This is a
book celebrating Spanish Literature and is specifically a work featuring twenty-eight
living writers (they were all living at the time the work was compiled, however
unfortunately a couple have passed away since). Each writer is set the
challenge of identifying their key or favourite pieces they have written
explain why they are favoured, talk about their literary influences and in the
majority of cases answer Valerie Miles’ questions (the imagination, editor and
presenter of this project). Then the work in question is presented, finishing
up with a bibliography of their works and a listing of the writer’s awards and
recognitions. As the Prologue explains, this behemoth, weighing in at over 700
large, small font, pages, the works of only established writers was considered
as it is assumed younger writers may not have reached (or be able to identify
with) the peak of their powers as yet, and therefore may not have created their
favourite piece.
Given my
yearning for more Vila-Matas, I jumped straight into this work with his offering,
a section from “Because She Didn’t Ask”. This is again a first person narration
of Vila_Matas writing a story for Sophie Calle, who will live out the story for
at the most one full year. Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, conceptual
and installation artist, one of her well known traits is to follow strangers
and investigate their private lives. She has collaborated with writer Paul
Auster, specifically asking him to invent a fictive character which she would
attempt to resemble. In fact Enrique Vila-Matas mentions the Paul Auster
connection with his fictional meeting of Calle in Paris. In Vila-Matas’ work,
Auster had declined the invitation he is will to accept. As per “The Illogic of
Kassel” the notebook style of our writer reveals the delays to the project,
what this does to his own creative process and the onset of writer’s block. Again
another revelation of the art of writing, the creative process, the art of
literature:
2.
I go over the first lines in my
red notebook. I wrote them down last year, on the 1st of September: “The
sun is rising in my study with high windows as I inaugurate my red notebook or
diary, where I’ll write about Barcelona and other nervous cities, asking myself
my name, who is it that’s writing these words, and it occurs to me that my
study is like a cranium from which I spring anew, like an imaginary citizen…”
How the devil could I bring such
intensely literary sentences to life? I’m in the same room where I wrote them
the first time around, but it’s hard to feel as though my study were a cranium
from which I spring anew, like an imaginary citizen.
I realize the sentences that
inaugurate my diary can’t possibly be brought to real life, they’re pure
literature. How could I saunter around my desk leisurely, thinking I’m walking
around the inside of a skull? As a result I yawn, I mope, I feel more paralyzed
than ever. Then suddenly it dawns on me that by yawning, by opening my mouth, I’ve
found the best way of feeling these literary sentences of mine as something experienced. Yawning worked a small
miracle and I stretched and began splintering like an abyss and went so far as
to merge with the void.
In my memory only the cranium
remains, which my imagination is depositing at this exact moment on top of my
table, like someone lowering their head to rest on their desk at work.
Whilst I
won’t give away the outcome of Vila-Matas’ piece and interactions with Sophie
Calle, it is another wonderful insight into the mind of a writer, one who is
not emanoured to follow your usual rules of engagement, one you need to put
yourself at his mercy and go along for the ride. At one stage in the excerpt
Vila-Matas becomes ill and as a result he is hospitalised, wanting something to
read he references Sergio Pitol and his sentence “I adore hospitals”, so in
pure Vila-Matas style, I’ll let him write my journey and the next writer from
this collection I visited was Mexican Sergio Pitol himself…
Pitol was
bedridden from age six until age twelve with malaria and as a result he became
a voracious reader, in his own introductory words, “A full-time traveller, a
treasure hunter.” This is one of the joys of this book, having the writer
themselves explain a little about their chosen work, and their influences (but
more on that later).
Pitol’s
selection was “By Night in Bukhara” taken from “Nocturno De Bujara”. Bukhara is
in Uzbekistan, and is a UNESCO World Heritage listed site. Our writer goes
there, “one of the navels of the universe”, “Where the earth is able to form a
connection with the heavens”. A fragmentary tale, intertwined with a story off
a rich Italian artist who the writer and his friend have sent from Poland to
Samarkand, blended with a fable of princesses and pain, injury and the sense of
touch. Mystical like the place Bukhara itself:
The heart of Bukhara doesn’t
seems to have seen a single change in the last eight centuries. I walked with
Dolores and Kyrim through the labyrinth of alleys barely wide enough for two
people. Extremely narrow paths that opened amazingly onto wide plazas from
which rose the mosques of the Po-i-Kalan, of the Lab-i-Hauz, the Samani and
Chashma-Ayub mausoleums, the slender, herculean Kalan minaret, the ruins of the
ancient bazaar. At a certain hour, late into the evening, the traveler wandering
through empty alleys (flanked by one-storey, and occasional two-storey, windowless
houses with wooden doors whose every centimetre is carved over, each different
from the one before, narrating in some way the history and signalling the
position of the family that inhabits it, reinscribed every hundred-and-fifty or
two-hundred years with the same designs, legends, and symbols they bore in the
eighteenth, fifteenth, and twelfth centuries) can hear the echo of his own
steps coming back to him from another time.
Pitol,
originally a diplomat, had a wealth of travelling and life experiences, this
theme coming through strongly in his writing. The work in this collection was
translated by Steve Dolph. To think a Mexican, writing in Spanish is giving us
a tale from Uzbekistan!!! With fifty-two works listed in his bibliography in
this book, it is amazing to think that his first work to be translated into
English was released only this year, the massive novel “The Art of Flight”
translated by George Henson and published by Deep Vellum, with an introduction
by....Enrique Vila-Matas himself. But that’s where my trail comes to an end;
Pitol had no references to contemporary Spanish language writers in his work so
I moved on to Javier Marias, author of numerous works, many with English
language translations including “The Infatuations” (tr Margaret Jull Costa).
His selected piece is from “Tomorrow In The Battle Think Of Me” (translated by
Esther Allen), interestingly the novel being released in English in 1996 by New
Directions and being translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Given a
number of readers here know Marias’ work, I thought the more prudent section to
quote is from his influences (titled “In Conversation With The Dead” for each
writer):
And of course Cervantes, although
in the case of Cervantes he comes to me directly in the Spanish language, but
also indirectly in the English language because I did translate Tristam
Shandy about 30 years ago, and it was a hard task and a long one, and
Sterne was so influenced by Cervantes in that novel that in a way I would say
that perhaps it is much more Cervantine than any Spanish novel of the
eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. And of course by translating that book when
I was young I learned so much about writing and about the use of time in the
novel, that I also have a rather permanent dialogue as it were with Sterne
himself and with Cervantes as well. Of course there are many others, the
authors I have translated into Spanish, because translation is one of the best
possible exercises for a writer. If you know two languages and you can
translate, I think that’s the best way to learn how to write. If I had a
creative writing school, which I would not, but if I did, I would only have
students who speak at least two languages and make them translate. Because you
happen to be not only a privileged reader, but a privileged writer if you can
renounce your own style, if you have one, and adopt some else’s – someone who
is much better than you, always if you are translating classics at least – and
if you can rewrite that in your own language in an acceptable way, let alone if
it is in a very good way, you are sharpening your instruments and you writing
will improve tremendously. I translated poetry by Nabokov and Faulkner, John
Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, Stevenson, Auden, Thomas Browne, Isak Dinesen, Yeats.
Finally
for this review I read the section for Antonio Muñoz Molina, I read and
reviewed his massive “In The Night of Time” (translated by Edith Grossman) last
year, and although I found it rather tedious, I thought it was time to explore
another of his works to see if this would resonate with me a little better. He
includes two works in this collection, including a piece from “El Jinete Polco”
(“The Polish Horseman”), translated by Valerie Miles, and piece from “Sepharad,
A Novel”, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
You are not an isolated person
and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face nor your profession
nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The
last shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable. Every morning you wake
up thinking you are the same person you were the night before, recognizing an
identical face in the mirror, but sometimes in your sleep you’ve been
disoriented by cruel shards of sadness or ancient passions that cast a muddy,
somber light on the dawn, and the face is different, changed by time, like a
seashell ground by sand and the pounding and salt of the sea. Even as you lie
perfectly motionless, you are shifting, and the chemistry that constitutes your
imagination and consciousness is altered infinitesimally every moment. Whole
scenes and perspectives from the distant past fan out, open and close like the
straight lines of olive groves or plowed furrows seen from the window of a
racing train. For a few seconds, a taste or a smell or some music on the radio
or the sound of a name turn you into the person you were thirty or forty years
ago. You are a frightened child on his first day of school, or a round-faced
young man with shy eyes and the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip, and when
you look in the mirror you are a man over forty whose black hair is beginning
to be shot with gray, whose face holds no traces of your boyhood, though a sort
of unfading youth accompanies you as an adult, through work and marriage, your
obligations and secret dreams and responsibility for your children. You are
every one of the different people you have been, the ones you imagined you
would be, the ones you never were, and the ones you hoped to become and now are
thankful you didn’t.
An
exploration of the shifting conditions of self, a passage which may lead me to
explore more of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s work. This is the beauty of this
collection, you can dabble in known or unknown writers, have an appetiser of
their offerings before taking the plunge with a full novel or collection of
their works. Readers or fans of Spanish language literature should include a
copy of this work on their shelves, a work which I couldn’t read from cover to
cover, but one I will reference over and over again in the coming years.
I will be
referencing it again in the coming weeks as I participate in Women in
Translation Month, the inclusion of only five of the twenty-eight writers being
women is of a concern, however I plan to have a daily post on this blog either
reviewing a work or looking at a snippet of a writer’s work, a short story or
an excerpt from this collection, giving you a few resources so you can explore
their writing further. Stay tuned during August as I bring you highlights from
this book....and another....but more on that later.
1 comment:
This is one I'm really keen to try (well, own, actually!). Nice to see writers in their own words and through their own words...
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