Latin American literature is world renowned for its richness in a variety of genres--poetry, the essay, the short story and, of course, the novel. Spanish-language literature in diary form seems less well known. Ocosingo War Diary is the first-ever English translation of one well-known writer's twelve-day ordeal, which took place in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, near Guatemala. Efraín Bartolomé gives an eyewitness account of the New Year's Eve massacre of 1994. Published to critical acclaim in Spanish in 1995, Ocosingo is part of a now classic tradition of testimonial literature in the vein of Elena Poniatowska's Massacre in Mexico (1971). Part pastoral elegy, part eyewitness reportage, Bartolomé's artful war diary is as much a prose poem as it is a memoir.
Novel (excerpts) | Spanish | Uruguay
December, 2012Primavera Con Una Esquina Rota is a testimonial hybrid novel centered on the experience and effects of exile. It chronicles the lives of five family members and the true experiences (for example, health problems) of the author himself interspersed at random along parallel and joining narrative lines. Benedetti uses many points of view (first-person, third-person, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, free indirect) and different styles (conversational, epistolary, poetic) along with delayed information and word games.
The novel begins about eight months before the release of Santiago, a militant serving a five-year prison term in the Libertad de Montevideo prison for attempting to overthrow the government, and who, upon his release and return home to resume his family life, discovers the impossibility of resuming any previous personal relationships. Santiago's family members include Don Rafael, his father; Graciela, his wife; and Beatriz, their daughter. Rolando, a friend to all of them, and lovestruck, wanders through the novel, eventually becoming Graciela's lover. They're all Uruguayan, and except for the prisoner, Santiago, reside in what appears to be Mexico City.
Santiago is present in the novel through his letters, which like most prisoner's letters express hope for the future. Don Rafael represents the historical memory of the city of his exile, while reflecting on the wisdom gained by those who are able to live in the present. Graciela, a militant in her own right, feels despair and exhaustion, a sickness of the soul that doesn't have to do with loyalties or treachery, but with the need to be useful and feel alive. Rolando is known as "Uncle Rolando" to Beatriz and offers unselfish and focused support to Graciela, who, although she is increasingly independent, is nevertheless confused or perhaps disoriented by her life. And just like her imprisoned father Santiago, who intervenes in the novel through his letters, young Beatriz does so through texts that could be a form of interior monologue, entries from a diary, or compositions written in school.
Primavera Con Una Esquina Rota is not only a magnificent exercise in literary style, lightly hampered by the incorporation of texts that are a bit foreign to the nucleus of the novel, but rather, principally, a remarkable display of patriotic literary courage on Benedetti's behalf. Having been vaccinated against intimidation long before, he wasn't afraid to present several unheroic, weak, and contradictory men and women while knowing that a good portion of expatriates would read the novel with a hypercritical military eye.
(A slightly different version of this translator's note originally appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review (Issue #48, Spring/Summer 2011))
Novel (excerpt) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2012Ricardo Menéndez Salmón is one of the most respected writers in the Spanish literary scene. Born in Gijón (Asturias) in 1971, he studied philosophy and has written eight novels, a book of short stories, and a literary travel book. He regularly publishes articles in newspapers, and cultural and literary journals. His work has been translated into Catalan, French, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese, and he has received numerous literary awards. Praised unanimously by critics in Spain, his prose, rich and cultivated, has been described as having "a personal style, strong and close to expressionism" (El País); "a mature writer with the air of a classic" (ABC Cultural); "no writer today can compare to Ricardo Menéndez Salmón" (Qué Leer); "Goyaesque imagery" (Revista de Letras); "the best of a generation of writers" (La Razón). His latest novel Medusa was published in September 2012.
Irse (English translation: "To Leave") is Isabel Cadenas Cañón's first poetry book. It was awarded the 2009 Caja de Guadalajara-Fundación Siglo Futuro Award for young poets and published in 2010. The book is divided into three parts, and it explores the consequences of leaving, of being abroad, and the impossibility of returning. The book was one of the ten best-selling poetry books in Spain for twelve consecutive weeks.
Dominican Republic | Prose Poetry | Spanish
June, 2012Death juxtaposed with amorous love becomes a creative force that fuels life as a never-ending cycle in this short, inventive prose poem originally published in Spanish in the literary journal La Poesia Sorprendida (No. IV, January 1944).
Tracto ("Tract") is a tunnel-poem, a poem-stairway, an intimate passageway connecting one darkness with others, the origin of light from whence the poetic word, the very essence of language, is interrogated.
Corona Tallo Raíces ("Crown Stem Roots") represents, through the experience of disappearance--a death in the family, the cutting down of a poplar grove that shaded the river--a radical immersion in the landscape, a harsh geography that joins the everyday traces of life and death.
Cuba | Poetry (excerpts) | Spanish
April, 2012The featured texts belong to assignments [tareas], an innovative long poem that has as its core the experiences of otherness, both in Cuba and the United States. assignments ponders the impossibilities of a stable identity, its infeasibility in space and time. On a formal level, assignments constitutes an homage to the number 7. It is made up of 21 sections, divided into 7 stanzas, with 7 verses each.
The unspoken cliché that writing should reflect the world in accurate language unveils itself provocatively in Mexican poet Jorge Fernández Granados's poem "Principle of Uncertainty." Its speaker posits that to perceive something like truth in "unreliable hiding-in-plain-sight / reality" you have to witness, and do your best, because "(the closest) proximity or (furthest) / distance are the error / from which we love or judge."
Another unspoken cliché that the collection Principio de incertidumbre (2007) voices aloud is that poetry can speak the world at all, since writing ultimately is a translation of experience. Principio, Granados's seventh book, whose title I translate literally as "Principle of Uncertainty," wishes to suggest that this is not a treatise on Heisenberg, but rather an experiment with how his principle might work in poetry. Thus, we read the "hurried notes" of an observer faced with the uncertainty of knowing anything precisely. And knowingly, Fernández Granados's free verse of mostly unpunctuated lines that wobble between phrases and across line breaks expresses uncertainty, but in ways that lead the reader into surprising detours and notable arrivals.
In a seeming contradiction to the preceding, a matter of punctuation appears in the ars poetica, "F(l)echas en la noche / D(a)rt(e)s in the Night," which underscores the poet's denial that he can write at all, even while he writes. A parenthesis as lexical item opens a window for the use of the same variable in English translation: F(l)echas - fechas" almost mirror each other, as do "Da(r)tes - dates," with the minor enormity of the lazy "e" in "dartes," hence "da(r)t(e)s," a manuever almost compensating for the size differential between "flechas" ("arrows") and "darts." I have calculated that adding an additional "( )" to bound the "e" could be an intelligible, even an aesthetic choice, though I recognize it is a kind of error.
The real issue comes into focus in the variously stated refrain "no podría escribir" / "I could not write," the resulting clause of a statement contrary to fact: "As if there were in words something able /to translate it." The world, that is, and I couldn't, says the poet. But the implied meaning of such "if" statements is present tense, in other words, the poet "can't write," he can only "transcribe / excavate" what the lyric says in the end: "in the difficult words that are nothing / surely but inseparable shadows hard / ruins teeth or darts in the night / that project things / the singular things of this world..." all clarified in the light of another morning. Even though the meaning of the refrain changes in the course of the poem, I (am bound to) render it as written grammatically, and all the while know that its meaning is variable, uncertain, and significant. Though I have done my best, I am not able to translate it, I can only approximate it.
(W. Nick Hill)
Marco Aurelio Ángel-Lara (Mexico, 1970) is a Mexican writer whose book of aphorisms, El atril de la luciérnaga, was published in 2011 by Arlequín. Marco has been anthologized in collections of Hispanoamerican poetry and awarded with poetry, essay, and short script international prizes. He obtained a Ph.D. in Critical and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has taught philosophy and Latin American literature for several years at different universities in Mexico and Europe.
Short Fiction | Spain | Spanish
April, 2012As part of a collection of short stories in which each protagonist is presented with the opportunity to evaluate her life by what she has or what she perceives to be missing, "Ursula," occupying the imprecise realm between short story and novella, is a quiet story of the tension in a marriage threatened by personal goals and serves as a strong reminder that the seemingly small decisions are what come to define who we are and have the power to change the course of our lives.
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).