This issue is dedicated to Mexican poet and essayist Gabriel Zaid.
Zaid truly is, as he has been called in Letras Libres, a “discreet classic.” No interviews with or photos of him exist. Zaid has seen fit to let his work speak for itself. And it certainly has. The author may have been discreet; his work, far from it. Zaid is an uncomfortable author whose essays seem designed to question power and established norms, to critize the literary and cultural malpractice that is so commonplace in our countries. We appreciate his humor, his cutting irony, and that overwhelming breadth of knowledge—somewhere between engineerlike and playful—with which he says so much in so little space. Paradoxically, Zaid’s collected works from Mexico’s Colegio Nacional take up five thick volumes. His essays are brief, but at the same time, they are many and varied. Anyone who has read him will agree with me that he is one of the great living writers of the Spanish language.
For some time now, we have hoped to dedicate a cover feature to Zaid; this was an outstanding debt. Thanks to the generous assistance of Christopher Domínguez Michael, we have finally been able to settle it. His wide-ranging work is multifaceted and irreductible. Our dossier is but a small sample, and it points in a single direction. The essays by Gabriel Zaid that we present here correspond specifically to Zaid as essayist and literary critic. Others of his facets are addressed in this issue’s ample and illuminating conversation between Enrique Krauze and José María Lasalle. Christopher Domínguez Michael, for his part, studies and reads Zaid as the Catholic poet he is, and, at once, as a critic—sometimes quite a radical one, at that—locked in a constant struggle with academic knowledge and cultural power. When Miguel Gomes says in his well known book La realidad y el valor estético, “Zaid intermingles the aesthetic with his ethical or ontological explorations, with his political or economic discussions, with his moments of seriousness or hearty laughter,” he couldn’t be more right. In order to be a true essay, an essay must put forth a language of aesthetic value, a language that transforms it into literature. This is no mean feat, but it is one that Zaid has irrefutably achieved.
Zaid has only seldom been translated, so we hope this dossier will be taken as an invitation for translators to bring more of his work into English.
This issue’s second dossier is dedicated to the diaries of José Donoso. Last year was the hundred-year anniversary of this Chilean writer’s birth. One year before, the press of the Universidad Diego Portales published the second volume of his diaries (Diarios centrales: A Season in Hell, 1966-1980). A happy coincidence: these diaries have started a great many conversations, and have come to claim a place of prominence not only within Donoso’s body of work, but also in the longstanding tradition of the literary diary. We can only celebrate the publication of these diaries, which exist thanks to the arduous and systematic work of Cecilia García-Huidobro. Her years of dedication have allowed Chilean literature to reach new heights. Chilean literature is indebted to Cecilia for this extraordinary contribution.
In this dossier, we feature a hitherto-unpublished selection of Donoso’s diaries from his time in Washington, along with a literary profile of the author written by Cecilia herself. Here we find a multifaceted, complex, contradictory Donoso, but one who is nonetheless always true to himself. Nicolás Bernales, in his essay, “All the Lives of José Donoso,” recounts the different phases of the Chilean writer’s trajectory, always under suffocating, self-imposed literary pressure. Lastly, Arturo Fontaine, in “Biography of the Pájaro,” paints a penetrating portrait of the torturous writing process of one of Donoso’s greatest works: El obsceno pájaro de la noche, translated into English as The Obscene Bird of Night. The third volume of Donoso’s diaries is scheduled to be released in 2026, but we can say for certain that, with the two volumes published thus far, Chilean literature has already been significantly enriched thanks to Cecilia García-Huidobro’s work. At Latin American Literature Today, we hope readers of English will soon have the chance to better acquaint themselves with one of the great writers of the Latin American “boom,” as the publication of these gripping diaries proves his lasting relevance.
This issue’s interview section holds many new offerings. The first is from Juan Camilo Rincón, who converses with Colombian poet and novelist Piedad Bonnett, recent winner of the 2024 Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía Iberoamericana. Adriana Pacheco, for her part, is back with another interview from Hablemos, escritoras, this time with Mexican author Brenda Lozano. The publication late last year of La biblioteca infinita: Leer y desleer a Borges by Argentine philosopher Ricardo Forster led me to interview him for this issue. His book is a nostalgic, personal work that puts the past in stride with the present through reading. Finally, Chilean poet and essayist Ismael Gavilán, as if in a game of mirrors, reads the reader of Borges—which is to say, Ricardo Forster himself. From our electronic platform, we are glad to present this continuous dialogue between poets and essayists that shows just how much reading resembles friendship.
Two more essays round out this issue. The first, by LALT contributor Indranil Chakravarty, addresses Cuban writer Severo Sarduy’s experience in India while Octavio Paz lived there as Mexico’s ambassador. The second, titled, “From This Other Side,” is by Rodrigo Mariño López and was a finalist in LALT’s second annual essay contest. In this text, Mariño López analyzes how “the glamorous image of the United States disappears, giving way to harsh realities of marginalization and violence, in areas like Ward 8 in Washington, D.C.” It is indeed an interesting exercise to observe this country from within, and to see how its dreams, at times, take on similar faces to those of the so-called Third World.
In our “Translation Previews” section, we share an excerpt from Samantha Schnee’s translation of Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft, as well as Will Vanderhyden’s translation of Gloria: A Novel by Colombian writer Andrés Felipe Solano. Finally, our readers will find an excerpt from KM Cascia’s translation of Apparent Breviary by Peruvian poet Gastón Fernández.
And, as always, much more: poetry in Quechua by Gloria Cáceres Vargas, poems by Manuel Iris and Alonso Ruiz Rosas, and stories by Salvador Elizondo, Esther Cross, and Carlos María Domínguez, among other poets and writers. We are also happy to share, in bilingual edition, Agnethe Brounbjerg Bennedsgaard’s interview with Mariana Enriquez, published last year by our friends at World Literature Today.
And there you have LALT No. 33, opening the door to the essay, that exiled son of the Academy, which first came to our language—as my friend Miguel Gomes tells me—in 1792 with Ensayo sobre determinar los caracteres de la sensibilidad by Francisco Javier Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo of Ecuador. This author, now forgotten, “was an enlightened man, jailed for his critiques of the Crown. You can’t get much more modern…” Miguel writes. Two hundred years later, another modern man, Gabriel Zaid, has taken the torch and turned the exercise of criticism into an act of intelligence and freedom. It doesn’t get more modern than that. There can be no better demonstration of the absolute currency of Gabriel Zaid’s work. We hope LALT’s readers will see it the same way.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Photo: LALT editor-in-chief Marcelo Rioseco, by Romina García.
