Jason Weiss

By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959

Some books, long obvious that they should exist, nonetheless emerge slowly into the world. Almost fifty years after his death, incredibly, the great American poet William Carlos Williams has published his first book of translations. Thanks to Jonathan Cohen, who had the skill and the care*and the awareness*to bring the book into existence, we now have a more complete picture of Williams’s poetic practice. With his ear famously attuned to the rhythms and tones of American vernacular, Williams was rare among poets of his generation in the United States, having grown up in a bilingual household. His father was an Englishman raised mostly in the Dominican Republic, while his mother was from Puerto Rico, a descendant of French Basque and Dutch Jewish immigrants, the latter from Spanish Jews further back. So that, in Rutherford, New Jersey, in the late nineteenth century, Williams was graced with a rather unique perspective coming from a Spanish-speaking home. His multiple cultures must have rendered a more nuanced sense of hearing in the poet of American speech. Moreover, he valued Spanish for its ‘‘independence. This lack of integration with our British past,’’ he wrote, ‘‘gives us an opportunity’’*for a new freshness in the English language, and alternate models for the poetic line. By Word of Mouth packs a lot into its pages. The scholarly apparatus that frames the poems, and comprises a third of the volume, proves indispensable for its understanding of what needs to be said without overdoing the matter. In his helpful foreword, Julio Marzán lays out just how fundamental the role of translator was for Williams, in his self identity

Save Twilight, by Julio Cortázar

At the end of his life, Julio Cortázar put together a book that was four decades in the making. Published soon after his death in 1984, Salvo el crepúsculo constituted his collected poems, many of which had hardly been seen. Often written in the margins, while changing planes or in other situations of travel, they offer in all their curious shapes and tones quick doses of the Cortázar spirit, his music and heart, and that playfulness he always managed to surprise us with. Stephen Kessler’s fluid and friendly translations were surely rendered with the ear as guide, for the poems and occasional prose texts invite us in, effortless yet beguiling, a familiar voice. In much of his work, Cortázar liked to bring into public view the process of elaborating the book in hand; to make the making a visible part of the book. Every so often, among the poems here, he sets off on a series of reflections regarding philosophical and esthetic questions as to that making, abetted by his longtime alter egos Calac and Polanco in never taking himself too seriously. We know his task was daunting in its way: to gather a lifetime of scattered poems, otherwise irretrievable moments from the vast past among so many notebooks and loose pages, decide which should survive, and devise some way to assemble them. After much trial and error, he found he had to let the poems—and chance— suggest their own sequences; and within that, like a form of punctuation, he laid out his intermittent prose reflections. His intention was not to assemble a collection so much as to seek “a poetic ecology” in how they might work together. “To accept no other order than that of affinities, no Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 94, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2017, 143–144

Pop, Tradition, and The Future

Álvaro Bisama Mayné is the author of novels (Caja negra, 2006; Estrellas muertas, 2010; Taxidermia, 2014), stories (Death Metal (2010), and essays (Zona Cero, 2003; Postales Urbanas, 2006). He directs the School of Creative Literature of the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, and writes about literature and popular culture in the newspaper La Tercera and in Qué Pasa magazine. Christopher Winks is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College/CUNY. He is the author of Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature (2009). Jason Weiss’s most recent translation is Silvina Ocampo (2015), selected poems.

Various Horizontal Writings

One among many concrete cases: the 28 of April 2013, during a road trip from the city of Querétaro to the capital, the Mexican writer José Luis Zárate and I decided to propose a literary game to our readers on the social network Twitter. We had already done so on previous occasions, with good results. We had just finished teaching a brief course in Querétaro about flash fiction and writing online—activities we had been involved in for quite some time—and the game could work as an extemporaneous conclusion to the classroom course. Besides, to tell the truth, we had nothing else to do. From the road, with our mobile devices, we gave notice to the course assistants and announced the game, which we called “Amalgams,” and proposed it to anyone who might be reading us. The rules were simple and we published them according to these terms:

Two Tigers: Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa

‘‘Who’s there?’’ is the first line in Hamlet. ‘‘I wake’’ is the phrase with which Carlos Fuentes responded to Shakespeare from the other side*the far side*of the Western world. Artemio Cruz, the character who wakes up on the last day of his life in the novel that bears his name, has no idea who he is. I believe that The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) is Carlos Fuentes’s best novel. It’s not the most ambitious, but it is the one carried out with the most skill insofar as his ambitions connect perfectly with his abilities to tell a story. There is a hypnotic narrative rhythm: syncopated in the sequences where Artemio Cruz is dying and open as the enormous skies of the high plains at the moment when the character recalls his part in history; there’s the perfect communication between descriptions of the external world and the mental states of the characters that inhabit it; there’s the admirable economy of gesture of telling, in second person, the character who is judging himself in his final hour. In the end, the novel appeals because it tells a fable in which everyone is inevitably reflected (like the eyes of old Artemio Cruz in the little mirrors on his wife’s handbag): the narrator of the story lives projected toward a future that is ending without him having really known who he was*maybe that’s how we all live, actually. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), my favorite novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, is a work that’s radically different from The Death of Artemio Cruz: it’s a shamelessly autobiographical tale which, though it too tells the

Brief Guide to Latin American Narrative at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Jorge Volpi (Mexico City, 1968) is best known for his 1999 novel En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor, 2002). Volpi helped found the ‘‘Crack Movement’’*a Mexican literary group that encouraged its members to write beyond magical realism. In 2012, he was awarded the Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa, for his novel La tejedora de sombras. He is also the author of No será la Tierra (2006; Season of Ash, 2009) and A pesar del oscuro silencio (1992; In Spite of the Dark Silence, 2011).

From the Observatory

Published in 1972, Prosa del observatorio was unique in Cortázar’s oeuvre both for its subject and form, while remaining true to his indomitable spirit. In eighty pages, the book comprises an elusive poetic essay built from two interwoven strands, plus thirty-six photographs taken by the author a few years earlier on a trip to the maharajah Jai Singh’s observatories in Jaipur, Delhi. As a counterbalance to reflections on the starry heights, the text considers in turn the inscrutable depths where the strange life cycle of the Atlantic eel plays out. Each realm poses a challenge to science, with its need to track and define hidden patterns, and each ultimately defies the imperatives of precision instruments by asserting the integrity of all that lies beyond what can be known by the rational mind. In fact, what attracts Cortázar to the observatories of Jaipur is less the measurement of the stars than the efforts by the eighteenth-century ruler to fathom the enigmas of astronomy. The photos depict marvelous structures, full of evocative curves and angles and openings, conceived according to some grand plan; dominating most vistas, though, are the many sets of stairs, which Jai Singh would ascend ‘‘to interrogate the sky.’’ The Argentine writer shows a comparably ambitious reach in weaving together the worlds of above and below, as well as laying out an imaginative space, a Möbius strip of simultaneity, where time immemorial abuts the immediate sensual present, and the fragile illusions of human certainty can be intercepted by the grace of the unforeseen. Much as he details the elaborate migration of the eel, and its widening resonance as metaphor for natural and evolutionary forces, the spark in his inquiries

Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature

In his remarkable study of Caribbean thought and imagination, Christopher Winks proves an insightful reader of the region as a whole. Drawing on the most perceptive writers and theorists in Spanish, English, and French, he reaches beyond the fragmentary aspect of their archipelago origins in favor of a ‘‘tidalectic’’ approach, to use Kamau Brathwaite’s term; after all, these various nations are shaped by common forces, both in the sea around them and the socioeconomic foundation from which they grew, specifically the brutal machine of plantation societies built on slave labor. By focusing on the notion of the city in this setting*as a site of dreams and resistance*Winks traces the course of Caribbean cultural aspirations as they navigated between a spent European model and some measure of continuity with a suppressed African past. Nowhere is he more impressive in his capacity to make connections, to unfold multiple implications out of a small kernel, than at the start of the book where he takes up a little-known vignette by the Cuban writer Calvert Casey. Offering a sort of olfactory palimpsest of a shabby seaside neighborhood in Old Havana, Casey links its qualities of decay to imperial Rome, thus encapsulating a resonance with ever-widening effect. As Winks discusses the full text along with its historical and biographical context, he manages to rebound off of V. S. Naipaul’s dismissal of Caribbean culture, invoke Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, compare a differing view of the region’s self-determination held by earlier Cuban writers, and more, propelling him well past the parallel to Rome. Casey’s Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 81, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2010, 257 259

Tijuana Jews: An Interview with Isaac Artenstein

Isaac Artenstein (b. 1954, San Diego) studied painting and photography at UCLA, and film and video production at Cal Arts. He wrote and directed the feature film Break of Dawn (1990, historical drama), which premiered at Sundance and was later shown on Telemundo and the BBC. He produced the romantic comedy Love Always (1996) which aired on the Lifetime Channel, the thriller Bloody Proof (2000) for Univision, and the social satire A Day Without A Mexican (2004). Artenstein has also directed and/or produced a number of award-winning documentaries, including Diana Kennedy: Cuisines of Mexico (1981) and Ballad of an Unsung Hero (1983; about radio pioneer Pedro J. Gonzalez), as well as In the Name of the People (1985; about the civil war in El Salvador), narrated by Martin Sheen. He has taught film production and directing at the University of Southern California and the University of California at San Diego, and was a founding member of the Border Arts Workshop in San Diego. Currently, Artenstein is developing a feature film based on his 1991 play Under a Brilliant Sky, about the photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. His new documentary Tijuana Jews had its premiere at the San Diego Jewish Film Festival in February 2005.

Kagel's keys

There is no single port of entry into the music of Mauricio Kagel. No tag or affiliation can prepare the listener who soon becomes immersed in the protean textures and the very spirit of inquiry that moves his work. Philosopher, metaphysician, provocateur, composer of an extensive oeuvre of great diversity over five decades, Kagel incessantly questions the roles of tradition and performance in Western classical music. Along the way, he has challenged old habits and underscored the inherent theatricality of all music production, frequently crossing over to where music becomes theater, writing radio plays and making some 20 films as forms of his particular music theater.