Spanish Lit Month Links: 7/1-7/7

¡Hola!  Just wanted to let you know that I have some good news for anybody tired of the one-dimensional language content of the blog this week: I'm going to take a break from blabbing about Spanish-language books tonight...to share a post about other people blabbing about Spanish-language books.  Psyche!  Although Stu and I still plan on presenting some sort of an end of the month link round-up/wrap-up thing for all of the Spanish Lit Month posts at the end of July, I thought I'd get things started early in order to make it easier for everybody to find out about the many other event posts already out there.  Please note that this list is a work in progress: I'll be updating it off and on over the next couple of days.  ¡Saludos!

Stu, Winstonsdad's Blog

Welcome to Spanish Lit Month

View of Dawn in the Tropics by G. Cabrera Infante

The Blue Hour by Alonso Cueto

The Shadow of What We Were by Luis Sepúlveda

Amanda, Simpler Pastimes
Libros españoles - un proyecto nuevo

Cría cuervos directed by Carlos Saura

Caroline, Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat
Amirbar by Álvaro Mutis

Emma, Book Around the Corner
Mafalda and Me

Jenny, Shelf Love
Don Quixote Part I: The Words and the Stories by Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote Part I: The Madness and the Cruelty
Don Quixote Part I: Cherchez La Femme
Don Quixote Part II: Madness, Folly, Lies, and Dreaming
Don Quixote Part II: Metafictional Monkeyshines
Don Quixote Part II: "You shall find me a grave man."

Jeremy, READIN
Cría cuervos directed by Carlos Saura

lizzysiddal, Lizzy's Literary Life
Five from the Archive: Spanish Literature

Neer, a hot cup of pleasure
Spanish Literature Month: July 2012

Obooki, Obooki's Obloquy
Spring and Summer Sonatas by Ramón del Valle-Inclán

Séamus, Vapour Trails
Spanish Lit Month - Plans and "Five from the Archive"
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Susanna, SusieBookworm
Spanish Lit Month: Kick-Off!
The Planets by Sergio Chejfec

Tara, BookSexy Review
Cría cuervos directed by Carlos Saura

Tony, Tony's Reading List
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos
¡Bienvenidos a Spanish Lit Month!
El piano by Carmen Laforet
"Mariachi" by Juan Villoro
The Song of the Cid: Canto One Anonymous
"Ester Primavera" by Roberto Arlt
Cría cuervos directed by Carlos Saura
Spanish Lit Month Links: 7/1-7/7

Cría cuervos

Cría Cuervos... [Cría cuervos] (The Criterion Collection DVD, 2007)
Directed by Carlos Saura
Spain, 1976
In Spanish with optional English subtitles

I wish I could find the interview with Carlos Saura that I came across years and years ago in which he talked about narrating Cría cuervos in such a way that it would reflect the admiration he felt for some of the storytelling innovations of the Latin American writers who were coming into vogue in his native Spain in the 1960s.  Until that time, I'll just note that one of the many, many things I love about this movie--culturally one of the most Spanish of all Spanish films of the era because of its veiled but ultimately scathing critique of the upper echelons of Franco's Spain in a work shot just a couple of months prior to the dictator's death and the beginning of the eventual transition to democracy for the country--is its blend of an intense, almost claustrophobic interiority with some conceptually showy Boom-like narrative devices that play with the concepts of time, memory, and reality in an unusually sophisticated manner for a motion picture.  Ironically, in terms of its plot the film would seem to be a rather simple affair at heart: three young girls at home on vacation from school find themselves suddenly orphaned after their father, a military man, dies of an apparent heart attack while in bed with his best friend's wife.  What complicates matters is that the middle of the three daughters, the eight year old Ana (Ana Torrent, in an unbelievably riveting performance), believes that she's responsible for her father's death for reasons that I won't go into here.  Fascinatingly, what haunts Ana isn't guilt for the imagined patricide but the painful memory of the loss of her mother to an incurable illness some time previously.  I say "fascinatingly" because the angelic-looking creature not only "sees" her mother frequently despite her older sister's reminder that their mother is dead, but she thinks that she can bring her back on demand with just a blinking of her eyes.  Saura takes this somber premise and, with the help of a terrific cast, a deliberate pace that allows events to unfold naturally, and a sublime score that never fails to wow me, masterfully turns it into a wrenching meditation on abandonment and loss.  While almost all of the action takes place in a grand but inordinately funereal old house in Madrid's embassy district, the story shifts back and forth in time in that it's told from the perspectives of the eight-year old Ana and the adult Ana (a wonderful Geraldine Chaplin, who also plays the deceased mother María in one of many Borgesian mirror image homages evident throughout the work) some twenty years later.  At the same time, it also shifts back and forth in space because the troubled Ana, who comes to believe that she holds the keys to life and death over other members of her family just as she thinks she did with her father, increasingly finds it difficult to differentiate between what's real and what's only memory in the eerie inner world where her dead parents walk in and out of her waking hours like something straight out of Pedro Páramo.  Superb.  (The Criterion Collection)

Ana

Cría cuervos, whose title comes from the Spanish proverb "Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos" ["Raise ravens, and they'll pluck your eyes out"], is being dissected on many blogs this week as part of the Spanish Lit Month activities.  I'll link other posts to the movie below as soon as I find out about them, but please feel free to join in on the discussions at the various blogs whether you've reviewed the movie yourself or not.

Other Cría cuervos posts

Amanda of Simpler Pastimes

Jeremy of READIN

Séamus of Vapour Trails

Tara of BookSexy Review

Ester Primavera

"Ester Primavera"
by Roberto Arlt
Argentina, 1933

Arlt, "our Dostoevsky" according to some argentinos and a guy who couldn't write his way out of a paper bag according to some effete others, can be introduced to Spanish Lit Month readers here, much more dispassionately, as the man who hit the degenerate trifecta in 1926, 1929 and 1931 with his crude, street smart jackpots El juguete rabioso [Mad Toy], Los siete locos [The Seven Madmen], and Los lanzallamas--all recommended.  "Ester Primavera" ["Esther Primavera," unavailable in English as far as I'm aware] is one of the better short stories I've read by him to date, by which I mean that most other book bloggers would probably hate the work.  You, on the other hand, you just might like it.  A character study of a Buenos Aires underworld type spending his last days in a tuberculosis sanatorium far away from the great metropolis somewhere out in the mountains, the story finds the narrator obsessing over the essentially unprovoked horrible wrong he once perpetrated on the young Ester Primavera.  In typically uncomfortable Arlt fashion, the narrator isn't really apologetic for ruining the title character's life but he can't seem to get her out of his thoughts either.  While Arlt plays with some more or less conventional contrasts between the dying lowlife in the mountain retreat and the innocent young woman in the big city, what really makes the story work from a strictly storytelling point of view is the unconventional delight he takes in underscoring the parallels between the physical and the psychological sickness of the narrator and his criminal companions.  After a scene in which one character smiles happily because he has just had a prolonged coughing fit but can find no signs of blood on his handkerchief, for example, the narrator dryly notes, "Ésa es la obsesión nuestra.  Y siempre nos consultamos" ["That's our obsession.  And we always consult each other"] (313).  Two paragraphs later, the reader will discover what "Physician, heal thyself" means to Arlt's doomed lungers in what I think is probably as optimistic a note as any to close on:

 Hasta hacemos apuestas, sí, apuestas sobre los que están moribundos en las salas.  Se juegan paquetes de cigarillos para ver quién acierta la hora en que morirá uno que agoniza.  Juego complicado y terrible, ya que a veces el moribundo no se muere, sino que "reacciona", entra en la convalecencia, se cura de la enfermedad y a su vez comienza a burlarse de los jugadores, y a entusiasmarse hasta el punta de buscar irónicamente otro "candidato" sobre quien apostar.

[We even place bets, yes, bets, on the people who are dying in the wards.  Cigarette packs are wagered to see who can guess the hour of death of somebody who's in agony.  A complicated and terrible game because sometimes the dying person doesn't die but instead "reacts," enters into convalescence, rids himself of the illness, and in turn begins to make fun of the gamblers and to work himself up to the point of ironically seeking out another "candidate" to place a bet on.]

Source

"Esther Primavera" can be found in El jorobadito, a 1933 short story collection by Arlt.  However, I read the story in Arlt fundamental (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2010, 303-317), which has selected writings chosen by Analía Capdevila and edited with a prologue and notes by Ana Silvia Galán, in part because I love that cover!

More Arlt-related posts here on Caravana de recuerdos

El juguete rabioso

Los siete locos

Los lanzallamas

"Las fieras"

El escritor en el bosque de ladrillos.  Una biografía de Roberto Arlt (Sylvia Saítta's Arlt bio)

Three snazzy Arlt-related posts written by Amateur Reader (Tom) over at Wuthering Expectations

"Roaming the city by guess and by God - Roberto Arlt and Mad Toy"

"Even so, it cannot have been good for his health - I marvel at Argentinean literature"

"We're discoverers who have only a vague idea of the direction we're heading in - Restless writers"

The Song of the Cid: Canto One

The Song of the Cid: A Dual-Language Edition with Parallel Text (Penguin Classics, 2009)
by Anonymous [translated from the Spanish by Burton Raffel]
Castile, c. 1200

De los sos ojos     tan fuertemientre llorando,

tornava la cabeça     e estávalos catando;

vio puertas abiertas     e uços sin cañados,

alcándaras vazías,     sin pielles e sin mantos

e sin falcones     e sin adtores mudados.

Sospiró Mio Cid,     ca mucho avié grandes cuidados;

fabló Mio Cid     bien e tan mesurado:

"¡Grado a ti, Señor,     Padre que estás en alto!

Esto me an buelto     mis enemigos malos."

(Cantar de Mio Cid, I, 1)

While well aware that the use of any two of the three words "medieval," "Spanish," and "poetry" in combination is a surefire way to drive readers away from the blog, I've knowingly but rather passive-aggressively decided to dedicate at least three posts this month to my reread of one of the greatest works in all of medieval Spanish poetry: the anonymous Cantar de Mio Cid, now available as The Song of the Cid in a newish dual language Penguin translation by Burton Raffel.  Canto One, the focus for today, may surprise those of you who only know the cantar de gesta [chanson de geste] tradition from the French side of the border.  Although there's no shortage of epic bloodletting or battles pitting Christians against Moors here, for example, the tone of the poem is more realistic/less fantastic than the Chanson de Roland both in its battle scenes and its nuanced portrayal of the Cid's non-Christian opponents.  The poem begins with Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the historic figure also known as the Cid (from the Arabic honorifics sayyid or sayyidi, "lord" or "my lord"], about to be exiled from Castile on account of some unspecified slight he falsely has been accused of committing against King Alfonso VI.  The Cid and his men are given nine days to say goodbye to their families and to exit the land, and once they do they have to earn a living in the frontier lands fighting against the Muslim inhabitants of various cities and fortresses.  In the climax of Canto One, after having riled Christians and Muslims alike on account of his prowess in waging war on their homes and protectorates, the exiled Cid fights and defeats the forces of Ramon Berenguer of Barcelona but then releases the Count after depriving him of a vast sum of money and other treasures.  Two other cantos, the main subjects of future posts, follow.

The beginning of the Cantar de Mio Cid in its original manuscript

For a quick look at how the poem reads in translation, I'd like to backtrack to the very beginning of the work and the matching translation of the Spanish above.  Here's how Raffel renders the moving first tirada or laisse [epic stanza], a scene that begins in medias res because the first page of the sole surviving manuscript of the CMC is missing:

Tears were flowing from his eyes, then flowing faster

As he turned and looked back, just standing.

He saw the doors, swung open, padlocks gone,

Wall pegs empty, no furs, no gowns

Or cloaks, no falcons or molting hawks.

My Cid sighed, his burden weighing him down.

My Cid spoke, in measured, well-controlled tones:

"I thank you, my Father, my Lord on high!

This is the vulture trap my evil enemies sent me."

(The Song of the Cid, I, 1)

Personally, I think that this is an excellent example of how readable Raffel's translation is throughout Canto One.  While substituting free verse for the assonant rhyme of the Spanish original, his English is compact, direct, and expressive--a big improvement over the other, often-wooden translations of the poem I've seen.  At the same time, one of Raffel's choices in the concluding line of this opening is a pointed reminder of just how much translations are, for better or worse, an unending tug of war between the original author and the translator: "vulture trap," while playing so well off the previous lines about the Cid's birds of prey, is a poetic add-on by Raffel that isn't present in the original, which only mentions a vague "esto" [this, something, i.e. implied treachery] as the source of the Cid's travails.  Should emendations like this be something to be concerned about translation-wise?  At this point, I'd say probably not. In any event, more on the cantar and its translation within the next week.  (Penguin Classics)

Mariachi

"Mariachi"
by Juan Villoro
Mexico, 2009

Villoro, whose 2004 Premio Herralde winner El testigo, while not quite a mindblower, was still jugoso enough to leave me wanting to read much more by the guy, here returns with a comic riff on machismo and Mexican identity in this ribald tale about a burned out mariachi star whose career-changing stint with a prosthetic penis in an Almodóvaresque arthouse porn film brings the singer new fans but leads to unexpected complications in his personal life.  I know, I know, I should probably just stop there, but I feel I owe it to you hardcore readers to share a few things that stood out in this amusing little work.  For starters, I loved the narrator's laconic description of himself: "Yo sólo podría haber sido mariachi.  Tengo voz, cara de ranchero abandonado, ojos del valiente que sabe llorar" ["In my case, I could only have been a mariachi.  I have a good voice, the face of a forsaken peasant, and the eyes of a brave man who knows how to cry"].  I also enjoyed the continuation of the description and, in particular, the playful irony with which the mariachi singer's comments work to subvert national stereotypes: "Además soy de aquí.  Una vez soñé que me preguntaban: '¿Es usted mexicano?'  'Sí, pero no lo vuelvo a ser'.  Esta respuesta, que me hubiera aniquilado en la realidad, entusiasmaba a todo en mi sueño" ["Furthermore, I'm from here.  Once, I dreamed that I was asked: 'Are you Mexican?'  'Yes,' I said, 'but I wouldn't want to be again.'  This response, which in reality would have had me killed, thrilled everyone in my dream"] (294-295).  Mostly, I admit, I got a kick out of Villoro's absurdly racy humor and the sheer novelty of his premise.  I mean, c'mon, whatever other short stories are destined to come your way during Spanish Lit Month, I'm quite confident that "Mariachi" is the only one that will dare to ask the burning question: "¿Qué puede hacer una persona que de la noche a la mañana se convierte en un fenómeno genital?" ["What can a person who turns into a genital phenomenon overnight do?"] (305-307).

Source

Juan Villoro's "Mariachi," with the original text in Spanish and a facing English translation by Harry Morales (as with all translated passages above), appears on pp. 288-317 of the Álvaro Uribe-edited Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction short story anthology (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009).

Full list of authors and stories included in the dual language volume:

Vivian Abenshushan, La cama de Lukin/Lukin's Bed

Álvaro Enrigue, Sobre la muerte del autor/On the Death of the Author

Eduardo Antonio Parra, Cuerpo presente/Requiem

Cristina Rivera-Garza, Nostalgia/Nostalgia

Guillermo Fadanelli, Interroguen a Samantha/Questioning Samantha

Jorge F. Hernández, True Friendship/True Friendship

Ana García Bergua, Los conservadores/The Preservers

Rosa Beltrán, Shere-Sade/Sheri-Sade

Enrique Serna, Tesoroviviente/Living Treasure

Juan Villoro, Mariachi/Mariachi

Fabio Morábito, Los crucigramas/Crosswords

Francisco Hinojosa, La muda boca/The Muted Mouth

Daniel Sada, El fenómeno ominoso/The Ominous Phenomenon

Guillermo Samperio, La mujer de la gabardina roja/The Woman in the Red Coat

Hernán Lara Zavala, A golpe de martillo/Hammering Away

Héctor Manjarrez, Fin del mundo/The End of the World

El piano

El piano (Menoscuarto Ediciones, 2010)
by Carmen Laforet
Spain, 1952

A red card for boring might seem a little harsh of a penalty for this otherwise unassuming novella about a young married woman's struggle for financial and emotional independence in postwar Spain, but on the other hand you and I both know that I'm never going to get my 50 pages of reading time back.  A mostly uninvolving follow-up to Laforet's dazzling debut effort Nada--maybe not soporific exactly (well, except for an excruciating crying jag scene at the end) but sort of bland and not all that exciting in the tradition of bands what follow up raw debut albums chock full of three minute pop songs with overly restrained sophomore efforts laden with a bunch of overproduced, medium tempo numbers clocking in at five minutes plus to demonstrate their newfound maturity as songwriters or something. Why "maturity" always has to equal a lack of hooks and/or energy is a matter I'll leave for you music types to explain to me someday, but in the case of El piano [The Piano] the parallel question is why the talented Laforet would want to abandon that vivid first-person voice of Nada for the colorless third-person narration here.  I don't get it.  Whatever, no big deal, nobody ever promised me I was going to enjoy everything I read for Spanish Lit Month anyway.  (Menoscuarto Ediciones)

Carmen Laforet (1921-2004)

El piano is the first of seven Laforet novellas featured in the collection Siete novelas cortas [Seven Novellas, not available in English translation at present].  The other titles include La llamada, El viaje divertido, La niña, Los emplazados, El último verano, and Un noviazgo, all written between 1952 and 1954.  El piano appears on pages 21-75 of the Menoscuarto edition.

Other works by Laforet include Nada [Nada], 1945, a novel I highly recommend; La isla y los demonios (1952); La mujer nueva (1955); and La insolación (1962).  In 2007, Menoscuarto put out a collection of Laforet's short stories under the title Carta a don Juan.

Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, one of the earliest people to get behind the idea of a Spanish Lit Month taking place, enthusiastically reviewed Nada on her blog last year.  Click here for her great post.

¡Bienvenidos a Spanish Lit Month!

¡Bienvenidos a Spanish Lit Month!  Now that July's finally here, Stu of Winstonsdad's Blog and I are very excited to welcome all of you to the kickoff of Spanish Lit Month as previously announced at Stu's blog here and at Caravana de recuerdos here.  Thanks again to Stu for inviting me to co-host the event with him and an extra special gracias to those of you--including many of my favorite bloggers--who have said that you'll join us or at least follow along closely during the month (please note that new participants are welcome throughout July).  Just as a reminder, we have three planned group events scheduled: a discussion of Carlos Saura's 1976 film Cría cuervos this coming weekend, a group read of Juan Carlos Onetti's 1950 La vida breve [A Brief Life] the following weekend, and a group read of Enrique Vila-Matas' 2001 Bartleby y compañía [Bartleby & Co.] the weekend after that.  Everything else is free choice--read one or more works originally composed in Spanish (and read in Spanish or in translation), and then tell us about it and/or them.  Stu and I will do round-ups of people's links near the end of the month, but feel free to contact us before then if you have any questions or would like to let us know about your posts.  For those so inclined, you can also find us on Twitter: Stu (stu @stujallen), me (Richard @caravanablog), and Spanish Lit Month (#spanishlitmonth).  Although I'm new to Twitter, I'm led to understand that this might be the ideal format for readers who can only take me in small doses.  ¡Saludos!

My non-readalong choices for the month are top secret at the moment with one exception: Spanish Lit Month seems like--no, will be--the ideal time to begin rereading DQ at long last.  Thanks to Jenny at Shelf Love for the unexpected push!