Translator\u2019s Note<\/b><\/p>\n
What follows is an excerpt from <\/span>Caballo fantasma<\/span><\/i>, the award-winning novel by Karina Sosa Casta\u00f1eda. Originally published by Almad\u00eda in Mexico City (2020), the translation is not yet under contract.<\/span><\/p>\n Although the novel begins with these seven words\u2014\u201cMy mother died six hundred days ago\u201d\u2014the unusual thing about the protagonist\u2019s opening comment is that she never really knew her mother Leonora. Part fictionalized memoir, this short novel, written in pristine prose, tells the story of how a young woman finds ways to grapple with her mother\u2019s former absence and new ghostly presence, a mother who abandoned her at a young age and yet seems to come alive in death; the mysteries surrounding her life haunt her daughter Ka, short for Karenina, from the Tolstoy novel. Ka writes and reads her way through this unusual loss as she makes entries in her diary and searches for clues\u2014literary and real\u2014about her childhood, her mother\u2026 and horses, one of the few things she knows Leonora adored.<\/span><\/p>\n Ghost Horse, <\/span><\/i>its title in English,<\/span> also delves into the psychological and philosophical processes of a quirky young woman: Ka\u2019s fierce independence and nonconformity, her love of books and libraries, her search for meaning and identity, but also her lies and deception. The book explores these depths through short chapters ranging from a few lines to a few pages in length, chapters that move from past to present and back again, and from self-contained scenes with her boyfriend to quotes from books and snippets of writers\u2019 life stories, making <\/span>Ghost Horse<\/span><\/i> a booklovers\u2019 tale but also a tale of lovers: Ka seems to never sleep with her boyfriend yet does sleep with another\u2019s partner. The author weaves together a sophisticated tale of memory, longing, dreams, death, ghosts, loss, desires, and secrets. As she does so, the reader slowly comes to doubt the reliability of the narrator: has the story all been a dream? And therein lies the intrigue of <\/span>Ghost Horse<\/span><\/i> and the nature of good fiction: both pull readers into someone else\u2019s very particular world and out of their own for a just awhile.<\/span><\/p>\n Without a doubt, Sosa\u2019s novel, with its pared-down structure, exquisitely chosen words, and sui generis worldview, is a literary gem that will intrigue English-speaking audiences.<\/span><\/p>\n Interested publishers should feel free to contact the translator with any inquiries at <\/span>rowenagalavitz@yahoo.com<\/span><\/a> or Karina Sosa Casta\u00f1eda\u2019s agent Ver\u00f3nica Flores at <\/span>vf@vfagencialiteraria.com<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Rowena Galavitz <\/p>\n \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n The horse\u2019s form represents the best part of \u2014Clarice Lispector\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/p>\n My mother died six hundred days ago. I have not been able to cry about it. Today, I\u2019ve come alone to a hotel that used to be a convent. A former convent where Italo Calvino wrote, \u201cOaxaca has the sound of an h\u2026\u201d the first words of \u201cUnder the Jaguar Sun.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I think about all kinds of absence. I\u2019m ruthless: at heart, my mother\u2019s death is just an excuse to write. One more way to alleviate my angst. I\u2019m in this place because of my impossibility: I have no one to cry with and: \u201cWhat is death without tears?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At this hotel, I seem like a distracted tourist. I got a room to spend the night. I have some black pants in my bag and blue velvet shoes. I think about Miyako Ishiuchi, the Japanese woman who photographs objects for each of her series. I could make a series that brings together my absent mother\u2019s objects. But perhaps every single one of her things has vanished from the world. I hope so. I hope all objects belonging in life to those now dead vanish from the world.<\/span><\/p>\n I didn\u2019t bring a picture of Mama to this hotel. Not even a book. Only the diaries I\u2019ve written over the last ten years, which I call <\/span>An Insignificant Woman<\/span><\/i>. I make notes:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI want to hear the voices, up close, of these silent tourists who barely make a sound, rising from the balcony to my bed. I want to drink anisette with coffee beans. Like Onetti did.<\/span><\/p>\n Onetti smoked all the time and when he spoke, his speech was unhurried; he always preferred silence. Mama is dead and she left me an idea: the idea that her life was closely linked to the life of horses.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I knew nothing about my mother. I hardly knew her name. I knew that we separated because it was best. Because she was fragile, because of my father\u2019s temperament, because for my mother I belonged to another life. My father\u2019s life.<\/span><\/p>\n But her absence, my mother\u2019s absence, only hit me in the moment they told me: <\/span>Your mother is dead<\/span><\/i>. Never before.<\/span><\/p>\n Mama had her reasons. And my father never felt like talking about it. That\u2019s how we grew up: my father and I, together, knowing that a woman, absent like a ghost, had brought me into the world. And that was enough.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019d like to say that I\u2019ll have a smoke and hang a sign on the door that says: I\u2019m Not Here. But you can\u2019t smoke at this hotel\u2014and besides, no one would come to look for me. Least of all here. I write a phrase from Onetti in my diaries: \u201cIt\u2019s true I don\u2019t know how to write, but I write about myself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n Curzio Malaparte, <\/span>Sangue<\/span><\/i>:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat disturbed me most, from when I was three or four years old, was that I felt surrounded by mysterious facts. From morning to night, every time I opened my mouth I asked for an explanation about some mystery: Who made the wall? Who made the horse? Who made the car? Who made the sky?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n The first time I considered in any sort of defined way looking for evidence of the horses was the day N left my life forever.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I might say N was a ghost. I say it to console myself. But I know I\u2019m lying. Of course N exists: he has a body, he walks in the world, like those images in my memory where horses sleep, curled up among stones, with their warm breath, like a very distant recollection; N\u2019s voice and hands come and go from my memory to the void.<\/span><\/p>\n In my unimportant journals there are things about N. But it\u2019s as if his absence meant more.<\/span><\/p>\n There are some poems in my diary that I copied from old books, things I underlined from my readings, photographs, cuttings, words, notes, shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of desires, birthday lists, lists of numbers. The addresses of people I\u2019ve stopped seeing.<\/span><\/p>\n My father hates lists. He says they have no purpose at all in the world. I make lists to unhinge my father. I unhinge him in secret.<\/span><\/p>\n My father, just like almost everyone else in the world, knows nothing about me.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n Can someone who has lived within you, even for a moment, stay there forever?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n I believe N has the same birthday as S\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai. I read S\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai\u2019s journals all the time. I think about his final years as he endured the slow death of his wife Lola. I think about the day S\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai decided to take his life, about how someone can come to know that today is the day.<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to understand S\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai. I think about him strolling in the V\u00e9rmez<\/span>\u0151 Park while the coachman smokes on the street. M\u00e1rai would go into a caf\u00e9 to read the newspaper and sit quietly.<\/span><\/p>\n Outside, his driver and horse wait for him. The coachman\u2019s horse would just barely move, like an old mountain of black, velvety stones.<\/span><\/p>\n A horse is also a mound of velvety stones that await movement.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s been quite a few days since my father has stopped talking to me at dinner. Sometimes I tell him lies. I tell him I\u2019ve saved up almost enough money to leave the country. My father gets all enthusiastic and says there\u2019s no need for me to save money; I could go wherever I want because that\u2019s what he has worked for.<\/span><\/p>\n You deserve everything. You\u2019ll see<\/span><\/i>, that\u2019s what he says, and then I tell him more lies. I tell him about Kevin. My father\u2019s pleased with the idea that Kevin will be with me for the rest of my life. I tell him that\u2019s how it will be. I tell more lies to make my father happy.<\/span><\/p>\n My father has no idea I\u2019m looking for something. He doesn\u2019t know I\u2019m immersed in things about dead people, ghosts, lies, horses\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n I want to enunciate a long sentence that jolts him. I want to make my father gather up the courage to give me an answer. Any answer.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/span><\/p>\n Do you like horses? Your mother loved horses.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The man who lived by my mother\u2019s side for the last twenty years tells me this. I think about how they met. I think about it at this very moment. I smell paraffin and we\u2019re in a funeral home that\u2019s too big; the carpet\u2019s the color of human blood. In the other room, there\u2019s apple pound cake, coffee and chocolates\u2014a present for those who came to the viewing. I think about the Ganges, about food stalls and death floating in the water. I feel like throwing up right here. I\u2019m drugged. Before I arrived I took a Lexapro; I\u2019ve taken it a couple of times. I feel like I\u2019m going to faint but something inside me resists.<\/span><\/p>\n I look at that man, my mother\u2019s widower, and I know he\u2019s not a ghost. He slurs his words. He barely manages to say something to me that I try not to hear. His green eyes and stiff body. What kept them together? A TV actor and my mother.<\/span><\/p>\n I think about that man\u2019s tears. Who was my mother? What is a horse in this world? What is a horse for me? A horse in the world\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n In the coffin, my mother seemed like a sweet woman. Her eyes were shut. I wish those eyes would look at me now. Her clasped hands reminded me of mine. The black dress seemed like that of a serious, old woman.<\/span><\/p>\n What did that small woman, always sick, with trembling breath and frazzled nerves, have to do with horses?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n After I finished college and came back home, Papa insisted I live with him. I stayed for a week until I found a new place.<\/span><\/p>\n On the fifteenth of September I moved into an apartment on Calle Hidalgo. But there was no need for a moving truck. I gave away the books I had bought during four years of college to my friends at school. I left others for the new tenant, who was, according to the landlords, a dentistry student. The only thing I kept was an ancient edition of the <\/span>Decameron<\/span><\/i> by Boccaccio. That and my clothes. My old black boots.<\/span><\/p>\n How many objects fit into a suitcase when you\u2019re going home?<\/span><\/p>\n How many things would you take to a desert island\u2026 in Oaxaca?<\/span><\/p>\n A book, some boots and a coat.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n September was terribly rainy in Oaxaca. Three weeks had passed, and I still didn\u2019t understand what I was doing there.<\/span><\/p>\n During that first month, I awoke some nights thinking I was at the apartment in the other city.<\/span><\/p>\n I thought about the vintage mirror in front of the bed. I missed the yellowish light of the lamp I bought in an antique store when I first got to the city. At the time, I was twenty-three.<\/span><\/p>\n There, in that college-student apartment, it was like being in a cave. The walls were humid. I liked my room\u2014and the narrow living-dining-room with the new sofa bed where I\u2019d sleep sometimes. Every once in a while Kevin would sleep there. I recall that aside from the lamp, I bought a couple of pillows, some spoons, a few plates, a three-tiered bookcase (very cheap and wobbly) and a blue plastic curtain that separated the shower from the toilet.<\/span><\/p>\n I liked that apartment where I\u2019d occasionally bring flowers. Where smoking was allowed\u2026 even though I didn\u2019t smoke.<\/span><\/p>\n I liked that it was a house inside a house: the owners lived downstairs, at the end of the hall decorated with artificial plants.<\/span><\/p>\n I liked being someone else within those blue walls.<\/span><\/p>\n In Oaxaca, in the spacious, well-lit apartment where the scent of the lemon tree on the patio wafted inside at night, I missed my cave, the humidity, being a foreigner in a city where you can be a ghost, where you\u2019re always alone. That\u2019s what I missed: not belonging.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/strong><\/p>\n In March, I was trying to make everything seem normal. I thought I should find an escape route.<\/span><\/p>\n I started working, thanks to the recommendation of my father\u2019s friend, at an office, a building with air conditioning and ten small cubicles in which each of the young architects replicated the idea of a home designed expressly for the survivors of this country in ruins.<\/span><\/p>\n It was the six-month anniversary of my new life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The trumpet trees were blooming, those yellow trees that bathe everything with living light. I thought about Kyoto. I discovered that a few blocks from my apartment there was a quiet library, its patio with a trellis of bougainvillea that trapped the murmurs from the outside world.<\/span><\/p>\n The library had a section on entomology, another on Gothic art, one on Italian painters. It was like entering an infinite labyrinth. It made me think of Alexandria.<\/span><\/p>\n Having a social life didn\u2019t interest me, but sometimes I\u2019d go drink at La Independencia Bar. There I could pretend to be someone else. There no one asked questions. Everyone was doing their own thing, drinking on the cheap and eating run-of-the-mill appetizers, pickled hot dogs or fried food, and singing banda songs from Sinaloa. It was a place where you could disappear for a while and the next day there\u2019d still be no answers.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n * * *<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n I wish I had pets: fish, for example. A round fish bowl on the table next to the fruit bowl. But that was absurd, in my mind I had the idea of leaving, of fleeing. Pets tie you down to cities, they\u2019re never happy somewhere else. No fishbowl or fruit bowl sits on the table.<\/span><\/p>\n May in particular was hellishly hot. Perhaps it was the heat. Perhaps it was because the office had a new project to design a government building. A huge budget. The head architect said he wanted something <\/span>novel<\/span><\/i>. I thought of Zaha Hadid. She was popular. I liked her work. But the boss said no. He showed us a sketch: a round building with a lot of glass. Round cement. Like a cake. I thought about Doric columns. As a joke, I told him, <\/span>Doric columns for the hallway<\/span><\/i>. He said, <\/span>You\u2019re a genius.<\/span><\/i> I was ashamed. I looked at his pearly smile with a single golden tooth. I was afraid of ending up as an architect who likes designing white elephants.<\/span><\/p>\n It was then, when the karaoke thing happened, that N and I met.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Translator\u2019s Note What follows is an excerpt from Caballo fantasma, the award-winning novel by Karina Sosa Casta\u00f1eda. Originally published by Almad\u00eda in Mexico City (2020), the translation is not yet under contract. Although the novel begins with these seven words\u2014\u201cMy mother died six hundred days ago\u201d\u2014the unusual thing about the protagonist\u2019s opening comment is that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":25283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4167],"tags":[4514],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[4512],"lal_author":[4510],"class_list":["post-25744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sobre-la-traduccion","tag-numero-26","translator-rowena-galavitz-es","lal_author-karina-sosa-castaneda-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25744"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=25744"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=25744"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=25744"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=25744"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=25744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span>Albuquerque, New Mexico<\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/i>humans. I have a horse in me that rarely
\n<\/i>expresses itself. But when I see another horse
\n<\/span><\/i>\u00a0then my horse comes alive. Its form speaks.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nTranslated by Rowena Galavitz<\/span><\/h5>\n
Excerpt from\u00a0<\/span>Caballo fantasma<\/span><\/i>, copyright \u00a9 2020 Karina Sosa Casta\u00f1eda<\/span>
\n<\/span>English translation copyright \u00a9 2022 Rowena Galavitz<\/span><\/h6>\nPhoto: Annie Spratt, Unsplash.<\/span><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"