PT Data wrangler

Tag: Rosalind Harvey

  • Lost and Found: Shortlisting for the European Literature Night Translation Pitch 2015

    Rajendra Chitnis writes:

    By any standards, the 2015 European Literature Night Translation Pitch has proven a remarkable success. 59 entries were received from 21 national literatures, from the Atlantic to the Baltic and the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and the shortlisting judges – Louise Swan, Rosalind Harvey and I – faced the impossible task of choosing our favourite eight to go through to the public final at the Free Word Centre on 4 June.

    Judging by this chance cross-section, anyone who fears that European literature may be flagging can breathe easy. The range of themes explored and styles deployed, in extracts taken from novels, short stories, verse, essay, biography, memoir and much in between, was more bracing than soothing, evidence that neither life nor art in Europe has lost its edge. Marginal voices featured prominently, whether ethnic-minority or mixed-ethnicity authors and narrators or juvenile characters, often female adolescents or socio-economic ‘drop-outs’. The theme of ‘lost and found’ – of a recovery of meaning and purpose through unusual friendships, love or the discovery of a new way of living – recurred, sometimes linked to homelessness and wandering or youthful ‘backpacking’ outside Europe. We repeatedly met the Europe of not only economic crisis, but also of the Cold War and post-Communist transition. European writers continue to evoke the darkest episodes in the continent’s recent history, notably Italian and Slovene reflections on Srebrenica, but they also find inspiration in medieval crusades (the Estonian Tiit Aleksejev) and ancient Egypt (the Italian Claudia Musio). In these, as in various fantasy texts, authors seem to hesitate between escape from and allegory of the contemporary human situation. In contrast to these grand landscapes, however, we also confronted the dissection of the everyday, most extraordinarily in JJ Voskuil’s huge fictionalised memoir of his career at a Dutch research institute. Overall, it seems possible to argue that, whether puzzled or enchanted children, wronged or disaffected intellectuals, migrants or the suddenly impoverished, the characters of contemporary European literature are marked less by exhaustion or defeatism, and more by resilience and often inarticulate defiance.

    As judges, we were led above all by the style. We faced a challenging balance between the epic and the lyrical, convention and experiment, black humour and pathos. Texts did not obviously conform to national stereotypes, and we were mostly persuaded by translators’ arguments about the universality of a work’s concerns. We were struck afresh by the creative subtlety of the individual imagination, and admired the translators who had set themselves the task of re-rendering that striking vision in English. Memorable examples included Charles Lee and Manon Manavit’s work on Maguy Vautier’s evocation of Touareg mythology in verse, Denise Muir’s on Manuela Salvi’s censored Italian graphic novel for teenagers and Ana Makuc and Cyprian Laskowski’s on the Slovene Bojan Meserko’s unpaginated, rearrangeable ‘infinite’ novel.

    Amazingly, our preferences in fact proved similar, and little haggling was needed to produce our shortlist. Our discussion was not guided by any particular priorities (gender, range of national literatures, type of writing, type of audience), but we were delighted to find that, in these and other areas, our list offered a fair reflection of what we had to choose from (though poetry and essays are unrepresented). Alongside the literary languages most frequently translated into English – French and German – we find Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Flemish and Hungarian. There are two genuine cycles of short stories – Pierre Autin-Grenier´s That´s Just How It Is, translated by Andrea Reece, and Krisztina Tóth´s Pixel, translated by Owen Good – a novel for young adults about a high-school shooting – Jesper Wung-Sung´s Proper Fractions, translated by Lindy Falk van Rooyen – two short satirical novels – Vonne von der Meer´s Take 7, translated by Laura Vroomen, and Jan Van Loy´s Scraps, translated by Anna Asbury – and three long, differently ambitious novels – Jan Němec’s biographical A History of Light, translated by Melvyn Clarke, Verena Rossbacher´s metafictional Small Talk and Slaughter, translated by Anne Posten, and Vladimir Zarev´s contemporary historical Ruin, translated by Angela Rodel. We hope the distinguished panel of judges charged with choosing a winner do not curse us, and we wish them good luck with their deliberations!

     

    Rosalind Harvey adds:

    We ended up with five male and three female authors, and six female and two male translators: there are undoubtedly more women in literary translation than men (arguably because it is a low-paid profession, and all low-paid professions – nurses, cleaners, carers – tend to have disproportionate numbers of women practising them, due to structural misogyny), but I was disappointed, although not surprised, to note the relative lack of women writers. This is not a new problem, and nor is it one that has been ignored: my colleague Katy Derbyshire, the translator from German, for instance, has spoken about this recently on a panel at the London Book Fair, and is planning on establishing a prize for women writers in translation to address this very issue. We tried to ensure that the disparity in literary translation out in the world was addressed to at least some extent in our shortlist, without, of course, compromising on quality. The selection process for ELN in a way functioned as a microcosm of the publishing industry at large; it was hard for us to end up with equal numbers of men and women on the shortlist (or even – shock horror! – with more women than men), simply because fewer women writers were pitched to us. This is a topic worthy of its own blog post.

    From my perspective as chair and co-founder of the Emerging Translators Network, I was particularly alert to who was pitching works and at what stage their careers were at. Many of the pitchers were known to me through the network, and as such I am aware of how hard they work and how passionately they champion the authors they believe deserve to be in English. In the end, though, the quality of the translations, tempered a little with the awareness in the back of all of our minds that diversity was crucial, was what had to take precedence.

    On the whole the process was a very heartening process – there is a wealth of interesting, challenging and fun-sounding literature coming out of Europe, and a wealth of translators ready to champion and translate it. Not all of it will end up in English, because there’s simply not enough money or space in the UK publishing scene. But some of it will, and should. All that remains is a willingness from publishers, readers and booksellers to trust these translators and believe in the quality of the work. Given the number of heartfelt submissions here, combined with the increase in literary translation in the UK in general, I think that this trust and belief has no choice but to grow.

    rajendra-chitnisRajendra Chitnis is a senior lecturer in Czech and Russian at the University of Bristol. He writes mainly on Czech, Russian and Slovak fiction from the twentieth-century to the present. He is currently principal investigator on an AHRC-funded project, Translating the Literatures of Small European Nations, which is exploring how, through translation, less well known European literatures gain the attention of the cultural mainstream.

    RosalindHarvey_Pro-picRosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her translation of Down the Rabbit Hole by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. She was one of Free Word Centre‘s first ever translators-in-residence.

  • Instructions for writing a corrupt novel

    Nepotism, sinecures, blackmailing paedophiles, bribing officials… Juan Pablo Villalobos writes for PEN Atlas this week, explaining how a writer can expose and enable the general corruption of his countryThe writer is preparing to write a corrupt novel, a novel that reflects the state of general corruption in his country, which – let’s say – is called Mexico. It’s not a question of writing a novel about corruption, no, that wouldn’t be at all original or provocative. What he’s trying to do is to write a novel in a corrupt way, trying to imitate the corruption that prevails in his country. And so before picking up his pen, or switching on his computer, before even coming up with an idea that might become a novel, what he needs is peace and quiet to write the novel, he needs a salary so as not to have to worry about a matter as banal as money as he writes his masterpiece, the corrupt novel. But the writer can’t have a job, no, if he has to follow a schedule from nine in the morning to five in the evening, when is he going to write the corrupt novel? And this is where the corrupt novel starts: at the moment the writer asks his uncle (it could be his father, a cousin, a buddy, even a childhood friend), who turns out to be the deputy minister in some government department (he could be a secretary, a civil servant, a chief of staff, whatever) to put him on the payroll, without him being employed, that is, to employ him as what is known in Mexico as an ‘aviator,’ or a phantom employee. Great: now the writer has a salary without having to work and can devote himself to what really matters, to writing the corrupt novel. But there’s a problem, now that he thinks about it: his computer is old, and it’s not a Mac! Plus he doesn’t have a printer. And so he calls up his uncle (or cousin, or buddy, or whoever it is) and his uncle takes a Mac and an HP printer out of the federal budget. Perfect, now it really is time to start writing, to think about the novel’s structure, for in order to be a corrupt novel it must be governed by the principle of maximum economic efficiency. That is to say: how can I get more money out of my corrupt novel? This has nothing to do with thinking about sales of the novel, oh no. We can think about that later. Right now it has to do with thinking about getting money from the contents of the novel – what is the theme of the corrupt novel? Two options make themselves quite clear to our writer: extortion or publicity. Find a theme that could make things awkward for a person or a company and demand money for him not to write the novel. Or offer to write the novel praising a personality or a company, so that it functions as a veiled form of publicity, as propaganda. And why not both these things? Why not extortion first, and then veiled publicity? Brilliant. The writer finally gets down to work. He extorts money from a paedophile. Then he sells the project of writing a novel to the government of one of the central states in the country (it could be the north or the south, too). It will be a great corrupt novel about the magnificent achievements of the state governor. An epic the likes of which has not been written since the novels of the revolution. But the writer of the corrupt novel cannot write and, in any case, is far too busy spending: a) the money from his aviator’s salary, b) the extortion money, and c) the advance paid him by the state government. And so, for a ridiculous wage, he hires an intern, a young, very enthusiastic kid who’s attended eight hundred literary workshops. It’s an ingenious strategy: the corrupt novel can only be written by a literary ghost writer. While the literary ghost writer drafts the novel, the writer must concern himself with the things that really matter when dealing with a corrupt novel: the publication and mass-marketing of the book. Who is going to publish the corrupt novel? Easy. Here his deputy minister uncle (brother or father) again comes into play, as well as the governor who is the protagonist of the corrupt novel, who both bribe the owner of a publishing house to publish it. Sorted. And it’s not even a cash bribe, no – it’s a promise that the government, by way of the system of state schools, the network of libraries and the various programmes encouraging reading, will buy thousands of copies of the corrupt novel. The circle is complete when thousands of shelves in bookshops throughout the country are filled with copies of the corrupt novel. It’s now that the corrupt writer will reveal the true story of the corrupt novel, its genesis and development, will explain to everyone that the corrupt novel was actually a performance to expose the generalized state of corruption in the country. But as he is about to do so, just as he is about to upload to his blog (and to Twitter and Facebook) a text with the explanation, he receives the offer of a tremendous bribe if he decides to keep his mouth shut (if he doesn’t accept, he will have to live with the consequences). And the writer, who over the course of writing the novel has been converted to corruption, the writer who is now a corrupt writer, takes the bribe and keeps quiet.Additional InformationRead the original piece in Spanish.About the authorJuan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel Quesadillas was published in English in 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.RosalindHarvey_Pro-picAbout the translatorRosalind Harvey lives in Bristol where she translates Hispanic fiction. In 2011 she was one of the first translators in residence at the Free Word Centre in London. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ debut novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and her co-translation of Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas was shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She is a committee member of the Translators Association, a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, and also runs regular translation-related events in and around London. Her most recent translation is Villalobos’ Quesdillas, with And Other Stories. 

  • Imagine – Writing fiction in Mexico

    Juan Pablo Villalobos returns to PEN Atlas this week, asking us to imagine the struggle of being a writer in Mexico, where fiction is so often outpaced by brutal reality

    Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

    Imagine you were born in a country called Mexico. Imagine you’re a novelist, that you want to write fiction. Imagine that your stories take place in Mexico, that your characters are Mexicans, that they speak Spanish. Imagine you tune in to a Mexican radio station each morning (you don’t actually tune in, what you actually do is activate an app on your mobile phone). Imagine what you hear: that twelve people have disappeared from an after-hours nightclub in Mexico City, that no one has the slightest idea what happened. They simply vanished. Just imagine. And that day you have to write a story, you’re writing a story for an American magazine. A detective story, this is what they’ve asked you for: a story that describes ‘the contradictions in Latin America’. And you think: what shall I write? But on the radio the ex-wife of a Supreme Court judge is talking about how she has spent a year in jail, her husband’s revenge on her for a lawsuit over the amount of child maintenance he has to pay. For children, moreover, who have autism. Just imagine. Then you remember it’s your little sister’s birthday, the one who still lives in the town where you were born and raised. And so you call her to say happy birthday and after the usual phrases for marking birthdays, you ask her how things are down there. An innocent question. And your sister tells you that last weekend six youths disappeared from the town (your sister says ‘kids’, not youths). Just imagine. She says that so far this year, twenty five people have disappeared.  In that town where nothing ever happened. In that boring town where your second novel was set. And you have to write a story. And what’s more, you’re writing your third novel, a novel that is also about Mexico. How to write? What to write? How to defy reality with literature, when reality is slamming into you and crushing you and making you feel that your poor, ordinary imagination can never catch up with it, can never even get close? Imagine writing fiction in Mexico. You recall a few facts: eighty thousand deaths and twenty five thousand disappearances in the ‘war on drugs’ from 2006 to 2012; eighty journalists murdered. Then you think of your brother, who suffered extortion. Of your best friend, your childhood friend, who was abducted and pushed to the ground in a field of corn with a pistol to his head, waiting for the coup de grace. Just imagine. Imagine being pushed to the ground in the middle of the countryside, listening to someone shouting at you: If you move I’ll fuck you up! Then they tell you to get up and start walking away. With your eyes shut. And you get up and you try to walk but you trip and you fall and you trip and you fall again. Because you’re convinced they’re going to shoot you in the back. You have no doubt you are going to die. Imagine you’re going to die from being shot in the back. Then they say: You, open your eyes, asshole. And finally you can move and you walk and they don’t shoot you, they’ve only stolen your car, your money, a laptop, an iPad, a mobile phone. You’re still alive but something died inside of you (Mexico died for you, imagine that, your own country dies inside your body), and you become paranoid. And when the following day someone calls you in the middle of the night – a wrong number – you swear you’re being spied on, so you pack a suitcase and go straight to the airport and you get on a plane that will take you anywhere, somewhere far away, while you swear, you swear on your mother’s life that you’re going to get the fuck away from Mexico, that you’re going to go to Canada, or the United States, or Europe, who cares. Just imagine. You, sitting there, thinking about the plot of a story and a novel while all this reality comes down on you, obliterating you. The page in front of you blank due to all the accumulated rage. How do you get rid of this rage? How about by speaking out? What about that time you spoke about the terrible things happening in Mexico at an event abroad, what about that look the cultural attaché from the Mexican embassy gave you – remember? – what about the hour-long speech he gave about the indisputable achievements of the government you had to put up with while he drove you to the airport. One hour of listening to figures from this fantasy country, maybe now you’ll wise up about what’s really going on there. Just imagine. Demagogy travels in Mexico’s fleet of diplomatic cars. But the radio keeps on going and there’s more news: your favourite newspaper has just apologised to a corrupt state governor for not having provided enough proof of the corruption scandal it had uncovered. The governor’s lawyers are more powerful than the lawyers of your favourite newspaper – what’s new, this you can no doubt imagine. You listen to the editor-in-chief of the paper, whom you admire, coming out with what you don’t think he believes, a mollifying statement, because otherwise the governor’s vultures will swoop down onto the newspaper and take away its last cent. What’s important is that the paper survives, that it tries to continue informing people about what is happening in the country. Even if it means saying sorry. Just imagine. Your rage spills over. You cannot write in this state. It’s impossible even to think. Impossible to live. It shouldn’t be possible to live. But it is, yes, it is. It has to be possible. You have to write. And so you take a breath, and you look at the blank page in front of you. You pick up your pen. And you start to write.

     

    About the author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He studied marketing and Spanish literature. He has done a great deal of market research and published travel stories and literary and film criticism. He has researched such diverse topics as the influence of the avant-garde on the work of César Aira and the flexibility of pipelines for electrical installations. He now lives in Brazil and has two Mexican-Brazilian-Italian-Catalan children.

    About the translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Quesadillas is her translation of Villalobos’s most recent novel, and her previous translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award. She is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional information

    Read the original piece in Spanish.

    Find out more information about Juan Pablo Villalobos’s new book, Quesadillas.

    Juan Pablo Villalobos and his translator Rosalind Harvey will be appearing at Waterstone’s Norwich this evening September 3rd, at 7.30pm.

    He will also be appearing at Mr B’s in Bath on September 4th at 7.00pm

    Juan will be speaking with Deborah Levy, at Keats House, London, September 5th 7.00pm

    Finally, please join English PEN, and And Other Stories for Juan Pablo Villalobos in conversation with DBC Pierre, at the Rich Mix, Bethnal Green, London, on Friday September 6th, from 7.00pm. This event will be hosted by Shane Solanki with music from special guest DJs Moshi Moshi Records.

    Find out more information on these events, and how to book. 

     

  • Scottish Translation

    Sold-out duels, ninjas versus saints, and the invisible translator made visible… Daniel Hahn reports from Edinburgh International Book Festival for PEN Atlas

    Edinburgh is one of the great international book festivals. There are plenty of terrific book festivals out there, but to my mind it’s the strength of the international literary coverage in particular that makes Edinburgh special. With writers this year from more than forty countries, I don’t know a literary event programmed with an eye to wider horizons. What this means, of course, is that it’s a celebration of – and an examination of – writers who produce their work in many languages, writers whose extraordinary work has come to UK readers through the skill of English-language literary translators.

    This year, alongside the writers, the festival has included a strand of events putting the translators and their craft centre-stage. This series, programmed with the British Centre for Literary Translation and funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, isn’t just about shoving the translator onto a stage to sit next to their writer, a well-meant gesture but which is mostly about helping the original writer get by in English; rather it’s made up of events about literary translation. Typically, of course, a translator expects to be invisible (that is apparently the most desirable state of affairs) – certainly nobody’s heard of us in the way they might have heard of our authors; and English-speaking audiences, we’re always told, aren’t on the whole interested in, or perhaps just aren’t comfortable with, discussions of the subject. So if we were to programme a series of events about translation, featuring in most cases a line-up of translators nobody’s ever heard of, would anyone show up to hear what we had to say? We put it to the test.

    Following a lively talk by David Bellos presenting his book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear, my own first event in the strand was chairing a discussion on translation between Nathan Englander and Etgar Keret. These two brilliant story-writers are good friends and serve as translators of one another’s work, and they promised many insights to share on the subject. We had more than fifty people show up, but that, I thought, was probably an anomaly; both Keret and Englander are big names to a book-festival crowd, capable of attracting audiences in decent numbers. It was them, not the subject, that accounted for those tickets being sold, perhaps.

    Translators, we were told in that event, were surely “saints”; but also, to Keret’s mind, “ninjas”. “As soon as you see them,” he explained, “they stop being any good.” A couple of days later, however, the translators were altogether visible – front, centre and under some very hot, very bright spotlights. And they were, it turned out, very good indeed.

    Both Monday and Tuesday night’s evening programmes at the festival included “translation duels”, in which a text is given in advance to two translators for each to produce their own English versions; at the event we present the two versions to an audience and discuss the discrepancies and what they tell us. We look at the ways each translator has interpreted the original differently, and how each has expressed what they want to express differently. It helps people who might not have given the subject much thought before to understand translation as both an interpretative undertaking and a creative undertaking, rather than a purely mechanical one.

    The first duel featured a text from Spanish, by Basque novelist Bernardo Atxaga (who also participated in the discussion), in versions presented by translators Rosalind Harvey and Frank Wynne. We discussed mostly pronouns, commas, Don Quixote, and the difference between a stream and a brook, and between “It held its head up” and “It carried its head high.” A little recondite? A tad esoteric? Just a touch nerdy? Yep, absolutely. Shamelessly, gleefully so. The following night, Frank returned for the second duel, this time from French (with a text by Laurent Binet), matched tonight with Adriana Hunter. This discussion was about sea lions, about the air force (or the airforce), research, italics, whether that second ‘to’ was really necessary, whether ‘gutbucket’ is appropriate in the context or possibly a hint too strong, and writing in the historical present.

    Frank, Rosalind and Adriana won’t mind my saying that none of them is what you might call famous. They are all, like me, like almost every translator, entirely unknown to readers. We don’t kid ourselves – our names don’t sell tickets to festival events. And both events were held in a 190-seater venue. And both sold out. So – might someone out there be a little bit interested in this subject after all?

    There was more to come; on Sunday, Ros Schwartz ran a public all-day translation workshop at the festival. On Monday Sarah Ardizzone and I took the stage for a wide-ranging, general discussion about literary translation (also sold-out). And then, of course, there were all those writers from those forty-something countries. Because really, our job, after all, is to make them look good, and to make it possible for readers in the UK to gain access to them. Because, no, it’s not about us, deep down. Their books are the point. But access to those books requires a strange thing, the complex sleight of hand that is literary translation, and I can’t help but being pleased that, for a change, readers were queuing up to ask questions about that part of the process, too.

    About the Author

    Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, with some thirty books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include novels from Europe, Africa and Latin America, and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé.

    A past chair of the UK Translators Association, he is currently programme director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.  He has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (with his translation of Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons) and a Blue Peter Book Award (for The Ultimate Book Guide, the first in his series of reading guides for children and teenagers), and judged a number of prizes including the IFFP and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. 

     

  • Bodies not corpses

    In his latest PEN Atlas piece, Juan Pablo Villalobos introduces new voices which demonstrate Mexico’s rich literary landscape

    When I was asked to write this blog, the first option immediately suggested to me as a possible topic was that of the literature about the violence in Mexico. I have to confess that my first reaction was to refuse and get defensive; however, after thinking it over, I decided to turn this refusal into my topic, which was what I was trying to do in my two previous pieces (‘I Don’t Want To Be In This Film Any More’ and ‘Against Narcoliterature’).

    My refusal came from a fear of helping to reinforce what – in my opinion – is a reductionist reading of contemporary Mexican literature, which, when you look beyond the cliches and stereotypes, is tremendously diverse. Far from the clamour of the literature of violence, there is another Mexican literature, a literature of intimacy and the body, of identity and memory. Here are a few examples.

    Written as a diary, El animal sobre la piedra [the animal on the rock] by Daniela Tarazona is an exploration of metamorphosis as a medical symptom. After the death of her mother, the protagonist goes on a trip to the beach as a way to deal with her grief. There she meets a man – who is to become her ‘partner’ – and his ridiculous pet Lisandro (an anteater), who will witness her transformation into a lizard. In Tarazona, the fantasy genre seems a ‘natural’ result of somatization:

    ‘After shedding my skin I should have gone to the doctor. But I didn’t, because this event and all the subsequent ones, which defined me as a mutating being, have been beneficial. There’s no doubt in my mind about it. The hallucinations, however, obey their own logic, and maybe this is why there are days when I don’t understand how I lost my identity. Am I no longer a person?’

    Bodily mutation is also the theme of El cuerpo en que nací  [the body I was born in] by Guadalupe Nettel. However, what in Tarazona is a hallucination, in Nettel is the critical employment of memory, uttered in the psychiatrist’s office.

     ‘The body we are born in is not the same one we leave the world in. I don’t just mean the countless number of times our cells renew themselves, but to its more distinctive features, the tattoos and scars that with our character and our convictions we gradually add to it, feeling our way, as best we can, without guidance or tutoring.’

    An autobiographical novel or what some theorists call autofiction, it tells the story of the author’s childhood and adolescence in a progressive family. The concepts of open marriage, alternative education and sexual freedom, advocated by her parents, undergo the trial of personal history, that intimate court from where children contemplate their parents.

    The body vanishes in Los ingrávidos by Valeria Luiselli [Faces in the Crowd in Christina MacSweeney’s English translation]. The narrator, a mother of two small children, is pretending to write a novel about the writer Gilberto Owen while watching her marriage fall apart. Her tale weaves together two ghostly existences: her own youth, and that of Owen, separated in time but which encounter each other by chance as spectres in the New York subway.

    ‘I wanted to have a professional photo taken (…)  just to see whether people can see me or not,’ Luiselli’s Owen says. ‘The owner of the studio sat me on a stool (…) She made a first attempt, and a second. She readjusted the height of the stool, tried again. She changed the backdrop. At the fourth attempt, she apologised. I can’t take your portrait, sir, something’s wrong with our equipment.’

    Just like the photograph of Owen, Faces is the simulacrum of a novel that is not being written; it is not a novel of ghosts, it is the ghost of a novel.

    A body that mutates, a body that scars, a body that vanishes: three wonderful novels by three writers from a country where, sadly, we speak less and less about bodies and more and more about the corpses on the ground around us.

    About the Author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

    About the Translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional Information

    Daniela Tarazona: El animal sobre la piedra, Almadía: Oaxaca, 2008.

    Guadalupe Nettel: El cuerpo en que nací, Anagrama: Barcelona, 2011

    Valeria Luiselli: Los ingrávidos, Sexto Piso: México D.F., 2011. Faces in the Crowd has just been published in the UK by Granta.

    http://grantabooks.com/3012/Faces-in-the-Crowd/2578

    http://www.untitledbooks.com/features/features/by-valeria-luiselli/

     

     

  • Contra la narcoliteratura

    La narrativa de la violencia en México 2: tres razones para no usar la palabra narcoliteratura

    Juan Pablo Villalobos

    La palabrita es un neologismo desgraciado cuyo uso pareciera inevitable hoy en día al hablar de la literatura mexicana actual: narcoliteratura. Como buen neologismo, surge de la necesidad de nombrar un fenómeno nuevo. En realidad, en este caso el fenómeno, la literatura que aborda el mundo del tráfico de drogas, no es nuevo, pero sí lo es la necesidad de nombrarlo. En México, el término se impuso sobre todo en los medios de comunicación – un poco menos en la academia, donde no goza de unanimidad –, ante la proliferación de libros en torno a este tema.

    Nombrar es un primer paso para intentar identificar, definir, encasillar, clasificar o agrupar, entre otras actividades igualmente reduccionistas. La dichosa palabrita es una especie de saco, muy amplio, donde parece caber todo: novelas policiacas, biografías de capos o crónicas amarillistas, por citar tres tipos de libros que abundan desde hace unos años en las librerías mexicanas.

    Su uso – y su abuso – está produciendo algunos efectos negativos sobre la recepción de la literatura mexicana. Para comenzar, provoca una cierta desconfianza en los círculos intelectuales ante las obras que abordan el tema. “Otra novela de narcos”, es una frase despectiva que puede oírse con regularidad, como si existieran temas despreciables en sí mismos, lo que supone ya una lectura prejuiciosa. Pero lo más importante es que el término no ayuda en nada a entender la literatura que hoy en día se está haciendo en México, empobrece el debate y oscurece el aporte de algunos de los mejores libros que se han escrito en los últimos años.

    Trabajos del reino, la primera novela de Yuri Herrera, es citada sin falta dentro del incipiente canon de la narcoliteratura. La historia de las peripecias de Lobo, un joven cantante de corridos, en el palacio de un poderoso narcotraficante llamado El Rey, es una alegoría de las relaciones entre el arte y el poder, una apología del arte como pureza, como medio de salvación: “Lo único extraño era él, que veía todo desde afuera. El único especial era él. Fue tan lindo comprenderlo, fue como un suave brillar entre la gente, un como sentir que las cosas son mejores cuando uno entra en un cuarto”. Decir que Trabajos del reino es una narconovela es negarle su filiación: la prosa elegante de Herrera se inserta de manera contundente en la rica tradición novelística latinoamericana del siglo XX, de la que supone una continuidad. Herrera pertenece a la estirpe de Miguel Ángel Asturias, Augusto Roa Bastos o Juan Rulfo y se erige como un heredero directo de la literatura del boom, igualmente influido por la tradición narrativa norteamericana.

    Si el término narcoliteratura opaca la aportación de Herrera, Julián Herbert y Carlos Velazquez se quedan, felizmente, en sus márgenes, resistentes a la clasificación, a pesar de haber escrito dos libros donde la droga es la gran protagonista.

    Cocaína (Manual de usuario), el brillante libro de relatos de Julián Herbert, explora el otro lado del fenómeno: el consumo. Con una ironía seca y sórdida, Herbert se propone, entre otras cosas, redactar el prospecto de uso de la cocaína, en el hilarante “Manual de usuario”: “1. ¡¡¡Felicidades!!! Por haber adquirido la mejor oferta del mercado. Durante cien años hemos contado con la preferencia de un sinnúmero de clientes a lo largo y ancho de la geografía internacional, así que no exageramos al decir, con orgullo, que nuestra mejor carta de recomendación es la historia reciente del mundo”. Sus personajes se debaten entre la euforia química y el insomnio, las crisis de abstinencia, el abandono hedonista y el propósito de rehabilitación: el mundo no es un pañuelo, es un papelito en el que reposa el preciado polvo blanco, y el camino es una larga raya.

    La biblia vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica) de Carlos Velázquez es el apocalipsis narco. Plagado de neologismos, infectado sin remedio por el inglés, autorreferencial hasta donde es posible serlo, cayendo a veces – hay que decirlo – en el chiste fácil, Velázquez crea una geografía propia, su mapa imaginario de Coahuila y Nuevo Léon, las zonas controladas por la Biblia Vaquera. “El díler de Juan Salazar” narra el infierno de la abstinencia cuando el dealer falla: “Su regresión se contaminó por las teorías de los relatos de cantina acerca de San Pedroslavia. Una tierra mágica. La droga no se termina nunca. Todo mundo es díler. La heroína es baratísima (…) Decía de la abstinencia que era como mascar un chicle sin sabor. El cuarto menguante de la malilla rápido alcanzaría los límites de la luna llena y la estación completa se poblaría para él de vampiros aztecas”.

    En el fondo, hablar de narcoliteratura parece más propio de quien quiere vender el fenómeno, y una cierta idea de país, que de quien quiere leer libros. Es la lógica del tráfico versus la lógica del consumo.

    Desgraciadamente, nuestros mejores libros no vienen con manual de usuario.

     

    Información adicional: 

    Yuri Herrera: Trabajos del reino, Periférica, Cáceres, 2008.

    Julián Herbert: Cocaína (Manual de usuario), Mondadori, Barcelona, 2009.

    Carlos Velazquez: La Biblia Vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica), Sexto Piso, México D.F., 2011.

     

     

     

  • Against Narcoliterature

    This week for PEN Atlas, Juan Pablo Villalobos writes against ‘Narcoliterature’.  This piece has been translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.

    The Narrative of Violence in Mexico 2: Three Reasons Not to Use the Word narcoliteratura

    Translated by Rosalind Harvey

    Narcoliteratura: this little word, meaning literature about drugs, is a vile neologism whose use seems inevitable nowadays when we come to speak of contemporary Mexican literature. Like all good neologisms, it arose from the need to name a new phenomenon. In actual fact, the phenomenon in this case – the literature that deals with the world of drug trafficking – is not new, but the need to name it is. In Mexico, the term rose to prominence above all in the media (somewhat less in academia, where it has not been unanimously adopted) in the face of the proliferation of books on this theme.

    To name something is the first step in attempting to identify, define, categorise, classify or bracket it, amongst other equally reductionist activities. The blessed little word is a kind of sack, a very roomy one, into which everything appears to fit: detective novels, biographies of drug lords or sensationalist non-fiction, to mention three sorts of books that for some years now have been in plentiful supply in Mexican bookshops.

    The term’s use – and abuse – is having some negative effects on the reception of Mexican literature. For a start, in intellectual circles it inspires a certain suspicion towards novels dealing with this topic. ‘Another drug novel’ is a derogatory phrase that is regularly heard, as if there were themes that were contemptible per se, which presupposes a prejudiced reading. But the most important point is that the term does not help at all to understand the literature currently being written in Mexico; it impoverishes the debate and obscures the contribution made by some of the best books written in recent years.

    Trabajos del reino [Kingdom Cons], the debut novel by Yuri Herrera, is cited without fail as part of the nascent canon of narcoliteratura. The story tells of the exploits of Lobo, a young corrido or ballad singer, in the palace of a powerful drug trafficker called El Rey [The King], and is an allegory of the relationship between art and power, an apologia of art as purity, as a means of salvation: ‘The only strange thing was he, who saw everything from the outside. He was the only special one. It was so wonderful to realise this, it was like something softly shining among people, like a feeling when one enters a room that things are better.’ To say that Trabajos del reino is a drug novel is to deny where it comes from: Herrera’s graceful prose fits emphatically into the rich 20th century Latin American literary tradition, of which it is a continuation. He comes from the same line as Miguel Ángel Asturias, Augusto Roa Bastos and Juan Rulfo, and establishes himself as a direct heir to the literature of the Boom, influenced just as much by the North American literary tradition.

    If the term narcoliteratura overshadows Herrera’s contribution, Julián Herbert and Carlos Velázquez remain happily on the margins, resistant to classification, despite having both written books in which drugs are the main protagonist.

    Cocaína (Manual de usuario) [Cocaine: A User’s Manual], the brilliant collection of short stories by Julián Herbert, explores the other side of the phenomenon: abuse. With pithy, sordid irony, Herbert sets himself the task of, among other things, writing the directions for use of cocaine, in the hilarious story ‘User’s Manual’: ‘1. Congratulations!!! You have acquired the best product on the market. For a hundred years we have been the preferred choice for countless numbers of international customers around the world, and so it is not an exaggeration when we say with pride that our best letter of introduction is recent global history.’ The characters swing between chemical euphoria and insomnia, hedonistic abandon and attempts at giving up: the world is not an oyster, it’s a twist of paper in which the precious white powder lies, and the way there is a long line.

    La biblia vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica) [The Biblia Vaquera (A Triumph of the Ballad over Logic)] by Carlos Velázquez is the narco apocalypse. Riddled with neologisms, hopelessly infected with English, as self-referential as it is possible to be, lapsing at times – it has to be said – into facile gags, Velázquez creates a geography all his own, an imaginary map of Coahuila and Nuevo Léon, the regions controlled by the Biblia Vaquera. ‘Juan Salazar’s dealer’ tells of the hell of cold turkey when the man’s dealer doesn’t come through: ‘His regression became contaminated by the theories surrounding the barroom stories about San Pedroslavia: a magic land where the drugs never ran out, everyone is a dealer, and heroin is incredibly cheap (…) He used to say that withdrawal symptoms were like chewing a tasteless piece of gum.  The last quarter of his cold turkey would soon reach the size of the full moon and the whole station would become filled just for him with Aztec vampires.’

    Essentially, speaking of narcoliteratura seems to be something done by those who want to sell the phenomenon, and a certain idea of Mexico, rather than those who want to read books. It is the logic of the trafficker versus the logic of the consumer.

    Unfortunately, our best books do not come with a user’s manual.

    Read the original text in Spanish here: Contra la narcoliteratura

    About the Author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

    About the Translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional Information

    Yuri Herrera: Trabajos del reino, Periférica, Cáceres, 2008. (To be published later this year by Faber and Faber in a translation by Lisa Dillman)

    Julián Herbert: Cocaína (Manual de usuario), Mondadori, Barcelona, 2009.

    Carlos Velazquez: La Biblia Vaquera (Un triunfo del corrido sobre la lógica), Sexto Piso, México D.F., 2011.

  • Yo ya no quiero salir en esta película

    La narrativa de la violencia en México 1: el cuento.

    Juan Pablo Villalobos

    Creo ciegamente que los escritores mexicanos estamos condenados a decepcionar a nuestros interlocutores extranjeros. Escribí una novela que ha sido traducida a varios idiomas y cada vez que tengo una entrevista o que participo de una lectura en el extranjero acabo con la sensación de no haber cumplido con la expectativa, frustrado por no poder ser suficientemente auténtico, lo que en el caso de México quiere decir folclórico. Me siento justo como el narrador de “Amigos mexicanos”, el divertidísimo y lúcido cuento de Juan Villoro, en el que un famoso periodista estadounidense, Samuel Katzenberg, contrata a un escritor mexicano para que sea su “contacto hacia lo genuino”, para que le ayude a diferenciar lo que es horrible de lo que es “buñuelesco”, para que le muestre el verdadero México. Al describir el México que Katzenberg quería conocer, Villoro resume a la perfección el abismo que separa a mexicanos y extranjeros al construir la imagen de nuestro país: “Él deseaba una realidad como los óleos de Frida: espantosa pero única”.

    En los últimos años la situación no ha hecho más que empeorar: la llamada “guerra contra el narco” del presidente Calderón ha provocado alrededor de 50.000 muertes violentas en el país. Nuestra realidad se ha vuelto espantosa, a secas, sin que tenga absolutamente nada de “única” o fascinante. De manera paralela a la escalada de violencia, ha surgido una escalada literaria, porque un número importante de escritores ha intuido la necesidad – social, diría yo – de buscar un lenguaje para narrar la violencia. Se escriben por igual novelas, cuentos, obras de teatro, guiones de cine e incluso poemas o performances, que recrean nuestro horror cotidiano. Comenzaré por el cuento.

    Narrar la violencia supone narrar el mundo del crimen organizado, las entrañas del monstruo aficionado a la decapitación. En el genial “Ese modo que colma”, Daniel Sada relata la fiesta de un grupo de narcotraficantes, fiesta que se suspende porque en una hielera de cervezas se realiza el hallazgo de tres cabezas humanas. Las páginas transcurren mientras las viudas pican hielo para evitar que las cabezas se pudran y apesten, los narcotraficantes comienzan a indagar quiénes son los traidores y las mujeres piensan en cómo dar sepultura a las cabezas: ¿en un féretro chiquito?, ¿en una caja de fruta? Sada culmina el cuento con una admonición escalofriante: “eso de las decapitaciones se estaba poniendo de moda”, “una moda que podría durar varios años”.

    ¿Qué nos ha pasado?, ¿cómo llegamos aquí?, son dos preguntas terroríficas que nos agobian. La realidad nos obliga a volver a pensarlo todo, a regresar, incluso, a lo elemental, a la definición de las cosas, para tratar de descubrir dónde nos hemos perdido. Francisco Hinojosa cree necesario, y lo es, citar el significado del verbo descuartizar en “Lo que antes eran calles”, cuento en el que un sicario con dislalia, apodado El Bóiler, termina descuartizando, por calentura, a la novia que lo ha engañado: “Descuartizar. Verbo transitivo que significa cuartear, hacer cuartos, despedazar, hacer pedazos, desmembrar, destrozar. Dividir en cuartos, a modo de castigo, el cuerpo de una persona”. Y sigue.

    Hay que volver a nombrar las cosas, narrarlas, porque ya no son lo que eran, o porque ya no son lo que parecen, o porque ya no parecen lo que son. En “Ojos que no ven” Iris García relata el reclutamiento de actores para un película entre los borrachos asiduos a una cantina. Su papel en el filme consistirá en declararse miembros del Cártel de Sinaloa culpables de algunos asesinatos. Delante de la cámara, a fuerza de golpes y balazos para dar realismo a la escena, porque no hay presupuesto para maquillaje, acabarán descubriendo que están siendo usados por el Cártel del Golfo para que se culpe al cártel rival de “todo lo que pasa”. Uno de los borrachos reclutados chilla una frase que bien podría decir cualquier mexicano que ve invadida su cotidianeidad por ese tipo de violencia que antes solo veíamos en el cine o la televisión: “Yo ya no quiero salir en esta película”.

    Algunos empezamos a delirar con visiones apocalípticas. Antonio Ortuño imagina en “Historia” que un país extranjero decide invadirnos, debido “al tráfico de drogas, el contrabando de órganos, el secuestro y homicidio de extranjeros, el estado de anarquía que priva y la migración masiva”. El protagonista del cuento intenta huir al tiempo que nos relata el miedo de los varones locales a que sus mujeres se ofrezcan a los soldados invasores para tener hijos rubios. Al final, justo antes de sucumbir al ataque de los tanques enemigos, se salva al encontrar refugio tras una puerta que le abre una mujer “gorda y renegrida”, “el cabello teñido de rubio y los dientes cubiertos por casquillos de oro”.

    Es la patria.

    Posdata: a los extranjeros aterrados con el presente texto, me gustaría transcribirles, para tranquilizarlos, una frase de Burroughs que Villoro repite en el cuento citado: “No te preocupes: los mexicanos solo matan a sus amigos”.

     Sobre el autor

    Juan Pablo Villalobos nació en Guadalajara, México, en 1973. Después de ocho años en Barcelona ahora vive en Brasil. Tiene dos hijos mexicanos-brasileños-catalanesitalianos. Su primera novela, Fiesta en la madriguera, fue publicada en 2010 y está siendo traducida a catorce idiomas. Su segunda novela se publicará en septiembre en español y en inglés durante el primer semestre de 2013. Escribe para diferentes revistas, periódicos y blogs de México, España, Brasil y Colombia.

     Sobre la traductora

    Rosalind Harvey ha vivido en Lima y en Norwich, donde se enamoró del español y de la traducción, respectivamente. Actualmente vive en Londres, donde traduce ficción en español. Su reciente traducción de Fiesta en la madriguera fue nominada al premio de primera novela del diario The Guardian. Es co-traductora, junto con Anne McLean, de El olvido que seremos de Hector Abad y de Dublinesca de Enrique Vila-Matas. El pasado otoño fue una de las primeras traductoras en residencia en el Free Word Centre.

    Información adicional

    Juan Villoro (DF, 1956): “Amigos mexicanos” en Los culpables, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2008.

    Daniel Sada (Mexicali, 1953-2010): “Ese modo que colma” en Ese modo que colma, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2010.

    Francisco Hinojosa (DF, 1954): “Lo que antes eran calles” en El tiempo apremia, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2010.

    Iris García (Acapulco, 1977 ) “Ojos que no ven” en Ojos que no ven, corazón desierto, Tierra Adentro, México, 2009.

    Antonio Ortuño (Guadalajara, 1976) “Historia” en La señora rojo, Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2010.

  • I Don’t Want To Be In This Film Any More

    The PEN Atlas series continues with a powerful despatch by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos.  This piece has been translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.

    The Narrative of Violence in Mexico 1: the short story

    Translated by Rosalind Harvey

    I believe unconditionally that Mexican writers are condemned to disappoint our foreign readers. I wrote a novel that has been translated into several languages and each time I do an interview or take part in a reading abroad I end up with the sensation of not having lived up to people’s expectations, frustrated at not being authentic enough, which in the case of Mexico means ‘colourful’. I feel just like the narrator of ‘Amigos mexicanos’ [Mexican friends], the hilarious and perceptive story by Juan Villoro, in which a famous American journalist, Samuel Katzenberg, hires a Mexican writer to be his ‘contact with the genuine’, to help him distinguish between what is hideous and what is ‘Buñuelesque’, to show him the real México. When he discovers the Mexico that Katzenberg wants to see, Villoro sums up perfectly the gulf separating Mexicans and foreigners when they come to construct an image of our country: ‘He wanted a reality like Frida’s paintings: horrific but unique’.

    In recent years the situation has done nothing but worsen: president Calderón’s so-called ‘drug war’ has caused around 50,000 violent deaths in the country. Our reality has become simply horrific, with nothing ‘unique’ or fascinating about it. The increase in violence has seen a parallel increase in literature, as a significant number of writers has sensed the need – a social need, I would say – to seek out a language for writing about the violence. Novels, short stories, plays, screenplays and even poems and ‘happenings’ are being written in equal measure, recreating our daily horror. I’ll begin with the short story.

    Writing about violence means writing about the world of organised crime, the inner workings of the monster so fond of decapitation. In the brilliant ‘Ese modo que colma’ [Sense of achievement], Daniel Sada describes a party thrown by a group of drug traffickers, a party called off because of the discovery in an ice box of three human heads. The story rolls on while the widows crush ice to stop the heads from decomposing and stinking, the traffickers start to investigate who the traitors are, and the women think about how to bury the heads: in a tiny little coffin? In a fruit crate? Sada ends the story with a chilling warning: ‘this decapitation thing was starting to become fashionable’, ‘a fashion that could last several years.’

    ‘What has happened to us?’ and ‘how did we get here?’ are two terrifying questions that are currently overwhelming us. Reality is forcing us to re-think everything, to go back, even, to basics, to the definition of things, in order to find out where we got lost. Francisco Hinojosa believes it is necessary – and it is – to cite the meaning of the verb descuartizar (to quarter, dismember or chop up) in ‘Lo que antes eran calles’ [What once were streets], a story in which a hitman with a speech impediment nicknamed ‘The Boiler’ ends up dismembering, in a fit, the girlfriend who has cheated on him: ‘Dismember. Transitive verb that means quarter, divide into quarters, disjoint, tear apart, break into pieces, chop up, destroy. To cut into four parts, as a form of punishment, a person’s body.’ And it goes on.

    We have to re-name things, write about them, because they are no longer what they were, or because they are no longer what they seem, or they no longer seem like what they are. In ‘Ojos que no ven’ [What you don’t know can’t hurt you], Iris García writes of actors being recruited for a film from among the regular drunks of a cantina. Their role in the movie is to admit to being members of the Sinaloa Cartel guilty of certain murders. In front of the camera, beaten and shot at, so as to lend the scene some realism since there is no budget for make-up, they discover that they’re being used by the Gulf Cartel so that their rivals in Sinaloa are blamed for ‘everything that happens.’ One of the hired drunks screams out a phrase that could well be uttered by any Mexican who sees his daily existence invaded by this kind of violence, which we used only to see in the cinema or on TV: ‘I don’t what to be in this film any more.’

    Some of us started to hallucinate with apocalyptic visions. In ‘Historia’ [History], Antonio Ortuño imagines that a foreign country decides to invade us, because of ‘drug trafficking, the illegal organ trade, the kidnap and murder of foreigners, the prevailing state of anarchy and mass migration.’ The story’s protagonist attempts to flee while describing the local men’s fear that their wives will offer themselves to the invading soldiers so they will have blond children. At the end, just before he surrenders to the enemy tanks, the man escapes by taking shelter behind a door opened by a ‘fat, blackish’ woman, ‘her hair dyed blonde and her teeth covered in gold caps.’

    She is the motherland.

    …

    Postscript: for foreigners terrified by the present text, I would like to transcribe, so as to reassure them, a phrase of Burroughs’ repeated by Villoro in the above cited short story: ‘Don’t worry: Mexicans only kill their friends.’

    Read the original text in Spanish here: Yo ya no quiero salir en esta película

    About the Author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

    About the Translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional Information

    Juan Villoro (Mexico city, 1956): “Amigos mexicanos” in Los culpables, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2008.

    Daniel Sada (Mexicali, 1953-2010): “Ese modo que colma” in Ese modo que colma, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2010. Almost Never his last novel is published by Graywolf in the US.  He began his career as a poet and was one of Mexico’s most admired novelists and story writers.

    Antonio Ortuño (Guadalajara, 1976) “Historia” in La señora rojo, Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2010. His writing has been translated into many languages. ‘Small Mouth, Thin Lips’ is a new story and can be read in Granta magazine 113.

    Francisco Hinojosa (Mexico city, 1954): “Lo que antes eran calles” in El tiempo apremia, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2010.

    Iris García (Acapulco, 1977 ) “Ojos que no ven” in Ojos que no ven, corazón desierto, Tierra Adentro, México, 2009.

  • I Don't Want To Be In This Film Any More

    The PEN Atlas series continues with a powerful despatch by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos.  This piece has been translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.

    The Narrative of Violence in Mexico 1: the short story

    Translated by Rosalind Harvey

    I believe unconditionally that Mexican writers are condemned to disappoint our foreign readers. I wrote a novel that has been translated into several languages and each time I do an interview or take part in a reading abroad I end up with the sensation of not having lived up to people’s expectations, frustrated at not being authentic enough, which in the case of Mexico means ‘colourful’. I feel just like the narrator of ‘Amigos mexicanos’ [Mexican friends], the hilarious and perceptive story by Juan Villoro, in which a famous American journalist, Samuel Katzenberg, hires a Mexican writer to be his ‘contact with the genuine’, to help him distinguish between what is hideous and what is ‘Buñuelesque’, to show him the real México. When he discovers the Mexico that Katzenberg wants to see, Villoro sums up perfectly the gulf separating Mexicans and foreigners when they come to construct an image of our country: ‘He wanted a reality like Frida’s paintings: horrific but unique’.

    In recent years the situation has done nothing but worsen: president Calderón’s so-called ‘drug war’ has caused around 50,000 violent deaths in the country. Our reality has become simply horrific, with nothing ‘unique’ or fascinating about it. The increase in violence has seen a parallel increase in literature, as a significant number of writers has sensed the need – a social need, I would say – to seek out a language for writing about the violence. Novels, short stories, plays, screenplays and even poems and ‘happenings’ are being written in equal measure, recreating our daily horror. I’ll begin with the short story.

    Writing about violence means writing about the world of organised crime, the inner workings of the monster so fond of decapitation. In the brilliant ‘Ese modo que colma’ [Sense of achievement], Daniel Sada describes a party thrown by a group of drug traffickers, a party called off because of the discovery in an ice box of three human heads. The story rolls on while the widows crush ice to stop the heads from decomposing and stinking, the traffickers start to investigate who the traitors are, and the women think about how to bury the heads: in a tiny little coffin? In a fruit crate? Sada ends the story with a chilling warning: ‘this decapitation thing was starting to become fashionable’, ‘a fashion that could last several years.’

    ‘What has happened to us?’ and ‘how did we get here?’ are two terrifying questions that are currently overwhelming us. Reality is forcing us to re-think everything, to go back, even, to basics, to the definition of things, in order to find out where we got lost. Francisco Hinojosa believes it is necessary – and it is – to cite the meaning of the verb descuartizar (to quarter, dismember or chop up) in ‘Lo que antes eran calles’ [What once were streets], a story in which a hitman with a speech impediment nicknamed ‘The Boiler’ ends up dismembering, in a fit, the girlfriend who has cheated on him: ‘Dismember. Transitive verb that means quarter, divide into quarters, disjoint, tear apart, break into pieces, chop up, destroy. To cut into four parts, as a form of punishment, a person’s body.’ And it goes on.

    We have to re-name things, write about them, because they are no longer what they were, or because they are no longer what they seem, or they no longer seem like what they are. In ‘Ojos que no ven’ [What you don’t know can’t hurt you], Iris García writes of actors being recruited for a film from among the regular drunks of a cantina. Their role in the movie is to admit to being members of the Sinaloa Cartel guilty of certain murders. In front of the camera, beaten and shot at, so as to lend the scene some realism since there is no budget for make-up, they discover that they’re being used by the Gulf Cartel so that their rivals in Sinaloa are blamed for ‘everything that happens.’ One of the hired drunks screams out a phrase that could well be uttered by any Mexican who sees his daily existence invaded by this kind of violence, which we used only to see in the cinema or on TV: ‘I don’t what to be in this film any more.’

    Some of us started to hallucinate with apocalyptic visions. In ‘Historia’ [History], Antonio Ortuño imagines that a foreign country decides to invade us, because of ‘drug trafficking, the illegal organ trade, the kidnap and murder of foreigners, the prevailing state of anarchy and mass migration.’ The story’s protagonist attempts to flee while describing the local men’s fear that their wives will offer themselves to the invading soldiers so they will have blond children. At the end, just before he surrenders to the enemy tanks, the man escapes by taking shelter behind a door opened by a ‘fat, blackish’ woman, ‘her hair dyed blonde and her teeth covered in gold caps.’

    She is the motherland.

    …

    Postscript: for foreigners terrified by the present text, I would like to transcribe, so as to reassure them, a phrase of Burroughs’ repeated by Villoro in the above cited short story: ‘Don’t worry: Mexicans only kill their friends.’

    Read the original text in Spanish here: Yo ya no quiero salir en esta película

    About the Author

    Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. After eight years in Barcelona he lives now in Brazil. He has two Mexican-Brazilian-Catalan-Italian children. His first novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was published in Spanish in 2010 and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second novel will be out in Spanish in September and in English in the first quarter of 2013. He writes for different magazines, newspapers and blogs of Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Colombia.

    About the Translator

    Rosalind Harvey has lived in Lima and Norwich, where she fell in love with Spanish and translation, respectively. She now lives in London, where she translates Hispanic fiction. Her recent translation of Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, and she is the co-translator with Anne McLean of Hector Abad’s prize-winning memoir Oblivion, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Last autumn she was one of Free Word Centre’s first ever translators-in-residence.

    Additional Information

    Juan Villoro (Mexico city, 1956): “Amigos mexicanos” in Los culpables, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2008.

    Daniel Sada (Mexicali, 1953-2010): “Ese modo que colma” in Ese modo que colma, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2010. Almost Never his last novel is published by Graywolf in the US.  He began his career as a poet and was one of Mexico’s most admired novelists and story writers.

    Antonio Ortuño (Guadalajara, 1976) “Historia” in La señora rojo, Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2010. His writing has been translated into many languages. ‘Small Mouth, Thin Lips’ is a new story and can be read in Granta magazine 113.

    Francisco Hinojosa (Mexico city, 1954): “Lo que antes eran calles” in El tiempo apremia, Almadía, Oaxaca, 2010.

    Iris García (Acapulco, 1977 ) “Ojos que no ven” in Ojos que no ven, corazón desierto, Tierra Adentro, México, 2009.