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

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.

Rodrigo Fresán, book thief

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.

What happened in McNally Jackson on June 22?

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.

What happened in the Galapagos Art Space?

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

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

 

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

 

The Third Reich cover

While I'm still giddy at the sight of this parenthetical beauty, I already want to turn on the reading light for this:

(Amazon page)

"Beach" in Granta

"Beach", a Bolaño short story, is in the magazine Granta 114: Aliens. The story also appears in the collection Between Parentheses, edited by Ignacio Echevarría and translated by Natasha Wimmer. Subscription is required to access the story online, but an earlier translation appeared in Eyeshot (here) while the original Spanish is here.

A controversy surrounded the classification of the piece as fiction or nonfiction. "Playa" ("Beach") was initially classified as a nonfiction. It first appeared as one of the essays in Entre paréntesis. The story mentioned drug addiction which led some reviewers and critics to assume that Bolaño was once a drug user. Some write-ups appeared mentioning his alleged drug use. This addiction and the decadent life associated with it, as well as his eventual death from a liver disease, were said to have contributed to the "Bolaño myth." However, Bolaño's drug use was denied by his wife and close friends so this essay was now considered to be a work of fiction.


See also:

"A Chilean Writer’s Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past" by Larry Rohter, The New York Times

'Bolaño’s “The Beach” translated at Eyeshot in December' by Maud Newton

"The new Granta stokes the Roberto Bolano mystique" by Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette

 

(Granta cover)

The Hudson Review – The Spanish Issue

The Spring 2011 issue of The Hudson Review (The Spanish Issue) contains exciting pieces by Latin American writers. They include, among others:

- "The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom" by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer [the first of "three insufferable speeches" in Between Parentheses collection, out next month, the Amazon page has a partial preview, click cover for an inside look] 

- "A Double Education" by Antonio Muñoz Molina

- "A Course in English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires: The Seventh Class" by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Esther Allen

- Extracts from the long poem "The Solitudes" by Luis de Góngora, translated by Edith Grossman

[via Wuthering Expectations, which is running a cool series of posts on this journal issue; image from Queen Sofía Spanish Institute (New York), celebrating the issue through "an evening of readings and discussion" on May 18]

In Geneva, in Madrid

At The Daily Beast, yet another excerpt from Between Parentheses, about Bolaño's travels in the city of Geneva and Madrid.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-28/robert-bolanos-european-adventures/




(Madrid)

Bolaño, blurbist

(     )

More mini-excerpts from Between Parentheses.

Conversational Reading printed some of Bolaño's takes on writers, taken from his essays in the upcoming book. 

http://conversationalreading.com/the-between-parentheses-reading-list/

"Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint...."

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.
– Paul Valéry, "The Yalu"

The blog Biblioklept has posted some excerpts from Between Parentheses, about Bolaño's take on American writers.

On Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:
http://biblioklept.org/2011/04/20/roberto-bolano-on-blood-meridian/
 
On Philip K. Dick's experiments:
http://biblioklept.org/2011/04/09/dick-was-a-kind-of-kafka-steeped-in-lsd-and-rage-roberto-bolano-on-philip-k-dick/
 
On William S. Burroughs's 'sainthood':
http://biblioklept.org/2011/04/05/roberto-bolano-on-william-burroughs/


See also:

"Guest Post: What Bolaño Read: The Americans" by Tom McCartan
http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/guest_post_what_bolano_read2/

'“Twain Is the Day, Melville the Night” — Roberto Bolaño on U.S. Writers' by Biblioklept
http://biblioklept.org/2011/01/13/twain-is-the-day-melville-the-night-roberto-bolano-on-u-s-writers/


The above Valéry quote is one of three epigraphs in Blood Meridian. But it wouldn't be out of place in 2666, no.



(Detail from Grayground by Ronald Ventura)

"Exiles"

...the shadow of my native land wasn’t erased and in the depths of my stupid heart the certainty persisted that it was there that my destiny lay.  

NYRblog posts "Exiles," another essay from Between Parentheses (due out next month). 

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/13/exiles/

"Who Would Dare?"

After Camus, everything changed.  

An essay from Between Parentheses (ed. Ignacio Echevarria, trans. Natasha Wimmer, forthcoming in May) is posted at the NYRblog. 

In "Who Would Dare?" Bolaño tells of his adventures as "book hijacker" and ponders the question of whether it was right for an author to recommend his own books to a man who was sentenced to death.

(via The Millions)

The 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge

 

"Literature and Exile"

"Literature and Exile," a speech from Between Parentheses, appears in The Nation.

The 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge