Today, we’re going to revisit a wild TMR season in which we featured three books originally written in Spanish, all published right around the start of the pandemic . . . Below, you’ll find info and links to all the episodes on Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos & Robin Myers, Four by Four by Sara Mesa & Katie Whittemore, and The Book of Anna by Carmen Boullosa & Samantha Schnee.

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We started this season off with . Here’s the jacket copy:

“When you live in an adopted country, when you’re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.”

Cars on Fire, Mónica Ramón Río��’s electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of characters—the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student—whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. With incredible formal range, from the linear to the more free-wheeling, the real to the fantastical to the dystopic, Ríos offers striking, jarring glimpses into life as a woman and an immigrant. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile’s La Zona Central, the stories in Cars on Fire offer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces—xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world—that shape life in Chile and the United States.

And here are links to each Cars on Fire episode:

Episode 1: Pages 1-63 (, , )

Episode 2: Pages 64-151 (, , )

Episode 3: Pages 152-End (, , )

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Then we moved on to . Here’s the jacket copy:

Set entirely at Wybrany College—a school where the wealthy keep their kids safe from the chaos erupting in the cities—Four by Four is a novel of insinuation and gossip, in which the truth about Wybrany’s “program” is always palpable, but never explicit. The mysteries populating the novel open with the disappearance of one of the “special,” scholarship students. As the first part unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not well in Wybrany, and that something more sordid lurks beneath the surface.

In the second part—a self-indulgent, wry diary written by an imposter who has infiltrated the school as a substitute teacher—the eerie sense of what’s happening in this space removed from society, becomes more acute and potentially sinister.

An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s “sophisticated nightmare” calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters.

And here are links to each Four by Four episode:

Episode 4: Pages 1-86 (, , )

Episode 5: Pages 87-156 (, , )

Episode 6: Pages 156-222 (, , )

Episode 7: Pages 223-End (, , )

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And we wrapped things up with . Here’s the jacket copy:

IN THIS CONTINUATION OF ANNA KARENINA’S LEGACY, RUSSIA SIMMERS ON THE BRINK OF CHANGE AND THE STORIES THAT HAVE LONG BEEN KEPT SECRET FINALLY COME TO LIGHT.

Saint Petersburg, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the vivid portrait that the tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts Anna wrote just before her death, which open a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairy tale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapon, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, plan protests that embroil the downstairs members of the Karenin household in their plots and tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa tells a polyphonic and subversive tale of the Russian revolution through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.

Episode 8: Pages 1-73 (, , )

Episode 9: Pages 74-98 (, , )

Episode 10: Pages 99-126 (, , )

Episode 11: Pages 127-161 (, , )

Episode 12: Pages 162-End (, , )

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Enjoy!

And while you’re here, you should get a copy of  and be ready for Season Twenty of TMR starting on September 6th!

And to kick things off (technically a day before the start of #WITMonth, but whatever, time is a construct), here is an excerpt from Mexican author Karla Marrufo’s Flame Trees in May, translated from the Spanish by Allison A. deFreese. Here’s a description of the book:

“There are stories that cannot help but change us forever, and Mayo, with its showers of golden rain, its flame trees on fire, its dark sun and the drips and drops that form bubbles, is one of them.”—Nidia Cuan

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula. Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.

Flame Trees in May is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books. 

And, as an editorial note, the layout of this novella is much closer to poetry than to prose. I’ve tried to represent it as best as possible in this post, but I highly recommend reading the physical book for a better sense of how this is supposed to appear on the page.

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did you know there’s a word in portuguese that resembles your name?

i’ve forgotten it now, but it means mementos or memories, like remembering to send greetings to someone, to send a memo. i would remember it if only i could pet the cat, just like i would remember to take out the trash on friday and to close the refrigerator door

the door to my tears,

and all the windows before leaving the house.

so much silence here. have you noticed? that when you keep quiet, the house gets dirtier so much faster? you are such stubborn dust. you pass through doorways and come to settle in corners kept under lock and key. maybe that’s why lola can’t stand this place

the room still sweats with the warm hypocrisy from when it was a law office

and i’ll tell you why, if we keep going like this, soon we’ll be able to rent it out as a funeral parlor. that’s a profitable business. people will never stop dying

or keeping quiet

or thinking today must be friday.

Karla Marrufo

come here. touch the wall. it’s covered in dark bubbles. so humid! the wood is swelling. i am swelling, and sometimes i feel myself rolling, floating, rolling—like those days when we’d go to the park and roll down the hill until we were exhausted, until we would land at the base of the hill where the grass was peaceful and green. remember? we spent so many weekends at that park! we arrived with our childish excitement, believing everything was going to be fine; we ate sandwiches and sipped fruit juice while the clowns blew up dog-shaped balloons

the dogs walking by were shaped like balloons that would later pop—

once blown up to full size and left to bloat at the side of the road, the cars never stopping.

but in those days, bubbles were clear, and everything was fine. we should return to that city again sometime, leave this flat landscape for a while.

have you noticed how tiresias looks at me? i’ve often wondered what he’s thinking when his little green eyes grow big and stare into mine. it reminds me of that movie

what was it called?

the one where they ask whether, instead of us being the ones who make animals more human, it’s not the opposite way around, that the creatures in our lives turn us into animals. later lola brought up that song again, the one about the professor who teaches puppies how to write

he was an animal lover for sure; a regular zoophile, lola said

what a silly song! it makes me laugh,

though my excitement lasts an instant

as i think about those animals

those bubbles

and how they drift through life with their broken fragments of memory.

so little time has passed, really, and yet i’ve started mixing things up; things disappear from my mind. sometimes the past is a faded beach house, condemned each day to endure the relentless caress of sand and the sting of salt swept in by the wind. lola insists i take vitamins, fish oil, seaweed capsules. she says i should sleep more

have peaceful dreams, sleep without needles pounding in my temples

for eight, ten hours

a thousand hours

to sleep forever

but a wicked sun keeps visiting me in my dreams, drawing black holes before my eyes

it wakes me—agitated—every forty minutes.

i saw it on tv. the blonde girl with the small mouth was talking about it: about the very dark spot at the center of a solar flare. you have to see it

we should talk more. a little more. you know? it’s easier to remember ordinary things that happen to us when we talk about them. that’s why names are so important

a handful of letters from the alphabet, bound to the heart our whole lifes.

mamá panchita used to repeat this ad nauseam.

she said names are very dangerous; they chart the lines that lead to our destinies.

i remember the last time, so sad, though it barely lasted a few seconds. we had bound mamá panchita’s hands with a rope, secured them to the ceiling beams, so she would stop

she was only hurting herself;

scratching open her skin as a way to remember.

her hands restless as kites,

but without the colors

and i was deeply moved by her dark skin. seeing it touched me in a way that no one else’s skin had ever moved me before. it smelled ancient, the scent of many years. doubt had left a deep crease between her eyebrows. in a corner of the room, right in front of her, the small altar to our lady of charity was laughing along with five freshly cut sunflowers and the sparkle of a few fake coins. eyes half-closed, mamá panchita squinted suspiciously as she observed the saint; her pupils glowering with the hatred of a thousand questions answered only by whispers.

and just as i walked into the room, an unspeakable anger seized me

she was scratching open her skin

who knows what she was looking for below the surface

that’s why she had all those sores on her arms,

that long scar on her face

and her terrifying screams and outrage made me shake with anger and then grow quiet because, there at her side for the last time, i felt incapable of speaking to her

come now, mamá, everything’s going to be fine. when i look into your eyes, there you are—so very much yourself, mamá, always you, taking the little thread of your name, that’s about to break

nothing. silence. in that quiet corner of the room, i didn’t so much as dare to light the white candles around our lady of charity; we kept still, our mouths sealed

by our dark hands.

when it comes to giving me looks, even tiresias is more expressive than that. this must be why he scratches me with such determination. you see? it’s the same thing backwards. relentless caresses and reverberating silences—and this house didn’t even suffer the misfortune of having been built near the ocean. it has survived for years in mamá panchita’s absence

in the absence of your sisters, your father, you,

and me

only the bubbles and drops remain

drip, drop

of a rather thick liquid, as if flooded by disappointment, muddied by a sadness that makes everything slippery. no matter how hard i try, i can’t stop pacing between these same drops of music, these same notes, this same smell that comes, always, in may

it’s may again

that clings to the walls of memory, climbing the walls like a vine, working its way into the memories hidden in every corner, embroidered with the threads of mamá panchita’s name. she was fascinated by fancy paper napkins, by the little drawings on disposable cups, the tiny flowers on plastic cutlery—so many treasures. remember? she ate with her hands instead of touching the plastic forks, cleaned her mouth using her sleeves instead of napkins, discreetly wiped her fingertips on the edge of the tablecloth—all to preserve the beauty of disposable things.

you see, i’m still finding her trove of plastic and paper at the most unexpected moments, in the most unexpected places, and this creates a dilemma for me because i never know what to do with these disposable objects she left untouched only to be thrown out later, nobody giving them a second thought.

do you know how many things vanish without anyone so much as thinking of them? i try to do it, to think about every single thing, about every person who dies . . . but there are far too many and i am

it seems to me

much too small. maybe when you start thinking about things, the things themselves become sad too. like the melon this morning. lola brought it, and it was gigantic, a really big one, and i had to cut through the rind myself, then scoop out the seeds from each little square—the hulls of those seeds rough to the touch as I removed them; each unique and alive, and they covered my hands like homicidal blood. and there wasn’t even running water in the house

no drip, no drop

and that meant my hands were coated in the melon’s sweet round death, its juice running onto the floor until finally i cried—knife in hand—about all the times i hadn’t known how to relish the thought of death.

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where are you going? did you know there’s a greek word . . . ?

but i took out the trash on friday and closed all the doors

all of them

though later i opened them again because i needed to let in the daylight and to breathe in the outside world. sometimes when the sun

a spot black as night

starts to scribble on the walls and furniture in my room, i force myself awake: but it’s no use. my eyes keep me anchored in sleep. my eyelids stay closed, inwardly, looking for a long time at a universe that lacks the contours drawn for us by daylight. that’s why i have to open the windows and doors, expand this space so the colors don’t stay hidden, so i, too, may draw myself for one more day. it’s strange: all of a sudden i start to imagine my own funeral, among dark bubbles, in this ridiculous heat. and i’m afraid,

of closed doors and windows

very afraid. i must be lost in the maze of cereal boxes and energy shakes. every morning the same routine, so easy to follow that in the end i get lost. it’s easy to get lost when you go about your day only pretending to be free

to have no blood at all.

and you know it. remember when we would get lost and promise each other we would never go home? never return again,

to the smoothies or fish oil or seaweed

even though the way home was a straight shot, no turns. we wanted to run away to the parks with their hills and lakes

do you remember?

Allison A. deFreese

to sail far away from home, balloons that rise until they touch the sky. we were happy runaways, glancing over our shoulders, feeling above it all and looking down on those small lives below . . . exactly the way life looked from the picture window at the italian restaurant. remember that place? its crystal-clear windows under the shade of a ceiba tree, where i waited for you, hidden inside, imagining the instant you would arrive? the ceilings in that space were as high as our sky. sometimes when you arrived, i would imagine you were someone else, a different fellow coming to see me. then we’d escape with our foolish fantasies that i cherish to this day

you are so silly, small woman!

you ramble on and on, you can’t hold your tongue; with a warm, sweet venom in your saliva

i am quite small for being such a silly woman

with the eagerness of a schoolgirl and a trembling desire to see you again, i loved waiting for you. and when you triumphantly entered the restaurant, you grinned, confirmed what you suspected, and then kept playing our game, hiding a rose behind your back

a forbidden caress

fixing your gaze on my body

later putting the flower in my hands without a word

what a lovely couple

yes, mamá, we make such a lovely couple, though tiresias may condemn us

with his intense green gaze and his claws on our skin.

yes, it sounds so pretty, but neither of us were destined to be martyrs, nor would our deaths be foreshadowed by ripping open our consciousness, little by little each day, in an italian restaurant

or by having someone read of a very long will and testament:

                                                     the one who dies first, dies best

we didn’t think about death back then, even though in those days we knew already that neither words nor names would ever be on our side. remember the letters we wrote each other, the tongue twisters, all the wordplay?

paradise bird white angel cloud heaven dream blood

and what does blood have in common with dreams?

they are connected in the same way that paradise is full of birds and angels: you must fly to reach paradise, just as there must be blood for a dream to end

and i laughed then, though i never understood a thing. because to me, you were as bright as the look of hope in a street dog’s eyes.

wait! you would have loved it in the city center yesterday, everyone was there. i walked and walked, past all the shops, among people and pigeons. it was fascinating. it was strange, getting lost in a crowd again. a thousand colors overlapping, dust in the air, the excitable sounds of people in a hurry, with their purchases and their sniveling kids holding melting ice creams, sad from the heat. and a man looked at me like no man has looked at me for many years.

i felt paralyzed and dry, a scarecrow of a woman. except that i can’t scare anything, not even pigeons. i couldn’t return his look, because i could tell he was someone who refused to be intimidated. i felt trapped like the queen in a game of chess, alone and vulnerable at the moment of defeat. i would like to learn to play chess

to find my way out of mazes

to fill myself with the power of knives

but no one will tell me how it’s done. i never learned to return a look. i know nothing about revenge. that must be why everything around me ends up dying or getting killed. you know, tiresias spent the night in the carport again. i’m afraid i will forget him, that he’ll forget about me. i am very afraid that one day we will both forget about each other—that i’ll drive out of the carport and he won’t move; and after that, he’ll never run away or come to me again; that later i’ll have to wipe up his blood and gently remove his little red collar from his neck, and place the drop that was his body

dark as a bubble

in a trash bag that i won’t forget to take out on friday. maybe after that, i’ll close the doors forever.

go on then. you can leave if you want. there’s nothing here anymore. that’s why we are so backward and rustic, so broken down—at a standstill. we lack the words to communicate, even those words that conspire against us, that aren’t on our side.

sometimes, i have the feeling a man is watching us, staring, lewd and hateful, and what no one realizes is that we are actually alone in this world, and no one can form the shapes of our eyes

of our skin, of our memories

as if not one beautiful thing remained, and only a little of the bad, the exact size and shape of our hearts

which become a little less small every day,

gets embedded in our hands and feet

did i tell you? tiresias killed a hummingbird

angel bird heaven paradise

and is tearing it apart now, licking it, dropping it at my feet as an offering of sacrifice. he’s a hunter because he can kill, because that swift flutter of wings makes no difference to him, nor does he care if a shooting pain stabs the heart as his little whiskered mouth shreds the warm body and throbbing heartbeat of a bird that was about to take flight. i also know how to heal wounds just like those, death wounds.

tiresias has killed another hummingbird. nothing ever changes! it’s like he fills his mouth with death so as not to hiss at our sins. we should play again

another paradise another crow another angel another cat another pair of wings

but without the terror of these days that now keep us apart. if we stay quiet, if we speak very quietly and tell each other new secrets, things could be like they were before. look closely . . . if you can just ignore my slurred speech and the way i drag my ��’s in every phrase—such an effort to form that sound— everything will be exactly the same as it has always been. you only need to make me repeat it over and over again

she sells seashells she sells seashells she sells seashells

and everything

everything

will be the same again.

Available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.

The associated with this post is copyrighted by .

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

Ecstasy-sex. Sinking-in-sex. Sex that shapes. Sex that sparkles.

Yes, once again I’ve decided to highlight a sex book that I thought would make the BTBA longlist.

But Almost Never is more than a book about a man obsessed with sex—it’s a stylistic masterpiece that’s incredibly intricate, unlike anything I’ve read, and exquisitely translated by Katherine Silver.

I don’t have a lot of time to write all the things I’d like to say about this book, but I do want to point out my favorite part of the opening chapter:

Now comes a description of Demetrio’s job: his workday went from seven in the morning till five in the afternoon, sometimes six, more infrequently seven.

That’s it. Nothing about what he actually does (at this point), just the time he spends there. Which is so wonderfully telling for this particular character.

Quickly: Sada is considered by many to be one of the greatest contemporary writers to come out of Mexico, was praised by Bolaño, and his novel Porque Parece Mentira la Verdad Nunca se Sabe is considered to be untranslatable. (According to Rachel Nolan of the New York Times it really does sound pretty daunting, what with its “650 pages, 90 characters and use of archaic metric forms like alexandrines, hendecasyllables and octosyllables.”)

Katherine Silver actually received an NEA Translation Fellowship to work on more Sada, so hopefully there will be additional books of his to consider for future BTBA awards . . .

Books don’t have anything in them about the present, only the past and the future. This is one of the biggest defects of books. Someone should invent a book that tells you what’s happening at this moment, as you read. It must be harder to write that sort of book than the futuristic ones that predict the future. That’s why they don’t exist.

In a sense, Villalobos is trying to write that very book. All media coverage of Mexico is mired in reports of drug war violence, a subject that permeates Down the Rabbit Hole. That all of the characters have names derived from Nahuatl, an indigenous language, can be seen, perhaps, as a connection of these very contemporary events to the history of Mexico. One might justifiably say that violence, innocence, and corruption are the themes of the book, and, by extension, the themes of Mexico.

Aside from the Borgesian idea of a book that details the literal present, there is not a Borgesian or magic realist moment in this recent novel from Latin America. Roberto Bolaño and Horacio Castellanos Moya have done a good job of eradicating the myth that literature from south of the border is solely populated by spirits and two hundred year old patriarchs, but another brand of fiction has cropped up in its place: narco-literature. Down the Rabbit Hole may qualify as such, though only in the sense that it takes place largely in the secluded palace of Yolcaut, Tochtli’s paranoid criminal-emperor father. Though this is the setting, and though there are mentions of violence, they are filtered through the lens of a small child who relays events in a simplistic manner, allowing the reader a glimpse into the life of a narco unburdened by the machismo voice of a typical narrator.

This is not to suggest that Down the Rabbit Hole lacks in machismo. There are few women in the book save for the “mute” servants and prostitutes who exist on the outskirts of Tochtli’s view. More than once Tochtli places male behavior into the simple polarities of macho and faggot. To be macho is to take things “like a man”; to cry at the sight of two animals being killed is to be a “faggot.” This dichotomy, effortlessly understood and accepted as law by a child, does not offend the reader as, they are constantly reminded, these are the thoughts of an unusual storyteller in an unusual situation. By employing a child to tell this story, Villalobos allows his readers to accept the violence, sex, and dirty dealings that exist on the periphery of Tochtli’s obsessions: hats (he has a vast collection), samurais, and Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses, which he longs to add to his personal zoo. Just as the reader is ready to accept these as the quirky, charming interests of a young boy, Tochtli reveals his other obsession: differing methods of turning people into corpses (he mostly admires the French for their guillotines). Tochtli’s narration gives the reader a view into an ugly world without the usual genre gimmicks of the narco-novel or police procedural. The effect is infinitely more unsettling.

I must admit I had reservations about Down the Rabbit Hole. I have tired of child narrators. This, however, is miles away from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night. Here we have a naive view of a terrifying world where few are trusted and everyone is a potential traitor; here we have innocence on the verge of corruption.

The slim number of pages aids in the success of the book; a longer version might have seen the concept grow tiresome. But no moment of the novel takes the reader out of its world and the rising action and denouement that might have felt tacked on to a lesser novel feel natural here. At just 70 pages, Down the Rabbit Hole strikes quick, leaving a strong impression.

This is a book I first heard about a while back when the innovative and amazing announced that they’d be bringing it out in the UK. Really glad that it found a U.S. publisher, and given FSG’s recent publications of Spanish-language literature—books by Andres Neuman, Alejandro Zambra, Roberto Bolaño—this fits right in.

Here’s the opening of Vince’s review:

Around the midpoint of Down the Rabbit Hole, the debut novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Rosalind Harvey, recently published by FSG, and not to be confused with the mystery novel by Peter Abrahams), the narrator, Tochtli, the young son of a Mexican drug tsar, states:

“Books don’t have anything in them about the present, only the past and the future. This is one of the biggest defects of books. Someone should invent a book that tells you what’s happening at this moment, as you read. It must be harder to write that sort of book than the futuristic ones that predict the future. That’s why they don’t exist.”

In a sense, Villalobos is trying to write that very book. All media coverage of Mexico is mired in reports of drug war violence, a subject that permeates Down the Rabbit Hole. That all of the characters have names derived from Nahuatl, an indigenous language, can be seen, perhaps, as a connection of these very contemporary events to the history of Mexico. One might justifiably say that violence, innocence, and corruption are the themes of the book, and, by extension, the themes of Mexico.

Click here to read the entire piece.

Down the Rabbit Hole is fascinating for several reasons, not least because it’s told from the perspective of a child. How did that affect the experience of translating the book?

For me the voice is the most important aspect of translation (and literature in general, I think), whether it’s a child or an adult narrator. When the voice is clear and strong and believable enough to remain in your mind, that’s your starting point. I read Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but mainly I was just listening out for Tochtli’s voice and trying to recreate it in English. [. . .]

Are you generally a reader of books in translation, either from Spanish or from other languages? How do other books in translation inform your own work, if at all? Are there any translators you particularly admire?

I do read quite a lot in translation; I try to read books written in Spanish in the original, and translated books I have admired in the last year or so include All The Lights by Clemens Meyer, translated by Katy Derbyshire, and a Swedish thriller called Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman, translated by Joan Tate. Obviously I admire Anne McLean a great deal and she taught me a lot about how to translate, and I also admire Suzanne Jill Levine for her creativity and humor (she has a great book about translating Cabrera Infante which I recommend), and the great Edith Grossman is incomparable.

It’s generally acknowledged that literature translated into English gets fairly bypassed by readers. Do you agree? What do you think can be done (or is already being done) to bring translations further toward the forefront? Why is doing so important?

Yes, it does happen but only because they aren’t given access to it! Things are looking up though—I know for a fact that there are interested and varied audiences for translation after having done three translation-related events this year in the UK, which were all very popular and elicited some really interesting responses. I think we need to translate and publish more of a range of writing: good literature is wonderful, but difficult or avant-garde work is not for everyone and so I’d like to see more Estonian chick lit, Indonesian thrillers or Bolivian erotica. People read that stuff as long as it’s good, it doesn’t matter where it’s from, so bring it on! As a reader I would say that reading translation is no more or less important than reading a literature, but as a translator I guess I say that reading translations can give you a broader vision of the world and of people and emotions, making you more aware of the huge differences but also similarities between people. Good literature from anywhere can do that.

On a related note, why is translation important to you, personally? What delights you about the work you do?

Translation is important to me as someone who’s always loved words, language, and wordplay in particular. I love punning, and playing around with words, and I always have ever since I learned to speak. When I was younger I want to be a writer, and translation is a form of writing. It is also often said that it’s the closest form of reading, and I love the chance my work gives me to really get inside a text, as well as getting inside a character’s head, and to be intimately involved with the creation of a book.

Here the

In this strong, propulsive collection of poems translator Forrest Gander uses dehiscent for the Spanish word diesminandose in one poem, and in the title of a second for ensimismada. López Colomé’s images draw on the dual meaning of the English word. The botanical one with the positive pitch of natural propagation of a species (picture a milk pod releasing its silk parachuted seeds) occurs for example in poems that reference the tibuchina flower and almonds, and with images of bees filled with pollen, silk flowers and blooming real ones (“My Life’s Portrait”). López Colomé though is not a “nature poet.” The substance of the poems are also wedded to the medical, colored by the idea that pain, pus, blood are pouring out of a wound. Thematically López Colomé touches on both, related concepts over and over again. The language also performs a verbal dehiscence, as is announced in the poem “Heart’s Core”:

. . . .
But
a certain sentence
perfectly measured,
a shard, black onyx dart,
keeps hitting the target inside me
with all its sinister, atomic
plunk.
How curious that it feels less like prickling than throbbing.
that between words
we find the heart’s core,
not merely an account of it.
there, where pain isn’t forgotten.
There, where memory
radiates,
candescent:
in signal strength enduring
with no need
to plead its case.
. . .

You know that you are in the hands of a master who has control over language. Echoes of the cultural past (“a shard, black onyx dart”), religious imagery allusively rendered (“the heart” in its iconographic Latin American role) are interwoven with the contemporary “atomic” and the technologically yoked reference to light, “candescent.” Thematically the poet is addressing the realities of pain at the heart’s core, but which can only be pointed to “between words . . . not merely an account of it.”

While this poem relies strongly on inner feelings that seem intimate, many of the other poems tell about states of emotion/being at a more distant remove. In this next poem the reader also encounters the use of images and language drawn from the poet’s reality. From the three part poem “My Life’s Portrait,” the second section, WATERWORM AGAINST A BLUE BACKGROUND:

A radiant
eight year old
on her way from the possible
to the shameful.

Reinvented
in the guise of a good girl
who learns to not be herself,
to sit still, all but immobile,
to adopt a pose
from this moment on
The expression on her face, fabulous.

A dress of purple velvet
with a lacy collar;
socks conscientiously folded down
to the top of the ankle
new patent leather shoes.
But her hands once again
escape the artist . . .

They reach into the future.
And they oblige
everything else to pose.
As she would pose and stare at that garden
with its interminable whirlwind
and the dizziness would intensify
until she tumbled into the grass
and discovered
that when her body wasn’t spinning around,
the stars themselves were circling;
then the telescopes in her eyes
would gradually funnel
away the delirium bit by bit . . .
Because I refused to be
a still life,
I lost the only grip I had.

The very cord that set me free
was twisted around my neck
a transparent slipknot
choking me
while fireflies
flickered
between the bars of my fingers
as I made
a fist.

The speaker ruminates on the ruptures in life; it starts with the promise of seemingly unlimited possibilities reduced on the one hand by societal expectations, and on the other hand the challenges of human existence. While the picture which emerges is dim—flickering fireflies seen through bars of fingers curving into a fist—it is not, from the adult speaker’s perspective, without humor or glimpses of happiness, the “fabulous” expression on the child’s face, the twirling of an eight year old in a garden.

This next poem continues with the child grown into adulthood. The “torment” emerges at the end, in the acorns grown into a choiring grove, a potentially poetic cliché that actually terrorizes. Gander interprets this in his introduction as an allusion to the cancer which López Colomé dealt while writing many of these poems.

“Tormented”

Enormous solids were falling
from who knows what heights,
who knows what places.
I trembled,
and in my mouth
an inky taste. Ready.

Hail, maybe
enormous kernels of ice;
coming down,
with a scandalous impact,
didn’t bury me, terrorized,
under the covers.
It didn’t happen, it wasn’t that.

A below-zero temperature
drove into the soft center of my bones.
A truly searing cold.

Nothing to do with monsters came to pass.
Nothing to do with endless distance.
Nothing to do with brutalities.
Only the agony of acorns.
Only a cycle that completes itself
every few years
and transforms into a tropical forest
a choiring oak grove.

Which is my terror.

In one of the longer poems “Dehiscent, Enraptured Invention” López Colomé brings another key concern of hers, the pull toward some spiritual reality, although not one tied to any traditional religious tradition.

To be able to speak

without punctuation

jubilant infinite moment
moment jubilant infinite
infinite moment jubilant
gibberish
and as if that weren’t enough
to burn and sing
a solipsist
heard
by no one
beyond
the weird world’s
distant core . . .

and what follows. There is an inner light here, with words as fuel, language in-itself pouring outward:

To be able to speak

without contrivance,
filigrees
underlinings or cursives

supreme instant
of unbounded
pleasure
at the center of an immensity
without any outside pressure
knowing that the vital forces
peel away from muscle easily
and drift off
and you drown
and it doesn’t matter
since you’re protected
enraptured
. . .

The first poem cited above, “Heart’s Core,” includes that image of a black onyx arrow piercing the heart, a contemporary version of ecstasy of St. Theresa captured once in Bernini’s sculpture. Here though the angel and long arrow are language itself. López Colomé makes it clear in her “Afterward” to this collection that her religious upbringing included exposure to religious poetry. She recalls that the words, the sound and movement and moving of the hearer, were her revelation, not that of a god’s visitation. As a child she confessed, “When I pray, I talk to God, but He doesn’t talk to me.” To which her confessor counseled, “Pray in your own words.” This directive she says gave her “a whole new imago mundi; a capacity to describe perceptions and emotions in a fresh way, with intimate verbs.” In adolescence she realized that “you could save the right words just to talk to yourself, without the Most Holy watching over your shoulder . . . a dialogue with my personal penumbra.” López Colomé is a religious skeptic, but definitely a fideist in the power of the Words.

Finally, the metaphor of dehiscence strikes me as a great way to understand the project of translation. The idea that a text, especially in the concentrated form of poetry, bursts out into multiple meanings in its original language, then in a translated text, and further in the two held in the tension of facing poems in Spanish and English. In López Colomé’s and Gander’s hands this bursting sometimes is propagative, at other times a lancing of wounds.

I have on my bookshelf at least five different approaches to that proto-text of vernacular poetry, Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which translators try to match the terza rima structure, others the plain meaning of the text, with all sorts of ground in between. Gander, an accomplished poet (essayist and novelist) in his own right and translator of many Spanish language writers, honors the voice and tone of López Colomé. If you pick up one of Gander’s several collections you would encounter a different voice, with his own unique concerns. Yet his approach is one of a poet with word choices that represent the meaning of the original, not the plain translation. Some of the changes are practical—both inventive and of a more mechanical, problem solving nature. The poem ‘Almendra’is in English titled ‘Almond.’ In the last stanza of the poem López Colomé draws attention to the actual word “almendra,”:

Consonantes trituridas        A vowel and two consonants
sin gastar savia en balde    worth the spit it takes
se repiten, se digieren         to chew them, repeat, and digest
se repiten sin cesar             them one after another
ene dé erre ene dé erre      ah el em ah el em
n d r  n d r                            alm alm

The translator has the challenge in a poem that uses in Spanish three consonants (consonantes trituridas) n, d, and r, which of course do not occur in the English translation, the word almond. So the first line quoted above keeps the intent but changes the literal wording, to a vowel and two consonants, which in “almond” are alm in Gander’s translation. Note here as well Gander’s mastery of Spanish colloquial speech in translating the second line to an English saying (not) “worth the spit it takes.”

Gander is able to take the project one step further, for example, in “Tormented,” when he translates “Un verdadero calor frio” not into “A truly/really hot cold,” but instead into the intended, equivalent meaning in English, “A truly searing cold.” Perhaps another English word could have been used in the place of searing, but I am hard-pressed to come up with any better.

Then there is a wholly different level of the translator’s engagement and interpretation. With true artistry Gander takes a series in Spanish “lagrimas, anhelos, nadieras” and turns it into “tears, longing, and ratty nothings.” Ratty: that’s a nice touch, as is the translation of “Aparacete tal cual, / resono” into (the Gander added italics and explanation mark) “Show yourself!”

In a world where what is truly of value received attention, López Colomé and Gander would be soon going on tour to read from this collection in the same range of venues that a popular rock group might appear. As it is, I urge anyone who wants to read moving poetry that unfolds with multiple re-readings to buy this book, and then to buy a second and third copy to put into others’ hands.

Kaitlyn was in my “Introduction to Literary Publishing/Open Letter Internship” class last semester, which included an assignment to write a book review of a work in translation. Kaitlyn’s in my “Translation and World Literature” class this semester, so expect to read another of her reviews in the not-too-distant future . . .

This is the third book of Jorge’s to be translated and published in English. Scribner did In Search of Klingsor, a while back, and one of our first titles was Season of Ash. As Kaitlyn mentions in the review, Jorge is mostly associated with the “Crack Movement,” which was founded by a group of friends and resulted in and a number of interesting works. (The most recent one to be translated into English is Eloy Urroz’s Friction.)

Here’s the opening of Kaitlyn’s review:

With In Spite of the Dark Silence, Jorge Volpi puts a new spin on a classic tale of obsession, following the fictional narrator who is consumed with his research of actual Mexican poet and chemist, Jorge Cuesta. The fictionalized biography, in its slightly bizarre nature, weaves the narrator’s research of Cuesta with the downward spiral of his personal life, and will quickly envelop its readers, leaving them with memorable lyrical prose and fragmented sentence structures.

Jorge Volpi is one of the founders of the Crack Movement, a literary movement in Mexico that aimed to break from the cynical, superficial, and outdated movements of the past. The members wished to rupture the contemporary literary conventions of Latin America, such as the expected “magical realism,” creating their own style, and encouraging others to do so as well. Their works reflect a sense of disillusionment and disappointment with the progress of civilization and the modern societal systems, which they contrast with the infinite possibilities inherent in fiction. In Spite of Dark Silence is one of the predecessors of this movement.

“His name was Jorge, like mine, and for that his life hurts me twice,” opens Volpi, as the narrator introduces his growing obsession with Jorge Cuesta. Cuesta, an actual Mexican figure, was a member of Los Contemporánoes, a Mexican literary movement in the twentieth century, who eventually committed suicide in a mental ward. His writing is both overtly and subtly woven into Volpi’s narrative as Jorge compulsively researches the poet, diving deeper and deeper into his life and oeuvre, and blurring the boundaries between the two Jorges.

Click here to read the full piece.

Jorge Volpi is one of the founders of the Crack Movement, a literary movement in Mexico that aimed to break from the cynical, superficial, and outdated movements of the past. The members wished to rupture the contemporary literary conventions of Latin America, such as the expected “magical realism,” creating their own style, and encouraging others to do so as well. Their works reflect a sense of disillusionment and disappointment with the progress of civilization and the modern societal systems, which they contrast with the infinite possibilities inherent in fiction. In Spite of Dark Silence is one of the predecessors of this movement.

“His name was Jorge, like mine, and for that his life hurts me twice,” opens Volpi, as the narrator introduces his growing obsession with Jorge Cuesta. Cuesta, an actual Mexican figure, was a member of Los Contemporánoes, a Mexican literary movement in the twentieth century, who eventually committed suicide in a mental ward. His writing is both overtly and subtly woven into Volpi’s narrative as Jorge compulsively researches the poet, diving deeper and deeper into his life and oeuvre, and blurring the boundaries between the two Jorges. Narrator Jorge happens to encounter the story of Cuesta’s self-castration and subsequent suicide, and finds himself inexplicably drawn to the tragic story. Despite his wife’s protests, the narrator’s obsession with Cuesta increases as he strives to replicate his experiments and ideals. Eventually quitting his job and abandoning his marriage, the narrator is doomed to follow in his idol’s footsteps—he admits, “If I could not rescue my own life, at least I would rescue his.”

This novel, as a precursor to the Crack Movement, features a light displacement of syntax, which will later be exaggerated. This effect is in part due to fragmented lines from Cuesta incorporated into the narrative, as well as the inclusion of whole letters and excerpts of his poetry. The disjointed style forces us to share the madness of Jorge, as his life intertwines with Cuesta’s. When Jorge attempts to come to terms with his obsession, Volpi writes,

I prefer my own fragmented history, unserviceable, hypocritical, vain, the futility of my effort, my sad relationship with Alma, my one and unrepeatable Alma, and a destiny that cannot aggrandize me, that in no way resembles Cuesta’s passion, that is as worthless as anyone else’s, but that is enough to cry and finish.

This slightly confusing sentence openly imitates his “fragmented” mind, while directly referencing Cuesta. We’re placed in his shoes, feeling overwhelmed and lost. In addition to the disjointed style, Volpi also presents us with lyrical poetry blended with his prose, writing, “I touched the wet clay, amazed by the eloquence of the revelation: My sight diffused on the space is space itself.” The latter half of this phrase is actually an excerpt from Cuesta’s poetry, demonstrating how Volpi incorporates Cuesta’s writing into his own. With this partially incomprehensible half-prose, half-poetry sentence, we share the narrator’s confusion and his obsession, as Cuesta begins to invade his every thought and feeling.

Olivia Maciel, the translator, adeptly maintains this style indicative of Volpi and the Crack Movement as well as writes an eye-opening Afterword on these subjects. She explains how “Jorge Volpi, along with other members of the Crack literary movement, begins a new conversation with the luminous and ever rare transubstantial world.”

In Spite of the Dark Silence is hauntingly arresting, dragging the reader into the downward spiral of its narrator and subject. At times we’re unsure if we’re reading something from the perspective of Jorge the narrator or Jorge Cuesta, making for a delightfully puzzling read. After being sucked into the quest of the narrator, we can predict how history will repeat itself, while hoping that it will not. In perhaps what could be described as a strange, twisted love story, In Spite of the Dark Silence questions passion, love, relationships, and obsession, illustrating just how far one will go.

Here’s the description from Small Beer’s website:

This huge anthology of more than thirty all-original Mexican science fiction and fantasy features ghost stories, supernatural folktales, alien incursions, and apocalyptic narratives, as well as science-based chronicles of highly unusual mental states in which the borders of fantasy and reality reach unprecedented levels of ambiguity. Stereotypes of Mexican identity are explored and transcended by the thoroughly cosmopolitan consciousnesses underlying these works. It is a landmark of contemporary North American fiction that deserves a wide readership.

And we actually ran a review of this by Sara Cohen back near Halloween. (Too fitting, no?) Here’s what she had to say about the two stories that you can read

“Photophobia,” by Mauricio Monteil Figueiras.

You can tell from the start that “Photophobia” is more sophisticated than most stories in this collection—the vocabulary is complex, the concept unquestionably cerebral. An apocalyptic narrative is told through stream-of-consciousness storytelling that cleverly distracts from the story’s premise until the ending begins to shed some light on the narrator’s purpose and motives. The tale stands out in this populist collection of stories like a sore thumb, but I’m glad it was included. Here is a typical (and excellent) sentence:

“Eternity, he thought, pocket apocalypses: man has not learned the lessons of history, he is still the ignorant student who recorded his confusion in the caves of Altamira—it’s just that the caves have become tabloids.”

“The Drop” by Claudia Guillén.

In “The Drop,” a depressed young woman refuses to leave her room, watching drops of water fall to the floor. Her mother (the stated villain of the piece) claims that if the dripping stops, her child will die. A visiting doctor learns about himself as he studies the girl. That’s it, the entire premise. But the story is well-told, the ending surprising, and it’s the kind of eerie tale that sticks with you.

Again, for the complete preview, and click here for Sara’s review. And then, if you like what you read,

All of the past RTN featured titles can be