{"id":286786,"date":"2011-08-29T21:24:12","date_gmt":"2011-08-29T21:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/08\/29\/argentina-independent-spotlight-on-carlos-gamerro\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:17:01","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:17:01","slug":"argentina-independent-spotlight-on-carlos-gamerro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/08\/29\/argentina-independent-spotlight-on-carlos-gamerro\/","title":{"rendered":"Argentina Independent Spotlight on Carlos Gamerro"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Argentina Independent<\/em> has a great feature on Carlos Gamerro, a very interesting Argentine writer who once contributed to Three Percent<\/a> and has a couple books coming out in translation. Here’s Joey Rubin’s intro:<\/p>\n

\n

The time has come for Carlos Gamerro to speak English. Born into a bilingual family in Buenos Aires in 1962, he\u2019s been using the language since childhood. Since the 1990s, he\u2019s been translating from it (books by Auden, Shakespeare and Graham Green) and lecturing in it (at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the US; at Cambridge University in the UK). But now, readers can welcome the author into a different kind of English conversation: over the next year, two of his novels will be released in first-ever English editions. Those books\u2014\u2018El secreto y las voces\u2019 and \u2018Las islas\u2019\u2014will be released in the UK as \u2018An Open Secret\u2019 (Pushkin Press, 2011) and \u2018The Islands\u2019 (& Other Stories, 2012).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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They are part of a diverse and cultivated body of writing that includes other novels (\u2018El sue\u00f1o del se\u00f1or juez\u2019 and \u2018La aventura de los bustos de Eva\u2019), literary essays (\u2018Harold Bloom y el canon literario\u2019 and \u2018El nacimiento de la literatura argentina y otros ensayos\u2019), and short fiction (\u2018El libro de afectos raros\u2019), works that have helped make Gamerro, according to fellow writer Federico Falco, \u201cone of the inescapable narrators of his generation.\u201d In the last year alone, he\u2019s released two new books: the novel, \u2018Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara\u2019, and the literary study, \u2018Ficciones Barrocas\u2019\u2014both to significant acclaim.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Bad Burgers,<\/a> available here in an original English translation, has been published thrice before in Spanish\u2014in the magazine \u2018Pisar el c\u00e9sped\u2019, the newspaper P\u00e1gina 12, and in the story collection \u2018El libro de afectos raros\u2019. It distills much of what makes Gamerro\u2019s writing distinctive; what Federico Falco, writing in the newspaper Perf\u00edl, has called \u201cthe three fundamental pillars\u201d on which Gamerro\u2019s writing stands: \u201cbrilliantly hatched plots, characters who, without surrendering the profound, rub up against pop culture, and a view of the national reality somewhere between critical and humorous.\u201d Reason enough for English-speakers to listen to what he has to say; now, at long last, in our native tongue. tion (\u2018El libro de afectos raros\u2019), works that have helped make Gamerro, according to fellow writer Federico Falco, \u201cone of the inescapable narrators of his generation.\u201d In the last year alone, he\u2019s released two new books: the novel, \u2018Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara\u2019, and the literary study, \u2018Ficciones Barrocas\u2019\u2014both to significant acclaim.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And here’s the opening of the interview:<\/p>\n

\n

Joey Rubin:<\/b> You have two books coming out soon in English translations \u2014 \u2018An Open Secret\u2019 and \u2018The Islands\u2019. Can you tell us a bit about the process of bringing them into English? Are they your first full-length works to be published in English? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Carlos Gamerro:<\/b> Yes, these are my first full-length works to be brought into English. After a few near misses \u2014 all of them in the UK, I suppose it\u2019s a side effect of my upbringing. Or maybe it\u2019s one of the mysterious effects of a general trend of Argentine culture where practically all the \u2018English\u2019 schools are precisely that, English (even though mine advertised itself as Scottish).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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So, after years of waiting, I suddenly found myself with two publishers vying for my work! Pushkin is a prestigious publisher of classics and choice new fiction, and & Other Stories is an exciting new venture you should do a piece about! I was lucky in that both accepted my choice of translator, Buenos Aires-based, England-born Ian Barnett, who\u2019s been living in Argentina for ages now, is an avid reader of Argentine fiction and has been wanting to do my stuff since he first read \u2018Las islas\u2019 back in 1998. His translations of me are \u2018in collaboration with the author\u2019 although my role is actually less to collaborate than to drive him crazy. With \u2018An Open Secret\u2019 we were using the \u2018comments\u2019 option and towards the end I thought of looking at the numbers and we had reached comment 1,500! But it\u2019s a dream situation: to have the same translator for all my books, one who is open (or resigned) to all suggestions, who is obsessive, devoted and, to top it all, a good friend.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The whole interview<\/a> is worth checking out, as is Joey Rubin’s translation of Bad Burgers.<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m personally very excited to get my hands on both of Carlos’s forthcoming books, which we’ll definitely review here. (And maybe include in Read This Next?)<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Argentina Independent has a great feature on Carlos Gamerro, a very interesting Argentine writer who once contributed to Three Percent and has a couple books coming out in translation. Here’s Joey Rubin’s intro: The time has come for Carlos Gamerro to speak English. Born into a bilingual family in Buenos Aires in 1962, he\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[42256,7656,42266,11806,42246,1646,6516],"class_list":["post-286786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-argentina-independent","tag-argentine-literature","tag-bad-burgers","tag-carlos-gamerro","tag-joey-rubin","tag-review","tag-spanish-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286786","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\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286786"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":320316,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286786\/revisions\/320316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}