Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Reinventing Spanish as a Literary Language A Conversation with Álvaro Enrigue

Author(s): Peter Constantine and Álvaro Enrigue
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 87, No. 6 (November/December 2013), pp. 12-15
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7588/worllitetoda.87.6.0012
Accessed: 27-06-2016 09:08 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to World Literature Today

This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:08:26 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
COVER FEATURE

Reinventing Spanish
as a Literary Language
A Conversation with Álvaro Enrigue
Peter Constantine

The Mexican literary scene is in flux. A new generation of writers is responding to great politi-
cal and social upheavals. Among these writers, the award-winning author and editor Álvaro
Enrigue is one of the most compelling and versatile. He is the author of four novels, two short-
story collections, and a book of literary criticism; he has worked as an editor, doing much to
promote the work of young indigenous Mexican authors writing in Mexican languages; and he
is also a journalist and literary critic for a number of Latin American and Spanish publications.
His first book to appear in English, Hypothermia, was published in 2013 by Dalkey Archive
Press in a translation by Brendan Riley (reviewed on page 62).

Peter Constantine: Over the last five years, initiated his compulsive and unsuccessful war
Mexican literature seems to have gone in unex- on drugs. You have to imagine what this has
photo: dominique nabokov

pected new directions. Would you agree?
Álvaro Enrigue: Somewhere between sixty
and eighty thousand men and women, all
people who had sisters and brothers, sons and
parents, have been murdered in drug-related
violence since 2006, when President Calderón
done to Mexico’s national psyche. On Monday
morning we were a hardworking middle-class
land, proud of the cultural explosion produced
by its new democratic ways, and on Friday
afternoon we were a dinky Wild West town.
Mexican literature turned away from the com-
fortable trends that suited the international

12 worldliteraturetoday.org This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:08:26 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 publishing market to a deep and problematic
soul-searching.
PC: Soul-searching?
AE: Spanish must be reinvented as a literary
language to fit new, extreme circumstances.
It must search in its history and tradition for
new ways to tell, “to give testimony,” as Saint
Paul would have said. In a recent novel by Yuri
Herrera, the main character is an “alfaqueque,”
a man who rescues ransomed people—the
word had not been used in four hundred years.
Horror might always have been the grease that
keeps the machine of creation moving forward;
it’s just that we had not experienced it. Mexico
had been a quite stable country for most of
the twentieth century, and Mexicans had not
experienced war in three generations. We only
saw the army at Independence Day parades;
now it’s all over the place in the north and west
of the land.
PC: What you say about the need to reinvent
Spanish is very interesting.
AE: Journalism is using a never-never land dis-
course to portray the ways in which drug lords
inflict violence. Young literary writers have
gone deeper, washing away the soil of language
to see what’s behind those journalistic land-
scapes. There are commercial novels, which
portray things the way they are now, but these
will be forgotten as fast as they are written.
If the world begins to look like a painting by
Hieronymus Bosch, intelligent people wonder:
What did we do for this to happen? How can
we find forms and words to express it?
PC: Who are the young literary authors you
find compelling?
AE: As often happens, it all began with the
poets, poets born in the 1970s—Julián Her-
bert, Luis Eugenio Sánchez, Luis Felipe Fabre,
photo: anirudh koul
Óscar de Pablo, or Dolores Dorantes. They all
came out with books that shattered the tradi-
tion of otherworldly, academic Mexican poet-
ry. It was like a crazed migration from Octavio
Paz to Nicanor Parra. Reality was becoming too
demanding to be represented with the tools of
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:08:26 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
concrete and postmodernist language. Then
came the fiction writers, new figures like Yuri
Herrera, Susana Iglesias, or Carlos Velázquez.
But they have predecessors: among the older
ones Élmer Mendoza or Victor Hugo Rascón
Banda, and in my generation Eduardo Antonio
Parra or Martín Solares, to name a few.
PC: I am reading a very funny and disturbing
story by Carlos Velázquez called “No pierda a
su pareja por culpa de la grasa” (Don’t lose your
partner just because you’re fat), in which a wife
puts her husband, who is seriously overweight,
on a cocaine regimen so he will slim down.
AE: There’s another amazing short story
Journalism is using
Velázquez wrote with the zany title “El alien a never-never
agropecuario” (The agronomic extraterres-
trial) about a punk band led by a boy with
land discourse to
Down syndrome—the boy becomes a star in portray the ways in
Mexico. In La Biblia Vaquera (The cowboy
Bible), Velásquez’s first book, there is a charac-
which drug lords
ter called “La Biblia Vaquera” who is an urban inflict violence.
guerrilla fighter, a professional wrestler, and
drinking champion. Velázquez never touches
Young literary
on the motives for the social unrest in Mex- writers have gone
ico, but its results implode into angry, carni-
valesque narratives. He is a writer with a social
deeper, washing
commitment who makes his readers split their away the soil of
sides laughing. Velázquez is not alone: Gua-
language to see
dalupe Nettel and Julián Herbert have just
published compelling autobiographical fiction what’s behind
written from the perspective of those whose those journalistic
future has been stolen. There is also Daniela
Tarazona, who doesn’t write about the drug landscapes.
war, but writes as if she, too, has escaped from
hell. None of these novels is a local allegory:
they are cosmopolitan and well-written fiction
in which the authors are searching for new
ways to portray the world they live in.
PC: What do you mean by “local allegory”?
AE: Twentieth-century Latin American litera-
ture was prone to allegories: literary devices in
which one character or situation represented
an idea about something particular to the
region. It was the well-organized universe of
the Cold War, in which there were two sides,
and, depending on your ideology, one or the
other was right. Mexico’s new writers are
November – December 2013 • 13
 much more open in the way they represent the
world they inherited. Theirs is a literature for
anarchic times: they focus on an object, they
blow it up, and make a story out of the trajec-
tory of the pieces. Emiliano Monge published
an extraordinary novel last year, El cielo árido
(The barren sky), in which the chaos that vio-
lence brings to people’s lives is rendered by a
desperate narrative device: as the plot moves
forward, the narrator changes the names of
the characters because nothing is what it
seems. This device connects with one used by
Carlos Velázquez in which the protagonist’s
strange name, the Cowboy Bible, applies to all
sorts of characters. There seems to be an urge
to return to an Edenic state, in which things
can be renamed.
PC: In one of your recent novels, Decencia
(Decency), intertwining plots stretch from
the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to the begin-
nings of the Guadalajara drug cartel in the late
1970s. Yet Decencia seems to point, more than
any other novel that has come out in Mexico
in the past five years, to what is happening in
Mexico today.
AE: You must remember that the idea of
smuggling drugs to the US was ideologically
oriented. The Colombian communist guerril-
las sent enormous shipments of cocaine to
the US in the 1980s with the aim of financing
their operations and promoting the degrada-
tion of American society. In those years, the
first professional drug cartel in Mexico was
established by former members of the Mexican
secret police and by radical guerilla fighters.
The secret police had been disbanded because
of human rights issues, and the radical guer-
rilla fighters had been granted amnesty—a
marriage of torturers and the tortured. They
were strange bedfellows who had become use-
less in a society that was already moving
toward openness. No wonder they produced
the most violent gangs of the century. But
Decencia is not a historical novel, despite its
intertwining plots stretching over decades of
Mexico’s history.
14 worldliteraturetoday.org This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:08:26 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
PC: Yet family history plays an important role.
AE: Yes, Decencia tells the not-so-decent way
in which my grandfather and his brothers
moved from their tiny town, crossing the sier-
ras to Guadalajara and Mexico City. Not so
decent in the sense that they sold raw sugar to
tequila producers to artificially age their liquor
and so double the price.
PC: You are also an editor of contemporary
indigenous Mexican writing.
AE: I was the editor in chief of the Mexican
Ministry of Culture’s publishing house for two
years; it was a wonderful job. We created a list
of books that no commercial publisher would
dare publish. When I started, there were three
kinds of literary collections: Spanish-speaking
prose writers and poets, translations, and
authors writing in indigenous languages. To
gain a wider readership for our indigenous
writers, we printed their works in our main-
stream collections in bilingual editions. We did
a book by Melina González Guzmán: Nana Ñ’u,
short stories in the Hñahñú language of the
Mezquital Valley in the central Mexican high-
lands. We also published the Tzeltal poet Adri-
ana López Sántiz’s bilingual book of poetry
Naetik / Hilos (Threads) and Slajibal Ajawetik /
Los últimos dioses (The last gods), by the Tzel-
tal prose writer Marceal Méndez Pérez. Some
of these books sold well; they reached a wider
readership outside their communities.
Mexico’s stance is marked by contradic-
tions when it comes to its indigenous classic
literature. We are incredibly proud of our clas-
sic past—Mexico, northern Central America,
and Peru are the three nations in the Americas
that have their own classic culture—but at the
same time the custodians of these cultures are
marginalized and living in terrible poverty.
But Mexico’s classic tradition is very much
alive, at least in ideological terms. Mexico is
still the nation of the Aztecs, the Maya, and
the Purepecha. Our three centuries of Spanish
colonial rule are taught in school as something
incidental, a short gap between two stages in
the evolution of an eternal Mexico.

PC: What are the stages of the eternal Mexico you men-
tion: indigenous, colonial Spanish, followed by what?
AE: Modern Mexico, I suppose, the one of the War
of Independence and the revolution, the industrialized
Mexico, the democratic Mexico—something like that. But
I must stress that this is not what I believe, it’s an ideo-
logical discourse that is embedded in the school system,
and one that dominates the self-perception of Mexicans.
PC: Dalkey Archive Press has just brought out the English
version of your novel Hypothermia in a translation by
Brendan Riley.
AE: It’s my first book to appear in English, and particu-
larly important to me because it helped me make the most
difficult step for someone who writes in Spanish: from
being a Mexican writer to becoming a Latin American
writer.
PC: Why is that a difficult step?
AE: It’s the book in which I learned to write with abso-
lute freedom. I was thirty-three—Dante’s age when he
descended into the inferno—and I took Dante’s example
seriously: I am in the middle of the road of life, a Hispanic
who now lives in the United States, and this is how things
look behind me and ahead of me. Hypothermia is my most
personal book—it is frank and personal, though not auto-
biographical—and curiously it is my one book that speaks
to the widest readership in the Spanish-speaking world.
It is read all over Latin America, and not just in Mexico
and Spain. Hypothermia put my work in the perspective in
which Latin American writing, in opposition to national
writing, is discussed.
August 2013
Peter Constantine’s recent translations include The Essential Writ-
ings of Rousseau, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, Sophocles’
Three Theban Plays, and works by Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and
Voltaire. He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early
Stories, by Thomas Mann, and a National Translation Award for The
Undiscovered Chekhov.
This content downloaded from 128.197.26.12 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:08:26 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tom Smithson Dead in His Garret
José Manuel Cardona
to Carlos Germán Belli
You left
through the smoke spirals of your famished fingers.
You arose above the burning tide of Long Island
perhaps to better dream from the depth of your equestrian
eyelids
of tasty morsels that your hungry clown palate
could only imagine.
It is false to say you died,
that they vomited you forever as if a useless thing.
Your sleep must be as light as the plumage of the California
whores
as graceful as one of those Manhattan elevators.
They fear seeing you wake at some unearthly hour
to go toward Wall Street and tell the sausage makers
that it is beautiful to dictate commercial letters to the blond
typists,
but even more beautiful to wander the banks of the Hudson.
Like that January day,
that sunrise of young lips and sheer breasts
when you directed your dreams toward the pastry shop,
so astonished,
so deeply surprised to discover God amidst the cream tarts
and feel his weight on your stomach’s livid walls.
Now only a flutter of ashes remains, and your name
voiced by the newspaper boy.
Translation from the Spanish
By Hélène Cardona
Editorial note: From El bosque de Birnam: Antología poética (Consell
Insular d’Eivissa, 2007).
José Manuel Cardona (b. 1928) is a poet from Ibiza, Spain. He is the
author of El Vendimiador (1953) and Poemas a Circe (1959). He was
co-editor of several literary journals and wrote for many publications.
He participated in the II Congreso de Poesía in Salamanca. The
Franco regime forced him into exile in France. He is an attorney and
holds PhDs in literature and humanities. He worked for the UN most
of his life.
Hélène Cardona is the author of Dreaming My Animal Selves and The
Astonished Universe. She holds an MA from the Sorbonne and has
taught at Hamilton College and LMU, translated for the NEA and the
Canadian Embassy, and received fellowships from the Goethe-Institut
and the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía.
November – December 2013 • 15