Latinocanadá: A Critical Study of Ten Latin American Writers of Canada 9780773560352

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Latin American Writing in Canada: Formation of a Literature
1 Jorge Etcheverry: Vanguard and Cosmopolis
Nine poems from La calle
Selection from the novel De chácharas y largavistas
2 Writing Four Nations: The Poetic Trajectory of Margarita Feliciano
Eight poems from Lectura en Málaga
Three unpublished poems
3 Gilberto Flores Patiño and the Myth of the Other
Two selections from the novel El último descendiente
Chapter three of the novel Sin salida
4 Alfredo Lavergne: Uprootal and the Compass of Poetry
Poem from Desde el suelo
Four poems from Cada fruto
Three poems from Rasgos separados/Traits distinctifs
Three poems from El viejo de los zapatos
Three poems from Retro-perspectiva/Rétro-perspective
Poem from La mano en la velocidad
Two poems from Alguien no soñó que moría/On ne rêve pas encore à la mort
Four poems from El puente
Three poems from the unpublished “Sombrero”
5 Alfonso Quijada Urías: The Wanderer at the Hour of the Jaguar
The short story “Florencia Sánchez”
The short story “Salvatruchos, Salvatruchos”
6 Eros and Thanatos in the Work of Nela Rio
Twelve poems from Túnel de proa verde
7 The Transculturation of Alejandro Saravia
The short story “La noche de Miguel”
8 The Urban Labyrinths of Yvonne América Truque
Two poems from Proyección de los silencios/Projection des silences
Six poems from Retratos de sombras y Perfiles inconclusos/Portraits d’ombres et Profils inachevés
Two unpublished poems
9 The Satirical Vision of Pablo Urbanyi
The short story “Siempre algo más”
10 Leandro Urbina, Multiple Exile
Two selections from the unpublished novel “Homo eroticus”
Notes
Authors’ Works
Bibliography
Index
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C
D
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G
H
I
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K
L
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Citation preview

l at i n o c a na d á

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Latinocanadá A Critical Study of Ten Latin American Writers of Canada hugh hazelton

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007 isbn 978-0-7735-3207-6 Legal deposit second quarter 2007 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. All translated selections by permission of the authors. The poems “Poor Us” and “Postcard” by Alfonso Quijada Urías are reprinted courtesy of Curbstone Press from They Come and Knock on the Door, translated by Darwin Flakoll, published in 1991.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Hazelton, Hugh, 1946– Latinocanadá: a critical study of ten Latin American writers of Canada / Hugh Hazelton. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3207-6 1. Canadian literature – Latin American Canadian authors – History and criticism. 2. Canadian literature (Spanish) – History and criticism. 3. Canadian literature (Spanish) – Translations into English. 4. Spanish American literature – History and criticism. I. Title. ps8075.s6h39 2007

c860.9

c2006-906768-6

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/13 Palatino.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Latin American Writing in Canada: Formation of a Literature 3 1 Jorge Etcheverry: Vanguard and Cosmopolis 28 Nine poems from La calle 44 Selection from the novel De chácharas y largavistas

48

2 Writing Four Nations: The Poetic Trajectory of Margarita Feliciano 51 Eight poems from Lectura en Málaga 60 Three unpublished poems 64 3 Gilberto Flores Patiño and the Myth of the Other 67 Two selections from the novel El último descendiente 78 Chapter three of the novel Sin salida 80 4 Alfredo Lavergne: Uprootal and the Compass of Poetry 85 Poem from Desde el suelo 95 Four poems from Cada fruto 95 Three poems from Rasgos separados/Traits distinctifs 97 Three poems from El viejo de los zapatos 98 Three poems from Retro-perspectiva/Rétro-perspective 99 Poem from La mano en la velocidad 99 Two poems from Alguien no soñó que moría/ On ne rêve pas encore à la mort 100 Four poems from El puente 100 Three poems from the unpublished “Sombrero” 102

vi

Contents

5 Alfonso Quijada Urías: The Wanderer at the Hour of the Jaguar 104 The short story “Florencia Sánchez” 119 The short story “Salvatruchos, Salvatruchos” 122 6 Eros and Thanatos in the Work of Nela Rio 129 Twelve poems from Túnel de proa verde 139 7 The Transculturation of Alejandro Saravia 152 The short story “La noche de Miguel” 164 8 The Urban Labyrinths of Yvonne América Truque 176 Two poems from Proyección de los silencios/ Projection des silences 184 Six poems from Retratos de sombras y Perfiles inconclusos/ Portraits d’ombres et Profils inachevés 186 Two unpublished poems 188 9 The Satirical Vision of Pablo Urbanyi 190 The short story “Siempre algo más” 206 10 Leandro Urbina, Multiple Exile 214 Two selections from the unpublished novel “Homo eroticus” 223 Notes

233

Authors’ Works Bibliography Index

303

267

277

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professors Ronald Sutherland, Winfried Siemerling, and Gregory Reid of the Université de Sherbrooke, as well as Professor Peter Roster of Carleton University, for their comments and advice on the text. I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to the many Spanish-speaking authors in Canada who shared material, observations, and information with me during the preparation of this work, which is dedicated with great affection to their community. Finally, I would like to thank two Canadian translators and writers, Larry Shouldice and Manuel Betanzos Santos, for their pioneering work and inspiration in establishing the Canadian and Quebec presence in the comparative study of the literatures of the Americas. Every effort has been made to identify, credit appropriately, and obtain publication rights from copyright holders of works in this book. Notice of any errors or omissions in this regard will be gratefully received and correction made in any subsequent editions.

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l at i n o c a na d á

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introduction

Latin American Writing in Canada: Formation of a Literature

A new literature is emerging today within Canadian society, a body of writing created by people from twenty different countries of the Western hemisphere. It is the work produced by Latin American writers living in Canada and might be called Latino-Canadian literature. Although of foreign origin, its writers are also part of the Americas and thus share many of the characteristics of Canadian letters, such as colonization, the implantation of European culture in an indigenous environment, the gradual freeing from Eurocentric literary modes, and the search for autonomous means of expression. Some of these writers are from nations with longer and more acclaimed literary traditions than that of Canada, yet most of them are also anxious to find a place for their writing within Canadian society and perhaps to enrich Canadian letters with their work. Latino-Canadian writing has expanded over the past quartercentury to include every principal literary genre, from the novel and short story, to poetry, theatre, essays, testimonial writing, literary criticism, children’s literature, autobiography, history, and journalism. Much of it has been of necessity self-published, but there now exist a number of small trade presses that function primarily in Spanish, producing work within a linguistic community that numbers roughly 200,000 in Canada1 and more than 360 million in the Spanish-speaking countries of the world – with another 200,000 Portuguese speakers in Canada and some 210 million more worldwide.2 The continual arrival of new immigrants from Latin America, coupled with the growing importance of Spanish as a second language in university education and international trade, gives a certain degree of autonomy to the world of Latino-Canadian letters. As in the United States,

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which is now home to over 42 million Hispanic Americans,3 Spanishlanguage writing in Canada forms a world unto itself and constitutes what critic and poet Gary Geddes has referred to as “a parallel literature,”4 one that runs alongside those of mainstream English- and French-speaking Canada and also feeds new writers into the literatures of the two official languages. The Hispanic community in the United States, although roughly a hundred times larger than that of Canada, is in reality fragmented into large blocks of Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Cubans, Dominicans, and other nationalities, each of which has a strong culture of its own and a long history of residence in the country – often predating that of English-speaking Americans. The smaller numbers of Latin Americans in Canada have encouraged people from different backgrounds to transcend national and cultural boundaries and define themselves linguistically, so there is now a surprisingly high degree of integration and a fertile cultural interchange between the various Spanish-speaking nationalities resident in the country.

a r r i va l Contact between the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds and Canada is hardly new; in fact, it has been a constant since the fifteenth century. The first Iberian visitors to Canada were the Basque and northern Spanish and Portuguese fishermen and explorers who are said to have begun to fish and winter on Canadian soil even before the voyages of Columbus; many of them named the coves, harbours, and land masses of Atlantic Canada, from Labrador to Fogo Island and Bonavista Bay. Later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Spanish and Latin American explorers sailing from Mexican ports explored the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska: Alejandro Malaspina wrote a seven-volume history of his expeditions,5 and the journals of Peruvian-born Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra have become classics in the literature of exploration.6 In the early 1800s the Cuban poet José María Heredia, an early Romantic fascinated by all things of the Americas, wrote a celebrated ode to Niagara Falls.7 Latin Americans consider the New World to form one basic continent, that of the Americas. In a broad sense, they consider the adjective americano in Spanish to apply to the entire hemispheric land mass from Tierra del Fuego to Ellesmere Island and believe that the term

Introduction

5

“American” has been willfully appropriated by the United States, whose citizens many have begun to refer to as estadounidenses, or “Unitedstatesians.” The first large immigration to Canada from the Spanish-speaking world was that of political refugees at the end of the Spanish Civil War, after the fall of Barcelona to General Franco’s troops in 1939. Several of the community centres that they established in Toronto published poems and short stories by these early arrivals, typing or later mimeographing them and posting them on the centres’ walls. These works dealt largely with the horrors of the civil war and the exiles’ longing for their homeland, just as the early works of Latin American refugees would do thirty years later.8 This Peninsular immigration increased during the 1950s and 1960s as more Spanish and Portuguese speakers left their countries’ repressive regimes and struggling economies to search for work in Canada. The first published writers among this group were primarily professors of Spanish language and literature who gradually assumed positions in universities across Canada. Many of them, such as the poet and novelist Jesús López Pacheco,9 were already successful authors in Spain before they emigrated. These writers produced an array of works, both in terms of their creative and academic publications, but a detailed examination of their literary production lies beyond the scope of the present study.10 One important figure among them for the Latin American writers who would arrive later, however, was the Galician poet and critic Manuel Betanzos Santos, who became a pioneer in the study of Canadian letters in the Hispanic world and a bridge between the original Peninsular immigration and the later Latin American one. Betanzos Santos, who taught at the Université de Sherbrooke for several years in the 1960s and later at McGill University and Lower Canada College, was always fascinated by the interplay of literatures. His trilingual (English-French-Spanish) literary magazine, Boreal, first published in Montreal in the 1960s, was to appear intermittently for the next twenty-five years and served as a forum for new writers in all three languages, often providing new Latin American arrivals with their first chance to publish in Canada. At the same time, Betanzos translated and published two anthologies of English Canadian writing, one in Argentina and the other in Mexico, and up to his death in 1995, regularly read his own literary creations at French, English, and Spanish poetry venues in Montreal.

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The initial wave of Latin American migration to Canada was composed of economic immigrants from Ecuador, who arrived in the late 1960s and settled mainly in the Toronto area. At the time, however, this group did not include any regularly active writers. A few years later, the political turmoil throughout the region, caused by heightened popular demand for more economic and political power, and the ensuing military repression forced large numbers of people, primarily from the Southern Cone of South America (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), to flee to Canada. Most immigrants were refugees who were often from the most idealistic, progressive, and artistically involved sectors of their societies and who had never considered leaving their homelands until they were driven out by the military dictatorships that took root first in Brazil in 1964, then in Uruguay in 1972, Chile in 1973, and Argentina in 1976. Sometimes Canada was chosen as a destination because of a particular affinity with or interest in the country; often the choice was made simply because the Canadian embassy was accepting refugees on a given day.11 Economic immigrants from the Southern Cone – as well as from other nations with a high degree of political instability, such as Colombia – joined the flow of refugees northward. A second wave of Latin American immigration to Canada took place during the 1980s as the rigidly stratified societies of other regions such as Central America and the Andean nations (particularly Peru and Bolivia) were rocked by insistent new demands for fundamental improvements in human, social, and economic rights. Such movements were again dealt with harshly, often precipitating all-out civil war, as in El Salvador, and a mass exodus of the population to neighbouring countries such as Mexico, as well as to the United States and Canada. Again, many in the exodus were artistic and cultural figures of repute in their countries of origin who continued to write, paint, and work in their respective fields when they came to Canada.12 Others were young writers and artists who were just discovering their talents when they were forced to leave their native lands and who subsequently published their first works and held their first artistic exhibits in Canada. Since then, beginning with Argentina in the aftermath of the Falklands War in 1982, democracy has gradually been reestablished in almost all of the countries of the region, although in many cases this has simply meant declaring an uneasy truce between the warring parties. Thus immigration to Canada since 1990 has been mainly for economic rather than political reasons,

Introduction

7

although refugees are still coming in from conflicts in Guatemala, Mexico, and especially Colombia. Moreover, as the Argentine Canadian poet and critic Margarita Feliciano has pointed out, immigrants themselves are economic exiles.13 By the end of the 1960s, several Latin American authors had established themselves individually in Canada; these early arrivals generally evolved in isolation from other Latin Americans, however, and often chose to write in English or French rather than in their native language. Among them was Gloria Escomel, a poet, playwright, and fiction writer of French and Catalan parentage who was raised mainly in Uruguay but settled in Quebec in 1967; paradoxically, although most of her work is set in the Río de la Plata area, she writes almost exclusively in French.14 The Chilean experimental poet Ludwig Zeller took up residence in Toronto in 1970, from which he maintained a lively presence in the worldwide surrealist movement,15 while his compatriot Renato Trujillo arrived in Montreal as a traveller in 1968 and decided to stay and write poetry exclusively in English.16 The Brazilian painter Sergio Kokis fled Rio de Janeiro after the overthrow of President João Goulart and the establishment of the military regime there in 1964; he subsequently lived in Europe for several years before settling in Montreal at the end of the 1960s. Though Kokis did not start writing until the 1990s, his eleven novels – all written in French – have been warmly received in Quebec.17 Rafael Barreto-Rivera, a bilingual Puerto Rican poet, moved to Toronto in the late 1960s and later became a principal innovator in sound poetry and member of the poetry performance group The Four Horsemen.18 Although deeply influenced by the Spanish oral tradition of declaiming poetry (a favourite pastime of his Galician grandfather), as well as by his reading in Spanish and Latin American literature in general, Barreto-Rivera nevertheless writes mainly in English. Large-scale literary activity by Latin Americans in Canada began in earnest, however, with the advent of the first Chilean refugees following the coup d’état that overthrew President Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. Most Chileans coming to the country settled in or around the large urban centres of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, with smaller communities forming in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Edmonton. In the majority of cases, the writers among them came into the country alone, with the notable exception of the Chilean immigration to Ottawa. Chilean poet and critic Naín Nómez had met Canadian graduate students from Carleton University while he

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was attending the University of Chile and was later invited to teach Spanish in Ottawa. Nómez’s associates from the “School of Santiago” poetry group at the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile, Jorge Etcheverry and Erik Martínez, along with other writers also linked to the university, all went on to settle in Ottawa, thus creating an early focal point for Chilean literary activity in Canada. The exiles arriving in Canada in the 1970s were still enormously stimulated by the vibrant artistic and political milieus of their native countries while at the same time often deeply scarred by the military repression there. It is not surprising, therefore, that the LatinoCanadian literature of the period is highly politicized, doggedly and even fiercely optimistic, and often poignant in its lament for their vision of a more just society and for the people who died and were tortured trying to achieve it. Poetry is an integral part of Chilean life and culture, and poetry readings formed part of the peñas (benefit parties) and other cultural events held by Chilean exile communities all across Canada. Many of the Uruguayan and Argentine exiles – along with a number of Chileans and Spaniards – had been active in theatre and cinema in their homelands and established Spanish-language theatre companies in Canada. In Montreal, Chilean playwright and author Rodrigo González was putting on children’s theatre and workshopping collective productions by the mid-1970s;19 in Toronto, the Uruguayan and Argentinean theatre group El Galpón also created its own productions and was influential in bringing the noted Argentine satirical playwright Osvaldo Dragún to the city.20 The 1970s also witnessed great activity in music, especially in the formation of Chilean groups playing a mixture of Andean folk songs, adapted poetry, and protest songs. Alberto Kurapel, a Chilean exile who had studied the work of the Living Theatre and acted in a Spanish translation of Megan Terry’s Viet Rock in Santiago in the Allende years, established himself in Montreal and brought out six consecutive albums of poetic – and politicized – folk songs celebrating and mourning his country’s tragic destiny.21 Chilean filmmakers, such as Leutén Rojas in Ottawa and Marilú Mallet and Jorge Fajardo in Montreal, were also active at this time.

a da p tat i o n Toward the end of the 1970s, Chileans living in different cities, especially in the Ottawa-Montreal-Toronto triangle, began to become conscious of and interested in each other’s work; at the same time, the

Introduction

9

first books by Chilean Canadian authors began to appear. One of the earliest Chilean writers to publish in Canada was the poet Francisco Viñuela, who did so with a small press in Montreal that was funded – at least in part – by the political party with which he was then associated.22 Within the following few years, however, independent Latin American publishing ventures began to spring up. In Montreal the Chilean poet Manuel Aránguiz was influential in setting up Les Éditions Maison Culturelle Québec-Amérique Latine, which in 1979 published La ciudad (The city), a work by Chilean exile Gonzalo Millán, which poet and critic Jorge Etcheverry has called “one of the most important books of contemporary Chilean poetry.”23 Millán, who lived mainly in Ottawa but also resided for a time in Montreal, was awarded the Pablo Neruda Foundation poetry prize in Chile in 1986. In 1981 Aránguiz published a bilingual (Spanish-French) edition of his own laconic, highly crafted poems, Cuerpo de silencio/Corps de silence. Naín Nómez moved from Ottawa to Toronto in 1976, where he came into contact with two other Chilean writers, poet Claudio Durán and short-story writer Juan Carlos García. Durán published two bilingual (Spanish-English) books of poetry in 1982: Homenaje/ Homage, translated by Margarita Feliciano; and Más tarde que los clientes habituales/After the Usual Clients Have Gone Home, translated by Rafael Barreto-Rivera, with Underwhich Editions in Toronto in 1982. Argentine poet Margarita Feliciano, who had moved from California to Toronto in 1969, brought out her first book, Ventana sobre el mar/ Window on the Sea, published in Pittsburgh by the Latin American Literary Review Press, in 1981.24 It was in Ottawa, however, that Chilean publishing established its strongest base. Chilean fiction writer Leandro Urbina arrived there from Argentina in 1976 and soon afterward set up Cordillera Editions, which within a few years published a book of short stories by Urbina as well as the first collections of the innovative poetry of Nómez and Etcheverry. In 1982 Cordillera brought out Literatura chilena en Canadá/ Chilean Literature in Canada, edited by Nómez and translated by Christina Shantz, a graduate student at Carleton who later became Urbina’s wife and the principal translator of the Ottawa-based Chileans. This book was the first anthology of Latin American writing to appear in Canada. A well-produced collection, it included both poetry and prose by the Ottawa writers, as well as work by Aránguiz of Montreal and by Durán, García, and Ludwig Zeller of Toronto. Moreover, its bilingual presentation opened up Chilean Canadian writing to the

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English Canadian public and publishers; Cormorant Books, of Dunvegan, Ontario, for instance, brought out translations of works by both Urbina and Nómez in the mid-1980s.25 The Latino-Canadian beachhead in Canadian letters had been established. Subsequent literary and publishing activity in Spanish in Canada has revolved around five main fields of activity, all of them interrelated: readings, festivals, anthologies, small presses, and literary journals. Recitation of poetry is a strong element in Spanish and Latin American letters, and the Hispanic community in several cities was already large enough by the early 1980s to provide an interested and surprisingly loyal audience. In Toronto the Trojan Horse café on Danforth Avenue was an early centre for poetry recitals,26 while in Montreal the doyenne of oral poetry and bohemian writing, Janou St-Denis, began to regularly invite Latin Americans to read in French and Spanish in the early 1980s.27 By 1995 there were no less than four venues for Spanish-language poetry readings operating simultaneously in Montreal. In Ottawa, where the total numbers of Chilean immigrants were far lower than in Toronto and Montreal, readings were at first more likely to be held with writers from other ethnic groups,28 although the El Dorado series of monthly readings, established in the mid-1990s by Jorge Etcheverry, Arturo Lazo, and Luciano Díaz, was centred on Spanish-language works. In Vancouver, where the Latin American literary audience is larger but more diffuse, readings tended to be held with immigrants from a wide variety of national and cultural backgrounds. The Salvadoran writer Alfonso Quijada Urías states that his closest reading associate there, with whom he often recited at the Octopus Bookstore, is a Malaysian.29 Festivals have been of strategic importance in the development of Latino-Canadian writing. In Toronto, Ludwig Zeller, Naín Nómez, and Leandro Urbina all read at the Harbourfront Reading Series during that venue’s early days, thus giving them exposure to the English Canadian public. Moreover, the Agrupación de Artistas Latinoamericanos (Latin American Artists’ Network, or lan) – a loosely knit association of musicians, painters, filmmakers, actors, dancers, performance artists, and writers that was active up to the mid-1990s – held several festivals of Latin American culture, some up to five days long, that included multiple poetry readings. Such events have permitted Latin American writers of varying backgrounds and nationalities to meet and mix with one another, as well as with their audience. In 1987 the Peruvian Canadian journalist and critic Alex Zisman of

Introduction

11

Toronto organized what by Latino-Canadian standards was a megafestival, inviting Hispanic Canadian, Latin American, and English Canadian writers to read at his North/South Encounter at York University. The extraordinary mix of participants included native-born Canadians Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, Timothy Findley, and Yves Beauchemin; immigrant Canadians Janette Turner Hospital, Neil Bissoondath, Austin Clarke, and Josef Skvorecky; Latin American writers of renown, such as Miguel Barnett of Cuba, Álvaro Mutis of Colombia, and José Emilio Pacheco of Mexico; and a wide selection of hispanophone Canadian authors, including the Spanish novelist Ramón Guardia from Montreal. This was the largest single literary event ever organized by the Latin American community in Canada and was a major step in bringing Canadian authors into contact with other writers of the Americas. It was followed by the establishment of the Festival de la Palabra y de la Imagen/Festival of Images and Words, a week-long festival of poetry readings, critical papers, and theatrical and musical performances that has been held yearly in Toronto since 1992. The festival, sponsored by the Celebración Cultural del Idioma Español (Cultural Celebration of the Spanish Language), combines academic and cultural events; founded by Mario Valdés of the University of Toronto and Margarita Feliciano of York University, it is now the largest Spanish-language venue in the country.30 In Montreal two key festival readings in the late 1980s finally brought together the disparate talents of the city’s Latin American authors. The early Latino-Québécois writers of Montreal were from a broad spectrum of nationalities and literary tendencies, and – aside from the Chileans – had not previously had any common interest that bound them together. The first large Spanish-language poetry reading in Quebec was held at a secondary school in Outremont in the fall of 1986, as part of a “Latin American Week” of cultural activities. It involved a dozen or so immigrant and refugee writers from a variety of Spanish-speaking countries and demonstrated that regardless of national or stylistic differences between them, the Hispanic writers of Montreal shared a common language, were part of the same overall literary tradition, and – if they chose to unite – could form a new branch of Quebec literature, la latino-québécoise. In 1989 the Colombian poet Yvonne Truque, who was working with a Latin American community group, organized a second, much larger reading within the context of another celebration of Hispano-American culture. This event included fifteen authors and took place at the Outremont bar

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L’Imprévu over three consecutive evenings, and participating Spanishspeaking authors were asked to read in both Spanish and French. Moreover, Quebec authors with a longstanding interest in Latin America, such as Paul Chamberland, Claude Beausoleil, and Janou St-Denis, were also invited to read. The festival, which established a new cohesiveness among the writers involved, led to increased contact between Latino and Québécois authors and, for the first time, received some notice in the French-language press. In later years, a number of Latino-Québécois writers were invited to read at the Festival internationale de la poésie in Trois-Rivières. Anthologies have also played a crucial role in bringing new Spanish-speaking authors to light and in shaping the direction of various groupings of writers. One of the first English Canadians to take an active interest in Latino-Canadian writing was Geoffrey Hancock, editor of Canadian Fiction Magazine. In 1980 Hancock organized a “Special Issue of Fiction in Translation from the Unofficial Languages of Canada,”31 which was – in effect – an anthology that included short stories by five Chilean Canadian writers as well as by the Argentine Canadian novelist Pablo Urbanyi. In 1987 Hancock dedicated an entire issue of Canadian Fiction Magazine to Latin American writers living in Canada, including work by most of the better-known Chilean Canadian authors of Toronto and Ottawa, as well as by other Latino-Canadian writers, such as the Argentine essayist and fiction writer Raúl Gálvez and Guatemalan poet Alfredo Saavedra, both of Toronto; Chileans Renato Trujillo, Marilú Mallet, and Miguel Retamal, all from Montreal; the Argentine Naldo Lombardi, from Edmonton; and the Uruguayan critic Javier García Méndez, from Montreal. This issue again constituted a veritable anthology and reached out beyond Canada to the larger Spanish American world through its inclusion of an interview with Julio Cortázar and critical appreciations of his work. It established Latino-Canadian writing as a major force in Canadian letters. Meanwhile, in Toronto and Montreal, new anthologies had begun to appear, compiled and published by Hispanic Canadian writers themselves. In Toronto, Diego Marín, a Spaniard who taught Spanish literature at the University of Toronto, compiled a trilingual (SpanishEnglish-French) anthology entitled Literatura hispano-canadiense/ Hispano-Canadian Literature/Littérature hispano-canadienne, published by the Alianza Cultural Hispano-Canadiense in 1984. This collection included short stories, poetry, and extracts from plays by both Peninsular

Introduction

13

and Latin American writers living in Canada. Most of the authors included were from the academic milieu: some of them, such as Manuel Betanzos Santos of Spain and Luis Pérez Botero of Colombia, were of the generation that had arrived in Canada during the 1950s; others, including the Spaniard Ricardo Serrano and the Dominican Raúl Bartolomé, had been born after World War II and had immigrated to Canada in the 1970s. The Alianza Cultural held regular literary competitions for Spanish-language work produced in Canada, and perhaps the greatest precedent of this anthology – apart from its trilingual presentation – was that it united writers from the two generations and two cultural traditions, those of Spain and Latin America. A few years later, in 1987, José Varela and Richard Young, both professors of Spanish at the University of Alberta, founded the Asociación para el Desarrollo de la Cultura Hispánica de Edmonton (apedeche, or Association for the Development of Hispanic Culture in Edmonton), which was modelled on the Alianza Cultural of Toronto. This organization, together with the Spanish Embassy to Canada and Multiculturalism Canada, organized a pan-Canadian literary competition for Latino-Canadian authors in 1985 and published a bilingual (Spanish-English) anthology of the prize-winning works and other entries in 1987. This book, Antología de literatura hispanocanadiense/An Anthology of Hispano-Canadian Writing, included poems by Naín Nómez and Jorge Etcheverry; short stories by Chileans Hernán Barrios and Francisco Viñuela, of Montreal; poetry by Argentine writer Nora Strejilevich, then of Vancouver, and by Chilean author Luis Torres, of Calgary; and work by other writers.32 Due to the large number of Hispanic nationalities that had settled in Montreal and to the relative isolation in which writers there worked for many years, it was not until the late 1980s that Latin American writers in Quebec began to put together their own anthologies, the first of which, Palabra de poeta (Poet’s word) was published by the Mexican Association of Canada in 1988.33 As with the readings in Montreal, the anthologies published there were marked by their heterogeneity. Palabra de poeta, although modest in form, included poetry by four Chileans, a Guatemalan, a Uruguayan, a Mexican, a Salvadoran, a Colombian, and an American and was illustrated with drawings by the Mexican artist Roberto Ferreyra. The following year, Les Éditions de la Naine Blanche brought out the first anthology of Latino-Québécois writers to appear in French, La présence d’une autre Amérique, an anthology that included the authors who had read at

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L’Imprévu. This work went through two printings and received a highly favourable review from the Haitian Canadian critic Jean Jonaissant in Lettres québécoises.34 A year later, in 1990, Chilean poets Jorge Etcheverry and Daniel Inostroza published the Spanishlanguage anthology Enjambres: Poesía latinoamericana en el Quebec (Swarms: Latin American poetry in Quebec), which included most of the authors of La présence as well as the Peruvian poets Alicia Núñez Borja and Yolanda de Saldívar (who writes in Quechua). This anthology, and the world of Latino-Québécois letters that lay behind it, received a full-page article and review in the literary pages of the Montreal Gazette.35 Daniel Inostroza went on, in 1992, to bring out the first anthology of Spanish-speaking women writers of Canada, Antología de la poesía femenina latinoameriana en Canadá (Anthology of Latin American women poets of Canada), a collection that included sixteen Latina writers from Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Ecuador, Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, and El Salvador. Its contributors were from across the country, from Montreal to Vancouver, and ranged from twenty-five to eighty years of age. A French translation of the work, Anthologie de la poésie féminine latino-américaine au Canada, was published by the same firm, El Unicornio Verde, the following year. Perhaps one of the most inclusive anthologies of Latin American writers in Canada was, however, one in which they formed only a part. Compañeros: An Anthology of Writings about Latin America, edited by Gary Geddes and myself, comprised the work of eighty-seven Canadian authors of English, French, Haitian, and Latin American origin. Since the theme of the anthology was Latin America itself, none of the works by Latino-Canadian writers dealt with living in Canada. For the twenty-six Latino-Canadian writers included in the work, however, the anthology provided an opportunity to publish with mainstream (and not so mainstream) English Canadian and Québécois authors, thus providing an interface between the longstanding interest in Latin America in Canadian letters (stretching back to Malcolm Lowry, Hugh Garner, and Earle Birney) and the burgeoning new world of Latin American writers of Canada. The anthology, together with the readings associated with its launch in Ottawa and Montreal and the numerous reviews that it received in the Canadian press, was characterized by a feeling of inclusion – of the two principal streams of literature, English Canadian and Québécois, flowing together with the newer currents of Haitian and Latino-Canadian letters into the river of shared interest in

Introduction

15

Latin America. It emphasized Canada’s communality with South and Central America, and the absence of a component of writing from the United States underscored that Canada and Latin America have their own unique relationship. Many of the Spanish-language presses that originally started up to publish local works either in Spanish or in bilingual editions during the 1970s and 1980s eventually became small commercial concerns. Government grants from Multiculturalism Canada, the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles, and other institutions have been helpful in financing translation and publication.36 The principal hispanophone small press of the early years was Cordillera Editions of Ottawa, which was run by Leandro Urbina until he moved to Washington, dc, in the 1990s and published twelve titles. Cordillera specialized in Chilean literature, particularly that of Chilean Canadian writers, but also brought out an anthology of Salvadoran poetry and books by Chilean exiles living in Paris and New York as well as work by writers living in Chile itself. It received grants from several government agencies, and its editions were available in Chile as well as Canada. In the mid-1980s Jorge Etcheverry also established a press in Ottawa, Split Quotation Press/Ediciones La Cita Trunca, which now has some eight titles in print, including Northern Cronopios, an Englishlanguage anthology of short stories by fourteen Chilean Canadian authors, and Strange Houses, a selection of poems by Gonzalo Millán, translated by Annegrit Nill, which was very well received in the English Canadian press. His friend and associate Luciano Díaz, also of Ottawa, founded a bilingual press titled Verbum Veritas, and in 2002 the two small presses pooled their resources to bring out Boreal: Antología de poesía latinoamericana en Canadá, which included some thirtynine authors representing twelve different countries and all regions of Canada and which remains the largest and most comprehensive anthology of Latino-Canadian poetry to be published to date. At about the same time, another Ottawa-based Chilean, Elías Letelier, began publishing books under the imprimatur of his website, Poetas.com. These publications, characterized by their breadth of interest and linguistic and cultural combinations, include works by Latino-Canadian authors in Spanish and French, as well as a Spanish translation of poems by English Canadian poet Endré Farkas, an anthology of Latin American writing in Italian, and a Spanish-language anthology of poetry dedicated to political prisoners in Turkey.

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Latinocanadá

Two small presses have stood out in Toronto. The first is Oasis Publications, directed by Ludwig Zeller, which for many years specialized in publishing surrealist poets from other countries, such as Édouard Jaguer of France and Jorge Cáseres of Chile. Oasis was remarkable for its frequent production of bilingual (Spanish-English) or even trilingual (Spanish-English-French) editions, as well as for the visual attractiveness and simplicity of the books it produced. Zeller himself enjoyed illustrating them with his ubiquitous collages, and his wife, Susana Wald, often provided them with her own elegant, enigmatic drawings. Moreover, in true surrealist tradition, Oasis would often use “found” materials, such as overruns of industrial paper, which the publisher bought second-hand.37 Ludwig Zeller and Susana Wald have now moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, and it is presumed that Oasis Publications will be continued from there. The second small press of note in Toronto is Artifact Editions, established in the early 1990s by the Mexican poet Juan Escareño, who is also a professional typographer. Artifact specializes in attractively designed and produced books of poetry and fiction by Hispanic Canadians and has published several works by the young Bolivian writer Alejandro Saravia, experimental poetry by the Mexican author Juan Pablo de Ávila Amador, and a bilingual edition of Civilus I Imperator, by Salvadoran poet and fiction writer René Rodas, a long poem that reflects on the effects of power on the human psyche. Small Spanish-language presses have proliferated in Montreal. Centre d’études et de diffusion des Amériques hispanophones (cédah), founded by Colombian poet Yvonne Truque and her printer/ translator husband Jean Gauthier, published a dozen books of poetry and short stories by Latino-Québécois writers before Yvonne’s death in 2001. Ediciones El Palomar was started up by the Guatemalan poet Rodolfo Escobar in the mid-1980s and was noted for its Cuadernos de Cultura Popular, a series of chapbooks of work by hispanophone authors such as Alfredo Lavergne of Chile and Maeve López of Uruguay. Las Ediciones de la Enana Blanca (White Dwarf Editions/ Les Éditions de la Naine Blanche), a trilingual (Spanish-FrenchEnglish) publishing concern, has brought out La présence d’une autre Amérique as well as poetry by Maeve López and a book of bilingual (French-Spanish) children’s stories by the Chilean dramatist and short-story writer Rodrigo González. Other presses include Chilean poet Jorge Cancino’s Les Éditions Omélic, his compatriot Daniel Inostroza’s Ediciones del Unicornio Verde, and the Cuban publisher

Introduction

17

Yolanda Gómez’s Fourmi Rose, which has to some extent specialized in the publication of women writers, such as the prolific Dominican poet, novelist, and short-story writer Eucilda Jorge Morel. Finally, literary journals have also been focal points of LatinoCanadian writing. In Vancouver the Chilean poet Carmen Rodríguez worked during the 1990s with the bilingual feminist magazine Aquelarre (Witches’ sabbath), which, although a publication of general rather than specifically literary interest, brought out an important special issue in 1991 on Latina writers in Canada. Toronto, which is the centre of Hispanic journalism in Canada – with at times a halfdozen newspapers and magazines publishing simultaneously in Spanish – has seen two chief experiments in literary publishing. Indigo: The Spanish/Canadian Presence in the Arts, was a very attractively produced review published under the direction of Margarita Feliciano from 1990 to 1991. It included poetry, short stories, and critical articles in Spanish, English, and French (without accompanying translation, the editors supposing their audience to be trilingual), as well as photography, interviews, translations of new work, and articles about Latin America and Latino-Canadian art and writing. Trilce, a completely bilingual review edited chiefly by the Salvadoran poet René Rodas, published Latin American authors of Canada and other countries from 1992 to 1993 and included such cutting-edge writers as the iconoclastic Alejandra Pizarnick of Argentina and Miguel Piñero, a Puerto Rican dramatist and poet living in New York who was one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Café. In Ottawa the review Alter Vox, jointly edited by Chilean poets Jorge Etcheverry and Luciano Díaz, has published biannually since 1998 and now includes poetry, fiction, essays, and book reviews as well as drawings and paintings. Although published in Spanish and centred on the literary and artistic production of the Latin American community in Canada, it also includes writers from other communities as well as material in French and English. In the winter of 2003, it published a hundred-page special issue devoted to the poems and academic papers presented at the first conference on Chilean Canadian writing, held in Ottawa in January 2002. Besides Manuel Betanzos Santos’s Boreal, three main reviews have appeared in Montreal. The earliest two, both of which were started during the 1980s, were indicative of the polarity that sometimes exists in Latin American letters: the first, La Botella Verde (The green bottle), published by Chilean poet and scriptwriter Jorge Cancino, was purely

18

Latinocanadá

literary in orientation and eschewed politicized writing, which it considered pamphleteering; the second, Sur (South), published by another Chilean poet, Tito Alvarado, was a cultural and political review that embraced socially committed work and was periodically printed in Cuba. In 1992 Ruptures: The Review of the 3 Americas also made its appearance, under the editorship of Haitian Canadian poet Edgard Gousse, who had studied for several years in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Ruptures, which brought out fourteen issues before closing in 1998, set itself the goal of working toward a literature of the Americas and published its texts in the four principal languages of the Americas: French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The review ran special issues on the literatures of Mexico, Quebec, the Caribbean, the Southern Cone, and Venezuela; these issues featured a number of illustrations and were so comprehensive (the one on the Southern Cone ran to over 600 pages) that they constituted virtual anthologies of contemporary writing in each country or region. Many Latino-Canadian and Latino-Québécois authors published in Ruptures’ first volumes and continued to work as volunteer translators in succeeding issues, rendering the works of writers from Canada and other parts of the world into Spanish and Portuguese in order to make them better known in Latin America. Beginning in the late 1990s, a younger generation of Mexican Canadian writers, led by Omar Alexis Ramos and Ángel Mota, have continued the Hispanic literary presence in Montreal with the review Helios, which publishes work in Spanish, French, and English, and also includes art work and experimental graphics. In recent years, as increasing numbers of writers have begun to publish on the Internet, several authors have set up website magazines, the largest of which are Elias Letelier’s Poetas.com, which includes political and social commentary as well as extensive archives of poets from the Americas, and Etcheverry.info, a site maintained by Jorge Etcheverry’s Cita Trunca Press, which contains poetry by many Hispanic authors of Canada as well as critical articles about their work. In addition, many writers, especially Chilean Canadians, now publish their work on websites in their home countries, which has contributed to their reintegration into their national literary currents. As Latino-Canadian letters have moved progressively toward the mainstream of Canadian writing, increasing numbers of authors have begun to publish in translation in English and French. Cormorant Books took the lead in the publication of Hispanic writers of Canada in English. Since 1987 it has brought out works by four LatinoCanadian authors – Chileans Leandro Urbina and Naín Nómez,

Introduction

19

Salvadoran poet and short-story writer Alfonso Quijada Urías, and Mexican novelist Gilberto Flores Patiño – and has published Compañeros and other works on Latin America as well.38 Girol Books, a primarily Spanish-language publisher in Ottawa that specializes in works of and about Argentine theatre, has brought out several works by the Argentine Canadian novelist Pablo Urbanyi in Spanish, and Williams-Wallace of Toronto, Broken Jaw Press of Fredericton, and Mosaic Press of Oakville, Ontario, have each published an English translation of one of Urbanyi’s novels. Broken Jaw has also published four bilingual (Spanish-English) collections and one trilingual (SpanishEnglish-French) edition of poems by the Argentine Canadian writer Nela Rio. The Muses’ Company, initially of Dorion, Quebec, has also published two bilingual (Spanish-English) books of poetry by Chilean writer Elías Letelier. On the French side, Les Écrits des Forges has brought out the poetry of Salvadoran Juan Ramón Mijango Mármol and of Chilean Alberto Kurapel, while Humanitas has published all of Kurapel’s exploratory avant-garde works of performance theatre as well as other books, such as a prize-winning collection of poetry by Salvadoran Salvador Torres Saso, in bilingual French-Spanish editions. The prestigious French publishing house L’Harmattan has published a bilingual (Spanish-French) edition of poetry by the Saskatoon-based Salvadoran writer Julio Torres-Recinos (editor of Amaranta Press), as part of its series “Poètes des cinq continents.” vlb Éditeur established a “Collection latino-américaine,” under the directorship of Uruguayan critic Javier García Méndez, which translated and published works by Pablo Urbanyi and by the Chilean filmmaker and novelist Jorge Fajardo but which generally showed greater interest in the works of Latin Americans from outside Canada. Boréal and Éditions Trois have published most of Gloria Escomel’s work, and Hexagone has brought out two volumes of poems by Elias Letelier. The main publisher of Latino-Québécois work in French, however, has turned out to be the venerable Éditions d’Orphée, which published works by bohemian and lesser-known authors for almost half a century and which printed unilingual Spanish and bilingual Spanish-French editions of virtually all the principal works of Chilean poets Alfredo Lavergne and Tito Alvarado.39 There is increasing interest in bilingual publishing, as evidenced by the vast list – almost a hundred volumes – of bilingual (Spanish-French) editions of the work of well-known Mexican and Québécois poets that have been jointly published by Les

20

Latinocanadá

Écrits des Forges, often in conjunction with Mexican publishers, since the late 1990s; the challenge is to ensure that such initiatives also include the work of Latin American authors living in Canada.

th e m e a n d a r t i s t i c d e v e l o p m e n t Although Latin American writers in Canada show a high degree of thematic congruity, they evince surprising variation as to when and in which ways their thematic interests evolve. There is generally, of course, an initial period in which the homeland is still uppermost in the writer’s mind, and themes of political struggle, economic hardship, and family relationships predominate. In many cases, this stage eventually gives way to the loneliness of exile and nostalgia for the native land, which is often idealized and transformed into a mythical paradise lost. The adventure of living in a new country gradually wears off, revealing what can often be a terrifying degree of alienation. As Sergio Kokis has remarked, “À la fin, ce passé fictif est si parfait que les gens et les choses de son pays d’adoption pâlissent et perdent de la valeur.”40 Eventually, however, unless the writer chooses to return to his or her country of origin (which is not always politically or economically feasible), he or she gradually begins to accept the new environment and increasingly to write about the present, often bringing new insights to Canadian reality when it is viewed through Latin American eyes. Finally, if the impulse is strong enough and the writer has sufficient linguistic ability, he or she may move even closer to the English Canadian or Québécois model, choosing to write directly in English or French rather than in Spanish or Portuguese. Given the author’s different national and linguistic origins, however, complete assimilation – actually assuming the identity of a native-born English Canadian or Québécois – is virtually impossible. Each author has his or her own internal thematic chronology. Some writers, such as Chilean poet Elías Letelier, continue to write frequently of political militancy, even decades after their arrival; often the theme is displaced from their homeland to another region undergoing a similar struggle so that it may carry on. For most authors, exile and nostalgia are the rites of passage of immigration; in the case of the Venezuelan poet Edith Velásquez de Málec, her longing for her birthplace, the island of Margarita, is transformed into a poetic celebration of a lost tropical Eden in her poem “Brillo en los tejados” (Radiance on the rooftops) from the book of the same name. Other writers, however, may become thematically obsessed by exile. Alberto Kurapel, for instance,

Introduction

21

has made it the single overwhelming metaphor for isolation and marginalization within his work, even naming his theatre company La Compagnie des Arts Exilio. For Kurapel, everyone is ultimately in exile from society and even from him- or herself, regardless of political circumstances. Likewise, an author may simply be uninterested in writing about his or her country of adoption: even an author as close to the mainstream as Gloria Escomel continues to write almost exclusively about returning to Uruguay.41 One of the characteristics that marks a certain amount of LatinoCanadian writing is its relative urbanism and technical complexity. Literary circles in many large Latin American cities have been far more deeply affected by twentieth-century European artistic movements such as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Absurdism than have Canadian letters;42 indeed, in the case of Chile, the experimental poet Vicente Huidobro actually introduced his avant-garde “Creationism” to France and Spain,43 while the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges has revolutionized the idea of the short story with his ficciones. Argentine authors Julio Cortázar and Enrique Anderson Imbert have also been influential in the development of minificciones, or extremely brief, condensed, often poetic tales ranging in length from a single sentence to several paragraphs. Literature and literary activity have traditionally been integral and dynamic forces in Latin American culture; one has only to remember the diplomatic posts held by Pablo Neruda, the thousands of mine workers who would show up for his poetry readings, or his exile from Chile in 1949 in order to realize the importance of the writer in Chilean society. Moreover, Latin American literature has a long and distinguished trajectory: in Chile, the Spanish soldier Alonso de Ercilla began writing La Araucana, his epic poem on the Conquest, in the mid-1500s; in Mexico, the earliest known individual poet was the fifteenth-century Texcocan prince Netzahualcóyotl; and the first great feminist writer, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, rivalled the Baroque poets of the Spanish Golden Age at the end of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, beginning with the works of the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias and his Cuban contemporary Alejo Carpentier some fifty years ago, the literary style known as magic realism arose in Latin America itself and has spread outward from there to influence writers all over the globe, from Salman Rushdie in Pakistan and England to Robert Kroetsch in Canada. Given these antecedents, then, it is often difficult for the LatinoCanadian writer to find a place within the more documentary, straightforward style of English Canadian poetry and prose and at the same

22

Latinocanadá

time maintain a place in the avant-garde world of Latin American letters. Canadian critic Milan V. Dimic has commented that much “ethnic” writing in Canada, such as that of Ukrainian and Italian Canadian writers, is fundamentally conservative in its desire to recreate and preserve a reality that has been overwhelmed by historical change, but Dimic admits that “this option to remain traditional, does not apply, of course, to émigrés such as the Chilean writers in exile who are catering to Latin American audiences used to avant-garde writing.”44 This clash of literary worlds is somewhat cushioned in Quebec by a greater openness to experimentation in francophone letters and within the English Canadian avant-garde countercurrent of concrete and sound poetry: witness Rafael Barreto-Rivera’s participation in The Four Horsemen. Nevertheless, the Latin American writer must face the fact that his or her concerns as an exile or use of a distinct style of writing may be far removed from those of English- or French-speaking authors and their audiences. Moreover, Canadian readers and reviewers are likely to be more interested in “foreign” Latin American writers who actually live in South or Central America and have a higher international profile than in “immigrant” authors of Latin American origin who are writing in Canada. In terms of literary reception, the response to Latino-Canadian writing has been mixed. The works that have fared best are those that have been published by better-known presses and those that have been written directly in English or French. Certain works have been very favourably received and widely reviewed and commented on: this applies on the French side to the novel Esteban, by the Mexican novelist Gilberto Flores Patiño, and on the English side to a collection of short stories by Salvadoran writer Alfonso Quijada Urías, The Better to See You. Such a broad reception would seem to depend on the ability of an established press to promote its publications. Despite a number of very positive reviews, however, actual sales of Quijada Urías’s book remained small. The language in which an author writes is also an important key to critical recognition. Works by authors such as the Argentines Guillermo Verdecchia and Alberto Manguel, who write in English specifically for an anglophone audience, have been very well received indeed.45 This also applies in Quebec to authors such as Jacques Folch-Ribas, a Catalan raised primarily in France who writes in French and is now considered one of the leading novelists in French Canada. Writers who continue to work in Spanish are considered to be somehow foreign,

Introduction

23

even when translated into English or French, while those who write in one or the other of the two official languages are thought to have joined the mainstream. A special dossier on immigrant writers in Lettres québécoises in 1992, for example, limited itself solely to those who wrote directly in French; thus the only Latino-Québécois author to appear in the issue was the Uruguayan critic Javier García Méndez. Even authors such as the Chileans Alfredo Lavergne and Alberto Kurapel, both of whom had published widely in translation and enjoyed a high degree of recognition in literary circles, were eliminated, along with virtually the entire body of Hispanic writing in Quebec.46 The review Ruptures, despite its output of visually attractive and highquality issues of poetry and prose from all over the Americas, which were published in four languages – including a massive special issue on Quebec literature – hardly received a mention in the Quebec press or other media. Given these rules of engagement for literary acceptance, then, many Latino-Canadian authors simply keep publishing in their native language, are promoted on local radio programs and in the hispanophone press, maintain their literary relationships with their home country, and choose to remain in the parallel universe of Latino-Canadian letters.

l at i n o c a na d á The grounds for selecting the authors included in the present study are a complex interplay of geographical, cultural, and literary factors. Among the preliminary criteria are the actual presence of the author in Canada, the scale of his or her work, and the extent to which it has been previously translated into English. This anthology includes only writers who are still living in Canada (with the exception of Yvonne Truque, who died as it was being written); it does so in the hope of helping to make their work more accessible to the Canadian public and with the aim of developing increased contact between the worlds of Hispano-Canadian and Anglo-Canadian letters. Such a decision has meant, however, that some unique and intriguing writers with colourful backgrounds were not included, such as the Chilean surrealist Ludwig Zeller and the Uruguayan poet Maeve López, whom critic Stephen Hennighan once called “the best-kept literary secret in Montreal,”47 but who had moved to Caracas at the time of writing. Another talented writer, Naín Nómez, a skilful poet and a key figure in the development of Latino-Canadian writing, has returned to Chile,

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Latinocanadá

where he has acquired considerable renown as a critic and editor.48 Two of the first Chileans to publish in Montreal, the prize-winning poet Gonzalo Millán and his compatriot Nelly Davis Vallejos, have also returned to live in Chile and thus have not been included. Moreover, the authors who have been chosen have all produced a body of work consisting, at the least, of three or four books or manuscripts. The close focus and detailed critical analysis that have been allotted to the individual authors in the study made it imperative that each have a substantial oeuvre to investigate. It was also important that the anthology be completely composed of material that had not been previously translated into English. This again involved certain restraints, both in terms of the criteria for selection and in terms of the works of the authors included. Carmen Rodríguez, for example, who worked with Aquelarre in Vancouver and has published a bilingual volume of poetry titled Guerra prolongada/Protracted War that examines exile and her homeland from a feminist point of view, is fully bilingual, and virtually all of her work has been previously translated into English, either by herself or others. Jorge Etcheverry, who is included in the present volume, is the author of seven published texts, three of which have been translated into English; the choice of his work was, therefore, limited to only four of his works. It must also be noted that the first selection in the present study from the unpublished novel “Homo eroticus,” by Leandro Urbina, appeared in an English translation by Christina Shantz in volume 2, issue 1, of the review Possibilitis in late August 1996, just as the first draft of the present study was being finished; the translation included here, however, was completed the month before.49 Latino-Canadian literature is an ongoing field. Great effort has been made to assure that the selection includes authors of varying national, regional, and – as much as possible – socioeconomic backgrounds. Given the sheer number of good Chilean writers in Canada, for instance, it would be relatively easy to make an anthology of Chilean Canadian work alone, as both Naín Nómez and Jorge Etcheverry have already done. Limiting the number of Chileans, however, has again meant leaving out some notable writers, such as Tito Alvarado of Winnipeg and Montreal, Ramón Sepúlveda, Luciano Díaz, and Elías Letelier of Ottawa, and Claudio Durán of Toronto. Furthermore, despite the relative strength of authors from the countries of the Southern Cone, it was felt that an overall balance among the various regions of Latin America was also necessary so that Mexico,

Introduction

25

Central America, northern South America, and the Andean countries would be represented. In view of the many Salvadoran Canadian writers now at work, for instance, it is quite likely that their influence will eventually match that of the Chilean and Argentine authors who arrived in the 1970s. Salvador Torres of Montreal and René Rodas of Toronto are both well on the way to producing substantial bodies of poetry and fiction, while Ernesto Jobal Arrozales of Kitchener has published a book of short stories (with an introduction by Manlio Argueta) on life in the Salvadoran countryside and has several manuscripts of poetry and testimonial texts awaiting publication. Balance also had to be achieved within Canada itself so that not all the authors studied were from the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto nexus in the two central provinces. Nela Rio of Fredericton and Alfonso Quijada Urías of Vancouver serve as partial balance to the pull of Canada’s capital and two largest cities. Contacts were also made with writers in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Calgary. Gender was a consideration, too, especially in the final selection of seven men and three women authors. There are a large number of Latin American women writers in Canada; Daniel Inostroza’s Antología de la poesía femenina latinoamericana en Canadá included sixteen women poets and did not exhaust the field. At the time that the present volume was created, however, many of the principal women writers, such as Carmen Rodríguez, had still not published their most important work. Others, such as the Venezuelan poet and fiction writer Edith Velásquez de Málec, author of the unpublished novel “Una comedia no muy divina” (A not very divine comedy), are still putting the final touches on promising manuscripts. One noted woman writer, the Chilean filmmaker and short-story writer Marilú Mallet, who published two very well-received collections of short stories with Québec Amérique in the 1980s, is now concentrating on cinema rather than fiction. New and prolific writers, such as Chilean poet Blanca Espinoza, have arrived on the scene, while others, such as Peruvian short-story writer Borka Satler and the indefatigable Dominican poet and fiction writer Eucilda Jorge Morel, have since expanded their repertoires. Two other criteria were also important. In view of the powerful centrifugal forces exerted in Latin America by capital cities, great effort was made to include authors from both rural and urban environments in Latin America, and, within the latter group, to achieve some balance between those from the capital and others from smaller provincial cities. Finally, it was also necessary to find writers who were of differing

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Latinocanadá

socio-economic backgrounds, who had lived through a variety of circumstances (all of which, however, had ended in emigration from their native lands), and who had adjusted to life in Canada in different ways. What is the future of Latin American writing in Canada? Although virtually all the writers working in Spanish in Canada were born or grew up in Spanish-speaking countries or societies – including not only Spain and Latin America, but also Hispanic cultures in the United States and the Philippines – there are also a number of authors who now also feel as comfortable writing in English or French as in Spanish. The poet and fiction writer Carmen Rodríguez, for instance, published her last book of short stories, De cuerpo entero/And a Body to Remember, almost simultaneously in English in Vancouver and in Spanish in Santiago, Chile, in 1997. Few authors, however, completely abandon their native language to write exclusively in English or French – the Brazilian novelist and poet Sergio Kokis being the notable exception. There is also a second generation of writers appearing now among the children of the original immigrants from Latin America, who carry on the same passion for literature but who write in English or French. The novel Côte-des-nègres, for instance, written in French by Mauricio Segura, received a warm reception from the French-language press when it was published in 1998. The majority of Hispanic Canadian writers, however, will doubtless continue to work in their native Spanish. One of the principal characteristics of Latino-Canadian writing is its capacity for self-renewal. Authors arrive and create in Spanish, and although their children – especially if born in Latin America – may well feel as strongly connected to their original culture as to their adopted one (as Chilean journalist Sergio Martínez has shown in his anthology Creciendo en el desarraigo: Jóvenes chilenos en la provincia de Quebec/Grandir déraciné: Jeunes chiliens dans la province de Québec), their descendants will eventually speak mainly either English or French. Meanwhile, however, new immigrants and refugees continue to arrive to carry on literary activity in Spanish in Canada. If there is increased political stability in Latin America in the future, the numbers of refugees will diminish; hopefully, no further countries will have to undergo the political, intellectual, cultural, and artistic haemorrhage that afflicted so many Latin American countries when they fell under military rule during the last quarter-century. In the absence of further coups d’état and civil wars, therefore, it is doubtful that Canada will again receive

Introduction

27

such a concentrated immigration of artistic talent as it did from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Guatemala when military governments in those countries literally purged the intelligentsia and the general population of their most progressive and creative elements. Given the protracted economic and political fragility of many countries in the region, however, from Argentina to Colombia, Canada will undoubtedly continue to take in a steady stream of economic immigrants over the coming years, a certain number of whom are sure to be writers and artists. Of the ten authors included in the present volume, for instance, six came north seeking asylum, and four chose to immigrate to Canada for other reasons. Latino-Canadian writing thus differs from previous patterns of “immigrant” literatures in that it is – and will probably continue to be – the product of a steady flow of immigration from a variety of different nations. Perhaps, given both the linguistic alienation and the potential for self-discovery that are involved in the experience of exile, it would be fitting to end this introduction with the opening and closing verses of an untitled poem by the Chilean poet and songwriter Patricia Lazcano, who has experimented in writing in Spanish, French, and English simultaneously. Her lines mirror the flow of language through the mind of the displaced writer: La lluvia tombe sur my window y me invita simplement to evoke your présence. ................ La pluie qui tombe sur my hands me invita à m’asseoir at the table solitaire.50

1 Jorge Etcheverry: Vanguard and Cosmopolis

The poetry and prose of Jorge Etcheverry are the works of a linguistic explorer in search of new forms of expression and ways of subverting the conventional. As one of the four founding members of the School of Santiago, a group of young poets of the 1960s who believed in an intertextual, fragmentary, and urbanized form of literary art, Etcheverry has continued to push the limits of writing from his exile in Ottawa and has also become a publisher and critic of Latino-Canadian letters. He has published in many literary reviews in Canada and the United States, sometimes under the assumed name of Patrick Phillmore, and is also an accomplished painter and illustrator. Etcheverry was born in 1945 in Santiago, Chile. His mother and father were both employed by a bank, although his mother also became politically active in the Unidad Popular, the umbrella group of political parties that supported Salvador Allende. Jorge attended public primary and secondary school, although he also studied one year in a private English-language institute and at one time had a French tutor. As a child, he read omnivorously, especially from the personal library of his grandfather, who had been a military officer in the left-of-centre government of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in the 1950s. His early interests ran to French literature (Hugo, Balzac), the occult and the paranormal (Mme Blavatsky),1 and science fiction. His father had a subscription to the Argentine science-fiction magazine Más Allá, which included stories by American authors such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. By the time he entered secondary school, Jorge was already painting and writing poetry. He studied English and French, both of which were obligatory at the time, as well as philosophy and psychology,

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and often spent part of the afternoon or evening listening to radio plays, which included works by Oscar Wilde and other playwrights, as well as dramatized versions of classic novels such as Manon Lescault. In poetry, he read works by classic Spanish authors such as the nineteenth-century romantic José de Espronceda and Federico García Lorca, as well as Pablo Neruda. He also had a keen interest in world literature and, as an adolescent, read Goethe, Hesse, Stefan Zweig, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Jules Verne, the Italian satirist and Futurist Giovanni Papini,2 the austere Swedish novelist Pär Lagerkvist (author of The Dwarf and Barabbas), Françoise Sagan, and James Joyce. Out of this heterogeneous choice of authors grew the seeds of Etcheverry’s later interest in psychology, exoticism, science fiction, the grotesque, and the avant-garde. Jorge entered the Instituto Pedagógico of the University of Chile in 1965. Although he was by now regularly painting figurative canvases and would like to have studied at the School of Fine Arts, he initially chose teaching philosophy as a more practical career program and later switched to literature. He also at this time became involved in leftist politics and entered the newly formed Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (mir, or Revolutionary Movement of the Left), which followed the political thought of Che Guevara and exerted constant leftward pressure on both the Christian Democratic government of Eduardo Frei and later on that of Allende himself. Etcheverry’s poetry began to change rapidly during his university years, first moving into a singular interplay of chorus, strophe, and antistrophe based on his readings of Aeschylus, and then advancing to the discontinuous, experimental, hallucinatory style that still characterizes his work today. Jorge’s reading during his university years had turned to the avant-garde and included Rimbaud, Lautréamont,3 Eliot, Pound, St-Jean Perse, Whitman, Beckett, Kafka, the phantasmagorical work of the Uruguayan Felisberto Hernández,4 Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the Whitmanesque Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha5 – as well as Gurdjieff and Ouspensky6 (even as a Mirista, his interest in the occult continued). The literary atmosphere, like its political counterpart, at the University of Chile during the late 1960s was one of great ebullience. Ariel Dorfman7 and Antonio Skármeta8 were on the Faculty of Spanish Literature; Gonzalo Millán, Leandro Urbina, and Marilú Mallet, all of whom were later to emigrate to Canada, were also writing and studying there. Various literary groups were formed, including the Grupo

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América, which gave readings both at literary venues and in the poblaciones, or shantytowns, outside the capital. The nature of poetry itself, especially in its potential as an avant-garde and revolutionary medium, was intensely discussed, and there was a great deal of questioning and subversion of existing literary structures and trying out of new techniques in form and style. In 1966 Etcheverry and three other poets – Naín Nómez, Erik Martínez, and Julio Piñones – joined together to form the School of Santiago, a poetic and artistic movement that believed that the new poetry must be primarily urban, personal (prefiguring postmodernism), and as fragmented as city life itself. The group was to have an immediate impact on Chilean letters, a fact confirmed by the avant-garde poet Raúl Zurita,9 who called its members “precursors of the New Vanguard of the 1980s.”10 Nómez, Martínez, and Etcheverry would all eventually end up in Ottawa, while Piñones stayed in Chile during the dictatorship. Although the individual members of the group never completely agreed on a plan of action – their published manifesto consisted of four individual tracts – they did all believe that both the idolization of the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the calculated flatness of Nicanor Parra’s “anti-poetry”11 had become conventions that held sway over Chilean poetry but had lost their relevance. Chile had industrialized and urbanized to the extent that Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, and other large cities now dominated the national consciousness; poetry that extolled the beauties of the countryside was no longer of primary significance. Among the characteristics that united the young poets, Etcheverry himself points to “the long poem; a kind of de-lyricizing of the subject that permitted the inclusion of elements that were more distanced from the real and that sometimes were part of the fantastic; and, also, a sort of exacerbation of the rhythmic aspect and of the fragmentation of the poem.”12 “here there does not exist either poetry or prose: here all that exists is the word – powerful, undifferentiated –,” wrote Etcheverry in his section of the School of Santiago’s manifesto.13 He and his associates were groping for a new kind of poetry as revolutionary as their politics (although, curiously, they did not insist, as Neruda had, on a connection between the two): a poetry that could enter into prose and move back again, a texte éclaté in which various voices could intrude and images abound in long, complex lines. Within recent Chilean poetry, they found a predecessor in the uninhibited, Whitmanesque exuberance of the poetry of Pablo de Rokha, whose “way of writing … was important for almost

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all of us: forceful, using long paragraphs, rhythmically charged, and with an idea of the poem as a fragment. You could almost say that De Rokha’s poetry consists of one enormous long poem that continually coalesces and disintegrates.”14 Indeed, the School of Santiago was influential in the reappraisal and revival of De Rokha’s oracular and exultant work, which had been eclipsed by that of the other two great Chilean writers of the nation’s avant-garde in the first half of the century: Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda. Other poets in the same tradition, such as Lautréamont (for his prose poetry), Whitman, Pound (especially his Pisan Cantos), Lorca (particularly the surrealistic and urban Poeta en Nueva York), Ginsberg, and Kerouac, were also important figures for the members of the group.15 Considering that they were still young, unpublished poets and university students (and that none of them would bring out an entire book until well after the coup d’état in 1973), the members of the School of Santiago received a great deal of attention in the Chilean media. An interview with them appeared in the Santiago daily La Nación in 1967, and in 1968 they were invited by the critic Jorge Vélez to publish short selections of their work, along with their manifesto, in an anthology that he was editing for the literary journal Orfeo, to be called “Treinta y tres nombres claves de la actual poesía chilena” (Thirty-three key names in contemporary Chilean poetry). Their inclusion in the anthology caused a certain stir in the literary milieu of young and experimental poets, and some criticism was voiced that their work was not politicized enough. Nevertheless, they were invited to appear on Chilean television, where they were interviewed by Antonio Skármeta, and their work was solicited for literary reviews in Germany and Mexico.16 The group began to become less active after Allende’s election in 1970, however, when literary activity in general was eclipsed as the level of political activity at the University of Chile went from intense to frenetic. The poems included in the selection of Jorge’s work in Orfeo show to what extent his style had already matured. They are certainly fragmentary, consisting of poem I from “G” and poems VIII, I, II, and IV (in that order) from “X.” Although the poet was only twenty-three years old when they were published, most of the major formal and stylistic elements that characterize his work even today are already present: the lines of varying length that occasionally change to prose paragraphs and back again; the spontaneous use of dashes, accompanied by an almost complete absence of periods (dashes are telegraphic

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and open-ended, while periods signal closure); the use of multiple voices; neologisms (“autodiálogos”/autodialogues), odd spellings (“noventaisiete” instead of the conventional “noventa y siete”), and contradictions (“We have to speak of the things that constitute the framework for our references, I’m lying, it’s not the framework”);17 a certain lyrical element that includes images of the sea; and unexpected and often bizarre images (“‘Like the inside of the eyelids of people who cross the desert with their eyes closed. In order not to go blind’”).18 The content also has a characteristic touch of science fiction, in this case combined with revolutionary or clandestine undertakings. Much of the activity of the poems seems to take place at night; and there is a fascination with all that is marginal, in this case including a party of beggars in a garbage dump.19 Although there is a degree of chaos or hermeticism in this first anthologized selection of Etcheverry’s work, the poetic independence, technical ability, and desire to transcend and transgress the existing limits of poetic expression are remarkable in such an early work. Following the coup d’état in 1973, Etcheverry began looking for a country of asylum. Naín Nómez emigrated to Canada and settled in Ottawa, where he had a friend studying at Carleton University. In 1975 Jorge and his young wife (who was pregnant), also went to Ottawa, where their daughter was born. Jorge enrolled at Carleton, where he began teaching part time as he worked on a master’s degree in Spanish literature. Although the actual number of Chileans who had chosen to live in Ottawa was far less than those who had settled in Montreal or Toronto, the cohort of writers among them was impressive: besides Nómez and Etcheverry, there were also Erik Martínez, Leandro Urbina, Gonzalo Millán, Manuel Alcides Jofré, Luis Lama, Ramón Sepúlveda, Arturo Lazo, and others. Reflecting the relative importance of poetry in Chilean culture, the Chilean Association of Ottawa would regularly ask the exiled poets to read at peñas (benefit parties) in support of solidarity with Chile or at other social or political gatherings. These events would involve Chileans of all political tendencies, although on a daily basis Chilean immigrants and refugees tended to group together according to the political affiliations that they had previously established in Chile (many of the writers were Miristas). After Leandro Urbina founded Ediciones Cordillera in Ottawa in 1979 with the specific purpose of publishing Chilean Canadian and Hispanic Canadian work, the Ottawa poets began to hold more readings and evenings dedicated solely to poetry. The indefatigable Christina

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Shantz also began to translate much of their work into English, and books and anthologies of Chilean Canadian writers began to appear. Jorge’s first book, El evasionista/The Escape Artist: Poems, 1968–1980, was published by Cordillera in 1980 in a bilingual edition that was translated by Christina Shantz and that contains black-and-white illustrations by the author. There is no indication as to when the various poems were published, so it is impossible to follow the author’s chronological development; but perhaps there is no need to, for stylistically the poems are part of the aesthetics laid out in Etcheverry’s manifesto in 1968 and continue in the same vein as the work that he published in Orfeo in Chile. Again, there is the fascination with the work-in-progress, which is a continual becoming rather than a creation of static being: thus many of the poems are simply named “State of Things 1” or “Fragment 5.” Once more, there are also long lines, occasionally interspersed with very short ones but more often assuming paragraph form and then breaking down once more into individual verses. Etcheverry also continues to prefer dashes to other forms of punctuation but now makes more frequent use of completely capitalized words for extra emphasis. The tone, however, has changed somewhat from Etcheverry’s earliest work: it is more discursive, relaxed, and colloquial. The poet has also begun to include bits of “flat” material, such as conversations filled with clichés or expected information, somewhat in the style of certain novels of Réjean Ducharme, such as L’hiver de force. These banalities and truisms are used in counterpoint to flights of imaginative and even capricious imagery and seem intended to point out the dullness and predictability of many human exchanges in the midst of unexplored creative possibilities. Moreover, the speaker will often interject decidedly “unpoetic” phrases – such as “To get back to the subject at hand,” or “Something else, let’s say it straight,” or even the comical “the cheapest kind / to be found in K Mart (there is no Spanish word for that)” – as distancing elements to ensure that the tone does not become too elevated. On the other hand, he frequently uses imperatives such as “Listen” or “Look” or even whole sentences beginning with imperatives, as in “A Drowsiness of Birds II,”20 in order to bring a sense of immediacy to the poem. The themes of El evasionista/The Escape Artist are as protean as in the work published in Orfeo, shifting from one stanza or paragraph to another, yet many of the poems seem at least to consist of certain thematic clusters in which one or more threads stand out over the others. Moreover, the three sections of the book are quite distinct. It is noteworthy

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that the first poem in the collection, “The Winged Dog,” as well as the very last, “Epigraph for the School of Santiago,” should deal in such a matter-of-fact manner with the historiography of Etcheverry and his friends’ poetic development and the ensuing onset of artistic fossilization that set in on them in Ottawa. In a sense, the two poems frame the work by setting its chronological parameters. Throughout the first section, there is an interplay between, on the one hand, apocalyptic depression as the speaker witnesses the triumph of violence and militarism and, on the other, the dogged hope that some new and higher form of human interchange may be possible or that perhaps it even already exists in simply experiencing each moment of enjoyment as completely as possible. Often, as in “State of Things I” and “Ahimsa,” the speaker takes on a prophetic, visionary persona, recounting dramatic scenes that he has witnessed in a tone that oscillates between the Biblical and the futuristic. It is a world of archetypal images juxtaposed in a certain medieval surrealism: The girl of the tales and the golden braids picking ripening cherries, barefoot on the snow A blind cat perched on the Gate of the Sun Ragged bands of people pass by, maddened with hunger Yet within this chaotic landscape, bands of clandestine fighters and militants struggle to spread revolutionary justice “like a Red Flower”21 across the earth. The second and third sections of El evasionista/The Escape Artist, however, draw back a bit from the hills of Armageddon to examine aspects of human relationships that may eventually free people from the hell that they have made for themselves as a world society. Here the speaker (or speakers) of the various poems often bursts into a surprising lyricism, either about women (“Dawn”), the netherworld of dreams (“Dream’s Advent”), or the inability of humans to understand the natural world (“Transverse Cats on Blue Ground at an Uncertain Hour”). Beneath the surrealist imagery, there is often an echo of esoteric philosophy, although stated in an unusual way. “Central Flower,” for example, is an odyssey in search of the meaning of human coupling that ends with this strange twist on Tantric thought: “When the tarantula of sex or the starfish of sex / may be discerned at the centre of all processes.”22 “A Caucus of

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Quail” parodies the twelfth-century Sufi text The Conference of the Birds, by Farid Ud-Din Attar; instead of finding enlightenment, however, the Chilean immigrants of the poem encounter a grey reality of “heavy shoes, the rat of inflation, ill-fitting / clothes,” and “On Saturday morning, the immigrants fill MacDonald’s to / overflowing,”23 a reality in which their dreams of revolution slowly wither and fade. In addition to his writing, Etcheverry also continued his university studies during the 1970s and 1980s. He finished his master’s degree in Spanish at Carleton University with a thesis on the Argentine writer Manuel Puig,24 studied comparative literature at the University of Ottawa, and began and abandoned a doctorate in Spanish literature at Laval (where he met the Spanish writer of literature of the fantastic Antón Risco). He then enrolled at the Université de Montréal, where he completed his doctorate in comparative literature with a thesis comparing the novels of Samuel Beckett with those of the Chilean writer José Donoso. One of his long-term literary interests has been the parallels between Quebec and Chilean poetry, and in the mid-1980s he presented a paper comparing the work of Gaston Miron with that of Pablo Neruda. Etcheverry has also been a pioneer, along with Margarita Feliciano and Luis Torres, in critical work on Latin American writing in Canada, on which he has presented a number of papers and has published articles in journals both in Canada (Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Canadian Fiction, Canadian Ethnic Studies, and Arc) and Chile (Araucaria). Curiously, although he worked as a lecturer while at Carleton and the Université de Montréal, he did not go into academia when he obtained his doctorate but instead has preferred to work as a specialized translator in electronics, which perhaps gives him more time to write. In the early 1980s, Jorge met Patrick White, who was then editor of the Ottawa-based literary journal Anthos. He also participated in the “Convergencias” readings by people of different nationalities that were organized by Leandro Urbina, where he met Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, and Paul Savoie, a writer from St Boniface. These readings have led to many others at gatherings of writers from different ethnic groups, and Etcheverry has now read with Pakistanis, Kurds, Jamaicans, and authors from various parts of Africa. He is also in sporadic contact with writers in the Ottawa area such as John Metcalfe, Francis Itani, and Cyril Dabydeen. Furthermore, Jorge has published a very large quantity of material – including poems, short stories, and minificciones in English, French, and

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Spanish (as well as pen-and-ink drawings) – in an array of literary journals and newspapers, including Now, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Viceversa, Indigo, The Antigonish Review, Waves, Existere, Possibilitis, and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos in English Canada; Urgences, Moebius, L’Apropos, and Ruptures in Quebec; The Americas Review and Texts in the United States; Lar in Chile; and other reviews in the Netherlands, Cuba, and Spain. His work is also well represented in anthologies of Hispanic Canadian writing in Canada, as well as on literary websites in Chile. Moreover, he has frequently published under the name of his alter ego, Patrick Phillmore (created in 1983), a poet who rejects Jorge’s involved aesthetics in favour of a direct, purposefully deflated poetry that Jorge has described as “a kind of anti-poetry in English.”25 Poems and drawings by Patrick Phillmore have appeared in Tidepole, The Tower, Drum, Skinny, Bouillabaise, and International Poetry Review. Following the establishment of Ediciones Cordillera in the late 1970s, Jorge participated on its editorial board; in the mid-1980s, however, he and his compañera of the time, Paulette Turcotte, founded Split Quotation Press/Ediciones La Cita Trunca, under the imprimatur of which he brought out his second book, The Witch, in 1985. Since then, Split Quotation has published a variety of other works, chiefly by Chilean Canadians, in both English and Spanish. Despite its unilingual title, The Witch is a bilingual Spanish-English edition, translated by Paulette Turcotte and illustrated by the author. It is also a text that continually straddles the line between poetry and prose. Although blocked off into generally unindented paragraphs, periods are again usually missing, and the various sections fit together more as a collage or mosaic than as a linearly coherent work; moreover, the text breaks into poetry (of variable lengths of line) in the last few pages. “It should be read in an intellectual rather than Kantian way,” says Etcheverry, “without looking for any necessary transcendence.”26 The narrator is an unidentified immigrant who shares at least part of the interests and trajectory of Etcheverry himself. His discourse is an ironic but increasingly claustrophobic description of his progressive marginalization in Ottawa as old friendships fall apart and he moves away from his wife and child: he experiences increasing disorientation as a highly urban bohemian obsessed with the written word who finds himself living in an essentially audio-visual, suburban- or rural-inspired culture; and his sexual fantasies and dreams begin to be dominated by succubi. Into his life comes the Witch, a woman from the countryside who has

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“burnt down the farm buildings, dispersed her cattle, frightened away the dogs.”27 Far from being a malevolent hag, however, she is a young woman in touch with deep telluric forces, a brewer of magical herbal potions who has lived alone in the narrator’s parodic conception of the Canadian bush, and she proves to be – despite the speaker’s protestations – a perfect complement to his aesthetic cerebralism and obdurate scientific materialism. The reader is thus surprised to find that, beneath the disjointed, tentative, sometimes obtuse nature of the text, The Witch is ultimately a love story. Etcheverry’s next book was La calle (The street), a collection of poems principally about the coup d’état in Chile and its aftermath. It was also his first book to appear in Chile, where it was published by Editorial Sinfronteras in 1986, as military censorship began to erode. La calle is the only work of his poetry not yet fully translated into English; several extracts from it are included in the selection of translations of his work that concludes this chapter. What is remarkable about the book is that its style and form are radically different from the rest of Etcheverry’s work and far removed from his stated aesthetic principles. This time, perhaps in rebellion against the restrictions of his own parameters, Jorge has opted for a simple, unadorned style in which each short piece deals precisely with a given theme. The content is factual, without direct intervention from the speaker, and most of the poems are constructed around a single, indirect, encompassing metaphor. The lines, which all begin flush with the left-hand margin, are relatively short and are devoid of extraneous images. Although the undercurrent of anarchic humour of his other works is also absent, it is compensated for by a dry, realistic irony that suits the somber subject matter of the text. Fear, hatred, and distrust are omnipresent; the point of view, however, is sometimes that of the general population and at other times that of the military themselves, affording a painful but effective view of the degree of dehumanization necessary to enforce the dictatorship, from the tyrant himself down to the common soldier. The poem “Recommendations,” for instance, is indicative of how the troops who carried out actions against their own people were taught to fear and distrust the general population; it is a nightmare vision of a military that has become a caste unto itself and then has turned upon its citizens: Don’t smoke at night Consider every civilian your enemy

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Make the uniform respected wherever you go More than anything else Uphold the prestige of your weapons The school tradition The name of the homeland Remember especially Not to speak to anyone on the street Not to take your finger off the trigger Don’t accept cigarettes from strangers Walk in pairs Mentally repeating the current password to yourself Don’t keep anything from a raid And above all Show no weakness Never forget the password.28 Over the past decade Etcheverry’s work has developed in several new directions, both in its themes – especially as to the role of the city and its relation to exile – and in its style. A dichotomy has grown up between two visions of the urban world: one of the city as a cosmopolitan centre and focal point of human energies; and the other of a soulless cement termite mound filled with isolated and alienated individuals. The city as international nucleus occurs most markedly in Etcheverry’s later poetry and is associated with either a Chilean city or some international centre that appears to be lost, remembered, or imagined by a speaker in exile. Here the city is a chaotic and fertile nexus in which immigrants, travellers, wanderers, outcasts, and locals meet and influence one another in unexpected ways. In Etcheverry’s prose of the 1990s, however, the city is generally in the North, far from the protagonist’s birthplace, and is portrayed as an antiseptic place of estrangement and commercialization, where even immigrants from other, more communal, exotic, and extroverted societies end up atomized and segregated, leaving people accustomed to a more cosmopolitan culture lonely and marginalized, incapable of coming to terms with their adopted country. Stylistically, Etcheverry has changed, too: his later works are more accessible than those of his youth in Chile or his first publications in Canada. The intense, ubiquitous formal experimentation of the manifiesto of the School of Santiago, with its truncated, purposefully disorienting, fragmentary style that blurs the borders between genres is still crucial to the underlying

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structure but has increasingly begun to give way to a more direct, conversational style that is less insistently avant-garde. Etcheverry’s next book, Tánger (Tangier), was co-published in 1990 by Cordillera in Ottawa and Documentas in Santiago and includes the Spanish text of The Witch at the end. An English version of Tánger has been translated by Jorge and Sharon Khan and was published by Split Quotation in 1997. Tánger is a collection of some fifty-four unnamed, unnumbered poems, the shortest of which consists of two lines and the longest of three pages; formally, there are poems using short, staccato lines as well as others with much longer ones or written in paragraphs. All, however, are unified by the central image of the seaport. Few specific geographical references are given beyond Valparaíso, Ottawa, and Tangier, the city that he has used for the title of the book. Tangier, which stands at the interface between Europe and Africa and which was a self-governing international zone from 1923 to 1956, is a symbol for the heterogeneous mixing of cultures and the interaction of peoples and even literatures (Jean Genet, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Mohammed Mrabet29 – to name a few – all wrote there). Yet the seaport (especially Chile’s largest port, Valparaíso) is also a metonym for Chile itself, a nation that is quintessentially identified with the sea, whose border runs only 300 kilometres inland, but which has over 4,000 kilometres of coastline, not including the innumerable islands of its southern archipelago. There is, moreover, a constant association between the first person plural used by the various speakers in the poems and the recurring images of seagulls and other maritime birds. Within the context of its maritime imagery, however, the book touches on a variety of themes, from the celebration of women and cosmopolitanism to the ravages of civilization on maritime fauna (and humans), the difficulty in maintaining revolutionary fervour in the developed world, and the possible disappearance in the audiovisual society of the tradition of literary bohemianism. Even though the speakers are of all ages and sexes, the principal narrator seems to be an exile and poet who is speaking of his generation. A notable split has occurred, however, in Etcheverry’s earlier enthusiasm for the urban environment as the key context of modern relevancy: the port, with its vast mixing of peoples and languages, continues to be a positive urban symbol, but industrial production, especially in terms of capitalist exploitation, is now a negative phenomenon associated with the destruction of the natural world. Nowhere else in Etcheverry’s work, in fact, is nature so lyrically presented, often simply for

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the pleasure found in naming and describing all that comes from the sea, and sometimes in order to elaborate metaphorical comparisons between the ocean or the seaport and women. The tone of the poems has also softened: it is now gentler, more playful, sometimes even serene. Yet various devices are still used to break down and subvert the overtly poetical nature of the text, thus continually renewing its primary function of communicating in a poetic way rather than letting it become a construct. These stratagems include contradictions, anecdotal diversions, clichés, repetition, lapses into minimalism, unidentified quotations, sudden changes in point of view, and the placing of portions of text or even whole poems in italics or parentheses (or both). Such techniques also enliven the text by adding a whimsical, unexpected, sometimes comical element. At times, the speaker also plays with the reader’s perceptions by first describing something with no identifiable end in mind and then developing it into a metaphor, as in the following example: The small citrus fruits with their thin, dry skins of intense orange, and a fine network of white threads within, thickly wrapping together the sweet, but lightly acidic segments Such are the days we bite into, the solar food that rejuvenates us and makes us lazy. This is helped along by a liquor something like brandy but sweet30 Two of Jorge’s latest works have been in prose. “Dreamshaping” is a sizable short story (almost a novella) that was published along with the work of three other Chilean Canadian authors in the anthology Exilium tremens by Éditions Omélic of Montreal in 1991. It tells the story of one François Laffayette, an anglophone of francophone descent who grows up in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and later moves to Ottawa and Montreal in order to become a writer. During his quest for a literary vocation, however, François begins to develop a mental process called “Dreamshaping” that is later to revolutionize human

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communication: it permits humans to realize their fantasies or wishes by mentally saturating themselves with them as they write them down. The whole tale is, in fact, a satirical picaresque based on alienation and marginalization. Alone and unemployed, François moves to Montreal in order to get in touch with his roots and enrols in a government-sponsored course of French as a second language only to become the laughingstock of his immigrant classmates, who can’t understand what a Canadian with a francophone name is doing stammering out his first words in French along with them. The narrative, told in the third person by a biographer who occasionally speaks directly to the reader, is filled with postmodernist touches, such as references to other biographies of François (who has become one of the key figures in world history after his discovery of Dreamshaping), allusions to rumours, and other spurious sources of information. There is also mention of several Chilean friends whom François has had, including a possible contact with Pablo Jorquera, whose name closely resembles that of the protagonist of Etcheverry’s next novel. François’s isolation in Canadian society is, of course, a mirror image of that of the foreign exile, even in its linguistic aspect. Like Julia Kristeva’s stranger, he finds himself “[t]o be of no account to others. No one listens to you, you never have the floor, or else, when you have the courage to seize it, your speech is quickly erased by the more garrulous and fully relaxed talk of the community. Your speech has no past and will have no power of the group: why should one listen to it? You do not have enough status – ‘no social standing’ – to make your speech useful.”31 The novel De chácharas y largavistas (Small talk and binoculars), which was brought out by Split Quotation Press/Ediciones La Cita Trunca of Ottawa in 1993, is Jorge’s most important work of fiction. This novel, written in the third person, details twenty-four hours in the life of Pedro Jorquera, or “P.J.,” as he is known to his anglophone friends, a Chilean exile living alone in Ottawa. Older and just as isolated as François in “Dreamshaping,” Pedro (also referred to as “The Observer”) spends much of his time wandering about the city watching life around him and meditating on his past as a political activist in Chile – a past from which he feels increasingly distant, even imagining that it was somebody else who underwent those experiences. For Pedro, the unnamed city in which he lives is the antithesis of the great cultural and commercial hub of Tangier: instead of being a place of mixing and interchange, it is one of isolation and solitude, despite the many nationalities

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that have settled there and that give it the appearance of being cosmopolitan without the deeper, reciprocal cultural interchange that characterizes truly international centres. It is a city where people end up after fleeing or leaving something else instead of a place of discovery or sharing. As such, it is better suited to plans for individual advancement than to The Observer’s shattered visions of solidarity, so that Pedro is finally rejected not only by the impassive, dominant society, but also by the immigrants with whom he works, who quickly realize that he is the very antithesis of the dreams that they pursue. As Luis Torres has observed about the fate of the exile, “the space/time coordinates which are supposed to be the nesting ground for the subject become foreign and menacing or simply indifferent to the plight of the individual.”32 In his role as The Observer, Pedro has also developed a proclivity for spying on and fantasizing about a nubile neighbour (an activity that is given a boost by his discovery of a pair of abandoned binoculars). Pedro does have a limited circle of friends who haunt the city’s cafés and bars with him and that includes several Latin Americans of different nationalities, as well as the somewhat cantankerous but intellectually vital Patrick Phillmore. Pedro’s most meaningful recent human contact, in fact, occurred several years previously with Patrick’s sister, Patricia. Toward the end of the novel, Pedro returns home from an excursion to the nightclubs of “The Other Side” (Hull), discovers that the object of his voyeuristic attentions is (he thinks) being molested by her boyfriend, and actually enters her house in order to save her. Pedro’s passivity and preference for watching rather than acting are emblematic of his long-term alienation and disorientation as an exile, an idealistic Chilean militant who finds himself washed ashore by the tide of history onto a depoliticized, consumer-obsessed land 7,000 kilometres from his birthplace. Exile has largely reduced him to observer status in life. The novel is interspersed with poems by Patrick Phillmore that comment upon the action. One of them, “Lifestyle,” seems particularly relevant to Pedro’s forlorn existence: I couldn’t really say My way of life is tremendous though at least I do like it a bit But I can’t help noticing that

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it’s definitely been below my expectations For about the last ten years or so33 De chácharas y largavistas represents a vanishing point for the Chilean refugee who has been in Canada for over twenty years without assimilating but who has adopted a cyst-like symbiosis within the body politic of the host country. In Etcheverry’s latest two books – collections of poetry entitled A vuelo de pájaro (As the crow flies), published by Verbum Veritas in Ottawa in 1998, with illustrations by the author; and Vitral con pájaros (Stained-glass window with birds), published by Poetas.com in Ottawa in 2002 – the author has moved to a more direct, conversational style, characterized by philosophical, even metaphysical concerns, as well as commentaries on daily life and the reality of living in Canada. In this sense, many of the poems reflect a synthesis of the lost cosmopolitan city with that of the new urban landscape of the North, where, although the speaker is most often evidently an exile, he has nevertheless chosen to stay and live. In the poem “El centro” (Downtown), also from Vitral con pájaros, for instance, the nameless city of the North has become “this city so small and square / like some postcard version of a New Jerusalem,”34 where the speaker observes immigrants from various parts of the world as they get on and off the bus and feels connected to them by a shared intimacy, as though both he and they were part of a new project of cultural exchange and fusion: And perhaps it was worth it then to come here and suddenly, silently, find them by surprise listen to them, watch them and it was a little as if in some way those innumerable masses down there far away in the South

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had been transformed into a ray of sunshine in these surroundings35 Finally, then, the image of the city of the North has also become that of a cosmopolitan nucleus, even a port – in the sense that the spread of aviation has transformed major cities with airports into the equivalent of nineteenth-century seaports – and the polarization between the urban images of Tánger and of De chácharas y largavistas has been overcome. In one other key poem, “Kale borroka” (Street protest – in the Basque language), the two urban realities of the rich and poor nations are further and irrevocably fused into one. The poem is a hymn to the rebellious spirit of youth that has caused it to protest against oppression, inequality, and tyranny in cities all over the earth, from San Sebastián and Jakarta to Quebec City and the capitals of Latin America. Their protests unite the cities of North and South, the rich world and the poor, transforming them into cosmopolitan revolutionary environments, abolishing the differences between them and reclaiming those clear, vast landscapes that form along with the streets their territory36 In this way, the isolation of the exile is overcome and the circle of his journey is completed: the cosmopolitan city is now the word, and the future belongs to those who struggle for the same ideals that first inflamed the imagination of the exile speaker so many years ago in a land so far away.

nine poems from la calle th e s at r a p s Sunk in contemplation of the void that seems to fill their heads Listening to the echo of their leaden footsteps Blind to the eyes of others Alone in the world, though not so alone Feeling hate sprout up around them like sudden vast wheatfields

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Dreaming their dreams of blood and gold never satisfied Condemned someday to die shattered Or to expire, rotting in their own petrified bodies.

t h e p e r m a n e n c e o f vo i c e When literature went off with the ashes of the last books a word began to flower soaked in sunlight and blood copied on the backs of bus transfers whispered secretly in movie theatres While those walking along the double hostility of the streets with their scissors for cutting tongues and the newscasters invented a silence of words.

th e h a r d s t o n e They have harvested people like ripe wheat They have emptied women like gloves turned inside out They have turned bodies into infinite maps of pain Hunger has enlarged the black pupils of children They have changed life into sweat and sweat into salt and blood and blood into fresh weapons and weapons again into hunger They have separated the vast human flocks But they have not been able to pulverize their spines.

perfection The best poetry is that which is read in private not spoken out loud The hardest coin is the one that is kept not spent

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And even The most beautiful women are models not lovers Just as the freshest drinks have no taste and efficient torture leaves no marks on the body they’ve been careful to clean all the beggars off the streets change out of uniform into civilian clothes fill the Alameda with gardens the radios with silence the newspapers with blank space.

eminence A horseman comes by. Then four of them. One stays while the others disappear over the horizon, beyond the mountains, beyond the masses of people. His horse finishes off everything green. Its hooves dry up all the earth beneath them. Its breath desiccates the air, eliminates the rain. Horse and rider stop in the middle of the plaza and turn to stone. The volume and edge of people’s ribs increase, while their lips become parched. Skin shrivels on stomachs. Flesh becomes sear; eyes dilate. Men sit on the curb, their strength sapped. Women lie on beds and children abandon their toys, while the bottoms of cooking pots simmer with cobwebs. report Listen: When the Great March of the Dark Years expelled us from the cities of Latin America The sun over our heads was a slice of lemon We went for a final walk before leaving We heard the vultures hiss – Someone was proclaiming the news on a deserted street.

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newcomer news Get off the plane Don’t ask anyone anything (you don’t speak English) let them stamp your visa and go through your suitcases Search for someone you know Try to tell things about back there if they ask Go to a hotel Have somebody accompany you to Manpower Play your cards right so they’ll give you the course Learn how to say, “I need some help” Buy used furniture Don’t be afraid of the locals Don’t stop buses with your finger Clean floors, work at whatever you can Don’t try to speak with the neighbours or to think you’re rich when you buy a used car Let the time pass Try to read a bit of news from Chile in the newspaper.

slides for Leutén Rojas The back of the nation has borne this situation for many years. I suppose it must be getting tired. None of the rocks, trees, or suburbs of the city seem to be awake. None of those pallid faces carved from stone seems to be alive. None of those debilitated minds seems prepared to fight. The soldiers look like they’re made of stone, standing on street corners, guarding government offices. Or driving dusty, heavy death machines. Or just standing there in front of a store, slowly smoking cigarettes with confidence and patience, their rifles slung over their shoulders, day after day. Can you listen to the news; can you read the papers? But maybe you can notice something else, unspoken, forgotten by us, the people who watch and blame themselves. From the other side of the world.

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children and planes The planes will cross the sky of these vast cities and we will tell the children that ask with their hands raised that they are headed for Chile While they learn an accented Spanish that they speak within the four walls of their homes and invent a country with a geography of dreams. s e l e c t io n f ro m t h e n ovel de chácharas y largavistas Easier said than done. One morning on a day in early summer, The Observer was strolling along a well-known boulevard whose name need not be mentioned here, when a strong wind suddenly began to blow, forcing him to take shelter in a modern shopping centre familiar to everyone. He had just cashed his last miserable unemployment insurance cheque and was feeling more or less secure, at least for the next thirty days, thanks to the way of looking at things in the short term that he had been acquiring lately – or perhaps had always had. When the month was over, he would (seriously, now) have to start looking for a job again, reenter the ruthless jungle in search of anything. His expectations would undoubtedly diminish with every box he crossed out in the “Help Wanted” ads in the newspaper, with every failed interview in which he felt ever more insignificant, aware that he was no longer young (in this milieu being old or even middle-aged was considered a sin); he would swallow his pride about his lengthy studies in his indeterminate country of origin (all of them now totally useless) and would apologize for his lack of experience, for the frequent and obvious holes in his curriculum vitae. “Please don’t take the past ten years too much into account”: another job hunter had once passed this escape clause on to him in a whisper – something that had been heard from somebody else in some other place, perhaps from a joke about a hippie who had come down from the hills and tried to get back into the job market. He would end up working as he had before – just for the time being – cleaning floors, waiting on tables in some second- or third-class restaurant, washing dishes, or at the best pumping gas in a service

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station, giving private Spanish lessons to groups of housewives, employees, or future tourists, or working as temporary help in an office. The provisional nature of these jobs would stretch out like a piece of gum, as it had in the past, for months, sometimes years. He would probably end up labouring side by side with burly immigrants who had just arrived, full of energy and enthusiasm (he had never felt that way), and who would inevitably ask him where he was from and how long he had been in the country, and after listening to his laconic reply, would look him up and down with a kind of pity, a kind of astonishment, and would afterward avoid speaking to him unless absolutely necessary. Those young people who needed to dream – despite (or precisely because) they were up to their necks in self-sacrificing, inconsequential little jobs – would see in him the exact and complete negation of everything they would one day like to become here in America as soon as humanly possible, and would draw away in fear – as if from some piece of bad news, or nightmare – from the potential future he represented. And he, with his innate pride of an intellectual temporarily – and out of necessity, he liked to believe – plunged into this milieu ruled over by the crudest capitalist materialism, would implicitly recognize that those young immigrants were justified in their attitude; he would absolve them of blame, knowing that part of the unwritten folklore of the working classes of every country (whose least fortunate representatives ended up here), were those sayings affirming that good luck as well as failure stick to you, are contagious. “Money begets money,” was the expression in his homeland.

 As he thought of these things – or rather, as they drifted through his mind – he went down the escalator that led into the bowels of the palace of consumerism. He put one hand in his pocket and instinctively squeezed his wallet, swollen now with the money from the cheque he had just cashed at the bank, feeling safer, with the solidity of a payday, even though he wasn’t working. There was a kind of melancholy seductiveness in being one of the herd, in being able to give himself small pleasures in an anonymous way, feeling happy just walking along, as he was doing now, or enjoying a cup of coffee with the newspaper open before him as he smoked a cigarette, relaxed, in no hurry, but looking, observing. There had been a song in his country

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that was popular just before he had had to leave, a line of which now kept running through his head – “How nice it is to have a little budget” – and which whenever he repeated it to himself, would fill him with a feeling of soft sadness, a tenuous, almost voluptuous self-pity. The hours had accumulated with that effect of saturation left by people, streets, and things that are repeated. His movements, the details around him, his footsteps, required only part of his attention. His mind was therefore only half-aware of his surroundings; he seemed to have been standing for years on the steps of the escalator that now deposited him below onto the gleaming tiles of the First Floor of the Shopping Mall. The emptiness in his head was filled with images of far-away scenes, perhaps remembered, perhaps seen in dreams or on television, which formed part of what he himself called – being an introspective type of fellow – his filmstrip review (which was the name given to the slides in the textbooks used in teaching Spanish): a long beach, lots of sunlight, the cries of sea birds. The Observer had been born in another country, near the coast, which he continued to miss even after all these years. But that origin was not so out of this world: Who here didn’t come from somewhere else? His rather swarthy skin and large eyes – dark and deeply set in their sockets – clearly marked him as a foreigner. People in stores, offices, and bars (which he now almost never went to unless to meet Patrick) always used to speak to him in French. A few years before, in a hotel in Montreal, during the last vacation he had allowed himself the luxury of having and in the midst of the final moments of his relationship with Patricia (“Ptrichia,” they pronounced it here), the concierge – a woman from Picardy, he had later learned – with a beautiful, transparent, almost angelic face, but who walked about burdened by a hunchback, had told him, “I’ll bet you’re Italian.” He had answered truthfully, correcting and disappointing her, as would usually happen in such cases, as if apologizing for not being from Italy, with its Mediterranean monuments and gigolos, its St Peter’s Square with the pope and pigeons, its Passolini and Red Brigades, its judges assassinated by the Mafia and its striptease parliamentarians – but instead being from (and here he supplied the name of the country in question).

2 Writing Four Nations: The Poetic Trajectory of Margarita Feliciano Margarita Feliciano is a poet of migrations and worlds of the imagination. Like many people who have changed country a number of times, her experience of home has been a palimpsest. She herself has said that she always feels the greatest affection for places that she has left behind.1 Margarita was born in Sicily, grew up in Argentina, did her university studies in California, and has lived most of the rest of her life in Toronto. Each country and region in her trajectory has left a different mark on her life and work. Her childhood in Syracuse and her later studies at the University of Florence gave her a deep attachment to the sea, Mediterranean light, Greek mythology, and Italian poetry. However, although she lived in Argentina only for eight years, she is most at home in the Spanish language and closely identifies with Latin American culture and literature. Her years in California, on the other hand, have left her with a love for the seascapes of the northern coastline of that state, which in many ways are a more rugged North American version of the Mediterranean landscape. She has also lived for varying periods of time in Italy and has travelled extensively in Europe, where she published two of her three books of poetry, and has an extensive interest in classical and pre-Colombian mythology and mythological archetypes. Interestingly, although the greater part of her life has been spent in Toronto, direct references to Canadian settings or landscapes are infrequent in her work. Nevertheless, her familiarity with English, as well as her critical work in comparative literature and participation in bilingual (Spanish-English) poetry readings, has brought her into close contact with writers of the Englishspeaking world.

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Margarita grew up in Sicily during the Second World War and has vivid memories of the house across the street being blown up by an Allied bomb and of her own evacuation to the countryside to avoid subsequent air raids. Her father was in the Italian Navy and spent the last year of the war in Japan, near Hiroshima. The family immigrated to Argentina in 1948 during the last great wave of European migration to that country to “hacerse la América” (strike it rich in America) and settled in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, where Margarita’s uncle was already living; her father worked as a naval officer on passenger liners between Argentina and Spain. The eight years or so that Margarita spent in Argentina marked her linguistically and culturally for the rest of her life, centring her within the Latin American, and specifically Argentine, social and historical reality. Although she continued to read in Italian and speak the language with her parents, Spanish became her mother tongue, and she read in it voraciously: Dante (in the translation by Argentine president and poet Bartolomé Mitre),2 Shakespeare, Dumas, Cervantes, and the nineteenth-century realist novels of Pérez Galdós of Spain.3 It was also in the Argentine school system that she developed her taste and capacity for the memorization and recital of great works of poetry. By the time she left Argentina to study in the United States, she had begun to write poems herself, and her tastes in literature had broadened to include works by many of the classic Argentine authors of the gauchesca poetic tradition, such as José Hernández (Martín Fierro),4 Esteban Echeverría (La cautiva),5 and Rafael Obligado (Santos Vega),6 as well as novels and fiction by Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Sienkiewicz. In the mid-1950s, Margarita’s father began working on tankers owned by Standard Oil, and in 1955 the family moved to Oakland, California (other relatives were already living in Monterey). The following year Margarita completed secondary school and then enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied Italian, French, and Spanish. What is remarkable about her second experience of emigration is that she continued to identify closely with Latin America and rejected American culture, which she found egotistical and self-absorbed.7 She also returned to Italy for a year of study at the University of Florence, where she deepened her knowledge of Italian literature through both her studies and her conversations with her uncle, a professor of literature at the nearby University of Arezzo. Despite her lack of identification with American culture, however, her

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years in California gave her the chance to renew her love for the maritime landscape, particularly that of the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco, which was equally spectacular, although more powerful and austere than the seascapes of the Mediterranean. In the mid-1960s, Margarita enrolled in the ma program at Berkeley in Spanish and Latin American literature and linguistics, where she became a close friend of the noted Chilean poet and critic Fernando Alegría.8 She was also stimulated by the enormous political effervescence at Berkeley at the time. In the late 1960s she married her first husband, a freedom fighter in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution who had later lived in Paris, and the couple moved to Santa Barbara, where he completed his studies in French linguistics and she took courses in Spanish American and Brazilian literature at ucla. However, in 1969, disillusioned with the staid and conservative atmosphere of Santa Barbara, appalled by Governor Ronald Reagan’s purge of California universities, and fearful that her husband would be drafted into the us army, the couple moved to Toronto, where her husband taught at the University of Toronto and she at York.9 Since that time, she has had two children, divorced, found a new partner who takes an active interest in her work, and continued her teaching career in Spanish and Latin American literature at York. She has also kept on writing both poetry and criticism and in her profession has specialized in lyric poetry, comparative literature, and archetypes and mythology in authors such as the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias and the Nigerian Chinua Achebe. Feliciano’s cultural cosmopolitanism has resulted in a peculiarly rich cross-section of influences and affinities. She has maintained her interest in Italian poetry, especially in the work of the crepuscular poet Giovanni Pascoli,10 and she has translated into English work by the Sicilian poet Mimmo Morina, editor of the pan-European literary review Nouvelle Europe. Her years in Argentina have left her with a great attachment to the work of the three great women poets of the first half of the twentieth century in the the Southern Cone: the lyrical poems of the Chilean Gabriela Mistral,11 the rebellious love poetry of the Uruguayan author Juana de Ibarbourou,12 and the later metaphysical meditations of the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni,13 who, stricken by breast cancer in the late 1930s, swam out into the sea to drown herself off Margarita’s hometown of Mar del Plata. Other Latin American poets who have also been important to her include Nicolás Guillén, the first great Afro-Cuban poet, renowned for his use

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of African rhythms and colloquial style;14 the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, whose anglophile inclinations inspired her to learn AngloSaxon in order to read Beowulf in the original; Pablo Neruda, to whom she has dedicated an ode to the tomato, in reference to the Chilean poet’s Odas elementales (Elemental Odes), such as “Oda a la alcachofa” (“Ode to an Artichoke”); the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, especially in the early love poems of his first anthology; and the hermetic and avant-garde César Vallejo,15 of Peru. Finally, her work in Spanish literature has also led her to identify closely with the work of the Spanish poets of the “Generation of 1927,” particularly the unadorned lyricism of Federico García Lorca, the intense poetic affirmation of Jorge Guillén, the metaphysical love poems of Pedro Salinas, and the politically charged verse of Rafael Alberti, whom Margarita met in Spain16 and who was the last surviving poet of the time until his death at age ninety-seven in 1999. Feliciano has also been active within the context of North American letters. While still in California, she became interested in American literature, especially in Walt Whitman, whose universality of spirit and sense of belonging to the New World have always held great appeal for Latin Americans; she dedicated a poem to him in her second book: “By Blue Ontario Shores,” a very personal reverie quite unlike Whitman’s poem of the same name, but with the same love of the lake’s vast expanse, albeit seen from the other side. She also developed an interest in the poets of the Beat Generation, although she comments that by the time she met Ferlinghetti at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, she found that he had begun to subordinate his poetic voice to political correctness.17 She has read in Toronto with Miriam Waddington, whose poems in The Visitants she is particularly fond of and who has become a personal friend, as well as with Irving Layton, who, after listening to a poem that she had written in a particularly telegraphic style, asked her, “Where’s the subject? Where’s the verb? Do you think just because you’re writing poetry you can forget about subjects and verbs?” The advice, she says, was well taken.18 She has also given readings and published with Fireweed, a women’s poetry cooperative that has included Miriam Waddington, Dorothy Livesay, and Bernice Lever (later editor of Waves). She was in frequent contact – in her capacity as critic rather than as poet – with Eli Mandel, who taught at York University for many years. Margarita has also read and published in a number of countries, especially Spain and the United States; in 2000 her poetry was included

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in the anthology Poetas sin fronteras, a collection of poetry from all over the Spanish-speaking world, edited by Colombian poet and critic Ramiro Lagos.19 Although Feliciano has at times felt isolated and culturally removed from the Canadian milieu, she has been one of the most active literary and organizational presences in the world of Latin American writing in Canada. The only Spanish-speaking groups active in Toronto when she arrived in 1969 were a few immigrants from Spain and Ecuador, but four years later, after the coup d’état against Salvador Allende in Chile, thousands of Chilean refugees began to pour into the region. Among the most influential writers who settled in Toronto were Juan Carlos García, Manuel Alcides Jofré, Naín Nómez, Gonzalo Millán, and Claudio Durán,20 all of whom published books in Canada and/or Chile and who eventually invited her to read with them. In the mid-1970s she participated in an informal literary group that held frequent readings in Toronto and included Claudio Durán, from Chile; the avant-garde sound poet Rafael Barreto-Rivera (who writes mainly in English), from Puerto Rico; the poet, critic, and translator José María Valverde, from Spain, who was teaching at McMaster University at the time; and the English Canadian poet and critic Joe Green. Later, in fact, she translated Durán’s collection of poems, Homenaje (Tribute), into English. Despite her fluency in English, she continues to read almost exclusively in Spanish, in which she feels more at home. Since the late 1980s, Feliciano has played two key roles in Hispanic writing in Canada. First, she has been one of the principal organizers (along with University of Toronto professor Mario Valdés) of the annual Celebración Cultural del Idioma Español (Spanish Language Cultural Celebration), which is held in Toronto each fall and includes theatre, dance, singing, and seven evenings of poetry readings and critical papers by Latino-Canadian writers as well as by guest authors from around the Spanish-speaking world, such as the novelist Luis Goytisolo of Spain and the poet Elsa Cross of Mexico. This celebration of Spanish-speaking literature and culture is by far the biggest event of its kind in Canada. Second, Margarita was the founder and publisher of Indigo, a trilingual (Spanish-English-French) literary and artistic review published twice in Toronto, in 1990 and 1991. Despite its brief lifespan (plans are perennially afoot to bring it out again), Indigo was the first review of its kind in English Canada. Attractively produced and laid out, the hundred and fifty pages in each

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issue contained poetry, short stories, scholarly articles, interviews, and translations into one or the other of its three languages, as well as photographs and art work. It included work by recognized English Canadian authors such as Timothy Findley, Jan Conn, and the Ecuadorian novelist (and ambassador to Canada) Alfonso Barrera Valverde and provided space for a variety of Spanish-speaking writers of Canada. Margarita has published three volumes of poetry, all of them, curiously, outside of Canada. Her first book, Ventana sobre el mar/Window on the Sea, published in 1981 by the Latin American Literary Review Press in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a bilingual text with illustrations by the Italian sculptor Gino Masciarelli and includes an introduction by Fernando Alegría. The translator is Feliciano herself, and the poems are often quite distinct English versions rather than close translations of the Spanish texts. As the book’s title indicates, the principal physical setting is the seacoast, seemingly that of Northern California, and the constant references to the ocean are often mixed with evocations of the joy and nostalgia of love found and lost. In contrast with the rest of Feliciano’s poetry, which is almost always laid out flush with the left-hand margin and grouped into verses, there is also some formal experimentation, especially with typography. One of the poems, “Océano Pacífico/Pacific Ocean,” uses an oblique margin running progressively right as it descends the page in the Spanish version and another running progressively left in the English one; other poems opt for a diffused typography in which the words spread out to cover a large part of the page, jumping from left to right and imitating their own actions with their forms: “Derrumbes / … Caaeenn” (“Landslides / … Are faaallinng”).21 Feliciano’s second book, Circadian Nuvolitatis, was published by Euroeditor in Luxembourg in 1986. As the Canadian Tunisian critic Hédi Bouraoui notes in his introduction, the title of the work is a neologism, “‘Circadian’ from the Latin ‘circa diem,’ implying everyday behaviour, feelings, sentiments and attitudes, and ‘nuvolitatis’ meaning the effect of clouds, haziness of feeling, mistiness of any interactions we have daily.”22 However, many of the poems are more exotic than this reading of the title would imply. Circadian Nuvolitatis, like Margarita’s earlier collection, is also bilingual, but this time she has written about half the poems directly in English and the other half in Spanish, and then translated each into the other language, creating what are actually alternate versions of the poems rather than exact translations. Turquoise

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skies, groves of pine trees, bright sunlight, and the sea are also present in this collection, but many of the settings have a more European than North American flavour, and the seascapes bring to mind the Mediterranean rather than the California coast. There are also more frequent references to topics from Greek and medieval mythology and more poems set in Canada. Margarita’s latest book, Lectura en Málaga (Reading in Málaga), published in 1995 by the University of Málaga in Spain, is a collection of poetry from when she was invited to read there the year before. This work, published only in Spanish, deals with a variety of topics and is much less linked to specific topographical landscapes than are the previous collections. Indeed, it represents a new direction, both in theme and in tone, in her poetry: a reorientation toward the objective world and an increasing realism. Most of the poems translated in the selection that closes the present chapter are from Lectura en Málaga, although a few have also been drawn from the unpublished poems that she continues to write. Feliciano has now finished a fourth collection, El portal de la sirena/The Mermaid’s Portal, which she would also like to publish in a bilingual (Spanish-English) edition. Although there are certain recurring elements in the themes and images that Feliciano uses in her poetry, there has also been a progressive evolution from feeling (or lyricism) to idea (or metaphysical construct). There is a high degree of continuity in the first two books, which is then transformed in the last. Ventana sobre el mar/Window on the Sea and Circadian Nuvolitatis share certain key themes: love and its loss within an idealized landscape that exists or has existed specifically for the lovers that inhabit it; the renewal of ancient myths; friendship; and the existential acceptance of solitude. Of these four themes, the first two are the most common. The love poems of both Ventana sobre el mar/Window on the Sea and Circadian Nuvolitatis largely take place within the natural world of the ocean shore, yet these settings are constructs – fragile, idealized worlds in which the lovers meet, love, and separate or in which the speaker later reflects nostalgically on her loss. In the first book, Nature and human elements are metaphorically fused, as in “Océano Pacífico/ Pacific Ocean,” in which it is unclear whether the speaker is addressing the absent lover, the sea, or both. In “Nahual” (which is the name of a Mexican nature spirit), the speaker imagines receiving “your love, / [a] huge, round seashell / washed ashore by churning tides.”23 Again, in “Nairobi Blues,” which ostensibly would seem to

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be a poem of longing for an absent lover, there is no reference at all to Kenya but rather to an elaborate fantasy world in which the sky has replaced the sea as the vector for the lovers’ feelings. In Circadian Nuvolitatis, although there is a poem, “Santa Cruz,” in which the lovers meet and then separate in a place that is objectively rendered, the settings for many of the love poems, such as “Flores/Flowers,” have evolved even further into symbolist gardens of jewelled light and chiaroscuro shadows that recall Rubén Darío24 and the modernista poetic vocabulary of the end of the nineteenth century. Even in “Bajando por la 280/Going Down [the] 280,” in which the title would seem to indicate a more realistic geography, the twists and turns of the lovers’ road seem to arise as imaginary incarnations of the speaker’s feelings rather than from the topographical features of an actual coast, and Californian and Mediterranean images are fused to the extent that the “glistening mirage of white / and multicoloured buildings”25 of the distant city is more like the Bordighera of a Monet painting than any identifiable Californian coastal town. The imagery that Feliciano uses in her love poems is usually associated with aspects of the sea and looks back on erotic interludes from the safety and distance of nostalgic reflection. There are, however, some surprising reversals of sexual roles. First of all, the sea is frequently used as a metaphor when describing the male, as in the title poem of her first book, “Ventana sobre el mar/Window on the Sea”: “You become an ocean wave / blindly beating against my breasts.”26 This reversal of the usual association of the sea with the feminine echoes classical South Indian poetry, such as a verse of the Tamil romance Shilappadikaram (The Ankle Bracelet): “where the shining sand / is beaten by the lustful waves.”27 Moreover, although the female lover is often compared to a flower, she is a decidedly active bloom: “I unfold as a flower, / whose moist, / shifting petals / entwine around your neck.”28 The speaker in “La puerta/The Door” is alone in a sun-drenched garden, where “The thirsty flesh of a yellow rose / kisses the air with multiple mouths.”29 Finally, in “Juegos/Games,” it is the female speaker who seizes the initiative and tells her lover, “I ask you, let yourself be penetrated, / accept this love / in barter for your own.”30 Another theme of Margarita’s poetry is the reliving of myth in the modern age. Many of the poems in her first two books situate characters – especially lovers – within Greek, pre-Columbian, or medieval myths. In “Cuesta abajo/Downwards,” the speaker likens herself to a siren who wishes to find and “submerge” her lover, presumably in

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her passion and body. Likewise, the speaker in “Fénix/Phoenix” compares herself to the immortal bird of Egyptian myth as she is reborn during the act of love. In “Diana cazadora/Diana the Huntress,” the narrator, whose sex is not specified, compares the simultaneous power and equilibrium of a statue of Diana shooting an arrow with the energy of the beloved.31 Several of the poems of Circadian Nuvolitatis also refer to the renewal of ancient myths. In “Penelope,” the female speaker recreates the Ithacan queen’s story and then looks forward to the return of her own Odysseus (perhaps her Jungian animus) upon her “internal sea.”32 “Aquitaine,” a tribute to Gérard de Nerval’s poem “El desdichado,”33 invokes the troubadour’s world of melancholy aesthetic refinement and declares that the minstrel lives again through Nerval’s poem, in which: he comes to life like a withered bird, as he is rescued from the gloom of libraries into the light where dreams are shared once more.34 The entry of the two lovers of “Les Jacobins” into a city in “the heart of Occitaine” (presumably Toulouse) is described in such a way that it is impossible to tell whether the pair are medieval visitors or modern tourists; here, however, in the heat of the Midi, the couple will fulfil their love as never before, to the point of becoming one with the rhythm of “love / which moves the sun and other stars,”35 the very line that ends Dante’s Divine Comedy.36 The poems of Feliciano’s third and latest work, Lectura en Málaga, break with many of the themes of the earlier two books and show renewed interest in the outside world. Certainly, “Ciudad” (City) and “Ojo dorado” (Golden eye), with their respective themes of urbanization and government surveillance, are new features in Feliciano’s poetic repertoire. Moreover, the earlier love poems of meeting, sharing, and parting have given way to poems of solitary exploration, such as “Buscando” (Searching), in which the speaker is now on a quest for the “essence of things,” vultures wheel over a putrefying carcass on the beach, and death is the ruling force. “Durmiente” (The sleeper) describes a landscape without any human component whatsoever, in which the focus of the poem is on the implacable forces of water and rock as they work upon one another. The theme of one of the only poems that mentions physical love, “Eras una caravana” (You were a caravan), is actually one of loss, as one of the lovers moves off into the

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night.37 Moreover, the mythical siren of earlier poems has now been transformed from playful and enticing lover back into the sinister schizophrenic creation of Greek mythology, whose beautiful female upper body is dominated by the bestial lower self and whose chief passion is murdering sailors rather than loving them. Lectura en Málaga turns away from romance and idealized love poetry, which Feliciano had already written with great ability, toward a more balanced equilibrium between interior and exterior worlds in which the quest for truth supersedes the search for love. Formally, however, the collection signals a change to a more conservative model: the expressionistic spread of words across the page that characterized her first two works, especially Ventana sobre el mar/Window on the Sea, has been succeeded by more concise lines of fairly regular length, in which typographical experimentation is no longer an important factor. Although the reader may feel a certain nostalgia for the romanticism and warmth of her earlier work – which has now been replaced by a more rigorous, implacable questioning – Feliciano is nevertheless able to bring her considerable poetic talent and refinement to bear on sterner themes. It is perhaps not simply coincidence that the book should include two poems with buscar (to search) in the title: “Búsqueda” (Search) and “Buscando” (Searching). The narrative voice in Feliciano’s previous poetry has often spoken of the love, light, legends, and seascapes of the past; now the time has come for the speaker to situate herself more firmly within the world that she inhabits, although without abandoning her earlier idealism. It is a trend that has continued in Feliciano’s latest, unpublished poems, which deal with more personal themes, such as the growth and coming of age of her daughters, the passage of time, existential solitude, and nostalgia. The voice of the meditative lover has become that of a philosophic explorer.

eight poems from lectura en málaga city Evening falls overcome with tedium. The passers-by of indifferent life glance from the corners of their eyes at glittering store windows. And the light spreads out like a milky shroud,

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enveloping me in its quiet chrysalis, driving the shadows into the cracks of night. Who knows where tumultuous life will come from, or if unexpected forms exist to forge once again the defenceless advance of hours. Slender skyscrapers, impassive sentinels of the world, look down from their rarified minarets upon the winding lights of the streets, immense serpents that writhe forward toward their slaughterhouse suburbs.

yo u we r e a c a r ava n Morning light filtered between our bodies opening up a helpless questioning, the sensation of sacks falling through the void onto stone. Our bodies met leaving shreds of affection, the tempest contained, the withered leaves of roses. With fallen arms I watched you abandon me as you fled. Like a caravan you disappeared into the humble tenderness of night.

cartography To the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Studying maps of the afternoon, the rivers become reckless with me; watching the imprisoned clouds I feel a dark tightening in my throat. At your strong touch

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the water fills with violent fish, and the black rain deafly shakes itself when I hear your name that sails across azure seas; and my spirit grows calm as I reach shore. We are two drops of water that unite to become the sea that protects us.

h i g h way The song has died on the air. Now only silence: Sadness withers the minutes. The highway opens up in my dark strangeness. I hear the beating of the tires on its naked surface. The mute highway coils its serpent rings in upon itself. Riding with me my thoughts pulsate, spurred on by the engine’s horses. Solitude bites into the twilight.

searching I am searching for the marrow, the essence of things, leaving behind the depth of leaves and branches, arches twining together in gothic greenness. Tautly they sway over us as we descend toward the coast where vultures sluggishly circle around a putrefying skeleton, and swarms of horseflies

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pullulate, goading my stupor. Sky and sea fuse together uniting in a soft caress of bodies. Death has become the inscription on the golden coin that bribes the days.

golden eye There is a golden eye that watches me, an eye that silently follows me through distant labyrinths. Like a burning torch it searches my inner world leaving me piles of broken shells and handfuls of earth where flowers once grew. Its insistent stare gives no refuge, only leaves swept by darkened winds. My reflection wavers in the mirror in the grey barrens of forgotten fairs. The golden eye pursues me everywhere, gold stillness without respite, it advances on me in the middle of the night, directs my footsteps toward a blind path extinguishing life born from earth, from the turgid leaves of trees. It destroys my existence leaving behind echoes of empty bottles.

th e m e r m a i d ’ s g at e The anvil of the unrepentant sea carved a rounded hollow in the rock, a perfect mirror to see and admire yourself. Seated on the reef you perceive only your delicate arms; light encircles your slender neck and envelops your breasts, a fleeting snow on the tall broken windows of a shaken sky.

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Your other half of disconsolate fish, the scaly half that holds you captive, doesn’t look down into the mirror of the waters; and you, like a new Circe, lead seafarers to their death, relegating them to the fresh stars of night and burning atoms of sunset.

sleeper They climb the rocky slopes toward a burning, shaken sky. In the still blue a cross of distant goshawks wheels motionlessly. No one knows if all has ceased to exist or if new life is tenuously present in the murmur of the wind. Who will bring us the hopeful green, the current of subterranean waters that flow toward the edge of uncertainty? The waters of this river disappear forever into the distance in a slow sleepy flow. No light will glint from them as thirsting for space they pass beneath the dark rust of rocks. They will fall still like a wounded hand bleeding in the sleeper’s silence.

th r e e u n p u b l i s h e d p o e m s wo r d s If I could say what I desire if I could carry this love I feel like a banner in the sunlight, if I could expose you

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like a ruined wall to the truth that lives in your epicentre, untranslated into glory, riches, or ambitions, then I would proclaim with my lips with the very words I speak, that I had forever defied unyielding time.

t h e b a s k e t o f to m a t o e s for Pablo Neruda Who knows from where or from what blue bed of sun and earth, they sprouted in all their redness and sweet passion for the infinite. There they lay in their basket nest in all their rounded smoothness, like small sparrows waiting to be fed. Their fire lit up the day reflecting the colour and light of the village as it slept in its fullness. They had come from faraway, from a land usurped from the sea that human patience had known how to build. Daily the skilled hands (and those of my lover) had tilled their unceasing hope preserving their burning growth as they prepared their voyage to the city. And here they have finally arrived, ready for the decisive moment, awaiting their entrance into pots or trays, for festive meals or the envy of brushes. Knives don’t dare stroke their skin nor has anyone been bold enough to kill the dark radiance pulsing through their beauty.

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return “and never again did you return / to that old neighbourhood” (anonymous tango) As in the words of old tangos, I return one Sunday with a shrivelled brow and snow at the temples, adorned with the glass beads of absent youth. The train leaves the station promptly on its colourless journey through time. A few barely remembered names vanish like spells that measure distance for the phantom sorcerers of years. The tree-lined street leaps violently out of the fatuous dens of remembrance but the house with its dark gate is now only the scent of yesterday. It is in this receding return with a sad forehead and faded curls, that my tired footsteps drive off the anguished winter drizzle.

3 Gilberto Flores Patiño and the Myth of the Other

Born in Mexico in 1941, Gilberto Flores Patiño is a novelist and shortstory writer whose work has dealt with a variety of different themes and has achieved a considerable degree of recognition, especially in Quebec. Flores Patiño is a man of eclectic, even esoteric, philosophical interests who is also capable of writing from the point of view of a child in unaffected and lyrical prose. As a writer, he is highly interested in experiments in narrative technique and in the inner workings of the human mind, particularly in how the individual consciousness construes the idea of the Other, whether real or projected. Throughout his work, the question arises: where exactly is the limit between the Self and the Other, between what is supposed and what actually exists outside of oneself? Gilberto grew up in Celaya, a provincial city of about 350,000 inhabitants in the north-central state of Guanajuato. The area is steeped in history, especially from the time of the colony and the wars of independence. The capital, Guanajuato, is a beautiful old colonial city that was a great silver- and gold-mining centre in the 1700s and whose picturesque architecture has made it a national monument. It was in the town of Dolores Hidalgo that the father of Mexican independence, Father Miguel Hidalgo, gave the call to arms against the Spanish in 1810; together with Ignacio Allende, from the nearby town of San Miguel (where Gilberto lived for many years), the two leaders launched the first rebel campaigns. The state is extraordinarily rich in legends, stories, and folk tales of the past. Gilberto’s paternal grandfather lived several blocks away from the family home, and Flores Patiño vividly remembers how, whenever he visited the old man, he would find him reading the Bible, not so

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much for its religious meaning as for the incredible wealth of stories that it contained. “Take away the holy water, and it was like the Thousand and One Nights,” Gilberto explains.1 He would later listen for hours as his grandfather retold the stories of the Bible, which served as his introduction to the world of the fantastic, the unexpected, and the mythical. Together with pre-Columbian and colonial tales, his grandfather’s stories were to form the basis of his own particular magic realism. As he grew older, Gilberto read Mexican and Greek mythology, as well as the works of Verne and Dumas, and was particularly fond of Gustave Doré’s engravings of Biblical scenes. Flores Patiño wrote his first short story at the age of seven and kept on writing through adolescence; he was also fond of jazz, especially the work of Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, and played harmonica with local jazz bands. After secondary school, he played semiprofessional soccer, worked as a salesman, and eventually became a reporter and columnist for the daily newspaper El Sol del Bahío in Celaya. His reporting led him into a variety of aspects of city life: both its underside (bordellos, murders, and political corruption) and the impressive variety of human experience of its everyday citizens. His daily column, “La ciudad dice” (The city speaks), included short stories, sketches, and interviews with a cross-section of the remarkable people hidden within seemingly ordinary lives in the city. This knowledge of the inner workings of a provincial city, along with his impressions of its inhabitants, would provide the backdrop for his second novel, Sin salida (No way out). Although he also worked as a journalist for a year in Mexico City, Gilberto was put off by the gargantuan scale of the capital and by the dehumanization of life there and returned again to the provincial, but more human, world of Celaya. By this time, Gilberto’s interest in reading, especially fiction, had taken off: he was fascinated by the suffering and inner anguish of the characters of Dostoevsky, Sartre, and Camus; by the surreal hatefulness of Oscar Matzerath in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum; and by the labyrinthine destinies of the inhabitants of Faulkner’s rural South. He was also widely read in the Mexican novel, in which the strongest current had traditionally been the realist, descriptive mode.2 Among the works that most impressed him at the time were Mariano Azuela’s novels of the Mexican revolution,3 with their unadorned style and onomatopoeic language; Agustín Yáñez’s novels of rural Mexico,4 which uncovered the mythical qualities of the relationship between the land and its people and

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used new narrative techniques to express them; Juan Rulfo’s brilliantly concise, haunted fiction, situated in rural Mexico but often strangely disconnected in time or space;5 and Luis Spota’s journalistic tales of corruption and hypocrisy in Mexican society.6 Sin salida, which he wrote at age thirty-two, has a journalist protagonist and is dedicated to Luis Spota. Flores Patiño’s first novel, El reino de silencio (The kingdom of silence), published in Morelia (capital of the neighbouring state of Michoacán) in 1969, covers several centuries in the life of a village in central Mexico, Zapote de Palomas, that gradually sinks back into atavistic superstition and is finally cursed by God. The novel begins with an epigraph from Faulkner and runs to 600 pages. Unfortunately, the author no longer has a copy of this work, and the book seems to be unattainable.7 Following this early experiment with magic realism, he largely put aside the novel of external description in order to better concentrate on the interior world of the mind. Sin salida, which was published in 1972, is set in a modern provincial city of Mexico and ostensibly focuses on three days in the life of its central character, an unnamed crime reporter for the city’s main newspaper. The novel culminates in the character’s temptation and subsequent rejection of committing suicide. Within this structure, however, there are a multitude of flashbacks to other periods and experiences in the journalist’s life, including various crimes and instances of human suffering that he has witnessed, as well as his own disillusion with his wife and love for a prostitute and dancer whom he meets in a local brothel. His wife becomes increasingly prone to hysterical rages, in one of which she finally puts an end to her own life and that of their infant daughter. Although this early novel at times seems overloaded with Dostoevskian suffering, including murders, a horrendous train wreck, scenes of police interrogation and torture, and the protagonist’s childhood relationship with his mentally handicapped brother and manic-depressive mother, the characters are complex and generally (with the exception of the wife) well defined. What stands out is the character of the protagonist himself, who is gradually revealed to be engaged in a valiant and solitary effort to take in, accept, understand, and in some way mitigate the pain and degradation that surround him and into which his work – and perhaps his own psychological need to suffer – has plunged him. Flores Patiño himself has summed up the novel as the search for an answer to the question, “Why do you exist, Cain?”8

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The settings of Sin salida are remarkable for their gloominess. Almost the entire novel takes place at night, and the intense sunlight and clear skies that are usually associated with central Mexico are replaced by darkness and perpetual cloud. The anonymous journalist works by night and sleeps by day, as do virtually all the other characters with whom he is in contact, from his fellow newspapermen to his prostitute lover, his police chief friend, and the restaurant owner, Lin, who lets him sleep in her room when he collapses from fatigue at a table and then later makes love to him. The nameless provincial Mexican city in which he lives, rather than being a centre of human activity and interaction, is perpetually asleep and deserted. Like a modern “Il Pensoroso,” the protagonist is given to long contemplative nighttime walks through empty streets lit only by electric street lamps, thus shifting the focus of the novel from the city itself to the inner workings of the main character’s mind. The only scenes from the journalist’s disappointing honeymoon by the sea are flashbacks in which he escapes from the bedroom to wander alone among the dunes in the moonlight. Although it is afternoon when he eventually makes love to Lin in her bedroom above the restaurant – and in some way finds a brief solace with her from his loneliness – the sky has darkened and a thunderstorm is coming in. Light is a redemptive element in the novel: virtually the only daytime scenes are the flashbacks of his walks, swimming, horseback riding, and lovemaking with his mistress at a house in the country – which are also the happiest moments of his life. Moreover, his long predawn meditation on suicide ends when dawn breaks and he hears his landlady’s collection of pet birds begin to sing as the earth reawakens and the sun returns, bringing him back into contact with physical reality. He rejects committing suicide and makes his way through the early morning streets to the central square of the city, where in a strange scene he lies down and feels “the freshness of the trees and of the grass that he felt pressed against his back as he lay in crucifix position on the lawn and felt the spikes of the morning sun nailing him for awhile longer to the earth, fastening him to life.”9 Like Christ, he has achieved atonement for his own suffering and that of those around him. It is in his third novel, Nudo de tinieblas (Knot of darkness, 1974), that Flores Patiño most completely explores the creation and image of the Other in the human mind. The theme of the novel is again suffering and redemption, but this time within the hermetic context of extreme psychological isolation from the rest of humanity. This bizarre

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and well-structured novel has only two principal characters: Señor Arzate (his first name is never given), who is the director of a public library in a small (again anonymous) Mexican city, and his unnamed secretary. The only other figures are the members of the library advisory board, with whom he has a brief meeting described in flashback; Benita, his landlady; and the clerk in the liquor store where he buys brandy. The novel takes place in a single evening and night, in which a rainstorm keeps Arzate and his secretary from going home after work, and they eventually end up making love in his apartment. The scenes are limited to Arzate’s office in the deserted library; the night streets of the city as he walks home with his secretary; the parlour of the vast lodging house where he lives, where they talk and share drinks; the stairway upstairs, which is haunted by figures from Arzate’s imagination; and his grimy bedroom. What is extraordinary about the novel is the gradual revelation that virtually the entire narrative is taking place inside Arzate’s mind. His secretary does indeed exist, but she has gone home for the night; the woman whom he romances throughout the novel is a creation of his own imagination. Moreover, another character, an anonymous parenthetical voice that keeps up a sarcastic commentary, or chorus, on the progress of the liaison, is in fact a second, weaker, aspect of Arzate’s personality; this voice accepts reality but is unable to stand up to the dominant, fantasizing persona of Arzate’s mind. Indeed, Arzate suffers from a withdrawal so severe that he is incapable of direct amorous contact with a woman; instead, he has turned to fetishism, buying small objects from the servants of the various women whom he knows (he believes that the women in question have actually left the articles in his apartment for him) and keeping them in a trunk in his dreary lodging-house room, where he periodically takes out the handkerchief, undergarment, or even childhood doll that he has purloined and goes into a prolonged sexual reverie about the woman from whom it comes as he caresses it, eventually stimulating himself to orgasm. His fantasies are, however, much more than just sexual images: they are complex human creations that take on a life and personality of their own and serve both as foils to his own overwhelming loneliness and as expressions of their own longing for human contact – Others whom he has willed into being. The character of his secretary, for instance, is so fully developed that it is not at all immediately apparent that she is not an actual person. Arzate is, in fact, not altogether certain whether she is real or whether he is simply imagining

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or even speaking her voice, and his landlady hears voices and finds two brandy glasses on the coffee table in the lodging-house lounge. There is the question of whether, given the highly repressed and sometimes violent nature of Arzate’s fantasies about his secretary, it isn’t better for him to be fulfilling his desires in secret. Very little information is ever given about Arzate’s past, which has the effect of keeping the focus on the irrationality of his alienation rather than on explanations of why it exists or how it could be cured. The imagery of darkness and light in Nudo de tinieblas is similar to that which haunts Sin salida. In keeping with Flores Patiño’s taste for temporal unity, the whole novel takes place in a single night, which is again a time of rain, mist, and deserted streets. The “knot of darkness” of the title is in fact the extreme isolation of Arzate’s interior self (or selves), yet the dichotomy has now also taken on the aspect of a struggle not only between shadow and light, and night and day, but between the artistic imagination (Arzate the fantasizer) and the reality principle (his mocking other self), as well as between evil (or rebellion against the accepted) and good (the defence of cosmic order). In fact, Arzate’s final progress with his secretary up the lodginghouse stairway to his room is impeded by a vast kinetic fresco of the fall of Satan from Paradise that he imagines on the walls, a battle that is described with great poetic imagination. “Without light,” says Arzate at the end of the novel, “there would be no darkness, for shadows are the dark part of light itself.”10 The novel is also part of a major shift among many Mexican writers away from the novel of external events and toward an increasing focus on the psychological and fantastic. This change in the concept of the novel was prefigured by the dreamlike, often phantasmagoric indeterminacy of Juan Rulfo’s short stories in El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain) and of his novel Pedro Páramo, both published in the mid-1950s. An interesting parallel to Nudo de tinieblas is Carlos Fuentes’s novella Aura (itself possibly inspired by Gérard de Nerval’s hallucinatory narrative Aurélia), published in 1970. Like Flores Patiño’s novel, Aura also deals with eroticism, perception, and the interface between reality and fantasy: a centenarian sorceress lures a young man to her dark and claustrophobic home by conjuring up the image of herself when young. As Octavio Paz has observed, “In Aura desire is all-powerful – desire and its terrors, lovely apparitions that fuse together into one single unbearable vision: not the image of death, but rather its mask, the grimace of the old woman.”11 In contrast to the

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somewhat breathless pace and supernatural overtones of Aura, however, Nudo de tinieblas proceeds with a leisurely but suspenseful rhythm and includes a great deal of dialogue and physical detail; perhaps the contrast is due to the fact that the protagonist of Fuentes’s tale is the victim of enchantment, whereas Señor Arzate wishes to take all the time available in order to fill in every detail of his onanistic and psychologically fulfilling fantasy. It also must be mentioned that Nudo de tinieblas marks the first appearance of the lyrical and poetic asides referring to Mexican mythology, colonial legends, Biblical stories, and cosmological whimsy, which later came to occupy much of Flores Patiño’s imagination. In the late 1960s, Gilberto moved from Celaya to the nearby old colonial town of San Miguel de Allende, which has had a large colony of foreign (chiefly American and Canadian) artists, retirees, and language students ever since the 1940s. He played harmonica in a jazz band, taught classes there in Spanish, philosophy, and history in several private academies, and later married an American woman, with whom he had two children and spent several years in her home town of Spartanburg, South Carolina. They divorced, however, and in the late 1970s Gilberto met his present wife, the Québécois translator Ginette Hardy. In 1980 the couple moved to Montreal. Gilberto had imagined Quebec as a northern version of Latin American culture and was disappointed by the relative reserve of the Québécois and the fundamentally North American ethos of their society. He found that people spent a great deal of time in their apartments and missed the atmosphere of the corner café; he also felt isolated from other Latin American writers in the city, none of whom were Mexican. In the mid-1980s he and Ginette returned to San Miguel for several years. During his years in San Miguel, Gilberto’s reading took several new directions. On the one hand, he read a great deal of Beckett, especially the trilogy Molloy, The Unnameable, and Malone Dies. He was also very impressed by the movie Rachel, Rachel, the film version of Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God; following the success of the film, the novel was translated into Spanish, and Gilberto found in it many similarities between small-town life in Canada and Mexico. On the other hand, he continued to deepen his exploration of esoteric philosophy, moving from Borges and Aztec philosophy to the Divine Comedy, the Apocrypha, Heraclitus, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. During the early 1980s in Montreal, he wrote his best-known novel, Esteban el

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centauro (Esteban), and finished a fourth novel, El último descendiente (The last descendant), in San Miguel. El último descendiente continues the story of Señor Arzate but in a more realistic and positive mode. Arzate is still living in his lodging house, but the city is now specifically San Miguel, and the other characters are all real. As in A Jest of God, love for another person offers redemption from solitude and gives meaning to life, and Arzate is finally able to establish a relationship (although this, too, could be another elaborate fantasy) with Angelita, the aging daughter of an elderly woman on the library committee. Angelita shares Arzate’s fear of others yet is valiant enough to drug her domineering mother and come to his lodgings to spend the night with him. The next morning Arzate can hardly believe that she was really there and actually falls physically ill when faced with the possibility of abandoning his selfcentred fantasy world. Indeed, Angelita’s main competition is now an antique mannequin whom he imagines as having been the daughter of the Marquis of Syria, thereby projecting an invented Other upon an inanimate object. The two chapters in which the mannequin relates her mythic past – among the most lyrical and poetic in Flores Patiño’s writing, blending Aztec fairy tales and oneiric colonial legends with cosmological myths that are retold by cranes – were included in the anthology Compañeros.12 The novel ends with the revelation that the huge old lodging house actually belongs to Arzate himself and that his emotional frigidity is the result of two traumatic experiences of his youth: being savagely ridiculed by a grimy, obese prostitute whom he had visited for his first sexual experience; and witnessing his mother’s murder at the hands of his father, who then committed suicide in front of him. He comes to terms with his past by unlocking the door to a cloistered garden where he used to spend the afternoon with his parents and accepting their deaths. In the final scene, he burns the contents of his fetish-filled trunk and turns his thoughts to Angelita, breaking through the shell of narcissistic isolation in order to make contact with an actual rather than imagined Other. Curiously, however, although the Arzate of the second novel finds a way out of his personal hell, El último descendiente is a neater, less intriguing novel than its predecessor. A French translation by Ginette Hardy was published by Fides in 1998 as Le dernier comte de Cantabria and was extremely well received in Quebec. The literary critic Robert Chartrand reviewed it twice in Le Devoir, thanking Flores Patiño for the “sumptuous gift” of the novel to Quebec literature.13

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Esteban el centauro, Flores Patiño’s fifth novel, is generally considered his greatest artistic and popular success. Here the style and theme are completely different from his earlier works. The novel is told from the point of view of an eight-year-old child, Esteban, who narrates much of it to his best friend, a wooden horse. Esteban is the son of American parents who lives with his single mother in San Miguel; he knows virtually nothing of his father, not even his name, and his artist mother is often more intent on alleviating her own loneliness with a series of lovers (whom Esteban calls “them”) than on devoting herself to her son. Perhaps Flores Patiño’s greatest success in this novel has been his ability to actually tell the story in the oral narrative voice of a child. Esteban’s prose is virtually without metaphor, ingenuous and unadorned, yet precise and often incisive in its observations. Excelsior, Mexico City’s equivalent of the New York Times, included the novel in its list of the thirty best books of 198514 and compared it to Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince,15 but the similarities between the two books are limited, particularly since Le Petit Prince is a fantasy narrated by an adult, whereas Esteban el centauro is essentially a realistic work told by the child himself and ending in tragedy. The novel, although short, is a tour de force, and its very directness marks a major break with all of Flores Patiño’s former and later work, which is characterized by hallucinatory flashbacks and mythological asides. Three general elements of his work are, however, present. First, Esteban, like the journalist of Sin salida and Señor Arzate, is deeply concerned with his own identity. Although his parents are American, he identifies strongly with the environment in which he lives and feels profoundly Mexican; Esteban is an immigrant, just as Gilberto was when he wrote the novel during his first stay in Montreal in the early 1980s. Second, the novel takes place over a short, limited space of time: three days in which the lonely boy converses with his wooden horse while his mother fails to return home. Many of his thoughts and descriptions are again given in flashback, but the continued, unexplained absence of the mother fills both Esteban and the reader with an increasing sense of foreboding. Third, as in Sin salida and El último descendiente, there is a violent crime involving the death of someone in the protagonist’s family: in this case, his mother is eventually found murdered, and the child must ultimately face the reality of death and solitude. Again, there is a fundamental tension between the narrator/protagonist and the Other, but this time that Other is split in two: it consists of both the mother, whom we only

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know through the child’s memories and who in fact is no longer alive; and the toy horse, which listens attentively to all the child’s anxieties and whose presence offers some consolation, although it also – like the mother – cannot answer the child’s questions. Gilberto’s wife translated Esteban el centauro while they were in San Miguel and sent the manuscript to Éditions Boréal in Montreal, where it was read with great enthusiasm by Jacques Godbout; the novel was published soon afterward and was warmly received in the Québécois press.16 It was also translated into English several years later by Linda Gaboriau and published under the title Esteban by Cormorant Books in 1995; its reviews in English Canada were also favourable,17 although less extensive. In the aftermath of its success, Flores Patiño has become more involved in Quebec literary life: he regularly participates in readings sponsored by the Union des écrivaines et écrivains du Québec and in 1991 translated Michel Marc Bouchard’s L’Histoire de l’oie into Spanish for presentation in Mexico City, where it won the yearly award for best foreign theatrical production in 1992. Bouchard’s work particularly intrigues him because of the similarities between the small-town and rural environments of Quebec and those of Mexico. He has since gone on to translate three other Quebec plays into Spanish: two for the Théâtre des Deux Mondes and one for Carbone 14. Gilberto’s interest in Canadian writing also extends to the historical novels of the late Roman Empire by Jean Marcel and the Biblical structure overlaid onto modern life in A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll. During the 1990s he became increasingly integrated into the expanding Latino-Québécois literary scene: his work has been included in La présence d’une autre Amérique, as well as in Compañeros and in the quatrilingual review Ruptures, and he has read with other Latin American writers in Janou St-Denis’s Place aux poètes. His relative success in Quebec letters has made him the bestknown Hispanic writer in the province; only Sergio Kokis (who is Brazilian) has a higher profile. Meanwhile, his reading has increasingly moved into the esoteric, including alchemy, the works of C.G. Jung, and particularly Jewish philosophy, in which he has explored the Talmud, the Torah, and works on the Cabbala, such as the Zohar of Moses of León. It is his wide knowledge of myth, allegory, and mysticism that have provided him with sufficient background for the extraordinary blend of material in a book of short stories entitled Le pégase de cristal, which has appeared only in a French version, translated by Ginette Hardy

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and published by Boréal in 1990. These stories, although presumably for children, are in fact perhaps more appropriate for adults who enjoy remembering or are nostalgic for their own childhood. The seventeen tales in the collection include elements of Aztec, Greek, Jewish, Arabic, and European folklore but are nevertheless all highly original stories of their own; the settings are generally Mexican, although the time frames vary from mythological to historical to modern. Almost all of the tales include single or multiple stories-within-a-story, interwoven into the text as storytelling competitions or Scheherazade-like series of distractions. In fact, the principal theme of the book is the sheer joy of storytelling itself. The final tale, “The Universal Story,” is only three lines long and sums up the book’s objectives: “There was once a child who lost his way among his adult dreams and never returned.”18 Flores Patiño’s latest work, Les contes de mon père, which was also translated by Ginette Hardy and published by Fides in 1996, continues the celebration of storytelling but in a less erudite, more folkloric context and in an even more lyrical style. As the title suggests, the stories are seemingly narrated by a master storyteller to an attentive and enthralled audience, with frequent references to the listener/reader as a participant in what is essentially an oral and audial process, including repeated cycles of action and perhaps with hand movements and gesticulation by the teller. The setting is rural Mexico, although no specific area is ever mentioned, and the time of the seven stories – tales, really, with structures that blend the fable, the picaresque, and the folk tale with the psychological observation of the short story – varies between the present, the recent past, and a melded mythological antiquity in which a Mexican gambler meets King Solomon in Jerusalem. The line between folkloric exaggeration and magic realism is also erased: is the child who sees scenes of his mentally deranged Aunt Soco’s life in her pocket mirror really entering another reality or hallucinating his own projections upon her mute and incoherent personality? Yet virtually all the stories include some confrontation between the Self and the idea or reality of the Other: the lovely young woman whom Aunt Soco once was; the failure (like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol) of the wealthy and exploitative Tomás Canales to understand the humanity of other people; the transformation of the ironically named criminal Plácido into the pestilential devil that he has found on the other side of the mirror as he breaks through the glass and embraces himself with bloodied arms; the bantering intimacy between the trickster Juan Taure and the ingenuous and patient Lady Death (represented by a clattering female

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skeleton directly related to the calaveras of Mexican traditions of the Day of the Dead, perhaps via the engravings of José Guadalupe Posada19 and the paintings of Diego Rivera); and the persevering search by Toña the beggar woman for her miscarried baby – the only Other whom she has ever loved – throughout the realms of the afterlife. The conceptualization of the Other now incorporates elements of individual psychology with those of popular myth. Perhaps Flores Patiño’s choice of French rather than Spanish for the first editions of his last two works – Le pégase de cristal and Les contes de mon père – is symbolic of his increasing orientation to the world of Quebec letters rather than to that of Mexico, with which he says he is steadily losing contact.20 Gilberto continues to write principally for his own enjoyment, without a well-defined public, as many of his books attest: Esteban el centauro is written by a child but is basically for adults, while the short stories of Le pégase de cristal, although they contain elements of fantasy associated with children’s literature, are in fact drawn from a highly eclectic and erudite list of sources and often include philosophical conundrums that are probably beyond the ken of most younger readers. He is presently at work on a novel that takes place both in Montreal and Mexico; it would be his first work at least partially set in North America and would mark a new direction in his writing. Yet changes in theme and style have always marked Gilberto’s writing – from magic realism to the interior confessional, from the simplicity of a child’s perceptions to the whimsical and unforeseeable world of fantasy. Flores Patiño has always followed his own path toward the Other, wherever it might lead.

tw o s e l e c t i o n s f r o m t h e n o v e l el último descendiente I Before, I was a tree in a forest of evergreen oaks, though I was not an evergreen oak myself. And before that I was the daughter of the Marquis of Syria. And before that a woman of the temple of fire and one of the brides of the god, who appeared every night to set fire to us with his spear of flame. And before that the guardian of a garden, where I looked after the fragrance of the flowers and would call for help when someone tried to steal it. And before that the bearer of an alabaster vase, along the path of prayer to the god of water. And

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before that the mother of a monster that fed on young men and damsels. And before that the scribe of a woman who told stories to a king every night to keep him from killing her. And before that a virgin who when she fell asleep would be seduced by a wooden swan, and at the end of the thousand and one nights that the dream lasted, would wake up and give birth to a girl who then became a virgin who slept beneath a tree and dreamed that she was her mother and then the scribe of the woman who told stories to that king and had a son who devoured young men and maidens and was a devotee of the rain god and keeper of a garden and one of the wives of the god of fire and a tree and the Marquise of Syria and now I am here. It’s been so long since I’ve seen a fire in a fireplace. I spend my life in the window, or in a cluttered room strewn with objects. From the window I see people pass by without noticing me, or perhaps they stop and speak of my attire. Then a man lifts me up and takes me to a room, where I am naked, because a girl has taken off my clothes. There is another there like me, but we don’t resemble each other. And boxes and trunks and wagon wheels and rolled-up carpets and vases and dried flowers and beds that have been dismantled and a wooden swan and three elves made of papier-mâché and a cast-iron statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe and sheet-metal roosters and mirrors with brass frames like suns, and a rainbow on a folded serape and a suit of armour said to have been abandoned in the sixteenth century by the person who inhabited it and that was made two weeks ago … II “Who revealed my secret to you?” A heron. There are golden grapes shining in the two brandy glasses. I feel the warmth from the fire. A garden of orange trees burns on her dress. The bird of sand takes flight from her head. I have removed her hat and leave it on the armchair. Her jet-black hair on her shoulders. I stroke it. Thick. Cold. The firelight envelops her face and her bare arms. Her hands, held rigid before her, seem to search for the warmth. I caress them and – she moves slightly. I kneel before the fire. I see her seat herself on the flowers of the rug. She rests her body on her right hand. The glasses are between us. Her grey eyes watch the dancing flames. “At night, after supper, we would go to the drawing room. I would work on my embroidery and listen as they talked. Like the time my father said that no, it wasn’t true; it couldn’t be. ‘I assure you it is, Your Grace.

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The innkeeper told me about him and described him just as he is in the book: tall, dry, deranged-looking, with a squire and everything.’ ‘I can’t believe it,’ said my father. ‘That’s understandable, Your Grace, quite understandable. The innkeeper said the same thing, that he couldn’t believe it even after seeing them.’ ‘The Spanish are all mad,’ said my father. ‘Unfortunately not, Your Grace.’ ‘Artists and madmen,’ the Marquis of Syria continued, raising his hand above his head; ‘I don’t know where art ends and lunacy begins.’ ‘It’s difficult to tell, Your Grace.’ And all morning they would keep me there, very still, seated next to the bed, with my hands folded in my lap. And he would look at me … No, he would pierce right through me, plunging into my eyes or the flesh of my cheeks or my breast. Into my breast, without even being bothered by the presence of my duenna, who those days embroidered more than ever. He would say out loud that my face was the most beautiful in the world, that there wasn’t anyone as graceful as I and that the colour of my hair was blacker and more beautiful than all the nights of time gathered together into a single instant and that my skin was as soft as flowers. In the afternoon we would walk among the trees and the dry leaves breaking apart beneath our feet reminded me of the story of the deceitful sorcerer and we would sit on the edge of the hill and watch the sunset and the duenna would hide among the boulders …”

chapter three of the novel s i n s a l i d a He left the newspaper office and went out into the street. A cold, light wind was blowing: a breeze from the early hours of the morning, trailing along the burnished night pavement that reflected the light from the streetlights. The sidewalk looked like hardened glass that had lost its vitreous quality and had turned to common concrete. There was no one on the street now. He looked at his watch: it was one minute before two in the morning. Everything around him was muted and still. The only sound he heard within the silence was that of his own footsteps, like a resonating trail scattering around him, invading his own void – a footfall that would gradually keep on diminishing till it incrusted itself in distance and oblivion, out past the end of everything, beyond the last block of the Great Street of the World, where there wouldn’t be a single house left to wrap up in a quiet hour such as this. Nothing would exist then, neither time nor counting.

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“I still have the bizarre feeling,” he thought, “that the dead are nothing more than the things with which I work, the dead whose importance lies in whether or not they’re worth an article in the paper: the terrible cruelty of civilization’s cannibalism. Tomorrow, like all tomorrows, someone will be feeding once again on the blood we turn into question marks, periods, and commas and then disguise in sentences. The sensation will take hours to disappear; sometimes it’s with me for days before I’m finally able to somehow vomit it out.” He stopped to light a cigarette and felt the enormous weight of the night subside, as if it were only an instant entangled in a web of silence, fixed beneath a grille of stars. Then he walked on, tossing the still-burning match onto the ground behind him. The clock on the tower of the Church of San Francisco struck two, and was followed by the shrill whistle of a locomotive, like a trail of its sound. He imagined the outline of a dark train slipping across the plain with its cargo of counterfeit dead, of bodies paralyzed in the parody of death known as sleep. A second, longer whistle cut through the coagulated darkness like a bolt of lightning before a thunderstorm. He thought of the railway station and remembered the distant Sunday afternoons of his childhood when his mother would take him there to walk along the platforms and watch the trains. Later, when his brother was born, those outings ended. Once he had felt afraid there, terribly afraid. It had been almost night when they saw a train coming in. First they heard a blast from its whistle; then they saw the brilliant headlight in the distance. They were sitting on a bench among the shadows of the platform. He stood up and his mother held him by the wrist to make sure he wouldn’t get too close to the rails. The locomotive arrived panting and stopped just beyond the end of the platform, where it blew out a jet of grey steam. Before them stood an interminable row of illuminated windows, at one of which appeared an old man’s face topped with a wide-brimmed black hat. He was frightened by the man’s long, thick grey beard and terrified by the dark eyes that stared back at him; the continual smile on the man’s face, instead of calming his fears, began to fill him with panic. And when that face that fascinated and repelled him finally disappeared from the window, he found he was again able to move and took refuge in his mother’s arms. Yet something, some impulse from beyond him, made him watch the door of the car, at which the old man’s complete figure soon appeared. He was

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completely dressed in black; a cape floated over his back as he walked forward, and the face beneath the beard was still fixed in that endless smile. He began to tremble with fear as the old man walked slowly toward them down the platform. His mother somehow seemed to be an accomplice of this strange traveller, because she began to laugh at his fear, whereas he would have preferred that she pick him up from the bench and that they run off as fast as possible. He closed his eyes, squeezing them tightly shut, in the hope that when he opened them again the strange figure would be gone. But no, it continued to come slowly toward them, its legs becoming longer at every step, the cape billowing out behind as if the man were running at them and only an optical illusion made it seem that he was advancing so slowly. When the stranger came up to them, two large hands reached down and lightly picked him up. He was paralyzed with fear and didn’t offer the least resistance; he hadn’t the strength left for anything. The hands held him up even with the ancient face, so that he could clearly see the tangled beard with its threads of zinc, the reddened eyes and toothless mouth that opened to ask a “What’s your name, my boy?” that smacked of soft gums, like those of a newborn baby. “Hmm? How’s that? You don’t want to tell me?” The train whistle blew once more, and the old man stopped insisting and put him back down. He ran to his mother’s arms and heard the old man’s voice thickly adding “What a cute kid!” from that mouth of toothless flesh. Yet something, some strange fascination, like a desire to punish himself, made him look up once again, and now all he could see was the cape floating away behind the man as he quickly moved off and then disappeared back through the door of the passenger car, as if he had never existed. He later dreamed of that man for many nights, until the dream itself became routine, and the routine removed the figure and stored it in the apparent void of remembrances that slowly petrify behind the wall of memory. Again he heard the train whistle drill through the night, a sharp cry that was longer than before. Its passengers would once again be moving onward into uncertainty. “How many times have I listened to the wheels of trains?” he thought. “That sound which even seems to reach me here, which could be right next to me now. Wheels that drag themselves along toward the dark precipice at the end of the voyage. It doesn’t matter where they set out from or where they are headed. Each journey has a beginning and an end, and all it leaves in its wake is the dust of the travellers that pass through. My own voyage will also end one day.”

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The part of the city that never slept lay in the direction of the train whistle, in the midst of streetlights, taxis humming in the distance that now at night seemed so near, footsteps of shadows wandering through the solitude of a life whose direction had been set at some previous two o’clock in the morning. Other two’s in the morning of other nights, of other lives captured by the invisible, hidden nature of the same reality that surrounded them all. “At night the city spreads out before me,” he thought, “as if it were a place of such importance; in fact it’s just a mass of viscous anguish, palpitating beneath electric lights – those lights that irrigate the lonely streets like some giant sprinkler.” The screech of an ambulance cut through the silence of the night, making it seem almost palpably heavy. He looked over his shoulder; the pale green of the reporters’ van was still visible in the light from the door to the newspaper building. He waited to hear the motor start up. Then the engine whined as the van sped past him, setting off an avalanche of accumulated shadows over the street as the headlights flashed violently by and shattered against the invisible barrier of darkness beyond their reach. “They didn’t see me,” he told himself, though he had seen three figures in the cab as the van went by. “Blanco must have finally come off his drunk. Or perhaps I’m also on my way with them, glancing at myself and thinking that I’m here on the sidewalk. Or maybe it’s just my shadow walking along here, like some forgotten silhouette.” Now he could hear the sirens of several ambulances: three, four – then more. “It must be something big: they’re not letting up!” The sound of the van’s engine faded as it moved off into the distance. The sirens, however, kept on, until they eventually also subsided into silence. The aftershock of all the sudden sound continued to buzz in his ears, like the echo of something that no longer existed. The street returned to its habitual calm in the depth of night. From farther off now, as if from the summit of a mountain beyond the dark clouds through which the moon occasionally broke, the howls of other sirens came rolling softly across the air. He thought of death as an abstraction, a void that in the end annihilated all possible effort. He looked at the locked doors of the houses as he walked by and imagined the occupants asleep, immersed in dreams. He felt an inexplicable compassion for them and for himself, too: a mixture of empathy and depression.

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“An anguished existence,” he thought, “of people grappling with sterile problems and strapped into a daily routine, without any higher ambition. And to top it off: death! A destiny like a bottomless well with no way out, a canal filled in at the end by eternity. Death is the endless way out, the irrevocable escape, but so what? Life’s not really worth that much either.” The sirens wailed on, increasing in intensity, as if legions of monsters were being tortured and were crying out in hideous cracked voices that ascended into the night and floated over the rooftops like living screams. “It’s something terrible,” he said softly to himself, “but what could it be?” He felt the hair on his neck stand on end as one of the ambulances gave a particularly haunting wail. “Nobody in the newsroom will be getting any sleep tonight.” The howling of the sirens had now become terrifying. An enormous tension was building beneath the previous calm of the night. Something dreadful had happened. He thought of how this morning the printing presses would be stopped and the paper would change its layout. The sirens had now become like the voices of the insane, keening and unreal. He wondered if he were going crazy. The ululating lament enveloped the city in death. He raised his eyes to the sky and saw that the darkness had moved in again: dense cloud had taken over everywhere. It seemed to him that farther up, above the clouds, there was nothing. “I wonder if total nothingness actually exists: a nothingness that can’t even be spoken of? Had life first come from that? If it had, then human beings themselves were also born from it, each in order to roll forward a huge wheel inscribed with the word ‘Solitude.’ At first, people had only had nature to distract them, and nature, with all its mysteries, possessed a silence that filled them with anguish. Humans had therefore learned to think, but when they did so they came face to face with themselves. That was when they discovered nothingness. Someone once told me that human emptiness had created God in its own image and likeness – or was it just the opposite? Had the image and resemblance to God created the void out of the human mind?” Meanwhile the sirens continued on as dozens of emergency vehicles were now evidently converging on some unknown tragedy, sounding like a swarm of grieving voices tearing at the night air.

4 Alfredo Lavergne: Uprootal and the Compass of Poetry

Alfredo Lavergne was born in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1951. The city and its long international history were to play a key role in his development. Valparaíso has always been Chile’s greatest seaport and the principal point of access between Santiago and the outside world; indeed, before the opening of the Panama Canal, when all shipping between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had to go round Cape Horn, Valparaíso was one of the principal ports of the world, and many European shipping firms established offices there. Two aspects of the city had an important effect on Lavergne. First, his paternal grandfather was the son of immigrants from France and England and spoke and read fluently in French. He remained an enthusiastic francophile who scoffed at Chilean culture and kept a large library of books in French, in which Alfredo was encouraged to read; in fact, Alfredo was even forced to memorize and recite passages of French poetry when he was a child. Second, Valparaíso’s prosperity in the nineteenth century was followed by a slow and irrevocable decline, especially as the upper and middle classes moved out of the crowded hilltop neighbourhoods of the port to the more spacious apartments and houses of Viña del Mar, one of Chile’s wealthiest cities, a few miles to the north. Thus Alfredo’s earliest memories of the city itself were of poverty, decay, and lost grandeur. Alfredo’s mother was a Criolla (native-born Chilean) who was employed as a secretary in a German import-export company, and his father worked for International Telephone and Telegraph (itt). Both parents had active cultural interests: Alfredo remembers his mother taking him to performances of zarzuela, or Spanish opera, and his father playing him his favourite jazz records. Lavergne’s early explorations of

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his grandfather’s library gave him a taste for French surrealist poetry, the literature of the fantastic, and astronomy (he remembers trying to look through the moon, which he thought was a hole in space). Alfredo also spent a great deal of time with his uncle Sergio – his father’s brother and the family rebel – who was a professional painter, Communist Party member, and alcoholic who endlessly discussed art with his nephew and encouraged him to think outside of conventional norms. Sergio was an admirer of the work of the great Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta,1 who spent most of his active life in Paris and New York; at about the same time, Alfredo remembers discovering the work of the Chilean avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro, who also lived many years in France and wrote part of his work in French. In late adolescence, as Chile entered the spiral of years leading up to the election of the leftist Popular Front government of Salvador Allende in 1970 and eventually to the military coup d’état of 1973, Alfredo experienced an instinctive and visceral rejection of his parents’ middle-class expectations. His family had moved to Santiago, where he received a scholarship to a strict German Chilean private school; upon graduation, he left his studies to take part in the growing student protest movement of the time and to work in a textile factory. His parents, who had dreamed of a medical career for him, were appalled, but in the political turmoil of the late 1960s, Lavergne forged a strong and enduring personal identification with the Chilean working class, a factor that is central to his poetry.2 By the early 1970s he was working in a plant that made electronic components for the automobile industry (an occupation that was to become his specialty), where he became active in the union; then, in 1971, at age twenty, during the first years of the Allende administration, he joined the Socialist (Marxist-Leninist) Party and married a young fellow militant. Alfredo began to write poetry in early adolescence, and his reading at the time ranged from Verne to Wilde to Hemingway (whose extreme individualism he rejected) to the great Chilean poets of the first half of the century, including the socially conscious work of Pablo Neruda; the “Creationist” experimentalism and iconoclasm of Vicente Huidobro; the lyricism of Jorge Teillier;3 and the Whitmanesque enthusiasm for life of Pablo de Rokha. Lavergne has always been almost exclusively a poet, and his style has consistently been marked by a rigorous minimalism, which he says he first developed from reading the barrage of political graffiti that covered the buildings of Santiago at the time – messages such as the following, in which fear of arrest made brevity a necessity:

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I’ve lost my house My job My bread – Now let’s lose our fear.4 He remembers a specific day in 1970, soon after the election of Allende, when he was walking from his factory job to a night school class and saw a poster for the First Annual Festival of Protest Songs, to be held that evening. He skipped his class and went to the concert, which included the group Quilapayún and his own cousin Payer Grondona; as he listened, he suddenly realized that poetry was not an isolated interest but an active part of society as a whole and that artistic expression could be both profoundly personal and socially committed. It was then that he decided his vocation was to be a poet. The coup d’état that overthrew the Allende government and installed a military regime under General Augusto Pinochet in 1973 forever changed Chile and the lives of virtually everyone in Alfredo’s family. His father, who had been active in the union at itt, lost his job; his mother began to work with resistance groups; his sister went into exile in Australia. Alfredo and his wife lived underground for several years and then decided to leave the country: they tried to obtain refugee status from France but received a more open response from Canada, to which they immigrated in 1976. (They eventually went back to Chile to work in the resistance movement against Pinochet in the early 1980s but returned to Canada two years later.) The year following his arrival in Montreal in 1976, Alfredo’s experience in automotive manufacturing allowed him to find a job on the night shift assembly line at the General Motors plant in Boisbriand, where he worked (except for his return to Chile) until 1999, afer which he moved to London, Ontario, to work in General Motors’ central warehouse. He has now retired from General Motors and returned to live in Santiago. Although Alfredo had recited his poetry at literary and political events and published individual poems in magazines, pamphlets, and flyers in Chile, it was in Montreal that he began bringing out his poetry in book form; his body of work now runs to twelve books and two unpublished manuscripts. His first collection, Desde el suelo (From the ground), was written in Chile during his return there from 1980 to 1982 and deals primarily with Chilean themes, such as the loneliness and fear associated with living clandestinely, the military mind, exile,

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love in the midst of political repression, and solidarity. Alfredo’s laconic, understated style is already apparent, although many of the poems have a narrative element that would later fade in importance. Two of Alfredo’s poetic trademarks are also present: several poems are in loose haiku form, while there is a very well-executed concrete poem, “Un humano y su yo” (A human and his self), in which the narrator’s greater self locks horns with his ego, the whole arranged symmetrically as though it were one side of an hourglass so that a series of lines of ever-diminishing length is finally reduced to: sólo tú ego pensastes en ti. Tú y yo solo decidí combatirte.

only you ego thought about yourself. You and I alone I decided to fight you.

The lines then expand out again in the form of a mirror image of those above, but with a wholly new content that reaches out beyond the self. The poem brings to mind some of Huidobro’s best concrete work from the 1930s and 1940s. The edition was illustrated by the Guatemalan artist J.R. Vasques and was published by the author himself. By the time Alfredo had resettled in Montreal and published Desde el suelo, his reading had widened immensely and had taken his poetic interests increasingly further afield. He had gone through the Spanish classics and had discovered a particular affinity for the work of Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), the Cordovan poet of the Siglo de Oro (Golden Age) whose work is the apotheosis of baroque complexity and literary conceit. Góngora’s ornate, enigmatic style, filled with mythological allusion and hyperbaton, was famous for its masterful use of multiple meanings. Moreover (and this was of particular interest to Lavergne), it forced the reader to assume an active role in decoding the text, to become an explorer and discoverer within the poetic construct itself. Alfredo was also drawn to Federico García Lorca’s later work, especially Poeta en Nueva York, in which Lorca combines his unembellished Andalusian lyricism with experimental, surrealist techniques. Finally, Alfredo began to find other poets who

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shared his own interest in minimalist poetry and concrete verse. He first came into contact with the haiku through the work of the Mexican poet José Juan Tablada (1871–1945), who travelled to Japan at the end of the nineteenth century and is widely credited with introducing the haiku, tanka, and other forms of Japanese verse to the Hispanic world.5 Tablada also experimented widely and incessantly with concrete verse, using the arrangement of the words on the page as a further artistic element of the poem. Another Mexican, Efraín Huerta (1914–82), whose bare-bones “poemínimos,” often with only one word per line,6 were loosely modelled on the Japanese haiku, was also important to Lavergne as an author who had taken traditional Japanese forms and had pushed them to the limits of surrealist technique. Subsequent reading, both in Chile and Canada, included the witty, sarcastic verse of the Spanish classical poet Francisco de Quevedo;7 William Blake, whom Alfredo discovered on a visit to Boston; the great seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho, whose Narrow Road to the North combines travel commentary with haikus about nature and concentrates the five senses in the poetic moment so that the reader might actually touch, feel, smell, see, and taste the landscape;8 Walt Whitman, especially for his dedication to the common man; Allen Ginsberg, whose heightened sense of orality and bohemian subject matter had a particular influence on Alfredo’s unpublished manuscript “Ese José y esas Marys” (That José and those Marys); the lyric, unadorned poetry of twentieth-century Spanish poets Antonio Machado9 and Miguel Hernández;10 the poems and popular songs that came out of the Spanish Civil War; and finally, the imagistic poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé (especially “Un coup de dés,” with its free-form typography and open-ended meaning), and the concrete and experimental work of Guillaume Apollinaire. Almost immediately after arriving in Canada in 1976, Alfredo became involved in the Latin American artistic scene in Quebec. He was an actor in the troupe of the Chilean Canadian playwright Rodrigo González in the late 1970s, presenting plays by Bertolt Brecht and González himself in Montreal and Toronto, and was also in contact with two other Chilean Canadian artists: the filmmaker Leopoldo Gutiérrez11 and the playwright/poet/singer/songwriter Alberto Kurapel. In 1982 he read with Yvonne Truque and Nelly Davis Vallejos12 at Place aux poètes and, as his work progressed, was invited to poetry readings at the Festival international de la poésie in Trois-Rivières and at the Salon du livre de l’Outaouais in Hull. In the

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mid-1980s the Spanish poet Manuel Betanzos Santos, publisher of the trilingual (English/French/Spanish) literary review Boreal, invited him to read with Milton Acorn. After the publication of Desde el suelo in 1982, Lavergne continued to produce a steady stream of poetry, at the rate of roughly one book per year, for the next decade and a half. All but the first three of his books have been brought out by Les Éditions d’Orphée, a publisher that was able to obtain funding for the translation of several of his works. What is fascinating about Lavergne’s literary production is its constant thematic change and development; moreover, each book presents a new aspect of his minimalist, unadorned, imagistic style as he strives for fresh, transcendent insight into reality. Alas dispersas (Scattered wings), published in 1986, deals with elements of love and eroticism, as well as with work on the assembly line, and is firmly set in Quebec rather than Chile. One of Alfredo’s most personal books, it includes a series of haiku-like verses on class and the relation between the sexes – “A Juan Panadero” (To Juan the baker) – as well as poems that play with form in various ways. In La primavera piedra (The springtime stone) – written in 1986 but published in 1988 by Editorial El Palomar of Montreal as the first in its series Cuadernos de Cultura Popular (Tracts of popular culture) and illustrated with superb drawings by the Mexican artist Roberto Ferreyra – Alfredo returns to Chilean themes, specifically that of working-class resistance to the Pinochet regime during the early 1980s. In the most geographically specific texts in this work, he describes the impoverished streets of Valparaíso at what was probably the nadir of modern Chilean history: Pinochet was in complete power, and there was no mention of eventual return to civilian rule; opponents to the regime were disappearing regularly; and the economy was haemorrhaging from the first years of neoliberal restructuring. The book is an uncompromising call to the streets, if not to arms, yet still includes a variety of concrete and sound poems. It is also the last of Alfredo’s works to deal primarily with Chile. Lavergne’s next two works, Cada fruto (Every fruit, 1986) and Índice agresivo (Aggressivity index, 1987), both published by Éditions d’Orphée, deal primarily with industrial society and worker alienation, based on the poet’s experience at the General Motors plant. With increasing cynicism and irony in Cada fruto, Lavergne describes work on the night shift of the assembly line and its psychological effects on the employees. In Índice agresivo, he broadens the focus to include society

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as a whole, and the ire of a highly politicized Latin American worker is vented against the stagnation of North American working-class life: the corrupt, silent unions; the false bonhomie of the corporate directors who tour the plant; the inhumanly fast rhythm of production; the psychological effect of having to keep up with increasing numbers of robots; and the gradual transformation of the workers’ home life into a simple space between shifts. There is a great deal of irony and some grim humour in both books; in the poem “Tiempos modernos” (Modern times), for instance, from Índice agresivo, the narrator draws an implicit comparison between himself and Charlie Chaplin in the silent film of the same name as he describes an unauthorized trip for a drink of water as the assembly line rolls on, thus losing “Thirteen seconds plus thirteen seconds” on his way to the spigot and back. “The pace making you punchy?” a fellow worker asks him, rather than insisting on the right to satisfy his thirst.13 Throughout Índice agresivo, the words march obliquely across the page, as though they were units to be inserted into a machine or had been composed to the rhythm of the assembly line, as in “Bouquet de dirección” (Directors’ bouquet): P. R. N. 1 – 2 – 3 – Drive. Workers Exist In neutral The liquid Gear Box.14 In his next book, Rasgos separados/Traits distinctifs (1989), Alfredo again changed themes and, to lesser extent, styles. The book appeared in one of Orphée’s curious front-to-back bilingual editions, in which the Spanish and French versions begin at opposite sides of the book and meet, upside-down to one another, at the centre. This work is solely concerned with Central America, especially Guatemala, to which Lavergne had travelled the year before, during the vicious civil war there that pitted the army and oligarchy against the Indian population, workers, and guerrillas. Alfredo’s interest in the country was stimulated not only by its indigenous cultural diversity and political divisions, but also by his readings of two key Central American poets: the Nicaraguan Marxist priest Ernesto Cardenal15 and the Guatemalan revolutionary Otto René Castillo.16 Perhaps the work is a poetic journal

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of the writer’s impressions; in any case, the personal subject has been completely excluded, and the book concentrates on concise, imagistic portraits of the Guatemalan people. Formally, the longest poem in the collection is thirteen lines; most of them vary between four and six lines and are modern, open-ended adaptations of the haiku style, as in “Las máscaras” (The masks): The fiends Incense Candles The priest who learned their language The elders with arms around each other Santiago de Atitlán Fiesta This is the day the Indians Wear masks.17 Lavergne’s next book, Palos con palitos (Sticks and chopsticks, 1990) was a pure homage to the haiku. Almost all the poems are in three short lines, although not necessarily of seventeen syllables: the poet is interested more in following the idea or feeling of the haiku than in its exact metric replication. Most of the poetry also deals with Nature, although the political element is periodically recurrent. The narrator is not content with a mere description of a natural state or event, however, but strives to break through the material level to reach a deeper order hidden within, as in the following untitled poem: The flowers organize the movement of bees within the garden. Moreover, often, as in the above poem, the narrator points out how the yin element subtly subverts or controls the yang, an observation also found in Taoist verse. By the early 1990s, Lavergne’s books were beginning to receive some mention in the Quebec literary world, both in La Presse and Le Devoir and in the yearly critical review La poésie au Québec, published by les Écrits des Forges; reviews of his work also appeared in Chile (Última Hora and La Gota Pura in Santiago), Colombia (Kanora), and

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Spain (Manxa, from Ciudad Real). His poetry was now also being published in literary reviews in Chile (Simpson Siete, Añañuca), the United States (International Poetry Review: Voix du Québec/Voices of Québec, Nuez), Mexico (Blanco Móvil, Norte), English Canada (Arc), and Quebec (Estuaire, Ébauche, Ruptures), and was included in a variety of anthologies (La présence d’une autre Amérique, Enjambres, and Compañeros). Moreover, Alfredo was becoming increasingly interested in Québécois literature, especially poetry, in which his reading took him from Crémazie and Nelligan to the working-class poetry of Alfred Desrochers and Jean Narrache.18 Among more contemporary Quebec authors, his tastes run to Jacques Ferron, Michelle Lalonde (especially “Speak White”), Nicole Brossard, François Charron, the minimalist poetry of Jean Royer, the rebellious voice of Janou St-Denis, the politicized verse of Paul Chamberlain, the unadorned short poetry of José Acquelin, the mocking, disillusioned poems (particularly L’Amérique) of Jean-Paul Daoust, and the descriptions of growing up in Abitibi in the work of Louise Desjardins (La 2e avenue, La love), which to Lavergne are reminiscent of life in Chilean mining towns. Alfredo has also been active in the translation and dissemination of Québécois literature in the Spanish-speaking world and has translated the work of many of the poets listed above for publication in both Latin America (especially Chile and Cuba) and Quebec (Ruptures). During the 1990s, he travelled to Chile on several occasions and gave readings and papers on Quebec literature in Santiago, La Serena, and even Punta Arenas, across from Tierra del Fuego. While living in Montreal, he continued to give readings in Spanish, French, and English (although he writes exclusively in Spanish) at a variety of venues, and for many years he enjoyed, with Alberto Kurapel, the highest degree of recognition in Quebec of any Chilean Québécois writer. Although he now lives in Chile, he returns periodically to Canada to visit friends and give readings; he also maintains his ties to other Chilean Canadian writers and publishes frequently on their websites as well as on a number of websites in Chile. Although the combative streak of political protest is present throughout his work, Lavergne’s latest volumes of poetry have focused on new themes. Retro-perspectiva/Rétro-perspective (1991) is a bilingual collection of cerebral, longer three-line poems that deal with art and aesthetics, reflecting his interest in the philosophy of the French critic Julien Benda.19 Lavergne’s eye as poet/critic is implacable: every aspect of the artistic experience is thrown into question,

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from the influence of the academy to poetic machismo, reader passivity, and the weaknesses of the narrator himself as autodidact. The collection ends with “Tragedia” (Tragedy), a brief, powerful comment on artistic freedom and political censorship: One word too many and the present poet might stand accused Lavergne’s subsequent two works continue the theme of critical observation but apply it in new ways. El viejo de los zapatos (The old man with the shoes, 1991), written exclusively in quatrains, uses series of spaces as interior line breaks – a technique often employed by Paul Chamberlain. This time, however, the speaker’s critical sights are set on a mix of political, artistic, and existential icons. La mano en la velocidad (Touching speed, 1993), which contains an insightful short appreciation of Lavergne’s work by the Cuban critic José Prats Sariol,20 continues in the same vein but with a more open poetic style in which virtually all punctuation is eliminated and the line breaks become so frequent that the linkage between word clusters is increasingly charged with ambiguity. One unique aspect of this book is the series of critical poems dedicated to other Latino-Canadian writers. Lavergne is one of the few Hispanic writers in Canada to speak of the influence that other Spanish-speaking writers in the country have had on his work, from the verbal exuberance of the short-story writer Hernán Barrios in “El discurso de la Macarena”21 to the fabulations of Francisco Viñuela in Las memorias de doña Alma Errante, the condensed poetic minificciones of Leandro Urbina, or the sardonic neobaroque verse of Salvador Torres.22 In the past nine years, Lavergne has published two new thematic collections of poetry. Alguien soñó que no moría/On ne rêve pas encore à la mort (1993) is an idiosyncratic set of poems on childhood written from the point of view of a child as it gestates, is born, and is raised through infancy that at times brings to mind Laurence Sterne’s Tristan Shandy or Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf. The persona of the prescient, uncompromisingly observant child is used to demolish various clichés about the family, human development, and political systems. El puente (The bridge, 1995) is a series of reflections on exile, in which the narrator/artist journeys from his land of adoption to that of his

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birth and back again without ever finding a physical or psychological space that he feels is truly his, for after years outside his native land, he is also a stranger there when he returns. Specific references to place (other than the fact that it is in “the Americas”) are omitted, and the world in which the exile moves is one of indistinct shapes, generic situations, and dream-like actions. Only in the last few poems does the narrator break out into a naming of places, from Chile, Argentina, Cuba, and Guatemala to Montreal. The bridge to transcendence of the anguish of exile is the philosophical acceptance of the essential solitude of being, no matter where that being may transpire; in the final poem, the narrator concludes that all of the inhabitants of the Americas are “transterrados,” a neologism that implies both uprootal and search for a new land. The psychological bridge has been crossed; the journey is over. The exile has finally discovered where he belongs: his true homeland is within himself.

poem fro m desde el suelo th e b i r d s a n d i I’m a person of evenings of bolts and pruned trees of lengthening shadows of wooden desks and green lanes. I know nothing of swallows; I’ve only seen one and I didn’t like its long emigrant flight.

four poems from cada fruto th e m u lt i nat i o na l In this place insecurity is earthly without monastic complications. In this place chaos is everywhere though a few are in control.

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In this place depression is routine hunched up in your temples. In this place the failing economy has its own graph in our consciousness and wallets. In this place the capitalist neither improvises nor lets up. In this place automation is a banquet for the shareholders. In this place the populist speaks of independence and we work in lines. In this place the social democrat smiles at us and the company supports his reelection. In this place the union is underdeveloped and officially deplores anticommunism. In this place every human being is a number and I am unionized worker 87653.

nocturne While stars the night of work awakes at dawn. The echo of its metallic corona floats. Day sleep everyday

Alfredo Lavergne

Follows us whipping our bodies We say good-night to the sun And the cars, sheep that keep us awake.

wo r k e r What they say about you Because they won’t let you speak.

g m c pa i n t s h o p Storm cloud the paint shop. Different colours for every owner All with the same toxic perfume painting the lungs “Essential Grey” and running down the throat enemy of joy. Shade of revulsion linear design plastic radiance North American format darkening spot. Infantile resource the colourless varnish Rust will avenge aesthetics Before the three-year guarantee runs out.

th r e e p o e m s f r o m r a s g o s s e p a r a d o s / tr a i t s d i s t i n c t i f s caterpillar for Francisco Ximénez, Order of St Francis They are making a black road knocking over trees filling in holes paving

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A new mystery the airport at Tikal on the ancient Quiché Maya trail A mystery? For the inauguration and its Politicians Soldiers Tourists They hide all the heavy machinery.

th e s w e e p Uniformed forms Raid the neighbourhood the town square A storm. Concentration camp. House by house they interrogate the inhabitants In their gardens.

lake They do the washing on its shores Dry things on its rocks. The little girls Distract The lake.

th r e e p o e m s f r o m el viejo de los zapatos r e c r e a t i n g day When night falls our eyes rise In search of non-existent gods Without being born outside of them Descends with its light to repeat reality.

the day

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p e r f e c t ly we l l m a d e The individual existed Observed his solitude and felt But when he was at the table In his house terror.

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fear

construction and remembrance And just for example the obstinate White sheet and our only silence ( ) Whether our children are crying or not.

th r e e p o e m s f r o m r e t r o - p e r s p e c t i v a / rétro-perspective i m ag i na r y m a l i c e for V. Huidobro The rose of dreams spikes itself onto the rose of history.

species Each time harmony is born our ancestral memory reawakens.

c r i t i c al s tat e In one tear the word and in the other its appearance. The dragonfly goes by unseen.

po e m f ro m l a m a n o e n l a v e l o c i d a d I who am an enemy of symbols put dreams onto the earth lower with my hands believe for years in concrete facts and it so happens that for months

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I have been jumping out of various devils or because we are resuming the assault from below on the property of the celestial state for this and other museums

angels

a 1,500-year-old woman and a mummified dignitary both were Incas leased to this civilization of glass mirrors museum beings that sell their labour power and buy products with other levels of sacrifice

tw o p o e m s f r o m a l g u i e n n o s o ñ ó q u e m o r í a / on ne rêve pas encore à la mort manuscript Flesh doesn’t grow It stretches To the maximum that food Permits Flesh Is a yawn In the face of death

cockcrow Mothers Before the first step Before the second cry Before the third kiss Before the darkened room Before we start refusing The cord that unites us begins to wither

four poems from el puente s tat e l e s s Since I feel far away from where I am Or because they push me toward places I won’t go I walk onward

Alfredo Lavergne

And with a quick touch of a pencil That sums up images That takes you on a trip I board the train. I return to where they should know me Go back because what happened before is still with me Reappear in my city and arrive in another.

poetry The vehicle advances at full speed And leaves The city The shantytown Behind Utopian Naked Open To the stone of development The jaw of progress The dust of humanist emancipation. I Who claim not to be at war Take the inspiration within reach Of everyone The pencil A sheet of paper And construct my own fortress.

to wa r d a n at l a s o f i n d u s t r i a l m a n In the name of flight I step on the airport floor without kissing it. Flag Anthem Independence Nation Constitution Liberalism Do not exist Nor is there a cultural antidote To dispute my option. Here (I’m going to speak of the ticket of respect) As in the native Córdoba of Góngora To use language is to worm your way into solitude. We poets are an untrustworthy creation And only death treats our feet gently.

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vi n e g a r i s n o t s o u r wi n e In the braided belt of these verses I carry the banal jewel The poorly placed city The native land The land that produces emigrants The land that grows impoverished from banishing The land that oppresses you within its walls The land of existential exile The land with its sand And it’s in another city that we learn The difference And the need to stop reading about it.

th r e e p o e m s f r o m t h e u n p u b l i s h e d “sombrero” b l u e a da p tat i o n A dog chases a squirrel Between the pines Night falls on the first snow That flattens dead grass.

a the cold’s r o s s It’s fall in Montreal. Today the emigrants are climbing The mountain Mount Royal To wait for The horizon That will cut off their heads.

Alfredo Lavergne

remembrance in the form of a spear Let us never Forget That far-off land That static image Of past against past

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5 Alfonso Quijada Urías: The Wanderer at the Hour of the Jaguar One of the leading writers of modern El Salvador, Alfonso Quijada Urías, has lived in Vancouver since the late 1980s. A writer of both poetry and fiction, Alfonso has produced a body of work that runs to ten published volumes, as well as several unpublished manuscripts. Several important – and seemingly contradictory – stylistic currents run through his work, from highly innovative structural techniques to an extreme concision and transparency; from a baroque, multifaceted play with voice and archetype to succinct, two-line prose poems. His short stories and poems have been published in Spanish in El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, Mexico, and Spain; and in translation in the United States, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Russia. Above all, he is an author who came to artistic maturity during a period when the most powerful upheaval in his country’s history arose and then burst open (“the hour of the jaguar,” according to a character in one of his short stories) – the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, which eventually led to his long and difficult exile. Alfonso was born in 1940 in Quezaltepeque, a city of some 60,000 inhabitants about an hour’s drive away from the capital city of San Salvador. His father was a farmer who had acquired several properties, most of them at that time within walking distance of the town. Of the nine children in the family, Alfonso was the youngest. His strongest contact with books during his youth was through the collection of his grandmother, a spirited woman who had run away from home in the early part of the century “because she wanted to learn how to read. Reading used to be considered a sin, something almost diabolical,” in rural El Salvador, Quijada Urías comments.1 Apart from historical novels such as Quo Vadis, his grandmother also read

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Don Quixote and the works of the seventeenth-century Spanish satirist Francisco de Quevedo, which she would lend to her grandson. Alfonso attended secondary school in Quezaltepeque, where he composed and played songs on the guitar, although he could not read music. During his adolescence, he read Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, but also the lyrical and often politically charged work of Pablo Neruda and the metaphysical meditations of César Vallejo. He also discovered the works of writers from Central America, including the poetry of the Nicaraguan symbolist Rubén Darío, as well as the classic short stories of the Salvadoran countryside of Salvador Salazar Arrué (Salarrué)2 and the impassioned, rebellious poetry of Carmen Brannon (Claudia Lars).3 Roberto Sosa, a young Honduran technician in water purification – and aspiring writer – settled in Quezaltepeque at this time and befriended Alfonso, showing him his writings, loaning him books, and introducing him to modern Spanish poets such as the brothers Antonio and Manuel Machado. The 1950s were a time of dialogue and questioning in El Salvador. The national newspapers of the period were increasingly opening their pages to public debate and even publishing a certain amount of creative material, such as poems and short stories, by a range of urbanized, uncompromising young authors who later came to be known as the Generación Comprometida (Politically Committed Generation).4 These authors, most of whom eventually fell silent, nevertheless prepared the way for the outstanding writers who came of age in the early 1960s, including the great revolutionary poet Roque Dalton;5 the poet, novelist, and critic Manlio Argueta;6 and Quijada Urías himself. Artistic rebellion was in the air. After high school, Quijada Urías studied in a teacher-training program in the nearby town of Suchitoto. By the age of twenty-two, he was already married and teaching in a rural secondary school not far from the capital. In the meantime, his interest in song writing had evolved into a desire to write poetry, and he had begun to publish in the national press. It was now the early 1960s, a time of great political and intellectual ebullience in El Salvador: the old order, under the control of the military and the ruling “fourteen families” of the oligarchy, was being increasingly challenged, as were traditional and conventional modes of artistic creation. Widespread censorship and massive political repression were not, however, to appear till later. Quijada Urías remembers the decade as being an era of debate and discussion, when people of all political and artistic tendencies would meet and talk in the cafés of San Salvador. A few years later, he and

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his young family moved to the capital, before finally settling again in Quezaltepeque, from which Alfonso commuted into San Salvador to work for the newspaper El Diario Latino. In the mid-1960s Alfonso (like Borges in Argentina and Ricardo Palma in Peru) was offered a job at the National Library, where he worked for the next five years. There, he was able to read as voluminously as he wanted, and he explored the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Whitman, as well as the works of such twentiethcentury authors as the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa,7 the Cuban novelist José Lezama Lima,8 the Nicaraguan poet and Marxist priest Ernesto Cardenal, Jorge Luis Borges, and Octavio Paz. Like Cardenal and several other Central American writers of the period, he was also interested in the work of the American writers of the Beat Generation, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. By now Alfonso was regularly writing and publishing poetry and was included in an anthology of new writers of El Salvador, De aquí en adelante (From here on), edited by Roberto Armijo9 and Manlio Argueta. Even though he was a decade younger than most of the other poets then publishing, he was asked to participate on the editorial board of La Pájara Pinta, a new literary review that was just being founded by Italo López Vallecillos,10 Manlio Argueta, Roberto Cea,11 and Roberto Armijo. This review, which appeared monthly for the next four years, published works by writers from all parts of Latin America and brought Salvadorans into contact with writers of the “Boom” in Latin American literature during the 1960s, including Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Octavio Paz. It also included works by Roque Dalton, whose political activity in the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (erp, or People’s Revolutionary Army) had by now forced him to go underground. Quijada Urías was now becoming well known in the world of Salvadoran letters. His poetry was twice short-listed for the Casa de las Américas poetry prize in Havana, in 1968 and 1969, and was included in two Cuban anthologies of the best writing from Latin America of those years, Ocho poetas (1969) and Seis poetas (1970). At the end of the decade, he left his post at the National Library and went to work for the University of El Salvador Press. Despite the negative economic effects of the Hundred Hours’ War (also called the Soccer War) with Honduras in 1969, Salvadoran culture continued to flourish in the early 1970s. The educa publishing house, which was to involve university presses in Nicaragua and Costa Rica as well as

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in El Salvador, was founded by Sergio Ramírez12 and eventually published a journal, Pensamiento Centroamericano, and the Ministry of Culture brought out its own review, Cultura, which was edited by the poet Claudia Lars. Alfonso was able to enjoy the cultural life of the capital, listening to jazz and tangos and frequenting the cinema, where he particularly liked the works of Italian directors such as Antonioni and Fellini. In 1972 Quijada Urías published his first two books, both of which show the influence of these somewhat bohemian years and underline Alfonso’s interest in a variety of themes and experiments in form. Cuentos (Stories), published by the cultural wing of the Ministry of Education, is a short collection of six surrealistic, fanciful short stories, many of which have to do with transformation and reincarnation or aspects of the grotesque and fantastic. “Decapitación” (Decapitation), for instance, deals with the paranoid hallucinations of a young artist who imagines that he has become an ant and that a fat man who has been observing him has metamorphosed into a dangerous toad, whom he perceives as the embodiment of bureaucratic philistinism. In “Los hongos” (The mushrooms), the unnamed protagonist is gradually converted into an enormous colony of flowering mushrooms and is then watered and cared for by his neighbour, Doña Flora, while his wife charges a five-cent entry fee to the village children who want to see him. In the end, his house is burned to the ground by the townspeople. Both these stories, along with others in the book, are remarkable for their symbolic representation of the highly precarious existence of the artist and nonconformist in Salvadoran society, a peculiar creature in a world suspicious of the imagination. Finally, another tale, “Otra manera de vivir” (Another way of living), would seem to be set in an ambience similar to that of the San Salvador hipsters of the 1960s. Two young jazz musicians vie for the attentions of a beautiful waitress; when one of them, the narrator of the story, is unexpectedly shot by the other, he is immediately reincarnated as a small songbird that spends the day warbling outside the young woman’s window, where she feeds him. Estados sobrenaturales y otros poemas (Supernatural states and other poems), published the same year as Cuentos by the University of El Salvador Press, is an even stranger and more experimental work. The first section, “Estados sobrenaturales,” has become somewhat of a classic of its time. It consists of nineteen untitled poems in paragraph form, with a high degree of formal eccentricity, including writing without capital

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letters or periods (and then whimsically breaking the pattern by introducing a few of each), numbering pages in Roman numerals, and highlighting certain passages in boldface script. Many of the poems are made up of what might be described as clusters or constellations of words that have been grouped together in cryptic, capricious, and often revelatory ways. The speaker, sometimes referred to as “el loco” (the crazy one), is a bisexual, vegetal, ludic character who liberates himself and possibly his lover, “la loca” (the crazy woman) from the confinement of conventional existence by pushing the limits of words as signifiers to the utmost as he searches (like Rimbaud) for illumination through disorientation. He ends poem xxvi, for instance, with the fervent wish that lice devour his rational mind. The narrator is in contact with other forms of consciousness, “Possessed by what cannot be seen or heard by anyone” (in poem xvii), and his madness leads to enlightenment (in poem xviii). He wishes to become “unknown and familiar to all, keeper of events in the reality of dream, of the keys that open the noise of silence, the wide doors of the senses” (poem xxi). The speaker wants to say the unsayable, to find out – like the jazz musician in Cortázar’s short story “El perseguidor” (The pursuer) – what underlies reality. There is an echo of Taoist philosophy here, viewed through a surrealist prism. Quijada Urías himself says that he “was looking for a new style, experimenting as I went, working toward a revolution in language.”13 Most of the other poems in the second, unnamed part of the collection are concerned with more direct, sometimes personal themes, such as the recurring one of families (often metaphors for the nation) that either are locked into suicidally rigid patterns of behaviour or are slowly disintegrating: “from abundance we went to poverty, that design of history, that dialectical step backwards” (peom xli). There are also meditations on love, nostalgia, death, human cruelty, and the frustration of not being able to read Lawrence Durrell because one doesn’t have enough money to pay for the book (poem xci). The poems are written in verse (although often in extremely long lines), with conventional punctuation (although certain passages are in capital letters this time), but maintain much of the same playful seriousness of tone as “Estados sobrenaturales,” together with a desire to approach subjects obliquely, enigmatically, and with unexpected imagery. The collection was well received in El Salvador, especially among younger, more experimental writers, who believed that Quijada Urías

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was opening up new directions for them. It also gave rise to a certain amount of controversy among left-leaning literati due to its only partial inclusion of politicized material: many of the poems, especially those comparing the family to the nation, have a great deal of political relevance, but some critics wanted all of them, especially those of “Estados sobrenaturales,” to be equally militant.14 It may be noted, however, that Roque Dalton himself is quoted on the back cover of Estados sobrenaturales y otros poemas. The text was taken from an interview that Dalton gave to the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti,15 in which Dalton describes Quijada Urías as having an “uninhibited, contemporary vision of the world” and praises his ability to write of “the objects, visions, fears, and neuroses of the people of contemporary Central America.” Interestingly, Dalton also adds that Alfonso’s poetry is “a cry of alarm that is much closer to the heroic deeds of Che Guevara than to the poetry of Ginsberg,”16 an assertion that Quijada Urías disputes, emphasizing his affinity for, but creative distance from, both figures.17 In 1972 Alfonso quit his job with the university press, where he had been working as editor of the publication El Tiempo, and began to travel. Leaving his family in San Salvador, he first set off for San Francisco, where an older brother of his was already living. He worked in a variety of jobs there, from busboy to labourer in a factory that made cardboard boxes, and also began to paint, mainly in acrylics. These experiences served as the basis for the short story “Salvatruchos, salvatruchos,” which is included in the present volume. He also visited City Lights bookstore and gave readings of his work in Santa Cruz. Upon his return to San Salvador the following year, he chose to work in marginal employment, such as the manufacture of handicrafts, in order to have more time for his work and for his own personal development and study. During this period, especially concerned with poeticizing the short story, he read the baroque seventeenth-century Spanish poet Luis de Góngora18 and the Uruguayan masters of short fiction Horacio Quiroga19 and Felisberto Hernández, as well as Kafka, Poe, and Swift. He was tempted to write a novel but found such a project too involved and time-consuming. In 1975 he again left El Salvador, this time for a year in Peru, which he spent mainly in the ancient Incan capital of Cuzco; he then returned to San Salvador by land, seeing much of Latin America as he travelled back through Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua.

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In 1976 the publishing arm of the Salvadoran Ministry of Education brought out his second book of short stories, Otras historias famosas (Other famous stories). This collection points to new directions in Alfonso’s short fiction and contains some of his best-known work. One thematic realm that the author seems to have wanted to explore is that of the village as archetype for the nation, which is often treated in a style associated with magic realism. In the minificción “Noé el hombre isla” (Noah the island man), a fanciful Noah, who is a “magician, tightrope walker, priest, telegraph operator, alchemist, poet, and globetrotter,”20 arrives in a Salvadoran village just after the Flood and the day before the Plague to establish his clan. “Contándoles el cuento” (To tell the story) gives a poetic account (with little punctuation) of the destruction of a village by an earthquake and its effects upon various individuals and classes of people, from the partial point of view of an aged medium named Adelina la turca (Adelina the Arab), who includes a two-page memorial of the names of those who died. One of the most powerful of Quijada Urías’s experiments with archetypal figures is the story “De Hijos Suyos podernos llamar” (“And Proudly Proclaim Ourselves Her Sons”), the title of which is taken from the Salvadoran national anthem. In it, a young man has his first sexual experience with an aged prostitute of immense proportions known as The Giantess, who whispers to all her young customers an endless litany of names of the generations of men of the nation, from the boys’ fathers to generals and presidents, whom she has serviced. The Giantess is thus identified with the homeland itself and with its endless passive exploitation by those in power. Otras historias famosas was well received in El Salvador, where Quijada Urías now had a high degree of recognition as a writer. Some critics found it too close to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez, although Alfonso’s archetypes would seem to have more in common with Jungian philosophy than with the Colombian novelist’s Macondo. Certain stories, especially “El presagio” (The omen), which is narrated in dialect, appear to have their roots in the rural tales of Salarrué, but the treatment is unremittingly contemporary. A third collection of short stories, La fama infame del famoso (ap)atrida (The infamous fame of the famous stateless man), was published by the University of El Salvador Press in 1979. The title is from The Iliad and includes a wordplay on “atridas,” or the House of Atreus, and “apátrida,” or “stateless person,” and the volume itself is visually as fanciful as its title. The cover is a pop-art collage of childhood scrapbook photos

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and film and sports icons, arranged to include a surrealist painting; inside, there are various photos, pen-and-ink drawings, collages, medieval drawings, newspaper clippings, and concrete poems in German and French that serve as introductions to each of the stories. The tales themselves deal with a wide variety of themes, although they are unified stylistically by the use of long, baroque sentences, stream-ofconsciousness techniques, and frequent movement beyond the limits of prose into a lyric prose poetry that bursts the bounds of conventional punctuation. Several of them again deal with archetypes, notably “Florencia Sánchez,” also included in the present volume, in which a female figure again becomes a symbol for the suffering of the Salvadoran people. In this case, the character is mythicized beyond individuation but is understood to be a wise woman of the countryside who has also lived in the city. Her subjection as a woman of Indian ancestry to generations of abuse and cruelty at the hands of the men in power within the Spanish-inspired colonial structure mirrors the dichotomy in Latin American culture between the “I” of the conqueror and the “Other” of the conquered that Tzvetan Todorov comments on in La conquista de América.21 By writing from her point of view, Quijada Urías stresses an identification with the Other in Latin American culture: the indigenous, the female, the exploited, the forgotten, the poor. Yet the story ends with the prophecy that the “hour of the jaguar” is fast approaching, when autochthonous forces will wreak their revenge.22 What stands out about the collection as a whole is the increasing use of first-person narrators of differing socio-economic backgrounds and ages to tell their tales in the language specific to them as individuals. Each short story narrated in this way becomes the personal account of the speaker, a unique voice both in experiential and linguistic terms. Thus “¿Me entendés?” (“Know What I’m Sayin’?”), the story of a young student’s participation in a demonstration that is ruthlessly repressed by the military, is told in the slang of bohemian youth in the capital in the 1970s. In the same way, “¿Qué jais?” (“¿Qué Hi?”), in which two opportunistic car thieves are arrested by the police, mistaken for leftist kidnappers, and repeatedly tortured, is a linguistic tour de force of inventive marginal slang integrated into long, poetic sentences of nonstop staccato narration: “That’s what we were into when we heard the Animal’s siren behind us but when were they ever going to catch us with a wonder car like that? So we danced them a mambo through the city and traffic, flat out down the boulevard all the way downtown, where we messed up their heads and lost them

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and then took off north down Trunk Road in that car that hauled ass like a mother and leapt over potholes like cotton clouds.”23 Quijada Urías had already used this technique in the epistolary story “Mi José” (“My José”) in Otras historias famosas, in which the wife of a Salvadoran immigrant to the United States writes home to her mother-in-law describing her husband’s (and the family’s) difficulties in integrating into their new environment. In La fama infame del famoso (ap)atrida, however, the approach is applied to a much broader spectrum of characters, including, in the title story, the ferocious rightwing (although cultured) mayor of a provincial city, in which there is an insurrection against his authority. Overall, then, the disparate stories in the collection form a mosaic of voices that give multiple points of view on the contradictory elements of Salvadoran society. Among the writers who influenced him in the development of his technique of internal monologues, Alfonso credits the great Brazilian novelist João Guimarães Rosa, author of the epic Grande sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands),24 as well as the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Asturias and the Cuban writer Jorge Lezama Lima. Just as La fama infame del famoso (ap)atrida was being published in 1979, however, Salvadoran political consensus was disintegrating, and the country was heading into civil war. Leftist guerrilla activity had been increasing steadily since the middle of the decade: in 1979 the democratically elected government was overthrown by a military junta; in 1980 the principal leftist parties in the country withdrew from political activity and integrated into the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or fmln), which coordinated guerrilla activities. Soon afterward in the same year, the archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was assassinated as he was saying mass, and right-wing paramilitary death squads began kidnapping and murdering opponents at will. For Alfonso, the time had come to leave, and he and his family began an odyssey that was to take them to Mexico City for five years, then to Cuba and Nicaragua, and finally to Canada in the late 1980s, where he had a brother living in Vancouver. It was a decade in which he continued to write but during which none of his work could, of course, be printed in El Salvador. Alfonso did publish in the Mexican literary reviews Plural and El Cuento, however, and one curious effect of the civil war and of the US’s involvement in it was that his work began to receive increased international attention – not only for its

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own literary merit, but both because the war there had become an international issue and because many Salvadoran writers and anthologists, including Manlio Argueta and Roberto Armijo, were now living abroad. Stories and poems by Quijada Urías were translated into Dutch, German, Russian, and French. In the United States, several poems were included in the anthology Volcán: Poems from Central America, a bilingual edition published by City Lights in 1983, and the story “A la sombra de una viejita en flor” (“In the Shadow of an Old Woman in Flower”) was included by Rosario Santos in the anthology And We Sold the Rain, published by Four Walls, Eight Windows Press in the United States in 1989. Finally, in 1991, when he was already living in Vancouver, Curbstone Press of New York brought out a bilingual anthology of his poetry, They Come and Knock on the Door, translated by Darwin J. Flakoll, the husband of Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría. In 1987 a Honduran publisher, Editorial Guaymuras, published a fourth collection of his short stories, Para mirarte mejor (The Better to See You). This work was translated into English by myself and published in Canada by Cormorant Books in 1993. The collection is perhaps the strongest, most cohesive of Quijada Urías’s work and is unified by several factors. Most of the stories deal with aspects of the political turmoil in El Salvador in the late 1970s or during the civil war that succeeded it in the 1980s. Moreover, of the sixteen stories that comprise the collection, eleven are narrated in the first person by a variety of individuals, who include a clandestine leftist printer unknowingly betrayed by his ex-lover; a family member riding with a funeral cortège on its way to bury a centenarian relative only to find their way blocked by a huge political demonstration; and a sevenyear-old daughter of a market vendor who unwittingly witnesses her unknown upper-class father’s marriage to another woman. As in La fama infame del famoso (ap)atrida, each of these tales is narrated in the language appropriate to the age, class, sex, and level of education of the speaker. Para mirarte mejor also includes five stories from Quijada Urías’s previous books, four of them told as first-person interior monologues, which is clearly the fictional device that the author has wished to explore and that binds the collection together. The language and structure of the stories in Para mirarte mejor are much more controlled than in Alfonso’s earlier work. Certain previously published stories – such as “¿Qué jais?” – have been reworked to bring them into tighter focus and eliminate some of the intentional

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spelling and punctuation mistakes, which, although they originally gave the impression that the story had been written by someone of limited literacy, slowed down the text and shifted the reader’s attention away from the content and the rhythms of the language. Several of the stories – especially those that are told in the third person and that thus achieve a greater degree of distance from the nation’s trauma – also have a great deal of humour. “Historia trivial” (“A Trivial Story”), for instance, satirizes cultural colonization in its description of the posing and posturing of an upper-class woman and a social-climbing poet who is trying to pick her up – characters who successively take on attributes of a variety of film stars, writers, and fictional characters (including Joan Crawford, Julio Cortázar, Madame Bovary, Fernando Pessoa, Wonder Woman, Dostoevsky, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino) as they court. In “El cuento en El Salvador” (“Short Fiction from El Salvador”), Quijada Urías lampoons the rigidly controlled Salvadoran press during the war in a straight-faced narration of the supposed kidnapping and subsequent enslavement of two circus clowns by guerrilla forces. The breathless, humourless newspaper style preferred by contemporary military censors, coupled with the bizarre facts and highly improbable situations of the tale, underline the speciousness of many of the articles published in the national media during the war. After they are freed by a military patrol, for instance: The young getaways also revealed that the terrorists who captured them regularly held diabolic rituals at night, including invocations of Satan, the Magnetic Stone, and the Dark Spirit of the Night, as well as other practices forbidden by our holy Catholic faith. The two young people are now being well protected by the Arce Battalion; they have been provided with good-quality clothes and shoes and are presently receiving excellent nourishment to help them recover the strength they lost during their captivity. Moreover, the information disclosed by the two youngsters is of great importance to the Armed Forces, according to a communiqué issued by a military spokesman.25

This, as the title of the story suggests, is fiction as written by the military régime. What, it might be asked at this point, had been happening since the early 1970s to Alfonso’s poetry? After the promising start of Estados sobrenaturales and its publication by Casa de las Américas, Quijada Urías

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continued to write and publish in literary reviews but did not bring out another book of poetry until 1992, when Claves Latinoamericanas of Mexico City published Reunión: Selección, 1971–1988, a collection of his poetry that spanned almost two decades. The hiatus in the publication of Alfonso’s poetry was due not only to the fact that he had been working more frequently with the short story, but also to the loss of his natural audience and access to print in El Salvador during the civil war. Cut off from his homeland and wandering from country to country, it would seem from the dates associated with the different sections of Reunión that he began to turn back to writing poetry in the 1980s. The style of his poetry after Estados sobrenaturales became more controlled, focused, and terse: although his lines remain for the most part quite long, a number of his poems are short, incisive examinations of specific themes. The twenty-year overview of his poetry in Reunión permits the reader to follow the development of his work and to observe the interplay between recent Salvadoran history and the themes of Alfonso’s poetry. During the 1970s, for example, as the social structure of Salvadoran society was undergoing increasing rigidification just when the general population’s expectations were opening up, Alfonso’s work was gradually becoming more politically conscious. Further, much of his writing from the period of civil war in the 1980s is filled with pain – but not despair – at seeing his homeland ripped apart and his compatriots killing and torturing one another. Other themes, especially dealing with nostalgia for his childhood, also recur, and even his bitterest laments at the tragedy of his country and most virulent attacks on its oppressors contain enough distancing, irony, and humour to assure that they are powerful, successful poems in their own right and do not fall into either complaint or pamphleteering. The following two short poems are illustrative: poor us We’ll die along with Capitalism, we’ve been sentenced. Poor us and without ever having enjoyed it.26

postcard So, then, you see this country about the size of a scratch

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and there’s a train like a plaything going by in the afternoon filled with tiny soldiers, who though they look like toys are for real, and you can see, too, the volcanoes like smudges of blue ink, and you can’t find a reason (though there may really be one) why there should be so many tiny soldiers in a country small as a scratch.27 Quijada Urías’s poetic work during this period is also firmly rooted in the strong twentieth-century tradition in Central American writing of the historical poem and the dialogue with the homeland, a tradition that runs from Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo’s celebrated Vámonos patria a caminar (Come for a walk with me, homeland) and Roque Dalton’s Historias prohibidas del pulgarcito (Forbidden stories from the land of Tom Thumb) to the much more directly politicized work of Nicaraguan poets such as Leonel Rugama28 and Ernesto Cardenal. In a different genre altogether, Quijada Urías published a collection of minificciones, titled Gravísima, altisonante, mínima, dulce e imaginada historia (An extremely solemn, high-flown, insignificant, gentle, and imagined story), with concultura in San Salvador in 1993.29 Apart from marking the return to freedom of publication in El Salvador and the return of Alfonso’s work to his homeland, the collection spans almost a quarter century of minificciones, few of which had been included in his previous collections of short stories. What is remarkable about Gravísima is that the writer of the long, strung-together memories and streams of consciousness found in much of his earlier work was also, at the same time, continually turning out the succinct, concise, often minimalist stories found here. Gravísima shows a completely new side of Alfonso’s writing; its short pieces are frequently paradoxical, whimsical, oneiric glimpses of the fantastic in which destinies fit together like Chinese boxes. Although Borges and Anderson Imbert of Argentina are also masters of the minificción (and there are echoes of Borges in some of these pieces), their work is more discursive, more in the realm of the brief short story, than the one- or twoparagraph Zen-like sketches and koans that Quijada Urías provides. Some, however, like the longer “La casa grande” (“The Big House”), are complete short stories in reduced form: It was in that house of vast corridors, bifurcating gardens and large (rooms) and multiform spaces that seemed to have been designed specifically for

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hide-and-seek, that I would (almost always) lose my way in the early evening, startled by the melodious vibration of the crickets or overwhelmed by some miraculous passage in a book I’d never read before. Then I would hear the voice of my mother calling me, playfully pleading with me to come out: calls that I would never answer because part of the game was not answering, and she would begin to search for me from room to room across the velvet shadows, in the corners of clear darkness where sooner or later she would find me. Now, after so many years, I have returned to that house of my most secret memories. Today I was the one who went from room to room calling for my mother, but my cries were useless, for she was so well hidden that she never answered, nor was I ever able to find her.30

Alfonso’s latest book of poetry, Obscuro (Obscure), is another exploration in a new direction, this time that of the long poem. Selfpublished in Vancouver in 1995, with pen-and-ink drawings in pointillist technique by the author, and brought out, like Gravísima, under the pseudonym Alfonso Kijadurías (a phoneticized version of his two last names), this work deals specifically with exile and the word. It is also the first of Alfonso’s works to speak of living in Canada, a personal examination of the power of the word in the life of a now-aging poet in a land where a different tongue is spoken. The act of writing is presented as a supreme gesture of self-affirmation in the face of repression, isolation, and indifference, and is compared to that of making love.31 It is also linked directly to the speaker’s embattled idealism; as with many of the Chilean writers in exile in Canada, the dream of a new and better society lives on in the speaker’s inner world. Despite his feeling of isolation and uselessness in Canada, the speaker reasserts his identity as shaman/poet/prophet, even in the midst of an urban environment. The poems of Obscuro were included with others of a similar vein and republished in 1998 under the title Es cara musa – a play on words involving escaramuza (skirmish), “the face of the muse,” and “the muse is expensive.” Later in the same year, Alfonso also brought out a selection of poems from his entire output, Toda razón dispersa (All reason scattered), published by concultura as part of its collection Biblioteca Básica de Literatura Salvadoreña (Basic Library of Salvadoran Literature), further emphasizing his place in the canon of Salvadoran letters. Alfonso’s latest book of fiction is also an exploration. Lujuria tropical (Tropical lust), published in San Salvador by concultura in

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1996, is his first novel, and he has chosen to write it in a highly poeticized, luxuriantly descriptive prose that has much in common with the neobaroque style of Cuban and other Caribbean authors such as Alejo Carpentier32 and José Lezama Lima. The picaresque story, when it appears intermittently from the poetic profusion, revolves around a singer named Lulú, who has successively exerted an overwhelming attraction first on the local dictator, then on a painter, and finally on a composer of boleros, or popular love songs. Images of colour and music unexpectedly blossom out of the text like tropical flowers; metaphors build up in extended flourishes of linguistic ebullience and then teeter on the verge of becoming magically real events; neologisms, wordplay, onomatopoeic inventions, and eccentric spellings heighten the ambiguity; and one-word sentences are interspersed with others that take up most of a page, in a genre that straddles prose poem and novel. Scattered among this verbal luxuriance are esoteric references to Hindu philosophy, Tantric sexual practices, European opera, Renaissance painting, and the West African gods of Santería cults, all of which gives a playfully archetypal resonance to the characters. The book ends with a four-page prose poem of praise to the feminine voice, followed by the word “fincipio” (begending), leaving the reader with a layered, sensory, impressionistic resonance rather than a chain of remembered events. Quijada Urías is now a well-known writer in El Salvador and is especially popular with readers in their twenties and thirties who appreciate his varied trajectory and willingness to experiment and go his own way, all the while maintaining an independent political awareness. During the 1990s he returned to Quezaltepeque a number of times in an attempt to reestablish himself there, but the economic hardship and shortage of work repeatedly drove him back to Vancouver; now, however, he has succeeded and spends half the year in El Salvador and half in Vancouver. This has allowed him to reaffirm his presence in Salvadoran letters, and he has published a number of books in San Salvador under his pseudonym Alfonso Kijadurías, which he now prefers to use. Although he is presently beginning to write about Vancouver, he has never felt a part of the literary world there. The Chilean poet and short-story writer Carmen Rodríguez is his principal literary contact there in Spanish, but, like Etcheverry and Urbina in Ottawa, Quijada Urías now also reads with other refugee and immigrant writers from Africa and Asia (especially Malaysia) as well as from Latin America.

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He feels that there is a strain of frivolousness in North American society, a tendency not to take anything too seriously, which at times reduces poetry to the status of a diversion rather than fostering the view that poetry can be a way of thinking about the world. Yet the isolation, solitude, and even marginalization in which he lives are not necessarily as negative as one might imagine, for he maintains that these aspects of his life help him to focus on his writing while giving him the time to do so. His contacts with Canadian writers have also been limited: he says that up till now he has read only some Robertson Davies, Leonard Cohen, Gary Geddes, and Margaret Atwood and that he knows nothing of substance about Québécois literature.33 Nevertheless, the constant drive to create in new genres that has marked his work since the beginning of his writing career indicates that there may be more stories, poems, or even novels in the future that will be at least partially set in Vancouver, for Alfonso Quijada Urías is not only a deeply Salvadoran author, but also a ceaseless linguistic searcher and cultural wanderer.

th e s h o r t s t o r y “ f l o r e n c i a s á n c h e z ” The horses of the Conquistadors ride in through her eyes; clouds of dust darken her retinas. Florencia Sánchez’s memory is of the ruins of a hut fragrant with the smell of copal incense and wooden dolls, of ears of corn, clay heads, the stench of stagnant water from the withered flowers in a vase, and notions of prophecy. It is the memory of a life forever close to death, a memory that knows how to cut and separate the different cycles of the tale of when they arrived, when they left, when they returned, when they killed somebody, when they drew and quartered somebody else, and even when you heard a merecumbé being played for the president’s or general’s daughter. It is the memory of having her ears tuned from very early on in the morning, the green and fragrant hours of her sundial of fruit; the hour of Salomé Durán and his mule and his strongbox on wheels that would beat out 1812 Overtures on the cobblestones just as the train would come into view belching black smoke – the noisy old Number 14 with its whistle and martial bellowings; the hour of packages, the hour that lasts a century of centuries because the rebels fight on even though Malespín and his imperious armies, schooled in the Bismarck method of warfare, always win. It is also the hour of the coconut trees, of the fruit that for her has always been another kind of star,

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a moon hidden behind the husks that are perfect for burning in the fires of her rituals, of her regal syncretism. Herself the daughter of a chimera, Florencia Sánchez has seen her children leave for other lands, her offspring born to be sacrificed. She has eyed up the man who insulted her deities and god by calling them sons of bitches, forgetting that he himself was nothing more than a desperate little demiurge. She has seen her children eat raw shit, clothed in rags, their weather-beaten skin cracked and swollen with poverty and tuberculosis – she, Florencia Sánchez, who came into the world when it was something else, long before this welter of signs and billboards in foreign languages; she has seen with her pure eyes the graves of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren; she has seen the scraps, the trash, the worms, the muck, the garbage, the gut of Don Bureaucrat Palacios and the riches of Don Idontgiveadamn Aboutanyone. She has seen the woman lying on her bed of roses in her bedroom filled with perfume and the music of Liszt, with her gilt curtains, her jewels, her little love nest, her hypocrisy after tea, canasta, or making love; she has seen the woman’s image in the bottom of her grimy cooking pot and the grey water of the ravines. Florencia Sánchez has waited for the child who left and never came back and has shovelled dirt onto the grave of the son who sold his soul and that of his people for a few miserable pesos, the one who moved up and up until he finally rose so high that he no longer remembered Florencia Sánchez, the root of all roots, the old woman, the witch, the angel, the lady selling beans or kneading tortillas, the wise farmer, seared by innumerable tragedies, the priestess, door, vessel, pitcher, griddle, gate to heaven, window on hell; the open wound, mother of blind Indians, grandmother to a thousand half-dead grandchildren, sister of hens, healer with chicken droppings, untiring worker, emaciated seamstress at the Vampiros & Co. textile mill, wife of Pablo Jaguar, oldest daughter of the legendary grandfather; sallow, with a sundial of fruit, a ring of lianas, the fragrance of nopal and a dress of ashes, the repository of all the injustices the unjust have decreed to justify their hate, their crucifix of crossed rifles. Florencia Sánchez, old as the first night of time, she who knows how to wait behind the door while putting up with the dirty tricks of history, the outrages, blows, insults, and false glow of the land of smiles. It might be said that I have invented you or that you are another of my great plagiarisms from more original

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sources. It might be said, but you and I know that you are real and are made of flesh and bone, Florencia Sánchez. You see how they have cleaned up the city by dragging all the beggars off to jail, along with the unemployed, the hoodlums, the simpleminded, the drug addicts, the thieves from Santa Anita and Plaza Barrios, the hawkers, and anybody who speaks out against the whole lousy system: the insomniacs, the homeless, the porters, the panhandlers, the girls who flaunt their asses, the mournful women from the wild side of life, the pregnant girls, the grimy kids from Candelaria, the women selling fly-covered nance fruit as they suckle their babies, the student and the radical bricklayer tied up and tortured, thrown down and kicked, hauled off to jail, driven half-crazy by all the torment. You see how they have cleaned up the city, how they have washed the blood off Liberty Park so it looks like a smiling Tower of Babel, spotless, shining, disinfected, its teeth polished, refined, wellto-do, healthy, beautiful, without any problems at all. Florencia Sánchez knows how to look through the walls and far into the distance to see the jails, the tunnels, the courtrooms, the accused, those without gangster lawyers to defend them; the blood and crap of the sewers, the black headlines of the yellow press, the news items under the flowerpots, cantaloupes, and watermelons; all the seething noise, the pain, the anguish like a jar of chilies, the sadness like a crate of rancid nance fruit, like lemons with salt. She also uncovers, as her gaze slides like a sponge over the tassels and anonymous landscapes of the ice-cream hawker’s push-cart, the benumbed mind beneath the brim of an enormous elfin sombrero. She knows how to smell bread, Florencia Sánchez, good bread and rancid cheese, the ancestral tortilla; she knows how to listen for the sound of the village that travels through her veins: vendors of lottery tickets, tonics, saints, and candles, earthenware cups, rooster feathers, iguanas, and alligators, herbs, spices, and fried food. She watches and listens as a lazy, sticky cumbia inflames the hips of the woman selling tortillas, the one with the face of a sleepy, olive-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe; the wail of her child and the whack on the behind that the tax collector plants on her ass to the laughter of the police that just yesterday were selling homemade nougat in the neighbourhood or shining shoes or running errands for the big men. She doesn’t sleep anymore, though she’d be more than willing to take a little nap; instead she stays awake looking up and down the

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street, prying into things, opening holes in the earth, making crosses, urinating in the drainage ditches, invoking the name of her people, because the day is drawing near, and her sons – the ones she gave birth to on the straw mat, the ones who left never to return – will have to come back to her womb that is now squashed flat as a tube of toothpaste and ay-ay-ay that day for those that effaced her from their landscapes, maps, and homes of iron, from their farms and luxurious automobiles and brothels and offices of sweat, blood, and tears, and from all their learned culture. Because Florencia holds life and death in her power, heaven and hell, water and dust, stones and the eye of the deer, flint and jade. Because she, only she, knows that day is drawing near – the night of the sun, the day of the moon, the hour of the jaguar.

th e s h o r t s t o r y “ s a lva t r u c h o s , s a lva t r u c h o s ” When Sabas Olivares got off the plane that had brought him from California, he felt a strong sense of relief, as if he were getting out of jail; the fresh, mentholated air flowed through his nostrils and down deep into his lungs. The observation platform of Ilopango Airport was crowded with people waiting for their relatives: nervous, goodnatured fathers on the lookout for their children; impatient women staring fixedly at the doors of the planes, hoping to see their husbands come down the stairways after a year’s absence. It was the year of the fall of Nixon, and no one ever again had the slightest doubt that the United States was run by the mafia. Salvadorans were coming straggling back to their homes, which were probably rented houses in the tenements of some obscure, forgotten town. And there was Sabas, raising his hand to his beard and running his fingers along its small waves like Errol Flynn. Nobody was expecting him, because his arrival was a surprise; it was going to be a real shock for his wife and kids, as well as for his parents, who hadn’t seen him for over two years and had hardly heard anything from him other than a few stray letters and messages that his friends brought with them when they came back to the country. He took off his beret and combed his hair. How good it was to return: it was like living the experience of that old tango by Gardel in your very bones, he thought, as he smoothed down his greying hair and again imagined the faces that were so dearly familiar.

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As he walked toward the gate, he lit a Chesterfield, and it felt as good as the first cigarette he had ever had when his old man had found him smoking in the backyard. He walked toward the sea of people, the waves of heavy bags, first to get his documents cleared and then on to the baggage claim. He smiled. The tricks of fate: his old friend from primary school, Antonio Sánchez Mayrena, was working in the customs office looking through suitcases. Then there wouldn’t be any problem with customs: none of those awkward moments when someone brutally paws through your things, your squalid possessions, that we all experience when we travel – unless you happen to be one of those big shots who fly in with all sorts of contraband that no one even looks at. Just at that moment he found himself standing next to Antonio, who turned and saw him, and they embraced each other with an urgent distraction befitting the airport, after which Antonio went through the motions of opening and closing his suitcases, and then with a hearty handshake and “Say hello to the family,” Sabas stepped out of the customs area. “Thanks, man,” he told his friend quickly and headed for the doors outside, where he ran into a few other faces he knew and greeted them with a slight nod of the head since his hands were full carrying out his army surplus duffel bags filled with worthless things of great value: cheap books, used clothes, and second-hand records – much of it bought at the Salvation Army. He went out into the street. A taxi pulled up as if by magic, and the driver – a little skinny guy who looked like Eisenhower – got out and put the bags in the trunk. It was Saturday, and the air was fresh and tropical; the stores were shut, and San Salvador had an air of apparent calm, the dissembling look of an advertisement that said nothing ever happens here, and if it weren’t for the whores and drunks that were out on the avenue and the beggars in the bus stations, you could say that the nation was living up to its name. Sabas looked out on it all just as he once had for the very first time in his life, when he had gotten off the train and discovered that same avenue in the 1950s, with its antiquated homes, seedy boarding houses, its terrifying bars where you were likely to get stabbed, but that had also inspired him with real emotion. It was a shame they had torn out all the statues of gryphons and chimeras, eagles and serpents, and that old one of the Atlacatl warrior by Valentín Estrada: it had all given the city a personal air – but that was poetic sentimentality. The avenue had had to

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be widened to make room for the increased traffic of cars, vans, trucks, tractor-trailers, tanks, motorcycles without mufflers, and overloaded delivery trucks. That was how San Salvador, which always managed to endure everything they did to it, had resisted the history of conquest, street battles, political riots, earthquakes, and fires – which turned out to have been good for business – along with the wars, coups d’état, demonstrations, penetrations, and molotov and embassy cocktails. They turned off the avenue, and the taxi began to climb the slopes of Santa Anita. Four drunks and a grotesquely painted woman were singing a popular song on the street; the cab went down San Jacinto and swung onto Avenida Cuba, and he remembered the year he had had to cozy up to his uncles while he looked for a bit of luck in whatever he could find so long as it would let him finish up his degree at night. He let himself remember, but now the memory was triumphant, not like those days when he’d gone around with his pockets sucked dry by poverty, the poverty that according to his father came from dreaming too much; because if he had just taken to farming, well then, What, his father had said, would he have had to complain about? He could have sowed whatever he’d wanted. But Sabas, he would say, is the only one of my twelve children to go looking for trouble. As they emerged from San Jacinto and took the road up the hill to San Marcos, the darkness became thicker. He stopped looking out the window and let the cab continue on without thinking about where they were going; the only thing he saw was the road ahead like an enormous serpent. He still couldn’t get away from those memories of his days in San Francisco, cleaning floors in the Town House Hotel on Mission Street; the face of Limpiao, the Filipino in the box factory; the infernal noise of the machines there, those giant guillotines that cut ten thousand cartons at a single slice; Anastas the Russian, running his machine; Julio Santana, the cousin of the famous guitarist; the van that came at noon selling lunches of plastic French fries and CocaCola, meat pumped full of injections to keep it from smelling bad; that beautiful crazy Salvadoran girl on the beach, a real Little Red Riding Hood with teeth for biting into the apple of the World. But most of all, he remembered the Infernal Factory where Comandante Chan amused himself by playing with his nostalgia, disguising it. It was a game that reaffirmed that fire is unquenchable. Chan would spend the whole day handing out military promotions to his fellow workers, a group that had been baptized with the name of Sandino

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Company in honour of the hero of the Segovia Mountains, in whose forces Chan said he had been a bull sergeant in those years long before in his native Nicaragua. “No kidding, my friend: even as a kid I had stripes on my balls, not like those soft Nicaraguan kids today.” As far as Chan was concerned, only William, the black guy from Honduras, showed any promise of becoming a real comandante, the upright leader that his country so urgently needed, because he’d made his mark. He’d fought in the Honduran army during the Hundred Hours’ War with El Salvador, a war in which four of his brothers and five of his uncles had died. Sabas had heard from William himself how he had gone from Tela to Tegus, where they’d prepared him for combat. “It was all a stupid mess: they send you out to kill and meanwhile they make off with everything they can loot, and that’s when a bullet comes and opens up your skull or you come back all fucked up without a cent to your name, like I was when I got back to Tela. Just give me one good reason I should go back. There’s nothing there, and as far as I’m concerned, they can take their war and shove it. I’m going to live my life right here, even if I do work like a mule. At least I’m making dollars now; what’s more, my older brother has a fantastic apartment and lives like a king – though not with a king’s dignity, like I do. I tell you again: I wouldn’t go back there for anything – Why would I want to? – even though things are screwed-up here as well, with the immigration cops checking up on you all the time.” When Limpiao the Filipino, the factory foreman, would go off on his rounds to see if his slaves were keeping up with their quota of cutting twenty-five thousand cartons a minute, the Comandante would start to elaborate on his experiences in the Segovias, and then Julio Santana would pick up his guitar and begin to tell us about the night he had spent so nicely, smoking hash with a drag queen named Emmanuelle, who was from Georgia and had a nice big ass like a woman and a face like Ninón Sevilla – a perfect make-up job, a real work of art – and they’d been drinking some excellent gin and turning on to the music of his cousin Santana, stretched out on Indian cushions, with Persian perfumes, Chinese oils, and Nepalese incense, between some babes with beautiful huge privileged tits, greedy for anything that was up for swallowing, never saying no either to the gin or to the longest of cocks: a wild weekend, man, stoned-out and whenever you’d like, just give them a call, brother, and tell ’em I sent you. The others, like Sabas, William, or the Ecuadorian who had gotten his entire family through the barbed wire entanglements and into

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Arizona, just went along with things. There were a lot like them, buddies of mine, who didn’t talk much but led strange lives, as if the air in their homelands had hit them over the head and then tied them down forever to the dusty streets of remote little towns in lost provinces, still with a few virgin forests, places under volcanoes, shantytown villages that tried to keep up with the times, poor and dirty, malnourished, baked by sun and drought. They would appear from those longed-for places with eyes etched with the lines of distant horizons. They also spoke only when necessary, like Isidro from Jalisco, who would say, “Motherfucker, what a jerk!” or Lico the Puerto Rican who ran the huge baling machine and played the bongos in Dolores Park on Sundays or his buddy Lorenzo who said he’d done three years of architecture at San Marcos, the oldest university in the Americas, and that he was hanging on in this goddamn city just for the money and then he was taking off for Spain to finish his studies. There was also Luisito, who had been in the merchant marine and had lived in Manila with Mariya, who used to dance in the nude for him waving around brightly coloured ribbons before going to bed, in accordance with a sacred rite of purification and respect that came from her people, and whom he had left in Argentina, where she was waiting for him with their young daughter Nicole; and there were also those Salvatruchos, Paco Martínez, Alejo Gallardo, and the others whose names I’ve forgotten, the youngest almost adolescents, smoking marijuana in the storeroom and talking about Che Guevara, the fall of Nixon, the Chilean resistance, Pinochet, the nature of real salsa music, and a whole endless tropical rap. All of them were more or less like Esteban, the poet without poems or books, the poet of life, the dreamer, who had once dragged his nonconformity through the salons of a government ministry and the halls of a public library in order to continue his undergraduate studies and in his free moments had handed out leaflets and manifestos, which finally cost him his job; and after that had gone from café to café and park to park without being able to figure out where he could find work, and there he was with a wife and three children and another kid on the way. “It’s fucking hopeless,” he would say to himself as he walked along in those days; “What a shitty life.” They were all like him, and he, them: they had the same unmistakable seal; they had been through the same trials; they were all without identity papers – wetbacks, illegal immigrants. They had dodged the customs and the immigration police; they had crossed the river at Ciudad Juárez in the darkness, pursued by the flashing lights of the patrol

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cars, or had gotten through a fence on that horrendous stretch of border at Tijuana; they had slept badly, putting up with drunks, whores, and smugglers; they had crossed the border inside of trucks and in danger of suffocating, or bouncing along in the trunk of a car during nights of nerves and weariness. But there they were afterwards on Mission Street, looking as if they owned Manhattan, dressed to the teeth in jeans and jackets; owners of decade-old Fords; “You looking very naice,” with ties, safari suits like Tom Jones – flashy dressers with platform shoes. They regretted ever being born in their miserable villages, some god-awful backward place in the middle of nowhere; they wandered around unrecognizable, but easy to detect from their personal details, their way of speaking, their good or bad habits; they were sentimental to the hilt, hardworking, manipulative, intelligent, marginal, and proud – myself among them. They’d venture into murky nightclubs where people would cut your throat just out of curiosity and chat up the topless dancers. They would buy everything they were never able to afford in their homelands: over-the-hill jalopies, electronic junk, electric pianos, sports jackets and formal wear; their wives would go shopping on Market Street, while they would buy pupusas and fried beans on Saturday nights at the Pulgarcito Café, and would drink in order to forget the open wound of their homeland, the stain that couldn’t be removed by all the bleach in the world, and that would never let them be. Everything was left behind now as the taxi climbed up the hill along Anastasio Aquino; on the radio the Musical Mockingbird was inviting the listeners to listen to the next tango by the Thrush of the Americas. Sabas offered the driver a Chesterfield, and they smoked like chimneys. Suddenly he was trapped once more by the memory of that fabulous woman he had met one Sunday at the beach, a drunken blond, a real Marilyn Monroe in a worn, transparent dress under which her lovely form showed the tattoos of a scandalously sexual life. That morning the tide had stranded an incredibly dead iridescent dolphin on the beach; the two of them had stood there looking at it, and that was enough for the girl who could have been a movie star to take hold of his hand and invite him with her eyes to fornicate behind the rocks. No one liked her; all of them, he found out later, including Esteban, unloaded all their guilt on her and treated her badly. Her name was Tetis; she had been born in New York, but had never got beyond second grade in school; she was a heroin addict at thirteen and then had spent three years in a mental hospital. To rehabilitate her they fed her barbiturates all day, and when she was

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well again, she married Jerry Stanley from Arizona, who died a year later in Vietnam. She was a hard case; she couldn’t live without drugs and said it was the country that made her so fed-up: the Imperial Sodom, the bastards on Wall Street. They talked that day from morning to sunset. The next morning she came back to the beach to continue her dance, her sarabande, in search of another tattoo for some untouched part of her body, with her Marilyn Monroe face. That was the morning Esteban had taken the plane. “Got a light?” he asked the taxi driver, who immediately pressed in the car’s cigarette lighter. “Here you are,” the driver said, passing it to him. He fell silent again, as dark as the darkness along the road. The car’s headlights shone on the rocks now, and on more than a pig or two grunting in the mud at the foot of the fenceposts, but in spite of that, it was more than pleasant to smell the scent of the earth again, to feel the wind on his face, just as he had years before, and the dream of returning and touching the ground with his feet again was becoming real. By the time they got to San Pedro Nonualco, the electricity had gone out. “What a coincidence,” he said to himself. “Just when I come back.” He gave the driver the street address – “Turn left up here; it’s the house with the green window” – got twenty colones out of his wallet and gave them to him with his deepest thanks. At the sound of the car, his children came tumbling out the windows and front door – how they’d grown since he’d been away – and as they shouted “Papa! Papa!” his wife emerged like a character out of a tale from the Thousand and Forever Nights, unsure and unable to believe that he was really there at the door; as they hugged, the kids were already getting his bags out and going through them to see if he’d brought any presents. Last night, his wife told him, I dreamed that a white horse was riding across the sky with you holding onto its tail, dragging you over the stones and the dust of the clouds, and about six this morning a brightly feathered torogoz came flying through my window; something was trying to tell me that you were coming home. And his aged mother appeared in the backyard with candles in her hands, repeating over and over again, “Thank God, my son, that you’ve come home; thank God, my son, that you’ve come home; thank God, my son, that you’ve come home.”

6 Eros and Thanatos in the Work of Nela Rio

Nela Rio is the author of nine collections of poetry and a number of short stories that revolve around three major themes – repression, personal loss, and the reinvention of mythologies – the last two of which are rarely treated in Hispanic Canadian letters. She has written powerfully on imprisonment, torture, and recovery, but has also produced a variety of work dealing with aspects of love and sexuality among mature and older people, the effects of disease and death on a spouse, and the struggle of women to find self-realization in their daily lives. Her work is characterized by an uncompromising and forceful imagination that examines every aspect of her subject and by a direct, uncluttered, yet polished style of writing in which her primary desire is to communicate as effectively as possible. She is also an accomplished visual artist who incorporates her poetry and fiction into her painting and virtual art – or “visual metaphors,” as she calls them – in artist’s books that she designs and makes herself.1 Nela was born in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1938 but moved to the city of Mendoza with her family when she was twelve years old. Mendoza, which now has a population of almost a million people, is the largest city in west-central Argentina and lies at the foot of the Andes Mountains on the main road through the pass to Santiago, Chile. Although founded in colonial times, much of it was destroyed by an earthquake a century ago, and it is now a relatively new and prosperous city, located in the heart of the Argentine wine-growing district and surrounded by vineyards and rows of poplar trees reminiscent of Italy or Catalonia. Nela’s parents were, in fact, second-generation Italians (which is why her family name is spelled without the usual Spanish accent on the i), and her grandparents spoke only Italian; she and her

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three sisters and one brother were able to understand Italian but did not speak it at home. The secondary school that she attended had a great number of first- and second-generation immigrant students from Russia, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Spain, and Italy; Rio says that she has always identified closely with immigrants, whether in Argentina or Canada.2 Rio attended the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Mendoza, where she gravitated toward Italian literature, especially to Pirandello, Pavese, and Moravia, and toward the French women writers Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir. She was also interested in the short story and particularly liked the works of the Argentine writers Borges and Cortázar and of the Uruguayans Horacio Quiroga and Felisberto Hernández, both of whom touched on aspects of the grotesque or fantastic. In political or activist circles, the Liberation Theology movement was just becoming active at the time – coinciding with the diffusion of the writings of the Brazilian bishop Hélder Câmara3 – and she identified closely with the comunidades de base, or “base communities,” in which priests and lay people lived and worked with the poor. Unlike many Argentines, for whom Buenos Aires is the absolute centre of cultural and intellectual life, Nela was not interested in moving to the capital: she visited there every few years, but felt that the Porteño4 literary scene was too exclusive, too dominated by quarrelling cliques and fashions, to really be relevant to her writing. After completing four of the five years required to graduate, however, she married a fellow student who had been offered a fellowship at Emory University in Georgia to complete his doctorate in Spanish literature and accompanied him to the United States. The death of their infant son from cancer, however, left them with crushing debts. When her husband was offered a position teaching Spanish at the University of New Brunswick in 1969, they moved to Fredericton, where she completed a master’s degree in Spanish and Latin American literature and began teaching at St Thomas University. In 1974 she returned with her three children to Mendoza for a sabbatical year in the middle of the rampant inflation and paramilitary terrorism of the chaotic presidency of Isabel Perón. Upon her return to Canada, she and her first husband divorced. She continued to teach at St Thomas until her retirement in 2005, specializing in women writers of the Spanish colonial period, particularly the brilliant Mexican seventeenth-century poet and feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.5

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Nela’s arrival in North America in 1962, coupled with the tasks of raising a family, led her to exchange her public persona as a poet, acquired in Mendoza, for a more private one, and although she continued to write, she stopped publishing and had no contact with other writers until 1979. This was a period in which she closed in upon herself. “Liberation begins at home,” she says,6 and after her divorce, she began to take a far greater interest in the world around her in terms of becoming more active in Canada, renewing ties with Mendoza, and seeking new affinities in Spain and the United States. As a part of her increasing interest in feminism and of her identification with the suffering of women in Argentina and other parts of Latin America, Nela became active in Amnesty International. She also began working with groups that helped and advised women immigrants and refugees to Canada. Listening to and often translating these women’s stories gave her new insight into both political and patriarchal repression, themes that she would return to later in her writing. Often, she discovered, there was a deeply disturbing absence of respect for women even among militants on the left, who supposedly had dedicated their lives to fighting political oppression. In the early 1980s she attended an Amnesty International conference in Toronto on writers and human rights, where she heard testimonials of women political prisoners. Luisa Valenzuela, a fellow Argentine writer whose works have virulently denounced government repression, was also there. The organizers of the conference had symbolically set out eight empty chairs on a stage, each with the name of an imprisoned writer who could not attend – a moving gesture, except that all the names were those of men. It was this double absence of women writers that later inspired her to write Túnel de proa verde (Tunnel of the Green Prow), a book of poems about the imprisonment and torture of a woman author who, lacking paper, writes her poems in her mind. Not until the mid-1980s did Nela decide to resume her career as a writer, and she did so with a boom of literary activity. She was still writing both poetry and short stories, and the themes that characterize her work were already present. Lacking contacts in Canada at the time, however, she began to send her work to Spain, where she entered it in some of the many literary competitions there, most of which are open to writers from around the world (in contrast to many other countries, which limit participation to their own residents). The

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results – two books of poems in second place and seven short stories short-listed for international literary awards – were gratifying and gave her new energy and encouragement to continue her work. Moreover, two Spanish publishers offered to bring out books of her poems: En las noches que desvisten otras noches (During Nights that Undress Other Nights), a powerful cry of defiance, pain, and mourning in the face of state-sponsored terror, was published in Madrid by Editorial Orígenes in 1989; and Aquella luz, la que estremece (That light, the one that trembles), a lyrical and passionate book of love poems, was published by Ediciones Torremozas of Madrid in 1992. Since that time, a number of her short stories and poems have been anthologized or published in literary reviews in Spain, Argentina, Canada, and the United States. Rio is now a member of the League of Canadian Poets (the only one who has been accepted for full member status on the basis of books published solely in Spanish) and participates in literary events in Spain, Argentina, Britain, and the United States. She returns regularly to Mendoza, where she takes part in workshops and publishes in the literary review Aleph. She is also active in Spanish-language women’s writing in Canada: she has read at the Women’s Day celebrations in Fredericton and at Inter-Church Council meetings in Toronto; has published in Aquelarre, the Hispanic women’s magazine in Vancouver; and in 1990 attended the first conference of Hispanic Women Writers in Toronto, where she met Margarita Feliciano and a fellow Argentine Canadian testimonial writer, Nora Strejilevich.7 Since the late 1990s Nela has organized an annual exhibition of poems mounted on posters by Spanish-speaking poets from all over the world; the event now includes readings and audio cassettes by some 170 writers from twentytwo different countries. The exhibit for 2003, Outspoken Art/Arte Claro, was broadened to include both poetry and visual art works on the theme of violence against women and included publication of an anthology edited by Gino D’Artali about women who have disappeared in Juárez, Mexico. Nela has been invited to read at an array of literary events and venues, many of them bilingual, in the United States, from North Carolina and Kansas to Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and San Juan (Puerto Rico); she has also made a number of contacts with translators and writers at professional conferences on Spanish and Latin American literature. She has joined the American Literary Translators Association, where she has found great enthusiasm for the translation of her works, particularly from Elizabeth Gamble Miller, a

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distinguished Spanish-to-English translator who is professor emeritus at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Joe Blades, the publisher of Broken Jaw Press in Fredericton, took an early interest in Nela’s writing and has published four bilingual collections of her poems: Túnel de proa verde/Tunnel of the Green Prow (1998) and Cuerpo amado/Beloved Body (2002), both translated by myself, as well as During Nights that Undress Other Nights/En las noches que desvisten otras noches (2003) and The Space of Light/El espacio de la luz (2004), which includes a selection of short stories, both translated by Elizabeth Gamble Miller. In addition, Broken Jaw published a trilingual edition of Rio’s poems, Sosteniendo la mirada: Cuando las imágenes tiemblan/Sustaining the Gaze: When Images Tremble/Soutenant le regard: Quand les images tremblent (2004), translated into English by Elizabeth Gamble Miller and into French by Jill Valéry and illustrated with photographs by Brian Atkinson of women guerrilla fighters from Guatemala. What distinguishes Rio’s work dealing with political repression is the power of her imagination, her ability to enter so completely into the mind of her subject that every detail of mental development and reaction rings true. Five of her principal works – three collections of poetry and two short stories – deal with the specific theme of such repression and its effects primarily upon its victims. Part of En las noches que desvisten otras noches and all of Túnel de proa verde are written from the point of view of a woman who is held prisoner, tortured, and raped in a clandestine prison. The earlier of the two books, En las noches que desvisten otras noches, is the more outward-looking and ideologically committed of the two and is specific to a certain historical time: virtually every poem, for example, is dedicated to a compañera who has fallen in the struggle against the military (the author was inspired by the women fighters of both Guatemala and Argentina). The book is a cry of resistance, defiance, and mourning, a cry that the speaker wants to “resound like thunderbolts” through the world.8 The national setting of the work is never given, but the struggle that it describes is an epic battle between the implacable, monolithic powers of “The Repression,” and the fragile, individual humans who stand up to it, either as resistance fighters or as other, more pacific opponents. In poem iii, for instance, a guerrilla in the countryside is shot to death in his sleep as he dreams of his beloved, who is associated metaphorically with the sun, laughter, the earth, and rebirth; in poem iv another woman fighter is encircled by “The Repression,” which is described as a “thirsty beast” that “sniffs the grass” before

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annihilating her with bullets in “the only part of her homeland she had left.”9 In poem vi an Indian peasant woman meditates on the devastation caused by the fighting; it is clear, however, that she regards the guerrillas as simply an extension of her own people’s fight for survival. Readers familiar with Argentine history might instinctively place such poems in the back country around Tucumán, the only geographical area of Argentina ever under complete guerrilla control during the mid-1970s, retaken by the military in a fierce campaign of extermination, using overwhelming force. The poems could just as easily, however, be set in any one of a number of other countries in Latin America (or Africa or Asia) that have experienced the same struggles. En las noches que desvisten otras noches then changes setting and goes on to describe the anguish of a woman political prisoner (or perhaps various prisoners) who is viciously tortured, including being repeatedly shocked with la picana, or the electric prod, and then raped by her captors, but who does not divulge any information. The language here is direct, brutal, full of pain and fierce tenacity, especially in its use of obscene insults to punctuate the rape scene in poem xii. In the last poems of the book, however, a new theme is introduced. Poems xxi and xxii present us with the image of the woman guerrilla fighter triumphant and the revolution for social justice and liberty finally a success, but the female speaker closes poem xxii by stating that the moment of victory is ruined by having to trade her gun for “a cup of coffee / I have to serve the new executives.” Then, in the last two poems in the collection, the speaker voices her disillusion with a new world in which “No one listens to this [revolutionary] woman / because the men are all celebrating the victory.”10 Liberation, therefore, when it comes, must be for both sexes; patriarchy must not continue in a post-revolutionary world. This sentiment has been echoed by other writers, including the Uruguayan Canadian poet Maeve López in “the last to have died”: and the women were finally convinced and laid down their guns and returned to their homes with lustreless eyes to wait for the men to build the new transparent world.11 Nela’s other book of poetry that deals with a woman’s imprisonment and torture, Túnel de proa verde, concentrates on the interior world of the victim/resister. In this later work, all reference to the

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exterior world has been stripped away, baring the protagonist/ speaker’s mental processes as she journeys through hell at the hands of her tormentors and then returns to the outside world. The setting here is virtually anonymous: it is anywhere that such practices are carried out. Again, as in the previous book, the prisoner does not divulge any information to her captors, nor does she physically write the poems; there is no place to hide them, and their discovery would reveal her interior world and make her even more vulnerable to her captors. The poems have simply been composed in her mind as she recovers in her darkened cell between bouts of torture. No mention is made of the woman’s previous life or of any kind of revolutionary activity; the work concentrates solely on her present situation. Although she draws strength from her dead women comrades (as well as from loves of the past), these women are principally compañeras in idealism, activism, and suffering rather than necessarily in armed struggle. In contrast with En las noches que desvisten otras noches, this collection ends with the speaker seeking healing – on her own terms and time – with the man she loves. Rio also has another collection of poems, the unpublished “El mundo que tú no viste” (The world you never saw), which recounts the stories of children who disappeared in Argentina’s Dirty War. Two of Nela’s best short stories, “Lucrecia” and “El olvido viaja en auto negro” (“Oblivion Travels in a Black Car”), also deal with the theme of government oppression but from a more objective point of view. “Lucrecia” tells the story of a brisk, homey, middle-class Argentine matron who “didn’t even buy the newspaper so she wouldn’t find out about anything; why make your life more difficult?”12 On her way down to the local kiosk, however, to get the latest issue of a magazine of knitting patterns, she is caught up in a demonstration and later detained, tortured, and humiliated by unidentified men. At the end of the story, devastated and stumbling, she is comforted by the other women prisoners: an overwhelming irony, for she had previously done her best to ignore their struggle. “Oblivion Travels in a Black Car” narrates the arrival of a black sedan (a type of automobile favoured by paramilitary death squads) on a quiet suburban street; here, however, the author has opted for a highly effective experiment in presentation, giving seven different one-paragraph versions of the car turning onto the street, as seen through the eyes of one man and six women neighbours. The car itself is the protagonist, a metonym for state terrorism, and its approach is variously described as tentative, arrogant, furtive, smug,

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ashamed, and haughty. Armed men are finally seen getting out of the vehicle, but the actual kidnapping is not described. Two further short stories by Rio deal not with aspects of politically motivated oppression but with violence committed against women. One of them, “Encarnación de la Palma,” narrates the rape and murder of a young girl by “one of those about whom you shouldn’t talk because they’re too important”;13 the perpetrator is then torn to pieces by the estate’s mastiffs as he tries to escape. The tale takes place at some unspecified time in the past, perhaps in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but periodically recurs – according to village legend – as the spirits of both the victim, Encarnación, and her aggressor eternally try to escape their fate. Although narrated in the third person, the point of view is that of Encarnación, whose ghost hears the hoof beats of the man’s horse and sees him enter the house; she tries to stop him, but his form moves past her and continues up to her bedroom to reenact the crime. The second story, “María Candelaria,” is about a woman of the same name earlier in the twentieth century who wanted to be a writer but was forced by her mother, Delia, to give up her writing in order to be a conventional wife and mother. The story is told from the point of view of the woman’s granddaughter, who later publishes her forebear’s work, and is accompanied by marginal notes for teaching the story in a literature class. All three characters in the story are women, and this time it is a woman, Delia, who is the oppressor. María Candelaria reflects that “Delia … in her bitterness and frustration, imposed the same life on her. María Candelaria wanted to believe that if women helped one another, life would change. Given that they suffered the same things and had similar longings, why not stop following traditions and put an end to the outmoded beliefs, perversely imposed ideologies, fear, envy, prejudices, bitterness, and desire for power among women themselves?”14 Another of Rio’s principal themes is that of love and sexuality among older people. The collection of poems Aquella luz, la que estremece, for example, is a celebration of love, intimacy, and eroticism that has strong echoes (especially in the lyric second section) of The Song of Solomon; in this case, however, the speaker is a mature woman in search of both sensual fulfilment and emotional and psychological partnership. The work as a whole is prefaced by an epigraph by Alfonsina Storni, considered by many to be the first great woman poet of Argentina, who also wrote on the same theme. The epic, visionary tone of the poems points to the need to create new mythologies,

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in which female power is enhanced so that males and females may meet (and mate) freely as equals. In “El leopardo de la piel de estrella” (The leopard with the skin of stars), for example, the daughter of the “first mother” learns the power of touch from caressing “the leopard with the skin of stars”; later “the daughter will go out into the forest of harmonious desires / and will teach her chosen man the caresses she has learned.”15 Female sexuality is clearly presented as an active, primordial force of great power. Several other of Rio’s short stories and books of poetry deal with the death or loss of a partner in life or with the loss of a part of the body. In these works, death – or its representative, disease – is a force that must be faced and accepted by a human couple, whose ties to one another are deepened by it. This difficult theme is not often touched on in literature, especially in such a calm and inherently positive way. The poems of Cuerpo amado/Beloved Body, for instance, begin with the establishment of a new relationship between two lovers for whom youth is far behind, expressing the joy that they find in discovering their companionship and shared sexuality – one of Rio’s favourite themes. The lovers’ idyll is, however, interrupted by the news that the woman has breast cancer. She retreats into herself to deal with the pain, but the relationship grows even closer as her lover accompanies her through the ordeal of a mastectomy. When she returns to him from the hospital after the operation, their life together is reaffirmed. Rarely have mature love and physical affliction been dealt with in such a delicate, sensitive, and utterly unsentimental way. Cuerpo amado/Beloved Body has touched a chord in many women, both for the suffering and for the affirmation that it describes, and the poems have received a warm reception in Canada and abroad.16 Another moving work by Rio on a similar theme, the unpublished collection of poems “En el umbral del atardecer” (At the threshold of dusk), chronicles the death of a woman’s husband and her subsequent states of mind as she tries to cope with her loss; she does not find a new partner or other person in her life. Instead, she is finally able to will herself into imagined contact with her beloved’s presence, which would suggest that such bonding can take place only rarely in life and cannot be easily repeated. The speaker accepts the deepest silences and loneliness of life and old age, and finally dies, to be mourned and remembered by her daughter. The forty-five poems in the collection are a poignant and lyrical mental and spiritual odyssey, expressed with great emotional accuracy and candour.

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An outstanding short story on the same theme, but from an altogether different point of view, is “Carlota todavía” (Ever Carlota), a celebration of the vitality of old age. It is, simply, the story of a woman taking a bath – and having a self-induced orgasm as she does so. The woman in question, Carlota, is a widow and grandmother who is capable of accepting all the wrinkles and sags that she looks at unblinkingly in the mirror as she dries herself off afterward, yet she is still a deeply sexual being who aches for love but who gives herself joyfully to her own touch if she cannot find that of another. Yes, Carlota is old, but she is a dynamic and fulfilled woman, one who enjoys sexual pleasure and satisfaction, even in solitude – although she wishes that other people her age were liberated enough to share the energy that she knows must also lie at least potentially within them. Rio dedicates an entire unpublished collection of poems, “El laberinto vertical” (The vertical labyrinth), to the theme of inventing new mythologies and archetypal legends for humankind – myths free from the prejudices and inequities found in the traditional JudeoChristian tales that underpin Western beliefs. In her customary clear, unaffected, spontaneous language and a serene but slightly elevated tone, “El laberinto vertical” relates the epic, quasi-Biblical story of the birth of the universe and the development of humankind, but the processes and stages of development are quite different from those of Judaic scriptures. From the very beginning, the omnipotent monotheistic concept of deity has been replaced by a dualistic, binary pairing of opposites that have been created to live in harmony; moreover, the sexual tags given to various natural phenomena are reversed from those of conventional Western symbolism. In the genesis poems of the text, light is referred to as “shaking out its head of hair / into the black sky they call night,” thus perhaps implying a correlation between light and the feminine, darkness and the masculine. In the balance of yin-yang dualism, “the days and nights pursued one another / with care and love / each respecting the other’s presence”; further, “all that has a still movement / lives another kind of life called death.”17 In “La esfera” (The sphere) the principle of duality is restated, although it is understood to be simultaneous with Oneness: “It was at times called Mother, at others, Father / and from it were born all things.”18 When people appear in the world, they form couples and mate peacefully and joyfully, giving themselves over calmly to desire and pleasure. Humans live in a Golden Age of harmony and love, in which greed and covetousness are unknown, as early peoples

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take what they need from nature and are sagely content with its balance. Gradually, however, civilization and its patriarchal values of domination and control gain the upper hand over the natural world and its equilibrium, driving them, along with the worship of female deities, into the recesses of sexual mysticism – the devadasis of “Las místicas” (The mystics) – and into folk consciousness. The triumph of the Patriarchy brings with it war, repression, and hierarchical squabbling, and civilization is finally abandoned by women, who reestablish their own alternative culture that will somehow bring back the values of the Golden Age. Since she started producing what has become an outpouring of poems and stories in the late 1980s, Nela Rio’s eloquent and forceful voice has spoken of feelings and people often overlooked by other authors, as well as by society at large. Her contribution to Hispanic Canadian letters is unique, and her work, which is increasingly accessible through translation, is now receiving the same attention and appreciation in Canada, the United States, and Britain that it has long enjoyed in Spain and Latin America. Her themes of political resistance, mature sexuality, self-realization, and the acceptance of suffering, old age, and death as part of the dynamic of existence are of increasing interest to a readership grown weary of the topoi of poetic discourse and eager to find a fresh and inclusive vision of reality in literature.

tw e lv e p o e m s f r o m t ú n e l d e p r o a v e r d e i I begin in this silence engendering apocalypse in this world chiselled with words of air in this time when written accounts are forbidden to create the long radiant nightmare of a woman of flesh bone blood a scent of reborn ashes and a yearning for rescue through the word. With a seal without lions or crests I decide to isolate myself in the most open space possible that protects me from this confinement from these walls raised up by strange ideologies

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imprisoning torturing imposing silence on my throat. Because I live in the space where imagination liberates because I walk in circles through reality that betrays I write poems of refuge on the inside of my tongue poems that rise from paralysis and the need to discover I’m still alive. I create a metaphor to encompass the great nightmare words to inscribe realities with white fire poems they cannot touch poems locked within my eyes poems they can’t rip out because they have become the skin of my voice. In the time of imprisonment when you live forever with just yourself the word opens worlds in the quiet tenderness of poetry.

v When the time of torture comes it is already familiar to me I have lived through it a thousand times as I lay awake I have seen her there crouching unhurriedly counting the minutes of those hours that do not pass toothless mouth pricking darkness shapeless horror

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there waiting waiting for my body to petrify with fear she is there, moves toward me hunched stretching herself slowly savouring my frozen sweat slithering forward on feet like polyps reaching out her hands like birds devouring a macabre feast her breath wounds me like hot thorns I want to shut my eyes that don’t respond the loathsome shadow advances closing off all exit my feet of terrified ice try to move so her touch will not destroy them! I watch look into her mouth of fathomless loss feeling a torrent of destruction dragging me down and I don’t know – I don’t know! – where the shadow water horror leads if this nightmare of all my vigils has an end or if its coming is eternal

vi My eyes search for light in the gloom of this cell darkened by my silence, punished with isolation and I relive the splendour of my compañeras who though dead live on I was on a vast plain like a torrential theatre where the wind blew thirstily its laboured breath caressing

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breathing through my hair with its many mouths preparing like a mad virtuouso a strange vision. The clouds silenced the whispering silently on tiptoe they had gathered in the sky to contemplate to protect forever in this changeable reality of mist and snow the presence of the wonder. The wind rose with the splendour and mystery of a primitive winged priest soaring to the heights and suddenly plummeting with rare shrillness searching beneath the rocks among the dunes in the mountains cliffs crags searching overturning uncovering the magnificent stars that had boldly fled the captured sky. They were there unmistakable among the rocks, sand, dust among the cries in the blood clubs ropes mica glistening triumphant gloriously alive! The wind in a gigantic display like a carnival magician’s cape without the laughter blew across the precious particles of the shattered stars whirling them away from the greenish purple of the engendering sky and then like a rain of shining gold

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alive attracting with every right the light of all things incredibly emphatically beautiful laughing wildly as though forgetting their time asleep the companion stars descended once more never to be extinguished and I was there a spectator made by history bathed in the light of shining victorious smiles sequins of planetary matter contemplating from the edge of the origin of time the creation of the first day of mica and the triumph of compañeras who will never die again.

vii In the excruciating routine of turning through the hours in the endless nights I am coming to the point where the river changes course where the waters flow back up their channels overflowing their banks drowning the fields the plains the mountains the mouths that remain open like caves. I am coming to the point where the breeze turns into a hurricane melodramatically blowing off the roofs of sacred things scattering burying days and nights ideas thought to be untouchable. It’s the point close to obliteration of faith, reason the vortex of chaos the immobility of hope the paralysis of gesture. Like the most wretched phoenix that has lost

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the mythical power of rebirth beating its wings in the ashes as it devours itself I see that point expanding like the crater of a volcano point of no return.

xii How strange it is to feel my body like a hand. When my fingers grow into long sharp-pointed questions orphaned of names in barbed conclusions of frauds and betrayals when like trembling springs frenetic divers they leap down to pierce the ground I think there must be truth behind the scream. When my fingers multiply incessant, palpitating turning back at me like fingernails growing backwards trying to seize the smallest part of a story breaking, tearing apart I think there must be truth behind the scream. When my fingers return from this longest of searches twisted, burned, bleeding my scream my scream my scream is lost in echos!

xiii Memories intertwine solitary hours with those when life used time as if it were inexhuastible. Rippling multicoloured banners separate

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trembling lips longing as if pushed by thick breaths of silence and I enter into the space eternally trapped within my memory slowly solemnly as into an ancient temple covered only by gestures of fulfilled loves I slip my nakedness sharp as a sigh into the warm mist carrying in my hands all the leaves of freely given autumn. Offering of colour and perfume I bow my head of unbraided hair before the moist gaze I remember and gather up my body of skin shining with desire in the contemplation of transparent objects that offer and refuse themselves silencing with a single gesture of my hand the murmurs around us. My flesh transformed into a burning flower I let the rain of silence vehemently run across my body like an embrace deferred or held back in the anxiety of remembrance that rescues reconstructs and again I possess you in the vital exercise of memory in the ancient temple of the trinitarian goddess.

xiv When sleep no longer belongs to night nor nightmare to sleep to close your eyes is to awaken.

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Dishevelled in the wind I run through the merciful corrosive exhaustion thirsting from days without water my dry tongue brittle cracked opening my body like an immense mouth. My feet walk upon the treetops shaking terrified birds from their branches. I am like a vision children’s nightmare my flight increasing my dread of stagnant water. And there I see myself disappearing into screams impaling myself on the horizon perforating the desert in search of the water that gathers among the rocks.

xvii Tonight they came for me. Tonight they came for me and I don’t know if I’ll return. The scrubland has gathered shadowy heads of hair pretentiously slicked down delving into the darkness with eyes like coals eyes like tongues tongues running heavily over my body criminally palpably lascivious moist covering me in their sharpened breath of razors crushing my resolute proud flesh against the hard earth

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they want to know shadows eyes tongues why my mouth is closed like a coffin keeping alive the ones they want dead. The uninhabited branches of these impotent scrublands arching their sharp inquisitorial points claw at my back drawing strange oracles of blood wrench my hair wanting to exhume the secrets that keep rebellions defiant but my pain-filled forehead does not open to their stabs. The crazed moon of memories wants to find paths through the undergrowth to throw itself like an arrow cutting with its sharpened rays of ice at the lewdly curling scrub that drags itself along sniffing mumbling frightful words the wind doesn’t dare repeat and leave in a gallop of thunderstorms crushing the clouds till they are heavy with shadows. They are stubborn inquisitors I am stubbornly silent in this night when they have come for me. Now I know that I shall return finally victorious grasping with my painful flesh a written word they shall never violate.

xviii When the word inscribes itself willingly with a vocation of eternity … Immense whirlwinds scatter these leaves

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that I write with blood among the shadows and my arms like mad seagulls flutter unable to restrain them. Everything disappears in circles of order and punishment. Wind wind full of howling wind of devastation. I struggle creating barbed-wire thickets to stop the maddened invader full of insignias useless for propping up what dangles between his legs like a pendulum oscillating suspended by gravity and impotency snorting wheezing furiously trying to raise its erect fetidness and my dress and hair are torn loose raped by the centaur riding over bones. Wind wind I’ve got to swallow you in huge mouthfuls to shout to you in leaves that no wind will ever erase.

xxi I declare and proclaim with a fury I do not wish contained that the hair of the hopeful sinners will become ensnarled with all the cries underpinning the dilapidated paradise that promises consecrated hallucinations that all the trees planted in rows like lead soldiers will turn grey and their leaves will fall like ashes

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the flowers shall radiate strange lights burning every facet of footlight visionaries and colour will flee from the earth. Because they will try to leave me denuded of dreams waves will sweep away the cities with spectacular blows from brooms books will lose their letters full of festive images history will again take up its improbable monoliths and the universe shall drown in a sterile genesis.

xxiii When the letters those fragile censured words that join me to the world, those words that silence chaos and violence are seized you will hear … when the world is shaken by primordial cataclysms transforming the surface of the earth as when the seas turn their wombs inside out ejecting terrified fish into space and bones become dust ferociously close their petals drowning the heart that beats when the rock melts into metal and hardens into crystal

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or when the roads lose their horizontality and rise into the sky to plunge back into the earth like spears … my cry demolish walls!

xxviii The imprisonment is finished the freeing continues over years and memories of continual leaving, yet love like the most tender rain of hope embraces me with your newly found arms and with those of my compañeras never forgotten. In the hours when your eyes search for mine to rescue me from something you do not understand do not ask me again why my days are forever full of nights why my hours are forever shaken by the wind why there are forever cries and exhausted stars do not ask me again. Do not tell me again that I am hitting against your heart with pains you wish to forget. I know my words seem the same in every poem because they keep returning they return in every poem like pristine but already painfully old signals from a lantern of flesh memory presence. I also want to rescue myself, I am responsible for images that fly back and forth across a horizon full of visions each day viscerally reconstructing those of yesterday

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flocks of images that come to look for me transmigrating from a wealth of suffering settling into my impoverished words using this dictionary of an obscenely limited number of words, but you know, my love, they strapped it on me like a tight dress that I must rip apart tearing skin and blood to staunch a story that they carved into my flesh in unfamiliar nights when I was alone without you and I felt far from everyone. A story spun in the clamours of a past that lives on in our days. And in the nights of these days when your love fills space with tenderness I give you my old nights so you may embrace them, kiss them, remember them and together we may forget them as we remember. I would like to give you another world, my love, so I am taking off the one they gave me in the nights you love me.

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7 The Transculturation1 of Alejandro Saravia

Born in Cochabamba, the third-largest city in Bolivia, in 1962, Alejandro Saravia is one of the new generation of Latin American writers in Canada. His literary output spans a variety of genres: articles (he is a professional journalist); four published collections of poetry; a novel; and short stories (one of which has been selected for the present volume). Throughout his work, however, certain characteristics are present, particularly a complete disillusion with the official history of his homeland; a fascination with language and the intersection of linguistic groups within a single national unity; a constant feeling of loss, both of his previous cultural sphere and of individuals; and an abiding interest in world literature. Bolivia is a nation of extreme contrasts, geographical (the Altiplano plateau and Amazon forests), ethnic, and historical. A majority of its population speaks either Quechua, Aymara, or another Indian language and traditionally has not had a representative voice in government; the rest of the nation, including mestizos (cholos), blacks, and immigrants, speaks Spanish. Power is tightly concentrated in the hands of a wealthy upper class and the armed forces, which are riddled with factionalism. The nation holds the Latin American record for coups d’état (over one per year since independence in 1825) and has the lowest per capita income in South America. Saravia’s childhood in Bolivia, like the country itself, was marked by a façade of stability that was continually undermined by internal conflict. On the surface, his family led a relatively comfortable middle-class existence. His father was an administrator for a government-owned bank, and his mother, who was originally from the

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mining centre of Oruro, worked in radio broadcasting and later as a secretary. There were six children in the family, of which Alejandro was the eldest. When he was five years old, his father received a new position with the Banco Agrícola de Bolivia in La Paz, where Saravia attended a Jesuit-run private grammar school, spent a year studying in the Canadian Baptist Institute (his first contact with Canada), and began to study English. Beneath the apparent economic stability of his family, however, chaotic forces were at work. His father was active in the union at the bank where he worked, and his mother held strong beliefs on the need for social and economic justice in the country. Frequent coups by rightwing military factions, especially that of Hugo Bánzer in 1971, led to his father and mother’s periodic imprisonment, during which the children stayed with other family members. His father was also exiled to Paraguay for a year, during which the military raided the family home, smashing and overturning everything that they found in a supposed search for documents. Alejandro’s first attempts at reading were the newspaper accounts – with photos – of the search for, capture, and murder of Che Guevara in the forests of eastern Bolivia in 1967. As Saravia observes in reference to his memories of his grandfather, a veteran of the Chaco War with Paraguay in the 1930s2 who suffered from shell shock, “The country’s history is engraved on your family.”3 One of the discoveries that most marked Saravia’s childhood was the book collection of his uncle, an agronomy student, who read widely and encouraged his nephew to do the same. Alejandro remembers that until then books had been “austere, almost inquisitorial entities”4 that he associated with school and obligation; now he began to understand them differently as he read Kafka, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky. He also went through the Bolivian classics, including works by authors such as Alcides Arguedas,5 the nineteenth-century novelist in search of a Bolivian identity; the symbolist poet (and enthusiast of Norse mythology) Ricardo Jaimes Freyre;6 and Antonio Paredes Candia, author of Cuentos populares bolivianos (Bolivian folktales);7 as well as other works on life in the old Spanish silver-mining colony of Upper Peru, which was renamed Bolivia in honour of Simón Bolívar after independence in 1825. He remembers reading his mother’s copy of Sartre’s The Wall, which he says showed him that literature need not necessarily be something elevated and removed from the world, but is instead a way of living in which art is an intimate part of daily life.8

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La Paz also had an active cinematheque, where Saravia became familiar with Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, and the politically inspired films of the Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjines.9 At age seventeen Alejandro made a decision that was to change his life and to be the source of his only novel, Rojo, amarillo y verde (Red, yellow, and green), the colours of the Bolivian flag: he accepted conscription into the Bolivian army. Most middle-class Bolivians, although nominally as liable for one year of conscription in the armed forces as are working-class and Indian men, traditionally use family connections or make payoffs to stay out of military service; Saravia, however, wanted to have the experience, which proved to be traumatic. Although it gave him the opportunity for the first time in his life to establish friendships with Quechua- and Aymara-speaking Indians, he also experienced the violent and destructive disdain and racism – and unremitting verbal abuse – with which the largely Indian conscripts were treated by their officers, virtually all of whom were of mestizo or European descent. Far worse, however, was that a particularly vicious right-wing coup d’état occurred in 1980 (there had just been one in 1979), in which Argentine military advisors, skilled in torture and counterinsurgency techniques during their own “Dirty War,” aided General Luis García Meza in crushing popular resistance. Conscripts were forced at gunpoint to participate in raids on houses, churches, and union offices, and aircraft were used to strafe and bomb striking tin miners and rebellious towns. After finishing military service, Alejandro had to wait for a year to enter university, because the armed forces had closed down the campuses. In the early 1980s, however, he studied journalism and communications at the Universidad Católica in La Paz, before switching to the literature program at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés. He studied English, discovering Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, Jack Kerouac, William Carlos Williams, and Sylvia Plath in the original; he also deepened his knowledge of Latin American writing and found an affinity for various authors that would later influence his work, including Borges, the experimental Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, the cryptic metaphysical Peruvian poet César Vallejo, the avant-garde Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, the Quechua-speaking Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas,10 and the Brazilian magic realist novelist Jorge Amado.11 Some of the books that he read had belonged to the Canadian priest Maurice Lefebvre, who was assassinated on 21 August 1971, the day that General Hugo Bánzer came to

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power. Alejandro joined the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Revolutionary Workers’ Party) and worked in it for four years; eventually, however, he became interested in political activity on a more pragmatic, independent basis. Curiously, his father had prohibited him from engaging in leftist political activity because he did not want his son to experience the same difficulties that he had had; the result, however, was that Alejandro had to break with his family. After university, Saravia worked in a bank, where he helped bring in a trade union, and as a broadcaster and journalist in communitybased and private radio. He enjoyed and was proud of his work as a trade unionist and had risen to a position of some importance in the labour movement. By this time he had travelled throughout Bolivia as well as to parts of Peru and Chile. Despite his antipathy toward upper-class Bolivians who lived as expatriates in the neocolonial motherland of Europe or – even worse, he thought – in the empire itself (the United States), he began to feel the pull of a more stable, economically viable life for himself and his young family outside Bolivia. By 1986 his personal situation was becoming ever more difficult: he had already been imprisoned once under martial law, and his wife was now pregnant. He decided to leave the country and, after at first considering immigrating to Mexico, subsequently obtained permission to come to Canada, where he had relatives living in Montreal. Years after leaving Bolivia, he still felt ambivalent about his decision – which he says was at first simply to leave the country for a year or two.12 Initially, Saravia’s strong interest in literature led him to decide almost immediately after his arrival in Canada that the best way to understand a country was by studying its writing. He therefore enrolled at the Université de Montréal the year after his arrival and began to take courses in English Canadian and Québécois literature, in which he was most impressed by the work of Hugh MacLennan, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Anne Hébert (Bolivia has had few famous women writers), Émile Nelligan, and W.P. Kinsella (whose sense of humour he enjoyed). He also worked in Spanish-language broadcasting at Radio McGill and Radio Centre-Ville, where his weekly program “Encuentro” (Encounter) compared cultural life in Canada with that of Latin America; he even translated stories by Kinsella and parts of Michel Tremblay’s A toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou into Spanish for presentation on the show. Over the next few years, he worked in the printing business, for Canadian University Service Overseas (cuso), and for the Canadian

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Human Rights Foundation, before finally landing a position at RadioCanada International, where he now works as an announcer and producer on the Spanish-language news and current-affairs program “Canadá en las Américas.” He has also travelled extensively in Canada, Europe, and Central America and even to Senegal, where he participated in a conference on community radio. He did not return to Bolivia, however, till 2005. Saravia began to write poetry and short stories in high school and has continued to do so ever since. He frequented the writers’ group El Averno (Hell) in La Paz and had a variety of well-known Bolivian writers for professors at university, including Julio de la Vega.13 He published only one short story in Bolivia, and not until he came to Canada did he began to publish more regularly, chiefly poems in Spanish-language reviews such as Enfoques in Montreal and Hispanos in Toronto. Despite his interest in Canadian and Quebec literature and his fluency in French and English, he has had little direct contact with Canadian writers, and his work has not been translated. In contrast to other Latin American writers in Montreal, however, he has also travelled frequently to Toronto, finally living there for a year in 1994, and has been a bridge between the Latin American literary worlds of the two cities. While in Toronto, he met the Mexican poet Juan Escareño, who invited him to participate in Hispanos, a biweekly cultural review. Over the next two years, Saravia contributed more than twenty-five articles on the politics and culture of English Canada, Quebec, and Latin America. He also met the engagé Mexican poet Juan Pablo de Ávila Amador and attended readings held by the Latin American Network, which was actively promoting local Spanishspeaking cinema, theatre, dance, and poetry. Saravia’s knowledge of both Ontario and Quebec has permitted him to make certain comparative observations between the Spanish-speaking communities in the two provinces. He finds that Latin Americans in Toronto define themselves more in the context of the Hispanic experience in the United States and that, in literary terms, they identify with Chicano writers such as Rolando Hinojosa14 and Sandra Cisneros;15 those in Montreal, on the other hand, look more to the experience of Latin American writers living in Paris (the favourite Latin locale for expatriation and exile ever since the wars of independence), and they feel a greater affinity with authors such as Julio Cortázar and the Peruvian novelist Alberto Bryce Echenique,16 both of whom have set much of their fiction in France. Even the terms of definition are different: Latin

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Americans in Toronto refer to themselves as hispánicos (Hispanics), while those of Montreal prefer latinos (Latins). Saravia also finds remarkable similarities between Bolivia and Canada from the point of view of linguistic interchange. He says that it was “the struggle the Québécois have gone through to maintain the French language that has made me realize the terrible injustice and linguistic deprivation of the Aymara- and Quechua-speaking peoples of Bolivia.”17 Certainly, the isolation of the two indigenous language groups within the framework of an arguably imposed and artificial Spanish-speaking national superstructure is a central theme of his work, especially in “La noche de Miguel” (Miguel’s night), the story selected for this volume, as well as in his novel. The racial and cultural prejudices that have aligned with linguistic ones in Bolivia are, however, far more severe than in Canada; moreover, the Bolivian situation is all the more idiosyncratic in that the two minority languages are spoken by the racial majority (indigenous peoples), a phenomenon that is similar to the South Africa of apartheid times, in which speakers of Afrikaans and English dominated the more numerous Zulus and Xhosas. Despite such similarities, however, Canada is still primarily a country rooted in the Occidental, materialist, desacralized spirit of domination and exploitation of natural resources, a way of thinking that has overcome indigenous philosophies and is only now being attenuated by other more holistic points of view. Due to their deep native roots, many people in Bolivia still retain a preference for coexistence over exploitation, for accepting nature – often in an animistic sense – rather than domesticating it. A surprising number of Bolivians of all classes, Alejandro says, still perform ancient ritual offerings called challas to Pachamama, the Mother of the Earth.18 Saravia has four collections of poetry, all of which have been published in Toronto by Juan Escareño in the series “Palabras Prestadas” (Borrowed words), put out by Hispanos Publishing, later renamed Artifact Press. The first, Ejercicio de serpientes (The book of snakes), which appeared in 1994, was the third book in the series (after volumes by Escareño himself and by Juan Pablo de Ávila Amador). The second, La brújula desencadenada (The unchained compass), came out in January 1996, and the third, Oilixes helizados (Elixe propellers) (a neologism coined from “exiles” spelled backwards) in 1998. His latest book of poems, Habitante del décimo territorio (Inhabitant of the tenth territory), which includes over eighty poems, was published in 2000. His remaining two works are an unpublished collection of short stories, “El libro

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que ladra a la luna” (The book that barks at the moon), and his novel Rojo, amarillo y verde, which was co-published by Artifact Press and White Dwarf Editions of Montreal in 2003. All of these works have a high degree of thematic and even formal consistency. The principal themes of Saravia’s writing are identification with the homeland, exile and loss (especially of love), and language. Stylistically, his work often shows a desire to experiment with new forms and ways of expression while maintaining a high degree of skill and other, less experimental structures as well. Identification with the homeland is perhaps the key theme of all, from which other subthemes and motifs have grown. Repeatedly, characters in Saravia’s work are unable to orient themselves in any meaningful way within the national parameters presented to them – as the title of his second book, La brújula desencadenada (The unchained compass), implies. Alfredo Cutipa, the protagonist of Saravia’s novel Rojo, amarillo y verde, has lived through a terrifying year as a conscript in the Bolivian army during the 1980 coup d’état, after which he moved to Canada. Even there, however, thirteen years later, he is still so obsessed with his experiences in the army that he tries to record them on paper so that he may succeed in understanding and perhaps in freeing himself from them. As he writes, he hallucinates the presence of two important characters from his past: his dead girlfriend, A., and a rebellious Indian conscript, The Boxer, whom he and his comrades found in their barracks with his rifle in his hand and half his face blown off. The military authorities say that it was a suicide, but Alfredo and other soldiers examine the magazine of the dead man’s rifle and find that it is full. As he writes, Alfredo gradually comes to the conclusion that Bolivia is an artificial construct imposed by force on a group of indigenous peoples or nations that has impeded their natural development ever since the conquest, “a country fractured into different societies, languages, and simultaneous historical times.” The only lasting relationship between the native speakers of Quechua, Aymara, and other languages – whether the descendants of the Inca and Tiahuanaco peoples, respectively, or members of the Guaraní and other indigenous groups – and the European (and mestizo) national structure that has been grafted onto them is one of domination, and in this sense, Bolivia has been a failure as a nation: “a population that furiously tried to hide its Indian fingernails, its Indian names, its collective memory of mestizos perpetually ashamed of the blood running

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through their veins.” “Bolivia is an imaginary homeland: a territory that doesn’t exist beyond a contradictory geography … It’s the collective ways of imagining ourselves and of dying that unite us.”19 Such a stand, however, involves rejecting the entire official historiography of the country and replacing it with a new interpretation – a lonely and difficult task, especially given the fierce opposition of those who have created and upheld the established order. In the opening and closing scenes of Rojo, amarillo y verde (the novel has a circular structure), Alfredo runs through the cars of the Jean Talon line of the Montreal Metro shouting flirtatious compliments in Quechua in the hope that some woman will understand him. Immigrant passengers from a multitude of countries prick up their ears, trying to understand what he is saying in this, “the city with the largest trilingual population in North America.” He imagines (or perhaps it is real) that a woman passenger asks him: “Are you from Cuzco?” A laugh. “No, no, I’m a mutt” [meaning he’s not from the Quechua heartland; Cuzco was the Incan capital]. “But even mongrels have a homeland, don’t they?” “No, ma’am, I’m Bolivian …” To be Bolivian was to have a wound that never healed.

Indeed, Alfredo’s obsession with his homeland reaches such a point that he dreams that he makes love to the motherland, who tells him that she will be whatever he wants, that “there are as many motherlands as there are Bolivians,” and then asks him, “Are you positive that I’m … a woman?” – upon which he sees that she isn’t and wakes up.20 As a soldier, Alfredo has been assigned to the garrison guarding El Alto (High Point), the country’s main air base, built atop the Altiplano just above La Paz. After the coup d’état, El Alto becomes the point of departure for bombing runs against the civilian population, and Alfredo is forced to carry out raids on churches and homes; at one point he is disciplined for insubordination for refusing to take part in a gang rape of a woman trying to get home after curfew – an idea initiated by an officer. Writing in Montreal years later, he asks himself why he never mutinied, why he didn’t assassinate General García Meza when his unit escorted him down to La Paz from the base, why he remained silent when the army covered up The Boxer’s murder. In a highly poetic passage, he finds escape from his guilt, remorse, and disorientation by mocking his oppressor:

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I laugh at their symbols … at their love of coats of arms and cockades. I laugh at the words of their anthems. I laugh at the admirals of inland waters and rubber ducks, at the rear guard generals, at the colonels in their slippers, at the dipsomaniac captains … I laugh at history. I laugh out loud, laugh until the high command becomes bewildered, laugh as hard as I can until laughter scares away the tears and makes death a little less death.21

It is as he writes his memoirs in Montreal that Alfredo finally finds a strange completion to his destiny in the form of a Kurdish woman, who is initially attracted to him because of his Bolivian socks. It seems that the Kurdish national colours – red, yellow, and green – are the same as those of Bolivia. The woman, who later becomes Alfredo’s lover, is an urban guerrilla working with the pkk (Kurdish Communist Party) for the establishment of an independent Kurdish homeland. Her dream is to have a country, while Alfredo’s is to rid himself of one, and, as a final irony, her name is Bolivia. The rejection of the official version of Bolivian history also, of course, implies the rejection of the larger political configuration of which it forms a part – that is, what many on the left in Latin America refer to as “el Imperio,” or the American Empire. Thus, in the minificción entitled “Who’s Pedro Domingo?” (the original title is in English), a Bolivian fighter in the War of Independence flees through the mountains, pursued by Royalist forces, and then is suddenly fired upon by a patrol of American troops. He survives and continues on his way. Moreover, in the sinister minificción “Un mensaje capital” (A capital message), in La brújula desencadenada, the unnamed narrator meditates on the fact that “an imperial message” of death can be delivered to anyone, anywhere in the globe, if deemed necessary. Thematically, however, the rejection of political systems and power relationships ultimately extends far deeper, to a rejection of violence itself. The poem “La confesión de Caín” (Cain’s confession) is a monologue delivered by Cain to his dead brother, asking for his forgiveness and telling him that the only reason he has not cut off his own hand – the hand that killed Abel – is because he hopes he can now use it to work for freedom from violence for everyone. The theme of exile in Saravia’s work is closely intertwined with those of forgetting and lost love. Although the title poem of Oilixes helizados is about the slow corrosion by time and distance of memories of life in another land, a more typical work dealing with this theme might be the prose poem “Nonagésimocuarto ejercicio para olvidar” (Ninety-fourth

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exercise in forgetting), in which the narrator, like someone in a hall of mirrors, reflects that: “Saying ‘I have forgotten you’ is, in reality, another way of remembering, of deepening the roots of memory. Thus, as you embrace someone, you find without wanting to another figure behind those lips, who observes you kiss; other eyes that watch you, filled with a rainy nostalgia that you yourself are perhaps inventing.”22 In the short story “La cena” (The dinner), a young Bolivian and his girlfriend sit in a quiet square in La Paz, talking of the future. She invites him to dinner that night, but instead he impulsively decides to finally do what he has always wanted to and books a flight out of the country. Forty years later, near the end of his life, married “to another woman who never knew this square,”23 he returns to the same plaza and finds himself sitting with the other old men, wondering whether he would be able to recognize his long-ago girlfriend once again, realizing the depth of alienation brought about by exile. The title of Saravia’s latest book of poems, Habitante del décimo territorio (Inhabitant of the tenth territory), is a poem in itself. The “tenth territory” refers to the Bolivian province along the coast of the Pacific Ocean that was ceded to Chile at the end of the War of the Pacific in 1883, thus depriving Bolivia of its only access to the sea.24 In his introduction to the book, Saravia posits that the almost 4 million Bolivians who have had to leave their country – whether for economic or political reasons – are also, metaphorically, inhabitants of that amputated territory, lost to their nation forever. The first poem of the book, “Pasajes” (Passages), is an extensive lyric of love and longing to his homeland, which he personifies as a woman whom he loves. The last section of the poem tells of the speaker’s sadness and sense of loss as he gropes for the word in Quechua for “the texture the soil takes as it dries out after the rain,”25 an image associated with birthplace, fecundity, and nostalgia made all the more poignant by the fact that, during his exile, he has completely forgotten it. He compares the sound of the word (which he believes begins with “k”) to the feeling “just after the harvest when you look out over the fields the same way you look at a woman who has just given [you] a son.” The Altiplano soil is the motherland and lover who ultimately offers the exiled speaker the solace of return via the word: Perhaps she will be the one, then, who will pronounce her name with a murmur of rain and seed her true name over my silent bones.26

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One of the most original themes in Saravia’s work is that of the power of language. The human voice and its vowels and consonants are all living things for Saravia; they are part of primordial communication between beings, the desire to reach out beyond oneself to the Other. The initial poem of his first book, Ejercicio de serpientes, entitled “Hoy quizá llueva una ‘a’” (Today perhaps it will rain ‘a’s), is an ode to the liberating power of the word – and the vowel – which will carry the reader (or listener) far into the world and the imagination if he or she will only cease banalizing language and become aware of its true significance. The narrator of the poem “Preguntas III” (Questions III) wonders whether the apple in the Garden of Eden wasn’t made out of vowels, thereby suggesting that speech is the most powerful human gift. In the poem “Desorden nocturno I” (Nocturnal disorder I), in La brújula desencadenada, words define all human interaction, whether vocal or not: Populated with words, like an anthill of vowels, your fingers, your hands are nothing more than texts in another language, a human text that the words in turn read and reread in the night, inventing you.27 Given Alejandro’s fascination with language, it is not surprising that whimsical titles, experimental typography, sounds, neologisms, and running together words all play a major part in his work. Although Ejercicio de serpientes, his first book, consists mainly of poems conventionally typeset flush against the left-hand margin, two poems signal an early interest in experimental layout. The first, coincidentally dedicated to Vicente Huidobro, is entitled “‘Aquí yace Susana cansada de pelear contra el olvido’” (“Here lies Susana, tired of struggling against oblivion”); its use of centred lines of varying length to physically shape the poem recalls the devices of concrete poetry that Huidobro used in his famous poem “Nipona.”28 The second poem, “La casa donde habitas” (The house where you live), positions certain words as though they were the steps and floors of a house. “Oh Canada …!” from Oilixes helizados, in which the narrator silently makes love to an unknown but extremely sensual woman (Canada?) within the warmth of her house, is a prose poem divided into two parts: the first, the description of their coupling, is written without

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capitals or punctuation, although with brief telegraphic spaces for pauses; the second, in which he leaves her house on foot and heads into the snow and wolves, is written as prose, respecting all typographical conventions. Several other poems in the same book are printed sideways in order to use extremely long lines. “Agonía de la cucaracha global” (Agony of the global cockroach) runs together the repeated word “olvido” (both “oblivion” and “I forget”) and then adds an r at the end, thereby providing the intertextual reading of “vi dolor” (“I have seen pain”). It is in the poem “Consideraciones antes de ponerse a escribir” (Considerations before beginning to write), however, from Habitante del décimo territorio, that Saravia creates his most complete concrete poem, positioning words on each side of the page, constructing ladders of words that cross the paper laterally and vertically, breaking words down into their constituent syllables, writing them backwards, and using at least six different kinds of typeface, all as part of a vibrant and anarchic love poem. Saravia’s taste for wordplay is especially evident in the titles of his poems and in his verbal mockery of authority. One of the poems of La brújula desencadenada, for example, is entitled “Traducción de un antiquísimo texto hallado en una caverna próxima al Mar Muerto, escrito por la apóstola Mariam durante la gobernación de Poncio Pilato y que actualmente se encuentra resguardado bajo siete llaves en Tel Aviv” (Translation of an extremely ancient text found in a cave near the Dead Sea, written by the Apostle Mariam during the governorship of Pontius Pilate and presently under the safekeeping of seven locks in Tel Aviv). In Rojo, amarillo y verde, Alfredo falls in love with the Kurdish woman Bolivia and then feels obliged to change the name of his homeland to “Volibia” (b and v have the same sound in Spanish), as a way of deconstructing the concept of the nation. Alfredo also uses comic deformations of military titles to poke fun at his late oppressors in the “glorious Volibian Armed Farces,” such as “Colononel Bánzer” and the “megalodipsomaniacal” “Gonorral García Meza,” whose cabinet included a certain Johnny Walker, and upon whom history should bestow “a crown of coca leaves.”29 Saravia’s particular mixture of playfulness and extreme seriousness, coupled with his interest in stylistic experimentation, indicates that his work will most probably keep evolving in unexpected ways in the future. His interest in Canada and Quebec and the unique linguistic perspective that he provides as a Bolivian bring new perspectives to a nation that is – like his – obsessed with language and identity.

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th e s h o r t s t o r y “ l a n o c h e d e m i g u e l ” Out there the dogs are afraid of people. As soon as they hear footsteps on the gravel or dust in the road, they run away as fast as they can without dropping whatever they have clutched in their jaws. Their eyes are full of fear, yet also of the hope that this time the footsteps coming toward them will signal something good, not of having a stone thrown at them, but perhaps of being offered a bit of bread by some wayfarer trying to elicit a propitious omen from the air, earth, or space around him. Against this straw-coloured backdrop of afternoon on the Altiplano, several pigs could be seen rooting among the freshly sown fields. The potatoes had been harvested a few days before, and there was an air of expectation on the sunburnt faces of the Indians of the community, who were now looking forward to the coming agricultural fair. On that day they would sell and ship off their loads of potatoes to the city in huge woven sacks as thick as phullus, or blankets, which they themselves had made and sewn shut with large needles and damp hemp cord. In the meantime, the pigs ran about among the recently harvested furrows, turning over the tightly packed earth with their hairy snouts, searching for the few potatoes that had been left in the ground because they were too small. From time to time a dog would bark. Miguel stood at the door of the only restaurant in the village, watching the order of the world and wondering why the pigs today seemed happier than the dogs. It must be because the pigs could eat the potatoes that were left, whereas the dogs couldn’t. At dawn tomorrow, Doña Cecilia was going to have three hogs slaughtered for the fair, and later on people would give the dogs the leftover pig bones from their plates. Even on clear days, there were always clouds over the peaks of the blue and red mountains that could be seen from the restaurant window rising high in the distance. If you listened carefully on certain sunny days in June, you could hear the deep, almost silent hum that came from those mountain ranges, as if immense and benevolent forces lay resting beneath the far-away blue haze; as if the mountains were sleeping in a vast dream, and you were hearing the magnetic rhythm of their powerful breathing that altered the flight of birds. A rectangular piece of wood nailed to the door of the building announced “Restaurante Calamarca” in peeling red letters that seemed to have once been tentatively traced by paint-covered fingers,

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A cold, dry wind blew across the Altiplano at this hour of the evening, as it had for centuries, and the customers wore woolen lluchu caps beneath their felt hats; most of their hats were discoloured, although a few had been well cared-for and looked as if they had spent their days asleep under plastic covers in closets rather than outside. The women, wide-framed and dark-skinned, with taut, shining cheeks, wore austere brown and ochre-coloured blankets that blended with the colours of the landscape. There were also stoutly built mestizo girls eating steaming platefuls of potatoes and lamb, seated tightly four in a row on rustic benches at tables covered with cloths smuggled in from Yunguyo long ago. At the foot of each table lay a few grey-whiskered dogs with their heads resting on their front paws and their eyes raised to see if any bones might fall their way.

 Miguel was Doña Cecilia’s serving-boy. One day a pair of very poor Indians had arrived at the restaurant, saying that they could no longer afford to take care of him or feed him, and begged Doña Cecilia to keep him for them until the day they could come back to reclaim him, assuring her that in the meantime the child would be of great help to her. They spoke softly in Aymara, sucking at the juice from the leaves they chewed, which flowed steadily from their denuded gums toward one side of their mouths; they seemed embarrassed and repeatedly called the proprietress Mamita and Mamay. When Doña Cecilia finally agreed, after looking kindly at the child who was crawling around in woolen diapers on the hard earth floor, the couple thanked her in unison – “Graishias, Mamay” – and left. The boy was now nine years old, and in all that time his parents had never returned to see him. Occasionally, customers at the restaurant would bring back stories from faraway villages of droughts so severe that the stones died of thirst, or of floods that caused landslides that buried whole towns, or of frosts that killed the crops, animals, and even people. Perhaps Miguel’s parents had already died or moved to the city. “What have you been up to, my boy?” asked a man who had just entered the restaurant. The child hadn’t seen him come in because he had been looking out the window, watching the movements of the pigs as he wondered which one would be slaughtered the following day. “I’ve known you ever since you were very young,” the stranger

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told him. Miguel began to feel afraid and searched for the eyes of Doña Cecilia, who was busy with two customers paying their bill; she was seated behind the wooden counter, on which were several packets of cigarettes of dark tobacco and a row of beer and soda bottles. The mestizo proprietress first looked at Miguel and then at the visitor; then, tilting her hat to one side, she went over to them. “How have you been?” she asked, with a certain mix of joy and calculation in her shy smile. “Fine, Doña Cecilia. How about yourself? I can see you’ve been selling good health,” the stranger replied. “Ay! Here we are, working hard as always. And you? What brings you out here?” “I’ve come for Miguel.” An even greater fear now began to spread over the boy, starting in his feet and climbing up under his skin and clothes, wafting across his back with a frozen breath; not knowing what else to do, he escaped into the kitchen. “But why do you want to take him away? The boy’s a big help and everyone likes him. He’s used to life with us. You’re going to make him feel bad; he’s going to be scared to death.” “He’s got to come back with me to the city. There he’ll go to school and learn how to read and write. How’s his Spanish?” “He can understand it, but sometimes you have to speak to him in Aymara.”

 The Indians turned their heads and continued to work as they saw Miguel come in; one of them greeted him with a brief smile, asking him in Aymara, “How are you, son?” Miguel didn’t know what to say and began to cry quietly. When they heard him, the men and women stopped peeling potatoes and sat watching him. There were twelve of them; their job was to keep the restaurant supplied with water, firewood, and sometimes kerosene, as well as to make adobe bricks, peel potatoes, cut up onions, plant oca, and occasionally play the zampoña, or pan pipes. Tomorrow they would also have the task of butchering the hogs for the fair, the day when Calamarca filled up with outsiders from other villages. There would even be people from the city, who came to buy part of the harvest – they were market middlemen – and sometimes to look for child servants, the sons or

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daughters of impoverished Indians whom the mestizos would take back with them to the city to work in their houses, where they would learn to speak Spanish. Miguel tried to explain the situation to the Indians more clearly by speaking in Aymara. “They want to take me to the city. A man came today and wants me to go back with him.” The Indians picked up their knives again and slowly returned to their peeling, placing the potatoes in a large pan full of water. “And do you want to go?” one of them asked. “No, no, no!” answered Miguel, shaking his head. “I don’t want to leave here.” “I wouldn’t want to either,” another of them said. “They speak a different language there and take advantage of you. Do you remember Sabino? Sabino Ajhuacho? He went back there after his military service. ‘Stinking Indian,’ they used to call him in the army; ‘Dumb Indian, fucking idiot.’ The others, the ones who’d been there a while, told him it was just in the army that they treated you like that, that the rest of the people were all right.” The other Indians and Miguel listened with their eyes fixed attentively on the man named Tomás Nina as he spoke of these things, while his broad, earth-coloured hands quietly continued picking up potatoes and peeling them by touch. Little by little the child drew nearer the circle of people until he was sitting among them. “When Sabino finished his time in the army,” Tomás continued, “he returned to the community to tell his parents that he didn’t want to work on the land anymore and that he was going to the city to make more money. His folks begged and cried for him to stay. He refused, and the day he left he got drunk and began to curse us all out in Spanish. He was bitter that none of us wanted to go to the city with him. We speak Aymara, and only a little Spanish. We’re Indians, but I guess he didn’t want to be one any longer. But then down in the city they treated him worse than in the army, almost as if the city were one big barracks full of quick-fisted sergeants. He still couldn’t speak their language very well, so the only work he could find was as a carrier in the market. Sometimes he toted stuff for Doña Cecilia, back when she bought up food here in the village and resold it in the city. Sabino always used to ask her about his parents. One day he found out that his mother had died and that the family house was in bad shape: the roof had half fallen in, there weren’t any relatives left to

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help with repairs, and he didn’t have enough money to do anything about it. After that he started drinking and his face got covered with scars because he kept getting into fights and the police – who were Indians themselves, but had forgotten they were – used to beat him till he was half-dead. “Tombos khenchas,” Sabino would yell at them: “Bad-luck cops.” Finally he got so he couldn’t carry things in the market any longer; people were scared just at the sight of him. He used to sit on a street corner and beg from passers-by and got skinnier and mangier until the priests locked him out of their churches. Even the dogs wouldn’t come near him because it seems he used to eat them; animals were frightened of him. He was found dead the day after the feast of San Juan last year. Doña Cecilia wanted to have him brought back to Calamarca, but they say some other beggars had already dragged him down to the river and left him there for the dogs to eat. To this day his old father still doesn’t know he’s dead. That’s why I don’t want to go to the city. An Indian who lives outside the community isn’t an Indian anymore; he’s like a lost dog that everyone kicks and throws stones at. That’s also why I’m not going to do my military service, even if everybody in the community gets mad and says I’m not a man. Why go there to get yourself kicked and insulted by people who don’t know how to work the earth, or even what moon to plant potatoes in, or what month the rains come?” “Migueeeel! Migueeeeel!” called Doña Cecilia. Tomás Nina and the other Indians turned toward the kitchen, where the call had come from, and then looked back at Miguel with a mixture of sadness and affection as the boy stood up and walked slowly toward the door. Tomás Nina gestured to the boy to go where they called him. Calixto Yujra, in an effort to comfort him, told him, “We’ll help you, son. You won’t have to go to the city.” “Come here, Miguel,” Doña Cecilia called. “This man wants to take you to the city.” “Aren’t I going to help you here, Mamita?” Miguel asked in Aymara. “Speak Spanish, child!” the mestizo woman answered, looking at the visitor with an apologetic air, trying to read the reactions in his eyes. “Would you like to have supper here?” she unexpectedly asked the stranger, making an effort to be friendly. He looked out the window at the sun slowly being engulfed in mountains and snow, and checked his watch. It was 6:30 p.m. He thought for a moment and then replied, “Yes, I would.”

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Doña Cecilia rose from the bench where they had been talking and disappeared through the door into the kitchen. “You haven’t told me yet what happened to your face, Miguel,” the visitor said. Miguel didn’t answer. “Don’t you want to say?” The child was on the verge of tears, but remembered the words of Calixto Yujra and felt reassured. “I burned myself,” he replied. “How?” “I was helping Doña Cecilia. She asked me to pass her a pot of hot soup and I fell with it and the soup spilled on my face.” “Does it still hurt?” “No, not now.” “Does she make you work hard?” “No, not much.” “Do you serve the customers breakfast?” “Yes.” “And lunch?” “Yeah, that too.” “And dinner?” “Yes, I also do that.” “So you’re in the restaurant all day long.” “I sleep here.” “Do you like that?” There was no answer. “Look, I know you don’t remember me. Doña Cecilia once worked as a cook in my house. That was when she was much younger and I was a boy like you. Once she came back to the city to sell produce and had you with her, and you were crying the whole time. ‘Ay! I don’t know what to do with that child!’ she said. So I told her that one day I’d come up here and get you and take you back to live with us. That day has come, Miguel. Now you’ll have to come home with me.” Miguel watched the man’s lips move as he spoke, glancing out the door of the restaurant now and again at the symphony of yellows, ochres, browns, purples, and blues that covered the evening landscape in Calamarca. The restaurant itself was made of adobe, plaster, wood, and corrugated iron. Intuitively, Miguel knew that even if he insulted this man with all the ugliest and angriest words in Aymara, it still wouldn’t be enough to keep him from carrying out his intention. “That’s how it is, Miguel. Now go get the things you’ll need, because we’ll be leaving after supper. You know, in the city you’ll be

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able to go to school and learn how to read and write and – who knows? – maybe even go to university some day, or become a skilled technician. That pays pretty well. Go on, now, and get ready.” The boy quickly went inside, and a dog lying under the table watched lazily as he disappeared behind the door that led to the kitchen, through which Doña Cecilia appeared a few seconds later, bringing in a plate of steaming thimpu, a lamb stew with white rice and boiled potatoes covered with an onion sauce seasoned with strong yellow chilies. The dog’s eyes shone and it raised its wet jowls as it smelled the wholesome aroma. “Help yourself,” Doña Cecilia invited her guest as she put the plate before him. A pleasant hunger made him moisten his lips as he picked up his knife and fork. The proprietress brought him a glass and a bottle of beer and then sat down across the table from him, cushioned by her springy petticoats. “Have you taken him to a doctor?” her guest asked. “For his face?” “Yes.” “Ay! Of course. But I’m forever after him not to play with fireworks.” “What?” “It was during the celebrations for the Day of San Juan that he hurt himself. He started playing with skyrockets and that’s how he burned his face so bad.” “When did he see the doctor?” “You think we’ve got a doctor here in Calamarca? There isn’t anybody like that here, aside from the callawaya, or healer, and even he sometimes asks me for money, though he never makes the Indians pay anything.” “In any case,” said the visitor, lowering his voice, “the city has plenty of good doctors. I’ll get him looked at; something must be able to be done about those scars.” “But the boy doesn’t want to go. What’ll you do?” “He’ll go with me – and understand later,” the visitor replied in a confidential tone. “Yes, but what about me? What am I going to do now without that boy? I’ll have to look for another one.” The visitor began to eat with relish. The knife and fork diligently peeled off chunks of meat, covering them with the onions cooked in chilies, and the man’s jaws worked with gusto on the white, floury potatoes from the first crop of the year.

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Meantime the child had come back into the kitchen; he stood watching the Indians peel potatoes, and told them in their language as he fought back his tears, that the man and Doña Cecilia had agreed on it: “He’s going to take me away, whether I want to go or not!”

 Night fell over the distant peaks, from which it spread its deep and subtle shadow over the Altiplano, where only sounds now gave things form. Miguel left the back door of the restaurant under a blueblack sky and went out to hide in the old church. Because he was a child, he knew little about the half-ruined building, which had been built at the end of the sixteenth century and repeatedly burned in succeeding Indian rebellions. The last battle there had been almost a hundred years before, when the central government had sent a detachment of soldiers to the village at the request of the local landowners, who probably felt uneasy about the way they treated their tenant farmers. Perhaps the Indian serfs had also decided they’d had enough, and had taken to the mountains with their guns and pututos, or cattle-horn battle trumpets, to combat the troops from the capital. At any rate, the soldiers were finally forced to retreat into the church, where they dug in amid prayers and entreaties to a god that had once long before just barely been able to cross the Atlantic in a fragile caravel. The Indians surrounded the building – which was made of adobe, straw, rock, and wood – and, despite the gunfire from inside and the casualties they received, they set fire to it, turning the church into an inferno. Even now people said that sometimes on the night wind you could still hear the cries of the soldiers as they burned alive. Before choosing a corner of the ruined building to spend the night, Miguel picked out two sheep to bring in with him. He convinced the animals to lie down on the ground and then stretched out between them in order to keep warm during the night.

 Doña Cecilia’s cheeks were turning red with impatience and frustration as she looked for the child. She came into the kitchen shouting and asked the Indians in Spanish if they knew where the boy was. Tomás Nina answered slowly in Aymara that no one had seen Miguel anywhere.

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“Migueeeeeeeeeel! Migueeeeeeeeel!” cried the woman again from the restaurant door out into the deserted street. All the customers had left. Seated on a bench with his feet up on a chair, the visitor looked up at the corrugated iron roof of the restaurant and at the sheets of flypaper that hung from the beams, and from which came an intermittent and feeble buzz of some insect that had become trapped on the sticky surface and now struggled there uselessly. The proprietress came over to him and forced a bit more worry into her voice as she said, “I really don’t know where he is.” “Now what am I going to do?” the visitor asked impatiently. “You can stay the night. I’ll give you a room, and in the morning I’m sure we’ll find the boy. Besides, tomorrow’s a holiday in Calamarca. Tonight we’re going to slaughter some pigs and tomorrow there’ll be feasting. I’ll make up a special dinner for you, and serve it along with another beer.” The woman’s voice filled with anxiety as she tried to convince the visitor to stay. “We’ll fix you a fricassee. The Indians will be working in the kitchen all night.” The traveller looked out the window. It was dark now and the light from the kerosene lamp on the rustic table softened their faces and left the outlines of their bodies in darkness. “You’ll sleep well here. In any case, there’s no way to get back to the city now. The last bus left a while ago.” A dog barked briefly in the distance. “You’re right,” said the man, rising to his feet and hiding his annoyance. He picked up a small travelling bag from the floor and looked at her expectantly. She rose and, turning to one side, went out onto the rectangular patio next to the kitchen and showed her guest to a room next to hers. “If you need anything, just knock on my door. I’ll be sleeping right here in the next room.” The visitor looked at her for a moment in the flickering light and told her he probably wouldn’t be needing anything more for the night. “I’m tired,” he said. The proprietress opened the door, gave him the lamp, and wished him good night. She disappeared into the darkness for an instant and then her silhouette emerged again against the light that came from the kitchen as she opened the door there.



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At two in the morning Doña Cecilia awoke in the midst of the Altiplano cold, startled by cries, whispering, and the sounds of a struggle, followed by the noise of footsteps and doors opening and closing in some part of the house quite close-by. Later, almost in her dreams, she heard the sharp squalling of a pig as it had its throat cut and was hung up to bleed in the hot steam of the kitchen. Her mind grew quiet as she remembered the preparations for the fair. The Indians must be continuing to work, and as she thought of that, she went back to sleep, letting her head sink back into the dark river of hair that during the day she kept twined in two long, shining braids. The holiday in Calamarca began in the restaurant at seven in the morning, when Doña Cecilia entered the kitchen and asked the Indians in Aymara if they had finished all the preparations. Tomás Nina replied that they had. The proprietress looked with satisfaction at the three pig’s heads lying on the table and smelled the odour of seasoned, spicy meat coming from the enormous pots that boiled above the great fire. “Have you cooked the potatoes? And the onions?” While she was asking such questions and listening to the Indians’ answers, Doña Cecilia bent over the pots, took off their lids, and tasted what they contained, squeezing the new and dried potatoes to see if they were well cooked. “Those pigs had a lot of meat,” she declared, “and they didn’t look that fat.” Suddenly, with an anguished gesture, she remembered the child. She turned to Tomás Nina. “Has Miguel been found?” she asked. Tomás motioned with his eyes toward a corner of the room where sacks of potatoes were stored. On top of them, on a small improvised bed in the midst of the steam and smoke of the kitchen, slept Miguel. “Ay, that kid! I couldn’t sleep all night because of him,” the proprietress exclaimed in a querulous tone. “Where was he hiding?” “In the old church,” said one of the Indians. “Ay, the boy’s hopeless: he’s always been like that!”

 It was now long after the cocks had crowed, and the light outside the window was strong enough to show people from outlying settlements

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arriving with their donkey trains laden with large bundles. There were also cattle and sheep that made the pebbles on the road clatter as they passed and raised small clouds of dust that dissipated quickly in the clear air. A few women were carrying hens that moved their heads restlessly, shaking their gelatinous crests. The Calamarca restaurant was still closed. Inside, in the kitchen, Doña Cecilia was hurriedly preparing coffee in an enamelled metal cup, which she placed on a small tray next to two bread rolls and a large slice of sheep’s cheese. She wiped her hands, picked up the tray, and was just going out the door on her way up to the visitor’s room when Tomás Nina told her in Spanish, “Don’t bother, señora; the young man left early this morning and said for you not to worry, that he’d come back for Miguel another day.” The proprietress remained motionless, amazed, trying to comprehend the situation. “What time did he leave?” she asked. “Before the cocks crowed, when it was still dark.” Doña Cecilia left the tray on a table and went out to see for herself. No one answered the door. She went into the room; the bed was made and there was no sign of her guest. Puzzled, she looked carefully at every detail of the simple place. Then, after a few moments, without having found an explanation for the visitor’s abrupt departure, she returned to the kitchen, picked up the breakfast tray, and sat down at a table in the dining room. There she sat, thoughtfully chewing the bread and cheese and taking sips now and then from the coffee. When she had finished, she called for the child. “Migueeel!” The boy’s small sunburned face appeared sleepily from behind the door. “Take this tray to the kitchen!” she told him.

 The holiday, with all its bustle and swarms of people, moved rapidly through the hours and the entrance to the restaurant. Plates came out of the kitchen, heaped high and steaming, and were sent back again with the bones picked clean. In the midst of the frenzy of bottles, voices, and laughter, someone would begin to sing a huayno. In the kitchen the Indian men and women had rolled up their sleeves and were busily washing plates and serving fresh potatoes, meat, dried

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chuño from years before, and fried onions and tomatoes; they cooked soups, made coffee, and washed the glasses used for beer and soft drinks. Doña Cecilia herself was sweating hard by about three in the afternoon. Two hours later, she was still adding up bills and making change. By seven o’clock, as night was falling, all there was left was a bit of rice, a few pieces of meat, quite a lot of cooked potatoes, and a bit of cheese and boiled corn. The customers had gone home, and the dogs that had spent the day prowling beneath the tables, guided by their noses, had all been thrown out. A few had managed to escape with pieces of bone and other leftovers in their jaws to savour at their leisure in the calm dusty lanes of the village. At eight o’clock Doña Cecilia closed the doors of the restaurant. Miguel, half-dead with fatigue, threw himself down full-length on one of the benches. When she found him lying there, Doña Cecilia was going to say something to him, but instead stood watching him for a moment and then went back into the kitchen, where she found the Indians sitting in different spots, all of them worn out, but with a certain relief in their faces as they slowly ate bowls of cheese and potatoes. “Why aren’t you eating the meat? Have some pork. Don’t you want to finish off what’s left?” “Yes, señora, but we’ve already had enough.” “When?” “Earlier in the day.”

8 The Urban Labyrinths of Yvonne América Truque

Yvonne Truque was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1955 and died in Montreal in 2001. Her mother, Nelly, was active in the Colombian trade union movement and was the first female member in the union of telephone workers. Her father, Carlos Arturo Truque, was a wellknown Afro-Colombian author who had grown up in the predominantly black and geographically isolated department of Chocó on the Pacific Coast. Carlos Truque was a prolific writer in his short life and an important figure not only in the black community of Colombia, but in Afro-Colombian (and Afro-Hispanic) literature as a whole.1 Many of his stories were about aspects of rural and urban AfroColombian life, and he had a deep interest in questions of social and economic justice; he also read widely in modern American literature, especially the works of Faulkner and Hemingway. Carlos Truque made his living as a journalist and translator from English, French, and Russian into Spanish, but also wrote poetry, plays, short stories, and film scripts, winning a number of literary awards. As a child, Yvonne remembers reciting the verses of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío for the family, and both she and her two sisters would later also be writers. The death of her versatile and energetic father from a stroke in his early forties devastated the family. Yvonne was only fifteen years old at the time. Four years later, Yvonne went to Spain to study sociology at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. The year was 1974, and the regime of the ailing General Francisco Franco was waning as the burst of social and artistic freedom known as “La Movida” erupted joyfully in Spanish society. It was in the same year that Yvonne began writing poetry, in a style that she herself qualifies as influenced by the work of the

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Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, in terms both of the epic, declamatory style of his Canto general and of his concern for social questions and Latin American unity. During her studies in Spain, Yvonne also became interested in the lyrical and politically committed poetry of the Spanish “Generation of 1927,” which included Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, and Federico García Lorca, and went on to discover the revolutionary León Felipe2 and the more meditative Blas de Otero.3 Yvonne left the university in her second year and spent the following three years travelling, living, and working – often accompanied by her sister Colombia – in various parts of Europe, including France, Switzerland, Holland, Germany, and Sweden. She studied French for a year in Geneva and also learned German; her reading at the time included German authors such as Hesse, Nietzsche, and Rilke, as well as Whitman (a great favourite in Latin America), the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and of course, her own brilliant compatriot and contemporary of her father Gabriel García Márquez. Upon her return to Colombia in 1979, after five years in Europe, Yvonne made two decisions. First, shocked by reentry into the chaotic living conditions in her country, she began to become increasingly involved in issues of social justice. Second, she decided that she wanted to be a writer. Her first public readings were principally with other women poets in Bogotá in the spring and fall of 1982, and an early edition of her first collection of poetry, Proyección de los silencios (Projecting silences), was brought out by Árbol de Tinta in Bogotá the following year. Her work was subsequently included in three Colombian anthologies of the 1980s: Poetas en abril, edited by Luz E. Sierra (1983); Poesía colombiana contemporánea, edited by José Luis DíazGranados (1984); and Momentos de poesía nueva colombiana, edited by Orlando Barbosa Rincón (1984). During this period, Yvonne obtained a job at the National Library in Bogotá and spent a great deal of time exploring the streets and lanes of her city, from the wealthiest to the poorest neighbourhoods. This interest in the social conditions illustrated by street life is reflected in early poems such as “Alguien duerme” (“Someone is Sleeping”), “De esa maraña que nos ha atrapado” (“This Labyrinth of Entrapment”), and “Contemplando el atardecer” (“Watching the Dusk”), all of which appeared in Proyección de los silencios and are at times reminiscent of the ambulatory reflections of Borges’s early poems about the suburbs of Buenos Aires or Neruda’s famous “Walking Around.” Yvonne’s reading at the time was principally of contemporary Colombian poets such

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as Aurelio Arturo,4 Porfirio Barba Jacob,5 and León de Greiff.6 Her two sisters, both of whom still live in Bogotá, were also beginning their literary careers at the time: Colombia was writing poetry and short stories, and she would go on to win the national short-story award from the Instituto Colombiano de Cultura in 1993 and to become editor of the bilingual (Spanish-French) literary review Vericuetos/Chemins scabreux,7 while Sonia was active as a literary critic and anthologist and would achieve some renown later on for her short stories. Meanwhile, however, Yvonne met a young Québécois printer named Jean Gauthier, who was working in a Canadian University Service Overseas (cuso) project to help set up a community printing service in a working-class barrio of Bogotá. Although she was more drawn to European than North American culture, Yvonne returned with Jean to Montreal in 1984 with their one-year-old daughter. Perhaps because of her years of travel in Europe, she quickly adapted to her new Québécois environment, polishing up her French and soon becoming active in the Latin American poetry scene that was just developing in Montreal at the time. In 1985 she and the Chilean poet Nelly Davis Vallejos organized a reading in French and Spanish at Janou St-Denis’s Place aux poètes to celebrate Latin American poetry in Quebec. Among the readers was the Chilean poet Alfredo Lavergne, and the event marked the first time that Latin American writers had read in Place aux poètes. Claude Charron, Paul Chamberland, and other Québécois poets interested in Latin American culture were in the audience. Later Yvonne was active in the program Actualidades Literarias de Latinoamérica on Radio Centre-ville. In 1988, while working with the Carrefour Latino-Américain (clam), she was the principal organizer of the largest Spanish-speaking poetry event ever presented in Montreal, La Présence d’une autre Amérique, which featured readings by eleven Latin American poets of Quebec as well as by several Québécois writers with an affinity with Latin American writing, including Paul Chamberland, Claude Beausoleil, and Janou St-Denis. The poems from this series of readings, which was spread out over three evenings, were later published by Les Éditions de la Naine Blanche in La présence d’une autre Amérique, the first Frenchlanguage anthology of Latino-Québécois writers. Yvonne continued to write in Montreal, publishing an expanded, bilingual edition of Proyección de los silencios in 1986 and a second bilingual collection of poems, Retratos de sombras y Perfiles inconclusos/Portraits d’ombres et Profils inachevés (Portraits of shadows and unfinished

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profiles), in 1991. Both of these books were brought out by the Centre d’études et de diffusion des Amériques hispanophones (cédah), a Spanish-language publishing firm that she and her husband founded in the mid-1980s and that eventually produced over fifteen titles by Latino-Québécois authors, making it the largest publisher of its kind in Quebec. She also became interested in the work of contemporary Quebec poets of a lyrical, bohemian, and politically involved tendency, including André Leclerc, Gilbert Langevin, Dania Maisonneuve, Claude Charron, and Janou St-Denis.8 Her poetry received first prize from Les Éditions Humanitas in Montreal in 1987, and she was one of the first Latino-Québécois authors to be invited to read at the Salon du livre de l’Outaouais in Hull. Yvonne was also active in journalism and published lengthy articles in the Latin American and Spanish-speaking press on such Canadian events as the siege at Oka in 1990.9 Her work, as well as that of other prominent Colombian artists of Montreal, such as the filmmaker Germán Gutiérrez, was the subject of an extensive article in the prestigious Bogotá daily El Tiempo in 1995.10 Ironically, it was after her arrival in Montreal that Yvonne became increasingly aware of her Afro-Colombian origins, recalling songs of the Chocó region, where her father had been raised, and following up on her interest in African music, especially in the West African drums, on which she often accompanied herself in her poetry readings. Simultaneously, Afro-American scholars and authors, especially from the United States, began to invite her to attend seminars, conferences, and readings in the US. The September 1987 issue of AfroHispanic Review, published at the University of Missouri, was entirely devoted to the life and work of her father;11 Yvonne wrote the introduction and included a moving poem dedicated to Carlos Truque, both as poet and father. Critical writing has also appeared in the United States on Yvonne’s own work, especially in Afro-American Studies programs.12 Yvonne finished a ba degree in social work at the Université du Québec à Montreal (uqam) in 2000. She subsequently worked with Le Front commun des personnes assistées sociales du Québec, for whom she wrote an exhaustive study of the long-term effects of economic marginalization, cuts in social welfare, and institutionalized poverty, entitled Québec: Le mensonge de la solidarité sociale et les pièges de la pauvreté and published a few months before her death in May 2001. Both of Yvonne’s published collections of poems are written almost exclusively from a Colombian perspective and include only a few

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poems – such as poem VII from Portraits d’ombres, which is dedicated to her daughter – that refer to Quebec or Canada. Toward the end of the 1990s, however, after having spent more than a decade in Canada, northern imagery began to appear increasingly in her work. She was aware of the fact that Quebec culture now had a more immediate impact upon her life than did that of Colombia, but although she felt an integral part of Quebec reality, her identity was fundamentally Colombian. Her political activism, for example, extended to social justice issues in both Quebec and Colombia. She was painfully aware, however, of the magnitude of the ever-worsening crisis in Colombian society and worked tirelessly to diffuse information about the political situation there and the human suffering that it was causing, as well as to organize and coordinate an international response to it. Interestingly, although she wrote her sociological and political analyses of problems affecting Quebec in fluent French, she preferred to write creatively almost exclusively in Spanish. Even though she and her translator-printer husband eventually divorced, she decided to stay on permanently in Quebec with her daughter. Moreover, her courses in social work stimulated her interest in prose writing and in testimonial literature, which is an increasingly important genre in Latin American letters. The themes of Yvonne’s work retain a surprising consistency throughout her work. Thematic constants include the struggle for self-realization, both on a personal level and as a woman; the implacable exploitation and subjugation of one human being by another in modern civilization; a dogged, insistent belief in the power of love and the human spirit; the pain, longing, and rage of lost love; the regenerative force of Nature – especially symbolized by maternal and female forces – for those who are lost and isolated within the labyrinthine urban environment; and an indomitable belief in the human ability to build a better future. Her earliest collection of poems is the unpublished manuscript “Hojas de sol y Recorriendo la distancia” (Leaves of sun and travelling the distance), which has been translated into French by the Quebec poet Jean-Pierre Pelletier and is currently awaiting publication. The work establishes Yvonne’s taste for grouping her work in two sections of poems, which she also did in her second published collection, Retratos de sombras y Perfiles inconclusos. The poems of “Hojas de sol y Recorriendo la distancia,” dated by the author between 1977 and 1985, were written primarily in Bogotá, although the last few were composed after her arrival in Montreal. The

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introspective quality and search for the inner self that characterize her work are already present in the very first poem, “De nuevo aquí” (Here again), written when the author was twenty-two years old, which acknowledges and laments the speaker’s inability to ever truly know another person – even a lover. The speaker is an urban wanderer – a characteristic persona in all of Yvonne’s work – searching the nighttime city for lost love and the daytime world for transcendence. The motif of the road to one’s individual destiny, which is both inherently unknowable and already accomplished if one accepts the simultaneity of time, is also present – and is, of course, made even more poignant by Yvonne’s early death so far from her native city. … Nothing is forbidden Every dream is a pore in someone’s skin Every skin an endless road to travel over Every being carries its own tragedy hidden Behind a clear gaze Open onto the future13 There is also an early interest in typographical experimentation and a formal playfulness in the work, both in whimsical typesettings of words such as “universe” in the poem “Ser” and in the use of capital letters, different fonts, and short prose poems. Interestingly, the only poem that speaks of an Afro-Colombian heritage is a eulogy to Candelario Obeso and his liberation of the Afro-Latino word and rhythm in the world. The final poems in the collection, written in Montreal, speak increasingly of loneliness and isolation. Although Yvonne’s imagery has also had a strong undercurrent of key, recurring motifs, different patterns of images have predominated at various conjunctures in her work. Her first book, Proyección de los silencios, is dominated by surreal images of the city (Bogotá) captured while wandering the streets on foot, images of light and fulfilment in the midst of darkness and barrenness and especially of love, innocence, and intimacy destroyed by ugliness and degradation. In the short poem “Y qué bella ha sido …” (And how beautiful it has been), for instance, the narrator returns from a night of “dreams, digressions, and longings” to “the painful emptiness of this / garbage – dump city.” In “This Labyrinth of Entrapment,” a description of a nighttime stroll through streets filled with abandoned children, homeless beggars, prostitutes, soldiers, and criminals ends with the

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morning headline “‘new queen chosen for coffee festival.’“14 The city becomes a “World jail/Jail world” in “Hasta desgarrarme” (To even rip myself apart); the narrator’s voice in “Debatiéndome en el mundo” (Struggling in the world) is at first speechless with pain and then “Explodes in me, completely in silence” as she gropes along in the darkness in search of “The clarity that I foretell / [that] comes rising up from within me.”15 This conflict between the word and silence, between darkness and clarity, is resolved in the final poem of the collection, “Proyección de los silencios,” in which human touch and voices break through walls of silence into a world of light and sound. Her second collection of poems, Retratos de sombras y Perfiles inconclusos/Portraits d’ombres et Profils inachevés, however, is more directly politicized and adds a new theme to her repertoire: that of elegy, whether for those fallen in the struggle for a more just society, as in her untitled poem in the section “Retratos de sombras” (Portraits of shadows) on the massacre at the National University in Bogotá, or simply for those who have been overcome and crushed by natural forces, as in poem II of the section “Perfiles inconclusos” (Unfinished profiles), which is dedicated to the survivors of the mudslide that wiped out most of the citizens of Armero, Colombia, after a volcanic eruption in 1985. In the first section, “Retratos de sombras,” the slightly unfocused alienation of the initial poems gives way to a more identifiable enemy: the power-wielding oligarchy, as well as those who support them (neocolonial and multinational interests) and those who carry out their orders (the police and the military). The narrator’s world becomes a battleground in which forces for constructive change are systematically blocked or eliminated by those of established power, and the predominant tone is one of anger. As in Proyección de los silencios, however, hope is still possible, although it is now transformed into a more utopian vision of a just, sharing society of brother- and sisterhood that will almost magically appear in the future. The second section of the book, “Perfiles inconclusos,” changes imagery once again. Here, dream and world, altruism and reality, are locked in a more universal combat, once again resulting in an apotheosis, this time in the form of butterflies of harmony and idealism that take flight along with the narrator and the reader in the final poem toward “A free-fall that awaits us tomorrow.”16 Images of flight and colour predominate as the spirit liberates itself from gravity and darkness.

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In the later, unpublished poems of “En mi marcha y otros poemas” (On my way forward and other poems, 1987), Yvonne continued to speak of the endless struggle between the idealism of love and community and the ruthless Machiavellian logic of power, as well as of how the urban environment has progressively alienated the human spirit: “a sense of estrangement exacerbated by the urban experience,” as the Afro-American scholar Marvin A. Lewis noted about her work.17 In poems such as “Itinerario al eclipse” (Itinerary to an eclipse), however, the inherent human violence of the Colombian urban landscape has been replaced with a more dehumanized, roboticized, automated destructiveness wrought on the human psyche and body by the cities of the exploiter nations of the North. The imagery remains consistent with that of her two published works, especially in its dichotomy between light, freedom, and the natural world, on the one hand, and darkness, emptiness, and the city, on the other. Now, however, bright colours, nostalgia for her tropical homeland, and the natural effects of springtime have been added to her repertoire of positively charged references, while northern images of greyness, numbness, and stasis are associated with those of the city. The tone of these poems is one of resignation, isolation, and exile. Political struggle is still a touchstone, but it has become a responsibility that is taken on gravely, existentially, with far less hope of a positive outcome than in her earlier work, although the possibility of joy and wholeness is still there; moreover, references to building some future community have completely disappeared. The integration of world and ideal is now to be achieved on a more personal basis, and although society as a whole will be involved, no clear vision of a common bond of wholeness is enunciated. There is a feeling of hopelessness in the face of institutionalized destructiveness, for which human sympathy and understanding may offer some consolation. In the poem “La misma estrella” (The same star), the speaker is visited in her dreams by an impoverished child, a victim of wars of counterinsurgency who searches for her warmth and protection, clutching at her breasts with “diminutive hands.”18 Yvonne’s last poems, grouped together in the unpublished manuscript “Los olvidados en la tierra” (The forgotten of the earth) and dated 1991 to 1995, shift away from themes of political struggle and isolation and offer a more metaphysical commentary on existence, in which acceptance of duality and ambiguity leads to a serenity rarely seen since her first poems written twenty years earlier in Bogotá. The

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imagery has been refined into binary combinations of darkness and light, violence and peace, cold and heat, that frequently either blend via a centring process or find an equilibrium. Formally, there have also been changes. Almost all are prose poems, and the book bears the subtitle “(Prosemas),” a word invented by Julio Cortázar to describe his own prose poems – or poeticized prose: an anagram combining poema with prosa.19 Some of these reflections consist of no more than two lines and are almost maxims; others recount brief stories and function more as minificciones; one is an experiment in trilingualism; some, such as “Ser mujer y escribir” (To be a woman and write), use capital letters for the major nouns and even verbs; two are dedicated to Afro-Colombian themes. Almost all of them have a tranquil – even assured – faith in the future of humanity that is quite surprising, coming as it does on the heels of the despair in “En mi marcha.” Although she continued to write up to the end of her life, Yvonne gradually began to play a less prominent role in Latino-Québécois literary activities, at the same time as she put ever more energy into her political activism. With the death of Janou St-Denis in 2000, the Place aux poètes readings gradually faded out, after a quarter-century of events. cédah, the publishing concern that she founded with Jean Gauthier, also became inactive. After the effervescence of Hispanic literary activity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yvonne chose to withdraw somewhat from literary socializing and to concentrate on her career in social work and on raising her daughter. At the same time, however, she rediscovered long-time interests in music and drawing that she began integrating into performance recitals. Her poetic production stands out as one of the most significant in LatinoCanadian letters, especially within the area of female writers, and she is considered by other Latino-Québécois writers to be one of the pioneers in the development of Spanish-speaking writing in Quebec.

tw o p o e m s f r o m p r o y e c c i ó n d e l o s s i l e n c i o s / projection des silences

someone is sleeping Moon rolling cautiously

Yvonne América Truque

Embracing flicker of lights Grey satin, the rain has stopped My street is gleaming again As I smoke a cigarette far-off silences surround me perhaps detecting an unexpected event Wind battering fragile windowpanes Fine brush of wind mute brush painting in silence coagulating words with no meaning Today I don’t know how to say anything it’s midnight and somewhere a child is wandering in silence walking aimlessly through his loneliness while in great houses the executioners sleep peacefully

wa t c h i n g t h e d u s k To keep warm as I advance down this glacial street I walk as if I were sound or incandescent grimace: this is how I must move to discover my city.

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Living at the crossroads of the void gnawed by routine, with fear and lies surrounding the senses, this is what it means to inhabit my city. Vultures descend beaks twisted with rage; vultures devouring vultures, even the rats scurry away in fear. Today we are alone living together in the entrails of an octopus that reaches out furious tentacles. Today we are alone, silencing silence. Evening is slowly falling over the neon lights that now start blinking on.

six poems from retratos de sombras y perfiles inconclusos/ portraits d’ombres et profils inachevés From the first section, “Retratos de sombras” We have been searching ever since the beginning And we will search until the end of time For the feeling of belonging to ourselves The imperative need to look into the mirror of years To see we are our own masters And within the wholeness of All Direct our destiny with the firmness of light And not in doubt and fear We have also been searching For far-off happiness, remote Indefinable when faced with the truth of the moment

Yvonne América Truque

In which we are broken fragments inside We are witnessing a forced orphaning Vertigo, fear, society offers Desolate delights for forgetfulness Stereo melodies, repeated rhythms There is no promised land, nor paradise No homeland to cling to After the long voyage And a seedless return Anger unites with nostalgia For what might have been but in which so many failed I walk past ruins, rubble, muddy corpses My people are being murdered and I call out to them We are spectres projected onto oblivion A long exile toward the void, an agony alive Wisps of straw scattered across a new sky Shipwrecked victims escaping again from yesterday Our pain transformed into open sores And yet steadily advancing toward the centre Toward the wound that never heals The longing for what could be but which others oppose From the second section, “Perfiles inconclusos” VI Ah no! No! No! No! This time I will not give you the pleasure of drinking my blood drop by drop Nor of excising my joy like a boil Nor of playing with my dreams Or appropriating my words No! No! No! No! This time

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I am moulding wings of greater strength and none of you shall hold me back from this final flight VII for my daughter Isabelle For you, I have just ended my world in yours and I skilfully separate a past full of solitudes both voluntary and imposed I deliberately destroy my world For you, I will forever invent whatever moon you desire and put it in your hands the fulfilment of games places all our own For you, my love is different though as tomorrows and years pass and distance approaches in your illusion of creating yourself you may possibly even hate me

tw o u n p u b l i s h e d p o e m s

to be a woman and write … To be a woman and write is to be a heroine who’s escaped being burned at the stake. It is being an alchemist who transforms and reveals arcane territories in a ritual of words. To be a woman and write is to awake from the spell of a thousandyear hex, when consequential words are invoked that remind us of the meaning of life and return it to us.

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To be a woman and write is to gain access to knowledge of the occult at each step in life. It is being the messenger who rebuilds the cognitive bridge that reason has destroyed. To be a woman and write is to stop existing in order to Live. It’s Living in order to Learn. It’s Learning in order to Know. It’s Knowing in order to Reveal. It’s Revealing in order to Transform. To be a woman and write is not easy and is still treated with reproach and scorn. Meanwhile, the word continues to be the geography bestowed upon a hindered wisdom. It is exercising a Power that has been usurped from us for centuries.

illegal entry … I’ve opened all the windows and doors and now I’m waiting for you to come. You can enter illegally and I won’t accuse you or point you out, because you won’t be committing a serious offence. You can ring the doorbell and say you’re here, though I already know who you are. You can go from one end to the other without my feeling you. You’ll be like the breeze invading me and breathing me in the moments in which I’ll be nothing but the awareness of the unlimited possibilities we’re offered. I’ve opened the doors and windows because I want you to come in. I want you to be the wind blowing freely through my spaces and caressing me at every step. I want you like the wind, fluid in its freedom, and I want to be like the awareness of that air we breathe – necessary, indispensable, like love.

9 The Satirical Vision of Pablo Urbanyi

Although he currently lives in Ottawa, Pablo Urbanyi is one of the most active writers of satirical fiction in Argentina today. Since the appearance of his first collection of short stories, Noche de revolucionarios (Night of the revolutionaries), in Buenos Aires in 1972, he has written a total of nine other works – six novels and two other collections of short stories – two of which have been published in Ottawa and the rest in Buenos Aires. Urbanyi’s work has achieved considerable acclaim in Argentina, where it is regularly and enthusiastically reviewed in the Argentine press. His novel Silver, a satirical fantasy based on the memoirs of a preternaturally intelligent gorilla raised in California, was runner-up for the prestigious Planeta Award in Argentina in 1993. Throughout his literary production, which has included portraits of drawing-room guerrillas, bumbling detectives, obsessive academics, unscrupulous physicians, pathological philanthropists, fascistic entertainers, frustrated writers, and other characters, Urbanyi has retained a remarkably consistent satirical style and ability to touch on basic societal and existential problems in a comical way. Within Argentine literature, his work is part of a long satirical tradition that began in the gauchesca era with authors such as Estanislao del Campo1 and that, in the twentieth century, has included Leopoldo Lugones,2 Leopoldo Marechal,3 and Julio Cortázar. Pablo was born in Hungary in 1939 and lived there throughout the Second World War, during which time his father fought in the Hungarian resistance movement. After the war, the family wanted to emigrate and had the choice between Argentina, Australia, or Canada. His father, thinking that English would be difficult to learn, opted for Argentina, and in 1949 the family settled in Longchamps, a town in the

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pampas just south of Buenos Aires, where his father eventually set up a toy factory. Although he continued to speak Hungarian with his parents, Pablo has always felt himself to be thoroughly Argentinian. He has maintained his contacts with Hungary, however, and several of his works have been translated into Hungarian and published there. Irony has always been part of Urbanyi’s life. The Hungarian village where he was born was ceded to Czechoslovakia after the war, so his first years of schooling were in the Czech and Slovak languages. In Argentina, despite once being thrown out of school for misbehaviour, he became interested in literature and started writing stories in the sixth grade. The poet Roberto Juarroz,4 who was the librarian at his high school, encouraged him in his reading of a variety of authors, from the French encyclopédistes (Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau) and existentialists (Sarte, Camus, Genet, and Girardot) to the Russian classics (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Andreyev) and writers of modern Buenos Aires (Roberto Arlt). He attended the University of Buenos Aires for five years, enrolling successively in medicine, psychology, and physics, but finally dropped out to get married and become a carpet salesman and desultory writer of fiction. In the mid-1960s Urbanyi and his family moved to the mountain resort town of Bariloche, in the Argentine Andes, where Pablo worked as a wool merchant and travel agent before opening up a small nightclub. They later returned to Buenos Aires, where he continued with odd jobs of various sorts and gave up writing altogether, all the while devoting himself to reading voluminously in world literature. The “Boom” in Latin American literature was on, and Pablo read the works of Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as the darkly humorous Polish Argentine writer Witold Gombrowicz.5 In Spanish classical literature, he was drawn especially to Don Quixote (which he says he has read at least ten times)6 and Lazarillo de Tormes (the anonymously written picaresque adventures of a young boy who serves as a blind man’s guide through the cities of imperial Spain),7 and in world literature, to the works of Swift, Balzac, Gogol, Poe, Prévert, Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Schweik),8 and Faulkner. Urbanyi, like many Argentines, was also interested in science fiction, particularly in the novels of Olaf Stapleton, Philip Dick, and Ray Bradbury. In 1968, at age twenty-nine, Pablo decided that his real vocation was writing, and he again returned to the University of Buenos Aires, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy. During

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his studies, he put together his first volume of short stories, Noche de revolucionarios, which offered a mordant, comical portrait of various sectors of Argentine society in disintegration. Urbanyi’s talent for pinpointing humorous contradictions in human behaviour, whether among envious suburban neighbours, upwardly mobile engineering students, or Lothario leftists, was already evident, and the book enjoyed a generally warm reception in the press and a high level of popularity with the reading public. The work also reflects Urbanyi’s continual experimentation with point of view, which has been a constant in his fiction. The first piece, “Me matan si no trabajo y si trabajo me matan” (They kill me if I don’t work and if I do work they kill me too),9 which is not written in an ironic tone, is the story of a semipoliticized artist who works in a factory and is kidnapped and murdered by a death squad. The character himself never appears; instead, the story is told from the multiple points of view of those who knew or were involved with him. The story “Mario … ¿Dónde te metiste?” (Mario, where have you gotten to?) is composed of one half of a dialogue, that of a loud-mouthed and rebellious critic of the Argentine military who is holding forth to an audience of passengers on a bus in a traffic jam and is eventually hauled away by the military, while his friend Mario looks on. Aside from using such innovative narrative techniques, Urbanyi also shows his ear for language, capturing the intonation and lilt of Porteño speech and using the vocabulary of Lunfardo, the street slang of the Río de la Plata area, with great naturalness and assurance. Two years later, in 1974, Urbanyi published Un revólver para Mack (A revolver for Mack), a detective novel that simultaneously parodies and fulfils the rules of the genre, while at the same time pillorying the corruption and egotism that were undermining Argentine society. The novel was widely noted in the Argentine press, including enthusiastic reviews in La Opinión and Clarín, two of the capital’s largest dailies, and was for a while the second-best-selling work of fiction in Clarín’s weekly ratings (Borges’s Prólogos was fourth).10 The protagonist of the novel is one Gerardo Romero, an ex-police officer who has set himself up as a private detective under the name “Mack Hopkins,” which he believes has a more Raymond Chandler ring to it. Gerardo is a powerfully built, big-hearted loner, fond of large-caliber weapons and platinum blondes, a man for whom friendship, loyalty, and honesty are more powerful motivating forces than money and power; Urbanyi himself has called him a “detective Quixote.”11 He

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lands the job of his dreams, all expenses paid, when an underworld boss sends him out to Bariloche and then to Mar del Plata, on the seacoast, in a prolonged chase of a sinister pornographer and drug trafficker who always manages to elude him. Only later does Mack learn that he has been set up, that the whole job has been a ruse to lure him away from Buenos Aires while the gangsters get rid of his best friend, a fellow private detective who has become a rival drug dealer. In the end, despite his naiveté, incompetence, clumsiness, and propensity for falling into traps, Mack manages to wreak his revenge. In a subsequent short story, “Concurso” (Competition), Urbanyi resurrected Mack to deal with police and military abuses, accompanied by two friends, the Astrologer and the Philosopher, who seem to be continuations of characters from Roberto Arlt’s famous novel of the 1930s, Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen). Following these popular successes as a writer, Urbanyi was hired as an editor for the cultural supplement of La Opinión, at the time the leading centre-left newspaper in Buenos Aires. After the military coup against Isabel Perón in 1976, however, the paper was placed under government control. A few years later, its editor, Jacobo Timerman, was kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured by an anonymous paramilitary death squad, and the newspaper was closed.12 Urbanyi, however, did not wait for Timerman’s disappearance: in 1977 he and his family left for Canada, the only country in which his wife, a pharmacologist, could find work, and settled in Ottawa. Emigration to Canada was a shock to Urbanyi: now nearing forty, increasingly successful as a journalist, and already popular as a writer, he found himself parachuting down into a country that was virtually unknown to him and to which, if not for the political chaos in Argentina, he had never dreamed of immigrating. Given the vast cultural and linguistic differences between Buenos Aires and Ottawa, he decided to forgo his journalism career and make a living teaching Spanish; within a year he was on the part-time faculty at the University of Ottawa. He also plunged ahead with his writing, undeterred by the isolation of working alone in Spanish in Canada; as time has gone by, in fact, his relative detachment from his surroundings has in some ways left him freer to focus more intensively on his literary vocation. By 1980, just two years after his arrival in Canada, Pablo had already finished a new novel, En ninguna parte (The Nowhere Idea), a sophisticated, humorous, satirical portrait of life in a Canadian university. The book was published in Argentina by Editorial Belgrano in 1981 and

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was translated into English by University of Ottawa professor Nigel Dennis and published by Williams-Wallace in 1982. A French edition, translated by Jean Potvin under the title L’idée fixe, was published by vlb Éditeur in its Collection latino-américaine in 1988. En ninguna parte marks another major thematic and stylistic shift in Urbanyi’s writing, although the ironic wit and sarcastic eye of the narrator remain constant. To begin with, the novel is a postmodernistic parody of academic postmodernism: the narrator is an Argentine lecturer in Spanish at a university in Ottawa who is working on a thesis on nineteenth-century Anglo-Argentine writer W.H. Hudson13 but who has decided to set down the “true” account of an extraordinary event that has occurred in his department; he then voluminously annotates his own text in a series of rambling asides on everything from the minutiae of the story itself to feminism and Spanish literature and the principal characteristics of North American society; there are also periodic notes by the editor of the book, as well as others by the proofreader and “a reader.” One is reminded of the playful and skilful use of annotated commentary in the novel Trou de mémoire, by Hubert Aquin.14 Added to this multilevelled interpretative flux, in which the narrator is both chronicler and critic, is the fact that most of the characters in the book earn their livelihoods from literature and make constant literary references and asides. The academic world is systematically deflated through the distancing effect of referring to all the university professors involved solely by their departmental nicknames, a distinction that “gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement,” which Henri Bergson considered an essential element of the comic.15 The plot of the novel revolves around a department rivalry. Two Spanish professors, Shorty and Aztec Mask, at an unnamed university in Ottawa (a footnote specifies that there are only two universities in the city, but that the author must maintain their anonymity) are initially discovered fighting in a university corridor, each claiming that the other one has stolen an unspecified brilliant idea from him. Although neither of them ever reveals exactly what the breakthrough idea really is, their dispute eventually rocks the department and the legal system and ends up before the Supreme Court. The court decides to accept the decision of any magistrate in Canada who will hear their case: only one such offer is made, by a judge named William Wilson (a bow to the responsible side of the doppelgänger character of the same name in a tale by Edgar Allan Poe), who resides in

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the village of Erewhon (population 2.5), to be found at an exact distance of ninety-nine miles west of Ottawa. A convoy of vehicles sets out from the department for the village. The hamlet of Erewhon is, of course, a reference to Samuel Butler’s classic utopian satire, originally published in 1872,16 in which a young emigrant to New Zealand discovers the hidden land of Erewhon (“Nowhere”), populated by an (ostensibly) eminently sensible, anti-mechanical, and conformist people, who train their youth at colleges of unreason. Judge William Wilson is himself a leftover from a saner, slower, more peaceful age that eventually ended when the first bank opened in town. He offers the litigants a choice: either they accept settlement by a toss of the coin, or they give up their lawsuits and agree that the idea never be revealed to anyone. The two opt for the latter solution, and the expedition of Spanish-speaking academics returns to Ottawa. Beyond its narrative structure, the novel and its annotations give Urbanyi the opportunity to lampoon North American society and the academic world in much the same way that he did the world of Argentine politics and attitudes in his earlier work, especially Noche de revolucionarios. Yet behind the satire and acerbic observations of the narrator, the novel is a serious examination of societal and personal values. One Argentine critic has called it “an allegory of the loss of meaning in life and of the consequent superficiality within which modern man must struggle … The author seems to suggest that the road to knowledge can only be traversed by a few, … [o]nly those who dare to renounce all the intellectual and material securities the world offers.”17 It is on the level of society as a whole that the literary allusions to Poe and Butler reveal their true meanings. William Wilson’s understanding and good-natured probity stand in sharp contrast to the overwhelming frivolity of the academics who appear before him in the Erewhon courthouse, just as the double of the Poe story was forever ready to denounce the decadence and mendaciousness of the wastrel William Wilson himself. Moreover, Wilson’s sentence, which includes a brief history of Erewhon, parallels Butler’s text in its denunciation of money, power, and the “rational” systems of thought that support them. The settlement of Erewhon, like Butler’s imagined land, exists beyond the limits of known reality, but whereas Butler’s pseudo-utopian vision was of an entire functioning society, Urbanyi’s Erewhon is a village in its last stage of decomposition, with a population of the judge, his assistant, and a horse (the 0.5 of the 2.5). Clearly, despite the transparent and ridiculous vacuity of the modern world

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(symbolized by the academy), the impulse to a more meaningful and humane society has died down to the merest flicker. Urbanyi’s next published works were two collections of short stories, De todo un poco, de nada mucho (A bit of everything, but not much of anything), published in Buenos Aires by Editorial Legasa in 1987, and Nacer de nuevo (Born again), brought out by Girol Books in Ottawa in 1992.18 Both of these collections of short stories are in a lighter, less literary vein than En ninguna parte and bring the author’s perennial wit to bear on North American society, specifically in the debunking of a certain unthinking and (often falsely) ingenuous positivism that underlies popular culture north of the Río Grande. Structurally, Urbanyi continues to experiment with voice and narrative construct in unexpected and amusing ways. Two of the texts of De todo un poco, de nada mucho are ostensibly papers on different topics, delivered to imaginary professional organizations in Argentina and Canada; the others are stories of varying length that are part of a “Curso Superior de Español Moderno,” consisting of listening exercises for students of Spanish as a second language, and come complete with comprehension questions at the end. The texts of Nacer de nuevo also include a variety of structural devices, including a series of letters written by a certain “Pablo” (who may or may not be the author) to “Alberto,” a friend in Latin America, describing and reflecting on a number of occurrences and anecdotes of life in North America. The book also contains short stories, narrated in either the first or third person; lists of instructions for carrying out certain technical operations; frame-by-frame descriptions of television talk shows; two playlets; and a trilogy of stories in which “Pablo” returns to make a mockery of several formal cultural events organized in Ottawa by the Argentine Embassy. De todo un poco, de nada mucho is, as its title suggests, the more playful of the two works and concentrates more on the United States. The lead “paper” (including two coffee breaks) is a detailed analysis of a certain historic event in the United States, given by an expatriate Argentine, Pedro Urbano, at an unspecified conference in Argentina. The event in question is the progressive constipation of the American nation, due to an imbalance in the supply and demand of commercial laxatives. This scatological catastrophe, which tests the eternal optimism and fibre of the nation, is the basis for a satirical deconstruction of everything American, from the obsession with statistics to the hunt for those responsible by the fbi and cia to the costly high-tech

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surgical interventions proposed as solutions by the medical community. Pedro’s wife, however, comments to him that the problem never really existed for her in Argentina, where “Just having a police officer look at me in the street was enough to make me have to duck into the first café I came across.”19 The second section of De todo un poco, de nada mucho, consisting of seventeen listening exercises for Spanish students, includes a variety of sketches and short stories that poke fun at both the clichés and shibboleths of Argentine culture (including a dead-pan tribute to the two great tourist attractions of Buenos Aires, grilled meat and the Obelisk) and at those of the United States (especially the confession of a continually back-sliding born-again pyromaniac to his brothers and sisters in the Lord – whose church he has burned down). The last piece in the book, another talk delivered to a conference, this time of women writers of the Americas on the authors of the “Boom” in Latin American literature, provides the narrator with the opportunity to direct his jibes at academics, feminists, and fellow Latin American authors more interested in travel junkets than in originality. It is of interest to note that the two people charged with organizing the schedule of the conference are “Pablo [the narrator], the writer with the soul of an academic, and Paco, the academic with the spirit of an artist.”20 Nacer de nuevo continues in the same vein as De todo un poco, de nada mucho, with two major differences: the satire has become somewhat embittered, and the setting is now Canada. In “La ley es la ley” (The law’s the law), a very cynical (and funny) piece on inheritance, an aged father who is about to commit suicide wills his body to his children to sell, piece by piece, for the best price possible. In “El señor sin pata” (The one-legged man) a father who has lost a leg to cancer cavorts loudly and mirthlessly with his family at a lake resort, trying desperately to fit into the Pollyannish refusal of North American society to accept disease and death, and ultimately sinks into depression when his family leaves him alone at the picnic table. “Instrucciones para hablar por teléfono” (“Directions for Phoning Faraway Grandmothers”) is a series of comparative instructions for carrying out this task in both developed and developing nations: Regrettably, [as to] grandmothers [who] live in underdeveloped countries, not all of them have telephones and calling them thus becomes quite a vexing task. You have to rely upon some neighbour with a compassionate soul who will be willing to go out and get them, and then call back some time later

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when you calculate that the grandmother’s faltering steps – which become slower every year – will have carried her to the spot where the phone is located. The danger in this, however, is that no chronometer has yet been invented that measures the rate of aging, and thus it becomes difficult to judge the speed at which the grandmother trots panting down the dusty streets of some distant land to get a bit of news about her progeny and grandchildren whom she perhaps doesn’t even know or who don’t yet exist or who she hopes may possibly even now be on their way as she trudges patiently toward the phone.21

One Argentine reviewer of the book – in an article entitled “What Must Canadians Think of This Radical Demystification of the First World?” – rediscovered the same vein of humour in Urbanyi’s stories that he had found in reading Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”22 Urbanyi’s novel Silver, published in a handsome edition by Editorial Atlántida in Buenos Aires in 1994, has been called his best work to date23 and received major coverage in the Argentine press. It was translated into French by Danièle Marcoux and published by BalzacLe Griot éditeur in 1999, and into English by myself for publication by Mosaic Press in 2005; a Hungarian edition, published in Budapest, appeared in 2004. Both satire and tragedy, it is, according to one critic, the story of Tarzan told in reverse,24 in which a young gorilla is bought in a market in Gabon by an American anthropologist and his British wife, who take him back to California to raise in the “enriched environment” of their home and to use as the subject of their research. Silver learns how to talk and to read (from Sesame Street), and matures into a being of charm, sensitivity, and taste – considerably more so, in fact, than the philistine anthropologist husband and his two sons. Silver also forms a close bond with Diane, the wife, and gradually displaces her husband in her affections. On the night in which their love is consummated, however, he is attacked by the husband, whom he throws through the window, and is then wounded by the police. Silver’s guilt or innocence consequently becomes a cause célèbre in California, and he is eventually sent back to West Africa along with a group of a dozen other “maladjusted” apes as a part of Operation Great Return, under the supervision of anthropologist Jane Gudart, who wishes to reinsert the corrupted beasts into their natural environment. Jane’s encampment on an island in the middle of a river in the interior of an unnamed African country gradually comes to resemble a

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totalitarian reeducation camp more than the happy experience of Paradise Regained that she has envisioned. Weakened by malnutrition, cold, disease, snakebite, and depression, all the apes eventually die except Silver, who by this time is living with Jane in a cage that she has set up to protect herself from wild beasts; finally, Jane herself runs off on all fours to join a colony of baboons across the river. Silver then makes his way to the capital, where he convinces the American embassy to fly him back to New York, despite their suspicions that he may be involved in Jane’s disappearance. Upon his arrival in the United States, however, he is taken into custody by the fbi and placed in a home for handicapped apes on the campus of Stanford University. It is from a wheelchair on the university grounds that he relates his story to Marco, an Argentine filmmaker living in Canada, who later writes it down – with the aid of Silver’s memoirs – after the gorilla dies. In Silver, the ferocious and somewhat heavy-handed irony of the preceding collections of short stories has been refined into a deeper, subtler, more philosophical form. As one Argentine critic has noted, although he lives in Ottawa, “Urbanyi continues to be an eminently Argentine author,”25 characterized perhaps by the eternally raised eyebrow of the Porteño sense of humour. Beneath the entertainment of the story lies a work that is rich in symbolism. Silver himself is ruthlessly exploited by civilization, specifically in the form of the anthropologists who continually want to study his behaviour and build careers out of their findings. Urbanyi has acknowledged that his inspiration for the tale came from a short story by Franz Kafka, “A Report for an Academy,”26 in which an ape captured for a circus learns to speak, write, and deal with civilization in any way that he can in order to find a way out of his predicament; he adds as well that a rereading of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels reinforced his desire to finish the manuscript.27 Yet, as in the Kafka story, there is also an opposite behavioural transference that takes place, this time from Silver to the anthropologists’ two sons: I’ll never forget one night at dinner, a scene fearfully recorded in my memory, like a sequence from a silent movie; years later, during our talks, Diane – a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whisky in the other – would provide the soundtrack. The day she and Gregory received the note from the teacher, after we had all dined together at the kitchen table, where I now sat as a member of the family and first tried to use those tools known as a knife and fork, Gregory, brandishing the letter and with great good humour and understanding, asked

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Bill and Charlie if it were true – or rather how much truth there was to what their teacher had written. The two boys looked at each other and then back at their father as if they hadn’t understood a word he’d said and immediately began to scratch their armpits and grunt, opening their mouths noiselessly. Gregory, with a guffaw of laughter, declared their imitation perfect. The kids continued their antics, and Gregory kept on laughing. Diane had lowered her head and sat staring at her plate. Finally, when Gregory was sufficiently amused, he told the boys to cut it out. But instead of stopping, they pretended they couldn’t understand him. Gregory insisted – “Come on, guys, that’s enough, seriously” – but all to no avail: they refused to stand up or answer. Finally, infuriated, he told them to leave the table. Still no effect. Only when Gregory raised his arm threateningly and pointed to the floor with his thumb did they slip off their chairs onto all fours – “nyick, nyuck” – and slink off to their rooms.28

Silver himself is, ultimately, a symbol of exile and alienation, a creature trapped between species, a gorilla in appearance but a human in mind and way of life, alternately loved and appreciated for his exoticism or xenophobically hated. Although he is cheered and adored by a crowd at Stanford when he does a Statue of Liberty imitation (much to Greg’s distaste), Bill and Charlie (his theoretical stepbrothers) call him a “shitty nigger,”29 while Dr What’s It punches him in the stomach to test his reactions. Silver has been raised as something he cannot become and then is expected by Jane Gudart to return to a state that he has never known; he is really neither ape nor human. Thus he finally opts for the semi-retirement of the home for handicapped apes, where Marco finds him. There is also a curious play of nationalities in the novel: the Americans, typified by Greg and his sons, as well as Jane, are insensitive, unimaginative, bossy, and essentially cold-hearted boors; the British, such as Diane and the university dean, are relaxed, cultured, and tolerant; the Argentines, such as Marco and the zookeeper who watches over Silver after his arrest, are the most friendly and understanding of all and the most apt to share a smoke or a shot of whisky with him. The roles assigned to these three nationalities closely reflect many Argentines’ alienation from imperial American power and closer identification with British and European culture. Puesta de sol (Sunset), first published in Spanish by Girol Books in Ottawa in 1997, was translated into English by myself and brought out by Broken Jaw Press under the title Sunset in 2003 and subsequently translated into French by Danièle Marcoux and published as

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La vérité de Pinocchio by Québec Amérique in 2004. It is a remarkable and powerful novel that combines a dark, unnerving sense of humour and an unerring attack on hypocrisy in all its forms with a deeply moving sense of the human condition. It deals with issues involving birth defects, medical ethics, scientific intervention, and euthanasia and pushes the boundaries of Urbanyi’s writing further than perhaps any of his previous work. Its reception in Argentina has been very positive, and Urbanyi has been commended for his ability to write about a subject so difficult for society – and individuals – to deal with.30 Unlike some of his previous books, the satirical and critical focus here is not directed toward a specific society or culture but to the dehumanization of science in the world at large. The novel, set in both Argentina and an unnamed northern country of self-exile, is the story of a young couple whose first child is born hideously deformed with spina bifida, a medical condition that includes paralysis, hydrocephalism, and profound retardation and that causes the hyper-dilation, or “sunset” effect, of the eyes – as though in a state of overwhelming fear – from which the novel takes its name. Ironically, it is probable that this very condition has been caused by the mother’s own doctor, who recommended that she have a tetanus shot after a minor accident, even though she was in her second month of pregnancy. This hypothesis is never proven, however, converting the events surrounding the child’s birth at once into a metaphor for the limits of medical knowledge and a denunciation of scientific hubris. Faced with the lonely choice of what to do with such a newborn infant, the couple decides to opt for the withdrawal of the child’s life-support system, but specialists at the hospital privately decide to keep the infant alive in order to perform a series of brutal – and useless – clandestine experiments and operations on it. In the end the child dies, but not before the couple’s intimacy and trust in each other have been permanently damaged and their faith in medical science totally destroyed. The story takes place in Argentina but ends in the unnamed northern country to which the couple is eventually forced to move. The parents are both strong characters: the father, Pedro, the son of Hungarian immigrants, is a rebel and something of a misfit who ends up supporting his family by working as a salesman in an Armenian family’s carpet store; the mother, Ana, from a more established Anglo-Argentine background, is finishing her courses in medical school. The powerful emotional bond that unites the two is placed under unbearable stress,

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almost to the breaking point, by the implacable medical establishment to which their child is inadvertently surrendered. Yet the novel, even as it reveals the cruelty and false objectivity of modern medicine (and, by extension, of science itself), does not fall into facile judgments or neatly opposing contradictions, and there is a strong current of lugubrious humour that prevents any sentimentality from creeping into the text. Pedro and Ana are tricked, cajoled, manipulated, and outmanoeuvred by doctors and caregivers, yet their own decisions are also scrutinized. In this sense, it is their love for their monstrous child – whom Pedro nicknames “Meningito” due to the infant’s meningocele, or encysting of the meninges within the brain, that often accompanies spina bifida – that motivates them in their search for a way to end his suffering at the hands of the medical world. At the end of the novel, the narrator reveals his recurring dreams of meeting and talking with the child on fields of melting snow. The novel itself is told in the form of seventy-five files that Pedro has written up at the request of Dr Brahe, a renowned neurological psychiatrist who takes charge of the newborn’s welfare. The doctor has suggested to Pedro that he write up these files, each dealing with a different aspect of his son’s sad history, in order to psychologically free himself from any anguish and ambivalent feelings that he may have, and Ana has also asked him to record what they have suffered through for their son. Urbanyi has thus made the child’s father the first-person narrator, although the mute and unknown Meningito is the focal point of events. Pedro is a dogged idealist and humanist who defends himself through satire and irony, the perfect prism with which to view the ambiguities inherent in the story. The timeliness of Puesta de sol goes without saying. In an age of overwhelming concern with bioethics, when genetic engineering is being fiercely debated in international forums and it is generally felt that civilization is on the cusp of a major revolution in the biological sciences, Urbanyi´s novel takes on a prescient quality. The struggle of the young parents to decide the destiny of their hopelessly damaged son and to question the tortuous and Machiavellian scientific reasoning of the medical community in its efforts to wrest him from them are of remarkable present-day import. It is rare that a novelist takes on this theme; it is even rarer that one is able to write about it with humour, understanding, pathos, and irony – and to produce such a disturbing and moving work of art.

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Urbanyi’s fifth novel is 2058, en la corte de Eutopía (2058, in the court of Eutopia), a work that combines satirical fantasy with science fiction, published by Editorial Catálogos in Buenos Aires in 1999. It is at once in the literary tradition of the fantastic voyage to an undiscovered or future land – as typified by Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Anatole France’s Penguin Island, and the Canadian writer James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder – and a continuation of a peculiarly Argentine vein of philosophical science fiction that includes work by Bioy Casares,31 Borges, and Anderson Imbert.32 The protagonist, an Argentine writer named Danilo, is invited one morning by a liveried footman to participate in the Grand Festival to Celebrate the Centenary of Eutopia, a land formerly known as the European Community. Danilo barely has time to grab his mate, kettle, and bottle of gin (which connect him to reality) before being led to an enormous stairway within a floating palace, where he will spend the rest of the day at a banquet with the Great Eminencies (or G-21), Their Majesties the King and Queen of Eutopia, and the Writers of Great Renown, attended to by squads of waiters, maîtres d’hôtel, masters of ceremonies, Valkyrie spokeswomen, cheerleaders, police, choruses, and actors who put on various tableaux of Eutopian culture between courses. Eutopia turns out, however, to be distinctly dystopian. The natural environment has been completely contaminated; mineral water is drunk in sips, like champagne; and the only food – despite being referred to by a plethora of succulent names – consists of tasteless green slabs of recycled something (or someone). In the meantime, thousands of sick and impoverished “uglies” appear at the palace’s portholes to beg for scraps from the tables of King John Charles the Good and the Eutopian heads of state, who have all ruled for so long that they have to be revived periodically by means of elixirs. The hypocritical positivism, false affability, and omnipresent commercialism that Urbanyi satirized in other works such as Nacer de nuevo as being endemic to North American society have now been multiplied a hundredfold – to the point where every cultural presentation ends with an advertisement and the King awards literary prizes by tossing them over his shoulder to the Writers of Great Renown behind him, who fight over them on hands and knees. Criticism and “negative thinking” are forbidden, Walt Disney has been reanimated and now controls world culture, the heroes of political correctness parade before

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the assembly to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” and culture has been petrified to such an extent that the creation of museums in the homes of dead authors is now causing a housing shortage. Paralleling and projecting trends in cultural and economic globalization, Urbanyi has broadened his ironic comment on society to take in not only the United States and Canada, but all of the rich countries of the “developed” world, and in the tradition of the narrative of a fantastic voyage, 2058 turns out to be a caustic and incisive parody of the world in which we live, extrapolated out to its logical, but still avoidable, end. In this sense, the novel is both an entertainment and a profound warning. Urbanyi’s latest novel, Una epopeya de nuestros tiempos (An epic of our times), published by Ediciones Catálogos en Buenos Aires in 2004, is in fact a mock epic that explores the alienation of exile within the sterilized, technocratic culture of supposedly “advanced” societies. The book describes forty-eight hours in the life of Ernesto, an Argentine immigrant to Canada whose fondness for all things natural and spontaneous has led to his increasing isolation within the empty positivism of a futuristic society that has sanctified conformity and consumerism into a secular faith: the tale of a multidimensional person within a bidimensional environment, a psycho-social situation reminiscent of the curious mathematical science-fiction novel Flatland, by Edwin Abbott.33 Even at home, in the company of his mediaobsessed children and materialistic wife, Ernesto has had to isolate himself from his family in a tiny room in the attic, his “cardboard tower,” where he meditates, makes endless notes, and attempts to write, barricading himself within a denigrated, irrelevant world of books and words. As he moves relentlessly from one banal and officialistic encounter with an artificial, rigidly conventional market utopia to another, he contrasts his current life with memories of the pampas and barrios where he grew up in Argentina, where the organic flow of human life – and economic hardship – held sway. Eventually Ernesto himself becomes obsessed with the relentless precision of the automatized civilization that he inhabits, symbolized by the incredible standardization in the size of eggs: How have the technicians been able to calibrate the nation’s hens so precisely? The issue takes on a metaphysical quality and becomes something of an existential quest for him: perhaps within it is hidden the secret of society’s drive to material perfection. He takes his question to a bureaucrat, Tom Bigegghead, of the Canadian National Egg Commission,

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but is disappointed and repelled by the perennially technical explanation and hackneyed philosophizing that he receives in response. The experience destroys what little ability he has left to function in this standardized dystopia, and after heedlessly killing a policeman, he returns home and (perhaps) commits suicide – or simply goes to sleep: we never find out which. The whole flattened trajectory and banality of Ernesto’s quest (the novel is dedicated to Robert Musil, the Austrian author of The Man without Qualities) is a profound and acidly parodic comment on both developed and developing societies, as well as on personal freedom and conformity. After delivering his discourse on the creation of egg uniformity, for instance, Bigegghead ends with a poem that updates and imitates the Victorian pieties of Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” driving Ernesto out of the office and precipitating his final breakdown. The poem ends with the lines: If you are not afraid to give your telephone number to a sales agent, or what’s more, if it does not bother you when he calls, since no one else ever does … If you have smiled all your life, if you have bought your coffin with a smile and they bury you with one too … not only will you believe that the world and all it contains is yours, but what’s more, you will be a good sheep to the shepherd and, even more importantly, a happy consumer, my son … 34 Urbanyi continues to devote himself almost exclusively to his writing. He has abandoned his teaching at the University of Ottawa in favour of less time-consuming and demanding teaching in language schools, and he returns to Argentina on a fairly regular basis. Curiously, with the exception of the late Spanish author Antón Risco,35 whom he met at Laval University before he abandoned a master’s degree there, Urbanyi does not feel a great affinity with other LatinoCanadian writers, although he does participate occasionally in literary events in Spanish in Ottawa. Nor has Urbanyi had much contact with English Canadian or Quebec writers; indeed, he continues to read almost exclusively – but widely – in Spanish. He has published, however, in literary reviews both in English Canada and in Quebec, including Canadian Fiction Magazine, Possibilitis, and Ruptures, has done all he can to further the translation and publication of his works both in English and French, and has received several grants from the Canada Council and from the Departments of Multiculturalism and

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External Affairs. Pablo also travels regularly to Europe, where he has given conferences in Spain, Germany, and particularly Hungary, his birthplace, with which he has maintained close linguistic and literary ties. Yet Urbanyi remains an author in exile, writing and publishing in another language, enjoying continued success in his native land, but still largely unknown in his adoptive country. Certainly, there are parallels between his situation and that of W.H. Hudson, the subject of the doctoral thesis by the narrator of En ninguna parte, whose most memorable works about Argentina, such as Far Away and Long Ago and The Ombú, were written and published in English while he was living in Britain. Yet Hudson, in translation, has become part of the pantheon of Argentine letters. Urbanyi’s work is increasingly translated into both French and English, and perhaps eventually this talented and versatile writer will become as well known to readers in Canada as he is to those in Argentina.

th e s h o r t s t o r y “ s i e m p r e a l g o m á s ” ( a lway s s o m e t h i n g ) The eminent professor sighed and continued to look out the window. Yes, something was definitely missing. Standing with his hands in his pockets, he surveyed the university courtyard. Hardly any students were left now. Classes had finished five days before, and the visiting professor had gone back to her university; now he would finally be able to devote himself to his work. Not that teaching, preparing his classes, counselling his students and listening to their problems, organizing conferences, welcoming visiting scholars, writing reports, going to meetings, and being on committees wasn’t work; but it wasn’t his real work, the true calling for which he had quietly been preparing for so long – years, decades even. That was his book, the book everyone was waiting for, the book that had to be written, the book that was so badly needed and that only he could write. Like a shadow, like a voice, the certainty that the moment had finally arrived suddenly came over him. It wasn’t a new feeling; on the contrary, it was as old as the idea of the book itself. Strange, as soon as he felt so sure of it, some other new demand or research topic would spring up. There was always something else that was needed in order to have the ideal conditions for writing. The telephone rang. With a hint of irritation, he left the window, walked over to the desk, and picked up the receiver. It was his wife: she wanted to know what time he would be coming home for supper

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and if there was anything “special” he wanted to eat, something he might particularly fancy. No, nothing really, whatever you’d like; you know I don’t pay much attention to … Well, actually, pork chops might be good, if there were any in the freezer. He hung up. How many times had he told her not to bother him when he was working? It was useless. Those phone calls, in some way, were also part of that something else. He’d have to put a stop to them once and for all. He went back to the window, put his hands in his pockets once more, and looked out onto the grounds. He watched the birds; the air conditioning kept him from hearing their songs, but he could follow their movements as they hopped among the budding branches of the trees that were still pale green with the colours of spring. Yes, all the bustle of university life was finally over. Well, there was still that conference in Dijon this summer; ah yes, and that symposium in Michigan. In order to avoid surprises, fatigue, and distractions, he’d had the good sense to cancel his trip to the conference in San Francisco. He congratulated himself on his decision: it would have left an empty space in both his life and his work. If he had to, he’d pull out of the other ones, too. Yes, the optimum conditions for writing were all inexorably falling into place. All four of his children had grown up, completed their studies, and graduated from university; two of them were married now, and only the youngest was still at home – technically, at least, because he was almost always out. Soon he’d be a grandfather. He smiled. He also had the perfect office, exactly the one he’d wanted so much and had fought to have for so many years, with large windows overlooking the park that were perfect for relaxing and meditating as he worked, just as he was doing at the moment. It had three desks, each for a different task: one for talking to visitors, one for answering correspondence, and one for writing his book. There was also a padded reclining chair, just for “taking it easy,” as they said these days. The walls were lined with books, two or three thousand of them, each either related to his projected study or of the greatest importance to it – some even indispensable (although each of them was also an added something). He’d been collecting them for years. There was also a small table with an electric ibm typewriter and, on another, larger table (specially designed as if it were for the handicapped, he’d once thought to himself with a smile), his computer and laser printer. Everything was a matter of making the right choices, and the most important decision had already been taken: he would write his book (or the final draft of it, really, because he’d already worked it all out in

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his mind) here in his office rather than at home; that way he’d have all his notes and books at hand, as well as the extensive resources of the university library if he needed any extra information or references. A formidable array of notes (arranged historically in layered stages, from his initial handwritten observations, in ink and pencil, to those that had been typed out on each of his three successive typewriters) now lay in a pile next to the computer. He could, in fact, say that the book was already finished, that all that was left to do was to neaten it up a bit: just edit it a little and rewrite a few things. Of course, things had changed enormously – both with reference to the outside world, to his book, and even to himself – since that first handwritten note so long ago. How long had it been now since he’d stopped taking notes? He suddenly felt a wave of strange, conflicting emotions: sometimes those very notes seemed like a burden, a threat, a reproach. The telephone rang again: a further irritation to add to the last one. Sometimes there were so many irritations – like ocean waves among which he had to struggle to keep from drowning. His “Hello!” this time had an almost military ring; then he heard his name like a question, in a soft, affectionate tone of voice – a tone that had once been that something else – the voice of love that had inspired him, but that he, the philosopher, knew would ultimately prove ephemeral. Memories and desires were one thing, reality another; with the anxiousness of a twenty-year-old welling up in the throat of a man of fifty-five, he answered, “Yes, it’s me. Are you still here? You haven’t left yet?” The visiting professor, the woman he himself had invited, replied, “No, not yet; I wanted to, but I’ve taken a long walk past those places we used to talk about, but where you were afraid to go with me because … I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind.” “No, no, I told you I couldn’t; I love you, but …” “Good-bye, then.” “Good-bye,” he said, and hung up. He couldn’t go back to the window. His emotions were like a volcano. He paced around the main desk, cursing his annoyance and confusion. Inevitably, his thoughts turned to his wife, to how she had also once appeared in the middle of his road, to impede the writing of his book, like a stone wall, like the Great Wall of China. She too had been that something else. The quiet, insistent, problematic temptation to get a divorce, to free himself: wasn’t it still there? Well, he’d learned that women were all alike and better the wearisome one you knew than the beguiling one you didn’t. And anyway, let’s face it,

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nowadays, the way things were going, was there any other woman in the world who could make pork chops like that, just the way he liked them? Yes, and on request, too. Were there any left in the freezer? He stopped short, exactly at the angle from which he could see the entire room, an office that was accessible only by appointment, sometimes with a two-week waiting period – or directly by phone on a private line whose number was known only to a select few: his wife, the visiting professor, and one or two others. Everything around him reflected his place in the world, his personal importance, showed how indispensable he was, with vital work that simply couldn’t be put off. The only thing that he did keep putting off was his book, the most important thing of all. No, that wasn’t it exactly, or well, yes, maybe it was: as he’d said before, when it came to the book, there was always something missing. At first it had been his own maturity, then the maturity of the mind, of his ideas, and of the main idea itself. Lately, however, those ideas … He continued pacing and gradually began to feel calmer; all sorts of good ideas began to come to mind as he walked back and forth. He liked to stroll through the university courtyard and be greeted by his colleagues and students – feared by them, even. Those beautiful evening walks with … There it was again, that same acidity, that queasiness in his stomach … His ideas, yes: it was all a harmonious process, regrettably slow and painful, and these days no one, neither young people nor anyone else, had the patience and serenity to wait. They wrote every which way, scribbling down whatever inanity came to mind, like chickens laying eggs and then cackling as they threw them in people’s faces, piling up garbage on top of garbage. He, on the other hand, had already gone through a whole process, had overcome the temptation to show off the very first egg he had laid, written in pencil. He had waited till he had a Parker 51 fountain pen, and hadn’t started writing even then, but had kept on waiting till he had his first typewriter; then had left his Parker and run after a Mount Blanc, waited some more, fought for and won a second typewriter – electric, this time – that even erased, but which also hadn’t really been enough because even though it was electric, it didn’t have any memory; and then at last, he’d gotten an ibm with memory – there it was, sitting on the second desk – which was also (what an irony!) now obsolete. Yes, walking was always good for the nerves and brought forth new ideas. Every human being, every professor, every intellectual

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was a microcosm of human history. That thought, the one he’d just had, was a beautiful metaphor – or was it more of a parable? While still in the cradle, the species had begun to write in cuneiform on clay tablets, then had evolved to the quill, thence to the pencil, the fountain pen, the odious ballpoint, the typewriter, and finally the computer. That was progress. Ideas – and the impossible task of writing his book. He smiled: that could be the subject of another book, or essay, or even short story. Hmmm … what? An idea. He made a mental note. No more jotting things down; he had enough notes now; he’d save that idea for a work in his tranquil old age, when he’d watch his grandchildren run around in the garden. He’d call it, “The Professor Who Could Never Write His Book. There Was Always Something.” The idea – it really was quite brilliant – that had just occurred to him, like a communicating vessel flowing into his spirit, brought him renewed vigour. All right, enough beating about the bush, let’s see if, with state-of-the-art technology at my fingertips, I still believe the book is going to write itself. Don’t be naive. Come on, just a page, nothing but the first page and the rest will … He stopped in front of his computer. It was just a machine – a sophisticated one, he had to admit – but a machine all the same: a fourth generation model 386, with a 100 megabyte hard disk that still, even with all its software – of which he had the most advanced, userfriendly, easy-to-use versions, including one with the ancient Greek alphabet that was perfect for quotations – had 80 megabytes left over, enough for 150 books (depending on how long they were). Plus there were 4,800 K of random-access memory (almost a book’s worth) and 24 megahertz for fast resolution, so he could call up any page he wanted in a fraction of a second. He could hear the voice of one of his colleagues who had commented behind his back that if you added up all the time he’d spent in getting the computer for free – from filling out order forms to writing notes and justifications – he could have written five books. Yes, there were those around him who were writhing with envy. Tap, tap, tap. He drummed on the computer, remembering how in banks, offices, even the university itself, women would talk to their computers – “Come on, little fella, be nice; don’t let me down” – in order to humanize them. He took off the plastic cover that protected it, turned it on, and sat down. A quick “beep” let him know that it was ready, that a whole world was opening up. He put his hand on the mouse and entered wp51, Windows, and in a few seconds, while

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the machine asked him to “Please wait,” a blank page appeared on the dark screen (he hadn’t been able to justify his demand for colour). Let’s begin; what else could still be missing? Hmm, nothing, frankly: nothing at all. He picked up the first note written in pencil and read the date in the top right-hand corner: it was from over thirty years before. The page shook; it was his hand that was trembling. The stress, the near paralysis that occurred whenever he had to overcome such quaking was now familiar. It came over him once again, and before it could turn into a cold sweat, just as he had foreseen, though it seemed this time that nothing whatsoever was missing, he quickly left wp and clicked on cm with the mouse; the computer shuddered slightly and then the words “welcome to chess master” appeared happily on the screen, accompanied by music, followed by the chessboard and pieces. No, he wasn’t like those other professors who played Pac-Man or Pac-Girl or Star Wars or Tetris; he preferred the classic game of logic to rest his mind, relax, and yet simultaneously sharpen his intellect by putting it to work. But he didn’t want to push it or tire it out too much; he set the program at elementary level. Come on, he knew himself well enough by now: he’d spent his life waiting for that something else. He’d had more than enough experience with all the possibilities: going to the post office to mail a letter; finding it was a sunny day (or a rainy one); reading someone else’s latest book (the chessboard was beginning to blur a bit); buying a lottery ticket; filling out grant forms, evaluations. He typed in p4r and the machine responded faithfully, immediately. The telephone rang. A further annoyance, his wife again: she knew it would take him a while to get home; he was so busy, but she was waiting for him … He asked a quick loving question, followed by an answer just as tender: yes, there were pork chops in the freezer, but she hadn’t put them on yet because she knew him so well. They would have gotten overcooked, and she knew just how he liked them. She certainly was well brought-up, really quite cultivated; she’d learned everything. That was exactly what his book was about: education, the philosophy of education. He was about to ask his wife about something else, but no, he knew there wasn’t any – the doctor had forbidden it. Yes, well, but doctors won’t let you do anything, though it was really a question of self-discipline: he had forbidden it to himself. He hated easy answers. He told his wife he still had ten minutes or so of work left; he’d call her again as he was leaving.

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“O.K., honey. Bye.” He hung up and turned back to the computer: “Now you’ve had it. Just watch!” When he left the office, he was in a bitter mood: so bitter, in fact, that he forgot to call his wife again. Despite the fact that he’d been playing at Level One, he’d lost the game, and his feeling of impotency had gotten worse; now it was almost a complete rout. It was pointless sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. Nobody called. As he walked out to his car, he wondered what that one last something else might be. Of course: it was a better society, one that was wiser, more just, more sensitive. This was an eminently practical thought – the kind they say philosophers never have – that he would understand and know how to make real use of in his book. There were so many things that were still needed, really: a new world, a universe, a reincarnation, a new life. The eminent professor lived quite a long distance away. His house was in the country, far from the anarchic din of spurious civilization, with a living room the size of a football field and a fieldstone fireplace where he could sit in front of the flames lost in thought as he listened to the crackling of the logs, a fireplace that had also once been that something else but that now was his. Of course, he still had to pay off the mortgage, but that was all worked out. He’d send in the final installment out of his last cheque from the university before retiring. A few kilometres before the entrance to the freeway, faced with the anguish he felt as he looked at the clear and infinite sky, which reminded him of other skies and filled him with the desire to escape, he remembered the conference in San Francisco that he’d cancelled going to in order not to squander his time. It would only be a week; of course, even that would be a waste – a painful one – but the visiting professor would be there, and breaking off with her … True, she also was an impediment, a something else. Would it be too late? He could already taste those pork chops: pieces of dead meat … or life. They wouldn’t be enough this time, though. He couldn’t go on living like this. He thought of that tranquil moment he had always wanted so badly, in front of the fire, and had so rarely been able to attain. But now something really was missing. He almost shouted, “That’s enough! I can’t take it any more!” And of course it was spring: there wouldn’t be any crackling fire in the hearth tonight, though there could be a feeling of peace. He looked at his watch. If he hurried, he might just be able to make it …

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He slowed down, turned at the next corner, then turned again onto another street and accelerated once more. He stopped. With relief he saw that the wine shop was still open. He got out of the car. He’d already made up his mind: just so he wouldn’t always keep having the same problem, so there wouldn’t be anything missing, he’d buy a case this time.

10 Leandro Urbina, Multiple Exile

A master prose stylist, the Chilean Canadian writer Leandro Urbina has published only two major works since he came to Canada in the mid-1970s, yet both books have received a high degree of recognition in Latin America, especially in Chile, and some degree of success in Canada. The first of the two is Las malas juntas, titled Lost Causes in the English translation, which has been published in four different editions in Spanish and one in English and which consists of a collection of concisely written, realistic short stories that deal with aspects of the coup d’état against Salvador Allende in 1973. The second work is Cobro revertido (Collect Call), a novel of exile set in Montreal that won the award for best novel of the year from the National Book Council of Chile and that has since been translated into both English and French. Urbina also has an unpublished novel, “Homo eroticus,” as well as various fragments of other texts that have appeared in Canadian literary journals and anthologies. Leandro’s experience is essentially an urban one. He was born in Santiago in 1949, the oldest of five brothers. His father was an automobile mechanic with a taste for reading, and both parents were anxious to have their children secure professional careers (which all of them have). Urbina’s father was partial to European authors of the nineteenth century such as Balzac, Daudet, and Sir Walter Scott; he would pass these books on to his sons after he had finished them. As a child, Leandro frequently listened to plays produced on Chilean radio (television production in Chile was limited at the time); he also read Emilio Salgari1 and Jules Verne, played soccer and chess, and was a fan of rock and roll. One of his earliest stories, written in

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secondary school, received a prize in a competition for young writers; a teacher of his, the well-known Chilean author Antonio Skármeta, was on the jury. Urbina entered university in 1967, changing his major in tandem with his interests from civil engineering to economics and then to literature. Like many young Chileans of his generation, he had been involved in leftist political activity since secondary school, but in his case with a special emphasis on teaching and contact with the inhabitants of the poblaciones, or shantytowns, of Santiago, where roughly 40 per cent of the population then lived. He participated in meetings, wrote and handed out pamphlets, taught and explained the works of Marx in clandestine gatherings, and worked in literacy campaigns. He also immersed himself in the works of the novelists of the Latin American literary “Boom”: Julio Cortázar, the experimental Argentine novelist living in self-exile in Paris; Gabriel García Márquez, the master of magic realism, from Colombia; Mario Vargas Llosa, the prolific Peruvian writer who touched on both national and European themes; Juan Rulfo, of Mexico, whose spare prose moves between hallucination and reality; and Juan Carlos Onetti, the Uruguayan creator of the bleak, sinister, phantasmagorical world of Juntacadáveres (Body Snatcher).2 He was also interested in American and European fiction, especially Faulkner, Hemingway, Mailer, Raymond Queneau,3 and Lewis Carroll. During his years at university, Leandro studied Spanish literature (specifically La Celestina)4 with Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean author of Death and the Maiden, who now lives in the United States. Dorfman published Leandro’s work in the review Quimantú. In the meantime, Urbina continued to frequent the writers’ workshop of Antonio Skármeta, who also included one of his early stories in the review Paula. Immediately after university, Urbina began to work as a story writer for a publisher of science-fiction comic books, for which he says he would rework themes from literary classics, setting them among the galaxies.5 He tried his hand at poetry, which traditionally has been held in greater esteem than prose in Chile, but decided, after rereading his first love poems, that he would concentrate on prose. The coup d’état of 1973 changed the entire direction of Urbina’s life. His house was raided by the military, and his father and two of his brothers were taken to the Santiago stadium, where they were held, interrogated, and tortured for three months. Leandro and another

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brother managed to escape across the rooftops; later he crossed the border into Argentina and arrived in Buenos Aires with fourteen dollars in his pocket, along with the names of a few other Chilean refugees who were already there. The intensity of these experiences would later be reflected in his fiction. During this first stage as a refugee in Buenos Aires (the second was to be in Ottawa), he worked in a textile factory, as a postman, and as a journalist. Despite the fear in the air during the final years of the Peronist regime – when inflation raged out of control at over 400 per cent and paramilitary death squads disposed of suspected leftists (and of course, Chilean refugees) with impunity – Leandro found the cultural and political intensity of the metropolis exciting. He became interested in the theatre and read extensively in German drama – including works by Wedekind,6 Brecht, Dürrenmatt, Kleist, and Georg Büchner (the author of Woyzeck and an exile himself)7 – as well as in Argentine drama, in which he especially appreciated the interplay between fantasy and uncompromising reality in the works of Roberto Arlt8 and the manic black humour of Osvaldo Dragún.9 He acted in Argentine theatre and worked as a dramaturge with the Teatro Circo. While in Buenos Aires, Urbina met an Argentine literary critic, Mariano Aguirre, who was putting together an anthology of texts about the coup d’état in Chile. Leandro worked with him on the project and was struck by the emotional difficulty that many refugee writers had in writing about the coup: anger, guilt, pain, disorientation – all the effects of trauma seemed to impede the focus of their work. Urbina resolved to write his own stories, using some of Brecht’s techniques to achieve a certain distancing from his subject. The result was Las malas juntas, which was to become a classic work about the coup and subsequent military repression. Urbina sent it off to the Casa de las Américas literary competition in Cuba in 1976, where it was short-listed for the best collection of short fiction from Latin America for the year. It was first published in Canada by Ediciones Cordillera five years later and then by Ediciones de Obsidiana in Chile in 1986, when the Pinochet regime began easing up on censorship; an augmented edition was put out by the prestigious Ediciones Planeta (Chile) in 1993, following the success of Urbina’s first novel, and was republished in 2000 by Ediciones Akal in Madrid. The English version, Lost Causes, translated by Urbina’s Canadian wife, Christina Shantz, was published by Cormorant Books in 1987.

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Las malas juntas deals with the effects of the military takeover on the lives of a variety of Chileans of different economic backgrounds and levels of education – from professionals to schizophrenics – immediately after the coup. Its power derives from the spare, concise prose and understated, unemotional tone; Urbina has found exactly the right style in which to be able to narrate such terrible events and focuses solely on one situation or character per story. The stories vary in length from minificciones of as little as eight lines to longer pieces of ten to fifteen pages; each is so succinctly told (either in the first or third person) that it becomes an emblem of political repression as a whole. Consider, for instance, the minificción “Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos” (“Our Father Who Art in Heaven”): While the sergeant was interrogating his mother and sister, the captain took the child by the hand to the other room. – Where is your father? he asked. – He’s in heaven, whispered the boy. – What’s that? Is he dead? asked the captain, surprised. – No, said the child. Every night he comes down from heaven to eat with us. The captain raised his eyes and discovered the little door in the ceiling.10

The note of tragic – but never black – humour that is often found in these stories has offended some Chilean readers; it is, however, probably one of the most powerful effects of the book. The characters confront their individual fates with dignity and a certain ironic courage that underlines their human fragility in the face of the carefully planned brutality and treachery of the military and its supporters. Urbina makes it clear just how divisive the coup was to Chilean society, pitting family members against one another, as in “El amulet” (“The Amulet”), in which a young man’s rightist aunt, who is having an affair with a military officer, turns in her left-leaning brother and his family. In “Las malas juntas” (“Bad Company”) – the title story of the Spanish editions – a young man is tortured to death by his former classmate at military school, the same one who used to persecute him when they played after classes. Divisions also run through the left: “Relaciones” (“Relationships”), for example, is a two-paragraph minificción in which two leftist friends who have quarrelled and had a falling-out over the correct policy for the Allende government to take to protect itself from a coup now find themselves in prison together.

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Yet Urbina also makes it clear that, despite its brutality, the military was well prepared for the take-over and had meticulously planned and executed a total reorganization of society. “La vuelta a casa” (“The Homecoming”) follows the young surgeon Dr Martínez as he walks back into Santiago – and his former life – from the Stadium, where he has been imprisoned and tortured for an unspecified amount of time. In his overwhelming relief at being free, Dr Martínez naively believes that he will be able to resume his way of living just as it was when the military first picked him up; instead, he is horrified to find that his imprisonment was only the beginning of his torment, for the entire society has changed, and he has been shut out of his previous existence. The barman at his old café turns out to be a military supporter and now scorns him; his former girlfriend asks him not to call again; his old friend Soto has been thrown out of the house by his wife, who thinks his presence there is a danger to herself and the children; Martínez’s apartment has been confiscated and now houses a policeman and his family, who apologize to him for the inconvenience; and his mother believes that he is one of the leftist traitors who have brought such misfortune on the country. At last, defeated and alone, he wanders back toward the Stadium from which he was released that morning, wondering whether his true home is not among the people still incarcerated there. In March 1976 the Argentine armed forces also staged a coup, overthrowing the government of Isabel Perón, and immediately began rounding up and “disappearing” suspected leftists. Chilean and other Latin American refugees there were prime targets for paramilitary death squads; a few months later, in fact, the Canadian embassy was occupied by Chileans seeking refuge. Urbina stayed in Buenos Aires until the police came to his apartment building twice in the same week to ask his whereabouts. Then, for the second time, taking only his manuscripts and personal effects with him, he and his Chilean-born wife set out for the previously unknown land of Canada as refugees. Aided by a Canadian graduate student who had studied literature with him at the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile, Urbina and his wife settled in Ottawa. Although at first he worked cleaning office buildings, Leandro soon secured a job as lecturer in Spanish at Carleton University as well as work as a translator. He received a master’s degree in Spanish American literature from the University of Ottawa, and his career as a writer began to take more definite shape. During this time, Urbina

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founded Ediciones Cordillera, a Spanish-language publishing house that was to specialize in works by Chilean Canadians. In 1979 he was the first Chilean to receive a Canada Council grant, specifically to write a novel, El pasajero del aire (Traveller of the Air), about his experiences in Buenos Aires. He had separated from his first wife in 1978 and the following year met his second one, Christina Shantz, a graduate student in comparative literature at Carleton University, whose skill in translation, coupled with her inexhaustible energy, were to make her the principal translator of all of the Chileans who first published with Cordillera. In the early 1980s Urbina and three other Chilean Canadians – Jorge Etcheverry, Naín Nómez, and Toronto resident Juan Carlos García – were also invited several times to read at the Harbourfront Reading Series in Toronto. Urbina states that he was finally able to overcome his initial rejection of English as the language of the American Empire – a feeling shared by many Latin Americans – by concentrating on the literature of other parts of the Englishspeaking world and, more specifically, that of Canada.11 He has periodically been in contact with Gary Geddes, Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, and the late Earle Birney and has worked with Cordillera to bring Chilean Canadian writing to light in English. Despite the success of Las malas juntas, Urbina felt that he wanted to move on from writing short stories and come out with a novel. The realistic, objective style of his first book had worked well for short stories and minificciones; by the late 1970s, however, Leandro wanted to develop a much looser, more flowing style that he felt would be more suited to long fiction. Accordingly, in El pasajero del aire (which has never been published in its entirety) he made a conscious and radical shift toward an open-ended, first-person, stream-of-consciousness way of writing that would enable him to move back and forth across time – often including dialogue and conversation within long paragraphs of remembered details – in a manner resembling not the chronological pattern in which past events actually take place but how the human mind in fact remembers and mulls over events or fragments of experience. One of the works that most interested him at the time was Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch), an immense novel entirely made up of fragments of interior monologue from various characters’ minds, arranged so that they can be read and interpreted in different sequences. Urbina did not, however, want to step over the line separating the subjective and objective worlds, as had magic realists such as Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez.12 Two chapters of El

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pasajero del aire were included in Chilean Literature in Canada/Literatura chilena en Canadá, an anthology edited by Naín Nómez and published by Cordillera in 1982. Although the transitions in his new style are somewhat abrupt, Urbina is already working out some new and effective strategies: certainly, the scene in which the protagonist, a young Chilean refugee, goes to the Turkish baths in downtown Buenos Aires is a remarkable one. As he lies in the sauna and swims in the pool there, he reviews the painful memories of the coup in Chile, all the while overhearing bits of political gossip and business deals among the wealthy businessmen who surround him, much of which presages the later coup in Argentina as well. In 1988 Christina Shantz received an offer to work as a translator at the United Nations, and Leandro moved to New York with her; in 1991 the couple went on to Washington, where Christina continued her translation career. Although they later separated and Urbina moved back temporarily to Ottawa, his initial stay in the United States saw the accomplishment of several key projects. To bolster his academic career, he finished a doctorate in Latin American literature at the Catholic University in Washington, with a thesis on the relation between history and fiction in the theme of the European arrival in the Americas, especially in reference to Columbus’s diary. He also put aside El pasajero del aire and began writing a new novel, “Homo eroticus,” the manuscript of which he completed, although it has not yet been published. “Homo eroticus” consists of a series of texts written by a Latin American immigrant (from an unnamed country) living in Canada; the anonymous author has signed a contract to serve as the object of a study entitled “The Sexuality of Underdeveloped Peoples,” which is being carried out by a doctor and his staff in conjunction with a certain multinational pharmaceutical company that would like to try out some new products on him. The patient is confined to his bed and given doses of various drugs; he then records his fantasies on tape or on paper (he prefers the latter) for analysis by the medical and psychiatric staff. Although the novel includes a variety of erotic and comic passages, it is also a mordant satire of the mentalities and stereotypes associated with both “developed” and “underdeveloped” countries, as well as of the authoritarian nature of the medical world. There is also, as Chilean critic and writer Naín Nómez has pointed out, “a marked identification between exile and the hospital, in which the protagonist feels alienated, used, and repressed by his constant confrontations with the doctor and nurses.”13

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While he was in Washington working on “Homo eroticus,” however, Leandro suddenly decided to work on a new project (although he had been turning it over in his mind for many years), one that he was to complete within two months and that would meet with an enormous degree of success: his novel Cobro revertido. This work, essentially on the theme of exile and set against the surreal background of a somewhat amplified Caribfête in the streets of Montreal, deals with twenty-four hours in the life of a Chilean refugee who has just received the news that his mother has died. The protagonist is unnamed, other than being called “the Sociologist,” in reference to his studies in that field – which he never completed. The Sociologist is an amiable, anarchic, sensitive individual whose failure to understand or accept the rules of the game in both Chilean and Canadian society ultimately leads him to tragedy. Women (most of whom have names beginning with the letter “m” – possibly linking them to an overall mother figure) have largely directed his life, starting with his mother, a woman of lower-middle-class origins who meddled in his affairs at every turn in order to try to assure that he would pursue a career in law and secure a better place for himself (and the family) in society. The Sociologist first hears of his mother’s death when he returns from a night’s drinking to the apartment that he shares with a Portuguese immigrant from Angola. He calls his uncle the next morning and impulsively (and guiltily) swears that he will be in Chile within two days for the funeral. He doesn’t, of course, actually have the funds for his ticket and, in humiliation, must turn to his ex-wife Megan, a Montreal anglophone who is now a doctor, to ask her for a loan to cover it. He then joins a group (or chorus) of his Chilean friends and fellow exiles in a beer parlour, who comfort him and later accompany him on a drunken odyssey – punctuated with endless conversations about Chilean and Quebec politics – in search of suitable clothes and gifts for him to take back, only to end up frittering away his funds in a striptease bar. Finally, while dancing to Caribbean music in Parc Lafontaine, his good-natured advances toward one of the women in the gyrating crowd are badly taken, and he ends up being stabbed in a scuffle with her boyfriend – who himself turns out to be Chilean. The Sociologist’s decline and fall are a product both of his own personality and of the disorientation and hopelessness of exile. The Chilean critic Grinor Rojo (who also introduced both Chilean editions of Las malas juntas) has compared the novel to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, but in reverse;14 Urbina himself comments that “It’s the

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voyage of a marginal to the centre, where the character does what English travellers used to do before in the colonies.”15 The Sociologist does not have the type of personality that bears up well under exile: his political beliefs, such as they were, are now fossilized memories unconnected to any real activism in Chile, where events have passed him by, or in Quebec, whose more ethnic-based politics he still does not fully understand or feel a part of; his career is dead, although he has never admitted it to his mother or relatives in Chile; he makes his living from odd jobs – when he can get them – and owes money to practically everyone he knows. As his failure becomes increasingly evident, he takes refuge in silence (even during the heated political discussions and litanies as to what went wrong during the Allende regime seventeen years before), in alcoholism, and in erotic adventures (deserting his wife for a new girlfriend and then making love to the second woman’s roommate). He does manage to preserve his sense of humour, his childlike impulsiveness, and his anarchic spontaneity, but he is a man in flight from himself. The strongest character in the novel, in fact, is the Sociologist’s mother, who inevitably becomes identified in his memory with Chile. For although she has sacrificed everything for the sake of her sons – even saving the Sociologist from drowning when he was a boy – and has died with their names on her lips, she also believed that the military intervention was necessary for the good of the country. Moreover, after the coup she betrayed his former girlfriend and her cousin by refusing to give them her son’s address in Montreal so that he could help them flee the country – after which both were picked up by the military and disappeared. As the critic Sylvie Perron points out, the dead woman’s laugh is even compared to the rumble of tanks outside.16 His mother, like his homeland, has rejected and shamed him. Is it any wonder that he flails about in a permanent state of selfdestruction, bouncing from one erotic adventure to another, and that he never actually returns “home”? Stylistically, Cobro revertido is a tour de force. The prose surges forward, weaving its way through long, complex, often lyrical and humorous reminiscences and events without losing its logical sequence. It is also agile, incorporating other conversations and even accents into the text, so that the narration suddenly takes on a lusophone tone as João, the Sociologist’s Portuguese roommate, tells him of his mother’s death, or is interspersed with a mixture of popular song lyrics, Chilean slang, and Québécois French as the Chileans converse while watching the topless dancers. Urbina credits his early teacher, Antonio Skármeta,

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with having shown him that “language could be poeticized, even in prose.”17 In terms of point of view, the various unmarked sections of the novel alternate between two methods of narration: the first person is used for the Sociologist’s memories, especially of his mother and the other women in his life, while the third person is reserved for the settings and scenes of his twenty-four-hour descent. Urbina sent the manuscript of Cobro revertido to the Planeta (Argentina) literary competition for 1992, where it was short-listed from among the over 300 novels entered from all over Latin America. It was consequently published by Planeta (Chile) and won the National Book Council award for best novel of the year. The work received a great deal of press coverage in Chile, and Leandro was interviewed by both Época and El Mercurio; the latter newspaper, Chile’s largest, accorded him front page in the Sunday literary section (ironically, El Mercurio had also been one of the strongest supporters of the military regime). The novel and the publicity that it received gave a great boost to interest in Chile in work written by Chileans living abroad. A French edition of the novel, Longues distances, translated by Danièle Rudel-Tessier, was published by Lanctôt Editeur of Montreal in June 1996. The novel was also translated into English by Beverly de LongTonnelli in California and was published in English as Collect Call by Split Quotation of Ottawa in 1999. Both the French and English versions, however, received little attention in the Canadian press. Urbina, who taught for almost two decades at Carleton University, lost his job when the Spanish and comparative literature programs there were closed in the late 1990s and subsequently returned to Washington dc – his third country of exile – where he taught at the Catholic University. He has now moved back to Chile. In the past, he has always waited until he has felt that a manuscript is really ready before publishing it. Readers in Chile, Canada, and other countries are now wondering what his next surprise will be.

tw o s e l e c t i o n s f r o m t h e u n p u b l i s h e d n o v e l “homo eroticus” Part I Last night I again had a nightmare that I haven’t been able to rid myself of for years. It starts out in this same damned hospital bed, which keeps sinking down on one side or the other, grating under my uncontrollable weight like teeth on the verge of breaking. Every time I

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go to sleep and wake up again, I get fatter. They’ve diagnosed my illness as being fatal, but the end never seems to come. My body feels as if it were full of pins poking into me and forcing the greasy serum from the plastic bag above me into this bloated sack of skin that refuses to abandon me and instead prefers to live within four walls like a rag doll, a stubborn survivor. “Die, will you!” I yell at it, and at that minute an entire police brigade kicks down the door to my room and starts hitting me over the head with their nightsticks, forcing me to jump through the window into space. Bristling like a porcupine with shards of glass, I go hopping along over the neighbourhood rooftops, squawking like a parrot, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa!” The sun burns me as I run toward the horizon that is now painted with rainstorms. Just at the moment I arrive on my own roof, the tiles give way and I fall through amid a rain of black dust, scraping myself and leaving slices of my fat flesh on the dry clay and rotting, splintered beams. “For God’s sake, son,” sobs my mother, coming toward me in the darkness. “Look what they’ve done to you. Every limb’s broken.” “Don’t worry, mother,” I answer. “They’ve promised to put me back together again at the hospital.” I calm her down and my voice begins to choke up. Then there’s the noise of a siren wailing and the thundering of horses’ hooves, and horseshoes scatter sparks of fire on the grey cobblestones in the distance and a growing horror comes over me, and my uncles are all yelling at me in chorus, pointing at me with their dirty fingers, “There he is; there’s the fat slob, on top of the wall! Take him away, take him away!” Someone turns on the light and I wake up in the white room that has been assigned me. There are signs of activity in the corridor, echoes of shrill voices. My mouth is dry and my neck muscles hurt. I look at the inert mass of my body and think I’ll stop eating forever. “Good morning,” I hear as they pull back the curtains and a sudden burst of light burns my eyes. I sit up in bed, scraping at the covers. Grabbing hold of the bedside table, I reach out for the breakfast tray that the nurse has just left under my nose and gulp up the nauseating coffee. Then I force down the tasteless eggs and cardboard toast. This is how my days begin, as they have now for the past several years, or perhaps months. Some mornings, in spite of my aversion, breakfast puts me in a good mood and I try to talk with the woman who cleans my room and brings me my mail about how hot it is, or how cold, how much snow, how little snow, how hot it is, how cold it is, how much snow, how incredibly much snow. Then I settle back

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against the pillows like a cat waiting for a veterinarian while I read a letter from my mother asking me for money because the family’s been having a hard time lately. Soon the doctor will come, a pale chunky guy who looks like a balding Valkyrie, to readjust my needles and check on my condition with a vacant smile and monotonous patter full of obvious genial fibs with which he has to impress his poor little patients who run around trying to find some charismatic authority figure to grab onto who will save them from the hell of their own degradation. He thinks he’s the Holy Father, Our Lord Himself, the Little Pope, Saint Hospitalarius. He must be a couple of years older than I, though perhaps he looks younger, yet he’s forever treating me like some kid with emotional problems. “The doctor is so kind,” the nurse says. “So generous.” But with me his posing falls flat because I’m onto him and all the arm-wavers of his kind. Still, I belong to him. Let’s face it. As long as he goes on paying I’ll continue to be his experiment, and he’ll keep coming around with his solemn puss and putting his nose in my papers and tapes to try to see if the work I owe him is getting done. They’ve given him a grant to study “The Sexuality of Underdeveloped Peoples,” and at the moment I’m his sole source of information, his Latin American (under the terms of my contract, I cannot reveal my exact nationality), and his last hope. There were others before me, all of them recruited by Nurse Seltzer in bars and discotheques – distrustful Salvadorans, Nicaraguans exiled for health reasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses from Cuba – all of whom tried to carry through the project, but ended up constipated or didn’t really have the aptitude or had gotten violent or had had problems with their conscience and had been discharged. I fantasize and write enough for any ten of them, and the doctor has a shameful, anxious desire to rummage through everything that comes out of my head. The nurse helps him by spying on me and stealing the notes I keep separately as my own private papers and running off to photocopy them. The nurse and the doctor have certain forebears and other things in common which I will relate later on. It was she who acted as gobetween for the initial contract. She met me at a party given by some Colombians. I had dropped by for a drink one Saturday night out of pure coincidence, pure boredom. There she was, definitely not alone, exchanging looks with a few fawning toadies. She was dressed up according to her version of what was sexy, which meant showing a lot without much grace, and her followers, most of whom were immigrants, were going wild, like flies after honey. After a moment, I noticed

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she was looking at me. I asked her to dance and, since suppleness is not one of her outstanding characteristics, I became bored after a while and began – out of pure inertia – to rub against her body, pelvis to pelvis, in an effort to give some direction to her crazy wagglings: “This way, this way, baby,” like a cubist painting trying to be an icon of Eros, looking her in the face, but without the least intention of whispering in her ear Come closer closer closer, no come on much much closer / and kiss me like this, like this, like this, the way I know you kiss, like the rest of the cretins chasing after her and imitating television Casanovas. She blushed and began to talk on and on, asking me what I did for a living, whether or not I liked my new country, the city, its people, the trees in the fall, supermarkets, department stores, malls, going shopping, opportunities, work, and snow. “Yes, sure, of course, yeah, you bet,” I replied, “because right now I don’t have a job,” and I put my hands on her hips. I could tell she was excited, but I didn’t want to push it, and when the dance was over, even though she kept on talking with me with the indisputable intention of staying with me, I told her I had to be going. I didn’t need an excuse. As soon as I let go of her, two other guys came up to ask her for the next set of boleros, cumbias, pasodobles, salsa, and cha-chas. What have you done with the love that you swore me? / And what have you done with the kisses I gave you? She looked in her purse and gave me her card in front of everybody. “What luck, man. The gringa’s given you her phone number.” “How about another glass of wine?” “Cheers, buddy.” “I’ve been after that one for the last four hours.” “Why don’t you share her a little with me there, pal? If she’ll go with you, she’ll go with me.” “And now you’re leaving?” “That’s life: some boil the water and others drink the mate.” She asked me to call her the next day, adding that she had some information about a job that might be of interest to me and that it had been a pleasure meeting me. See you later! I called her. We agreed to meet that afternoon, in a café, where we talked for several hours. She explained to me – in general terms and the most professional tone possible – about the project at the Medical Research Centre. I told her something of my life, the most romantic parts at least. Her eyes shone. I put my hand on her back as we left. My fingers could feel her warm skin beneath the silk of her blouse, together with a slight trembling that made her turn her head toward me with her lips open. I asked her if she’d like to have a drink at my house so we could continue the conversation. She said no, that there was someone else in her life and that he was waiting for her. I could tell by the way she looked

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at me that I’d only have to insist a little more in order for her to dare throw herself into an adventure of hidden passions and unrestrained libido, oh, ah, oh. But I didn’t push it; instead I told her I understood, that love must be treasured and cared for and she finally went off, a little surprised – and a bit irritated, I think – by my lack of perseverance. It was basically better that way. Why complicate things? A few days later, I signed a contract with the doctor and his institute. As soon as we met I confessed my genital problems to him, and we negotiated a salary according to the price lists on several tables of transactions. Essentially, he would furnish me with lodging, food, and a small stipend, in return for which I would provide him with stories of erotic incidents “that I had experienced,” and act as representative of the imagination and supposed sexual impulse of the Third World, through which he and his colleagues would be able to unravel our obsessions, motivations, and primary desires. Moreover, I also agreed to submit to injections of a certain new drug that they were trying out on behalf of a prestigious maker of pharmaceutical products and which they believed would help me after the restorative operation, though its success rate would have to be further evaluated before they used it on me. Although they’ve never told me so directly, I know they can’t guarantee the results. I console myself now with the fact that whatever happens, some record of my passage through this land of opportunity will be left in my papers and voice recordings. I’d always played with the idea of being able to relate certain events in my life: not necessarily write them down or anything, just tell them. Lately my desire to do so has intensified. I never wanted to open my mouth before. I don’t consider myself one of those people who torture their friends with interminable anecdotes in order to show off a sensitivity that would otherwise never be apparent. In any case, I still miss the decrepit confessions of my youth; it’s funny I should be making them now. The doctor has entrusted me with one task and here I’ve immediately thought of taking on another. That’s always been a part of my nature […] Part III […] I was brought up surrounded by women – my mother and her sisters. My father was most notable by his absence, while my older brother was busy with “his own things,” and the younger ones were forever tangled up in my mother’s skirts.

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My aunts were dressmakers of great renown. Jobita, Rosaura, and Marieta sewed everything from beautiful simple blouses to highly complicated and ethereal bridal gowns. Dozens of clients paraded through their fitting room in search of a touch of elegance that would make men slowly turn their heads and would dim the combativeness in the eyes of other women. In the afternoon, when I would come home from school, I used to look through the keyhole into my mother’s room and watch the continual falling of skirts, flying of petticoats, the dressing and undressing of anonymous bodies. Bristling with fear, covered in goose bumps, I constantly expected to hear a voice like a trumpet suddenly sound in my ear: “What are you doing here, you diabolical little pig!” I used to remain glued to the door until my back couldn’t take it anymore. Sometimes, when the light would begin to burn my eyes and my knees would be tingling with impatience, I would put my fingers under the buttons of my shirt and grasp my scapulary and ask the angels to please turn me into a mouse so I could wriggle through the cracks in the walls – tling-tlong – underneath the door or up over the transom, and hide beneath the heavy legs of the great “antique” chairs, that had feet the size of wild animals of the night, and that my aunts had had made to order according to French designs, which were by far the most elegant and solid and would last forever (“In the style of Louis XVI, the king of France who was beheaded by the commoners, my child, and Marie Antoinette, his queen, who they say was so beautiful that she’s now the name of a cake.”) And then I’d be able to watch everything from mouse-level, without fear of anyone noticing me, hidden behind my friend the guillotined head that would protect me from attack and that had been tossed into a shadowy corner of the room (which it shared with the old enamel spittoon) and that smiled at me with half-closed eyelids and a pointy nose. And I could look at all the ankles and defenceless calves of the women and girls who were waiting to be served in just a moment and then suddenly jump out in front of them with eyes red with magic fire and scare them – “Ay, ay, ay! A mouse!” – and then the greatest miracle of all: they would lift their skirts and get up on the sofa and I’d have a nice view of their panties, laughing like a wild mouse – “What a terrible kid!” – and then would rub my magic wand and turn into a pampered cat and they would say to me “What a beautiful cat! Here kitty-kitty!” and would pick me up and hold me on their laps and pet me along the spine of my back – “He’s a furry thing, isn’t he? And his

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neck’s so soft!” – till my tail would stand on end with pleasure and I’d be able to purr against their breasts with my nose right in between them, rising and falling as I lay there half-smothered. And in the protective darkness they would go on chattering to the rhythm of petticoats and pins – “Jobita this,” “Marieta that” – “Ay, Juanita, for heaven’s sake don’t make me laugh: I’ll prick my fingers” – and then I’d watch as they walked over to the mirror, under the lights – sometimes with gestures of approval, at others of disappointment – and always anxiously asking, “Mirror, mirror, who’s the most beautiful, the most elegant, the most attractive, the most desirable?” And then, “What do you think, Rosaura, about making it a bit lowercut?” “Shouldn’t it be brought in more at the hips? It’s so loose, I look like a nun.” “I try to hide it, but it just makes them jealous.” “I look like a perfect little princess.” “I’m the queen of sensuality.” “The underwear’s from France; they call it lingerie there.” “How daring, Silvia dear: your husband will be wild about it.” “Are you kidding? He never notices anything; he’d rather go to the burlesque show and watch all those common little tarts.” “For God’s sake, Silvia, how could he be so blind?” “That’s why I want it to show a bit more, so his friends will go wild. This party is mine: all his bosses will be there, a bunch of dirty old men whose eyes bug out whenever they see a pretty woman.” “You’re worse than the wife of that lawyer Rodríguez.” “Maybe, but she’s really got something to complain about. They say that sneak of a husband of hers, besides being a cripple, is partial to boys aged fourteen to eighteen – nineteen, at the most – and that the only reason he married at all was to stop the rumours and please his Mama.” And my aunts would say, “Yes, that’s right,” or “No, it’s not,” “Ah! Don’t tell me!” or “Sew up the sleeve,” “Backstitch the hem,” “Take her measurements,” or “You’ll have to wait a bit, Maruja dear; do you want some tea?” “Child, go tell your mother to make tea for Doña Maruja and bring it in to her, will you?, with some biscuits, too.” “Yes, Maruja, nice and sweet, just the way you like it.” My mother was mistress of the house, vastly pregnant with my fourth brother. She would sit with her legs apart in front of a fan in the dining room on hot afternoons and listen to the soap operas on the radio. My father had bought a refrigerator a short time before, and she would make herself pitchers of bananas and milk with ice cubes and drink them parsimoniously with her head turned toward the radio as if it were an old acquaintance who was always a pleasure

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to listen to as he told tales of his adventures out in the world. Then orders would come in for lemonade for the Zamorano girls, who were waiting for their First Communion dresses and would giggle like idiots when I would bring in the tray and offer them their glasses; or for tea and biscuits for Doña Maruja who has to have her skirt adjusted because she’s put on a touch more weight over the holidays and the bulges show under her slip and on her legs that she crosses so nonchalantly as her pale bare arm lifts a haughty cigarette. “Ah, such a good little boy,” Doña Maruja says as she hugs me when I put the tray down on the table next to the sofa. My face is buried in her mass of red hair and enraptured I breathe in the perfume from her neck. She lets me stay like that a few seconds and then tells me I’m the only one who really knows how to wait on her and take care of her. I pull away and she asks me to massage her feet. She’s walked all day. I get down in front of her and caress the moist skin of her foot, which is as tender and plump as a tiny animal. She stretches out as if she were tired and asks me to go a little higher up to her calf and then to rub my fingers in gentle little circles on her knee, and she opens her legs and her lips and feels for her purse and takes out a bag of chocolates and begins to pop them into my mouth one by one, like communion hosts on my tongue, and I’m wishing there were more light to be able to see between her thighs because her knee is as far as I can go. But the windows of the salon are never opened: the darkness is sacred; it protects against heat and indiscretion; the light belongs to the area around the mirror, which is lit by lamps. By now she and I are both sweating. My nostrils and chest are bursting for air, as are her mouth and mine, in mutual wonder. She begs me in a whisper to go faster with my little circles and begins to move her legs as if she were running, but discreetly, restraining herself, and my fingers sink into the little soft hollows behind the bone and begin to feel gelatinous, almost as if they were melting, as they penetrate her body, dear Doña Maruja, and she stuffs me full of chocolates, candy and sighs – one-two-three-four – her breasts beginning to slip out of her blouse now, my mouth full – four-four-four – as I keep running uphill on tiptoe and she’s swinging her hips from one side to the other, her thighs trembling with exhaustion, raising her hand in the air with her fingers starting to clench and her eyes open to direct the finale of the music that suddenly stops with a hoarse sound and her hands fall on my head and my head falls on her stomach and she holds me there tightly for a minute so her inflamed flesh can feel the waning motion

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of my jaws still trying to liquefy the thick ball of dark chocolate that she has offered me. Then she whimpers, “Nice dog, such a nice little dog,” lifts my face toward hers, so open and luminous, as if there were a moon on her forehead, and tells me, “Study mathematics, my boy, lots of math; you’ve already got poetry in your body.” And her full lips kiss my eyes. Then I get up and she takes her cup of tea and crosses her legs and my Aunt Rosaura comes nervously in saying, “Sorry, Maruja dear, we’ll have the fitting in just five more minutes,” and she says, “There’s no hurry; I’m still drinking the tea my little friend here brought” […]

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Notes

introduction 1 According to Statistics Canada’s figures for “Population by Mother Tongue, 2001 Census,” the Spanish-speaking population of Canada was 245,495, with Portuguese speakers numbering 213,815. The two language groups placed fifth and sixth after the two official national languages; Chinese, Italian, German, and Punjabi came before them. There were 70,095 Spanish speakers and 33,355 Portuguese speakers living in Quebec; for Ontario the figures were 118,690 and 152,115, respectively. See http://www.statcan.ca/english/pgdb/ demo18a.htm; and http:// www.statcan.ca/english/pgdb/demo18b.htm. 2 National Geographic Atlas of the World, 36, 62, 72, 110–12. The exact population figures are 364,150,000 in the Spanish-speaking countries of the world and 211,176,000 in those that speak Portuguese. 3 The US Census Bureau estimates that there were 42,687,224 Hispanics in the United States in 2005. By 2000, Hispanics (12.5% of the total population) had surpassed Afro-Americans in terms of percentage of the population (12.5% to 12.3%, respectively), and they now form the principal minority group in the country. It should be cautioned, however, that the term “Hispanic” is used in a cultural sense in these figures; actual numbers of fluent Spanish speakers are somewhat lower as they gradually assimilate into the population. See http://www.census.gov/popest/ national/asrh; and http.//quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.htm. 4 Gary Geddes, personal conversation, May 1995. 5 The bicentennial celebrations of the Malaspina expedition of 1792 were the occasion of several publications of interest on Spanish explorations of the Northwest Coast during the Enlightenment. See María Dolores

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Higueras, Northwest Coast of America; also Mercedes Palau Baquero and Antonio Orozco Acuaviva, eds, Malaspina ’92. See the highly readable account of his voyages by Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, El descubrimiento del fin del mundo. José María Heredia, “Niágara,” in Poesías completas, 45–7. Juan Carlos García, telephone interview, 11 September 1996. López Pacheco (1930–97), author of a dozen books, including novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, was one of the outstanding young Spanish writers of the 1950s. His novel Central eléctrica, published in 1958 when he was twenty-eight years old, is a profound reflection on the effects of technology on both rural society and class structure. Harassed for his social activism and membership in the Communist Party, López Pacheco immigrated to Canada in 1967 and taught the rest of his life at the University of Western Ontario, where he continued to write and translate. Other distinguished academic immigrants from Spain included Professors Alfredo Hermenegildo, Félix Carrasco, and Antonio GómezMoriana, at the Université de Montréal, and Diego Marín, who taught at the University of Toronto. Antón Risco, author of five novels and a number of essays on science fiction, taught at the Université Laval for some thirty years and wrote in both Spanish and his native Galician. His novel Hippogriffe was translated from Spanish by Brigitte Amat and published in Montreal by vlb Éditeur in 1992. The randomness involved in seeking protection at a given embassy during the early days of the Pinochet regime is well described in Chilean author Marilú Mallet’s short story “Voyage à l’extreme,” in Les compagnons de l’horloge-pointeuse. Such was the case in particular of two Salvadorans: Alfonso Quijada Urías, who was already an established author in Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean; and the painter Manuel Polanco, whose canvases and murals were well known in his native country. Margarita Feliciano, “El exilio en el Canadá.” Escomel is the author of some fifteen books, among them sociological studies, a radio play, poetry, short stories, and novels, including Pièges (1992), a masterful novel of idealism and duplicity in Latin American politics. Zeller, who has now retired to Oaxaca, Mexico, is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and is well known within the surrealist movement in Mexico, Brazil, Germany, and the Netherlands. His wife, Susana Wald, a professional painter, often illustrates and translates his work. Zeller is also a visual artist and has brought out numerous collections of whimsical collages. Trujillo was also a musician and founder of the Andean musical group Los Quinchamalas, which performed in the US and Canada in the 1980s.

Notes to pages 7–10

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His two collections of poems, Behind the Orchestra: Poems and Anti-Poems (1987) and Rooms: Milongas for Prince Arthur Street (1989), were both published by Goose Lane Editions of Fredericton. Trujillo moved to Pittsburgh in the early 1990s and died there a few years later. Kokis is also an essayist – see Les langages de la création (1997) – and poet as well as an acclaimed painter. His remarkable La danse macabre au Québec (1999), a collection of forty poems and paintings, draws its inspiration from medieval tradition via Ensor, Dix, Grosz, and Orozco. Barreto-Rivera’s highly innovative sonic wordplay can be appreciated in print – see Voices, Noises (1982) and especially Nimrod’s Tongue (1985) – but is particularly powerful in his performance readings. He and his fellow Four Horsemen (bp Nichol, Paul Dutton, and Steve McCaffery) toured across Canada in the 1970s; their recitals can still be appreciated on recordings such as Live in the West (Toronto: Starborne Records, 1974). González continued writing and producing plays (some thirty manuscripts) and mime and theatre performances for children up to the late 1990s. His Théâtre Chaos has toured in Belgium, Burkina Faso, and Chile. He has also published a bilingual collection of Zen stories with animal characters, Contes de la tête et de la queue/Cuentos de la cabeza y la cola. Before his death in 1999, Dragún, one of the most inventive playwrights in Argentine theatre in the twentieth century, had specified that his manuscripts and papers should be left to Girol Books, a Spanish-language press in Ottawa that specializes in Argentine and Latin American theatre. Kurapel produced a large body of work and founded his own theatre company, Exilio, before returning to Chile in 1998. Besides three volumes of poetry, he wrote eight plays in French and Spanish using consecutive translation techniques as well as ten plays in Spanish only. All of his extremely experimental theatre, using a barrage of mixed-media and performance techniques, was published in Quebec by Éditions Humanitas. Viñuela’s first collection of poetry, Exil transitoire/Exilio transitorio, translated by Johanne Garneau-Lassonde, was published in Montreal by Éditions Nouvelles Frontières, a Marxist bookstore, in 1977. Jorge Etcheverry, “Chilean Literature in Canada between the Coup and the Plebiscite,” 55. Feliciano’s book, which is described in detail in chapter 2 of the present volume, was especially notable for its innovative bilingual format. Rather than translate her own work, Feliciano chose to write parallel versions of the same poem, often with a surprising degree of difference between them. Urbina’s classic collection of short stories about the coup d’état against Salvador Allende and its aftermath, Las malas juntas, was published as

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Notes to pages 10–15

Lost Causes (1987). Nómez’s lyrical and surreal poetry, from the unpublished manuscript “Países como puentes levadizos,” was published as Burning Bridges (1987). “In the 1970s the Trojan Horse brought together Greek and Chilean artists who sang protest songs against the dictatorships of their respective countries. The café also served as a popular venue for poetry readings and other performances”; Margarita Feliciano, personal note, 14 January 2003. “Poet, actor, theatre director, and pioneer in spoken-word readings, Janou St-Denis died in 2000, leaving an indelible mark on the literature of Quebec. In 1972 she published her first collection of poetry, Mots à dire/Maux à dire, and in 1975 launched ‘Place aux poètes,’ a series of poetry readings that was to continue on for the next quarter century, becoming the longest-running weekly poetry event in Canadian literary history. Held in various bistros and cafés around Montreal, Place aux poètes was as open and universalist as Janou herself: the invited poets included the well-known and the unknown, student poets and major figures of Quebec literature, immigrant and feminist voices, as well as Latin American poets living in Canada and anglophone poets reading in French. The events served as an enormous open microphone onto the world of poetry in Quebec”; Hugh Hazelton, [Note on Janou St-Denis], 68. Jorge Etcheverry, personal interview, 31 July 1996. Alfonso Quijada Urías, telephone interview, 26 August 1996. The Celebración Cultural del Idioma Español (ccie) began its activities in 1992 as a commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. Mario Valdés retired from the organization in 1995, but Margarita Feliciano is still the principal coordinator. “Table of Contents,” Canadian Fiction Magazine: Fiction in Translation from the Unofficial Languages of Canada, nos 36–7 (1980). This was the only time that the apedeche awards were given out. The Mexican poet, medical doctor, and “cultural worker” (his preferred term) Gilberto Sosa was the organizer of this anthology and the person who convinced the Mexican Association of Canada to pay for the printing. Sosa, a political activist who was later confined to a wheelchair by a crippling leg injury, returned to Mexico and died under suspicious circumstances in Guatemala in 2000. Jean Jonnaissant, “Des poésies québécoises actuelles,” 35–6. Stephen Henighan, “Montreal, a Publishing Centre in – Spanish?” Montreal Gazette, 7 July 1990, K4. Canadian federal and provincial grants are awarded solely for the translation and publication of authors who live in Canada or the respective province. Although this policy has been extremely helpful in bringing new

Notes to pages 16–21

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Latino-Canadian writing to the fore, it has also limited the translation of works by authors outside of Canada. The literary review Ruptures, for instance, which published authors from all over the Americas (and beyond) was never awarded a grant either by the Canada Council or the Quebec Ministry of Culture because, although it published some Canadian and Quebec authors, it did not publish them exclusively. The review folded in 1998 after bringing out fourteen issues. Other than the Glassco Prize, given by the Canadian Literary Translators’ Association for a first booklength translation, no prizes are awarded in Canada for translations into or out of any language other than French or English. For a discussion of Canadian translation policies and their effects on Hispanic women writers of Canada, see Hugh Hazelton, “Vuelos septentrionales,” 137–44. Beatriz Zeller, telephone interview, 10 September 1996. Cormorant Books was founded by Gary Geddes, a Canadian poet, fiction writer, critic, and anthologist with a long interest in Latin American literature and politics, and was then carried on by Jan Geddes from their farmhouse in Dunvegan, Ontario. In the late 1990s Jan Geddes sold her interest and the press moved to Toronto, but its current publisher, J. Marc Côté, maintains his commitment to publishing both mainstream Canadian and ethnic writing. Printer and publisher André Goulet’s Les Éditions d’Orphée brought out scores of works by beginning or lesser-known authors – in French, English, and Spanish – starting in the 1950s. Nicole Brossard, Jacques Ferron, Claude Gauvreau, Jean-Charles Harvey, Michèle Lalonde, and many other Quebec authors of note all published works with him, and he was also the printer for Louis Dudek’s Delta Books in the 1950s. In the 1970s and 1980s Les Éditions d’Orphée also began diffusing the works of Chilean writers in Quebec, including not only Lavergne, but also Tito Alvarado, Nelly Davis Vallejos, and poet and painter Jorge Lizama Pizarro. Lavergne’s translator (into French) during the 1980s and 1990s was his companion, Sylvie Perron. Sergio Kokis, Le pavillon des miroirs, 358. For a discussion of Escomel’s work, as well as that of three other LatinoCanadian writers who work partially in English or French, see Hugh Hazelton, “Migrating Language,” published in Ellipse, vol. 58, which also includes work by Gloria Escomel, Salvador Torres, Carmen Rodríguez, and Jorge Etcheverry, selected by Hugh Hazelton and translated into French and English. For an excellent overview of the influence of the avant-garde literary movements in the first part of the twentieth century on Latin American literature, see Jorge Schwartz, Las vanguardias latinoamericanas.

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43 The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) is considered by many Latin Americans to be the most consistently experimental and innovative poet of the first half of the twentieth century. Huidobro published his first manifesto separating (and thus freeing) the artist from the constraints of the natural world, “Non serviam,” in 1914. Two years later he moved to Paris, where he began to write in French and founded the avant-garde literary review Nord-Sud with the poet Pierre Reverdy. The two poets published authors such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, and André Breton. Huidobro founded an avant-garde movement, Creationism, which rejects mimetic art in favour of an autonomous, fragmented, transcendent poetry in which the poet creates a new world based on the imagination and an untiring effort to create images and metaphoric patterns that do not occur in nature. Huidobro experimented with sound poetry, concrete poetry, and linguistic randomness during his prolific career. For an introduction to Huidobro and his work, see the selection from his writings edited by René de Costa, Poesía y poética: 1911–1948. Susana Benko’s Vicente Huidobro y el cubismo, an analysis of the Cubist movement in both art and poetry and its relationship to Huidobro’s poetics, offers excellent insights into the creative mind of poets who paint and vice versa. 44 Milan V. Dimic, “Canadian Literatures of Lesser Diffusion,” 18. 45 Guillermo Verdecchia is a Vancouver-based playwright who was born in Argentina but grew up in Canada. His Fronteras Americanas (1997), a satiric dramatic monologue based on the paradoxes of the Latino immigrant who lives between two cultures, won the Governor General’s Award for drama in 1993. The internationally known Argentine anthologist and novelist Alberto Manguel, who spent much of his early life in Israel and Europe, prefers to write in English. 46 Jean Jonaissant, “De l’autre littérature québécoise, autoportraits,” 2. 47 Stephen Henighan, “Montreal, a Publishing Centre in – Spanish?” Montreal Gazette, 7 July 1990, K4. 48 Nómez’s Poesía chilena contemporánea (Contemporary Chilean poetry), an anthology of the principal Chilean poets of the twentieth century – including Mistral, Neruda, Huidobro, and De Rokha – was co-published by the prestigious Fondo de Cultura Económica and Editorial Andrés Bello in 1992 and is considered one of the defining selections of modern Chilean poetry. 49 Unless otherwise specified, all translated material in this book has been rendered in English by the author of the present study. 50 Patricia Lazcano, unpublished poem.

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chapter one 1 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), one of the most famous psychics of her time, grew up in southern Russia but later travelled widely in Europe, Asia (especially India and Tibet), and North and South America before marrying Henry Steel Olcott, an American esotericist, with whom she founded the Theosophical Society. Her Isis Unveiled (1877) offers an occult interpretation of human history. 2 Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) was a Florentine poet, novelist, journalist, and satirical polemicist who denounced the “decadence” of D’Annunzio in his review Lacerba (1913) and advocated the search for new models for modernizing Italy. He became associated with Marinetti and the Futurists before suddenly converting to Catholicism in 1920, after which he went on to write on religious subjects and eventually supported Mussolini. 3 It is of note that Isidore Ducasse (“Le Conte de Lautréamont”) was born in Montevideo in 1846, at the height of the nine-year blockade and siege of the city by the combined forces of Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas and the troops of Uruguayan ex-president Manuel Oribe, and must have witnessed scenes of extreme misery and deprivation as a child. 4 Felisberto Hernández (1902–64) was a Uruguayan short-story writer and novelist who is considered one of the masters of the literature of the fantastic. In a fragmentary, oneiric, hallucinatory style, many of his stories deal with mysteries and secrets that are held by both animate beings and inanimate objects and that wait anxiously to be revealed. 5 Pablo de Rokha (Carlos Díaz Loyola, 1894–1968) is considered one of the three major figures of avant-garde poetry in Chile during the first half of the twentieth century, the others being Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda. His direct, idiosyncratic, often confrontational style (and a later falling-out with Pablo Neruda) delayed his recognition in comparison with that of the other two poets. Etcheverry and the poets associated with the School of Santiago endeavoured to restore De Rokha’s work to its rightful place. See Naín Nómez’s study Pablo de Rokha. 6 George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1877–1949) was a Russian spiritualist and occultist who travelled through South Asia and the Middle East and later founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Paris in 1922. He believed that humans live in a waking sleep, from which they may be delivered by heightened physical and spiritual awareness. His best-known book was Meetings with Remarkable Men, published posthumously in 1963. Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878–1947) was a mathematician and journalist who followed Gurdjieff’s teachings and popularized them in Britain.

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7 Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942), a Chilean novelist, playwright, and literary critic who now lives in the United States, is probably the best-known author of the Chilean diaspora. His essays in works such as Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck, 1970), co-authored with Armand Mattelart, criticize the influence of US culture in Latin America, while his fiction and theatre often deal with political repression. His play La muerte y la doncella (Death and the Maiden, 1990) was made into a film directed by Roman Polanski. 8 Antonio Skármeta is a Chilean novelist and short-story writer who worked as an actor and theatre director while studying at the Instituto Pedagógico at the University of Chile. He preceded Etcheverry and the School of Santiago by about a decade (he graduated in 1964). English speakers are most familiar with his novel Ardiente paciencia (1985), which was later made into the film Il Postino (The Postman) in 1995, directed by Michael Radford. Skármeta has also translated works by a number of English-speaking authors, including Norman Mailer, William Golding, and Jack Kerouac, into Spanish. 9 Raúl Zurita (b. 1950) began writing in Chile in the 1970s and by the following decade had become the most popular poet in the country. His work is iconoclastic, alternately intensely lyrical and evocative and highly experimental in form. He is also famous for his four-kilometre-long poem “Ni pena ni miedo,” written across the landscape of the Atacama desert in 1993, which may be read from the air. 10 Jorge Etcheverry, personal interview, 31 July 1996. 11 Nicanor Parra (b. 1914) is the inventor of the “anti-poem,” a concise, focused form of poetry filled with black humour and written in a purposefully flat language. Parra, a decade younger than Neruda, wished to overcome the rhetorical and often overblown language that he felt had come to typify the work of Neruda and other poets. Parra taught mathematics, physics, and engineering for many years at the University of Chile. 12 Jorge Etcheverry, interview, in “La memoria,” 114. 13 Jorge Etcheverry, “G” and “X,” 229. 14 Jorge Etcheverry, interview, in Gonzalo Millán, “Escuela de Santiago,” 53. 15 Jorge Etcheverry, personal interview, 31 July 1996. 16 Ibid. 17 Etcheverry, “G” and “X,” 223. 18 Ibid., 221. 19 Ibid., 224. 20 Jorge Etcheverry, El evasionista/The Escape Artist, 13, 111, 17, 43, 99, 105. 21 Ibid., 23. 22 Ibid., 57.

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23 Ibid., 113. 24 The multilayered novels of Manuel Puig (1932–90) blend popular culture with thematic seriousness, frivolity with tragedy, sexuality with politics, and such media as magazines and film with fiction. His most famous novel, El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976), which was made into a film by the Argentine director Héctor Babenco, is a novel in dialogue form, reminiscent of La Celestina, without any direct narration. Puig was one of the first Latin American writers to openly declare his homosexuality. Suzanne Jill Levine, who translated three of his novels, has written a masterful biography and analysis of his work, titled Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman. 25 Jorge Etcheverry, personal interview, 31 July 1996. 26 Ibid. 27 Jorge Etcheverry, The Witch, 29. 28 Jorge Etcheverry, “Recommendations,” 260. 29 Mohammed Mrabet was born around 1940 in the Rif Mountains of Morocco. During the 1960s he became acquainted with Jane and Paul Bowles in Tangiers. Since his first novel, Love with a Few Hairs, Mrabet has written some fifteen books; Paul Bowles translated several of his novels into English. 30 Jorge Etcheverry, Tánger, 41. 31 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 20. 32 Luis Torres, “Writings of the Latin-Canadian Exile,” 180. Torres places the theme of exile in Latino-Canadian literature within the context of the broader tradition of writings of exile and diaspora in European literature, beginning with Ovid’s Tristia. 33 Jorge Etcheverry, De chácharas y largavistas, 45. 34 Jorge Etcheverry, Vitral con pájaros, 80. 35 Ibid., 81. 36 Ibid., 35.

c h a p t e r tw o 1 Margarita Feliciano, personal interview, 24–25 May 1996. 2 Latin America has a long tradition of mixing literature and politics, with the result that many men and women of letters have also held office or been leaders of political groups, and vice versa. Mitre, who served as both general and president of the Argentine republic, was also a poet, novelist, journalist, translator (from Italian and French), and an adept and skilled historian of Argentina’s early history. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, one

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of the most famous writers of Argentine Romanticism (his historical treatise Facundo is a key work of Argentine literature), succeeded Mitre as president in 1868. Other examples include the Cuban patriot José Martí and, more recently, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru in 1990. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is considered the greatest Spanish novelist in the Realist tradition (Doña Perfecta, 1876; Marianela, 1878). Later in his prolific literary career, he moved more toward Naturalism and psychological analysis. Two of his last novels, Tristana (1892) and Nazarín (1895), were made into films by Luis Buñuel. José Hernández’s epic poems El gaucho Martín Fierro (The Gaucho Martín Fierro, 1872) and La vuelta de Martín Fierro (The Return of Martín Fierro, 1879) are considered the national epic of Argentina and the classic work in the gaucho tradition. Narrated in the gaucho vernacular, as though the writer were a payador or country troubadour, the two long poems describe the miseries of life on the frontier for the mestizos who found themselves trapped between Indian raids, on the one hand, and forced conscription into the Argentine army, on the other; the poems also present an austere moral code of life based on honour and the struggle for survival. Esteban Echeverría (1805–51) is considered the first writer in Latin America to work within the Romantic tradition. After studying in Paris on a government grant, he returned to Argentina, intent on applying the Romantic esthetic to a new literature based on the landscape and dramas of his homeland. His most famous work, La cautiva (The captive, 1837), is a long poem dealing with the heroic effort of a frontier woman to save her wounded husband and herself from raiding Indians. For a comparison between La cautiva and a Canadian work of the same period, see Hugh Hazelton, “A Sense of Native Land in Two Nineteenth-Century Narrative Poems.” Rafael Obligado (1851–1920) was a later poet in the gauchesca tradition, whose long poem Santos Vega (1885), despite its traditional Pampas setting and frontier material, is not written in the gaucho vernacular. Margarita Feliciano, personal interview, 24–25 May 1996. The Chilean critic, novelist, short-story writer, and poet Fernando Alegría (b. 1918) has produced a voluminous body of critical work on subjects as diverse as Thomas Mann, Walt Whitman, the origins of Chilean poetry, and the radical reinterpretation of the modern Latin American canon (Literatura y revolución, 1971). He taught at the University of California at Berkeley and then for many years at Stanford University.

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9 Margarita Feliciano, personal interview, 24–25 May 1996. 10 Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), author of a number of books of pastoral, lyrical poetry often inspired by ancient Rome, wrote in a remarkably fragmented, impressionistic style and called the poet an eternal child who views the world for the first time. 11 Gabriela Mistral (Lucila Godoy Alcayaga) (1889–1957) worked as a rural schoolteacher in her native Chile for twenty years as she refined and polished the evocative, imagistic, spare lyricism that characterized her poetry (Desolación, 1922; Tala, 1938). She was named a lifetime consul by the Chilean government and was the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize (1945). For a discussion of Mistral’s place in Chilean literature, see Gastón Lillo and J. Guillermo Renart, eds., Re-leer hoy a Gabriela Mistral. 12 Juana de Ibarbourou (1892–1979) was one of the first women writers in Latin America to celebrate female sensuality and passion in her poetry. Her fresh, natural, lyrical style made her work extremely popular in the 1920s and 1930s. 13 Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) was born in Switzerland but raised in the province of San Juan, Argentina. She lived in Buenos Aires as an unwed mother and began to publish poetry in her mid-twenties. Her delicate but passionate poems of love and disillusion and her forthright affirmation of the feminine condition brought her national recognition as the first great woman poet of Argentina. She met with Juana de Ibarbourou and Gabriela Mistral in Montevideo in the 1920s. The dramatic circumstances of her life have made her something of a legend. 14 Nicolás Guillén (1902–89) was the most famous Afro-Cuban poet of the twentieth century. In a direct, conversational, and precise language, he incorporated the social reality of the island into his poetry, using the vocabulary, rhythms, music, and sounds of Afro-Cuban culture. Guillén joined the Communist Party in 1937 and was a strong, continual supporter of the Cuban Revolution. 15 César Vallejo (1892–1938), the foremost avant-garde poet of Peru in the first half of the twentieth century, wrote his first two austere, darkly metaphysical and formally innovative books (Los heraldos negros, 1918, and Trilce, 1922) in isolation in Trujillo, Peru. His work was unrecognized until later in his life. He travelled to France and Russia in the 1930s and defended the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. 16 The “Generation of 1927” was actually a diverse group of young, avantgarde Spanish poets, inspired by José Ortega y Gasset and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who wished to expand the artistic frontiers of their time by

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blending lyricism with surrealism and creating a highly original metaphoric esthetic unlinked with the natural world. See Vicente Gaos, ed., Antología del grupo poético de 1927, for an introduction to the poets and their work. Margarita Feliciano, personal interview, 24–25 May 1996. Ibid. Ramiro Lagos is a Colombian poet, anthologist, and literary critic who has taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro since 1965. One of his most timely anthologies is Voces femeninas del mundo hispánico (1991), an anthology of poetry by Latin American women. Juan Carlos García is a Chilean fiction writer and literary critic (El dictador en la literatura hispanoamericana, 2000) who currently teaches at Glendon College, York University, in Toronto; Manuel Alcides Jofré, who writes poetry (Cabos sueltos/Canadian Poems, 1986) in both Spanish and English, lived in Toronto for a decade before returning to teach in his native Chile; Claudio Durán is a Chilean Canadian poet who teaches philosophy at Atkinson College, York University. Margarita Feliciano, Ventana sobre el mar/Window on the Sea 50. Hédi Bouraoui, “Introduction,” in Margarita Feliciano, Circadian Nuvolitatis, 8. Feliciano, Ventana, 2, 11. The Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) was one of the chief figures of the modernista movement in Latin American letters. Initially inspired by European, especially French, symbolism, the modernistas proclaimed the transcendental, idealistic nature of poetry and preferred cosmopolitan, highly refined imagery and a rarified vocabulary. Darío, who lived in Chile, Argentina, and Spain before finally returning to Central America, later championed the shared values and ways of thinking of the Hispanic world, particularly in the face of increased Anglo-Saxon dominance. Feliciano, Circadian Nuvolitatis, 54. Feliciano, Ventana, 4. Prince Ilango Adigal, Shilappadikaram, 35. In the Sangham love poetry that flourished in Tamil literature from the first century b.c. to the third century a.d., five types of natural settings (of which seascapes were one) were used as metaphors for the union and separation of lovers. Feliciano, Ventana, 4. Feliciano, Circadian Nuvolitatis, 33. Feliciano, Ventana, 12. Ibid., 26, 36, 42.

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32 Feliciano, Circadian Nuvolitatis, 16. 33 The title of the poem has a curious history. In Spanish “Desdichado” literally means “unhappy” or “unfortunate,” “unlucky”: thus the title would be “The Unfortunate” or “Ill-Fated One.” Nerval chose the title, however, from the eighth chapter of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, in which a mysterious companion of Sir Richard the Lion-Hearted, who has lost his castle to King John, bears the device upon his shield, with the meaning of “The Disinherited.” 34 Feliciano, Circadian Nuvolitatis, 18. 35 Ibid., 60. 36 Dante Alighieri, “Paradiso,” Canto 33, line 145, in La Divina Commedia, 924: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.” 37 Margarita Feliciano, Lectura en Málaga, 23, 29, 15.

c h a p t e r th r e e 1 Gilberto Flores Patiño, personal interview, 10 May 1996. 2 J.S. Brushwood, México en su novela, 23. 3 Mariano Azuela (1873–1952) was one of the greatest authors of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). His experience as a medical doctor with the revolutionary forces of Julián Medina afforded him profound insight into the suffering and motivation of those involved in the struggle. His intensely realistic vision of the Revolution, in which ideology is often a minor motivation, and his austere, energetic prose marked the beginning of modern Mexican fiction. A number of his novels, including the modern classic Los de abajo (The Underdogs, 1915), have been translated into English. For interesting insight into his life, see his Páginas autobiográficas. 4 Agustín Yáñez (1904–80) applied new narrative techniques, such as interior monologue, cutting between time frames, and changes in point of view, to describe the collective life of rural Mexico, especially in his trilogy Al filo del agua (1947) La tierra pródiga (1960) and Las tierras flacas (1962). He also served as governor of the state of Jalisco and as minister of education in the federal government. 5 Juan Rulfo (1918–86) is one of the most enigmatic and influential authors in modern Latin American literature, although his entire reputation rests on two short books: the oneiric, surrealistic, and symbolic novel Pedro Páramo (1955); and the short stories of El llano en llamas (1953). As a child, he was orphaned during the War of the Cristeros (1926–28), which succeeded the Revolution, and an eerie sense of trauma and displacement

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pervades his work, in which a precise, but overwhelmingly ambiguous prose style constantly dissolves the borders between reality, symbol, and perception. Luis Spota (1925–85) was a professional journalist whose more than twenty-five novels constantly examined corruption and the abuse of power in modern urban Mexico. Gilberto Flores Patiño, personal interview, 10 May 1996. Ibid. Gilberto Flores Patiño, Sin salida, 170. Gilberto Flores Patiño, Nudo de tinieblas, 151. Octavio Paz, “Introduction,” in Carlos Fuentes, Cuerpos y ofrendas, 13. Hugh Hazelton and Gary Geddes, eds, Compañeros: An Anthology of Writings about Latin America, 39–41. Robert Chartrand, “Le cadeau du bibliothécaire,” Le Devoir, 14 March 1999, E8. Other enthusiastic reviewers included Laurent Laplante in Nuit Blanche 74 (1999): 14; and Marie-Renée Lavoie in Québec Français 113 (Spring 1999): 18. “Crónica Librarium,” Excelsior, 6 December 1985. “Gilberto y El Centauro,” in “Librarium,” Excelsior, 4 September 1985. The novel was praised in “Esteban le centaure: Le regard neuf de Gilberto Flores Patiño,” Le Devoir, 12 December 1987, D1 and D12, by Clément Trudel, who took the opportunity to interview the author and write an extensive article about his work as a whole; Georges Lamon was equally approving in “Transmettre son imaginaire à son cheval de bois,” La Presse, 2 January 1988, F7. Short laudatory articles also appeared in Le Droit, 3 October 1987, 47; Châtelaine, November 1987, 19–20; and Nuit Blanche 30 (1987): 55. The most complete English review was that by Penelope Williams in the Ottawa Citizen, 17 December 1995, C4, who also (like Excelsior) compares it to The Little Prince. Gilberto Flores Patiño, Le pégase de cristal, 151. José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1931), one of the most prolific lithographers and illustrators of his time, is now known primarily for his striking use of the popular tradition of the calavera, or anthropomorphized skeleton, to satirize all aspects of Mexican politics, society, and culture by comically and hideously underlining the omnipresence of death. His influence extended to the murals of Diego Rivera (Sunday Dream at Alameda Park, which features a flamboyantly dressed female calavera holding the painter by the hand), as well as to the mural painting of José Clemente Orozco (The Stillbirth of Learning). Gilberto Flores Patiño, personal interview, 10 May 1996.

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chapter four 1 Roberto Matta (1911–2002) was a Chilean painter associated with the Surrealists in the 1930s and 1940s. He developed a highly personal style that blends abstract and semifigurative forms with elements of science fiction, creating complex, fluid compositions in which organic and mechanical images are melded. Some of his paintings also have a political content, denouncing war and state repression. 2 Despite his interest in diverse forms of poetry, from the haiku to the concrete poem, as well as philosophical, psychological, and esthetic themes, Lavergne has always maintained a strong element of politicization and reaffirmation of his solidarity with the worker in his poetry. Several of his works, such as Índice agresivo and La primavera piedra, have been largely dedicated to this aspect. His latest poetry, largely published on the Internet, has been even more denunciatory of abuses of human rights and the environment. An example is “Chilicanos 2000,” http://www.nodo50.org/ entrerejas/chiclanos.htm. 3 Jorge Teillier (b. 1935) is a Chilean poet whose work combines a somewhat nostalgic lyricism with rural and quotidian themes – a type of poetry quite removed from the restless poetics of the avant-garde (Huidobro, Neruda, de Rokha) and antipoetry (Parra) but appreciated among Chilean readers for its return to the fundamentals of poetry. Naín Nómez has included him among the nine principal Chilean poets of the twentieth century in his influential anthology Poesía chilena contemporánea. 4 Alfredo Lavergne, personal interview, 9 November 1995. 5 A representative selection of Tablada’s highly original and innovative work has been included in the anthology compiled by Octavio Paz et al., eds, Poesía en movimiento. His poetry, however, is often not included in analyses of the Latin American avant-garde because he was of an earlier generation and did not belong to a definitive movement, as did Manuel Maples Arce and the Estridentistas. 6 An example of Huerta’s poemínimos is “Tláloc,” in Gabriel Zaid, ed., Omnibus de poesía mexicana, 593: Sucede Que me canso De ser dios Sucede Que me canso De llover

It so happens That I’m tired Of being god It so happens That I’m tired Of raining

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Notes to page 89 Sobre mojado Sucede Que aquí Nada sucede Sino la lluvia lluvia lluvia lluvia

Drenched It so happens That nothing ever Happens here Except rain rain rain rain

7 Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645) is renowned for his mordant sense of humour and love of parody, which are evident in the prose of his essays and novels, such as the picaresque Vida del buscón llamado Pablos (1604), and in the refined irony of his poetry. Along with Góngora, he is considered one of the greatest poets of the Siglo de Oro, or Golden Age, of Spanish letters during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 8 Matsuo Basho’s (1644–94) travel writings, based on his walking tours of various parts of Japan, used haikus to crystallize the emotions and reflections related to exceptional moments in his journeys. 9 The great Spanish lyrical poet Antonio Machado Ruíz (1875–1939) taught French in the provincial cities of Soria, Baeza, and Segovia as he wrote his meditative poetic reflections that incorporate images of the spare Castillian countryside. His works also include a number of minipoems (“Apuntes,” “Canciones,” “Proverbios y cantares”); see Manuel Álvar, ed., Antonio Machado. Machado’s brother, Manuel, also a well-known poet, was more closely associated with Spanish Modernismo. 10 Miguel Hernández (1910–42), who had to leave school at age fourteen in order to work as a shepherd, is considered one of the finest and most natural poets in Spain in the twentieth century. His direct, lyrical, sensitive style was moulded by the traditional ballads and romances of the countryside as well as by his readings of poets of the Spanish Golden Age. Hernández’s El rayo que no cesa was translated by the Quebec poet Émile Martel and published as L’éclair sans cesse. Hernández was imprisoned by Franco after the Spanish Civil War and died in his cell of tuberculosis at age thirty-two. 11 Leopoldo Gutiérrez is a Chilean filmmaker who lives in Montreal. His documentary film Blue Jay: Notas del exilio (Blue Jay: Notes on exile, 2001), made in Spanish and English, describes the lives and aesthetic philosophies of five Chilean writers who settled in Ottawa in the 1970s: Jorge Etcheverry, Leandro Urbina, Eric Martínez, Naín Nómez, and Gonzalo Millán (the latter two have returned to Chile).

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12 Nelly Davis Vallejos (b. 1941) published her first book of poems, Ritual, in Valparaíso, Chile, just months before the coup d’état against Salvador Allende in 1973. A political activist and teacher, she was forced to flee to Canada, where she continued writing and published five more books of poetry (three with Les Éditions d’Orphée) before returning to Chile in 1988. She was one of the earliest and most active organizers of poetry readings in Spanish in Montreal. For a longer description and thematic analysis of Latino-Québécois writing, see Hugh Hazelton, “Quebec Hispánico.” 13 Alfredo Lavergne, Índice agresivo, 73. 14 Ibid., 91. 15 Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1920) is a poet, translator, and anthologist who studied British and American literature at Columbia University before entering the priesthood and becoming part of a community based on the teachings of liberation theology on the islands of Solentiname in Nicaragua. He was later minister of culture in the Sandinista government. Cardenal’s poetry combines elements of Central American history, political struggle, and metaphysical speculation and is widely known. He studied with Thomas Merton at the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani, Kentucky, for several years in the late 1950s and translated and edited an anthology of American poetry in 1963. 16 The Guatemalan revolutionary poet Otto René Castillo (1936–67) wrote two important collections of direct, moving, personal, and quietly politicized poetry: Tecún Umán (1964) and Vámonos patria a caminar (Come for a walk with me, homeland, 1965). He joined the guerrillas fighting the military regime in Guatemala and was captured, tortured, and then burned alive by the Guatemalan army in 1967. 17 Alfredo Lavergne, Rasgos separados/Traits distinctifs, 17. 18 One of the most original Quebec authors to deplore the misery of the urban working class during the Depression and mid-twentieth century was the poet Jean Narrache (Émile Corderre, 1893–1970), whose poems denouncing the injustice of society were written in “habitant” dialect. In many of the poems of his six books, the speaker wanders through city streets, describing and commenting on the sufferings of the “pauverr’ yâbs” whom he encounters. For an insightful comparison of Narrache’s work with that of F.R. Scott (who first translated him), see Richard Giguère, Exil, révolte et dissidence. 19 Lavergne was drawn to the extreme rationalism, clarity, and freedom of Benda’s (1867–1956) aesthetic philosophy, with its accompanying aversion to the emotional and intuitive, elements that are reflected in the unwavering critical gaze of the speaker in Retro-perspectiva/Rétro-perspective.

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Notes to pages 94–105

20 José Prats Sariol is one of contemporary Cuba’s foremost writers of literary criticism and history, as well as being an accomplished author of short stories. 21 Hernán Barrios, a Chilean prose writer based in Montreal, won the apedeche award for first prize in fiction in 1987 with his short story “El discurso de la Macarena,” translated by Paul Figueroa in the apedeche anthology as “Macarena Has Her Say.” His long, baroque sentences, together with his engaging, highly urbanized style, make his English-titled collection of short stories, Landed immigrant (1990), one of the most interesting works in Latino-Canadian literature. He was able to write only one other book, El país imaginario (The imaginary country, 1995) before losing most of his vision to a debilitating disease. 22 Salvador Torres, a poet, essayist, and fiction writer from El Salvador who lives in Montreal, won the Humanitas award for 1989 with his bilingual book of poems Dioserías y odioserías/Dieuseries et odieuseries, translated by Laure Palin. Torres now writes in both Spanish and French. See his essay “Considérations sur une expérience romanesque en deuxième langue”; and Hugh Hazelton, “Migrating Language.”

chapter five 1 Alfonso Quijada Urías, telephone interview, 26 August 1996. 2 Salarrué (Salvador Efraín Salazar Arrué, 1899–1975) was a Salvadoran fiction writer, poet, journalist, and painter who is chiefly known for his brief, highly original short stories about peasant life, which used regional vocabulary in their narration and local speech patterns in their dialogue, somewhat similar to Quebec romans du terroir. 3 Claudia Lars (Carmen Brannon Vega, 1899–1974), the daughter of an Irish American, lived in Costa Rica, the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala before returning to El Salvador to devote herself to writing. Author of more than a dozen collections of lyrical, often socially committed poetry, she also opened the way to new generations of writers through the literary review Cultura, which she edited for the Salvadoran Ministry of Education. 4 Manlio Argueta, ed., Poesía de El Salvador, 143. According to Argueta, many of the authors in this group eventually tired of confronting the dictatorship or ended up giving into it. The notable exception was Italo López Vallecillos (b. 1932), who continued to write spare, powerful poetry for the rest of his life. 5 Roque Dalton (1935–75) is considered one of the principal revolutionary poets of twentieth-century Latin America. Active as a guerrilla fighter in

Notes to pages 105–6

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El Salvador and member of the Ejército Revolucionario Popular (erp, or People’s Revolutionary Army), he wrote historical monographs and a novel as well as five books of poems. His poetry is marked by the inclusion of Salvadoran and Central American history as a poetic theme. He was killed by members of his own party. Manlio Argueta (b. 1935) is one of the foremost novelists of contemporary El Salvador and is especially known for his works dealing with the war during the 1970s and 1980s. Argueta is also an accomplished poet and editor of a key anthology of Salvadoran poetry, beginning his poetic career as part of the Círculo Literario Universitario (University Literary Circle) with Roque Dalton and Otto René Castillo in the 1950s. His anthology Poesía de El Salvador (1983) covers the entire history of Salvadoran poetry. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) was partially brought up in South Africa and was fluently bilingual, earning his living as a translator in Lisbon and writing part of his early work in English. Pessoa created a number of other distinct poetic personas, which he called “heteronyms,” each of which had his own particular poetic style and esthetic philosophy. Relatively little known during his life, Pessoa has exerted enormous influence on late-twentieth-century poetry. Cuban poet, essayist, editor, and novelist José Lezama Lima (1910–76) is considered one of the most influential and enigmatic writers in twentiethcentury Latin America. His visionary, ambiguous, hallucinatory novel Paradiso (Paradise, 1967) is the epitome of his inventive, highly poeticized, multifaceted style of writing, constantly in search of a new way to describe reality. Novelist, playwright, essayist, and poet Roberto Armijo (1937–97) was one of the principal writers of his generation in El Salvador. Although he was at first known as “the poet of Chalatenango” for his lyrical poems about his home area, he spent much of his later life in Paris, where his poetry became more philosophic yet was still tinged with nostalgia for his homeland. One of the initial members of the group of writers known as the Generación Comprometida, Italo López Vallecillos (1932–86) was a poet, short-story writer, essayist, and historian. He was also active in literary publishing, popularizing the work of classic Salvadoran writers such as Salarrué during his years as editor with the University of El Salvador Press and with educa during the 1960s and 1970s. José Roberto Cea (b. 1939) is a prolific poet, anthologist, novelist, playwright, and literary and art historian who has written extensively on Central American painting. As a member of the Círculo Literario

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Universitario of the late 1950s, he was influential in bringing Salvadoran reality into contemporary poetic discourse. Nicaraguan short-story writer, novelist, and essayist Sergio Ramírez (b. 1942) combines an experimental style, often using multiple points of view, with committment to social and economic change. He served as vice president of Nicaragua under the Sandinista government in the 1980s. Alfonso Quijada Urías, telephone interview, 26 August 1996. Ibid. Unfortunately, Quijada Urías has lost many clippings of reviews and articles on his work during his travels and exile. Poet, playwright, journalist, essayist, critic, and novelist Mario Benedetti (b. 1920) is one of the most versatile and prolific writers of twentieth-century Uruguay and has had enormous influence in Latin America. Socially committed, ironic, tender, and at times experimental (his long poem El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel, 1971, is actually a novel in verse), Benedetti enjoys wide popularity as a writer. His novel La tregua (The Truce, 1960) was made into a film in Argentina. Roque Dalton, back cover of Alfonso Quijada Urías, Estados sobrenaturales y otros poemas. Alfonso Quijada Urías, telephone interview, 26 August 1996. Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627), widely considered the most erudite proponent of baroque culteranismo in the Spanish Golden Age, developed a highly refined, rarified poetic style involving ornate elements such as hyperbaton, or inverted word order, and elaborate layers of metaphor. See Dámaso Alonso, Estudios y ensayos gongorinos, for a comprehensive and meticulous disarticulation of the complexities of Gongora’s poetry. Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937), a Uruguayan who lived for many years in the subtropical province of Missiones in northern Argentina, is considered one of the foremost short-story writers of his time. His work, carefully constructed and written in a direct, unadorned, but subtlely lyrical style, combines elements of Naturalism with the fantastic, often achieving a sudden, intensely dramatic effect. Alfonso Quijada Urías, Otras historias famosas, 12. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, 3. Alfonso Quijada Urías, La fama infame del famoso (ap)atrida, 81. Alfonso Quijada Urías, “¿Qué Hi?,” 152. João Guimarães Rosa (1908–67) is considered the most deeply innovative and linguistically complex author of twentieth-century Brazil. Grande sertão: Veredas (1956), which has been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses in its verbal complexity and mythic structure, established the sertão, or dry

Notes to pages 114–30

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hinterlands of Brazil, not only as a physical symbol for human struggle in the country, but also as an archetype for the Brazilian consciousness. Alfonso Quijada Urías, The Better to See You, 87. Alfonso Quijada Urías, They Come and Knock on the Door, 25. Ibid., 39. The Nicaraguan poet Leonel Rugama (1949–70) was a young schoolteacher who became active as a Sandinista guerrilla in the struggle against the Somoza regime and died at the age of twenty-one in a battle in Managua. His work, which combines social activism with elements of sound and concrete poetry, has been widely anthologized. concultura is the acronym for the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte (National Council for Culture and the Arts), an agency established by the Salvadoran government to promote the nation’s cultural activities. Since the signing of the peace accords ending the civil war in 1992, many young people who fought in the fmln are now working in the Salvadoran Ministry of Culture. Alfonso Quijada Urías, “La casa grande,” 64. Alfonso Quijada Urías, Obscuro, 5. Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist Alejo Carpentier (1904–80) lived in Paris and Venezuela, besides his native Havana, and was fascinated by the shock resulting from the collision of European culture with those of the Americas, particularly in the Caribbean. His framing of the concepts of the neobaroque and lo real maravilloso in the 1940s laid the foundation of magic realism. Alfonso Quijada Urías, telephone interview, 26 August 1996.

chapter six 1 “Representaciones de la violencia: El lenguaje de las flores en ‘El jardín de las glicinas,’” conference given by Nela Rio at Concordia University, 21 September 2006. 2 Nela Rio, telephone interview, 5 August 1996. 3 Hélder Câmara (1909–99), archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, from 1964 to 1985, was a lifelong advocate of economic and social justice for the poor and an inspiration to the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America. Câmara founded the movement Ação, Paz e Justiça (Action, Peace and Justice), which believed in using nonviolent methods to achieve social change and which tried to convince the Vatican that it must provide “a preferential option for the poor.”

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4 Argentines refer to inhabitants of Buenos Aires as Porteños (people from the port). 5 The Mexican poet and essayist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651?-95) was one of the most brilliant minds of her time. A passionate and witty defender of the rights of women and a master of the forms of classical Spanish poetry, she was able to carry on her writing and polemics even from within the walls of her convent and is now known as the greatest woman poet of the Golden Age. See Octavio Paz’s exhaustive study of her life and work, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o Las trampas de la fe. 6 Nela Rio, telephone interview, 5 August 1996. 7 Nora Strejilevich is an Argentine poet and fiction writer who taught both in British Columbia and Alberta before moving to the United States in the mid-1990s. Una sola muerte numerosa, her testimonial novel about the Dirty War in Argentina in the 1970s, was published by the North-South Center Press in Miami in 1997, where it won the Letras de Oro prize for fiction. It was translated by Cristina de la Torre and published as A Single Numberless Death by the University of Virginia Press in 2002. 8 Nela Rio, En las noches que desvisten otras noches, 7. 9 Ibid., 12. 10 Ibid., 42, 44. 11 Maeve López, “the last to have died,” 241. 12 Nela Rio, “Lucrecia,” 188. 13 Nela Rio, “Encarnación de la Palma,” 54. 14 Nela Rio, “María Candelaria,” 6. 15 Nela Rio, Aquella luz, la que estremece, 14. 16 Breast cancer and the suffering and problems of readaptation that it entails for its survivors are issues that are currently widely discussed, and Rio’s poems are appreciated for their artistic statement about the disease. Six poems from Cuerpo amado/Beloved Body were chosen for a bilingual reading by Gladys Ilarregui at the conference “Take Control of Your Health,” Detroit, Michigan, 8 July 1998. In the summer of 2002, Rio was also invited to do a series of readings from the same book in England, the Netherlands, and Spain. 17 Nela Rio, “El laberinto vertical,” 3, 3, 5. 18 Ibid., 8.

chapter seven 1 “The concept of transculturation, the process of cultural transformation through the influx of new cultural elements and the alteration or

Notes to page 153

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disappearance of existing ones[,] … was created by the Cuban sociologist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who used it in his monumental study Contrapunteo cubano de tabaco y azúcar [Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar], first published in 1940. Ortiz found the term particularly well suited to describing the history of Cuba and other parts of the Americas that had been settled by waves of peoples from a variety of cultures and civilizations that often had little or nothing to do with one another, such as the Ciboneys, the Taínos, the Spanish, the African slaves, and later Chinese and European immigrants to the island. Bronislaw Malinowski, in his introduction to the work, pointed out that the term was much more accurate than that of ‘acculturation,’ which was used in the United States to speak of other cultures gradually accepting a monolithic norm. In the transculturation process, both the new culture and the old or ‘original’ one gradually fuse, thus creating a syncretic synthesis of both, as well as of older levels of the palimpsest”; Hugh Hazelton, “Bolivia-Canada,” 2. The Chaco War (1932–35) between Bolivia and Paraguay, the two poorest countries in South America at the time, broke out after the discovery of oil in the northern Chaco, a region of thick thorn forests that suffers from drought during much of the year and flooding during the rest. The national boundaries between the two countries had never been clearly defined. Standard Oil (and the United States) encouraged the Bolivians in their claim to most of the region, while Royal Dutch Shell (and Great Britain) favoured the Paraguayans. Bolivian troops, mainly from the highlands, suffered greatly from the tropical heat and diseases, particularly in the trench warfare that developed. Some 40,000 Paraguayans and 50,000 Bolivians died in the war, which ended in a Paraguayan victory, but also left both nations bankrupt. The ensuing anti-government backlash in Bolivia marked the beginning of serious attempts at social reform. Alejandro Saravia, personal interview, 21 July 1996. Ibid. Alcides Arguedas (1879–1946) is generally considered the first great Bolivian indigenista of the twentieth century. The indigenista literary movement in Latin America was particularly concerned with developing a voice and appreciation for the Indian cultures of the region, primarily through novels and short stories dealing with their lives and reality. Arguedas, who was born into a landowning family of Spanish ancestry, was instrumental in the Palabras Libres (Free Words) literary movement, which advocated the creation of an authentic Bolivian literature. His novels, especially the modern classic Raza de bronce (Race of bronze, 1912), dramaticized the oppression and misery of the Indian condition in Bolivia.

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6 The Bolivian poet, essayist, playwright, and historian Ricardo Jaimes Freyre (1868–1933) was the principal exponent of the modernista literary movement in Bolivian literature. Modernismo, inspired by the French symbolists and epitomized in the work of Rubén Darío, rejected bourgeois culture and was fascinated by the exotic, ethereal, artificial, and mystical. Later, under the influence of the Cuban poet José Martí, it took a more nationalistic pro-Hispanic turn. Jaimes Freyre, a man of cosmopolitan culture who spent much of his life in Argentina, was particularly interested in themes from Scandinavian and Germanic mythology, which inspired the poems of his most famous work, Castalia bárbara (1899). 7 Antonio Paredes Candia (b. 1924) is a prolific Bolivian author of works of history, folklore, linguistics, biography, and children’s literature. His collections and retellings of legends and tradiciones, or tales, from colonial times and the wars of independence, are still popular today. The most famous author of tradiciones was Ricardo Palma, the nineteenth-century Peruvian author of the Tradiciones peruanas (1872). 8 Alejandro Saravia, personal interview, 21 July 1996. 9 Jorge Sanjines (b. 1936) is generally considered Bolivia’s greatest filmmaker. In 1961 he founded the Grupo Ukamau, the country’s first film school, and a few years later became director of the Bolivian Institute of Cinematography. A basic tenet of his more than twenty films is the empowerment of the common people through art. His most famous film, El coraje de un pueblo (The Courage of the People, 1971), narrated a strike among the tin miners of a village in the Altiplano, and its ensuing repression by the military, and was enacted by the villagers themselves. His work has had tremendous resonance throughout Latin America. 10 The Peruvian novelist, short-story writer, and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911–69) is one of the greatest writers of the indigenista tradition. The son of a Cuzco lawyer, he was raised principally by Indians and was fluent in Quechua before he spoke Spanish. His novels, especially Yawar fiesta (1941), Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers, 1958), and Todas las sangres (All the bloods, 1964), delve deeply into the Andean Indian mind and spiritual experience and are characterized by his insight into Indian reality. Arguedas was also famous as an anthropologist and political activist. He committed suicide in 1969. See Mario Vargas Llosa’s study of his life and work, La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo. 11 The amazingly prolific Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado (1912–2001) was one of the best-loved writers in Brazil. Most of his work is set in his home state of Bahía and contains a unique blend of social realism, sensuality, humour,

Notes to pages 155–61

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and local traditions and folklore. Several of his novels, including Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, 1958), were made into movies. Alejandro Saravia, personal interview, 21 July 1996. Julio de la Vega (b. 1924), a Bolivian poet, novelist, and playwright, is known for his lyrical and impassioned descriptions of his nation’s landscape and peoples. His novel Matías, el apóstol suplente (1971), a long and animated interior monologue, is considered one of the best Bolivian novels of its time. Rolando Hinojosa (b. 1929), a Chicano novelist from the Rio Grande valley in Texas, won the Casa de las Américas prize in 1972 for his first novel, Estampas del valle (The Valley), which began a cycle of more than a dozen novels that examine the Chicano experience in South Texas over a period of half a century. Set in the fictional town of Klail City, in Belkin County, in the Rio Grande valley, his works include more than a thousand different characters and have made him one of the best-known writers of Chicano fiction in the United States. He is also a literary critic and professor of English at the University of Texas. Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954) is a Chicana novelist, short-story writer, and poet who was brought up in both the United States and Mexico. Her novel The House on Mango Street (1983) describes the cultural, economic, and social conditions and challenges of growing up in the Chicano community in Chicago and brought her great popular and critical success. Her work examines the feelings of alienation, isolation, and longing involved in existence both as a member of a minority and as a woman. The urbane novels and short stories of Peruvian Alberto Bryce Echenique (b. 1939), characterized by their ironic sense of humour, picaresque adventures, and fluid, conversational narration, often deal either with life in contemporary Lima or with displaced Peruvians living in Paris or other parts of Europe who compare their present way of life with that in Peru. Alejandro Saravia, personal interview, 21 July 1996. Ibid. Alejandro Saravia, Rojo, amarillo y verde, 26, 10, 39. Ibid., 201, 9, 46, 47. Ibid., 174. Alejandro Saravia, La brújula desencadenada, 21. Alejandro Saravia, “El libro que ladra a la luna,” 6. The War of the Pacific (1879–83) pitted an expansionist, economically aggressive Chile against Peru and Bolivia. Spurred by British capital, Chile wanted to develop the nitrate deposits of the northern Atacama desert, which were then in great demand in Europe as fertilizer, and set up mining

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operations on Bolivian soil without full permission. The ensuing conflict, one of the first to be fought with modern armaments (repeating rifles, early machine guns, armoured cruisers, and primitive submarines), ended with the Chilean invasion and military occupation of Peru. Chile took all of Bolivia’s Pacific territory, as well as the southern province of Peru. The war left both Bolivia and Peru with a perennial animosity and distrust of Chile. Alejandro Saravia, telephone interview, 3 July 2003. Alejandro Saravia, Habitante del décimo territorio, 11. Saravia, La brújula desencadenada, 17. Huidobro’s interest in concrete poetry was most evident in the poems that he wrote between 1917 and 1925, when he was living primarily in Paris and Madrid, especially in two volumes that he wrote in French, Horizon carré (1922) and the unpublished “Salle 14,” which was to accompany an exhibit of his “poèmes-peints” in Paris in 1922. Saravia, Rojo, amarillo y verde, 113, 64.

chapter eight 1 Afro-Colombian literature has existed in oral form, of course, ever since the arrival of African slaves in the sixteenth century and has had enormous influence on Colombian song and music. It first began to achieve expression as a written literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the pioneering Afro-Colombian poet Candelario Obeso (1849– 84) published his Cantos populares de mi tierra (1877), the first Colombian work to speak naturally and intimately of the Afro-Colombian culture, reality, and way of thinking, using a language and rhythm inspired by their own speech. Obeso was also a diplomat and translator of the poetry of the French and English Romantics into Spanish. The majority of Colombia’s population of African descent live in Chocó and on the Caribbean coast. See Laurence E. Prescott, Candelario Obeso y la iniciación de la poesía negra en Colombia. 2 León Felipe (1884–1968) was the pseudonym of Felipe Camino Galicia, a Spanish poet and anthologist who taught literature in Mexico and the United States, returned to Spain to fight alongside the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, and then went into exile in Mexico. Influenced by Walt Whitman, whom he translated, his poetic style is prophetic, declamatory, and combative, exalting human values in the face of militarism and oppression. An excellent introduction to his work is his Antología rota, for which he selected the included poems himself, with an afterword by Guillermo de Torre.

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3 The Spanish poet Blas de Otero (1916–79) began his career with introspective poetry that oscillated between spirituality and nihilism. Later, however, after the Spanish Civil War, his work focused more on human and political, and even specifically Spanish, problems. 4 The lyrical, oneiric, and organic quality of the poems of Aurelio Arturo (1906–74) made him one of the principal poets of mid-twentieth-century Colombia. His sensual, evocative imagery of the Colombian landscape was especially appreciated, particularly in the poem “Morada al sur” (A home in the south), which was also the title of his only published collection of poetry. 5 Porfirio Barba Jacob (1883–1942) was the principal pseudonym of the more than a dozen used by the Colombian poet Miguel Ángel Osorio Benítez, whose Bohemian lifestyle led him to Cuba, Central America, the United States, and Mexico, where he eventually settled. His work is characterized by a simultaneous celebration of the senses and despair at the futility of life. 6 The Colombian poet León de Greiff (1895–1976), of Swedish and German ancestry, introduced ideas and esthetics of the European and Latin American avant-garde of the 1920s to his country. His lyrical, rhythmic poetry reflected his interest in music, and he was himself the author of many songs. Other poems used the neologisms, mixtures of different levels of language, and eclectic references more typical of the avant-garde but always maintained their intuitive quality, as in the poem “Balada del mar no visto, rimada en versos diversos” (Ballad of the sea I’ve never seen, rhymed in diverse verses). 7 Yvonne served on the editorial board of Vericuetos/Chemins scabreux during the late 1990s. She also compiled and translated a bilingual (FrenchSpanish) selection of work by francophone poets of Canada, “Poesía de Canadá: Quebec … tierra de exilio/Poésie canadienne: Québec … terre d’exil,” which appeared in Vericuetos/Chemins scabreux, no. 4–5 (1995): 9–44. It included poems by Gilbert Langevin, Janou Saint-Denis, Jean-Pierre Pelletier, Martin Audet, Isabelle Miron, and Denis Desjardins. A second selection and translation, “Poesía canadiense/Poésie canadienne,” published under the auspices of Yvonne and Jean-Pierre Pelletier in Vericuetos/ Chemins scabreux, no. 7 (1998): 23–32, included work by Claude Hamelin, Sylvain Campeau, Pierre Bilodeau, Jean Sébastien Huot, and José Acquelin. A third collection of authors, “Québec … Terre d’exil,” in Vericuetos/ Chemins scabreux, no. 8 (1999): 49–56, again selected by Yvonne and JeanPierre Pelletier, focused on immigrant writers in Canada and included Mona Latif-Ghatas of Egypt, Marie-Célie Agnant of Haiti, and Margarita

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Feliciano of Argentina. These contributions were ground-breaking exchanges between the Colombian and Quebec literary worlds; Vericuetos/ Chemins scabreux is, in addition, a highly visually attractive review and is also distributed in Latin America and France. Many of the poets with whom Yvonne felt the deepest affinity were frequent readers at Janou St-Denis’s Place aux poètes. André Leclerc (b. 1943) is a trade-union activist and poet whose work combines experimental rythms, typographies, and slang and street language as it denounces the abuse of power. His long poem Poussières-Taillibert, dedicated to workers who died building the Olympic Stadium, is an outstanding example of his work. Danya Maisonneuve (1955–1994?) was a transgendered poet whose work, partially gathered together in her chapbook Mémoire de l’autre, explored the inner labyrinths and solitudes of the self. Yvonne América Truque, “La crisis autóctona en el Canadá,” in El Tiempo Hispano (Miami, Florida), September 1996, section “Hispano,” 6. Fabio Martínez, “Creatividad en Canadá,” El Tiempo (Bogotá), 12 February 1995, section “Arte,” 6–7. Afro-Hispanic Review: A Publication of Black Studies and Romance Languages 6, no. 3 (Sept. 1987). Clementina R. Adams, Common Threads: Themes in Afro-Hispanic Women’s Literature, contains a chapter on Yvonne and her work as well as one on Yvonne’s sister Sonia. Yvonne América Truque, “Hojas de sol y Recorriendo la distancia,” 17. Hugh Hazelton and Gary Geddes, eds, Compañeros: An Anthology of Writings about Latin America, 179. Yvonne América Truque, Proyección de los silencios, 11, 23–4, 25. Yvonne América Truque, Retratos de sombras y Perfiles inconclusos/Portraits d’ombres et Profils inachevés, 37. Marvin A. Lewis, “Yvonne Truque: A New Female Voice from Colombia,” 8. Yvonne América Truque, “En mi marcha y otros poemas,” 29. The title of Cortázar’s book involves further wordplay with “poemas”: Pameos, meopas y prosemas.

chapter nine 1 Estanislao del Campo (1834–80) was a major author of gauchesca poetry who preferred to write in a comical, parodic vein rather than in the epic tradition of José Hernández’s Martín Fierro. In his long poem Fausto (1866), a gaucho describes to his friend what he experienced when he attended Gounod’s opera Faust in Buenos Aires, confusing fiction for reality

Notes to pages 190–1

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and satirizing the pretensions and vanity of urban civilization. For an introduction to nineteenth-century gauchesca poetry apart from that of Hernández, see Eleuterio F. Tiscornia, ed., Poetas gauchescos. Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) was the embodiment of the symbolistinfluenced modernista tradition in Argentina. Poet, short-story writer, novelist, literary critic, and historian, Lugones was an early master of the literature of the fantastic, both in prose and in the delicate, eerie, and highly refined poetry of works such as Lunario sentimental (1909). The poet, novelist, dramatist, and essayist Leopoldo Marechal (1900–70), deeply immersed in classic European literature yet highly active in the avant-garde movements of the 1920s, was the author of several novels, among which is Adán Buenosayres (1948), one of the most extraordinary works of Argentine literature. This massive novel of modern life among the artistic community of Buenos Aires, constructed as a parallel to Dante’s Divine Comedy, is an epic and satirical journey through urban Argentine reality, in which language, art, philosophy, and human relations are all examined in a deeply humorous and original style. The Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz (1925–95) was also a literary and film critic who worked with a number of Latin American and European publications. His entire poetic production of eight works has the same title, Poesía vertical, with ordinal numbers for each individual volume. His poetry has a strong metaphysical component that advocates the return of the sacred and the sense of wonder to language and human experience. The avant-garde Polish author and playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904– 69), known for his wildly inventive and bitterly comic novels, moved to Argentina in 1939 and lived there until 1963. His first novel, Ferdydurke, published in Poland in 1937, which deals with the progressive infantalization of schoolboys by a mad professor who wishes to rob them of their inner identity, has been interpreted as a satire of the rise of authoritarianism. His novel Trans-Atlantic (1950), set in Buenos Aires, satirizes the life of a Polish immigrant (and everyone around him) in Argentina who must choose whether or not to aid a pedophile friend in his efforts to seduce an adolescent boy. His work has been translated into thirty languages. Pablo Urbanyi, personal interview, 8 June 1996. The novel Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), of anonymous authorship, is considered the earliest picaresque novel of Spain. In spare, realistic prose that nevertheless betrays a deeply cynical and satirical portrait of human relations, a homeless boy relates the adventures and vicissitudes of his life as he struggles to survive on the streets and highways of Imperial Spain. He is successively employed as a guide to a blind beggar (un lazarillo),

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a servant to an avaricious priest, an impoverished squire, and other marginal figures of Spanish society. The Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek (1883–1923) was an inveterate traveller, sometime anarchist, master satirist, and author of innumerable short stories whose novel The Good Soldier Schweik (1920–23) is a comic epic illustrating the hypocrisy and corruption of human systems. Schweik is repeatedly drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War but manages never to get sent to the front, thanks to countless ruses in which he outwits his superiors by feigning stupidity. The novel, which is actually an unfinished cycle of four books, has been translated into fifty-four languages. The title was taken from the opening lines of the seventh section of the long poem “West Indies, Ltd.,” in Obra poética, 142, by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, which denounces exploitation in the Caribbean. Clarín (Buenos Aires), 27 March 1975, 6. Pablo Urbanyi, personal interview, 8 June 1996. Timerman’s account of his ordeal, Preso sin nombre, celda sin número (Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, 1982), became a classic work of testimonial literature against the military regime and was widely read in the English-speaking world. The Spanish edition was republished by Ediciones de la Flor in Buenos Aires in 1999, with prefaces by Arthur Miller and Ariel Dorfman. W.H. Hudson (1841–1922) is considered one of the most important authors of nineteenth-century Argentina, even though he wrote in English. He was raised by Anglo-American parents on a small estancia in the province of Santa Fe, north of Buenos Aires. In 1874 he left Argentina and settled in Britain, where he dedicated himself to his writing. His short stories and sketches of life and legends of the pampas are greatly appreciated in Argentina, and his novel Green Mansions (1904), set in Venezuela, and memoirs of his childhood, Far Away and Long Ago (1918), are also well known in English. An accomplished naturalist, he wrote many books about Argentine fauna, especially birds, as well as a chronicle of Wiltshire sheep herding, A Shepherd’s Life (1910). Both Borges and the great Argentine essayist Ezequiel Martínez Estrada consider Hudson’s descriptions of gaucho life to be among the finest in Argentine literature; see Jorge Luis Borges, “Sobre the Purple Land,” 733–6; and Martínez Estrada, El mundo maravilloso de William Henry Hudson. The Québécois novelist Hubert Aquin (1929–77) was a brilliant creator of multiple identities and “writers” in his novels. Trou de mémoire (1968) is

Notes to pages 194–203

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31

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the most complex of all his novels in terms of the number of creators and commentators of the text, to the point where the reader is unsure who wrote or edited what. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” 53. Samuel Butler, Erewhon. “Sátira social y alegoría de múltiple interpretación,” Los Andes (Mendoza, Argentina) 9 January 1983, section “Cultura,” 1. Although based in Ottawa, Girol Books is a mainly Spanish-language press that specializes in Argentine literature. Founded by Peter Roster and Miguel Ángel Giella, both professors at Carleton University in Ottawa, it has become one of the principal publishers of Argentine theatre in the Americas. Pablo Urbanyi, De todo un poco, de nada mucho, 35. Ibid., 131. Pablo Urbanyi, “Directions for Phoning Faraway Grandmothers,” 7–8. Rodolfo Alonso, “¿Qué pensarán los canadienses de esta radical desacralización del Primer Mundo?” La Gaceta de Tucumán (Tucumán, Argentina), 4 April 1993, section “Suplemento Literario.” R.A. Borello, in a review of Silver, in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanas 547 (Madrid, 1996): 137–8. Danilo Alberó, “Silver es un notable Tarzán posmoderno,” Ámbito Financiero (Buenos Aires), n.d. August 1994, 4. Jorge Ariel Madrazo, “Silver, por Pablo Urbanyi,” La Prensa (Buenos Aires), 25 September 1994, section “Suplemento Cultural,” 2. Franz Kafka, “A Report for an Academy,” in Stories, 1904–1924, 219–28. Pablo Urbanyi, “Aventuras de un simio,” Primer Plano (Buenos Aires), 24 July 1994, 7. Pablo Urbanyi, Silver, 38. Ibid., 41. “Urbanyi doesn’t pretend to provide either solutions or answers to existential questions, but he does endeavour to demystify conventional ways of thinking, call into question modern utopias, and deflate the belief that science is the ultimate answer to the great mysteries of life.” From a review by Olga Steimberg de Kaplan, “Puesta de sol,” La Gaceta de Tucumán (Tucumán, Argentina), 3 January 1999. Adolfo Bioy Casares (b. 1914) is known as a pioneer of Argentine science fiction of a metaphysical and philosophical bent, as well as a master of the literature of the fantastic. He has collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges on a number of literary projects, including the Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940), and is appreciated for both his novels and his short stories.

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32 Although he has lived in the United States since the mid-1940s, where he has taught at the University of Michigan and at Harvard, Enrique Anderson Imbert (b. 1910) is highly regarded both as a literary critic and as a writer of literature of the fantastic. His short stories, often as brief as minificciones, are known for their dreamlike, playful quality and their high degree of inventiveness, twisting reality in unexpected ways or simply replacing it altogether with fantasy. 33 Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. The inhabitants of Flatland live in a two-dimensional world and are happily unaware of the existence of a third (or fourth) dimension, which is extremely difficult for multidimensional visitors to their country to explain. The novel is also a clever satire on Victorian society. 34 Urbanyi, Una epopeya de nuestros tiempos, 260–1. Kipling’s poem “If,” in T.S. Eliot, ed., A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, 273–4, has long been considered a paradigm of Victorian moral values in Britain. Urbanyi’s parody is as long as the original. The final stanza of the Kipling poem is as follows: If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son! Kipling dedicated the poem to his only son, John, whom he encouraged to join the British army during the First World War, even using his connections with the military to get the young man accepted into the Irish Guards. John Kipling died at age eighteen in the British offensive on Loos in 1915; his father lived on, shadowed by guilt, until 1935; see Jonathan Brown, “The Great War and Its Aftermath: The Son Who Haunted Kipling,” The Independent (London), 29 August 2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/world. For an incisive, unrelenting view of Kipling’s poetry, see George Orwell’s review of T.S. Eliot’s anthology, “Rudyard Kipling: Review of A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, ed. T.S. Eliot,” reprinted at http:// gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/Orwell-B.htm. 35 Antón Risco (1926–98) was a native of Galicia who emigrated from Spain during the Franco regime, travelling to France and the United States and then settling in Quebec City, where he taught at the Université de Laval for over thirty years. Risco, who wrote primarily in Galician, although

Notes to pages 214–15

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also in Spanish, is known for his novels, several of which mix fantasy with science fiction, as well as for his critical work in the literature of the fantastic. Memorias dun emigrante (Memoirs of an emigrant) won the Premio de Crítica Española in 1987, and As metamorfoses de Proteo was awarded the Premio Galicia for novel of the year in 1989. His futuristic satire on eroticism and genetics, Hipogrifo, was translated into French by Brigitte Amat and published as Hippogriffe by vlb Éditeur in Montreal in 1992.

c h a p t e r te n 1 The adventure novels of Italian author Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), “the Italian Jules Verne,” are extremely popular in Latin America, although virtually unknown in English. Among his more than eighty novels, the most famous are surely those about the pirate Sandokan, “The Tiger of Malaysia,” a somewhat Byronean hero who struggles incessantly against the British Empire in order to preserve the autonomy of his island. 2 The Uruguayan novelist and short-story writer Juan Carlos Onetti (1909– 94), considered one of the ground-breaking authors of twentieth-century narrative in Latin America, invented a sombre fictional world characterized by the marginalization and inversion of values of its protagonists (Juntacadáveres’s goal is to found a brothel), as well as by the ambiguity of their attitudes and actions. 3 The works of the French poet and novelist Raymond Queneau (1903–76) combine humour, surrealism, irony, linguistic experimentation (he believed in the revitalization of French through the inclusion of slang and conversational language in writing), and a questioning of the absurdity of established values that is both challenging and popular. One of his novels, Zazie dans le métro (1959), was made into a film by Louis Malle. 4 La Celestina, first published in 1499 as La comedia de Calisto y Melibea, is one of the greatest (and strangest) works of the transitional period between medieval and Renaissance Spain. Although written as a play, it is a prose work of several hundred pages and, in many ways, is a novel in dialogue form. The plot revolves around a sorceress and procuress, Celestina, whose aid is invoked by a dissolute young noble in winning the love of a woman whom he desires. The originality, suggestiveness, moral ambiguity, and colloquial quality of the work ensured its immediate renown in Spain; it was translated into all the major languages of Europe in the sixteenth century and had considerable influence on the content of European, including Elizabethan, theatre. For an encyclopedic study of the work, see María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, La originalidad artística de La Celestina. 5 Leandro Urbina, personal interview, 9 June 1996.

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6 Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) was a German Expressionist playwright whose work attacked bourgeois values and sexual mores. Dedicated to the liberation of the masses by confronting them with their true condition, he used various theatrical techniques, including farce and vaudeville, to disorient the audience. His character Lulu is the symbol of untamed energy in conflict with conventional society. 7 The German poet and playwright Georg Büchner (1813–37) was also a socialist and political activist whose early socialist tract Peace to the Hovel, Strife to the Palace (1834) resulted in exile from his native Hesse. His play The Death of Danton (1835) emphasizes the tension between revolutionary fervour and despair, while Woyzeck (1836) speaks of the torment of the human spirit imprisoned by poverty and class and is considered a precursor of Expressionism. Woyzeck was the basis for Alan Berg’s opera Wozzeck (1925), in which the atonal music and fragmentary structure reflect the protagonist’s disorientation. 8 The Argentine novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist Robert Arlt (1900–42) is known for his ironic, uncompromising, yet metaphysical portraits of marginal life, class conflict, and urban despair in Buenos Aires during the 1930s and 1940s. His most famous protagonist, Remo Erdosain, struggles with criminal temptation in the novels Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen, 1929) and Los lanzallamas (The flamethrowers, 1931). 9 Osvaldo Dragún (1929–99) used Absurdism, black humour, and Brechtian distancing techniques in his acerbic, frenetic plays of modern alienation. The short, mordant plays of Historias para ser contadas (1957) are among his most popular works. 10 Leandro Urbina, Lost Causes, 28. 11 Leandro Urbina, personal interview, 9 June 1996. 12 Ibid. 13 Naín Nómez, Identidad y exilio, 27–8. 14 Quoted in Carlos Olivárez’s review, “Urbina llama por teléfono,” Época (Santiago, Chile), September 1992, 5. 15 Leandro Urbina, personal interview, 9 June 1996. 16 Sylvie Perron, “Banished between Two Worlds,” 231. 17 Urbina, quoted in the review “Leandro Urbina: ‘Me interesa el reporteo del tiempo, el ambiente, el espacio propio,’” La Segunda (Santiago, Chile), 15 September 1992, 37.

Authors’ Works

chapter one: jorge etcheverry Poetry books of poetry A vuelo de pájaro: Miniantología personal. Ottawa: Verbum Veritas, 1998. La calle. Colección Manieristas. Santiago, Chile: Sinfronteras, 1986. El evasionista/The Escape Artist: Poems, 1968–1980. Trans. Christina Shantz. Ottawa: Cordillera, 1981. Reflexión hacia el sur. Saskatoon: Amaranta, 2004. Tánger. Santiago, Chile: Documentas; Ottawa: Cordillera, 1990. Vitral con pájaros. Ottawa: Poetas.Com, 2002.

poetry in translation Tangier. Trans. Jorge Etcheverry and Sharon Khan. Ottawa: Cordillera, 1997. The Witch. Trans. Paulette Turcotte and Jorge Etcheverry. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1985.

poems in anthologies “Carnet de crapaud,” Trans. Manon Bilbeau. “Viriato.” Trans. GenevièveAnn Rogers. In La présence d’une autre Amérique: Anthologie des écrivains latino-américains du Québec, 19–22. Montreal: Naine Blanche, 1990. “Estado y sistema,” “Parábola,” and “Oda a una mujer enferma de las tiroides.” In Enjambres: Poesía latinoamericana en el Quebec, 21–4. Montreal: Cordillera/Enana Blanca/Gallo Rojo, 1990. “Ethnical Blues,” “El pueblo”/“The People,” “Flor central”/“Central Flower,” and “Cuaderno del sapo”/“Toad’s Notebook.” Trans. Christina

268

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Shantz. In Naín Nómez, ed., Chilean Literature in Canada/Literatura chilena en Canadá, 20–37. Ottawa: Cordillera, 1982. “The Fence,” “The Torturer,” and “Recommendations.” Trans. Hugh Hazelton. In Hugh Hazelton and Gary Geddes, eds, Compañeros: An Anthology of Writings about Latin America, 259–260. Dunvegan, on: Cormorant, 1990. “G,” “X,” and “Manifiesto de la ‘Escuela de Santiago.’” Orfeo, nos 33–8, special issue “Treinta y tres nombres claves de la actual poesía chilena” (Santiago, Chile, 1968): 220–5, 228–9.

Fiction novel De chácharas y largavistas. Ottawa: La Cita Trunca/Split Quotation, 1993.

short stories in anthologies “De aquí y de allá”/“Here and There,” “Calle con gaviotas”/“Street with Seagulls,” and “En eso andábamos”/“That’s What We Were Up To.” Trans. Christina Shantz. In Naín Nómez, ed., Chilean Literature in Canada/Literatura chilena en Canadá, 108–29. Ottawa: Cordillera, 1982. “Dreamshaping.” In Exilium tremens, 73–105. Montreal: Omélic, 1991. “Fame.” Trans. Sharon Khan and Jorge Etcheverry. In Luciano P. Díaz, ed., Symbiosis in Prose: An Anthology of Short Fiction, 79–85. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1995. “Reflexión hacia el sur”/“Reflecting on the South.” In José R. Varela and Richard A. Young, eds, Antología de literatura hispano-canadiense/An Anthology of Hispano-Canadian Writing, 41–-7. Edmonton: apedeche, 1987. “A Ticket to Santiago.” Trans. Sharon Khan and Jorge Etcheverry. In Jorge Etcheverry, ed., Northern Cronopios: Chilean Novelists and Short Story Writers in Canada, 21–30. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1993. “Trabajadores del vacío.” In Luciano P. Díaz and Jorge Etcheverry, eds, Boreal: Antología de poesía latinoamericana en Canadá, 76–8. Ottawa: Verbum Veritas and La Cita Trunca, 2002.

c h a p t e r tw o : m a r g a r i t a f e l i c i a n o Poetry books of poetry Circadian Nuvolitatis. Luxembourg: Euroeditor, 1986.

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Lectura en Málaga. Málaga, Spain: Universidad de Málaga, 1995. Ventana sobre el mar/Window on the Sea. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1981.

poems in anthologies “Atrapando a los gnomos,” “Caída,” “Huida II,” “Hoy y siempre,” and “Llegada II.” In Luciano P. Díaz and Jorge Etcheverry, eds, Boreal: Antología de poesía latinoamericana en Canadá, 89–91. Ottawa: Verbum Veritas and La Cita Trunca, 2002. “Carretera,” “La puerta,” “Proyecciones,” “El viento,” and “Viajes.” In Daniel Inostroza, ed, Antología de la poesía femenina latinoamericana en Canadá, 17–21. Montreal: Unicornio Verde, 1992. “Huida,” “Noche,” “Camino,” “Colección,” “Mundo antiguo,” “Visión nocturna,” “Visión,” “Día,” “Noche,” “El portal de la sirena,” “Playa,” “Testigo,” and “Flores.” In Ramiro Lagos, ed., Poetas sin Fronteras, 153–60. Madrid: Verbum, 2000. “Huida,” “Noche,” “Camino,” “La colección,” “Mundo antiguo,” “Visión nocturna,” “Visión,” “Día,” “Noche,” “El portal de la sirena,” “La playa,” “Testigo,” and “Flores.” In Lady Rojas-Trempe and Catharina Vallejo, eds, Celebración de la creatividad literaria de escritoras hispanas en las Américas, 229– 33. Ottawa and Montreal: Girol and Enana Blanca, 2000.

poems translated in anthologies “La grande route,” “La porte,” “Projections,” and “Voyages.” In Daniel Inostroza, ed., Anthologie de la poésie féminine latinoaméricaine au Canada, 18–21. Montreal: Unicornio Verde, 1992.

c h a p t e r th r e e : g i l b e r t o f l o r e s pa t i ñ o Novels and Short Stories El último descendiente. Mexico City: Gernika, 1986. Esteban el centauro. Celaya, Mexico: Atenas, 1985. – Esteban. Trans. Ginette Hardy. Montreal: Boréal, 1987. – Esteban. Trans. Linda Gaboriau. Dunvegan, on: Cormorant, 1995. Le dernier comte de Cantabria. Trans. Ginette Hardy. Montreal: Fides, 1998. Le pégase de cristal. Trans. Ginette Hardy. Montreal: Boréal, 1990. Les contes de mon père. Trans. Ginette Hardy. Montreal: Fides, 1996.

270

Authors’ Works

Nudo de tinieblas. Celaya, Mexico: Franciscana, 1974. Sin salida. Naucalpan de Juárez, Mexico: Novaro, 1972.

Translations “El bosque.” Translation of Gilles Maheu, La Forêt, as part of the international repertory of Carbone 14. Unpublished manuscript. “La historia de la oca.” Translation of Michel Marc Bouchard, L’Histoire de l’oie, as part of the international repertory of the Théâtre des Deux Mondes. Presented at the Gran Festival de la Ciudad de México, July 1992. Unpublished manuscript. “Leitmotiv.” Translation of Michel Robidoux, Leitmotiv, as part of the international repertory of the Théâtre des Deux Mondes. Unpublished manuscript. “Memoria viva.” Translation of Normand Canac-Marquis, Mémoire vive, as part of the international repertory of the Théâtre des Deux Mondes. Unpublished manuscript.

c h a p t e r f o u r : a l f r e d o l av e r g n e Poetry Alas dispersas. [Montreal]: N.p., 1986. Alguien no soñó que moría/On ne rêve pas encore à la mort. Trans. Sylvie Perron. Montreal: Les Éditions d’Orphée, 1993. Cada fruto. Montreal: Les Éditions d’Orphée, 1986. Desde el suelo: Poemas, 1980–1982. [Montreal]: N.p., 1983. El puente. Montreal: Les Éditions d’Orphée, 1995. El viejo de los zapatos. Montreal: Les Éditions d’Orphée, 1991. “Ese José y esas Marys.” Unpublished manuscript, 1985. Índice agresivo. Montreal: Les Éditions d’Orphée, 1987. La mano en la velocidad. Montreal: Les Éditions d’Orphée, 1993. La primavera piedra. Montreal: Editorial El Palomar, 1988. Palos con palitos. Montreal: Les Éditions d’Orphée, 1990. Rasgos separados/Traits distinctifs. Trans. Sylvie Perron. Montreal: Les Éditions d’Orphée, 1989. Retro-perspectiva/Rétro-perspective. Trans. Sylvie Perron. Montreal: Les Éditions d’Orphée, 1991. “Sombrero.” Unpublished manuscript, 1995.

Authors’ Works

271

c h a p t e r f i v e : a l f o n s o q u i ja da u r í a s Fiction books of short stories Cuentos. Colección Tekij – Sonoro Pez del Bosque. San Salvador: Ministerio de Educación, Dirección de Publicaciones, 1971. Gravísima, altisonante, mínima, dulce e imaginada historia. San Salvador: Concultura, 1993. La fama infame del famoso (Ap)atrida. San Salvador: Editorial Universitaria, 1979. Otras historias famosas. Colección Nuevapalabra. San Salvador: Ministerio de Educación, Dirección de Publicaciones, 1976. Para mirarte mejor. Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Guaymuras, 1987.

short stories translated in book form The Better to See You. Trans. Hugh Hazelton. Dunvegan, on: Cormorant, 1993.

short stories in anthologies “A la sombra de una viejita en flor.” In Rosario Santos, ed., And We Sold the Rain. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996. “¿Qué Hi?” Trans. Hugh Hazelton. In Hugh Hazelton and Gary Geddes, eds, Compañeros: An Anthology of Writings about Latin America, 152–4. Dunvegan, on: Cormorant, 1990.

novel Lujuria tropical. San Salvador: concultura, 1996.

Poetry books of poetry Certeza de la duda. San Salvador: concultura, 2005. Es cara musa. San Salvador: concultura, 1998. Estados sobrenaturales y otros poemas. Colección Contemporáneos. San Salvador: Editorial Universitaria, 1971. Obscuro. Colección Disco Rayado. Vancouver: Ediciones Marginales, 1995. Reunión: Selección, 1971–1988. Mexico City: Claves Latinoamericanas, 1992. Toda razón dispersa. San Salvador: concultura, 1998.

272

Authors’ Works

poetry in translation They Come and Knock on the Door. Trans. Darwin J. Flakoll. Willimantic, cn: Curbstone, 1991.

poems in anthologies “Antimemorias,” “La guerra de tres días,” “Mi general,” “El señor Presidente,” “César,” “El pródigo,” “La casa de los gatos,” “Fábula,” “Homenaje a las lecturas malsanas,” and “El más mejor.” In Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, Washington Delgado, Margaret Randall, and Cintio Vitier, eds, Seis poetas, 37–61. Colección Premio. Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1970. “Che Ernesto Che,” “Popeye the Sailor,” “De la infancia vencida,” “Confesionario,” “Mesa redonda,” “País hijo de …,” “Spiritual,” “Variaciones sobre un antiguo tema,” “Indicaciones para hacer un paradiso,” “Los Buenos servicios,” “Control de la natalidad,” and “La guerra sucia.” In Antonio Cisneros, René Depestre, José Agustín Goytisolo, Efraín Huerta, and Roberto Fernández Retamar, eds, Ocho poetas, 139–53. Colección Premio. Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1969. “El escarabajo,” “Postal,” and “Mesa redonda.” In Roberto Armijo and Rigoberto Paredes, eds, Poesía contemporánea de Centroamérica: Selección de poetas nacidos alrededor de 1900–1950, 103–6. Colección El Bardo. Barcelona: Los Libros de la Frontera, 1983.

poems translated in anthologies “Antes de la muerte”/“Before Death” and “Crónica”/“Chronicle.” Trans. Barbara Paschke. In Alejandro Murguía and Barbara Paschke, eds, Volcán: Poems from Central America, 20–1. San Francisco: City Lights, 1983.

chapter six: nela rio Fiction short stories “Carlota todavía.” In La Gala, 75–80. Madrid: Torremozas, 1993. “El grito del espejo.” Unpublished, n.d. “El jardín de las glicinas.” Revista Literaria Baquiana 10 (Miami, fl, 2000–01): 24. “El olvido viaja en auto negro.” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 6, no. 1 (Greeley, co, 1990): 177–8. “Encarnación de la Palma.” Luz en Arte y Literatura, no. 12 (Tarzana, ca, 1999): 50–3.

Authors’ Works

273

“Lucrecia.” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 10, no. 1 (Greeley, co, 1994): 188–93. “María Candelaria.” Unpublished, 1993. “María de la Victoria.” Alter Vox, no. 6. (Ottawa, Fall 1999): 6. “Marietta, en el Angelus.” In Relatos de mujeres (I antología), 55–62. Madrid: Torremozas, 1994. “Pre-meditación.” Unpublished, 1992. “Stella.” Unpublished, 1991.

short stories in translation “Encarnación de la Palma.” Trans. Hugh Hazelton. Luz en Arte y Literatura, no. 12 (Tarzana, ca, 1999): 54–7. “Ever Carlota.” Trans. Samuel Zimmerman. Metamorphoses 1, no. 2 (Amherst, ma, 1994): 36–9. “Lucrecia.” Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller. International Quarterly (1998): 95–9.

Poetry books of poetry Aquella luz, la que estremece. Madrid: Torremozas, 1992. Cuerpo amado/Beloved Body. Trans. Hugh Hazelton. Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 1998. During Nights that Undress Other Nights/En las noches que desvisten otras noches. Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller. Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 2003. En las noches que desvisten otras noches. Colección La Lira de Licario. Madrid: Orígenes, 1989. Sosteniendo la mirada: Cuando las imágenes tiemblan/Sustaining the Gaze: When Images Tremble/Soutenant le regard: Quand les images tremblent. Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller and Jill Valéry. Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 2004. Túnel de proa verde/Tunnel of the Green Prow. Trans. Hugh Hazelton. 1998. 2nd rev. ed., Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 2004.

poetry and short stories The Space of Light/El espacio de la luz. Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller. Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 2004.

Manuscripts of poetry “Al filo de la luna, otros amores.” Unpublished, n.d. “El laberinto vertical.” Unpublished, n.d.

274

Authors’ Works

“El mundo que tú no viste.” Unpublished, n.d. “En el umbral del atardecer.” Unpublished, 1993.

poems in anthologies “Ahora era antes,” “La tarde mojando la noche,” “Ahuecando las manos,” “La vida como una ciudad,” “Como paloma,” “Solos, ella y él,” “El desafío,” “La piel que desviste,” “Pulido ámbar,” “La infatigable realidad,” “Camino a la vida,” and “La vida tiene alas.” In Lady Rojas-Trempe and Catharina Vallejo, eds, Celebración de la creatividad literaria de escritoras hispanas en las Américas, 235–40. Ottawa and Montreal: Girol and Enana Blanca, 2000. “Comienzo/Beginning,” “El rosedal/Rose Garden,” and “La brisa/The Breeze.” Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller. “Túnel I/Tunnel I.” Trans. Hugh Hazelton. In Joe Blades, ed., Danger Falling Ice: The League of Canadian Poets Writes of Spring Reading in Fredericton, 28–35. Fredericton: bs Poetry Society, 1997. “La doncella de fuego.” In Antología del fuego, 46–7. Madrid: Altorrey, 1993. “La hora” and “Un día y muchos puertos.” Antología VIII-2001. salac, no. 5 (La Plata, Argentina, 2000): 5. “La noche del laurel mudo,” “Tango,” and “Malena, en el patio de la luna llena.” In Luciano P. Díaz and Jorge Etcheverry, eds, Boreal: Antología de poesía latinoamericana en Canadá, 40–3. Ottawa: Verbum Veritas and La Cita Trunca, 2002. “María José, Where Are You?” Trans. J. Weiss and A. Mason. In Images of Ourselves: The Faith and Work of Canadian Women, 108–9. Toronto: United Church, 1992.

Books with Art Work En el tiempo de la vigilia/Au temps de la vigile. Trans. Édith Jonsson-Devillers. Poem and art work. Fredericton: La Candela, 2003. Francisca sin techo/Francisca, Homeless. Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller. Poem and art work. Fredericton: La Candela, 2000. Haiku de la paloma. Poem and art work. Fredericton: La Candela, 2004. La inocencia del enigma. Poems and art work. Fredericton: Gold Leaf Press, 2002. Los espejos hacen preguntas/The Mirrors Ask Questions. Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller. Poetry and art work. Fredericton: Gold Leaf Press, 2000. María de la Victoria. Trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller. Short story and art. Fredericton: Gold Leaf Press, 2002.

Authors’ Works

275

c h a p t e r s e v e n : a l e j a n d r o s a r av i a Poetry Ejercicio de serpientes. Palabras Prestadas. Toronto: Hispanos Publishing, 1994. “El libro que ladra a la luna.” Unpublished manuscript, 1982. Habitante del décimo territorio. Toronto: Artifact, 2000. La brújula desencadenada. Palabras Prestadas. Toronto: Hispanos Publishing, 1996. Oilixes helizados. Toronto: Artifact, 1998.

Novel Rojo, amarillo y verde. Toronto: Artifact; Montreal: Enana Blanca, 2003.

c h a p t e r e i g h t : y v o n n e a m é r i c a tr u q u e Poetry “En mi marcha y otros poemas.” Unpublished manuscript, 1987. “Hojas de sol y Recorriendo la distancia.” Unpublished manuscript, 1985. “Los olvidados en la tierra.” Unpublished manuscript, 1995. Proyección de los silencios. Bogotá: Árbol de Tinta, 1983; Bogotá: La Catedral, 1984. – Proyección de los silencios/Projection des silences. Montreal: Centre d’études et de diffusion des Amériques hispanophones (cédah), 1986. Retratos de sombras y Perfiles inconclusos/Portraits d’ombres et Profils inachevés. Introduction by Hugh Hazelton. Montreal: cédah, 1991.

c h a p t e r n i n e : pa b l o u r b a n y i Novels En ninguna parte. Buenos Aires: Belgrano, 1981. – The Nowhere Idea. Trans. Nigel Dennis. Toronto: Williams-Wallace, 1982. – L’idée fixe. Trans. Jean Potvin. Montreal: vlb Éditeur, 1988. Puesta de sol. Ottawa: Girol, 1997. – Sunset. Trans. Hugh Hazelton. Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 2003. – La vérité de Pinocchio. Trans. Danièle Marcoux. Montreal: Québec Amérique, 2004.

276

Authors’ Works

Silver. Buenos Aires: Atlántida, 1994. – Silver. Trans. Danièle Marcoux. Montreal and Paris: Balzac-Le Griot, 1999. – Silver. Trans. Hugh Hazelton. Oakville, on: Mosaic, 2005. 2058, en la corte de Eutopía. Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 1999. Una epopeya de nuestros tiempos. Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 2004. Un revólver para Mack. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1974. – Un révolver pour Mack. Trans. Jean Potvin. Montreal: vlb Éditeur, 1992.

Short Stories De todo un poco, de nada mucho. Buenos Aires: Legasa, 1987. – “Curso Superior de Español Moderno” and “Las terrazas de Ottawa y la literatura latinoamericana,” from De todo un poco, de nada mucho. In A hagyaték [The legacy], trans. Eva Dopos, 7–83, 87–113. Budapest: Z, 1992. Nacer de nuevo. Ottawa: Girol, 1992. – “El legado,” from Nacer de nuevo. In A hagyaték [The legacy], trans. Eva Dopos, 117–25. Budapest: Z, 1992. Noche de revolucionarios. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1972.

c h a p t e r te n : l e a n d r o u r b i n a Novels Cobro revertido. Biblioteca del Sur. Santiago, Chile: Planeta, 1992. – Longues distances. Trans. Danièle Rudel-Tessier. Montreal: Lanctôt, 1996. – Collect Call. Trans. Beverly J. DeLong-Tonelli. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1999. “Homo eroticus.” Unpublished manuscript, 1991.

Short Stories El pasajero del aire/Traveller of the Air (excerpts). Trans. Christina Shantz. In Naín Nómez, ed., Chilean Literature in Canada/Literatura chilena en Canadá, 204–43. Ottawa: Cordillera, 1982. Las malas juntas. Ottawa: Cordillera, 1978; Santiago, Chile: Obsidiana, 1986. Las malas juntas. Revised and augmented edition. Biblioteca del Meridión. Santiago, Chile: Planeta, 1993; Akal: Madrid, 2000. – Lost Causes. Trans. Cristina Shantz. Dunvegan, on: Cormorant, 1987.

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– Nomads. Ottawa: Verbum Veritas, 1997. – Nómadas. Ottawa: Verbum Veritas, 1998. – The Thin Man and Me. Ottawa: Split Quotation, 1994. Duque Vidal, Yolanda. Destin/Destino. Montreal: Alondras, 2001. – Le jardin de mes rêves/El jardín de mis sueños. Montreal: Alondras, 2001. – Poemas de canto y luna. Montreal: Girouette d’Amour, 1999. – Senderos. Montreal: Alondras, 2002. Durán, Claudio. Después del silencio/After Silence. Trans. Margarita Feliciano. El Tabo, Chile: Alta Marea, 1986. – Homenaje. [Toronto]: N.p., n.d. – Más tarde que los clientes habituales/After the Usual Clients Have Gone Home. Trans. Rafael Barreto-Rivera. Toronto: Underwhich, 1982. – Santiago. [Toronto]: N.p., n.d. Escalante, Lorenzo. Ganadero como su padre y otros cuentos. Montreal: Girouette Bleue, 1996. Escareño, Juan. Volando: Poemas, casi todos para mujeres. 1991. Reprint, Toronto: Poetas en el Rincón, 1994. Escomel, Gloria. Exorcisme du rêve. Paris: Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Près, 1974. – Fruit de la passion. Laval, qc: Éditions Trois, 1988. – Les eaux de la mémoire. Montreal: Boréal, 1994. – Pièges. Montreal: Boréal, 1992. – Tu en parleras … et après? Laval, qc: Éditions Trois, 1989. Espinoza, Blanca. Ojos de agua. Concepción, Chile: lar, 1985; reprint, Berne and Montreal: Cielo Raso, 2006. – Poco antes del alba/Peu avant l’aube. Berne and Montreal: Cielo Raso, 2006. – Tango. 2001. Reprint, Berne and Montreal: Cielo Raso, 2005. – Valparaíso. Berne and Montreal: Cielo Raso, 2006. Fajardo, Jorge. La zone. Trans. Pierre Desruisseaux. Collection Latino-américaine. Montreal: vlb Éditeur, 1990. – Le cercle. Montreal: Créations de l’Insomniaque, 1995. – Votre manteau mouillé/Su abrigo mojado. Trans. Chantal Chevrier. Montreal: Humanitas/Nouvelle Optique, 1990. Ferreiro, Magdalena. Trinitaria. Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2001. – Villa de niebla. Montevideo: artefacto, 2004. Fortis, Paul. Desnudos en el parque. Ed. Julio Torres-Recinos. Saskatoon: Amaranta, 2004. – La esquina de la muerte y otros cuentos. Ed. Julio Torres-Recinos. Saskatoon: Amaranta, 2005.

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Fuente-Labarca, Luis Antonio. Los caminantes. Santiago, Chile: elevec, 2005. Fuenzalida, Nieves. Three of Us Remain. Trans. Luciano P. Díaz. Ottawa: Verbum Veritas, 1998. García, Juan Carlos. El dictador en la literatura hispanoamericana. Santiago, Chile: Mosquito, 2000. – Historias de la Facultad y otros relatos. Santiago, Chile: Mosquito, 2000. – Historias del poder. Santiago, Chile: Sinfronteras, 1986. – Todo mi cuento. Concepción, Chile: Editorial Literatura Americana Reunida, 2006. Garrido, Rosa. De las artes de amar. Seville, Spain: Alfar, 1996. González, Rodrigo. “Avenida de las Libertades/L’Avenue Bossanovia.” Trans. Lucie Lapointe. Unpublished manuscript, n.d. – “Cuentos.” Unpublished manuscript, n.d. – Cuentos de la cabeza y la cola/Contes de la tête et de la queue. Trans. Micheline Bail. Montreal: Enana Blanca, 1992. – “El circo.” Unpublished manuscript, 1995. – “Le grand cirque atomique et la guerre des espèces.” Unpublished manuscript, n.d. – “Rosaura, o La mujer que se vistió de mancebo.” Unpublished manuscript, n.d. – “Subdesamundo.” Unpublished manuscript, n.d. Guardia, Ramón. El bengalí. Mexico City: Punto por Punto, 1985. Hernán, Claudio. Destierro nórdico. Dorval, qc: Claudio Chávez, 1992. – La lucha vital: Un grito a la gran nación latinoamericana. [Montreal]: N.p., n.d. Inostroza, Daniel. De ausencias y retornos. Montreal: Centre d’études et de diffusion des Amériques hispanophones (cédah), 1989. – Elephant Cemetery. Montreal: Green Unicorn, 1991. Jansen, Eduardo Nunes. Ensaios poéticos em terceira dimensão. Recife, Brazil: Casa da Cultura do Recife, 1986. Jiménez, Selva Norah. Apasionada. Montreal: Alondras, 2002. – Instintos y emociones. Montreal: Alondras, 2001. Jofré, Manuel Alcides. Cabos sueltos y Canadian Poems. Santiago, Chile: Casa Canadá, 1986. Jorge Morel, Eucilda. De la neige dans mon soleil. [Montreal]: Fortratexte du Québec, 1987. – Desde la torre azul. Montreal: Fourmi Rose, 1999. – El camino verde frente al mar. Montreal: Fourmi Rose, 2005. – El éxodo de “Verde” y otros cuentos. Montreal: Girouette Bleue, 1996. – Encuentros. Montreal: Fourmi Rose, 1995. – Et tombe la neige … Montreal: Green Unicorn, 1992.

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– La gentil dominicana. 1988. Reprint, Montreal: Fourmi Rose, 1998. – La mansión del león. Montreal: Centre d’études et de diffusion des Amériques hispanophones (cédah), 1992. – La montaña del misterio. Montreal: Fourmi Rose, 1999. – La ronda infantil. Montreal: Girouette Bleue, 1996. – Les boucles d’oreille de la lune/Los aretes de la luna. Trans. Jacques Lecavalier et al. 1994. Reprint, Montreal: Fourmi Rose, 2002. – Les passions secrètes. Montreal: Fourmi Rose, 1997. – Los rubíes del tiempo. Montreal, Girouette Bleue, 1996. – Los zapatos azules. Montreal: Fourmi Rose, 2003. – Playas sin fronteras. [Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic]: N.p., 1981. – Por el camino azul. Montreal: cédah, 1993. – Voces nocturnas. Montreal: Girouette Bleue, 1995. – Y oí tu voz. Montreal: Girouette Bleue, 1996. Kokis, Sergio. A casa dos espelhos. Trans. Marcos de Castro. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2000. – Errances. Montreal: xyz, 1996. – Funhouse. Trans. David Homel and Fred Reed. Toronto: Dundurn, 1999. – Kaléidoscope brisé. Montreal: xyz, 2001. – La danse macabre du Québec. Montreal: xyz, 1999. – La gare. Montreal: xyz, 2005. – L’amour du lointain. Montreal: xyz, 2004. – L’art du maquillage. Montreal: xyz, 1997. – Le magicien. Montreal: xyz, 2002. – Le maître de jeu. Montreal: xyz, 1999. – Le pavillon des miroirs. Montreal: xyz, 1994. – Les amants de l’Alfama. Montreal: xyz, 2003. – Negão et Doralice. Montreal: xyz, 1995. – Saltimbanques. Montreal: xyz, 2000. – Un sourire blindé. Montreal: xyz, 1998. Kurapel, Alberto. ¡Amanecerá la siembra! lp. [Montreal]: apir, 1976. – A tajo abierto. lp. [Montreal]: apir, 1978. – Berri-uqam. Trans. Jean Antonin Billard. Trois-Rivières: Écrits des Forges, 1992. – Carta de ajuste, ou Nous n’avons plus besoin de calendrier. Montreal: Humanitas/Nouvelle Optique, 1991. – Colmenas en la sombra, ou L’Espoir de l’arrière-garde. Trans. Jean Antonin Billard. Montreal: Humanitas, 1994. – Confidencial/Urgent. lp. [Montreal]: apir, 1989. – Contra-exilio. lp. [Montreal]: apir, 1982.

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Index

Afro-Colombian literature, 176, 179, 258n1. See also Truque, Yvonne América Agrupación de Artistas Latinoamericanos, 10 Alcides Jofré, Manuel, 32, 55, 244n20 Alianza Cultural Hispano-Canadiense, 12–13 Allende, Salvador, 7, 8, 28, 29, 31, 55, 86, 214, 217, 235n25. See also Chile Alter Vox (literary journal), 17 Anderson Imbert, Enrique, 21, 116, 203, 264n32 anthologies, 9–10, 12–15, 16, 25, 26, 33, 76, 113, 178, 238n48 Antología de la poesía femenina latinoamericana en Canadá, 14, 25 Antología de literature hispanocanadiense/An Anthology of HispanoCanadian Writing, 13 Aquelarre (feminist literary journal), 17, 24, 132 Aránguiz, Manuel, 9 Argentina, 6, 27; “Dirty War” of, 135, 154; military coup in, 218; political oppression/resistance in, 130, 131, 133–4, 218 Argentine writers: Arlt, 191, 193, 216, 266; Bioy Casares, 203, 263n31; Campo, 190, 260–1n1; Dragún, 8, 216, 235n20; Echeverria, 52, 242n5; of gauchesca tradition, 52, 190,

242nn4–6, 260n1; Gombrowicz, 191, 261n5; Hernández (José), 52, 242n4; Hudson, 194, 206, 262n13; Juarroz, 191, 261n4; Lugones, 190, 261n2; Marechal, 190, 261n3; Mitre, 52, 241n2; Obligado, 52, 242n6; Puig, 35, 241n24; Storni, 53, 243n13; Timerman, 193, 262n12. See also Anderson Imbert, Enrique; Borges, Jorge Luis; Cortázar, Julio Argentine writers in Canada: Strejilevich, 13, 132, 254n7. See also Feliciano, Margarita; Rio, Nela; Urbanyi, Pablo Argueta, Manlio, 105, 106, 113, 251n6 Arlt, Robert, 191, 193, 216, 266 Artifact Editions, 16, 157–8 Asociación para el Desarrollo de la Cultura Hispánica de Edmonton (apedeche), 13 Aura (Fuentes), 72–3 avant-garde poetry, 21–2, 29, 30–1 Barreto-Rivera, Rafael, 7, 9, 22, 55, 235n18 Beat poets. See Ferlinghetti, Lawrence; Ginsberg, Allen; Kerouac, Jack Betanzos Santos, Manuel, 5, 17, 90 bilingual/multilingual publication: anthologies, 9–10, 12–13, 26, 113, 259n7; journals, 5, 17–18, 76, 90,

304

Index

178; small presses, 15–17, 18–19, 91; specific authors, 24; Etcheverry, 33, 36; Feliciano, 56, 235n4; Lavergne, 91, 93; Rio, 133; Truque, 178– 9, 184 Bodega y Quadra, Juan Francisco de la, 4 Bolivia, 6, 152, 157, 161, 255n2, 257n24 Bolivian writers: Arguedas (Alcides), 153, 255n5; Candia, 153, 256n7; Jaimes Freyre, 153, 256n6; Vega, 156, 257n13. See also Saravia, Alejandro Boreal (literary journal), 5, 17, 90 Boreal: Antologiá de poesía latinoamericana en Canadá, 15 Borges, Jorge Luis, 21, 54, 73, 106, 116, 130, 154, 177, 192, 203 La Botella Verde (literary journal), 17–18 Brazil, 6 Brazilian writers: Amado, 154, 256n11; Kokis, 7, 20, 26, 76, 235n17; Guimarães Rosa, 112, 252n24 Broken Jaw Press, 19, 133, 200 Canadian Fiction Magazine, 12 Carpentier, Alejo, 21, 118, 219, 253n32 Celebración Cultural del Idioma Español (ccie), 11, 55, 236n30 Centre d’études et de diffusion des Amériques hispanophones (cédah), 16, 179, 184 Chicano/Chicana writers, 156, 257nn14–15 Chile, 6, 7, 21, 234n11, 257n24: Allende government of, 8, 29, 31, 86, 217; coup d’état in, 7, 31, 37, 55, 86, 214; importance of poetry to, 8, 32; as maritime nation, 39; under Pinochet regime, 87, 90, 216, 234n11; postwar politics of, 28, 29; University of, 8, 29–30, 31, 218 Chilean writers: Alegría, 53, 56, 242n8; De Rokha, 29, 30–1, 86,

239n5; Dorfman, 29, 215, 240n7; Mistral, 53, 243n11; Parra, 30, 240n11; Skármeta, 29, 31, 215, 222– 3, 240n8; Teillier, 86, 247n3; Zurita, 30, 240n9. See also Huidobro, Vicente; Neruda, Pablo – in Canada: anthologies of, 33; avant-garde style of, 22; benefit readings by, 8, 32; community of, in Ottawa, 7–8, 9–10, 15, 32–3, 218–19; community of, in Toronto, 55; early publications by, 8–10; literary journals of, 17–18; small presses of, 9, 15–16; websites of, 15, 18 – by author: Alcides Jofré, 32, 55, 244n20; Alvarado, 18, 19, 24, 237n39; Aránguiz, 9; Barrios, 94, 250n21; Cancino 16, 17; Davis Vallejos, 24, 89, 178, 249n12; Díaz, 10, 15, 17, 24; Durán, 9, 55, 244n20; García, 9, 55, 219, 244n20; Letelier, 15, 18, 19, 20; Lizama Pizarro, 237n39; Millán, 9, 15, 24, 29, 32, 55; Rodríguez, 17, 24, 25, 26, 118. See also Etcheverry, Jorge; Kurapel, Alberto; Lavergne, Alfredo; Nómez, Nain; Urbina, Leandro city, as theme/influence: in Etcheverry, 38–9, 41–2, 43–4; in Flores Patiño, 68, 69–70; in Truque, 177, 181–2, 183 City Lights (bookstore/press), 54, 109, 113 La ciudad (Millán), 9 Colombia, 6, 7, 27 Colombian writers: Arturo, 178, 259n4; Barba Jacob, 178, 259n5; De Greiff, 178, 259n6; Lagos, 55, 244n19. See also Truque, Yvonne América Compañeros: An Anthology of Writings about Latin America, 14–15, 19, 76 concrete poetry, 88, 89, 162–3, 258n28 concultura (Salvadoran cultural agency), 116, 117, 253n29 Cordillera Editions, 9, 15, 32–3, 36, 39, 216, 219, 220

Index Cormorant Books, 10, 18–19, 76, 113, 216, 237n38 Cortázar, Julio, 12, 21, 106, 130, 154, 184, 190, 215, 219 Creciendo en el desarraigo: Jóvenes chilenos en la provincia de Quebec (anthology), 26 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 21, 130, 254n5 Cuadernos de Cultura Popular (chapbooks), 16, 90 Cuban writers: Carpentier, 21, 118, 219, 253n32; Guillén, 53–4, 243n14, 262n9; Heredia, 4; Lima, 106, 112, 118, 251n8; Martí, 242n2, 256n6; Sariol, 94, 250n20 Cuerpo de silencio/Corps de silence (Aránguiz), 9 Dalton, Roque, 105, 106, 109, 116, 250n5 Darío, Rubén, 58, 105, 176, 244n24, 256n6 Davis Vallejos, Nelly, 24, 89, 178, 249n12 De Rokha, Pablo, 29, 30–1, 86, 239n5 Díaz, Luciano, 10, 15, 17 Dorfman, Ariel, 29, 215, 240n7 Dragún, Osvaldo, 8, 216, 235n20 Durán, Claudio, 9, 55, 244n20 Écrits des Forges, 19–20, 92 Ecuador, 6, 55 Ediciones El Palomar, 16, 90 Ediciones La Cita Trunca/Split Quotation Press, 15, 18, 36, 39, 41, 223 Éditions d’Orphée, 19, 90, 91, 237n39 Éditions de la Naine Blanche (White Dwarf Editions/Ediciones de la Enana Blanca), 13, 16, 158, 178 Éditions Humanitas, 19, 179, 235n21 Éditions Maison Culturelle QuébecAmérique Latine, 9 El Salvador, 6, 27; civil war in, 104, 112; postwar debate/creativity in, 105; and war with Honduras, 106

305

– writers from: Argueta, 105, 106, 113, 251n6; Armijo, 106, 251n9; in Canada, 25, 94, 250n22; Cea, 106, 251–2n11; Dalton, 105, 106, 109, 116, 250–1n5; “Generación Comprometida,” 105, 250n4, 251n10; Lars, 105, 250n3; López Vallecillos, 106, 250n4, 251n10; Salarrué, 105, 250n2. See also Quijada Urías, Alfonso Enjambres: Poesía latinoamericana en el Quebec (anthology), 14 Escareño, Juan, 16 Escobar, Rodolfo, 16 Escomel, Gloria, 7, 19, 21, 234n14 Etcheverry, Jorge, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 28– 44; and avant-garde, 29, 30–1; and community in Ottawa, 32–3, 219; critical work by, 35; early work by, 31–2, 33; literary influences on, 28– 9; literary journal of, 17; pseudonym/alter ego of, 28, 36, 42; published work by, 31–2, 33, 35–6; readings by, 35; and School of Santiago, 8, 28, 30–1, 34, 38; small press of, 15, 18, 36, 41; style and tone of, 29, 31–2, 33, 36, 38–9, 40; university studies of, 29–31, 32, 35; website of, 18 – themes of: city, 38–9, 41–2, 43–4; exile, 38, 41–4; immigrant experience, 35, 36, 38, 43; militancy, 34; nature, 39–40; political repression/ violence, 34, 37–8 – works by: as anthologized in Orfeo, 31, 33; A vuelo de pájaro, 43; La calle, 37–8, 44–8; De chácharas y largavistas, 41–3, 44, 48–50; “Dreamshaping,” 40–1; El evasionista/The Escape Artist, 33–5; Tánger, 39–40, 44; Vitral con pájaros, 43–4; The Witch, 36–7, 39 exile, 5, 7, 8, 20–1; in Etcheverry, 38, 41–4; in Lavergne, 94–5; in Quijada Urías, 117; in Saravia, 160–1; in Urbanyi, 198–200, 204–5; in Urbina, 220, 221–2

306

Index

explorers/early visitors from Spain and Portugal, 4 Falklands War, 6 Feliciano, Margarita, 7, 9, 11, 51–60, 132; idealism, in early work of, 57– 9, 60; literary activities of, 11, 17, 35, 51, 55–6, 236n30; literary influences on, 52, 53–4; literary journal of, 17, 55–6; love poetry of, 56–9; readings by, 54–5, 57; realism, in later work of, 59–60; sea/seascape, in work of, 56–8; style of, 56, 60; university studies of, 52–3 – themes of: 57, 59; love in idealized landscape, 56, 57–8; mythology, 51, 57, 58–9, 60; solitary exploration, 59–60 – works by: Circadian Nuvolitatis, 56– 7, 57–9; Lectura en Málaga, 57, 59– 60, 60–4; El portal de la sirena/The Mermaid’s Portal (unpublished), 57; unpublished poems, 64–6; Ventana sobre el mar/Window on the Sea, 9, 56, 57–9, 60, 235n24 feminist writers and publications: Aquelarre (literary journal), 17, 24, 132; Rodríguez, Carmen, 17, 24, 25, 26, 118; Sor Juana, 21, 130, 254n5. See also Rio, Nela Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 54, 106 Festival de la Palabra y de la Imagen/Festival of Images and Words (Toronto), 11 festivals, literary, 10–12 Flores Patiño, Gilberto, 19, 67–78; and Biblical/mythological influences, 67–8, 73, 76; folklore elements, in work of, 77–8; journalism career of, 68; literary activities of, 76; literary influences on, 67–9, 73, 76; magic realism of, 68, 69; nighttime/darkness, in work of, 70–2; readings by, 76; reception of works by, 74, 76; and relationship with Quebec, 73, 76, 78; storytelling, in work of, 76–8

– themes of: city, 68, 69–70; concept of the Other, 67, 70–2, 74, 75–6, 77– 8; fantasy/interior self, 71–2, 74; isolation/loneliness, 69–72, 74–6; mythology, 73, 74, 75, 76–77, 78; suffering and redemption, 69–70, 74 – works by: Les contes de mon père, 77–8; Esteban el centauro, 22, 73–4, 75–6, 78; Nudo de tinieblas, 70–3; Le pégase de cristal, 76–7, 78; El reino de silencio, 69; Sin salida, 68, 69–70, 72, 80–4; El último descendiente, 74, 78– 80 Four Horsemen (poetry performance group), 7, 22, 235n18 Fuentes, Carlos, 72, 191 Galician writers, 5, 205, 234n10, 264– 5n35 García, Juan Carlos, 9, 55, 219, 244n20 gauchesca poetry, 52, 190, 242nn4–6, 260–1n1 Gauthier, Jean, 16, 178, 180, 184 Geddes, Gary, 4, 14, 119, 219, 237n38 Ginsberg, Allen, 29, 31, 89, 106, 109 Girol Books, 19, 196, 200, 235n20 Góngora y Argote, Luis de, 88, 109, 252n18 González, Rodrigo, 8, 89, 235n19 Guatemala, 6, 27, 91–2, 133 Guatemalan writers: Asturias, 21, 112; Castillo, 91, 116, 249n16, 251n6 Guevara, Che, 29, 109, 153 Guillén, Nicolás, 53–4, 243n14, 262n9 Hancock, Geoffrey, 12 Harbourfront Reading Series (Toronto), 10, 219 Hardy, Ginette, 73, 74, 76, 77 Hašek, Jaroslav, 191, 262n8 Helios (literary journal), 18 Hernández, Felisberto, 29, 109, 130, 239n4 Homenaje/Homage (Durán), 9, 55 Hudson, W.H., 194, 206, 262n13

Index Huerta, Efraín, 89, 247–8n6 Huidobro, Vicente, 21, 31, 86, 88, 162, 238n43, 258n28 L’Imprévu (Montreal), readings at, 11–12, 13–14 indigenous (aboriginal) peoples, victimization/subjugation of: in Lavergne, 91–2; in Quijada Urías, 111, 119–22; in Saravia, 157, 158–9, 164– 75 Indigo: The Spanish/Canadian Presence in the Arts (literary journal), 17, 55–6 Inostroza, Daniel, 14, 16, 25 A Jest of God (Laurence), 73–4 journals, literary, 5, 17–18, 35; Aquelarre, 17, 24, 132; Boreal, 5, 17, 90; Indigo, 17, 55–6; Lettres québécoises, 14, 23; Orfeo, 31, 33; Poetas.com, 15, 18, 43; Ruptures, 18, 23, 76; Vericuetos/Chemins scabreux, 178, 259n7 Kafka, Franz, 29, 109, 153, 199 Kerouac, Jack, 29, 31, 106, 154 Kipling, Rudyard, 205, 264n34 Kokis, Sergio, 7, 20, 26, 76, 235n17 Kurapel, Alberto, 8, 19, 20–1, 23, 89, 93, 235n21 Latin American literature, 21–2; “boom” in, 106, 191, 197, 215; modernista movement in, 58, 244n24, 261n2; philosophical science fiction, 203, 263n31, 264n32; and politics, 241–2n2; testimonial literature, 25, 132, 180, 254n7, 262n12. See also poetry, types of Latin American theatre in Canada, 8, 19, 20, 55, 156, 235nn19–21 Latin American writing in Canada, 3–27; anthologies of, 9, 12–15, 33; bilingual/trilingual publication of, 9, 12–13, 15–18, 19, 235n24; in context of Latin American literature, 21–2; and early literary activities,

307

5, 7–8; early publications by, 8–10; in English, 7, 22–3, 26, 27, 238n45; by explorers/early visitors, 4; festivals of, 10–12; in French, 7, 10, 12, 13, 20, 22–3, 26, 27, 76–8; future of, 26–7; journals of, 5, 17–18; by political refugees, 5–7; readings of, 5, 10–12, 13–14; reception of, 22–3; small presses, 9, 15–17; themes of, 20–1; translation of, 15, 18–19, 236–7n36; urbanism of, 21; by women, 25 “Latino-Québécois” writers/literature, 11–12, 13–14, 16, 19, 23, 76, 178–9, 184 Laurence, Margaret, 73, 155 Lavergne, Alfredo, 16, 19, 23, 85–95, 237n39; as automotive worker, 86, 87, 90–1; childhood of, 85–6; family of, 85–6, 87; francophone background of, 85–6; and interest in Québécois literature, 93; literary influences on, 86, 88–9, 94; and other Latino-Canadian writers, 94; and protest movement, 86–7; and reader as explorer/discoverer, 88; readings by, 89–90, 93, 178; reviews of work by, 92–3; solidarity of, with working class, 86, 247n2; theatrical work of, 89; themes of, 87–8; and trip to Guatemala, 91–2 – poetic style of: and concrete poetry, 88, 89; and haiku, 89, 90, 92; as minimalist, 86–7, 89, 90; quatrains, 94 – themes of: 87–8; art and aesthetics, 93–4; childhood, 94; exile, 94–5; industrial society/worker alienation, 90–1; political repression/resistance, 87–8, 90 – works by: Alas dispersas, 90; Alguien no soñó que morìa/On ne rêve pas encore à la mort, 94, 100; “The Birds and I,” 95; Cada fruto, 90–1, 95–7; Desde el suelo, 87–8, 95; “Ese José y esas Marys” (unpublished), 89; Índice agresivo, 90–1, 247n2; La

308

Index

mano en la velocidad, 94, 99–100; Palos con palitos, 92; La primavera piedra, 90, 247n2; El puente, 94–5, 100– 2; Rasgos separados/Traits distinctifs, 91–2, 97–8; Retro-perspectiva/Rétroperspective, 93–4, 99; “Sombrero” (unpublished), 102; El viejo de los zapatos, 94, 98–9 Lazcano, Patricia, 27 Letelier, Elías, 15, 18, 19, 20 Lettres québécoises (literary journal), 14, 23 Liberation Theology movement, 130, 249n15, 253n3 Lima, José Lezama, 106, 112, 118, 251n8 Literatura chilena en Canadá/Chilean Literature in Canada (anthology), 9 Literatura hispano-canadiense (anthology), 12–13 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 106, 191, 215 long poem, 16, 30–1, 117, 240n9, 242nn4–6, 252n15, 260n1 López, Maeve, 16, 23, 134 López Pacheco, Jesús, 5, 234n9 Lorca, Federico García, 29, 54, 88, 177 magic realism, 21, 68, 69, 77, 78, 110, 154, 215, 219, 253n32 Malaspina, Alejandro, 4 Mallet, Marilú, 8, 12, 25, 29 Manguel, Alberto, 22, 238n45 Marín, Diego, 12 Márquez, Gabriel García, 110, 177, 191, 215, 219 Martínez, Erik, 8, 30, 32 Más tarde que los clientes habituales/ After the Usual Clients Have Gone Home (Durán), 9 Mexican Association of Canada, 13 Mexican writers, 16; Azuela, 68, 245n3; Fuentes, 72, 191; Huerta, 89, 247–8n6; Paz, 54, 72, 106, 177; Rulfo, 69, 72, 215, 245n5; Sor Juana, 21, 130, 254n5; Spota, 69, 246n6; Tablada, 89, 247n5; Yáñez, 68, 245n4 – in Canada, 18, 236n33

Mexico, 6, 7, 16, 18, 21, 31, 67, 132. See also Flores Patiño, Gilberto Millán, Gonzalo, 9, 15, 24, 29, 32, 55 minificción (short poetic tale), 21, 35, 94, 110, 116, 160, 184, 217, 219, 264n32 Montreal: as contrasted with Toronto, 156–7; literary community in, 5, 7, 8–9, 11; literary festivals in, 5, 11–12; literary journals in, 17–18; poetry readings in, 5, 10, 11–12, 13–14; small presses in, 9, 16–17; theatre/film community in, 8. See also Place aux poètes; St-Denis, Janou mythology: in earlier poets, 88, 153, 256n6; in Feliciano, 51, 57, 58–9, 60; in Flores Patiño, 68, 73, 74, 75, 76– 77, 78; in Rio, 129, 136–7, 138 Narrache, Jean, 93, 249n18 Neruda, Pablo, 21, 29, 30, 31, 35, 54, 86, 105, 177 New World, Latin American concept of, 4–5 Nicaraguan writers: Cardenal, 91, 106, 116, 249n15; Darío, 58, 105, 176, 244n24, 256n6; Ramírez, 107, 252n12; Rugama, 116, 253n28 Nómez, Naín, 23–4, 219, 220; anthologies edited by, 9, 220, 238n48, 247n3; and community in Ottawa, 7–8, 30, 32, 248n11; and community in Toronto, 9, 55; published works by, 9, 10, 13, 18, 236n25; and School of Santiago, 8, 30 North/South Encounter (Toronto), 11 Oasis Publications, 16 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 215, 265n2 Orfeo (literary journal), 31, 33 “Other”: in Flores Patiño, 67, 70–2, 74, 75–6, 77–8; in Quijada Urías, 111 Ottawa: Chilean literary community in, 7–8, 9–10, 15, 32–3, 218–19;

Index literary journal in, 17; poetry readings in, 10; small presses in, 15 Palabra de poeta (anthology), 13 Parra, Nicanor, 30, 240n8 Paz, Octavio, 54, 72, 106, 177 Perón, Isabel, 130, 193, 218 Peru, 6, 153, 242n2, 257–8n24 Peruvian writers: Arguedas (José María), 154, 256n10; Bryce Echenique, 156, 257n16; Vallejo, 154 Pessoa, Fernando, 106, 251n7 Phillmore, Patrick (Etcheverry pseudonym/character), 28, 36, 42 picaresque fiction, 41, 77, 118, 191, 248n7, 257n16, 261n7 Pinochet, Augusto, and regime of, 87, 90, 216, 234n11. See also Chile Place aux poètes (Montreal), 76, 89, 178, 184, 236n27, 260n8. See also St-Denis, Janou Poesía chilena contemporánea (anthology), 238n48 Poetas.com (online literary journal), 15, 18, 43 poetry: anthologies of, 15; avantgarde, 21–2, 29, 30–1; in Chilean culture, 8, 32; recitation of, 7, 10, 52; as revolutionary, 30; and School of Santiago, 30–1; urbanism of, 30; on websites, 15, 18 – types of: “anti-poem,” 30, 240n11; concrete, 88, 89, 162–3, 258n28; gauchesca, 52, 190, 242nn4–6, 260n1; haiku, 89, 90, 92; historical/ dialogue with homeland, 116; long poem, 16, 30–1, 117, 240n9, 242nn4–6, 252n15, 260n1; mixed poetry/prose, 30–1, 36; poemínimo, 89, 247–8n6; prose poem, 31, 104, 118, 160–1, 162–3, 181, 184 poetry readings, 5, 21; at benefit parties, 8, 32; at literary festivals, 10– 12, 13–14. See also individual authors political repression: in Etcheverry, 34, 37–8; in Lavergne, 87–8, 90; in Quijada Urías, 111, 113, 115; in Rio,

309

131, 132, 133–6; in Saravia, 159–60, 163; in Truque, 182, 183; in Urbina, 216–18. See also Argentina; Chile; El Salvador Portugal, 4, 5 La présence d’une autre Amérique (anthology), 13–14, 16, 76, 178 prose poem, 31, 104, 118, 160–1, 162– 3, 181, 184 publishers. See small presses Puig, Manuel, 35, 241n24 Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco de, 89, 105, 248n7 Quijada Urías, Alfonso, 19, 104–19; and cultural life of postwar El Salvador, 106–7; early published work by, 106; and historical poem/ dialogue with homeland, 116; humour in works by, 114, 115–16; international recognition of, 112– 13; and life in Vancouver, 112, 118; literary activities of, 106; literary influences on, 104–5, 106, 109; magic realism of, 110; as manual labourer, 109; minificciones by, 116; and national library job, 106; poetic experimentation of, 107–8; pseudonym of, 117, 118; readings by, 109, 118; and university press job, 106–7, 109; and voices of fictional narrators, 111–12 – themes of: 107, 108; artist/nonconformist, 107; exile and the word, 117; nostalgia, 115; political repression, 111; political turmoil/civil war, 113, 115; subjugation of “Other,” 111; suffering/disintegration of nation, 108–9, 110 – works by: collections/anthologies, 113, 115, 117; Cuentos (short stories), 107; Estados sobrenaturales y otros poemas, 107–9, 114, 115; La fama infame del famoso (ap)atrida, 110–12; “Florencia Sánchez,” 111, 119–22; Gravísima, altisonante, mínima, dulce e imaginada historia,

310

Index

116–17; Lujuria tropical, 117–18; Obscuro, 117; Otras historias famosas, 110, 112; Para mirarte major, 22, 113–14; “Poor Us,” 115; “Postcard,” 115–16; “Salvatruchos, Salvatruchos,” 109, 122–8; They Come and Knock on the Door, 113 readings, poetry, 5, 21; at benefit parties, 8, 32; at literary festivals, 10– 12, 13–14. See also individual authors refugees, political, 5–7, 26–7 Rio, Nela, 19, 129–39; and Amnesty International, 131; and breast cancer as theme, 133, 254n16; and Liberation Theology movement, 130; literary activities of, 132–3; literary influences on, 130; poetry poster exhibitions by, 132; readings by, 132; as translator, 132–3; university studies of, 130; “visual metaphors” of, 129; writing career of, 131–3 – themes of: 129, 139; death/disease and loss, 137, 254n16; equality of humankind/sexuality, 136–7, 138– 9; mature love/sexuality, 136, 138; need for new mythologies, 129, 136–7, 138; patriarchy, 134, 139; political repression/women as political prisoners, 131, 132, 133–6; violence against women, 133–5, 136 – works by: Aquella luz, la que estremece, 132, 136–7; “Carlota todavía,” 138; Cuerpo amado/Beloved Body, 133, 254n16; “Encarnación de la Palma,” 136; El espacio de la luz, 133; “El laberinto vertical” (unpublished), 138; “El mundo que tú no viste” (unpublished), 135; “En el umbral del atardecer,” 137; En las noches que desvisten otras noches, 132, 133–4; “Lucrecia,” 135; “María Candelaria,” 136; “El olvido viaja en auto negro,” 135–6; Sosteniendo la mirada: Cuando las imágenes tiemblan, 133; Túnel de proa verde/Tunnel of the Green Prow, 131, 133, 134–5, 139–51

Rodríguez, Carmen, 17, 24, 25, 26, 118 Rulfo, Juan, 69, 72, 215, 245n5 Ruptures: The Review of the 3 Americas (literary journal), 18, 23, 76 Salvadoran writers. See El Salvador, writers from Saravia, Alejandro, 16, 152–63; as army conscript, 154; concrete poetry of, 162–3; and contrasts of Montreal and Toronto, 156–7; family of, as victims of war/political oppression, 153; as journalist/ broadcaster, 155–6; and life/work in Quebec, 155–6; on linguistic/cultural struggles in Bolivia and Quebec, 157; literary activities of, 156; literary influences on, 153, 154–5; political activities of, 155; style of, 158; university studies of, 154, 155 – themes of: exile and lost love, 160–1; identification with homeland, 158– 60; language, 162–3; mockery of oppressors, 159–60, 163; rejection of political systems, 160, 163; subjugation of indigenous peoples, 157, 158–9 – works by: La brújula desencadenada, 157, 158, 162, 163; “La cena,” 161; Ejercicio de serpientes, 157, 162; Habitante del décimo territorio, 157, 161, 163; “El libro que ladra a la luna,” 157–8; “La noche de Miguel,” 157, 164–75; Oilixes helizados, 157, 160–1, 162–3; Rojo, amarillo y verde, 154, 158, 163; “Who’s Pedro Domingo?,” 160 School of Santiago, 8, 28, 30–1, 34, 240n8 science fiction, 28, 29, 32, 191, 203, 204, 215, 247n1, 263n31, 264n32 Shantz, Christina, 9, 32–3, 216, 219, 220 Skármeta, Antonio, 29, 31, 215, 222–3, 240n8 small presses, 9, 15–17; Broken Jaw Press, 19, 133, 200; Cordillera Editions, 9, 15, 32–3, 36, 39, 216, 219, 220; Cormorant Books, 10, 18– 19, 76, 113, 216, 237n38; Écrits des

Index Forges, 19, 92; Éditions d’Orphée, 19, 90, 91, 237n39; Éditions de la Naine Blanche (White Dwarf Editions/Ediciones de la Enana Blanca), 13, 16, 158, 178; Éditions Humanitas, 19, 179, 235n21; Girol Books, 19, 196, 200, 235n20; Oasis Publications, 16; Split Quotation Press/Ediciones La Cita Trunca, 15, 18, 36, 39, 41, 223; Verbum Veritas, 15, 43; vlb Éditeur, 19, 194 Southern Cone of South America, 6, 18, 24, 53 Spain, 4, 5 Spanish Civil War, 5, 89 Spanish literature: early works of: La Celestina, 215, 265n4; Don Quixote, 105, 191; Lazarillo de Tormes, 191, 261–2n7; Golden Age of, 21, 88. See also Spanish writers (below): Góngora y Argote; Quevedo y Villegas Spanish writers, 12–13, 234n10; Betanzos Santos, 5, 17, 90; Blas de Otero, 177, 259n3; Felipe, 177, 258n2; “Generation of 1927,” 54, 177, 243n16; Góngora y Argote, 88, 109, 252n18; Hernández (Miguel), 89, 248n10; López Pacheco, 5, 234n9; Lorca, 29, 54, 88, 177; Machado Ruíz, 89, 248n9; Pérez Galdós, 52, 242n3; Quevedo y Villegas, 89, 105, 248n7; Risco, 205, 264n35. See also Galician writers Split Quotation Press/Ediciones La Cita Trunca, 15, 18, 36, 39, 41, 223 Spota, Luis, 69, 246n6 St-Denis, Janou, 10, 12, 76, 93, 178, 179, 184, 236n27, 260n8. See also Place aux poètes Strejilevich, Nora, 13, 132, 254n7 Sur (literary journal), 18 surrealism, 21, 34 Swift, Jonathan, 109, 154, 191, 198, 199, 203 Teillier, Jorge, 86, 247n3 testimonial literature, 25, 132, 180, 254n7, 262n12

311

themes, literary, 20–1. See also individual writers Toronto, 5, 6, 7; as contrasted with Montreal, 156–7; literary community in, 7, 8–9; literary festivals in, 10–11; literary journals in, 17; poetry readings in, 10–11; small presses in, 16; theatre community in, 8 Torres-Recinos, Julio, 19 transculturation, 254n1. See also Saravia, Alejandro translation: Canadian government funding of, 15, 236n36; into English, 18–19; into French, 19. See also bilingual/multilingual publication; see also individual authors Trilce (literary journal), 17 Trojan Horse Café (Toronto), 10 Trujillo, Renato, 7, 12, 234–5n16 Truque, Carlos Arturo, 176, 179 Truque, Yvonne América, 11, 23, 89, 176–84; as Afro-Colombian writer, 179, 181, 184; family of, 176, 178; father’s influence on, 176, 179; and interest in Québécois contemporaries, 179, 260n8; journalism of, 179; literary activities of, 178–9, 184, 259n7; literary influences on, 176–7, 177–8; and national library job, 177; performance recitals by, 179, 184; prose poems of, 184; readings by, 177, 179; small press of, 16, 179; socio-political concerns/activism of, 177, 178, 179, 180, 184; typographical experimentation by, 181, 184; university studies of, 176, 179 – themes of: 180; city, 177, 181–2, 183; elegies for the fallen, 182; idealism/ utopian possibilities, 182, 183–4; power/political repression, 182, 183; struggle for self-realization, 181; urban alienation/isolation, 183; urban wanderer, 181–2 – works by: “En mi marcha y otros poemas” (unpublished), 183; “Hojas de sol y Recorriendo la distancia” (unpublished), 180–1; “De nuevo aquí” (unpublished), 181;

312

Index

“Los olvidados en la tierra” (unpublished), 183; Proyección de los silencios/Projection des silences, 177, 178, 182, 184–6; Retratos de sombras y Perfiles inconclusos/Portraits d’ombres et Profils inachevés, 178–9, 180, 182, 186–8; unpublished poems, 188–9 United States, 3–4, 5, 6, 15, 26 University of Chile, 8, 29–30, 31, 218 urbanism, of literature/poetry, 21, 30. See also city, as theme/influence Urbanyi, Pablo, 12, 19, 190–206; isolation of, as Latino-Canadian writer, 205–6; as journalist, 193; language, as used by, 192; literary influences on, 191; narrative techniques of, 192, 196, 199, 202; as university instructor, 193; university studies of, 191, 191–2 – literary borrowings and allusions by: Arlt, 193; Butler, 195; Chandler, 192–3; Hudson, 194; Kafka, 199; Kipling, 205; Poe, 194–6; Swift, 199, 203 – themes of: academic world, 194–7; Argentine society, 192–3, 196–8; “civilization” as unnatural environment, 198–200; consumer society, 203–5; cultural/economic globalization, 203–4; European society, 203– 4; exile/alienation, 198–200, 204–5; North American/US society, 194– 200; science, medicine, and ethics, 200–2; utopia/dystopia, 203–4 – works by: Una epopeya de nuestros tiempos, 204–5; En ninguna parte, 193–6, 206; Nacer de nuevo, 196, 197–8; Noche de revolucionarios, 190, 192; Puesta de sol, 200–2; Un revólver para Mack, 192; “Siempre algo más” (“Always Something”), 206– 13; Silver, 190, 198–200; De todo un poco, de nada mucho, 196–7; 2058, en la corte de Eutopía, 203–4 Urbina, Leandro, 10, 18, 29, 32, 35, 214–23; experiences of, after coup d’état, 215–6, 218; family of, 214,

215–6; life/work in Ottawa, 218– 19; literary influences on, 214, 215, 216; readings by, 219; small press of, 9, 15, 32–3, 219; social/political activities of, 215; style of, 217, 219– 20, 222–3; theatre work of, 216; university studies of, 215, 218, 220 – themes of: coup d’état/political repression, 216–18; “developed”/ “undeveloped” worlds, 220; exile, 220, 221–2 – works by: Cobro revertido, 214, 221– 3; “Homo eroticus” (unpublished), 24, 220, 223–31; Las malas juntas, 214, 219, 221, 235n25; El pasajero del aire, 219–20 Uruguay, 6 Uruguayan writers: Benedetti, 109, 252n15; Ibarbourou, 53, 243n12; Lautréamont, 29, 31, 239n3; Onetti, 215, 265n2; Quiroga, 109, 130, 252n19. See also Escomel, Gloria; Hernández, Felisberto; López, Maeve Valdés, Mario, 11, 55, 236n30 Vallejo, César, 54, 243n15 Vancouver, 7, 10, 17, 24, 26 Velásquez de Málec, Edith, 20, 25 Ventana sobre el mar/Window on the Sea (Feliciano), 9, 235n24 Verbum Veritas (small press), 15, 43 Verdecchia, Guillermo, 22, 238n45 Vericuetos/Chemins scabreux (literary journal), 178, 259n7 Viñuela, Francisco, 9, 235n22 vlb Éditeur (small press), 19, 194 Waddington, Miriam, 54 Wald, Susana, 16, 234n15 websites, literary, 15, 18, 43 Whitman, Walt, and style of, 29, 30–1, 54, 86, 89, 106, 177, 258n2 Zeller, Ludwig, 7, 9, 10, 16, 23, 234n15 Zisman, Alex, 10–11