This week’s music is “We Will Live for Ages” by Hjaltalín.

Things we discussed that you should check out:

The Spanish issue of ;

, for access to Basque literature;

A recording of��.

And just like that, the Three Percent Podcast is back! Stay tuned for additional conversations, diatribes, and info about new and forthcoming translations. As such, if you don’t already subscribe to the Three Percent Podcast you can find us on and other places. Or you can always subscribe by adding our feed directly into your favorite podcast app: http://threepercent.libsyn.com/rss

September 10, 1714,

the Siege of Barcelona

A group of infantry soldiers and their captain opt to smoke and drink in an abandoned theater rather than be stationed at the walls, firing against the Bourbon troops. Bombs fall on the city night and day, ceaselessly. Everything is ruin and desolation. Death hangs gloomily over everyone, scythe at the ready.

“What mindless suicide!” one of the soldiers suddenly exclaims. “We shall die as rats yf we continue on this way. A pox upon the Hapsburgs and a pox upon the Bourbons: ��!”

“Die as dogs, jolt-head!” chides another soldier. “I should beat thee down at present! For at least we shall make history! They’ll write book after book about us, they will erect museums, make paintings, write poems in our honor . . . we shall be heroes of the fatherland!”

“Aye, if there’s any fatherland left,” grumbles a third infantryman.

“I had rather be a living deserter than a dead patriot,” muses a fourth soldier.

“That’s enough! Quiet, all ye!” bellows the troop’s captain. “Chance to die and chance to live but, in any case, remember that the fatherland doesn’t always coincide with the territory. I wot the tale of a man named Joan Orpí, who refounded our Catalonia on the other side of the globe, less than a century hence. On my word.”

���Գ�����徱������!”

“Cock and pie!”

“And what befell henceforward, Captain?”

“And what befell henceforward, bid ye? Well, in ’is quest to try that all, he lived a thousand and one adventures,” declares the captain. “Ye shant find these in any book of history, yet they be no less memorable or less important. Au contraire. Would ye care to hark, and forbear complaining for a time?”

The infantry soldiers smile like children, nod their heads, and perk up their ears. They pour more wine and pass around tobacco. The captain/narratorlights his wooden pipe and begins his declamation.

“Who was this adventurer what founded a New Catalonia thousands of leagues away, yet went to the diet of worms leaving naught a trace in our history?”

“Joan Orpí!” one soldier shrieks.

“Precisely! Who traversed seas fill’d withe mythical monsters and virgin forests at risk to his life (and the lives of many others) for a fistful of gold coins and (perchance) posthumous glory . . . ?”

“Orpí . . . !” bellows a soldier.

“The selfsame! And who risk’d chicaning the very Catholic Kings and came cross’t near as many enemyes as friends?”

“Christopher Columbus . . . ?” ventures another soldier.

“No, ya beef-head, none other than Joan Orpí! At least that was what I was told by a corky criollo from the Yndies I happen’d upon one night when tippling in Seville. He quoth to be a ‘friend of a Catalan conquistador, humble altho an old Christian^[1] and a nobleman of New Andalusia in the Americas, later founder of New Catalonia.’ Thus he even spake Catalan.”

“Hold up . . . one moment, Captain!” says one of the soldiers. “Canst thou truly trust a brandy-face? Art thou convinsced the criollo was whom he sayd to be and that he werent lying with a latchet? How many years pass’d betwixt these events and the telling of them? And, once for all, why have I this tic in mine eye each tyme I get nervous?”

“Enuf tilly-tally, soldier, and merely heed the tale,” orders the captain, in a didactic tone. “Whence my ‘informant’ explaint this historical drama to me, the criollo in question were four sheets to the wind. Nonetheless, I didst believe him. And knowth ye why? 1) For the criollo spake Catalan, and 2) for I be a man of faith (faith in the imagination, to be clear!). And now, allow me begin with chapter XVI, of whych I am inordinately fond.”

^[1] i.e. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the subject of blood purity divided the Hispanic world into new Christians, in other words, those descended from Arabs or Jews, and old Christians, of pure Christian blood.

CHAPTER XVI

��

In which young Orpí celebrates Carnaval

with his fraternity and ends up

dressed as the Stag King

I shall begin with a day when Joan Orpí was celebrating Carnaval. Following the parade, our young hero ended up in a cemetery, where a band of joyous revelers were engaged in a wide range of obscenities. Some were licking others’ anuses, some were eating fruits and tomatoes they’d rubbed on their genitals, and others were drinking sacramental wine and masturbating and dancing to the improvised music of drums and tambourines. All were dedicated to the collective ritual, singing, shrieking, praying, making offerings and insinuations, muddy and half nude . . . ducks and rabbits fell at their hands . . . hens were violated and eviscerated . . . some slathered themselves with the blood of the dead animals—

[One instant, Captain . . . halt! Forbear the tale����!]

There are a few other instances later on of this narrator captain being interrupted

“How now?” he asks, irritated.

“For the lyfe of us, we cannot fathom why thou beginnst with chapter sixteen. Would logick not state the first chapter?” asks one of the soldiers.

“Yea, start withe the first! The first!” cry out other soldiers.

“How’s that? Doth ye seek the typical story with a beginning, middle, and end?” asks the captain, perplexed. “Dunderheads! Don’t ye know that true literature is only true when written against itself? Why put plot over language and form?”

“Here we hie again,” complains one of the soldiers. “Art thou one of those pedantic academics, ay? For if that be the case, I prefer to be killt by enemy troops . . .”

“Numbskulls!” bellows the infuriated captain. “When I speak of going against the narration I don’t mean there shall bee no story, no adventures, no characters! I speak of the need for a hybrid construction, plurilingualism, exaggeration, hyperbole, pastiche, and bivocal discourse to bring together what convention & morality strive to keep separate. Literature must be a frontal attack designed to suspend all rational judgment in order to reinvent it each second anew!”

“I cannot bear these sermons . . .” says one of the soldiers.

“If he keeps up this proselytizing, I’m outta hither . . .”

“Yawn . . .”

“Fine!” exclaims the captain in exasperation. “Okay, Okay, fine! Quit thine complaining! I shall beginne at the beginning, as you wish! But no more interruptions, I’ll lose the thread, and judge me not for mine invention, but rather for the grace of my wit, glossed in three books and their corresponding chapters, which one of ye shall ‘copy’ anon. And that’s an order!”

BOOK ONE

��

IN WHICH IS NARRATED, WITH GREAT GUSTO AND AN EYE ON POSTERITY, ORPÍ’S INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD, FIRST IN THE TOWN OF PIERA AND ANON DURING HIS STUDIES IN THE CITY OF BARCELONA, WHERE HE HAD VARIED EXPERIENCES, AS MANY GOOD AS BAD, WHICH TAUGHT HIM THAT LIFE IS NO BED OF ROSES BUT RATHER A LONG ORDEAL WHERE ONE LEARNS FROM HARD KNOCKS, AND AS SUCH AND BEFITTING HIS STORY SHALL BE EXPLAINED PERHAPS NOT EXACTLY AS IT TRULY HAPPENED, BUT AT LEAST QUITE SIMILARLY.

Both and are available through the and if you use 2MONTH at checkout, you’ll get 20% off.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And be sure to read all of Mara’s translations, including The Boys by Toni Sala and Wonderful World by Javier Calvo.

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Els Surfing Sirles.

Since the lists I’ve been posting the past few days—and plan on continuing for as long as I can—have been taking up so much time, I’m just going to jump into this week’s stuff.

Book I’m Reading and Loving: by Toni Sala, translated from the Catalan by Mara Fay Lethem (Two Lines)

A lot of times, the books I choose for my spring “World Literature & Translation” are ones that I’ve wanted to get to for a while, but haven’t found the time or motivation to actually get to. By assigning them to my students, I feel OK about setting aside some of my other work to dive into these.

I have a bunch of books like this I have to read over the next couple months, but I decided to start with Toni Sala’s The Boys, and holy shit this is so good. Initially, I was a bit worried about reading it. All year I’ve been having severe death anxiety panic attacks, and anything related tends to make my mind go crazy, and the basis of this novel is that there’s a car accident that takes the lives of two young men.

That aspect’s not very unnerving to me, but bits like this one—from the first part, which is narrated by an aging banker—really hit home:

Being an adult is accepting death, harboring it inside you like a cancer, dying. How can he accept that his own daughter were already adults, that they were already infected? Accept death, how could he? How can you accept something you don’t understand? How can you continue to be a person, if you accept the incomprehensible? Accepting death is accepting loneliness, and the commotion over the death of the two brothers was in fact his resistance to facing up to his age, to his death; his resistance to separating from his daughters, to the death of his daughters—dying, the brothers had freed their parents from killing them, as he would have to kill his daughters the day he died.

For whatever reason, all the talk about death in here doesn’t wig me out. Instead, it’s pretty compelling, and interesting to see how this accident, this forced exposure to death, works its way through the various characters and their life stories.

It helps that there are so many great lines in this book, little reflections that I was particularly drawn to. Also from Ernest, the same narrator as above:

When you have children you spend your life risking your dignity. Your existence lies in the hands of someone else. That’s what children are. They destroyed you. There should be some way to retire after having them. Retire from being a parent.

The book moves through a series of voices, from Ernest to the crazy truck driver he meets at the scene of the accident (and whose section is all about creating online personas, whores, and Catalan independence), to Iona, the girlfriend of one of the dead brothers, which is the section I’m in now.

There’s a lot more to say about this book and its mediations on being on the outside, marginalized in some way, and how, for such a relatively simplistic plot, keeps sucking me in. But I’ll save my further reflections for class. (And for once I’ve finished this.)

Overall though, it’s absolutely worth picking up a copy. The Catalan literature being translated into English these days is really fantastic.

Book I Can’t Wait to Read: by Lina Wolff, translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry (And Other Stories)

I’m really excited to read this because Lina Wolff will be in Rochester on March 2nd as part of our Reading the World Conversation Series. Even if she weren’t coming, I’d be into this book though. And Other Stories (along with Two Lines, who published The Boys) are one of those great young presses bringing out really interesting books that are beautifully produced. This isn’t my favorite of the And Other Stories covers, but then again, I hold them to a really high standard, given how great their books look.

Anyway, in terms of this novel, it’s set in Caudal, Spain and features prostitutes who collect stray dogs and name them after famous male authors, like, Bret Easton Ellis. I haven’t started it at all, yet, so I don’t know how the whole novel functions, but Stefan Tobler (founder, publisher of And Other Stories) said this, which got me really intrigued:

It’s like a Bolaño novel with more of a feminist bent. A pretty unflinching and dark look at love and violence—while also being very, very funny often, and having an incredibly spiralling structure around a central character’s friends and acquaintances.

I like funny and I like spirals. I’m in!

And if you want more Lina Wolff, be sure and check out this story from where she also wrote urging someone to translate the short fiction of the Swedish author Oline Stig.

Podcast I’m Definitely Not Listening To: Season Two of Serial (This American Life)

I wasted weeks of my life listening to the first season of this show, which contains all the things I hate about NPR: that smug, annoying NPR voice; the wishy-washy nature of the reporting; the manipulative way the story is constructed, with more of a focus on playing with the listener’s emotions than the facts of the reporting itself; the way Carol, or whatever her name is, seems genuinely surprised to find out that people in this country are jailed because of flimsy, or incorrect evidence. All of it drove me insane, yet I felt compelled to keep listening, to be part of the conversation.

Obviously, I wasn’t the only one with

What do I know after listening to every episode of Serial? Nothing. I know absolutely nothing, except that it wasted my damn time, and I really hate it when that happens. Did you know sometimes we send people to prison on flimsy evidence? Did you know investigators can manipulate a witness narrative to fit the evidence they think they have? Did you know sometimes the wrong people go to jail? Did you know the American criminal justice system sucks?

Yes. You did. Either you did, or you should have before listening to Serial. If you didn’t, please don’t be proud of just now realizing this. That’s like admitting you just learned where to vote; it implies all those times you weren’t voting. And you gotta ignore a lot of things to think anything Serial showed us was new. Unless, of course, you get most of your news from public radio, which mostly ignores local murders, making you that person who has no idea about the local string of smash-and-grabs at the 7-Eleven, but knows all about the government in the Balkans. Great: That person learned something. Maybe that counts for a bonus point.

When I read that season two was finally coming out, and was about Bowe Bergdahl, I was momentarily interested. I would’ve preferred something less exposed, less already covered by major media outlets, but whatever. Then I saw this picture:

No. Absolutely not.

But what’s worse is that Kaija listened to the first episode of this new season and told me the teaser at the end for episode two:

“Hello, this is Sarah.” That’s me, calling the Taliban.

Hell no. I can’t take this. Even though I unsubscribed months ago, I feel like my iTunes just won’t let me. Every time I open up the podcast app, there’s information about Serial and a dozen other podcasts that are breaking down every episode of Serial. It’s like she invented the very idea of podcasts AND journalism!

On the upside, it sounds like the backlash is in full swing and not as many people are losing their minds over this season of the show. Maybe there is some hope for humanity after all.

We’re going to have a ton of interns again this summer, which should free up a bit of time to let loose on this blog, which I plan to do in grand style . . . But before getting into those fun and games, I thought it would be best to ease back into the Three Percent world by highlighting some exciting new ventures, starting with brought to you by one of Open Letter’s favorite translators, Heather Cleary.¹

The BAR launched last week to great acclaim (including mentions by Bookforum, Granta, New Directions, and the like), and for good reason. This bilingual internet magazine “presents the best and latest work by emerging and established writers from the Americas, in both Spanish and English. We value translation and conversation. We publish poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, visual art, and interviews.”

And the inaugural issue is, to slang it up a bit, pretty baller.

There’s a

Javier Calvo: The other day I saw a book by Alejandro Zambra on a list of the most anticipated books of 2013 in the United States, and I wanted to ask you this: what do you think of this phenomenon, which to me is one of the most important things that have happened in American publishing in a long time? I’m talking about the attention Spanish-language fiction has been getting since Bolaño. How have you experienced this change as a translator, reader, scout, etc?

Mara Faye Lethem: Do you see it as so distinct from the Boom? Because I don’t.

Javier Calvo: I do see significant differences from the Boom. To begin with, I think the boom was much more a strategy, and as such it had a center. And when I say strategy, I say it almost in the sense of the British Invasion: we’re going to take over North America. Here, I don’t see too much strategy, and as a matter of fact I don’t see how an editor could hope to get rich on the books of Aira or Zambra. Secondly, the Boom in America was a much more asymmetrical phenomenon, the rich neighbor’s consumption of a series of consumer elements related to exoticism and magic.

Look, for example, at the resounding failure as strategies of all the “commercial brands” of exportation of Latin American literature: McOndo, the Crack Movement . . .

In the current case it’s true that Bolaño has been sanctioned by the American world of culture as the “Chosen One” to replace GGM [Gabriel García Márquez] as the Great Novelist in Spanish, but I also see differences: it seems to me that the acceptance of the new literature in Spanish already lacks that aspect of consumption of the poor, the exotic, and the distinct. I believe that now, strangely, it already has a certain aspect of normalcy, acceptance of the two-directional cultural tides that exist between Spanish and English. Although this may perhaps be overly optimistic.

Mara Faye Lethem: Well, when they talk about Aira as the new Bolaño, yes, that implies a certain strategy of marketing. I think that the case of Bolaño has been an astounding example of the unpredictability of the editorial world, and the strategy of buying books in other people’s styles is ridiculous, but shows no signs of waning. I suppose people’s lack of vision, as well as their fear, just get bigger and bigger than their risk-taking . . .

There’s an featuring the intriguing pull-quote, “We exist in a constant state of translation. We just don’t like it.”

There’s

The pointless memories are the most beautiful ones. I must have been, what, eight years old when this guy with a bird’s name, Piri, came to my grandparents’ house. He’d come to help my grandmother with the little sausage and bakery business she’d set up in her third courtyard. It sounds unbelievable, I know, but the house really did have three courtyards and in the third, as I said, my grandmother had set up a real life steam-powered manufacturing line for chorizo and bread. If you showed up very early in the morning, you could imagine the smoke belched out by the grinders, ovens, crushers, fillers and pots being, logically, the smog that rose in a frenzy from the First World’s last generation of machines.

There’s that opens by name-checking JLo and “Jenny from the Block.”

And

Overall, this is a solid opening issue, and one I’m sure we’ll be featuring time and again. (Oh, and while I’m plugging things that make me happy, Heather’s translation of Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark is at the printer now. So all your Chejfec/Cleary fans have something fantastic to look forward to reading this fall.

¹ Actually, we love Jennifer Croft, Pola Oloixarac, and Maxine Swann all deserve special shout-outs as well.

Today we’re featuring Argentine author Pola Oloixara, whose “Conditions for the Revolution” was translated by Mara Faye Lethem. Mara has translated a number of really interesting books, including Javier Calvo’s Wonderful World Albert Sanchez Pinol’s Pandora in the Congo and David Trueba’s Learning to Lose. She wrote the piece below about her experience working on this story for Granta.

Translating Pola

There is plenty about Pola to intimidate anyone. Her Facebook fan page proclaims her “The Wonder Woman of the 21st Century”. She is an expert on orchids. Her dimpled smile could launch a thousand ships. Her writing is terrifically brainy and peppered with references. So when I tried to step into her shoes, to channel her spirit to lead my fingers across the keys like a Ouija board, it involved more than the usual leap of faith. Screwing up my courage, I opted for some serious deconstruction and research, then worked to put back together the pieces while maintaining Pola’s ever-present humor.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of my best friends are Argentines. (Or was it Argentinians? Or Argentineans, as my spell check insists?) I’d translated authors from Argentina before. But never an Argentine as Argentine as Pola. The fact that her work is intensely local one of her assets, but for a translator who has never set foot on Argentine soil, it presents some challenges. I enlisted a ��ǰ��ٱ�ñ�� informant who wouldn’t laugh in my face when I asked such questions as “What do they sell at kiosks in Buenos Aires?” (Thanks, Nacho!) But the real challenge was not in the slightly different conjugations, the unfamiliar foods, the different school system, the slang.

The biggest challenge for me when translating this story had to do with that ineffable sense of place or, perhaps better put, the culture and politics embedded deep in language. There are so many things I take for granted when translating work from Spain or Catalonia, where I have lived for many years, that have to do with the context. Here we have a Secretariat of Linguistic Politics, officially acknowledging something many countries don’t: our choice of words is often a political act, albeit very subtly, or unconsciously.

“Conditions for the Revolution” has as its backdrop the Argentine economic crisis of 2001, and swap clubs and unrest that sprang up around it. Along with certain terms, like caceroleantes, which have no perfect translation, the atmosphere of the story was, for me, swimming in unfamiliar waters. But isn’t that one of the great things about being a translator, that we are transported to other worlds and have to find our way back to our own, leading the English-speaking reader by the hand?

– Mara Faye Lethem

And to give you a taste of Oloixarac’s work in Lethem’s translation, here’s the opening of “Conditions for the Revolution”:

That morning, Mara went by her mother’s house to get some clean clothes. She slid between the armchairs in the living room and the coffee tables overflowing with magazines; she didn’t want to run into her. On the modular shelving in the library, flanked by books by Eduardo Galeano and Gabriel García Márquez, the computer screen showed an unfinished game of solitaire. Mother Cris wasn’t there. She’d been a little depressed because Quique, her current lover, had way too much time on his hands. At first he wandered around Cris’s house, leaving his toothbrush there, and then kindly (suspiciously) offering to cook, until one day she gave him a hard stare and said, look, I think that, these days, the most important thing in a relationship is respecting each other’s space, but if you need to, please let me finish, if you really need to, you can stay here. Quique was of medium height and had brown eyes and a disorientated air about him, but he seemed stripped of everything that makes disorientation an attractive or romantic trait.

‘You don’t recognize me because I let my grey come in and now I have a ponytail.’ He had brought his snout closer.

Cris would have preferred that he didn’t make such direct mention of the ponytail; she was enough of an adult – and alone, not getting any younger – to know she could stand the sight of the ponytail, but not talking about it. Quique wasn’t intimidated by Cris’s sideways glances, the deliberate nature of some of her absent and distracted moments. He read it as a display of parameters, a female logic lubricating its own version of the conquest seconds before launching, insatiable, into mating. The sweetness of desperation was an inalienable asset in middle-aged ladies for whom casual sex would soon be a piece of Grandma’s jewellery that nobody would want to touch. Quique was an optimistic guy. He narrowed his eyes, fulfilling his civic role of mensch playing at seducer:

‘In those days I already had you in my sights, but you were with somebody else.’

Cris pursed her lips, trying mentally to distance herself from the scene: for the moment, being the recipient of Quique’s attentions was far from flattering. But ‘somebody else’ awoke Cris’s interest (vanity disguised as interest) from its lethargy and, overcome with complicity, she used the opportunity to laugh hysterically. And yes, she was always with somebody or other. Quique felt as if the fat men of the Metal Workers’ Union were urging him on, gesturing at him with full arms as if he were in a car and wanted to park; you go ahead, he thought, as he slipped his thumb cautiously through the loop of Cris’s jeans. With a quick glance, Cris detected his hand hanging close to her proud ass, her personal PR agent; unable to renounce her chance at playing the coquette, Cris commented: Hmm . . . dangerous. I’m the type that falls in love, so if I were you, I’d think twice. If Quique had been twenty years younger, he would have made a bet with himself as to how long it would take him to penetrate her anally; now, mature and serene, he stuck out his tongue slightly before touching her lips.