Time and Place: Past/Present/Spring/Fall

I'll be teaching in Rosario in the fall. I always say "fall" when I announce this plan, though it will be spring in Argentina. It is almost impossible for me to think of October as anything other than autumn--I can imagine the month with different weather than that of Oregon or Michigan, but it's hard to affix a different label. This may be one more tell-tale sign of a person who, as my children like to remind me, never managed to leave school. Deformación profesional. For a translator-traveler, it doesn't bode well.

One of the stray details I recall from high school geometry is the idea of translation across a line. In September, I will "translate" myself across the Equator. Translate myself from the fall to the spring quadrant, plotting coordinates that in all likelihood are not functionally equivalent.

I've done this before. But in highland Ecuador, more on the Equator than across it, the seasons weren't marked, or the weather seemed spring-like when I expected spring, or persistent drought threw everything out of whack, so none of us--locals or visitors--knew what to expect.

In preparation for a spatial translation, I'm reading as much as I can. On the page--across the page--I translate just fine, to alternate realities, different worlds, parallel universes, an unbecoming future or a still imperfect past. Right now, I'm mid-way through Angélica Gorodischer's Trafalgar. (To my knowledge, the full collection hasn't been translated, though the first story, "A la luz de la casta luna electrónica"--"By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon"--appears in Fares and Hermann's anthology, Contemporary Argentinean Women Writers (1998), translated by Linda Britt.)

The book takes place, sort of, in Rosario. It is told in Rosario, as the inter-galactic salesman Trafalgar Medrano relates his travels and adventures to an unnamed listener/narrator (a woman who keeps cats and brews bad coffee). Questions of translation permeate the narrative, not only as demanded by encounters with the inhabitants of other worlds, but as a preoccupation or labor of the people (beings?) Trafalgar encounters, such as the linguist Veri Halabi in "La sensatez del círculo."

My current favorite, though, is "De navegantes." In this tale, Trafalgar visits the court of Isabel of Castilla in 1492--traveling not in time, but to a world that is nearly identical to the one he and his interlocutor inhabit some 500 years later. In either world, it's a pivotal moment in Spanish and world history. It's the seed of origin myths (the canon of Latin American literature often starts with Colón) and counter-discourses, dominion and resistance. Everything Trafalgar describes is familiar, except that it's not.

Trafalgar changes history, shifting the parameters of the conquest, though he isn't able to stick around and see how things turn out. The ethical clichés of time-travel fiction--the caution against meddling with events that seem all but foreordained, because of what we "know" comes later--are turned upside down.

No, turned sideways. Translated across a different axis. This is a parallel world, remember, just a degree or two off plumb. The seasons may be different, or they may be other seasons, seasons that only look the same from a distance.

It's a story I will keep thinking about. 

Tasting Notes

Over Valentine's Day weekend, to vary the admittedly delicious but oft-repeated wine and chocolate theme, I was invited to put together a writers' event for Winter's Hill Vineyard. We settled on the theme, "Word and Wine Tasting," and set out--tongue firmly in cheek--to prepare tasting notes that might pair our readings with suitable wines. We were three poets, two fiction writers, reading from published work and work-in-progress. I thought it would be easy--piece of cake, glass of wine. Then I found that, like most writing exercises, it was harder than it looked. Or sounded. 

I read from my novel manuscript, WISDOME. The novel includes several short segments of mysteries that feature the intrepid Vancouver detective, Sgt. String. What might one sip with such a story? This, in part, is what I came up with:

A complex dessert wine of character and verve makes the ideal foil to the Sgt. String mysteries excerpted within the novel. Pair a  2006 Winter's Hill Vineyard Golden Nectar with a culinary mystery with a hint of spice. Mineral and almond shell notes greet the nose before the wine opens to bitter citrus, sage, and white pepper, with candied nuts and sharp apple in the long finale--just right for savoring the solution to a crisp whodunit.

Now, there's no need to limit word pairings to wine. I associate Anna Karenina with Cadbury Creme Eggs, of which I ate far too many while I was reading the novel in high school (not for school, if that matters). Might the disappointment of the occasional dud egg, its filling crystallized, not gooey, echo Anna's sadness and frustration? The smothering smoothness of chocolate, the beginning of a love affair? And then there's the question of forbidden treats, because there's no way I was allowed to eat as many of those chocolate eggs as I remember consuming. But these are pairings after the fact, rather than recommendations: a recollection of what I ate while reading, and so an association between food and book that is largely incidental, if enduring.

Besides, one isn't supposed to read while eating, or eat while reading. The diet gurus' first commandment is to stop and pay attention to your food. Still, what might one read with a plate of purple broccoli? What might one read to the cook? 

I remember hearing Diane Wakoski read a poem about a student returning a book with Cheetos stains on the pages. Another time, Marge Piercy read a poem about the pear you take along on a plane trip, that piece of fruit there's never an occasion to eat--too messy for the flight, and then your host offers you a snack--and the poor pear travels on, bruised, disintegrating, somehow too good to throw away. I am probably getting the poem all wrong--I just remember that pear, and the unwillingness to discard what one is equally unwilling to eat--so apologies to Piercy for mangling her poem, though perhaps there's some merit in remembering it all these years.

Mistrusting my memory, I just went looking for Diane's poem. I found it in The Butcher's Apron. It's "The Fear of Fat Children," first published in The Rings of Saturn. (Bizarrely, on the shelf beside it, one of my own children had left a small pink eraser in a tiny cardboard carton decorated with strawberries and the warning:  ERASER DO NOT EAT.) There are no Cheetos in the poem; maybe she just mentioned orange grease when introducing it, or maybe I imagined the whole thing. But there is wonderful food, and ambivalence, and fear.

Still, these are poems about eating. Our tasting notes, by contrast, suggested what to drink while listening.

Once started, it's easy to keep going. Pair a bitter café con leche in a Spanish bar with the newspaper left at the end of the counter, already read by an earlier-rising patron, its pages shuffled loose, fanning and fluttered. Match the frizzy astringency of ginger ale with embarrassingly bad love poems. A hoppy pale ale with a travel memoir that dances on the edge of credibility.

Just about anything reads well with hot tea. It's best if the tea is still scalding, meaning I've just sat down. It's morning; I have time. The pages are crisp and I am ready to be pleased.

Argentina Reading Challenge--Book List

As promised last week, my list of picks for Ficciones, the 2011 Argentina Reading Challenge. The challenge starts next week, but you can join at any time. I'm teaching all Argentine plays this quarter, and re-reads count, but it seems like cheating to just upload my syllabus. So these are my choices so far, in no particular order. I may amend the list as the year rolls along. I look forward to hearing about what others are reading, too!

1. Trafalgar, by Angélica Gorodischer. I've just begun work on a translation of another of Gorodischer's books--Cómo triunfar en la vida--and this is one I haven't read.
2. Buenos Aires in Translation: a collection of four recent plays translated by Jean Graham-Jones. More on the plays one-by-one as I read them.
3. I was going to read Steps Under Water, by Alicia Kozameh (English translation by David E. Davis), because I heard her give an amazing reading a number of years ago, when a colleague invited her to campus. She was a little thrown by the silence in the Q & A; we were speechless, still absorbing. But in assembling this list, I find a more recent book, also in translation and one I was unaware of: 259 Leaps, the Last Immortal, translated by Clare Sullivan. I'll read that one.
4. Moira Sullivan, by Juan José Delaney. One of his stories is included in the October 2010 Words without Borders issue, Beyond Borges--if you haven't yet, check it out [here]--and this sounded intriguing. I've been reading plays about Italian immigration to Argentina. Delaney's work takes up the Irish experience.
5. Los crímenes de Oxford, by Guillermo Martínez. Another Words without Borders tip.
6. And back from "beyond" to Borges, with On Writing in the new Penguin Classics edition edited by Suzanne Jill Levine.

And to all, a good read!

Ficciones-- 2011 Argentina Reading Challenge

This isn't really a post, more an announcement. Join me in accepting the 2011 Argentina reading challenge, Ficciones. I haven't chosen my books yet, but there's plenty to choose from! I'll add the list here once I make up my mind, and invite others to join in.

On the pleasures of teaching an old favorite

Next fall, I'll be teaching a course on Argentine theater in Rosario, Argentina. This winter, I'm teaching Argentine theater at the U. of Oregon. Some of the plays we're studying are plays I've worked on for a long time. Others I've begun studying more recently, as part of my ongoing work on theater and immigration. Still others are plays I've been lucky enough to see performed during one of the international theater festivals I've been able to attend, or on one of those too-infrequent research trips.

Today we discussed Osvaldo Dragún's Historias para ser contadas (we'll continue on Thursday). Historias was one of the first Latin American plays I read, if not in the first theater class I took, at Michigan State with Priscilla Meléndez, definitely in John Kronik's class during my first semester at Cornell. Historias was one of the plays I wrote about in my first published article. I've been thinking about it for a long time. But I still love to go back to the play. (It's been translated by Joe and Graciela P. Rosenberg, under the title Stories for the Theatre, a translation I have not yet read--that's the sound of me clicking the inter-library loan request send button.)

My view of the play hasn't shifted radically over the years. I relish its deceptively simple structure, it's looping self-reference, it's flexibility and openness to reinterpretation and reinvention, as in Rosa Luisa Márquez's staging in Puerto Rico [watch it here, thanks to the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video library: http://hidvl.nyu.edu/video/000540522.html]. But what has me writing about the play tonight is the pleasurable repetition of talking about a text--novel, play, poem, doesn't matter--that has been important to one with a new group of people. It's a privilege to do so again and again over many years. Some of my students seemed more taken with the play than others; some waved their hands in the air, ready to be called on, while others clearly hoped I'd look the other way. That's fine. It's a cliché of teaching that each group of students is different, that the comments people offer in class discussion are unpredictable, that each new class may bring to our attention things we have previously failed to see.

But cliché or not, it's still fun. Fun in the reading, and fun in the rereading. It was a beautiful, sunny, cold day today, perfect weather for revisiting an old favorite: optimistic weather, clear weather, good weather for thinking and conversation.

Are there unintended consequences to imaginary travel?

Immersed in an imaginary Galápagos--translating Beyond the Islands--I have been travelling, mentally, for years.  I hope people will read the translation and "travel" as well. And yet, a fragile ecosystem like that of the Galápagos Islands can only support so many visitors. Am I part of the problem? How many people might finish the book and them jump on a plane? What will happen when they get there?

Visitors to the islands marvel at the extraordinary richness of life (and marvel that life survives at all) yet worry about the islands' destruction, a dynamic common to both fiction and travel guides. The numerous guides to the islands' flora, fauna, and tourist accommodations are, to varying degrees, at once advocates for their preservation and promoters of the islands as a unique and desirable destination. The foreword to Pierre Constant's Galápagos: A Natural History Guide extols the islands' beauty, then sounds the alarm, citing rising numbers of visitors and residents, among other threats, and concluding that "the Galápagos must be safeguarded as the innocence of the world. [. . .] The magic of 'Las Encantadas' may one day disappear under the surface of the waves, but by then, humans would have gone long before" (9). The reader is placed at the threshold of Eden, on the verge of expulsion yet, perhaps, with a chance to turn back--Shades of Vonnegut's Galápagos, with its apocalyptic premise and misleading brochures. Overuse of natural resources places the Galápagos at risk, as another guidebook puts it, of "too many tourists 'loving' the islands to death" (Smith 288). The authors of The New Key to Ecuador and the Galápagos write, "We do realize that we are promoting tourism to the Galápagos with this book, while at the same time lamenting the increased numbers of tourists. Our hope is that appropriate quotas are enforced and that tourists to the Galápagos respect the animals and land while contributing to the benefit of the park" (Pearson and Middleton 405).

Ecologically, the threat of looming catastrophe is hardly far-fetched. The islands have seen huge increases in settlement and in visitors, as well as in problems caused by over-fishing. In 2004, some 108,583 people visited the islands (Constant 7). In April of 2007, the government of Rafael Correa declared an emergency in the Galápagos; in June of that year, UNESCO declared the archipelago "endangered." Some 35,000 colonists now live in the Galápagos, more than double the estimated 12,000 living there in 1990 (Bassett 12, 14).

The Galápagos evoked in Alicia Yánez Cossío's Más allá de las islas/Beyond the Islands are both real and unreal. Blending humor and social commentary, Yánez Cossío uses the islands' isolation and the overlapping discourses surrounding them (evolutionary biology, ecotourism, pirate stories) to address issues also present within mainland Ecuador. She draws on the history and folklore surrounding the Galápagos, including varying accounts of their discovery and settlement, their scientific importance, and the place of the archipelago in world tourism. The setting is not accidental, as these specific islands invite readers to think about change and evolution (and about chance and accident) in particular ways. At the same time, the narrative treatment of the islands is not limited to a strictly realistic representation. The name of the islands appears only twice in the novel--one of those times in the Latin name of the Galápagos hawk.

Taken in the context of the multiple threats posed by settlement, tourism, and climate change, the novel's title suggests that tenable, sustainable solutions can be achieved only by somehow reaching beyond present realities and terms of debate. This is perhaps even more true today than when the novel was first published in 1980. Unlike the natural history or tourist literature about the islands, Yánez Cossío's novel focuses on the human population. Pablo Ospina writes that an analysis of photographs in illustrated books or tourist guides reveals that 98% are nature photographs while only 2% include people--generally tourists. This, he argues, creates the impression that the islands are uninhabited and that visitors will find a reserve entirely dedicated to preservation ("islas enteramente consagradas a la protección de la naturaleza" 165). By contrast, the novel links the islands as place of isolation or refuge and eventual renewal with a consideration of the creative process and its importance in individual identity. In Yánez Cossío's rewriting of the archipelago, the greatest destructive force is not environmental degradation but human intolerance.

Whether reading fiction that ranges far from an individual's experience builds global tolerance is an open question. Nor would I ever propose a strictly self-improvement model of reading. I don't read novels just because they're good for me (though my well-being is regularly restored by fiction).

But it's worth underlining: imaginatively, writers--and readers--travel freely, widely, even impossibly, but not necessarily without consequences.

References

Bassett, Carol Ann. Galápagos at the Crossroads. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2009.

Constant, Pierre. Galápagos: A Natural History Guide. 7th. ed. Hong Kong: Odyssey, 2006.

Ospina, Pablo. "Región y nación en la formación de las identidades galapagueñas." Procesos: Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia 19 (2002-2003): 151-69.

Pearson, David, and David Middleton. The New Key to Ecuador and the Galápagos. 2nd. ed. Berkeley: Ulysses, 1997.

Smith, Julian. Moon Handbooks Ecuador, Including the Galápagos Islands. 3rd. ed. Emeryville, California: Avalon, 2005.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Galápagos. 1985. New York: Dell, 1999.

Yánez Cossío, Alicia. Beyond the Islands. Trans. Amalia Gladhart. New Orleans: UNO Press, 2011 (forthcoming).

---. Más allá de las islas. 1st. ed. Quito: Colegio Técnico "Don Bosco," 1980.

Evolving Fictions (Galápagos novels)

The Galápagos Islands are both familiar and exotic, a commonplace of short-hand evolutionary theory ("everyone knows" Charles Darwin used his observations there to develop his theory of natural selection) that despite the boom in tourism over the last three decades, relatively few people will ever visit. Sixteenth-century sailors called the islands "enchanted" because they seemed to appear and disappear. For Ecuador, the islands, annexed in 1832 and first settled as a penal colony, have been a destination for impoverished colonists from the mainland, a military base, a source of revenue and of national pride, and a hotly disputed area in which the interests of local fishermen, settlers, tour operators, and conservationists come into conflict. Described and re-imagined by novelists, poets, nature writers, and essayists, as well as by filmmakers, the islands have become a "written archipelago." The theme of a paradise in danger of being corrupted--or already corrupted--appears repeatedly, in both fiction and nonfiction. Darwin, in his diary, wrote of Chatham Island, "The country was compared to what we might imagine the cultivated parts of the Infernal regions to be" (304). The narrator of Herman Melville's "The Encantadas" observes, "In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist" (127).

To set a novel, or part of a novel, in the Galápagos is to open questions of evolution, origin, and change; the setting carries with it rich conceptual and metaphorical baggage. Whether or not the location is ultimately central to the story, the reader will expect the islands to mean something. While readers' contact with the islands may come more from travel guides and ecological accounts (there are many excellent guides as well as recent histories that discuss both political and environmental events in the archipelago), poetry and fiction set in the Galápagos also reveal an emphasis on the movement (of humans and other species) to and from the islands, and a consciousness that what we read often determines where we go.

Much Galápagos writing has happened outside Ecuador, but the islands have been a focus within Ecuador as well, particularly in the work of writers Alicia Yánez Cossío, Efraín Jara Idrovo, and Gustavo Vásconez Hurtado. Jara Idrovo, for instance, spent several years in the Galápagos during the 1950s. In his long poem "sollozo por pedro jara," the search for the son's name unites the poet's search for the right word, the stone contained in the name Pedro (Peter), and the stones of the rocky islands. (Cecilia Mafla Bustamante's translation of the poem appears in the journal ISLE (5.1, 1998). [http://isle.oxfordjournals.org] Yánez Cossío's third novel, Mas allá de las islas [Beyond the Islands], first published in 1980, rewrites the archipelago in a parable of destruction and renewal, while a second novel related to the Galápagos, Esclavos de Chatham, treats the sufferings, rebellion, and trial of a group of presumed criminals who arrived in Guayaquil in 1904, having escaped from Chatham Island (today known as San Cristóbal) where they had been the prisoners of Manuel J. Cobos. The exploits and disappearance of the vanished Baroness Bousequet von Wagner in the 1930s remain staples of fictional and nonfiction accounts of the islands. Gustavo Vásconez Hurtado's novel, La isla de los gatos negros offers an interpretation of events surrounding the baroness closely linked to presumed espionage work for the Germans and the Japanese on the part of the protagonists.

Novels written outside of Ecuador often take the Galápagos as an exotic backdrop against which to place characters working out personal dilemmas unrelated to their locale (as in Cathleen Schein's The Evolution of Jane) or as one stop among many on a longer sea voyage (Patrick O'Brian's The Far Side of the World). In Nino Ricci's The Origin of Species, the protagonist is an "accidental tourist" (with apologies to Anne Tyler), a man who, on that other mainstay of South American adventure tourism, the Inca Trail, was urged by another traveler to visit the islands that he subsequently finds unwelcoming and unreal: "The landscape was freakish, barren near the shore but slowly giving way to grey half-soil studded with grey shrub, the vegetation spaced out so evenly it looked sinister" (236). While the protagonist's trip pushes him to the edge of survival and humanity, the central themes of the novel, relating to memory and origins (of personality or motivation more than of species) might have been evoked by any harsh environment. In Melville's enchanted isles, life comes from elsewhere, and mainly in the form of the trash that litters "wide level beaches of multitudinous dead shells, with here and there decayed bits of sugar-cane, bamboos, and cocoanuts, washed upon this other and darker world from the charming palm isles to the westward and southward; all the way from Paradise to Tartarus" (127). Melville combines excess and emptiness, the furthest heaven and the deepest, lightless pits of hell, so that the islands appear unchanging, uninhabitable, and yet constantly washed by the perpetually variable sea, populated only by reptiles and by plants that are somehow incomplete, "tangled thickets of wiry bushes, without fruit and without a name" (127).

Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos are a haven of possible renewal, one in which the sole survivors of a series of catastrophes--among them a global financial collapse--are a group of improbable castaways shipwrecked on the island of Santa Rosalía. Vonnegut's novel resonates most strongly with Yánez Cossío's satirical, sometimes whimsical, vision. Leon Trout, narrator of Vonnegut's novel, highlights the element of chance in the evolution of human opinion as he observes, "If Charles Darwin had not declared the Galápagos Islands marvelously instructive, Guayaquil would have been just one more hot and filthy seaport" (16). In his recap of the islands' history, Trout notes that the Spanish "did not claim the islands for Spain, any more than they would have claimed hell for Spain" (18). When Ecuador later stakes its claim, "It was as though Ecuador, in a spasm of imperialistic dementia, had annexed to its territory a passing cloud of asteroids" (18). Curiously, like Yánez Cossío's Beyond the Islands, Vonnegut's novel also includes a plague of infertility, this one caused by mysterious bacteria. In Vonnegut's text, the archipelago makes possible the survival of the human species, which has died out elsewhere on earth. Granted, a million years have passed, and the humans of the novel's present have changed--evolved--so that they are now a species very similar to seals, a species that lacks the enormous brain that Leon Trout (a ghost), blames for all of the disasters suffered by humans in the distant past. Vonnegut's novel both comments upon and contributes to the recycling of prior descriptions of the islands as either inferno or paradise. Through the device of a tour brochure that includes Darwin's description of the islands in The Voyage of the Beagle, Trout is able simultaneously to cite a fictional advertisement "intended to delight nature-lovers rather than pleasure-seekers" and to reproduce, again, Darwin's stark assessment of that uninviting place (13). That Darwin's statement--"Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance" of the islands--is being used to sell tickets is a further irony.

References

Darwin, Charles. Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. Ed. Nora Barlow. The Works of Charles Darwin. Vol. 1. Ed. Paul H. Barrett and R.B. Freeman. New York: New York UP, 1987.

Jara Idrovo, Efraín. El mundo de las evidencias. Obra poética, 1945-1998. Ed. María Augusta Vintimilla. Quito: Libresa/Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 1999.

Melville, Herman. "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles." The Piazza Tales. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1996. 125-73.

O'Brian, Patrick. The Far Side of the World. 1984. New York: Norton, 1992.

Ricci, Nino. The Origin of Species. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2009.

Schine, Cathleen. The Evolution of Jane. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Vásconez Hurtado, Gustavo. La isla de los gatos negros: (Galápagos). 1973. Quito: Ediciones Libri Mundi, 1993.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Galápagos. 1985. New York: Dell, 1999.

Yánez Cossío, Alicia. Beyond the Islands. Trans. Amalia Gladhart. New Orleans: UNO Press, 2011 (forthcoming).

---. Esclavos de Chatham. Cuenca: Editorial Sano Placer, 2006.

---. Más allá de las islas. 1st. ed. Quito: Colegio Técnico "Don Bosco," 1980