{"id":267826,"date":"2009-01-14T16:41:15","date_gmt":"2009-01-14T16:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/01\/14\/bureaucratic-imagination-on-the-bolano-phenomenon\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:27:24","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:27:24","slug":"bureaucratic-imagination-on-the-bolano-phenomenon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/01\/14\/bureaucratic-imagination-on-the-bolano-phenomenon\/","title":{"rendered":"Bureaucratic Imagination on the Bola\u00f1o phenomenon"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Bureaucartic Imagination has an interesting post<\/a> on the Bola\u00f1o hype in the States. It also touches on one of the ‘big problems’ of literature in translation:<\/p>\n

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Moreover, his books are often about the mundane details of very specific and frankly petty literary disputes and details that must make little sense to, say, readers of The New Yorker, which just published his short story “Meeting with Enrique Linh,\u201d wherein a first person narrator named Roberto Bola\u00f1o spills out a multi-page, unparagraphed dream in which he hangs out with the Chilean poet Enrique Linh in a bar.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Most American poets, let alone subscribers to The New Yorker<\/em>, don’t know who Enrique Linh is, and I’m certain that neither group has any clue who Bertoni, Maquieira, Gonzalo Mu\u00f1oz, Mart\u00ednez, and Rodrigo Lira; Linh identifies these writers, along with the narrator, as \u201cthe six tigers of Chilean poetry in the year 2000.\u201d Far from having universal appeal, this story speaks to a very particular plight, namely, that of \u201cyoung poets with no support…who’d been shut out by the new center-left government and didn’t have any backing or patronage.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Nothing much happens in \u201cMeeting with Enrique Linh.\u201d The Bola\u00f1o character talks to Linh at the bar then goes out into the street where he meets a \u201chit man\u201d named \u201cJara,\u201d who looks like a \u201cfifties gangster.\u201d There is no explanation in the story of who Jara is, so most New Yorker readers won’t understand the reference to Victor Jara, the Chilean poet and folk-singer who was brutally murdered after the 1973 coup.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Please beware before you click that link: the site is blood red with black type, and after looking at it for a few seconds your head will feel like it’s about to explode. Press on. Your head won’t explode. But you will be left with a bit of a headache.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Bureaucartic Imagination has an interesting post on the Bola\u00f1o hype in the States. It also touches on one of the ‘big problems’ of literature in translation: Moreover, his books are often about the mundane details of very specific and frankly petty literary disputes and details that must make little sense to, say, readers of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[18546,2186,2136,18556,756],"class_list":["post-267826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-bureaucratic-imagination","tag-dubravka-ugresic","tag-ejvl","tag-red-website-hurts-my-eyes","tag-roberto-bolano"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":354916,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267826\/revisions\/354916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}