fiction: Mathematics as Science Fiction.” Finally, we saw a certain urgency in opening the door to Iranian American writer Azar Nafisi with an interview carried out by WLT’s editor-in-chief, Daniel Simon, and published in their latest issue (Vol. 97, No. 3, May 2023). Their conversation centers on Nafisi’s work in English (her books are not yet available in Spanish). Here, it is worthwhile to pause briefly and check Arnold Weinstein’s words against Nafisi’s. Nafisi, who has known totalitarianism up close, states that imagination “arouses our curiosity. We want to know, we want to go to places we have not been, meet people we have not seen.” But that’s not all; she also sees in imagination an undeniable social and political significance: “Imagination goes far beyond just totalitarianism and democracy. It addresses our humanity, against any kind of absolutism, including the absolutism of death.” Such a defense of imagination is not uncommon in these times of deliberate distortion and perverse falsehoods. For many creatives all over the world, their practice has become a way to revindicate our much-threatened freedom in the democratic world. 

Death took us by surprise this year when we learned of the passing of Venezuelan writer Victoria de Stefano (1940-2023). Victoria formed part of LALT’s advisory board from the journal’s inception, and we were lucky enough to publish her work more than a few times. Here, Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza bids her farewell with a beautiful text titled “Goodbye, Dear Victoria, the World Will Always Fit in Your Room.” Just a few weeks later, we learned of the passing of Jorge Edwards (1931-2023), a writer of both fiction and nonfiction and the author of a text bold enough to cause discomfort for many: Persona non grata. Peruvian writer Jorge Eduardo Benavides remembers him in this issue of LALT with his essay “Jorge Edwards, Transgressor of Genres.” Some writers are missed, having left us waiting for their last book, their last column in the Sunday paper, some poem we never read. We cannot turn back time—or perhaps, through the imagination, we can. When we reread the writers who have left us, we keep them alive; we make them part of that personal canon made up of the books we have loved so much. 

All are invited to this new issue of LALT, which also includes interviews with Afrouruguayan writer Jorge Chagas, Mexican writer Clyo Mendoza, and Peruvian writer Gustavo Rodriguez (winner of the 2023 Alfaguara Novel Prize). In our Indigenous Literature section, we feature texts in Portuguese and Tu’un Savi by Daniel Munduruku, Florentino Solano, and Nadia López García. In our Translation Previews section, you’ll find writing by Mario de Andrade translated by Katrina Dodson and by Daniel Guebel translated by Jessica Sequeira. We continue to find enlightenment in reflections on translation, with an interview of esteemed translator Kristin Dykstra by Erín Moure. And, finally, in our Seeking Publisher section you’ll find an excerpt from Ghost Horse by Karina Sosa Castañeda, translated by Rowena Galavitz and originally published by Almadia in 2020. 

That’s all there is to say—all that remains is to set off on the marvelous journey through the imagination we hope to offer in each issue of LALT. Mystery still has its eyes on us, and we on it, with a book in our hands. 

Marcelo Rioseco

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Marcelo Rioseco, editor-in-chief of LALT.

It is within this context that Latin American Literature Today comes to suggest a few readings, with all the wonder and pleasure that come from hearing new voices in Latin American literature. On this issue’s cover, we present Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda, in a feature prepared by Andrea Armijos Echeverría. The feature includes an interview by Andrea herself, as well as a collective text with reflections from various Latin American writers, editors, and cultural organizers who had something to say about Ojeda’s work: the reader will find breadcrumbs and crossed paths in this text, as miscellaneous as it is enlightening. And we share another text that represents a never-before-seen meeting of the minds, organized by translator Sarah Booker and our Translation Editor, Denise Kripper, in which an important group of translators share their stances on their own translations of Mónica Ojeda’s work into various languages. “My writing comes from fear and desire,” says the author herself: drives that touch the bottomless fibers of the human condition in all its mystery.

We are also proud to present in this issue three never-before-published poems by Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas, specially authorized for this issue of LALT. We share these poems in celebration of Cadenas’ receipt of the 2022 Miguel de Cervantes Prize for Spanish-Language Literature. LALT has been taking note of Cadenas’ journey in this direction for some time. In 2019, we published the speech given by the Venezuelan poet when he won the twenty-seventh Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry. On that occasion, LALT dedicated a whole dossier to Cadenas. Later, in 2021, we published his text entitled “Gracias,” composed of his comments (made online from Caracas) during the launch of his book The Land of Mild Light, edited by Nidia Hernández and published by Arrowsmith Press in Boston. This coming twenty-third of April, in the assembly hall of the University of Alcalá de Henares, King Felipe VI of Spain will bestow upon the Venezuelan poet the Cervantes Prize. It will mark the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one. We can only be happy that Latin American poetry continues to enjoy good health in the old continent.

It is worthwhile to bring secret connections to light, as Baudelaire once told us. Until March 9 of this year, the sixtieth edition of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair was taking place in Italy. LALT did not want to be left behind, and thanks to our Argentina correspondent, Gustavo Valle, we put together a dossier dedicated to Latin American children’s literature, with two new essays on the subject: one by Franco Vaccarini of Argentina and the other by Fanuel Hanán Días of Venezuela. Our Managing Editor, Arthur Malcolm Dixon, also interviewed prolific American author and translator Lawrence Schimel, who is widely recognized for his long and productive career in children’s literature. Our Colombia correspondent Alejandra Jaramillo, with the same enthusiasm as ever, brings us an essay by Natalia Ramírez Reyes on children’s literature and the boom of the picture book in Colombia. We all know that children’s literature has a centuries-long tradition, but only recently, in our current world of myriad censorships, cancellations, and erasures, have we seen books for children so profoundly affected by political correctness. The recent scandal over alterations to books by Roald Dahl left no one indifferent; the new outbreak of censorship in this post-pandemic world is truly shocking. LALT, as always, will continue to promote children’s literature and all others in the spirit of absolute freedom.

The other sections of this new issue are likewise chock full of new things to read. Our Ecuador correspondent, Victor Vimos, interviewed Bolivian writer Edmundo Paz Soldán about his latest book, La mirada de las plantas (Almadía, 2022). Poetry is never left behind, and our Book Reviews Editor, Néstor Mendoza, interviewed Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who just published his first verse collection, Cuaderno de septiembre (Visor, 2022).  It has been a fruitful year for the Colombian writer, who was recently awarded France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for his novel Volver la vista atrás. Mexican researcher Krishna Naranjo Zavala contributes again to LALT with an interview of Zoque poet and translator Mikeas Sánchez. In this interview, we hear Mikeas speak about her book Mojk’jäyä / Mokaya, which means “corn flower” in her language. The importance of her work is reflected in the many translations undertaken of her writing into languages including Catalan, Italian, German, Maya, Portuguese, and English.

The essay by Venezuelan writer Miguel Gomes in this issue, “Letter to a Friend on Criticism and the Essay,” returns to a central theme of LALT’s editorial project: the essay as a form of exploration and knowledge. This essay is itself a warning sign regarding the role of academia and the proliferation of a solipsistic brand of criticism that turns its back on the everyday reader. It is not enough to repeat this; it must be shown by example. The present-day essay has nothing to do with the writing of intricate scholarly reports with which an enlightened elite might earn its stripes in the job market. The pedestrian reader, Miguel Gomes seems to tell us, is still left waiting.

Black voices are present and accounted for in this new issue of LALT. This time, we shine a spotlight on Venezuelan poet Miguel James, born in Trinidad in 1953 but residing in Venezuela since the age of six. Venezuelan essayist María Antonieta Flores reflects on James’ poetic trajectory and affirms, with no two ways about it, that this author’s literary approach “played a role in achieving the freedom that poetic expression enjoys today, particularly during the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century” in Venezuela. LALT continues to pay heed to the voices that, from the periphery, remind us that the distance between the borderlands and the center is also a question of attention and interest. This distance, oftentimes, is born of illusions or, more roundly, of blindness.

Our preview section is always full of novelties, and sparks immediate curiosity among those who read our literature in translation to English. In this issue of LALT, said readers will find Frances Riddle translating Ecuadorian writer María Fernanda Ampuero, Samantha Schnee translating Mexican writer (and friend of the journal) Carmen Boullosa, and Wendy Call translating Zapotec poet Irma Pineda. In our “On Translation” section, we feature Denise Kripper’s interview with Bolivian translator Joaquín Gavilano, who was recently awarded a 2022 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Ariel Dilon, in an essay in memory of Argentine writer Marcelo Cohen (1951-2022), reminds us that, while we may not frequent a writer’s personal spaces nor participate in his projects, simply reading his work turns us into a sort of long-distance friend of his—a close, expectant friend, we might say. The losses of such literary friendships can be as devastating as those of the loved ones who surround us.

LALT’s twenty-fifth issue sticks to a wager in which we still heartily believe. A wager that is an invitation from the most gratuitous of literature, but also from its political and literary urgencies. Latin America never ceases to surprise us with its incessant crises and setbacks. Even still, its literature keeps coming, and we want to shine a light on this phenomenon in the broadest, freest way possible. To wager is also to invite, to suggest, to point out pathways of reading. Perhaps the gratuitous stands for something else: the shiny little ball that bounces around the maddening roulette wheel of literature is unpredictable precisely because its fate is guided only by the laws of freedom and the game itself. For this reason, little is gained by any effort to regulate literature on the part of the ultra-correct censors who are currently at the helm. Time also plays its part in all of this. I return to the question from the start: what and whom should we read? Let us leave the answer to the readers of today and tomorrow. LALT, to paraphrase Chilean poet Pedro Lastra, is here to share the news from abroad. Freedom, taken seriously, should mean something, right?

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Marcelo Rioseco, Editor-in-Chief of LALT.

So we come to this new issue of LALT with a writer who, in recent years, has claimed her own undeniable place among the most solid literary voices of Latin America: Colombia’s Pilar Quintana. Her presence in our digital pages is nothing new. In 2020, we shared an excerpt from her exceptional novel The Bitch (2017), translated by Lisa Dillman, and now we close out 2022 with a cover feature dedicated to her work. We owe this work to guest editors Ingrid Luna López and Óscar Daniel Campo, who put this project together from Colombia. Its two essays, one by Leonardo Gil Gómez and the other by Ruth N. Solarte-Hensgen, invite us to reflect critically on certain aspects of Pilar Quintana’s work. Ingrid and Óscar also spoke to the author for an interview titled “Animality and Writing: A Conversation with Pilar Quintana.” The feature closes with an excerpt from the English translation of The Bitch, by exceptional American translator Lisa Dillman.

This issue’s other dossier is dedicated to a writer who has already achieved canonical status in Spanish-language literature: Uruguayan novelist, poet, and translator Cristina Peri Rossi. In 2021, Peri Rossi won the Cervantes Prize, the most important literary distinction in the world of Hispano-American letters. In its verdict, the prize jury recognized in Peri Rossi “the trajectory of one of the great literary vocations of our time and the magnitude of a writer able to express her talent in a multitude of genres. The literature of Cristina Peri Rossi is a constant exercise of exploration and critique, never shying away from the value of the word as the expression of a commitment to key themes in the contemporary conversation, such as the woman’s condition and sexuality.” This dossier was organized by our associate editor, Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza, along with María José Bruña Bragado and Néstor Sanguinetti, two experts on Peri Rossi’s work who enthusiastically took part. It features writing by Rafael Courtoisie, Gerardo Cianco, Virginia Lucas, and Natasha Tanna, as well as brief but meaningful remarks on Peri Rossi’s work from Selva Almada, Martha Asunción Alonso, Jordi Doce, Ariana Harwicz, Esperanza López Parada, Lina Meruane, Mónica Ojeda, and Fernanda Trías. These peers are unanimous in their recognition of the work of a writer who truly earned her place in the canon of our literature.

A contribution to poetry in this issue—which is both a recovery and a surprise at once—comes from Mariano Vespa in his interview with Laura Rubio León y Federico Barea, who talk at length about two important movements of the Latin American neo-avant-garde. On her part, Laura Rubio León discusses the Colombian nadaístas from the perspective of her book Nadaísmo: una propuesta de vanguardia (2020); on his, Federico Barea analyzes the Argentine beats from the perspective of his book Argentina Beat 1963-1969 (2016). Mariano Vespa does excellent memory work, as always, reminding us that Latin American poets also work at the brink of experimentation and the abyss. Mariano writes: “The conversation that follows connects both their energies, which transcend the aforementioned publications, communities stimulated in associations, and new meanings.” We couldn’t agree more.

As always, this new issue of LALT also has much more to offer: previews, fiction, poetry, more interviews, a new Indigenous Literature feature, etc. This issue is no exception. Our readers will find translation previews from Sarah Booker, Katherine M. Hedeen, Olivia Lott, Helena Dunsmoor, and Ramón J. Stern. Indigenous prose returns, this time through with Mapuche voices through Mariela Fuentealba Millaguir and Daniela Catrileo. Indigenous literature from Brazil is back too, through writer Julie Dorrico.

The diversity of voices, genres, and cultures that come forth in this issue blows me away, as does the fact that it is dedicated to two women whose work shines through for its exceptional literary quality. We invite our readers to approach this issue without forgetting that suggestion, as classical as it is contemporary: “Festina lente.” There is also pleasure in reading. I insist: we refuse to allow the authors we publish in LALT to fade into a simple catalog of literary works published in a literary journal. What we seek is just the contrary: for each issue of LALT to present these works as part of a living, breathing, present-day literature through which Latin America comes into conversation with the world and for the world.

Marcelo Rioseco

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Marcelo Rioseco, Editor-in-Chief of LALT.