{"id":31240,"date":"2024-03-25T13:03:38","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T19:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/2024\/03\/cyclops-by-alejandro-zambra\/"},"modified":"2024-03-28T00:38:07","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T06:38:07","slug":"cyclops-by-alejandro-zambra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/2024\/03\/cyclops-by-alejandro-zambra\/","title":{"rendered":"Cyclops by Alejandro Zambra"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note:<\/b> Megan McDowell\u2019s translation of \u201cCyclops\u201d by Alejandro Zambra will be included as one of five additional stories in the soon-to-be-released new edition of <\/span>My Documents<\/span><\/i> from Penguin Books. We are happy to share the story as part of this issue\u2019s feature on Zambra\u2019s work. It appears exclusively in English as a preview of the forthcoming publication.<\/span><\/p>\n

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First, you have to live, Claudia said, and it was hard not to agree: before you could write, you had to live the stories, the adventures. Back then, I wasn\u2019t interested in telling stories. She was, or actually she wasn\u2019t, not yet: what she wanted was to live the stories that maybe years or decades later, in an uncertain and tranquil future, she would tell. Claudia was Cortazarian as could be, although her first experience with Cort\u00e1zar had been, in reality, a disappointment: when she reached chapter 7 of <\/span>Hopscotch<\/span><\/i>, she recognized, in horror, the very text that her boyfriend would often recite to her as his own. As a result, she broke up with him and began a romance with Cort\u00e1zar that perhaps continues to this day. My friend was not, is not, named Claudia: I\u2019m protecting her identity, just in case, and also that of her ex\u2010boyfriend, who in those days was a teacher\u2019s assistant and surely today teaches classes on Cort\u00e1zar or Lezama Lima or intertextuality at some university in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

At that point, in 1993 or 1994, Claudia was already, no doubt about it, the protagonist of a long, beautiful, and complex novel, worthy of Cort\u00e1zar or Kerouac or anyone else who might dare to follow her fast, intense life. Other people\u2019s lives\u2014our lives\u2014on the other hand, could fit easily onto one page (double\u2010spaced, at that). At eighteen years old, Claudia had already been there and back several times: from one city to another, one country to another, one continent to another, and also, above all, from pain to joy and joy to pain. She filled her notebooks with what I always supposed were stories or sketches for stories or maybe a diary. But the one time she read some of the pieces to me, I discovered, to my astonishment, that she wrote poems. She didn\u2019t call them poems, but rather <\/span>annotations<\/span><\/i>. The only real difference between those annotations and the texts that I wrote back then was the level of imposture: we transcribed the same sentences, described the same scenes, but she promptly forgot them or at least claimed to, while I recopied them neatly and wasted hours trying out different titles and structures.<\/span><\/p>\n

You should write stories, or a novel, I told Claudia that afternoon of cold wind and chilled beer. You\u2019ve lived through a lot, I added, clumsily. No, she replied, categorically: you\u2019ve lived more, you\u2019ve lived much more than me, and then she started to tell my life story as if she were reading my palm, past, present, and future. She exaggerated, as all fiction writers (and all poets) do: random childhood anecdotes became fundamental, every event signified a decisive loss or advancement. I half identified myself in the protagonist, and could partially recognize the decisive secondary characters (she herself was, in the story, a secondary character who took on importance little by little). I wanted to match that novel by improvising Claudia\u2019s life story, too: I talked about travel, about her difficult return to Chile, her parents\u2019 separation, and I would have kept going, but suddenly Claudia told me to be quiet and went to the bathroom or said she was going to the bathroom, and she didn\u2019t come back for ten or twenty minutes. She returned with slow steps, masking, just barely, a fear or shame I hadn\u2019t seen in her before. I\u2019m sorry, she said, I don\u2019t know if I\u2019d like for someone to write my life story. I\u2019d like to tell it myself, or maybe not have it told at all. We lay in the grass and exchanged apologies as if we were competing in a good manners contest. But, in reality, we were speaking a private language that neither of us knew how to translate, or wanted to.<\/span><\/p>\n

That was when she told me about chapter 7 of <\/span>Hopscotch<\/span><\/i>. Because I knew that particular TA and I knew he\u2019d been Claudia\u2019s boyfriend, the story struck me as even more comic; I pictured him as the cyclops Cort\u00e1zar spoke of (\u201c. . . and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap . . .\u201d). I suppressed my laughter until Claudia let out a guffaw and told me it wasn\u2019t true, but we both knew it was. I don\u2019t really like Cort\u00e1zar, I blurted out suddenly, maybe just to change the subject. Why not? I don\u2019t know, I just don\u2019t really like him, I repeated, and we laughed again, this time for no reason, now free of the stifling seriousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

It would be easy, now, to refute or confirm those clich\u00e9s: if you have lived a lot you write novels, if you\u2019ve only lived a little you write poems. But that wasn\u2019t exactly our argument, which wasn\u2019t an argument, or at least not the kind where one person wins and the other loses. We wanted, perhaps, to tie, to go on talking until they set the dogs on us and we had to run away, drunk, leaping over the sky\u2010blue fence. But we weren\u2019t drunk yet, and the guard couldn\u2019t care less whether we left or went right on talking all night long.<\/span><\/p>\n

Translated by Megan McDowell
\n<\/span>From <\/span>My Documents<\/span><\/i>, forthcoming from Penguin Books in 2024<\/span><\/h5>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCOMPRA LOS LIBROS DESTACADOS EN ESTE N\u00daMERO EN NUESTRA P\u00c1GINA DE BOOKSHOP<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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Photo: Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov, Unsplash.<\/span><\/h6>\n
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Editor\u2019s Note: Megan McDowell\u2019s translation of \u201cCyclops\u201d by Alejandro Zambra will be included as one of five additional stories in the soon-to-be-released new edition of My Documents from Penguin Books. We are happy to share the story as part of this issue\u2019s feature on Zambra\u2019s work. It appears exclusively in English as a preview of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":30914,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4853],"tags":[4906],"genre":[],"pretext":[],"section":[],"translator":[],"lal_author":[3108],"class_list":["post-31240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-autor-destacado-alejandro-zambra","tag-numero-29","lal_author-alejandro-zambra-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31240","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=31240"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31757,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31240\/revisions\/31757"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31240"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=31240"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=31240"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=31240"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=31240"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=31240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}