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  • A Cake Full of Knives: An Interview with Elisa Victoria

    A Cake Full of Knives: An Interview with Elisa Victoria

    Elisa Victoria on child narrators, comics, and post-Franco Spain. Translated by Charlotte Whittle.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Elisa – thank you for talking to me. In your novel Oldladyvoice, we follow Marina, an anxious but hilariously discerning 9-year-old girl spending the summer with her grandma while silently battling life’s miscellany of demons: her mother is sick with an unspecified illness; she’s having to endure the humiliation of a late baptism; and her debilitating shyness prevents her from making friends, or kissing them. I’d like to start by asking how the character of Marina came to you.

    I wanted to portray a responsible girl, who does what she ought to but also has a strong will, who’s fun and a little bit naughty but also touching, who is in a complicated situation but finds balance through things she can rely on – comics, dolls, her relationship with her grandmother. I wanted her to have a particular idea of religion in which the Christian God served as a mediator for her worship of her mother as a higher deity; I wanted to show how communication problems occur from such a young age – how she relates to her grandmother, for example, and how she falls out with some of the children around her because she can’t grasp their social codes. My idea was to create a composite character – like a cake full of knives, or a knife stained with a red liquid that turns out to be strawberry jam – and work with these mixed feelings that exist simultaneously, because, to me, childhood is a period of extremes, with many contradictory, coexistent layers.

    Marina has such a unique voice; it is both hilarious and incredibly moving in its profundity. How did you and your translator, Charlotte Whittle, work together to capture this voice in English?

    Charlotte was very respectful, asking me about historical context and local expressions – she gave me total confidence, and I was fascinated by what her questions were. She also showed me a draft of the first chapter, to see if I thought the tone was right, and I loved it right from the beginning. I thought it was a fantastic translation, where non-literal equivalencies made for a shared effect.

    Oldladyvoice is your first book translated into English. You’ve spoken elsewhere about the satisfaction this brings you, but specifically that ‘it feels . . . as though the words have more value now that they’ve been translated by Charlotte than they did when I wrote them.’ Could I ask you to speak about this, and what you feel happened to your words in the process of translation?

    I think that has to do with it being the first time I saw myself translated, and also with prejudices around the English language. I was so used to my own words that they had lost their meaning; seeing them transformed gave them back their value. There’s also the concrete value of English, a language I’ve known since I was a child and that, for different cultural reasons, I’ve deeply respected and even idealised. It’s silly, but seeing myself translated by Charlotte made me feel like a “real writer” for the first time. My main source for finding the book’s style was the writing of John Fante, something I had discussed with Charlotte and that she had taken into account, and it was fascinating to see myself in his language.

    The story takes place over a summer in 1993, at what feels like a pivotal moment in Spain’s history: Franco’s brutal dictatorship is still a recent memory for many, but there’s a sense of hope for the future. As Marina remarks, ‘the nineties are all that stands between us and what’s next.’ You were also a child of the 1990s. In what way did coming of age in this decade influence you and your writing? And what impact does it have on Marina?

    I was interested in several aspects of the nineties, and I drew confidence from knowing first-hand and in depth what they were like, what it was like to be there. It is true that numbers have the power to influence us, and the millennium had an air of conclusion about it – an ending before the beginning of something else. In Spain in particular, there was a certain mood of triumph in the air after all the suffering the civil war and the long dictatorship brought, with the Seville Expo ’92 and the Barcelona Olympics happening around the same time. It was superficial, but it made a huge impression on children, who are so sensitive to advertising campaigns and who truly hoped for a bright future thanks to that vibe. I chose 1993 because it coincided with the hangover of these big events, which left the atmosphere of a burst bubble behind them, and a terrible drought that summer, which seemed an appropriate accompaniment to the protagonist’s psychology. And because of the re-election of Felipe González, a president beloved by many women at the time, which offered the counterpoint of a social phenomenon with a dose of humour.

    Marina is obsessed with El Víbora, a subversive cult comic for adults published in Spain between 1979 and 2004, subtitled ‘Comix for Survivors’ (in reference to those who lived through Spain’s 40-year dictatorship). There are several concurrent stories of survival in the novel: Marina’s attempt to survive childhood; her mother’s battle to survive illness; and the survival of national trauma throughout the twentieth century. In what way are these stories of survival linked?

    The characters in Marina’s comics are all transgressive in some way: they’re sex workers, addicts and troublemakers, but, to Marina, they’re ‘a formidable army backing her up’ who ‘fill her with hope’ and show her the ‘path to salvation’. Why is it that Marina is drawn to these characters and their creators? Do you yourself find comfort and courage in the outsiders of literature?

    These characters shed light on forbidden topics that tend to awaken a magnetic curiosity in children precisely because they’re issues swathed in mystery and secrecy. They’re marginal characters who face a lot of obstacles, and so Marina identifies with their difficulties, seeing them as heroic figures who can handle major (and often unfair) pressures. She also finds inspiration in the comics because of the quality of the stories and the style in which their authors present them: the idea that such a job exists – of telling complicated, beautiful, raw stories that are entertaining and spine-chilling, full of contrasts – gives her hope. It’s an artistic job to which she can aspire; it means that there are people earning a living from this work underground, earning money from telling those stories. That’s the path to salvation I ended up taking myself, the one walked by outsider creators in all disciplines, because when I could no longer stick to academic study, that path was there for me and for anyone who needed it; comics taught me a way to tell stories that I was at ease with, and taught me that there were alternatives to official career paths. Showing both the distress and enlightenment they brought to that generation was an affectionate tribute.

    I think people are often dismissive of child narrators in the same way they’re dismissive of children in real life, assuming they lack perspective on the world, a notion that Marina subverts with endearing effect. Was this a consideration for you when writing the book, and why did you choose to write from this perspective?

    The perspectives of children and young people have always interested me because they give voice to an excruciating tenderness that makes you laugh and bleed at the same time. Childhood and youth are periods so rich in nuance that I never tire of stories about these stages of life. There’s also a certain vindication of the complexity of those experiences and psychological phases, an urge to demand respect and dignity for people going through them and not being taken very seriously. I realised I was obsessed with these issues, and that I tended to write stories about younger people, so I decided to delve into that as much as I could in the novel form, where I could fully embrace the voice of a child, get it out of my system and put it into words, in case I forgot what it had been like to be a child. I wanted to take advantage of that information and leave myself a kind of handbook for the future, to prevent myself from turning into one of those adults who seem not to remember anything of youth.

    In a similar way, I think some readers may be shocked to read about a 9-year-old girl who is so compelled by sex and violence, often conflating the two in her mind and making herself the protagonist in her fantasies. I found this aspect of the book so interesting, and I feel more and more writers are exploring the complexities of children’s interior lives. Did you have any apprehension when tackling this aspect of the novel? Did the freedom required to write this story come to you easily?

    I was convinced that thoughts like these take place in the minds of many children, but I knew those passages would be somewhat troubling. I had published a couple of experimental books where I’d written with ferocious freedom, and so I had practice and confidence in addressing those themes that made it come easily. But, at times, I tried not to go so far in this book, toning things down slightly in some parts so they wouldn’t be as brutal. Even so, I know some readers find them shocking. My Spanish publisher asked me if I was sure about the passages, but I was certain that I had already toned it down quite a bit. I’m not the first to have portrayed this kind of complexity and I won’t be the last, and I’m happy to belong to that tribe.

    It feels like what Marina wants most is to be seen and understood – by her peers, but also by the adults in her life. Is there something we can learn from the novel about how we relate to and treat children?

    Well, I suppose a nice conclusion would be that it’s possible to communicate deeply with children if they’re treated considerately and spoken to naturally and with interest, taking into account their points of view, their circumstances, and the fact that they’re human beings with enormous ability for perception and reflection. We can take people seriously without being tactless.

    Marina is an impossible character to forget. Has she stayed with you since you finished writing the book, and has she changed you in any way?

    When I was writing the book, I had a huge catalogue of scenes with her at different points in her development: looking at the cutlery drawer from above and below, sitting and watching TV with her grandmother, tossing and turning in bed unable to sleep – endless reels of images that I visualised. With time, one of these has remained with particular force, and when I think of Marina, I always picture her sitting alone on the kerb, eating an ice-cream, with the slightly strained expression of someone pondering difficult matters but at the same time concentrating on enjoying the ice-cream’s flavour and refreshment. Now that you ask, I think the way she’s changed me has to do with her giving me the chance to let go of all the information I gathered from working in such depth on her character. I spent years taking notes on childhood, my own and that of others, and I stored up that information against the clock, fearing that it might get blurry as time went by. Publishing this book, and the fact that it worked as a kind of essay on childhood, has lightened my load – she has lightened my load.

    Finally, speak to me about your friend, the author Andrea Abreu. While different in tone, Abreu’s debut novel Dogs of Summer can be read as an interesting companion piece to Oldladyvoice. Do you see your and Abreu’s novels as belonging to a new literary tradition?

    I don’t know if it’s new, since we both have sources in the past that have shown us the way, many of them shared. But I do think there’s a shared spirit when it comes to our interest in exploring the raw and the beautiful, the broken and the tender in all their richness. I do feel that our works communicate in some way, and not just because they tackle similar periods in terms of the protagonists’ ages. Andrea told me, at some point, that Oldladyvoice was an inspiration to her. And for me, reading Dogs of Summer gave me back the purity of creative energy that at the time I felt had slipped through my hands. It filled me with courage and set me on the path to my next book.

    Elisa Victoria was born in Seville in 1985. She has published two books of short stories, Porn & Pains in 2013, and La sombra de los pinos in 2018, and has contributed to several anthologies. Her debut novel, Oldladyvoice, was published in Spanish in 2019 to great critical acclaim and was selected as Book of the Week by El País. It hs been translated into English, Italian and Portuguese. Her latest works are the novel El Evangelio, and El quicio, an illustrated book in collaboration with the artist Mireia Pérez, both published in 2021.

    Charlotte Whittle’s work has appeared in The Literary Review, Los Angeles Times, Guernica, BOMB, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her translations include novels by Jorge Comensal, Elisa Victoria, and Norah Lange; her most recent translation is Papyrus, the international bestseller by Irene Vallejo. She lives in England and New York.

    Interview by Zoe Sadler, English PEN.

    Photo credit: Joaquín León.

  • Lest Writers Become Accountants: An Interview with Mauro Javier Cárdenas

    Lest Writers Become Accountants: An Interview with Mauro Javier Cárdenas

    Ecuadorean Mauro Javier Cárdenas discusses radical grammar, Spanish, and US politics.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Mauro – critics and fellow writers have spoken of Aphasia, your latest book, as reimagining what the novel form can be. Is this something you set out to do? Did form precede story, or story precede form?

    Whosoever reads too many novels will despair at the sameness of novels, I’ve often thought – at the excess of conflict / action / resolution, for instance, at the figurative language straining to elicit images of Stirring Novelist, at the tiresome stagecrafting of suffering, at the pantomimes of poetic diction and so on, and so yes, in order to avoid despair – ha! – I’ve tried to empty the novel of everything I hate about novels. How transgressive, some readers have pointed out, we get it, you write outside the rules, blah blah blah, and although most of the time I prefer to join them in their mockery – because it’s more festive that way – sometimes I want to say to them, but I don’t want to die of boredom, or, if I’m in a more transcendental mood – run! – I don’t write these performance-of-an-impulse sentences to be transgressive or experimental or to sour your Mai Tai, no, I write them to attempt a representation of life that doesn’t replicate the recycled murmurs of our lives. How exciting to read outside predramatised forms, those readers never say, thank you, at last we understand.

    There are many writers in Aphasia, some dead, some alive, and some – like László Krasznahorkai – who you have met and interviewed in the real world. I’m interested in the process of rendering in fiction a character’s thoughts on a writer whom you have spoken to at length. Is that an uncanny process?

    When you spend so much time thinking about imaginary situations, the distinction between memories, imaginary memories, dreams, films, and what you imagine while you’re reading becomes irrelevant while you’re writing, so despite my fondness for my memories of László Krasznahorkai’s monologues about monologues in San Francisco – a monologue is someone trying to convince you of something, László Krasznahorkai said, but in my books no one listens – they exist in my mind alongside Korin’s monologues in War & War, Antonio’s monologue in Aphasia about Korin’s monologues in War & War, and everything else directly or indirectly related to them. What I’ve come to find uncanny is remembering: to be in San Francisco and see myself in my bedroom in Guayaquil, for instance, listening to ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ by Guns N’ Roses on the radio for the first time – and me recording the radio on cassettes – thirty-three years ago.

    So much force is derived from your style in Aphasia. I’m thinking particularly of the interesting things you do with speech – using multiple comma splices to mean the reader is unclear who, precisely, is speaking, until after the fact of having read a few clauses (your answers here are good examples too!). Could you talk to me a little about why and how you deploy this grammar in your long (all 1,000-plus-word) sentences?

    If a neuroscientist were to place electrodes on my head, trying to determine what happens to my mind when I read The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago, which contains those long sentences whereas the Proofreader says Yes, this symbol is called deleatur and it reminds me of a snake that changes its minds just as it is about to bite its tail, and someone responds Well observed, sir, for however much we cling to life, even a snake would hesitate before eternity, the neuroscientist might be surprised by the spikes in my neuroelectronic representation of elation, especially if he’s a strict grammarian, and I might try to explain and say But without style it’s just ledgers of life on a page, doctor, and as long the author’s somewhat consistent on whatever rules she chooses for her style, we her readers will follow elatedly, Well observed, sir, for however much we cling to other people’s rules, we shouldn’t ask our writers to do so lest they resign and become accountants.

    In an attempt to make sense of a fragmentary, perhaps traumatic life, Antonio reads and writes a lot. Do you think reading or writing can indeed make sense of our world? Is one better than the other, for that?

    The answers are no and neither, but that isn’t any fun so let’s focus on Antonio’s mind, which is devoid of an active imagination due to his altered state ever since his sister’s altered state occasioned her escape from her trial proceedings, and since Antonio needs his active imagination to read and write fiction, he can’t do either, rereading instead of reading – rereading being a less taxing process of reconstitution – and transcribing audio recordings of his mother and former wife instead of writing fiction. Let’s take a turn toward self-help just to aggravate the ghost of Cioran. In Aphasia, there are three chapters titled after three so-called realist American short stories, which rely on a traditional Aristotelian reversal for their emotional effect – in other words the kind of stories Antonio claims to detest – and which he rereads to reconstitute the fantasy that he possesses the emotional range to care for his sister – those reversals acting as microscopic shocks – and it is perhaps his reconstitution of this fantasy that allows him to care for his sister, and in one sense that is the sense he’s after.  

    Aphasia is, of course, deeply concerned with language, and how language is both produced by and produces identity. There are a few moments in the book where Spanish is left untranslated, and where the choice to speak/write in either Spanish or English is of personal significance. Could you talk to me about whether that’s also significant for you?

    When I was asked about my inclusion of Spanish in The Revolutionaries Try Again, my first novel, I spoke at length about how, in a country like the United States, where some of the non-Latin American natives might flash their guns if you speak Spanish in public, including Spanish in a novel in English has a political dimension, and yet now, upon further reflection, I think those comments of mine could be categorised as Latin American kitsch – that is, emphasising what the non-Latin Americans in USA want to hear, which is that Latin Americans in the USA are the victims of outsized injustices, which allows the non-Latin Americans in the USA to feel superior to the Latin Americans in the USA – other examples of Latin American kitsch include those dreadful essays about the agony of losing mi español or about reclaiming California from Joan Rivers, or those book covers full of Virgens de Guadalupes, or those novels filled with melodramas of tíos and mamis – and so I’ve lost interest in including Spanish in my novels in English beyond a joke or two, like when Antonio is asked why he doesn’t write in Spanish or why he writes sentences that seem to contain more than one story at the same time and in his mind he responds pues ya ve que no he cambiado en nada, profe. None of the above is meant to discount the unconscionable injustices some of my fellow Latin Americans have to endure in the USA. I just think it’s too facile to include an abuelita or two in a novel in English and then make a big stink about it being political just to receive the patronising acclaim of the non-Latin American natives in the USA.

    My final question is about being an Ecuadorean in the US. Obama is mentioned in Aphasia (I won’t ruin things by going into the complexities of that); during your writing of the book, there was another president; and the book was first published in the US on the very day that the US voted for a third. How much of the tumult of the political landscape of the country you have now lived in for years is in this book – in your writing at large?

    My favourite American literary performance of the last four years goes as follows: a wealthy American writer who’s married to a Republican Ivy Leaguer publicly claims to be afraid of the president, which results in wide acclaim instead of wide derision since no one wants to point out – because that would be so mean – that the only impact the lazily nefarious American president has on this writer’s household is less taxes. I share this 2019 American classic because I’ve been trying to clarify for myself what the tumult of American politics means to me outside of these performances of virtue. Most American writers categorised as sophisticated aren’t directly impacted by the tumult of American politics, and the ones that are directly impacted – because they don’t have the right papers, sufficient funds, the right shade of pale – are patronisingly subcategorised as POCs.

    And now – at last – to answer your question: I seem to prefer writing about characters in an altered state of mind, and what can be more mind altering than the American government tailing your family on your way to school and apprehending your dear father simply because he doesn’t have the right papers and you having to record it on your phone so that someone out there will take pity on you and demand that he be returned to you?

    Mauro Javier Cárdenas was born and brought up in Guayaquil, Ecuador and studied Economics at Stanford University. His debut novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, was published in 2016. He was awarded the 2016 Joseph Henry Jackson Award and in 2017 was included in the Hay Festival anthology Bogotá39, a selection of the best young Latin American novelists working today. 

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

    Photo credit: Victoria Smith.

  • On the Other Side of the Door that Leads to Hell: An Interview with Selva Almada

    On the Other Side of the Door that Leads to Hell: An Interview with Selva Almada

    Argentinian writer Selva Almada discusses femicide, violence in lockdown, and how to write historic trauma.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Selva, when PEN Transmissions spoke to you last year, before Chicas muertas had been translated into English, you said that you ‘owed your activism’ to the book – that it was a ‘public stand’ that ‘reaffirmed your feminism’. It is now available to an anglophone public, and I want to ask how important it is to you that this public stand has moved across linguistic and national borders. Dead Girls is about femicide in Argentina, but it is also about gender-based violence at-large – how do the issues you address in the book ‘translate’ across the world?

    I think the book pushed me to throw myself, body and soul, to the reflections and preoccupations that I had, for many years, most of the time, on my own. If an author should always try and accompany their book, I felt that Dead Girls in particular demanded more of me than any of my previous ones. It also coincided with those vibrant years when different feminisms began to emerge in Argentina. We – as women – started to come out onto the street to express in public our ideas, our position vis-à-vis male violence, our condemnation. Two years ago, there was also a very strong debate in Argentina regarding the legalisation of abortion. We, as women writers, participated actively in the campaign. It was a very intense period, in which people began bringing taboo issues like abortion and (naturalised) male violence out of the closet. People started to understand that the killing of a woman at the hands of a man is a crime that is more closely related to cultural than criminal issues. These have been highly educational years. Unfortunately, misogyny is a problem affecting almost all societies in the world –  in some more exposed or more vicious than in others. Is the advance of the Right in Europe not proof of this? I don’t think it’s crazy to say that these phenomena go hand in hand: misogyny and the Right.  

    Could you talk to me a little about the intersections of violence, gender and capitalism that Dead Girls examines?

    The cases narrated in the book are the cases of very young, working-class women. One of them is going to college, in a period in which, in Argentina, this represented an aspiration and an opportunity to move up the social ladder. But she nevertheless comes from a working-class family: her father works in a meat-packing depot, and her mother is a housewife. In the other two cases, they are even poorer – one of them is a maid, and the other a sex worker. Added to the vulnerability inherent in being a woman and being young is the vulnerability also of being poor. The abuse they suffer is related to a class issue: the cruel games they are subject to, like the one they call ‘calving’. However poor and deprived a man is, when he gets home, there is always someone lower than him: a woman.

    Dead Girls is one of several recent and extremely powerful novels from Latin America that render violence through lyrical writing – that arrest, and prompt deep searching, by bringing gender-based violence and art together. Could you talk a little about your mode of writing here, which is urgent and spare and honest, whilst also lyrical and artful and beautiful?

    When I started to think about this book, and once I had finished the research and collated the fieldwork, the key question was how I was going to write it. I drafted a few versions, but it was very hard to arrive at the voice of the text. What would the narrator be like? How much would she have in common with me? What kind of distance would she take? A distance similar to the one I’d taken as a journalist? I wasn’t convinced by any of those drafts. The writing seemed foreign, lifeless, to me. I talked to my about it, and we came to the conclusion that I didn’t have to go looking for new tools to write the book – that I already had them in me, that they were the same I had used for all my other books. I was going to write a book of non-fiction using the narrative tools of fiction. That’s why this book has several points of contact with the rest of my work: the construction of the characters and the landscape, the territory of the language of provincial Argentina, far from the city; the lack of an intention to be just a testimony, but rather to work as a poetic form.

    Exploring that a little further, Dead Girls doesn’t settle neatly into one genre – it is personal but public, journalistic but novelistic. You’ve spoken elsewhere about the factual and the fictional both being deployed out of respect for Andrea Danne, María Luisa Quevedo, Sarita Mundín, and their families and friends – in order not to hide the truth of these stories behind reinvention, but also not to claim to offer complete accounts through reportage. The modulation – and its rendering through interview and conversation – results in a deeply intimate text. Could you speak about intimacy, and the role it plays in the book?

    When I decided that the narrator (the reporter) was going to be closely linked to me (the author), the possibility of something intimate, something personal, appeared. These stories, these tragedies that had happened to these girls, could have happened to me or my friends. And although we hadn’t traversed the limit of horror that is death, femicide, we had experienced first-hand hundreds of other types of abuse. Abuse that had become normalised. Forms of abuse that we were told to get used to, and were brought up to accept, because that’s how we were brought up as women – to accept the norms of machismo behaviour. This meant that the public and the private couldn’t be separate in the book.

    One always cautions against reading biography into the novels of women writers, but you place yourself firmly within this narrative. In the slow moments – when the narrator is travelling between interviews, waiting to speak to relatives – the context of Dead Girls means readers can’t help but fear, in a way, for you. Did you feel a heightened sense of risk whilst researching and writing this book? What effects did proximity to such traumatic but tragically prolific events – ones that you, early in the book, frame as perpetually close-to-home – have on you?

    No, I can’t say I felt I was in danger, but I did feel I was about to write a book that would be different to all my previous books. In this one, I would be particularly exposed. And I was going to write the stories of women I didn’t know, which was a responsibility. I suppose all those feelings do permeate the text.

    Though your research and writing of this book took place some years ago, its urgency is still of course – and damningly – urgent. With Dead Girls coming out in English in 2020, its look at gendered violence in small towns and domestic settings speaks arrestingly to the much-documented rise in femicide and violence against women during COVID-19 lockdowns. What connections between the stories of the book and this recent context do you see?

    This was – and is – a big concern among feminists in Argentina: What happens with women who are victims of gender violence and are obliged to live under the same roof as their aggressors during lockdown? What happens to them when the ties – always weak – that they can establish with the outside, on the other side of the door that leads to hell, are shut by an order from the State and by a situation that goes beyond the needs of the individual? The government took some measures, yet the statistics for femicides in recent months obviously show that these were not enough.

    Something that comes out in the discursive nature of the book is intergenerationalism (particularly between women of different generations), and the differences in perspectives that attend it – shame, blame, survival, anger, activism, speaking, hope. It reminds of the collective, cross-generation women’s narratives of books like Alia Trabucco Zerán and Sophie Hughes’s The Remainder, and Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury’s Every Fire You Tend. What did those intergenerational perspectives reveal to you?

    I wanted the book to tell the story of women who’d been my contemporaries because, although I didn’t know them, I was able to know how they thought, how they lived, how they’d been brought up as women, since, surely, we would have shared a very similar upbringing. Stemming from how my generation was at that point – in which violence was still pretty much accepted – stories emerged from my mother, my female neighbours, women from previous generations. And the truth was that not much had changed. I think the big changes have only begun taking place in the generation of those who today are teenagers – who are growing up within feminism, who go to the Ni Una Menos demonstrations, and who take part in the debate for the legalisation of abortion. In twenty-five years, not much had changed. But in the last five, there’s been quite a radical shift, also among women of my generation: there’s been a collective awakening.

    Dead Girls rightly damns patriarchy, but men’s voices – friends and family of Andrea, María Luisa, and Sarita – also appear in the book. That struck me, and I wonder if you could speak on that?

    In María Luisa’s case, her brother acted as a spokesman for the family. I am not sure how that happened, but, ever since the body was found, he was the one that became the visible face of the family’s quest for truth. Twenty-five years later, he was still the one in charge of demanding justice. That is how he expressed it to me, and I respected his role. His mother had already passed away.

    In the case of Andrea, her sister didn’t want to take part in the book or give her testimony, apart from a brief email reproduced in the text. Many years had gone by, so it was very difficult to find people willing to talk about the cases. It so happened that most of them were men. Sarita’s case is different: the ones providing testimony are the women of the family. I did not see it as something that stands in contradiction with the book, to be honest. I needed to talk to someone and, if the voices came mostly from men, I would do something with that anyway.

    Finally, I want to ask about the words femicide and feminicidio – words that weren’t in common usage in the anglophone or hispanophone at the time of the murders explored in Dead Girls, and words that are today used with different frequency in different national and linguistic contexts. How useful are these terms in bespeaking the terrible truth of the murder of women for being women – of its horror, and at once its horrific prevalence?

    In the book, the term ‘femicide’ is mentioned only a few times. At the beginning, it’s used to clarify that the murder of a woman at the hands of a man is not a ‘crime of passion’ or a ‘domestic crime’, as it used to be called. Once that’s explained, I think it sets the political tone of the book, and the narration of the cases: it is not a book about crimes, nor is it a police chronicle; it is a book about femicide and how femicide is part of a culture that enables men to make use of the bodies, and even the lives, of women. A word may sometimes not be a grand thing, but I think that today in Argentina no one can ignore the fact that this type of crime has a specific name, and a very particular weight. Even those who deny it and insist that more men than women are killed every year – even those deniers know that we are talking about different things. That is the real weight that a word, a concept, can have once it gets internalised by an entire society. And this is a huge step that we have taken in recent years.

    Compared to Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Sara Gallardo and Juan Carlos Onetti, Selva Almada (Entre Ríos, Argentina, 1973) is considered one of the most powerful voices of contemporary Argentinian and Latin American literature and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of the region. Including her début The Wind that Lays Waste, she has published two novels, a book of short stories, a book of journalistic fiction and a kind of film diary (written in the set of Lucrecia Martel’s most recent film Zama, based on Antonio di Benedetto’s novel). She has been finalist of the Rodolfo Walsh Award and of the Tigre Juan Award (both in Spain). Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish and Turkish.

    Attend the launch of Dead Girls here.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

    Translated from the Spanish by Carolina Orloff.

  • Latinx Letters: An Interview with Leo Boix

    Latinx Letters: An Interview with Leo Boix

    Leo Boix discusses bilingualism, British Latinx poetry, and race in Latin America

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Leo – your creative life has worked across two languages: Spanish and English. In another interview, you’ve said that, in your practice, Spanish is the language of the ‘heart’, and English ‘more of the mind’. I’d like you tell me about moments in your creative life when the opposite has been true.

    At the time of that interview, my technical ability to communicate emotion in poetry came very easily in Spanish, and less so in English. But since starting to write in English ‘full-time’, this has changed. That said, I often use Spanish or Spanglish words in my poetry to signal my linguistic duality – to make the language complexity that is very real to my life in England more explicit. I write literary reviews in English, political articles in Spanish; I translate poetry from Spanish into English. And although I mostly speak Spanish at home with my partner, the artist Pablo Bronstein – who was born in Argentina but came here to the UK with his family when he was four – my poetic life happens increasingly in an English landscape with a consciously Latin American/Latinx bent. I am aware that my poetry might appear odd, but that’s a result of my lived experience – my experience as a poet living within and between two of the multiple languages spoken in the UK.

    I am currently working on my debut English collection, out in 2021 with Chatto & Windus, which will focus on this idea of writing and living between two languages, cultures, and traditions. What I’m trying to say is: this duality is as British as any other.

    There is, rightly, a growing literary consciousness around British Latinx writing – and perhaps particularly poetry. What has caused that?

    It is true that, in the last few years, there has been a growing number of Latinx writers publishing in the UK, which is of course a direct result of our standing up and making ourselves heard. This has in turn resulted in a greater awareness and interest in the Latinx experience from those outside it. Within the poetry world, the activist and director of The Complete Works Nathalie Teitler has been instrumental in mentoring, promoting and publishing British Latinx poets. She has been a pioneer and a visionary. In 2017, Nathalie and I established ‘Invisible Presence’, an Arts Council England national scheme to nurture and promote the work of ten young British Latinx voices,. That project, which included the publication of an anthology and a series of live events at The Roundhouse, led two years later to the launch of Un Nuevo Sol, the first major anthology of work by UK-based writers of Latin-American heritage. It’s amazing that it took so long for this to happen, despite the presence of many writers and poets and literary groups. British Latinx is the fastest growing and eighth-largest ethnic group in London, with more and more second- and third-generation members, and yet it has taken this long for our presence to begin to change the UK literary. The move from the margins is fragile, however, and needs constant work.

    You’ve been active as a poetry educator, and in community-based initiatives (like SLAP and ‘Invisible Presence’) that are fostering British Latinx writing. This is part of a wider question around diversity, inclusion and representation, but what more needs to be done within publishing, reviewing and reading cultures for Latin American and Latinx writers?

    We need more acceptance from the British poetry establishment that there is a diversity of languages within the British experience – and that this is not to the detriment of the English language, but, on the contrary, enriches the poetry scene.

    Unfortunately, in this country, there is very poor awareness of and ability with foreign languages, as a result of lacking government priorities. And this has resulted in many people in Britain finding foreign-language words shocking and unacceptable within English-language contexts. I find that lack of ambition and understanding – and challenge – very sad. This is not the case in other countries, where more people can speak more languages than just the one with which they were born. We definitely need more British Latinx mentors and schemes working with young writers and poets, and we also need more grassroots work in schools and community centres (around the country) nurturing and promoting young Latinx voices.

    But, at once, resistance within the exclusively English-language poetry world needs to be addressed. It’s not only that we as British Latinx need to be more vocal, but also that British non-Latinx need to be interested in the fact that there are many British people, friends and neighbours, who have grown up with a Latin language background, and that this doesn’t make them any less British. The British experience cannot be seen exclusively as a monolingual and monocultural experience.

    Your column in the Morning Star, ‘Letters from Latin America’, is a wonderful thing. In some ways, Latin American lit and the Star are obvious bedfellows. But it’s also quite remarkable to have that sort of dedicated, industrious focus on a region’s literature in a UK newspaper. Could you speak a little about how that came to be?

    The Morning Star is the only UK national newspaper with a monthly dedicated column to Latin American/ Latinx literature and poetry. It’s not a coincidence that the Star would take an interest in Latin America: it has historically stood against the cultural, political and economic dominance of the United States in Latin America and elsewhere, and for left-wing social movements in Latin America during and after the dictatorships that marred so many of its countries. Many Latin Americans that came to the UK in the last decades did so escaping the violence of repressive regimes supported by the US. Still more came escaping the unfathomable poverty of Latin America, often the result of factors that the Morning Star challenges.

    Has your literary relationship to Argentina changed (waned?) over the years?

    In many ways, yes. I published two poetry collections in Spanish with an independent Argentinean publishing house several years ago, but since have always been on the move towards writing in English. Now, I do so almost exclusively, and tend to publish my poetry mostly in English-speaking literary journals and magazines. In any case, I see this as a very fluid relationship – one that may change in future. I keep close contact with Argentinean and Latin American poets and writers, who I often translate into English for British audiences. I hope similarly that my new collection in English will reach Argentina and Latin American audiences, perhaps in translation.

    I’d like to talk about Black Lives Matter, and racism and anti-racism in Latinx literature. I’ve read some extraordinary literature from black and Indigenous Latinx and Latin American writers recently – Geovani Martins’s The Sun on My Head, translated by Julia Sanches, springs to mind – but there remains a paucity. Is a growing right-wing populism further marginalising black and Indigenous Latinx and Latin American writers? And, conversely, how vital is literature as a means of resistance to this populism?

    Yes, it does exist. But a lot more needs to be done to bring black Latin American writers to the fore. When Un Nuevo Sol was published a few months ago, the editors included as many varied voices as they could find in the UK, but acknowledged that more needed to be done to foster Afro-Latinx poets here.

    In Latin America, the debate on race and racism includes issues around African-heritage voices in countries with deep histories of slavery – Brazil being probably the most prominent example, as the last country in the world to abolish the slave trade. But the debate around race in most other Latin American countries, many of which have had negligible relationships to that particular form of slavery, centres on the complex and often difficult relationships between Indigenous peoples and the descendants of European colonialists. This relationship is too complex for the space we have here, but it arises social, cultural and literary imperatives different to those in Britain.

    Does the Latin American literary world have a problem with race?

    Generally, yes – mostly due to related socio-economic inequalities, and a disproportionate lack of possibilities in terms of publishing resources. Yet in the last few years there have been some moves to rectify this, with the publication of books by indigenous and Afro-Latinx poets and writers such as Junot Diaz, Paulino Lins, Rayen Kvyeh, Luz Argentina Chiriboga, Willie Perdomo, ​Elizabeth Acevedo, Mayra Santos Febres, Rita Indiana and Manuel Zapata Olivella.

    It is important to remember that Latin America is a vast continent made up of many countries, where the majority of the population are pueblos originarios, and where languages such as Quechua, Guaraní, Aymara and Wayuu still thrive. There are vibrant literary scenes happening there, and we should not assume that we can paint all of Latin America with the same brush. A high-end literary agency in Mexico City is an entirely different world to a small community publishing house in Asunción.

    Finally: a couple of weeks ago, Arts Council England committed to adding ‘Latinx’ to diversity and equal opportunities monitoring forms. How important is that?

    This is huge. We have been fighting for this for years. I remember working for a community newspaper in London for the Latin American diaspora in the late 90s, and back then we were campaigning to be recognised in official forms. But it seemed such a long way off. It is of great importance because, from now on, it obliges all cultural institutions in the UK to account for the Latinx experience and to make further attempts at including us. We should – we must – remember that there are many of us out there.

    Leo Boix is a Latinx bilingual poet, translator and educator born in Argentina who lives and works in the UK. Boix has published two poetry collections in Spanish and has been included in many anthologies, such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe), Why Poetry (Verve Poetry Press), Islands Are But Mountains: Contemporary Poetry from Great Britain (Platypus Press), The Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2019-2020 (Eyewear Publishing) and Un Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers (flipped eye) . His poems have appeared in POETRY, PN Review, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Manchester Review, The White Review, Letras Libres, Ambit, Magma Poetry, The Rialto, The Morning Star, SouthBank Poetry, Prism International, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere. Boix is a fellow of The Complete Works Program and co-director of Invisible Presence, an Arts Council England national scheme to nurture new voices of Latinx writers in the UK. He is a board member of Magma Poetry, co-editor of its Resistencia issue showcasing the best Latin American and Latinx writing, and an advisory board member of the Poetry Translation Centre in London. Boix is the recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize 2019. His debut English collection will be out in 2021 with Chatto & Windus (Penguin/Random House).

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

  • Self-censorship and silence

    Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott

    ‘I’m alive because I know who’s in charge. People follow the orders of the Gulf Cartel around here,’ says Francisco, a journalist from the city of Matamoros in Tamaulipas, which is considered to be one of Mexico’s ‘narco-states’.

    Francisco does not only receive instructions from his editor. He also takes calls from the ‘boss of the plaza’, who orders him to put in or take out images of shootings and dead bodies: ‘If you care about your family, keep that shooting yesterday out of the papers. Otherwise, you’re fucked.’ And Francisco obeys – to save his life, to keep his job.

    Francisco, like so many others, suffers from ‘self-censorship’. This is an increasingly common phenomenon in Mexico, the most dangerous country in Latin America for journalists, and one whose citizens’ right to information is being severely violated by attacks on the press: more than 120 journalists have been killed in recent years, and 22 have disappeared. In this country, journalists are murdered because of what they publish and because of what they refuse to publish. Every 26 hours, a journalist will be the victim of an act of violence. Last year alone, 326 attacks on communicators were recorded, five of which were murders. And it isn’t only organised crime that’s killing journalists. Most of the attackers are officials or agents of the Mexican state.

    The murders are getting bloodier and crueller, and they involve every kind of torture. The violence against female journalists is particularly terrible, and often gender-specific: the majority of those killed were also raped or mutilated, and some were even decapitated. We’re tired of watching the bodies of our colleagues and friends being taken away, and the pain and suffering their spilt blood leaves in its wake.

    The relentless assault on freedom of expression is getting worse. By choosing not to guarantee the safety of journalists, Enrique Peña Nieto’s government has succeeded in silencing important independent critical voices. Bullets, censorship, self-censorship and government control of advertising and TV and radio concessions have led to a serious lack of correct and timely information, and a dearth of news about key issues such as state crimes committed by the army, the navy and the various police forces. There is not enough coverage of the phenomenon of narcopolitics, the collusion of corrupt authorities with the powerful drug cartels that dominate the Mexican territory, or the smuggling and piracy that have, with the cooperation of the police, passed into the hands of organised crime. State violence – forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and torture – hardly receives any attention in the televised media. There are parts of the press under the thumb of the government or the drug cartels. There are forbidden topics and forbidden journalists. The idea is to instil fear, horror and silence.

    Those of us who dare to break the barrier of silence have to confront all kinds of threats. We work in conditions of war, but without the protection that reporters covering armed conflicts would normally receive. Here there are no bullet-proof vests or helmets. Press signs on vehicles mean nothing, and neither do the press cards that are supposed to ensure your personal safety in neutral territory.

    Faced with the drug barons’ Kalashnikovs, we have only our pens. Among the mighty rifles of the army or the police, there are only our notebooks and computers. We are an easy target. It doesn’t cost much to kill journalists in Mexico, and the murderers know that it’s highly unlikely anything will happen to them afterwards. Impunity is the only constant. Over 90% of murders go unpunished, despite the existence of the Office of the Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes Against Freedom of Expression, which last year recorded a backlog of 120 pending cases. The Public Prosecutor’s Office is a smokescreen. The Mexican state would rather carry on pretending than actually take action to protect the country’s journalists.

    This is an unequal war. As journalists, we have words. The people attacking us have bullets. Mexican journalism is wounded; information is mutilated.

    Why do we stay here, why do we carry on? Out of dignity and a commitment to the truth. Our mission is to search for that truth in spite of everything. Mexican journalists have learnt to work under hostile conditions, completely undefended. We live with persecution and harassment. But we don’t let fear paralyse us – on the contrary, it helps us to measure the risks and stay alive, to continue giving a voice to the voiceless and shining a light on dark secrets that are normally kept silent.

    Staying here and carrying on, that’s the mission, although we can smell the predator’s rotten breath, although we can hear the bullets, although we know that words cost lives. Freedom has a high price in Mexico, but it’s the only way we have of reaching the truth.

    Read this piece in the original Spanish here.

    Read ARTICLE 19 Mexico’s annual report ‘State of Censorship’, which examines freedom of expression in Mexico.

    Sanjuana Martínez is a featured writer in English PEN’s 2015 Mexico focus. Read about her case and take action here.

    To find out more about Sanjuana Martinez and her work, visit www.websanjuanamartinez.com.mx
    Follow her on Twitter: @SanjuanaMtz
    Visit her Facebook page: Sanjuana Martinez

  • Autocensura y silencio

    Read Annie McDermott’s English translation of this piece here.

    ‘Estoy vivo porque se quien manda. Aquí se hace lo que ordena el Cártel del Golfo,’ dice Francisco, un periodista de la ciudad de Matamoros, Tamaulipas, considerado un narcoestado de México.

    Las órdenes de trabajo para Francisco no vienen solamente del jefe de redacción, también atiende las llamadas del ‘jefe de la plaza’ quien le ordena quitar o poner imágenes de balaceras o cadáveres: ‘Si quieres cuidar a tu familia, no publiques nada de la balacera de ayer, si no, te va a llevar la chingada,’ le dice quien se ostenta solo como ‘jefe de plaza’. Y Francisco obedece para salvar la vida, para conservar su trabajo.

    Francisco como muchos, padece la ‘autocensura’, un fenómeno cada vez más común en México, el país más peligroso en América Latina, para ejercer el periodismo y donde el derecho a la información de los ciudadanos está siendo vulnerado severamente por la violencia contra la prensa: más de 120 periodistas han muerto en los últimos años y 22 permanecen desaparecidos. En este país, los periodistas son asesinados por lo que publican o por lo que se niegan a publicar. Cada 26 horas, un periodista será víctima de un hecho violento. Tan solo el año pasado, se registraron 326 ataques contra comunicadores y cinco fueron asesinados. A los periodistas no los asesina solamente el crimen organizado. La mayor parte de los agresores son funcionarios o agentes del estado mexicano.

    Los asesinatos son cada vez más sanguinarios y más crueles. Incluyen torturas de todo tipo. La violencia contra las periodistas es terrible, el componente de género está incluido, la mayoría de las ejecutadas fueron violadas, o mutiladas; algunas incluso decapitadas. Estamos cansados de ver pasar los cadáveres de nuestros colegas, de nuestros amigos. La estela de dolor y sufrimiento que va dejando la sangre derramada de nuestros compañeros.

    La guerra sin cuartel contra la libertad de expresión se intensifica. El gobierno de Enrique Peña Nieto prefiere no garantizar la seguridad de los periodistas y de esta manera, ha conseguido acallar importantes voces independientes y críticas. Las balas, la censura, la autocensura o el control gubernamental sobre publicidad y concesiones de radio y televisión, han ido provocando un alto déficit de información veraz y oportuna, una ausencia de noticias y cobertura informativa sobre temas importantes como los crímenes de Estado cometidos por el Ejército, la Marina o las distintas policías. Tampoco hay suficientes noticias sobre el fenómeno de la narcopolítica, la connivencia de autoridades corruptas con los poderosos cárteles de la droga que dominan el territorio mexicano o el contrabando y la piratería que ha pasado a manos del crimen organizado en connivencia con los policías. Las desapariciones forzadas, ejecuciones extrajudiciales; la tortura, son parte de la violencia del Estado que difícilmente encuentra un espacio digno en los medios de comunicación televisivos. Una parte de la prensa está arrodillada ante el poder gubernamental o el poder del narcotráfico. Hay temas prohibidos y periodistas prohibidos. Se trata de instaurar el miedo, el terror y el silencio.

    Quienes nos atrevemos a romper el cerco de silencio, tenemos que enfrentarnos a todo tipo de amenazas. Trabajamos en condiciones de guerra, pero sin la protección que debe ser brindada a los informadores en  la típica cobertura de conflictos bélicos. Aquí no hay chaleco antibalas ni cascos. Tampoco funciona el aviso el aviso de ‘prensa’ colocado en los vehículos, o la acreditación que salvaguarda tu integridad física en territorio neutral.

    Frente a los Kalashnikov de los capos de la droga solo tenemos nuestras plumas. Entre los rifles de alto poder del Ejército o las policías, solo están nuestras libretas y computadoras. Somos un blanco fácil. Matar periodistas en México sale barato. Los asesinos saben que hay una gran probabilidad de que no les pase nada. La impunidad es la constante. Más del 90 por ciento de los asesinatos sigue impune a pesar de que existe la Fiscalía Especial para la Atención de Delitos cometidos contra la Libertad de Expresión, la cual, el año pasado, registró un rezago 120 casos. La fiscalía es una cortina de humo. El estado mexicano prefiere simular que actuar y proteger a los periodistas.

    Esta es una guerra desigual. Los periodistas tenemos la palabra. Ellos – los depredadores de la prensa – tienen las balas. El periodismo mexicano está herido. La información mutilada.

    ¿Por qué seguimos aquí? Por dignidad, por compromiso con la verdad. Nuestra misión es la búsqueda de esa verdad por encima de cualquier obstáculo. Los periodistas mexicanos hemos aprendido a trabajar en condiciones adversas de absoluta indefensión. Convivimos con la persecución, el hostigamiento y el acoso. Pero el miedo no nos paraliza, al contrario, nos ayuda a medir los riesgos para seguir con vida, para continuar dando voz a los sin voz y lanzar luz sobre las zonas oscuras de la información sometidas al silencio.

    Seguir aquí, es la misión, aunque el fétido aliento del depredador este cerca, aunque se escuche el sonido de las balas y las palabras cuesten la vida. La libertad, tiene un alto precio en México, pero es el único camino para llegar a la verdad.

    Read Annie McDermott’s English translation of this piece here.

    Read ARTICLE 19 Mexico’s annual report ‘Estado de Censura’, which examines freedom of expression in Mexico.

    Sanjuana Martínez is a featured writer in English PEN’s 2015 Mexico focus. Read about her case and take action here.

    To find out more about Sanjuana Martinez and her work, visit www.websanjuanamartinez.com.mx
    Follow her on Twitter: @SanjuanaMtz
    Visit her Facebook page: Sanjuana Martinez

  • The translator as literary activist

    Jethro Soutar writes for PEN Atlas on the urgent case of Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, the PEN-award-winning author whom he translates and whom he is now trying to help protect, as Juan faces persecution from the regime in Equatorial Guinea

    Traduttore, traditore, they say. But far from being a traitor, the translator is often a writer’s closest ally. US soldier Matthew Zeller was in the midst of a fierce gun battle in Afghanistan when he was outflanked by two Taliban fighters: as they moved in for the kill, Zeller’s Afghan interpreter saw the danger and shot the insurgents dead. Zeller had to campaign for several years to secure a US visa for Janis Shinwari, his translator and saviour.The life of a literary translator is thankfully a lot less gory. Nevertheless, we are occasionally called upon to offer our authors a lifeline. This week, news reached me that Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, an Equatorial Guinean author whose novel By Night the Mountain Burns I translated for And Other Stories, was being pursued by his country’s dictatorial regime. Ávila Laurel and five others, including Salvador Ebang Ela, founder of Elefante y la Palmera, the Elephant and Palm Tree, a political party known for conducting peaceful protests against police brutality, had requested permission from the Provincial Government of Bioko Norte to hold a demonstration in Plaza Ewaiso E’pola on 23 February. The request was refused and followed by an announcement that Ebang El and his sympathisers were to be rounded up.When writers come under threat in their own countries, translators can act as a bridge to the outside world. Sometimes publicising what’s happening can make a real difference, letting writer and tormentor know that the rest of the world is watching. When Orhan Pamuk was formally charged with insulting Turkishness, Maureen Freely, his English-language translator, published as many articles as she could about the case in the international press.Shirley Lee translates from Korean and has focused her attention on exiled North Korean writers. She provides them with a lifeline simply by being interested in what they have to say, but she also has to coax and encourage them: it’s not easy expressing yourself freely if you’ve been conditioned to writing under the scrutiny of a repressive regime.Becoming a translator is not a political act in itself – Lee says she was drawn to North Korea by the peculiarities of the country’s language and literature, not its politics – but it’s hard not to be politicised by such exposure to tyrannical regimes.Pietro Zveteremich was political. He withdrew his membership from the Italian Communist Party after translating Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which was published in translation before it was ever published in Russian. The Soviet Union went to great lengths to try and prevent publication, even forcing Pasternak to sign a telegram sent to Zveteremich, asking him to withhold his translation. But Pasternak also sent Zveteremich a handwritten note saying precisely the opposite; Zveteremich licensed publication of his translation and the book was launched to great fanfare and acclaim.Pasternak and Pamuk were both given the Nobel Prize and the international prestige that goes with such awards can be vital in protecting writers from persecution at home. In the UK, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize provides prestige and some media coverage, while doing a sterling job in recognising the contribution of translators and championing translated works from distant lands.They don’t come much more distant than Annóbon Island, the setting for By Night the Mountain Burns. Annóbon is a remote island off the west coast of Africa, administered by Equatorial Guinea but periodically cut-off by the regime, for reasons of power and control.I first met Ávila Laurel in 2012 in Barcelona, where he’d fled after going on hunger strike in Equatorial Guinea, a protest against government oppression. We went for a drink in a bar in the Raval area that was run by another Guinean exile. It was a friendly place, but there was a sadness to it. As Ávila Laurel explained: ‘Barcelona’s a lovely city, but we’re not here out of choice.’ Critics of President Obiang’s regime are bullied into leaving as a matter of course, and Ávila Laurel had been proud of the fact that he’d stuck it out, that he was an outspoken writer living in Equatorial Guinea.I asked him whether he was working on anything in Barcelona and he said that he was: he was writing his memoirs, he said, to leave them in Barcelona when he flew back to Guinea, por si acaso… just in case.It was a chilling thing to be told: here was a man calmly preparing for the worst, yet determined to go home.And go home he did. He’s at home now in fact, literally so, for although he’s been advised to go into hiding, he refuses to do so: he’s done nothing wrong, so why should he hide? All the same, he’s been forced into keeping a low profile, to being confined to the neighbourhood and suspending his public work. He’s safe for now, but there’s no telling whether the danger has passed: Equatorial Guinea’s regime creates a climate of fear by making threats, real and veiled, and by following up on some of them.So it’s left to myself and David Shook, Ávila Laurel’s poetry translator, to stay alert and watch our author’s back: to act as his bridge and keep the world informed, por si acaso. About the authorJethro Soutar is a translator of Spanish and Portuguese. His translation of Hotel Brasil by Frei Betto will be published by Bitter Lemon Press, while By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel will be published by And Other Stories in the autumn. Both books were awarded a PEN Writers in Translation award. Soutar is currently editing a book of translated football-themed writing from Latin America, The Football Crónicas.About Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel Juan Tomas Avila LaurelJuan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. His parents were from the remote Annobón Island, off the African coast. His books include the novel Avión de Ricos, Ladrón De Cerdos(The Pig Thief And The Rich Man’s Aeroplane) and the short story collection Cuentos Crudos (Raw Tales). Ávila Laurel has been a constant thorn in the side of his country’s long-standing dictatorial government. A nurse by profession, for many years he was one of the best known Equatorial Guinean writers not to have opted to live in exile. But, in 2011, after a week-long hunger strike in protest against Obiang’s regime, timed to coincide with the President of Spain’s visit to Equatorial Guinea, Ávila Laurel moved to Barcelona. He writes across all media, in particular as a blogger, essayist and novelist.Additional information By Night the Mountain Burns was awarded an English PEN translation grant. To further support the book’s publication, visit the And Other Stories website.Set on Annobón, a remote island off the West African coast governed by Equatorial Guinea but completely neglected by the government, By Night The Mountain Burns recounts the narrator’s childhood, growing up among countless siblings, several mothers, ever absent fathers and an unusual grandfather. We learn of the dark realities of island life: bush fires that destroy crops and threaten homesteads, cholera outbreaks, the sometimes uneasy marriage between folklore and religion and the imposition of an official language that is not their own and, which has very little context within their isolated world.By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel is translated from Spanish by Jethro Soutar and will be published in November 2014. To support the publication of this book, subscribe by 5 March.Jethro Soutar wrote about Juan Tomás for the Guardian Books blog.David Shook, Juan Tomás’s poetry translator, writes about the current situation in the Los Angeles Review of Books.A panel of translators and human rights activists will be considering the role of the translator as ‘literary activist’ at this year’s London Book Fair. The discussion will take place on 10 April at 1pm. 

  • 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. 

     

  • PEN Atlas Q&A – Alejandro Zambra, author of Ways of Going Home

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis talks to Alejandro Zambra about his new novel, the responsibility of memory and the nation of Chile being in a period of convalescence

    Translated from the Spanish by William Rowlandson.

    The Spanish text of the interview can be read here.

    Ways of Going Home presents your parents’ generation as either victims or accomplices of the Pinochet regime. It was hard to remain neutral. Is trying to establish what happened during those dark years essential to moving on?

    It is essential, necessary and also inevitable, and Chilean society has understood it as such. Those of us who were children during those years were able to take shelter in the idea that we were not really there, that we knew nothing; and in one sense it actually was like that. But there were certain things, certain movements, certain ideas that we did understand and that we were able to intuit. I feel that it is extremely important to recover that world which we half inhabited. We could never have known whether our parents were the way they were because that is how adults are, or whether they were actually scared.

    Your generation lives with the spectre of the past, yet, as you say in the novel, they were only secondary characters. ‘We grew up believing that the novel belonged to our parents. We cursed them, and also took refuge in their shadows, relieved. While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner.’  That must be a heavy burden to live with. Is that how you see it?

    I see it like a responsibility or a burden that one can never relinquish, and I suppose one has to learn to live with it. You see, it is not only about personal stories; it is about a first-person plural ‘we’, a community of voices who only begin to define themselves late in life, with a sense of collective shyness, but also with determination and drive. Our adolescence coincided with the so-called return to democracy, and yet the grave error of those years – the early 1990s – was, precisely, believing that it was a democracy, when all the while Pinochet was still very much in power. We had no idea what a democracy looked like; we had been born in a dictatorship and for that reason we accepted the limited freedom – that pastiche of freedom – as if it were some wonderful prize. Democracy only really began to return when Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998.

    ‘We reach the National Stadium. The largest detention centre in 1973 was always, for me, no more than a soccer field.’ Your characters remember the past in a different way. Is trying to establish the real version of the past possible at all?

    Well I don’t believe that the process has ended, nor that it can end. I suppose that, in many different ways, the whole of Chilean society has been looking for those truths, those realities, and sharing them. I think that many happy memories later become bitter through the mediation of other memories. The child who used to go to the National Stadium and eat ice cream and watch football matches later learns of the horrible things that happened there and only then do his happy memories darken. Individual happiness becomes absurd, empty, irrelevant, against the injustice, violence and brutality of the dictatorship. I would say that understanding the past – I mean for those who were not victims – in some sense is about getting ever closer to the real victims.

    ‘Instead of howling, I write books.’ You started your novel with that quote from Romain Gary. Is that how you see the role of a writer in Chile today?

    Not necessarily. I mean, it works for me, but I would not project it upon the role of writer in Chile. I can identify myself with that sentence of Gary most of all because as a child and during the dictatorship I would spend much time thinking, and very often what I was thinking and what I was feeling had no form, it seemed to me incommunicable, like a cry of despair, a howl, an unfathomable protestation of absolute bitterness. Eventually I found a way to communicate my thoughts and feelings of that time. I feel that writing a book is opening oneself up to deep inner scrutiny, to a long contemplation in a glass that is sometime a window and other times a mirror. When I came across that wonderful line of Romain Gary, I understood that I subscribed to it fully. It is a type of motto for me.

    Do you believe that Chileans today need to face the past, admit to their role in the past? In what way can that be done?

    Well yes, I think so. By questioning what is happening today, simply enough. The past has not passed: a significant proportion of today’s problems in Chile have their origins in the dictatorship, and we are still bound by the constitution of 1980, which was written by the military. Don’t ever stop looking at the past, because we need that contemplation of the past in order to understand what is happening in the present.

    Juan Gabriel Vásquez in an interview here for the PEN Atlas said that he sees remembering as a moral act? Would you agree with him?

    Absolutely. To remember with accuracy, with the sharpest precision possible. To remember is to explore. To remember is to know not only the names of the people who appear in the photograph, but the name of the person who took the photo, when they took it, and why. To try to know all that is necessary.

    Your narrator is embarrassed about the fact that he lost nobody during the dictatorship, his family were indifferent or supportive of the regime. Is society nowadays divided along those lines?

    Well it is an ambiguous sentiment: what the narrator wants is to understand the pain, and he comes to realise that he will never understand it properly because he never suffered it. Claudia is also aware that although she was a victim, many others suffered far more than her. I think that it is better to say that Chilean society today is divided between those who want to turn the page and forget the whole sorry business and those who want to remember, and who are seeking images to express the past, which in turn expresses the present.

    Your narrator writes poetry as well. Do you believe that poetry might be closer than prose to reflecting the essence of images from the past?

    To be honest I have no idea. When I think about those years I think above all in bare images, with no literary embellishments. I imagine photographs, documentary films. In addition to the documentary films of Patricio Guzmán, I would like to mention other documentaries that seem to me of crucial importance: “La ciudad de los fotógrafos” [“The city of photographers”] by Sebastián Moreno; “Actores secundarios” [“Secondary players”], by Jorge Leiva and Pachi “Bustos, “El edificio de los chilenos” [“The Chilean Building”], by Macarena Aguiló, among others.

    There is a sense that your narrator handles his material very carefully, almost tentatively. Is that because you believe that recollection of the past is a fragile process?

    Yes. I like the image of the convalescent, as Baudelaire said, he who is returning from an illness, returning, in some sense, from death. The whole of Chile is convalescing; it is awakening, recovering its senses. And the narrator tries to reflect that.

    The final part of your book is entitled We Are All Right. Is that ultimately what describes your generation?

    No. Perhaps some people think that, but they are a minority. The rest of us have been living a permanent state of crisis that perhaps only now is making us strong. Now that we are no longer children, now that we are not only not children but are parents ourselves, what makes us strong is precisely the consciousness of that crisis, that precariousness.

    Additional Information

    Alejandro Zambra is a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. He currently teaches at the School of Literature at the Diego Portales University in Santiago. His first novel, Bonsái, was awarded the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006 and attracted much attention in Chile. Zambra featured in Hay Festival’s Bogotá39 and was selected as one of Granta’s best young Spanish-language novelists in 2010. The book is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

    Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

    You can read more about Alejandro’s new book on Granta’s website.

     

  • PEN Atlas Q&A – Alejandro Zambra, author of Ways of Going Home

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis talks to Alejandro Zambra about his new novel, the responsibility of memory and the nation of Chile being in a period of convalescence

    Translated from the Spanish by William Rowlandson.

    The Spanish text of the interview can be read here.

    Ways of Going Home presents your parents’ generation as either victims or accomplices of the Pinochet regime. It was hard to remain neutral. Is trying to establish what happened during those dark years essential to moving on?

    It is essential, necessary and also inevitable, and Chilean society has understood it as such. Those of us who were children during those years were able to take shelter in the idea that we were not really there, that we knew nothing; and in one sense it actually was like that. But there were certain things, certain movements, certain ideas that we did understand and that we were able to intuit. I feel that it is extremely important to recover that world which we half inhabited. We could never have known whether our parents were the way they were because that is how adults are, or whether they were actually scared.

    Your generation lives with the spectre of the past, yet, as you say in the novel, they were only secondary characters. ‘We grew up believing that the novel belonged to our parents. We cursed them, and also took refuge in their shadows, relieved. While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner.’  That must be a heavy burden to live with. Is that how you see it?

    I see it like a responsibility or a burden that one can never relinquish, and I suppose one has to learn to live with it. You see, it is not only about personal stories; it is about a first-person plural ‘we’, a community of voices who only begin to define themselves late in life, with a sense of collective shyness, but also with determination and drive. Our adolescence coincided with the so-called return to democracy, and yet the grave error of those years – the early 1990s – was, precisely, believing that it was a democracy, when all the while Pinochet was still very much in power. We had no idea what a democracy looked like; we had been born in a dictatorship and for that reason we accepted the limited freedom – that pastiche of freedom – as if it were some wonderful prize. Democracy only really began to return when Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998.

    ‘We reach the National Stadium. The largest detention centre in 1973 was always, for me, no more than a soccer field.’ Your characters remember the past in a different way. Is trying to establish the real version of the past possible at all?

    Well I don’t believe that the process has ended, nor that it can end. I suppose that, in many different ways, the whole of Chilean society has been looking for those truths, those realities, and sharing them. I think that many happy memories later become bitter through the mediation of other memories. The child who used to go to the National Stadium and eat ice cream and watch football matches later learns of the horrible things that happened there and only then do his happy memories darken. Individual happiness becomes absurd, empty, irrelevant, against the injustice, violence and brutality of the dictatorship. I would say that understanding the past – I mean for those who were not victims – in some sense is about getting ever closer to the real victims.

    ‘Instead of howling, I write books.’ You started your novel with that quote from Romain Gary. Is that how you see the role of a writer in Chile today?

    Not necessarily. I mean, it works for me, but I would not project it upon the role of writer in Chile. I can identify myself with that sentence of Gary most of all because as a child and during the dictatorship I would spend much time thinking, and very often what I was thinking and what I was feeling had no form, it seemed to me incommunicable, like a cry of despair, a howl, an unfathomable protestation of absolute bitterness. Eventually I found a way to communicate my thoughts and feelings of that time. I feel that writing a book is opening oneself up to deep inner scrutiny, to a long contemplation in a glass that is sometime a window and other times a mirror. When I came across that wonderful line of Romain Gary, I understood that I subscribed to it fully. It is a type of motto for me.

    Do you believe that Chileans today need to face the past, admit to their role in the past? In what way can that be done?

    Well yes, I think so. By questioning what is happening today, simply enough. The past has not passed: a significant proportion of today’s problems in Chile have their origins in the dictatorship, and we are still bound by the constitution of 1980, which was written by the military. Don’t ever stop looking at the past, because we need that contemplation of the past in order to understand what is happening in the present.

    Juan Gabriel Vásquez in an interview here for the PEN Atlas said that he sees remembering as a moral act? Would you agree with him?

    Absolutely. To remember with accuracy, with the sharpest precision possible. To remember is to explore. To remember is to know not only the names of the people who appear in the photograph, but the name of the person who took the photo, when they took it, and why. To try to know all that is necessary.

    Your narrator is embarrassed about the fact that he lost nobody during the dictatorship, his family were indifferent or supportive of the regime. Is society nowadays divided along those lines?

    Well it is an ambiguous sentiment: what the narrator wants is to understand the pain, and he comes to realise that he will never understand it properly because he never suffered it. Claudia is also aware that although she was a victim, many others suffered far more than her. I think that it is better to say that Chilean society today is divided between those who want to turn the page and forget the whole sorry business and those who want to remember, and who are seeking images to express the past, which in turn expresses the present.

    Your narrator writes poetry as well. Do you believe that poetry might be closer than prose to reflecting the essence of images from the past?

    To be honest I have no idea. When I think about those years I think above all in bare images, with no literary embellishments. I imagine photographs, documentary films. In addition to the documentary films of Patricio Guzmán, I would like to mention other documentaries that seem to me of crucial importance: “La ciudad de los fotógrafos” [“The city of photographers”] by Sebastián Moreno; “Actores secundarios” [“Secondary players”], by Jorge Leiva and Pachi “Bustos, “El edificio de los chilenos” [“The Chilean Building”], by Macarena Aguiló, among others.

    There is a sense that your narrator handles his material very carefully, almost tentatively. Is that because you believe that recollection of the past is a fragile process?

    Yes. I like the image of the convalescent, as Baudelaire said, he who is returning from an illness, returning, in some sense, from death. The whole of Chile is convalescing; it is awakening, recovering its senses. And the narrator tries to reflect that.

    The final part of your book is entitled We Are All Right. Is that ultimately what describes your generation?

    No. Perhaps some people think that, but they are a minority. The rest of us have been living a permanent state of crisis that perhaps only now is making us strong. Now that we are no longer children, now that we are not only not children but are parents ourselves, what makes us strong is precisely the consciousness of that crisis, that precariousness.

    Additional Information

    Alejandro Zambra is a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. He currently teaches at the School of Literature at the Diego Portales University in Santiago. His first novel, Bonsái, was awarded the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006 and attracted much attention in Chile. Zambra featured in Hay Festival’s Bogotá39 and was selected as one of Granta’s best young Spanish-language novelists in 2010. The book is translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

    Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

    You can read more about Alejandro’s new book on Granta’s website.