Editor’s Note: The translations that make up this dossier were completed by students of the University of Exeter under the direction of professor Katie Brown, and are dedicated to the memory of Libby Jones, a former student of the University of Exeter, a talented translator, and a contributor to LALT. She is greatly missed by all who knew her.
I had a dream: a group of beautiful girls parading down a narrow street. They were dressed in dark clothes and looked like they were from an asylum. All of them were blind. But upon closer inspection, I could see that the blind eyes of the girls were my own.
Elisa Lerner, Notas de una aspirante a escritor
Elisa Lerner’s writing seems to be guided by an eye that, without being distracted from seeing, shows itself destined to hear. […] an eye that has carefully learned to hear.
Eugenio Montejo, Tres relatos de Elisa Lerner
Although nowadays we know Elisa Lerner from her crónicas, this was not always the case. Her work first gained attention in the public literary scene through a mixture of the stage and pages of a literary magazine. It was, then, the sixties and seventies in Caracas, the country was just beginning to experience democratic elections. The republican times were exciting. In those days, Lerner was emerging on the national artistic scene in a doubly unique way: writing surprising theatrical texts and being part of the Sardio group and its magazine of the same name. Both spaces were characterized by being, above all, dominated by male artists and writers. And they were extraordinary men, who knew how to accompany her, trusting in her talent with an aesthetic, civic, and civil disposition, which they generously extended to one another. In those years, Lerner was already writing and publishing crónicas, although these were not the initial reasons for her public attention. Then, with the arrival of the twenty-first century, came her novels and more of her interviews.
The theatrical text, the crónica, the novel, and the interview are all literary genres typical of Elisa Lerner. Her poetics also includes a selection of aspects on which she based all formats of her stories, with a very particular way of approaching them in which she impressively integrates private and public experiences. Cinema, comics, literary readings, press, radio, theater, dialogue, identity, gender, memory, and testimony are all part of the author’s set of thematic and conceptual choices. These come and go in her texts, appearing and disappearing according to the intimate rhythm of the characters’ homes and streets, but, above all, under the lucid scenic revelation of these two realms, the home and the street, which are reflexively linked in Lerner’s writing. Hence, in her work, one of the “axes of her thought,” which José Balza calls the “invisible code” that defines each artist, is the mirror. Especially in her crónicas, throughout the 1958-2015 collection Así que pasen cien años: Crónicas reunidas (2015).
At least three types of uses of the word “mirror” are presented to us in the Lernerian crónicas. One of these meanings is the mirror as an object that forms a reflection of things placed in front of it. This is the simplest usage of mirror, and the most familiar amongst us common readers because it coincides with the named, materially tangible object, known as the mirror in real life. The other concept explored through this word in Lerner’s crónicas is mirror as the interior of a character, reflecting their experiences and ideas. This second use of the term alludes to a character’s memories, thoughts, sensations, their inner being. The third sense of the word presents the term mirror as a scriptural object and subject. That is to say, an imaginative source of writing, in fragmentary, moving, reflective, and reflexive ways. In this sense, memory is a mirror for Lerner, from which emanate fragmented memories, small memories that, when exposed in light of the narrator’s current experiences, allow her to consciously manage daily life within her texts.
Lerner’s literary crónicas are examples of the materialization of the metaphor of the mirror, in the sense of the object-subject of writing.
What are these memories? Personal memories, some close, others distant, of the narrator of the crónicas. Some where she is the character-witness of her and her family’s own private life in the household environment. Others where there are characters from the neighborhood circle, or things seen in the city or heard on the street. What are the narrator’s current experiences? Those of national and international daily public life, artistic, economic, political, and social experiences that the storyteller manages to intertwine with her own memories through writing. What does it mean to consciously manage daily life? It comes down to the ability to navigate day by day in the world of her stories with the security that comes from unravelling one’s own identity.
Lerner’s literary crónicas are examples of the materialization of the metaphor of the mirror, in the sense of the object-subject of writing. In a 1969 crónica, “Las cartas de Alillúieva,” the author refers to the Russian writer’s memories and feelings in these letters as personal evocations, notes and “autobiographical fragments” that “safeguard her individuality,” her ability to manage her everyday life as a “confrontation of the intimacy of people and things in the universe.” Svetlana Alliluyeva, the Russian writer of the book Twenty Letters to a Friend, says the writer was denied this everyday life until she was almost forty years old, with only her refuge in the United States in the 1960s opening the door to an individual life and her book publication. When referring to Alliluyeva’s mirror writing, writing of personal evocations where mirrors produce universal reflections, the narrator of the crónicas adds:
These letters do not describe an individual suffering of the Russian soul like that which overwhelms Dostoevsky’s heroes. Svetlana testifies to the bureaucratic suffering of our time, that collective obstacle that has prevented many beings from unraveling their identity. And when beings fail to unravel their identity, the days border on chaos and absurdity. That chaos and absurdity penetrate the expressions of the man of today, clouding his humor and his retrospective memory of innocence, turning our age into a vast subversive comedy.
The crónica writer also tells us that Svetlana uses her mother’s surname, Alliluyeva, both to sign the book and in everyday life beyond it. Her father’s last name is Stalin. Joseph Stalin is the bureaucrat, the official with excessive, terrifying influence on the public affairs of his age as well as on the lives of his own family, including that of Svetlana, his only daughter.
So, whether they refer to a smooth and shiny surface, to an inner world or to a source-support of writing, these three understandings of “mirror” from Lerner’s code of writing all refer to a space of representation of images (reflections of things according to the direction of the light), to an agent of clarity that makes visible the distinct qualities of objects. Photographic film, cinematographic film, the film projection screen, the television screen are all examples of surfaces of clarity, almost equal to that of mirrors; where things are made visible, are projected, which are figures, signs or symbols, sounds (useful in a conscious, vital way) for the worlds of the crónicas. Sheets of paper and pages simulated on electronic devices are other surfaces of clarity on which things are revealed, word by word, when writing. From this point of view, writing is a mirror for Lerner, capable of uncovering images for the writer and recording them in a coordinated way for readers. In other words, as a testimony, as a memory for them too, to which they can turn to see their own face, to illuminate their memories. In this way, readers also increase the amount of things reflected and of reflections of that memory shared through literary texts “as an act that unites us collectively and lovingly,” as we are told in “El país y la memoria” (1968).
“La calle de mi infancia” (2015), the final crónica of the 1958-2015 collection, is an example of writing as a mirror in Lerner’s work. In the text, the narrator evokes memories of the long street where she lived from the ages of four or five to twelve and reflects on that period which is both intimate and universal. She speaks of memory, of memory as a source for writing, and of writing itself as a place where memory becomes a voice. She reflects on the importance of looking at (listening to) memories in one’s own mind (together with the radio, movies, and other similar repositories of memory) in order to produce with the voice (with language) melodious sounds in the text, the resonant duet in the mirror. She also speaks of the clarity of the sheet of paper as a site of revelation for writing. The crónica begins by introducing the abovementioned topics:
What is remembering? Going down to the bottom of the mine and ardently extracting memories? Perhaps in the brittle light of the pages they achieve some clarity. And, after a certain time, sing inside of oneself. I am four years old again, maybe around five. From a radio, not so far away, fragments of Spanish popular songs can be heard. When it is not “¡Mi jaca galopa al viento…!” I hear “¡Rocío! ¡Ay, mi Rocío!” Surely, it is 1937. Or, before that, 1936? “¡Oh, mi Rocío, capullito de alelí!” In the seventies, in some Carlos Saura film, I hear the old tune again. In La prima Angélica, the members of a family sing, with summer sweetness, pieces of the song in the moment they are surprised by the Franco uprising. (Italics are mine)
Guided by the narrator’s mirroring eyes—eyes that, without being distracted from seeing, are destined to hear (as Eugenio Montejo says)—the writing manages to reproduce sounds, gestures, emotions, sensations that identify her street in the center of Caracas in “its innocent retrospective memory.” “La calle de mi infancia” and her previous crónias are sharp, spicy, but also loving examples of how to use the notion of a mirror to turn writing upside down, the reading of the inner lives of her readers in this world, where, undoubtedly, one is with others, where we all fit.
We seem to have been late to understand the concept-metaphor of the mirror in Lerner’s work, perhaps because, as is my case, we have been too busy reflecting on other captivating mirrors: the one that talks to Snow White’s stepmother; the one that terrified Jorge Luis Borges; the cosmetic one of the makeup and clothing industry, the one of our personal image. Or perhaps, we have been delayed because, as the crónica writer tells us in “El país y la memoria” (1968):
When you live under dictatorships, like the ones we have had in Venezuela, memory is no longer clarity or thought, intimate reiteration to which to be collectively true, and not a dogmatic time of emphasis. It becomes a possession of dictators, a game and never a mission. It is an enigmatic, solitary belonging, which only serves to persecute and not for the collective and loving identification of a country.
Hopefully the brilliance of Elisa Lerner’s crónicas and all of her work will soon be available to readers in digital format.
Translated by Tabby Woodhams and Katie Brown
Photo: Peter Herrmann, Unsplash.
