Colombia | Short Fiction | Spanish
November, 2019Like every other writer of his generation of Colombian writers, Roberto Burgos Cantor labored in the long shadow cast by Gabriel García Márquez. Although Roberto was one of Colombia’s most celebrated writers, he remains little known outside the country. He and others in his cohort staked out a fictional imaginary independent of García Márquez, paving the way for a later generation of more urban, realist writers, such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Franco, Pilar Quintana, and Margarita García Robayo.
But Roberto was an important Colombian writer in his own right. Cartagena, the coastal Caribbean city of his birth, was at the center of his literary universe, and the most marginalized of its inhabitants, his protagonists. The author rendered his solidarity with the poor and powerless in a lyricism that embraced equally the horrors and the beauty of life among Cartagena’s dispossessed. La ceiba de la memoria, his novel dealing with the city during its heyday as a center of the slave trade in the 17th century, the Holocaust, and contemporary political violence in Colombia, received the José María Arguedas Prize awarded by Cuba's Casa de las Americas in 2007. Roberto’s polyphonic novel of 20th century Cartagena, Ver lo que veo, won Colombia’s National Novel Prize in 2018, shortly before his death. During a writing career that spanned more than fifty years, the publication of a new work by Roberto was always an event of great public interest.
“Stories of Singers” is part of the collection Lo Amador (1981), Roberto’s first published volume. It is comprised of seven linked stories that narrate life in the eponymous hard-luck Cartagena neighborhood. Critics agree that these vivid, heartbreaking, and lyrical stories are among Roberto’s best work, among seven short story collections and seven novels. As one critic wrote of Lo Amador, “Few books can make us journey, amazed and compassionate before the spectacle of life, as this one.” “Stories of Singers” is the first English translation of Roberto’s work.
An interesting coincidence: I moved to Lo Amador in the late 1980s and early 1990s to do anthropological research. When neighborhood residents learned what I was doing, they referred me to the book, as if everything that could possibly be known about their lives were contained in it. Never having heard of the book, I eagerly went out and bought it.
Lo Amador so beautifully captured the life and language of the people as I understood them in the little time I’d spent there that I nearly abandoned my fieldwork. Time and deeper understanding only confirmed my initial impression. His work has been an inspiration to my own, first in anthropology, then as a translator, and now as a writer of fiction. And, of course, the grief that his death caused in the nation’s literary circles, and the enduring popularity of Roberto’s fiction among his fellow Colombians, speak for themselves.
- Joel Streicker
Giovanni Quessep has been influenced by Colombia’s most important poets from the first half of the 20th century, such as Aurelio Arturo and León de Greiff, with whom he was personally acquainted and developed an important friendship. In the sixties, he worked as an editor at the legendary Mito, Colombia’s highly acclaimed philosophical and literary magazine created by Jorge Gaitán Durán, and in the seventies he co-founded Golpe de dados, a poetry magazine recognised throughout Latin America as one of the most important poetry publications of the past and current centuries.
Quessep’s poetry is nourished by his personal experiences growing up on the Colombian Caribbean coast; by his travels through Italy, where he fell in love with the work of Dante Alighieri; and by his knowledge of the vast tradition of Spanish poetry, particularly the poets of the Spanish Golden Age and Ruben Darío, one of his most important literary references. A descendant of Lebanese immigrants, he is also deeply acquainted with Middle Eastern poetic traditions, and specifically with the work of poets such as Omar Khayyam, Farid Uddin Attar, and Ferdowsi, who have also greatly influenced his work. Quessep’s poetry is the result of an improbable mixture of faraway elements that come together to create a unique voice both indisputably Colombian and universal.
I started working on this project in 2015, with Quessep's permission, and I have been collaborating with Ranald Barnicot since the beginning of this year, following the advice of some editors who told me that my translations could benefit from a collaboration with a native English speaker, preferably a poet or poetry translator, as Ranald is, and they certainly have.
- Felipe Botero
It has been a privilege and a challenge to work with Felipe on these richly allusive, mysterious, deeply felt and moving poems. I feel that Quessep exemplifies Eliot’s First Voice of Poetry. The poet is primarily addressing himself in the hope of working through profound, personal, and painful issues. Perhaps we are left feeling that we have not completely understood, but, in Eliot’s oft-quoted and memorable words, poetry can communicate before it is understood. Indeed, perhaps it is impertinent to suppose that we have a right to complete understanding.
- Ranald Barnicot
The two poems featured here come from Andrea Cote Botero’s first book, Puerto calcinado [Port in Ashes] (2013), winner of the Puentes de Sturga International Poetry Prize. At first glance, this title seems out of place given that the poet’s native Barrancabermeja conjures up no images of coastline, but rather is most known for a 1998 civilian massacre, one of the most deadly of Colombia’s armed conflict. The poetic voice’s reflection around the port as a place of both arrival and departure, turns illusory, no more than a fleeting bridge to someplace else, or perhaps this place itself. What most stands out, then, is uncertainty, destruction of space, searches for lost identities, labyrinthine memory, and longings for gods--and others--gone missing. The poems take on rhythm and pace while the poetic self explores all this from every possible angle. For Cote Botero’s poetic subject, the port is connection--to now barren terrain, a lost homeland, and María--a connection only truly achieved in the ephemeral uttering of a poem.
Likewise, emphasis on connection, on bridge-building, guides my approach to translating Cote Botero. She has been doubly underrepresented in translation: first, as a woman, given that women are far less likely than men to be translated into English (and even less frequently by a woman); and, second, as a Colombian, since poetry from the region is the second-least translated into English among all Spanish-speaking countries. In fact, according to the Three Percent Translation Database, from 2008 to 2018 no book-length translation of a Colombian woman poet has been published in the United States. Given these conditions, I view the choice of who to translate as an act of bridge-building, forging connections between places and readerships that might not otherwise come into contact. The question of how to translate this voice, then, becomes bridge-crossing, the process of carrying what makes Cote Botero’s poetry so compelling into English, allowing its complexity to find its footing in new linguistic terrain. In this way, the bridge Cote Botero and I build through translation is far from illusory: these two poems intend to highlight marginalized voices, complicate notions of how Colombians--and women--are expected to write, and forge strong, long-lasting literary connections.
- Olivia Lott
100 Refutations | Colombia | Poetry | Spanish
June, 2018Manuel Saturio Valencia Mena (1867-1907) was a teacher, a poet, a popular leader from the Chocó region, and the very last man officially sentenced to death in Colombia. As a child, he participated in the parochial choir and learned both French and Latin under the tutelage of the Capuchin priests. He was an exceptional student and the first black man accepted to Cauca University’s law program. He earned the rank of captain while fighting in La Guerra De Los Mil Dias. He was a lifelong autodidact and served in many important positions in the region. In 1907, he was framed for arson—for likely political reasons—and, after a six-day trial, he was executed by firing squad.
100 Refutations | Colombia | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018Carmen Peña Visbal, born in Barranquilla, Colombia, is a poet, journalist, lawyer, and expert in strategic communications. Visbal has studied human resources at the Industrial University of Santander; law at the Free University of Colombia; human rights at the ESAP (Escuela Superior de Administracion Publica); security and national defense at the War College of Colombia (Escuela Superior de Guerra); criminal law and forensic sciences at the Catholic University of Colombia; senior management at Nueva Granada Military University; and political management and governance at the University of the Rosary. She has held numerous leadership positions in journalism, government, and consulting. Visbal’s collections of poetry include Dite (1994), Las vestiduras de mi alma (1998), Mi voz no te alcanza (2008), and Todo silencio es esencial (unpublished). She has also been included in several anthologies such as Poseia Colombiana del siglo XX escrita por mujeres, Vol. 2 and Siete Poetas: Dreams of a country at peace without mines.
100 Refutations | Colombia | Poetry | Spanish
May, 2018Eliana Díaz Muñoz’s work has been featured in journals such as Viacuarenta, Casa de Asterión, and the Danish journal Aurora Boreal. She has participated in the Colloquium on Cultural Diversity in the Caribbean, the International Congress of Hispanic Literature, the International Meeting of Women Poets, and other national and international conferences. She is a professor at the Universidad del Atlántico in Colombia.
100 Refutations | Colombia | Poetry | Spanish
April, 2018Irina Henríquez is a poet and film producer from Colombia with a degree in humanities from the University of Cordoba in Montería, Colombia. She leads the Manuel Zapata Olivella literary workshop at the University of Montería, has produced numerous award-winning short films, and is the author of A Riesgo de Caer from Ediciones Corazon de Mango. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies in Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, and Spain, and her work has been translated into English and Portuguese.
The first time I visited Buenos Aires, I was sixteen years old. It was only the second time I'd ever left the States–the first to a country that was not English-speaking–and my experience was meticulously mapped. There were tango shows and treks through the technicolor alleys of La Boca. There were orange trees and street markets and performances at the Teatro Colón. There were handsome waiters not so much older than I was who served me steak, and handsome gauchos who put on the traditional corrida de sortija displays for us—on horseback, armed with thin jousting poles, they'd attempt to pierce the key rings strung with ribbons of white and baby blue that were mounted on an archway overhead. When they speared one, they'd single one of us from the crowd and offer it with a kiss as a souvenir.
This Buenos Aires was the one that lived for many years inside my mind. I was not young or silly or inexperienced enough, even then, that it was lost on me that this had all been carefully curated for an outsider, and yet memories of it still ached with that visceral pang of romance that memories of that age do.
Margarita García Robayo's collection Orquídeas ("Orchids"), on the other hand, offers an entirely different Buenos Aires: one that lives on scaffolds and in backroom bars, at late-night parties and among transgender prostitutes, on mosquito-ridden patios and in butcher shops–in the quotidian, in the ephemeral, as crónicas do. Published daily in newspapers and magazines around the world—but especially in Latin America—this literary genre of short prose may range from witty commentary to melancholic remembrance to fiery political satire. What the best crónicas unfailingly share, however, is that they live in a dark, amorphous space where observance may be faulty, memories may be deliberately amended, character is often irrelevant, tragedy and comedy may coexist, and the reader never quite knows where they stand.
Assembled together between covers like slides in a carousel, García Robayo's crónicas make Buenos Aires begin to look a lot like Brooklyn, or like anywhere, where mundane and absurd observances spin through our heads constantly each day and quickly disappear. And yet the author treats each with such indelible specificity, with such tenderness and disdain, that immersed in each page-long moment, the reader knows it could never have occurred anywhere else but in García Robayo's city, in her world. And so I struggled to translate this book, at first. The words were there but the spirit wasn't. I still wanted the technicolor alleys, the handsome waiters. Never before as a translator have I so struggled to find an author's voice.
In November 2016, two days after the election of Donald Trump, I returned to Buenos Aires. My rose-colored glasses were gone, my guard was down, I was alone, and for a week I spoke to almost no one except shopkeepers and taxi drivers to whom I would struggle to explain the Electoral College in Spanish. I had planned to return to the street fairs, to see some tango, to vacation. Instead, for a week, I walked. From Villa Crespo to San Telmo, Nuñez to the Recoleta, Palermo Soho to the Centro, I walked and walked and there it was: García Robayo's Buenos Aires, in the punk-rock art students and their rustling sketchbooks, in the sex shops in the Retiro, in the tourist traffic across the footbridges over the brown water of the Río Dique, as in the life of any great city seen through a cronista's eyes. I now prefer this version, this vision, the one García Robayo offers, the one glimpsed at in this selection, the one I finally found in her voice upon returning. A Buenos Aires uglier, more pathetic, truer and therefore somehow ever more romantic than the one I had once known.
- Alicia Maria Meier
José Asunción Silva (1865-1896) is credited, through his assimilation of elements of Symbolism and the work of poets such as Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, with helping inaugurate Latin American modernismo. Silva was born in Bogotá to a wealthy family with a love of literature and a history of tragedy. At nineteen, he visited France, where he met the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, but was forced to return to Bogotá to take control of his father’s failing business. Unable to pay his family’s debts, he took a diplomatic post in Caracas, and in 1892 his sister Elvira died, occasioning the composition of “Nocturne III,” one of the most famous poems in the Spanish language. Silva is also the author of a novel, De Sobremesa, which was reconstructed after first having been lost in a shipwreck on his return from Caracas. On May 23, 1896, after a dinner party, he shot himself in the heart. He was thirty years old. The house where he lived in Bogotá is now the Silva Poetry House, a national monument and an important cultural organization that grants the José Asunción Silva poetry prize for the recognition of a lifetime of poetic work.
While Silva is Colombia’s most famous poet (he appears on the 5000 Peso bill), his poems are virtually unknown in the United States. These translations stay close to the overall sense of Silva’s poems, but nevertheless diverge and take liberties. Readers encountering Silva for the first time should note that that while many of these translations fulfill the mandate of translation as it is usually understood, some, such as “Nocturne III,” might best be described as collaborations. I’d compare them to the paintings of Glenn Brown, whose hallucinatory reworkings of old masters result in something both familiar and uncannily new. But while Brown might adapt, say, a Rembrandt—an image long established in the canon—Silva’s poems are not yet widely available in English, so comparisons can’t easily be made. I’ve taken the risk of introducing some of these poems into English in non-traditional translations because I’m hopeful that more normative translations of Silva will follow, but also because my original intention in translating Silva was more personal: I sought to engage, as an American of Colombian descent, on my own terms with the work of one of Colombia’s most important poets. I was pleased to find not the antisocial, “diseased” modernist many Latin American critics have dismissively accused Silva of being,* but, to the contrary, a poet whose work centers around the question of life—both life as such, in all its scintillation and strangeness, and the complex question of how to live. The questions Silva poses—whether poetry can be lived, whether the price of stability isn’t a forfeiture of life itself, and how life and the numerous deaths-in-life manifest themselves—are as urgent as ever. My primary objective as a translator was thus to convey the urgency and originality of Silva’s vision and the consistency of his thought.
* For an analysis of Silva’s reception in Latin America, see Alfreo Villanueva-Collado’s “Masculine Culture, Feminoid Modernism: José Asunción Silva and ‘El mal metafísico’” (Confluencia, Volume 19, Number 2). Villanueva-Collado looks at Silva and others to explore “the relationship between the paradigm shift called Modernity, understood as a national project gendered as masculine, and the concept of Modernism as a pathogen which feminizes culture,” and argues that “Such a relationship lies at the center of Latin American critical and cultural practice and, operating outside critical consciousness, still shapes and determines cultural and literary criticism, especially with respect to Latin American turn-of-the-century narrative production.”
- Robert Fernandez
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).