In the Hispano-American world, the name Arnold Weinstein is perhaps entirely unknown. None of his books has been translated into Spanish. What’s more, I suspect his brilliant talks recorded for The Great Courses will remain strictly in English for a long while to come. Weinstein is one of those extraordinary professors (at Brown University) whom one would not hesitate to call a man of letters. The publication of his book The Lives of Literature in 2022 only hammers this home. In it, Weinstein reminds us that we read to know how others are, to vicariously live other lives because, perhaps by becoming others, we might learn who and what we really are. This is no small matter. Literary imagination is a passport (with diplomatic immunity) to that slippery otherness where the world’s mystery awaits us. “Without ever saying it, literature is drawn, like moths to the flame, to the question of how much any of us can afford to imagine,” Weinstein tells us. A weighty, provocative claim. Imagination, in the end, depends on us.
I pause over Professor Weinstein’s reflections to introduce a cover feature that has a great deal to do with the above: with reading, writing, citing, giving, exciting, and, of course, imagining. The cover of this issue is dedicated to Argentine writer Rodrigo Fresán. The feature itself was organized by Chilean writer María José Navia and includes writing by Ramiro Sanchiz, Nicolás Campisi, and Rodrigo Bastidas Pérez. Fresán’s work is fundamental to Spanish-language letters, as María José makes clear: “A body of work that keeps reading as it is written and that, when you read it, makes you want to write.” What more can you ask of a book? In her introduction, she warns us that this is an “impossible dossier.” It’s true—as with all great bodies of literary work, something will always escape us. “With Fresán, when we read, we remember,” María José writes, before adding, “and remembering always brings you back to the imagination,” that unique and wondrous time machine with which the world’s readers travel. The feature concludes—as it should—with a text on translation, titled “Translators’ Triptych,” in which Isabelle Gugnon, Will Vanderhyden, and Giulia Zavagna (translators into French, English, and Italian, respectively) reflect on their translations of a single sentence by Fresán: a playful and imaginative exercise that speaks to the multiple echoes of Fresán’s prose in other languages.
This issue’s second dossier is dedicated to Nicaragua. For some time now, it has been impossible to avert our gaze from what is taking place in this small Central American country. Human rights violations are an everyday occurrence, decried again and again in international fora. Nothing changes. Things keep getting worse. This February, the Ortega-Murillo regime deprived ninety-four Nicaraguans of their nationality, including writers Sergio Ramírez (winner of the 2017 Cervantes Prize and featured author of LALT’s eighth issue in 2018) and Gioconda Belli (winner of the 2023 Reina Sofia Poetry Prize and a Chilean citizen as of February 19 of this year). Dumbfounding the world, Nicaragua’s dictatorial regime not only committed the implausible act of stripping away its opponents’ nationality; it also confiscated their property. For this reason, we invited three Nicaraguan writers—Jorge Adiak Montoya, Fátima Villalba, and Mario Martz—to join Sergio Ramírez in telling the stories of their experiences after being forced to leave Nicaragua behind. Their testimonies serve as proof of how, since 2018, the country’s political situation has deteriorated. Nevertheless, Nicaraguan writers continue to resist this wave of repression with weapons of their own making. Sergio Ramírez puts it perfectly, writing: “Mine is a tongue without borders. The tongue no one can take from me and from which I cannot be banished. The tongue that is my homeland.”
As you’ll know if you follow us on social media, this year we organized our first-ever literary essay contest, which was a great success. The winner was Mexican writer Olivia Teroba, with her essay “Money and Writing.” As we announced, we are happy to share Teroba’s essay in this issue. On its decision, the prize jury stated: “This essay stands out for its discursive clarity, its incisive nature and its opportune quotations, the unique way it confronts difficulties with the resources of literary creativity.” Teroba’s essay “is also a stone-cold confession; an urgent reminder, a long meditation on the writer’s vocation, fragments of a literary diary written in secret.” Six other essays were also declared finalists, and in this issue we publish the first of them: “The Behind-the-Scenes of C.E. Feiling’s El agua electrizada: Disputed Biographical and Political Landscapes” by Argentine writer Mariano Vespa. In early 2024 we will announce the second call for contest submissions. We hope for the best. Not only a contest, this effort is also a revindication of the essay as a form of critical exploration, a type of text we believe is immune to preconceived formats whose freedom is plagued with doubts and intuitions as well as the bulky baggage of specialized knowledge. In any case, this is also a revindication of a long tradition in Latin American literature and thought.
Another novelty fills us with joy. Starting with this issue, Latin American Literature Today (LALT) will include a special section in which we feature texts previously published in World Literature Today (WLT), both in English and in translation into Spanish. This marks the fulfillment of a long-held editorial dream: the dream of becoming a small showcase for world literature in the eyes of the Spanish-speaking world. For some time now, we have published Latin American authors whose concerns go beyond their own region. And we are convinced of this: Latin America is more than itself. Our authors also care about the world. This new step will bring Hispano-American readers even closer to the literatures of other parts of the world. The remarkable legacy of WLT rests on the foundation of almost a century of tireless effort; it is therefore a true honor for all of us at LALT to publish material that could not reach Latin America by any other path. In this first edition of the new section, we chose to highlight award-winning German writer Jenny Erpenbeck (the 2018 Puterbaugh Fellow) with an article by our University of Oklahoma colleague Robert Lemon, “Vectors, Vanishing Points, and Vicissitudes in the Works of Jenny Erpenbeck.” In Latin America, science fiction is a hybrid and emerging genre that is earning an ever-larger space for itself in the academic world; so we decided to share an article by David Fowler, “Mathematics in Science Fiction: Mathematics as Science Fiction.” Finally, we saw a certain urgency in opening the door to Iranian American writer Azar Nafisi with an interview carried out by WLT’s editor-in-chief, Daniel Simon, and published in their latest issue (Vol. 97, No. 3, May 2023). Their conversation centers on Nafisi’s work in English (her books are not yet available in Spanish). Here, it is worthwhile to pause briefly and check Arnold Weinstein’s words against Nafisi’s. Nafisi, who has known totalitarianism up close, states that imagination “arouses our curiosity. We want to know, we want to go to places we have not been, meet people we have not seen.” But that’s not all; she also sees in imagination an undeniable social and political significance: “Imagination goes far beyond just totalitarianism and democracy. It addresses our humanity, against any kind of absolutism, including the absolutism of death.” Such a defense of imagination is not uncommon in these times of deliberate distortion and perverse falsehoods. For many creatives all over the world, their practice has become a way to revindicate our much-threatened freedom in the democratic world.
Death took us by surprise this year when we learned of the passing of Venezuelan writer Victoria de Stefano (1940-2023). Victoria formed part of LALT’s advisory board from the journal’s inception, and we were lucky enough to publish her work more than a few times. Here, Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza bids her farewell with a beautiful text titled “Goodbye, Dear Victoria, the World Will Always Fit in Your Room.” Just a few weeks later, we learned of the passing of Jorge Edwards (1931-2023), a writer of both fiction and nonfiction and the author of a text bold enough to cause discomfort for many: Persona non grata. Peruvian writer Jorge Eduardo Benavides remembers him in this issue of LALT with his essay “Jorge Edwards, Transgressor of Genres.” Some writers are missed, having left us waiting for their last book, their last column in the Sunday paper, some poem we never read. We cannot turn back time—or perhaps, through the imagination, we can. When we reread the writers who have left us, we keep them alive; we make them part of that personal canon made up of the books we have loved so much.
All are invited to this new issue of LALT, which also includes interviews with Afrouruguayan writer Jorge Chagas, Mexican writer Clyo Mendoza, and Peruvian writer Gustavo Rodriguez (winner of the 2023 Alfaguara Novel Prize). In our Indigenous Literature section, we feature texts in Portuguese and Tu’un Savi by Daniel Munduruku, Florentino Solano, and Nadia López García. In our Translation Previews section, you’ll find writing by Mario de Andrade translated by Katrina Dodson and by Daniel Guebel translated by Jessica Sequeira. We continue to find enlightenment in reflections on translation, with an interview of esteemed translator Kristin Dykstra by Erín Moure. And, finally, in our Seeking Publisher section you’ll find an excerpt from Ghost Horse by Karina Sosa Castañeda, translated by Rowena Galavitz and originally published by Almadia in 2020.
That’s all there is to say—all that remains is to set off on the marvelous journey through the imagination we hope to offer in each issue of LALT. Mystery still has its eyes on us, and we on it, with a book in our hands.
