READIN

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

🦋 in re. The Christ of Elqui

(Continuing in this year's theme of re-readings:) A correspondent has gotten me back interested in Domingo Zárate Vega and The Art of Resurrection. This is the frontspiece to the book, a pastoral letter written on the 25th of February, 1931, by the bishop of La Serena, José María Caro; in my own rough/not-fully-coherent translation (original at Casa del Libro):

Dear children of Our Lord:

What has been transpiring among you has filled with grief your bishop's heart.

A poor demented man presents himself among you -- one like those who fill our madhouses; and the faithful (I include in this adjective all those who go to church and who comply with their religion, fulfill their sacred duties) have received him as God's messenger, as the Messiah himself, no less, and have made themselves his apostles, his flock.

And meanwhile the faithful -- the judicious, the educated faithful -- have been tolerating this scandal, this blasphemy, tolerating mockery from these faithless maniacs; whose meanness of consciousness seizes any occasion to display its own lack of taste, lack of discretion, of appreciation for the things and people most worthy of universal respect and veneration... How can such a thing have happened -- how can such a hallucination be contagious? Our Lord has permitted it as a punishment for some one and as a humiliation for many.

We are all sensible enough to tell when someone else is in his right mind and when he has lost it. If among you, some poor campesino stood up and claimed in all seriousness, to be the King of England, if he surrounded himself with ministers (like such a king), and wore a special gown to show his office... Is there anyone among you, even a single one, who would not see the madness such a poor man was suffering from? Wouldn't it be the same if he claimed to be Our Holy Father?

And yet there are those among you who do not recognize his madness, because he claims to be not a person of this world, but nothing less than King of Kings and Lord of Lords himself. I repeat myself, our madhouses are full of just such things... Will any one among you let himself be led by the hallucinations of such a madman?

I pray that you, you who have suffered before this spectacle, will assist with your charity, with your prayers and with your counsels in ridding us of this contagious madness.

I ask, for the love of God and of one's brother, the love that we all must bear, I ask that you do everything, with your parish in mind, devote every force to keeping from this danger those who might fall into it, and to bringing back those who have been lost to this madness.

I hope, besides this, that when the authorities come to understand this evil, as I have demonstrated it to you, they will bring some remedy, will separate this danger from us all.

I wish you peace and felicity in Our Lord.
José María Caro

posted evening of February 11th, 2012: 1 response
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Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

🦋 Manifestation

(from Chapter 3 of Our lady of the dark flowers)

posted afternoon of October 23rd, 2011: Respond
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Monday, July 18th, 2011

🦋 Counterfeits

My copy of the forthcoming issue of Two Lines -- journal of the Center for the Art of Translation -- arrived in today's mail. A nice feeling to see my name there; my translation of the first chapter of The Art of Resurrection is my first contribution to Two Lines, hopefully there will be more to come.

And -- well, this seems like some kind of sign to me, to me who is always looking for portents: The editor's note from Luc Sante mentions in its second sentence "the late Kenneth Koch, one of my greatest teachers" -- so soon after I'd been thinking about Koch in the context of translation...

posted evening of July 18th, 2011: 4 responses
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Sunday, March 6th, 2011

🦋 It was twenty minutes after three.

The events of Chapter 19 of Our Lady of the Dark Flowers are unfolding like a malevolent clockwork, like a bad dream in which events cannot progress any way except toward their preordained, tragic outcome -- in short like history. "They are turning this place into a mousetrap," Olegario Santana thinks as he returns to the school of Our Lady of Iquique, perhaps for the last time -- he tries to persuade Gregoria Becerra to leave the school but she is steadfast in her commitment to the strike.

This impending sense of doom requires that Rivera Letelier move his narration to the past tense. Throughout the book the narrative present tense has been dominant, and the stories being told have focused on individuals, makers of free decisions within the context of the history which is the framework of the book. Here the story is the history, the concrete events of the past, where free choice is no longer relevant, and the events are related in the past tense. (And still there is a quick switch to the present tense when Olegario Santana is pleading with Gregoria Becerra to leave, when she is deciding freely to stand by the union; and somehow this is not confusing to the reader, somehow it flows perfectly.) The last words of the chapter have General Silva Renard making his fateful decision:

At this point, the general was convinced that the situation was no longer maintainable -- «in order not to compromise the prestige and honor of the authorities, of the security forces, I was faced with the necessity of checking the rebellion before the end of the day» is how he put it in his journal. Finally, he made the decision. Rising up on his steed, the sun's rays shining off his military harness, he crossed himself lightly. He raised his hand to give the order to fire.

(It is extremely disconcerting to be reading this story while the unions in Madison are occupying the state capitol and threatening a general strike. Not that I expect governor Walker to call out the state militia and fire on the protestors, although such things have happened in our history as well as in Chile's -- but this book is a sad reminder of the lengths to which those in power will go, have gone, to maintain their power.)

This chapter also features the blind poet, Rosario Calderón, who has made occasional appearances throughout the book reciting popular poetry to the strikers. He is here declaiming what I take to be another verse of his namesake's poem commemorating the massacre:

Hoy por hambre acosado
esta región abandono,
me voy sin fuerza, ni abono,
viejo, pobre y explotado,
dejo el trabajo pesado
del combo, chuzo y la lampa
y esa maldita rampa
donde caí deshojada,
soy la flor negra y callada
que nace y muere en la pampa

Pursued by hunger
I leave this place,
powerless, penniless,
an old man, broken down and poor,
I leave this oppressive work,
this heavy pair, my shovel and my bucket,
this damned mine shaft
I fell down, broken;
I am the dark and silent flower
which grows and dies in the pampa.

Chilean blogger Walterio2 has posted Calderón's verses and a lot of other pampino poetry: La pampa es silente.

↻...done

posted morning of March 6th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, February 27th, 2011

🦋 Yolanda

Olegario Santana (the calichero with the pet buzzards) smokes Yolandas; he has a two or three pack-a-day habit, and he thinks of the woman on the front of the pack as his feminine ideal. Rivera Letelier returns to this several times; taking a cigarette and looking at the pack and thinking about women is by now (halfway through) sort of a master gesture for Santana. I'm torn about this -- it strikes me at first glance as a bit clichéed, a bit simplistic; OTOH Santana is a pretty alien figure to me. This could well be an accurate representation of his character.

I'm thinking of Santana as the physical presence of Rivera Letelier in the story, for a few reasons. He was the first character introduced; he is a loner, quiet and reserved in his relations with the others, which strikes me as the proper deportment for the author; he is older than the others (Rivera Letelier was in his early 50's when he wrote this book, which I believe is roughly Santana's age -- quite old for someone in his extremely hazardous profession) and is the most skeptical about the odds of their strike having a positive outcome, the first to express worries about the military presence building up in Iquique.

There has been almost remarkably little narrative foreboding vis-a-vis the impending massacre. The book's first half has been about the workers and their friendships, about the blossoming love between Idilio and Liria María, and about the pampino community's high hopes for a proletarian victory and a new order. The only overt foreshadowings I have noticed that were not explicitly in Santana's voice were in Chapter 7, where it is mentioned that the provincial governor has asked Santiago for military reinforcements "without hope that the unrest will be resolved", and now in Chapter 10, where new reinforcements are arriving from Arica and the situation is "turning ugly."

posted afternoon of February 27th, 2011: Respond

Saturday, February 26th, 2011

🦋 A history lesson: El rey de la salitrera

At the beginning of chapter 10 of Our Lady of the Dark Flowers, Idilio Montaño is passed out in a corner of the schoolroom where the friends are staying, sleeping off his drunken fight of the previous night. As he comes to, he hears an old pampino telling a group of young men the history of John Thomas North's acquisition of the majority of the nitrate fields in northern Chile. This expository technique seems like it should be extremely heavy-handed but I think Rivera Letelier pulls it off. Anyway, I found the history lesson quite useful.

"...This English upstart is the best example of what I'm talking about. His name was John Thomas North and they called him 'The Saltpetre King." It was this proud commoner who instigated, who provided arms and pounds sterling to secure the downfall of Balmaceda, the last rightful president of Chile..."

According to the speaker, Balmaceda intended to nationalize Chile's nitrate resources; North owned vast amounts of the Atacama as a result of having purchased Chile's worthless bonds during the War of the Pacific. North is only dead about ten years at the time of the strike, and the speaker claims to have met him in person. He says the pampinos would joke about "Our Father who art in London..."

Interesting to think about how close to their country's history these characters are. This scene makes me think (in a US context) of an elderly Civil War veteran telling some young compatriots about a famous general he had met... Or to put it in the labor context, a grizzled old Teamster or Longshoresman telling about... My familiarity with labor history in the US (and indeed with US history in general) is far too limited to build a satisfactory scenario for either of these examples, alas.

posted afternoon of February 26th, 2011: Respond

Friday, January 28th, 2011

🦋 Rivera Letelier chronology

I am working on understanding the trajectory Hernán Rivera Letelier followed from being unknown to being, as Dorfman says, "one of the very few writers in Chile who can make a living writing books." His first novel was wildly successful, La reina Isabel cantaba rancheras, and made of him an overnight literary sensation. That was in 1996, only 8 years before Dorfman is talking with him, but you get a very firm sense of Rivera Letelier as an established literary presence. A lot can happen in eight years -- he has by this time published several novels.

posted evening of January 28th, 2011: Respond
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🦋 en la tarde calurosa y transparente

Time for a story. In the fifth chapter of Desert Memories, Dorfman takes a detour from his tour of northern Chile, to relate a yarn; and he does so in a very clever way. Rivera Letelier is talking to him about the town of Pampa Unión -- this is remembered from a frame in which Dorfman is standing in the ruins of Pampa Unión on the following day, after he has left Antofagasta -- last night Rivera Letelier was telling him a story about this town of bordellos, this town which features in his novels Fatamorgana and The Art of Resurrection. The year is 1929 and the president of Chile, General Carlos Ibáñez de Campo, will be passing through the Pampa Unión station, where his train will stop for water.

The band of musicians is ready, they've been practicing for weeks. The children are waiting to sing. The train is coming, the train can be seen chugging on the horizon. And people begin to cheer and they are hushed by one of the organizers. Things have to look orderly and nice. They want to use the occasion to ask the president if he could bestow upon this town some sort of legal status, recognize them as a municipality, put them on the map.

Accept them into the fold of the great Chilean family.

"And the locomotive," Hernán had said, taking his time, savoring our interest, "pulls into the station at exactly 3:08 in the hot, transparent afternoon."

And here Rivera Letelier's wife interrupts the story (and Dorfman's retelling of the story) to tell them supper is served, and Dorfman interrupts himself to talk about the meal -- so the meal serves as a frame internal to the story we have been hearing retold. From the mention of Mari he moves further back to talk about Hernán meeting Mari in the restaurant her mother ran out of her kitchen (and here we get an elaboration on the bit that Laura Cardona referred to in her review of The Art of Resurrection), and about his working in Pedro de Valdivia and listening to the stories of the viejos -- although "miners tend to die young," the men who have been working with explosives in the fields of caliche for years are called "old men" because they look old. And much, much more about his childhood and his path to becoming one of the most successful authors in Chile...

And after all this, Dorfman brings us back to last night in Antofagasta, after they have eaten supper, and he is asking his friend,

"So what happened?"

"What happened where?"

"At Pampa Unión. When the train with the president pulled in? We're going to pass through there tomorrow, you know."

"Oh, yes. At exactly 3:08 in the afternoon the train pulls in. Everybody waits and waits, the Boy Scouts from the nearby towns, the Red Cross, the fire brigade, from every little hamlet, the basketball team, the soccer team. And the man who was going to make the speech clears his throat and gets ready to hand the president their petition to make them into a real and recognized locality and they keep on waiting while the locomotive is serviced. And then..."

"And then...?" Angélica asked.

"And then at 3:14 in the afternoon, the train pulls out of the station."

"No president."

"He did not even poke his head out the window...."

"As if they did not exist," I had said to him last night, I say to myself again as I contemplate the desolation in which the whorehouses of Pampa Unión now lie, that whole town built for no other purpose than for men to make love in the desert. "As if those people never existed."

My mind is still resonating with Hernán's answer.

"Except for me," Hernán had said to us last night, whispers to Pampa Unión today. "I'm here to tell their story."

↻...done

posted evening of January 28th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

🦋 La dictadura

The fourth chapter of Desert Memories, "Nomads of Nitrate," offers an interesting juxtaposition, on the third and fourth days of Ariel and Angélica's journey north. May 15th, 2002 finds Dorfman in Antofagasta, meeting with a group of pampinos who were evicted six years earlier from the salitrera Pedro de Valdivia upon its condemnation. (Also present is Hernán Rivera Letelier, whom I'm glad to see -- one of my principal goals in reading this book is to find out more about Rivera Letelier.) The previous day he had visited María Elena, the last working salitrera in Chile, and dined with Eduardo Arce, the camp's manager for Soquimich S.A.

Despite the hospitable welcome... I was not entirely at ease. ...I feel uncomfortable whenever I meet members of Chile's business class, all too aware of their complicity with Pinochet's dictatorship, which in the case of Soquimich was particularly egregious, as our dictator's then son-in-law, Julio Ponce, had been one of those who acquired these salitreras from the state when they were privatized in the early 1980's in what observers consider dubious circumstances. And Eduardo Arce hints, at some point between the abalone and the sea bass -- or was it just before we were served the meringue dessert? -- when I inquire about his family, that his father had been traumatized by the experience of losing his hacienda in the South during the agrarian land reform program of President Eduardo Frei Montalva in the late sixties -- a process carried out by some of my best friends. But this is also Chile -- a country where people, at least of the elite, sit in close proximity to their former enemies and smile and chat about vintage wines and make believe the past does not really exist, that Arce is not a supporter of Pinochet and that I have not come to the North to search for the disappeared body of Freddy Taberna, not mention that Arce would lunch tomorrow at this table at the same time that I would be seated at a table in Antofagasta with the pampinos who were evicted from their homes because of decisions taken in this very room where we were having our midday meal.

posted evening of January 26th, 2011: Respond

🦋 Pre-historic Migration

Below the fold, a piece from The Art of Resurrection that came to mind as I was reading this article. (I have that book on my brain now...)

At the opening of Chapter 4, the Christ of Elqui is walking along the rail line through the pampa, from Sierra Gorda to Providencia (or as the two he met in Sierra Gorda told him it is known locally, La Piojo -- they also warned him to stick to the tracks so as not to get lost in the desert) --

Across the pampa's wide expanse, the dry four o'clock wind was beginning to blow.

The Christ of Elqui, he had been hiking for a long hawl with no rest, his long hair blowing into his eyes, when he stopped; he lifted up his gaze, making a visor of his hands. All of a sudden it seemed as if he could make out the gravel lot of the plant over there where the hills began to rise -- in the pampa, such a sight gives one the illusion of seeing "a ship foundering on the desert plain," as some northern poet's verses call it. But the railroad line just followed its interminable southerly right-of-way.

Surely a little ways further, and it would turn off to that side.

Just at that moment, miraculous in the open pampa, under the brutally incandescent midday sun, a butterfly crossed over the iron rails. "An ephemeral butterfly”, he said in wonder, the Christ of Elqui; he could not imagine from how far off it had flown. It was an orange butterfly with black markings.*

As he watched it disappear, fluttering off to the east, that was when it occurred to him. Why not take the short cut, save some hiking, save some time? Clearly, more powerful than all the desert’s misdirections and illusions would be the Eternal Father, guiding his steps.

So he thought; and that is what he did.

(Is it clumsy, this having the two warn him to stay on the tracks, then having him take the short-cut and get lost? Possibly. But, very beautiful. Some of the subsequent portion of the chapter is quoted in this post from a few months back.)

I wonder who the northern poet being quoted in the second paragraph is. The closest thing to the quoted phrase I have been able to find with Google is from Elisabeth Nox' recently published first novel La ciudad de los hombres perdidos, "Pero en ningún momento llegó a preguntarse cómo había llegado el barco a encallar en mitad del desierto." Interesting but probably not what I'm looking for...

* One of the butterflies that Nabokov named, the Pseudolucia aureliana, is native to the Atacama; however it is blue with yellow markings, oh well.

↻...done

posted afternoon of January 26th, 2011: Respond
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