Quarrels between poets are a familiar story. Any reader interested in such things will know them well. They pop up throughout the literary history of the West, but are not exclusive to it. The dispute between Homer and Hesiod, Martial’s epigrams, the glorious Spanish Golden Age with rivalries as notorious as the one between Quevedo and Góngora. In France, during that same century, poets took sides in the classic debate between the old-school and the modern. The list grows long. In Latin America, Chile was perhaps the most disciplined disciple of the Spanish Baroque writers. Neruda, Huidobro, and De Rokha all rode into long-lasting pitched battles. They were not without their followers. Their struggles were bitter, but also intense and amusing. When it comes to literature, Chile has always been a ring defined by its own geography. Insularity and intensity, animosity and blind defense. Chilean society has only begrudgingly gotten along with its poets, and vice versa. Nevertheless, these quarrels serve to shed light on literary history, paradoxically revealing that poetry is always a subversive act, going against the grain: a practice for a select few.
That brings us to the author on this issue’s cover: Alejandro Zambra, who is himself the author of a novel titled Poeta chileno, translated by Megan McDowell as Chilean Poet. No one could remain indifferent to that title. A Chilean writer—a writer who is himself a poet—writes about one or many Chilean poets. Doubly unique. The title is somewhat deceitful, as it shies away from placing the novel on the battleground of Chilean literature. It is, in this sense, an exception to what I mentioned earlier. An upper-case exception, I must say. If the book does set foot on the battlefield, it does so parodically, with humor and freedom. Chilean Poet goes a different direction and, by shunning the obvious, asks a deeper question: “Who is the Chilean poet?” Or, in other words: “Who is really the poet in this story?” We spoke to Zambra about this novel and other books: Literatura infantil and Un cuento de Navidad. There is a great deal to say about this feature. First, we thank Megan McDowell, a longtime friend of LALT, who helped us put it together. Here we present her translator’s note from the forthcoming new edition of My Documents as well as a never-before-seen translation from the same book. The feature also includes the epilogue by Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo from the recent new edition of La vida privada de los árboles (Anagrama, 2022). Make no mistake: while we talk about Chilean poets in this feature, we also talk about children’s literature, the risks and wagers of fatherhood, personal relationships, loves unraveled and rebuilt, sentiments between friends, and a love rarely mentioned in literature: the love of stepparents. Allow me to correct myself: a love rarely mentioned. Period.
This issue’s second dossier is dedicated to Elisa Lerner of Venezuela, a multifaceted writer who has cultivated, as Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza points out in his interview with her, “crónicas, drama, essays, short stories, novels, and aphoristic writing.” Lerner is one of those hard-to-find writers who take poetry seriously while not being a poet. It’s no surprise, then, that their conversation touches on the value of prose and language. Meanwhile, Néstor Mendoza’s essay, “Notes on De muerte lenta by Elisa Lerner,” puts forth an approach to “the first of two novels published by Lerner,” which “possesses the Carpentian ‘severity of a courthouse.’” You need a lot of silence to write this kind of novel, and a lot of silence to read it. In her article, “The Metaphorical Concept of the Mirror in Elisa Lerner,” María Josefina Barajas reflects on the mirror as a metaphor in Lerner’s crónicas, the mirror as “object-subject of writing.” The dossier closes with the short story “Papa’s Friends,” originally published in 1991 and translated by Amy Prince.
The fiction section of this issue leans toward the Southern Cone, with Luisa Valenzuela, Tali Goldman, and Martín Kohan from Argentina, along with María José Navia from Chile. In our indigenous literature section, we present four poems in Nahuatl by Baruc Martínez and four poems in Tutunakú by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez. In our window onto literatures written in other parts of the world—provided thanks to the generous support of World Literature Today—we feature an article on Korean literature by researcher Eun-Gwi Chung titled “‘Tough as Ox Tendons’: Korean Literature and Returning Catastrophe,” along with a story by US writer Philip Metres, “Lost in the Underground Cathedral,” about a trip on Moscow’s subway system in 1992. This section ends with an interview of Japanese poet Shizue Ogawa by US historian Alice-Catherine Carls.
In other news, we’re happy to announce the start of a literary friendship. From this issue on, through an exclusive agreement with literary podcast platform Hablemos, escritoras, LALT will publish excerpts from their interviews with outstanding Latin American women writers. In this issue, we start with interviews with Argentine writer Selva Almada, Mexican writer Brenda Navarro, and Peruvian writer and journalist Gabriela Wiener. We are grateful to Adriana Pacheco for granting us access to this monumental project, which has already carried out over five hundred interviews. We are lucky to share their work in our digital pages. This agreement would not have come to pass without the initiative of our translation editor, Denise Kripper, whose translation of Salt by Argentine writer Adriana Riva we also highlight in this issue. Salt was published by Veliz Books in February of this year. Our readers can find an excerpt from Denise’s translation into English in the “Previews” section of this issue.
In 2023, we launched two contests: one for literary essays and another for book reviews. Our goal with these contests was to promote literary writing. Academic articles have come to saturate the world of critical reflection, and their objective is to feed an academic machinery from which the everyday reader is conspicuously absent. We, in contrast, hope to vindicate the literary essay written with the reader in mind, whose logic rests on exploration, closeness, and ultimately an invitation to read. With this goal in mind, we present in this issue the last three finalist texts from our first-ever Literary Essay Contest (2023), by Luis Madrigal, Daniela Suárez, and Rodrigo Mariño, respectively. Likewise, we present the three winners of our first-ever Book Review Contest (2023). Congratulations to Irina Ruth Garbatzky for her review of Ilusiones de botánica by Cuban writer Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, Ronny de Jesús Ramírez for his review of Después de tanto arder by Dominican poet Soledad Álvarez, and Maikel Alexander Ramírez for his review of Maniac by Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut. Here we also feature Rodrigo Figueroa’s interview of Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue, plus interviews of poet Ana Negri and Paula Vásquez, author and founder of the Lata Peinada bookstore in Spain. The issue comes complete with poems by five Latin American poets and much more besides.
And so LALT carries on, with faith in the obvious: literature is irrepressible. It refuses to be either an atlas of our Latin American ills or a documentation of barbarism. One need be no prophet in order to see how literature is now disappearing from the university classroom at an ever more alarming pace. Some call this phenomenon “the crisis of the humanities.” We hear tell of the market, of budget cuts, of the student body’s lack of interest. But this is a condescending, even deceitful description. What’s in crisis is not literature—just reading this journal should be enough to corroborate the good health literature still enjoys in this age plagued by algorithms and social networks. Literature has simply refused to be anything else, to be distorted, to be exhibited as an illustration of the social sciences. There are already professors who speak of “a university outside the university.” And that’s a good thing; the idea is tempting. This nonexistent university might still offer what in certain neoliberal countries is called “a public, free, and high-quality education.” Delusion or utopia? Maybe both. It would not be so outlandish, at this time of crisis in the humanities, to start reading Latin American Literature Today as the first textbook of a university whose only aim is to give away poetry to any and all takers.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
