Lemebel, Cortázar, Ōe, Ishiguro, Wallace, Bolaño (Grand Street links)

Selected online things from the defunct magazine Grand Street.

Two Chronicles by Pedro Lemebel, trans. Mary Ann Newman

A Rejected Chapter from Hopscotch, trans. Alberto Manguel

A dialogue between Kazuo Ishiguro and Ōe Kenzaburo

Death Is Not the End by David Foster Wallace

Speaking of Grand Street, issue # 67 (Fire) (1999) must be collectible. It marked the English debut of Roberto Bolaño with "Phone Calls", translated by Mark Schafer. Upon his death, the translation was reprinted in his memory, in Grand Street # 72 (Detours) (2003).

The "third" book of Hopscotch

Hopscotch was the book that got me started in transla­tion, that won me that National Book Award [for Translation, now defunct], and also led me to do One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez wanted me to do his book but at the moment I was tied up with Miguel Ángel Asturias’s “banana trilogy.” Cortázar told Gabo to wait, which he did, to the evident satisfaction of all con­cerned. So Hopscotch was for me what the hydrographic cliché calls a watershed moment as my life took the direction it was to follow from then on. I hadn’t read the book but I skimmed some pages and did two sample chapters, the first and one far­ther along, I can’t remember which. Editor Sara Blackburn and Julio both liked my version and I was off and away.

What drew me to the novel and to Julio were the varie­gated interests he and I had in common: jazz, humor, liberal politics, and inventive art and writing. As I have said, I read the complete novel only as I translated it. This strange and uncommon procedure somehow followed the nature of the book it­self and I do not think it hurt the translation in any way. In­deed, it may have insured its success. ...

One stiff-necked critic was outraged that he should be called upon to read the novel twice. Julio wrote me and figu­ratively shook his head over the fact that the poor boob did not know that he was being toyed with. He went on to say that it was bad enough to ask people to read his novel once, let alone twice. He would never do such a thing. When I finished the translation I remembered the instructions at the beginning and realized that I had offered a third reading of the novel by simply barging through from the first page to the last. What that obtuse critic had not realized was that hopscotch is a game, something to be played. The version that Julio had sketched out on the cover of the novel was evidently the way the game is played in Argentina, starting on a square called Earth and following the numbers to a square called Heaven. It was only natural that his intellectual friskiness should have been noticed by his countryman, Jorge Luis Borges, who was the first to publish Julio’s work. Would that their poor, trou­bled and so often solemn birthplace had been more like them in its history. Cortázar also maintained that our species was misnamed and should have been called homo ludens (nothing to do with any coughing gays).

- Translator Gregory Rabassa writing about Hopscotch, from his memoir If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents. (Excerpts here)

Hopscotch soundtrack

Via one of my groups in Goodreads, all the jazz music played in Julio Cortázar's Rayuela can be listened to in Youtube (playlist 1 or playlist 2).

The music is in the 2001 album Jazzuela. Julio Cortázar y el Jazz (song list).

Enjoy! And, yeah, you can hop around the songs.

César Aira on Argentine literature

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).

If you could save only five books ...

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.)

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

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."

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