Juan Villoro

Hello,

I translated “Among Friends,” a story by Juan Villoro, for Issue 8 of n+1. It’s an excellent story by an excellent (& egregiously untranslated) author, accompanied by stills from a beautiful, vertiginous video by Melanie Smith and Rafael Ortega.

The rest of the issue is also great, so please go buy and read it.

Thanks!

David

On Jerome Rothenberg and Navajo Horse Songs for the Poetry Foundation

On Arthur Russell for After All

http://www.afterall.org/onlinecurrent.html?online_id=66

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
David Noriega
6th January 2009

Wild Combination is director Matt Wolf’s self-described filmic “portrait” of Arthur Russell, the cellist, composer and songwriter whose music – which traversed the spectrum from minimalist avant-garde to disco – has recently provoked a frenzy of interest and praise after a lifetime of obscurity. The film lands somewhere in between biographical documentary and expressionistic rendition of Russell’s music; talking-head testimonials from friends, family and collaborators are interspersed with evocative landscape shots and archival footage. The end result is engrossing and, on occasion, poignant.

Russell grew up in Oskaloosa, Iowa, before running away from home in his teens. In San Francisco, he changed his name from Charles to Arthur and joined a Buddhist commune. In 1973 he moved to New York, where he became deeply embedded in the legendary downtown art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. There he obsessively proceeded to create a large, inchoate and dizzyingly variegated body of work until his death from AIDS in 1992. Such a life is well stocked with the stuff of narrative pleasure and pathos, and Wild Combination indulges the viewer with just the right amount of these things. Russell’s father, verging on tears, describes hitting his son after finding weed paraphernalia in his room; Allen Ginsberg, a good friend and collaborator, tells us (by way of archival footage) that Arthur ignored his duties at the San Francisco commune because he was perpetually holed up in the seminary playing his cello. When the setting shifts to downtown Manhattan, the film pauses long enough to give a detailed panorama of a thrilling cultural moment rife with down and out bohos, cheap rent, heady performance art and bacchanalian dance parties. Here Russell was, for a time, artistic director of the vanguard performance space The Kitchen, and communed with the likes of Rhys Chatham and Philip Glass (who appears as one of the film’s most entertaining and informative interviewees). Finally, we are confronted with the tragedy of Russell’s illness and death, made especially poignant by the intimate, honest testimony of Tom Lee, his longtime lover and confidante.

Wild Combination’s overall success lies in its ability to retain Russell’s music at the heart of his biography. Wolf thoroughly canvasses Russell’s extensive and mind-bogglingly diverse catalogue, which includes, among other things, avant-garde orchestral compositions, underground disco hits (songs like “Is It All Over My Face” and “Go Bang,” which earned the artist his few moments of commercial success), and a number of solo cello and voice recordings that evade categorization. Throughout the film Wolf deploys the simple but satisfying tactic of matching the music with some cleverly chosen visual component. To wit, a selection from Instrumentals– a series of playful and pop-sensible, yet unconventional, compositions from early in Russell’s New York career – is accompanied by old black and white cartoon footage of eerily anthropomorphized flowers and trees prancing hypnotically across the screen.

Indeed, one of the film’s greatest joys is that it compounds the synaesthetic impressions already facilitated by Russell’s songs, which, in a natural reversal of Goethe’s famous definition of architecture as frozen music, encourage a perception of sound as fluid space. This is particularly true of Russell’s solo recordings, which reached their zenith with the 1986 album World of Echo, and which the film makes clear were the products of Russell’s most solitary and impassioned work. They also give Wolf the opportunity to delve into Russell’s most charming idiosyncrasies, such as composing all day long with the blender on.

These are beautifully fragile songs, interweaving plangent vocal melodies with spare cello parts played through delicately applied electronic filters. It’s not hard to imagine the cello’s deep bass notes as the gentle tectonic movements of a soft but sturdy ground, its scraping treble notes and shards of feedback as jet streams in an enormous Midwestern sky. Russell’s unaffected singing hovers tenuously between the two realms, an interplay of echo and silence that suggests fragmented enclosures – the skeletal silhouettes of farm machinery, perhaps. Russell’s music is the boundlessness of an Iowa cornfield paradoxically contained within the reverberating space of a New York City loft. Thanks to Wolf’s visual overtures (which include numerous shots of cornfields), it is also a smattering of city lights as seen across a river, or an unraveling cassette tape floating underwater, or simply colors shimmering in an empty space.

In many ways Wild Combination cannot help but be deeply nostalgic. On the simplest level, as expressed by Russell’s loved ones, it is nostalgic for a time when the man was still alive and making music. But the film also yearns for a time when downtown Manhattan was a haven for authentically bohemian and adventurous artists, poets and musicians; and even for a time when hearing a piece of recorded music meant knowing that, somewhere in the room, part of a simple machine was reassuringly spinning. (Abstract close-ups of rotating records and tapes are, indeed, one of Wolf’s favorite visual motifs.) There is a question implicit in the film’s wistful approach: Why did it take so long for Arthur Russell’s music to reach a larger audience? In other words, why now and not then?

Typically, narratives of under-appreciated genius hinge on a volatile or reclusive artist whose nature alienates him from the practices and institutions of his field – one who has, say, a profound aversion to live performance or an intense dislike for the gregarious schmoozing and self-promotion that so often drives success. Wild Combination makes clear that Russell, though certainly spacey and eccentric, was no maladjust working in self-imposed isolation. He collaborated with important artists of his time, had a natural gift for leadership and mediation, and relished his active position within a defined artistic community. What’s more, this community was the birthplace for much of the music that, by the end of the 20th century, had been either explosively commodified in popular culture (punk rock, hip-hop) or canonized in the avant-garde (minimalism).

Wild Combination offers a few possible answers to this question. There is Russell’s obsessive perfectionism, which kept him from completing most of his projects. There is also the dogged multiplicity pointed out by the musician and critic David Toop: Whereas most members of the downtown music scene had well-defined signature styles, Russell hopped from genre to genre, unwilling to settle for either cerebral experimentalism or pop accessibility. Most artists who succeed, commercially or critically, in combining the experimental with the conventional do so by situating themselves solidly on either end of the spectrum and picking, gingerly and methodically, from the other, thus slightly expanding the common conception of what constitutes “pop” or “avant-garde.” The Talking Heads (with whom Russell played on several occasions) were a pop band that took cues from the avant-garde; Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca were avant-garde composers that borrowed elements (i.e., electric guitars) from rock music. Russell was incapable of such selective and repetitive appropriation for the simple reason that he could not sit still. I imagine him continually subsumed in what Brian Eno called “idiot glee,”[1] an almost trancelike state of passionate playfulness, writing an album of country songs, then arranging a piece for chamber ensemble, then seeing if he could tap the mass market by making people dance (a ritual in which he himself never partook). In all of these endeavors Russell was too liberal with his blending. More than arranging casual encounters between genres, he thoroughly crossbred them: His pop songs were too weird and his weird pieces were too poppy.

At one point in Wild Combination, Philip Glass pays Russell a great musical compliment: “People who become an artist on an instrument – the instrument becomes bent to their needs and their expression. And that’s what he did.” What follows is footage of Russell playing live, alone with his cello. In seeing this performance it’s not hard to imagine that, had we been there, we wouldn’t have known quite what to make of it. First of all, Russell looks different – bearded and longhaired, not the clean-cut Iowan people knew. Then there’s the song. It starts out as a mildly discordant drone, Russell chanting “Eli” over a sustained chord. But soon a plaintive, folk-like melody emerges. “Eli,” as it turns out, is the name of a dog that nobody likes.

Here is Russell in all his contradictions: An earnest Midwesterner, a West Coast Buddhist, a natural New Yorker; a restless experimenter who explored the natural boundaries of his voice and instrument, but also a songwriter of great and moving simplicity. Wild Combination leaves us with the feeling that Russell was a tricky figure to pin down. Each of the film’s interviewees understands him differently. To his parents he is Chucky, a troubled adolescent with overambitious reading habits; to Ginsberg he is a Buddhist bubblegum poet; to Lee he is “the guy I wanted to be sitting on the couch with.” Somehow he even manages to be, in the words of disco diva Lola Love, “the funkiest white boy I ever met.” It is in this sense that Wild Combination succeeds as a portrait rather than a simple biography. Like any good portrait it casts its light with affectionate restraint, enough to reveal its subject’s complexity, but not enough to rob it of its mystery.

On El Malpensante for n+1

A profile of Colombian literary magazine El Malpensante for n+1 Web.

http://nplusonemag.com/wrongthinkingillfeeling

Wrong-Thinking, Ill-Feeling

November 24th, 2008

When Mario Jursich and Andres Hoyos founded the literary-cultural magazine El Malpensante in 1996, Colombia’s president, Ernesto Samper, had recently emerged unscathed from a series of trials revealing financial ties between his campaign and one of Colombia’s most infamous and powerful drug cartels, the Cartel de Cali. The armed conflict between military, guerrilla, and paramilitary groups was reaching new violent heights and infiltrating nearly every level of urban and rural life. The country was enshrouded in an atmosphere of chaos and fear, so thorough and penetrating that a sinister new mantra soon emerged: todos los colombianos somos secuestrables—all Colombians are kidnappable. All of us: not just the wealthy and the powerful. (The world secuestrable, cumbersome in English, is succinct and correct in Spanish, and was ubiquitous at the time). This national state of fear left little space for intellectual pursuits. El Espectador, the country’s oldest newspaper, had recently cancelled its Sunday magazine, which until that point had served as a lonely bastion for Colombian literary writing. Print media, television, and radio, when they weren’t dedicated to covering massacres and unpunished political corruption, provided solace in distraction—beauty queens, telenovelas, soccer.

This is not to say there was no writing. The unrest and cynicism of the mid-90s saw the rise of a new generation of Colombian novelists who recoiled from the picturesque ruralism of García Márquez and the rest of their Boom predecessors, opting instead for a seamy urban realism directly influenced by the narco-violence surrounding them. (Fernando Vallejo’s novel La virgen de los sicarios [Our Lady of the Assassins] had been published in 1994 and is probably the most successful example.) Yet these writers lacked any sort of flagship institution, a publication that would reliably disseminate and discuss their work; a cohesive, public arena to foster a culture of criticism or a communal sense of aesthetic appreciation.

El Malpensante in many ways emerged directly from this hole in Colombian literary and intellectual culture. Hoyos and Jursich set out to assemble a cosmopolitan magazine, one that took ‘Literature’ as a lens through which to view the world. The first issue, which established the magazine’s subtitle as “Paradoxical Readings,” was unprecedented in Colombia for the quality, scope, and vitality of its content. Its cover—a black and white photograph of a nude woman covered neck-down in paint, seductively biting a cigarette—was provocative and elegant at once. The content consisted in roughly equal parts of original material and of work reprinted or translated (by either Hoyos or Jursich) from different sources. There were essays by Gabriel Zaid (a renowned Mexican writer) and Héctor Abad Faciolince (who has since become a prominent figure in Colombian letters, not least due to his work in El Malpensante); a short story from the young and then-unknown Colombian Antonio Caballero, and letters from the also young (though dead) Colombian Andrés Caicedo; an essay from 1746 by the Spanish Benedictine monk Benito Jerónimo Feijóo, inaugurating a feature that exhumed writings from the distant past; texts from older but underrepresented Latin American authors; and then translations of Mark Twain (“Advice to Youth”), H. L. Mencken (“Against Women”) and Salman Rushdie (“In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again.”) All this at a time when there was hardly a place in Bogotá to read book reviews.

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Since then, El Malpensante has published every month and a half, each issue roughly 90 pages long. In physical appearance it lands somewhere between The Believer and Harper’s, though with more space devoted to illustration and design than either. Its pages are in color and only slightly glossy. While some journalistic pieces are adorned with relevant photographs, most are accompanied by prominent and original artwork, almost exclusively from Colombian and Latin American artists. (In fact, the magazine has directly contributed to a certain Colombian design aesthetic that is sleek, comic-inspired and Photoshop-heavy, as exemplified by the frequent contributions of Bogotá artist Camilo Mahecha; these, however, are usually offset by more subdued pen drawings or gouaches.) The ad space inside El Malpensante is largely dedicated to cultural endeavors—publishing imprints, university programs, book fairs—while the back page is reserved for cars, banks, watches, or whiskey.

The magazine’s written content can best be understood by the meanings and implications of its title. The word malpensante translates loosely to “ill-thinker.” As employed by the magazine (in reference to itself and, ideally, its readership), the word essentially denotes a perpetual critic or skeptic, one who is predisposed to think ill of things until they prove themselves worthy. Or, looking at the term a little differently, a “wrong-thinker,” one who opts to methodically think the wrong thoughts in the face of established and available ones. The term also recalls malpensado, a word common in Colombian parlance and a key player in my early adolescent formation in Bogotá: a malpensado is simply someone with a dirty mind, prone to finding obscene meanings behind any and all gestures, statements or events. (It is also often applied ironically to anyone who points out such salacious undertones when they are meant to be obvious.)

At its best, El Malpensante exhibits not only the critical rigor that is expected of a publication of its sort, but also a touch of youthful perversity and mischief, now adult in its methods and motivations. Brief pieces are ironic and droll but relentlessly critical, ruminating on any number of things, from the indelible craters in Bogotá’s roads, say, or Paris Hilton’s unintentional aphorisms, to the perennial “death of poetry.” Fiction usually comes from young, emerging Colombian writers, and is often violent, sexual, or at least unnerving. As Jursich said to me, “it is a declared purpose of the magazine to irritate the reader.” One issue opens with a letter from three women renouncing their support for the magazine based on a story by the young Colombian writer Luis Miguel Rivas, outraged by its insensitivity toward the rape of a female character.

+ + +

Politically, El Malpensante studiously avoids opening itself to charges of leftism-understandably so, perhaps, given that they exist in a country where decades of violence from Marxist guerrilla groups have ensured that the notion of an orthodox Left seems both grim and absurd, and where legitimate leftist parties habitually fail to resist being associated—or, in the most disappointing cases, actually associating—with FARC and its drug-funded infrastructure of violence.

So El Malpensante is frequently critical of the Latin American Left—in a number of articles, for instance, questioning or openly disparaging the politics of Hugo Chávez and his allies. Jursich insists that El Malpensante is a “non-ideological” publication (one generally ought to be skeptical of such claims); what he really means, I think, is that its ideology is leftist but reticently so, profoundly dissatisfied with the state of the Left as it exists concretely. Thus, it pretends to renounce ideology altogether in order to better remain true to its ethos, to ill-think and wrong-think through the problems of the Left, and in so doing to combat the obsolete dogmatism that has led so many Colombian and Latin American political movements down the paths of corruption, cruelty, and failure. El Malpensante removed itself from politics in order to build a sanctuary for art and culture; its non-ideology represented, politically, a commitment more than a withdrawal: when it touched on politics, it would do so with the knowledge that liberals and conservatives alike were culpable for the same failures and as such deserved equal criticism.

The magazine’s unwillingness to be pegged as a leftist publication (verging on fear, almost) has led it on a few occasions to the tactic of publishing articles advancing neoliberal or even blatantly conservative doctrines—most notably when the magazine published a translation of prominent U.S. neocon Edward Luttwak’s essay “Give War a Chance.” In such cases El Malpensante might seem dedicated to the easy principle of provocation; to “irritate the reader” runs the risk of becoming an end in itself rather than a means to foster introspective analysis, criticism, and debate. When I visited El Malpensante to talk with Mario Jursich, he cited “Give War a Chance” as the prime example of the magazine’s non-ideological character: he did so eagerly and automatically, and yet he couldn’t quite remember Luttwak’s name.

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In the twelve years since El Malpensante first came to life, Colombia’s political and social climate has changed, and most would be hard pressed to argue that it hasn’t improved. State power, once hopelessly corrupt and ineffective, is not nearly as much those things as it used to be: Colombians are no longer indiscriminately kidnappable, and even in the last few months FARC has suffered enough serious blows to bring up the possibility, however complicated or distant, of a foreseeable defeat. Since January, three of FARC’s top commanders have died or been killed; a significant number of valuable hostages have escaped or been rescued (including Íngrid Betancourt, a French-Colombian politician who was captive for over six years and provided the rebels with a great deal of leverage in negotiation); the military has obtained crucial information on FARC’s inner workings, and guerrilla numbers and military strength have severely declined. All this has come to pass under the leadership of President Álvaro Uribe, variously described as center- or far-right, but nevertheless an unabashed militarist who was George W. Bush’s strongest ally in Latin America and has thus counted on billions’ worth of US money and weapons under Plan Colombia. For having reduced and contained a violence that used to be immense and impervious, Uribe is popular even amongst otherwise stubbornly liberal Colombians. And rightly so, perhaps; no one can reasonably argue against rescuing innocent hostages, or eradicating the fear of bombs in shopping malls and on major urban streets.

Yet the methods behind the government’s recent successes have been called into question. Significant ties have emerged between military and government officials and the AUC, Colombia’s largest right-wing paramilitary group, which is as infamous as the guerrillas it seeks to eradicate for the cruelty and scale of its human rights violations. More recently, the commander of Colombia’s army resigned after a series of investigations uncovered the military’s widespread practice of murdering innocent, often destitute civilians in order to falsely count them as insurgents killed in combat. One is left to wonder, then, about the true nature of the Uribe administration’s progress: while much of the countryside remains deeply vulnerable to the ongoing violence, the peace and prosperity that have resurged in recent years in cities like Bogotá and Medellín seem to be the product of a severely questionable politics. Is Colombia better, then, because there is social justice and political accountability? Or is Colombia better because the moneyed urban elite can once again visit their nearby country estates without the fear of roadblocks?

While the Colombian intellectual elite has recently enjoyed significant improvements in its quality of life, parts of the intelligentsia have not been entirely willing to come to terms with the fact that it owes these improvements to a very concrete ideology, and one which—certainly in the case of the editors of El Malpensante—is not its own: the ideology of President Álvaro Uribe and, by extension, that of the Bush administration. These new circumstances cast the magazine’s commitment to ideological slipperiness in a different light: where it once reflected the Colombian intelligentsia’s justified disdain for politics in general, it now reflects its discomfort at the fact that, after the miserable failure of a series of peace talks organized by Andrés Pastrana, the previous president, the current one’s predilection for American-funded gunfire seems to be working.

Some of El Malpensante’s readers have tried to address this problem by urging the magazine to maintain a more solid political perspective. A letter from a reader published in 2007 characterizes the decision to publish Luttwak’s article and others as the magazine “opening itself up to propaganda,” and goes on to criticize El Malpensante for straying from its vigorous origins and starting to pander to the self-satisfied, narcissistic and shamelessly elitist Bogotá bourgeois—”conservative and chauvinistic, sure, but cultured and with good taste.” The letter’s arguments are poignant and piercing, and one wonders if perhaps this is why it was published as the only letter in that issue.

The danger with ill-thinking is that it can devolve into the diet of the intellectual in his parlor, his high-rise, looking out over a chaotic landscape that he need not touch with anything but the wheels of his big American car. When it lands shrink-wrapped on coffee tables every six weeks, El Malpensante provides a singular comfort to the educated, successful Colombian: the comfort that comes with thinking that, despite the mess, despite the ignominy, Colombia is a cultured country, a civilized country. And not in a García Márquez, finding-beauty-in-provincial-chaos kind of way, not anymore: we, the magazine reassuringly says, are sophisticated and cosmopolitan, just as much as the Americans and the Europeans are, even though their roads and schools and governments may be better than ours.

This is a particularly cynical way of looking at El Malpensante, and it has its virtues. But it discards culture too quickly. In 2003, the exiled Colombian journalist Silvana Paternostro wrote: “The government believes that, first and foremost, Colombia needs to vanquish the rebel army, and that only when this happens will the Colombians be free. El Malpensante exists to remind the government that the free flow of art and ideas, of opinions and of beauty, is also essential.”

In less exalted terms: culture is valuable in and of itself. In El Malpensante’s 10th anniversary issue, in November of 2006, Hoyos outlined some of the ways in which this can be the case for Colombia: “I wouldn’t say that culture and the arts here are in a desperate state, but more than a luxury they are a necessity, an indispensable instrument when it comes to discovering who we are, who we could be, where we are going, and where we could be going.…The calamities of our country have submerged us Colombians in a certain fatalism: things are the way they are, and it is almost impossible for them to be otherwise, says a common mental murmur… [But] to ill-think before an expectant audience is an activity that transmits an unmistakable electricity when one knows that this audience’s decisions can torpedo established ideas, atmospheric laziness, and accepted bad taste, as well as plant disquietudes in the minds of people who did not have them before.”

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El Malpensante owes its success and visibility in large part to business savvy and an unabashed respect for capital: Hoyos sank a good chunk of his substantial wealth into the magazine’s beginnings to ensure it would run for at least three years, and since then El Malpensante has made a point of following a business model that is not only sustainable but relatively profitable (that it is profitable at all is remarkable for a literary magazine in Latin America). This thoroughly cements its status as a magazine of and for the rich, educated, urban elite—and, ultimately, it has no pretensions of being anything else. Hector Abad Faciolince (who has contributed to the magazine from its first issue) once referred to Hoyos as “one of the few rich Colombians with a taste for patronage,” and in a sense this affectionate but slightly barbed description applies to El Malpensante’s entire project: they contribute to the arts as benefactors, and every six weeks they donate a generous 90 sheets of paper reproduced 30,000 times.

El Malpensante has a few kindred spirits in other Latin American countries: Peru’s Etiqueta Negra, Argentina’s La Mujer de mi Vida, and Mexico’s Reverso, to name a few, evince the same affinity for literary cosmopolitanism as a means to interpret culture at large. Most of these countries are, like Colombia, plagued by instability—in Mexico, an escalating, grisly war between drug traffickers and the military; in Peru, a tenuous state of peace achieved by an ex-president who is now undergoing trials for corruption and human rights abuses. In such contexts, magazines like El Malpensante and Etiqueta Negra act as bunkers for literary culture; they protect our enjoyment of the more refined pleasures from the hostility of the elements.

I once spent a fruitless morning trying to contact Jursich at the Malpensante office by phone. He later emailed to tell me that several telephone cables in the neighborhood had been stolen. The entire block was incommunicado. When I finally spoke to him (by cell phone), he referred to the event as “Macondiano,” a reference to the fictional, quaintly backward village of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was a joke, but there was the slightest hint of desperation to his tone: we may have built the sanctuary, but outside the wind keeps blowing.

In Which We Were All Situationists Once

Reminiscences for This Recording.

Stop Smiling review: “Senselessness” by Horacio Castellanos Moya (tr. Katherine Silver)

(There is a shorter version in the print edition.)

http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=1150

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness

The Stop Smiling Review

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Senselessness
By Horacio Castellanos Moya
Translated by Katherine Silver
(New Directions)

Reviewed by David Noriega

The late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño once wrote that Horacio Castellanos Moya’s work is “insufferable to nationalists,” that it “threatens the hormonal stability of imbeciles.” Though Bolaño died before he could read Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez, recently published in English by New Directions as Senselessness, he would doubtless have found in this little novel the most substantive and astounding manifestations of the Salvadoran novelist’s dogged and graceful hostility toward any and all dogma, be it nationalist, liberal, Marxist or anything in between.

Senselessness depicts a landscape dominated by the collapse of such ideologies and the concurrent dissolution of the individual. The novel is a rambling first-person account of a writer who has been exiled to an unnamed Central American country — there are reasons to believe it is Guatemala — and is working for a human rights project run by the Catholic Church. His job is to proofread a massive report detailing the massacring of thousands of indigenous people by the military. In between hours spent in his office in the “archbishop’s palace,” the walls decorated with only a crucifix, he encounters emblems of the country’s various factions: clergymen, watered-down left-wingers, military men and ex–urban guerrilla commandos. He regards them all with scorn, skepticism or (in the case of those with both power and guns) fear. Moya devotes much of his ceaseless internal monologue to cataloguing their hypocrisies and shortcomings.

Senselessness is perhaps best described a manic study in violence, not as a simple denunciation or dissection but as a sort of experiment in ambiguity and collapse. The novel submerges its cynical, exiled narrator in a place — geographically, mentally, physically — where everything is guided by violence, in various stages between mediation and immediacy: violence remembered and recounted, violence suspected and imagined, violence witnessed firsthand. The report on the massacres, which consists largely of testimony from surviving Cakchiquel Indians, provides a steady and haunting backdrop for the narrator’s misadventures and meditations. He regularly punctuates his narrative with loose phrases copied into his notebook: eerie, pained sentences in a rhythmic, broken syntax captured deftly in English by Katherine Silver. The narrator’s relationship with the report’s prose begins as mere perverse literary fascination — the Indians’ words remind him of the verses of seminal Peruvian poet César Vallejo — but ultimately becomes something of a crazed obsession, providing the visual fodder for the worst of his hallucinatory fits.

While the narrator is not reading graphic descriptions of state-sanctioned murders, he is almost wishfully finding evidence of plots against him (for his participation in a project unveiling crimes of the state), or he is simply in his apartment hearing gunshots fired in the street below—five shots or six, nobody seems to remember or care. To him, all this violence is, well, senseless, or rather pointless: he derides the lefties that call themselves human rights activists as much as he derides the military and the Church, so why should he put his neck in the guillotine for a project run by priests and vegetarians? He claims to care about little more than getting paid and laid, and he engages in the banal rituals of quotidian existence with a special loathing surpassed only by his disgust at his inability to escape them. He goes on reading and ranting and fucking — or failing to do so — but gradually his constitution proves brittle under the pressures of violence and vanity.

The narrator’s vanity is integral to the story, defining his character and providing the framework for his collapse. He is intelligent and hilarious, and he has come to think of himself as one of very few human beings who knows to distrust and mock in every direction with a sort of indiscriminate desperation. The novel consists, mainly, of the relation between this vain misanthropy and the world that surrounds it, often taking the form of various frustrations and humiliations: the scene is set with the free-thinking cynic having to swallow a tedious and cheap gig in the bowels of the Church to keep body and soul intact. And here, in the language of those who have lived through horror, he encounters, buried and bitter, rare instances of beauty: Allá en el izote estaban los sesos tirados, como a puro leño se los sacáron. (In English, with a little more poetic flair courtesy of the translator: “There in Izote the brains they were thrown about, smashed with firewood they spilled them.”) Violence begets beauty, given a series of circumstantial distortions: a new context, the right audience, time and chance affording distance and strangeness.

Mostly, though, Castellanos Moya’s narrator faces his inability to beat back an oppressively encroaching reality: the titular senselessness, which automatically rejects all modes of thinking available to make sense of a world at once violent and banal, engulfing an intellect hostile toward every placid worldview it encounters. Gradually, under such strain, the foundations of reason and sanity erode. In uncontrollable fits of imagination —“imagination,” he says, “is a bitch in heat” — he finds himself identifying with the Indian-killers, swinging invisible Cakchiquel babies up high and bashing their heads against roof beams. By the end of the novel, having concluded that “hell is the mind not the flesh,” he is reduced to frantic spasms of paranoia suspended in an ether of muted but penetrating uncertainty. His paranoia, though inaccurate (he grossly overestimates his importance to the project), is not entirely unfounded — violence, for all its guises and deceptions, is after all very real and very near. In the end, the reader still doesn’t quite know whether to think him pitiful for his arrogance and weakness or heroic for his constancy in cynicism, though perhaps one simply ought to think him both.

Silver’s agile translation treats American readers to a stunning specimen of contemporary Latin American literature: brimming with humor that is both vulgar and sophisticated, steadfastly cynical yet never quite resigned and always trembling with restless energy. Though Bolaño was this literature’s godfather and ardent spokesman, few other writers have benefited from his recent international popularity. There is, however, no dearth of recent works from Central and South American writers that deserve to be read elsewhere, and Senselessness is a testament to this fact. One can only hope its publication in English presages a larger wave of Latin American literature in translation, so that stateside readers will not remain benighted for long.

The Occasional Laser Beam Skyward

In Which a Band Only Has Room for One Primitive Caveman Drummer God

at This Recording

I SINNER

I imperfect gentleman
I dancer at the abyss’s edge,

I obscene sacristan
Prodigal child of dumpsters,

I nephew – I grandson
I thick-soled confabulator,

I lord of the flies
I quarterer of swallows,

I football player
I swimmer of Estero las Toscas,

I defiler of tombs
I mumps-sick satan,

I remiss conscript
I citizen with voting rights,

I devil’s shepherd
I boxer beat by my shadow,

I distinguished drinker
I priest of the good table,

I cueca champion,
I absolute tango champion,
Guaracha, rumba, waltz champion,

I protestant pastor
I prawn, I family father,

I petty bourgeois
I professor of occult sciences,

I communist, I conservative
I compiler of old saints,

(I luxury tourist)

I chicken thief
I dancer immobile in the air,

I maskless executioner
I egyptian demigod with the head of a bird,

I on my feet on a cardboard rock:

Let there be mists,
Let there be chaos,
let there be clouds,

I born delinquent
Surprised in flagrante,

Stealing flowers in the moonlight
I ask forgiveness left & right & center
But I do not declare myself guilty.

-Nicanor Parra

Bolaño translation for Triple Canopy

A full translation of Roberto Bolaño’s acceptance speech for the Rómulo Gallegos prize, which he picked up in 1999 for The Savage Detectives, in Issue 2 of Triple Canopy

I’ve always had a problem with Venezuela. An infantile problem, fruit of my disorganized education; a minimal problem; but a problem nonetheless. The center of the problem is of a verbal and geographic nature. It is also probably due to a sort of undiagnosed dyslexia. I don’t mean to say by this that my mother never took me to the doctor; on the contrary, until the age of ten I was an assiduous visitor to doctor’s offices and even hospitals, but from that point on my mother decided I was strong enough to handle anything.

But let us return to the problem. When I was little, I played soccer. My number was 11, the number of Pepe and Zagalo in the World Cup in Sweden, and I was an enthusiastic player but a pretty bad one, though my left leg was my good leg and supposedly lefties never lose steam during a match. In my case, this wasn’t true: I almost always lost steam, though every once in a while, say once every six months, I would play a good match and recover at least a part of the enormous credit lost. At night, as is natural, before going to sleep, I would run circles in my head around my pitiful condition as a soccer player. It was then that I had the first conscious inkling of my dyslexia. I shot with my left leg but wrote with my right hand. That was a fact. I would have liked to write with my left hand, but I did it with my right. And that, right there, was the problem. For instance, when the coach would say, “Pass it to the guy on your right, Bolaño,” I wouldn’t know where to pass the ball. And sometimes, even, playing along the left flank, hearing my coach shout himself hoarse, I would have to stop and think: left—right. Right was the soccer field, left was kicking it out of bounds, out toward the few spectators, children like me, or toward the miserable pastures that surrounded the soccer fields of Quilpue, or Cauquenes, or the province of Bío-Bío. With time,

of course, I learned to have a reference every time I was asked or informed about a street that was on the right or the left, and that reference was not the hand with which I wrote but the foot with which I kicked the ball.

And with Venezuela I had, more or less around the same time—meaning until yesterday—a similar problem. The problem was its capital. For me, the most logical thing was for the capital of Venezuela to be Bogotá. And the capital of Colombia, Caracas. Why? Well, by a verbal logic, or a logic of letters. The v in Venezuela is similar, not to say related, to the b in Bogotá. And the c in Colombia is first cousin to the c in Caracas. This seems insubstantial, and it probably is, but for me it constituted a problem of the first order when, on a certain occasion, in Mexico, during a conference about the urban poets of Colombia, I showed up to talk about the potency of the poets of Caracas, and the people—people just as kind and educated as yourselves—remained silent, waiting for me to move beyond the digression about the poets from Caracas and start talking about the ones from Bogotá, but what I did was keep talking about the ones from Caracas, about their aesthetic of destruction. I even compared them to the Italian Futurists—differences notwithstanding, of course—and to the first Lettrists, the group founded by Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître, the group out of which the germ of Guy Debord’s Situationism would be born, and the people at this point began to conjecture. I think they must have thought that the poets from Bogotá had made a mass migration to Caracas, or that the poets from Caracas had played a defining role in the new group of poets from Bogotá, and when I finished the talk, abruptly, as I liked to finish any talk those days, the people stood up, applauded timidly, and ran off to consult the poster at the entrance. And as I was leaving, accompanied by the Mexican poet Mario Santiago, who always went around with me and who had surely noticed my mistake, though he didn’t say anything, because for Mario mistakes and errors and equivocations are like Baudelaire’s clouds drifting across the sky, that is to say something to look at but never to correct—on our way out, as I was saying, we ran into an old Venezuelan poet (and when I say “old,” I remember the moment and realize that the Venezuelan poet was probably younger than I am now), who told us with tears in his eyes that there must have been some kind of mistake, that he had never heard a single word about these mysterious poets from Caracas.

At this point in the speech, I get the feeling that don Rómulo Gallegos must be turning over in his grave. “But to whom have they given my prize?” he must be thinking. Forgive me, don Rómulo. It’s just that even doña Bárbara, with a b, sounds like Venezuela and Bogotá, and Bolivar, also, sounds like Venezuela and doña Bárbara. Bolivar and Bárbara, what a good couple they would have made, although don Rómulo’s other two great novels, Cantaclaro and Canaima, could perfectly well be Colombian novels, which leads me to thinking that maybe they are, and that beneath my dyslexia there might perhaps be a method, a bastard semiotic method or a graphological or metasyntactic or phonemic or simply poetic method, and that the truth of truths is that Caracas is the capital of Colombia, just like Bogotá is the capital of Venezuela, in the same way that Bolivar, who is Venezuelan, dies in Colombia, which is also Venezuela and Mexico and Chile.

I don’t know if you can see where I’m trying to get here. Pobre Negro, for instance, by don Rómulo, is an eminently Peruvian novel. La Casa Verde, by Vargas Llosa, is a Colombo-Venezuelan novel. Terra Nostra, by Fuentes, is an Argentinean novel, though I warn you not to ask me what I’m basing that affirmation on, because the answer would be prolix and boring. The pataphysical academy teaches (and mysteriously, too) the science of imaginary solutions, which, as you all know, is that which studies the laws that regulate exceptions. And this shock in the order of letters is, in a sense, an imaginary problem that requires an imaginary solution.

But let’s return to don Rómulo before we get into Jarry and note a few strange signs along the way. I have just won the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Number 11. I used to play with the number 11 on my shirt. This, to you, will most likely seem a coincidence, but it leaves me trembling. Number 11, who couldn’t tell left from right and thus confused Caracas with Bogotá, has just won (and I use this parenthetical to once again thank the jury for this distinction, in particular Ángeles Mastretta) the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. What would don Rómulo think of this? The other day, talking on the phone, Pere Gimferrer, who is a great poet and on top of that knows everything and has read everything, told me that there are two commemorative plaques in Barcelona marking houses where don Rómulo used to live. According to Gimferrer (although he wouldn’t put his hand in the fire over the particulars), the great Venezuelan writer started writing Canaima in one of these houses.

The truth is that I believe 99.9 percent of the things Gimferrer says to the letter, so, as Gimferrer was talking (one of the houses with the plaques was not a house but a bench, which posits a series of doubts; for instance, if don Rómulo, during his stay in Barcelona—and I say “stay” and not “exile” because a Latin American is never exiled in Spain—had worked on a bench or if the bench later came to install itself in the novelist’s house)… As I was saying, while the Catalan poet was speaking, I got to thinking about my now-distant (though no less exhausting for it, especially in my memory) ambles through the Eixample district, and I saw myself there again, bouncing around in 1977, 1978, maybe 1982, and suddenly I thought I saw a street at sunset, near Muntaner, and I saw a number, the number 11, and then I walked a little further, and there was the plaque. That’s what I saw, in my mind.

But it’s also probable that during the years that I lived in Barcelona, I passed by that street and saw the plaque, a plaque that possibly says, “Here lived Rómulo Gallegos, novelist and politician, born in Caracas in 1884, died in Caracas in 1969,” and then other things, in smaller letters, like his books, accolades, etc. And it’s possible that I would have thought, without stopping, of another famous Colombian writer, though I could have only thought this without stopping, I insist, because by that point I had read don Rómulo as required reading in school in either Chile or Mexico, I can’t remember which, and I liked Doña Bárbara, though, according to Gimferrer, Canaima is better, and of course I knew that don Rómulo was Venezuelan and not Colombian. Which truly signifies very little, being Colombian or being Venezuelan, and at this point we return, as if bounced back by lightning, to the b in Bolivar, who was not dyslexic and who

wouldn’t have much minded a united Latin America, a preference I share with the Liberator, as it’s all the same to me if people say I’m Chilean, even though some Chilean colleagues prefer to see me as Mexican, or if they call me Mexican, though some Mexican colleagues prefer to call me Spanish, or even disappeared in combat. And in fact it’s all the same to me if I’m considered a Spaniard, even if some Spanish colleagues hit the ceiling and start proclaiming I’m from Venezuela, born in Caracas or in Bogotá, which doesn’t bother me much, quite the contrary, in fact.

What’s true is that I am Chilean, and I am also a lot of other things. And having arrived at this point, I must abandon Jarry and Bolivar and try to remember the writer who said that the homeland of a writer is his tongue. I don’t remember his name. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in Spanish. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in English or French. A writer’s homeland, he said, is his tongue. It sounds a little demagogic, but I agree with him completely, and I know that sometimes there is no recourse left us but to get a little demagogic, just like sometimes there is no recourse left us but to dance a bolero under the light of streetlamps or a red moon. Although it’s also true that a writer’s homeland is not his tongue, or not only his tongue, but also the people he loves. And sometimes a writer’s homeland is not the people he loves but his memory. And other times a writer’s only homeland is his loyalty, and his courage. In truth, a writer’s homelands can be many, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends a great deal on whatever he is writing at the moment. The homelands can be many, it occurs to me now, but the passport can only be one, and that passport is evidently the quality of his writing. Which does not mean writing well, because

anyone can do that, but writing marvelously well, and not even that, because anyone can write marvelously well, too. What, then, is writing of quality? Well, what it has always been: knowing to stick one’s head into the dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation. To run along the edge of the precipice: on one side the bottomless abyss and on the other the faces one loves, the smiling faces one loves, and books, and friends, and food. And to accept that fact, though sometimes it may weigh on us more than the flagstone that covers the remains of every dead writer. Literature, as an Andalusian folk song might say, is dangerous.

And now that I have returned, finally, to the number 11, which is the number of those who run along the flanks, and now that I have mentioned danger, I recall that page of the Quijote where the merits of arms and letters are discussed, and I suppose that, in the end, what is being discussed is the difference in the level of danger, which also means the level of virtue, entailed in each occupation. And Cervantes, who was a soldier, has arms win out over letters, has the soldier win out over the honorable occupation of the poet. And if we read these pages well (something that now, as I write this speech, I am not doing, even though from the table at which I sit I can see my two editions of the Quijote), we will sense in them a strong aroma of melancholy, because Cervantes is having his own youth triumph, the ghost of his lost youth, before the reality of his exercise of prose and poetry, which until then had been so adverse. And this comes to my mind because to a great extent everything that I have ever written is a love letter or a letter of farewell to my own generation, those of us who were born in the ’50s and who chose at a given moment to take up arms (though in this case it would be more correct to say “militancy”) and gave the little that we had, or the greater thing that we had, which was our youth, to a cause that we believed to be the most generous of the world’s causes and that was, in a sense, though in truth it wasn’t.

Needless to say, we fought tooth and nail, but we had corrupt bosses, cowardly leaders, an apparatus of propaganda that was worse than that of a leper colony. We fought for parties that, had they emerged victorious, would have immediately sent us to a forced-labor camp. We fought and poured all our generosity into an ideal that had been dead for over fifty years, and some of us knew that: How were we not going to know that if we had read Trotsky or were Trotskyites? But nevertheless we did it, because we were stupid and generous, as young people are, giving everything and asking for nothing in return. And now nothing is left of those young people, those who died in Bolivia, died in Argentina or in Peru, and those who survived went to Chile or Mexico to die, and the ones they didn’t kill there they killed later in Nicaragua, in Colombia, in El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of these forgotten youths. And this is what moves Cervantes to choose arms over letters. His companions, too, were dead. Or old and abandoned, in misery and neglect. To choose was to choose youth, to choose the defeated and those who had nothing left. And that is what Cervantes does, he chooses youth. And even in this melancholy weakness, in this crack in his soul, Cervantes is the most lucid, for he knows that writers don’t need anyone to praise their occupation. We praise it ourselves.

Frequently, our way of praising it is to curse the hour in which we decided to become writers, but as a general rule we tend to clap and dance when we’re alone, for this is a solitary occupation, and we recite our own pages to ourselves, and that is our way of praising ourselves, and we don’t need for anyone to tell us what we have to do and much less for a poll to elect ours as the most honorable of occupations. Cervantes, who wasn’t dyslexic but who was left crippled by the exercise of arms, knew perfectly well what he was saying. Literature is a dangerous occupation.

Which takes us directly to Alfred Jarry, who had a gun and liked to shoot, and to the number 11, the leftmost extreme, which looks out of the corner of its eye as it passes like a bullet by the plaque and the house where don Rómulo lived. And I hope that at this point in the speech don Rómulo is not so angry with me, that he won’t appear to Domingo Miliani in dreams asking why they gave me the prize that bears his name, a prize that for me is hugely important—I am the first Chilean to obtain it—a prize that doubles the challenge, as if that were possible, as if the challenge by its very nature, by its own virtues, weren’t already doubled or tripled. A prize, by this reasoning, would seem a gratuitous act, and now that I think about it, since this is all true, a prize does have something of the gratuitous in it. It is a gratuitous act that does not speak to my novel or its merits but to the generosity of a jury. (Until yesterday, I did not know any of its members.) Let this be clear, because like Cervantes’s veterans of Lepanto and like the veterans of the Latin-American Florid Wars, my only wealth is my dignity. I read this and I don’t believe it. Me, talking about dignity. It’s possible that the spirit of don Rómulo won’t appear in dreams to Domingo Miliani but to me.

These words are written now, in Caracas (Venezuela), and one thing is clear: Don Rómulo can’t appear to me in dreams for the simple reason that I can’t sleep. Outside, the crickets are chirping. I calculate, very roughly, that there are some ten or twenty thousand of them. Perhaps don Rómulo’s voice is in one of their songs, confused, joyfully confused, in the Venezuelan night, in the American night, in the night that belongs to all of us, to those who sleep and to those of us who can’t.

I feel like Pinocchio.

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Hell is empty, and all the devils are here

XII. On the airplane (imagine, incidentally, if the period of descent before the brusque skip of wheels to airstrip concrete were literally prolonged to infinity) I am reading a magazine when a woman, of a certain age and decked head to toe like Franco’s Spain, walks up the aisle with a baby clutched to her bosom. For an instant I am seized by the image of me, magazine tossed to a neighboring lap, delivering the torpid, drooling infant a swift punch to the face.

Ireneo Infante, Fragmentos