[{"id":47034,"date":"2026-09-17T00:01:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T06:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=47034"},"modified":"2026-09-17T01:05:30","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T07:05:30","slug":"there-are-countless-books-i-would-have-loved-to-translate-a-conversation-with-jordi-fibla-feito","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/there-are-countless-books-i-would-have-loved-to-translate-a-conversation-with-jordi-fibla-feito\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThere are countless books I would have loved to translate\u201d: A Conversation with Jordi Fibla Feito"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jordi Fibla Feito (Barcelona, 1946) is one of Spain\u2019s most prestigious translators. After studying Philosophy and Letters, he entered the editing world as a proofreader and editor for the publishing houses Noguer and Plaza y Jan\u00e9s. In 2015, he was awarded the Premio Nacional a la Obra de un Traductor<\/span><\/i> for his \u201clong career as a professional translator, versatility, and the quality of his work.\u201d Among the authors he has translated are Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Lawrence Durrell, and Henry James, though he is also known for his translations from Japanese, which are collaborative works with Keiko Takahashi. In the 1980s, he served as a translator for the magazine <\/span><\/i>Quimera<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eduardo Su\u00e1rez Fern\u00e1ndez-Miranda: <\/b>On the work of a translator, Don Quixote commented: \u201cA man could occupy himself with worse things, and things that would bring him less profit.\u201d What drove you to this profession?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jordi Fibla: <\/b>It was a vocation that lay dormant until I discovered it in my youth. Since I was very young, I loved reading, and I often wondered what it would be like to read those translated works in their original language. At eighteen, when I began working at a publishing house, I dreamed of becoming a writer, but I struggled with a severely limited creative potential. There I met Andr\u00e9s Bosch, a novelist who also translated\u2014or rather, a translator who also wrote novels. That way of life seemed ideal: you write a book and then dedicate your time to translating while you wait on the idea for your next one. Bosch never gave me any advice about writing, but he certainly taught me about translating. A decade went by, during which I juggled work and study, before I finally tried to put that ideal into practice, though it has only been partially realized. I have been a professional translator for thirty-five years but have never written a creative piece worthy of publication.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.: <\/b>What are, in your opinion, the key virtues of a good translator?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>A passion for reading and a curiosity for languages in general\u2014which doesn\u2019t necessarily mean trying to be a polyglot, but rather always being fascinated by the fact that human beings speak in so many different ways. Or, for example, while reading a novel by M\u00e1rkaris, thinking: \u201cI would love to be able to read this in modern Greek. Well, maybe I will, if I live to be a hundred\u2026\u201d Stoicism is an important virtue for a translator, since it remains a poorly paid profession, one in which increasing demands are made of you in return for the prospect of remaining perpetually underpaid. Patience, tenacity, and discipline round out, in my opinion, the list of virtues a literary translator should possess.<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M: <\/b>Joaquim Mallafr\u00e8 reminds us in his essay <\/span>Llengua de tribu i llengua de polis: Bases d\u2019una traducci\u00f3 liter\u00e0ria<\/span><\/i> that \u201canother translator who sets literal fidelity aside and trusts in his intuition in Ezra Pound. \u2018More sense and less syntax\u2019 were his words.\u201d Is this \u201cintuition\u201d that Mallafr\u00e8 mentions important to you?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>The way I see it, it is absolutely impossible to do a direct translation without knowing the original language. It is clear that intuition alone cannot reliably guess the relationships, nuances, idioms, allusions, and references among thousands of ideograms. It\u2019s one thing to learn the meaning and pronunciation of a few ideograms in order to embed them in your own poem; it\u2019s another to have that magical gift and be able to faithfully translate Po Ch\u00fc-i\u2019s great poem, \u201cPeach Blossoms at the Great Forest Temple,\u201d without having seriously studied classical Chinese.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a kind of automatic intuition that lets you know when the choices you make are correct. This, in my opinion, coincides with something Conrad once said. Aniela Zag\u00f3rska, Conrad\u2019s niece, translated his works. It was a curious case: a Polish niece translating to Polish the novels that her Polish uncle had written in English. Well, Conrad told her that translation, just like other art forms, requires choosing, and choosing involves interpretation. He advised her: \u201cDon\u2019t get stuck trying to be too scrupulous. In my opinion, it\u2019s better to interpret than to translate. It\u2019s a matter of finding equivalent expressions, and to do this, I beg you to follow your temperament more than a strict conscience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Along with this automatic intuition, there is a more profound intuition, one that we colloquially call \u201cracking your brain\u201d\u2014the conscious work you get to when faced with an obstacle of such magnitude that you don\u2019t see a way of preserving meaning without using completely different words than the original.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.:<\/b> Meanwhile, in his book <\/span>El gest i la paraula<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> Feliu Formosa claims that \u201c[Bernhard] demands a literal approach, outside of the reordering that German syntax demands.\u201d In your work as a translator, have you come across authors with whom a more literal approach is the best option when it comes time to tackle a translation?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>I think what Bernhard is asking for here is that, if he is going to bend German syntax for his creative purposes, translators should do the same in their respective languages. The translator should, in principle, defer to the author\u2019s wishes, as long as they do not demand something that cannot (or should not) be done in the target language. It may be the case that readers of the original text may be able to better accommodate the grammar and lexical liberties the author takes, which may not coincide with those of people who read the work in their own language. <\/span>Finnegans Wake <\/span><\/i>probably has very few readers in English, but certainly many more than the Spanish translation does. And books are published to be sold. The environment in which translation emerges is a reality of which we cannot lose sight.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.: <\/b>On the subject of Thomas Bernhard, he was a writer who stayed out of the translation of his works. What relationships have you had with the authors you translate? Have they collaborated with you?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.<\/b>: Some of those whom I would have liked to meet personally had already passed or were at the point of vanishing, as was the case of the incomparable Patrick Leigh Fermor, with whom I just barely had the opportunity to exchange a couple of letters before his death. It\u2019s not a good idea to try to address difficulties by consulting with authors. If they are from the English-speaking world, at least in my experience, they have zero knowledge of Spanish, and to some, translation seems like a quixotic endeavor. I don\u2019t remember exactly what William Kennedy said to me when I raised concerns about some phrases that seemed not to make sense in one of his novels, but I think a loose translation that maintains the spirit of what he said would be: \u201cI would never get into work like yours, even if they threatened to tie me to the tail of a runaway horse that would drag me across a thorn-covered field in New Mexico.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.:<\/b> Alianza Editorial has published the collection of stories <\/span>Mi marido es de otra especie <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>My Husband Is of Another Species<\/span><\/i>) <\/b>by Yukiko Motoya and the novel <\/span>Si los gatos desaparecieran del mundo<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>If Cats Disappeared from the World<\/span><\/i>) by Genki Kawamura. Both books were translated by Keiko Takahashi and yourself. How do you go about collaborating with another translator?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>When it comes to my translations from Japanese, I can\u2019t simply call it \u201ccollaboration with another translator.\u201d Let\u2019s say I have had the generous and patient\u2014because I could sometimes be a real pain when I didn\u2019t just go along with the solutions she\u2019d propose\u2014help of my wife, Keiko Takahashi. We met half a century ago. From the very beginning, she spoke to our children in Japanese, and it became the second language in our home. We have visited Japan countless times over the last half-century, and I have maintained a good relationship with her family, who only speak Japanese, but are accommodating when I speak to them as Tarzan would speak English. I have gone through phases of hitting the books to better understand the language, but I have lacked consistency. I have an understanding that lets me see a text and understand what it is about\u2014I can read the hiragana and katakana syllabaries perfectly, and I can recognize a significant but insufficient number of kanji. So, while I continue to express myself in Japanese like a beginner, I have a clear ability to decipher a text. Everything I have just said, along with Keiko\u2019s integral help, has allowed me to translate quite a few works from her language.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.: <\/b>Yukiko Motoya\u2019s latest book, titled <\/span>Selecci\u00f3n autom\u00e1tica <\/span><\/i>in Spanish, was translated by Emilio Masi\u00e1. From a reader\u2019s perspective, is it preferable for the same translator to take on a writer\u2019s complete work?<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>It isn\u2019t essential for a writer to always be translated by the same translator, but it is true that one can form deep bonds that make it difficult to accept the work of a new one. For example, this is what happened to me with <\/span>The Magic Mountain. <\/span><\/i>For years, I have had Isabel Garc\u00eda Ad\u00e1nez\u2019s new translation sitting on the table, waiting. And despite the fact that four years before her work was even released, I had read in a literary magazine that \u201cMario Verdaguer\u2019s old version is constantly republished and is long overdue for retirement,\u201d that was the version I had read as a teenager. That translation left an indelible mark on me, and, while I extend my apologies to Isabel, I haven\u2019t been able to retire it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\"Cosas<\/div>\n
Cosas transparentes<\/i><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"El<\/div>\n
El rumor del oleaje<\/i><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"La<\/div>\n
La historia de Genji<\/i><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n

<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Sale<\/div>\n
Sale el espectro<\/i><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
Translations by Jordi Fibla: <\/span>Cosas transparentes<\/span><\/i> by Vladimir Nabokov (Anagrama), <\/span>El rumor del oleaje<\/span><\/i> by Yukio Mishima (Alianza), <\/span>La historia de Genji<\/span><\/i> by Murasaki Shikibu (Atalanta), and <\/span>Sale el espectro<\/span><\/i> by Philip Roth (Random House).<\/span><\/h6>\n

 <\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.: <\/b>In 2005, Atalanta published <\/span>La historia de Genji<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>The Tale of Genji<\/span><\/i>) by Murasaki Shikibu, one of the great classics of world literature. You were in charge of its translation. How did you tackle a labor of such magnitude?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>Someone who truly tackled the translation of a massive work\u2014one written before <\/span>El Cantar de M\u00edo Cid<\/span><\/i>, to give us some perspective, and in a language that even the Japanese, excluding experts, haven\u2019t been able to understand for centuries without a modern translation\u2014is Royall Tyler, an expert in the language of the Heian period (eleventh century C.E.). I merely translated his English text. That isn’t to say it was a walk in the park. I had to keep an appropriate tone while using as timeless a language as possible, making sure that in no way does it sound too current or too anachronistic. Tyler managed this, unlike the translators who came before him: Arthur Waley, whose enchanting prose describes a distant world with a tone one might use to describe the Victorian aristocracy; and Edward Seidensticker, whose version is a tad pedestrian, lacking the poetic tone of Tyler\u2019s. Tyler even translated each <\/span>waka<\/span><\/i> so that the number of English syllables would correspond with the original Japanese meter. Like a <\/span>haiku,<\/span><\/i> a <\/span>waka <\/span><\/i>does not rhyme but has an exact number of syllables: 5-7-5-7-7. While the poems are formatted as two lines\u2014because otherwise, the tome would be even thicker than it already is\u2014if you divide any of them into segments of the number of syllables I mentioned, you get an authentic <\/span>waka <\/span><\/i>in English. This is not the case in my version. The text contains eight hundred poems, and forming authentic <\/span>wakas<\/span><\/i> in Spanish from the English translations was an impossible task, not even considering that I had little more than a year to complete the project before the deadline. As such, I forwent Tyler\u2019s exquisite attention to detail and focused more on conveying the poetic tone of the <\/span>waka<\/span><\/i>, leaving meter to the side.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.: <\/b>Muchnick Editores published your translation of Junichiro Tanizaki\u2019s <\/span>The Key<\/span><\/i>, which was later published by Siruela\u2014another collaboration with Keiko Takahashi. You seem to have a special affinity for Japanese literature. Is that so?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>I do; I am interested in Japanese culture in general, and particularly its literature. I suppose I was one of the first Spanish readers to discover Haruki Murakami, given that I read <\/span>Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World<\/span><\/i> in English almost twenty years before Tusquets published it in Spanish. In 1976, I spent six months in Osaka, where I frequented the Nakanoshima Public Library and read English translations of Shusaku Endo, Osamu Dazai, Soseki Natsume, Seicho Matsumoto, Akiyuki Nozaba, Kobo Abe\u2026 My brother-in-law is an avid reader too, and we would often have interesting chats about literature with my wife as an interpreter. It\u2019s a shame that after all these years, when we travel and are able to see one another, it is the same situation. He doesn\u2019t know more than a half-dozen words in Spanish, and I can\u2019t communicate beyond the exchange of a few simple phrases in Japanese, but we continue to talk about literature with Keiko as our interpreter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.: <\/b>You have also played a big part in translating Philip Roth\u2019s work. What can you tell us about the American writer? Out of all his work, which novels would you highlight?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>What happens to me with Philip Roth is the same thing that happens with Thomas Mann, Andr\u00e9 Gide, Henry Miller, Patrick Modiano, Julio Cort\u00e1zar, and Vila-Matas: I am interested in their work as a whole. I know that all authors have books that are masterpieces, others that are less successful, and some that are dispensable, but that doesn\u2019t matter to me with the authors I just mentioned. Whatever they may do\u2014or have done\u2014I am going to read their work and enjoy it, no matter its objective quality, if that\u2019s a term we can even discuss in the arts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I could say that the work Roth prefers above all his others, <\/span>Sabbath\u2019s Theater (El teatro de Sabbath), <\/span><\/i>is my favorite as well. It is at the very least a novel I translated with much delight, despite the fact that it tells a sad tale, a joy only comparable to the one I felt while reading another work, not translated by me, <\/span>The Professor of Desire (El profesor del deseo). <\/span><\/i>But if I had to highlight one of his novels, I am inclined to choose another that I did not have the chance to translate, <\/span>My Life as a Man<\/span><\/i> (Mi vida como hombre)<\/span><\/i>, for a personal reason\u2014a peculiar coincidence. While I read, I saw that I had not only read all the books mentioned in the novel\u2014and there are many\u2014but I had also underlined in pencil in my copies, from Thomas Mann\u2019s <\/span>A Sketch of My Life <\/span><\/i>to Ernst Kris\u2019s <\/span>Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art<\/span><\/i>, exactly the same quotes that appeared in the novel, though I had read them long before reading Roth\u2019s work. I would argue that this is like one of those coincidences that only happens in a Vila-Matas novel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.: <\/b>You have also translated the work of other North American writers, like John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, and Saul Bellow. Was it difficult to find a voice for each of them?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>The truth is, when you begin work on a book, you don\u2019t search beforehand for a voice, a tone, a style, however you may want to call it. As I said before, intuition intervenes by itself, while the selection of a certain turn of phrase, a certain adjective, a particular way of rendering a metaphor, depends on knowledge of the language and the experience one has. It\u2019s what I call profound intuition to distinguish it from the automatic form. It produces an effect similar to what happens with mirror neurons: the voice of the source language gives rise to the voice of the target language, adapted, as needed, to the linguistic peculiarities of this new medium.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

E.S.F-M.: <\/b>To close, I would like to ask if there is any author or specific work that you would especially like to translate.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

J.F.: <\/b>I would have liked to translate everything that has been published about and by Philip Roth after his death. I just read <\/span>Baumgartner <\/span><\/i>by Paul Auster, and I deeply regret not having the opportunity to translate it, without haste, but without pause. I would have loved to translate <\/span>The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers\u2019 Guild (El banquete anual de la cofrad\u00eda de los sepulturero) <\/span><\/i>by Mathias Enard. There are countless books that I would have liked to translate. I read a lot in English and French (though not as much as I would like to, due to my declining eyesight), and every work I enjoy makes me want to translate it. In fact, reading a foreign text in its original language is the first step to a translation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by Iyan Smith Williams<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo: Spanish translator Jordi Fibla.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jordi Fibla Feito (Barcelona, 1946) is one of Spain\u2019s most prestigious translators. After studying Philosophy and Letters, he entered the editing world as a proofreader and editor for the publishing houses Noguer and Plaza y Jan\u00e9s. In 2015, he was awarded the Premio Nacional a la Obra de un Traductor for his \u201clong career as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":47163,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4166],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[5590],"lal_author":[5123],"class_list":["post-47034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-translation","tag-issue-39","translator-iyan-smith-williams","lal_author-eduardo-suarez-fernandez-miranda"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47034"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47168,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47034\/revisions\/47168"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47034"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=47034"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=47034"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=47034"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=47034"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=47034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":46714,"date":"2026-09-16T23:37:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T05:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=46714"},"modified":"2026-09-21T14:57:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T20:57:51","slug":"shadow-of-a-shadow-the-double-sanitization-of-the-visceral-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/shadow-of-a-shadow-the-double-sanitization-of-the-visceral-word\/","title":{"rendered":"Shadow of a Shadow: The Double Sanitization of the Visceral Word"},"content":{"rendered":"

To read the \u201cNew Wave\u201d of Latin American literature in Tehran is to read a text that arrives already altered twice. When a novel by Ariana Harwicz travels from the raw, unbridled shores of Spanish to the restricted landscape of Persian, it does not simply undergo a linguistic shift; it survives a double sanitization.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a translator who spent several years navigating the narrow corridor of relay translation\u2014relying on the English bridge to access these voices\u2014working directly from Spanish to Persian now affords me a vantage point that is as privileged as it is unsettling. In my recent conversation with Harwicz for <\/span>Full Stop<\/span><\/i><\/a>, I described her prose as a \u201csyntax of anxiety.\u201d This is a language where the very structure of the sentence\u2014its stuttering rhythms and nervous tension\u2014mirrors a character\u2019s trauma. Yet, having once inhabited this very intermediary space that defines much of Latin American literature in Iran today, I have witnessed how easily this anxiety evaporates within the relay.<\/span><\/p>\n

What reaches the Persian reader is often a shadow of a shadow: a text made legible in New York and moral in Tehran, with the author\u2019s original voice muted in transit.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

II<\/b><\/p>\n

The English editions of Harwicz\u2019s work are, by all standard metrics, masterful works of prose\u2014fluid, evocative, and justly acclaimed. Yet, in the realm of body-centric literature, this very fluency acts as a double-edged sword: the success of these versions as standalone English novels often necessitates a quiet erasure of the source\u2019s original, abrasive tension.<\/span><\/p>\n

This institutional sanitization begins in the editorial offices of the Anglophone metropole\u2014primarily London and New York. Even in the most avant-garde publishing houses, translation is rarely treated as a comparative act. Without a rigorous, word-for-word check against the source language, the manuscript is surrendered to the drive for monolingual fluency. The editor, often estranged from the source tongue, focuses solely on how the text \u201cbreathes\u201d in English, prioritizing a version that feels \u201cnatural\u201d at the expense of the author\u2019s deliberate, jagged strangeness. This is a commercial necessity\u2014an attempt to ensure the text\u2019s survival in a crowded marketplace\u2014but it carries a profound, hidden cost.<\/span><\/p>\n

Translating a writer as defiant as Harwicz demands real editorial courage. This is not a conscious conspiracy of censorship, but a systemic failure: when \u201creadability\u201d becomes the primary metric, the visceral architecture of the original is the first sacrifice. In Harwicz\u2019s universe, the word is not merely a vehicle for the story\u2014it <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> the story. The decision to soften a blow into a touch does more than alter a sentence; it shifts the entire tectonic plate of a character\u2019s psyche.<\/span><\/p>\n

The more \u201cimpure\u201d and linguistically unstable the prose, the more aggressively it is smoothed. In <\/span>Perder el juicio<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>Unfit<\/span><\/i>), Harwicz warns against the impression of being a \u201c<\/span>lombriz solitaria<\/span><\/i>.\u201d In Spanish, this is a biological pun: literally a \u201csolitary worm,\u201d it is also the common term for a tapeworm. It evokes a parasitic loneliness living inside the body\u2014a clinical disgust. The English edition flattens this into a sociological label: \u201c<\/span>loner<\/span><\/i>.\u201d The infection vanishes; the discomfort is neutralized.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond biology, entire systems of imagery are tamed. Harwicz describes in-laws watching a scene \u201clike lynxes\u201d (<\/span>…ven como linces<\/span><\/i>). In Spanish, the lynx is a nocturnal predator\u2014alert, feline, and carrying a Gothic menace. The English rendering replaces this with \u201ceagle eyes.\u201d By substituting a nocturnal predator with a common daylight idiom, the original\u2019s animalistic tension is evacuated. Specificity is traded for recognizability.<\/span><\/p>\n

Inevitably, this linguistic softening extends to violence. When Harwicz lists the charges of domestic abuse\u2014including \u201c<\/span>trompadas<\/span><\/i>\u201d\u2014she evokes heavy, brutal blows with a fist. A <\/span>trompada<\/span><\/i> shatters; a slap merely stings. By choosing the latter, the translation \u201cdisciplines\u201d the violence, making it domestic rather than explosive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Physical violence in these texts is inseparable from economic desperation\u2014a reality that is similarly refined. When the narrator considers hiring a hitman, Harwicz uses the phrase \u201c<\/span>poca plata<\/span><\/i>\u201d: dirt cheap, highlighting the chilling insignificance of human life. The English edition renders this as a \u201creasonable amount of money.\u201d With this single phrase, the chilling vacuum of the periphery is filled with the transactional logic of a bank clerk.<\/span><\/p>\n

This same logic tempers even the dehumanizing coldness of the State. In a social worker\u2019s report, Harwicz uses the term \u201c<\/span>progenitora<\/span><\/i>\u201d\u2014a clinical, biological term for \u201cfemale parent.\u201d The English translation softens this back into \u201cmother.\u201d Harwicz wanted the reader to feel the protagonist\u2019s total emotional erasure by the system; the English \u201cMaster Copy\u201d restores a sentimentality that the author had carefully stripped away.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ultimately, the editorial filter retreats from the messy, uncontainable reality of the physical body. When Harwicz speaks of peeling off the children\u2019s \u201c<\/span>piel<\/span><\/i>\u201d (skin)\u2014a corporeal metaphor for filth inseparable from the body\u2014the English renders it as a mere \u201clayer.\u201d The biological disgust is bleached; the infection is scrubbed away in favor of a clean, domestic image.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the impulse to domesticate penetrates the very architecture of the self. In Harwicz\u2019s original, psychological alienation is embedded in the syntax. Observing the women\u2019s changing rooms, she writes: \u201c<\/span>imagino la manera de ponerse la malla al rev\u00e9s<\/span><\/i>\u201d (I imagine the way of putting the swimsuit on backwards)\u2014a disembodied observation where action occurs without a clear actor. The English translation, however, forces a grounded subjectivity: \u201cI imagine <\/span>myself<\/span><\/i> putting the swimsuit on backwards.\u201d The English language, ostensibly uncomfortable with this decentered structure, forcefully injects an ego into the sentence.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is more than a stylistic choice; it is a fundamental misreading of the maternal gaze. In the original, Harwicz uses the masculine plural \u201c<\/span>los<\/span><\/i>\u201d just before this phrase, making it clear the narrator is imagining her children\u2019s chaotic ritual. By injecting \u201cmyself,\u201d the translation \u201ccorrects\u201d the grammar and, in doing so, \u201ccures\u201d the protagonist\u2019s dissociation. It transforms a haunting obsession with lost children into a moment of self-reflection, erasing the clinical detachment of the original.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nowhere is this editorial discomfort more profound than in its encounter with mortality and geography. A mother\u2019s distress is described as \u201c<\/span>estado cuatro<\/span><\/i>\u201d (stage four)\u2014a terrifying diagnosis equating mental collapse with terminal illness. The English edition retreats from the morgue to the therapist\u2019s couch, rendering it as a \u201c<\/span>nervous breakdown<\/span><\/i>.\u201d A raw, biological ultimatum is replaced by a generic psychological trope. Even geography is flattened: \u201c<\/span>espacio zafral<\/span><\/i>\u201d\u2014a term rooted in the grueling history of Latin American sugar harvests\u2014becomes a vague \u201cseasonal space.\u201d The local ghost is exorcised at the altar of global legibility.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not a mere quibble over synonyms. While most critics focus on the architecture of the sentence, they often overlook the molecular politics of the word. A word is not just a building block; it is a micro-history. To replace a jagged, historically-laden word with a smooth, global equivalent is to perform a silent eviction of the author\u2019s reality. In such body-centric literature, the sentence is a physical extension of the body. To \u201ccorrect\u201d a fractured sentence or to \u201crefine\u201d a repulsive word is to perform a linguistic lobotomy. We are not just losing meanings; we are losing the author\u2019s right to be difficult, to be ugly, and to be untranslatable.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

III<\/b><\/p>\n

If lexical choices reveal one layer of intervention, structural decisions expose another. Striking examples appear in the work of Brenda Navarro, which I recently navigated while translating her into Persian. Just as the anatomical body is sterilized in Harwicz\u2019s prose, the narrative body undergoes a similar surgery in Navarro’s. In <\/span>Empty Houses<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>Casas vac\u00edas<\/span><\/i>), the poetic fragments that function as the narrative’s emotional lungs are largely excised. Meanwhile, in <\/span>Eating Ashes<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>Ceniza en la boca<\/span><\/i>), the original’s four massive, suffocating sections\u2014designed to induce a sense of breathless claustrophobia\u2014are fragmented into numerous short chapters.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is what I call \u201cPacing Domestication\u201d: providing the English reader with frequent \u201cexit points\u201d and breathing spaces. It is a form of structural Valium, turning a desperate marathon into a series of polite sprints. For the relay translator in Tehran, the architecture of the book has been fundamentally compromised before the first Persian word is written.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

IV<\/b><\/p>\n

While the English filter performs a soft sanitization, the Iranian filter enforces a hard one. The most damaging effects emerge from their interaction. In Tehran, the body exists within a strict regime of restriction, and it is here that the prior intervention of the English text becomes chillingly consequential.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider what I call the \u201csyntax of scars.\u201d Harwicz describes <\/span>jeringas<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>…con jeringas<\/span><\/i>) scattered across a forest floor\u2014a stark, industrial image of addiction. The English version renders this as \u201cneedles,\u201d introducing a sylvan ambiguity that softens the \u201csocial filth.\u201d By the time this image reaches Tehran, the institutional censor encounters a word that no longer insists on its own violence. The edge has been taken off before the state even arrives.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the most disturbing consequence of this English intervention occurs with the physical body\u2014the ultimate red line for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Ershad). When describing the confusion of dressing her children in urine-soaked clothes, Harwicz refers bluntly to their anatomy: <\/span>pito<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>cola<\/span><\/i> (penis and rear). The English edition neatly sidesteps this anatomical urgency, focusing instead on the garment: the biological reality is reduced to a misplaced \u201cflap.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In this pre-sanitized state, the English translation has unwittingly acted as a proxy for Ershad. The relay translator inherits an image already stripped of the physical reality the state seeks to erase. The visceral truth of the body is buried beneath a convenient aesthetic compromise, allowing the institutional censor to finish a job that began in an Anglophone editorial office.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

V<\/b><\/p>\n

These transformations unfold within an Iranian publishing industry where print runs have dwindled to a mere hundred copies. In a country outside the Berne Convention, publishing often becomes an act of localized resistance, yet this precarious environment also incentivizes dangerous shortcuts. The grim economics of a hundred-copy run cannot sustain the labor-intensive process of direct translation from the original tongue. Instead, they favor the path of least resistance: a market of redundant, mass-produced \u201crelay\u201d versions. In a landscape saturated with English translators\u2014whose rates are suppressed by oversupply\u2014English functions as the commercially expedient bypass, displacing the rarer and more costly specialist of the source language.<\/span><\/p>\n

In these conditions, the ethical responsibility of the translator becomes acute: translation as an act of restoration. Those hundred copies must function as a sanctuary for the text, not as a site of its further erosion. Economic constraint does not justify aesthetic compromise. To accept the degradation of the source is to participate in a form of censorship rooted not in ideology, but in convenience.<\/span><\/p>\n

The practical solution is a methodology of radical skepticism. We must treat the English \u201cMaster Copy\u201d not as a destination, but as an unreliable, suspicious map. It requires reading against the apparent fluency of the English text, identifying where the prose has been polished into compliance, and reconstructing the original\u2019s abrasive edges through a cold, forensic reading.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VI<\/b><\/p>\n

In our conversation, Harwicz quoted Fernando Pessoa: \u201cLiterature is the proof that life is not enough.\u201d When the literature that reaches us is already anesthetized, life becomes even more insufficient. The Iranian reader deserves more than a sterilized echo; they deserve the arrhythmic pulse of Harwicz\u2019s syntax and the abrasive immediacy of Navarro\u2019s language.<\/span><\/p>\n

To translate under these conditions is to resist both domestication and erasure. It is an insistence that literature remain a space where the body is not written out of existence and where language retains its capacity to unsettle. Otherwise, the translator\u2019s bridge becomes nothing more than a filter of convenience. For translation to remain meaningful, the bridge must not lead to the safety of the shore; it must lead directly into the heart of the tornado.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo: Mehrnegar Dolatmand, Unsplash.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To read the \u201cNew Wave\u201d of Latin American literature in Tehran is to read a text that arrives already altered twice. When a novel by Ariana Harwicz travels from the raw, unbridled shores of Spanish to the restricted landscape of Persian, it does not simply undergo a linguistic shift; it survives a double sanitization. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":47615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4166],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[],"lal_author":[5696],"class_list":["post-46714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-translation","tag-issue-39","lal_author-miaad-banki"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46714"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46716,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46714\/revisions\/46716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46714"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=46714"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=46714"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=46714"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=46714"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=46714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":46707,"date":"2026-09-16T23:30:52","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T05:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=46707"},"modified":"2026-09-20T17:59:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T23:59:58","slug":"raw-cooked-drunk-the-visionary-reach-of-everyday-words-in-rumis-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/raw-cooked-drunk-the-visionary-reach-of-everyday-words-in-rumis-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Raw, Cooked, Drunk: The Visionary Reach of Everyday Words in Rumi\u2019s Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note:<\/b> In this section, we share texts originally published by our parent publication, <\/span>World Literature Today<\/span><\/i> (WLT), now in bilingual edition. This text was first published in <\/span>World Literature Today<\/span><\/i> Vol. 100, No. 4 in July 2026<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Click here to subscribe to WLT:<\/strong>
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Rumi (1207\u20131273) incorporates everyday words drawn from the Sufi lexicon as he addresses concerns ranging from materialism and warmongering to spiritual communion and the evolution of consciousness. A contemporary translator shares excerpts featuring these words, revealing how Rumi enriched them and extended their reach.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

T<\/span>he thirteenth-century Persian sage Rumi stepped down from the pulpit around the age of thirty-eight, turning from sermons to poetry, but his impulse to offer spiritual guidance and navigate us through the baffling experience of being human never died. In this endeavor, he called upon all his resources, drawing on his own struggles and observations, the teachings of his beloved guide Shams, as well as literary and spiritual texts, including poetry by Sufi forerunners Attar and Sana\u2019i, Persian folktales, the Qur\u2019an, Hadith, and on rare occasions, Pali Buddhist stories. His work often incorporates words from the established lexicon of Sufism, including common words from the kitchen, street, market, and tavern, which he further invests with a spiritual charge of his own. He turns to these words when addressing some of his most urgent concerns, such as stages of spiritual development or the materialism and warmongering that afflicted his world as it does ours.<\/span>\u00a0<\/b>When translating Rumi\u2019s poetry, these everyday words present a challenge. The translator must preserve their familiar ring while also imparting the deeper meanings he intended.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>Let\u2019s look at six of these words, starting in the kitchen.<\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/b>Raw, Cooked, Burned\u00a0<\/b>(khaam, pokhteh, sookteh)<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Summing up his life, Rumi once said, \u201cI was raw. I was cooked. I was burned up,\u201d a blunt and bewildering declaration. And yet, with these three sentences, he also sums up the Sufi path.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rumi applies the words \u201craw,\u201d \u201ccooked,\u201d and \u201cburned\u201d to the human psyche and ego, marking three stations along a path of evolving consciousness, which, he insists, is open to anyone with the will for introspection and a devotion to spiritual practice.<\/span><\/p>\n

To be\u00a0<\/span>khaam<\/span><\/i>\u00a0or uncooked is to dwell in the earliest stage of the mutable self, to be bound up in self-interest and blind to the deeper truth of interconnection. To varying degrees, the uncooked may be prone to greed, lust for dominion, and obsession with status. They may cling to false certainties, choosing dogma over bewilderment. They may fear the emptiness and the ache of separation so much that they scramble to find relief in possessions, control, or spectacle.\u00a0The most benign are shackled by self-consciousness while the most malevolent wreak havoc.<\/span>\u00a0<\/b>Addressing the warmongers of his time, Rumi writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

What kind of lightning are you setting farms on fire?<\/span>
\n<\/span>What kind of cloud are you raining down stones?<\/span><\/p>\n

What kind of hunter?<\/span>
\n<\/span>Caught in your own trap\u2014<\/span>
\n<\/span>a thief stealing from your own house.<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019re sixty years old. You\u2019re seventy years old,<\/span>
\n<\/span>and you\u2019re still uncooked?<\/span>
\n<\/span>Still won\u2019t let love\u2019s flames near,<\/span>
\n<\/span>Won\u2019t let them burn you up?<\/span><\/p>\n

Enthralled by stuff and status,<\/span>
\n<\/span>The crown, the turban, the king\u2019s beard\u2014<\/span>
\n<\/span>thorns pricking your hands<\/span>
\n<\/span>and where is the flower?<\/span><\/p>\n

In another direct address to a blustering leader, Rumi writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Master, your head is swollen with fantasies.<\/span>
\n<\/span>One moment, you celebrate,<\/span>
\n<\/span>one moment, you sulk.<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019re in the fire now. I\u2019ll leave you there<\/span>
\n<\/span>till you\u2019re cooked,<\/span>
\n<\/span>till you\u2019re no longer a slave to your mind,<\/span>
\n<\/span>till you\u2019re its master.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not limited to warmongers and statesmen, hierarchical thinking, grandiose fantasies, and obsession with status were common in Rumi\u2019s scholarly and religious milieu. While preaching about ego dissolution and self-transcendence, sheikhs and scholars vied for robes of honor and VIP seats, and, as size indicated status, some stuffed their turbans with rags. As Rumi neared the apex of his career, preaching for thousands in a massive turban and silk robe, he was growing weary of fame and the hypocrisy he sensed around him and perhaps within. Later, he writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

I wanted to be a kingpin,<\/span>
\n<\/span>top dog, bigger than big.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like smoke, I climbed greedily,<\/span>
\n<\/span>going nowhere\u2014<\/span>
\n<\/span>a crooked plume, wayward,<\/span>
\n<\/span>drifting over parched land,<\/span>
\n<\/span>thirsty for meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know when Love hunts you down,<\/span>
\n<\/span>when you fall prey to Love,<\/span>
\n<\/span>you only rise higher.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether Rumi\u2019s confessional poems are reflective of his own experience or not, his choice to write in first person creates an intimacy and sense of solidarity with listeners. He speaks not as a distant saint but as a peer evolving alongside or just ahead of us. In another stream of confessions, he writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

I saw myself sharp as a thorn.<\/span>
\n<\/span>I fled to the softness of petals.<\/span><\/p>\n

I saw myself sour as vinegar.<\/span>
\n<\/span>I mixed myself with sugar.<\/span><\/p>\n

An aching eye seeing through pain,<\/span>
\n<\/span>a stewing pot of poison,<\/span>
\n<\/span>I was both.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reaching for the antidote,<\/span>
\n<\/span>I touched compassion.<\/span>
\n<\/span>I touched mercy.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was a cup holding only dregs.<\/span>
\n<\/span>I poured in the water of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Raw and callow,<\/span>
\n<\/span>I followed the one already cooked by Love\u2019s fire.<\/span><\/p>\n

The one he \u201cfollowed\u201d was a scruffy mystic, lone traveler, and spiritual master in common clothes named Shams of Tabriz. Rumi was around the age of thirty-eight when they met, sitting on a horse, in a lavish robe, surrounded by followers, weary of fame and hungry for meaning. Over the course of a few years, Shams cooked Rumi. Their love, their unmasked conversations, the character-forging demands Shams made, the devotional practices he introduced, and the turbulence of their relationship, which alternated between periods of intense intimacy and sudden estrangement, all fed the fire that transfigured Rumi. Under Shams\u2019s influence, not only did Rumi convert from preacher to poet, but he finally experienced the spiritual states he had been preaching about for so long.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the start of their relationship, Shams knew Rumi was a formidable creative force but one shackled by his reputation and guarded in his communication. Still attached to reputation, name, and rank, still \u201craw and callow,\u201d Rumi had yet to experience<\/span>\u00a0fana\u00a0<\/span><\/i>or<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>dissolution of self and union with the divine. And he had yet to find his true voice. Shams insisted an essential step toward his liberation involved rebelling against the expectations of conservatives and even staining his reputation in their eyes. To that end, he sent Rumi to a Jewish neighborhood where wine was freely made and sold, demanding he return carrying a jug on his back so everyone could see\u2014the latter, a blasphemous act for a Muslim sheikh. Along with many other tasks and challenges, Shams introduced Rumi to\u00a0<\/span>sama<\/span><\/i>, a practice of deep listening and whirling dance. It was an act of love, and rebellion, to engage in sama, which conservatives considered at best a distraction, at worst a sin, sometimes attempting to outlaw it. Likely echoing Shams, Rumi writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Let them judge. Let them talk.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Let them smear your good name.<\/span>
\n<\/span>You\u2019ll have less to guard!<\/span><\/p>\n

Lover,<\/span>
\n<\/span>the eyes of lovers behold you.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Your friend is the sea.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rumi whirled for hours on end, spinning free of what Blake called \u201cmind-forg\u2019d manacles.\u201d\u00a0 Thanking Shams, Rumi calls out:<\/span><\/p>\n

Light, feast, triumphant blessing,<\/span>
\n<\/span>friend, trickster, haven for my drunken heart\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/span>
\n<\/span>you shattered my cage\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/span><\/p>\n

You fountain of grace,<\/span>
\n<\/span>you fire in thickets of tangled thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today you arrived beaming with laughter\u2014<\/span>
\n<\/span>that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.<\/span><\/p>\n

A propensity for laughter is an important mark of spiritual development. The ones who have burned up and merged with love\u2019s fire are quick to laugh, and their sense of humor is contagious. \u201cIt tears through me like fire. It teaches me,\u201d Rumi says. And later:<\/span><\/p>\n

Crack open my shell. Steal the pearl.<\/span>
\n<\/span>I\u2019ll still be laughing.<\/span>
\n<\/span>It\u2019s the rookies who laugh only when they win.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rumi uses the word\u00a0<\/span>khaaman\u00a0<\/span><\/i>here, which I translated to \u201crookies\u201d rather than \u201cthe raw ones,\u201d \u201cthe uncooked,\u201d \u201cthe beginners,\u201d or \u201camateurs.\u201d \u201cRookies\u201d connotes competition, which struck the perfect note as Rumi uses the words \u201cwin\u201d and \u201cconquer,\u201d poking fun at the ego\u2019s fixation on victory and undue distress at defeat. He continues:<\/span><\/p>\n

Look at the furnace. Look at the stones.<\/span>
\n<\/span>See the glowing red veins?<\/span>
\n<\/span>Gold\u2014laughing in fire, daring you,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cProve you\u2019re no fake!<\/span>
\n<\/span>Laugh even when you lose.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re fodder for death so learn to laugh<\/span>
\n<\/span>from the angel of death<\/span>
\n<\/span>He laughs at the jeweled belt and crowns of kings\u2014<\/span>
\n<\/span>all that splendor\u2019s just on loan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Presence and permeability to both the comedy and the tragedy of life distinguish the cooked and burned from the raw who will fortress themselves in myriad ways to avoid intimacy with life\u2019s ups and downs. The raw resist the fire of love, sorrow, discipline, and longing. The cooked endure and eventually welcome it. The burned become it. To be burned up is to be liberated from the cramped architecture of a narrow and defensive self, from its calculations and fears, and to exist, bravely present, merged with a divine love.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Rumi writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Leave your tricks and schemes behind.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Like a moth, hungry for light,<\/span>
\n<\/span>dive into the blazing heart of the flame.<\/span><\/p>\n

Be a stranger to yourself.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Wreck the house you call self.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Wake up in Love\u2019s house.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rumi surely woke up there and, once again, acknowledges Shams:<\/span><\/p>\n

You brought my spirit to a boil,<\/span>
\n<\/span>turned my grapes to wine.<\/span><\/p>\n

You lit a fire to the fragrant wood<\/span>
\n<\/span>and body of song in me.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Watch the smoke rise.<\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/b>Morsel\u00a0<\/b>(loghmeh)<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Rumi equates the word \u201cmorsel\u201d with material gain, intentionally using the diminutive term to downplay the importance of material pursuit. No matter how grand the material acquisition, it is still a mere morsel,<\/span>\u00a0<\/b>fleeting and unable to satisfy the deeper hunger of the soul. He writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

You are a guest on this earth, not a beggar.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Don\u2019t trade the water of your soul<\/span>
\n<\/span>for a morsel of bread.<\/span><\/p>\n

End to end the whole material world<\/span>
\n<\/span>is less than a single morsel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Greed for crumbs dries up the river.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Rumi, to be obsessed with material gain is to be more beggarly than beggars. An impoverished beggar needs the money he begs for; the rich do not, and yet wealthy hoarders take and take, mistaking wealth for life\u2019s deepest reward.<\/span><\/p>\n

The last line quoted above brings to mind bodies of water dried up by corporate diversion and extraction, though Rumi, writing eight hundred years ago, is more likely speaking of our internal landscape. \u201cIn the depths of the soul, there is a gushing spring, invisible to the eye,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/span>Aabeh hayat<\/span><\/i>, the \u201cwater of life,\u201d \u201cbubbles up from its depths.\u201d When we tend to our soul, this water, this life force, \u201cflows through our veins\u201d and does not run dry.<\/span><\/p>\n

Addressing one in thrall to material cravings like the hungry ghost of Buddhist tradition, grasping endlessly and never satisfied, Rumi writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Why scheme for a morsel?<\/span><\/p>\n

Curb your insatiable hunger<\/span>
\n<\/span>and you won\u2019t be seduced by a trickster<\/span>
\n<\/span>nor reduced to being one.<\/span><\/p>\n

When greed groans,<\/span>
\n<\/span>I play deaf.<\/span><\/p>\n

In these stanzas and throughout his poetry, Rumi mixes the imperative voice with the confessional, assuring us again that he is not holier than thou but just another human, experiencing the challenges of being both matter and spirit, with all its attendant hungers. In the last stanza above, like a true friend, he shares a favorite strategy for managing lesser impulses.<\/span><\/p>\n

Biographers from medieval to contemporary times confirm that Rumi walked his talk<\/span>.\u00a0<\/b>One night, after whirling at a\u00a0<\/span>sama<\/span><\/i>\u00a0gathering and wandering through town in his elated state, he hears the\u00a0<\/span>robab,<\/span><\/i>\u00a0an instrument he adored. It\u2019s \u201cthe sound of a creaking door opening to paradise,\u201d he would tell his son. Ecstatic, he hands over gifts he received that night to a beggar, including a fur-collared robe. Later, he writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Lovers whirl in devotion. Ecstasy their crown.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Where they are, what use is the royal cloak?<\/span>
\n<\/span>Beautiful one, dressed to serve, come and dance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Speaking to the Love within us all, Rumi urges, \u201cUnveil your face .\u00a0.\u00a0. so water reflecting you becomes the jewel.\u201d Far more precious than any gemstone\u2014any \u201cmorsel\u201d\u2014is Love reflected in our world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Poverty\u00a0<\/b>(faghr)<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

In a poem from\u00a0<\/span>Divan-i-Shams,<\/span><\/i>\u00a0Rumi begins, \u201cLast night in my dream, I saw my poverty (<\/span>faghr<\/span><\/i>).\u201d The literal translation is stark and cofounding if we only have access to the common meaning of\u00a0<\/span>faghr<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Rumi\u2019s poetry and in Sufi literature,\u00a0<\/span>faghr\u00a0<\/span><\/i>does not refer to material poverty but to spiritual poverty, a hunger in the soul satisfied only by communion with the divine. Some call it a God-sized hole. Rumi believes this emptiness is part of the human condition, no need to avoid it nor to futilely fill it with stuff. In fact,\u00a0<\/span>faghr\u00a0<\/span><\/i>is a coveted, holy state. It \u201cmakes room for Love\u2019s wine.\u201d He writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Last night in my dream,<\/span>
\n<\/span>I saw my hunger. I saw my need.<\/span><\/p>\n

I saw an emptiness only God can fill.<\/span><\/p>\n

Enchanted by the beauty of this poverty,<\/span>
\n<\/span>I nearly fainted.<\/span><\/p>\n

Enchanted by its perfection,<\/span>
\n<\/span>I lay awestruck till dawn.<\/span><\/p>\n

This poverty is a mine of rubies.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Its red glow drapes me in silk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rather than adding a footnote or endnote to a literal translation of\u00a0<\/span>faghr<\/span><\/i>, I decided to unpack the word inside the poem, baking the spiritual connotations into the first stanza. Then, in the second and fourth stanzas, I was able to simply use the word \u201cpoverty,\u201d knowing it would carry the penumbra of meaning that Rumi intended and could not be flattened into its colloquial meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

The poem closes with paradoxes and stunning beauty\u2014a full emptiness, a rich poverty, and a sensual experience of the divine. Far from the notion of a harsh and punishing God, here is an inviting, silky, and rosy vision of communion<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Drunk\u00a0<\/b>(mast)<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

In Rumi\u2019s poetry,\u00a0<\/span>mast<\/span><\/i>\u00a0most often means drunk on God, drunk on love, drunk on the miracles of existence and mysteries of nonexistence, reeling with wonder and awe.\u00a0<\/span>Mastee<\/span><\/i>\u00a0is a state of rapture.<\/span><\/p>\n

In colloquial Persian, the intoxicant is alcohol. Rumi acknowledges the many sources of\u00a0<\/span>mastee<\/span><\/i>\u00a0and includes wine and hashish on his list as well as power, doubt, and delusion. Highlighting the range of possibility, he writes, \u201cJesus was drunk on God\u2019s Love. His donkey was drunk on barley.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The notion of divine Love as intoxicant is a common Sufi trope. Poets such as Attar and Sana\u2019i, Rumi\u2019s predecessors, invoked it to communicate an absorption in God and the dissolution of the rational, calculating mind. They conceived of\u00a0<\/span>mastee\u00a0<\/span><\/i>as an exceptional state. Rumi takes the trope further, proposing that divine intoxication is a basic, underlying condition of the cosmos. He writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Gardener, listen.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Thunder beats a drum. Clouds pour the wine.<\/span>
\n<\/span>The garden is drunk, the meadow is drunk,<\/span>
\n<\/span>the buds and thorns are drunk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whirling sky, watch how the elements whirl!<\/span>
\n<\/span>Water is drunk, air is drunk, earth is drunk, fire is drunk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t even ask about the unseen.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Spirit is drunk, intellect is drunk, imagination is drunk,<\/span>
\n<\/span>and the mysteries of eternity\u2014<\/span>
\n<\/span>they\u2019re the drunkest of all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Liberate yourself from the tyranny of self.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Be humble as soil and you will see<\/span>
\n<\/span>every particle of soil is drunk on Love\u2014<\/span>
\n<\/span>by the Creator\u2019s design.<\/span><\/p>\n

In winter, the garden is still drunk.<\/span>
\n<\/span>The roots of trees secretly sip wine.<\/span><\/p>\n

The whirling elements and drunk particles of soil bring to mind electrons spinning around the nucleus of atoms like whirling dervishes. And though Rumi had no notion of subatomic happenings, he was mirroring a recurring motif in the spinning Milky Way when he whirled for hours on end<\/span>.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0He saw\u00a0<\/span>mastee<\/span><\/i>\u00a0in every particle of every being, a rapturous life force coursing through all. And though it is often buried or obscured by the mundane demands of material existence and the mind\u2019s attachments and delusions, he invites us to burn through the latter and access the wellspring. Rumi seems divinely compelled to raise the bar on feeling states we deem accessible, and perhaps simply by invoking\u00a0<\/span>mastee<\/span><\/i>\u00a0again and again in his intoxicating verse, he inches us closer.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the first poem I ever heard by Rumi, he praises the\u00a0<\/span>mastaan\u00a0<\/span><\/i>or Love-drunk. My father recited it in Persian, and I think of him every time I recite it. He was a doctor, a gynecological oncologist and master surgeon, sometimes called in for emergencies in the wee hours of the morning. He once asked me, \u201cHaleh, do you know who\u2019s in the hospital working at four a.m. every day? The janitors,\u201d he said, answering his own question. \u201cThey\u2019re mopping the floors and cleaning the toilets. Not easy. Don\u2019t ever look down on them. Respect them, respect people of service.\u201d My father was\u00a0<\/span>khaaki<\/span><\/i>, another everyday word that recurs in the poetry and has its own spiritual dimensions. To be\u00a0<\/span>khaaki<\/span><\/i>\u00a0literally means to be \u201cof the soil.\u201d In Rumi\u2019s poetry and beyond, this coveted attribute means humble, reverent, free of obsessions with hierarchy and status. It opens us to awe and\u00a0<\/span>mastee<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 Here is a translation of the first poem I heard my father recite:<\/span><\/p>\n

The house overflows with drunkards,<\/span>
\n<\/span>drunk on Love.<\/span>
\n<\/span>More come knocking.<\/span><\/p>\n

Crazed but still bound,<\/span>
\n<\/span>they tore off their chains.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can\u2019t quiet this ruckus.<\/span>
\n<\/span>The heavens are beating the drums in celebration.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ecstatic souls,<\/span>
\n<\/span>hearts that serve the heart,<\/span>
\n<\/span>broke free from their prisons<\/span>
\n<\/span>and launched like birds.<\/span><\/p>\n

They shattered the jugs.<\/span>
\n<\/span>They don\u2019t need them.<\/span>
\n<\/span>Their bodies are barrels,<\/span>
\n<\/span>their blood is wine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh God, what wine did they drink?<\/span>
\n<\/span>Oh God, what Love did they taste?<\/span><\/p>\n

Rumi invites us to live by an ethic of Love, care, and reverence, knowing there are a multiplicity of inclinations within and temptations without that may \u201cdrag us this way and that.\u201d Like a whirling dervish who turns and turns, straying from one point to arrive there again, it is the nature of humans to forget and remember, forget and remember the soulful truths of interconnection and oneness. In cultures steeped in of materialism and militarism that rely on spiritual impoverishment and polarizing narratives, it becomes even harder to remember. Rumi\u2019s verses constitute a poetry of remembrance. He is rooting for humanity, and it is a testament to his devotion that he summons all his poetic resources\u2014dazzling images, form, meter, rhyme, rich metaphors, leaping progressions of thought, confessional and didactic tones, as well as these spiritually charged everyday words\u2014not only to create aesthetic masterpieces but also to communicate his liberating visions.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Author\u2019s note:<\/b> All poems and excerpts are translated by Haleh Liza Gafori from <\/span>Gold<\/span><\/i> (2022) and <\/span>Water<\/span><\/i> (2025), published by New York Review Books \/ NYRB Classics.<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Image: Topkap\u0131 Palace Museum Library, Istanbul.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: In this section, we share texts originally published by our parent publication, World Literature Today (WLT), now in bilingual edition. This text was first published in World Literature Today Vol. 100, No. 4 in July 2026. Click here to subscribe to WLT:   Rumi (1207\u20131273) incorporates everyday words drawn from the Sufi lexicon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":46777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4538],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[],"lal_author":[5771],"class_list":["post-46707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-literature-from-wlt","tag-issue-39","lal_author-haleh-liza-gafori"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46707"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47554,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46707\/revisions\/47554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46707"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=46707"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=46707"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=46707"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=46707"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=46707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":47625,"date":"2026-09-16T23:06:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T05:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=47625"},"modified":"2026-09-21T15:18:48","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T21:18:48","slug":"una-multitud-a-oscuras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/una-multitud-a-oscuras\/","title":{"rendered":"Una multitud a oscuras"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sobre <\/b>El ej\u00e9rcito ciego<\/i><\/b> (Alfaguara, 2026) de David Toscana<\/b><\/p>\n

Una an\u00e9cdota brutal del siglo XI sirve al mexicano David Toscana para proponer una reflexi\u00f3n de amplio alcance antropol\u00f3gico y pol\u00edtico en<\/span> El ej\u00e9rcito ciego<\/span><\/i>. El libro relata la historia del ej\u00e9rcito b\u00falgaro que fue derrotado el a\u00f1o 1014 por las tropas bizantinas de Basilio II. Tal como relata la cr\u00f3nica de Ioannis Skilitzes en un fragmento que sirve de ep\u00edgrafe al libro, los hechos fueron los siguientes: no satisfecho con la victoria, Basilio mand\u00f3 arrancarles los ojos a los 15.000 prisioneros enemigos, dejando un tuerto entre cada cien guerreros para que pudieran encontrar el camino a casa. Impresionado ante el retorno de estos menesterosos en la oscuridad, a pasos cortos y palpando al frente, el emperador Samuel habr\u00eda muerto de la impresi\u00f3n. La vida de todo su pueblo se ver\u00eda afectada de modo radical con la llegada de estos impactantes despojos humanos, pues \u201cquince mil ciegos son una carga m\u00e1s pesada que quince mil cad\u00e1veres\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

David Toscana es due\u00f1o de una s\u00f3lida trayectoria compuesta por una docena de novelas, algunas de ellas reconocidas con premios como el Xavier Villaurrutia, el Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Arguedas y, con <\/span>El ej\u00e9rcito ciego<\/span><\/i>, el Premio Alfaguara de Novela 2026. Esta novela utiliza un registro propio de la f\u00e1bula, conjugando el minimalismo y los personajes arquet\u00edpicos con una aparente sencillez del lenguaje, produciendo pliegues y trazos sutiles donde el sentido de las an\u00e9cdotas se multiplica, al igual que la cantidad de personajes que vemos correr por sus poco m\u00e1s de doscientas p\u00e1ginas. Sin embargo, las sencillas historias de artesanos, talabarteros, criadores de cerdos, herreros, centinelas, campesinos o escribanos que vuelven a sus pueblos intentando retomar en algo la normalidad de sus vidas \u2014aunque muchos se perdieran, voluntariamente o no, en el camino\u2014 esconden una reflexi\u00f3n mucho m\u00e1s profunda: qu\u00e9 tipo de mundo se construye cuando se pierde masivamente el sentido de la vista, aquel que nos permite un m\u00ednimo grado de certeza acerca de lo compartido, de aquello que vemos y nos cercioramos que es com\u00fan para todos.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

La crueldad de Basilio II abre paso a una acci\u00f3n narrativa profundamente l\u00edrica. Nos encontramos con S\u00f3ndok el lector, quien inventa un cuento fingiendo leer una hoja que es incapaz de ver \u2014y que proven\u00eda de una biblia descoyuntada\u2014, despertando las suspicacias del padre Alzeko ante el sacrilegio de inventar tal relato sobre un texto sagrado. O con Timot\u00e9i el titiritero, quien con su mu\u00f1eca precaria y su \u00fanico vestido relata historias a los ciegos que imaginan estar ante los grandes aparejos propios de un espect\u00e1culo circense de primer nivel. Las l\u00edneas argumentales no est\u00e1n protagonizadas solo por soldados mutilados, sino tambi\u00e9n con quienes deben afrontar estas masas de nuevos ciegos que trastocan todo el orden anterior: est\u00e1 el maestro Z\u00f3simo, h\u00e1bil verdugo ocular del imperio bizantino, que se complace en sus finos instrumentos para arrancar los ojos a quien el emperador as\u00ed lo dicte \u2014especialmente a los traidores\u2014, pero que ante la masividad del encargo posterior a la batalla se declara incapaz de acometer la tarea. O el jud\u00edo Moskono, maestro ceramista que comienza a fabricar esferas de arcilla que imitan los globos oculares perdidos, para luego ampliar su artesan\u00eda a figuras llenas de s\u00edmbolos, colores y alusiones que multiplican las posibilidades de los antiguos combatientes. As\u00ed, aparecen varias decenas de personajes que afrontan este singular castigo con originalidad y astucia, volviendo esa nueva realidad un mundo habitable por ciegos, tuertos y videntes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cVoy a narrar lo que no vi para que lo vea quien me escuche\u201d, dice en un momento el narrador de la novela, un soldado an\u00f3nimo que recoge muchos de los hilos que suceden a la derrota de los b\u00falgaros. As\u00ed como el sentido de la vista entrega una seguridad epistemol\u00f3gica b\u00e1sica \u2014y la tradici\u00f3n oral, con sus m\u00faltiples dichos en torno a ella as\u00ed lo corrobora: \u201cver para creer\u201d, \u201cdonde mis ojos te vean\u201d, \u201cojos que no ven\u2026\u201d, y as\u00ed\u2014, Toscana construye una muy sugerente ficci\u00f3n en torno a la ausencia de ella. En <\/span>El ej\u00e9rcito ciego<\/span><\/i> nos encontramos con un mundo donde la imaginaci\u00f3n adquiere un mayor peso a la hora de construir lo que nos rodea. Pero, al mismo tiempo, la consecuencia de esta cat\u00e1strofe es que toda experiencia termina individualiz\u00e1ndose de modo radical: al no tener una <\/span>visi\u00f3n<\/span><\/i> compartida de las cosas, los personajes que por aqu\u00ed deambulan est\u00e1n encerrados en sus propias cavilaciones, como si solo por medio de la vista se tuviera la posibilidad de compartir un mundo, un modo de habitar lo com\u00fan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Las preguntas que despierta esta tragedia masiva son m\u00faltiples, y muchos son tambi\u00e9n los caminos a seguir. \u00bfQu\u00e9 hacer con esos millares de ojos arrancados a los soldados? Lo que ven esos ojos desconectados de sus due\u00f1os, \u00bfincide en algo en los recuerdos o subjetividades de los cuerpos a los que ya no env\u00edan se\u00f1ales o percepciones? \u00bfQu\u00e9 sucede si se entierran esos ojos; exigen acaso un cuidado distinto al de una cosa? \u00bfQu\u00e9 pasa con la idea de belleza si ya no podemos ver y, por tanto, transmitir y compartir aquello visto? Poco a poco se dejan de lado las solemnidades, y as\u00ed como ya no hay d\u00edas ni noches en las vidas de los ciegos, los ojos \u2014coloridos, limpios, conservados en salmuera\u2014 pasan a ser objetos para jugar, para arrojar o para conjurar aquella vida pasada. Las cuencas y los p\u00e1rpados ahora in\u00fatiles se abren tambi\u00e9n a otros significados, pr\u00e1cticas y ritos, creando una poblaci\u00f3n donde la ceguera no es una excepci\u00f3n y, por lo tanto, puede marcar sus propias y originales pautas de conducta en torno a esta experiencia novedosa.<\/span><\/p>\n

La condici\u00f3n de f\u00e1bula no est\u00e1 dada solamente por ese tono m\u00ednimo y sencillo propio del Calvino de <\/span>El vizconde demediado<\/span><\/i> o de algunas ficciones de Baricco, sino tambi\u00e9n por el modo en que la novela juega con el propio relato hist\u00f3rico. En vez de condenar a los ciegos a la miseria y al imperio b\u00falgaro a la ignominia y la derrota (a fin de cuentas, como dice el narrador, \u201csi por el mundo corriera el rumor de la existencia del imperio de los ciegos, vendr\u00edan los persas, los francos, los moravos, los rus, los \u00e1rabes, los turcos, los \u00e1varos, los croatas, los pechenegos, los valacos, los magiares, los j\u00e1zaros; vendr\u00eda cualquier horda de salvajes a cazar al animal herido\u201d), con ese mismo tono jocoso e imaginaci\u00f3n hist\u00f3rica el ej\u00e9rcito de los ciegos vuelve al ruedo. Esos seres que habitan en la noche eterna tuercen el destino y logran salvar el honor, en una peripecia sorprendente e ingeniosa que los convierte en algo muy distinto a lo que parec\u00edan condenados.<\/span><\/p>\n

La ceguera ha demostrado ser un tema de alto alcance literario, despertando reflexiones antropol\u00f3gicas (a partir de <\/span>Edipo Rey<\/span><\/i>), dist\u00f3picas (el <\/span>Ensayo sobre la ceguera<\/span><\/i>, de Saramago) o existencialistas (el <\/span>Informe sobre ciegos<\/span><\/i>, de Sabato), entre otros. <\/span>El ej\u00e9rcito ciego <\/span><\/i>contin\u00faa esa noble estirpe literaria y se vuelve una digna merecedora del Premio Alfaguara (que no siempre funciona como sello de calidad). Con todo, aunque esta novela no alcanza la profundidad de S\u00f3focles ni la estilizaci\u00f3n tan caracter\u00edstica de Saramago o Sabato, logra una ejecuci\u00f3n correcta en torno a una f\u00e1bula bien trabajada, original, adem\u00e1s, en el contexto de la novela hispanoamericana. Con el impacto de su muy llamativa an\u00e9cdota y sus breves cap\u00edtulos que la dotan de un ritmo \u00e1gil, David Toscana nos entrega un libro valioso que, tal como a sus personajes, nos <\/span>hace ver imaginando<\/span><\/i>; es decir, que hace literatura.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a1Compra libros de los autores y traductores incluidos en este n\u00famero en nuestra p\u00e1gina de Bookshop!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sobre El ej\u00e9rcito ciego (Alfaguara, 2026) de David Toscana Una an\u00e9cdota brutal del siglo XI sirve al mexicano David Toscana para proponer una reflexi\u00f3n de amplio alcance antropol\u00f3gico y pol\u00edtico en El ej\u00e9rcito ciego. El libro relata la historia del ej\u00e9rcito b\u00falgaro que fue derrotado el a\u00f1o 1014 por las tropas bizantinas de Basilio II. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":47628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5746],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[],"lal_author":[5679],"class_list":["post-47625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-they-write-for-lalt","tag-issue-39","lal_author-joaquin-castillo"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47625"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47627,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47625\/revisions\/47627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47625"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=47625"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=47625"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=47625"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=47625"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=47625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":47127,"date":"2026-09-16T23:05:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T05:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=47127"},"modified":"2026-09-19T17:04:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T23:04:28","slug":"el-afan-europeizante","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/el-afan-europeizante\/","title":{"rendered":"El af\u00e1n europeizante"},"content":{"rendered":"

Volvamos ahora la mirada hacia los europeizantes, hacia los que, descontentos de todo americanismo con aspiraciones de sabor aut\u00f3ctono, descontentos hasta de nuestra naturaleza, nos prometen la salud espiritual si mantenemos recio y firme el lazo que nos ata a la cultura europea.<\/span>1<\/span><\/sup> Creen que nuestra funci\u00f3n no ser\u00e1 crear, comenzando desde los principios, yendo a la ra\u00edz de las cosas, sino continuar, proseguir, desarrollar sin romper tradiciones ni enlaces.<\/span><\/p>\n

Y conocemos los ejemplos que invocar\u00edan, los ejemplos mismos que nos sirvieron para rastrear el origen de nuestra rebeli\u00f3n nacionalista: Roma, la Edad Media, el Renacimiento, la hegemon\u00eda francesa del siglo XVIII\u2026 Deteng\u00e1monos nuevamente ante ellos. \u00bfNo tendr\u00e1n raz\u00f3n los arquetipos cl\u00e1sicos contra la libertad rom\u00e1ntica de que usamos y abusamos? \u00bfNo estar\u00e1 el secreto \u00fanico de la perfecci\u00f3n en atenernos a la l\u00ednea ideal, que sigue desde sus remotos or\u00edgenes la cultura de Occidente? Al criollista que se defienda \u2014acaso la \u00fanica vez en su vida\u2014 con el ejemplo de Grecia, ser\u00e1 f\u00e1cil demostrarle que el milagro griego, si m\u00e1s solitario, m\u00e1s original que las creaciones de sus sucesores, recog\u00eda vetustas herencias: ni los griegos vienen de la nada; Grecia, madre de tantas invenciones, aprovech\u00f3 el trabajo ajeno, retocando y perfeccionando, pero, en su opini\u00f3n, tratando de acercarse a los c\u00e1nones, a los paradigmas que otros pueblos, antecesores suyos o contempor\u00e1neos, buscaron con intuici\u00f3n confusa.<\/span>2<\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n

Todo aislamiento es ilusorio. La historia de la organizaci\u00f3n espiritual de nuestra Am\u00e9rica, despu\u00e9s de la emancipaci\u00f3n pol\u00edtica, nos dir\u00e1 que nuestros propios orientadores fueron, en momento oportuno, europeizantes: Andr\u00e9s Bello, que desde Londres lanz\u00f3 la declaraci\u00f3n de nuestra independencia literaria, fue motejado de europeizante por los proscriptos argentinos veinte a\u00f1os despu\u00e9s, cuando organizaba la cultura chilena; y los m\u00e1s violentos censores de Bello, de regreso en su patria, hab\u00edan de emprender en su turno tareas de europeizaci\u00f3n, para que ahora se lo afeen los devotos del criollismo puro.<\/span><\/p>\n

Apresur\u00e9monos a conceder a los europeizantes todo lo que les pertenece, pero nada m\u00e1s, y a la vez tranquilicemos al criollista. No s\u00f3lo ser\u00eda ilusorio el aislamiento \u2014la red de las comunicaciones lo impide\u2014, sino que tenemos derecho a tomar de Europa todo lo que nos plazca: tenemos derecho a todos los beneficios de la cultura occidental. Y en literatura \u2014ci\u00f1\u00e9ndonos a nuestro problema\u2014 recordemos que Europa estar\u00e1 presente, cuando menos, en el arrastre hist\u00f3rico del idioma.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aceptemos francamente como inevitable la situaci\u00f3n compleja: al expresarnos habr\u00e1 en nosotros, junto a la porci\u00f3n sola, nuestra, hija de nuestra vida, a veces con herencia ind\u00edgena, otra porci\u00f3n substancial, aunque s\u00f3lo fuere el marco, que recibimos de Espa\u00f1a. Voy m\u00e1s lejos: no s\u00f3lo escribimos el idioma de Castilla, sino que pertenecemos a la Romania, la familia rom\u00e1nica que constituye todav\u00eda una comunidad, una unidad de cultura, descendiente de la que Roma organiz\u00f3 bajo su potestad; pertenecemos \u2014seg\u00fan la repetida frase de Sarmiento\u2014 al Imperio Romano.<\/span><\/p>\n

Literariamente, desde que adquieren plenitud de vida las lenguas romances, a la Romania nunca le ha faltado centro, sucesor de la Ciudad Eterna: del siglo XI al XIV fue Francia, con oscilaciones iniciales entre Norte y Sur; con el Renacimiento se desplaza a Italia; luego, durante breve tiempo, tiende a situarse en Espa\u00f1a; desde Luis XIV vuelve a Francia. Muchas veces la Romania ha extendido su influjo a zonas extranjeras, y sabemos c\u00f3mo Par\u00eds gobernaba a Europa, y de paso a las dos Am\u00e9ricas, en el siglo XVIII; pero desde los comienzos del siglo XIX se definen, en abierta y perdurable oposici\u00f3n, zonas rivales: la germ\u00e1nica, suscitadora de la rebeld\u00eda; la inglesa, que abarca a Inglaterra con su imperio colonial, ahora en disoluci\u00f3n, y a los Estados Unidos; la eslava\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Hasta pol\u00edticamente hemos nacido y crecido en la Romania. Antonio Caso se\u00f1ala con eficaz precisi\u00f3n los tres acontecimientos de Europa cuya influencia es decisiva sobre nuestros pueblos: el Descubrimiento, que es acontecimiento espa\u00f1ol; el Renacimiento, italiano; la Revoluci\u00f3n, franc\u00e9s. El Renacimiento da forma en Espa\u00f1a s\u00f3lo a medias \u2014a la cultura que iba a ser trasplantada a nuestro mundo; la Revoluci\u00f3n es el antecedente de nuestras guerras de independencia. Los tres acontecimientos son de pueblos rom\u00e1nicos.<\/span><\/p>\n

No tenemos relaci\u00f3n directa con la Reforma, ni con la evoluci\u00f3n constitucional de Inglaterra, y hasta la independencia y la Constituci\u00f3n de los Estados Unidos alcanzan prestigio entre nosotros merced a la propaganda que de ellas hizo Francia.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1<\/span> \u201cEl af\u00e1n europeizante\u201d forma parte de <\/span>Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresi\u00f3n<\/span><\/i>, publicado originalmente por la editorial Babel en Buenos Aires, en 1928.<\/span><\/h5>\n
2<\/span> V\u00edctor B\u00e9rad, el helenista revolucionario, llega a pensar que la epopeya hom\u00e9rica fue \u201cproducto del genio nacional y producto lentamente madurado de largos esfuerzos nativos, pero tambi\u00e9n bruscos resultados de influencias y modelos ex\u00f3ticos: \u00bfen todo el pa\u00eds y en todo arte no aparecen los grandes nombres en la encrucijada de una tradici\u00f3n nacional y de una intervenci\u00f3n extranjera? (<\/span>L\u2019Odys\u00e9e<\/span><\/i>, texto y traducci\u00f3n, Par\u00eds, 1924).<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a1Compra libros de los autores y traductores incluidos en este n\u00famero en nuestra p\u00e1gina de Bookshop!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Foto: Pedro Henr\u00edquez Ure\u00f1a, intelectual y escritor dominicano.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Volvamos ahora la mirada hacia los europeizantes, hacia los que, descontentos de todo americanismo con aspiraciones de sabor aut\u00f3ctono, descontentos hasta de nuestra naturaleza, nos prometen la salud espiritual si mantenemos recio y firme el lazo que nos ata a la cultura europea.1 Creen que nuestra funci\u00f3n no ser\u00e1 crear, comenzando desde los principios, yendo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":47128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5746],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[],"lal_author":[5768],"class_list":["post-47127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-they-write-for-lalt","tag-issue-39","lal_author-pedro-henriquez-urena"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47127"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47130,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47127\/revisions\/47130"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47127"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=47127"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=47127"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=47127"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=47127"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=47127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":46681,"date":"2026-09-16T22:53:39","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T04:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=46681"},"modified":"2026-09-16T22:53:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T04:53:39","slug":"victimhood-and-redemptive-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/victimhood-and-redemptive-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Victimhood and Redemptive Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

This text by Carlos Gran\u00e9s serves as the prologue to the new edition of <\/span><\/i>Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario <\/span>by Venezuelan essayist Carlos Rangel (1929-1988), published in Santiago de Chile by the Fundaci\u00f3n para el Progreso in 2023. Rangel\u2019s book was originally published in 1976, first in French in Paris, and then that same year in Caracas by Monte \u00c1vila Editores.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In 1976, when Carlos Rangel published <\/span>Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario<\/span><\/i> (released the following year in English as <\/span>The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States<\/span><\/i>), Latin America\u2019s political landscape was far from encouraging for those who believed in the democratic, liberal, or social liberal project. Up north, in Mexico, the PRI had become a conveyer belt of temporary monarchs who monopolized power with no checks or counterweights, and down south, in Argentina, Juan Domingo Per\u00f3n had instituted a populist regime that adapted fascist rituals to a democratic system of government, thereby achieving the unlikely feat of derailing the finances and debasing the social cohesion of the richest, best educated country on the continent. Between one extreme and the other lay yet more antidemocratic experiments. The military controlled countries like Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile\u2014Argentina would join them a few months later\u2014while intellectuals and universities somatized marxist grievance and fascination with Fidel Castro\u2019s revolutionary project.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just five years before, Eduardo Galeano had published <\/span>Open Veins of Latin America<\/span><\/i>, an essay that renovated Latin American obsessions sparked by the Spanish-American War of 1898\u2014especially a fanatical anti-Yankeeism and Latin frustration at the overwhelming power of the Anglo-Saxons. This book reinforced an old myth that satisfied deep-held psychological needs common to Latin Americans. Our poverty was not our own fault: rather, the Yankees and Europeans were to blame. We were poor because they were rich; our wealth had been sating northern stomachs for five hundred years. Since time immemorial, our fate had been submission and exploitation. First we were victims of colonialism, then of imperialism and its local underlings. We had been stripped of everything except the virtue and moral superiority with which to decry, accuse, and point out the guilty.<\/span><\/p>\n

How pleasant, above all for intellectuals, was the victimhood brought up to date in Eduardo Galeano\u2019s essay; what peace of mind it offered, what clarity of purpose, how easy it made the work. The concoction that emerged from mixing Marxism-Leninism, dependency theory, and the everlasting anti-imperialist appeal forged in Rod\u00f3\u2019s <\/span>Ariel<\/span><\/i> yielded diagnoses that gave perfect explanations\u2014because myths are perfect. Nonetheless, these explanations were of little use when it came to understanding Latin American realities, for one simple reason: they always looked outside, never within; they stressed the treachery of our enemies and their allies, their nefarious appetites, but never our own mistakes, never our fascination with useless ideas\u2014primitive Christianity, the Jesuitic mission, Napoleonic autocracy, millenarian utopias, identitarian purity, the teleology of progress, the socialist paradise, racial homogeneity, fascist nationalism\u2014which came to us as leftovers from Europe and which some redeemer carburized with local delirium so as to get them up and running again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We must bear in mind this political and ideological context, this analytic complacency and easy comfort in an error that dignified the soul and weakened the body, if we are to understand the irreverent and transgressive quality of Rangel\u2019s book. Like the little boy who pointed out the emperor\u2019s nakedness, in these pages the Venezuelan intellectual sought to identify the myths\u2014if not lies\u2014that clouded minds and prevented Latin Americans from correctly diagnosing their reality and their problems. This book is, among other things, a story of mistakes, an account of the abstractions and illusions that have been superimposed over reality and have kept us from relating to it without victimhood or redemptive violence, which are two sides of the same coin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rangel begins his demystifying endeavor, with neither painkillers nor half measures, at the beginning, with the conquest. Latin America, he says, at that initial moment, became a screen onto which Colombus and the other conquistadors projected their fantasies and desires. All the images of wealth, wonder, purity, and human goodness that floated in the medieval headspace found, in the newly discovered New World, unequivocal referents that seemed to confirm the words of the Bible and of medieval fictions. Here was the earthly paradise, the golden age, the human being just as he was created before the fall, before he knew sin. These lands were home to the Fountain of Youth, to El Dorado, the legendary California, and the Amazons. They were also home, of course, to the noble savage who so astonished Bartolom\u00e9 de las Casas, that angelic being who had not suffered the pitiful corruption that rotted the soul and could only arise from Western civilization.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here was the ferment of the great Latin American myth. At the hands of a foreign power, the noble savage had been torn away from this paradise in which he enjoyed an authentic, free, and happy life and dragged into a new, painful colonial condition marked by alienation, poverty, and dependency. Redemption from this suffering lay in the rejection of the corrupting civilization, despite the fact that by that point, when thoughts of liberation started coming to the fore, almost five centuries had passed since the Spanish arrived. Millions of people who prayed to a Catholic God, spoke Spanish, and bore the surnames Morales, Reyes, Mart\u00ednez, and L\u00f3pez had to exclude themselves from the West and refute any connection to Europe, the United States, and Western civilization in general. Thus the delirium and mythification of Latin American reality began. Perhaps the path back to the noble savage was barred\u2014although today\u2019s decolonialists argue the contrary, that it is indeed possible to deny five hundred years of mestizaje and recover the purity of ancestral values and knowledge\u2014but we could at least evolve into a new creature, one equally ascetic and good-hearted, superior in the aptitude of its convictions: not the noble savage, but the noble revolutionary. His mission, clearly, would be to put an end to our economic, political, and cultural subordination to the United States and the West, to extirpate the colonial and imperial inheritance that polluted us.<\/span><\/p>\n

These noble revolutionaries had a prerogative they did not share with the noble savage: guns and violence. The version of Marxism-Leninism that spread through Latin America at that time legitimized emancipatory action. Unlike Marx, who argued in favor of modernizing exchange between the metropolis and its colonies, Lenin realized that communism and the Soviet Union would gain greater returns if they pitted them against each other. This was the origin of third-worldism, a subject to which Rangel dedicated another book. The end of imperial rule would come through fostering national liberation movements around the world, and especially south of the United States, with these peoples joining the anti-Western crusade.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With these ideas smoldering in many minds, and after the great revelation, after realizing that all of Latin America\u2019s ills were imported and the causes of its misery came from the Yankee empire, the path grew clearer. Young people could discard the option of reform, avoid the need for self-reflection, and turn to the jungle or the mountains to form guerrilla cells and kick off an unhinged campaign of sabotage. In the sixties and seventies, while Rangel was writing his book, imperialist agression and economic exploitation were to be repulsed through subversive action.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nationalism in Latin America started taking on a red tint. Former fascists who believed in national purity, like the young Argentines of the Tacuara movement, now began to form left-wing guerrilla groups. Curiously, and disturbingly, they were pursuing similar ends. The example of Fidel Castro and Leninist discourse had convinced them that the fatherland was to be defended by taking up arms and expelling the external enemy. While in the thirties it was right-wingers and clero-fascists, like Argentina\u2019s Julio Meinvielle, who had legitimized the use of violence in politics, now it was leftists like Che Guevara who did so. It made little difference that the former wanted to excise the Jewish and anarchist contamination that came from the east while the latter were concerned with the Yankee contamination coming from the north; nor that the military strongmen\u2014Stroessner, Castelo Branco, Videla, Pinochet\u2014then came along to excise communism, another foreign plague. They all followed the same mental scheme. They feared the corrosive or subjugating contamination that threatened the nation, which they were willing to defend with bombs, bullets, or cattle prods. In terror of the external or internal enemy, the noble savage proved to be much more savage than noble.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After laying out this general framework, Rangel then goes on to sweep away the myths that prevent a clear view of reality. The first and most pressing at the time in which he was writing is dependency theory, the most influential economic discourse of the day. In his book, Rangel demonstrates that the United States did not get rich at our expense, swindling us out of our raw materials or forcing us into unfair contracts. The Yankees had already gotten rich before coming into contact with Latin America, and this fact\u2014their political stability and economic strength\u2014allowed them to come to our shores and intervene in our affairs in imperial terms. This is worth clarifying: far from gratuitously defending the United States, Rangel points out all its faults, including its military landings and strategic relations with tropical dictators, the \u201cconsular caudillos\u201d who did so much to weaken democracy on the continent. There is no interest here in polishing the Yankees\u2019 image for the Latin American reader. Rather, Rangel is interested in taking apart the myth such that we might start accepting that our weakness in the face of Yankee imperialism is the result of our own mistakes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, the habit of blaming the empire for all our ills is an intellectual vice of the most noxious and useless kind. Instead, we would do well to start acknowledging certain facts. For example, the fact is that while the U.S. succeeded in forging a homogeneous country with a clear sense of its destiny, we, two hundred years after gaining independence, continue refounding our countries and subdividing the common citizenry into ever-smaller ethnic nations. In a show of postmodern novelty or neo-indigenist marxism, now we call it \u201cplurinationality,\u201d as if Latin America had not sinned enough in turning a single political entity, which went from Mexico to Chile, into a lush display of national fragments, each prouder than the other of its borders, its glories, and its heroes, all buttoned up in military uniforms and bathed from head to toe in blood.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The worst part is that Spanish America had a headstart. In the sixteenth century, what\u2019s now the United States was a wasteland of famine and ignorance while Peru, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic had universities and flourishing colonial cities. The America that grew south of the Yankee border, our America, was the one destined to sow some kind of enlightenment in the swamps, deserts, and frozen coastlands of the north, but what happened was the opposite. This is the harsh reality\u2014the shock therapy\u2014with which Rangel confronts his Latin American readers. Enough passing the buck. The time has come to set aside comforting myths, to reject the role of the noble savage, which is frankly infantile: a way we have found to avoid the responsibilities of adulthood and justify the violent, self-destructive tantrums with which the noble revolutionary, from time to time, expresses his fruitless unease. The time has come to take a look at ourselves, to examine our own political systems, the ideas that have guided our leaders, strongmen, and dictators; to understand the role of the Church, to analyze the legalistic illusions that have so often enticed us, to reconsider the Black Legend that has perpetuated so many false conceptions, to recognize our own xenophobia disguised as nationalist emancipation. The time has also come, of course, to overcome our deep-seated resentment, that bad counselor that leads us to prefer any tyranny, even that of Vladimir Putin, as long as it is not on the side of the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

Carlos Rangel undertakes this task in this book. <\/span>Del buen salvage al buen revolucionario<\/span><\/i> is also a review of the shortcomings that condemned PRIism, Peronism, Allendism, and the military model (of the right as well as the left) to failure. He defends only one Latin American political project: the democratic project\u2014social democratic, to be exact\u2014that was pursued by V\u00edctor Ra\u00fal Haya de la Torre in Peru with the APRA, and that found true success with R\u00f3mulo Betancourt\u2019s Acci\u00f3n Democr\u00e1tica in Venezuela. This was the political creed that Rangel sought to promote at a time when intellectuals worshipped the radicalism of the left and mocked bourgeois democracies. Had this book been read more often and more closely, had it awoken a tenth of the fervor provoked by <\/span>Open Veins of Latin America<\/span><\/i>, perhaps our fate would have been different. The populist cyclone of the past two decades perhaps would have come up against greater resistance, and the place where this book was written would perhaps not be, as it is today, a scrapyard for the worst of our history: the demagoguery and victimhood of the noble savage and the violence and despotism of the noble revolutionary. The good news\u2014there is always good news\u2014is that it is never too late.<\/span><\/p>\n

Madrid, 27\/01\/23<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo: Colombian writer and anthropologist Carlos Gran\u00e9s. Credit: Archivo ABC \/ Ignacio Gil.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This text by Carlos Gran\u00e9s serves as the prologue to the new edition of Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario by Venezuelan essayist Carlos Rangel (1929-1988), published in Santiago de Chile by the Fundaci\u00f3n para el Progreso in 2023. Rangel\u2019s book was originally published in 1976, first in French in Paris, and then that same […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":46787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5746],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[1067],"lal_author":[5766],"class_list":["post-46681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-they-write-for-lalt","tag-issue-39","translator-arthur-malcolm-dixon","lal_author-carlos-granes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46681"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47124,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46681\/revisions\/47124"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46681"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=46681"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=46681"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=46681"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=46681"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=46681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":46655,"date":"2026-09-16T21:09:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T03:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=46655"},"modified":"2026-09-16T21:09:54","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T03:09:54","slug":"dwellers-in-bewilderment-forms-of-the-absurd-in-antonio-di-benedetto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/dwellers-in-bewilderment-forms-of-the-absurd-in-antonio-di-benedetto\/","title":{"rendered":"Dwellers in Bewilderment: Forms of the Absurd in Antonio Di Benedetto"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note:<\/b> 2026 marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto. To celebrate the work of this renowned author, we are glad to share this never-before-published essay by his countrywoman, poet and essayist Vanesa Almada Noguer\u00f3n, a frequent contributor to LALT.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one thing that nobody can deny, it\u2019s that the world of letters\u2014objections aside\u2014is one of the most gripping and captivating worlds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are the facts: on March 24, 1976, a few hours after the military coup that overthrew Argentina\u2019s constitutional government, a man is arrested at his office, located at Avenida San Mart\u00edn 1049, in the midst of his workday as assistant director of a well-known Mendoza newspaper. The reader doesn\u2019t know it yet, but he is one of the first writers detained by the latest military dictatorship.<\/span><\/p>\n

The country falls into one of the darkest chapters of its history and the man\u2014who claims he doesn\u2019t have the slightest idea why they\u2019re taking him\u2014goes on to suffer physical torture, moral debasement, and extreme psychological violence, ranging from maddening confinement to four sadistic mock executions.<\/span><\/p>\n

At first, he is locked up at the Liceo Militar General Espejo, in his home province, where he shares a cell with several fellow journalists. However, the dictators don\u2019t take long to move him to Unidad Penal No. 9 in La Plata, more than a thousand kilometers from his home city, where he stays behind bars for almost a year and a half, until September of 1977.<\/span><\/p>\n

For their part, the newspaper\u2019s directors are floundering. They prefer not to intervene. They choose not to intervene. Their interests and intentions largely align with those of the new regime.<\/span><\/p>\n

Besides his work as a journalist, the man writes. Fiction is his thing. He tries in vain to endure his captivity by making use of this gift: everything he writes is confiscated, torn to pieces, and thrown away. Then he comes up with a scheme: he requests permission to send letters (many political prisoners did so) and begins a very particular exchange of correspondence with a lady friend of his. The letters are perfect simulations of letters, with all the typical epistolary markings and the proper, carefully inserted expressive trivialities (harmless, of course, to the authorities\u2019 eyes). But something sets their content apart: in each of them, the writer describes a dream.\u00a0 And each dream is an illogical, surreal sequence of events, ludicrous to the core or plainly incomprehensible. They are stories, of course. Exquisite works of fiction that, as such, will be collected and published two years later as a book.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

To put faces and names to the characters, we\u2019ll have to go back in time, returning to those dire, dismal years. To place ourselves, in short, within an Argentina racked by censorship, fear, and the most brutal of persecution. Let\u2019s get moving.<\/span><\/p>\n

The newspaper in question is <\/span>Los Andes<\/span><\/i>, one of the oldest and best known in the country, and the main print publication in the Cuyo region. The lady friend in question is Adelma Petroni (1907-1987), an esteemed visual artist from Buenos Aires who, in the fifties and sixties, earned great international prestige. The book in question is <\/span>Absurdos<\/span><\/i> (1978), a decisive work within the canon of dictatorship-era fiction. And the man in question is Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986), an Argentine writer, journalist, and screenwriter born in Mendoza, considered one of the most significant literary voices of the twentieth century.<\/span><\/p>\n

Naturally, the context in which the book was produced is inseparable from its reading. \u201cLast night I had a lovely dream: I\u2019ll tell you about it,\u201d Antonio would say to Adelma in his letters. Immediately after, he would transcribe the contents of his stories in microscopic handwriting, the kind you have to read with a magnifying glass. Petroni thus became a key proxy and handler of these clandestine stories. They were published in Spain. Barcelona-based press Pomaire saw to their distribution. Di Benedetto himself later recognized in interviews that the title was directly linked to the situation he was forced to live through: the arbitrary imprisonment, the unstated charges (he was never concretely accused of anything), the viciousness, the hostility, the senselessness. The absurd was not just a conceptual category: it was, above all, an accurate descriptor of the life to which he was subjected.<\/span><\/p>\n

Made up of fifteen stories of widely varying length and register\u2014eleven of them previously unpublished (written in captivity) and four others previously included in papers and magazines\u2014<\/span>Absurdos<\/span><\/i> acts as a space of projections and correspondences in which multiple genres coexist: the gaucho tale, the fantastic fable, the horror story, the dream journey, and the existential parable, all saturated with the same charged sensibility and permanent tension.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the book\u2019s most distinctive and recurring traits\u2014as in all of Di Benedetto\u2019s work\u2014is the habitual presence of wild or domestic animals, along with the almost invariable reappearance of the arid, radically hostile spaces that characterize the rural world of the Pampas. This resource takes on a disturbing symbolic weight that goes much further than regionalism or local flavor. Dolly Sales de Nasser writes in her critical study, \u201cEl absurdo existencial en la obra de Antonio di Benedetto\u201d:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While each story is a finished narrative, their grouping into a single book is the result of their marked unity, established by several of their shared aspects. One is the depiction of a recurring space: the Cuyo countryside, within which Di Benedetto puts into writing the drama of existence confined to a space that seems not to belong to this world and that often turns against those who inhabit it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Likewise, the construction and exposition of characters dominated by helplessness\u2014or clinging to the expectation of an extraordinary or \u201cmiraculous\u201d interruption that might modify their existence or change their fate\u2014make up the foundational plot that girds this stifling absurdity that permeates landscapes, routines, and behaviors.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the man in question, this constrained Antonio, defeated and kept apart from his profession and his family, has achieved something more: his thematic terms and narrative threads (of sense and senselessness) are by no means obedient to whims or chance; rather, they cater to a two-sided purpose that perhaps the writer himself does not entirely anticipate.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the one hand, the heralded coming of the absurd takes a step closer in every setting and plot line the author chooses. The harshness of the surroundings, the solitude, the defenselessness, the fateless erring, along with his efforts to depict his characters in permanent conditions of confinement, invasion, or constant danger, refer back specifically to the experience of captivity\u2014and, perhaps, to a broader conception of human existence as a common, shared state of estrangement, bewilderment, and vulnerability.<\/span><\/p>\n

Argentine researcher Jimena N\u00e9spolo\u2014the author of one of the most thorough studies of Di Benedetto\u2019s work\u2014points out that almost all the stories that make up <\/span>Absurdos<\/span><\/i> were written from a confinement that, unlike the voluntary confinement surrounding the composition of <\/span>Zama<\/span><\/i> (his most critically acclaimed novel, published in 1956), was imposed by state violence. This apparently external distinction lends the stories a particular drive: they contain a certain urgency, a pressure that filters through and is compacted and sealed in through their expressive sobriety and verbal economy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Simultaneously, the book\u2019s rural focus offers a possible closure or endpoint to the purifying sublimation and mythologizing to which literary fiction has subjected the imagined Pampas for decades. Consider, for example, \u201cAballay,\u201d the volume\u2019s best-known story, which also made its way to the screen as a film co-written and directed by Fernando Spiner (<\/span>Aballay: el hombre sin miedo<\/span><\/i>, 2010).<\/span><\/p>\n

This text masterfully narrates the waning years of a gaucho who, after hearing a sermon on the stylites\u2014anchorite monks who lived atop columns to isolate themselves from the world\u2014decides to never again dismount from his horse as a way to expiate his guilt for having killed a man in his youth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Argentine critic and researcher Julio Premat suggests in his essays that, with this story, Di Benedetto sets out a counterpoint to the long literary lineage that runs from Jos\u00e9 Hern\u00e1ndez to Jorge Luis Borges, closing the cycle of reverential rewritings of the gaucho and the Pampas. Aballay is not a typical heroic gaucho, but rather the inversion of one: a repentant gaucho, tortured by his guilt, whose paradoxical penitence\u2014remaining on his horse in perpetual motion\u2014is lofty and absurd all at once. According to Premat, this character can be equated to a guilty Mart\u00edn Fierro, wholly aware of his failings and viewed through a perspective of redemption that the text, nonetheless, chooses not to resolve either simply or comfortingly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Referring specifically to Di Benedetto\u2019s work as a writer, his path through said work, and his eventual literary consolidation as an author, it becomes clear, as mentioned above, that <\/span>Absurdos<\/span><\/i> serves as an inflection point both in his own oeuvre and in the shaping of an identity that would mark the Argentine fiction of the twentieth century.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this regard, the academic Teresita Mauro Castellarin points out that Di Benedetto\u2019s trajectory as an author of short stories ranges from the fantastic, allegorical stories of <\/span>Mundo animal<\/span><\/i> (1953) to the objectivist forms of the so-called \u201cGeneration of 55,\u201d only to then arrive, in his last two books\u2014<\/span>Absurdos<\/span><\/i> (1978) and <\/span>Cuentos del exilio<\/span><\/i> (1983)\u2014at a synthesis that integrates the fantastic, the oneiric, the historical, the existential, and the absurd into writing of greater density. The fantastic tale, Castellarin also tells us, at this stage becomes independent of any mechanical allegorical function and operates as a discursive strategy of profound aesthetic autonomy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We might say, then, that Di Benedetto\u2019s writing approaches\u2014in its expressive and conceptual aspects\u2014the Hispano-American narrative tradition that includes, for example, Felisberto Hern\u00e1ndez, Silvina Ocampo, and Virgilio Pi\u00f1era: authors for whom the fantastic serves as a horizon more than a plot resource. Within this tradition, time appears blurred, indefinite, intentionally ambiguous and disposed to contribute to a sought-after sensation of uncertainty and estrangement. This is, of course, no recognizable historical time, but rather a temporality in suspension, almost dreamlike, in which circumstances seem to be governed by a logic entirely distinct from everyday causality.<\/span><\/p>\n

But, returning to this literature\u2019s origins, it is worth pointing out that the circumstances of its production have become a structural factor, not just an anecdotic fact: this writing itself is born as a clandestine, undercover act, from the depths of the forbidden, and is projected via the fragmentary, often enigmatic form of each letter (of each story). In said stories, Di Benedetto explores<\/span><\/p>\n

the experiences of men and women in extreme situations, in which the characters come up against their own limitations, which are imposed upon them and determine their fate. […] These characters\u2019 anguish is an anguish marked by the everyday, which emerges from something very concrete and is defined by waiting, or by the awareness that it is impossible to achieve a specific goal that, oftentimes, may be or indeed is at their fingertips. (6)<\/span><\/p>\n

The absurd thus functions as a device with which to reveal the fissures in one\u2019s own experience, linked to a political violence that, as it shifts traditional frameworks of meaning, presupposes and demands new forms of representation.<\/span><\/p>\n

And while it is true, as implied above, that the stories of <\/span>Absurdos<\/span><\/i> are, in a sense, articles of outcry (this outcry is present, inevitably, in the process by which they were created), it should also be remarked that these stories are, first and foremost, literature: a literature rigorously assembled and inhabited by characters placed in the most pitiless landscapes of the rural world, who seek redemption or a more or less logical sense of existence which, in this fictional environment, is denied them.<\/span><\/p>\n

The question that this book ends up asking us, beyond its undeniable literary triumphs, is: What is literature\u2019s place within the story that contains and permeates us, what role can it or must it play, what are its range, its limits, and its strengths?<\/span><\/p>\n

Di Benedetto\u2019s late reception in Argentina\u2014his work went partially unknown while he was in exile and in the years after his return in 1984\u2014stands in stark contrast to its academic and editorial recovery, which accelerated starting in the late nineties, especially with the reprinting of his complete works at the hands of Adriana Hidalgo. <\/span>Absurdos<\/span><\/i> was no exception: it was reprinted by the same press in an edition that mentions, as we might reasonably expect, the context and conditions of the book\u2019s creation, thus allowing new readers to approach the collection with full awareness of the circumstances of its genesis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding these circumstances\u2014chilling, to say the least\u2014Rafael Mor\u00e1n, a fellow journalist and coworker of Di Benedetto\u2019s at <\/span>Los Andes<\/span><\/i>, said in an interview: \u201cAlso on March 24, at four in the morning, they [the soldiers] came looking for me at my house, meaning to break in. Neither my family nor I was there at the time; we knew the coup was coming and we had taken precautions. But my neighbors told me, some time later, how that night they threw a grenade through the glass of my library window and started letting out tear gas. They did it so clumsily that they couldn\u2019t go inside, since they would choke on the gas themselves, and my own neighbors had to come out and help them. \u2018Be careful, these ones are dangerous,\u2019 they told them, \u2018these ones are readers.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cReaders,\u201d people who have a library, people who read, people who think, people who, therefore, are \u201cdangerous.\u201d The man in question here, of course, also fell within this category. He was doubly dangerous because, what\u2019s more, this man wrote. And from this vocation and this narrative genius was born, among other great things, <\/span>Absurdos<\/span><\/i>. The man set its existence in motion through a trick, and the book came into the world through another trick\u2014one much more intimate, introspective, confessional, and exquisite: the trick of the letters, which are still\u2014you can\u2019t deny it\u2014one of the most gripping and captivating worlds.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo: Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: 2026 marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of Argentine writer Antonio Di Benedetto. To celebrate the work of this renowned author, we are glad to share this never-before-published essay by his countrywoman, poet and essayist Vanesa Almada Noguer\u00f3n, a frequent contributor to LALT.   If there\u2019s one thing that nobody can deny, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":46764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2877],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[1067],"lal_author":[5506],"class_list":["post-46655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-issue-39","translator-arthur-malcolm-dixon","lal_author-vanesa-almada-nogueron-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46655"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47097,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46655\/revisions\/47097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46655"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=46655"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=46655"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=46655"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=46655"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=46655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":46643,"date":"2026-09-16T21:05:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T03:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=46643"},"modified":"2026-09-16T21:05:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T03:05:01","slug":"roberto-bolano-at-75","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/roberto-bolano-at-75\/","title":{"rendered":"Roberto Bola\u00f1o at 75"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this essay, I\u2019d like to try to answer the following question: how much of Roberto Bola\u00f1o do we have left in 2025, when he would have turned seventy-five?<\/span><\/p>\n

We still have his books, the interviews he gave, and the documentaries in which he appears. But we also have a variety of young authors who still read him. And we have many others, already over forty themselves, who published their first books emulating passages from <\/span>The Savage Detectives<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Amulet<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>Nazi Literature in the Americas<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems few writers in Latin America have kept to the path that opened in <\/span>2666<\/span><\/i>. It\u2019s as if this book were the future of the novel and the novel of the future all at once. But, as in the case of the <\/span>Quixote<\/span><\/i>, its echo can still be perceived in other lands and other literatures.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bola\u00f1o is still on bookstores\u2019 bestseller lists and lists of essential authors. He has been discussed at great length in academic spaces and even more in talks, seminars, and writers\u2019 conferences all over the world. But, in a sense, Bola\u00f1o has remained what he always was: a writer who reformulated the literature he inherited from the classics and the Latin American Boom. He was a romantic and an innovator; he was, in his own way, a political writer and a highly literary writer. He was one of those writers\u2019 writers.<\/span><\/p>\n

And, nonetheless, the question is worth considering. We don\u2019t know what he would have written from 2003, when he died, to the present. Surely silence would have fallen. You can\u2019t go any further in literary terms after <\/span>2666<\/span><\/i>. What remains, after a new artistic movement, is reinvention. And Bola\u00f1o surely would have reinvented himself. But he also would have kept his distance from the commercial book world, which is not to say he would have avoided altercations and confrontations with presses, prizes, and writers whom he detested, and whom he would have kept detesting.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite this, Bola\u00f1o would have done a better job of managing his author\u2019s rights. He would have allowed others to transform his stories and novels into stage plays, comics, films, TV series, and other cultural artefacts because he was well aware that, once written, these books had already ceased to be entirely his and, from the moment of their completion, they also belonged to those who might adapt and appropriate them.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is, of course, pure speculation. It\u2019s also possible that he would have grown more radical in his literary and aesthetic stances, ensuring that his work and his legacy\u2014although he had no faith in these words\u2014would find the best means through which to reach readers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps Bola\u00f1o is not a writer for all readers, but he never was. Only his death launched him into the cosmos of mass reading, research, and literary criticism. During his life, Bola\u00f1o played all possible fields so as to make his voice heard. Thus, his perception of the world was not in the interests of a select few. Rather, it served to build a literary temple on firm foundations: honor, honesty, courage, and impertinence.<\/span><\/p>\n

All of these traits shifted and slid into every one of his books of stories, articles, and essays. And, above all, into his novels. Because his poetry, conversely, was reserved for another endeavor: there, he was an explorer.<\/span><\/p>\n

He did not give himself over to the influence of a given style of phrasing. Nor to the syntax of everyday speech. Nor to the fading wake of the modernist, the classical, or the prosaic. Because, although he declared himself the heir of Nicanor Parra, his undertaking and his <\/span>ars poetica<\/span><\/i> were different. Where Parra plays, Bola\u00f1o elaborates; where Parra opens, Bola\u00f1o closes; and where Parra laughs, Bola\u00f1o is serious and summoning.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bola\u00f1o the poet is the Bola\u00f1o who would have stood the test of all this time. He would have returned, in the end, to the roots of the word from the poem, turning flesh into language through free verse, attuned to a reality that was neither prosaic nor banal, but rather existentially daring and ambiguous.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here we must turn to our imagination, questioning the value of Bola\u00f1o\u2019s prose to the detriment of his verse practice. You can\u2019t imagine Bola\u00f1o without poetry, when it comes to his phrases or their poetic accentuation. We should look closely at his books of poems: there we\u2019ll find a new literary undertaking that was neither perceived nor pursued.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a poetic undertaking that converses with everything it finds in its path. Because where the novel ends, poetry begins, and in the poem, by virtue of its brevity, a whole system of signs, symbols, and political and cultural junctures comes into play\u2014a system as disruptive to the established order as it is beautiful in its execution.<\/span><\/p>\n

We cannot think of Bola\u00f1o in the present, since his death is still disputed.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the one hand, he is a ghost called up by those who want to live their lives to the limit, to write from a place that seems romantic and dangerous.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other, we have the brotherhoods to which Bola\u00f1o gave his blessing, which, to this day, make much of the words he dedicated to them in some article.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then we have Bola\u00f1o\u2019s friends, who reinterpret and forget him piece by piece as the winds of the book market change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then come those who are visiting him for the first time. They are left dumbstruck, dazzled, and unable to identify what is happening to them as they read.<\/span><\/p>\n

The latter are the most faithful: the generational turnover that every writer needs in order to keep on existing as an author.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lastly, we have those who read him in the late nineties and the first decade of the oughts. Some have managed to write; others were published. But all of them discovered that Bola\u00f1o still brings a smile to their faces, a moving memory to their minds, an irreplaceable imagery and a variety of complex, contradictory sensations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many of them will keep wondering whether Bola\u00f1o is a great writer or an enigma, a farce.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe it doesn\u2019t matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe it has to be this way.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe no one dies unpublished after reading Bola\u00f1o, but they can still die as cowards if they don\u2019t give everything to their writing: all they are and all they remember, all they desire and pursue and all they\u2019d rather forget and destroy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bola\u00f1o did not go out with a bang for no reason. He did not write as if his very life were slipping away through the process; he did not race against time just for the thrill of the chase. No. Bola\u00f1o wrote until the end because he placed literature at the center of his life in order to tell us, from this place, that life\u2014as we knew it and know it still\u2014is much more than delayed emotions, weekends with family, Sundays in front of the TV, or news we force down like canned food.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bola\u00f1o wrote until the end because he had no other choice.<\/span><\/p>\n

He did it to open our eyes. To open the world. And, in that crack he managed to open, he planted the seeds of new words with which we now define the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of these words is honesty. The other is courage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Together, they form the diptych of virtues that an author must posess in order to be a writer.<\/span><\/p>\n

And, as long as those who write fail to take on writing with the courage of honesty, literature will continue to face one of its darkest and most dangerous hours. It will be tempted to rest on its haunches, to let itself die in the imminence of TV series, which have taken away a good measure of the best it once had.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bola\u00f1o is laughing from the back of the room. We all know it. He is there and not there.<\/span><\/p>\n

The more he laughs, the more he scares us.<\/span><\/p>\n

The more he scares us, the more essential it becomes that we read him and hear him.<\/span><\/p>\n

The rest, everything else, will be silence, or a desert of tedium in the midst of a maelstrom of boredom.<\/span><\/p>\n

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo: Chilean writer Roberto Bola\u00f1o<\/span><\/h6>\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this essay, I\u2019d like to try to answer the following question: how much of Roberto Bola\u00f1o do we have left in 2025, when he would have turned seventy-five? We still have his books, the interviews he gave, and the documentaries in which he appears. But we also have a variety of young authors who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":46778,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2877],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[1067],"lal_author":[5754],"class_list":["post-46643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-issue-39","translator-arthur-malcolm-dixon","lal_author-christian-jimenez-kanahuaty"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46643"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47092,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46643\/revisions\/47092"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46643"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=46643"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=46643"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=46643"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=46643"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=46643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":46649,"date":"2026-09-16T21:04:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T03:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=46649"},"modified":"2026-09-21T13:50:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T19:50:01","slug":"emil-cioran-and-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/emil-cioran-and-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Emil Cioran and Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Emil Cioran (1911-1995), music was not simply an object of aesthetic study, but rather the singular justification emerging from the disaster of existence. While thought fails to hold off suffering with abstract concepts, the art of sounds stands as an escape route and a revelation. Through writing that was meticulous, fragmentary, and awash with lyricism, the Romanian thinker found in the architecture of sound the decisive bridge between the wound of birth and the longing for an unattainable absolute. For Cioran, music was not just a pastime; it was, instead, the highest justification of existence and the only way out of the pain of living. While verbal and reflective discourse crumble before the world\u2019s senselessness, music offered him an all-encompassing, universal comfort.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

Starting in the seventeenth century, Western Modernity opened a deep rift in modes of understanding the relationship between sound and logos. With the advent of Cartesian rationalism, music was initially relegated to a subaltern position among the passions, needing to be governed by the clarity of the intellect. During this time, the sonic arts were closely linked to affect theory; sound was a vehicle with which to move the soul, but always under the watchful eye of a mathematical and rhetorical structure. Enlightenment philosophy saw in music a form of ornamentation or, in the best of cases, a rudimentary language of the emotions that paled in comparison to the precision of philosophical and scientific discourse. Nevertheless, this semantic subordination underwent a radical shift with the coming of German idealism and romanticism. Philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer entirely subverted the Cartesian order, postulating that music does not copy ideas, but is rather the immediate objectification of the Will itself. Music ceased to be the lowest rung of knowledge to become the supreme metaphysics. Cioran inherited this Copernican turn, but stripped it of any systematic optimism. The modern and post-romantic context situates music as the critical reverse of enlightened reason: where the concept shuts down and shows its seams in the face of pain, music appears as an incorporeal testimony, a language that does not need to mean anything in order to be real.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

In Cioran\u2019s thought, words have a peculiar limitation: they lie and they categorize. But music is lacking in concepts and, therefore, it communicates the naked truth of being. This leads to another implication: following the tradition of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, music is the pinnacle of art for the Romanian thinker; he places it above literature, painting, and philosophy. But it is not just a question of hierarchy. Music is, in fact, the anesthetic of the ego. The art of sounds dissolves the conscious self, allowing us to experience a temporary but pleasurable death in the midst of life. Thus, more than a musical aesthetic, Cioran concludes that supreme beauty is linked to tears. True art must evoke the original loss of being. Perhaps this is why music is a sort of \u201ctomorrowless redemption\u201d: a safeguard that redeems human suffering only as long as the melody lasts. When the music stops, the absurdity of reality instantly returns. In this unique experience, it seems that music teaches us to let go of the world. It shows us that nothingness can be beautiful and that emptiness need not be terrifying\u2014the void can be, instead, a perfect melody.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Anathemas and Admirations<\/span><\/i> (1987), Cioran deems music the last bastion of purity, elevating it above consciousness and linking it to the divine structure of the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. In a fierce critique of the \u201cspectacularization\u201d of music, Cioran casts his darts at the work of Richard Wagner: the \u201ctotal work of art\u201d defended by the man behind <\/span>Lohengrin<\/span><\/i> is the noisy materialization of history, the manipulation of the passions and a false theological redemption through myth. For Cioran, music functions as a means to learn to die, not in a stoic sense, but in one that is strictly mystic and diluent. While stoicism demands control, reason, and acceptance of one\u2019s fate, Cioran\u2019s music operates out of contempt for reason and absolute submission to ecstasy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

In Cioran, music might open the door to a mysticism of nothingness. The moralist, the stoic, the right-thinking human being dominates or seeks to control his passions through reason (<\/span>logos<\/span><\/i>). For the Romanian thinker, on the other hand, music is the path to the annihilation of reason and of the self. Music does not exist in order to help us withstand pain; music wants to dissolve within it. Perhaps for this reason, music delays suicide in the face of said desire. Music does not grant a stoic strength through which to endure the world\u2019s absurdity; it is, rather, a motive given to human beings to not commit suicide immediately.\u00a0 It is a painkiller, not a conduct manual. But also, in Cioran, music can be understood as a \u201cgeneral rehearsal\u201d for death. This is why he defines it as a \u201cvoluptuous death.\u201d Listening to Bach or Brahms allows us to experience a weightless detachment from the body, simulating a state of nonexistence, but pleasurably. Perhaps, as in so many other areas of his work, Cioran displays his mastery of paradox here: his suggestive and contradictory ideas on music become a sort of \u201cunlearning of being,\u201d a curious <\/span>dictum<\/span><\/i> for a \u201cgood death,\u201d which would consist\u2014in the act of listening to music\u2014of letting go of identity, the ego, and the curse of having been born. Music erases chronological time, facilitating this transition into emptiness. The ideal universe should be extinguished to the tune of a melody. Music is the only aesthetic framework that makes our final destruction tolerable.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

In the twentieth century, aesthetic reflection on music bifurcated down marked theoretical and historical paths, embodied by contemporaries of Cioran\u2019s like Theodor W. Adorno and Vladimir Jank\u00e9l\u00e9vitch. The distance that separates the Romanian thinker from these authors is both epistemological and temperamental, revealing a radical difference in the ways they conceived of the sonic act. Adorno addresses the phenomenon of music from a rigorous sociological dialectic. For the Frankfurt theorist, music\u2014especially that of the Second Viennese School\u2014is a reflection of material tensions, class contradictions, and the subject\u2019s alienation under late capitalism. Adorno seeks a conceptual decoding of the score as a historico-critical document. Cioran, on the other hand, abhors any historical or sociological reductionism. In music he seeks not the tracks of social alienation but the marks of the cosmic exile of the human being. For Cioran, music is not a product of history, but rather an escape route from submission to historical time. Jank\u00e9l\u00e9vitch, for his part, approaches music through a philosophy of mystery and the ineffable. In works like <\/span>Music and the Ineffable<\/span><\/i> (1961), the French philosopher claims that music says nothing because it expresses that which cannot be said any other way, defining it as an art of the \u201calmost nothing\u201d (<\/span>presque-rien<\/span><\/i>). While Cioran shares the notion that sound escapes the tyranny of the concept, he keeps his distance from the subtle lightness and melancholic enchantment of Jank\u00e9l\u00e9vitch. Where the French philosopher identifies a ludic, evanescent mystery, Cioran finds a heartrending experience, a theological wound and an upright absolute that pauses breathing and adjoins the darkest of mysticisms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

In Cioran\u2019s spiritual geography, we must abandon the idea of musical composition as entertainment. Music is an embodied ontology and its primordial function is to serve as metaphysical anesthetic and as simulacrum of redemption. Far from putting forward a taxonomic definition, the author distributes throughout his work a narrative characterization articulated through four fundamental properties. Firstly, music is manifested as a dissolution of individuation, a torrent that spills over the borders of the self and dilutes the weight of the flesh into an incorporeal fluidity. Secondly, music operates as a subversion of chronological time, replacing the tyrannical succession of minutes on the clock with a pure and static time, a sort of portable eternity accessible to mortals. Thirdly, music has a lachrymal and cathartic essence; it appeals not to our intelligence, but rather to a nocturnal lucidity born of tears and purified despair. Finally, music is defined by its capacity for divine impersonation, presenting itself as the last vestige of divinity in a deserted universe, as aesthetic evidence of transcendence where theology has failed. In his masterpiece, <\/span>On the Heights of Despair<\/span><\/i> (1934), Cioran beautifully synthesizes these qualities as he writes about the power of listening and the dissolution of existential limits: \u201cMusic is the sobbing of space, a cry that rings out from the depths of matter until it is lost in the infinite. To listen to music is to allow the self to sweetly bleed empty, it is a bodiless death throe in which the soul is freed from the weight of the earth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

In Cioran\u2019s life, insomnia held a legendary status as the driving force behind his thought. For the Romanian thinker, insomnia was not just a medical dysfunction, but a metaphysical catastrophe that deprived him of the innocence of unconsciousness.\u00a0 In the context of this nightly torment, his correspondence and his fascination with Buddhism converged through music. In his letters, Cioran drops the mask of the cynical essayist to reveal how music operated directly upon his body, devastated by sleepless nights. He describes his chronic insomnia as a \u201cdemential lucidity\u201d that turns his mind into a factory of suicidal thoughts. In his letters, he admits that music is the only stimulus able to \u201cease\u201d the tension of his muscles and his nerves contorted by nighttime panic. Paradoxically, in these same intimate texts, he confesses that music heals him but, at the same time, weakens him in a beautiful way. He writes that, after listening to certain pieces, he feels an absolute \u201cpurpose in not going on living.\u201d Sound loosened the springs of life; it did not heal him so he could go back to his routine the next day, but rather left him suspended in a void where biological pain ceased. In his correspondence with his brother and his close friends, Cioran describes the musical experience as almost a chemical substance: an injection of infinity that permeated his flesh. Sound achieved what no medicine could: it paused time and replaced the flow of blood with the flow of the chords.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

In Cioran\u2019s personal pantheon, two names stand out above the rest, turning into categories of his own thought: Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He conceived of these composers not as mere aesthetic preferences, but as two different ways of relating to the Absolute. On the one hand, Cioran\u2019s veneration of Johann Sebastian Bach takes on some signs of an aesthetic theodicy. For a thinker who declared that God was dead and railed tirelessly against the hope offered by faith, Bach\u2019s polyphonic architecture is the only crack through which the hypothesis of divinity becomes tolerable.\u00a0 The perfection of his counterpoint and the rigorous geometry of his cantatas are, for Cioran, not just technical exercises, but proof that heavenly order is possible, even if the Earth is damned. In a well-known aphorism from <\/span>All Gall is Divided<\/span><\/i> (1952), he writes cuttingly: \u201cIf anyone owes everything to Bach, it is God.\u201d The cantor of Leipzig\u2019s music justifies all of creation; it is the very structure of being reconciled with spirit. On the other hand, for Cioran, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart embodies the dimension of uncorrupted grace and angelic melancholy. If Bach is the cathedral of sound, Mozart is the light that comes in through the windows without breaking them. Mozart\u2019s music represents the longing for a prelapsarian paradise, a state of purity in which human suffering is transfigured into a weightless, sovereign beauty. Faced with the pain of the world, Mozart offers consolation that does not deceive, sadness that smiles into the abyss. While Bach elevates the thinker towards a severe transcendence, Mozart momentarily reconciles him with the fragility of his condition.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

The core of the relationship between Cioran and music becomes clear as he confronts the outer limits of language: silence and emptiness. Philosophy is built on the word, the concept, and argumentative logic. Nonetheless, for Cioran, logos is a fraud, a veil that disguises our inability to come to terms with nothingness. When philosophical thought reaches the extremes of its lucidity, it comes up against the existential void, an emptiness that the written or spoken word only betrays in attempting to name it. Here, music is revealed as an ontological antecedent to discursive thought. Music does not need contextual intermediaries to manifest its being; it is anterior to the split between subject and object. Lacking a semantic referent in the material world, the fabric of sound springs directly from the primordial abyss. It is the only force capable of colonizing the void without destroying it, lending silence an intelligible architecture without shattering its mystery. Where philosophy fails, left dumbstruck by nothingness, music assimilates this void, feeds on it through its pauses and rhythms, and transforms it into a tolerable mystic experience. For Cioran, music is superior to philosophy because it does not seek to explain away pain or senselessness; instead, it dwells within them and elevates them to the dignity of pure beauty.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

The last stop on this abrupt, spasmodic journey between Cioran and music is, perhaps inevitably, silence. For Cioran, the silence that comes when the music stops is not simply the absence of sound; it is the culmination of experience and the definitive encounter with the truth of being. If music is the vehicle that transports us, the following silence is the final destination: the void, purified of all hope and illusion. The experience of this post-musical silence can perhaps be articulated in the following terms. Firstly, while the music is playing, the listener experiences an ecstasy that Cioran calls an illusion of the absolute. But, when the last note ends, this illusion fades away, revealing the harsh reality of the world. Cioran observes, for example, that the silence that follows a Bach piece is not the same silence that existed before it began. It is a silence pregnant with meaning, a space in which the self has been ground to pieces and stripped of its defenses. It is the closest a Westerner can come to experiencing the emptiness (<\/span>\u015a\u016bnyat\u0101<\/span><\/i>) prescribed by Buddhism without turning to formal meditation. Secondly, silence becomes an end goal: in his notebooks, Cioran puts forth the radical argument that music is, ultimately, a distraction\u2014the noblest of them all, but a distraction nonetheless. This brings a unique implication: the danger of comfort. In one of his most gratifying paradoxes, Cioran suggests that music deceives us, making us believe pain has an aesthetic justification or the universe possesses a secret harmony. The following silence destroys this deceit. It returns us to primordial nothingness, forcing us to face the senselessness of the universe head-on, but now with a mind calmed by the beauty we have just witnessed. Finally, music reveals to us an aesthetic of the fragmentary and the silence of writing. This is molded by the way Cioran writes. His rejection of the grand philosophical treatise and his choice of the aphorism (the brief fragment) imitate the dynamics of music. An aphorism by Cioran is like a note played on the harpsichord: it bursts into nothingness, wounds us with its lucidity, and is immediately extinguished, with the reader left adrift in a reflective void. Writing is one way to skirt around this wound.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo: Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Emil Cioran (1911-1995), music was not simply an object of aesthetic study, but rather the singular justification emerging from the disaster of existence. While thought fails to hold off suffering with abstract concepts, the art of sounds stands as an escape route and a revelation. Through writing that was meticulous, fragmentary, and awash with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":46765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2877],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[1067],"lal_author":[127],"class_list":["post-46649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-issue-39","translator-arthur-malcolm-dixon","lal_author-ismael-gavilan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46649"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46651,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46649\/revisions\/46651"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46649"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=46649"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=46649"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=46649"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=46649"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=46649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":47273,"date":"2026-09-16T20:48:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T02:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/?p=47273"},"modified":"2026-09-21T14:49:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T20:49:49","slug":"i-threw-myself-into-literary-writing-with-tremendous-irreverence-a-conversation-with-nona-fernandez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2026\/09\/i-threw-myself-into-literary-writing-with-tremendous-irreverence-a-conversation-with-nona-fernandez\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI threw myself into literary writing with tremendous irreverence\u201d: A Conversation with Nona Fern\u00e1ndez"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hablemos, escritoras: Episode 561<\/b><\/p>\n

The name of Chilean playwright, actress, writer, and screenwriter Nona Fern\u00e1ndez is Patricia Paola Fern\u00e1ndez Silanes. She was born in Santiago, Chile, on June 23, 1971, and trained in theater at the Universidad Cat\u00f3lica. Among her best-known plays are <\/span><\/i>El taller<\/span> (2012) and <\/span><\/i>Liceo de ni\u00f1as<\/span> (2016), produced and premiered by La Pieza Oscura, the company she leads with Marcelo Leonart. She has also written various scripts for television series. Her novel <\/span><\/i>Mapocho<\/span> received the Santiago Municipal Literature Prize, while <\/span><\/i>La dimensi\u00f3n desconocida<\/span> won the Sor Juana In\u00e9s de la Cruz Prize in 2017. The English translation of her novel <\/span><\/i>Space Invaders<\/span> was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. Her other books include <\/span><\/i>Voyager<\/span> (Penguin Random House, 2019) and <\/span><\/i>Chilean Electric<\/span> (Penguin Random House, 2021).<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

This is an adapted excerpt from a conversation with the author on the <\/span><\/i>Hablemos, escritoras<\/span><\/a> podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Adriana Pacheco:<\/b> Dear Nona, where did it all begin, this rich career of yours? What was your first step? Why theater?<\/span><\/p>\n

Nona Fern\u00e1ndez:<\/b> Theater\u2026 Why theater? And people in theater ask me, \u201cWhy literature?\u201d I think theater is foundational for me; I mean, my passion for theater begins, I think, at the very same moment my passion for literature begins. And if I am anything, I am an actress. I say: I have a degree in acting, I am an actress, I studied at the Universidad Cat\u00f3lica, I have developed my career in theater since I graduated, I have my company, and I find it impossible to imagine my life without theater.<\/span><\/p>\n

But, of course, when I was a little girl and I fantasized about the idea of being something, of having a profession, theater and literature were two things that were on my mind. But with literature, I did not know how to become a writer. Just think: a cultural blackout, a dictatorship\u2026 It was very difficult to meet an author, whether male or female, and, in any case, the authors I read in school were dead. I had no way of accessing that world; writing was something very strange, or even thinking about it. I do not come from an intellectual family, either; a family of readers, yes, but not an intellectual family. So there was no precedent for it. That was not the case with theater. Theater was a degree program offered at the university. It was very important to my family that I go to college. So that path was much easier to see or to follow. And I studied theater, but the writing bug was always in me.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> Who did you study theater with? Who are the figures in your theatrical training?<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> I studied theater, as I said, in the classrooms of the Universidad Cat\u00f3lica, with professors like Egon Wolff, an extremely important playwright who is no longer with us, a recipient of the National Performing Arts Prize. I studied with H\u00e9ctor Noguera, another important Chilean actor. I studied with Ram\u00f3n N\u00fa\u00f1ez, too. How funny, because they are all getting old; my teachers are quite old now.<\/span><\/p>\n

And, well, Alfredo Castro was another of my professors; Willy Semler, Ram\u00f3n Griffero\u2026 all men. I am naming only men. And I would tell you that, yes, I had women professors in the more theoretical courses. Now, these days, I teach there myself. Of course, I am no exceptional case,\u00a0 nor am I the only woman. There are many of us teaching important courses because that is vital in a degree program.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.: <\/b>I would like you to tell us about your Chile, your own. The Chile where you grew up.<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> About that Chile\u2026 Well, of course, I was born in \u201871; the military coup came in \u201873. And my early years unfolded, let\u2019s say, during the dictatorship. I lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, the Matta neighborhood, an old neighborhood. My school was there, a school that was quite, how should I put it, broad-based, in the sense that there were people from both the right and the left at that time. I would say the vast majority were anti-dictatorship, opposed to the dictatorship, but there were many daughters of military personnel, and sons of military personnel, too. We were quite a mix, and I am very grateful to have had that opportunity to live alongside one another during my formative years.<\/span><\/p>\n

I come from an apolitical family, with no party affiliations, but with a tendency more toward the left\u2014or, rather, to put it in the terms of those years, anti-dictatorship, anti-military. And my childhood unfolded in that strange universe that was the dictatorship. Strange, but for us as little girls, it was not. It was our reality. The reality was that there was a curfew, that at a certain time you had to stay inside your house, that it was not advisable to spend too much time out on the street. Especially when I was younger, I remember being kept off the street somewhat. There were things you could not say, there were things it was better not to ask, and there were people who had suffered, but we could not know much about it. Why?<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> Let\u2019s talk about your book <\/span>El taller<\/span><\/i>, which is a play, where, as you read, you are already pausing to consider which character is going to enter and which is going to exit.<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> And you create your own staging. I mean, each reader creates their own staging. It has to do with the conversation we were having, about who our teachers were in theater school. I studied, as I was telling you, with Egon Wolff, who was a great teacher, he was tremendous. And I would tell you that a large part of everything we read with Egon, in world theater history and playwriting, was by male authors, by men. Great names, without a doubt; I am not going to complain about that. They were writers we needed to know.<\/span><\/p>\n

And in the case of Chilean theater, which we studied with a woman professor, Mar\u00eda de la Luz Hurtado, we also read only plays by men, except for Isidora Aguirre; we read her play <\/span>La p\u00e9rgola de las flores<\/span><\/i>, which is very well known in Chile. The rest were all works written by men.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I think, without my realizing it, this gradually conditioned my writing for the theater, because it was something I did not dare do at all. I had a great deal of respect for theatrical writing; not so for literary writing, which I threw myself into with tremendous irreverence. But theater, for me, was another very sacred, difficult space. I was not going to venture there; for me, it was very difficult.<\/span><\/p>\n

And what happened to me with <\/span>El taller<\/span><\/i> was that the play was inspired by an actual archival record from Chile: a literary workshop taught by Mariana Callejas, an intelligence agent during the dictatorship years, in a house in Lo Curro. And it was almost like a myth. At that point, when I went out into the world, it was almost like a myth. I did not know whether it was true or false that a large part of contemporary Chilean fiction had been there and had been part of that workshop. And every time I did research, I had trouble finding information.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now it is all there; the atmosphere seems to have loosened up quite a bit. But back then, in the nineties, it was difficult for me. And then I said, \u201cI want to do this.\u201d I mean, we <\/span>have<\/span><\/i> to do this with my team, with my theater company. And we threw ourselves into doing it. It has been one of the most successful plays we have had. Fifteen years have gone by, and we are still performing it.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> You are still staging it?<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> Of course, we are still putting it on. I am Mariana, no less.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> How wonderful. Nona, what also happens for you when you are working with young people who want to go into theater?<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> Of course. You pointed out something very interesting, which I think is a desire that lives in all of humanity. In fact, when we are little girls, that is what our games are about: being someone else, a woman or a man. And I think what often happens to those of us who work in theater\u2014and, mind you, also to those of us who write literature or fiction\u2014is that we remain caught up in that game, we remain caught up in that moment, in that possibility of being other women, other men, of living other lives, of inhabiting other territories.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> Nona, in an interview you said that theater circles are sometimes less competitive than literary circles, and that in theater you have a somewhat more collaborative environment.<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> Yes, it is a much more collaborative space because that is how it works. A play, obviously, can turn out to be a monologue; I can write it, I can direct it, I can perform it, but that is usually not how it works. Nor is that the aim. I am not very interested in that kind of solitary work. In fact, the two fields I work in\u2014one is literary and narrative writing, and the other is theater\u2014are, for me, complementary spaces. When I find myself working alone on my books, or even writing a play, it is a tremendously solitary space that, at times, is wonderful. Theater, on the other hand, is more collaborative and communal; ultimately, all the creative contributions circulating there are placed at the service of the others and at the service of a common goal that we do not even know when we begin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even as a playwright, I can propose a play, but I know that play I have in my head and set out in my text is going to be subverted millions of times in the work onstage: by the direction, by a performance, by the designers, by the musicians. And what comes out of all that is something else; it is something else that usually, or at least in my experience, is infinitely more interesting than what I had proposed.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> And many things happened in your career before <\/span>Mapocho<\/span><\/i> came along. Tell us.<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> Of course. I had finished my first book of short stories, called <\/span>El cielo<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>Mapocho<\/span><\/i> appeared as a final story in that book. It came out of an archive I looked at from the dictatorship years, where I saw a photograph\u2014this was in the nineties\u2014of three bodies that\u2014it must have been on September 12 or 13, 1973\u2014were there, in the river.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although we knew about that, about the bodies that had been carried along by the river during the dictatorship, seeing it affected me in a different way. Beyond knowing about it, it affected me differently, and the idea took hold of being able to investigate who these people were, these three people; to be able to tell the stories of these lives, to be able to understand how these lives had ended up in the river.<\/span><\/p>\n

In all my research, I began to understand that the dictatorship did not have a monopoly on bodies being carried down the river, and that the city of Santiago had a kind of calling to go and throw its dead, its garbage and its dead, into the river. And the book took shape, it ended up becoming something else, drawing on other archives as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> Let\u2019s talk about your book <\/span>Avenida 10 de Julio<\/span><\/i>, where you say: \u201cHistory, the sole belonging of my tired, anesthetized, and memory-sapped generation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> Well, there is something we talked about at the beginning of the interview that had to do with going out into the world at a time when there were so many enigmas, so much mystery. Things happened and no one explained them to you. And when I find in writing a platform for investigation and reflection, obviously those questions that were left there, loose in that past, begin to try to find a way to be answered. And that is how writing keeps giving me its spaces.<\/span><\/p>\n

Both <\/span>Mapocho<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Avenida 10 de Julio<\/span><\/i> have that very pronounced calling, to go hunting for those things that remained: many questions scattered around, turned over; questions that I feel my generation forgot or that became an obsession. I think my generation is divided between those of us who remained very obsessed with those questions and those of us who decided\u2014or those of them who decided\u2014to forget and move on.<\/span><\/p>\n

Avenida 10 de Julio, to be precise, here in Santiago, Chile, is the avenue of spare parts, where you normally go to look for a car part when you have lost one. Normally\u2014and this is something very interesting, and I know it happens in many cities around the world\u2014if my car mirror has been stolen, I probably will not find the same mirror, but I will find another mirror that has been stolen from another car, and I will buy it. I am going to live with a part that is not mine, but that belongs to someone else.<\/span><\/p>\n

To this day, I find the metaphor of that street mind-blowing. I think it has many readings, many possibilities for play. And I, at least in this book, was interested in that search for the original part. I am going to inhabit, I am going to go to a territory where perhaps I can find what I lost a long time ago, something that was stolen from me, something I lost, something I ruined. Perhaps I will have the chance to find it again and continue down the route. Or perhaps not? I have lost it for good, and I must remain anesthetized and inhabit this space however I can.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> In the case of your book <\/span>Space Invaders<\/span><\/i>, which has been widely read and translated, we hear another voice: the children\u2019s. And children remember differently. What satisfaction has that book given you? I\u2019m sure it has been a great deal.<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> Yes, that book has brought me many gifts. Of course, it is a very short book. To me, it was always a short story, and my editor told me, \u201cNo, this is going to be a short novel.\u201d And, of course, the book has had a very strong international impact. Well, first nationally, a very strong one. It is a book that has brought me many joys and many connections here in Chile. It has given me the chance to meet many young audiences, very young and not so young, too. It is a book that resonates deeply across all generations and internationally as well, which has always been something incomprehensible to me.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> About your book <\/span>Voyager<\/span><\/i>, you say in other interviews: \u201cRemembering is a present act; we remember, and we make it present in the moment of remembering.\u201d This book talks about memory, as well as mothers, grandmothers, and caregivers.<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> Voyager<\/span><\/i> is a very wide-ranging book, because it talks about stellar memory, it talks about nebulae, it talks about our neurons, our neural constellations, how similar neural constellations are to stellar constellations. And the starting point is my mother\u2019s failing memory, when she begins to have epilepsy, because my mother has epilepsy, and her memory begins to fail a little because of that. And how her memory becomes strange, and how I begin to embody that memory, and how, in fact, I also begin to pass it on.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I think it is extremely important, not only because we are living in a time when we want to highlight women\u2019s memory, writing, and presence in our lives. We are living in a moment when this seems tremendously important to us, and it is. I have always thought it was important to observe, underscore, and highlight women\u2019s work. But it also seemed important to me because my mother\u2014and I am going to be very specific\u2014is a very small person. No, she is a great woman. She is not an intellectual woman, a scientist, she is not a point of reference for anyone except me, and that is probably no small thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that was precisely what I liked in the book: talking about the importance of small people, of small women, of those who are not noticed by history and will not be noticed by history, but who build reality insofar as they are our predecessors, insofar as they are our points of reference and keep giving us not only pieces of their lives and their memories, but their entire lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

A.P.:<\/b> Yes, I love the book, I love the beginning, and I love the idea of connecting it with constellations of stars, which is obviously a beautiful metaphor. Nona, thank you so much for this interview.<\/span><\/p>\n

N.F.:<\/b> Absolutely, Adriana, thank you very much.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Translated by Andrea Mac\u00edas Jim\u00e9nez<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

You can listen to the full interview on <\/b>Hablemos, escritoras<\/i><\/b>.<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n
Buy books by the authors and translators featured in this issue on our Bookshop page!<\/b><\/a><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo: Chilean writer and actress Nona Fern\u00e1ndez.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hablemos, escritoras: Episode 561 The name of Chilean playwright, actress, writer, and screenwriter Nona Fern\u00e1ndez is Patricia Paola Fern\u00e1ndez Silanes. She was born in Santiago, Chile, on June 23, 1971, and trained in theater at the Universidad Cat\u00f3lica. Among her best-known plays are El taller (2012) and Liceo de ni\u00f1as (2016), produced and premiered by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":46771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2878],"tags":[5739],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[5272],"lal_author":[4861],"class_list":["post-47273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-issue-39","translator-andrea-macias-jimenez","lal_author-adriana-pacheco-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47273"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47553,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47273\/revisions\/47553"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47273"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=47273"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=47273"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=47273"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=47273"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=47273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]