And Juan Jose Saer. I first came across Saer when he passed away in 2005. A few of his books (Nobody Nothing Never, The Witness, The Investigation, and my favorite, The Event) had been published by Serpent’s Tail, but unfortunately, Saer never seemed to get the credit he was due. At least not in this country. (Written as if that’s some sort of surprise. If I had a penny for every under-appreciated world author I’d be able to retire somewhere crazy, like Argentina.)

When he died, Saer’s agent (Guillermo Schavelzon Agencia Literaria and the wonderful Jacoba Caiser) pushed to get some of his untranslated works out there. To have him rediscovered after his death. (If I had a nickle for every post-death rediscovery . . . you know, you know.)

So based on the collective love for his earlier works (especially The Investigation and The Event . . . wow), Open Letter decided to sign on three books: The Sixty-Five Years of Washington (a.k.a. Glosa, but Gloss just sounded too toothy and slick for us), Cicatrices (which will probably become Scars) and La Grande (which, uh, The Grand?? Not so sure about that), and will be bringing these out over the next few years, all translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph, the editor of the mind-blowingly good (soon to be press?).

We’re kicking off this Saer revival with The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, which comes out this November, and is absolutely brilliant. And our friend Rahul Soni—who happens to be part of the first class coming to the Ģą˝´«Ă˝ to be part of our M.A. in Literary Translation program—ran over at the brilliant webmagazine Pratilipi.

Here’s Steve’s brief set-up for the excerpt and description of the book:

ł§˛ą±đ°ů’s Glosa—to be published this fall by Open Letter as The Sixty-Five Years of Washington—was first published in 1985, in the middle of what would become a thirty-year exile in France. It recalls an Argentina of twenty-five years previous, before guerrilla terrorism and millitary repression overwhelmed the country. But “The Sixty-Five Years of Washington” isn’t mid-century cosmopolitan nostalgia—just the opposite. The novel is concerned with hearsay and memory, how they work to distort both the past and the future, how they shape and deform our sense of the so-called “real” world, how they simultaneously alienate and connect people. Over the course of the book we see the characters being slowly erased by the contradictions inherent in their recollections.

In the selection below, Leto and an engineer nicknamed The Mathematician have been walking downtown through the small city of Rosario, discussing the birthday party of a mutual friend, Washington Noriega, a party neither attended, before The Mathematician suddenly ducks into a building.

Go. Go now. Read it in full. Saer’s a masterful stylist, and this literally is not to be missed.

Well, if you’re still here, least I can do is give you a taste:

Absorbed, as we’re in the habit of saying, in his thoughts or, if you prefer, as always, in his memories, Leto steps away from the tree, walking slowly toward the intersection. He has just forgotten about the Mathematician. Like the stage actor who does a pirouette and then disappears into the darkness off stage or, better yet, like those sea creatures who, ignorant of the sun that makes them flash, reveal, periodically, a glistening spine that sinks and reappears at regular intervals, a few images, sharp and well formed, approach and abandon him. Distracted, he crosses the street and arrives at the opposite sidewalk—and his distraction is also what makes him go through with the paradoxical act of stopping on the bright sidewalk and turning back toward the corner he has just left, knowing unconsciously that he is waiting for someone or something, but not knowing exactly who or what, or better yet, and strictly speaking, his body is what turns and stops to wait—Leto’s body, no?—that unique and completely external thing that, independent from what, inside, yields control and continuity, now casts, over the gray pavement, a shadow slightly shorter than him—his body, I mean—plump and young, standing in the morning, on the central street, giving the world the illusion, or the abusive proof, maybe, of his existence.

In a hurry, the Mathematician walks out of the newspaper office. Seeing him, Leto for a fraction of a second thinks, What a coincidence, the Mathematician, until he remembers that they have been walking together for several blocks and that he’s been waiting for him on the sidewalk for a couple of minutes. The Mathematician walks straight to the middle of the sidewalk and noticing Leto’s absence stops suddenly, disconcerted, but, turning his head, spots him on the next sidewalk and resuming a normal stride and smiling apologetically, starts walking toward Leto, who also smiles. And the Mathematician thinks: Did he decide to leave? Maybe he crossed the street to put some distance between us and now he’s smiling back guiltily. The editor had sat reading the press release on his desk without making a move to touch it, as though it were a venomous snake. They probably have me blacklisted, the Mathematician thinks. But, like a magician who makes several plates at once dance at the edge of a table, his thoughts are occupied at the same time with Leto, and the Mathematician, to show his good will and that the delay wasn’t his fault, hurries a little without managing to get very far, as the traffic on the two-lane cross street is stopped on the corner because of the movement on the central street, forcing him to wait a moment at the cable guardrail, smiling at Leto over the cars advancing at a walking pace.

Being able to share Saer with the English-speaking world is an example of what makes publishing worthwhile. (That and the money, naturally.)

A bilingual quarterly, Pratilipi is one of the best online magazines featuring contemporary Indian authors. They cram a lot into each issue (see this issue’s and staggering list of contributors), with a wide range of pieces, from Ashwani Kumar’s piece on (this issue’s focus is “violence”) to a fragment of Krishna Baldev Vaid’s (sorry—pun is all theirs) to and interview with Minakshi Thakur from HarperCollins India about .

This interview is pretty interesting, especially in terms of what Minakshi has to say about the Hindi market:

The one big gap we identified was that most books in traditional Hindi publishing is not produced keeping the reader in mind. Also there is hardly any culture of editing there. The books are poorly produced. They look uninspiring. The big challenge for us was to unlearn certain things we swear by in English publishing and learn things about the Hindi reader afresh.

We had to understand things like – given a choice your reader would borrow books and read than buy them. The buying capacity needed to be understood. Competing with the Hindi market price points would pose a huge problem as we were aiming at the same quality as Harper’s English titles. [. . .]

Ģą˝´«Ă˝ the big Hindi publishers like Rajkamal, Vani and Gyanpeeth I would say there is a lot to learn from them and much more not to borrow or learn from them. On the one hand we should be thankful that whatever we have read so far in Hindi – all the great authors and their lovely books – is because they have been there. On the other what we cannot tow their line on is state govt. subsidies and library orders. We cannot go that way or do books solely for that. We will produce books for the discerning audience; we shall produce books to create an interface between the writer and his/her readers. Again it is going to be very difficult and daunting and a slow process. We cannot claim that Harper Hindi will become huge or pose a threat to any of the big old Hindi concerns in two years’ time. It won’t. Also we don’t have the time to play rivals. There are better things one can invest their time in. The attitude has to be right and a lot of experiment in the market would be required to find a breakthrough. The Hindi market needs a definite facelift. We must break away in certain ways and give the reader something in a way that hasn’t been tried before and most importantly at the price they can afford.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. In the article I wrote for the I focused a lot on what impact the big multinationals will have on Indian publishing.

It’s great that HC is publishing Hindi translations of authors like Doris Lessing, but I have to admit, that for all the good corporate publishers might bring about in terms of distribution channels and general professionalization of the industry, I’m a bit wary of corporate execs talking about giving any market a “facelift,” especially in the same paragraph in which they say that they have to change the market because they can’t do books solely for “government subsides and library orders.” (Although I have to admit, the translation of that sentence is a bit wonky and confusing.)

So, like I said above, it will be interesting to see what happens to the Indian book market over the next few years . . .

What’s really interesting about this is the description of the Indian literary scene:

PRATILIPI: India is a multilingual, multi-script culture. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages, excluding English. The Sahitya Akademi (the National Academy of Letters) recognizes 24 – including English. They publish two periodicals, one in Hindi and one in English, with work from all Indian languages – translated into Hindi or English. Similarly, there are magazines published by the State Academies, in the language of the region. Sometimes they too carry translations from other Indian languages. Still, there are no magazines/platforms that have the scope and flexibility to bring all these literatures together.

Besides, one of the persisting legacies of colonialism is that English is the dominant language when it comes to translations. Most translations from Indian languages are into English. Translations across Indian languages are rare (except by the Sahitya Akademi) and, ironically, this is something not many people, including writers, are very worried about. Translation into English gets you some money, recognition, near-canonization and a pan-Indian/global presence – something that translation into another Indian language cannot offer.

In such a scenario, we wish we could be a magazine where interaction across Indian languages and also between the Hindi and English worlds of national literary life could take place. Most good authors in Indian languages get translated into English, but the two worlds have remained, basically, very different worlds.

Hindi and Indian languages have maintained the Nehruvian welfare model in a dangerous way. Nothing can happen there without government involvement in the form of institutions or funds. And there are the publishers’ canards about readership in Indian languages. Even when satellite-TV giants and publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins have entered the Hindi/Bhasha market, everybody keeps repeating that Hindi/Indian language literature does not sell. In Hindi and other languages, the average print run for a book is 1000, with most of the copies going to public-sector libraries at a profit margin that has kept some publishers in business for more than sixty years. On the other hand, the English scene has always been market-driven.