Posts featuring Luis de Lión

Compass and Rifle: On Roque Dalton’s Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle

No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen . . .

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman, Seven Stories Press, 2023

On Thursday, July 6, 2023, the inaugural day of Guatemala’s International Book Fair (FILGUA), the government of El Salvador requested organizers to exclude Salvadoran author Michelle Recinos’ Sustancia de hígado (F&G Editores) from the fair. The next day, online news outlet elfaro revealed that El Salvador’s ambassador in Guatemala had said, “It would’ve been an unpleasant thing for the government of El Salvador if this book had been a part of the fair.” Details are scarce, but presumably, this action was related to Michelle’s story Barberos en huelga, winner of the 2022 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, which openly criticizes sitting president Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs. 

Hearing this, I can only imagine what Roque Dalton would have written about Bukele. 

Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement. 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest in literary news from Central America and India!

In this week’s round-up of the latest in global literary news, we are celebrating award honourees and writers redefining their national literatures by working through the art of translation. From keeping memory alive and imagining the future, these are some of the texts that connect past, present, and future.

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Central America

The Guatemalan writer Gloria Hernández was awarded with the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature on November 3. The prize, founded in 1988, is given annually to Guatemalan writers whose career has had an impact in the international landscape. It includes a monetary compensation of Q50,000 (USD4,700), a diploma, and a medal. Additionally, one of the awarded writer’s books is reedited and published.

Hernández was the seventh woman in history to receive the prize. In her speech, she devoted the award to “the female and male writers fallen performing writing and critical thinking against the enemies of freedom, art, and light,” mentioning several martyrs from the Guatemalan state terror of the 80s, such as María López Valdizón, Alaíde Foppa, Otto René Castillo, Irma Flaquer, Roberto Obregón, and Luis de Lión. She also talked about the role of women in storytelling, as they are the ones that keep the memory of the clan alive. “That memory which was my grandmothers is now living in my mother.” Long an an advocate for children’s literature, she additionally stated that “In the face of ignorance and foolishness that considers children’s literature a minor genre, I only smile and continue with my work.”

The nineteenth edition of the International Book Fair in Guatemala (FILGUA) is close; thousands of writers, editors, scholars, and artists from a wide range of disciplines will gather from November 24 to December 4. There will be more than a hundred book releases, several contests, conferences, and workshops. The fair will resume its face-to-face format after COVID restrictions, but will also keep a virtual schedule, and the organizers hope to reach an audience of 2.4 million people there.

This year, Korea will be the honored guest, and its embassy will hold several activities like Korean writing workshops, a traditional costumes exhibition, a taekwondo demonstration, a Korean art show, and a K-pop concert. The inaugural conference is entitled “The relation between Korea and Latin America,” and will be presented by Juan Felipe López Aymes, a scholar from the Regional Center of Multidisciplinary Research form Universidad Autónoma de México. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France!

This week our writers bring you news from Central America, Hong Kong, and France. In Central America, renowned Guatemalan writer Eduardo Haldon has released his latest novel, Cancón, and Savladoran writer Claudia Hernández’s book Slash and Burn has been released in English translation by & Other Stories. In Hong Kong, literary journal the Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine has pertinently published a special feature about “Distance,” while in France, Italian writer Sandro Veronesi has won the Foreign Book Prize for Le Colibri, to be published in English translation in spring. Read on to find out more! 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

Guatemalan poet Carmen Lucía Alvarado was recently nominated for the Rhysling Award for her poem El vacío se conjuga entre tus manos (The void blends in your hands), translated by Toshiya Kamei. Read the poem in English and Spanish here. Famed Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon released his new novel called Canción (Song). Published by Libros del Asteroide, his latest book tells a new chapter of the history of Halfon’s family, centering on his maternal grandfather and his kidnap during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996). You can read an excerpt of Canción in English at The New York Review of Books site.

Also in Guatemala, the veteran poet and journalist Ana María Rodas released a new collection of short stories entitled Antigua para principiantes (Antigua for beginners). This new book includes several of Ana María’s most renowned short stories, plus other unpublished stories. This marks Ediciones del Pensativo’s first book of the year.

Additionally, in early January, & Other Stories published Slash and Burn, by the Salvadoran short story writer Claudia Hernández. The book was translated into English by Julia Sanches, who has translated the work of writers such as Daniel Galera (Brazil) and Noemi Jaffe (Brazil). READ MORE…

Luis de Lión: Unearthing the Lost Poems of a Disappeared Poet

Luis de Lión is the desaparecido number 135. Luis de Lión was questioned and tortured for twenty-two days. He had diabetes.

Though every human tragedy has its witnesses, too often those who speak the truth about them are forcefully silenced, whether by censorship, imprisonment, or murder. During the brutal Guatemalan Civil War, the violence and repression inflicted on the populace was felt heavily in the national literature, which saw many great writers suffer in its wake. In this essay, José García Escobar reports on one of the disappeared, the prolific poet Luis de Lión, and his daughter’s poignant search for her father’s lost texts.

Mayarí de León, the daughter of the Guatemalan writer, poet, and teacher Luis de Lión, was seven years old when her father was kidnapped for the first time, in June of 1973. He was kept in prison for eight days.

“When he was released, many of his friends came over,” Mayarí tells me over the phone. “We were living at my aunt’s house in Zone 1, and they came and talked to him.” She also remembers that Ana María Rodas, poet and friend of Luis’s, was there. “She cut a carnation and put it in my hair,” she says.

Mayarí doesn’t remember much else—quietness. Solemnity. Downcast eyes. She was too young and didn’t get to hear the grown-ups’ conversation, and probably wouldn’t even have been able to record more than a phrase in her memory. But she understood what was going on: men had captured her papá. Mayarí claims that from that moment on, she had nightmares. Dreams of ravines filled with dead bodies woke her in the middle of the night.

In 1973, thirteen years into the Guatemalan Civil War, the government and Guatemalan Army often targeted intellectuals and dissidents. Other writers such as Otto René Castillo and Roberto Obregón had been killed already, and many would follow, including Alaíde Foppa, Irma Flaquer, and José María López Valdizón. Then, the thirty-four-year-old Luis was an upcoming literary talent, a prime example of how Guatemalan writers, despite the lack of access to publishers or editors, continued to produce work of high quality. Luis himself, by 1973, had published two short story collections, and his novel El tiempo principia en Xibalbá had received second place in Quetzaltenango’s Juegos Florales in 1972—the first place having been declared void.

“My hands started sweating too,” Mayarí says. “Whenever I’m nervous or excited, whenever I’m taken by extreme emotion, my hands sweat. This started after my father’s first kidnapping.”

Eight days after Luis was taken into custody by the Policía Nacional, he was released. Thanks to the intervention of the Universidad de San Carlos’ student’s association, he was allowed to walk out; Luis had been kidnapped alongside the association’s general secretary. “He came out all bruised and thin,” Mayarí says. “But I know that this first detention confirmed his ideology and social calling.”

Mayarí claims that her father never told her of his days in detention, but she has come to know of Luis’s struggle through his unpublished poems and stories, collected over a search lasting for the last fifteen years. From it stems Luis’s latest publication El papel de la belleza—The Role of Beauty: an anthology of his poetry, which spans from 1972 to the very last poem he wrote before his second kidnapping in 1984. El papel de la belleza, in true de Lión style, shows many of his typical concerns and interests, his militancy and ideology, his attention to social issues and indigenous struggles, his care for the quotidian, his devastating and scenic use of language: minimalistic, casual, relaxed, always elegant. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week’s latest news from Argentina, Central America, and the United States!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Argentina, Central America, and the United States. In Argentina, Chris Andrews’s forthcoming translation of César Aira’s novel The Divorce was awarded a PEN Translates award; in Guatemala, a new posthumous collection by Kaqchikel Maya writer Luis de Lión was published; and in the United States, bookstores and libraries have been supporting the Black Lives Matter protests by publishing recommended reading lists. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

English PEN announced the winners of its PEN Translates award earlier this month, and among them was Chris Andrews’s translation of César Aira’s The Divorce, forthcoming from And Other Stories in 2021. The Argentine author and translator continues to have a powerful influence both at home and abroad. His short novel Artforum, published in March by New Directions, earned glowing praise in an April NPR review: “Aira is unencumbered. He does what he does, and what we receive is giddy, unquestionably self-indulgent, and yet absolutely perfect.” The review, it should be noted, doesn’t reference the translator, Katherine Silver. It’s almost unbelievable that Aira can work at such a remarkable pace—he publishes two or three short novels a year—and continue to get such good reviews. (His most recent release in Argentina, Fulgentius, was also lauded.) The good news is that his pace of writing ensures work for translators and new releases into English for years to come.

Perhaps soon there will be a service to have Aira’s new releases delivered to your door monthly. Buenos Aires is a hotbed for independent publishers, and book clubs have sprung up as a way to promote and discuss new offerings. In a market inundated with new books each month—at least until recently—the clubs also provide vetting and a way to make sense of the noise. Some require members to obtain the book themselves, but others do the task of curating and sending members their selections each month. Pez Banana works this way (the name, which means banana fish, is a homage to Salinger). Founded by two veterans of the Buenos Aires publishing industry, Florencia Ure and Santiago Llach, the service sends a new release novel and reading guide each month. Among other book club choices, Bukku also sends out a monthly selection, and the decision of which service to subscribe to may come down to what else is in the box: Bukku deliveries include the book, a bookmark, a playlist curated by the author, and a surprise book-related, locally designed gift. Sign me up.  READ MORE…

Printed Matter: On Enriqueta Lunez’s New Moon

Ambiguity across the trilingual text is a way of asserting the sovereignty of Indigenous languages in dialogue with English and Spanish.

New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik by Enriqueta Lunez, translated from the Tsotsil by Clare Sullivan, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019

Although there is an increasingly large corpus of Latin American Indigenous literature in translation, these translations seldom make it into print. While the digital medium offers advantages—global circulation, the ability to include audio and video of spoken word performances, the capacity to cheaply reproduce multilingual volumes—print remains a vital avenue for the publication of these works as in many circles it still possesses a prestige that digital lacks. Within Indigenous literary movements themselves, authors tend to set print publication of their works as an important goal, even as they clearly value digital publication as an important and effective tool that facilitates their ability to reach a global audience. Most Indigenous literatures that do make it into printed translations do so in anthologies such as Miguel León-Portilla and Earl Shorris’s In the Language of Kings (2002), Allison Hedge Coke’s Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, or Nicolás Huet Bautista and Sean Sell’s Chiapas Maya Awakening: Contemporary Poems and Short Stories (2017).

Published in December 2019, Clare Sullivan’s translation of Tsotsil Enriqueta Lunez’s work in New Moon/Luna Nueva/Yuninal Jme’tik, is perhaps only the third single-author volume of an Indigenous writer from Latin American to be published in English translation, the other two being Sullivan’s translation of Zapotec poet Natalia Toledo, The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems (2015), and Nathan C. Henne’s rendering of the Kaqchikel writer Luis de Lión’s Time Commences in Xibalbá (2012). Although the publication of these works over the last decade demonstrates how little Indigenous literature has been translated and how much more work there is to be done in the area, it also shows that interest in reading these authors in translation is slowly gathering steam, as Wendy Call’s translation of selected poems by the Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, In the Belly of the Night and other Poems, is due out later this year from Pluralia. In other words, New Moon speaks to the increasing prominence of these voices in the global literary market.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Central America, France, and Peru—our writers bring you this week's latest news from around the globe.

This week, our reporters bring you news of the release of unpublished Proust short stories in France, literary award winners in Guatemala and Panama, and the Lima International Book Fair in Peru.

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

It’s award season in Central America!

In early October, the committee of the Miguel Angel Asturias National Prize in Literature (Guatemala) announced that this year’s winner was the poet, fiction writer, critic, and translator Luis Eduardo Rivera. Luis began his career in the seventies, alongside other great Guatemalan writers like Marco Antonio Flores, Ana María Rodas, and Luis de Lión. He’s the author of close to twenty books, and he currently lives in France where he teaches Spanish and Literature. Famed writer Eduardo Halfon received this prize last year.

Guatemalan readers and book lovers also saw the opening of a new bookstore called Kitapenas Books & Bistro, and Editorial Catafixia, one of Central America’s most important indie presses, celebrated its tenth anniversary a few days ago. Catafixia has published the likes of Vania Vargas, Wingston González, Sabino Esteban, Jacinta Escudos, and Alfredo Trejos. READ MORE…

“Guatemala has always produced great writers”: An Interview with Guatemalan Poet and Feminist Ana María Rodas

One day, poetry simply came out of me. One day, I was filled with poetry.

Wearing a thin sweater, a colorful scarf, and a dazzling smile, Ana María welcomed us to her house in Zone 15, Guatemala City. Outside it was pouring, much like when she presented her famed Poemas de la izquierda erótica (Poems from the Erotic Left), forty-six years ago. She offered us tea—“To fight back the cold,” she said, still smiling—and told us we had to do the interview in the living room, not upstairs, because, “There are books scattered everywhere; imagine, a lifetime spent collecting books.” And, yes, one can only imagine.

Ana María Rodas, born in 1937, is a veteran Guatemalan poet, journalist, and teacher. Her career spans more than sixty years. She has released close to twenty books, and her work has been translated into English, German, and Italian. In 1990, she simultaneously won the poetry and short story categories of the Juegos Florales de México, Centroamérica y el Caribe. In 2000, she won the prestigious Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature for her life’s work. She is also one of the leading figures of Guatemalan and Central American feminism. She has lived her whole life in Guatemala. And one cannot say this lightly. She grew up during the Jorge Ubico dictatorship (1931–1944), admired how the Guatemalan Revolution toppled Ubico in 1944, thrived during the so-called Ten Years of Spring, lamented the 1954 CIA-backed coup that removed the democratically elected, progressive president Jacobo Árbenz, and witnessed the atrocities of the Civil War (1960–1996). Many of her friends and colleagues were killed during that time. Alaíde Foppa, Irma Flaquer, and her dear friend, Luis de Lión, author of El tiempo principia en Xibalbá—considered one of the cornerstones of contemporary Central American literature. Even if she never picked up a rifle or joined the militarized resistance, her feminist struggle and intellectual defiance have influenced many generations.   

She’s not a cynic, though. Or bitter. She’s hopeful. “Even though we have a brute for president,” she says, “I believe in resisting.” And resisting, Ana María has done.

But as much as Ana María is grandmotherly and warm, as much as she’s a jokester and amicable, she is also analytical, astute, and disarmingly agile. She’s a force of nature, a rising tide, and an unmovable object. Her poetry is sensitive, electric, and subversive.

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