Bifurcaria bifurcata

2012 Sebald Lecture

2012-02-28T00:10:00.000+08:00

"Making the Crossing: The Poet as Translator", the Sebald Lecture delivered by Sean O'Brien in London on February 6, can now be downloaded/listened to at the site of British Centre for Literary Translation. Link.

Juan Rulfo in zombieland

2012-02-21T22:48:00.000+08:00

Juan Rulfo (1918-1986) was a Mexican writer and photographer who was famous for his so-called "literary silence." In his lifetime he produced only some 300 pages of literary fiction, contained in two books published within two years of each other. The first, El Llano en llamas (1953, translated in English as The Burning Plain and Other Stories by George D. Schade), is a collection of stories.

The Burning Plain's fifteen stories deal with human vices and human-landscape nexus. The setting is the Plain of Mexico, a barren wasteland where the drama of human conflicts play out. Rulfo's themes are dark, but his expressive language is altogether beautiful and untamed. Here's a link to one of the 15 stories in The Burning Plain: "No Dogs Bark".

A new translation of El Llano en llamas, to be called The Plain in Flames, will be released by Texas University Press, which published the earlier Schade translation in the 70s. This comes out in October of this year. The translators are Latin American scholars Ilan Stavans and Harold Augenbraum.

Rulfo's second book was Pedro Páramo (1955, translated twice: by Lysander Kemp in 1959 and by Margaret Sayers Peden in 1994), a seminal novel and considered to be one of the earliest and most notable manifestations of "magical realism." The book, a haunting ballet of spooks and the spooked, is a brilliant "comedy of manners". A reported fourth film adaptation of Pedro Páramo will star Gael García Bernal and will be directed by Mateo Gil.

Despite this very slim body of work, Rulfo's influence on Spanish-language writing is said to equal that of Borges. In a survey of the greatest Latin American novels of the 20th century among critics and writers, conducted by the newspaper El País in 2000, the highest number of votes was obtained by Pedro Páramo (39 votes), well ahead of Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez (28), Gran sertón: veredas by João Guimarães Rosa (21), Rayuela by Julio Cortázar (17), Conversación en la catedral by Mario Vargas Llosa (11), and El astillero by Juan Carlos Onetti (11). See the complete list here.

I first met Roberto Bolaño

2012-02-12T22:52:00.001+08:00

"I first met Roberto Bolaño through Andersen Tepper in The Village Voice. It was back in 2006, I was in Tehran, and Bolaño, who was by then already dead and a ghost, was standing on the page with two other authors from Latin America, Martinez and Galeano. The meeting so excited me that I had a friend who was traveling to Tehran buy me their books and bring them to me, because as you might or might not know, in Iran there are no bookstores selling books of literature in foreign languages (except one or two that sometimes get orders), and you can’t go online on Amazon or any other site and order the books, because either you don’t have a credit card, or if you have one, sanctions and regulations might prevent you from using it in the country of Axis of Evil, or even if you can pass through all these obstacles, there are still others: the books cannot be sent to an address in Iran, and even if they could, there would be no guarantee that they would survive the Iranian postal service inspections or irregularities and reach you."

– from "Reading Bolaño in Tehran" by Raha Namy, in The Quarterly Conversation

B/w covers

2012-02-07T20:30:00.001+08:00

Picador 40th Anniversary Editions, 2012

(via The Automaton)

A wild poet chase: The Savage Detectives Group Read

2012-02-05T20:38:00.000+08:00

Last week participants began posting reviews for The Savage Detectives group read hosted by Richard and me. It's been a great week of reading the variety of ideas and thoughts on a text rich with ideas and references. Though not everyone finished the novel, the posts offered different ways of looking at a pillow book. Here then are the links to reviews.

Richard / Caravana de recuerdos 1 , 2, 3

Caroline / Beauty is a Sleeping Cat

Bellezza / Dolce Bellezza

Sarah / what we have here is a failure to communicate

Bettina / Liburuak

nicole / bibliographing 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Séamus / Vapour Trails 1 , 2

Amateur Reader (Tom) / Wuthering Expectations 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

Gavin / Page247

Selena / luxe hours

Sarah / A Rat in the Book Pile

Scott / seraillon

Rise / in lieu of a field guide

Jeremy read the book in advance and shared his thoughts and linked with us at READIN.

Image by Jenny Volvovski.

Aira contra Marías

2012-02-04T12:33:00.000+08:00

It's one of the breathtaking literary fights of recent memory. In the Insatiable Booksluts' Death Match series, the métier of Argentine boxer César Aira was pitted against Spanish slugger Javier Marías. The prose in contention? Aira's Varamo and Marías's Bad Nature, complete with a vintage rating system and a well-served prize trophy.

Watch the electrifying rounds and find out the (very close) results here.

Complete cover

2012-02-02T21:26:00.001+08:00

(from Sociedad malavibra,
via seraillon)

Evil cover

2012-02-01T18:16:00.000+08:00

Published by New Directions, 2012

(Thanks, M. Pollack!)

Miraculous cover

2012-01-30T22:00:00.000+08:00

Design: Gonzalo Muiño

Art direction: Rodrigo Corral

(link)

Literature of the abyss

2012-01-24T01:32:00.003+08:00

"I had some problems with Kafka, whom I consider the greatest writer of the twentieth century."

- from an excerpt of an interview with Roberto Bolaño.

Eloísa Cartonera and César Aira

2012-01-21T01:15:00.001+08:00

It may seem odd that the text I chose to translate, El Cerebro Musical by César Aira, is bound by a cardboard cover. It is difficult to make out the title and author that are hand-painted on the cover in red and orange against a yellow background, mirroring the red lettering on the cardboard itself. One can still read the address in Buenos Aires where the box was made, and the words "INDUSTRIA ARGENTINA" are still legible under the title. The barcode on the back is not a proof-of-purchase of the book, but rather of some lost transaction made by the supermarket Día. It is a flimsy cover, hardly protecting the text within, but no other copy of this book has these same features. This uniqueness is what has made Eloísa Cartonera, the publishing house in Buenos Aires that creates these cardboard books, an inspiration to other "paper picker presses" throughout Latin America, the subject of documentaries, and the starting point of my own investigation.

...

Much like Eloísa Cartonera, Aira seems concerned with "much more than just books." He saturates the markets with books marked with his name, if only to demonstrate that no book is the Aira. There is a certain disposable quality to this saturation of the market and it becomes a personal choice which Airas are worth reading and which are 'throw-aways.' [Eloísa Cartonera] converts what was thrown away into a piece of art. Coupled together, Aira and Eloísa Cartonera break down the components of the book into their simplest forms—cover and text—in order to suggest how stories are ephemeral, just like the cardboard ...

- from a thesis called "On Eloísa Cartonera and César Aira: Much More Than Just a Translation of El Cerebro Musical" by Stephanie Reist, Williams College. Eloísa Cartonera is a small publishing house and cooperative in Buenos Aires; it specializes in books bound in cardboards. Reist's study covers the emergence of "cartoneros", issues on translating Aira, and a full translation of Aira's story "The Musical Brain." The story appeared in the New Yorker last month in Chris Andrews's translation. The thesis is available (pdf) here.

The tree issue of Five Dials

2012-01-18T13:13:00.001+08:00

Yes, the trees recognized themselves in paper, in books, just as they recognized themselves in all the other things that hadn’t been thought of quite yet, like bedsteads and bagpipes and bonfires, not to mention violins, cricket bats, toothpicks, clothes pegs, chopsticks and misericords. Men and women would sit in the shade of trees, reading books, and the trees, dreaming of all that was to come, saw that they were the books as well as the chairs the men and women sat in, and the combs in the women’s hair, and the shiny handles of the muskets, and the hoops the children chased across the lawns. The trees took pride in the idea of being a book: they thought a book was a noble thing to become, if you had to become anything – a terrible bore to be a rafter, after all, and a wheel would mean such a battering, though of course the travel was a bonus, and what tree in its right mind would wish to be rack, coffin, crucifix, gallows . . .

- from "Why the Ash Has Black Buds" by William Fiennes, in the delightful 22nd issue of Five Dials (pdf download link)

New Asymptote

2012-01-17T13:35:00.000+08:00

The latest issue (January 2012) of Asymptote is up. It's an issue devoted to Taiwan fiction. But many other items are of interest, including:

Two Ghazals by Hafez
Antonio Chen on Taiwanese novelists in 2011
The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics by David Shields
Vedita Cowaloosur on Gopal Gandhi's Bollywoodised translation of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy
An interview with Max Lane (On the politics of translation)

Check out the whole issue here.

Photo story

2012-01-16T18:21:00.000+08:00

And yet there are certain features of the photo (something about the arrangement of the objects, the petrified, musical rhododendron, two of its leaves invading the space of the ficus like clouds within a cloud, the grass growing in the planter, which looks more like fire than grass, the everlasting leaning whimsically to the left, the glasses in the center of the table, well away from the edges, except for Kristeva’s, as if the other members of the group were worried they might fall) that suggest a more complex and subtle web of relations among these men and women.

- from "Labyrinth", a story by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews, in The New Yorker. The story was accompanied by an interview with Barbara Epler, New Directions publisher, in the magazine's blog.

See also: interview with Natasha Wimmer about her translation of the Bolaño novel The Third Reich.

Catachresis

2012-01-06T01:51:00.000+08:00

   "Keep going," said Belano, "we'll get one."
   "What is a catachresis?" I said.
   "That one I used to know, but I've forgotten," said Lima.
   "It's a metaphor that's become part of common everyday speech and is no longer perceived as a metaphor. For example: needle's eye, bottleneck."

   - The Savage Detectives

Catachresis #9 (legs of the table, the neck of the bottle,
the elbow of the pipe, the leg of the chair), 2011

How did you translate that into sculptural form?

To make these sculptures I produced assemblages to represent these metaphors, which could resemble early Surrealist sculptures, in that the link that brings objects together into one form comes across as absurd. The ‘hidden’ meaning of these sculptures operates just like the metaphors themselves, as the complicity of the viewer is needed to find the hidden thread that binds these objects together.

- Argentine artist Amalia Pica talks about her Savage Detectives-inspired installation artworks (read more)

Is "doorstop" a catachresis?

The 2011 challenge ends

2012-01-01T13:48:00.004+08:00

¡Feliz año nuevo!

THE 2011 ROBERTO BOLAÑO READING CHALLENGE is now officially ended. I'm thanking all the participants - 30 readers! (with blogs or without, in Twitter or not, with book reviews or none) - who joined, even some of you late in the day. It has been a splendid year reading the great Chilean writer's works and reviews of his books.

The anticipated extension to this challenge is this month's THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES GROUP READ, hosted by Richard (Caravana de recuerdos) and me. Join us in reading, reviewing, and discussing this tome at the end of the month.

My special thanks to the following readers who submitted reviews to 15 of Bolaño's books.

Vapour Trails
Caravana de recuerdos
The Parrish Lantern
seraillon
Shifting Sands
Winstonsdad's Blog

Congratulations to those who did well in the challenge. For those who fell short of their goal, worry not. One can still complete it anytime, and there's no more deadline! :) I will still be interested to know when you finally achieve the level of "Mesmerist"/"Critic"/"Vagabond"/"Poet"/"Detective"/"Worm" and of course the "Godzilla status" (at least 13 books) at some point in time. Feel free to contact me, via comment or email, when you do finish your target level. We'll celebrate.

This challenge blog celebrated its 1st year anniversary four days ago (Dec. 28). In the course of the year, it has adopted a new name, Bifurcaria bifurcata, and has published more than 100 blog posts. I intend to let it continue life as a general blog about international literature and about translation, focusing on an expanded list of excellent writers, Latin American or otherwise. Stay tuned.

Thanks once again for your participation.

-Rise

More thoughts by Natasha

2011-12-26T21:46:00.001+08:00

Here's what I linked to last time.

Here's more of Natasha's thoughts on RB. (Why didn't they just post the whole thing?)

The First Infrarealist Manifesto

2011-12-22T09:48:00.000+08:00

“It’s four light hours to the confines of the solar system; to the closest star, four light years. An excessive ocean of emptiness. But are we really sure there’s only emptiness? We only know that there are no stars shining in that space. If they exist, would they be visible? And if there are bodies that are neither luminous nor dark? Couldn’t it be that on the celestial maps, the same as on those of Earth, the star-cities are indicated and the star-villages are omitted?”
— Soviet science fiction writers scratching their faces at midnight.
— The infrasuns (Drummond would say the happy proletarian fellows).
— Peguero and Boris alone in a lumpen room having premonitions of the wonder behind the door.
— Free money.

In 1976, when Roberto Bolaño was 23, 24 years old and living in Mexico, he drafted the first* manifesto of Movimiento Infrarrealista de Poesia, a poetry movement that inspired the visceral realism (or vicerealism) movement in The Savage Detectives. Along with other poets, Bolaño and Mario Santiago banded together to form and lead the infrarrealistas; their acknowledged stand-ins in the novel were Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima.

The manifesto was titled “Déjenlo Todo, Nuevamente” and could be found in original Spanish here.

Excerpts of the manifesto in English were quoted in many reviews of Bolaño’s books. The only complete English translations that I found online were in two sites:

Abandon Everything, Again
Give It All Up Again

The activities of the infrarrealistas in their heyday were described in the following links:

“Bolaño in Mexico” by Carmen Boullosa
Interview with Mario Santiago
“The Great Bolaño” (pdf) by Francisco Goldman
“Interviewees” (Spanish links) by Jeremy
Review of Bolaño Infra in Caravana de recuerdos

* There’s another manifesto (“Por un arte de vitalidad sin límites”) written earlier in 1975 by José Vicente Anaya.

A crime from the cardinal's archives

2011-12-20T09:24:00.000+08:00

“Experimentos Bacteriologicos” is the seventh episode of Los Archivos del Cardenal http://www.tvn.cl/programas/losarchivosdelcardenal/2011/ , a gripping television series that presents fictionalized accounts of some of the cases documented by the Catholic Church’s human rights department, the Vicariate of Solidarity. The series began broadcasting last month and drew some initial grumblings from conservatives—which only seemed to boost its already high ratings. The show’s writer, Josefina Fernandez, happens to be the daughter of one of the Vicariate’s lawyers and is a fan of the U.S. series Law and Order. There is, quite obviously, an enormous stockpile of chilling real life events for the show’s scripts.

This most recent episode is based in part on the activities of Mariana Callejas and Michael Townley, a Chilean-American couple who worked for the regime’s secret police agency, the DINA. Callejas often held literary gatherings at their home, sometimes hosting her guests overnight during the curfew while the DINA used the premises not only as a makeshift lab but also to hold and interrogate political detainees. The late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano also included this material in his novel By Night in Chile, calling Callejas “Maria Canales” and Townley “Jimmy Thompson”.

>>Read more

Vásquez, Parra, Sada (links)

2011-12-20T01:14:00.000+08:00

At READIN, Juan Gabriel Vásquez's essay on the how and why of novel reading, translated by Jeremy.

At Ricardo Blanco's Blog, translations of Nicanor Parra's poetry by Richard Gwyn.

At the Paris Review Daily, a memorial to Daniel Sada by Francisco Goldman.

Borges!!!

2011-12-13T00:10:00.001+08:00

Three conversations with Borges by the Argentine poet Osvaldo Ferrari, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni:

On Argentine Identity
The Inveterate Traveller
On Order and Time

The Maker (1960)

Foreword: To Leopoldo Lugones
The Maker
Dreamtigers
Conversation About a Conversation
Toenails
Shrouded Mirrors
Argumentum Ornithologicum
The Captive
The Effigy
Delia Elena San Marco
A Conversation Between Dead Men
The Plot
A Problem
A Yellow Rose
The Witness
Martín Fierro
Transformations
A Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote
Paradise, XXXI: 108
Parable of the Place
Everything and Nothing
Ragnarök
Hell, I: 32
Borges and Myself

Museum [?]

Of Exactitude in Science
The Dagger
Afterword

Borges!

2011-12-11T20:07:00.001+08:00

Here are links to Borges stories translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with Borges. They are versions of all the eight stories in Borges's story collection, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Branching Paths).

Foreword
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
The Approach to al-Mu'tasim
Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote
The Circular Ruins
The Lottery in Babylon
A Glimpse into the Work of Herbert Quain
The Library of Babel
The Garden of Branching Paths

Some background and views on these translations:

The Borges Papers
Working for the Future (via READIN)
Jorge Luis Borges's lost translations
Replacement of Borges/di Giovanni translations

What happened in Philoctetes Center, December 2009?

2011-12-05T22:18:00.001+08:00

The poetry reading was called "Madmen, Exiles, and Savage Detectives: Latin American Poetry from Arenas to Bolaño". The readers were Jaime Manrique and Laura Healy.

Healy will read from her translations of work by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro and Roberto Bolaño, cofounders of the poetic movement Infrarealism, which was immortalized in Bolaño's Savage Detectives. Like the fictional characters Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño and Papasquiaro tried to infuse their poetry with life as much as they infused their lives with poetry. The evening will serve as an introduction to the work of Latin American poets who spent their lives in the margins, whether by choice or as a matter of circumstance.

Words Without Borders had a review of the event here.

The entire reading was posted in YouTube.

P.S. This is Bifurcaria bifurcata's 101st post!

Natasha's thoughts on The Savage Detectives

2011-12-05T20:34:00.001+08:00

Premio Cervantes

2011-12-04T17:39:00.001+08:00

Regarded as the Spanish-language Nobel Prize for Literature, the Cervantes Prize is named after the author of the Quixote. It is considered the highest recognition of Spanish and Latin American writers whose works have contributed significantly to enriching the Spanish-language literary heritage. The list of authors awarded since its first edition in 1975 is clear evidence of the significance of the Prize for Spanish culture.

The prize winner is decided by a jury at the end of the year. It is awarded by the King of Spain to the recipient every April 23rd, the anniversary of the death of Cervantes, in the auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares, birthplace of the writer.

The winners are listed below. Nicanor Parra, Bolaño's favorite Chilean poet, wins the prize this year.

WINNERS OF PREMIO CERVANTES

2011 Nicanor Parra (Chile)

2010 Ana María Matute (Spain)

2009 José Emilio Pacheco (Mexico)

2008 Juan Marsé (Spain)

2007 Juan Gelman (Argentina)

2006 Antonio Gamoneda (Spain)

2005 Sergio Pitol (Mexico)

2004 Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (Spain)

2003 Gonzalo Rojas (Chile)

2002 José Jiménez Lozano (Spain)

2001 Álvaro Mutis (Colombia)

2000 Francisco Umbral (Spain)

1999 Jorge Edwards (Chile)

1998 José Hierro (Spain)

1997 Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba)

1996 José García Nieto (Spain)

1995 Camilo José Cela (Spain)

1994 Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)

1993 Miguel Delibes (Spain)

1992 Dulce María Loynaz (Cuba)

1991 Francisco Ayala (Spain)

1990 Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina)

1989 Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay)

1988 María Zambrano (Spain)

1987 Carlos Fuentes (Mexico)

1986 Antonio Buero Vallejo (Spain)

1985 Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (Spain)

1984 Ernesto Sábato (Argentina)

1983 Rafael Alberti (Spain)

1982 Luis Rosales (Spain)

1981 Octavio Paz (Mexico)

1980 Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay)

1979 Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)
1979 Gerardo Diego (Spain)

1978 Dámaso Alonso (Spain)

1977 Alejo Carpentier (Cuba)

1976 Jorge Guillén (Spain)

Sources: Ministerio de Cultura; Wikipedia

Whose disquiet is the most disquieting?

2011-12-04T16:54:00.000+08:00

Searching online for a copy of The Book Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, I found there were several translations to choose from (by Margaret Jull Costa, Richard Zenith, Alfred Mac Adam, and Iain Watson). All four versions first appeared in 1991. My impression was that the Zenith (from Penguin) is the most "complete". The Jull Costa, which was reissued by Serpent's Tail, was a selection of the fragments. There are sites which compared excerpts from these translations side by side, but I'm not sure a well-worded choice excerpt will give a definitive edge to one version. One way to go around this is to buy more than one version, but that would be impractical.

I'm anticipating a group reading of this book, hosted by Tom (Wuthering Expectations), some time in the first quarter 2012. Borrowing from the library is not an option. I haven't seen a decent library since college. Used bookshops are also out of the question. I live in the province and the number of passable bookshops is ... nil. So I have to buy the books (online or in stores in Manila), or swap them, which is also like buying since I pay for the shipping.

Another factor that would influence my choice is the pricing. When comparing book prices, the two default sites I visit are:

The Book Depository - Based in UK, this seller is sent by heaven because the cost of shipping to many countries is FREE! Never mind that they sold ~~their souls~~ the company to Amazon. Never mind too that the publication date of US-published titles are delayed by a month or so, and that shipping to an island in the Philippines takes about a month. The prices often compare favorably against those of bookstores.

BookFinder.com - another heaven sent site. It's particularly useful when finding out of print titles.

I'm inclined toward getting the Zenith version. It could prove to be the most disquieting.

The most disquieting discovery I made however is this. Copies going for almost a thousand dollars.

(Date accessed 4 December 2011, 4:23 pm)

The 2012 Mediterranean Reading Challenge

2011-12-04T15:37:00.001+08:00

The Black Sheep Dances just announced The 2012 Mediterranean Reading Challenge.

The qualified countries to read from are: Algeria, Albania, Tunisia, Spain, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Bosnia, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Monaco, Slovenia, Crete, Cyprus, and Malta.

There are three levels of participation (Tourist-Explorer-Scholar, corresponding to 3-6-9 books).

You can sign up at this link.

Castellanos Moya's five reasons to write

2011-12-03T13:54:00.001+08:00

LP: Do you think literature can help deal with trauma?

HCM: Most of the indigenous victims and survivors of massacres are poor and illiterate. Literature is a privilege they don’t have access to. There is no way literature can help them to deal with their traumas. What they need is psychological and economic support, and mainly justice.

...

LP: What compels you to write?

HCM: I started to write in a country where writing didn’t give you any status or money. By that time, in that place, to be a writer was synonymous with being subversive. I guess since the beginning, I have felt the urge to write because of a necessity of expression, because of the perception that I don’t fit in any place, because I know that I’m survivor, because I want to get rid of what infects me, and for a sense of revenge.

– An interview with Horacio Castellanos Moya at Latineos,
via Now That it's Now, the New Directions blog.

Advice of Marguerite Duras to Enrique Vila-Matas

2011-12-03T12:43:00.001+08:00

[Never Any End to Paris] describes Vila-Matas’ apprenticeship as a writer in Paris, the city to which he moved (from his native Barcelona) as a young man in the 1970s. He had the good fortune to rent a room in the apartment building belonging to the fabulous novelist and film-director (and alcoholic of epic and tragic proportions) Marguerite Duras. Early in the story Enrique bumps into Duras one day on the building’s stairway. Nervous and stammering, he asks her in his substandard and broken French for some advice on the novel he is writing (his first):

“Some advice, that I need, help for the novel.” Marguerite understood perfectly this time. “Ah, some advice”, she said, and she invited me to sit down in the foyer (as if considering me to be very tired), slowly put out her cigarette in the entrance hall ashtray, and headed, somewhat mysteriously, towards her office, from which she returned after a minute with a sheet of paper that resembled a medical note and which contained instructions that might – she told me, or I understood her to say – be useful to me in the writing of novels.

– Richard Gwyn, author of The Vagabond's Breakfast, writes about Duras's advice to the young, aspiring writer Vila-Matas (read more)

The Savage Detectives, the un-movie

2011-12-01T22:58:00.001+08:00

Gael in talks for “The Savage Detectives”

The Mexican actor Gael García Bernal could be the protagonist of the film “The Savage Detectives” (Los Detectives Salvajes in Spanish), based on the book of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, announced today the newspaper “La Nacion”.

The director, Carlos Sama, said in an interview with the Chilean newspaper that he’s “in talks” with Gael Garcia Bernal to play the protagonist of the film that could premiere in late 2009.

“The Savage Detectives”, published in Chile in 1998, relates the search for Mexican poet Cesárea Tinajero by two young poets: The Chilean Arturo Belano, who would be interpreted by Garcia Bernal, as well as the Mexican Ulises Lima.

Sama, aged of 41, who wrote the screenplay for the movie with Luis Felipe Fabre and Arcadi Palerm-Artís, said the shooting will start this year in northern Mexico in the Sonoran Desert, “which is a very special place”.

...

That was in 2008.

But it turned out to be more a film pitch than a done deal. Horacio Castellanos Moya couldn't help making a reference to this film in his essay on the "Bolaño myth": "the old mythology of the road trip, which came from Kerouac, has now been recycled with the face of Gael García Bernal (who will also portray Bolaño in an upcoming film, by the way)." Castellanos Moya traced the road trip myth from García Bernal portraying Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries.

Carolina López, Bolaño's widow, said that no contract for a film adaptation of the novel was actually made.

The movie that could somehow approximate the novel's eroticism and 'artlessness' was probably Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too), directed by Alfonso Cuarón. The movie, which also starred García Bernal, is about two teenage friends and an older woman who went on a road trip in search of a lost beach.

Enrique Vila-Matas, literary executor of Enrique Vila-Matas

2011-11-30T21:16:00.001+08:00

Pedro M. Domene: If I may, I’d like to begin this interview by asking how much in your texts is fiction, and how much is autobiography?

Enrique Vila-Matas: The broad passageway that joins fiction and reality is cool and well-ventilated, and the air within blows about with the same natural ease with which I mix biography and invention.

...

PMD: In [Dublinesca], you persist in rendering homage to your favorite writers with extraordinary tributes, as you have done for years. In this case, it’s Bloomsday, Joyce, and the Irish saga.

EVM: The atmosphere in this book is that of the Irish novels. The more rainy passages of Dublinesca touch upon it. «Old age, disease, the gray climate, a silence of centuries. Boredom, rain, sheer curtains closed up to the outside world. Familiar ghosts from Aribau Street. We needn’t seek out palliative remedies to ease the pain of our parents’ drama, or of our own. Aging is disastrous.» This gray atmosphere and this boredom are there in Dublin, and in the Irish novels.

PMD: Does Dublinesca assume a celebration of the intellect with its abundant references to books and authors, as well as the constant shadow of Ulysses?

EVM: A celebration of the intellect? It’s clearly not my place to say so.

...

PMD: ... [W]ho will foresee the end of literature first, a publisher or a writer?

EVM: I am sure that one day there will come a writer who will be the last. There will be a last writer; there has to be. I see him without any publisher, and I couldn’t really say why. The last publisher will come before the last writer. The writer will be alone in the world, ultimately and without a doubt, alone. And he’ll think these kinds of things, for example: «The creative work belongs to the author.»

...

PMD: What have you inherited from the old Vila- Matas, I mean the author previous to Exploradores del abismo (2007)?

EVM: I am his executor. I manage his work. I maintain the friendships that he had. I’ve advised him upon relocating to another neighborhood and a new house. I’ve also given him advice on changing his character, and now he’s more pleasant. I manage his life sensibly

- from an interview with Enrique Vila-Matas where he talked about his novel Dublinesca (Dublinesque, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey, 2012).

Enrique Vila-Matas has written several books in Spanish; three are currently available in translation: Bartleby & Co., Montano’s Malady (also published as Montano), and Never Any End to Paris. At least five of his books were admired by Roberto Bolaño – La asesina ilustrada, Una casa para siempre, Bartleby & Co., Para acabar con los números redondos, and Suicidios ejemplares.

Related links:

Literary brotherhood (related posts)
Official website (English page)
"East End" (fiction)
"Adhesive Tales" (in Spanish)
"Doctor Vila-Matas" by Ednodio Quintero

César Aira on Argentine literature

2011-11-30T11:17:00.001+08:00

On his books:

I must say that all my books are experiments. They are thought as such, but they are not done with methodical seriousness of a scientist. They are, rather, done with the non-methodical seriousness of a crazy wise person or a boy who plays with a chemistry set and mixes two substances to see what happens.

On postmodernism:

My motto continues to be the famous verse of Baudelaire: “To go ahead and always in search of the new.” That attitude is not postmodernist. I believe that postmodernism undoes that, erecting a species of supermarket where they organize the culture of the past in one aisle, the one of now on that other aisle, and the one to come in yet another compartment. With them it is a matter of formulating combinations at random. That is not me.

On Borges:

I was too young and even so I felt all the greatness, the elegance, the exquisite quality of his texts, almost like a poison because later on all others seemed not to be of the same caliber. All writers in Argentina have had to find themselves against Borges.

I saw that the only option was an anti-borgean path, in which I went to Rimbaud: life, life that enters and is one with literature. Borges is another thing: he is cold; he is an Everest of intelligence and lucidity uncontaminated with reality. But I have made peace with Borges.

On Juan Jose Saer and Ricardo Piglia:

In the first place, Saer and Piglia are ten years older than I, from another generation, another atmosphere, another world. In fact, I read them as a youngster. Piglia is a serious writer, an intellectual. I appreciated Saer very much; he is almost a classic modern Argentinean, he is also a serious writer, but I have looked for other models. Saer no longer attracts me; with time I have been moved away from that serious, responsible position towards society.

On Manuel Puig, Alejandra Pizarnik and Osvaldo Lamborghini:

I found them brilliant models, for different reasons, of life, of attitude. Sometimes one takes a model and later does all of the opposite, but the model continues acting on us.

On 19th century Argentine Literature:

The best thing is the gauchesca, our great invention, and within it the “Martín Fierro,” a book we no longer think of as such because it has been turned into an Argentinean fetish. Without a doubt, it has great literary merits. In the twentiehth century, all good Argentine writers looked for that point of connection.

On Borges-Bioy Casares-Silvina Ocampo:

We went downhill from there, or to paraphrase Oliverio Girondo, you can say the best Cortázar is a bad Borges. It is hard but an unavoidable truth.

On Roberto Arlt:

Paradigms are repeated every time, the right and the left exist everywhere, but also there are intermediate lines, like Roberto Arlt. He for me is a great one. Good, it would be necessary to say one of the best, the other being Borges. So different and similar. My work comes from that intellectual, borgean line, but with vigorous arltian affluences.

On Alejandra Pizarnik:

I wrote a couple of books on Alejandra Pizarnik, one is a study on her poetry, done with the intention to redress an imabalance, because with Alejandra that myth of distress has been created, of the sleepwalker, the small shipwreck, etc., so all her criticism fell in that metaphorical field, of her as a celebrity and it does not do her justice.

On Ernesto Sabato:

And yet it surprises me a little that somebody like him can be taken so seriously. He has very laughable edges, that vanity, the “malditismo,” that tragic figure that does not match with his personality.

On Julio Cortázar:

There are some stories that are good, but as I said, his best is a bad Borges, or a mediocre Borges. Uglier in Cortázar is the prologue for the edition of the Ayacucho Library stories of Felisberto Hernandez, of a paternalistic tone, where he practically comes close to say that the greater merit of the Uruguayan writer was to seek him, when in truth Felisberto is a brilliant writer to whom Cortázar could not aspire at least to shine his shoes.

More topics in "César Aira: Against Everybody" at Latino Weekly Review (October 2004).

Limpidity and deformity

2011-11-28T13:09:00.001+08:00

One quality that’s distinctive among writers of an experimental bent is his limpidity: his prose rarely draws attention to itself; most of the time, the reader is fully occupied imagining what is being recounted and described. Aira has said that the “correctness” of his prose, which he has sometimes rebelled against (as in “How I Became a Nun”), may have been a side effect of his work as a translator. But as anyone who has read him knows, the “correctness” is only syntactic: his sentences are well formed, as the linguists say, but his stories and his books are, well … deformed, swerving wildly, jumping from one kind of fiction to another, as in “The Musical Brain”.

- Chris Andrews talks about his translation of "The Musical Brain" (subscription only) by César Aira, at The New Yorker blog. Read more from the interview here.

If you could save only five books ...

2011-11-26T00:25:00.001+08:00

EPG: If you could save only five books from a fire that would consume all other books in the world, which ones would you pick?

JC: That’s the kind of question you cannot answer while the tape recorder is on.

EPG: Should we turn it off?

JC: No, because then the answer will be too pat, too well thought out. You say books, I don’t know; I think, for example, that one of the five works that I would like to save is a poem, a poem by Keats. Do you understand?

EPG: Yes.

JC: One of them.

EPG: Which one?

JC: Any one of the ones I love, the great odes: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "Ode to a Nightingale" or "To Autumn," the great moments of Keats’s maturity. And while we’re talking about poetry, I’d like to save the Duino Elegies by Rilke. But five is an absurd number.

EPG: I know it’s an absurd number and it’s very difficult, but I’d like to know now, right now.

JC: OK. There’s a book of prose that I’d save, Ulysses. I think Ulysses is somehow the sum of universal literature. That would be one of the five books. I really should have punished you for this kind of question. Do you know how Oscar Wilde answered? They were more generous with him. They asked which ten books he would save. And Oscar Wilde answered, "Look, up till now I have only written six."

EPG: You’re very humble to have not included any of your books.

JC: I don’t have to, I always carry them within me.

EPG: And what about Marx?

JC: I was thinking of literature. Of course, when you said books, I should have thought, from the historic point of view, of course, Marx and Plato’s dialogues.

- from an interview with Julio Cortázar, from the online archives of Dalkey Archive Press (which contain interviews with Carlos Fuentes, Fernando del Paso, Juan Goytisolo, Milan Kundera, David Foster Wallace, etc.)

Readings of Borges, Marías, and Bolaño

2011-11-22T14:57:00.001+08:00

Regarding what happened in Symphony Space, there's a podcast with download link here or here.

The program is part of "PRI: Selected Shorts Podcast". Here's how it goes:

0:26 Introduction to Roberto Bolaño

2:08 Introduction to the first story

2:36 “The Shape of the Sword” by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. David A. Yates), read by Charles Keating

21:27 Introduction to the second story

22:15 "On the Honeymoon" by Javier Marías (trans. Margaret Jull Costa), read by Ivan Hernandez

34:15 Introduction to the last story

35:29 “William Burns" by Roberto Bolaño (trans. Chris Andrews), read by Michael Stuhlbarg

Attack of the zombies

2011-11-22T10:47:00.001+08:00

"The Colonel's Son", a story of Roberto Bolaño (not online), appears in the Horror Issue of Granta. I'm presuming this is from the upcoming The Secret of Evil.

The story is about "a B-grade horror flick ... on late night TV." What is online is an animation inspired by this piece.

Nothingbutamovie.com is an HTML5-based animation inspired by Bolaño’s story. It was created by Owen Freeman and web designers at Jocabola.

Indelible memory

2011-11-21T10:46:00.001+08:00

Then there was poor Aunt Giselle, my mother's youngest sister, who came with us on the second-to-last summer we spent at the Del Mar. More than anything else, Aunt Giselle loved bull-fighting, and she couldn't get enough of the fights. Indelible memory: my brother driving my father's car with complete impunity and me sitting next to him, smoking, without a word from anyone, and Aunt Giselle in the backseat staring in ecstasy at the foam-splashed cliffs and the deep green of the sea beneath us with a smile of satisfaction on her pale lips and three posters, three treasures, on her lap, proof that she, my brother, and I had rubbed shoulders with the bullfighting greats at the Plaza de Toros in Barcelona. I know my parents disapproved of many of the activities that Aunt Giselle pursued with such passion, just as they weren't pleased by the freedoms she permitted us, excessive for children, as they saw it, although by then I was nearly fourteen. At the same time, I've always suspected that it was we who looked after Aunt Giselle, a task my mother assigned us without anyone realizing, surreptitiously and with great trepidation. In any case, Aunt Giselle was with us for only one summer, the summer before the last we spent at the Del Mar.

– Roberto Bolaño, from The Third Reich, trans. Natasha Wimmer (full excerpt in NPR)

"How not to remember the layout of that house."

2011-11-20T21:13:00.001+08:00

How not to remember the layout of that house. The dinning room, a living room with tapestries, the library, and three large bedrooms in the section most recessed, the one that faced toward Rodriguez Pena. Only a corridor with its massive oak door separated that part from the front wing, where there was a bath, the kitchen, our bedrooms and the hall. One entered the house through a vestibule with enameled tiles, and a wrought-iron gated door opened onto the living room. You had to come in through the vestibule and open the gate to go into the living room; the doors to our bedrooms were on either side of this, and opposite was the corridor leading to the back section; going down the passage, one swung open the oak door beyond which was the other part of the house; or just before the door, one could turn to the left and go down a narrower passageway which led to the kitchen and the bath. When the door was open, you became aware of the size of the house; when it was closed, you had the impression of an apartment, like the ones they build today, with barely enough room to move around in. Irene and I always lived in this part of the house and hardly ever went beyond the oak door except to do the cleaning. Incredible how much dust collected on the furniture. It may be Buenos Aires is a clean city, but she owes it to her population and nothing else. There's too much dust in the air, the slightest breeze and it's back on the marble console tops and in the diamond patterns of the tooled-leather desk set. It's a lot of work to get it off with a feather duster; the motes rise and hang in the air, and settle again a minute later on the pianos and the furniture.

– Julio Cortázar, from "House Taken Over", trans. Paul Blackburn

"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls."

2011-11-18T23:00:00.001+08:00

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent. I was heading down the boulevard Port Royal, then I took Saint-Marcel and L’Hôpital and saw green among all that grey and remembered the lions. I was friend of the lions and panthers, but had never gone into the dark, humid building that was the aquarium. I left my bike against the gratings and went to look at the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else.

– Julio Cortázar, from "Axolotl", trans. Paul Blackburn

The chaos of memories

2011-11-17T21:02:00.001+08:00

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood – it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation – which these books arouse in a genuine collector. [...] Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of the books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. “The only exact knowledge there is,” said Anatole France, “ is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books.” And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.

– Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library"

The construction of the Bolaño backlash

2011-11-17T03:20:00.000+08:00

Horacio Castellanos Moya (Image from Sampsonia Way)

If Jorge Volpi presented a novel take on the "Bolaño phenomenon", then Horacio Castellanos Moya wrote something misinformed and misleading about it. The infamous essay was called "Bolaño Inc." and a translation of it appeared in Guernica in November 2009.

I had told myself I wasn’t going to say or write anything more about Roberto Bolaño. The subject has been squeezed dry these last two years, above all in the North American press, and I told myself that there was already enough drunkenness. But here I am writing about him again, like a vicious old man, like the alcoholic who promises that this will be the last drink of his life and who, the next morning, swears that he will only have one more to cure his hangover. The blame for my relapse goes to my friend Sarah Pollack, who sent me her insightful academic essay on the construction of the “Bolaño myth” in the United States. Sarah is a professor at The City University New York and her text “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States” was published in the summer issue of the journal Comparative Literature.

Albert Fianelli, an Italian fellow journalist, parodies a quote often attributed to Herman Goering and says that every time someone mentions the word “market,” he reaches for his revolver. I’m not so extreme, but neither do I believe the story that the market is some kind of deity that moves on its own according to mysterious laws. The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S. I say this because the central idea of Pollack’s work is that behind the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing operation but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American culture and literature that the U.S. cultural establishment is now selling to the public.

I don’t know if it’s my bad luck or if it happens to my colleagues as well, but every time that I’ve found myself on American soil—at the airport bar, at a social gathering, wherever—and I’ve made the mistake of admitting to a citizen of that country that I’m a fiction writer who comes from Latin America, that person will immediately pull out García Márquez, and will do it, what’s more, with a self-satisfied smile, as if he were saying to me, “I know you, I know where you come from.” (Of course, I’ve found myself with wilder ones who boast about Isabel Allende or Paolo Coelho, which, ultimately, makes no difference at all, since Allende and Coelho are little more than the light and self-help versions of García Márquez.) As time goes by, however, those same North Americans, at those same bars and social gatherings, have begun to pull out Bolaño.

The key idea is that for thirty years, the work of García Márquez, with its magical realism, represented Latin American literature in the imagination of the North American reader. But since everything tarnishes and ends up losing its luster, the cultural establishment eventually went looking for something new. It sounded out the guys in the literary groups called McOndo and Crack, but they didn’t fit the enterprise—above all, as Sarah Pollack explains, it was very difficult to sell the North American reader on the world of iPods and Nazi spy novels as the new image of Latin America and its literature. Then Bolaño appeared with his The Savage Detectives and his visceral realism.

Castellanos Moya's full essay was published here.

There were several strong reactions to this essay, but I think Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions offered the most cogent refutation of Castellanos Moya's thesis which was inspired by Sarah Pollack's analysis of Latin American literature.

A year after his essay appeared, Castellanos Moya was still patting himself on the back. From his interview in Sampsonia Way:

In “Bolaño Inc,” which appeared in Guernica in 2009, you bemoan publishers’ marketing of Latin-American literature in the U.S and the mythologized image they assign to popular writers such as Roberto Bolaño. Did you see some of the responses you got when that was published?

Yes. Some people sent me emails. But all the anger of these people is normal. Bolaño is an idol, so people don’t read him as a writer. We live in very empty times, so you look for someone to fill your emptiness, and some people read fiction looking for truth, for a kind of salvation, which is why a writer like Paulo Coelho is so popular. And it’s funny, these attacks on that article, most of them came from Latin American residents in the USA, because those are the ones who feel much more vulnerable when you attack all this celebrity crap of American culture that they believe in. [Laughs] When the article was first published in the daily newspaper La Nación from Buenos Aires, the reactions were very positive.

Castellanos Moya is a Salvadoran novelist. He is the author of Senselessness, Dance With Snakes, The She-Devil in the Mirror, and Tyrant Memory. According to Bolaño, who read four of his books, his best novel—"or at least the darkest, a long tirade against El Salvador that caused Castellanos Moya to receive death threats obliging him to go into exile yet again"—was El asco. Thomas Bernhard en San Salvador ("Nausea: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador"). Bolaño wrote further in Between Parentheses:

El asco, of course, isn't just a settling of scores or a writer's response to a moral and political situation that he finds profoundly discouraging, it's also a stylistic exercise, a parody of certain works by Bernhard, and the kind of book that makes you laugh out loud. Sadly, very few people in El Salvador have read Bernhard, and fewer still have a sense of humor. One's country is no laughing matter. [...] Herein lies one of the book's many virtues: nationalists can't abide it. Its acid humor, like a Buster Keaton movie or a time bomb, threatens the hormonal stability of the idiots who, upon reading it, feel an irresistible urge to string the author up in the town square. Truly, I know of no greater honor for a real writer.

I'm not sold on "Bolaño Inc.", but I'm game with El asco. Anything that invoked Bernhard, even in a mode of parody, and apparently doing so with skyrocketing humor, and politically motivated, should have a place in the reading list.

Related links:

"The Peculiar Art of Cultural Formations" by Sarah Pollack (pdf)
"Snatch" (fiction)
Excerpt from the novel Senselessness (1)
Excerpt from the novel Senselessness (2)
"A Dangerous Homage"—appendix to El asco
"Notes/Wanderings"
Interview and excerpts from "Revulsion"
The Nation profile written by Natasha Wimmer
Q&A With Horacio Castellanos Moya
On Heinrich von Kleist
The Poet Versus Lady Macbeth
Read This Next: Tyrant Memory
Snapshot: El Salvador
A Conversation With Horacio Castellanos Moya

"Fragments of a return to the native land" (audio)

2011-11-17T00:54:00.000+08:00

The audio came from the "Lit&Lunch" program sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation. It featured Natasha Wimmer discussing her translations of Roberto Bolaño's works and reading two excerpts: from 2666 and Between Parentheses. The audio file can be listened to here. (It was available for download previously - in mp3 format - but I'm no longer sure of the link.)

The total running time was around 50 minutes, broken as follows:

00:01 Natasha Wimmer was introduced.

01:53 Wimmer spoke about Bolaño’s novels and the challenges of translating 2666.

06:19 Wimmer read an excerpt from "The Part About Fate" in 2666. Part of the excerpt can also be read here.

27:40 A reading from Between Parentheses, which she was translating at that time. She read sections from an essay called "Fragments of a return to the native land." This recounted Bolaño's return to Chile in 1998 after a 24-year absence.

38:07 She took some questions from the audience.

49:31 End of audio clip.

Who could understand my terror better than you?, or On the order of Bolaño's stories

2011-11-16T19:22:00.000+08:00

The stories of Roberto Bolaño are found in four collections, two of which appeared in his lifetime. At least one story – "El contorno del ojo" (The Contour of the Eye") – is still unpublished in book form; it appeared in the online journal 60Watts (via).

All stories in Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were translated by Chris Andrews and they were contained in Last Evenings on Earth and The Return. Andrews (or his editor, or his publisher) did not use the Spanish titles for the English titles and he rather jumbled the table of contents between the two collections. As a consequence, the dedication pages and epigraphs in the original Spanish books were not preserved in the translations.

When I reread these stories, I plan to follow the original order in the Spanish. If you're curious about which stories appear where, here's the list.

Llamadas telefónicas

The stories are grouped into three parts. The collection is dedicated to Carolina López and the epigraph is from Chekhov – ¿Quién puede comprender mi terror mejor que usted? (Who could understand my terror better than you?)

1. Llamadas telefónicas

Sensini – in Last Evenings on Earth
Henri Simon Leprince – in Last Evenings on Earth
Enrique Martín – in Last Evenings on Earth
Una aventura literaria – "A Literary Adventure", in Last Evenings on Earth
Llamadas telefónicas – "Phone Calls", in Last Evenings on Earth

2. Detectives

El gusano – "The Grub", in Last Evenings on Earth
La nieve – "Snow", in The Return
Otro cuento Ruso – "Another Russian Tale," in The Return
William Burns – in The Return
Detectives – in The Return

3. Vida de Anne Moore

Compañeros de celda – "Cell Mates", in The Return
Clara – in The Return
Joanna Silvestri – in The Return
Vida de Anne Moore – "Anne Moore's Life", in Last Evenings on Earth

Putas asesinas

There are two sets of dedication: Para Alexandra Bolaño y Lautaro Bolaño,por las lecciones de vértigo; Para Alexandra Edwards y Marcial Cortés-Monroy,por la amistad. The epigraph is taken from Horace – La demanda acabará en risas y tú te irás libre de cargos. (You laugh and go scot-free.)

El ojo silva – "Mauricio ('The Eye') Silva", in Last Evenings on Earth
Gómez Palacio – in Last Evenings on Earth
Últimos atardeceres en la tierra – "Last Evenings on Earth", in Last Evenings on Earth
Días de 1978 – "Days of 1978", in Last Evenings on Earth
Vagabundo en Francia y Bélgica – "Vagabond in France and Belgium", in Last Evenings on Earth
Prefiguración de Lalo Cura – "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura", in The Return
Putas asesinas – "Murdering Whores", in The Return
El retorno – "The Return", in The Return
Buba – in The Return
Dentista – "Dentist", in Last Evenings on Earth
Fotos – "Photos", in The Return
Carnet de baile – "Dance Card", in Last Evenings on Earth
Encuentro con Enrique Lihn – "Meeting With Enrique Lihn", in The Return

Sources: Convesational Reading (comment); I Just Read About That; online 'copies' of the Spanish books

The King of the Forest reissued in new cover

2011-11-15T21:29:00.000+08:00

Notwithstanding the incorrect attribution (another pseudonym?), this cover design by INK Illustration for The King of the Forest (Invisible Library, 2010) looks plausible.

For an annotated bibliography of the acclaimed German novelist, I refer you to A Solipsist's 2666.

Image © 2011 by INK Illustration

The Portuguese Literature Challenge

2011-11-14T22:38:00.001+08:00

Amateur Reader (Tom, Wuthering Expectations) has cooked up one of the most tempting reading challenges this year. This was in September so the challenge is now in full swing.

THE PORTUGUESE LITERATURE CHALLENGE

The mechanics are posted here. It will basically cover pre-1920 literature translated from the Portuguese, mainly the period of Tropical Belle Époque.

The reading is to end by April 30, 2012. You can check the reading lists for Portugal and Brazil.

A group reading of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa is pretty much a done deal sometime in the first quarter of the year. I almost bought this book the last time I went to Manila. So I guess I have to finally buy it.

This year I hope to read ten stories by Machado de Assis from Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story (2006), ed. K. David Jackson. [It's a selection that aims for comprehensiveness, containing 72 stories by 37 Brazilian writers. The most represented writers in it were Machado de Assis (10 stories, 63 pages), Clarice Lispector (9 stories, 36 pages) and João Guimarães Rosa (7 stories, 56 pages).]

Sometime next year (because my immediate reading queue is now full to brimming) I want to finish Euclides da Cunha's Rebellion in the Backlands, the "Bible of modern Brazil". I started it, and actually loved what I read so far. But the reading requires me to strain very hard. The language is ... the language of the elements. And it's full of science stuff, a bit nerdy, but really good, in a masterpiece kind of way.

"The Angel" by J. R. Wilcock

2011-11-13T22:13:00.001+08:00

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (1919-1978) is the author of the encyclopedia novel The Temple of Iconoclasts, one of the books that influenced Roberto Bolaño's writing of Nazi Literature in the Americas. No other book of his was translated, but Richard (Caravana de recuerdos) brought to our attention Wilcock's La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno ("The Wedding of Hitler and Marie Antoinette in Hell"). It should alert English translators and publishers. The title alone promises supreme infamy.

Here is a link to one of Wilcock's stories. It's translated from the Spanish by Jeremy and posted in his journal READIN. Jeremy is currently reading Los detectives salvajes for The Savage Detectives Group Read. His reading is recorded in these posts.

Bonus link: Jeremy's translation of Slavko Zupcic's story "Requiem" appeared recently in Words Without Borders. It may be the kind of story Borges will dictate from beyond the grave.

Free ebooks

2011-11-13T20:31:00.001+08:00

Mostly classic books already in the public domain. So, enjoy. And please let me know in the comments when you come upon similar sites.

DailyLit sends books to your email by installments.
http://dailylit.com/

Open Culture has lots of freebies: audibooks, ebooks, movies ...
http://www.openculture.com/

LibriVox relies on volunteer readers to read and record books. Cool site.
http://librivox.org/

Bartleby.com is another highly recommended site for classics.
http://www.bartleby.com/

Project Gutenberg is the pioneering site that started it all. The ebooks come in a variety of formats.
http://www.gutenberg.org/

What happened in Symphony Space, Nov. 2010

2011-11-13T15:45:00.001+08:00

Back in November 2010, a live reading of Bolaño's stories was staged in New York. The program was called "Selected Shorts: Roberto Bolano and the Writers He Admired". The event was described as:

An evening of stories by the late Chilean master (The Savage Detectives, 2666) and writers who inspired him, including pieces by Javier Marías, Nicanor Parra, and Jorge Luis Borges. Bolaño is known for a particular noirish, atmospheric, dangerous, edgy, cool, engrossing style that immediately draws you in to a world of writers, policemen, prostitutes, politicians, militants, lovers and dreamers. Bolaño won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2666. Performers include Michael Stuhlbarg (Boardwalk Empire and A Serious Man), Felix Solis, Ivan Hernandez (the Public Theater's concert staging of Paul Simon's The Capeman) and Charles Keating.

How did the evening go, one may ask. There was, amazingly, a great recap of the show.

It is possible to see the imprint of Bolaño most beloved writers on his novels and stories. The elements of his influence were certainly put to best display on Wednesday. Both Bolaño’s elements of mystery and comedy were visible in the poem and two stories that were chosen for the evening. In Marías’ “On the Honeymoon,” the narrator describes watching a woman walking down the street “adjusting the elastic on a recalcitrant pair of panties.” When later, she gestures up toward the balcony where he is sitting and screams, “You’re mine, or I’ll kill you!” it is easy to recall scenes from his oeuvre. I thought of the three academics in the first section of 2666, who, at first trivially arguing in a taxicab, end up assaulting their driver. We get a sense that, at any moment, the comic banal can descend into violence. In his story, Marías has created a world that is chilling and mesmerizing. The reader is made squirmishly uncomfortable, and yet feels completely at ease. Bolaño’s humorous meditations on writers and literature within his novels was also evidenced in the Parra’s poem “Something Like That,” when the speaker muses: “The true problem of philosophy is who does the dishes.” And in Borges’s “The Shape of the Sword,” a story of an Irishman’s betrayal by a friend who turns out to be the narrator himself, we see where Bolaño found his playfulness with form.

Read the full account here.

By night in Mexico

2011-11-13T14:41:00.001+08:00

Among the novels written by Roberto Bolaño, translator Natasha Wimmer was quick to identify The Savage Detectives as her favorite. According to her, it is "just the easiest one to fall for". While working on her translation of the novel, she personally went to Mexico and visited the places mentioned in the book. She talked about it in an interview posted in Granta Online Only:

I know that you spent some time in Mexico City when working on The Savage Detectives, Bolaño’s debut novel – in what way did this affect your interpretation of the book?

Natasha Wimmer: [T]he time I spent there completely transformed my understanding of the book. The Savage Detectives is a love song to Mexico City, and to walk the same streets that Bolaño and his characters walked gave me a very intimate, visceral sense of the city and the novel. There’s something about Mexico City at night, in particular, that’s distinctive. For one thing, it’s darker than most other cities I know, which means that things seem to loom out at you as you walk, and you have the sense that you’re on the verge of the kind of bizarre encounter that Bolaño’s characters have all the time. I also spent time at Café La Habana (the original of Café Quito in the novel), which hasn’t changed much since Bolaño hung out there, and I stumbled over all kinds of cultural details that saved me from translation pitfalls (‘El Santo’??? for example, was one of the notes scribbled on my first draft of the translation; he is, of course, Mexico’s most famous masked wrestler, as I soon discovered).

EL SANTO

National Book Critics Circle Award winners

2011-11-12T21:00:00.001+08:00

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award is an annual prize given by the NBCC for the best book in 6 categories, including fiction. Unlike the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this award considers books published in the United States both in English and in translation. In its 37 years of existence, however, it appears only two books in translation won the award.

Official site:
http://bookcritics.org/awards

Blog:
http://bookcritics.org/blog/

NBCC winners in the Fiction category:

2010 Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad
2009 Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall
2008 Roberto Bolaño 2666 (trans. Natasha Wimmer)
2007 Junot Diaz The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2006 Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
2005 E.L. Doctorow The March
2004 Marilynne Robinson Gilead
2003 Edward P. Jones The Known World
2002 Ian McEwan Atonement
2001 W.G. Sebald Austerlitz (trans. Anthea Bell)
2000 Jim Crace Being Dead
1999 Jonathan Lethem Motherless Brooklyn
1998 Alice Munro The Love of a Good Woman
1997 Penelope Fitzgerald The Blue Flower
1996 Gina Berriault Women in Their Beds
1995 Stanley Elkin Mrs. Ted Bliss
1994 Carol Shields The Stone Diaries
1993 Ernest J. Gaines A Lesson Before Dying
1992 Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses
1991 Jane Smiley A Thousand Acres
1990 John Updike Rabbit at Rest
1989 E.L. Doctorow Billy Bathgate
1988 Bharati Mukherjee The Middleman and Other Stories
1987 Philip Roth The Counterlife
1986 Reynolds Price Kate Vaiden
1985 Anne Tyler The Accidental Tourist
1984 Louise Erdrich Love Medicine
1983 William Kennedy Ironweed
1982 Stanley Elkin George Mills
1981 John Updike Rabbit Is Rich
1980 Shirley Hazzard The Transit of Venus
1979 Thomas Flanagan The Year of the French
1978 John Cheever The Stories of John Cheever
1977 Toni Morrison Song of Solomon
1976 John Gardner October Light
1975 E.L. Doctorow Ragtime

BBC World Book Club

2011-11-11T18:48:00.001+08:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/wbc/all

The site contains lengthy interviews with authors and their most famous novels.

The podcasts can be downloaded.

Featured writers and books:

• David Grossman - To the End of the Land
• Hisham Matar - In the Country of Men
• Colm Toibin - Brooklyn
• Henning Mankell - Faceless Killers
• Val McDermid - A Place of Execution
• Boris Akunin - The Winter Queen
• Jo Nesbo - The Redbreast
• Javier Cercas - Soldiers of Salamis
• PJ O'Rourke - Eat the Rich
• Bernhard Schlink - The Reader
• Damon Galgut - The Good Doctor
• Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows
• Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible
• Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind
• David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
• Richard Ford - The Sportswriter
• JMG LeClezio - Desert
• John Boyne - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
• Andrea Levy - Small Island
• Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss
• James Ellroy - American Tabloid
• Alaa Al-Aswaany - The Yacoubian Building
• Gunter Grass - The Tin Drum
• Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
• Nawal El Sadaawi - Woman at Point Zero
• Kate Grenville - The Secret River
• Moshin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• David Guterson - Snow Falling on Cedars
• Toni Morrison - Beloved
• Derek Walcott - Omeros
• Alice Walker - The Color Purple
• Annie Proulx - The Shipping News; Brokeback Mountain
• David Lodge - Nice Work
• Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
• John Irving - The World According to Garp
• Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
• Sebastian Faulks - Birdsong
• Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres
• Patricia Cornwell - Post Mortem
• Edna O'Brien - The Country Girls
• Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose
• Sara Paretsky - Indemnity Only
• Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient
• Armistead Maupin - Tales of the City

BBC's "Read My Country"

2011-11-11T18:15:00.001+08:00

At the BBC site, a radio series where writers are asked for book recommendations from their own countries.

"If you had to recommend three books or poems that would deepen a visitor's understanding of your country and culture, what would they be?"

The Strand spoke to some select writers to get recommendations from their home countries.

Two of the writers interviewed were Miguel Syjuco from the Philippines and Santiago Roncagliolo from Peru.

Miguel Syjuco – Philippines

Miguel Syjuco is a Filipino writer now based in Canada. His novel Ilustrado is the 2008 winner of the Man Asian Literary Award. His three choices for the Philippines are:

1. Noli Me Tangere - José Rizal
2. America Is in the Heart - Carlos Bulosan
3. Dogeaters - Jessica Hagedorn

I will also vouch for the first two titles in Syjuco's list. They were two of the best Filipino literary classics I've read. As for the Dogeaters, I have a copy and I hope to read it soon.

Santiago Roncagliolo – Peru

Santiago Roncagliolo is the author of Abril rojo (Red April). You can listen to his interview at this link. His three choices for Peru are:

1. Un Mundo para Julius (A World For Julius) - Alfredo Bryce Echenique
2. Travesuras de la nina mala (The Bad Girl) - Mario Vargas Llosa
3. Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers) - José Maria Arguedas

The other interviewed writers were from Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Israel, Iraq, Kenya, China, Turkey, Norway, India, Australia, Ireland, and Jamaica.

You can listen to these writers talk about their choices and read from their selections at this link.

English talks

2011-11-10T23:06:00.001+08:00

The BBC archive of interviews with modern British novelists:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/

Kingdom of Redonda

2011-11-09T18:53:00.000+08:00

The Spanish writer Javier Marías is one of the claimants to Redonda Island. His ascension to the throne of Reino de Redonda ("Kingdom of Redonda") as Rey Xavier I was told in one of his novels. He created a publishing imprint with the name Reino de Redonda and also an annual literary prize, Premio Reino de Redonda.

Since 1999, Marías bestowed titles to several of his peers. Spanish and foreign artists, film directors, and writers had been granted Redondan titles of Duke or Duchess.

The recipients of Redondan titles are:

Pedro Almodóvar, Duke of Trémula (1999)
John Ashbery, Duke of Convexo (1999)
Pierre Bourdieu, Duke of Desarraigo (1999)
William Boyd, Duke of Brazzaville (1999)
A. S. Byatt, Duchess of Morpho Eugenia (1999)
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Duke of Tigres (1999)
Francis Ford Coppola, Duke of Megalópolis (1999)
Agustin Díaz Yanes, Duke of Michelín (1999)
Roger Dobson, Duke of Bridaespuela (1999)
Francis Haskell, Duke of Sommariva (1999)
Eduardo Mendoza, Duke of Isla Larga (1999)
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Duke of Corso (1999)
Francisco Rico, Duke of Parezzo (1999)
Sir Peter Russell, Duke of Plazatoro (1999)
Fernando Savater, Duke of Caronte (1999)
Luis Antonio de Villena, Duke of Malmundo (1999)
Juan Villoro, Duke of Nochevieja (1999)
Ian Michael, Duke of Bernal (2000)
W. G. Sebald, Duke of Vértigo (2000)
António Lobo Antunes, Duke of Cocodrilos (2001)
Frank O. Gehry, Duke of Nervión (2001)
Pietro Citati, Duke of Remonstranza (2002)
Michael Braudeau, Duke of Miranda (2004)
Antony Beevor, Duke of Stalingrado (2006)
Pere Gimferrer, Duke of Arder (2006)
Ian Robertson, Duke of Impertinentes (2006)
Mario Vargas Llosa, Duke of Miraflores (2008)
Orhan Pamuk, Duke of Colores (2009)

* * *

Winners of the Redonda literary prize, established 2001:

(They are voted by the current dukes and duchesses and awarded cash and Redondan duchy.)

2001 J. M. Coetzee, Duke of Deshonra
2002 Sir John H. Elliott, Duke of Simancas
2003 Claudio Magris, Duke of Segunda Mano
2004 Eric Rohmer, Duke of Olalla
2005 Alice Munro, Duchess of Ontario
2006 Ray Bradbury, Duke of Diente de León
2007 George Steiner, Duke of Girona
2008 Umberto Eco, Duke of la Isla del Día de Antes
2009 Marc Fumaroli, Duke of Houyhnhnms
2010 Milan Kundera, Duke of Amarcord
2011 Ian McEwan, now Duke of Perros Negros

Sources:
http://www.javiermarias.es/REDONDIANA/DuquesdeRedonda.html
http://www.javiermarias.es/2007/07/xavier-i-de-redonda-10-aos-de-reinado_06.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Redonda

Rodrigo Fresán, book thief

2011-11-09T00:58:00.000+08:00

I remember that afternoon: we left Kentucky Fried Chicken and Bolaño went down the stairs to the platform of his commuter train and I went back home and half an hour later Bolaño rang my doorbell, again. He was soaked by the storm and wild-eyed and shaking as if barely withstanding a private earthquake. "I’ve killed a man," he announced in a deathly voice; and he came into my apartment, headed for the living room and asked me to make him a cup of tea. Then he told me that as he was waiting on the platform, a couple of skinheads had come up to him and tried to rob him, that there was a scuffle, that he managed to get a knife away from one of them and stab the other one near the heart, that then he ran away down corridors and streets, and that he didn’t know what to do next. "What should I do? Should I turn myself in?" I said he shouldn’t. Bolaño looked at me with infinite sadness and said that he couldn’t keep writing with a death on his conscience, that he wouldn’t be able to look his son in the eyes anymore, something like that. Moved, I said that I understood and I’d go with him to the police station; to which he responded, indignant: "What? You’d turn me in just like that? Without mercy? An Argentinian writer betraying a Chilean writer? Shame on you!" Then Bolaño must have seen my desperation: because he gave one of those little cracked laughs of his and, fascinated, said over and over again "But you know I couldn’t kill a mosquito…How could you believe a story like that?
– Rodrigo Fresán, "The Savage Detective" (2007), The Believer, in "Notes Toward an Annotated Edition of 2666" by Natasha Wimmer

Rodrigo Fresán is an Argentinean writer who lives at present in Barcelona. He is the author of 10 novels, only one of which (Jardines de Kensington) is so far available in English (Kensington Gardens, translated by Natasha Wimmer).

One of Fresán’s acclaimed books is called Mantra. It has a great overview, by way of a recipe, here.

Bolaño had this to say about this book in Between Parentheses: "Mantra is a kaleidoscopic novel, shot through with fierce, occasionally over-the-top humor, written in a prose of rare precision that allows itself to oscillate between anthropological document and the delirium of late nights in a city—Mexico City—that superimposes itself on the subterranean cities beneath it like a snake swallowing itself."

Rodrigo is a close friend of Roberto. They talked a lot. They were both book stealers in their youth.

Fresán's "Notes Toward the Memoirs of a Book Thief" appeared in Granta Online Only, where he wrote, Wimmer translating:

Stealing books is actually literature as sport. When we write or read we’re sitting or lying down, almost motionless. When we steal books, however, the muscle of our brain acts in perfect harmony with the muscles of our body. When we steal books, we think and act, and, in some sense, read and write.

When you steal a book, you’re person and character all at once.

In the same site, Fresán has a piece called "Borges and Me, and Me". It's as if it's ready to acknowledge another to be called "Borges and Me, and Me, and Me", and so on, ad infinitum, like a mirror.

Is that a translator in your machine?

2011-11-08T00:24:00.000+08:00

It’s true there’s a wow factor in a point-and-shoot translator app like Word Lens or the statistical analysis approach of Google Translate. Many of [us] use these and other machine-based translators. But human translators are doing just fine too. At least that’s the word from ATA [American Translators Association] spokesman Kevin Hendzel. He told me the industry grew 15% in 2009 and 13% in 2010. Not so surprising when you think about it: American troops are still in Afghanistan. The US government’s 17 intelligence agencies are still listening in to people all over the world. American businesses are still expanding into new global markets.

PRI's The World has a refreshing podcast on translation, "Translators Past, Present and Future". Download/Listen to it here.

Patrick Cox talks to, among others, David Bellos, translator of Georges Perec's "user's manual" and author of the recent Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (this book's on top of my wish list!).

You can listen to the rest of the "The World in Words" podcasts here (recommended).

Coming in 2012: The Secret of Evil

2011-11-07T22:54:00.000+08:00

For a while, the publication date of The Secret of Evil was set for November 1st. But now it was moved to April 2012. I guess All Saint's Day won't do.

The book design was from a series done by Rodrigo Corral Design. It was, how shall I put it, "a steaming cup of peyote".

(Image)

Juan Villoro

2011-11-06T13:13:00.000+08:00

Juan Villoro, born 1956, is a novelist and journalist from Mexico City. His most celebrated novel is El testigo (2004, The Witness) which won the Herralde Prize. He is the author of several novels, short stories, nonfiction works, and children's books. Although no full-length book of him is currently available in English translation, he seems to be one to watch out for.

Links:

"The Red Carpet" (trans. David Noriega) is Villoro's essay about the political landscape of Mexico. The original Spanish is here.

Sololiteratura has his selected works and reviews of his books in Spanish.

Other translated pieces available online are a story published in n+1; fiction and nonfiction from Words Without Borders, and an excerpt from El testigo (trans. Chris Andrews) in The Quarterly Conversation.

Belletrista – a great resource on books by women writers

2011-11-05T13:28:00.001+08:00

I came across this site devoted to reviews of books by female writers.

http://www.belletrista.com/

Belletrista is "a not-for-profit, bimonthly web magazine which seeks both to encourage cross-cultural understanding through international literature written by women and to increase the visibility of that literature". They also have a blog.

The current issue features a review of The Scale of Maps by the Spanish novelist Belén Gopegui, translated by Mark Schafer. Gopegui is one of the writers admired by Roberto Bolaño.

Also reviewed in Issue 13 are:

Fire from the Andes: Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, edited and translated by Susan E. Benner and Kathy S. Leonard, reviewed by Akeela Gaibie-Dawood

Who Is Ana Mendieta? by Christine Redfern, illustrated by Caro Caron, reviewed by Charlotte Simpson

Premio Herralde; Premio Rómulo Gallegos

2011-11-05T00:58:00.000+08:00

Los detectives salvajes won two major awards in Latin America. One was the Premio Rómulo Gallegos which put Roberto Bolaño's name alongside those of the Boom writers Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes. The other was the Premio Herralde de Novela, awarded yearly by the Editorial Anagrama to an unpublished novel in Spanish language by a writer of any nationality. The prize, given every November, comes with a purse of 18,000 euros.

Selected winners of Premio Herralde:

1985 Adelaida García Morales (El silencio de las sirenas / Silence of the Sirens)
1986 Javier Marías (El hombre sentimental / The Man of Feeling)
1992 Paloma Díaz-Mas (El sueño de Venecia)
1997 Jaime Bayly (La noche es virgen)
1998 Roberto Bolaño (Los detectives salvajes / The Savage Detectives)
2002 Enrique Vila-Matas (El mal de Montano / Montano's Malady, also published as Montano)
2003 Alan Pauls (El pasado / The Past)
2004 Juan Villoro (El testigo)
2006 Alberto Barrera Tyszka (La enfermedad / The Sickness)
2008 Daniel Sada (Casi nunca / Almost Never)
2010 Antonio Ungar (Tres ataúdes blancos)

The complete list of winners of the Herralde Prize is found here, that of Rómulo Gallegos is here .

"Elena Garro" by César Aira

2011-11-02T10:56:00.000+08:00

Elena Garro (1920-1998) was a prolific Mexican writer. She wrote novels, plays, scripts, and journalism. Two of her books were available in English translation: her first novel Recollections of Things to Come (trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, University of Texas Press) in which the narrator of the story was the setting(!), and the pair of novellas First Love & Look for My Obituary (trans. David Unger, Curbstone Press).

Here's an extract from an informative short profile of Garro, written by César Aira (as confirmed in the comment below), in a translation by Matt Johnson. This is one of the entries from Aira's Diccionario de autores latinoamericanos* (Dictionary of Latin American Writers, Emece Editores, 2001).

She was born in Puebla in 1920. In her youth she was a ballerina and a choreographer. At seventeen, she married Octavio Paz, living with him in Mexico and in Europe. Her first book was a novel, Los recuerdos de porvenir (the title is taken from a verse by Carlos Pellicer): "In 1953, as I lay sick in Berna, and after receiving an intensive cortisone treatment, I wrote Los recuerdos del porvenir"...to great critical acclaim, winning the 1963 Premio Villaurrutia. The narration makes use of a peculiar memory: the prosopopeia; a town, whose character is between dark and ghostly, of the sort made popular by Agustín Yáñez (and brought to its decisively mystic status by Rulfo), tells the story, which employs a delicate magic of temporal sleights of hand. Looking back on the author's career, critics have continued to refer to this book as her most important work. In reality, the peculiar genius of Elena Garro only timidly shows itself in its pages. The same can be said of her following book of short stories, La semana de colores (1964). After these two books, along with one anterior book of theater pieces, Un hogar sólido y otras piezas en un acto (1958), the author did not publish again for nearly fifteen years, during which she experienced a complex personal odyssey. Her marriage with Octavio Paz fell apart in the worst possible manner, and the writer, accompanied by her daughter, Helena Paz, left the country (one of the determining factors being a series of denunciations against Mexican intellectuals pronounced by her after the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968), undertaking an extended flight across various countries that brought her to Spain and later to Paris, where she took up residence.

Continued here (LibraryThing message #44).

The Spanish text is here.

* The Amazon title entry for Aira's dictionary is subtitled "Coastal Management Sourcebooks". Yayks.

Literary prizes at El Poder de la Palabra; Premio Salambó

2011-11-01T15:38:00.000+08:00

I found a site (in Spanish) which compiles all major literary prizes in Latin America. Quite an informative site. Google Translate will come in handy for non-readers of Spanish.

El Poder de la Palabra is a website dedicated to literary writings. It contains excerpts from literary texts in Spanish, as well as biographies of writers.

I'll be featuring here some of the notable prizes. One of these is the Premio Salambó. This award is organized by Club Cultura de la Fnac and Café Salambó. It is given to the best book of fiction published in Spain in the previous year. The jury is composed of 15 renowned authors in Spain and Latin America. It is the only kind of award in Spain in which the winner is chosen exclusively by writers. The award lacks funding however. Perhaps that's the reason why no award was given in the past two years.

Winners of Premio Salambó*:

2001 Javier Cercas (Soldados de Salamina / Soldiers of Salamis)
2002 Javier Marías (Tu rostro mañana 1. Fiebre y lanza / Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear)
2003 Juan Eduardo Zúñiga (Capital de la gloria)
2004 Roberto Bolaño (2666 / 2666)
2005 Alvaro Pombo (Contra natura)
2006 Vicente Molina Foix (El abrecartas)
2007 José María Merino (La glorieta de los fugitivos)
2008 Cristina Fernández Cubas (Todos los cuentos)
2009 -not given-
2010 -not given-

* English titles are added for the three novels available in translation. The entry on Javier Marías is corrected to indicate only the first volume of his novel. The next two volumes have yet to appear in 2002.

Celebrating José Saramago

2011-10-31T10:28:00.000+08:00

Margaret Jull Costa's profile of José Saramago can be read "online only" at Granta. What caught my eye was her quote of Saramago in an interview, discussing the point where he realized a way to proceed more effectively with his storytelling, the very point of his transition to a "non-punctuated style".

I was already at the twentieth section of the book [Levantado do chão] and not very happy with it, when I realised how it could be written. I saw that I would only be able to write it if I did so as if I were actually telling the story. That could not be done by putting so-called oral language into writing, because that’s impossible, but by introducing into my writing a mechanism of apparent spontaneity, apparent digression and apparent disorganisation in the discourse. I say ‘apparent’ since I am only too aware of how much work it took to ensure that it turned out like that.

I underlined "apparent spontaneity ...". It described a realistic style which I find very absorbing, a style in which method is closely tied to content and form. It's the same spontaneous style one can also detect in César Aira and Javier Marías. Spontaneity in these writers can be a result of a desire for "authenticity" (I use this term loosely, as it has many pitfalls).

Margaret Jull Costa analyzed this writing style (which is closer to that of Marías who she also translated):

In reducing punctuation down to commas and full stops, in letting a sentence follow the natural digressions of thought, Saramago cuts himself free from the straitjacket of conventional realistic literature, allowing himself, as narrator, to carry the reader along on the wave of those thought processes, those digressions. [...]

One cannot help but see this egalitarian approach to both punctuation and narration as an expression of Saramago’s declared anarcho-communism and atheism, as cocking a snook at orthodoxy and authority, be it God or Government, and as a way of privileging the spoken voice, the ordinary human voice. [...]

Read more here.

(Image sources: Asymptote and The New York Times, from Small Memories; prae.hu)

Carlos Fuentes's best Latin American novels of the past and present centuries

2011-10-29T22:36:00.000+08:00

CARLOS FUENTES AT THE INTERNATIONAL
BOOK FAIR, GUADALAJARA, MEXICO, 2009
(Photo: Ivan Garcia / AFP/Getty Images)

The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes's top 10 lists of best Latin American novels were subjective but still worth a look for sure.

No, Bolaño was not on it. Nor were the "three or four best contemporary writers in Spanish language" he endorsed. That would be, in no order: Enrique Vila-Matas, César Aira, and Javier Marías. (I'm not sure who occupied the fourth spot. I'm almost sure it was Javier Cercas. But he was also very enthusiastic about Pedro Lemebel and Rodrigo Rey Rosa.)

The lists drawn by Fuentes were published in El País. I'm including the English titles when available.

20th century best Latin American novels:

El Aleph,Jorge Luis Borges(The Aleph)
Los pasos perdidos,Alejo Carpentier (The Lost Steps)
Rayuela,Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch)
Cien años de soledad,Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Paradiso,José Lezama Lima (Paradiso)
La vida breve,Juan Carlos Onetti (A Brief Life)
Noticias del imperio,Fernando del Paso (News from the Empire)
Yo el supremo,Augusto Roa Bastos (I the Supreme)
Pedro Páramo,Juan Rulfo (Pedro Páramo)
Conversación en La Catedral,Mario Vargas Llosa (Conversation in The Cathedral)
Santa Evita,Tomás Eloy Martínez (Santa Evita)

21st century best Latin American novels:

Historia secreta de Costaguana,Juan Gabriel Vásquez (The Secret History of Costaguana)
En busca de Klingsor,Jorge Volpi (In Search of Klingsor)
Oír su voz,Arturo Fontaine
El desierto,Carlos Franz (The Absent Sea)
Las muertes paralelas,Sergio Missana
Amphitryon,Ignacio Padilla (Shadow Without a Name)
El síndrome de Ulises,Santiago Gamboa
Abril rojo,Santiago Roncagliolo (Red April)

See also: Fuentes's 1981 interview at the Paris Review. Also his recent interview (bilingual) at Literal magazine where he talked about Vlad, his latest book about vampires, and political issues in Mexico.

(via By the Firelight)

Breathing Bolaño

2011-10-29T01:28:00.001+08:00

Here’s a curious book. Actually, two-books-in-one: two poets having a conversation about writing poems through poems. Meta-poetry, if you will.

– Breathing Bolaño: Breathing by Tod Thilleman & From Corrido of Bolaño by Richard Blevins (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009)

The publisher page has a link to a review, a link to a reading by and interview with Blevins, and an excerpt.

Bolaño Infra

2011-10-28T20:35:00.001+08:00

A great little find for fans (and maybe even future fans) of a certain 1998 Roberto Bolaño novel, Bolaño Infra. 1975-1977: Los años que inspiraron Los detectives salvajes [Infra Bolaño, 1975-1977: The Years That Inspired The Savage Detectives] provides a short but thoroughly satisfying account of Bolaño's mid-twenties in Mexico during the time when the then aspiring poet was co-founding the Infrarrealist movement and raising hell with a gang of bohemian friends and sympathizers who would later become immortalized within the pages of The Savage Detectives as the "visceral realists."

What a find! By Richard's positive review at Caravana de recuerdos, this book by Montserrat Madariaga Caro looks like a fine addition to the ever expanding shelf devoted to Bolaniana. Let it be translated and the world will be right.

MONTSERRAT MADARIAGA CARO (PHOTO)

"A childlike joy in storytelling"

2011-10-28T08:19:00.001+08:00

If his books met with no resistance, that would mean that they weren’t upsetting accepted standards for judgement and setting new ones, which is what they’ve done in Argentina, where Aira is a strong pole of attraction and repulsion.

Chris Andrews talks to Scott Esposito (link) about his translation of Varamo by César Aira.

Quimera's ten most important Spanish novels of the decade

2011-10-26T23:07:00.000+08:00

In December 2009, the Quimera magazine published a list of the 10 most important Spanish novels of the decade (2000-2009) as voted by 25 writers and critics. It included novels by writers who were born or who permanently lived in Spain. I reproduce the list below. Translations, if available, are indicated.

1. 2666, Roberto Bolaño (2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer)
2. Bartleby y compañía, Enrique Vila-Matas (Bartleby & Co., trans. Jonathan Dunne)
3. El vano ayer, Isaac Rosa
4. Nocilla Dream, Agustín Fernández-Mallo
5. Soldados de Salamina, Javier Cercas (Soldiers of Salamis, trans. Anne McLean)
6. Tu rostro mañana, Javier Marías (Your Face Tomorrow, trans. Margaret Jull Costa)
7. Rabos de lagartija, Juan Marsé (Lizard Tails, trans. Nick Caistor)
8. España, Manuel Vilas
9. Lo real, Belén Gopegui
10. Concierto del No Mundo, A. G. Porta (The No World Concerto, trans. Rhett McNeil)

A. G. Porta, the last writer on the list, was Bolaño's co-author of the novel Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (1984, "Advice from a Morrison Follower to a Joyce Fanatic").

(via Jorge Carrión)

True Dawn, True Dusk, Tremble of Twilight

2011-10-25T18:43:00.000+08:00


ROBERT PATTINSON CARRYING 2666 (IMAGE)

     The novel, so unanimously acclaimed, was called Twilight and its plot was very simple: a boy of fourteen abandons his family to join the ranks of the revolution. Soon he's engaged in combat against Wrangel's troops. In the midst of battle he's injured and his comrades leave him for dead. But before the vultures come to feed on the bodies, a spaceship drops onto the battlefield and takes him away, along with some of the other mortally wounded soldiers....
   ...
     It wasn't only Gorky who read Twilight. Other famous people did, too, and although none of them wrote to the author to express their admiration, they didn't forget his name, because not only were they famous, their memories were good, too.

– 2666, pp. 718, 721

Global capitalism in 2666

2011-10-25T10:12:00.000+08:00

The heart of Bolaño’s critique in 2666 is this: On all sides of the story, the reader is shown people who must step forward to recognize the origins of their way of life if the violence at its core is to be stopped. The diffuse, disparate, and desperate nature of global capitalism has a sheltering and obfuscating digital effect marked by the introduction of false analogs that prevent the acknowledgment of the origins, consequences, or resolutions of our plights. There is a voluntary excess inherent in the system that allows this gap in understanding, making these changes in perspective true only in its enactment. The enactment and making true of this excess is the expenditure that joins the world of global capital under a single system and enforces the separation of its disparate parts. The system of global capitalism requires the ignorance generated by the separation of its parts to maintain the frenzied, excessive activity of its cycle.

– "Lost Analogs A Critique of Global Capitalism in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666" by Matthew Boyd, HESO Magazine

Read the full essay here.

The Savage Detectives Group Read

2011-10-21T23:03:00.010+08:00

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me, says one Juan García Madero. A book is the best pillow there is, says Roberto Bolaño.

Richard of Caravana de recuerdos and I think one of these notable pillow books could be Bolaño's cult object Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer). We are hosting a group read of this novel in January 2012.

All are cordially invited – rebels, poets, bloggers, slackers. It's not poetry reading but it could have the same effect.

Savagery or previous experience as detective isn't required to participate. Nor is one expected to be a member of an avant-garde group like the visceral realists.

All one needs to do is sleep on the book and maybe join in on the discussion. Readers become "salvajes" in their own right.

Bloggers may post reviews and impressions anytime in January but "official" discussion starts on the last weekend of the month (Jan. 27-29). We'll link to your reviews.

About the book. At around 600 pages, it's a hefty pillow. We can't promise a wild poet chase, but wildness and unwieldiness shouldn't be in short supply. (Here's an excerpt.)

This early announcement should give readers plenty of headway. It's probably best to start early with the detective work. Or you can wait till All Souls Day, when our narrator began to write his adventures. Or the new year. It may turn out to be a firecracking yearstarter.

You can read this as part of the Bolaño Reading Challenge. It's supposed to end this year, but we'll count this toward your future Godzilla status.

"Detectives-Readers"

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos

mel u, The Reading Life

Amateur Reader (Tom), Wuthering Expectations

Emily, Evening All Afternoon

Scott, seraillon

Frances, Nonsuch Book

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Anthony, Time's Flow Stemmed

Bettina, Liburuak
Gavin, Page247
Sarah, A Rat in the Book Pile
Caroline, Beauty is a Sleeping Cat
Jeremy, READIN
Becky, Page Turners
Séamus, Vapour Trails
Amy, The House of the Seven Tails
nicole, bibliographing
Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza
Sarah, what we have here is a failure to communicate
Col, Col Reads
Selena, luxe hours
Claire, kiss a cloud

The red image is from a design by Jenny Volvovski (From Cover to Cover). It is used with permission. You may copy and insert this badge in your blog.

(cross-posted)

October Asymptote

2011-10-21T22:40:00.003+08:00

The "fat" October issue of online Asymptote contains an excerpt – I think the opening, with translator's note – from Murakami Haruki's 1Q84 (trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel), Czeslaw Milosz's late poems translated by his son, and translations by Lydia Davis and George Szirtes.

I'm also happy to see translated poems by one of my favorite contemporary Filipino poets, Allan Popa.

A reading from the book of Dr. Aira

2011-10-21T00:40:00.004+08:00

Katherine Silver reads a short extract from her translation of César Aira's Dr. Aira's Miracle Cures, coming in 2012 from New Directions.

At this link (via Conversational Reading).

You can also watch Donald A. Yates talk about Borges in the same video.

See also: more interviews with Silver at Too Many Books in the Kitchen and Center for the Art of Translation blog, and also her three essays in Sampsonia Way.

"The Erotic Place of Translation"
"Literary Translation and Subversion"
"Maintaining Boundaries (and Borders)"

"Latin America, a Hologram" (Jorge Volpi)

2011-10-10T01:07:00.000+08:00

Volpi at a book fair in Bogotá, 2011. (Photo by: periodismosinafan.com at Flickr)

One of the best takes on the Bolaño phenomenon was that by Jorge Volpi, a Mexican novelist, essayist, literature scholar, and former lawyer. Volpi's best known novel is En busca de Klingsor (1999, In Search of Klingsor), a fusion of WWII history, Nazism, and scientific inquiry. He had been an acquaintance of Bolaño, having spoken to him on many occasions. Like Javier Cercas in the novel Soldiers of Salamis and Enrique Vila-Matas in Montano, Volpi has featured Bolaño as a character in one of his novels, El fin de la locura ("An End to Madness", still untranslated).

The following is an excerpt from a speech he gave on "The Future of Latin American Fiction." The essay titled "Latin America, a Hologram" was serialized in five parts in Three Percent, 9-13 November 2009. This is from part 3 of the speech, a section called "Bolaño, perturbation."

3. Bolaño, perturbation
by Jorge Volpi

Not since the Boom, or to be precise, since García Márquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, had a Latin American writer enjoyed such sudden celebrity as Roberto Bolaño: After his success in Spanish—winning the Herralde and Romulo Gallegos prizes and his conversion into the guru of the new generation—he received unanimous praise from the French critics, his fame spread to the rest of Europe, and, five years after his death, it exploded in the United States, one of the most difficult media for foreign literature to penetrate. The publication of 2666 in English at the beginning of 2009 became the fifth moment of the Bolaño delirium, and so began the construction of a global icon: thousands of copies sold, each article and review more praise-filled than the last—including in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker, the trend-setters of intellectual fashion—and the launch of a legend that combined his personal excesses and his early death. And if that were not enough, his heirs abandoned the agency of Carmen Balcells, the mythical co-founder of the Boom, for Andrew Wylie, aka the Jackal, the New York literary agent who has concentrated more Nobel prizes and cult authors per square meter in his office (and who has already announced the recovery of a novel that Bolaño left among his papers) than any other agent.

While reading the reviews and articles published in the North American literary media about Bolaño, I was continually surprised that the American reading of Bolaño, especially the reinvention of his biography, had almost nothing in common with the reception of Bolaño in Spanish. I do not believe, as some Spanish critics and even some of his friends do, that the American Bolaño is a falsification, a marketing product, a forced reinvention, or a simple misunderstanding: on the contrary, maybe the power of his texts lives in the diverse interpretations, sometimes contrasting or opposed, that it is possible to extract from his books. But the reception of his American critics reveals, however, another phenomenon: not only does the Bolaño read and recreated by them have nothing to do with his Spanish reception, but it seems that none of his panegyrists took the trouble of reading what the Spanish speaking critics had been saying about him—with almost always the same admiration—for more than a decade. When he arrived in the United States, he suddenly became a cult author; Bolaño got across the desert, crossed the border, and escaped the literary migration, but he could not take his family with him: as a whole, the American critics boasted about their discovery, as if they were responsible for unearthing Bolaño; they considered only their contrived mythological creation and didn’t take the real world into account.

Few authors were so conscious of their place in world literature, especially in the Latin America world, as this Chilean author: each one of his texts is a double answer—it might be worthwhile to say a slap in the face—to the traditions that obsessed him. Of course, none of that appears in the readings of the American critics. For a Mexican like myself, who also had the opportunity to converse with Bolaño dozens of times, it’s hard to believe that a book as plagued with references to Mexican literary history as The Savage Detectives—in my opinion, a boxing ring in which Bolaño settles accounts with his past—could be read, understood, and enjoyed by a media that totally ignores them. However, that is what happened: his success in the United States was absolute. What does that mean? In the first place, the book is so universal—and so open—that Bolaño’s scholarly winks lose their importance; and perhaps the prejudices and the superficiality of the American reading are huge. Bolaño has not been glorified in English for being Latin American or Chilean, nor because of his ties with this part of the world—he could easily have been Thai or Kuwaiti—but for other reasons, literary as well as extra-literary, and his case is not comparable, in any measure, to other writers of the region—or even Isabel Allende—and perhaps only to Haruki Murakami, the only international literary star capable of casting a similar shadow in English.

You can read the rest of part 3 here, and the rest of the essay at these links: part 1, part 2, part 4, part 5.

Volpi so far has three books published in translation: In Search of Klingsor, Season of Ash, and most recently, In Spite of the Dark Silence.

More on Volpi at the following links:

Wikipedia page
Interview at BOMB magazine

"Airports: Frontier Nations" (Andrés Neuman)

2011-10-08T11:01:00.000+08:00

If – if only – it were possible, many people would prefer to abolish waiting. They’d much rather disintegrate and immediately reappear in the place they want to be. Today, all transitions seem like obstacles. Seen from that impatient point of view, there are places we find odious: bus and train stations, waiting rooms, airports. At the same time, speed has rendered these waiting spaces absolutely essential. While our anxieties bounce off their walls, these temporary homes make possible the contemplative mode we need to slip into just to keep on running. The introspective effect of airports fascinates me. Bizarre structures that combine haste and quietude, strength and thin air. Within them, the vertigo of our lives collides with a sublime contradiction: We’ve come here to fly, but once inside we barely move. We have the urgent need to leave, but the interior rhythm of the building, its ceremonies and its rules, oblige us to wait. We are that obligatory patience. An urgent future that somehow seems far off.

- From Andrés Neuman's short essay in Granta (Online Only).

Andrés Neuman (b. 1977) is a poet and novelist from Argentina. He published his first novel Bariloche when he was 22. The novel was First Finalist for the Herralde Prize, for which Detective Bolaño sat as a member of the prize committe. Neuman was included in the "Bogotá-39 list" - 39 most outstanding Latin American authors under 39 - and in Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.

His first novel to appear in English will be The Traveller's Century (Pushkin Press, 2012), translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. The book's synopsis from the publisher's site is rather amusing, and annoying, for being described in abstract terms.

The Traveller of the Century is an original and ambitious experiment–a work that invites us to look at the nineteenth century with twenty-first-century eyes. A novel that rediscovers the inspiration of classic narrative from a contemporary point of view. A dialogue between the Europe of the Restoration and the political plans of the European Union. A narrative bridge spanning the past and the global issues of our present–immigration, interculturalism, translation, nationalism and the emancipation of women. Love as a metaphor of translation, translation as a metaphor of love. An exceptional, fun, mature novel from a writer wise beyond his years.

If a book's storyline is that hard to summarize, so that the publisher had to resort to doling out the themes, then it's certainly one of two things. But the mention of love and translation in the same sentence perks up my ears.


NEUMAN (Foto: Pepe Marín)

Yet another excerpt from Tres ...

2011-10-04T21:01:00.000+08:00

... is online at The Threepenny Review. The excerpt is taken from the first poem in Tres, "Prose in Autumn in Gerona", in Laura Healy's translation.

http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/bolano_f11.html

(Related posts)

P.S. Curious readers can read the whole Tres in another translation posted in Scribd.

"I don’t look so much for feelings and emotions, as for alternative ways of thinking." - short interview with César Aira

2011-10-02T23:38:00.001+08:00

César Aira's interview with The Victorian Writer magazine was a short one, three questions, but packed with bizarre opinions, like "art has no effect on a person’s life, nor on society, nor on history."

The interview was reprinted here: http://wheelercentre.com/dailies/post/efdeb45918bb/

A reading from Tres ...

2011-09-26T12:43:00.000+08:00

... at this YouTube link. This was back in May during the Mass Poetry Festival in Salem. Laura Healy read excerpts from her translation of the first part of the poem.

Tres is available this month from New Directions.

See our Tres-related posts here.

Three of Aira's translators interviewed

2011-09-23T10:52:00.000+08:00

Listen to Chris Andrews, Katherine Silver, and Rosalie Knecht's hour-long interview by Colin Marshall at The Marketplace of Ideas. (SPOILER ALERT: In the third segment of the interview, Rosalie Knecht described the ending of How I Became a Nun.)

http://colinmarshall.libsyn.com/who-is-c-sar-aira-translators-chris-andrews-katherine-silver-and-rosalie-knecht

You can subscribe to The Marketplace of Ideas mailing list here.

Challenge updates

2011-09-18T13:19:00.000+08:00

The latest Bolaño book review submitted for the challenge is that for Antwerp in seraillon.

There is so far a total of 14 books reviewed by our participating readers. And we're still accepting submissions!

To enter reviews: Submit them to bolanoread@gmail.com or via a comment on the main page. Reviews written before 2011 are also accepted.

I've also included links to two essays by Marcelo Ballve, an early critic of Bolaño, in the Resources page.

Here's a rundown of the reviews so far:

2666

Caravana de recuerdos (Part 1, 2, 3, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 5)
The Parrish Lantern
Review of Contemporary Fiction

Amulet

Antwerp

seraillon

By Night in Chile

Distant Star

Last Evenings on Earth

The Parrish Lantern

Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (The Troubles of the Real Police Officer)

Caravana de recuerdos

Monsieur Pain

Winstonsdad's Blog

Nazi Literature in the Americas

Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview

Shifting Sands

The Romantic Dogs

The Parrish Lantern

The Savage Detectives

The Parrish Lantern

The Skating Rink

The Third Reich

Caravana de recuerdos

The Third Reich cover redux

2011-09-13T01:10:00.001+08:00

The US cover is electric. The stupendous UK cover (box) declares open war.

(Amazon UK)

Bolaño translations, 2012-201X

2011-09-12T20:12:00.001+08:00


Manuela Martelli and Luigi Ciardo act in "The Future"

It's never too early to anticipate. This year Bolaño enthusiasts are lucky to be treated to three works in English translation: Between Parentheses, Tres (bilingual), and The Third Reich. At least six more are awaiting English publication.

The Secret of Evil - a posthumous prose collection.
Advice from a Morrison Follower to a Joyce Fanatic - an early novel written with Bolaño's friend A. G. Porta. You can't judge a book by its cool title. But it could earn some points.
Diorama - one of 3 books discovered among Bolaño's papers. Still unpublished in Spanish.
A Lumpen Novella - El futuro, the film adaptation of this book, is already being shot on location in Rome. It will be perfect if the short novel will come out as a movie tie-in. It had a rather interesting premise.

The Troubles of the Real Police Officer - another discovered manuscript. It came out in Spanish early this year. It's very likely it will be released in English in mid- to late 2012. And the wonderful Natasha Wimmer will probably translate again for FSG.
The Unknown University - the last of Bolaño's 3 major collections of poetry translated by Laura Healy. New Directions will most likely publish this in 2012.

There may be other odds and ends, unpublished/uncollected pieces, and interviews/essays from the anthologies Bolaño por sí mismo and Palabra de América. What is certain is we'll not yet run out of Bolaño covers to look forward to in the next couple of years.

(Bolaño bibliography; Image)

Old badges

2011-08-30T22:08:00.007+08:00

I'm uploading the first two badges I made for the challenge back in January. I eventually replaced these with the badge containing the image used in the cover of Amulet. The Impala was inspired by the getaway vehicle in The Savage Detectives.

(Impala)

A wall of night: Alarcón reads "Gómez Palacio"

2011-08-26T12:32:00.000+08:00

In one of The New Yorker's fiction podcasts, novelist Daniel Alarcón read and discussed "Gómez Palacio", a short story translated by Chris Andrews and collected in Last Evenings on Earth.

You can listen to or download the audio at the following link.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/03/28/110328on_audio_alarcon

(Alarcón)

This craft of verse: the master and his lectures

2011-08-25T21:40:00.004+08:00

We're still infected with borgesitis contracted from yesterday's natal anniversary of "the brave librarian" (the title of RB's essay on him in Between Parentheses). So here are two forking paths that lead to an expanding labyrinth of imagination.

1. Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man

A 47-minute English documentary about the Argentine poet. File size: 260 MB. Right-click title for download link.

2. This Craft of Verse

Recordings of six(!) lectures delivered in Harvard University in fall '67 and spring '68, discovered from the university archives. The lectures were transcribed and published in book form in 2000. Hear the booming voice of the poet, speaking from across time.

Roberto isn't Aira's cup of tea

2011-08-24T21:27:00.002+08:00

Several blogs and literary reviews in the United States have greeted the decision by New Directions to publish your work in English by calling you ‘the next Roberto Bolaño’. What do you make of the Bolaño phenomenon in the USA? Do you think his success has changed the way Latin American fiction will be received in the 21st century?

I’ve hardly read Bolaño. He’s not my cup of tea. What’s more, I come from a time when success was suspicious. I’ll always be marginal. I’ll always have readers, but I’ll never have an audience.

- from an interview with César Aira in Kill Your Darlings, August 2011 (via)

http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2011/08/cesar-aira-writing-is-my-freedom-where-i-receive-orders-from-no-one-not-even-from-myself/

Ficciones - 2011 Argentina Reading Challenge

2011-08-22T11:52:00.000+08:00

Is it too late to champion a reading challenge for this year? Definitely not. If it's as good, as enticing as this, then we'll certainly make the time for it.

The Ficciones (2011 Argentina Reading Challenge) will cover Argentinean literature in Spanish and in translation. The challenge will end in February 14, 2012. So there's still a good six months to pad up the reading list with great books (Borges! Cortázar! Aira!). The challenge is hosted by Jen (Jen and the Pen).

Readers can sign up at this link. And check out the reading suggestions.

I just signed up!

http://argentinareadingchallenge.blogspot.com/

''The Future" starts shooting

2011-08-06T02:55:00.002+08:00

Rutger Hauer is in talks with director Alicia Scherson to act in ''The Future,'' a film adaptation of a Roberto Bolano novella.

NICOLAS VAPORIDIS

Shooting started on July 14. The film will star Nicolas Vaporidis, Manuela Martelli, and Luigi Ciardo.

What happened in McNally Jackson on June 22?

2011-07-29T16:17:00.001+08:00

This is mighty late to be linking to a report about an event (Natasha Wimmer's conversation with The Nation literary editor John Palatella) that happened more than a month ago. But it's always our pleasure ...

Natasha spoke about Bolaño in both a casual and academic way—she mentioned writing things like “B is totally crazy” next to passages where he ranted about other authors (“He really works himself up”), but also shared deeper insights, like that his manic energy stems from his idea that “Real writers are on the edge of an abyss, but instead of this depressing him it filled him with glee.”

She spoke of how strange it was to get to know Bolaño not through writings about his personal life or family, but rather through writings about what literature affected him at different points of his life (for example, while impoverished in Barcelona, he apparently read up on the Napoleonic wars). From this she had to take “biographical clues,” some of which were misleading.

The full report here from Book Stalker. And see also Elka Reads.

Another excerpt from Tres

2011-07-28T09:56:00.001+08:00

via Center for the Art of Translation blog and Three Percent

A bilingual excerpt from Tres in the very first issue of Aldus, a Journal of Translation from Brown University. The English excerpt came from the third poem "A Stroll Through Literature", in translation by Laura Healy.

The journal can be viewed on-screen or downloaded (PDF format) here: http://www.theartmovement.info/aldus/

See also earlier Tres excerpts in Words Without Borders (trans. Erica Mena) and BOMB (trans. Laura Healy).

A Bolaño walking tour, Blanes, Spain

2011-07-16T12:38:00.002+08:00

He had just had a street named after him. Now, The Prague Post's blog Colophon followed his traces in several places - beach, library, apartment residences, barbershop.

Bolano lived in several apartments just blocks from the beach. They are for the most part [nondescript], with no plaques yet to mark his erstwhile presence. The streets were empty by the time we found the apartments, as most were taking siesta. Yelps and laughter from the beach was audible as we snooped around, snapping photos of what might have been Bolano’s barber, just across the street from one of his apartments.

http://www.praguepost.com/blogs/books/2011/07/13/roberto-bolanos-blanes/

The "Distant Star / Estrella Distante" exhibition

2011-07-03T21:17:00.006+08:00

Regen Projects and kurimanzutto have come together to compile another impressive exhibition at the formers highly coveted gallery. Entitled Distant Star / Estrella Distante, the exhibition is based on the writings of Chilean born writer Roberto Bolaño (b. 1953 – d. 2003).

...

Among others, the exhibition will include Carla Rippey, who supplied the cover artwork for Bolaño’s first published book and was a great friend of his in Mexico City when he lived there in the early 70s; Patti Smith ... went to his home in Blanes, Spain, seeking to photograph one object, which ended up being his writing chair; Abraham Cruzvillegas whose work La Barbie roughly references the murders in Sonora as depicted in 2666; Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari’s film Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright is a typewritten love story, referencing Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert, as so much in Bolaño’s work references the vast canon of literature that came before it.

http://slamxhype.com/art-design/distant-star-estrella-distante-an-exhibition-organized-around-the-writings-of-roberto-bolano/

The Regen Projects website schedules the exhibition for July 14. It will run until August 20. The gallery is located in Los Angeles, CA.

(Patti Smith, Madrid, 2010)

The Seamstress and the Wind and the translator

2011-06-29T14:07:00.002+08:00

Back-to-back interviews with Rosalie Knecht, the translator of the latest novella by César Aira:

Interview by Scott Esposito @ The Conversational Reading

Interview by Alicia Kennedy @ The Awl (which also points to an essay in Harper's [June 2011, needs subscription])

(Rosalie Knecht)

What happened in the Galapagos Art Space?

2011-06-29T13:39:00.001+08:00

Two reported on the night celebrating the nonfiction of RB:

One from The Book Bench (The New Yorker); the other from BOMBLOG (via fiction and caffeine).

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/06/into-the-wilds-of-roberto-bolao-1.html

http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/5463

A reading list from WWB

2011-06-14T15:03:00.000+08:00

If you're compiling a reading list from Roberto Bolaño's Between Parentheses, you can find many of his recommended authors right here at WWB.
- Susan Harris, Words Without Borders

http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-bolano-guide-to-wwb/

A night between parentheses

2011-06-13T23:04:00.001+08:00

BETWEEN PARENTHESES: Celebrating the Nonfiction of Roberto Bolaño

WITH: **translator Natasha Wimmer, novelist Francisco Goldman, The Believer editor Heidi Julavits, Harper’s contributing editor Wyatt Mason, and The Paris Review editor Lorin Stein**

MONDAY: June 13

DOORS: 7pm

START: 7:30pm

TICKETS: FREE

VENUE: Galapagos Art Space

ADDRESS: Brooklyn, NY 11201

http://galapagosartspace.com/event/between-parentheses-celebrating-the-nonfiction-of-roberto-bolano

Literary brotherhood

2011-06-08T22:02:00.001+08:00

In the previously linked interview with Enrique Vila-Matas, his answer to the last question, quoted below, reminds me of another mention of Bolaño as a "brother".

Vila-Matas: Meeting Bolaño in 1996 meant that I no longer felt alone as a writer. In that Spain, which was trapped in a provincialism and an antiquated realism, finding myself with someone who from the very first moment felt like a literary brother helped me to feel free and not consider myself as strange as some of my colleagues would have me believe. Or maybe it was the opposite: I was stranger still. We laughed together very much. We wrote letters to imbeciles and we talked of a beauty that was short-lived and whose end would be disastrous.

Here's Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, author of Bonsai and The Private Lives of Trees, in an interview in June last year:

Q: What do you think of the Roberto Bolaño phenomenon in the US?

Zambra: I think what has happened with Bolaño is wonderful. His work deserves all the attention in the world and it’s impossible to exhaust it in one or two readings. On the contrary, we will be reading and re-reading his books for a long time to come. Bolaño is to me like an older brother whom I admire without reservations. I anxiously await his return from his travels so I can listen to his stories. I don’t want him ever to die. And don’t tell me he’s dead. I won’t believe you.

http://www.planet-mag.com/2010/books/sergio-missana/alejandro-zambra/

Vila-Matas in Paris

2011-06-06T23:08:00.001+08:00

I believe that fiction is the only thing that brings me closer to the truth that reality obscures. There remains to be written a great book, a book that would be the missing chapter in the development of the epic. This chapter would include all of those—from Cervantes through Kafka and Musil—who struggle with a colossal strength against all forms of fakery and pretense. Their struggle has always had an obvious touch of paradox, since those who so struggled were writers that were up to their ears in fiction. They searched for truth through fiction. And out of this stylistic tension have emerged marvelous semblances of the truth, as well as the best pages of modern literature.

– Enrique Vila-Matas, interviewed by Scott Esposito about his third translated book Never Any End to Paris, for The Paris Review Daily

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/06/06/enrique-vila-matas-on-never-any-end-to-paris/

What Ishiguro read in 2009

2011-05-31T21:14:00.000+08:00

My reading this year was dominated by Roberto Bolaño's two massive novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666 (both Picador). The first is the superior, but 2666, for all its occasional longueurs, is still quite magnificent. Bolaño links seamlessly South American, US and European traditions; modernism with gritty realism and the crime thriller. These are both important works and the advent of Bolaño is a significant moment in the history of modern fiction.

– Kazuo Ishiguro, Books of the year 2009, The Observer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/22/books-of-the-year-2009

The Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity ...

2011-05-28T18:39:00.008+08:00

... is presented by bibliographing and Wuthering Expectations.

Disembraining begins the last week of June.

http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2011/05/anything-ubu-readalong-opportunity.html