LALT Team – LALT

Nota Bene: September 2024

LALT Team — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 21:01:59 +0000

Juan Villoro: No soy un robot

Villoro reflects on how the digital transforms our lives and our relationship with reading. Up from these pages pop mobile devices, selfies, and Twitter (now X), facial recognition technology, the internet and viral lies, online reading, and a transformation in how information is broadcast… A new technological context that leads to the “disappearance of reality.” The book explores the anticipatory clues visible in the most technologically advanced countries, like Japan and South Korea, the prophecies contained in the visionary literature of Ray Bradbury, and the old controversies (present in Rousseau and Diderot) surrounding reality and representation, which now take on new relevance.

Josu Landa: Poética

“This is a high-flying book from Josu Landa; it is a poetics, or rather, a philosophy of poetry. In fact, philosophy and poetry have gone hand in hand; there have been philosopher-poets, like the Presocratics Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, who wrote their ideas in verse, and also poet-philosophers, like Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Nevertheless, the greatest challenge is writing a philosophy of poetry, which is as arduous as attempting a poetry of philosophy. This endeavor is connected with the philosophy of language, for just as this discipline must explain how a series of sounds or inkstrokes acquires meaning, this book seeks to explain how such a series takes on the status of poetry.” – Mauricio Beuchot

Edda Armas: En el oído medio

Edda Armas refers to the voices that come along with this book and intersect in its text as supports that embrace, unleash, or highlight what she means to say. “If you keep hold of the other’s hand in the text that’s being woven, in that act of sharing, the text takes on a strength that surprised me because I hadn’t done so in other books.” There are poets, philosophers, musicians… “These are voices with which I greatly concur: Antonio Gamoneda, García Lorca, Cerati, Eduardo Moga, Marcel Proust, Clarice Lispector, José Emilio Pacheco, Patricia Guzmán, Watanabe, Rafael Cadenas, Yolanda Pantin… There are authors from many countries. These are books that, for a time, accompanied me, and that is the importance of art: it gives you many networks that collude in creation to give meaning to an expression.” The use of such varied voices universalizes the experience of suffering. Human beings, this book tells us, all suffer pain in the same way and need to share it, to endure it together.

Lola Rosario: Daughter de Borikén

“Lola Rosario’s poems reflect the urgent voices of those who returned, who fight for their roots and cry out ‘¡Borikén presente!’ with every action, every breath, and every act of love and independence. These poems, an intimate and meticulous mix of English and Spanish, remind us that both languages come from colonial tongues. In ‘Spanglish pride,’ Rosario writes: ‘You gotta remember/ inglés is not our mother tongue/ ni tampoco el español yours/ both landed on the shores of our mouths/ like murderous colonizadores/ seeking to rob us of/ much more than our tierra.’ Rosario also writes about beauty, resistance, and the identity of the Boricua woman. Finally, the importance of these poems’ protest is undeniable. ‘¡Lárguense ya!’ and ‘Clipped’ confront the history of U.S. interests in Puerto Rico, colonialism, and experimentation on the country’s bodies and fertile ground. Each and every poem in this collection serves as a call to those who are already here to continue the struggle, and to those who are still far from home.” – Jacqueline Jiang

Jorge Luis Arcos: Ensayos daimónicos

“His words lead to the flow of an often-lost identity. Alterations that do not abandon poetic knowledge, through which he has composed one of the most important bodies of essayistic work of current Cuban literature. Poetic thought and poetic writing go hand in hand for Jorge Luis Arcos.” “There are examples that refute the thesis—put forth by Charles Baudelaire and Juan Ramón Jiménez, among others—that the poet is half creator and half critic. But, just the same, there are others that confirm it. In Cuba, I can think of no writer who embodies this archetype more thoroughly than Jorge Luis Arcos. In his work, the tasks of reflection and creation come together as two facets of a single personality. – Efraín Rodríguez Santana and Carlos Espinosa Domínguez

Eduardo Berti: Método fácil y rápido para ser lector

If reading can be a celebration, why limit yourself to a series of identical rules or predictable protocols? In these pages, Eduardo Berti offers answers to this question, and puts before us new ways of reading fiction: active and creative ways, jumping off from methods that are easy and innovative, individual and collective, analytical and comical. Método fácil y rápido para ser lector teaches us to explore our beloved books from never-before-seen perspectives. Discover the falseness of that cliché that tells us to turn the page once and for all.

Christian Elguera: Los espectros

Los espectros, by Christian Elguera, winner of the Premio Copé de Oro of the IX Bienal de Novela “Premio Copé 2023,” recreates the panorama of Peruvian and international political history of the twentieth century. With remarkable technical range, the chameleonic figure of Eudocio Ravines leads us down the dark paths of power and reveals the sinister forces in motion behind the big desisions that affect the masses. This novel offers a sarcastic vision of the contemporary history of Peru.

Johnny Gavlovski: Poemas químicos

“In the drama this book puts before us, there are many cross references to Dante’s Comedy: the image of a necessary catabasis, of descending to the underworld, to Hades, entering hell in order to understand heaven through a process of purification. This book reproduces, both intimately and openly, the Inferno–Purgatorio–Paradiso trilogy: the metaphor of the Hurricane that marks the collection’s second chapter is astonishing, as is its correspondence with the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno: and I reached a place where great lamentations hurt my ears. We were entering a place that lacked light, and that roared like the tempestuous sea when disputed by conflicting winds. The infernal hurricane, which never stops, wrapped up in its whirlwind of spirits; it spins them around constantly, and shakes and troubles them: when they find themselves before the dilapidated fence that holds them in, there are the screams, the sobs, and the laments.” – Edgar Vidaurre

Cristina Gutiérrez Leal and Daniela Campos: Panorama histórico-crítico da literatura venezuelana

“This collection, organized by researchers Daniela Campos and Cristina Gutiérrez Leal, stands out as a significant landmark in studies of Venezuelan literature in Brazil. It offers an approach that is simultaneously comprehensive and detailed, passing from the nineteenth century through to the present day. Divided into four parts, the book examines diverse aspects of Venezuelan literature, including its historical roots and comtemporary themes that span the intersection between politics, society, and culture. It boasts analyses of cultural modernization, populism and democracy, the anti-colonial imagination, and the literature of petroleum, as well as discourses of migration. Composed of twenty-seven articles by internationally recognized academics, this work is required reading for all those who seek to understand the particularities of Venezuelan literary production and its increasing presence in the global scene. Furthermore, the translation into Portuguese broadens access to this important intellectual production, contributing significantly to the understanding and appreciation of Venezuelan literature in a Brazilian context. This collection of guiding texts allows us to perceive how literature can serve as a powerful lens with which to understand and interpret Venezuelan reality and its interactions with the world.” – Tatiana Capaverde

José Antonio Rodríguez: The Day’s Hard Edge

In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day’s Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.

Julia Wong Kcomt, translated by Jennifer Shyue: A Blind Salmon

Tusán writer Julia Wong Kcomt’s sixth collection of poetry, A Blind Salmon is her first full-length collection available in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepén, Tijuana, and Vienna. It takes up sameness and difference, shot through with desert sand. In these poems, Wong Kcomt renders homage to writers such as the Peruvian poet and visual artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing them. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose to build a lyrical menagerie all her own.

Magalí Etchebarne: La vida por delante

A group of women who stand up to the sordidness of the passage of time; two friends on holiday in an imposing landscape where darkness and the past lurk like a stalking animal; two sisters who postpone doing away with their mother’s ashes in the sea; a couple living in the tension of permanent conflict. With eyes and ears highly attuned to horror, but also to beauty, the stories of Magalí Etchebarne, rich in mastery, intelligence, and humor, delve into the lives of characters locked in a constant struggle with suffering. Four universes in which tragedy and comedy dance intertwined, and that skillfully depict life’s inclemencies and the tireless pursuit of love and hope.

Pola Oloixarac: Bad hombre

For a period of time, Pola Oloixarac received a series of invitations from women who had an unrelenting goal: to punish certain men with whom they had (or hadn’t) had a romantic relationship. The accusations levied against them were chilling, and they demanded that the narrator take a side: Does she stand with feminist justice or with the “bad hombres”? There could be no middle ground. Fascinated and sometimes perplexed, Oloixarac ventures into the labyrinth of a system able to cast a cloud of suspicion and condemnation over almost anyone, including herself. Through captivating, sometimes monstrous characters, the author dissects the mechanisms of cancellation and political correctness, just as she leads us to explore the complexities of sex and desire. In her sharp, thoughtful style, Pola Oloixarac constructs in Bad hombre an intimate novel, passionate about the power of women, that brings to light scenes of Victoria Ocampo and her lovers, sexual sects in California, cyber-basilisks, and an exploration of the centrifugal forces of a new configuration of the world that both attracts and confounds us.

Natalia Litvinova, translated by Kelsi Vanada: Basket of Braids

The title of Basket of Braids forms a surprising image. Why would anyone store braided hair in a basket? For Belarusian poet Natalia Litvinova, who immigrated with her family to Buenos Aires at the age of ten, this basket of braids symbolises the strength of the bonds between the rural Slavic women who came before her—and her own link to her heritage across time and space. Litvinova’s poems evoke memories of the culture and place that shaped her through dense lines rich with imagery. Each poem is a jewel, a talisman, a spell, often lingering on relationships between Litvinova’s ancestors and the land they were tied to, its flora and fauna. Appearing for the first time in English translation by Kelsi Vanada, Basket of Braids gives readers an intimate experience of one poet’s memory and heritage, held in language like amber.

Daniel Borzutzky: The Murmuring Grief of the Americas

In The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, 2016 National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky holds to account the private interests driving Western humanitarian decisions, laying bare the immense toll of exploitative labor practices and the self-serving nature of authoritative bodies. These powerful, musical poems explore our hemispheric grief under the yokes of labyrinthine immigration policies, militarized policing, and mass capitalism. Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Núñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He teaches English and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Adriana Riva: Ruth

Ruth is a woman who goes to the opera with her friends, takes art classes on Zoom, talks to her kids, watches her granddaughters. She expounds on the things she likes and doesn’t like, laying bare the wisdom she has earned from experience. Ruth is a Jewish woman, a widow with time on her hands for the first time, finally able to dedicate her energy and wit to exploring the nooks and crannies of a desire unmoored by obligations. With clear, amusing prose, full of humor and notes of tragicomedy, Adriana Riva breathes life into the inner world of an old lady on the cusp of her eighties who is tired of obeying and chooses instead, for the first time, to speak her mind.

Julia Kornberg, translated by Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg: Berlin Atomized

Berlin Atomized begins in Buenos Aires of the early 2000s with the self-baptisms of Nina Goldstein. She bathes too frequently, washing with fervor and repeating: “I am not asleep.” She grows up partying and taking undeserved siestas, while her eldest brother Jeremías is drawn into the city’s powder keg music scene, and the middle sibling, Mateo, learns of his terminal illness and prepares to join the IDF. Though Argentina faces the worst economic crisis in its history, the Goldsteins are being reared in a newly developed gated community that displaces working class families. Each sibling rehearses their escape from the capitalist Eden of their birth, unaware that the gated community will soon be underwater, and their family scattered all over the earth. From Punta del Este to Paris, Berlin to Jerusalem, Brussels to Tokyo, the novel progresses into a dire near future of constant flight and fire as the siblings search for one another. Defiant and dexterous, percussive and percolating with violent light, Berlin Atomized is Julia Kornberg’s napalmic debut—a tale about the end of the world, as told by the clear-eyed youth to which that world had been promised.

Alejandrina Falcón: Traductores del exilio: Argentinos en editoriales españolas: traducciones, escrituras por encargo y conflicto lingüístico (1974-1983)

This book can be read as a contribution to the cultural history of the Argentine exile community in Spain and as a study of practices of translation and literary importation in the Hispano-American publishing field in the last decades of the twentieth century. Both plotlines come together in the story at hand: the story of the Argentine exiles who put their strength and knowledge to work for the Spanish publishing industry between 1974 and 1983. The presence of Latin American workers at Spanish presses has not yet been systematically studied or represented in the multiple narratives that make up the collective memory of Hispano-American publishing. One purpose of this book’s research is to make manifest this presence, exploring the set of themes and problems that circled around it. Another is to contribute to knowledge of the history and sociology of literary translation in the Spanish-speaking space, building a collective biography of literary importers and exploring the motley world of the Argentine translators who, from exile, had a hand in the production of translated and popular literature with foreign pseudonyms.

Nota Bene: June 2024

LALT Team — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 19:01:27 +0000

José Eustasio Rivera: La vorágine: Una edición cosmográfica

In this cosmographic edition, reading La vorágine is inseparable from reading the territory in which it develops. Almost a century after its first publication, Margarita Serje and Erna von der Walde, in their original approach to the text, take the last version José Eustasio Rivera published in his lifetime and recover the maps that the author included, but that were omitted in future editions. Likewise, the cosmographic edition of this classic of Colombian literature presents six maps designed especially to accompany readers in their journey through the Orinoco-Amazon region and includes a selection of writings by naturalists, missionaries, government officials, and specialists in social sciences, offering a panoramic range of perspectives on the area where the novel takes place and laying a path towards its historical dimension.

Paco Carreño: Los impostores

The most brutal serial killer in Argentina’s history clung to the hope that they would someday make a film based on his life, directed by Quentin Tarantino and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. His case, like many others dealt with in Los impostores, cries out to be recognized. These strange and abhorrent ways of gaining visibility come at a time when words seem insufficient to offer any consciousness of having a place in the world. The main shortcoming in these lives is a deficiency in their capacity as speakers. Their own language is limited when it comes to making sense of their lives. They lack the words necessary to find themselves in the eyes of others. In a world dominated by doings, this essay is an attempt to recover the word’s sovereignty. The freedom of mankind is impossible without the prior freedom of our words.

Mery Yolanda Sánchez: Poesía completa

“Before the butterfly’s flight, you knew of infamy. They taught you not to loose the arrow so as to avoid regret. They told you you had to invent a family, and you got it entirely together for the murderers. You did not await the offspring of your urges. Old as you are, you will not cry for those unborn. You’re well aware that theirs is the glory of eternity.” This poem is a display of the expressive potency that permeates the poetry of Mery Yolanda Sánchez, published here for the first time in its entirety, includying her latest book, hitherto unpublished. In this essential book, readers will experience the presence of the victims of Colombia’s violence. It is only fitting to let yourself be carried along on the emotions, often angular and cutting, that these poems construct.

Néstor Mendoza: Alfabeto de humo II: Ensayos y reseñas sobre poesía venezolana

Reading Alfabeto de humo II: Ensayos y reseñas sobre poesía venezolana is an act that lends new dimensions to our experience of Venezuelan literature, which is broad-ranging and varied. In this exercise, we find texts that refract off one another in their discourse, or, as author Néstor Mendoza puts it: “The mirror can be that which I see out there, we add to it.” The organic character of the word that contains its own pulse, as an almost immediate purification of readings, thought, and emotion. The poets whom Mendoza addresses outline subjects such as death, the air of Venezuelan territory at any of its cardinal points, and the air of the Mediterranean, and also enter into intertextuality, exile, love, uprootedness, light and aridity, and with it, rain. – José Ygnacio Ochoa

Lorena Huitrón Vázquez: Los que no encajan

Designed as a tryptych, Los que no encajan starts by setting foot in a landscape apparently unnatural to poetry: the medical world and phototherapy. We are not accustomed to light, the voice of “Solarium” seems to tell us, as soon as the book begins. Its second part, “Teorema de Bernoulli,” delves into betta fish and jellyfish. In an experimental key, the poems interweave different images to compose a separate, distant language, close to the voice of the poet herself. The final section, titled “Gimnasia respiratoria automática,” closes the book with a return of that light that had blinded us before: “Either we come late to luminosity or it will simply be far from us forever.” Nostalgic for light, love, closeness, the poet writes: “Our love has been like asthma, / labored breath in company.” A suggestive metaphor for the very act of reading this book: breathing in company, shared light, an image recombined. – Marcelo Rioseco

Maria Dayana Fraile: Hella Kitty

Hella Kitty is a compendium of frenetic, solar love, a kingdom of figures and metaphors where the biological and the philosophical dance to a rhythm set by the soul. In its pages, a world becomes a toy, a body transforms into a nucleus, and a murderous moustache guides us through a theorem of bare feet on the glass of the capitalist economy. Dress in silk, embrace the shadow of the wild, and prepare yourself for an unparalleled literary journey with Hella Kitty. Fraile invites us to a space where femininity is revealed as both amusing and fiercely critical of the system in all its gradients. Discover the voice of a deadly poet, a model narrator, and a murderous doll who redefines the limits of both poem and story. – Gladys Mendía

Gustavo Valle: La máquina de leer los pensamientos

Luba Ediciones presents La máquina de leer los pensamientos (2024) by Gustavo Valle, a writer who has made headway in Venezuelan literature calmly and at his own pace. Valle is a first-rate author who has worked on both novels and poetry. This is far from his first poetic offering. Ciudad imaginaria is a magnificent book of poems published in 2006, whose rereading reveals a poet who was already mature at the time. Materia de otro mundo, from 2003, likewise evinces its author’s poetic calling. La máquina de leer los pensamientos is Valle’s third poetry collection. Its verses are short, precise knifestrokes, entering into an ontology that folds over the world’s matter with the fire of language. This is a fine work of poetry inscribed in a book from an independent press—one of those whose work is genuinely worthwhile because they put love into it and produce exquisite, delicate editions that are a pleasure to have and to read. The cover illustration, I’m happy to say, is my own. – Fedosy Santaella

Esteban Moore: Al margen de la noche (antología)

This poetry is born of a deeply-held commitment to existence. Reality and personal experience are dialectically conjugated, distilling a poetic universe all its own whose shape has evolved from rigorous schematism into the expanding density of a rich metaphorical imagination. Moore’s language has maintained not only its accented identity but also a worthy level of precision. Shot through by an emotional charge articulated with lucid intellect, these texts reveal the poetry in things and in the world in general. His gaze open to a multiplicity of subjects, Esteban Moore shows himself to be, at the peak of his creative enterprise, a living presence in our letters. – Joaquin O. Giannuzzi

Juan Camilo Rincón: Ser colombiano es un acto de fe: Historias de Jorge Luis Borges y Colombia

Rincón truly hits the mark with this book. The research work that went into it admirably reflects this journalist’s passion for the Argentine’s literature, and is a display of the fine narrative journalism being practiced in his country. If you ask me, I believe this book will become one of those little treasures that Colombian literature has engendered over the years; what we read here is no less than an homage to the Borgesians, to being Colombian, to the act of faith that we all represent and that Borges managed to capture in ink in his lifetime. Time will pass and the Argentine will live on, and our letters will remain lofty as long as there are still people who write and recall how marvelous it is to know one is alive. – Santiago Díaz Benavides

Irina Garbatzky: El archivo del Este: Desplazamientos en los imaginarios de la literatura cubana contemporánea

El archivo del Este: Desplazamientos en los imaginarios de la literatura cubana contemporánea ponders the persistence of the imageries, landscapes, and references points of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in a selection of Cuban literary, performance, and theatre production, especially towards the end of the twentieth century. The corpus takes as its starting point the journal Diáspora(s)—the work of Carlos A. Aguilera, Rolando Sánchez Mejías, and José Manuel Prieto—and includes other authors of that generation (Antonio José Ponte, Reina María Rodríguez) as well as previous (Jesús Díaz, Fernando Villaverde) and following generations (from Generation Zero, like Abel Fernández Larrea). The general hypothesis is oriented towards the notion of the archive, in the sense given to it by Michel Foucault: not so much the documentary accumulation of a historical episode and more the systematization and emergence of a discursive constellation.

Nicolás Medina Mora: América del Norte

From the winner of the 2023 n+1 Writers’ Fellowship and taking place during the turbulent years under both the Trump and López Obrador administrations, América del Norte is a smart, playful, and illuminating novel that interrogates the fictional and dangerous nature of borders, nationalities, and ethnic identities—and the life-altering power of these contested politics. Medina Mora, a Mexico City native, weaves his keen sense of US–Mexico sociopolitics in this wonderfully ambitious work of autofiction, combining contemporary vignettes, political critique, failed essays, fictionalized letters, and more, to probe the Mexico City elite scene, to (lovingly) parodize the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and ultimately, to wrestle with the contradictory relationship between two countries bound by geography and torn apart by politics. Medina Mora’s novel comes thirty years after NAFTA was signed into effect, but captures too the centuries-long history of political, emotional, and literary mistranslations between the US and Mexico before then.

Tamara Tenenbaum: La última actriz

Although she once dreamed of being an actress, Sabrina ended up studying Arts. Spurred on by Gabriel—her thesis director and lover—she decides to research the tracks of Jewish theatre in Argentina. So she turns to Jaim, an old professor who suggests that she inspect the remains of the archives of the AMIA, the mutual society that suffered a terrorist attack in 1994. “It was at that moment that I decided I was going to dedicate myself to that past. It’s not that that world called my attention, not any more than any other world: what drew me in was the fact that it had disappeared.” In La última actriz, Tamara Tenenbaum displays an exceptional narrative intelligence. With two disturbing women characters and a plot as elusive as it is hypnotic, this novel deals with being a woman, with desire and realization, with the myth of the dybbuk and the possession of the body, with tradition and modernity, with the city of Buenos Aires and the search for an existential key amid a mound of burnt papers.

Loreto Villarroel, director: La Ciudad de los Escritores

La Ciudad de los Escritores is a product of the “La Ciudad y las Palabras” program, whose main goal is to enrich the perception of the city through film and literature. This initiative is based in the outreach branch of the Doctoral Program in Architecture and Urban Studies of the Department of Architecture, Design, and Urban Studies of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and has been in operation for seventeen years. Throughout this time, the program has welcomed world-renowned writers and filmmakers, becoming a highly impactful space of encounter and cultural exchange. This book seeks to share the perspectives of a select group of authors on various cities, whether through their own experience or through that of other writers. The talks and interviews collected in this volume took place between 2020 and 2021, providing a contemporary, up-to-date vision of the relationship between literature, film, and the city. This project stands out for its contribution to the common good, as Alejandro Aravena (winner of the 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize) points out in the book’s prologue. Aravena highlights the importance of literature to architects, as it allows us to grasp the emotional dimension that spurs on our actions in the city and elsewhere.

Sofía Balbuena: Borracha menor

“Sofía, don’t become an alcoholic,” her father tells her when she is about to leave Argentina behind and move to Barcelona. These words will become a personal prophecy. Sofía Balbuena opens a space, in the first person, to inspect the habits and structures that drive us towards certain patterns of consumption. With personal experience and her own life as a guiding thread, she reconstructs a mosaic of alcoholic narratives written by women in search of a space of belonging wider than the self. If women’s experience represents a minor literature, this book seeks to push that premise to its limit: to expose all that which could be considered minimal or little and put it at the center, hierarchize it, and submit it to light’s will.

Mariana Sández: La vida en miniatura

Dorothea Dodds has lived 59 years unnoticed. In the shadow of a problematic, absent brother, she fills the roles of daughter, secretary, and caretaker of parents who never valued her enough. She is the perfect model of responsibility and diligence, the ideal person to leave in charge of the house during summer vacation. And so, one fine day when she needs to get away from it all, she decides to do just that. With the help of an English cousin named Mary Lebone, she gets a job that consists of watching houses and pets throughout the length and breadth of the English countryside. In these traces of the lives of others, she will finally find the necessary clues to figure out her own. With a prose style follows in the footsteps of Natalia Ginzburg or Iris Murdoch, La vida en miniatura is a novel with hints of a travel book, in which the path to be taken is on the inside: Dorothea zigzags through the green fields of England while retracing key episodes of her past and learning to live her present.

Sergio Mansilla Torres: Sentido de lugar: Ensayos sobre poesía chilena de los territorios sur-patagónicos

Sentido de lugar: Ensayos sobre poesía chilena de los territorios sur-patagónicos by Sergio Mansilla Torres is a book conceived as an imaginary journey through said territories and the texts that represent them, from the Valdivian temperate forests in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the far south. A passage through landscapes, memory, and subjectivities made of living, dreamed, and suffering places, as the indelable existencial experience of their authors, which morphs into poetic writing in dialogue with the geography, bodies, and writings of the world. Throughout these essays—which pulverize the clichés that exist around southern Chilean poetry (“larismo,” or place poetry, being one of them), demonstrating its permanent exploration and complexity—the author enters into the oeuvres of renowned poets like Maha Vial, Verónica Zondek, Jaime Luis Huenún, Delia Domínguez, and Christian Formoso, as well as others who have developed their craft exclusively in these territories and who cry out to be discovered in others, such as Ivonne Coñuecar, Ramón Quichiyao, Marlene Bohle, and Juan Pablo Riveros, among others.

Nota Bene: March 2024

LALT Team — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 22:04:54 +0000

César Ferreira, ed.: Nueve asediosa País de Jauja de Edgardo Rivera Martínez

This volume brings together a variety of critical approaches to the novel País de Jauja on the thirtieth anniversary of its publication. The diverse readings put forth by each of the included essays demonstrate the currency of one of the major Peruvian novels of the late twentieth century and attest to the well deserved seat of honor that Edgardo Rivera Martínez occupies in Peruvian literary history.

Leonardo Padura: Personas decentes

Havana, 2016. A historic occurrence shakes Cuba to its core: Barack Obama’s visit during what has been called the “Cuban thaw”—the first official visit by a US president since 1928—along with events like a Rolling Stones concert and a Chanel parade, all of which turn the island’s rhythm upside-down. So, when a former Cuban government strongman is found murdered in his apartment, the police, overwhelmed by the presidential visit, turn to Mario Conde for a hand with the investigation. Conde will find out the dead man had many enemies; he was once a censor, ensuring artists towed the revolutionary party line, and was known as a despotic, cruel man who ended the careers of many who refused to fold to his demands. When, a few days later, he finds a second dead body murdered with the same modus operandi, Conde must discover if the two deaths are related and what lies behind these murders.

Marisa Martínez Pérsico: Los parques interiores

Los parques interiores by Argentine poet Marisa Martínez Pérsico received the forty-eighth Rafael Morales Poetry Prize in Spain. This book inadvertently demystifies the prejudice that tells us a poet must have “a voice of their own”: “a voice” in the singular and “of their own” as author and authority. In doing so, it also squashes the farce of identity: within each of us lives all of us, as is clear from the epigraph through the rest of the book. Aristotle told us “being is said in many ways.” Here, being is expressed with a plurality of emotional mettles, styles, predictions, and memories. At the heart of this poetry lies a loss, not all its own but all of ours: the open track that every reader fills with what is missing from life.

Fadir Delgado: La temperatura exacta del miedo

The human being from the human soul. That’s La temperatura exacta del miedo, the poetry collection by Fadir Delgado, which received Colombia’s National Poetry Prize in 2023. Despite the smiles and clarity of life, each of us bears within ourselves our own fears. angsts, displeasures… and sickness is the culmination of them all. So, this work is born as a reflection on ourselves, on sickness and the tracks it leaves inside, on the soul; in short, a neverending game of contradictions and sentiments, full of symbols and paradoxes, that resonates with each and every one of us, verse after verse.

Sergio Ocampo Madrid: Las distancias

Rare are literary works that accurately express the abyss between the extremes of reality, often separated by a mere neighborhood street or the few miles between city and countryside; those inescapable fates explained away as family roots, as surnames, that determine, for better or for worse, the luck and life of everyone in societies like ours. In this novel, which dips its toes into both the essay and the biography, Sergio Ocampo Madrid has met this challenge head-on, offering us a critical view of the Colombia of the past half century, interwoven with his version of the story-never-told, the ever-missing piece in this continent of hyperboles and illusions that is Latin America.

Various authors: Feroces: compilación de autoras jóvenes venezolanas

The stories collected in Feroces: compilación de autoras jóvenes venezolanas (Sello Cultural, 2023) are written in Venezuelan, not only in terms of their author’s nationalities or the context—whether it be urban or rural—in which they take place, but also in terms of the ways these tales are constructed, their starkly open way of naming things. My father used to say, in the end, people end up falling out with their own language. The authors of Feroces, on the other hand… go wild over it, bare their fangs, and sink their claws into the Venezuelan tongue. And that is both a beauty and a delight. – José Urriola

Eugenio Montejo: Obra completa. Tomo III. Blas Coll y los colígrafos

In his practice as a poet and essayist, Eugenio Montejo cultivated what he called “oblique writing,” a very personal and often playful take on heteronymy. Following the tradition of Larbaud, Pessoa, and Machado, this “obliqueness” conceives of our subjective sphere as a labyrinth. Around Blas Coll, the typographer of Puerto Malo, an excentric obsessed with language, orbits the work of the “Colligraphers”: Sergio Sandoval, maker of popular coplas; Tomán Linden, sonnetteer on his way back from all concern for modernity; Eduardo Polo, to whom we owe a mercurial children’s poetry; Lino Cervantes, focused on experiments like the “Colligram”; and Lucian Vacaresco, posthumous playwright, whose play “The Angel” is presented here for the first time, along with new materials from the other heteronyms.

Marcelo Rioseco: Midori & El 18-O

Marcelo Rioseco’s Midori is a true poetic happening in the Spanish language. It is written in a language that is no longer what is was, but rather what it will be, with speech-acts proper to the prophets of old, the Latin American music of one who is both nameless and faceless, of a “mad angel and his velvet soldiers” that descend down the continent towards Santiago de Chile to face the fatherland on an apocalyptic tour, passing through pained and ravaged cities, leaving behind phantasmagoric footprints and the grace of unresolved kinship. This is where its greatest merit lies. And in revealing, for youth of all ages, a verse that cures itself of the bitter metastasis of time gone by and the serpents of the violent, drugged out, and transmigratory present. – Luis Correa-Díaz

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, tr. Katherine M. Hedeen: midnight minutes

midnight minutes is Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s prize-winning anti-nationalist salvo. Two-thousand-plus lines that opt for the night as homeland, resisting all manner of borders. An exercise in freedom, here there is only flow: one long, dark breath. Defiant of accusations of irrationalism, unbound by anecdote, and highly experimental, midnight minutes signals a new path for contemporary Latin American poetry, translated with oceanic resourcefulness by his longtime collaborator, Katherine M. Hedeen.

Isabel Zapata, tr. Robin Myers: A Whale Is a Country

The animals that populate the poems of Isabel Zapata’s A Whale Is a Country invent us: they lead us into the forest of our own humanity. Their songs, growls, and silences speak in a language we took for lost, but now we hear it anew: in tender, crystalline, quadrupedal poems that invite us to recover our connection to the kindred lives with which we share this world. An extinct marsupial is a ghost. A tortoise is an ancient spirit wandering an island at the end of the world. A stuffed polar bear is the modest proof of a terrible defeat. From the microscopic waters where the hardy tardigrades make their home, to the ardent imagination that forged the impossible jackalope, to the nature preserve in Woodside, California, where Koko the gorilla learned sign language, every ecosystem appears before us as a site of discovery and communion.

Jennifer Croft: The Extinction of Irena Rey

Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets—and deceptions—of Irena Rey’s that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

Evelio Rosero, tr. Anne McLean & Victor Meadowcroft: : Way Far Away

Way Far Away is the Colombian master Evelio Rosero’s ninth novel and has been billed by his Spanish publisher as “one of the most important Colombian works of fiction written in the past two decades.” In search of his missing granddaughter Rosaura, an old man named Jeremías Andrade arrives in a town strewn with dead mice and overflowing with mist and fog. The owner of a rotten hotel and the dwarf who always accompanies her; children who play with sinister soccer balls and observe life from the ruined rooftops; an albino named Bonifacio who appears and disappears like a ghost; the cart driver whose only task is to pick up the mice piling up night after night; the charitable nuns in a nearby convent—these are the characters that converge in a vigil turned nightmare. Jeremías’s wanderings reveal a haunting truth, and a possibility of reunion in a place where all is lost, a forever-gaping abyss.

Nota Bene: December 2023

LALT Team — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 12:00:20 +0000

Diego L. García: El lento hacer: Ensayos sobre imagen y escritura

The essays in this book belong to the Borgesian tradition of inquiry. Syntheses, escape routes, and, above all, “debts of love”—as Steiner would say—to the Word and the Image. Here, the reader will find capsules of writing that not only pause over their objects of analysis but also become reflections (mirrors) of themselves. Is that two-way street—imagining “the whole” through introspective journeys—not one of the foundations of the art of the essay? From a photo by Garry Winogrand to a poem by Layna Ranz, from the photographs of Martin Parr to the poetry of Arturo Carrera, from the prose of John Fante to that of César Aira. This is the route of these inquiries by Diego L. García, in his slow-paced and harmonious essays.

Carmen Leonor Ferro: La caja

“Each verse of this poetry collection—each segment of this pained breath—is a story: the story of the last desire, the eyes gazing upon photos and documents tucked away in the dead sister’s trunk: “the Italian passport,” “the family papers.” A writing of speech, as is added every day to our language. A writing that speaks from memory, a sort of mourning that recalls the permanence of one who was once in the home, in the words. Every verb conjugated demonstrates the presence of one who is no longer there.” – Alberto Hernández

Luz Machado: Pequeña lámpara gemela

Pequeña lámpara gemela brings together two books from the oeuvre of Venezuelan poet Luz Machado: La espiga amarga (1950) and La casa por dentro (1965). It belongs to “a lineage of dissonant voices that alter the Venezuelan poetic archive through their aesthetic and political projects. Luz Machado’s poetry builds a universe where exchange, contact, mixture, and inter-involvement between matters belonging to different kingdoms—human, animal, vegetable, mineral, atmospheric, mythic—constitute the main operation of her writing,” as Gina Saraceni suggests in the epilogue to the this volume, strung together through an exhaustive review of the collections’ original editions and an anthology published in 1980, with corrections by the author herself.

Santiago Roncagliolo: El año en que nació el demonio

The Viceroyalty of Peru, 1623. On a night darker than any other, the Devil becomes flesh in the City of Kings when, in the convent of Santa Clara, a novice gives birth to a horrifying beast with two heads, a forked tongue, and eight extremities. The birth of this offspring coincides with the appearance in the capital city of a woman named Rosa who, it is said, is able to talk to both God and the Devil. Whether witch or saint, she is in the sights of the Holy Office, which will not rest until it reveals this young woman’s true intentions, as well as her possible relationship with the demonic birth and the terrible doings it will unleash. Santiago Roncagliolo breathes life into a dark epic, chock full of intrigue and enveloped in the ghosts of superstition and idolatry, in a novel that proves his worth as an author with unmatched versatility and a master of the most varied forms of the novel.

Irene Vallejo: El silbido del arquero

After the siege of Troy, forced to flee to save his family, the defeated hero Aeneas receives a vision about the future of his lineage. Accompanied by a handful of survivors, he embarks into the unknown and is shipwrecked at Carthage, where he is well received by Dido and can finally glimpse his bloodline’s redemption. A few centuries later, the poet Virgil is charged by Emperor Augustus with telling the glorious story of Rome, rooted in Aeneas’s first adventure. Unsure how to carry out this task, the poet strolls through the city in search of inspiration, unable to ignore the misery that hides behind the polished marble of its streets. Myth, history, adventure, romance, and war cross paths in this choral novel to remind us that the past is interwoven with the fibers of the present. Irene Vallejo gives proof of her erudition and her narrative talent in every chapter, hypnotizing her readers into looking with ever-new eyes at the lessons the past has to offer.

Roberto Brodsky: Balas perdidas

This book is a compilation of Brodsky’s essays on the most pressing questions of Chilean politics of the past half century. Written by a skillful stylist with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge, this volume is also a triumph of literary journalism and a work of intellectual, political, and personal self-disclosure whose central goal is to explain “what Chile is today.” Brodsky’s texts give an account, forged in the moment with transparency and equanimity—which is not to say impartiality, since the matters at hand give rise to multiple agreements and disagreements, but never half measures—of foundational events that, today, have more historical weight than Chile’s declaration of independence or the occupation of Araucania.

Alaíde Ventura Medina: Autofagia

“Alaíde Ventura Medina has written quite the book! Just like its protagonist, Autofagia is fragile, quiet, and implacable. In a hostile city, two young women define eating as ‘the act of making food disappear.’ The lack of food brings them weakness, bewilderment, sweats, and dizziness, but also complicity, pleasure, delusion. It pulls out stories more intimate than their own organs and more ferocious than the environment that closes in around them. We enter into the body and the territory at hand in the mood to question everything.” – Cristina Rivera Garza

Lina Meruane: Avidez

Let us take pause over “avarice,” our own and others’. Everyone’s. Desire, anxiety, ambition, greed. Lina Meruane lays bare the material and metaphorical meanings of this word through a multitude of insatiable mothers and daughters, incisive sisters, and sharp-edged friends and lovers, as well as wild men and animals whose hunger feeds into love and hatred, misery and punishment, resentment, forgiveness. An obsessive universe crisscrossed by objects that come to life and bodies that lose it, sundered and mutilated. Reading these caustic stories by Lina Meruane sparks, as does every one of her books, an unforgettable avarice for reading.

Paula Vázquez: La librería y la diosa

Brought up in a family in which books are “dangerous to your health,” Paula dreams of having her own library. This love of literature leads her to seek a life far from her household of origin. On the other side of the ocean, first in Barcelona and then in Madrid, she founds a bookstore inhabited by the works of her most beloved authors. To her surprise, after her mother’s death, this vocation gives way to new longings that sometimes seem impossible: to have a child and finally belong to a place, permanently. Torn between projects and countries, Paula finds a new revelation in ceramics. In the garden of Mishal, her teacher, she discovers the power of patient observation and artisanal work, and ends up casting the figure of the Venus of Laussel, which she places at the center of her house. Guided by her, by conversations with friends, and by her readings of authors she admires, from T.S. Eliot to Roberto Bolaño, Natalia Ginzburg, Agota Kristof, and Marta Sanz, the Argentine author and founder of bookstore Lata Peinada presents a moving memoir on the transformative power of literature, the unique task of the bookseller, and the different ways of creating and reinventing a life.

Fernanda García Lao: Teoría del tacto

With shock, irreverence, and a radical poetics of discomfort, Argentine writer Fernanda García Lao makes bodies of a range of emotions from the contemporary world: wombs-for-hire, social media, solitude, prostitution, pornography, death, old age, and madness. Everything that doesn’t fit. Assembling events both real and fake, these sharp-edged stories push the believable to the insane and make of the real a strange object, with clear links to the finest tradition of the Latin American short story. Teoría del tacto, the third book by Fernanda García Lao from Candaya and the fifteenth of her career thus far, closes with one of her most intimate and autobiographical texts: “Mis Dos Hemisferios,” an account of a family’s past, exile, migration, losses, and the reconstruction of identity.

Martín Felipe Castagnet: Minotauro, una odisea de Paco Porrúa

This is a double-edged book. On the one hand, it is a profound and dedicated analysis of Minotauro publishing house, which captivated generation after generation of readers. And, on the other, it is a biographical profile of the great publisher and translator Francisco “Paco” Porrúa. Color illustrations, first-hand testimonies, and archival materials go hand-in-hand with Castagnet’s research on this marvelous publisher who spread science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

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Nota Bene: September 2023

LALT Team — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 07:01:42 +0000

Elisa Díaz Castelo: Proyecto Manhattan

Proyecto Manhattan creates a polyphonic setting in which there coexist different voices linked to the creation of the atomic bomb. Through a series of intersecting monologues, this hybrid text uses elements of stage-writing to recover and underline the roles played by various women in the Manhattan Project. Within this choir we hear the voices of Jean Tatlock (a psychiatrist who succumbed to suicide and was once the romantic partner of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the bomb’s creator), Kitty Oppenheimer (Oppenheimer’s wife and the mother of his children), the women of Oak Ridge (a group of workers who, unknowingly, contributed to the development of nuclear weapons), and Leona Woods (a physicist and the only woman involved in the construction of the world’s first nuclear reactor). Around the focal point of the detonation of instant mass death circle voices that, from the shadows, observed its birth.

Miguel Otero Silva: Casas muertas and Oficina N.º1

Once known as “the rose of the plains” for its beauty and prosperity, Ortiz is now a town in ruins, devastated by war and sickness. Among its wreckage and the echoes of past glory lives Carmen Rosa, a young woman who dreams of a future far from death and memory, far off in the desert, where they say prosperity springs up from the earth and splendid cities brimming with life are born overnight. Casas muertas and Oficina N.º1 form a diptych that was a landmark in Venezuelan literature, admired by writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda. With extraordinary lyricism, Miguel Otero Silva shows us the slow agony of a mortally wounded place, and the hasty birth of his country’s first oil settlements.

Ingrid Vanessa Canizales: Río de hilo: Reflejos de la selva

“This story begins in Cali in 2019. After visiting family and friends for a few months, I needed to get back out on the road. I started traveling Latin America in 2013 along with my partner in life and adventures, Martín, who would be by my side throughout this story. The previous journey was through places I had visited years before, starting down the road to Bolivia. Once again finding spaces and great friends in Ecuador was the irresistible fuel to get us, this time, all the way to Brazil. We spent two months in Ecuador, a land of great snowy mountains and volcanoes, of paradisiac beaches, of broad-ranging gastronomy, of friendly and warm-hearted people. Ecuador is a long journey, one necessary in life, and it deserves a whole book to itself. This story in particular is about the time we spent sailing down the current of the Amazon River, which we reached on the Napo River in Ecuador; it is, therefore, an approach to the everyday life of the river along with the people who dwell on it, through stitches that reveal the experience. The illustrations were sewn in thread during the journey. One has a great deal of free time on boats, and we spent many days sailing on them. This season on the river allowed these embroideries to come to life, telling the tale of days spent in a hammock.” – Ingrid Vanessa Canizales

Various authors: Colonialismo cultural y ontología indígena en comunidades Pewenche de Alto Biobío

“This book—a book for specialists at first sight—is a lucid and profound critical analysis of contemporary Chile. Reading about what is happening in Chilean schools, we find clues suggesting that the same monocultural and colonialist logic identified here might have variations, not only in other sectors of the educational field (universities, for example) but also in health, social security, culture, politics, economics, and religion. The fractures and divisions that split Chilean society in other sectors here find valuable points of insight. In other words, this remarkable study invites us to identify the many deeply cut lines that divide Chile. Not only does it decry these lines; it also proposes alternatives conceived of cognitive justice and historical justice as foundational dimensions of social justice.” – Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Roberto Palacio: La era de la ansiedad

La era de la ansiedad is a book about the vertigo of our times. We live under what Kierkegaard called “reflective sorrow,” the pulse of a world whose heart keeps beating within us even when all action has ceased. New practices seem to feed into this “anxiety”: we build our identity such that we have nothing to hope for but a “like”; we love ourselves like boxers, feigning blows only to then isolate ourselves, not knowing when to come back; artists sell invisible sculptures and invest exorbitant amounts in the untouchable. These pages make up a 360-degree panorama of the present, outlined by Roberto Palacio with an unfurling of original ideas, written in the key of a non-academic and informative philosophy. He shows that, in a world deprived of truths and utopias, only the self-care derived from thought can give new meaning to the symptoms of uncertainty.

Lorena Huitrón: Prueba olímpica

“A teacher once told us there were two kinds of poets. The first is those who are born with the power—a gift of nature, touched by the hand of God—and every one of their verses penetrates and changes us. On the other hand are the poets who are not blessed and who make up for this shortfall through reading. Their poems find their place in the tradition because they have read more poetry, and they succeed in becoming links in an enormous chain. The teacher concluded that these two types of poets did not mix, they were at opposite poles. After reading the poetry of Lorena Huitrón, we find that this teacher was mistaken. Lorena has a natural power that disquiets her reader, who will remember her verses like a melody, like a bird muttering into our ear, but at the same time she fits into tradition so as to change it. Prueba olímpica explores the possibilities of prose poetry, coming out of its shell to dispute—and demystify—the new probabilities of poetic language: verses that become epigraphs of a subsequent poem, obsessions that open into an endless process, wounds that discover for themselves that it makes sense to mock their existence. As we read on, we would like to believe that, horizontally, in the reading of Prueba olímpica, Lorena Huitrón opens—with a sarcastic wink—a vertical path that helps us understand it is possible to recognize ourselves in her verses.” – Carlos Azar Manzur

Margo Glantz and Tamara Kamenszain: Ya te llegará: Correspondencia 1984-1997

Margo Glantz and Tamara Kamenszain met in 1979, when Tamara and Héctor Libertella went into exile in Mexico, and they made friends. So much so that their relationship continued for decades, in which they came together from time to time in different countries and circumstances. These letters depict a time when they did not see each other and, nonetheless, they wished to keep in touch, to know about each other, to comment on their writing, to maintain a lively dialogue. They go from 1984, when Tamara definitively returned to Argentina, to 1997, when their post exchange was replaced by email. This correspondence bears witness to a fond, trusting relationship between two fundamental Latin American writers, and to how their lives and bodies of work were intertwined. Like a mosaic of their universes, in these letters we discover literary criticism, definitions of marriage, and complaints about the difficulty of living as a writer, but above all we find the tremendous vitality of two women who raised children just as they wrote key texts of this continent’s literature. Ya te llegará is both an activation of the past and a future desire: that this dialogue should last forever and be renewed, with just as many sparks, at every new reading.

Nurit Kasztelan: Tanto

Today’s time is the same as yesterday’s time and last week’s time, as if it were used. It has been so long since she has spoken to anyone; maybe, if she did so, her speech would be as slow and deliberate as the pampas. Helena leaves the city behind to spend a season in the countryside. She doesn’t know what she wants, what she has too much of, or what she’s missing, but she is searching. She travels prepared: she brings a couple of books, her notebooks, clothes, some provisions, and a box of photos; she needs nothing else. Little by little, she seems to perceive the passing of time in a new way; she finds her way by the placement of the sun, the density of the wind. Birdsong is no longer an amorphous mass of sound; rather, she seems to recognize a kiskadee, a chimango, a thrush. And, of course, sowing time comes: she takes guidance from a book of herbs and thereby chooses a special tract of land, picks out the weeds, and plants carrots. There is something transformative in her coexistence with nature. But the countryside does not go her way. She doesn’t want to leave, nor does she feel that she should stay. Something is moving the clouds in her favor, and her train of thoughts grows ever more disordered. Among the voices of nineteenth-century naturalists, travelers, and poets, Nurit Kasztelan has composed a first novel as beautiful as it is captivating, pausing over the strange monotony that only a foreign yet familiar landscape can inspire.

Fernanda Trías: Pink Slime, translated by Heather Cleary

Winner of the Uruguayan National Literature Prize for Fiction, the Bartolomé-Hidalgo Fiction Prize, and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize. A port city is in the grips of an ecological crisis. The river has filled with toxic algae, and a deadly “red wind” blows through its streets; much of the coast has been evacuated as the wealthy migrate inland to safety, leaving the rest to shelter in abandoned houses as blackouts and food shortages abound. The unnamed narrator is one of those who has stayed. She spends her days trying to disentangle herself from the two relationships that had once meant everything to her, and looking after the young boy who’s been placed in her care. As the world in which they move becomes smaller, she reflects on the collapse of the other emotional ties in her life and the emergence of a radical yet tender solitude. With striking prose and vivid characters, the multi-award-winning Pink Slime offers profound reflections on motherhood, marriage, and caregiving, set against the backdrop of a crumbling city.

Lina Meruane: Señales de nosotros

A young woman is educated in an English boarding school that hammers home its principles: with no effort and no pain there can be no reward. The young woman takes great pains to be an exemplary student, to deserve her place in this costly institute. Outside, meanwhile, the military junta tortures bodies, exiles citizens, and incinerates corpses just as it tries to hide its economic and political violence in an endless national broadcast. But inside, the school makes sure no one knows a thing. No one must find out, despite the signs that fall all around like rain, “floating momentarily in the water, then sinking in concentric circles.” Meruane wonders: can it be true “that we were completely incapable of reading these signs, that we asked no questions and understood nothing, that we accepted everything, that we were innocent?” In Señales de nosotros, perhaps her most lucid and urgent book, the author rethinks the silence and lies in which a whole generation grew up, and the fissures that allowed for the horror’s inexorable reveal. A powerful meditation on this country “we dwell in without living it”: the Chile of the past that is the Chile of the present.

Mariana Spada: The Law of Conservation, translated by Robin Myers

The Law of Conservation is a poetry collection intensely attuned to landscape, both geographic and metaphorical. Borders blurred as cities cede to rural land; the body as a changing place on an equally unstable map; the subsoil of sexuality; the terrain of memory, both rich and painful; new countries traveled and new roots set down as an adult, navigating desire, loneliness, and love. In the context of gender and sexual identity, Spada’s work pays subtle, incisive attention to the inextricable relationship between transformation and conservation: transformation toward the experience of honoring and protecting our deepest and most abiding truths. At the same time, her poems also unsparingly explore the external shifts (in the speaker’s surroundings and even her memories) that make it so challenging to retain an unassailable sense of self.

Nota Bene: June 2023

LALT Team — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 07:02:44 +0000

Enrique Bernardo Núñez: Cubagua, edited by Alejandro Bruzual, translated by Rowena Hill

“Cubagua—conceived in 1925, written between 1928 and 1930, and published in 1931—is the culmination of Enrique Bernardo Núñez’s narrative work. The novel, which occupies a very special place in Venezuelan literature, signified an advance in Latin American fiction as a whole. Although a long time passed before it was recognized as such, it is regarded today as the country’s chief avant-garde novel, having no precedent and leaving practically no recognizable heirs. Speaking of the past, the author succeeded, before any contemporary intellectual or writer, in deeply understanding the complexity of the present, obliquely analyzing the society and the consequences of the economic project of the dictatorship of the time. An almost prophetic work, it already identifies some of the main problems that have obstructed the realization of the possible future encoded in the South American nation and its immense natural riches. Venezuelan author Enrique Bernardo Núñez (1895-1964), as well as a writer of fiction, was a full member of the Academia Nacional de la Historia, the first official chronicler of the city of Caracas, and an opinion journalist for almost half a century.” – Alejandro Bruzual

Rafael Cadenas: Florecemos en un abismo: Poemas, prologue by Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza

“‘I / am just / a man trying to breathe / through the pore of language. / A stigma, / sometimes an intruder, / in any case, someone out of character.’ These words from a poem by Rafael Cadenas, published in his book Gestiones (1992), speak to us of someone whose relationship with language is organic, vital, and indispensable, but arduous and complicated all at once. They speak to us also of a state of consciousness that has attained an existential fullness in line with wisdom, leaving behind simulacra and imposture, opting instead for living ‘out of character.’ Reaching this state is the result of a long journey, full of uncertainty and guesswork, that began more than six decades ago.” – Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza

Luis Miguel Isava: De las prolongaciones de lo humano: Artefactos culturales y protocolos de la experiencia

“What is experience? What constitutes it? An everyday approach to these questions would presuppose that understanding emerges from sensory perception. Luis Miguel Isava returns to these inquiries and develops a very different proposal: experience is not produced as the result of perceiving, understood as an original and unmediated act; rather, it takes place based on certain specific conditions of possibility. For Isava, this prerequisite functions, in effect, as a protocol: a system of formal criteria, subject to historical and cultural contingencies, that organize and lend meaning to the perceived, thereby ‘endorsing’ it as experience. These protocols that make experience possible are so deeply rooted that they can appear invisible and ‘natural’ to us, when in fact they are ever-changing.” – Juan Pablo Lupi

Elisa Díaz Castelo: An Imperfect Geometry, translated by Robin Myers

“There are echoes and playful rewritings of Octavio Paz and Vicente Huidobro, but also the influence of Wislawa Szymborska—and, farther back, of Sor Juana, who shares Díaz Castelo’s interest in science and its nomenclatures. US American poetry also reveals its mark when the conversational register turns inward. Her work is also indebted to Greek tragedy and its choral structure, which breaks down the epic into voices. Elisa has the kind of talent that only comes around every thirty years. Anything can happen: she could stop writing, she could change the registers she explores, the genres she pursues. There’s no way to know. But what she has written so far has already secured her a place in the history of Mexican literature, and her name is already written there, her echo traveling back.” – Myriam Moscona

Kaira Vanessa Gámez: Lo demás es voz

“Lo demás es voz issues from houses in silence. These are poems whose words are peeled off oblivion. One must break apart bodies and footprints to say what must not be kept silent, what belongs to the night. Family characters, plots, and knots, which somehow come undone, keep the tension high. A rebel poet eludes silences; ‘where there are no voices, I step in.’ The mother is the center, but also the daughter. The word itself and varied readings accompany Kaira Vanessa Gámez; within them, she seeks some sort of redemption.” – María Clara Salas

Daniela Ema Aguinsky: Terapia con animales

“Between Casi incendio mi cuarto con una vela and Estoy enamorada de Ellen Bass, we find this book by Daniela Ema Aguinsky, where every instant incinerates the last with unforeseen grace. Not stepping back and not getting ahead of herself, living in the now, shining a light on each happening before it gets lost—this seems to be her natural condition. The everyday blends into the momentous: menstruation and the synagogue coexist within a single poem, unbothered. In Terapia con animales, desire is transfigured into an object, the cold leftovers of a breakup remain in the freezer, an infidelity leaves only a forgotten pair of panties between the sheets. Fleeting secrets allow this original, solitary voice to find in love a vocative with which to test distance.” – Fernanda García Lao

Jorge Andrés Medina: Osario

Those who have departed still remain, buried in the cemetery of our memory. To recount the ineffable labor of excavating fleshless recollections and, little by little, bring them back to life: this is achieved in this Osario. Jorge Andrés Medina lifts up the tombstones of the past, revealing an intimacy that, as we come to understand, belongs to us: the beloved grandparents we lost in childhood, the exile proper to all youth, the mother who returns seeking forgiveness, and our father, after having robbed him of his mannerisms and his steady gaze. Everyone remembers their dead every now and then. Only a poet can unearth their secrets, to give them an ossuary worth visiting.

Eduardo Cote Lamus: Diario del Alto San Juan y del Atrato

Originally published in the magazine Mito in 1959, the Diario del Alto San Juan y del Atrato is the result of Eduardo Cote Lamus’s journey to the Chocó department on behalf of Colombia’s House of Representatives. As Chocoan writer Velia Vidal notes in her introduction, “going against the grain of the travelers of his time, Eduardo Cote Lamus does not see us as strange; he looks us in the eye, on a level, and builds a narrative for Chocoans and visitors from any location, in which the former see us treated justly and the latter will be enticed by an extraordinary place.” The photographs that accompany the text, taken by the author himself, as well as the images of the notebook in which the poet recorded his observations, are published here for the first time.

Amparo Dávila: Cuentos reunidos

The short fiction of Amparo Dávila flows with stylistic simplicity and pause, addressing a broad range of human emotions. Her characters confront fear, solitude, death, and madness, the products of an undefined, disturbing presence. The exploration of mental and emotional disorders in the narrative work of this Mexican writer, as well as the complex way she structures her characters, has led to her literary body of work being recognized as one of the richest and most enigmatic in Mexican fiction. This edition brings together all the short stories written by this significant author: her already renowned collections Música concreta, Tiempo destrozado, and Árboles petrificados, as well as a previously unpublished volume, Con los ojos abiertos.

Various authors: Nuevas emergencias

Nuevas emergencias was published exactly ten years after Emergencias, the short fiction anthology in which authors like Mónica Ojeda, Carolina Bruck, Eduardo Ruiz Sosa, and Tomás Sánchez Bellocchio were first published in Spain. In this new volume, seventeen Ibero-American writers, all of whom studied at the master’s program in creative writing at the UPF-BSM, remind us that the short story genre is still as much an archive of classical forms as a laboratory for new variations. With echoes of the great American masters of the twentieth century (from Borges to Foster Wallace and Carver to Alice Munro) and the twenty-first (like program instructors Juan Villoro and Samanta Schweblin), this book presents texts that speak of ancient mournings and investigate today’s technologies, from urban realism to gothic fantasy, with and without fiction, on science at the end of the world and love in the time of Instagram.

Daniel Rea Gómez: Fruto

To care for another preserves us, sustains us, and brings us together, but also flattens us and wears us out. In Fruto, the contradictions of care are addressed through fourteen voices that interweave, giving rise to a transgenerational book that explores an obvious fact that goes largely unrecognized: stories of care cannot be reduced only to mothers; in fact, they involve us all. We are not all mothers, but we have all cared and been cared for. When the endless labor of maternity cornered Daniela Rea in a dark place, she did what she knows best: journalism. To understand her new circumstances, she sought out other women who mother and care; listening to them led her to interview her own mother, to question her own upbringing. While she listened to these experiences of care in extreme situations, her own story found its place and meaning. Fruto is a convocation of women, the result of lending an ear to ourselves to find what brings us together.

Jorge Carrión: Los campos electromagnéticos

One hundred years after the publication of the landmark surrealist work Los campos magnéticos by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, composed through automatic writing, we find here the first collaborative effort in Spanish between people and machines to put together a book. Writer Jorge Carrión, along with the engineers and artists of Taller Estampa, programmed and fed a GPT-2 artificial intelligence system and conversed with another, GPT-3, with the end goal of generating two literary texts: exercises in speculative writing, sometimes surreal, as hypnotic as they are disturbing. The volume is topped off with an introduction and an epilogue, producing an essay on the theories and practices of artificial writing, in which Carrión sheds light on the past, present, and future of the fascinating bond between aesthetic creation and automation.

Valeria Tentoni: El color favorito

Is the question the starting point of all writing? Or does it rather come through contact, reading, books—a teacher, as in this case? Is it a vocation that can be taught and learned? Valeria Tentoni narrates a desire that transforms into an outline, then into writing, and finally into a book and into learning, always along personal and haphazard paths. In this ode to the interview, in her admiration of the teacher, we see a journey through which a writer constructs herself in the reflections of others.

Silvia Guerra and Jesse Lee Kercheval, ed.: Flores Raras: (escondido país) poesía de mujeres uruguayas

With a prologue by Lucía Delbene and an epilogue by María Rosa Olivera Williams, Flores Raras brings together poems by fifty-four women, from some who started publishing in 1900 to others born in 1939. Silvia Guerra and Jesse Lee Kercheval, recognizing the outstanding work of so many Uruguayan women poets, sought to revisit the work of many others with solid bodies of work who, nonetheless, are not so well recognized, and are even sometimes forgotten or entirely unknown. So, as well as poets like Delmira Agustini, María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, Juana de Ibarbourou, and Ida Vitale, Flores Raras includes the work of authors like Concepción Silva Belinzon, Susana Soca, María de Monserrat, Luisa Luisi, Virginia Brindis de Salas, Eduarda Cadenazzi, and María Mauricia Gutiérrez, and, of course, local historian María Díaz de Guerra.

Jorge Volpi: Enrabiados

Can the irreversible be stopped in its tracks? Can a person become a theorem with no solution? Is it possible to flee from a fate that does not belong to us? Is it social media that pushes us into battle? Can a fictional character compose a declaration of principles? Does all music fit into a single body? We walk along, besieged by questions; we suffer the inequality imposed upon us by those in power; we breathe in the anger of ever-more polarized societies. We live furious lives, irascible lives, enraged lives. As if this were a guidebook to rage, here Jorge Volpi dissects, stresses, and delves masterfully into the spaces that generate our confrontations and the fissures into which each and every one of us plunges, if we are not lucky enough to escape.

Nayeli García Sánchez: Araneae

Thanks to a Google search, Natalia discovers that her father, who abandoned her when she was a baby, passed away four years ago. She decides to travel to Irapuato, her father’s native city, in search of information on him, despite the reservations of her boyfriend and her mother, who can’t make heads or tails of this trip. Natalia is joined in this pursuit by her boyfriend and, above all, by her relationship with spiders, which have been present in her life since she was a little girl and with which she now works professionally.

Luis Sagasti: Lenguas vivas

How many languages have been heard throughout human history? How many different colors do these languages name? How many verb tenses do they use? Do they have their own alphabets? How many living languages survive today? Lusi Sagasti has composed an unclassifiable, hypnotic book in which he tells minimal stories, ones that leave their mark on time, like the songs sung in the evenings by soldiers on both sides in the trenches of the First World War, or the biographies of unknown contributors to encyclopedias and dictionaries, or the traces of the final speakers of a language, or the frantic correspondence between translators who play at translating a story from English to Spanish and back to English then back to Spanish and so on and so on to infinity.

Dainerys Machado: Retratos de la orilla

A woman returns from Havana to Miami just to learn that her boyfriend, a Democrat politician, was caught in a hotel room with another man. A woman takes care of her dying mother, a former beauty queen who has called her ugly her entire life. A woman who wants to get pregnant goes, with a thousand doubts in tow, to a gender reveal party. Between realism and fantasy, this nomadic book travels through diverse settings in Cuba and Miami. In its nine stories, it explores the short story’s ability to create its own little worlds, in the right hands. With humor, ease, and cruelty, dodging the clichés of stories about women, Dainerys Machado sinks into the complex, sometimes contradictory psyches of her characters, inviting us into surprising tales with the narrative diversity that only a true storyteller can master.

Claudia Piñeiro: A Little Luck, translated by Frances Riddle

Twenty years after a shocking accident, Mary Lohan returns to the Buenos Aires suburb she escaped in a fugue of guilt and isolation. She is not the same—not her name or voice, not even the color of her eyes. The neighborhood looks different too, but she’s still the same woman and it’s still the same place, and as the past erupts into view, they slowly collide. A Little Luck is a story about the debilitating weight of lies, the messy line between bravery and cowardice, and the tragedies, big and small, that can ripple out from a single decisive event. In a place she had determined to forget forever, both anticipated encounters and unanticipated revelations show her, and us, that sometimes life is neither fate nor chance: perhaps it’s nothing more than a little luck.

Silvina Giaganti: Donde brilla el tibio sol

“‘We’re on the take-it-head-on-and-see-what’s-up team,’ says a friend to this book’s narrator, inadvertently defining its author’s poetics. The cocktail employed by Silvina Giaganti (barrio, football, father) could end in disaster, but it doesn’t. With the same tone—somewhere in between hot and cold—with which she talks to a guy who picks her up the day Independiente plays La B, Silvina faces up to clichés, taking them apart and putting them back together with heart and smarts. She also takes apart, in passing, the ghosts of inner shortfalls, producing (steely-eyed) an archaeology of the self that’s something like an investigative report into intimacy and a lot like a poetic metaphor straight to the jaw. Independiente, she says, is the Trojan horse in which the emotions that will one day detonate are hidden. What more can I say? Nothing: read Donde brilla el tibio sol, if possible while listening to Nino Bravo.” – Santiago Llach

Alejandro Zambra: Literatura infantil

A diary of fatherhood, a “letter to my son,” and pure fiction coexist in extraordinary harmony throughout this book. While this singular and unclassifiable book by Alejandro Zambra is called Literatura infantil, it should be added that it includes a phenomenal short story centered on vulgar language and a straightforwardly lysergic tale in which a man tries, in the midst of a therapeutic mushroom trip, to relearn the demanding art of crawling. If any child should accidentally come across these pages, they should read them in the company of an adult, despite the fact that here it is the children who, in their own way, protect the adults from despondency, selfishness, and the dictatorship of chronological time.

Translators’ Triptych: Around the World (All Worlds) In One Sentence by Rodrigo Fresán

LALT Team — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 07:05:33 +0000

The novels of Rodrigo Fresán have received major prizes in translation into other languages: his overall body of work won the Prix Roger Caillois in France in 2017, and The Invented Part was awarded the Best Translated Book Award in the United States in 2018 and was a finalist for the Premio Babel-Laboratorio Formentini in Italy in 2020.

His brimming, spellbinding books, which sometimes cover more than two thousand pages (as in the case of his triptych), can sometimes intimidate his readers. I think, though, that just one sentence of his is enough to reveal their true wonder. Like opening a little window to let in Peter Pan, or placing a new recollection in the palace of memory, here three of his translators reflect on the brilliant twists and turns of his work, all from one single sentence. Not an easy task because, as Giulia Zavagna tells us, “Fresán is many things, and his books are written, rewritten, and written about all the time. It’s all there, like in a huge house you never want to leave because, bit by bit, you find everything you need.”

María José Navia

Isabelle Gugnon, translator into French:

It’s difficult to pick out just one sentence from the long and ever-growing body of work of Rodrigo Fresán, who is a big fan of inserts and last-minute addenda. The sentence I chose does not necessarily represent his obsessions, but it does, like many of his sentences, contain a good measure of his referential, light-footed, and sprightly style. It’s from his latest novel, Melvill, on the genesis of the life and work of Herman Melville through the life and death of his father, Allan Melvill:

“Toda existencia, incluso la más en apariencia (pero sólo en apariencia) intrascendente (tanto la que se desprende del polvo colorido de las alas de una mariposa o brota del espiráculo de un leviatán) debe ser narrada; porque ignoramos los muchos modos en que esta pueda llegar a influir o afectar a la épica universal del más grande de los hombres por venir y vivir”.¹

This sentence does not present any apparent difficulty in understanding, but it does in translation; it is sinuous and playful. Intersected by two parentheses that appear as hooks (Fresán adores them), it makes the reader wait before minimizing “existencia,” almost discounting it, classifying it as “intrascendente.” But, at the same time, the first parenthesis warns the reader not to take stock in appearances, while the second seems to list a series of pretty images that could come from some sort of bestiary. The second parenthesis actually contains two references to authors whom Fresán cites often: Vladimir Nabokov and Herman Melville. The novel, titled Melvill, can be understood, veiledly or unveiledly, as talking about his white whale. The reference to Nabokov leads us straight to the passion for lepidopterous strolls of a writer to whom Fresán refers in almost all of his novels (in The Dreamed Part, he has him appear as the protagonist of a story inserted into the novel). Thus, as examples of “insignificant existences,” the author seems to have found other lives. He then insists, in italics, that existence must be narrated, “debe ser narrada.” But before it can be, seemingly neutral existence has passed through Fresán’s pen and no longer corresponds to reality. Here he addresses the fallacy of any ostensibly realistic piece of writing. Pulled out of the imagination, literature cannot be realistic. But even so, who knows? Perhaps it can influence (albeit not in its own time) the entire “universal” moment yet to come. Is the sentence’s ending meant to be ironic, or is it simply saying that anything artfully written, inspired by any life, if it is ignored in its own era, might be understood as a work of genius by a great man who has not yet been born and who will have to be a great reader too?

Despite its transparency, the sentence is ambiguous if it ends here. But Fresán continues with another reference, this time to the Tralfamadorian books of Kurt Vonnegut, who appears in all of his books, as if in a game: the dream of some “immensely small” volumes in which all stories fit. Everything mixes together: reality, fiction, literary references, trivial lives and great men—past, present, and future—through the act of reading and writing, in a sentence that is simple “en apariencia (pero sólo en apariencia).”

Will Vanderhyden, translator into English:

Choosing one sentence that was particularly challenging/fun/difficult to translate from the ever-increasing number of Rodrigo Fresán’s sentences that I’ve translated over the years has, appropriately, been difficult and fun and challenging. There are a lot of different ways I could have gone with this prompt: I might have delved into the challenges of rendering Fresánian wordplay or of unpacking his irrepressible referentiality; I might have explored the pitfalls of attempting to recreate his use of alliteration and juxtaposition or of sustaining multiple levels of meaning across his slippery extended metaphors. Essays could be written on the digressive and recursive nature of Fresán’s style and on the intricacies of his sentences that, like Matryoshka dolls, nest within them miniature iterations of his larger project.

In the end, I chose a sentence from The Remembered Part, the third volume in Fresán’s Parts triptych. It wasn’t included in the original edition of La parte recordada but was one of many inserts that Fresán added during the process of translation. It appears in a series of sentences and paragraphs that describe a book the protagonist imagines writing, a book that is also, in a way, the book we are reading, and also, in still another way, all books.

The Spanish version goes like this:

“Un libro que cometiese de manera perfecta y perdonable el crimen y pecado: probar fehacientemente que las vidas tienen una lógica y un orden que existe; que las vidas son, en realidad, novelas o libros de cuentos; que nacen y mueren, sí, pero entre un punto y otro empiezan y terminan varias veces y, en ocasiones, cierran sus partes y puertas dejándolas abiertas; que, mirando hacia atrás, descubran ese hilo secreto de destino corrigiendo y redactando toda secuencia (A y luego B y luego C) en trascendente consecuencia (A y por lo tanto B y por lo tanto C) y dotando así de sentido al pasado.”

And this is how I translated it:

“A book that would commit the perfect and pardonable crime and sin: proving irrefutably that lives have a logic and an order that exists; that lives are, really, novels or books of stories; that they are born and die, yes, but between the one point and the other they begin and end multiple times and, sometimes, they close off their parts and doors by leaving them open; that, looking back, they discover that secret thread of fate correcting and redacting all sequence (A and then B and then C) into transcendent consequence (A and thus B and thus C) and thereby giving meaning to the past.”

I made a slight change to the syntax of the introductory clause. A more “faithful” version might have been: “A book that would commit the crime and sin in a perfect and pardonable way…” I found that construction to be awkward in English and, really, on another day, I might have taken further liberties and rewritten the clause like this: “A book that would commit the perfect crime and forgivable sin …” But, in the end, I decided it was important to maintain the alliteration and, though it may seem confusing, to have “perfect and pardonable” modify both “crime and sin.” Woe betide the capricious contingencies of translation!

The sentence has a typical Fresánian structure (the list) and features some of his characteristic orthographical tendencies (the liberal use of semicolons and parentheses). It has a primary, extended metaphor (“lives” as “novels or books of stories”) and a secondary, implied metaphor (“lives”/“novels or books of stories” as structures with “parts and doors” that are closed off by being left open).

Beyond specific translation challenges, what interests me most about this sentence is the way it distills the paradox at the heart of Fresán’s Parts triptych. It’s no coincidence that the triptych’s protagonist writes a book called The Impossible Story: what he’s hoping to do—to prove “that lives have a logic and an order that exists”—is impossible, as the sentence’s final turn so exquisitely demonstrates. Any “logic” and “order” that lives have is constructed, a fiction that memory creates post facto, “looking back” and discovering “that secret thread of fate correcting and redacting all sequence into transcendent consequence.”

The protagonist of the Parts triptych is obsessed with the idea of escaping the darkness of his own past by rewriting it, and Fresán uses this obsession to explore the ways in which we all do that when we remember, when we make memory: giving in to the impulse to see our past how we want to see it, to turn it into a narrative that explains and justifies us to ourselves. To distill it down even further: “The past is a broken toy that everyone fixes in their own way.”

Giulia Zavagna, translator into Italian:

To write this is to accept defeat from the start. Because it’s hard. It’s really hard to choose a single sentence with which to talk about the work of Rodrigo Fresán. I think I would find it hard to even choose a single paragraph, a single story, or a single novel—his work is that organic and full of intertextual references and characters (and songs, and films, and books) that appear, disappear, hide, and are chased through his pages, between commas and parentheses. It’s hard because Fresán is many things, and his books are written, rewritten, and written about all the time. It’s all there, like in a huge house you never want to leave because, bit by bit, you find everything you need.

It’s hard for me as a reader because to isolate one sentence means, at the same time, to leave aside thousands of others that already form part of a sort of inner library of mine, to which I return again and again. I wonder if I should choose a sentence about writing; there are so many and they are so brilliant. Or perhaps one on reading, the fil rouge that passes through all his work in curves and spirals and knots and loops. I wonder if I should choose one of the countless sentences full of humor, the ones that make you think about how much fun the author was having while he wrote and how much fun you’re having reading. Because Fresán’s books can be very, very funny. Or one of the countless sentences full of melancholy, the ones that in two lines—sometimes less, two words—break your heart. Because Fresán’s books can be very, very moving. I wonder if I should choose a long sentence, one of those that leaves you out of breath but jumping for pure admiration. Or a short sentence, one of those that go by all but unnoticed but still light up a whole new meaning. I wonder, even, if I should choose a sentence written by Fresán, or one written by Fitzgerald (Francis Scott, but also Penelope), Barthelme, Nabokov, Emily Brontë, Melville, Battiato, The Beatles: one of those that say so much about his work and his literature, crystallized in epigraphs or slipped between the lines, as if in invisible conversation.

And it’s even harder for me as a translator due to the difficulty of illustrating, with a single sentence, the incredible journey that is coming face to face with a book by Fresán. Translation is many things; one of them is the impossible attempt to get into the head and the imagination and the language of another. Translating Fresán is translation squared: getting into the mind of a writer whose characters write and read all the time, a writer who is rewriting all the time, expanding his work and his world. I wonder if I should choose a sentence built out of that wordplay that kept me up at night. The one I had to rethink and rewrite the most, or the one that convinced me from the start and stayed as-is. I wonder if I should choose one of the sentences that gave me imposter syndrome (there are so many!) or one of those that, sitting at my desk at six in the morning, made me feel invincible (yes, once in a blue moon it happens to translators too).

The fact is, I can’t help but put off this choice—I, who choose and discard sentences and words all the time as a job—because I was lucky enough to translate just two books by Rodrigo Fresán, and this was, without a doubt, the most absurdly difficult and the most incredibly enjoyable work I’ve ever done. A book is many things; one of them is something that changes your life. And if every translation changes the way you read, your habits, your tics, and your preoccupations, my encounter with Fresán changed everything.

He says it himself in The Invented Part, one of those books full of spellbinding sentences: “one of those books that, with time’s rapid passing, time’s running, charges you the entrance fee of learning everything all over again: a brand new game with rules and […] a breathing all its own, a rhythm you have to absorb and follow if your goal is to climb up on the shore of the last page.”

Sections by Isabelle Gugnon and Giulia Zavagna translated from Spanish to English by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

¹ Translator’s Note: To aid in comprehension, here is a (quite literal) translation into English of this sentence, attempted by Arthur Malcolm Dixon, translator into English of the Spanish portions of this text: “Every existence, even the most apparently (but only apparently) trivial (so much so that it falls off the colorful dust on a butterfly’s wings or spouts out of a leviathan’s blowhole) must be recounted; for we know not the many ways it might come to influence or affect the universal epic of the greatest of men yet to come and to live.”

Photo: Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán. © Basso Cannarsa / Opale.

After traveling around Latin America and working in the publishing field, Isabelle Gugnon has been working for years on translating Spanish-language literature. She is the translator of Rodrigo Fresán, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Manuel Vilas, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Samanta Schweblin, Diego Vecchio, Dolores Reyes, Lorena Salazar Masso, Layla Martínez, and Fabián Martínez Siccardi.

Will Vanderhyden is a translator of Spanish-language literature with a BA in History from Lawrence University and an MA in Literary Translation from the University of Rochester. He has translated nine books of fiction for publication and his translations and writing have appeared in online and print publications like Granta, Two Lines, The Literary Review, The Scofield, The Arkansas International, Literary Hub, Bomb Magazine, Purple, Future Tense, and Southwest Review. His translations include work by Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, Fernanda García Lao, Juan Villoro, Laura Fernández, Dainerys Machado Vento, Camila Fabbri, Juan Ignacio Boido, Andrés Felipe Solano, and Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, among others. He received a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in 2015 and National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships in 2016 and 2023. In 2018, his translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction.

Giulia Zavagna is a literary translator from Spanish to Italian. She has translated Julio Cortázar, Amparo Dávila, Rodrigo Fresán, Rodrigo Hasbún, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Camila Sosa Villada, among others. Her translations have also been featured in newspapers and magazines such as Vanity Fair, The Passenger, La Repubblica, and La Stampa. She is the editor of SUR, where she publishes classic and contemporary Latin American authors. She lives and works in Rome, where she every now and then offers literary translation workshops.

Nota Bene: March 2023 by LALT Team

LALT Team — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 19:01:21 +0000

Aura García-Junco: Mar de piedra

Facing one of the most frequented avenues, Madero is occupied by the statues of hundreds of women, men, and even children who have disappeared day after day. This unusual phenomenon coincides with the spread of mattangs––maps that, according to believers, reveal the fates of those who know how to read them––and whose cult has taken hold of the capital. Skeptical, Professor Sofía finds the trace of a stone being, left by a ghost from the past, on one of these trails; the current of the cosmos will lead her to the possible origin of her disappearance. In this dystopian and gray city, a university professor, a recovering alcoholic, and a furious woman who denies fate find their way through a society that has become accustomed to seeing their peers vanish, but in which there are also those who refuse to forget.

José Balza: Percusión

The full narrative oeuvre of José Balza (1939) constitutes an exercise in unstoppable creative freedom, in which one act of writing leads to another. Characterized by rigor and compositional intelligence, Percusión, first published in 1982 and republished by Catedra in 2022, became a classic of Venezuelan literature practically from the moment it first saw the light, and not just because it represents one of the most radiant moments of the author’s work, but also because its originality and craftsmanship (in it, the narrator takes us down a linguistic stream that runs parallel to his monumental journey from city to city) make this novel a true literary revelation.

Álvaro Enrigue: Tu sueño imperios han sido

Hernán Cortés enters Mehxicoh-Tenoxtitlan with his nine captains, two translators, his troops, and their horses. There, the princess Aotoxtli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, treats them to a meal, accompanied by the priests, and later the emperor Moctezuma himself will welcome the leader Cortés. The Spanish are well-received, but one of Cortés’ subordinates, Jazmín Caldera, doesn’t dare tell him that the concern was never how to get to Tenoxtitlan, but rather how to get out of it once they were inside. How to approach history through fiction? Álvaro Enrigue has written a powerful narrative: a possible version of the encounter that changed the history of the world, a novel wrapped in mystery, violence, the lust for power, and dreams that were once part of empires.

Bárbara Alí: Memoria fantasma

Memoría fantasma is immersed in the reconstruction of the memory of a missing father. From games linked to invention, the dictionary, dialogues with other characters and the narration of dreams, the poet seeks a story that breaks through the silence of History and a fabric that is both home and shelter. This is a wholly free, surprising, and self-conscious collection of poems, somewhat wild but at the same time sustained, with courage but without shrillness, made up of small fragments that are carried with a certain violence from one place to another, sometimes abruptly, sometimes delicately. It contains great moments and spaces of transition.

Mario Vargas Llosa: El fuego de la imaginación: Obra periodística I

For more than sixty years, Mario Vargas Llosa has worked intensely as a columnist. His texts published in written media around the world are a kind of intellectual, literary, and political autobiography that he has constructed to the rhythm of current events at all times. With this first volume, which is dedicated to culture, Alfaguara begins the publication of the entire journalistic work of this master of world literature. These chronicles and articles are a testament to a life dedicated to reading, to the contemplation of art, to deep reflection on the events of history, to the development of the progress of humanity, and to culture as the fertile ground of freedom and civilization.

María Elena Morán: Volver a cuándo

With a colloquial tone, both musical and highly suggestive, and with expressive discoveries, Volver a cuándo speaks through the drama of a family affected by the social consequences of post-Chavismo, of how the ideals and hopes of people in the world survive under shaky conditions in a minefield of reality. Or, as Pilar Quintana points out: “With her rich and self-confident prose, which does not stop, like a river or a marathon, María Elena Morán brings chaos to life. A novel to feel first-hand the tragedy of Venezuela and its migrants. A new voice that is worth reading.”

Gustavo Rodríguez: Cien cuyes

There is a structural, subterranean violence that runs through Peru these days, as convulsive as it has been for centuries, a “latent but more dangerous violence,” according to Gustavo Rodríguez, winner of the 2023 Alfaguara Novel Prize. Cien cuyes speaks to such violence as the winner of the twenty-sixth edition of this award. The jury, chaired by Argentine author Claudia Piñeiro, highlighted the winning work as a “tragicomic novel, set in today’s Lima, which reflects one of the greatest conflicts of our time: we are increasingly long-lived and hostile to our elders. A riveting book whose protagonists care, are cared for, and defend dignity to its ultimate consequences.”

Santiago Espinosa: Cuaderno de California

Between the sea and the mountains, and more precisely, between the force of the tide and the imminence of earthquakes, the back-and-forths of Cuaderno de California emerge. Here vulnerable, poetic, and political observation of the external landscape causes incessant movements within the internal landscape of a couple (two very old souls) who travel: sometimes there are tiny movements, other times near-earthquakes. A chronicle of travel and memory and a dialogue of love, Santiago Espinosa’s work is wise in its beauty and beautiful in the depth of its reflection: it is not easy to think so sharply when we are so moved, taking pause before the beauty that captures us.

Daniel Guebel: Un crimen japonés

“A son should not live under the same sky as his father’s murderer.” This exquisite novel set in medieval Japan begins with this phrase from Confucius. Yutaka Tanaka, the feudal lord of Sagami province, must avenge the death of his father, assassinated by a band of masked samurai. The investigation of the crime throws him into battlefields, court intrigues, and betrayals. Like a Prince Hamlet lost in the folds of a country he does not understand, Yutaka will face the fascination of automata, the sentimental maneuvers of Lady Ashikaga, and the secrets of sokushinbutsu.

Ignacio Ezequiel Hutin:
Ucrania: Crónica desde el frente

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which has now lasted for almost a year, bears many years of history. Argentine journalist Ignacio Ezequiel Hutin is one of those who knows the background best; he was there while he traveled the most unwelcoming corners of Europe as a correspondent. The result is a book in which he narrates the harshness of the war in first person: Ucrania: Crónica desde el frente. On one side and on the other, he sees suffering, decadence, and ideals that are sustained against all adversity; fighters from places as far away as Latin America, and even bitter statements: “Sometimes they shoot not to defeat the enemy but because on days when there’s shooting you get paid more.”

Natalia García Freire: Trajiste contigo el viento

In this novel, readers become another inhabitant of Cocuán and are swept away by an overflowing language that blurs the border between dreams and reality. In Trajiste contigo en viento, Natalia García Freire once again portrays the hypnotic Andean universe, a privileged setting of her imagination, unique in contemporary Latin American literature. The voices of nine characters—Mildred, Ezequiel, Agustina, Manzi, Carmen, Víctor, Baltasar, Hermosina, and Filatelio—tell us of the past and present of a condemned place, as well as the miracle of the Mother-God on Earth.

María José Navia:
Todo lo que aprendimos de las películas

“Fathers and mothers and couples and friends and ultrasound scans, dangerous rooms, altered visions, and the imminent possibility of the end of all things are projected on the screen of Todo lo que aprendimos de las películas by María José Navia’s magical illumination. Ten storylines that end up forming the same mental feature film and are read/seen not as fairy tales but rather as haunted stories waiting for the arrival of that great tornado that will take them far away and return them to that place where they never wished to be forsaken. In the most technicolor black & white, Navia demonstrates all that readers might learn from reading her––from the opening acknowledgement to the very end, please, shhh, make no sound––in the most eloquent, riveting, and grateful of the silences and all its luminous darkness.” – Rodrigo Fresán

Claudia Apablaza: Historia de mi lengua

Historia de mi lengua is a hybrid text, falling between the personal diary and the essay, written in short, fragmented images. Moreover, the Spanish edition of Historia de mi lengua appears with two new texts regarding the Chilean author (published by Overol) and accompanied by eight collages by Xoana Elías, an Argentine visual artist based in Barcelona, who has developed very characteristic and personal graphic work through collage. Her works of art, usually in black and white, investigate the possibilities of minimalism, offering suggestive and poetic images.

Amanda Berenguer: The Lady of Elche, translated by Kristin Dykstra

“Amanda Berenguer’s poems from the 1980s collected under the title of The Lady of Elche are, like the unburied sculpture of the title, an enigma of identity, history, and memory constructed through shards of language cutting through time and space. The poetic voice emerges in Montevideo, in Spain, in the Grand Canyon, in New York, in search of self and connection. Berenguer’s images are as jarring and blunt as the ‘mandrake moon,’ which ‘stuck nightmares / and perversion into both sockets of my eyes,’ and as haunting and fluid as ‘an oscillating forest of submerged cadavers / feet shackled in cement cubes.’ Dykstra’s phenomenal translations are works of art themselves, poignantly rendering Berenguer’s shifting registers and movement through the far reaches of modernity into English-language poetry.” – Juliet Lynd

Pedro Mairal: Esta historia ya no está disponible

“There’s a lot of humor in these pages, almost always the kind that shows up without us having to look for it; especially when writing becomes a way of prolonging solitary conversations. This is a book about someone who comes up with poems on the bus, stories on a taxi, someone who, perhaps towards the end of the walk, puts together these whispering and semi-miraculous texts. The themes are deliciously diverse: fatherhood, too many books, vocational conflicts, the hustle and bustle of love and friendship, and above all, the desire to learn, suddenly, a little more about the world. I don’t think it’s possible to refer to this book without emphasizing, even if just in passing, the word wisdom.” – Alejandro Zambra

Catalina Lascano: Aquí estoy yo hablando todo el rato

What does it mean to be a daughter, a son? There are many answers: we have heard some from Philip Roth, Vivian Gornick, Delphine de Vigan, Mauro Libertella, and Richard Ford, among others. In Catalina Lascano’s debut novel, being a son means being a detective: investigating the story of a family, hidden under years of silence in drawers, boxes, envelopes, letters, cassettes, and photo albums. But it also means being a thief: stealing these clues, from both father and mother, in order to write your own version of the story.

Magalí Etchebarne: Cómo cocinar un lobo

“An afternoon dies and all the questions appear, but so do new certainties. It’s like learning a new language: the language of poetry. Now, Magalí Etchebarne has to take apart her house, exploring it again, one last time, this time empty. You can’t help but think of Anne Carson: ‘If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.’ But, whether she likes it or not, this fire is under control. It’s a fire moderated by someone who’s suffering her very own desperation.” – Marina Mariasch

Various authors: A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written: An Anthology of Venezuelan Poets in Chile, translated and edited by David M. Brunson

A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written is a bilingual anthology of poetry written by fifteen Venezuelan poets who are currently residing in Chile. Edited and translated by David M. Brunson, the volume encompasses the work of young poets coming from many different circumstances. Some have already published several books, while others have just begun their careers as writers. The vast majority of the original Spanish texts appeared in books, anthologies, and magazines across Chile, Venezuela, and elsewhere in the Hispanosphere. […] Begun during Brunson’s travels in Chile amid the 2019–2020 protest movement, this dual-language collection aims to elevate the individual voices of each migrant poet, to connect them with new readers, and to enrich the body of literature available in English.

Ana Montes: Meditación madre

In the eleven stories that make up Meditación madre, a savage energy leads the characters to the edge of overflowing and threatens to destroy everything in its path. Desire becomes obsession and obsession brings with it the immanence of disaster. In this book, Ana Montes shows that the everyday and the domestic also have their devastating side.

Spanish-to-English translations by Jenna Tang

Fear in the Andes, Mónica Ojeda in Translation: A Translators’ Conversation

LALT Team — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 19:04:38 +0000

A phenomenon in the Spanish-speaking world, Mónica Ojeda’s work has been translated into Dutch, English, French, Greek, Italian, and Portuguese. Some of her translators took the opportunity of this dossier to engage in conversation around our experiences translating her work.

Alba-Marina Escalon translated Ojeda’s Mâchoires (Gallimard, 2022) into French, Els Thant published the short story “Gestold bloed” in Dutch in PLUK, Ifigenia Doumi translated Mandíbula (Skarifima, 2021) into Greek, Massimiliano Bonatto translated Mandíbula, Nefando and Las voladoras into Italian (Polidoro editore, 2021; Polidoro editore, 2022; Polidoro editore, 2023), Sarah Booker translated into English Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2022; New Ruins, 2022), Nefando (Coffee House Press, 2023), “Earthquake,” published in Southwest Review, 2022, and, alongside Noelle de la Paz, co-translated “Soroche,” forthcoming with Two Lines Press’ Calico Series in 2024.

LALT: How did you come to Mónica Ojeda’s work?

Alba-Marina Escalon: When Gallimard let me know I’d translate Mandíbula, I couldn’t have been happier. Four weeks earlier, the editor had sent me chilling pages recounting a kidnapping so that I could do a translation sample. They sent it without giving me details. I didn’t know what the novel was about, who the author was, or what country she was from. It was like a blind date with the text. This delivery coincided with a visit to the Pacific Ocean I’d planned, so the reading and first lines of the translation—done by hand on loose pages—happened as if in a dream, among waves, wind, sand, and sun. The style, atmosphere, characters immediately captured me. Because of the kidnapping, I thought it was a Mexican author, but when I learned it was a text by Mónica Ojeda, I was really happy to expand my borders to the South. As I’m French-Mexican and have been living in Guatemala for more than ten years, I almost always work with Central American and Mexican authors. Nevertheless, Ecuador felt familiar, and it wasn’t a problem to adapt to the idioms or atmosphere of Guayaquil.

Els Thant: I discovered Mónica’s work on the shelves of my neighborhood bookstore in Quito, Ecuador. I love her poetic style and the intertextual richness of her stories. The Andean imaginary is quite present in Mónica’s work, so for me it is a familiar setting with which I identify. The concrete project of translating a story by Ojeda began a year ago in the context of my literary translation class at the University of Ottawa. It’s been a long, fascinating journey from the first draft to a deep revision process, and ending with the publication coming out this month. It will be my first published translation, the formal beginning of my career as a literary translator.

Ifigenia Doumi: Thanks to Skarifima, a small publishing house in Greece; they are into Latin American literature and particularly interested in contemporary authors. Besides Ojeda they have published Carla Bessa (Brazil), María Fernanda Ampuero (Ecuador), and Rita Indiana (Dominican Republic). So, they contacted me and suggested that I translate the book. After a quick look, I knew I was going to love it, so I accepted. And it turned out to be quite a good pairing; the book was warmly received by the public as well as shortlisted for the first literary translation prize organized by the LEA Festival (Literatura en Atenas) in 2021. I also had the chance to meet Mónica in Madrid, which I believe is what a translator always wishes for.

Massimiliano Bonatto: I learned about Mónica Ojeda’s work in 2018 when Mandíbula came out. Then I was just starting my career as a literary translator and was reading many Latin American authors to propose them in Italy. One day Mónica’s agent, with whom I was already in touch, sent me her new novel. I read it in two days, completely absorbed by the story and petrified by the power of the author’s voice and the voices of the female characters, by the force and the relevance of the topics tackled. So I wrote up an introduction of the book and author, translated some passages of the text, and bombarded with emails different editors who might be interested. After a couple years, an editor decided to give it a go, and that’s how it all started.

Sarah Booker: I learned about Mónica’s work through the 2017 Bogotá39 selection of promising writers under the age of 40. I was drawn to the fact that she was an Ecuadorian writer, as I’ve spent time in the country and was hoping to see greater international representation of Ecuadorian literature. I was also intrigued by her interest in technology, given Nefando was out at the time and getting attention because of the way it looks at the dark side of technology. I was lucky to be in Spain when Mónica moved back and was able to meet her a few times while she was promoting Mandíbula. I was especially drawn to Mónica’s interest in fear as well as her constantly creative use of language.

Noelle de la Paz: I first read “Terremoto” in an online journal as I was seeking out short fiction by Latin American women authors to translate. I was struck by the way Mónica brings the lyricism of a poet into her prose and immediately ordered a copy of Las voladoras and dove in. I have a lot of respect for the short story form and its skillful compression, and in this collection, I was excited to find Andean mythology and a deep sense of place interwoven with the apocalyptic, the feminine, and the grotesque. Through the generosity of the translator community around me (fellow translator Jenna Tang knew I was eager to work on Las voladoras and connected me with Sarah Booker, translator of her novels into English), I was able to talk to Sarah about our shared admiration for Mónica’s work and the possibility of collaborating. When an opportunity for a co-translation came up, I jumped at the invitation.

LALT: Can you share one particular challenge you encountered in the translation?

A-ME: The translation of Mandíbula took nine months. Certain chapters were more difficult than others, due to the themes or the style. Mónica Ojeda’s personal universe is quite complex, and this is reflected in her poetics. An example of this was chapter three, which recounts Miss Clara’s job interview. It’s made up of long sentences interrupted by subordinate clauses between commas, which are then interrupted by other phrases marked by dashes or parentheses. The mental instability of the character facing the stress of an interview is reflected in these complex, confusing constructions, and replicating them without them sounding artificial in French was one of the primary challenges. It was also difficult to translate certain nicknames that referenced cultural elements specific to Ecuador, like the nickname Miss Ángela, alias Baldomera, which I decided to translate as Black Mamba as it had to do with a marginal Afro-Ecuadorian literary character prone to violence. If the reference to the film Kill Bill is a bit forced, it does not sound dissonant and it’s a nickname that teenagers could give their teacher. I thought it was interesting to translate this nickname so that the French reader wouldn’t miss that characterization.

ET: “Sangre coagulada” is a story told by a girl, and it was a challenge to transmit the poetic style of Ojeda, the setting of the Ecuadorian páramo, the intense experiences, and the language that both belongs to and is foreign to the girl. The descriptions are very poetic and even philosophical. The story includes various references to God: a chicken head, for example, is described as a perfect roundness, like God, and when it falls to the floor, it rolls and looks like “geometría divina.” It’s all rhythm and poetry, that’s why more than ever I read my translation out loud to assure I’d reproduced this rhythm in Dutch. Other challenges were the localization of the cultural references, the neologisms (various names for the red color of the blood), and recurrent themes (blood, water, chickens, God, time). Mónica Ojeda tackles topics like rape and abortion so poetically, and from the innocence of the little girl, that you might forget the cruelness they imply.

ID: The main challenge was to follow the pacing of the narration and to maintain its rhythm. The suspense of the parts describing the girls’ disturbing games (I was occasionally overwhelmed with suspense, so I worked too fast and had to go back again and again), the dense parts concerning the teacher (which were the ones I most enjoyed; I loved this character), the prevailing feeling of fear. Also, being hardly acquainted with creepypastas and the community of online storytelling, I had a lot of catching up to do, but this is only part of the pleasant and interesting research you are expected to do as a translator.

MB: There were many challenges. One was the dialogues—for example, those between Annelise and Fernanda that make up standalone chapters—or among the girls, where the translation had to be as fluid as possible and reflect a youthful and current way of talking. Another challenge was translating the chapter where Annelise and her friends are at a party: the present moment of the story is woven with scenes from the recent and more distant past, when Annelise and Fernanda were younger. Mónica doesn’t give any temporal referent, so the sentences mix together, and you can’t tell if she is talking about what is happening now or what happened before, creating an effect of confusion and total loss of control over what you are reading, which I think is fantastic. But translating it, I needed to fully understand what was happening, so I used different colors to underline the sentences according to temporality: in blue for present and in red for the past. That’s the only way I could manage not to get lost in her words.

SB: Ojeda’s approach to layering voices sets her apart as a writer, as she frequently weaves distinct narratives together in alternating sentences. For instance, one chapter of Jawbone intersplices Annelise’s recounting of a horror story with Fernanda and Annelise’s exploration of online creepypasta culture. One noteworthy challenge to translation comes in one of the final chapters of the novel, in which eight-year-old Fernanda and Annelise are at the pool and are starting to figure out the secret lives their mothers lead. There, music is playing on loudspeakers, and the Spanish version of lyrics from these songs are inserted to create a sonorous affect and echo the narrative events. Due to copyright concerns, we weren’t able to include the full song lyrics in the translation, but we wanted to find a way to preserve the effect. As such, instead of using the full lyrics of “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” we included the opening line of the song and then transitioned to a scene from the Hans Christian Anderson version of “The Little Mermaid.” Like the song lyrics, the selected scene describes the mermaid’s encounter with Ursula and even includes mention of a crocodile, thus echoing Annelise’s story about her mother as well as the crocodiles that lurk throughout the novel. While this was a significant deviation in terms of rhythm, the intention was to preserve the effect of interrupting the prose while maintaining the thematic resonances.

NdlP: The story “Soroche” is broken up into the alternating points of view of four women. The biggest challenge—which was also the appeal for me—came with the character Ana. On a craft level, it called for meticulous attention to word choice and rhythm while navigating repetition and graphic language. It was about choosing the right words to render horrifying, humiliating, bodily descriptions in vivid detail while retaining a kind of poetic quality, aiming for a reader experience that simultaneously disgusts and mesmerizes. On another level, if we think of translation as the closest read—to “climb inside [the protagonist’s] skin and walk around in it,” as Bruna Dantas Lobato writes—my challenge was to sit in the discomfort of immersing myself word-for-word in the horror of abject humiliation and self-loathing at the core of the story.

LALT: How is Latin American literature received in your culture?

A-ME: In France, fortunately, many literatures are translated. The literary culture is big enough that there is room for all tastes, for all the countries. There are presses whose catalogue reflects a specialization in Latin American literature (Métailié, Gallimard…), there are festivals that promote Latin American authors like Les Belles Latinas or, a few years ago, the Festival Colibris in Marseille. There are even associations that have support programs for translators who work with authors from the region. Since the Boom of the 70s, this literature is well received in France. Nevertheless, I dare say that authors from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, or Mexico are translated more than writers from Central America, for example. If it weren’t for Miguel Ángel Asturias, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, or, recently Eduardo Halfon, Guatemala would not exist in the French imaginary. Mónica Ojeda is a unique case, and that’s why I’m happy to be her French translator.

ET: The story collection Las voladoras is a good example of a new movement in contemporary Latin American literature, the “new Latin American gothic” or “Andean gothic.” Even though Mónica Ojeda was awarded the Next Generation Prince Claus award in the Netherlands in 2019, her work has yet to be published in Dutch. I hope to be able to change this with the translation of “Sangre coagulada” and her other work. In the Netherlands there is a rich tradition of literary translation. Many exponents of the famous boom of the 60s and 70s were translated, primarily on the initiative of the press Meulenhoff. Today there is a renewed interest in works that come from the American continent in general and from Latin America in particular. As far as presses, Ambo/Anthos has displaced Meulenhoff and is quite focused on Hispanic American literature. Representatives of small countries like Ecuador are rarely included on the lists of the best Latin American authors. In both the Netherlands and Flanders there are funds to promote the translation of valuable works to Dutch. I’m ready to translate the rest of the stories in Las voladoras!

ID: On an annual basis, 50-80 books are translated (and published) from Spanish and Portuguese into Greek. More than half of these are Latin American (and almost all of them in Spanish). The most popular and most published authors are García Márquez and Borges (early 80s), plus Cortázar and Allende (late 80s). Actually, these are the first ones Greeks got acquainted with. (By the way, all the works of Cortázar are currently being republished.) Then came a second wave of Latin American authors in the early 90s and the early 00s: Roncagliolo, Chavarría, Gutiérrez, and of course Sepúlveda, whom we seem to love a lot (his collected poems are to be published shortly). Then came Bolaño, Padura, and Aira; there’s a growing interest in them. Also, Latin Noir is a genre that seems to be gaining ground; there’s even a small publishing house specializing in it, Carnívora. It’s not very common for a Latin American author to have many books translated into Greek, apart from the ones I already mentioned, along with a couple of others, perhaps. However, people who like Latin American literature are, I dare say, obsessed with it, and that’s why editors (both small and big publishing houses, Castaniotis, Patakis, Opera…) keep looking for both new classics and contemporary authors. Also, in the past 15 years a very promising literary festival has been organized in Athens (and recently in other cities as well), LEA (Literatura en Atenas), which invites authors from Spain, Portugal, and Latin America and/or presents their books and even organizes translation workshops and poetry readings. LEA has also established the prize for literary translation of literatura iberoamericana; the third one is to be awarded this May concerning books published in 2022. It is an interesting meeting point for readers, writers and translators and a nice way to get people to learn more about the literature of these languages which, in terms of the local book market, cannot compete with English, French, Italian, and German, I’m afraid.

MB: Latin American literature is well received in Italy. There are a lot of authors translated and there are readers who pay close attention to what is happening on the continent. There are presses specializing in Latin American literature, such as Sur, Polidoro editore, La Nuova Frontiera, Gran Vía, etc. These are independent presses that work closely with the authors, giving a lot of visibility to the books through presentations in bookstores, fairs, and festivals and inviting authors for small tours in Italy. And there are presses that seek out new authors, interesting and unconventional new voices, also risking a lot. Above all Argentine, Mexican, Colombian, and Chilean authors are being translated, but in recent years the focus is widening to include other countries. Ecuador, for example, until quite recently had almost no authors translated in Italy. With the arrival of Móncia Ojeda as well as Natalia García Freire and soon Yuliana Ortiz Ruano, Ecuadorian authors are now well represented.

SB: In the United States, quite a lot of Latin American literature is translated, though often it is marketed within certain narrow parameters. Much has been written about the publishing phenomenon of the Latin American Boom that gave way to the dominance of magical realism as a way to describe anything Latin American that perhaps departs from a strict sense of reality. More recently, the Latin American literature that seems to get the most attention and that has become a marketing tool would be the use of horror among women writers from the region. Wonderful writers like Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin are part of this movement, and Mónica’s work is also marketed along similar parameters.

NdlP: There’s definitely an appetite for Latin American literature in the U.S. The Latin American Boom familiarized U.S. readership with magical realism and arguably continues to be a reference point for the literature coming from the region(s). More recently, as Sarah Booker points out, there is a growing interest in what’s been called a new wave of Latin American horror/gothic. In these works, forces like indigenous and urban folklore, colonial and political histories, and the everyday violence of modern life collide, more menacing than mystical perhaps. As part of the Filipino diaspora, I find these themes quite resonant with Philippine and Philippine diasporic literature with its shared Spanish colonial past, and I look forward to English translations increasing access to more readers interested in this comparative lens.

Image: Covers of various books by Mónica Ojeda, translated into multiple languages.

Alba-Marina Escalón is a Franco-Mexican visual artist and literary translator who has been living and working in Guatemala since 2012. She works with different techniques such as drawing, photography, and video. Her graphic creations focus on geometry, textures, and labyrinths. Her work has been showcased at several exhibitions in France, Mexico, Canada, Slovakia, Uruguay and Guatemala. She has also illustrated several books including Cuarenta Noches by Vania Vargas (Sophos, 2019) and a Colombian review of translated literature called Barbárika (2022). She has a Master’s degree in Literary Translation from the Haute École de Bruxelles, and has participated in several translation residency programs (BILTC in Banff, CITL in Arles, IFAL in Mexico). She has translated into French several Guatemalan writers such as Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Denise Phé-Funchal, Wingston González, Eduardo Halfon, and Mario Payeras. In 2022, she translated Mandíbula, by Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador), published by Gallimard (Paris).

Els Thant studied Romance Languages and Literature at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and holds a degree in Spanish Studies from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). She has been a Sworn Translator and Conference Interpreter in Dutch, Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, and German since 1998. In September 2022 she started a PhD Program in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa. She intends to focus on literary translation. Els lived in Ecuador for more than 20 years and would love to translate the work of Mónica Ojeda and other promising Latin American newcomers into Dutch. Her translation of the short story “Sangre coagulada” (Las voladoras, Madrid, Páginas de Espuma, 2020) was published in PLUK, a Dutch magazine that focuses on the promotion of new literary translators.

Ifigenia Doumi was born in Athens, Greece. She studied English Literature at the University of Athens, Literary Translation at EKEMEL (European Centre for the Translation of Literature and the Human Sciences, run by the Ministry of Culture), and Acting. She translates from English and Spanish and has translated several authors from Latin America, such as Guillermo Martínez (Argentina), Wendy Guerra (Cuba), Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador), María Fernanda Ampuero (Ecuador), Beatriz Saavedra (México), Rita Indiana (Dominican Republic), Teresa Ruiz Rosas (Peru), and Mario Benedetti (Uruguay), among others. She has written two poetry books (Love Me Tender, Saixpirikon, Thessaloniki 2018; Όλα μ’ αρέσουν, Kastaniotis, Athens 2022). ifidou@yahoo.gr

Massimiliano Bonatto has been translating in the publishing industry since 2011, working with Italian publishers such as 66thand2nd, Codice Edizioni, Black Coffee, Sur, Iperborea and Polidoro editore. He translates both fiction and nonfiction books from English and Spanish. The authors he has translated include Mónica Ojeda, Fernanda Trías, Vanessa Londoño, A. Igoni Barrett, and Nafissa Thompson-Spires. He is currently editor of Spanish and Latin American fiction at Polidoro editore, an independent publisher that is bringing many young and groundbreaking writers to Italy. He also works for the audiovisual industry and collaborates with the international queer festival Gender Bender.

Sarah Booker is an educator and literary translator working from Spanish to English. Her translations include Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2022; National Book Award Finalist), Gabriela Ponce’s Blood Red (Restless Books, 2022), and Cristina Rivera Garza’s New and Selected Stories (Dorothy Press, 2022), Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020), and The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018). Her translations have also been published in journals such as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:am magazine, The Baffler, and Southwest Review. She has a PhD in Hispanic Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently based in Morganton, North Carolina where she teaches Spanish at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.

Noelle de la Paz is a poet, translator, and artist working from NYC and San Francisco. Through iterative explorations of form, narrative, and translation, she attempts to visibilize and interrogate girlness, brownness, languaging, and movements through borders, real and imagined. Her work is published or forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, The Recluse, Southwest Review, Newtown Literary, Two Lines Press’ Calico Series, and elsewhere, and has been featured as part of the exhibitions Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text (Franklin Street Works, 2019) and Boulevard of Ghosts (Local Project Art Space, 2021). She was a 2021-22 Emerge–Surface–Be Fellow at The Poetry Project, and has also received support from Brooklyn Poets, VONA, the Dia Foundation, and Queens Council for the Arts.

Nota Bene: To Mexico and Beyond

LALT Team — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 04:25:40 +0000

Luis Jorge Boone: Cámaras secretas. Sobre la enfermedad, el dolor y el cuerpo en la literatura

Una leona rampa de noche by Héctor Iván González recounts Román’s encounter with M, a mature woman who makes him her lover. Román, in his impetuous twenties, has dropped out of school to make money, thus abandoning his dream of becoming a writer. Meanwhile, M is part of Mexico’s economic elite. She avoids problems, which Román faces without measuring up the consequences. Such a difference is bound to generate unexpected conflict. He would do anything for her, which will prove fatal. Román has a good relationship with his boss, who will make him a confidant in the temptation of Nicole, a Franco-Mexican student. At the same time, Román befriends his colleague Daniel, who tells him about his adventure with Aurora, a sensual teibolera from Uruguay, whom he still hasn’t forgotten.

Héctor Iván González: Una leona rampa en la noche

José Homero: Función de Mandelbrot

Función de Mandelbrot is the most recent book of poetry by José Homero (Minatitlán, 1965). Divided into three sections, like a triptych, this title recapitulates love and sensory experience through the memory of senses and offers a transition from night to light. The allusion to fractals is due to the fact that, just as this geometric object repeats the same pattern on different scales, in a work of art the characteristics of the whole can be appreciated in any one of its manifestations: in a poem, for example, however random or fragmentary as it may seem.

Guillermo Santos: El siglo solitario. Ensayos sobre Bernhard, Kertész, Sebald, Weil y Jünger

“Guillermo Santos is a writer who possesses enviable qualities for anyone who wants to delve into the depths of the most daring and disturbing literature of the twentieth century. He is a born observer, and by that I mean someone who waits for the opportunity to know things in depth before filling us with judgments and opinions; he is also an unrelenting and lurking reader, who does not allow a book to get away without first having navigated it to his heart’s content. And finally, he has a delicate prose marked by the sincerity that wisdom offers when intertwined with youth and the authentic desire for knowledge.” – Guillermo Fadanelli.

Marxitania Ortega: Luz brillante

“The six stories that make up Luz brillante are connected by desire; there is a crack between the everyday nature and the longing of the characters, whose search for meaning makes them combust in the mysteries of their own light. Marxitania Ortega weaves her stories between santeros and Cuban drums; between hot water from the samovar and the aromatic pistachio sweets of a family home in Tehran, between hotels and taxis in hot Acapulco. In the diversity of settings, in the distinct concerns that go through the characters, desire is a permanent atmosphere. Light is a symptom of the fervor of the spirit, a guide for its paths, but also a loss: it cannot exist without its counterpart, its darkness.” – Daniel Armijo

Ana García Bergua: Leer en los aviones

The fascinating tales gathered in this book tell the stories of journeys, displacements, and transitions. Accustomed to the trip or the idea of it, the characters gradually find a vital zone never visited before, which sometimes transforms them, and other times allows the flaw, mania, peculiarity, or weakness that identifies them to reach its extremes. In Ana García Bergua’s narrative, her exposition always calm and unhurried, the melancholy and humor of human lives emerges, interwoven. Stories of clandestine love, trips that end up separating married couples, everyday but disastrous journeys, unusual towns, wandering ghosts, dogs that get lost on planes, disturbing hotel rooms, small detours on the route that completely change the characters’ destinies.

Johann de Medina: Los purgatorios que me habitan

“In Los purgatorios que me habitan by Johann de Medina (Mexico City, 1997), one perceives the care, dedication and, I would almost say, the attention of an entomologist that he applied to reviewing and editing the book. Such care might make us think this collection of poems was put together by an older poet, with literary cunning already worthy of wide renown. It should be noted that Johann’s poems are characterized by introspection and reflection, but also by ease, spontaneity, and a free spirit. But I don’t mean to say that this book boasts audacity or a lightness lacking in rigor, tout au contraire.” – Héctor Iván González.

Alejandro Vázquez Ortiz: El corredor o las almas que lleva el diablo

Alejandro Vázquez Ortiz (Monterrey, 1984) breaks the literary clichés that have marked the narrative of northern Mexico up to now, and has established himself as one of the most genuine and risky voices of his generation. El corredor o las almas que lleva el diablo, is an adrenaline-pumping story that places us in the middle of the highway, where an illegal race is about to begin. The industrial environment of the city of Monterrey amplifies the role of machines, truck engines that increase speed at the whim of their drivers, and that merge, at a certain moment, with their flesh. This is a novel about the violence of race cars, the unstoppable impulse to go forward: a work that emphasizes dehumanization, perversion, and, at the same time, human compassion.

Alicia García Berga: La lucha con la zozobra. La libertad bajo palabra en los poetas Xavier Villaurrutia, Gilberto Owen, Jorge Cuesta y Octavio Paz

This is not an academic book; it is a book by a poet about other poets. In it, the paths in search of poetic freedom that were allowed in Mexico since the beginning of the twentieth century are reviewed. Specifically, those of Xavier Villaurrutia, Gilberto Owen, Jorge Cuesta, and Octavio Paz, as a response that opens up to the present and unveils a new notion of poetic identity, apart from Romanticism. Above all, this book is a careful reading of texts that are worth pausing over and thinking about, in which we see how poetry makes its way by itself and through the new forms that its language discovers. Alicia García Bergua invites readers to delve into the plot and decipher it alongside her.

José Luis Prado: Migrar bordes

“To disappear is to become present, to manifest a desire, and to close your eyes and break the substance of the self. To disappear is also to evoke from immanence a position facing reality: that of the simulacrum. Thus, between dream and dream––or variations thereof––there is a risk of fading from memory and language to translate reality. In Migrar bordes there is a pavilion, a notebook, apostilles, sounding boards, medical prescriptions, and photographs, elements that are part of K’s identity, a simulacrum of himself, a Kubo Shunman, a Chuang-Tzu, the reflection in the mirror of a doppelgänger who recognizes himself in a crisis of thought and who, by questioning his presence, disarms his ‘double’ to build, adapt, plagiarize a character, a story, a life.” – Yussel Dardón

Astrid Velasco: Un espejo que mira hacia dentro

With a firm hand and a sensitivity that borders on exquisiteness, the Mexican poet Astrid Velasco brings, in her collection of poems, a set of poetic tesserae from an oblique view of reality. “Clarity,/ I invoke you/ the same in delight/ as in farewell.// Not for my tears or my anger,/ not for the sum of the wounds/ that weave insomnia.// I don’t want the lies that escalate creepers/ by the fence of your smile/ to calm the time/ that has to come to devour me.// Rage, surrender to silence.” Through Argentine publishing house Buenos Aires Poetry, Velasco breaks transnational limits and places herself on the other poetic shore.

Antonio Ortuño: La Armada Invencible

Antonio Ortuño presents a new novel, solidifying the position he has earned in the international literary world. The Mexican author brings us La Armada Invencible, a work that takes up the dream of so many young people in the nineties: to form a rock band. Barry Dávila, a man in his forties who dresses as a metalhead from the eighties, has a plan: to bring together “La Armada Invencible,” the heavy metal and thrash group with which he could have succeeded if only internal fights and a society deaf to the harshness of his music would not have barred his way. More than twenty years after the band’s dissolution, Barry seeks out his old friends, ailing and frustrated, to play together again and claim that unfinished past.

L. M. Oliveira: Las marcas del agua

Las marcas del agua recounts the forgotten story of a brotherhood that tried, in the mid-sixteenth century, to establish a place where harmony would reign, taking advantage of the journeys of Cortés, Magellan, and Luis de Carvajal. Almost in the twenty-first century, this company comes back to light, thanks to historian Teodoro de Villalpando. After the discovery of a lost and enigmatic newspaper that seems to refer to said brotherhood, the Spanish journalist living in Mexico, Juana Vicente––who is fleeing from an investigation that links Mexican politicians and drug traffickers to a scandalous fraud––decides to meet with the historian. Las marcas del agua is a novel of complex architecture and fine couplings, where the injustices of the past seem like an allegory of Mexico’s present.

Luis Pérez Oramas: La mano segadora

La mano segadora gathers poems from seven titles to date by Venezuelan writer Luis Pérez Oramas and offers a hint at four unpublished books. Put together by the author himself, this extremely personal anthology accounts for a writing process that, throughout almost forty years, remained firm in its profession to search for a voice, one that spins events, establishes poetic life, and vice versa. “For Pérez Oramas, such a voice seems to be endowed with an independent existence from the speakers. But this voice contains no words. Its poetics is due to the lost voice, the one that sets a trap that it already knows is useless,” says Adalber Salas Hernández in the epilogue of this book, which brings readers back to one of the most genuine and necessary voices of contemporary Venezuelan poetry.

Yolanda Pantin: El ciervo. Antología poética 1981-2022

“Free from descriptive erotic forms, the voices of women poets fill every corner of literary criticism in the West. In this context, the poetry of Yolanda Pantin enters decisively, with detailed and beloved speech. She has created in readers of ‘learned poetry’ an effervescent relationship of affection and amazement with her work (as other great Venezuelan poets of her generation are also doing). Her poetry comes through a courageous discourse that surrounds the intimacy of the poetic voice: it involves her voice with a social tone, the prose poem, the epigrammatic and conceptual form, and the sober discourse of poetics with a certain heritage in English-language concrete poetry.” – Xavier Oquendo Troncoso

Armando Bartra: Exceso de muerte. De la peste de Atenas a la covid-19

Armando Barta takes a journey to explore the history of epidemics, their sociocultural backgrounds, and the way to deal with them, culminating in the current COVID-19 pandemic. The work compiles historical and literary testimonies through which it reflects deeply on the crisis of modernity, in which we find ourselves characterized by, in addition to the pandemic, climate change, economic and social inequality, and other issues. Finally, he invites us to rethink ourselves, our reality, and our relationships with nature and death. In the paradigmatic moment we live in, it is unavoidable to question our being.

Margarita García Robayo: La encomienda

The narrator of these pages lives five thousand kilometers away from her native country. She works for an advertising agency, wants to apply for a scholarship to go to the Netherlands to write, and does regular video chats with her sister. She sends her parcels, packages that include food, drawings of her nephews, and from time to time, a surprise, like an old photograph. Often, the food arrives rotten. With a masterful hand and remarkable economy of means, Margarita García Robayo leads the reader through the labyrinth of her protagonist and narrator in this unsettling novel that speaks to uncertainty, memories, fears, loneliness, family relationships, prospects of motherhood, and longings for the future.

Spanish-to-English translations by Jenna Tang