In the work of Antonio Rivero Taravillo (1963–2025), literature occupies a central place. Novels such as Los huesos olvidados, Los fantasmas de Yeats, and 1922 offer clear proof of this. He received the Antonio Domínguez Ortiz Prize for his study of the life of Juan Eduardo Cirlot and the Premio Comillas for his biography of Luis Cernuda. A profound connoisseur of Irish literature and of Gaelic, he also carried out significant work as a translator, most notably his Spanish translation of the complete poetic works of W.B. Yeats. As a poet, he published the collections La lluvia and Lo que importa. This interview was conducted some time ago; may its publication now serve as a tribute to his life and work.
Eduardo Suárez Fernández-Miranda: 1922 is a book that marks the centennial of several events fundamental to literary history. Alongside the complex figure of James Joyce and his Ulysses, you also give prominence to T. S. Eliot and the publication of The Waste Land. The opening pages are devoted to Ezra Pound. What role did Pound play in the publication of both works?
Antonio Rivero Taravillo: In the book, Eliot is given the importance he deserves—which is considerable. The year begins with the publication of Ulysses, then in October and November The Waste Land appears in Great Britain and the United States. Joyce’s work transforms our idea of the novel, but Eliot’s does the same with our idea of the poem. Questions about what The Waste Land is and what it speaks of are still discussed a century later; the debate remains unresolved. For the publication of both works—and for their authors to have time, attention, contacts, and income—Pound was providential, a benefactor as well to others such as Hemingway, who also appears in 1922. Pound was far more than a defender of the political theories of Mussolini or a psychiatric patient at the end of the war: he was a lifelong defender of the best poetry and innovative literature. To put it plainly, Pound is far closer to Dante than to Meloni.
E.S.F-M.: Formally, 1922 can be considered a novel. Yet, upon reading it, one gets the impression of being faced with a documentary. All the characters and events are treated with rigor and verisimilitude. Was it difficult to maintain that balance so that the novel did not become an essay?
A.R.T.: The protagonists are authors that I have been familiar with for a long time. I have either translated or written about all the principal ones, and as 2022—the centennial of the events narrated in my book—approached, it became increasingly clear to me that I wanted to do something with them, prompted by the happy coincidence of so much genius giving its all at the same moment. What initially took shape as the idea for an informative essay ended up becoming a novel—a sui generis novel of the kind I tend to write. It is like deriving the score from biographies, epistolaries, and other documents, and from there producing a unique interpretation as a musician would: closer to the traditional or jazz than to the classical, with ample room to introduce that personal touch. Everything of importance narrated in 1922 is true; I merely allowed myself to dress it up with descriptions and dialogues (also plausible) and, above all, with a stylistic vocation not lacking in humor—just as humor abounds in Ulysses itself. Flann O’Brien, for instance, emphasized above all Joyce’s humor, something he himself did not lack, and according to Djuna Barnes, Joyce once said of his book: “There is not a single serious line in it.” When the time came for final edits, I made sure that the accumulation of facts did not overwhelm; I removed dates and details and placed more focus on the atmosphere.
As for the verisimilitude of Ulysses, not long ago I read an article by Anne Enright—also a compatriot of Joyce—in which she suggested that “at times it seems that commentators fetichize Joyce’s fetishization of plausibility; despite all his use of maps, directories, and train schedules, he also wrote whatever he pleased.” That, indeed, is the essential point: transforming into a work of art what might otherwise have been a telephone directory or a manual on literature.
E.S.F-M.: Through the pages of your book pass figures such as Paul Valéry, André Breton, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Pablo Picasso… Was 1922 an unrepeatable year for culture?
A.R.T.: It was certainly a very important year. With the end of the Great War, the avant-gardes that had remained latent finally emerged and took flight, having been kept quiet by the tragedy of war—in other words, they were silenced by the cannons. In the book, I tell of everything that was taking shape in 1922, including in the Spanish-speaking world: from estridentismo in Mexico to César Vallejo in Peru, who that year published his groundbreaking Trilce and the following year left for Paris, the space where almost all of this unfolded. For Paris, together with the year itself, is the book’s protagonist. It was not only the capital of literature written in French, but also of that written in English, and in a sense, of many other literatures as well.
E.S.F-M.: Returning to Joyce’s Ulysses, why do you think it is a book that arouses such fascination? What did its publication mean for literature? And how did you first encounter this novel by an Irish writer?
A.R.T.: There is no single factor. Narrative devices such as stream of consciousness had already been used by others, but Joyce uses them in a masterful way, alongside a range of other tones, methods, and styles. He practically changes his procedure with each chapter. The triumph of Ulysses is the triumph of language itself, and of the ways in which it is channeled. I have always loved Ireland and its extraordinarily rich literary tradition, in which Joyce is—brilliant and great as he may be—an enormous figure, yet still one link in a longer chain. I studied English philology through my fourth year, and if I never completed the degree, it was because I was suddenly seized by enthusiasm for Gaelic—both Scottish and Irish. This is one of the currents (only one of them) that converges in Joyce. Later, I became involved in the Bloomsday celebrations in Seville and coordinated a collective volume published by the Fundación José Manuel Lara in 2004, when a century had passed since the day Bloom walked through Dublin and through the twists and turns of the human soul.
E.S.F-M.: Joyce advised his Aunt Josephine—who had provided him with so many useful details about Dublin—to read The Odyssey, or Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses, beforehand: “You can read it in one night. You can find it at Gill’s or Browne and Nolan’s for a couple of shillings; then try Ulysses again.” How might our reading change if we were to take Homer’s poem into account?
A.R.T.: We would see that the works engage in dialogue with one another at different levels. Toward the end of 1922, we see a version of Antigone that Jean Cocteau created and staged that very year. Sophocles too, is alive, and so are so many others. The classics are old dogs, affectionate ones, who from time to time ask us to take them out for a walk and give them fresh water.
E.S.F-M.: In the essay Why Read the Classics, Italo Calvino observes that “the more one thinks one knows them by hearsay, the newer, more unexpected, and unprecedented they turn out to be when one actually reads them.” Joyce’s Ulysses has generated an enormous body of criticism. Do you think it is important to be familiar with it beforehand, or should one instead “plunge right into its pages, letting oneself be carried along by the musical and atmospheric power of its language,” as advised by José María Valverde?
A.R.T.: I think both Calvino and Valverde are correct. There is no need to do preparatory homework. The more one knows, the better; but to perfectly understand Ulysses, one would have to be a Dubliner in 1904—and if, instead of being called Patrick O’Halloran, for instance, or John Doe, one were James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, all the better. The good thing is that over the course of the last hundred years there have been many people called something else that have nevertheless enjoyed the book, to a greater or lesser degree. Its length can be daunting, but fortunately, one can also enjoy reading its chapters independently, so long as you focus above all on its procedures and styles.
E.S.F-M.: You are a profound connoisseur of Irish literature and of Gaelic. You have translated Flann O’Brien—I am thinking in particular of The Hard Life (La saga del sagú de Slattery)—and the complete poetic works of W.B. Yeats, published by Pre-Textos. How did the idea of translating Yeats come about?
A.R.T.: Irish literature is extraordinarily rich. I was fortunate enough to immerse myself in it at a young age, through music and mythology, and to study Irish—or Gaelic—on my own (although, strictly speaking, the latter term refers to the Celtic language of Scotland, which I also studied and translated). That is what allowed me to bring into Spanish the only novel that Flann O’Brien wrote in Irish, An Béal Bocht (La boca pobre), as well as a selection of his newspaper columns, La gente corriente de Irlanda, in which he plays with the Irish language. He spoke and wrote Irish perfectly, unlike Joyce or Yeats, whose knowledge of the language was quite superficial. I began translating Yeats after feeling bewildered by certain extraordinary poems like “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” Later, I decided to embark—starting out as a cabin boy and finishing as captain—on the journey of translating his collected poetry. Some of Yeats’s poems are very dark, weighed down, in my opinion, by a confusing esotericism, but these poems are more than made up for by others: love poems from his early period or works concerned with political and social matters, such as “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” about the Irish conflict whose outbreak has also now reached its centennial (a subject to which I devote a chapter in 1922).
E.S.F-M.: Given your strong affinity for Irish literature, have you ever considered translating Ulysses or Finnegans Wake?
A.R.T.: Both would be titanic undertakings, and the latter in particular is tyrannical in the linguistic deformation it demands. That said, in my third year at university I translated, together with a classmate, a paragraph from Finnegans Wake, attempting to preserve its multiple meanings and the banquet of words—something that, between us, no one has managed to reproduce quite like a writer whose last name happens to be a variant of my own: Julián Ríos. A translation of Finnegans Wake would necessarily have to be a re-creation. I wouldn’t mind attempting it, but it may make more sense—although it may not seem to make sense at all—to read the original.
E.S.F-M.: On the occasion of the centennial of Ulysses, the Spanish translations that have appeared to date—those by José Salas Subirat, Valverde (revised), María Luisa Venegas Lagüéns and Francisco García Tortosa, as well as Joaquim Mallafrè’s in Catalan—have been rereleased. What do you think of them?
A.R.T.: There is also the translation by Marcelo Zalaboy—who is himself the translator of Finnegans Wake—and, in September, one by Carlos Manzano appeared as well. I have great respect for all of them. I have compared them selectively (I have only read the book in its entirety in English), and each has its own merits. I would perhaps opt for Valverde’s revised version, although the translation by Venegas and García Tortosa, published by Cátedra (not by Alianza, where it has also appeared), includes an excellent introduction by the latter. I have not looked closely at Mallafrè’s translation, but the reports I have received are excellent.
E.S.F-M.: “One must bear in mind the translatability of linguistic creation, even though human beings are incapable of fully carrying it out.” These words by Walter Benjamin speak to the difficulty of the translator’s work. How do you approach a literary text you are to translate, and what materials do you rely on?
A.R.T.: With audacity and humility. In general, if there is a sense of attunement with the author or with the story itself, so much the better. I prefer to translate poetry because it is the genre that I practice with the greatest devotion and because, despite the limitations it imposes, it affords me a great deal of freedom. At the moment I am translating a novel written in Irish, a process for which access to digital dictionaries saves me considerable effort (although I still keep some of those volumes in print). I believe that the resulting text must produce an effect. And if we are talking about a poem, one must translate its music. In poetry, the literal translation is the most unfaithful of all.
E.S.F-M.: As a novelist, you have published Los fantasmas de Yeats, a re-creation of the Irish poet’s journey with his wife to Seville in 1927, at the time of the Generation of ’27’s homage to Luis de Góngora; and Los huesos olvidados, in which Octavio Paz appears as one of the protagonists. It seems that you have made literature itself the central protagonist of your novels. Is that so?
A.R.T.: It is. I do not consider myself a writer of fiction. What I tend to do in narrative is to give novelistic form to chronicles centered on authors who, for one reason or another, have interested me—though with a more literary treatment when it comes to language. In 1922, for example, there are numerous winks and homages to works written by the protagonists. Just as there is science fiction or the historical novel, one might say—if it doesn’t sound too strange—that what I create is “literature fiction.”
E.S.F-M.: Seville and Dublin come together each June 16 to commemorate Bloomsday. How did this celebration come about in the Andalusian city?
A.R.T.: The driving spirit behind it all was Juan Antonio Maesso, of the Diputación de Sevilla, who convinced his institution to celebrate the day—an especially beautiful occasion because it is not tied to an anniversary, nor to Joyce’s birth, nor the publication of Ulysses, but rather to the day on which the action of the novel takes place. It is the most literary of celebrations, with readings, dark beer, and kidneys. It was also providential that García Tortosa was a professor in Seville: a Joyce specialist and one of the translators of the book, he knew how to spread his love of the Irish author to many of his students—some of whom later became professors themselves.
E.S.F.-M.: It is also in Seville where you direct the magazine Estación Poesía. Can you tell us a bit about this publication?
A.R.T.: It is a magazine I proposed to the Centro de Iniciativas Culturales de la Universidad de Sevilla (CICUS). It began publication in 2014, and twenty-five issues have appeared to date. It includes the work of well-established poets as well as emerging voices, in addition to reviews, translations, and the occasional article, and highlights both poetry from Spain and poetry produced in Latin America. From now on, each issue will include a monographic dossier. The first of these was devoted to Luis Cernuda, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of his birth.
E.S.F.-M.: Los hilos rotos, your most recent book of poems, was awarded the Premio Nacional de Poesia Ciudad de Lucena “Lara Cantizani.” Earlier you had published El bosque sin regreso and Lo que importa. What place does poetry occupy within your literary work?
A.R.T.: I began by writing poetry, and it is with poetry that I continue to write—although sometimes the thought crosses my mind that I no longer have anything to say. I believe, however, that this is a mistake, because even when themes become overused there are always new ways of approaching them.
E.S.F.-M.: To conclude, we would like to know what literary projects you are currently working on.
A.R.T.: In the first quarter of next year, the Vandalia collection will publish a book of my poems. A few months later, in order to give that book some time to breathe before it is crowded out by its siblings, I would like to begin releasing, in an orderly fashion, the rest of my poetry volumes, as I have a considerable number of unpublished ones—a figure I will not give here because it seems a bit obscene (it is not sixty-nine, but it comes close). I have also finished another novel of that particular kind that I tend to write: a novelized biography of a very singular English poet who, incidentally, spent forty years interned in the same psychiatric facility as Lucia, Joyce’s daughter. At the same time, I am currently polishing a more orthodox and canonical biography—without any fiction beyond that already found in the protagonist’s own highly imaginative life—on one of the finest Spanish writers of the twentieth century. As for translations, I have decided to set aside those that others can undertake—books of prose without major complications—and to concentrate instead on translating poetry, which demands more of me but gives more in return. Ideally, these will be texts written in languages to whose study I have devoted a great deal of time and which, if I do not translate them myself, I fear will remain untranslated: texts written in Irish of any era as well as texts in Scottish Gaelic and in Medieval Welsh from periods earlier than what is known outside of Wales through the Mabinogion.
Translated by Iyan Smith Williams
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