In January 2014, I went to Cuba under a visa from the Cuban Ministry of Culture. Part of the work that I was doing in Cuba involved collaborations with Cuban writers. I had the chance to work personally with Ricardo Alberto Pérez on these poems. Born in 1963, Ricardo is among the first generation of writers raised with the Cuban Revolution. His work has not appeared in English, though it is known and lauded in Cuba and throughout the Americas.
- Daniel Borzutzky
Pilar Fraile Amador's Larva & Hedge is one of those rare collections that affects the reader by both attracting and repelling, that can simultaneously enchant and disturb. Fraile's poems mesmerize and sing; they weave captivating webs. But they are fascinating, too, in their potential for repulsion, in their willingness to inhabit the most unsettling of spaces. The force of the text, then--the way it acts upon the reader's interior--is twofold.
On the one hand, Fraile's poems are magnetic. They read like deftly spun incantations, sonorous lines draped over imagined topographies. But they derive equal force from their readiness to shock and disturb, to wield images that pierce a reader's repose and rearrange one's insides. The poems occupy both dreamscape and night terror; they caress and startle. They situate us in the space between our discomfort and enthrallment at the sight of blood. We cannot turn away.
That Fraile's text both attracts and repels is fitting. It is a collection that deals in dualities, juxtaposing the intimate and the collective, the strong and the weak, the human and the animal; yoking them together to call their differences into question. It is this gesture that begins Fraile's project of blurring lines and traversing borders.
The volume itself is binary, split into two distinct sections that function together. In Larva, Fraile explores the undercurrent of correspondence that exists unnoticed between human beings, the wellspring of the common subconscious. Here, individual and collective memories intermix and alter one another and the living can communicate with objects and the dead. The destruction of the 'I,' then, becomes a generative act that allows the other--or others--to pass into and expand an individual consciousness. Under these circumstances, the lines between past and present, between self and other, grow indistinct. The speaker is a secret essence that mediates the collective, a human distillate in the antechamber of life. The past never dies.
In the second section of the book, Hedge, the individual disappears completely. The poetic subject shifts to plural as Fraile reflects on what binds a community. While both halves of the volume are image-driven, the poems that constitute Hedge are more intricate than the preceding fragments, rich with sensory detail and of longer duration. They take shape as blocks of prose poetry that make use of repetition, compression, and fragmentation and fuse lines into paragraphs. This configuration yields both continuity and a useful sense of isolation: while each poem is visually cloistered as a block of text on its own page, the poems hang together with their consistent form as stages in a continuous meditation.
Fraile cites influences who move "in the border of the border"--from symbolists Baudelaire and Rimbaud with their intuitive associations, unconventional syntax, and indirect expression; to the surrealism of Lorca and Buñuel; to contemporary Spanish classics like Ullán, Valente, and Gamoneda. Her imagistic precision, along with stylistic choices like nonlinear forms and a disjunctive, multivocal timbre, demonstrate a desire to move in literary border areas and to create poetry that is unflinchingly exploratory.
- Elizabeth Davis
Cuba | Short Fiction | Spanish
November, 2014Antonio Álvarez Gil is a novelist and short story writer. Born in Melena del Sur, Cuba, he has resided in Sweden since 1994. I discovered Naufragios (Algaida, 2002; in English translation, Shipwrecked) some years ago at a bookstore in Spain, where he has published several novels and won numerous awards. For years, the enigmatic beauty of one of that novel's characters, a Russian-Cuban girl, lingered in my mind, and it took some time before I discovered that the vast universe occupied by his characters extended beyond Cuba and the Soviet Union, where Álvarez Gil himself had long ago studied chemical engineering. Knowing that literature was his vocation even when he was obliged to pursue a different career altogether, Álvarez Gil has written short stories and novels often brimming with the adventures of youth and universal literary and human quests--whether set in the present, as is the case with "Fascination"; the recent past of Cubans experiencing Soviet Perestroika up close, as in Callejones de Arbat (2012); or the more distant past of Las largas horas de la noche (2000, 2003), where, as Arístides Vega Chapú suggests in a recent review of the novel, the "most universal Cuban of all time," José Martí, undergoes immense humanization within his ten-year foray in Guatemala City in the late 19th century. That is to say, literature, love, travel, persecution, exile, masculinity, the ocean, and vocation harbor an important place in Álvarez Gil's writing. Mostly realist, it is also prone to twists and turns that take on an almost magical quality closely linked in his prose to the processes of writing, inspiration, and intertextuality. In "Fascination," readers board a cruise ship in Stockholm only to find themselves amidst Cuban characters working out their relationships to their homeland, their compatriots, the vigilance of the state, their desire--and, last but not least, to a writer who seeks to find the best way to introduce himself to all of them, and to tell a good story while doing so.
- Jacqueline Loss
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish
September, 2014Likened to Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Clarice Lispector, Hebe Uhart is an Argentine writer whose distinctive voice has made her beloved over the past 50 years by the Argentine public and fellow writers. Relatos Reunidos, her collected works, won the award for the Best Work of Literary Creation at the Buenos Aires Book Fair in 2011. Her newest story collection, Un día cualquiera, was released in 2013. An avid traveler with a piercing eye, Uhart has also published two travelogue collections, with a third forthcoming.
"The Fluffy Cake" is the title story from a collection originally published in 1976. Uhart says she wrote the story after a having experienced a moment of considerable disappointment during which she saw her world as flat and depressing, like this cake she had once made in childhood.
"Dear Mama" was included in the 1997 story collection Guiando la hiedra. Uhart wrote it as a tribute following the death of her mother. In 2009 it was adapted for the theater by Laura Yussem.
- Maureen Shaughnessy
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish
June, 2014Luisa Valenzuela, one of Argentina's most prominent and inventive fiction writers, was born in Buenos Aires in 1938. The home in which she grew up was a gathering place for writers, artists, and publishers. Borges (whom she described in her Paris Review interview as "a walking system of thought") came at least once a week, being a close friend of her mother, Luisa Mercedes Levinson (herself a well-known writer). The Luisa in question here wrote her first poem at six, and published her first story at twenty. The author of over twenty books--novels, short stories, and micro-fictions--Valenzuela has lived in France, Spain, Mexico, and New York, and taught at numerous universities, including Columbia and NYU. She has won a host of major prizes and awards (including a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, the Cervantes Prize, and at least one honorary doctorate). Her work has been widely translated. She left Argentina in the wake of the 1976 military coup, when one of her books was censored; in 1989 she returned to Buenos Aires and re-settled in her native neighborhood of Belgrano. Although fluent in French and English, she always held on to "the Argentine language [as] a home I don't want to lose" [The Paris Review interview, No. 170]. Her writing has rightly been called "hallucinatory" (although in matters of craft, it is absolutely lucid), arising as it has from her country's surreal and violent politics. Valenzuela's sentences have force and momentum, though her phrases may shift into unexpectedly delicate cadences and textures. Terror, exile, and alienation continue to be major themes, yet there is also a new, entirely unsentimental, tenderness between her characters.
"The Wanderer" (original title: "La errante") is from Tres por cinco, a collection published in Spain in 2008 and Argentina in 2010.
Valenzuela's most recent visits to New York took place in May 2014 for the launch of Review 88: Literature and Arts of the Americas, where she did a reading of "Conyecturas" (a witty philosophical story called "Conjectures on the Great Beyond" in English), and in 2013 for several events at McNally Jackson centering on her latest novel, La máscara sarda (The Sardinian Mask), which delves into the Sardinian roots of Juan Domingo Perón.
- Marguerite Feitlowitz
Mexico | Short Fiction | Spanish
June, 2014Using her background in psychotherapy, Glafira Rocha blends genres and fractures forms to introduce us to texts devoid of spatial, temporal, and character delineations, thus fully delving into the psyche of each voice. Like Dan Chaon's Stay Awake and Robin Black's If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Rocha's Such Tales is a work of fiction intended to disturb and unsettle. Spanning nearly nineteen thousand words in length, the volume centers on human conflict, inviting its audience to examine the catalyst for evil that resides in the relationships among the people Rocha depicts.
The situations explored in Such Tales include, among others: a killer struggling to find his keys after murdering a mother and her two children; a psychopath pondering mass homicides; a dying woman experiencing her final thoughts, visions, and hallucinations; two highly driven women competing for power within the same career and the same mind; private letters describing a father's absence, a wife's loneliness, and the incestuous sexual abuse of their child; people wandering around a town vivid with remnants of the revolution for freedom; the loss of a child testing an elderly woman's faith; a paralytic discussing his shoe fetish; a woman living with depression and struggling to move through her day; the brutal death of a relative affecting everyone and no one equally.
- Gustavo Adolfo Aybar
Victoria Estol was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1983. She holds degrees in sociology and social communication. Bicho Bola, her first book of poetry, and the one from which the poems featured here are taken, has been well received by local literary critics. She earned a commendation from National Pablo Neruda Competition for Young Poets and contributed to the anthology Cualquiercosario, co-edited by Uruguay (Yaugurú) and Spain (Libros de la imperdible).
The poems featured here come from a series entitled "El asalto a las putas," or "Whorehouse Raid," which takes up the old film cliché of gunslingers shooting up a saloon and making off with women thrown over shoulders--an event depicted in the second poem. The cartoonishness of this scene is not downplayed, but it is offset and undermined by the poems that bookend it. The title of the poem that precedes it, "far west will never can forget" is meant to be a Spanish speaker's interpretation of English, implying that Wild West tropes are perhaps more alive now in the cowboy landscape of northern Mexico. The poem acts as a forlorn meditation on the waning of the Wild West mythos in the face of urban modernity. In contrast, the final three surprise us by introducing the rarely heard voices of the women themselves as they sit around telling stories that begin in bravado and jest, but fall silent when the tales turn to sexual subjugation. Their tragedy is framed by an epigraph in which Hollywood's idealized Wild West outlaws--Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--weigh in from beyond the opening poem's veil of history, saying "did you ever imagine this butch / no sundance this doesn't smell right to me."
Readers may find it helpful to note that Sánchez finds his footing more in rock and roll than the literary establishment, claiming that he only became a poet because he couldn't be a rock star. He's currently rectifying that with the support of his experimental rock band, un país cayendo a pedazos, which describes itself as "a fresh cocktail of humor, criticism, sex, rock, and performance." To check out their performance of "el asalto a las putas," along with other multimedia fun, go to: http://unpaiscayendoapedazos.tumblr.com.
His newest book, jack boner & the rebellion, will be published in February 2014.
- Anna Rosenwong
Argentina | Short Fiction | Spanish
January, 2014First published in the Argentine journal Acción in 2011, Jimena Néspolo's short story "La mujer del dorado" narrates the strange case of Virginia Fhury, a woman with yellow-green eyes who breeds Dobermans on a declining, formerly ostentatious farm in a small Argentine town--and who never seems to age. Virginia becomes a point of obsessive interest among the townsfolk, and the narrator reconstructs the details of Virginia's life from the gossip and reports s/he overhears. Told from the point of view of a singular, unnamed narrator, s/he invokes the plural consciousness of the town for emphasis, and betrays a sense of lament at the town's intrusiveness. As the mystery of Virginia's age unravels, the reader might imagine that so, too, does the bickering cohesiveness of the town. The reader is left to wonder: were Virginia's age and life a mystery after all, or did the town invent a myth based on whispers of her identity? Small town politics feature as prominently as the eternally youthful golden woman.
I translated this story in cafes in Argentina while on a Tinker Foundation grant for predoctoral research in the summer of 2012. Jimena generously agreed to correspond with me and meet for coffee to discuss the finer points of her writing style and philosophy, which come alive in her artfully constructed bio note. During a meeting over coffee in Buenos Aires, she stressed the importance of the play on words in the title, something that is difficult to carry over to the English from the original Spanish. The "mujer del dorado" simultaneously invokes a woman made of gold; a woman from the mythical El Dorado of South American legends; and a woman of golden color, much like a "carpa dorada" (goldfish). All three associations are important, given the gilded history of Virginia's family, her mythical status in town, the strange story of the large goldfish passing through her legs, and the way in which she dies. I decided to let the Spanish speak for itself and titled the story "The Dorado Woman" rather than the more literal "The Golden Woman" or "The Woman of Gold," and throughout the text of the story tried to emphasize the three associations Jimena wrote into the Spanish.
- Kristina Zdravič Reardon
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
September, 2013Patricia Esteban Erlés (b. 1972 in Zaragoza, Spain) completed her studies in Hispanic Philology at the University of Zaragoza and specializes in chivalric literature. Her own literary production, in contrast, is firmly rooted in contemporary society, as she represents the age in which she lives, with all the technological innovations and personal uncertainties of our postmodern world. Her work has been described as gothic, with a marked influence from film, featuring a disarming sense of the mysterious as she explores the points of contact between reality and fantasy. The story featured here, "Cantalobos," comes from Manderley en venta (Tropos, 2010), which won the 2007 University of Zaragoza literary award for short fiction and was named one of the top ten books of short stories of 2008.
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